Love Lies Bleeding

The writer-director Rose Glass, who introduced herself five years ago with the well-regarded horror film Saint Maud, has a knack for setting up a suggestive yet oppressive mood. She was built, really, for film noir, and her latest, Love Lies Bleeding, has steamy moments and genuinely horrifying violence. In both films, though, she can’t quite stick the landing and some of the more hallucinatory passages risk bad laughter. That’s the trouble with movies as serious as Glass’s are — she doesn’t release our laughter with any comic relief, so it has to be released somehow, and it happens when our protagonist’s fantasies are made absurdly literal. Any more detail would be spoiling part of the big finish. 

I enjoyed Love Lies Bleeding more than Saint Maud, but I’m not eager to watch either of them again. Our heroine, Louise or “Lou” (Kristen Stewart), staggers under the weight of the world. A gym manager, Lou likes women but seems to have attracted only bad news like Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), who is hyperactive and needy in a way that screams drugs, or just desperate loneliness. Soon enough, Lou meets Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a hopeful bodybuilder, and falls in love with her. Jackie seems nice but a little flighty; her instability spikes when she gets hooked on steroids Lou gives her. Jackie happens to have landed work at a shooting range owned by Lou’s dad (Ed Harris), a bad motorscooter who uses the range as a front for gunrunning and has left many bodies at the bottom of a ravine. 

That’s not all. Lou’s beloved sister Beth (Jena Malone) is stuck in an abusive relationship with J.J. (Dave Franco), who puts Beth in the hospital one day. Venting her anger, Lou says she wants J.J. dead, and Jackie hears and goes to visit J.J. in a spiral of roid rage. During all this, the feds are sniffing around; they’d like to nail Lou’s dad for all the bodies in the ravine, plus a new one found down there. For a while, I was with the movie as a sort of artful mirage of passion, in which Lou’s desires are answered by Jackie the leonine figure of mystery. Where did she come from? What does she want? It’s all kind of abstract. As if that weren’t enough stress, Lou is trying to quit smoking during all this. Good luck with that.

It’s capably acted — this deserves to be Katy O’Brian’s breakout role, allowing her to explore pleasure and pain and fear and madness, and Stewart has some fine, truthful moments. Her Lou grounds the sometimes strange film in lucidity and gives us someone to relate to. When these two make each other smile, they create a pocket of warmth we don’t want to lose, even though this is a noir and we know a storm is on the horizon. There’s a troublesome, though most likely unintentional, subtext wherein the mixed-race Jackie enters the pale Lou’s life and behaves savagely. Again, noirs are not nice. But it’s tricky to create characters we’re meant to care about, and cast actors who can make us care, and then shove them into the meat grinder of noir, where by definition everything turns to pulp.

Pulp, of course, can be fun. But Rose Glass has now made a horror movie and a noir, both genres that can offer a terrific time, and dipped them in a thick, forbidding mood. Jackie’s two major trippy sequences seem to signify more than is there; they pop in for a surreal twinkle, then are gone and unremarked on. Yet this kind of emotionally fuzzy psychodrama, which feels palpably physical but relentlessly interiorized, can poke us in raw places that other movies can’t get at. Someday Glass will find a story that consorts well with her dread-ridden tone, and she will make a classic that even I, who feels emotionally adrift in her films to date, will have to acknowledge. I’m also willing to note that the problem could be more mine than hers; something in my store of emotions and responses gets put off by what she’s doing or what she’s trying. That doesn’t make it bad. It certainly doesn’t make it boring.

Drive-Away Dolls

It’s probably too simplistic, and probably wrong, but on the evidence of Ethan Coen’s solo debut feature Drive-Away Dolls, he’s the goofy one in the Coen partnership and his brother Joel (who directed The Tragedy of Macbeth a few years back) is the serious one. (Typically perversely, the truth is probably the other way around.) Drive-Away Dolls, which Ethan also co-wrote with his wife Tricia Cooke, is blessedly short (77 minutes less seven minutes of end credits) and full of sex, violence, and jokes. The jokes sometimes land and sometimes don’t, but overall it’s a pleasant enough trifle. Not everything the Coens are involved in, separately or together, has to be a cinematic game-changer.

