Brawl in Cell Block 99

In the first shot of Brawl in Cell Block 99, the heavy tire of a truck flattens a can of lite beer. This, I imagine, is a signal that you’re about to get a shot of the hard stuff. You may have read about how ferally brutal Brawl is, and what a change of pace it is for its star, Vince Vaughn, but the truly shocking thing about it is how tender much of it is, how much humanity even briefly seen supporting players are apportioned. The movie is hushed, almost meditative, as it lays the groundwork for a grand finale involving crushed skulls, faces scraped against concrete. The audience for the film may fall within a very tiny Venn diagram of those who can sit with subtly emotional, drawn-out scenes and those who can hang with the bone-cracking and bloodletting.

It is also some kind of grim masterpiece, fully delivering on the promise of writer/director S. Craig Zahler’s 2015 debut, Bone Tomahawk. In that Peckinpah-meets-Deodato epic, Kurt Russell and a small posse delve into hell — land of hulking cannibals — to save a woman from a fate worse than death. Here, Vaughn, as recovering alcoholic with a side order of rage issues Bradley Thomas, must descend level by level into a dungeon of horrors to rescue his pregnant wife Lauren (Jennifer Carpenter) and their unborn daughter from an equally ghastly end. There’s a heaping helping of white-knightism in both films, but it doesn’t go unchallenged, nor do easy notions of manhood or machismo. Violence in these films is not to be relished, but to be engaged in with sorrow that it had to play out this way — without sadism but also without mercy. They are portraits of men in extremis, grotesque but fully alive and human.

After being laid off from his auto-mechanic gig, Bradley comes home to discover that Lauren has been cheating on him. He tells her to go into the house, then uses his fists on her car, finally ripping the hood off. We don’t need to be told that he is inflicting damage that he can easily fix; the same would not be true of wounds dealt to Lauren. And then a wondrous thing happens: after punishing the car, Bradley steps inside and faces Lauren, and they talk. They talk like adults in a movie for adults. This, too, is shocking. Everyone who meets Bradley seems to sense that he has, as a detective puts it, a moral compass. They can also see in his eyes that he would rather not hurt people, but is exceptionally capable of doing so if his hand is forced. Well, his hand is forced, in an odyssey that takes him from a minimum to a maximum security prison, and finally to “the prison within the prison,” ruled by the sportive cigarillo-puffing sadist Warden Tuggs (Don Johnson).

Brawl in Cell Block 99, like Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk, doesn’t use brutality for a kick or a tickle. It’s lumbering, terrible, thudding stuff, with the fights often filmed in long takes so we can see that, yes, that is indeed Vince Vaughn and not a stunt double distributing pain like Halloween candy. Bradley is a bad-ass, but Vaughn isn’t interested in that aspect of him (nor is Zahler). You’re not meant to go “whoo!” when the fists fly and arms are splintered, the way you were at something like Sylvester Stallone’s back-to-basics 2008 Rambo. You’re meant to wince, avert your eyes. Vaughn brings an intelligent wit and vulnerability that play against his six-foot-five frame. Bradley is a man who could easily be a hero, except that fate has made him a villain.

He does it all for his woman and his unborn child. As with Bone Tomahawk, I couldn’t be less interested in unpacking the story’s politics (avoiding spoilers, but some of the plot hinges on a hot-button issue). A great many effective pulp fantasies of the past, of course, would not pass today’s ideological purity tests. I’m as lefty as they come, and whatever right-wing skeleton may be rattling around inside Brawl concerns me not in the slightest. There’s no agenda being pressed here, just a cracking story with across-the-board fine performances (it’s predictable that Udo Kier is in perfect creepy form as a crime associate, but how about the surprisingly authoritative work from Marc Blucas — the most boring presence on Buffy the Vampire Slayer — as Bradley’s racist drug-dealer friend?). I don’t know how S. Craig Zahler votes, but I have seen how he writes and directs, and I’m ready to say he’s the most exciting filmmaker working in the violent genres since Tarantino raised his flag 25 years ago. Watch him.

Strapped for Danger

Leave it to Richard Griffin, the bad-boy independent Rhode Island director, to put a large, engorged, heavily veined exclamation point on the filmmaking portion of his career.¹ His latest and last film, Strapped for Danger, is not a bid for awards or respectability; it’s a party without a drop of seriousness in it. (Griffin’s previous film, the surreal and wistful Long Night in a Dead City, probably offers his heartfelt and genuine goodbye to the medium for those looking for that.) It also, quite accidentally and coincidentally, conveys more of the heat and wit of Tom of Finland’s artwork than last week’s Tom of Finland biography managed. Old Touko Laaksonen himself might have studied some of the scenes and risen to the occasion.

