SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE 1930s - THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN

You couldn't order a more perfect first generation horror movie knock-off than The Vampire Bat. The 1933 effort by Majestic Pictures (which had no other meaningfully long-lived productions before it was absorbed into Republic Pictures at the end of the '30s) is very close to the platonic ideal of a cheap-ass attempt to simultaneously copy both Universal's Dracula and Frankenstein, the two films that ignited the horror boom of the '30s while almost single-handedly introducing the notion of paranormal horror into American cinema in the first place. Acknowledging the Frankenstein influence is, I confess, already leading us into spoiler territory; though the rules pertaining to spoilers about 82-year-old Poverty Row programmers easily found for the watching on the internet are a bit slippery, aren't they? You've had every chance in the world to watch The Vampire Bat, while also lacking any reason to assume that you should. Well, here's me coming along to declare that yes, you should. The movie is no timeless classic, but it's definitely a unique one-off in the annals of pre-1968 horror, even though its individual elements are extensively mined from pre-existing material.

The setting is Kleinschloss, Germany, probably sometime around the modern day, if we're going to jduge by clothes, though the attitude of the local populace is decades behind the curve. Seems Kleinschloss has been suffering from two plagues of late: on the one hand, a large number of unusually aggressive bats have been infesting the town. On the other, there have been a distressing number of exsanguination deaths, with the victims all sporting a pair of pristine holes through their necks to the jugular vein. Take those two things in hand together, and it almost inevitably spells "vampire", but at least one man, police inspector Karl Brettschneider (Melvyn Douglas), thinks that's a load of absolute bullshit. He's been unable to do much in the way of proving that he's right and the rest of town is a bunch of superstitious ninnies, mind you, and the more bodies pile up, the more tense the population is getting, to the point that they're ready to snap. While Karl, his girlfriend Ruth Bertin (Fay Wray, who'd already filmed her career-marking roles in Mystery of the Wax Museum and King Kong, though this film beat those to theaters), and her lodger Dr. Otto von Niemann (Lionel Atwill) work to find some kind of scientific answer to the goings-on, the kind of mob that tends to spontaneously form in movies like this has allowed circumstantial evidence to indict Herman Gleib (Dwight Frye), a transparent knock-off of Dracula's Renfield, right down to the actor playing both parts. And Herman is certainly creepy as all get-out with his freakish adoration of the bats that the rest of the town hates, and his uncomfortably close affection for Martha (Rita Carlyle), the latest victim of the "vampire". But we've got no reason to doubt him, and ever reason to fear for his safety just as much as Karl does. Particularly since we get to meet the real killer long before Gleib ends up running for his life from the mob.

It's no vampire, either - Universal may have paved the road for horror movies with actual monsters from the bowels of hell, but it took a while for that particular innovation to filter into all that many American movies, and The Vampire Bat eschews ghouls for simple monstrous humanst. Yet it finds space for a peculiar, entirely unexplained hypnotism subplot, so it's not entirely allergic to the paranormal.

But still, this is a movie that's deeply undecided what to do with this new thing, "horror", that it has available to it. The opening scene, barring a frantic montage establishing the nightmare that is life in Kleinschloss, is something of a case study in not quite knowing how much faith the audience will have in the film, or how much trust the film can afford to have in the audience. As remarkable as it is to say, 36 years after the novel Dracula appeared, 62 after Carmilla, and 114 after Polidori's short story "The Vampyre", The Vampire Bat is so dubious about its own subject matter that it goes to all the bother of explaining, in extensive detail, what vampires are and what they do. That this scene is palatable at all is due almost exclusively to Douglas, a sarcastic, modernist presence whose sharp energy helps to ease the clumsiness of the writing (and it is enormously clumsy - "Gott im Himmel, don't jest!" is a representative sample of the flop-sweaty Germanisms wedged into the script, and if I wanted to share a sample of the film's puffy exposition, I'd have to spend the next half-hour transcribing bloated monologues). Hindsight's a cheat, but it's not remotely surprising that the actor quickly burst from cheap quickies like this to major studio productions: in the most casual ways conceivable, he acts the pants off of everybody who shares the screen with him, possessing a more distinctive and cutting personality than the rest of the human cast combined. And he manages to add momentum and excitement to the film's rather indulgent reliance on "let's stand around the thing and talk" scenes, enough of them that I'm a little stunned to report that the movie is, in fact, not based on a stage play.

I should be fair and mention that, while Douglas is objectively the best in show, the leads are all pretty solid. Wray is let down by a part that is never more interesting or deep than in her first scene, when she's a focused science-adjacent young woman, and not yet just the romantic adjunct to the main plot, but Atwill's increasingly frayed man of science is one of the reliable character actor's more complicated creations, and Frye blends creepiness with sweet pathos in a lovely way, giving a vastly better performance here than managed to in Dracula. Maude Eburne, stranded in the absolutely unlikable role of the daffy old lady (Ruth's aunt, and Dr. von Niemann's hypochondriac patient), manages to even make the comic relief not as shrill as the writing easily could have encouraged it to be.

The real star of the show, though, is the film's attitude, partially effected by director Frank R. Strayer, who marches the script ruthlessly through its paces (the film's running time, which is variable from source to source, is never reported as more than a few minutes over one hour, and it firmly refuses to dick around with that short allotment of time), while allowing the unstated menace haunting the town to linger in the background and in the spaces where actors say nothing. That's the other thing that drives the attitude: this is actually a fairly brutal, clipped movie, for something made in a nominally more innocent time. Being pre-Code helped The Vampire Bat considerably; it can indulge in a harrowing death for a character who doesn't deserve it, and a shockingly matter-of-fact revelation of unspeakable viciousness on the part of another.

It also benefits from being enormously cheap and efficient: while the sprawling style and atmosphere of a Frankenstein is deeply rewarding in its own way, there's a lot to like about the brusqueness of The Vampire Bat. With no opportunity to slow down and dwell on things, the movie's unfussy look suggests a much more natural, everyday sensibility: the Mitteleuropean sets, looking like a hundred others from the same era, are unexpectedly naturalistic, with Strayer and cinematographer Ira H. Morgan saving the particularly complex, vivid shots for moment of punctuation, or especially intense terror in the characters' lives. As a result, those moments land much harder. And we see in this kind of impulse the seeds of setpiece-driven film production.

Enough is wrong with the film that it can't be regarded as a lost masterpiece: the hypnotism angle is a confusing distraction that writer Edward T. Lowe, Jr. never thinks about resolving, while the necessary expository slowness hasn't aged at all well, now that we all know all about vampires and Gothic derangement in European towns. And the decision to end the movie, an enormously sober look at mob rule, intellectual overreach, and basic human indecency, with a gag about an old lady who has the shits so bad that she might not even make it up the stairs without messing herself - seriously, by the standards of 1933 taste and censorship, it might as well be the diarrhea scene from Bridesmaids - is so peculiar that it transcends "bad filmmaking" into some kind of crypto-Surrealism.

What it can and should be regarded as, though, is a not-quite-great encapsulation of all the things horror was trying to be in the first years as it coalesced out of the ether: society in terror, rich visual atmosphere, pretty girls being menaced, reasonable choices turning into something awful. And there are elements to it that are notable for how little they resemble the horror of the '30s or anytime after: this is a movie in which horror is a strictly human-driven concern, for example, and not even the nicest characters are exempt from culpability, which is the really striking part. It's an invaluable time capsule, anyway, showcasing how much had been achieved by 1933, and how much was left to do. It's nowhere close to the best horror film of the 1930s, but it is maybe the best combination of wide-ranging success with utterly typical elements, and any historically-minded aficionado of the genre owes it to themselves to investigate the singular peculiarities of this one.

Body Count: A whopping 6, a spectacular bloodbath for such an early entry in the nascent genre. And that's not even counting the apparently hefty number of deaths summarised in the opening montage.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: SILENT HORROR - HOUSE OF MYSTERY

There's a particular subgenre of movies that's really popular, and relied on so heavily that just a few years after it broke out, the Hollywood studios have almost driven it into the ground. Hoping to freshen things up, one of the savviest producers around decides to offer a job to one of the most impressive directors working in another country, to bring a bit of that foreign stylistic flair to the moribund genre. And it works - the film that immigrant produces is broadly regarded as one of the best, and maybe the best ever made in that style. But it didn't do anything to prop up the ailing genre, which just got staler and more hackneyed until it finally died out a few years later.

I'd add the rhetorical flourish, "remind you of anything?", except that it's happened enough times, with some of the details more or less true in different cases, that what it reminds you of and what it reminds me of might not even be the same. Which is one of the most enjoyable parts of studying history: it's how you realise that things really are exactly the same now that they always used to be. In this case, anyway, the story applies to The Cat and the Canary from 1927 (it's the first adaptation of a stage play by John Willard that would filmed twice more under the same title, and at least a couple of times under various pseudonyms). Let's fill in those blanks: the foreign director was Paul Leni, director and art director, whose 1924 Waxworks was one of the key films of the German Expressionist movement; the producer who was so immensely impressed by Waxworks was German expatriate Carl Laemmle, founder and mastermind of Universal Pictures. And the subgenre was the "old dark house" movie, a later name (the film of that title wouldn't come out for five years yet) for what, in retrospect, we might call the very first trend in American horror cinema.

