Back to "Elm Street"

The "Nightmare on Elm Street" films were seen as reprehensible stuff back in the '80s and '90s, the kind of trash that mainstream film lovers and many critics loved to rail against.  Sure, we all knew who Freddy Krueger was, just like we knew who his brethren slasher fiends Jason Voorhies and Michael Meyers were.  However, I never actually saw any of their movies until I sought them out myself in college.  I was always squeamish around the slasher genre, so just watching the first films from each of the major franchises was more than enough for me.  To date, I still have no idea when Jason's hockey mask and chainsaw getup showed up in the "Friday the 13th" series.

Over the years however, attitudes have mellowed a bit, mine included.  The horror genre moved on to other things, and the long-running slasher series that started in the '70s and '80s are mostly kaput now.  "Halloween" is still active, but the most recent attempts at rebooting "Nightmare on Elm Street," and "Friday the 13th" didn't go too well.  The old effects and scares look more and more dated with each passing year, and the films are regarded as more cheesy than scary by modern viewers.  And so, it's the perfect time for a  former '80s scaredy-cat to risk another look.  The original 1984 "Elm Street" was my favorite of the '80s slasher films, and there are several "Elm Street" sequels that keep popping up in pop culture conversations.  I decided to finally take a look at them.  

So, over the past week, I watched "Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge," "Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors," "Wes Craven's New Nightmare," and the documentary "Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street," about Mark Patton, the gay star of "Freddy's Revenge" and his complicated relationship with the film.  "Dream Warriors" and "New Nightmare" have long been held up as "Elm Street" features that are actually pretty good, with clever writing and good quality fantasy horror effects.  "Freddy's Revenge" is more interesting for the way that it's become a cult film over the years, full to the brim with homoerotic subtext - or was it subtext? - and subsequently embraced by the LGBT community. 

I'm glad I watched "Freddy's Revenge" and "Scream, Queen!" together, because the documentary added some great context to what was otherwise a fairly standard, by-the-numbers '80s horror film.  Mark Patton is far more interesting and compelling in real life, and the story of how he tried to pursue an acting career while closeted, and the fallout of the film's failure, is fascinating.  Watching him struggle to embrace the "Elm Street" fandom and make peace with the screenwriter he felt wronged him, delivers far more effective drama than anything from the actual "Elm Street" film he starred in.  "Freddy's Revenge" is campy and unintentionally hilarious, but honestly not bad for its era.    

"Dream Warriors" is nearly as beloved as the original "Nightmare on Elm Street" among the series' fans.  The effects work is still impressive, and it was fun to see Patricia Arquette and Laurence Fishburne in early roles.  However, I don't think it's nearly as strong as the original, and the concepts and ideas tend to be better than their actual execution.  The acting, unfortunately, is pretty poor throughout.  This was also the major problem with "New Nightmare," billed as a meta-film about Heather Lagenkamp playing herself, being menaced by Freddy Krueger as a new "Elm Street" film is being planned.  The first hour of Lagenkamp and a wooden child actor getting increasingly mired in family melodrama left me bored stiff.  Wes Craven pulled off the same concept so much better with "In the Mouth of Madness" a few years later.

However, watching all these films cemented for me that I find Freddy Krueger himself, and the whole shtick of using nightmares to kill people, absolutely fabulous stuff.  Robert Englund's great as Krueger throughout, giving him real flair and panache.  The different kill sequences, the use of body horror, and the different levels of reality are all realized in really creative, interesting ways in these films.  They allow the filmmakers to conjure up these wild, weird cinematic images that occasionally slip into the realms of the surreal and the experimental.  "Dream Warriors" in particular has been very influential, and I can see echoes of it in so many other subsequent fantasy films, right up to "New Mutants" in the present day.   

I'm debating watching the rest of the series, even though I know it goes downhill in a hurry, and even though I can see how the series' use of dream logic and gory aesthetics could be really, really bad in the wrong hands.  There's something oddly comforting about Freddy's straightforward simplicity as a villain, and the formulaic nature of these films.  It helps that the violence looks so cartoonish now, and the effects are so over-the-top, I can't take them seriously at all.  They're occasionally scary in short jolts, but not disturbing. 

