THE KILLER (2023)

 It's an artfully executed, engaging, and expensive trifle. It isn't the ubiquitous brand names that do it, necessarily - the rampant brands only call attention to how difficult it is for an op like the Killer to remain unknown and off the radar. (And there's just, JUST, a little subversive giddyness at seeing the Amazon buying process taking up this much screenspace in a Netflix product.) That kind of anonymity costs, and the movie is as artful in showing us this as everything else. But the non-showy yet conspicuous outlay of cash becomes as obvious in Netflix's case as it is the Killer's - most obviously, it doesn't repeat the mistake of The Gray Man and actually takes us to the locations of each chapter.  

The French comics upon which this movie is based come to the States in handsome, hardcover volumes, and such lavish presentation is at odds with the pulp roots of this kind of storytelling. A similar and strong disconnect is felt as we mentally tally up the expenditures on this insular, noirish tale of process and procedure. (I had a conversation with a filmmaker friend a while back, who lamented that his new film would only not look like a student film if he'd had six times the budget. This conversation popped into my mind as I clocked the number of caterers listed during The Killer's closing credits - the food budget alone would likely have allowed my friend to commission a Reznor/Ross score for the work in question.

These issues aside (and they are largely my issues) the thing moves from start to finish, kicking off with a title sequence that's as quick a read as the title page of a comic. The movie builds nicely around Fassbender's almost non-performance as we clock the stark differences between what he thinks and what he does, observing with interest as he steadily breaks his own rules while something like humanity begins to surface. Fincher's style remains archly grand, and he seems to be leavening his own arsenal with a couple of tricks lifted from Soderbergh (who has himself lifted much from Fincher). For all its outlay on travel budgets each chapter is as tightly inscribed and actor-driven as the extended scenes of a Tarantino film; Fassbinder's suppressed laugh at the parable/best joke of 2023 levelled at him by Tilda Swinton is a crystalline moment, one of many scattered across the movie. But The Killer never feels as messy as a noir about a violent, meticulous but increasingly desperate man should. Netflix may have given Fincher the largest toybox with which he has ever played, and as fun as it is watching him cut loose, and watching this thing move, but we're never really on for the ride.

WILL-O'-THE-WISP

 "...it gives us wood, and so many wonders..."

Joao Pedro Rodrigues has a lot on his mind here, and just comes out and says it. Were he a younger filmmaker one might see this 67-minute opus as a kind of mood or aesthetic board, as it feels like a mess of things he wished (no, no, needed) to address.  The symmetry of the palace dining room scenes and the classical tableau re-enacted by lusty firemen suggest Greenaway formalism; these touches are often so delirious yet composed that Rodrigues perhaps has been hit with an Andersonian whimsy and is running like hell with it (maybe through a screening of Titane from which he grabs a healthy shot of firehouse eroticism). There's even a bit of Godard in Prince Alfredo's naive but sincere appropriate of Greta Thunberg's speech in articulating his mission to his parents; he doesn't (yet) have the words, but he feels the urgency, and he's desperate enough to save the dying planet that he's willing to forsake his royalty and become a fireman.

That directness may be key to our salvation, as laid out here - André Cabral's fireman Alfonso has plenty of reasons to distrust the motives of the young prince, and lays them out clear; but Alfredo recognizes the chip on Alfonso's shoulder, acknowledging the trauma that put it there (and even his own complicity in that trauma). But their attraction and love is undeniable against all this. The film parallels this in macro: even as it directly addresses environmental devastation and fascism (hell, it's the only new movie that has people dying of COVID) it acknowledges the need for pleasure and transcendence, which it more than delivers, through the delight of its forms, the warmth of its music, some truly offbeat comedy, more peen than you can shake a stick at, and an absolutely sensational dance sequence after the midpoint. (Bummed as I was to have missed a couple of screenings of this, I was happy to be able to rewind and watch this sequence two more times after the end.)

Days later, and I'm thinking its brevity in relation to its themes is more an asset than a limitation. It's never messy in placing so much in its runtime, and doesn't pretend to any easy answers to the issues it presents, though generous enough to suggest that its pleasures remain within our reach. It's one of the year's best (and greatest).

Unnamed Footage Festival 6(66) - five days!

My friends are back (and this is therefore not a totally objective post) with a new iteration of the Unnamed Footage Festival, a celebration of found footage horror, faux documentaries, narrative films that tell their stories through in-world cameras, and other fascinating narrative/documentary hybrids. 