A trend, moreover, just as inflexible and formulaic as the giant insect pictures of the 1950s or the slasher movies of the 1980s. You take one old, dark house, add a layer of intrigue around a pile of money, plug in a mystery where it seems like some kind of paranormal event might be happening, until it turns out to all be human machinations designed to trick people into overreacting. And in making it, try very hard to split the difference between comedy and horror to the point where it's not terribly funny nor very scary, but it doesn't ever seem like it was trying to be. The style was born, cinematically, with D.W. Griffith's 1922 production of One Exciting Night, an original riff on the stage hit The Bat by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood (itself adapted into film multiple times, including a tremendously popular version in 1926), and it inspired numerous imitators, though the rigidity of the genre guaranteed that it would start to burn out fairly quickly. By the time of The Cat and the Canary, it was already old hat, which is undoubtedly why Laemmle thought to bring in a great stylist with a proven skill at seamlessly marrying an unusual flavor of light comedy with extravagant horror. Something to let the movie stand out from the crowd. And thus, quite by accident, Laemmle changed the fate of American horror, a form so new that it hadn't even been named as such.

For what Leni did wasn't merely film a movie with a florid, exaggerated visual style that gave it vastly more personality than its entirely generic script, by Alfred A. Cohn and Robert F. Hill, could have achieved by itself. Thanks to his presence, The Cat and the Canary is more or less the first movie to introduce Expressionist aesthetics into Hollywood filmmaking in a systematic and consistent way. That, in turn, led to Universal's entire population of genre-defining movies in the 1930s, and all the things that followed on their model.

We'll return to that, but just to keep everybody on the same page, allow me to recap the plot of the movie. In the Hudson River Valley there lived a wealthy man named Cyrus West, whose family hounded him "like cats around a canary", hoping for a taste of his riches. To get back at the scheming greedy bastards from beyond the grave, the first condition of West's will is that it can't be opened until 20 years after his death, by which point a second will has mysteriously appeared, to be opened in the event that the first cannot be fulfilled. The sole living resident of West's decaying mansion, the sour-faced housekeeper Mammy Pleasant (Martha Mattox) is convinced that it's her late employer's ill-tempered ghost, while the executor of West's estate, Roger Crosby (Tully Marshall), brooks with no such paranormal nonsense. But something unexplained is going on - a living moth was in the safe where the wills were kept, despite it supposedly having been locked for 20 years, with Crosby the sole person who knew the combination. And somebody took a peak inside the documents.

No sooner has that unnerving discovery been made than the potential heirs to the West fortune start to turn up, prior to the midnight reading: Harry Blythe (Arthur Edmund Carewe), Charlie Wilder (Forrest Stanley), Susan Sillsby (Flora Finch), Cecily Young (Gertrude Astor), Paul Jones (Creighton Hale), and Annabelle West (Laura La Plante). The latter three are much younger, and weren't so involved in the general avarice that drove Cyrus literally mad, so it's not too surprising when Annabelle turns out to be the solitary heir (the will specifies the most distant of West's relatives to share his surname). There's only one catch, and it's eminently survivable: she must be found sane by a medical doctor, or the fortune goes to the individual named in the second will. Which unfortunately gives the unknown person who took an early look into the documents plenty of time to remove her from the picture entirely. And it might not even be as difficult as all that: a guard (George Siegmann) from the local sanitarium shows up to announce that a very dangerous inmate has escaped and his tracks reveal him to be on the mansion grounds. This is the Cat, a serial killer noted for tearing his victims apart "like canaries".

Ghosts, serial killers, and at least one potentially murderous, pissed-off family member: just another night in a spooky old house, really. 90 years down the road, it takes very little effort to predict the ending, and I don't know that it was all that much different in 1927. What makes The Cat and the Canary stand head-and-shoulders above the rest of its genre, then, isn't its crafty storytelling. And it's not its scintillating characters - these are all stock characters, and there's not a genuinely impressive performance in the lot - La Plante is a thoroughly generic blonde heroine, and Hale (who graduates from tepid comic side character to tepid romantic comic lead) is notable mostly for his distracting Harold Lloyd glasses. With the remainder of the ensemble required to play either daft foolishness (Finch) or unchecked rage (everybody else, basically), there's little room for making any strong impression.

What it does have is the most impressive style of any American proto-horror movie of the 1920s, or probably the three decades of "true" horror to follow. It's a little daft to compare the two films, but it honestly seems to me that it can only be appropriately compared to fellow 1927 release Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, the only other Hollywood production I can name that is so plainly a German movie in all but language, and that's a largely irrelevant concern in silent cinema. Not just in the sense of extreme shadows and the creation of shocking splashes of feeling through compositions that emphasise line and shape more than narrative content, the inheritances of film noir and later horror movies right up to the modern day. The Cat and the Canary uses everything it can within the medium of cinema itself to visually depict psychological states - the exact characteristic that "Expressionism" refers to in the first place - and constantly challenge the viewer's relationship to the image. Right from the start, the movie launches with a montage of inconceivable brashness, establishing Cyrus West's empire, his family, his death, and blasting us forward 20 years through a combination of title cards, newspapers, and discontinuous images. The film calms down a lot after that, but it's still full of impressive touches. Throughout, text and title cards are manipulated to depict not just what is said, but how it's said. Tinted images are used with unusual fluidity and surprising creativity (like the legitimately terrifying jump from "interior lighting" yellow to "hellbound nightmare" red as a character bolts up in fright), enough to suggest that there was a future for this already old-fashioned technique, which was completely abandoned after sound arrived in the same year.

Not all of the film works - the Cat, so suggestive when all we see is flashes of a freakish-looking clawed hand, is pretty unabashedly dopey when it appears, in a way that make sense with the script but isn't any more satisfying because of it, and Aunt Susan is a enervating liability, comic relief going wrong in the most conspicuous way - but the overall use of image manipulation to place us inside the psychology of the people experiencing this particular old dark house redeems just about everything. The generic trappings are intensified and made to seem new and bold - and that's after almost a century of movies using those same trappings! - and the flat characters are turned practically into a legitimate strength. For the film requires psychologically uncomplicated figures to clear the way for it being a psychological performance itself.

The one thing it never is, is scary (hell, even for the rather dubious Susan and Paul, both entirely unlikable comic relief characters, the film scrapes up the energy to be funny more reliably than it's ever scary). Maybe they thought it was in '27. That's the one form of "pretend you're living in a different time period" I've never been good at. It is sometimes good and creepy, usually thanks to the Cat's paw; mostly, though, it's just damn impressive, playing with cinematic form and representation like few movies of any style have gotten away with under the aegis of a big Hollywood studio. Small wonder that it ended up forming the kernel of something very like a new genre: suggesting that all mainstream American horror starts with The Cat and the Canary is blatantly untrue, but it's less blatantly untrue here than for any other individual movie. And even after all those descendants, its strengths are still as unique and powerful as they ever might have been.

Body Count: 1 only, which speaks ill of the commitment of a killer who rips his victim apart like canaries.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: SILENT HORROR - IN THIS LABYRINTH, WHERE NIGHT IS BLIND

The 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera is two things. One of these is the best of the small population of pure horror films made in the United States during the silent era. The other is a thorny mess to talk about, so we need to have some history. The short version of the story is all we need, which is that in 1929, Universal shot a large amount of new footage and heavily revised the movie for a 1930 re-release including sound passages, chopping a huge portion of its running time off in the process, and requiring the frame rate bumped up to 24 frames per second, sufficiently faster than the 20 frames per second at which the film was shot that it obvious that it's moving too fast. This 1930 cut has been the basis for almost all subsequent editions of the film, given that it has been preserved (not quite in a complete form) in 35mm, while the 1925 cut now exists only in 16mm home copies that look pretty beaten and battered. Thankfully, the film has been one of the best-served of all silents on high-def video, and there is an edition collecting the 35mm print in both 24 fps and 20 fps, running to 78 and 92 minutes, respectively, as well as the 16mm original at 114 minutes. This review is primarily in response to the 114-minute 1925 cut, though I've also checked in with the quite spectacularly different 92-minute edition of the 1930 cut (enough of the footage is new to that version, and the plot sufficiently different, that I'd argue it should be thought of as a different film entirely). And now the housekeeping is done and we can go on with the actual movie review.

And how glad I am to do that! The Phantom of the Opera, in any cut, is one of the great classic horror masterworks, for reasons that are hardly limited to its most famous element - I refer to the make-up designed by actor Lon Chaney for his performance as the Phantom, among the most iconic images in all of silent cinema, and perhaps the most famous make-up design in the entire history of screen horror. I don't want to diminish anything: Chaney's Phantom design is glorious, and it deserves every molecule of its fame. But there's a great deal of movie above and beyond that design, even beyond that character, and much of it is pretty unreservedly terrific.

Not all of it. It's certainly the case that none of of the other performers in the movie are on the same level as Chaney, which isn't a surprise - I can't name a single one of his films where he isn't giving the most interesting performance. But one particular cast member isn't really any good at all, Mary Philbin, and that's rough, since she's playing the character with the most screen time. Philbin certainly was capable of more than this - she's very good, if hardly one for the ages, in the wonderful 1928 costume drama The Man Who Laughs. Here, though, she's flat and disaffected. It's the exact opposite of the stereotypical problem of silent film acting, which is not so hard to find in 1925 (in fact, not so hard to find in this very film), with wild gesticulations and huge facial expressions: she's subdued to a truly remarkable degree for a silent performance, enough that it slips from "naturalistic acting a decade ahead of schedule" into "leaves no trace of her personality" (she is, to be fair, notably better in the footage shot in 1929). Her scenes with Chaney are easily the best; hard to say if that's the value of having a strong scene partner, or the value of having more interesting situations to play than the dewy, virginal ingénue.