I guess this means, in a funny way,  I feel like I'm finally old enough for Freddy Krueger movies.       

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"Fujiko Mine" and "Tatami Galaxy"

I'm easing slowly back into the anime world, and taking advantage of the many best-of-the-decade lists that marked the end of the 2010s to help with viewing options.  I've been away a long time, and I don't know the landscape so well anymore, so I'm sticking with more familiar names first.  

And there aren't many names as familiar for anime fans as Lupin III, the beloved master thief who has starred in multiple series and films since the early 70s.  I've been hearing about the 2012 series, "Lupin III: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine" for a long time.  It's biggest selling point is that full creative control was given over to a rare female director, Saya Yamamoto, with character and animation direction handled by Takeshi Koike, best known for the feature "Redline."  Reviews promised more adult elements, in keeping with the earlier versions of the Lupin character.  The show was successful enough, it's had three spinoff films with these versions of the characters.

So, it was a huge disappointment that "Fujiko Mine" turned out to be such juvenile stuff.  It's adult only in the sense that our main character, femme fatale Fujiko (Miyuki Sawashiro), spends a lot of the show naked, and unapologetically likes sex and seducing men.  It's novel in that it Fujiko firmly in the center of the narrative, and shows how she develops relationships with "Lupin" franchise characters like Jigen (Kiyoshi Kobayashi), Goemon (Dasiuke Namikawa), and Zenigata (Koichi Yamadera), independent of her beloved rival in crime, Lupin III (Kanishi Kurita).  However, Fujiko's adventures are such tawdry stuff.  In nearly every episode she ends up undressed and in soft-core porn poses, and her sexuality is used mainly for titillation.  All the hints about deep, dark secrets in her past turn out to be red herrings.  It's a darker take on the character, but one that's not doing her any favors.  Even worse, Zenigata gets a new subordinate named Oscar (Yuki Kaji), a bundle of terrible gay and transgender sterotypes who is also a very vocal misogynist.  

The series is definitely eye-catching, designed to look like '70s manga with retro character designs and great use of linework.  On the other hand, this also makes it a little too easy for me to associate "Fujiko Mine" with the first two Animerama films - those curious, X-rated fantasy features that tried to juggle in-your-face erotica and cartoonish humor, often with disastrous results.  It's a shame that the show leans into its most prurient elements so hard, because there are episodes of "Fujiko Mine" that I liked, and these versions of the Lupin characters are appealing.  A big irony is that Lupin himself has his usual horndog behavior toned way, way down, and he's as much fun as ever.  I liked the show enough to watch it all the way through, but I couldn't in good conscience recommend it to anyone else.

Now on to "Tatami Galaxy," directed by the dependable Masaaki Yuasa.  The eleven episode series follows a college student (Shintaro Asanuma) who lives a different version of his first two years of campus life in each episode.  In each universe, created when he makes a different choice about which university club to join, he is lead astray by his friend Ozu (Hiroyuki Yoshino) and finds himself drawn to a girl named Akashi (Maaya Sakamoto).  The animation by Madhouse in Yuasa's usual Superflat style is beautifully fluid, and in some episodes mixed with live action elements.  The show is very dialogue heavy, with the hero often monologuing at breakneck speeds.  I recommend the dubbed version unless you're very comfortable with subtitles.

This is another anime that I've been meaning to watch for ages.  It's a delightful existential romp through the psyche of an oversexed, insecure, zealously idealistic loser, who thinks all his troubles are due to bad luck, and is only disabused of that notion through metaphysical shenanigans.  It's also a beautiful, inventive, experiment in visual storytelling that's comparable to watching someone perform variations on a musical theme.  We watch the same elements, characters, and situations remixed and reintroduced over and over again, and it remains compelling, funny, and wildly entertaining the whole way through.  The high point is one of the later episodes, "The 4½ Tatami Ideologue," where the protagonist gets lost in an endless  maze made up of different versions of his own room.