I noted previously that "more and more movies are being made that confront issues of fantasy and reality in increasingly hybrid and bizarre ways, and UFF continues to cheerfully mutate to embrace them." During a conversation between screenings last year, film programmer Joel Shepard noted that this makes the festival a difficult thing for which to give a simple, elevator pitch, and that's what makes UFF so interesting. And though the designation for this sixth year (UFF 666) is a signal that it is leaning more on the found footage horror sub-genre it was initially largely formed to celebrate, there's still notable and considerable variety in the approaches taken by the filmmakers to make this a more than worthwhile stop for horror fanatics and adventurous filmgoers.

As a preview, I'll go through the five days of UFF666, noting my targets along the way. (Times TBA as of this writing.)

The whole thing kicks off at the Alamo Drafthouse (2550 Mission Street) on Tuesday, March 21, with a prelude screening, if you will, of a 35mm print of Matt Reeves' Cloverfield. One of the more widely-released and seen found footage horror films (and maybe a bit undervalued, thanks to the backlash against its odd viral marketing strategy), the film tells the story of some friends in New York City frantically trying to survive the rampage of a mysterious monster wreaking havoc on the city. It's everything you want in a found footage horror movie, leavened nicely with giant monster carnage, at least one demolished national landmark, and a keenly felt and played romantic subplot. 

UFF666PROPER opens Thursday, March 23 at Artists Television Access (992 Valencia Street). The fest's first feature is Mean Spirited, the first in a string of movies this year in which horrible social media influencers encounter maybe-a-bit-disproportionately-horrible fates. And it's being chased with the second edition of Don't Stop Recording: "This Is Really Happening" Power Hour, a wild and mind-bending collection of the most violent and bizarre moments from favorite and freaky found footage features. You'll want a beer for that one; UFF will provide.

UFF5 offered the theatrical premiere of Robbie Banfitch's far-reaching experimental horror film The Outwaters, and the film went on to become one of 2022's cult favorites. Banfitch cited UFF every chance he got for taking a chance with his film, and on Friday, March 24 he returns to UFF and the Balboa Theatre (3630 Balboa Street), bringing with him a pair of short Outwaters prequels (Card Zero and File VL-624) and his new world premiere, Tinsman Road, which promises a quieter yet engrossing mystery framed as raw miniDV documentary footage.

UFF then jumps to the recently-revamped (and quite lovely) 4 Star Theatre (2200 Clement Street) for a full weekend of screenings March 24 and 25. The final weekend is always a plethora of sensations, and it's well worth parking oneself and just letting the movies happen to one. Saturday/24 you have a pair of short film programs; the Shakespeare-in-Screenlife opus R#J; the politically-charged Lebanese haunted house story What Is Buried Must Remain. Sunday starts strong with the Portrait of Jason-modeled The Gulf of Silence (a feature length interview with fictional UFOlogist Dr. Laura Gale); the day's offerings include 2011 Australian indie sensation The Tunnel (and a new-ish making-of feature, The Tunnel: The Other Side of Darkness) and the Chilean black metal forest horror Invoking Yell.

New festival sponsor Good Vibrations will be on hand to give away a bag of carefully selected toys after Saturday's late show Safe Word, a kinked-up and delightful-looking roman porno from UFF favorite Koji Shiraishi. Similarly spicy is Sunday's marathon-viewing of the Onion's darkly-hilarious, dead-on reality TV spoof Sex House.  And the whole festival ends triumphantly with Horror in the High Desert 2: Minerva; the first film in this presumably-ongoing series was one of the most convincing and engrossing faux-docs this writer has ever seen, and director Dutch Marich returns to the Nevada desert to track more mysterious disappearances there, and document the emotional fallout back home.

Marich is but one of many filmmakers who will be present to discuss their work with you. Though I've highlighted the screenings that caught my interest I may well have skipped over what'll turn out to be your favorite UFF offering - the complete schedule, including start times and details on the short films accompanying each screening, can be found at the Unnamed Footage Festival's website. See you in the dark.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME

-So this thing came out when I was ten, and I remember two things about its release: first, the poster declaring that it contained "SIX OF THE MOST BIZARRE MURDERS YOU WILL EVER SEE." Second, a little blurb on the ads that said that due to the bizarre nature of the ending of the movie no one would be seated during the last fifteen minutes of the film. Now this was toward the end of the period when audience members would just show up whenever for a movie, then stick thru the next screening until they were caught up to the point at which they'd entered. But in my fevered brain I imagined screenings of this movie being cleared with fifteen minutes to go, with an ending so terrifying that it would only play to empty houses. A potent thing in the imagination of a young cinephile.