But even with a rocky lead, and a best-in-show performer who doesn't show up until the second quarter of the movie, there's barely a moment of The Phantom of the Opera that doesn't just work at the highest level a genre picture made before its genre had even manifested itself could manage to. This is a seriously impressive horror movie, possibly the only classic of the nascent form from the '20s and '30s that gets at the general feeling of German Expressionism (where cinematic horror as we now think of it was largely invented in the first half of the '20s) without specifically copying the technique of Expressionism. It's a stretch to call it "scary" all these years later - even Chaney's uncanny make-up is more freakish and creepy than scary, partially owing to its cultural ubiquity - but it has a doom-soaked mood of claustrophobic interiors and silhouettes flittering away out of corners, and a staging of a hanged man's shadow that's one of the boldest pieces of lighting you could want from a horror movie.

The focus on decrepitude, night terrors of the unknown, and the crawling sense of dread surrounding this mysterious man who controls Box 5 of the Paris Opera House and has been giving anonymous lessons to the chorine Christine Daaé (Philbin), understudy to the florid prima donna Carlotta (Virginia Pearson - in the most significant narrative change between the two cuts, Pearson plays Carlotta's mother in the 1930 version, which is kind of a nasty trick). A lot of the material that doesn't take place in the catacombs and sewers beneath the Opera, where the Phantom dwells, can run the risk of seeming insubstantial, as generally happened in the other important "straight" adaptation of Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel, Universal's 1943 color epic (which largely gutted the material and transformed it into a solid if frequently weird attempt at an MGM-style melodrama on a budget). Here, though, director Rupert Julian - who had the film taken away and largely reshot by director Edward Sedgwick, only for virtually all of Sedgwick's footage to be discarded after terrible test screenings - does such a good job at layering a constant sense of danger to the beautifully spooky sets, and keeping our attention focused on the Phantom even in the long stretches of the film where he's not present, that even the most unexceptional moments of straightforward character business have a menacing aura that dashes any possibility of this presenting itself as a romantic drama (the approach taken by the famous and infamous Andrew Lloyd Webber musical from 1986, itself adapted into a 2004 movie).

The Phantom himself helps with that, of course: once we finally see him, even before the immaculately-staged reveal of his grotesque face, Chaney makes damn sure that we never stop thinking about the character. There's such stateliness and largeness to Chaney's posture and movement, never shading into self-parodying silent film histrionics: his Phantom has unimaginable, crushing screen presence, whether he's dominating the frame, appearing in a small niche, or standing behind title cards in one of the most stylistically brash cards the film has up its sleeve. Chaney's career is full of tremendously high-impact work and a one-of-a-kind ability to demand the camera's attention, and this is still a good contender for the best performance he ever gave. Then we see the make-up, transforming his features into a repellent distortion of a human face with a death rictus, and there's no contest. This is the role he's known for, and it's the role he absolutely deserves to be known for.

Chaney's terrifying grotesque, domineering and threatening and yet very, very sad; the tense feeling to the camerawork and staging of the sets; the thick and heavy lighting; for all these things, The Phantom of the Opera is an absolutely triumph of sustained mood, one that does, yes, deserve to be called "operatic"; it insists on strong emotional responses to potent cues, and not all of those are what we would now call horror. The longer it goes, the more that Raoul and Christine's romance does become a strong factor in the story and the atmosphere of the film, even if the actors don't manage to sell any kind of real attraction between them. There's a certain kind of desperation to the way the love story plays out, something that feels genuinely fragile and threatened by the sheer scale of the Phantom's menace. It's all oddly weighted, but then, horror had no rules at this point, at least not in America. That leads to freshness and lack of predictable beats; uniquely for a classic horror film, it's really hard to get ahead of the tonal swerves the film takes on the way to its climactic face-offs. This is a landmark movie for any number of reasons, not least of which is that the genre it helped shape so quickly moved away from it that it doesn't feel constrained by that genre; it makes horror a tool rather than an end point, and that results in a very unique kind of energy that makes this one of the most essential horror films made prior to 1968.

Body Count: 3, plus who knows how many innocent opera-goers crushed to death by a falling chandelier.

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THE 1995 CANNES PROJECT

Updated thoughts now that it's over: Thanks so much to Nick for putting all of this together! I don't suppose I'll have as many chances to do such high-volume movie watching come the end of summer, and I'm tremendously happy to have started off my last summer of pre-grad school freedom with such a crazy, totally rewarding and surprisingly instructive project.

Whip-smart film writer and all-round good human being Nick Davis makes a habit every year of celebrating the Cannes International Film Festival by spending some time exploring a previous edition of the festival, and this year, he's made it a 20th anniversary party, by digging into the films of the 1995 festival. And for the first time, he's invited some folks along to join him in forming a sort of alternate jury and critics pool. One of whom, I'm happy to report, is me.

Every day, I and the rest of the "jurists"shared our capsule thoughts on the films that premiered in 1995 years ago on that date, in the main competition at Cannes and some of the sidebar selections. And I'd urge you all to keep tabs on the developments at Nick's place, since that's where I and several others had our big conversation about the movies as well as announcing our own, two-decades-of-hindsight-later picks for what should have won the big Cannes prizes.

Here's the index for all my own individual thoughts on the movies, day by day.

Day 1: 5/17 (Opening Night: The City of Lost Children)
Day 2: 5/18
Day 3: 5/19
Day 4: 5/20
Day 5: 5/21
Day 6: 5/22
Day 7: 5/23
Day 8: 5/24
Day 9: 5/25
Day 10: 5/26
Day 11: 5/27
Day 12: 5/28 (Closing Night: The Quick and the Dead

Roundtable Discussions (at Nick's site)
Roundtable #1, 17-21 May
Roundtable #2, 22-24 May

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CANNES 1995: CLOSING DAY

About the project

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD (Sam Raimi, USA/Japan)
Screened out of competition

The revisionist Western wouldn't exist without star and co-producer Sharon Stone, who hand-picked the director and two of her three co-leads; but it barely survives her (and that "barely" is me being more generous than the movie deserves). Her shallow, anachronistic performance is grating enough that even a rarely-worse Russell Crowe seems good in comparison. It's not right to lay all the blame on Stone, though: Simon Moore's screenplay is a nightmare of clattering dialogue and a tediously repetitive structure with no dramatic momentum. Raimi does what he can to spike things with his usual cartoon flair, and the opening quarter-hour is a marvel of camerawork, weird characters, and comic energy. He even manages to make the endless series of gunfights all feel meaningfully different. But he mangles the tone as the film goes on, turning a playful satire into a leaden, straightforward slog. At least cinematographer Dante Spinotti and production designer Patrizia von Brandenstein make sure that things stay pretty, and three years after Unforgiven, Gene Hackman makes a terrifically hissable Old West villain. 6/10

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CANNES 1995: DAY 11

About the project

LA HAINE (Mathieu Kassovitz, France)
Screened in the main competition

A snapshot of urban race relations that, in its youthful rage, its mixture of quotidian life and political urgency, and elements of its style, is easy to summarise as the French Do the Right Thing. The film's brazen success at message-slinging even lives up to that comparison, though it also suggests, rightly, that La haine isn't the most original thing out there. Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé, and Saïd Taghmaoui are magnificent as the three buddies whose casual wanderings form a window into life both as a playground for bored twentysomethings and an impoverished hell where institutional violence and ethnic tension are constantly present, while the razor-sharp black and white cinematography (while it risks putting a glossy, romantic spin on the material) pays off far more often than not in accentuating the rough textures of the banlieues. The juvenile energy sometimes leaves the film stranded in go-nowhere scenes and the ending is overdetermined, but this is potent enough that Kassovitz's premature Best Director nod from the jury is easy to understand, if not endorse. 8/10


DEAD MAN (Jim Jarmusch, USA/Germany/Japan)
Screened in the main competition

I'll own up to my biases: this was my first Jarmusch film and perhaps for that reason has always been my favorite. I'd also readily declare it the best film I've seen from the whole of Cannes 1995, sidebars and all. A fatalistic fable about America's love of mythic violence that finds a mortally wounded accountant traveling through the Wild West in the best cinematic approximation of Pilgrim's Progress I've ever seen. Robby Müller's freakishly great cinematography - maybe the best work of a legendary career - uses silvery metallic black-and-white to strip the landscape of its romance and amp up the feeling of otherworldly spirituality; Neil Young's blanched-out guitar riffs that service as a score lend a jarring contemporary touch that beautifully accompanies Jarmusch's rancid humor. It's top-notch anti-Americana, and the only revisionist Western you really need; you can count on your hands the number of movies, irrespective of genre, that do a better job of lacerating Hollywood's beloved cultural myths while replacing them with new myths and metaphysical philosophies all its own. 10/10


HARAMUYA (Drissa Toure, Burkina Faso/France)
Screened in Un Certain Regard

There aren't enough sub-Saharan African films that get any kind of meaningful exposure in the Euro-American cultural sphere for it to make any sense to call any of them over-familiar. That being the case, Haramuya is not by any means an adventurous game-changer in its story or its technique. It's a low-key slice-of-life story of a Burkina Faso town uncomfortably balanced between tradition and Westernised modernity, with a particular family being caught up in the tension between honoring the old ways and knowing when to abandon them as unworkable and choked off. Toure's direction is exceedingly, winningly generous, refusing to blame any of the characters for latching onto the worldview that seems right to them, and presenting the frayed attitudes of the townspeople with observational warmth that feels apart from the community but also speaks to a great comfort and familiarity with them, or real-world people like them. The overall effect is much too muted to pretend that this is, by any imaginable definition, "essential cinema", but it's insightful, humane work even so. 7/10


