Phantasm 5: Ravager

While the original Phantasm has sentimental value to me and is a good example of low budget 70s genre filmmaking, its far from a great film. The plot is paper thin, its dated in the best and worst ways and its a bit slow and dry. But the film that is essentially a horror-movie-for-kids-about-PTSD spawned a world famous franchise thanks to its iconic villains, charming FX and cool soundtrack. But the sequels kinda suck.

Phantasm 5: Ravager is the final chapter to a saga that was best left at one story and the best entry since the original because its only focused on deconstructing its origins, ignoring the unnecessary and finishing what it started. Ravager reduces all of the sequels to "bad dreams", which would be upsetting and ludicrous in any other sequel, but this is the forgotten motif of the 1st film. This thematic continuity is what makes all great sequels work. Add the fact that this is the most grungy, cheap and personal film since the 70s as creator Don Coscarelli lets a new director make this a fan film and not a commercial cash-in like the rest. Ravager looks back at the series with fondness for the journey, apologizes for the schlockiness and redeems its fans for their loyalty by expanding on the artistic credibility of the original, at least narratively (the production is far below the original's standards). Its a moving tribute to a series that helped define an era and I'm very glad they said their peace and ended it properly before central star Angus Scrimm passed away.

This is my favorite low budget exploitation film of 2016 btw. For a series and era that was defined by its adolescence, this is a mature farewell.

Rampage: President Down 2016

Uwe Boll is the closest thing we have to a Jess Franco today. He's a European Marxist who started in satire, moved to popular genre fare and now makes very politically-radical, no budget, S&M cinema. They both share a pitch black sense of humor, a pessimistic outlook on human life, a very handy & experimental commercial style that is ironic and trained for minimalism. Verhoeven is also a big influence on Boll naturally.

But Boll deals almost exclusively with deconstructing American values, particularly the more conspiratorial & exploitative media elements. As a German filmmaker, he often draws parallels to Nazi Germany's mistakes and supposed "positives". He intentionally makes films that feel like propaganda but as "anti-propaganda". With President Down, this once very entertainment-driven filmmaker is all about message and clarity. The miniscule budget of this thing doesn't allow for much of a production at all, but Boll is a veteran filmmaker on different budget levels so he finds genius uses of cinematography and location and makes great use of the action footage he has. He thinks as an editor foremost and I think Eisenstein would appreciate a lot of this film.

Its a powerfully depressing and brutally honest character study of the mass shooters society keeps creating. Boll is very sympathetic but offers fair judgment of this kind of anarchist extremism. Its an amazing tight rope walk actually because I can't think of another filmmaker tackling this themes so directly. With a tiny budget, Boll isn't worried about profits and God bless him for sticking to his guns in such a passive age.

I don't agree with 100% of what he says with this film, but its stuff that needs to be said. I think if this was directed under another name, Boll would've received big critical props.

Dog Eat Dog 2016

Guess what this film's political subtext is from its title...

Rewatched Paul Schrader's darkly comic crime film from last year. Holds up well. Its a disturbing omen on the political/economic/identity issues that have made 2017 so bleak and divided. Yet its also more brutal and honest than this first post-Trump year.

Schrader shows the growing depravity, hopelessness and blind evil bubbling up from society
s most privileged outcasts - American white blue collar thugs. He finds them absurd and a bit amusing as well as their ignorant bigotry and hatred. This is an updated, more satirical version of Schrader's Taxi Driver, focused on social factors that produce this particularly toxic and media-protected/media-enabled type of malcontented misfit. The politically correct might mistake Schrader as being sympathetic to the alt-right or amorality when really he is curious to the human condition and finds these despicable characters as intrinsic to solving today's problems because they are the sickest victims.

Nicholas Cage is quite sharp as the lead thug, calling on 100s of his seedier, more conflicted anti-hero roles in the past. The role itself is a kind of dark mirror to his breakout character in Raising Arizona, which is cute. Also Cage is reunited with Willem Dafoe. As in David Lynch's "Wild at Heart", the two are eccentric robbers and like that film Dafoe steals the show as a totally unhinged white trash stereotype of a more realistic color. Christopher Matthew Cook is very well cast and directed as the Curly in their gang of Stooges. Not that he's funny or the focus, but he totally pulls off the illusion that these are not over-the-top parodies but truly insane men you might meet if your life falls apart.

DED works best if you've seen many modern gangster films or at least Schrader's work in the genre, but its a very stylish and intelligent affair. Schrader uses his decent budget, material and technology to make one of his most abstract and surreal films. I feel like there's Godard and maybe even some Refn nods here. The end of the film will definitely lose casual fans but its a clever metaphor for the entire film's theme and ties directly back to Taxi Driver, confirming that Schrader's intention was always that Hollywood endings are very sick, dishonest and self-aggrandizing dreams to insult the intelligence of the audience and that they should deconstruct them to find out what reality holds.