-It wound up on cable a year or two later, and Dad and I watched it. I finally saw six of the most bizarre murders I would ever see, and was seated in the family room as that bizarre and unwatchable ending played out. And at the end I thought, well, that....wow, that's crazy.

-About twenty years after that I'm working at an arts center on the other coast, and I get it in mind to program a small retrospective of films by J. Lee Thompson (likely a tribute series, as he passed away around that time). The initial thought was his Oscar-nominated The Guns of Navarone, Cape Fear, and maybe a couple of the Bronson collaborations from the 80s. The series didn't come together, but over the course of researching Thompson's career I saw that he'd directed Happy Birthday to Me. And I thought, well, that....wow, that's crazy.

-Rewatching the movie now it falls in that interesting '80/'81 place where the slasher is taking off but isn't quite a franchise-ready model. So this shares the more overt murder mystery aspect of many of the more interesting movies in the subgenre at the time, and even though it reveals the killer about 2/3 through it still retains a trick or two up its sleeve. There's interesting and subtle social commentary as a bloody swath is cut among an elite clique of a hoity-toity prep school. And yes, it is startlingly violent, though I believe I've seen at least six other murders in movies that I'd consider more bizarre than those captured here. And none of the much-ballyhooed murders are anywhere near as genuinely disturbing as a protracted surgical sequence during one of the movie's numerous flashbacks.

But if you're looking for assurances that this thing was in fact helmed by a guy who'd been nominated for an Oscar, they're there. Thompson clearly studied/was aware of mystery and suspense filmmaking, including the nascent subgenre in whose ghetto he was working, and attempts to grasp the style of his contemporaries. (The black gloves worn by the killer suggested he'd given giallo a once-over as well.) His composer Bo Harwood had learned his craft alongside Cassavetes, but this isn't his first horror movie, either, and he delivers a fully-orchestrated and shaded score. And Thompson's old school enough to unleash castle thunder during the storm that rages outside the climactic birthday party. 

BLOOD DAUGHTER

This will not be an objective post by any means - it's as much a celebration as a review or analysis. The fact is, my good friend and occasional collaborator Bryan Enk is screening his new work this month. It's called Blood Daughter, and it's his latest in an ongoing series of work (dating to his very first films) based on Bram Stoker's Dracula (the novel, and Coppola's film). This new movie brings Alex Johnson, the daughter of longtime cast member Chuck Johnson, into the extended family of collaborators in the title role. I am the first civilian to have seen the movie. I am delighted to say it's the finest work Bryan has ever done.

Bryan casts his net even farther out this time, brining in elements, appropriately enough, of Dracula's Daughter and Nadja (and, in a key moment, Murnau's Nosferatu) as he pushes the story, begun in 1993, to the present, in which daughter Abby lives in a tower, her needs being met by her father and a number of servants kept in his thrall. Abby seizes the initiative and kicks off a battle for her own soul, which fractures into various fragments with which she spars as the moment of reckoning approaches.

For those familiar with Bryan's earlier films there's much to enjoy in seeing his gang back together, here as the same characters at significantly older ages - Andy Hunsaker's Claudius is clearly wearied from the intervening decades of investigating fucked up paranormal shit; hilariously, the late-40s David Jarrell brings the same youthful mannered pomposity to Lord Henry that he did in 1994, like he stepped directly into this one from Dracula Returns. 

I wondered if many of the tight references to the earlier work would be lost on those coming to the corpus for the first time. Word from the initial screenings is that the resonance of these moments is felt, if not fully understood, by those meeting these characters for the first time. But Bryan's knack for fleet but slaying throwaway gags remains as sharp as ever, as does his ability to mine supernatural tension from concrete, every day settings and detonate little dream bombs with recurring phrases and images. Even if you're meeting these characters for the first time there's much to sink your teeth into.

And then there's Alex.

Alexandria Johnson has been present in this series, quite literally, from her birth (announced by the director in a meta-epilogue to Bryan Enk's Dracula). She takes focus here in thirteen roles (full disclosure: I'd missed a couple until reading Bryan's helpful list), and makes the single greatest, auteur-qualifying contribution I've ever seen an actor make to a Bryan Enk film. The dance between the earlier films and this new one, between youth and age, the various selves of the characters, is the most ambitious thing I've ever seen Bryan attempt, and Johnson's performances (as Abby's various selves and holy shit as the characters of the previous movies) are crucial to how fluid and effortless it all seems. The style of interacting close-ups continues as Abby and her Father begin their conflict in earnest (and Jeff Miller plays the weariness of eternity better than many on-screen vamps) - when the two finally collide in frame together the impact is fraught and thrilling.