THE ENGLISHMAN WHO WENT UP A HILL BUT CAME DOWN A MOUNTAIN (Christopher Monger, UK)
Screened in Un Certain Regard

The title has more of a personality that the film it's attached to. It's your basic genial and utterly generic exercise in letting Hugh Grant do his Hugh Grant thing against a backdrop of Colorful British Eccentrics, a form that was just about to launch into the stratosphere. Visiting a Welsh village in 1917, an English surveyor declares to the zany locals that their beloved "mountain" is in fact just a 984-foot-high hill, leading them to enact a plan to... well, I can't hardly spoil the movie any more than it already has. As the leader of the indignant Welsh, Colm Meaney (who is Irish, we are compelled to point out) provides a much needed dose of live-wire prickliness, and I admire the dry irony of the bedtime story narrative framework, but that's pretty much all that the movie can claim for itself. Removed from that early moment when he as still just a new transatlantic curio, Grant's bumbling and stuttering has lost most of its charm, but there are worse examples of the form. 6/10

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SHINING AT THE END OF EVERY DAY

There has been some effort online to stress Damon Lindelof's presence as co-writer of Tomorrowland and thus somehow save the reputation of the film's director and other writer, Brad Bird. Which presumes in the first place that Tomorrowland is bad enough to justify insulating the beloved auteur from it, and I think that's far from an objective truth, even though it's obviously the worst of his five features. But more to the point, there's no separating Bird from Tomorrowland: it might share the name with a large segment of the Disneyland and Magic Kingdom theme parks and thus be part of the Disney corporation's endless game of "brand extension", and it might be a phenomenally overpriced summer tentpole, but this is no director-for-hire job; this is absolutely a movie made by the director of The Iron Giant, and much of what some people find annoying about it thematically derives directly from that fact. What people find annoying about the story structure is vintage Lindelof. I'll spot that part of it, not least because I absolutely agree with it.

That structure gets off to an inordinately rocky start, with one of the most damaging and irritating framework narratives I've seen in a long time. Damaging, because when it returns at the end of the movie, it sets up an implied relationship to those of us in the audience that Bird and Lindelof couldn't possibly have actually intended. Irritating, because it feels like a filmed improv exercise circling around the drain for endless agonising minutes, as two characters we'll eventually learn to be Frank Walker (George Clooney) and Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) bicker mindlessly about the right way to tell the story and the right place to start (and, incidentally, Frank's attitude in this scene also feels profoundly miscalculated given where it ends up arriving in the film's overall chronology). Eventually, they get out of this rut to open on the story of young Frank's (Thomas Robinson) experiences at the 1964 World's Fair in New York, where he introduced a semi-working jetpack to a glum fellow we'll later know as Nix (Hugh Laurie), and is invited by Athena (Raffey Cassidy), a girl about Frank's age, and despite her youth apparently an adviser to Nix. She's the one who gives Frank a pin that allows him access to a teleporter that takes him to a fantastical world of high technology, and then we trot ahead to 2015, our appetites having been presumably whetted.

Whetted, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, and Tomorrowland makes the strategically baffling decision to simultaneously align itself at an audience of children and their families, while also basing virtually all of its appeal on nostalgia for the Space Age - something that not merely the children, but even their parents are largely too young to possesses, except secondhand. And this is the element of the film that directly recalls The Iron Giant: the wholehearted belief that things were better when there was more optimism about the future and less terror, and the promise of space exploration made everything seem bright, shiny, and futuristic. This sits comfortably right next to the film's thesis that the biggest problem with contemporary life is that we've gotten tremendously good at identifying everything rotten, and then putting exactly no effort into fixing it. Which I think is entirely true, though the movie's somewhat pie-eyed idea for solving this human shortcoming largely through the power of wishing and reminding everybody how much we all used to want jet-packs is not entirely true. Maybe not even mostly true.

So the movie is in 2015, where we find Casey, a high schooler who has been instilled with the very same belief in choosing optimism over fatalism by her dad (Tim McGraw), a NASA engineer. Casey's gung-ho attitude is so pronounced, it brings her to the attention of Athena, who hasn't aged an hour since 1964, and who gives the older? younger? girl a pin that, when touched, transports her into a strange high-tech world full of, wouldn't you know, jet-packs and such other chrome-coated signs of mid-century futurism. And her tour of this world, once she figures out how to use the pin safely (when in Tomorrowland, for that is this place, she still interacts physically with the real world), is the film's outright highlight, a synthetic long take that moves through one of the most impressive CGI landscapes ever put into a movie, craning around to catch every last detail. It is the perfect cinematic mechanism to put us in the exact same place of dumbfounded awe and childlike excitement that Casey feels, and if that was the solitary triumph of Bird and cinematographer Claudio Miranda's work on this project, I wouldn't be able to reject the film outright.

It triggers a quest, and that's exactly where Tomorrowland collapses. It's not worth going into all of the movie's odds and ends as Casey and Athena hunt down angry grown-up Frank, and Casey learns the secret of Tomorrowland, a place where all of the most gifted geniuses of the 20th Century gathered to make the world a better, kinder place, until cynicism and hopelessness caused them to lock it away and watch it decay into a husk of its former self (it's an unambiguous though maybe unintentional parody and subversion of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged - the best and brightest hiding in a gulch, only here the geniuses are presented as moral failures because they refuse to freely share their knowledge and achievements with all of humanity. This has not prevented the film from being used as further evidence of Bird's crypto-Randianism by people with nothing more interesting to do with their lives than willfully misunderstand movies). The biggest flaw of the movie, in fact, is the fascination it has with those odds and ends, and the greedy way it dolls them out, piecemeal. It's the whole "mystery box" shtick that was pioneered by J.J. Abrams, mentor in different ways to both Lindelof and Bird, and it doesn't work in Tomorrowland at all.

The film is a punishing 130 minutes, and most of that is taken up with the endless second act, in which Casey drives from Florida to Texas to New York all while failing to learn things that could speed the film up considerably. That's not fair, actually. I mean, it absolutely is fair - the movie would be cleaner, faster, and more engaging if Athena and Frank would just fucking tell Casey what she eventually finds out. And we'd have a sense of the conflict sooner than 90 minutes into the movie, which would be nice, in this children's film from Disney. But it's not fair because the film also suffers from unneeded bloat: there's a trip to Paris that could be written out of the script with the barest amount of work, and several other moments that could be snugged up and shortened. The film could fly and get to the collapsing Tomorrowland well before the one-hour mark; instead it creeps and drags, with the heftiness of an epic but the simplicity of message movie for kids and parents to share. It's a terrible combination of flavors, and it makes a solid 40 minutes of the film seem to exist for no reason other than to keep the good parts as far separate as the filmmakers dared.

It's a pity that the script is so puffy, because a lot of Tomorrowland is really quite lovely: the design is terrific, Bird's adoration of mid-century science fiction is so palpable that it almost veers into self-parody (at one point, it does just that: there's a trip to a curiosity shop selling geek-friendly trinkets that's very little more than a delivery system for in-jokes), and the ingenuity of some of the setpieces both at the level of conception and visual execution is fun and playful. Clooney plays a snappish old man well enough, and Robertson and Cassidy are two absolutely indispensable discoveries - neither of them a "discovery" per se (it's not even Robertson's first leading role - she was in the Nicholas Sparks adaptation The Longest Ride earlier in 2015. Though I imagine that Tomorrowland probably shot first), but given exemplary showcase roles her that make a strong argument for how much we should all want to follow both actors in the future.

All of the ingredients of the film are there, and many parts of it are beguiling summer movie candy; it's just not a great story. The beginning I liked, even for all its saccharine sentiment; the end I liked, even for its contrivance and one hellaciously stretched-out death scene. The middle, though, is nothing but an endurance test. I'm not even sure that the middle is what there's the most of it, but God knows it feels that way, and that's exactly the problem.

6/10

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CANNES 1995: DAY 10

About the project

UNDERGROUND (Emir Kusturica, France/Germany/Bulgaria/Czech Republic/Hungary/Serbia)
Screened in the main competition

The Palme d'Or winner, and it's easy to see why: the film's study of war's effect on the 20th Century is spiked with humor, black as the heart of a collapsed sun, that repeatedly knocks it around the head with a psychotic carnivalesque flair. Everything from its use of music (which is pure genius) to its frequently inexplicable blasts of almost surreal touches in the characters and mise en scène make it the one film in competition that truly feels like nothing else. On the downside, the film is not short - the easiest version to find is 164 minutes, a half-hour shorter than the Cannes cut - and it tends to repeat its points enough that even the whiplash swings from one tonal register to the next aren't enough to keep it from feeling bloated. I also feel like my knowledge of Balkan politics makes it hard for me to honestly judge it (it was the locus of enormous controversy at home). But misgivings aside, this is a deliriously watchable movie, sober topic and all. 9/10


ED WOOD (Tim Burton, USA)
Screened in the main competition

A tribute to one of cinema's most disastrously inept oddballs from one of its most successful, and one of the two possible correct answers to the question, "What's Tim Burton's best movie?" An unrestrained love for old movies and the gaudiest kitsch of the '50s permeates every set, performance, and note of Howard Shore's superlative score, leaving it less a straightforward biopic of the notorious low-budget director Edward D. Wood, Jr, than an inside-out journey through his dementedly sunny worldview - the movie about Ed Wood that Ed Wood would have made if he had all the talent in the world instead of none whatsoever. It's also a bittersweet reminder of the days when Johnny Depp's quirky excesses served to finding shockingly real character truths, and when he and Burton fed off of each other's creativity rather than indulged each other's laziness. Energetically and stylistically, it's one of the most flippant and giddy entries in its genre, but its dopey frivolity is the very reason it's more honest and insightful than damn near all of them. 10/10


THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE DEAD (Gary Fleder, USA)
Screened in Un Certain Regardx

An especially pure early example of that most quintessentially '90s cinema, the Bald-Faced Tarantino Knock-Off. Interesting primarily in that it possesses what might be the single most sedate performance ever given by Steve Buscemi, this story of five career criminals led by Andy Garcia is marred by forcibly eccentric dialogue and inorganically weird characters, on top of the more obvious shortcoming: the story the film tells simply isn't terribly compelling and outside a few individual scenes, it doesn't have any opinion, either artistic or philosophical, on the events it depicts. Though I do admire Fleder and screenwriter Scott Rosenberg's willingness to let the story develop at its own pace and through its own side channels. Warped title notwithstanding (a lift from Warren Zevon), the film lacks the bent humor of even the most flailing wannabe Tarantino pictures, and it has barely a trace of visual style or filmmaking energy, which not merely permits but practically begs us to notice how little substance it has as a story. Hopelessly bland through and through. 5/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: DISNEY THEME PARKS AT THE MOVIES

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Disney's latest effort in brand-mining, Tomorrowland, takes the name (if nothing else) from one of the most famous attractions at Disney's various theme parks. Journey with me back to the beginning of this particular game.

The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish violation of known natural law seemed certain at the outset.

-H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

The Country Bears goes wrong fast, and it goes wrong hard. The film's opening scene is a concert in 1991, the final one given by the titular group before their inglorious retirement, and every last thing about it conspires to be as hideous in combination as remotely possible - the lighting is perfectly designed to accentuate everything that looks horrible about the main characters. For the main characters are people in extraordinarily complex bear costumes with state-of-the-art puppetry faces. And the first time we see them, they look like there was no room left in Hell, and so it began to vomit forth the dead.

Setting aside the ursine abominations inhabiting all the main roles - though we cannot help but return to them later - The Country Bears is a disgusting moral failure of a different sort. This is, depending on the exact set of definitions you want to use,* the very first movie released by the Walt Disney Company as a tie-in promotion to one of its theme park attractions. This was back in 2002, when the company's film division was starting to lose its way again after roaring back to life in the early 1990s, and any terrible idea that could plausibly be defended as a branding exercise could make it through the gates. 50 weeks and two movies later, this misbegotten experiment would finally result in a critical and commercial success, with Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl; but before that happened Disney had to embarrass itself a couple of times (The Haunted Mansion was the second effort; I haven't seen it, but the rumor is that it's the worst of the trio).

Really, though, calling The Country Bears an embarrassment is being nice (and also a shameful waste of a pun: it's a veritable embearassment!!!!!). This a stare into the black void of corporate shamelessness and inartistic savagery, a movie whose technologically audacious and unforgivably off-putting animatronic bears are merely the most visible example of the movie's overriding lack of anything beautiful or interesting. The story the producers settled on - Mark Perez is the credited writer and Peter Hastings directed (an animation story artist making his solitary theatrical film), but it hardly seems fair to blame them for getting their names slathered on what's unambiguously a company affair first and foremost - is as musty as it gets, trading on the sadly too-common belief that if you're making a movie for kids, you can get away with any number of clichés, since your pre-teen target audience hasn't encountered them yet. Herein, Beary Barrington (voiced by Haley Joel Osment, sung by Elizabeth Daily, physically performed by Misty Rosas and Alice Dinnean - this is going to turn into an all-parenthetical review if I keep up like this, so let's just acknowledge that the bears were all played by puppeteers working their asses off), a tween bear adopted by humans, has started to feel the pain of being different, goaded by his dick adopted brother Dex (Eli Marienthal). So he runs away to make a pilgrimage to Country Bear Hall, the home of his beloved Country Bears before they disbanded eleven years ago. I allowed myself to assume from the dates that it might turn out that one of the Bears would prove to have fathered Beary, because I somehow managed to expect that this would at least invest itself in some fancier dumb clichés.

Country Bear Hall is, alas, about to be torn down by the over-enthusiastic (human) developer Reed Thimple (Christopher Walken, in the role that exemplifies the "can't say no to a paying job" aspect of his career). But Beary has a great idea: if the Bears get back together for a benefit concert, surely the hall's owner and the band's manager, Henry Dixon Taylor (Kevin Michael Richardson) could raise the $20,000 to save the historic site. So the two of them go on a road trip to recruit the divided bears: brothers Ted and Fred Bedderhead (Diedrich Bader and Brad Garrett), Zeb Zoober (Stephen Root), Tennessee O'Neal (Toby Huss), and Trixie St. Claire (Candy Ford). Given that all of them are suffering som kind of enormous dysfunction and bad blood lies between many of them individually, this proves to be most difficult task. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't prove insurmountable, because this is a Disney picture.

The absurdly insipid, pedestrian storytelling could never have resulted in a movie worth keeping, though it's honestly the strongest thing about The Country Bears; hoary, trite stereotypes at least have the benefit of being road-tested. Even without leaving the writing, the characters are a much bigger liability, being as they are a collection of cheap redneck jokes weirdly sanitised for the sake of the kids who make up the sole audience that can be honestly supposed to enjoy this. The actors are totally helpless to combat this problem, owing in no small part to the tripartite acting (voice, body, face). Frequently throughout, and especially in the critical case of Beary, there's no obvious relationship between the physical performance and the line readings, and it makes the characters feel like emotionless monsters, even without accounting for the terrifying design and execution of the bear suits. They do not provide any illusion that they're connected to the story at all, simply floating through the world without interacting with it except arrhythmically, in the fashion of an alien being clumsily mimicking human behavior.

But let's go ahead and account for the bear costumes, anyway. They are marvels, produced by the Jim Henson Creature Shop and clearly serving to show off that company's best and brightest doing some of the most complex work imaginable. The bears have incredibly precise, flexible, nuanced faces; it's always possible to tell exactly what they're thinking just from a still image. But even so, they are pure, high octane nightmare fuel, the spiritual heirs to the four-year-old talking and walking snowman that the Creature Shop built for Jack Frost. The bears aren't quite as viscerally unacceptable as that character - bears, after all, exist in the world, and even at their most grotesquely malformed, none of them have any feature as individually upsetting as Jack Frost's arms. But dear God, I do not like to look at them. Their heads are all weirdly big for their bodies, and they look not quite like bears, even less than the original audio-animatronic creatures in the Disney attraction. Incidentally, I won't have a better moment to compare the movie to the show; as a Disney parks lifer, The Country Bears strikes me as a most generic and soulless attempt to spin off the Country Bear Jamboree (it's not clear at all from the script, but I think we're meant to understand the movie as a kind of sequel to the show; though it is a sequel from an alternate universe). The big problem is the music: the show has a soundtrack made up of goofy bluegrass music on the '50s model, the movie is larded up with that godawful country rock that started to become popular in the late 1990s, taking the folksy heart out of the whole genre of music. Another problem is ineptness: giving fan favorite Big Al (James Gammon) a slot in the film, and denying him his fan-favorite song? Shoddy multi-platform synergy, that. And for Christ's sake, not including the talking mounted game heads in any capacity is just proving that you didn't wanted to make a movie from this material in the first place.

I had not finished my low-grade freakout over the bear designs, though; hadn't even gotten to the worst part. Which is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, their tremendously detailed, realistic mouths, with their incredibly specific teeth and almost tangibly damp tongues. And somehow, Hastings always seems to make them the centerpoint of every close-up. David Cronenberg couldn't have put more unsettling organic terrors into a movie if his life depended on it.

The film was a disaster at the box office, proving that sometimes we do live in a just universe. I feel sorry for the Creature Shop folks, honestly: the bears are miraculous machines, ugly or not. But they had the misfortune to show up in a badly-written and cloddishly-directed exercise in corporate intra-marketing. This is a commercial, and it's a remarkably bad one; and with Beary proving to be such an awful protagonist, alienating in every way, it's even worse as an inspirational tale of believing in your dreams and sticking by family, in various more or less figurative senses of that word. I would say that, if there were justice, this would have brutally murdered Disney's attempt to make movies out of theme park rides, but then, the first Pirates is at least worth the indignity of The Country Bears. And, indeed, the first Pirates - hell, all four Pirateses - seems that much more precious in light of how utterly craven and artistically uninspired its peculiar subgenre can so depressingly prove to be.

