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5/29/2023 0 Comments Guardians of the galaxy vol. 3 When Martin Scorsese made his infamous “not cinema” remarks in regards to the MCU, the backlash amongst comic book fanboys took on a predictably feral, defensive, and largely cringe-inducing fervor. But one comment - made by Joss Whedon (perhaps his last moment of grace, before slinking off in disrepute), in regards to Scorsese’s claim that Marvel movies aren’t “the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being” - has lingered tellingly in the years since… “I first think of James Gunn, and how his heart & guts are packed into Guardians of the Galaxy.”
It’s a sentiment that remains more applicable than ever to this third and final chapter of Gunn’s signature trilogy. Much of the cultural chatter surrounding the film has fixated on reports of the MCU’s creative demise being greatly exaggerated… but it would probably be simpler just to give Gunn his due and acknowledge that he’s evolved into a filmmaker who’s singularly gifted at putting his own personally askew stamp on big-budget studio crowd-pleasers. It wasn’t a path many likely envisioned for the Troma-trained misfit auteur in his pre-Marvel days. But the first Guardians of the Galaxy crested a wave of addictive mixtape tunes and irreverent humor to transcend standard comic book formula; it had Gunn’s own brew of tart-yet-sweet artisanal soda pop coursing through its veins. The second was a typical sequel of diminishing returns - still fun and fresh, just not *as* fun and fresh. But a fruitful detour to DC followed… first with Gunn’s robustly entertaining take on the Suicide Squad - probably the closest he’ll ever come to spattering his Troma influences and sensibilities all over a 185-million canvas - and then with his even better Peacemaker spin-off series on HBO Max, which might just be the best thing he’s ever done (it’s actually rather devastating that Gunn’s duties as co-head of DC seem to have pushed the second season deep into some far-flung future). Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 shifts its focus onto the knavish yet endearing Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and his tormented backstory (be warned - those with a weak stomach for animal cruelty may have a rough time of it). When the cosmic meta-being Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) is dispatched to Knowhere to collect Rocket by order of his sadistic creator, the High Evolutionary (Peacemaker’s Chukwudi Iwuji - one of the better villains in recent memory), the mission fails… but Rocket is left perilously close to death, forcing Quill (Chris Pratt) to pull himself out of his drunken, self-pitying stupor and rally the Guardians - including Drax (Dave Bautista), Nebula (Karen Gillan), Mantis (Pom Klementieff), and Groot (Vin Diesel) - in order to save him. Like many Marvel movies, GOTG3 feels overstuffed yet understuffed at the same time… its story teetering on the edge between high-stakes and low-stakes (part of the issue is that Rocket’s plight is still just the springboard to a MacGuffin pursuit… the Guardians need to find the tech that will allow them to circumvent his kill switch, which propels them from one massive set piece to the next)… but the cast chemistry is so symphonic, the team dynamics so jigsaw-tight, and Gunn’s grasp of the characters so instinctive and heartfelt at this point, that it hardly even matters. The entire ensemble (including Zoe Saldana’s “rebooted” Gamora, who we discover has thrown in with the Ravagers since the events of Endgame) cooks at consistently high heat (Pratt’s “Han Solo by way of Andy Dwyer” take on Star-Lord remains an MCU standout, no matter how much social media likes to give his stardom grief)… but special mention must be made of Karen Gillan, whose Nebula has achieved a steady evolution from secondary villain to arguably the franchise’s prickly soul. All of the characters, however, feel like some facet of Gunn’s psyche; it’s the reason Guardians of the Galaxy has always had a deeper, more perceptible creative synergy than other Marvel properties. At one point Gunn stages an intricately choreographed, single-take corridor brawl - all of the Guardians working in concert together as No Sleep Till Brooklyn blasts on the soundtrack - and it feels like a much-needed reminder of why comic book movies became so popular in the first place. The original Guardians of the Galaxy, with its scrappy underdog misfit energy, probably remains the most purely enjoyable… but this third entry is the darker, riskier, more emotionally satisfying film (and not just because it features the MCU’s first F-bomb). By the time Bruce Springsteen’s Badlands is playing over the closing credits, the end result feels like a genuine send-off… both in terms of the characters and and in terms of Gunn himself, as he makes the permanent transition to DC. It’s really too bad. Superman is Superman, but what one wouldn’t give for Gunn to take a crack at directing a Howard the Duck spin-off instead.