Gay male strippers Joey (Anthony Gaudette) and Matt (Diego Guevara), along with their hetero colleague Chuck (Dan Mauro), halt the festivities at their strip club and rob the clientele, taking a cop (C. Gerald Murdy) hostage. This arouses the ire of the cop’s partner (Anna Rizzo), who hates gays but swings into action accompanied by the club’s drag-queen hostess Piñata Debris (the fabulous Johnny Sederquist) to track down her partner (and tentative boyfriend). The strippers bring the cop to a frat house to hide out and locate a stash of diamonds. The script, by playwright Duncan Pflaster, gets to the satirical point quickly: frats are little but hothouses of crypto-gay rough-trade behavior, and sexy queer criminals fit right in.

Strapped for Danger has been billed as “very naughty,” and so it is; it has more penises than you can shake a dick at, as well as copious nipples, male and female, offered for pinching and caressing. It’s probably not an accident that Griffin has picked now to unleash the gayest movie of his career, a time when our only president thinks nothing of giving a speech at the virulently homophobic Values Voter Summit. Our vice president wouldn’t make it through the opening credits, either (the kidnapped cop, Rod Pence, might be named after him). Then again, the movie’s relevance could just be happenstance — certainly it has no overt politics weighing it down, just subtext for those who enjoy it.

Gayosity aside, the movie looks to be Griffin’s tip of the hat to cheeseball ‘80s action, of the sort produced by Cannon. Strapped for Danger looks slicker than most of those sleaze epics ever did, though; cinematographer John Mosetich dabs on the lurid reds of the strip club, the more naturalistic hues of the frat house or the police station. The actors cheerfully camp it up, which is the only thing you can do with material like this: if you’re at a party, you party. The stand-outs are the formidable Sarah Reed as Chuck’s snorting squeeze Beverley, Matthew Menendez and Brandon Grimes as hot-to-trot pledges, and of course the wicked wit(ch) Sederquist, who in another corner of his life performs as Ninny Nothin.

The occasion of this review is bittersweet for me, because I was there in August 2000 when Richard Griffin’s feature debut Titus Andronicus opened, I just barely thirty, he not yet thirty. The better part of two decades later here I am, a grayer ink-stained wretch, and there he is, a grayer director retiring from film but returning to theater. This means we can still enjoy his work, though not on a screen. To my dismay, and possibly to Griffin’s relief, this will be the last time I review a film of his (unless I go back and cover his earlier stuff … or write a book about his filmography, heh-heh). It’s been a pleasure and a privilege to do so. Strapped for Danger, with all its sex-positive weenie-flapping, turns out to be the perfect capper to a career that has delighted in tweaking squares and turning sacred cows into brisket.

¹After releasing this film — fortunately for fans of Griffin, unfortunately for my review — Griffin decided not to throw in the towel just yet. I did not know that at the time, and so anything I wrote here about this being his swan song blah blah blah is invalid. I kept the review the same anyway. But the next time he grandly announces “Attend me! This motion picture shall be my last!,” it better be his last, dammit.

Tom of Finland

Touko Laaksonen, better known as the fetish artist Tom of Finland, liked to draw what aroused him: beefy men in uniform, or leather, or leather uniform. A veteran of World War II, Touko seemed to draw his aesthetic partly from the Nazis, with whom the Finnish army fought against the Soviet Union in an example of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend — kind of.” (Finland stayed independent and never formally allied with Nazi Germany; near the end of the war the two countries got into it with each other anyway.) I don’t think the new Finnish biopic Tom of Finland gets into the Nazi thing, which is probably for the best; by his own admission, Touko was never particularly political at heart, though his work ended up being plenty political.

Touko (Pekka Strang) cuts an artsy figure — with his porkpie hat and mustache, he resembles a Eurotrash R. Crumb (whose bizarrely sexual comics, like Touko’s art, are as notorious as they are renowned). He slouches around Finland, furtively pursuing men in parks or at “poker parties” and risking arrest. (Homosexuality wasn’t decriminalized in Finland until 1971.) He has a job in advertising, and on the side he draws painstaking pictures of men posing alone or in twos or threes, sometimes busy, sometimes just bulging. What made Touko’s drawings so magnetic to gay men in later years, and what gives them a spark that transcends the usual porn, is that they come from such an obvious, desperate place of, well, concupiscence. It was his inner orgy life given form, though in technique it was, as one critic said, illustrative but not expressive. The men’s expressions are sullen or glazed over with lust (there are some exceptions). The blankness of their faces is a good screen on which the viewer can project his fantasies.