The dolls (the original title was Drive-Away Dykes) are buddies Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan). They get a car from a drive-away service and head to Tallahassee, not knowing there’s something in the trunk. Violent men hired by a powerful figure are after this something, for reasons I should let the movie tell you. Jamie, a lascivious sort, and Marian, who brings a Henry James novel with her, are generally the kind of diametrically opposed friends you only meet in B-movies. But Coen never pretends this is anything but a B-movie. Full of psychedelic scene transitions that recall the knockout daydreams in The Big Lebowski, it’s informed by any number of exploitation flicks of the ‘70s, though I feel sure none of those had references to The Europeans. 

The movie is all over the place — its tone is the ‘70s, but it’s set in 1999 for some reason, and sports some anachronisms like someone saying women can marry each other in Massachusetts (they couldn’t until 2004). A small dog is treated somewhat cavalierly (though not cruelly, thankfully), its only purpose being an excuse to get Jamie’s ex (Beanie Feldstein, funny as usual) on her trail. The terrific character actor Bill Camp scores every time as the drive-away manager Curlie, who’s sort of the comedic flip side of the elderly gas-station attendant who almost loses the coin toss in No Country for Old Men. As often happens in Coen movies, the desperate criminals are ruinously stupid, and their quarry is only innocent in comparison. Stars Pedro Pascal and Matt Damon drop in briefly, adding to the tapestry.

It may also be simplistic to imagine that Coen came up with the knockabout male crime stuff while Tricia Cooke (who identifies as queer; she and Coen have an open marriage) handled the lesbian stuff. Certainly the scenes inside various lesbian bars (an endangered species these days) were informed by someone who’s been there. Apparently “basement parties” are or were a thing; Jamie and Marian find themselves at one such shindig hosted by a women’s soccer team, and are invited to another. The South in 1999, presumably, was a lava pool of activity for like-minded young women to pursue glory or humiliation. In this universe, men mostly exist to be laughable or menacing (Colman Domingo holds up the “menacing” portion as imposingly as he did in @Zola). This is the kind of movie where Beanie Feldstein comes to the rescue, gun blazing.

Weirdly, of the two solo Coen efforts, I prefer Ethan’s sex-positive, consolateur-laden goof to Joel’s starkly artsy Shakespeare. (The two films couldn’t be less alike.) For one thing, it’s more fun, and fun is as rare nowadays as lesbian bars. The loosey-goosey Qualley and the stoically suffering Viswanathan are an engaging match; if their Jamie and Marian headlined a TV series I’d be there for it. If you don’t relish their company, you’re only with them for slightly north of an hour, and there are other strange divertissements throughout, such as Miley Cyrus’ bit as a character named Tiffany Plastercaster, or a heavy who emphasizes people skills as a path to persuasion (with dialogue you can imagine hearing, slightly tweaked, in Miller’s Crossing), or the funniest front-page headline since Arrested Development’s heyday. It’s silly and soft and bound for the cult-movie section, where it will find the following it lacks right now.

Poor Things

It won’t do to take Poor Things literally. This, after all, is a movie in which a pregnant woman jumps off a bridge and is brought back to life, with the brain of her still-living child implanted in her own skull. The result is Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), who seems built to violate the Victorian mores of her society. We witness Bella, with her infant brain in a full-grown woman’s body, evolve from an innocent who spits out hated food and speaks in broken syntax to a wiser woman who reads up on socialism but still refers to the sex act as “furious jumping.” 

The movie, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite) and based on a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, is partly a riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and partly a charcuterie board full of bits from other works of dark science fantasy, with frequent visits from weird cinema down through the ages. I loved it, though possibly would have loved less of it; at two hours and twenty-one minutes, Poor Things starts to circle and belabor its point. Some won’t mind; others won’t get past the first half hour. Not a horror movie itself, it’s best appreciated by horror fans with long memories and patience. Its visual imagination is richly capacious, it has an uncompromising vibe of pure cinema, and when you see it a second time — and you may want to — you’ll at least know at which points to hit the bathroom.

Stone gives a hungry, open-souled performance illustrated by I lost count of how many sex scenes; she will be and has been praised for her bravery in the second aspect, but the meat of her work resides in the first, as Bella’s brain grows and her responses to stimuli and to life — at some points in her journey, there’s little difference — gain more subtlety and less babyish affect. Stone helps put across the story as a fable about growth in a barren garden of a society. We’re not meant, from our privileged perch as 21st-century people, to take Bella’s arc as a Victorian woman as commentary on feminism or anything else. Victorian London is just the most diabolically fun setting for this tale and its central figure, a prickly and proudly ungovernable agent of chaos.