Like "Fujiko Mine," "Tatami Galaxy" has its share of salacious elements, including a character who owns and obsesses over a "love doll."  The difference here is that the sexual elements are much more restrained and largely played for laughs.  The protagonist's libido is represented by a hapless CGI cowboy named Johnny (Noboyuki Hiyama).  There are also some good female characters, Akashi and a rowdy post-grad named Hanuki (Yuko Kaida), who keep the protagonist on his toes.  It's hard not to become fond of all the characters in the end, after seeing them in so many different situations and complications.  Even the protagonist, as infuriatingly immature and self-deluded as he is sometimes, had me rooting for him to get the girl in the end.

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"Harley Quinn" Year One

I originally tried out the first two episodes of the animated "Harley Quinn" series back when it first premiered, and decided that the show wasn't for me.  It's an unapologetically R-rated, over-the-top take on the Batman universe from the point of view of Harley (Kelly Cuoco), who breaks up with the Joker (Alan Tudyk) in the premiere to strike it out on her own.  There's a lot of blood and guts, and everyone curses like a sailor.  The first episode laid on the gratuitous mature content so thick, it was hard to pay attention to anything else.  The second episode with Harley crashing a bar mitzvah was more my speed, but wasn't enough to win me over.

So, it took a while for me to get back to the other eleven episodes of the first season, but I'm glad that I finally did.  Yes, the profanities still fly fast and furious, and the amount of gore is frequently over the top.  However, "Harley Quinn" settled down after a few episodes into an appealing chronicle of Harley's quest to become a supervillain.  She recruits a crew, comprised of hammy actor Clayface (also Tudyk), Doctor Psycho (Tony Hale) who has various mind powers, half-man half-shark King Shark (Ron Funches), and elderly ex-war criminal Sy Borgman (Jason Alexander).  These are all fellow losers who discover they're better off being losers together.  Then there's Harley's long time gal pal Poison Ivy (Lake Bell), who gamely supports her bestie through the tough times and frequently bails her out of trouble.  It's Ivy who Harley ends up crashing with after parting ways with Mr. J.  

Most of the season is taken up with Harley trying to up her villainy game enough to be noticed by the Legion of Doom supervillain organization, while she tries her best to get over the Joker.  Running subplots include Ivy dating the dorky Kite Man (Matt Oberg) on the down low, Commissioner Gordon (Christopher Meloni) having marriage troubles, and Harley buddying up to The Queen of Fables (Wanda Sykes), a supervillainess currently transformed into a talking book.   I like the ways that the series skewers existing DC media and presents some wildly different takes on familiar characters.  Batman (Diedrich Bader) and Joker and Lex Luthor (Giancarlo Esposito) are more or less consistent, but Ivy, now updated with green skin, a potted roommate named Frank the Plant (J.B. Smoove), and a wonderful deadpan demeanor, is suddenly much more fun to get to know and hang out with.  And a sad-sack Bane (James Adomian) is low-key one of the funniest characters in the show.

 This version of Gotham takes a lot of cues from the "Venture Brothers" universe - superheroics and supervillainy are more commonplace career choices, such that there's an agency you can use to help you recruit minions, and your local realtor can help you find the perfect villain lair.  Getting into the Legion of Doom gets you access to a lot of perks, but you have to submit paperwork and check with HR before blowing up the coffee guy.  Harley reminds me an awful lot of Dr. Venture and the Monarch, with her single-minded obsession with proving her worth as a supervillain, and the giant emotional pitfalls that seem to trip her up at every turn.  The difference is that Harley is enabled by a more solid support system to work past a lot of her issues in these thirteen episodes.  We get stories about her terrible family, her past with the Joker, and her awfully sweet friendship with Ivy.  Also, it helps that Harley is actually very good at supervillainy.

