Five At A Time #5: They’s Wemt, In The Fire

#21 Fox and His Friends

Fox and His Friends is a bizarrely difficult movie to talk about because it’s a queer film whose aesthetics are steeped in vintage gay culture yet doesn’t actually have a whole lot to do with being gay. It’s a tragedy that ends in a suicide that still can’t help but exude a nervous joy even during its most uncomfortable moments. It’s a posh film about trash. It’s wonderful.

Fassbinder is a disarming auteur. Like Cassavetes, he is one of film’s great modernists, only interested in love and the aspects of life and commerce that interact with love. For example, a bathhouse in his view is less interesting for the fucking that goes on in it as the way people behave when they expect they’re about to fuck. So we have a rags-to-riches, Pretty Woman style of romance where the money is not the focal point; indeed, Fassbinder goes out of his way to make us aware of how boring money is, via rambling digressions about interior decoration and what type of music is appropriate to play at parties, not unlike the tedious descriptions of designer clothing in American Psycho.

So if the moral is the classic “money can’t buy happiness” refrain but the movie itself isn’t about money per se, and it’s a gay romance that only occasionaly hinges on the specificities of living a gay lifestyle, what exactly is Fox and His Friends? I’m having an embarrassingly hard time trying to figure that out. I do know that I love it, that Fassbinder has a knack for luxurious, detailed pallettes and a great command of performative subtleties. While Fassbinder is a more narratively inclined filmmaker than Cassavetes, I must again defer to that filmmaker in terms of description: sometimes a movie about living is best lived with.

#22 The Glass Shield

Charles Burnett made neorealist movies about poor black people in ’60s Los Angeles instead of poor Italians in postwar Rome, which is why he is not famous and respected. He should be, because he would be if he had started making movies over the past decade instead. The Glass Shield is not a hyper-realistic docu-drama in the vein of Killer of Sheep; stylistically it bears, if anything, more in common with the Hughes Brothers’ movies of this era, the quasi-psychedelic dread of Dead Presidents and Menace II Society. But it still carries on the work Burnett did in his earlier films; although fictionalized and stylized it is no less demanding a document about race in Los Angeles than his previous work. Main character J.J. tries to smile and oblige his way through a crooked and bigoted police department, trying to make the best of things through compromise and positivity, until by the end of the film he is chokeslamming comanding officers onto their desks in frustration, in a kind of spiritual frustration with how law enforcement has put his blackness at odds with the one job he’s ever valued or wanted. Things don’t turn out well for him; how could they?

There is a vaguely convoluted whodunit tying the film together, and Ice Cube is in here too, promoted as the protagonist even though he’s in maybe 15 minutes of the fim at most. These things are distractions; when it’s not working, it’s because The Glass Shield is getting in its own way with Hollywoodisms, with obnoxiously blunt dialogue and bracing electronics whenever something dramatic happens. Sometimes it works if you’re generous enough to ride with it as hammy neo-noir, and sometimes it seems like the film is second guessing itself and not trusting that the audience can feed from its drama without assistance. Still, the movie does not deserve to be forgotten as it has been. It’s not a master at his finest, but it is a master grappling with a new filmic language for his message, and as he does so occasional pearls of wisdom can be heard.

#23 Zombie

Boy, those last two were pretty fucking boring, weren’t they? Not the movies themselves, the movies are great; but what I had to say about them was not especially instructive or illuminating. Too often I feel this need to use puffy, indirect language to talk about smart films, as though I need to sound worldly enough to have a valid seeming opinion on them but also noninsistent in case I turn out to be unqualified. It’s something I’m going to work on. You know what I don’t need to work on? Getting my head around some good ass grindhouse bullshit like Zombie. Let’s try something different with this one.

When we were very little my brother and I got some small, palm sized books about spooky monsters for Halloween. You had your vampire factoid pamphlet and your werewolf brochure and you had your zombie index, and it was that last one that ended up scaring the tap-dancing Christ out of me every time I would open it. The pictures were fucking horrifying, they were not illustrations of googly-eyed, construction paper-green zombies shuffling around but detailed, realistic photographs of these trudging hell-cooked monsters with rotted flesh scabbing off them in rolling cutaneous waterfalls, their eyes clenched shut in perpetual nightmare stasis. Those pictures haunted my young dreams, and come to find out, every single one of the photos used in that book was snatched from this movie here, Zombie. That fat one in the picture up there is the first zombie you see, exploding out of a yacht’s bathroom to devour a bufoonish coast guard scout. I realized when he wafted up on deck that I’d met him before when I was young, and it was like someone slid a brick into my wall of memory that I hadn’t even seen was missing.