A lot of the film, with its mad-lab gore and copious sex and nudity (if this got through with an R rating, what gets an NC-17 these days?), is like a Hammer horror from the ‘60s seen through a fever-dream lens (literally a fisheye lens at times, as well as a bokeh blurring effect). Cinematographer Robbie Ryan and production designers Shona Heath and James Price can take deep bows. And Lanthimos doesn’t forget about the supporting cast, including a waffle-scarred Willem Dafoe as Bella’s creator (who burps bubbles when eating) and a whiny Mark Ruffalo as one of the (male) fools who try to trap Bella’s spirit. Poor Things has a paltry-for-the-2020s $35 million budget but manages to look like a big Hollywood saga, only seen through a funhouse mirror.

Poor Things is essentially a comedy. We never fear for Bella even when things look bleak and Jerskin Fendrix’s ominous score becomes, according to the editorializing subtitles, “perplexing.” With its concerns with dark scientific inquiry and female consciousness coming into its own, it’s the true Barbenheimer this year. It arrives just in time to give me happy optimism about the future of cinema as a delivery system for idiosyncratic visions. It may not make studio accountants giddy, and might even be too stubbornly strange for the Academy, but it’ll take its place among the iconic works in dark-fantasy history. But this sort of unstable experiment comes with a mild warning: I loved it, but some of it I didn’t like. If that makes sense.

Once Within a Time

By the time Mike Tyson turns up as “the Mentor” in Once Within a Time, the phantasmagoric new strangeness by Godfrey Reggio, you might want to know exactly how Reggio directed Tyson — what he told Tyson about the character he was playing and the gestures and expressions he was making. Reggio, most famous for his Qatsi trilogy begun by Koyaanisqatsi in 1982, has said that Tyson didn’t actually need much direction. He, at least, understood what he was doing there, though we might not. 

But I’m not here to poke fun. Once Within a Time is the latest (perhaps the last) in the 83-year-old former monk’s forty-year mission to make cautionary visual/aural tone poems about what humans are doing to a perfectly good planet. Greta Thunberg is represented as a paper mask, as of course she is. She and Mike Tyson might typify two different approaches to living, or maybe not. Tyson’s casting as a Mentor who instructs children how to build a new world on the ruins of the old might signify that Reggio believes that anyone — rapists of the earth, rapists of women — could conceivably redeem themselves and play useful roles in evolution.

But of course Once Within a Time can’t be held to a strict ecological reading, or any reading. I doubt Reggio (who co-directed with longtime editor Jon Kane) sits around watching other people’s films, but his movie, let’s say, resonates with the work of David Lynch, Guy Maddin, Shinya Tsukamoto, and more. You could groove on the sounds (Philip Glass, who goes all the way back to Koyaanisqatsi with Reggio, contributes another noodly-doodly score) and images, let it all wash over you, and not bother with a scene-by-scene assessment of meaning at all. Perhaps Reggio might prefer it that way. If it means nothing to you, it means nothing (and you’ve only spent less than an hour on it). If it speaks to you, either bluntly or slant, it might do its most enduring work as an allusive experimental fable.

I don’t feel like writing a blow-by-blow of what “happens,” and you don’t feel like reading one, trust me. Some of it, fixated on children or primates gazing at the camera, has ties to Reggio’s previous effort, 2013’s Visitors. A credit near the end tells us the film was “handmade in Brooklyn,” and it does have that quality of having been tinkered with, either digitally or in real space. There’s no dialogue — not in recognizable English, anyway. Various figures — Iranian composer Sussan Deyhim as “Mother Muse,” a “Nonsense Man” who looks like an apple, spirits and robots — do their duty-dance with the death of the world. Smartphones appear as diabolical screens reflecting false existence back to us, at one point forming a black-brick road followed by an Adam and Eve.

Some critics don’t like what they read as Reggio’s preaching and hypocrisy (using the same technology he demonizes, etc.) He certainly isn’t in it for the money, and his brand of film assembly has, for the last twenty years or so, needed Steven Soderbergh in its corner as an executive producer or “presenter.” (Reggio has always enjoyed benefactors: Francis Coppola presented Koyaanisqatsi, and he and George Lucas shepherded Powaqqatsi.) Once Within a Time seems aimed at kids, and a good deal of it has a joyful, searching quality. This time out, Reggio seems to acknowledge that the end of life as we know it doesn’t have to mean the end of life full stop, that there might be a next chapter only the youngest of us might read. Or it might be all devastation and charred flowers. We don’t know, and neither does Reggio, who seems to shape these things more as questions than as answers anyway. 