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CANNES 1995: DAY 9

About the project

THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE (Nicholas Hytner, UK)
Screened in the main competition

Alan Bennett's drily sarcastic screenplay and Nigel Hawthorne's delectable turn as the imperious, then terrified, then deeply confused George III of Great Britain are the clear justifications for a movie that does a great job of exploring the nasty world of 18th Century British politicking, and not such a great job of populating it with characters worthy of it, His Majesty notwithstanding. It meets my cardinal rule for costume dramas, making the period it depicts feel tethered to living human emotions rather than locked away for our stuffy, privileged edification; but Hytner's somewhat choked direction and the largely one-note performances of most of the cast some don't make the humans themselves feel all that lively (very nearly including Helen Mirren, the recipient of a frankly baffling Best Actress citation from the Cannes jury, and I say that as an unrepentant Mirren fanboy). It's thoroughly entertaining, witty, and historically literate in the best way, but nobody who isn't already in the bag for British period pictures will be swayed by this particular example of the form. 7/10


THE CONVENT (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/France)
Screened in the main competition

Unconventional, at very least: American professor Michael Padovic (John Malkovich) arrives at a Portuguese monastery so excited to find the documents that will prove his theory that Shakespeare was of Spanish-Jewish descent that he all but abandons his wife Hélène (Catherine Deneuve) while falling for his research assistant Piedade (Leonor Silveira). Alas, but this plays right into the plan of Baltar (Luís Miguel Cintra), the monastery-keeper who also happens to be, probably, the actual embodiment of Satan, and has Faustian pacts lined up for both of the Padovics. I am incapable of being unmoved by any project so unafraid to look completely ridiculous, or one that's so willing to grab right on to the Biggest Possible Themes of good and evil, all the more so when it's being shepherded by a fearless 86-year-old director with nothing to prove. But damn, is it a muddle, with the actors going every which way, the ill-chosen music queues insisting that an Italianate portal-to-hell extravaganza is right around the corner, and far too much obvious coding of its themes. 5/10


DON'T FORGET YOU'RE GOING TO DIE (Xavier Beauvois, France)
Screened in the main competition

This somewhat inexplicable recipient of the Prix du Jury (the festival's third-place award, essentially), is more than anything a routine slice of realist-adjacent European art cinema. That means long, slow shots; a showy lack of clear story development; joyless explicit sex; and a general sense that everything is more or less awful. It is, by all means, a sturdy example of that genre, assuming that genre is your bag, but it's certainly not enough of a stand-out to feel like it earned a Cannes berth at all, let alone an inordinately high-profile prize. The movie is a series of elliptically-linked anecdotes centering around Benoît, a young bisexual man with HIV played, not terribly well, by the director; the script (by a five-member writing team) wins lots of points for refusing to clarify what it can deftly imply, but there comes a point where opacity about the main character's psychology outside of a general background radiation of suicidal ennui feels like an unnecessary wall between the film and the viewer. 7/10


DESPERADO (Robert Rodriguez, USA)
Screened out of competition

It's probably an overreach to suggest that Rodriguez was already starting to go wrong in just his second feature. I do think, however, that for all its eager style and filmmaking brio (it positively oozes "you're going to let me have how much money?" in its conception of the action sequences), those things different between Desperado and El Mariachi, to which it is sequel and remake, are exactly the things that tend be most problematic with the director's films. The desire to make a slick, cool impact in the moment is so intense that he doesn't do much if any work to stitch those moments into a greater whole with its own building momentum and sense of purpose; it's really not much more than a clip reel with an excessively great soundtrack. That said, some of those clips are mighty good, and for every moment that's patently an unnecessary indulgence, there's a better one that's B-movie cartoon zaniness at its freest. That climactic shootout centered on guns built into guitar cases covers a lot of sins... 7/10

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POINT OF VIEW

A review requested by Nathan Morrow, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

As titles go, Mind Game is perfect: it describes exactly what the movie is and plans to do to its audience (it's also in English and Latin characters, despite the film being overwhelmingly in Japanese). The 2004 animated feature is a psychological portrait that uses metaphysics, memory, and delirious shifts in perception to keep things from ever making perfect sense, and then having allowed itself to start to level off in its second half, it jumps into a finale that intuitively works but God help you if you decide to apply linear logic to it. I've seen the film three times now, and I'm still not completely sure I know how to parse everything that happens, other than being comfortable in declaring that all of it feels right, relative to where the characters are at any given moment. And that is all that the film requires, given that it is far more interesting in portraying a state of mind than telling s story. It can be best compared to another film that also, coincidentally, first appeared in 2004, an ocean away: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which also places us inside of a character's memories for lengthy stretches of screen time. The most important difference being that Eternal Sunshine, no matter how much inventive camerawork and editing were thrown its way, is still ultimately bound by what actors are physically capable of doing. Mind Game, being animated, is under no such limitation; and it takes the absolute fullest possible advantage of its medium.

The movie was the feature directorial debut of Yuasa Masaaki, with the animation direction specifically overseen by Morimoto Koji, and it is absolutely the movie that happens when somebody who has been kicking around the industry for a while finally pukes out everything he's absorbed into one frenzied blast of inspiration. If nothing else, Mind Game might well be the most-animated Japanese film of the 2000s, utilising at least three absolutely different aesthetic vocabularies as it goes along, none of which are the big-eyed clear line drawings with bold colors that most of us first think of as anime (though there are a couple of dream sequences where old-school anime is broadly parodied). Even within its individual flavors, which range from photorealistic drawings to sketches that feel like a bored teenager's doodles, the animation in Mind Game to any one sort of thing - its most distinctive trait, visually, is the way that the protagonist's whole body can be warped into extreme shapes and exaggerated facial expressions. It resembles, if it resembles any one thing, the similarly intense caricatures of emotions in Takahata Isao's My Neighbors the Yamadas, on which Yuasa was one of the primary animators.

The film's internal breakage is always linked to the strength and nature of the emotional state entered by its lead character, and I guess we should meet him right about now, huh? Mind Game centers on Nishi (Imada Koji), a young man who could charitably be described as a pathetic loser; his career as an aspiring manga artist hasn't quite exploded yet, and his personal life is a shambles, as we find out in the exact moment of meeting him, as he encounters his childhood crush Myon (Maeda Sayaka) in the subway, as she's on the run from gangsters, if in fact she is. By this point, the film has already begun relaxing the normal rules of continuity and chronology, and the opening scenes don't obviously slot into any gap in the onscreen plot. What really matters, anyway, isn't the presence of gangsters, but Nishi's unbridled response to seeing Myon again: he freaks out and remembers how much he never remotely got over her, and keeps staring at her large chest. He is as perfect an embodiment of a sexually underdeveloped manchild as you could ever hope to come across, and everything that happens, happens because he trails after Myon like a lost dog. That's how he ends up at the restaurant run by her sister, Yan (Takuma Seiko), when the gangsters show up looking for the sisters' father (Sakata Toshio); that's how he ends up being shot dead; that's how he ends up impressing God It/Him/Herself with the furor of his desire to live; that's how ends up leading Myon and Yan into the belly of an unfathomably enormous whale, where they spend the longest individual portion of the film's running time cooling their heels and visiting with a peculiar but mostly friendly old man (Fujii Takashi). It's not a normal movie. Don't need it to be a normal movie.

The thing I love best about Mind Game and thing that annoys me the most about it are inextricably yoked: this is a film entirely about Nishi's perception of the world and of himself. On the downside, this means that the whole thing is a bit tawdrily obsessed with sex and female bodies (this is a distractingly boob-obsessed film), though sometimes the tawdriness goes all the way back 'round to genius, like the technicolor orgy fantasy in which Nishi uses his phallus as a jump rope, as Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2" plays, like some kind of oversexed remake of Fantasia on acid. So even the downside is only kind of a downside, and the upsides are constant, extreme, and enormously gratifying. Mind Game is, directly as a result of its subjectivity, one of the most radical animated projects made in this century in any ultimately representational style. That radicalism does not mean that the film isn't messy as hell, for it certainly can be. Though it's surprising clear throughout why the fluid style is being employed on a moment-by-moment basis (it is, almost without fail, because of Nishi's mood at that moment, moving between lust, fear, anger, or triumph with visual cues to match). And the digressive parentheticals which make up essentially all of the narrative, no matter how surreal they get in terms of what we're seeing and how much loopy comedy it generates, kind of make perfect sense as the literalisation of Nishi's daydreams.

And radicalism is only so much of a justification for itself; Mind Game is a dazzling feat, a cornucopia of new ideas and arresting, shocking visuals, but it can be a little fatiguing, honestly. After a while, and for me it's during the slowest part of the whale interlude, one begins to wish that the movie didn't feel quite so free to race headlong into every rabbit hole that caught Yuasa's eye. The point of the movie, illustrating a hectic mind in a state of near-constant panic, either romantic or existential, explains and earns the barrage of disconnected moments - I used the word "daydream" earlier, and that's exactly the way the film feels and connects its ideas - but it would be possible to accuse it, accurately, of being bound together by no stronger tie than "cool shit goes down in the most unpredictable ways". Frequently, that's enough: the scene between Nishi and God, who transforms in appearance with every movement and cut, is a marvel of animation and sarcastic theology alike, and it would never have showed up in a film that was exercising any kind of discipline or restraint. The same for the closing montage, which wraps up the fates of just about every character of note in quick bursts of visual storytelling that legitimately can't be unpacked without a pause button.

At any rate, you can't separate out the weaknesses from the commanding, singular strength of how well this movie uses the specific capabilities of animation to plow through its protagonist's head. Subjectivity divorced from physical plausibility is a miraculous combination, and it's enough to make Mind Game one of the essential animated features in the last 15 years. In fairness, it might well be the case that this is an animated film mostly for other animators and animation buffs; but as an animation buff in good standing, I don't personally have any problem with that. It just makes it slightly - slightly - hard to be quite as active in recommending it to the world at large as I'd like to.

