For the week of November 20th, the Criterion Collection is bringing Terry Gilliam's solo directorial debut Jabberwocky to Blu-ray. I think I like the idea of Terry Gilliam movies more than I actually enjoy the movies themselves. As a cartoonist and co-founder of Monty Python's Flying Circus, Gilliam has cultivated such a unique house style. He's the anti-establishmentarian as anarchist, demolishing the framework behind any institutions that would strangle the individual, yet he does so with a visual grammar that's equal parts Orson Welles, Looney Tunes, and Pieter Brueghel. In any given frame, Gilliam has about eight thousand elements ping-ponging off one another, and his best features (Brazil, The Fisher King, 12 Monkeys, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) have a density of a Mad Magazine (as written by Jonathan Swift) splash page. They're also more than a little exhausting, and even more so when Gilliam is mostly left to his own devices. There's an irony, I realize, in the fact that one of cinema's leading anti-authoritarians works best when he has to negotiate around artistic/financial constraints. And Jabberwocky, unfortunately, ranks alongside The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and The Zero Theorem as one of his most frenzied and tedious efforts. Lewis Carroll's poem of the same name is only seven quatrains long - you'd have to work hard to make it fill more than a page - yet the film runs a full 105 minutes, distending and distorting the poem into the saga of an idiot medieval cooper (Michael Palin) who ends up facing a horrible monster. Stress end: Gilliam withholds a full reveal of the beast until the last ten minutes, instead concerning himself with a feature-length explication of how horrible the Middle Ages were. Gilliam buries his actors and sets under a thick coating of dirt, piss, and poop. His is a world where lunatic kings (personified by a doddering Max Wall) live in crumbling estates and have less power than wealthy merchants, where sudden violence makes little impact on the surrounding populace (vide the jousting sequence, where blood sprays over blasé spectators), and where famine is so endemic that a rotting potato becomes symbolic of great hope and love. Even Palin's hero wants to be anything but; he's deeply comfortable with his own mediocrity and - in the film's cleverest conceit - anxiously has to fend off the affections of a beautiful, Rapunzel-like princess (Deborah Fallender) who's deluded herself that Palin is some grand squire. You watch Palin get pissed on no fewer than three times, and you realize how far we are from the courtly dignity of something like Excalibur. As a mission statement, then, Jabberwocky is a rousing success. But as a movie, it brutally overstays its welcome. Gilliam uses the same setup over and over again: Palin bumbles into some loathsome medieval situation, gets humiliated/micturated upon/beaten senseless/all of the above, only to trip backwards into inexplicable social advancement. Sure, individual variations work as funny standalone sketches (Palin's hapless ravaging of a blacksmith's operation plays like demented Rube Goldberg), but we quickly realize that Gilliam has nothing else to say. Furthermore, while I like the idea of Gilliam undercuting his hero's agency (Palin's climactic "battle," as it were, only makes him seem more craven and weak), it offers nothing to us in terms of suspense or even base audience identification. One can argue that Gilliam protagonists Sam Lowry and James Cole are just as ineffectual as Palin is here, but at least we care about them enough so their failure registers as somewhat tragic. Still, I can say this. Often times, a director's first feature suggests artistic promise without the necessary development to bring it to full fruition, except Jabberwocky feels like pure, uncut Terry Gilliam. For better or worse, he emerged fully formed. That's something, I suppose.
Far better is the Safdie Brothers' Good Time, which gets a Blu-ray release courtesy of A24 and Lionsgate. I actually had similar problems with their debut feature Heaven Knows What as I did with Jabberwocky - the Safdies layer in so much sonic and visual chaos that the movie starts feeling like a full-frontal assault, and not in a good way - but Good Time is pretty much perfect, and I credit the film's genre constraints. Instead of a neorealist-on-acid look at heroin addiction, Good Time is a lean and mean pulp thriller about a beyond-scuzzy robber (Robert Pattinson, who emerges here as the heir apparent to '70s De Niro or Pacino) who's got only one night to scrape together his younger brother's bail-bond before the NYPD sends him to Riker's Island. Things do not go well, to say the least, and the Safdies' deranged aesthetic style proves uniquely effective in conveying the degree to which Pattinson's half-cocked plans go right off the rails. The Safdies immerse you in their lead's improvisations, whether he's conning his way into a ailing stranger's house or raiding an abandoned fun-park, of all places, for some supposed ill-gotten gains: most of Good Time unfolds in jittery close-ups and medium shots that rarely leave Pattinson's anxious frame. In its energy and invention, I thought of Martin Scorsese's terrifying comedy After Hours, and of Michael Mann's propulsive noir Collateral - Good Time never stops moving. Yet in their manic, unpredictable approach to genre, the Safdie end up with a film that feels more substantial than the more sober-minded Heaven Knows What. The surface might look like adrenalized pulp, but like the best termite art, it hides depths. Without stopping to force a larger message, the Safdies use Pattinson's experience to mine uncomfortable observations about race today. It is not