Sorcerer

When William Friedkin died on August 7, the press of course referred to him in terms of his hits: “the director of The French Connection and The Exorcist.” Friedkin was also the director of 1977’s Sorcerer, a movie he might have preferred to be remembered by. Of all his films, it was his favorite, “the only film I’ve made,” he said in 2017, “that I can still watch.” It ended up being one of his biggest flops, having gone way over budget at great physical risk to the cast and crew; the making of Sorcerer was often as nerve-wracking and nightmarish as the movie itself is. 

Based on the premise of Georges Arnaud’s novel The Wages of Fear, which also inspired H.G. Clouzot’s 1953 classic of the same name, the film comes close to being a pure-cinema riff on the frustrations of machines and nature and how they are aligned against the will of man. Four men hiding out in a Colombian village are selected for what looks to be a suicide mission: using a couple of broken-down trucks, they must convey old boxes of dynamite, which has leaked highly unstable nitroglycerine liquid, over two hundred and eighteen miles of bumpy, treacherous jungle roads — and the most rickety-looking suspension bridge you’ve ever seen — so that a burning oil well can be blown up, dispersing the fires. The men are Scanlon (Roy Scheider), an American wheelman for thieves, on the run from a mob boss; Kassem (Amidou), a terrorist who targeted an Israeli bank; Victor (Bruno Cremer), a stockbroker who fled jail time for tax fraud; and Nilo (Francisco Rabal), an icy hit-man.

Friedkin and writer Walon Green (The Wild Bunch) introduce these men in pre-plot vignettes to establish what they seek to escape. They are offered a large sum of money by the American oil company to perform this mission. In either film version, I think we’re meant to take the story as a metaphor for how capitalism grinds everyone down, though Friedkin tends to let subtext take care of itself; he gets much more juice out of the central challenges, which pit truck against nature and sometimes against itself. Humans create machines to master nature, but here the machines are jerry-rigged and half-dead, and the jungle is robust, throwing many obstacles in the protagonists’ path. (There are no heroes here.)

The legendary (or if it isn’t, it deserves to be) bridge sequence, in which first one truck and then the other seems to exhale stoically and try its luck over the splintered boards and unlikely ropes of that bridge, can still get us to lean forward in our seats and wince audibly, even though we know that nobody died filming it, and the bridge itself was part of hydraulically assisted movie magic. Friedkin, a master of tension, can make us forget all that. Then there’s the fallen-tree sequence, which inspires a Treasure of Sierra Madre-like gust of sardonic laughter from the hit-man, before the terrorist — who has experience with bombs — figures out a way to clear the path. The physical realism is oppressive, reeking of a sense of futility. The men, feeling every inch of the slow 218-mile drive, strain against the elements to attain freedom, which isn’t guaranteed.

I don’t want to get into a contest between Sorcerer and The Wages of Fear. Both are masterful in their distinct ways, and the Clouzot classic has won (and earned) a spot among the Criterion-anointed canon, while Sorcerer, this surly and downbeat thing that could serve as a comment on Vietnam, got chased out of theaters in 1977 by the post-Vietnam bag of candy nobody knew they’d been waiting for, Star Wars. The writing was scrawled in blood on the wall: Friedkin’s taste for antiheroes or flawed heroes, which had stood him in good stead in his previous two hits, was now as much a thing of the past as Clouzot. Disagreeable main characters eventually found a home on HBO and elsewhere on the dial; they were, by and large, no longer welcome in theaters, though Friedkin kept trying. But he could never quite get behind the heroic code or perfect people doing perfect things. Right up to the end he asked, with his usual impatient tenor, “What the fuck is wrong with us? Why do we do this shit?” and to try to answer the former, he made movies exploring the latter. Sorcerer was maybe the clearest example of his mission, of his question. Give it a shot. 

The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has launched any number of adaptations, variations, and permutations in the 205 years since it was first published. The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, a modern-day riff on the story, may be one of the more touching — up to a point. A first feature by writer-director Bomani J. Story, ABG&HM is bound to be derided as “woke” by a certain contingent, though none of the Black characters in it is especially heroic or faultless, least of all Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes), a student at an advanced high school. 