  

There's also a lot of influence from "Rick and Morty," especially the quippy dialogue full of non-sequiturs and pop culture references.  It's nice, however, that many of the references are in-universe, and highlight some of the more obscure corners of the DC universe.  A lot of the weirder villains show up, like Maxie Zeus (Will Sasso) and Giganta (Vanessa Marshall).  However, the show also breaks new ground, having Doctor Psycho get his ass cancelled for calling Wonder Woman (also Marshall) the C-word during a battle, or having Howie Mandell guest star as himself, and get quickly killed off by the Joker.  As a fan of many previous DC shows, it's also a treat to see the old school version of Aquaman (Chris Diamatopoulos), and Harley back in her original costume briefly.

Speaking of the costume, I really appreciate the show for giving us a more thoughtful bridge between the old "Batman: The Animated Series" version of Harley, and the post-"Suicide Squad" version.  The writers do a good job of setting up her personal growth arc and paying it off in a way that none of the other versions of the breakup story have.  I've always been a little iffy on Harley as a character because she's often a bundle of tropes that don't seem to fit together, but this time around, it's easier to appreciate her as somebody who's still working through a lot of baggage to find herself.

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"Infinity Train," Year Three

Minor spoilers ahead.

"Infinity Train" recently premiered its third series as an HBO Max exclusive after the first two aired as miniseries for Cartoon Network.  Building on concepts and themes introduced by the first two series, the third doubles down on darker, more complicated material.  This time around, the protagonists are Grace (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) and Simon (Kyle McCarley), two older teenagers who lead a pack of kids called the Apex.  They've taken over one of the train cars to use as a base, and spend their time trying to get their personal growth tracking numbers higher instead of lower.  Grace and Simon get separated from their friends one day, and meet a little girl named Hazel (Isabella Abiera) and her gorilla protector Tuba (Diane Delano).

This season is very ambitious, tackling racism, tribalism, misinformation, toxic relationships, and parenting issues through the show's fantasy filters.  Unlike the show's previous protagonists, Grace and Simon have been following a set of rules for life aboard the train that are completely backwards.  We eventually find out that this is due to a series of misunderstandings.  But even more troubling, somewhere along the line they decided that the train's "denizens," the creatures created by the train to populate its cars, aren't real, sentient beings.  Based on this, Simon and Grace feel no guilt about abusing and destroying them to get their numbers higher.  In the first episode, we watch the Apex kids raid a car full of denizens, causing mayhem and destruction.  There's a lot of violence and some pretty awful deaths in this installment of the "Infinity Train" series.  But what really caught my attention was the use of ambiguous endings, sympathetic villains, and an honest-to-god tragic arc alongside the expected redemption story.

I like that the show pushes at boundaries and content restrictions in some meaningful ways.  I like that it subverts expectations and doesn't pull its punches.  However, I'm not remotely surprised that the series was moved from Cartoon Network to HBO Max.  There is a main character who is a young child this year - Hazel - but it's really Grace and Simon who have the journeys of self-discovery, and they get very dark.  No matter how many talking cats drop in or how whimsical the show's train car worlds appear, there's no disguising the show's more mature aims.  I've seen plenty of cartoons where the main characters struggle to disentangle themselves from a harmful ideology.  I've rarely seen any where the main characters are responsible for creating and perpetuating that ideology, and then have to face the consequences for the harm that they've done.  And I've never seen a sympathetic, redeemable character pointedly not get redeemed.  

And of course, there's nothing wrong with that.  However, it does highlight that there's still an unfortunate tendency to pigeonhole American animated shows as being for certain audiences.  There's plenty of adult animation these days, but it tends to be violent comedies or raunchy sitcoms for young adults.  Otherwise, you have adventure and action series aimed at the 6-12 set, edutainment for preschoolers, and everything else is an outlier.  You could easily draw comparisons between "Infinity Train" and other recent series like "Steven Universe," which also tackle personal growth through fantasy allegory, but there's really nothing on this side of the Pacific Ocean that's nearly as challenging for younger viewers. 