an accident that, more often than not, Pattinson preys on people of color to further his own agenda: he seems subconsciously attuned to the fact that if things go south (as they do in a heartbreaking vignette involving Captain Phillips' Barkhad Abdi), his own skin color affords him certain privileges that either absolve him of blame or shift it to those who don't look like him. Some critics have charged that, for this reason, Good Time is itself racist, and they're missing the point. The Safdies never characterize Pattinson as anything other than an irredeemable rotter (he takes advantage of his developmentally disabled brother; he seduces an underage girl and then betrays her; he outright bungles rescuing his brother from a minimum-security hospital). Sure, we get swept up in his journey, but that's the brilliance of the film - it absorbs us into its gravity even as we struggle to break free. One of the year's finest features.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "there's a near gonzo succession of events that ensues, including at least one potentially disastrous mistake by Connie, and it's easy to see why Good Time has raised the hackles of some critics and audience members, since it has Connie repeatedly act reprehensibly, behaviors which include sexual abuse of a minor, as well as a tendency to take advantage in any way possible of those less fortunate than even he is, something that gives some of the proceedings a racial edge. Tonally the film is a rather odd brew of 'kitchen sink' realism with a completely psychedelic undertone (in one case more or less literally, since a hallucinogen enters the fray and one character is subjected unwillingly to the drug). Good Time has undeniable power, even if some may object to certain plot mechanics or even some aspects of the characterizations, notably Safdie's. It also has some really fine, if disturbing, work from Pattinson, as well as nicely modulated performances by Jennifer Jason Leigh as Connie's girlfriend and, memorably, Taliah Webster as a younger girl who falls under Connie's sway. That said, the film struck me as a bit too self conscious for its own good, something that to me is symbolized by the protracted opening credits sequence and then bookended by a kind of weird closing credits sequence that plays out over a supposedly final 'button' for the character of Nick. It's too artificial to do anything other than draw attention to itself, and an undeniably powerful story probably would have been better served without this kind of weird stylistic choice."
From Well Go USA comes director Jung Byung-gil's bruising thriller The Villainess. Let's get things straight: by any conventional narrative metrics, The Villainess is an incoherent mess, and I use that word charitably. Ostensibly, Byung-gil is riffing on Luc Besson's iconic La Femme Nikita - his heroine (the ferocious Kim Ok-bin) falls into the clutches of a secret government agency that remakes her into a brutal assassin - but after a certain point, your guess is as good as mine in terms of what's actually happening. The whole middle hour is a morass of flashbacks and double-crosses and shocking reveals, all of which could make for a satisfying melodrama if not for Byung-gil's relentless fracturing of the chronology. After a certain point, I couldn't figure out what was happening, and I didn't care. But I also didn't care that I didn't care (if that makes sense). For all its weaknesses, The Villainess is also the only truly essential action film of 2017. Every so often, an action movie redefines what we expect of screen carnage, and The Villainess belongs on the short list with films like Hard Boiled or the Wachowski Siblings' The Matrix. Using savvy digital trickery and a host of fearless stuntpeople and camera operators, Byung-gil creates an immersive approach to staging hand-to-hand combat that's unlike anything I've ever seen. He begins the opening setpiece - a raid through a dojo - from Ok-bin's first-person viewpoint, locking us in as she cuts through hordes of killers with sword and gun, only to shatter that illusion when a bad guy smashes our heroine's face into a mirror, wrenching us into third-person perspective for another long, giddily presented single take. Somehow, though, as terrifyingly paced as the fighting is, the action always maintains clear geography and spatial awareness, even if we're with Ok-bin as she's swordfighting with two killers while riding a speeding motorcycle or vaulting and slashing her way onto a runaway public-transit bus. Byung-gil pushes us just to the edge of visual overkill but doesn't go over, and in doing so he captures the frenzy and terror of actual violence better than most action movies even dare. Ignore the plot and enjoy the ride.
Jeffrey Kauffman called the film "an assumedly coherent story seen through a prism, where little shards of plotting are seen, albeit often shorn of context. It's routinely frustrating (at least it was for me), and it tends to detract from what is the film's inarguable energy in its more straightforward action scenes. I'm frankly still not sure what exactly happened to Sook-he, or at least when certain things happened, but it's a testament to this film's visceral impact that in a way the narrative deficiencies don't end up hobbling the film that seriously. There are such deliriously crafted action sequences in this film, and Kim Ok-bin delivers such a furious performance as Sook-he, that a lack of comprehension tends to fade as one impressive set piece after another unfolds. The film is probably not helped by an overabundance of 'jiggly cam' and ADHD editing techniques, but when you have a heroine taking out nemeses with any number of weapons while engaging in a manic motorcycle chase, why argue?"