Vicaria rattles off elements and scientific facts, and Hayes lets us share how good it feels to Vicaria to be in control of something. Her home life is gutted though (barely) functional, her neighborhood is infested with crack dealers and the resulting violence, and the (white) authority figures who enforce the rules in school and on the streets won’t help her. I believed very quickly and completely in Vicaria as a brilliant girl who may also be missing a few pieces psychologically.

Vicaria’s mother was shot to death years ago, leaving behind Vicaria and her father (Chad L. Coleman), who buys crack from the cold-blooded local dealer (Denzel Whitaker) when he’s not working two jobs. The movie is matter-of-fact about the misery it shows us, and is also willing to sketch in some genuine warmth between family. The portrait of a bleeding community feels full and lived. To complicate things, Vicaria’s brother Chris (Edem Atsu-Swanzy) has recently been killed by the cops. Vicaria steals his body — not the first corpse she’s squirreled away, we learn — and decides to test her theory that death is a disease and can be cured.

This angry Black girl’s monster isn’t just the re-animated Chris; it’s rage itself, which Chris seems possessed by, and by the need to act it out. Fury flows through the monster’s veins as much as the electricity Vicaria uses to jump-start him. (When he strangles people, he leaves deep, ugly burn marks on their flesh.) Bomani J. Story uses Frankenstein to tell a tale about how anger and desperation can napalm the innocent and guilty alike. Chris wreaks havoc on cops and criminals — destroying the world that destroyed him — and we get the impression he’s acting as much on Vicaria’s wishes as his own. Her name probably sounds like “vicarious” for a reason.

ABG&HM is a fine, wounding drama that occasionally puts on a Halloween costume and gets its hands gory. It’s a hell of a calling card, and Story can take a bow for the seeming effortlessness with which he juggles thematic concerns and sustains an oppressive tone usually in exciting conflict with the snappy filmmaking. But the movie doesn’t hit us as deeply as it might, and it’s easy to see why: We never get to know Chris as a living person — he’s dead right from the start, and the artsy, wordless flashbacks we get of him don’t help. Story may have needed to keep the film to a certain length, and scenes of Chris and Vicaria sharing warm moments may have been sacrificed. So there’s no contrast between whatever he was before and the growling, haltingly spoken monster he becomes. 

Chris’s own family, even including Vicaria, doesn’t seem to have much of an emotional response to his recent death, either (and nobody goes looking for his body, which it’s assumed that someone “sick” made off with) — not even Aisha (Reilly Brooke Stith), who’s carrying Chris’s baby. They all get together for a family dinner that, as I noted above, is a welcome respite from the grimness — but shouldn’t they show a bit more consciousness of who isn’t at the table? (Chris is mentioned a couple times.) I know, I know, Story has more on his plate than grief and its realistic impact; an entire movie could be made (and has been) about processing all the intense, tangled emotions following a loved one’s violent death. Here, Chris’s death isn’t the subject, it’s a delivery system for a premise, and we sort of need to agree to go along with that to get the most out of the film. It’s not perfect, but it leaves me wanting to see more from this filmmaker. It gets our interest and holds it.

Videodrome

On February 4, it will have been forty years since David Cronenberg’s Videodrome — his magnum opus about fantasy and control — emerged, like a rash, on theater screens and shortly thereafter withdrew its shingle and closed shop. In the decades since, it has been re-appraised as an important work on display in the Cronenberg museum of images and ideas. Taking the form of a classic noir, the film is less a whodunit than a what’s-it-gonna-do-to-me. The protagonist, Max Renn (James Woods, seldom moister or better), owns and operates a shady indie TV station that traffics in the obscure and the louche. Max is always on the lookout for harder content, and he finds it in Videodrome, a program consisting only of torture and murder (simulated or real? does it matter?). 

One of the great ironies of Videodrome is that the actual content of the Videodrome programming isn’t the problem — it’s not, in and of itself, harmful to the viewer. It’s just there to lure people — perhaps a certain kind of person not averse to violent fantasizing — and then the signal, which we’re told could just as easily be conveyed in a test-pattern screen, causes hallucinations and, eventually, death. The concept of salacious and/or violently stimulating content as a Trojan horse for something else is borne out by Cronenberg’s own movie, which attracts us with kink and splattery, suppurating Rick Baker special effects and then infects us with its virus of ideas — or at least an invitation to debate them. Unlike Videodrome, Cronenberg doesn’t want to hurt you, just provoke thought.