Schrader is proving in his autumn years to be one of the best indie directors we've seen, always sticking to his guns and producing a sharp, critical and entertaining bit of style cinema. And of course Cage and Dafoe have carved out great names without ever having to worry about the budget or exposure of their projects. These are artists who know good art.

20 years apart, how many pairs of actors get to work with strong creators like Lynch & Schrader?

Wiener-Dog 2016

* Written in August 2016

Brutal, honest, uncompromising filmmaking 

This is the movie of 2016. Its a movie about where we are as a world in 2016. The way Love was the movie of 2015, Boyhood 2014 and 12 Years A Slave 2013.

Its another dark satire from Todd Solondz whose work grows more poetic and reflective with each film. He's worked with episodic films before but this time they are tied together narratively by a small symbolic animal actor and thematically by the the progressing ages of the human actors. Its biographical and confessional.

One one level this is Solondz' most appealing work, at least visually and marketing-wise. But it could be his most savage and aggressive. But its also his most balanced and most clever. Very possibly his best.

He solidified this style of muted Technicolor nightmare storytelling with his last films (Life During Wartime and Dark Horse) which were very under-the-radar. "Wiener" is his most visible film since Welcome to the Dollhouse and he uses that as a tool to shock the Dollhouse fans and Dachshund fans who wander into this existential horror film.

There are no gimmicks or tricks. Images, dialogue, acting and directing make the movie and nothing hold back. Solondz has evolved into one of the greatest film directors ever delivering nothing but personal works that entertain and also leave one rocked to the core. With age he has stripped down his directing style to Pure Cinema with powerful moving images that are poems unto themselves and dialogue that is never superfluous. The average film-goer may object to his upsetting themes of despair, pedophilia and loss of innocence, but there's no debating that this man is an artist of the highest order.

Unlike most online reviewers, I was satisfied that Solondz hadn't finally given in to making a cute indie festival crowd-pleaser. And thankfully he had a crew of producers and actors who supported him in tricking the mass media into thinking this was something other than a bold statement. Tod Solondz is the only artist on the list of modern American filmmakers who is unpopular enough and full of enough conviction to call out the villains of this modern era: celebrity artists, SJWs, Millennial hipsters, corporate sponsors, bad parents and all the enemies of honesty in our society and the killers of great cinema.

The film is being sold as the first Solondz film since his debut to avoid explicit perversion or mention of pedophilia. Actually, Dark Horse was that film. Wiener Dog makes allusions to these taboo subjects subtly and the effect is even more upsetting and tragic. There's a very pornographic scene of a male child actor symbolically asking to be raped followed by an agonizing extended moment where Todd Solondz own personal Hell is literally unraveled on screen. This all-encompassing depression for his condition and the shameful guilt in his un-indulged fantasies symbolically explode on the screen (anyone who has seen "Happiness" will pick up on the powerful meaning of bloody feces in the Solondz oeuvre).

Wiener Dog is an act of a creature ripping off the created human husk and bearing the blackness and pure light of his soul on the screen for the cold judgment and dim-witted entertainment of us all. The final shot is one of the most powerful metaphors ever created through cinema. Total catharsis and self-reflection for the repressed and utterly dark mind with a heart of gold.

10/10

Nocturnal Animals 2016

I was infuriated by this movie. Not because of its quiet, anticlimactic ending nor the charges of misogyny or the pointless and distracting visual cues or the horribly amateur attempts at Southern accents or the 10th consistent performance by Amy Adams as a meek, tense, wide-eyed All-American girl gone awry. Its that all of that could've been forgiven if the movie had a sense of play or self-awareness. This was such a pretentious "Hollywood makes an art film" exercise. We're supposed to feel so much but neither the director or cast seems to give a shit about anything except "how cool this is going to look?" and "how serious are they going to take me?" I should've expected that given thats the M.O. for both Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal's careers, but I thought I might get a mature and modest drama in a 1970s vein and I guess I did, but it was so loaded with bad Millennial gimmicks and emo sentimentalism and an overall childishness. I really want to call this the worst movie of 2016 because its such a damning example of the excesses of mainstream entertainers but moreso because its a titanic waste of potential. I believe this same story and production concept could have delivered the most important and well-balanced film of 2016. Who would object to a glossy 21st century Andrei Tartokovsky flick? But it would take so much more talent than whats available right now in movies. Perhaps Nocturnal Animals will become a big curiosity or influence a generation to examine its influences, but as a singular work its just dreadful.