I think I appreciate The Villainess more, though, after watching the safe, Hollywood-slick The Hitman's Bodyguard. As mainstream buddy-comedies go, you could do a lot worse than this one. It runs less than two hours, has two competently diverting chase sequences (most notably a boat-car-motorcycle shootout through the canals of Amsterdam), and gets a lot of mileage from stars Ryan Reynolds (as a bedraggled security contractor) and Samuel L. Jackson (as the assassin Reynolds is trying to protect). I am not at all surprised that The Hitman's Bodyguard made almost $200 million worldwide this summer. Sometimes you want steak, and sometimes, only a Big Mac will suffice. And if it were 1994, this particular Big Mac might the be the thirteenth-best American action movie of the year. However, something like The Villainess only hurts something like The Hitman's Bodyguard by comparison. The Villainess is no less derivative and clichéd, yet it compensates through sheer kinetic energy and physical prowess. The Hitman's Bodyguard is all too happy to coast, safe in the knowledge that the masses will respond no matter how much it appropriates from superior films. The degree to which this film wants to be Midnight Run is staggering. Reynolds is a GQ-ready gloss on De Niro's disgraced former lawman, while Atli Örvarsson's music quotes the earlier film's awesome Danny Elfman score so blatantly that Elfman might want to consider seeking legal counsel. Both the heroes frequently engage in the kinds of quick-cut fisticuffs that Jason Bourne popularized, only their ultimate target isn't the CIA but rather Gary Oldman's Eastern European lunatic, who comes across like some weak-tea version of his Air Force One baddie. Oldman's henchmen first attack Jackson in a convoy raid ripped straight from Clear and Present Danger; Reynolds' hardware-store brawl against a particularly hardy enemy recalls the sporting-goods showdown in the superior Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning. Even Reynolds and Jackson themselves aren't playing characters. They're playing RYAN REYNOLDS and SAMUEL L. JACKSON, and their frequent bickering exists to further their respective IPs: take Reynolds' wise-ass charm, spark it off Jackson's wizardry with a certain twelve-letter epithet, and watch the money roll in. It's filmmaking as Paint-by-Numbers, and if anything suggested even a little more fire and passion, I'd be more charitable towards the whole affair. But Patrick Hughes' direction is serviceable at best (at times, there's no much digital noise that you wonder if all the actors were green-screened in from a soundstage), and the film keeps jettisoning its more interesting elements. Why establish Daredevil's Élodie Yung as a tough Interpol rookie if you're going to sideline her for 80% of the movie, and why, in the name of all that is holy, reduce the great Salma Hayek to an extended cameo as Jackson's firebrand of a wife? Hayek gets the film's best scene - she massacres a whole bar as Lionel Richie's "Hello" plays in the background - and a better version of this movie centers around her and Yung as they run roughshod over Europe. But that take might be a little surprising, and The Hitman's Bodyguard only delivers exactly what you expect.
In fact, as four-quadrant studio fare goes, I'm far more amenable towards Luc Besson's freewheeling Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets because of its sheer visual invention and glee. If I'm being honest, Valerian doesn't really work: at 137 minutes, it's both overlong AND truncated, given that it's pulling from twenty-one issues of the French comic series Valérian and Laureline, which follows two intergalactic law-enforcement agents on their adventures through space. We zip from one action scene to another, with little sense of how/why any of it adds up, yet I prefer any of that temporal dislocation to the painful banter between stars Cara Delevingne and Dane DeHaan; the normally talented DeHaan flails at assaying the kind of deluded himbo in which '80s-era Kurt Russell specialized. To some degree, I am not remotely surprised that Valerian bellyflopped at the global box-office. I've also watched the film twice in one week, and I could easily rally for a third viewing. On a visual level alone, Valerian proves more overwhelming than Besson's more traditionally successful The Fifth Element. It joins the ranks of movies like TRON: Legacy and Zach Snyder's Sucker Punch, movies where the aesthetic invention justifies any narrative gaffes and dunderheaded character decisions. At times, Valerian moves like the pop epic I wanted Avatar to be. An early sequence, which follows a species of translucent, gorgeous alien creatures from tranquil harmony to violent devastation, is hypnotic in terms of how Besson downplays dialogue in favor of strong graphic images: the ways tiny, luminescent orbs cause the aliens' skin to shimmer and glow, or the frisson that results from watching these impossible creatures glide away from certain destruction. From a filmmaking standpoint alone, Valerian might be Besson's magnum opus, and while it drops a couple hundred IQ points every time the human characters open their mouths to speak, I found myself concentrating less on any exposition and more on the mise-en-scene or some throwaway bit of digital magic in the background. My recommendation? Hit the mute button anytime someone starts to talk. As a silent movie, Valerian could stand on par with Fritz Lang's Metropolis. It's that sensually impressive.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "there's a Felliniesque ambience at play in this film, with a peripatetic camera darting hither and yon in search of some new shiny object, as well as an emphasis on odd looking characters (alien and humanoid). The whole dreamlike atmosphere perhaps helps the film to elide some of its more problematic plot presentations, but the performances in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets often bring this film crashing down kind of like the flaming wreckage that destroys the pearl planet. The two stars play their characters like petulant teenagers, and unfortunately a large supporting cast is often less than effective. The film certainly could have used some tightening in terms of pacing, but also in terms of actual explicative content delivered in the screenplay to help the viewer understand what's going on. When the expected massive info dump occurs quite late in the film, it's a matter of too little, too late, after much too much."