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CANNES 1995: DAY 8

About the project

ULYSSES' GAZE (Theo Angelopoulos, Greece/France/Italy)
Screened in the main competition

God bless anybody who can make it through all three hours without their attention faltering at least once. Angelopoulos's immodestly slow-moving cinema of languid shots and low-key performances isn't for everybody, and Ulysses' Gaze is a particularly extreme version of that. It sends Harvey Keitel as Greek-American film director "A" on a mission to find the oldest piece of cinema made in the Balkans, and straight into a heavily symbolic meditation on the oppressive weight of history and violence in that region, in which enormous dismantled statues of Lenin gaze out coldly at the world, and oppressive fog demonstrates the confusion and obscurantism of human perception. Individually, it's made up of almost nothing bu striking images and meaningfully slow moments, but long before the movie was even thinking about ending, I was cowed into submission more than transfixed by the gravity of every moment. Angelopoulos was aghast at receiving "merely" the second place Grand Prix, but even that seems more a nod to the film's important politics than its artistic effectiveness. 6/10


SHANGHAI TRIAD (Zhang Yimour, France/China)
Screened in the main competition

The recipient of a special "Technical Grand Prize", which basically equates to a Best Cinematography award, given to DP Lu Yue, production supervisor Bruno Patin, and color timer Olivier Chiavassa. It's absolutely a film that deserves a cinematography award, too, though it's also the kind of film for which your first thought upon exiting it is, "that definitely deserves something for its cinematography!", if you understand my meaning. Filtering its tale of gangland warfare through the perspective of petulant nightclub singer and gangster's moll (she's played, terrifically, by Gong Li), and then filtering her through the eyes of a teenage boy from the country (Wang Xiaoxiao) who can barely articulate his impressions through all of it, the film has a point-of-view problem, staying at arm's length from its story (which is a bit overly routine) and characters. It's far livelier in its last thirty minutes, when it moves to a rural island and starts to complicate Gong's character, and the beauty carries it through a lot. But this is not one of Zhang's deeper works. 7/10


THE ARSONIST (U-Wei Bin Haji Saari, Malaysia)
Screened in Un Certain Regard

The first-ever Malay film to play in competition at Cannes, and the first I have seen; I wonder if the UCR jury was as blindsided by it as I was. Fluidly moving the very particular milieu of William Faulkner (it's based on his story "Barn Burning") into the very particular milieu of the Javanese immigrant minority in Malaysia, the film is at once a symbolic microcosm of class and ethnic resentment and a transporting family drama. It depicts the thorny relationship between a boy and his sometimes admirable, sometimes beastly father, with actors Khaled Salleh (the father) and Ngasrizal Ngasri (the son) offering up devastating performances based almost entirely in silent reactions and body language - a late moment that finds Ngasri clapping his hands over his ears and scrunching up his face to block out his father's actions ranks among the great images from Cannes '95. The aesthetic is casually naturalistic but with a poetic attention to darkness and color; the social insights are smart as they are quiet. And all in just 67 minutes! 9/10

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: SILENT HORROR - IT'S ALIVE

To begin with, define "horror" in a way that makes everybody happy; then solve the intractable mysteries of cinema history prior to 1920. And once you have done these two things, you can authoritatively state, "this is the first American horror film". But until we reach that point of pure intellectual fulfillment, the best we can do is to make our best approximation. So it's more a matter of convenience than rock-solid history that leads me to anoint as that first American horror film a certain adaptation of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's frequently strip-mined Frankenstein, produced in 1910 by the Edison Company. And here's what we do know: we do know that this was the very first American Frankenstein. So close enough for government work, is what I'm saying.

It holds another distinction, too: it was the first screen Frankenstein that adapted Shelley to the screen primarily by means of ignoring her completely. Part of that is the inevitability of condensing even a novel as moderate in its size as Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus to the duration of a one-reel motion picture - that duration being a bit difficult to pin down. Online sources all land on 16 minutes, but the version I have seen (which does not seem to be projected at too high a framerate) is less than 13. Either way, that leaves time for only a very harried version of Shelley's story, or a rebuild of the whole thing using only the basic ingredient common to all movie Frankensteins: a medical student named Frankenstein (Augustus Phillips) decides to take it on himself to create live, and the thing he gives life to (Charles Ogle) proves to be a ghastly perversion. Though even in the most reduced form, writer-director J. Searle Dawley's adaptation plays loose with the material: while Shelley famously kept the details fuzzy, the basic notion of all versions of the story is that Frankenstein desired to bring dead flesh to life; this Frankenstein of 1910 is actually creating life out of nothing, more explicitly in the fashion of God even than usual.

In fact, this film's embrace of the "Frankenstein wants to be God" metaphor is so extreme that the monster turns out to be, literally, an extension of the creator's thought. The basic description of events - which you can easily follow for yourself, the public domain film is easily found on the internet (though on YouTube, at least, you can have either good resolution or properly tinted colors, but not both) - finds Frankenstein leaving for school, becoming consumed with thoughts of life and death, forming his creature, realising too late that his evil, unholy impulses had imprinted upon the being, turning it into a wrathful monster. It follows him as he returns home and to the arms of his fiancée (Mary Fuller), harassing them both, and causing Frankenstein to admit to the wickedness of his deeds. And this is where things get openly metaphysical, as the monster apparently ceases to exist except as an incorporeal projection of Frankenstein's mind, which even then dissolves into nothingness as he redeems himself from his impure ways.

It sure as hell ain't Shelley, though most of the film is derived from the book (Frankenstein in school, Frankenstein making the monster, and the monster assaulting Frankenstein's wife on her wedding night, all the significant plot points in the movie, are all Shelley's). But even if it deviates from the source material, it's still an enormously gratifying adaptation, intelligently grappling with its basic themes in a form that better suits the scale and palette available to a filmmaker of 1910, when scenes were still all but universally communicated in theatrical wide shots with limited cutting, and what we'd now call feature-length films only barely existed. Dawley, who liked to (overweeningly) call himself the first motion picture director, was more concerned than anyone else working at that time with dramatic cohesion, character reality, and the function of acting in films, so it fits that his Frankenstein would be a primarily psychological one; and his treatment of the monster as closer to an Edward Hyde-esque manifestation of Frankenstein's broken soul than a rampaging corpse is impressively achieved, all the more for being in such an unfamiliar idiom, both in terms of the stagey framing and the extravagantly broad acting.

But I brought us all together for a very specific reason, and I haven't even touched on it: how is Frankenstein '10 as horror, anyway? Astonishingly great, in fact, especially since horror as a codified genre in American cinema was still 20 years away from finally coalescing (thanks, in part, to that other and better-known Frankenstein). Like most adaptations of the novel, its most striking scene is the creation of the monster, and I will frankly declare that, adjusting for the steep technological curve of the years following, this particular movie has one of the very best versions of that scene ever. It's more of an alchemical process than the biological one favored by most later movies: Frankenstein tosses some stuff into a vat locked into a metal chamber, and the monster forms, almost of its own will. The technique is obvious and simple: Dawley set a model on fire, and burned it into ashes, while waggling one of its arms, and then he ran the footage backwards. It's as primitive as any trick in the cinematic toolkit, but it works enormously well here: watching a humanoid form extrude from the very air is uncanny as hell even without the distressing floppiness of that dead arm, no matter how much the smoke moving downward gives away the game. It's a terrific scene in every detail: the cuts back to an increasingly nervous Frankenstein, the refusal to show the fully-realised monster at first, even the skeleton hanging out in the corner of one frame, implying a chamber of horrrors just off camera that we can only imagine.

As for the monster itself, it's a freaky bit of make-up, designed by Ogle himself, and looking more like a wild man-ape than a grotesque animated corpse. Ogle certainly gives the most interesting performance, too, slinking around erratically and using his big grand gestures as ways of stressing his alien nature, while Phillips and Fuller make those same gestures simply because that's how you do, in 1910. Watching him lope and shuffle around the sets is horror of the most genuine sort: an intrusion of something incomprehensible and wrong into a sedate, even boringly normal space. It's too much to ask that a 105-year-old movie should still be even marginally "scary", but with this monster creeping around these places, Frankenstein is still impressively able to be unsettling and creepy. The film is a relic of an almost unrecognisably earlier period in the medium's development, but it's as broadly accessible as anything from the same filmmaking style that I can name. It's kind of the perfect "my first early narrative cinema" experience, with the comforting familiarity of genre helping to bridge the archaic presentation with the far more immediate emotions it evokes. American horror couldn't ask for a sturdier, more confident opening act than this.

Body Count: 0 or 1, depending on exactly how metaphysical you want the monster to end up being.