Following the rabbit hole of clues and sketchy figures, Max gets involved with Nicki Brand (Debbie Harry), who gives advice on the radio by day and indulges s&m urges at night. Nicki is intrigued enough by what she sees of Videodrome to want to be part of it. For Max, she becomes the erotically entreating face of Videodrome, her lips bulging forth from the TV set from which many of Max’s head trips flow. Despite the wild and often unprecedented imagery he puts on the screen, Cronenberg has never been a flashy director, which suits his material just fine. If we’re to understand what Cronenberg is telling by showing, we need to see it, straight on and dead-eyed. No fancy cinematic footwork will do.

Other figures fade into the picture, like gangsters out of the noir fog — mainly media cult types, who study the effects of mass communication and either caution against it or weaponize it. Somewhere in the film’s second half, Cronenberg gets a little lost in the weeds of his own story’s implications. But that’s what makes it art. Cronenberg has famously said that you make a movie to find out why you wanted to make the movie. Videodrome, possibly, stays unresolved for us because it was unresolved for him, and how can something this visually and philosophically tangled be resolved? It can’t. It can only go out on a small frequency and reach the like-minded, who may perceive its unanswered questions as a void they feel duty-bound to fill with interpretation.

Cronenberg began with a disturbing childhood experience with a TV signal that was barely coming in; the (again) unresolved fuzz and hiss of a bad signal, he thought, could have been a dark and frightening program without enough juice to cut through the static. That’s not even a premise, that’s a vibe, and the original tone of young Cronenberg’s unease makes it into the movie. The sometimey signal of Videodrome seems to cast its malefic spell by what it conceals as much as reveals. Sweaty imagination pastes in what the eye misses. Videodrome has a lot to say about the bad romance between eye and brain, mind and body. Cronenberg has taken his childhood fear and built a world of conspiracy around it. Some of it plays as old hat — Cronenberg had just been down a similar paranoid road with 1981’s Scanners — and some of it is an excuse for Cronenberg and Rick Baker to do the Lovecraftian work of imagining the unimaginable. “Long live the new flesh” are Max’s final words, and Cronenberg’s artistic credo. The flesh Cronenberg shows us may be new, but it’s as flawed as the old flesh, because it’s ours. 

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Befitting the wild-ass movie itself, I’m of multiple minds about Everything Everywhere All at Once, which speaks fluent jibber-jabber about alternate universes and “verse-jumping.” It’s about a hundred different things — nihilism, choices, motherhood, the bone-cracking clarity of martial arts — and so comes dangerously close to being about nothing. It’s ambitious as all get-out, and always has a sight gag or a fight scene to perk things up when the goings get too cerebral. It’s restless, relentless entertainment, which would be fine at an hour and a half, but EEAAO rambles and verse-jumps its way to two hours and thirteen minutes, less six minutes of end credits, and sometimes it seems a bit much, a bit aggressive and draining. 

And then, as if on cue, something happens like Jamie Lee Curtis playing a version of “Claire de Lune” on her piano with her toes, because her fingers are hot dogs, and one’s mood lifts again. Maybe a movie so tirelessly determined to show us things we haven’t seen before can’t escape being cluttered and shambolic occasionally, or even often; EEAAO reminded me of Terry Gilliam, but his better films, which have a better balance between honking nonsense and visionary bravado, so that one feeds into the other. I’m also tickled pink that the movie is one of the year’s great unexpected success stories, a genuine sleeper word-of-mouth hit with, wonder of wonders, Michelle Yeoh her own fabulous self front and center. 

Yeoh is Evelyn Wang, who runs a laundromat with husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). The laundromat is in trouble with the IRS, which, in the person of auditor Deirdre Beaubeirdre (Curtis), wonders why Evelyn has declared so many things as business write-offs. The IRS stuff seems unnecessary except as a part of glum, stressful reality we become desperate to escape (a further link to Gilliam). And we do, when an alternate-universe version of Waymond visits Evelyn to tell her that a mad version of their daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) threatens the existence of the multiverse. I’m not going to explain how, or why; that’s the movie’s job. Evelyn suddenly knows martial arts, or she has hot dogs for hands, or she’s a rock talking with a rock version of her daughter in a universe where life didn’t happen.