The movie’s Touko seems to follow suit, eventually shopping for leather-daddy gear and becoming one of his own stolid cartoons. Touku never seems especially cheerful or even happy. The frequent same-sex encounters are filmed rather neutrally by straight director Dome Karukoski. The heart of the movie is in the relationships between Touku and those who love him, such as his disapproving sister (Jessica Grabowsky), or his younger lover who succumbs to AIDS, or the Californian gays who invite him out to see the impact he had on American rough-trade culture (in the West Coast ‘70s as well as the Helsinki ‘40s, it’s all about butch hair and mustaches and shared cigarettes and sexuality so aggressively lunging it seems almost like Kabuki at times). What we don’t know is whether he loves them back — or can. The film cites Touko’s wartime stabbing to death of a Russian paratrooper as the event that froze his soul, took him out of the human race and sidelined him as a watcher, an artist.

Once the movie gets to California and the snarky twinks and amiable bears who revere Tom of Finland’s work, its outlook improves and it shakes off, at least temporarily, the Helsinki blues. It does spend a lot of our time beforehand being dreary (though, as lighted by cinematographer Lasse Frank, gorgeously dreary — not drearily dreary as in the recent England Is Mine). I found myself wanting a whole movie documenting Touko’s bright years in the ‘70s, before AIDS decimated the community and before Touko himself fell to emphysema in 1991. But in order to appreciate Touko’s liberation and vindication in his later years we need to see the repression/oppression of his youth. In the ‘40s, Touko passes one of his naughtier drawings under a toilet stall as a come-on; he gets a fat lip for his troubles. Fast-forward to the ‘70s, and dudes are dueling with giant inflatable phalluses at pool parties where wayward police, rather than being feared, are catcalled.

That juicy round of hooting at embarrassed cops who, in another time and place, would have been arresting the whole party is gratifying and about as close as Tom of Finland comes to pure comedy — except when it shows us Touko’s work. The drawing has the fizz of an artist mesmerized by his own onanistic images, like all those so-aroused-it-hurts drawings by R. Crumb of fat-bottomed girls, or S. Clay Wilson’s seething panoramas of filth. It has wit, and a refreshing lack of sentiment. Would that the same were true of the film, which goes a little soft (flaccid, if you will) near the end, with a bunny brought into a dying man’s hospital room — the scene is, I think, a mistake. But most of the handsomely assembled film pays tribute not to the man’s pornography but to the way it pointed gay men away from shame towards pride, like an arrow, or like something similarly shaped.

Blade Runner 2049

There’s a lot to say about Blade Runner 2049, the long-gestating sequel to the 1982 cult classic, but here’s my initial thought: see it, don’t see it, but know that something like this — a downbeat, two-hour-and-forty-four-minute, expensive (anywhere from $150 to $185 million), R-rated work of art — will not come along again any time soon. (Especially because its opening-weekend take was “only” $31 million, which is thought to be disastrous.) Eccentricities like this will be lost in time, as someone once said, like tears in rain. More than once, I was stirred by an image or a subtly broken line reading or the thunderous, doomy soundtrack. It’s a little baffling, though, how little of it has stayed with me — except in isolated shards of sound or picture.

That’s because Blade Runner 2049, like its dour predecessor, is a bitter tone poem about humanity’s pros and cons rather than an adventure or a mystery. It continues the vision of the hellish dystopian city that the first film practically invented, and expands on it somewhat, taking us further out from the slums of L.A. (Master cinematographer Roger Deakins nurtures beauty where the first film found mostly ugliness.) In both cases the plot doesn’t matter as much as the thematic and visual heaviosity the plot makes possible. The mission of the protagonist — K (Ryan Gosling), a replicant whose job is to find and retire previous iterations of replicants — is defined mainly by where the plot needs him to be. A buried skeleton has been found, and markings on the bones determine that the owner of the skeleton was (A) a replicant and (B) pregnant. K must wipe out all evidence of this birth, including whoever the child is.

That sound you hear is Blade Runner 2049 brutally dismantling about half of the Blade Runner fandom’s most earnest theories, but it slyly leaves intact the biggest one of all — that the first film’s anti-hero, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a killer of replicants, was himself a replicant. Deckard was never a source of laughs (except when he posed as a dweeby inspector to gain backstage access to a replicant he was hunting), but when Ford appears well into the second hour, he brings some dry levity with him. Before that it’s mostly the po-faced adventures of Ryan, the Boy Who Isn’t a Real Boy. Gosling holds the screen capably, occasionally giving it up to livelier, usually female presences like Robin Wright as K’s hard-bitten superior officer and Sylvia Hoeks as Luv, a fearsome replicant who seems to have stepped out of a Frank Miller comic — Ronin, maybe.