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5/10/2023 0 Comments evil dead rise In Evil Dead Rise, we’re introduced to Beth (Lily Sullivan), a rock roadie who’s passing through Los Angeles and decides to drop in on her older sister, Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland)… a tattoo artist and single mom with three children - would-be DJ Danny (Morgan Davies), budding SJW Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), and cute-as-a-button Kassie (Nell Fisher). Beth learns that not only has Ellie’s husband recently split, but their apartment complex has been condemned… and they’re amongst the last remaining tenants, set to be evicted at the end of the month. An impromptu earthquake cracks open the floor of the parking garage, revealing a long-forgotten bank vault, which contains several vinyl recordings and a copy of the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, or the Naturom Demonto - “The Book of the Dead,” a hellish tome bound in flesh and inked in human blood. If past Evil Dead films are any indication, it’s not difficult to suss out where this is headed…
We need to have a frank and honest conversation about this franchise. Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn - with its blended balance of splatter and slapstick, expertly anchored by Bruce Campbell’s deadpan looney tunes punching bag of a lead performance - would seem to epitomize the essence of the series… and its tonal approach was firmly carried over to the recent Campbell-led TV continuation that ran for three seasons on Starz. And yet the films - specifically Fede Alvarez’s 2013 reboot (which seems to have been bafflingly retconned in recent years into some sort of genuine masterpiece) and this latest offering - somehow landed creatively on the idea that they should be as unrelentingly brutish and nasty and unpleasant as humanly possible. Raimi’s kinetic and kooky alchemy (hardwired into the DNA of even his more straightforward original) has basically been replaced by sandblasting the viewer with spiritual nihilism. Ellie is the first to be possessed by the Deadites and Sutherland, it must be said, commits to the role with unwavering zeal. “Mommy’s with the maggots now,” she declares, in the trailer’s most iconic line, before exploding out of the bathtub, contorting her body in midair, and unleashing a blood-curdling banshee shriek, her pallid flesh already starting to rot (if not quite a star-making performance, it certainly feels like it will be an iconic one). For those who deliberately seek out horror that’s gnarled to the core, Evil Dead Rise is arguably even more punishingly effective than its predecessor; director Lee Cronin is in full command of the rusty barbs of his craft, which might give you tetanus if you aren’t careful. One character munches on a wine glass, the jagged shards poking against the inside of her esophagus. A pair of shearing scissors are put to particularly gruesome use, while Beth has the flesh flayed from her leg with a cheese grater. Suffice it to say, gore junkies will feel as if their bloodstreams have been joyously flooded with a dopamine cocktail. And yet, one has to ask - why is any of this fun? It’s a question I’ve yet to receive a satisfactory answer to, and one that tends to involve a lot of deflection (“Well, what do you expect from a horror movie?”). To be clear, this isn’t a question of content - I’ve seen every torture porn film known to man and rarely blinked - but rather a question of context. As in - These are just kids, man. Cronin almost does too good a job engendering sympathy for the film’s down-on-their-luck but tightly-knit clan of characters - their familial bonds feel authentic, and we experience a sharp measure of protectiveness towards them. But Evil Dead is a world deliberately absent of hope - there’s no saving Ellie, no goal to work towards beyond basic, desperate, clawing survival. When she pins a whimpering Bridget to the floor and disfigures her daughter’s face with a tattoo needle, it’s a profoundly ugly moment in a profoundly ugly movie. Lily Sullivan - who looks a bit like Jane Levy’s Mia from the last film crossed with a young Clea DuVall - is an able heroine; when she picks up a chainsaw, her entire body saturated from head to toe with blood, it’s a viscerally charged moment - a reminder of the uniquely addictive high-fructose sugar rush of horror movies. But as she bisects her possessed sister’s head while feeding her through a wood chipper as a traumatized Kassie looks on, it begs the question - what exactly are we cheering for? The sad, soul-crushing demise of an innocent family? This sort of bleak barbarism was never what Raimi was about. There was always an impish glee to how he operated, as if his imagination were spewing unchecked all over the screen. This is just cinematic flagellation. Unlike most, I left the theater in a dreary, withdrawn mood. Evil Dead Drag would have been a more appropriate title. |
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