Written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, aka Daniels (Swiss Army Man), EEAAO isn’t all cold, clever pizzazz; some of it is legitimately moving, and gets at the specific pains of an Asian-American family in a more lateral and artistic way than it might have with a more conventional narrative. Pain and disappointment are passed down the generations; a giant, fearsome Everything Bagel becomes a symbol of anything life-annihilating or self-denying that consumes us from within. Some of this sounds heady, and then the movie pulls out the rug and gives us a sequence with various verse-jumpers each doing their own required weird thing in order to launch into the next universe. Interesting storage spaces are discovered for trophies. Googly eyes stand in for levity in the midst of the grim assembly line of life.

But. As I said before, a movie that can mean everything can also mean nothing, a paradox exemplified in-story, by Alpha Joy (called Jobu Tupaki) and her Everything Bagel. The movie suggests that the notion of everything — the uncountable number of universes and realities — can spook us into the numb but comforting embrace of nothingness, or nihilism. Thus EEAAO incorporates and comments on its own internal gremlins. As more people watch it, it’s going to be fun to read everyone’s interpretations of it — perhaps more fun than actually watching it. Again, it can get exhausting, and not just narratively; the amount of effort it must have taken to stitch this thing together gives me a headache just thinking about it. I admire it much more readily than I love or even like it. But the fact that movies like this can still be made — and prosper — proves to me that the eulogy for cinema can wait another few years. 

Crimes of the Future

“Careful, don’t spill,” whispers Viggo Mortensen to Léa Seydoux in one of the more outrageous moments of intimacy in Crimes of the Future. Marking a return to feature filmmaking after an eight-year hiatus for writer-director David Cronenberg, the movie could serve as a natural companion to a good number of his other films, especially Crash, which had a similar hushed, deadpan humor. In Cronenberg, people are driven restless by the war between their minds and their bodies — the Cartesian split, as he likes to call it. Here, climate change is making bodies into numb cocoons for unprecedented mutant organs. Long live the new flesh, indeed.

Mortensen and Seydoux are Saul Tenser and his artistic accomplice Caprice. Saul’s body has been developing new organs, which Caprice extracts and tattoos, as part of their performance art for a small but avid crowd. Cronenberg may be saying this or that about his own life as a subversive artist, but Crimes has more levels than that, some of which are accessible to those not Cronenberg and some of which are not. The movie, which is full of menacing machines with scalpels as well as mutilated flesh inside and out, can be taken as a Cronenberg art installation. Here and in many of Cronenberg’s other films, people transform, their flesh rebels alarmingly, and they view it as a beautiful evolution — they can either see it that way or go insane — while others recoil in horror. (Think of Jeff Goldblum excitedly rattling off theories while slowly disintegrating in The Fly as Geena Davis kept going “What is wrong with you?”) 

As usual with Cronenberg, his eroticism is less about the friction of bodies than the pulling off of societal restraints. “I’m not very good at the old sex,” says Saul to a creepy functionary (Kristen Stewart) smitten with him and his art. It’s this same woman, Timlin, who delivers the movie’s defining line: “Surgery is the new sex.” Those who have too literal a response to that premise — like actual car-crash survivors who had a beef with Crash — may tire of Cronenberg’s metaphorical game-playing. Cronenberg’s particular thematic emphases do make it tough for some to jump past what’s being shown and click into what’s being said.

Oddly, for all the carving and fondling of body parts, Crimes is sometimes, like Timlin, too enamored of its own ideas. The decade or two that Cronenberg spent away from the body-as-fallible-meat subgenre that he practically invented resulted in some interesting push-pull between Cronenberg and whosever story he was adapting. We took pleasure in his running stories about gangsters or psychiatrists through his filter. Crimes takes him back to the old gory days, for sure, but I can’t help feeling that it’s a summing-up, a greatest-hits album. Hey, some of those hits are pretty damn great, and they play well again here. But the pleasure of Cronenberg in the past few years lay in his making magic with material you wouldn’t expect him to forge in his own image. This material is as snugly fitted to him as that weird eating chair is supposed to be to Saul, but like the chair it occasionally moves clumsily and spills things. It gets talky and plotty when we’d like to hang out and dig the world-building. 