Ronin, of course, like about five million other things, was heavily influenced by the original Blade Runner. The sequel wisely gets the first film’s iconic visuals out of the way quickly, and it doesn’t feel like a fan film but like a legitimate addition to canon. Like other films directed by Denis Villeneuve, it’s hushed and long and will put considerable pressure on some viewers’ patience. But I enjoyed its meditative tempo, and the way it uses violence is as upsetting as in the first Blade Runner but not as freaky and mean-spirited. The general tone of the original was fear and rage blended into a melange of futuristic noir; the tone of 2049 is sadness, loneliness, largely due to living in a society ruled by privilege and hubris. Everyone is walled off from everyone else, one person literally; the movie ends up saying that humanity isn’t all that important if artificial intelligence can create a better humanity. Cool story, bro! But as an experience of severe imagery and soundscape, 2049 delivers. Someday on Blu-ray it will be the go-to movie for the attuned to float around in for almost three hours, getting stoned on the bitter and doom-laden toxic mood.

Inhumanwich!

“In Soviet Russia, sandwich eats you!” is not a joke featured in the retro sci-fi/horror tribute Inhumanwich! (pronounced IN-hyoo-MAN-wich), but there are plenty of other jokes. The movie, shot in golden-oldie black and white, concerns an astronaut whose sloppy joe sandwich combines with radiation to turn him into a rapidly growing monster made of meat. This is the kind of knowingly daffy premise that can go south — and sour — but writer/director David Cornelius strikes a light tone early on and delivers, as I said, a tribute to schlock of the ‘50s, not a callow put-down. If you’re too hip for ridiculous big-monster movies, why put in the years of work to make one? To show the world you’re better than the movie you just made? Cornelius, in contrast, is not too hip for those movies or for his own movie. He loves them as I do, and his affection is infectious.

I don’t know for sure (but he’ll probably tell me) exactly which creature-double-features Cornelius is referencing, but I’ll take a stab and say Inhumanwich! is The Blob by way of The Incredible Melting Man (or, if you want to be fancy, First Man into Space), with elements and tropes from however many hours of snowy TV young Cornelius sat in front of. (There also seem to be fun nudges in the ribs of John Carpenter’s The Thing and the infamous Arch Oboler radio play “Chicken Heart.”) Astronaut Joe Neumann (amiably played by Jacque “Jake” Ransom before he turns into a blob of beef) terrorizes the Cincinnati countryside after his rocket crash-lands, and it’s up to the usual team of soldiers and scientists to stop it before it engulfs the planet.

Cornelius and editor Matt Gray keep Inhumanwich! sprinting (and short — the film crosses the finish line at an hour thirteen, including credits). As the old-timers who made stuff like Them! and Tarantula knew, you don’t want to give the audience a lot of time to think during your movie about killer turnips or whatever, and Cornelius also knows what the soul of wit is. (Look for his uncredited cameo as a Jordy Verrill-type gentleman who encounters the monster in the woods.) The scenes are clipped to punch up the punchlines; this good-hearted comedy boasts a good deal of technical savvy, of the sort that’s invisible when it’s working. There’s a bit about a character who repeats everything she hears during a phone chat, which would make a goofy sort of sense if we were just hearing her side of the conversation and we were getting exposition from it; but we also see the other side of the talk via split screen, so the redundancy becomes a surreal joke. It’s one of several gags in Inhumanwich! that you just know started with Cornelius watching some forlorn excuse for a movie with buddies and saying “Wouldn’t it be funny if…”

The performers are mostly encouraged to mimic the unhip flatness of ‘50s sci-fi actors. The movie doesn’t confine itself to any one era, though; some of the signifiers announce themselves as from the ‘50s, some from modern times. To that end, Jake Robinson’s stogie-chewing, growling General Graham seems to channel John Belushi’s Wild Bill Kelso and the uncouth soldiers of Day of the Dead, moreso than the rigid military men you’d find in antique schlock. He seems to be of the ‘70s and ‘80s, whereas a later character (Brad Nicholas), whose competitive abilities might be of some use against the monster, seems of more recent vintage. Cornelius mashes up the decades as if to say that some things in the universe remain constant, such as humanity’s response to a killer pile of ground beef. Inhumanwich! is just the brand of inspired nonsense we need at the moment.