I don't know what future this thing is going to have - whether it will become a festival sensation, an eagerly discussed movie that brings deserved attention to the earlier films, or yet another low-budget horror flick lost among the sea of them in the anonymizing streaming landscape. I'm invested in it, and am hopeful that the light of my friend's film does make it to the entire world, even more. Mainly, though, I just hope you get to see it, and dig it. Don't be afraid. Do as you will.

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022)

It's very much an old master returning to the stage with a greatest hits collection, which is no bad thing. There remains much pleasure to be experienced seeing and feeling the familiar technosex/bioport/ stilted dialogue/coexistence of analog and digital technologies (and what that coexistence suggests about the chaos of our time). But it's not the recognizable tropes that had them running for the exits at Cannes; on the other hand if you want the familiar, you deserve what you get seeking it in the corpus of David Cronenberg. 

He ups the in-world stakes in a way that will alienate part of his audience, especially in the US at this particular moment, but it only underscores the urgency of the questions he's always been asking, questions that he (and we) are running out of time to explore: what are we making of our world? How are we changing to adapt to it? Do we possess not just the capability but the faith necessary to discard what we knew to embrace a future that may be better than our present? 

On top of all of this: excellent use of the spaces in Athens to underscore the movie's themes; uniform commitment on the part of the cast; one of the best kisses I've seen in a movie of late; and the thing's funnier than you'd expect.

BENEDETTA

Anyone cornered by an atheist at a cocktail party knows that militant denial can be just as tedious as blind piety. You don't have to be among the faithful to be bored by films that bash religion. I'm as mindful (and weary) of the centuries-long and still ongoing cruelties and violence inflicted in the name of God. I fear that Hollywood has embraced the same awareness, to the point that filmmakers are allowed to indulge in a form of religion-bashing that makes for uniformly lazy storytelling. Jo Brennan's carefully articulated review of Rose Glass' SAINT MAUD helped me understand why these movies have failed - for the most part, having made the observation that the church is corrupt, or that faith is the habitat of the delusional or the traumatized or the hypocrite, some filmmakers may be left sitting on a smug cushion of "oh did I just BLOW YOUR MIND?" while their movie just stops, having nowhere else to go.

To be sure, Paul Verhoeven casts a whole lot of aspersion on the church in BENEDETTA; particular attention is paid to the tight grip the church makes on finances (the Abbess even makes the blunt point that her convent is not a charity), as well as the naturally human impulses that fly in the face of religious comport, human urges that only intensify under the weight of religious duty. And the thing has willful, even giddy, irreverence all through it, from its basis in the story of a 17th century lesbian nun to the fact that it's, y'know, a movie by Paul Verhoeven (who announces his intent from the start with not one, not two, but three scenes of scatological eruption blasting forth in the first half hour).

But the movie benefits strongly from Verhoeven's masterful touches. The hypocrisy of the church is revealed with a great deal of earthy humor (there is legend-level nun-side-eye in nearly every scene - just because they're devout doesn't mean they lack opinions), and Verhoeven and cast are as uninhibited in delivering Benedetta's visions as they are her sex scenes. There are generous cinematic allusions as well, mainly to Verhoeven's movies (Benedetta's sexuality confounds authority as strongly as Rachel's in BLACK BOOK; oddly, we also get a few nods to ROBOCOP, especially in the first third) but also Hitchcock's (a nun's ascent up a tower leads to an earthly plummet, as in VERTIGO - and what else is the inspired dildo but 2021's best Macguffin?).

But where Verhoeven leaves the wanna-be-blasphemers in the dust is in his earnest appreciation for, and preservation of, the mysteries of faith. The ambiguity is what drives this thing, as are the questions it raises that it is too smart and generous to answer for us. The earnestness with which Benedetta's love for Bartolomea intertwines with her love for Jesus is palpable; like Jesus, she squares the human with the divine in perfect harmony, and the true hypocrisy of the church manifests in its inability to recognize or understand this (indeed, that Benedetta attains her divinity through embracing her pleasure scares THEE SHIT out of the patriarchy, aghast that she, not they, were chosen.) The mystery is preserved right through the final title card of the epilogue, after which Verhoeven's credit tags the thing as loud as a thump on a Bible. The movie is funny, raunchy, downright horny, human, and ambiguous; and only one truly possessed by faith could have made it. Hallelujah, and amen.