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CANNES 1995: DAY 7

About the project

THE NEON BIBLE (Terence Davies, UK)
Screened in the main competition

Years later, Davies would confess that he found this, his third feature, a failure whose value was chiefly that without it, he wouldn't have been able to make The House of Mirth. And I am not one to disagree with a gifted filmmaker: it's hard not to regard this as the reigning low point of Davies's otherwise unblemished career. Which isn't the same as dismissing it as totally without its own merits: it's dazzling to look at, recasting the U.S. South of '30s and '40s as a dreamy, theatrical space, full of impenetrable black backdrops against which the characters move as haunting abstractions of human behavior. The proportion of gorgeous, heavily thought-out shots that burn into the brain is high with this one. But that cuts both ways: the stagey stylisation robs all the humanity out of an already whispery scenario, leaving even as reliable an actor as Gena Rowland unable to make any real impression. It's not unmemorable, but it's chilly as hell, to its extreme detriment as a memoir. 6/10


NASTY LOVE (Mario Martone, Italy)
Screened in the main competition

The film has the misfortune to peak in its first ten minutes, a freewheeling introduction to the characters and the film's overriding theme of weird sexuality that's so vigorous in its lack of clear connective tissue between thoughts that it borders on surrealism. But even if it grows somewhat less evocatively deranged as it moves along, and its climactic reveals have a certain "ho-hum, people are depraved the world over" feeling, it's always a pretty unique, even oddball trek through the realms of bleak family drama and increasingly unresolved murder mystery. Anna Bonaiuto does fine work as the daughter soldiering her way through half-formed clues and a host of insistently unhelpful rogues to find out what chain of events led to her mother ending up dead on a beach; it's thanks almost solely to her flintiness that the film is able to land its final declarations about the ways that hurt begets hurt and ancient sins can keep battering us in the present. A giddy blast of offbeat bleakness through and through. 8/10


RUDE (Clement Virgo, Canada)
Screened in Un Certain Regard

A watershed moment in the Canadian film industry: the first feature made by an entirely black crew and with a mostly black cast. It's the kind of film that makes one feel tremendously bad to dislike it, especially since a defense of many of its seeming deficiencies can be sketched directly from its outsider perspective: the film is literally finding different ways of looking at its subjects from the norm. But that only excuses the awkward shots and shabby mise en scène up to a point, and it doesn't include the stilted performances of underwritten characters at all. There are highlights, chief among them the lacerating, sexually aggressive performance of Sharon Lewis as the pirate radio operator of the title, and one of the film's three plotlines - a newly-released convict trying to find a way back to his son's life - is as piercing and well-observed as the other two are generic and underfelt. Mostly, though, this is a well-meant amateur misfire, the kind larded up with irritatingly fussy shots and dopey symbolic lions. 6/10


KISS OF DEATH (Barbet Schroeder, USA)
Screened out of competition

The obvious question is "what on God's earth led to a David Caruso crime thriller getting a Cannes slot?", it seeming from all the ingredients that this had to be nothing whatsoever other than a generic mid-'90s gangster movie. Which it kind of is, and it's no wonder based on all the evidence here that Caruso's leading man career was snuffed out almost before it started (I still have not seen Jade, the movie that delivered the killing blow). He's simply too generic an actor to support the largely run-of-the-mill moral and psychological questions posed by the script, though Schroeder makes good use of his off-kilter looks. What actually saves the film - almost - are the fascinatingly bizarre supporting characters played by Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Rapaport, Stanley Tucci, Kathryn Erbe, and especially a blustering, mad Nicholas Cage. It feels like dropping a vanilla everyman into a cage of cartoon zoo animals, and damned if it doesn't give the film a tension that manages to justify its existence in an overpopulated genre. 6/10


SAFE (Todd Haynes, UK/USA)
Screened in Directors' Fortnight

Nothing less than one of the key English-language films of the 1990s. Its dissection of material society, spirituality, self-definition, and the dis-empowerment of women at first looks barbarically simple in its "allergic to the environment" metaphor, only becoming more fluid, nuanced, and unnervingly applicable to seemingly every aspect of modern life as you try to reduce it to its essentials. Every frame of Alex Nepomniaschy's cinematography could be cut out and hung on the wall, as he and Haynes present David Bomba's ingenious, deceptively naturalistic production design in ominously squared-off images that present the script's suggestion of contemporary life as a house of untraceable horrors with an intuitive precision far beyond words. In the center of this miraculously cryptic and blunt story, Julianne Moore gives the best performance of a legendary career as vivid blank slate, a collection of impressions and responses seeking a center around which to coalesce. So brilliant that it must be difficult and dense, yet so keenly cinematic in its singular aesthetic that watching it is a totally intuitive experience. 10/10

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THE PITCH IS BACK

Being "disappointed" in Pitch Perfect 2 would require having meaningfully elevated expectations for it, and hopefully not too many people would make that mistake. Cinema history is littered with comedy sequels that fail in exactly the way this one does: re-create the same plot beats and thematic arc, only do everything bigger, more expensive, and less funny. There are few enough exceptions that the course of wisdom is to just assume that you're heading for a piece of absolute crap, or a mildly amusing but horrifically lazy retread at best, and when you are graced by the sudden arrival of an Addams Family Values or A Shot in the Dark, clutch it to your breast like an innocent child. What I am disappointed in, then, is not the movie itself.

But I am definitely willing to concede that I'm very disappointed in Elizabeth Banks's directorial debut, which Pitch Perfect 2 happens to be: after years of counting on Banks to be a reliable stabilising presence in wonderful comedies, mediocre comedies, and downright shitty comedies, I was more than a little eager to see her apply the knowledge she picked up over the years into working on the backside of the camera. And that didn't happen; there are lots of reasons that Pitch Perfect 2 isn't very great, but the directing is absolutely one of them, with the tone going far more sour far more often than in the first Pitch Perfect and the visuals flatlining in exactly the place you'd want them to thrive, the musical numbers. Which are inventively staged by choreographer Aakomon "A.J." Jones, but shot hectically and cut to ribbons by Banks and editor Craig Alpert, and that's just no fun at all.

In her defense, Banks didn't have all that much to work with. The script, written like the original by Kay Cannon, is a pristine example of sequelitis, going to extreme (and frankly, unnecessary) lengths to set the characters back to the start in a lot of ways, while raising the stakes enormously but unconvincingly, and ramping up everything that worked last time from modest and thus charming all the way to screaming and tedious. Three years after winning the national college a capella championships, the Barden Bellas are America's premiere a capella group, having completed a three-peat of their victory, and thus must be punished back down to freakish misfits. This is accomplished in the first of the film's weirdly regressive jokes, for a movie that is so fucking anxious to show off its liberal message bonafides: at a concert for no less than President Stockfootage Obama, the self-named Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson), sardonic Australian and beloved breakout character from the last movie, suffers a wardrobe mishap that leaves her genitalia on lingering display for all of America to gawk at with intense furor and ragehorror, because the vaginas of fat people are the holes to Lovecraftian hell dimensions.

The Bellas are kicked out of the a capella ssociation with only one chance to redeem themselves: if - if! - they can become the first American team to win the world championship of a capella. And they throw themselves into the task of doing so, though de facto leader Beca Mitchell (Anna Kendrick) is far more interested in her new internship under a great music producer (Keegan-Michael Key) than making new and radically challenging arrangements for the group to prove itself. It's no more and no less predictable in its assemble of stock items than Pitch Perfect was, and the difference comes down entirely to performance and tone. Pitch Perfect ignored its wanton overfamiliarity in favor of focusing on the warm, specific characters played by Kendrick, Wilson, and others like Brittany Snow (who comes back as a graduation-averse four-time senior), Anna Camp (who cameos), and Ester Dean (who returns in a role that isn't as mired in lazy stereotypes as before, though it feels like she's also in the movie less). Pitch Perfect 2 lets its characters be far too snappish, and the basic pleasure of watching characters be friends with each other is forced and inauthentic in most of its occurrences. There are just enough flashes of the congenial spirit of the first movie for the sequel to be, generally, speaking, satisfactory; for example, a long scene around a campfire where the movie digs in with a "wow, we're all going to graduate soon and this will all end" vibe that the movie keeps glancing at without committing to.

But these likable grace notes are only intermittent in a film that loses the originals two best weapons, with much-degraded performances from a palpably checked-out Kendrick and Wilson shading perpetually into mean brutality instead of fleet-footed sarcasm. And then there's the usual "do it again but bigger and stupider" problem, which finds the last movie's riff-off turned into a huge underground a capella death match overseen by a rich eccentric played by David Cross as a collection of mincing effeminate stereotypes that were stale by the end of the 1980s (this scene does have, by far, the film's best joke in the form of the most unexpected celebrity cameos in an age), and the dirty-minded humor cranked into outright foulness that's so wearying as to lose any ability to trigger even a slight giggle. The morally reprehensible color commentators played by John Michael Higgins and Banks herself (she proves, like many actors before her, incapable of directing herself; she keeps stumbling into a reprise of her Effie Trinket from The Hunger Games and its sequels) are even more of a film-stopping liability than before, jamming the breaks to grimly push through riffs with rather too much cruelty to be even ironically funny.

Even when the film plumbs new territory, it's of limited value. The movie's new villains, an archly Germanic a capella group led by the statuesque Kommissar (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen) and Pieter Krämer (Flula Borg), are amusingly severe at first (all of Kendrick's best work comes in her scenes with them), though it eventually becomes clear that the movie's sole idea for them is "boy, Germans are assholes!", the first volley in what will eventually become a whole litany of national parodies in the last act that makes Epcot Center look like a painfully realist docudrama (one previously unseen Bella, played by Chrissie Fit, is nothing but a delivery system for obnoxious and tired "boy, what about illegal immigrants? And those Central American death squads!" jokes). The new hero, Emily Junk, is a generic striver played by Hailee Steinfeld without any color or charm, and the film's open insistence in its writing and framing that she's set to be the franchise anchor going forward is nothing but a threat. Particularly if her character continues to write such joylessly anonymous pop songs as the one that turns into a major film-long plot point, and we're meant to find enthralling in some way or another.

It would be overstating to call Pitch Perfect 2 "bad". Mostly, it is profoundly lazy, slackly plotted - after three years of national prominence at a school where a capella culture is a Big Fucking Deal, there's only one Bella who isn't a senior, and the script calls repeated attention to this fact - and tonally off; not contrary to being funny so much as it doesn't have the flair and timing to be more than thinly amusing. There's never more than ten minutes that go by without a scene that works well on a character level, and Key proves to be an infectious scene-stealer, wandering in from a spikier, much smarter movie and bringing all its stinging wit and laser-focused pacing with him. The filmmakers didn't not care. But they didn''t care enough, and their movie is the most boring kind of retread, one with all the jokes muted and the performances robbed of vitality and the characters put through glaringly simplistic paces.

5/10

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