Still, if you’ve seen a lot of movies like this lately, I want to know which theater you’ve been going to. As much as this is patented Cronenberg Cinema, he’s also having a terrific time making it, and it often shows. Cronenberg loses himself in the sets in Greece; everything looks badly used, no vision of a shiny future but one full of numbness and grime. Even apartments look like some mad doctor’s castle laboratory. Using a strictured voice, Mortensen emotes largely with his eyes or with throat-clearing, and Seydoux, with her mischievous diastematic smile, makes a great partner in futuristic crime for him. Stewart, liberated in this nightmare world, creates a compelling woman out of little but nervous tics. Cronenberg is an actors’ director, as was obvious as far back as The Brood (1979), and by creating an artsy-bloody backdrop for them to play in front of, he gets performances and moments no one else can. Crimes might strike some of us fans as been-there-done-that, but what’s wrong with being there and doing that again? 

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

Some of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is likable and emotionally rich enough to be worth watching, but it’s depressing how it declines from being a good Nicolas Cage movie to being a bad Nicolas Cage movie — after fighting off the bad movie for about its first three-quarters. Cage plays a fictionalized version of himself, the over-the-top “Nick Cage,” an actor still beloved despite having toiled, out of financial necessity, in direct-to-video cash-grabs for over a decade. Unbearable Weight sets him up as a man serious about his craft, whose time as a Hollywood must-hire may have come and gone. 

For any of us who feel great affection for Cage as a person and great respect for him as an artist, the premise — he’s so desperate for cash he’ll appear at a rich guy’s birthday party — is just saddening. But then Nick gets to his destination and meets the birthday boy, Javi Gutierrez (Pedro Pascal), and when they’re together the movie can get away from its dumb-ass plot. That plot has two CIA agents (Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz, both poorly used) recruiting Nick to keep an eye on Javi, who they believe is the head of a lethal drug cartel. The plot also involves the kidnapping of not one but two teenage girls, and we’re shown their tearful fear in what’s supposed to be a quirky comedy. 

But when Cage and Pascal are just hanging out, the movie is gold. Pascal radiates kindness and warmth; his Javi is just the sort of superfan Nick and his battered ego need. Halfway across the planet, in a well-appointed mansion, Nick’s work genuinely moved this weird, soft guy who may or may not be a druglord. I recognize that if movie studios made their products according to my wishes, they’d have all gone bankrupt long ago. But I cannot express how dispiriting Unbearable Weight gets when it drops the Nick/Javi bromance and lurches into action-comedy mode. By the time the excessively boring car chase rolled around, I had more or less emotionally checked out. It had become apparent that what I valued in the movie wasn’t what its makers — director Tom Gormican and his co-writer Kevin Etten — valued.

And so we get a scene with Nick in disguise as some ancient drug dealer, in make-up that makes him look like Al Pacino playing a latter-day Frank Serpico. We get shootouts and Mexican standoffs. We shrug as the CIA agents are completely thrown away without a backward glance. We may not be very impressed by the meta aspects of the script, all of which have been done more cleverly elsewhere, including in the Cage-starring Adaptation, whose ending did what Unbearable Weight does but with the intent of showing how pat and empty that expected Hollywood “climax” had become. I don’t think we’re meant to take away anything comparable from this movie, though. Or maybe we were, before the presence of Cage and Pascal softened its edges. When you have guys with the warm rapport they share, you don’t want them to be in a cold satire about how the dream factory they believe in so devoutly is a corrupt sweatshop dictated by money. You just want to see more of them. I wouldn’t mind if this were the first of several Cage/Pascal team-ups.

I don’t know whether the very ending is just soggy or a comment on soggy endings, but either way it doesn’t leave us with much. It’s hard to say where Unbearable Weight will fit into Cage’s general portfolio, though it’s sad that it couldn’t do what it tries so hard to do, which is to put Cage back in the sort of wham-bam box-office hit he used to have. What a Hollywood ending that would have been — the great actor comes in from the cold and gets the standing ovation (just as he does in the movie). Instead, it barely cracked the top five its opening weekend, and hemorrhaged money soon after. Maybe Cage’s Con Air and Face/Off days are behind him, but these days his work in smaller things like Joe or Mandy or even Pig (I didn’t care for it but can respect it as the kind of blues riff Cage gravitates to) is where you’ll find the Cage worth loving. We find him only intermittently here.