Part of the reason for this feeling is because of childhood associations, but an equally large part is that director Lucio Fulci made the decision to shoot most of the film in daytime. Stuff that happens at night sometimes doesn’t feel as real, you can call it a dream or an optical illusion if it seems wacky enough. But if it happens in the sunlight, it’s a memory. Zombie’s most famous scene is probably the woman’s eye getting dragged into a splintered door, and while that part is gnarly it’s not as distressing as the afforementioned scene of the fat zombie trying to dismember two cops adrift on the East River, or when a platoon of conquistadors blooming with maggots start slowly rising out of the earth right there in the tropical sun. A zombie can’t be reasoned with, but an important implication of that is that a zombie also can’t be denied.

When Zombie shows us an extended underwater brawl between a zombie and a shark it’s not done as a quirky, internet-y setpiece. It’s a nightmare. It’s unnerving. It’s feverish. It’s out of place. It’s unexplained, like everything else in the movie. Doctors are trying to figure out why people are reanimating, and locals tell them it’s probably voodoo, but as to who or what cast the spell, and for what reason, we and they are helpless to deduce. “When the earth spits out the dead, they will drink the blood of the living” is the best we’re given.

So here is a film with arcane motivation but diabolicaly articulated reality, as explicit as it is mysterious. This, to me, is the heart of horror, the unthinkable and unknowable asserting itself as the truth. Zombie drowns you in this truth with its bright colors and meticulous gore. It’s a movie of and for the gut.

#24 Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets

On the one hand, Valerian is simultaneously incoherent and rote, its leads have no chemistry or charisma, it pilfers a frankly disgraceful amount of its aesthetic cues from Mass Effect and (bizarrely enough) The Phantom Menace, and any time Carla Delevigne karate chops someone or talks about being an unpredictable woman you can actually notice Luc Besson’s erection visibly obscuring the foreground. Calling it a trainwreck is actually underselling the chaos of the movie because a train at least has a noticable structure and pathway that it can be unmoored from, whereas Valerian seems as though its story was cobbled together from word-like noises someone recorded Robert Heinlein making during a mescaline adventure and attempted to pass them off as his great unfinished screenplay. The film is a bit silly and hard to follow.

On the other hand, Valerian is also a nearly two and a half hour movie that has something actively occuring on screen in almost every scene, be it a scimitar fight or a spaceship chase or a shape shifting octopus monster played by Rihanna performing a burlesque strip tease. This is not a small or unimpressive feat, especially when you consider that a given Marvel film of comparable length can generally be broken down into 90% idiots being unfunny towards one another, 5% punching and 5% pedestrian robot/alien mishaps. There is something commendable about Besson deciding to place almost the whole first 15 minutes of the movie into an untranslated alien language, his willingness to throw you onto a submarine in the middle of an asteroid in search of a memory-eating jellyfish without explaining what any of this means or why it’s important. Valerian is less concerned with what is happening than its mandate that something be happening by any means, and God damn whoever believes that shouldn’t come at the cost of a comprehensible narrative.

It’s commendable in a sense, but it also makes the movie impossible to recommend in almost every way, because it is so long and so deeply unconcerned with making sense that it begins to exhaust the viewer almost immediately, and since the goal of the film is straightforward genre escapism it’s hard to feel like you’ve accomplished much by seeing it through to the end. It’s functionless but not tedious, and as background noise it is something to the left of pleasant.

#25 Audrie & Daisy

(cw/sexual assault)

Here’s one thing Audrie & Daisy does well that I’d never before seen executed well in any documentary: animation. It’s very difficult for me to throw my support behind documentaries that have an intrusive authorial point of view, as in Herzog, or ones that are over-produced, like that preposterous cartoon about Henry Darger. But here we have a somewhat lighter touch. Rotoscoping a a court testimony is certainly a stark venture into stylization, but it is never distracting. Watching a young man describe terrible debasements made towards a teenage girl through a cloak of animation humanizes the situation and decentralizes the importance of the storyteller; it creates a perfect distance between the act, the audience and the interpreter. Similarly, a sequence where abusive tweets are superimposed over the streets and homes of a girl’s neighborhood gets the point across — the invective is severe, and it’s coming from the people closest to her — without either driving your skull into the act itself or distracting from the information by drawing undue attention to the storytelling.

Because a movie like Audrie & Daisy is a story that can tell itself; that acts it recounts are so awful and the emotions are so serious and inflamed that little in the way of auteurship is needed to convey its gravity to the audience. But the filmmakers realize that it is a movie, not a Vox flowchart, and do a sensible and responsible job taking control of the pace and presentation of information. Audrie & Daisy is as much about telling a story as it is about bearing witness, and if the viewer needs only minimal help to let them see it would be a waste not to go to the effort.