I would have loved to have seen "Infinity Train" when I was around that age when I was getting too old for traditional cartoons and started eyeing anime.  It has such an appealing universe and set of conceits, while talking about emotional health in such approachable terms.  I think the second season is my favorite for the characters, but the third doesn't slip in quality at all.  I look forward to seeing where the show goes from here.

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I Have So Much to Say About "Bus Stop"

Romantic comedies are not supposed to make my blood pressure rise when I'm watching them, out of sheer agitation.  They're not supposed to get me so upset and worked up that it affects my sleep.  And yet here we are.  I was actually looking forward to "Bus Stop," which I knew was one of Marilyn Monroe's major hits.  I'd just seen Marilyn in "The Prince and the Showgirl," which had a famously troubled production, but the end product came out just fine.  And at first, "Bus Stop" seemed promising, starting with a naive cowboy named Beauregard (Don Murray), who arrives in Phoenix, Arizona all the way from Montana, to compete in a rodeo.  He's also supposed to be looking for a bride, which he's unsure about, having no experience with women.  However, Beau soon meets a cafe singer named Cherie (Monroe), and is instantly smitten.

What I expected to follow was a cute romance between Beau and Cherie, maybe involving some rodeo and nightclub antics.  Instead, the film goes the screwball route.  Beau comes on so strong that Cherie rejects him almost immediately.  Beau, however, refuses to take no for an answer, and goes after her relentlessly.  He's gotten everything else in his life by never giving up.  Why should a girl be any different?  Most of the film is taken up with Cherie being dragged around town and eventually outright kidnapped by Beau, despite rejecting him again and again.  She orchestrates multiple escapes, but all of them are thwarted.  The most outrageous moment comes when she almost makes it on to a bus to Los Angeles, but Beau literally lassos her like a steer, and forces her on to a bus to Montana.  It's only when the bus gets stranded at a local diner due to snow that Beau is finally stopped.  The bus driver, played by Robert Bray, intervenes in the situation and beats up Beau until he promises to leave Cherie alone.  Of course, Beau and Cherie get together in the end anyway, because Beau turns out to be perfectly charming when he minds his manners, and Cherie just wants a man who doesn't mind that she has a checkered past.

However, for about an hour "Bus Stop" plays like a horror film, and has more in common with the latest version of "The Invisible Man" than any modern romance.  It is absolutely infuriating to watch Beau steamroller Cherie's objections and assert his outsized entitlement so many times.  He grabs her arms to keep her from leaving, picks her up without asking permission, and at one point tears her dress and humiliates her.  Even in their earliest conversations, he's already deciding what their life in Montana will be like, totally disregarding any notion to the contrary.  What's more terrifying, however, is that Beau is so often aided and abetted by everyone else in the film.  Cherie's landlady lets him into her room while she's sleeping.  Nobody tries to help at the bus depot when he abducts her, despite there clearly being police and many other people around.  It's only when Beau is particularly brutish to Cherie at the diner, throwing her over his shoulder and smacking her rear, that the bus driver finally intervenes.  Well, there is one additional dissenter - Beau's mentor Virgil (Arthur O'Connell) comes along on the trip with Beau, and disapproves of Cherie because he thinks a showgirl isn't good enough for him.  He becomes exasperated enough with Beau's antics to help the bus driver beat him up in the end.    

Beau's behavior is treated as a symptom of extreme ignorance, but it's still tolerated.  Several people describe him as having no manners, but nobody ever points out that he's committing assault, false imprisonment, and kidnapping, or gets law enforcement involved.  In the end, the bus driver calls him out as a bully, and the only way to deal with a bully is for someone stronger to knock him down.  Afterwards, Beau sulks like a little boy and then reluctantly goes to apologize to everyone he's inconvenienced.  Soon, all is forgiven because Beau is truly remorseful.  However, he gets exactly what he wants in the end without compromise.  After ten minutes of sweet talking Cherie, she's getting on the bus to Montana again.  Never mind that we know she  wants to go west and try her luck in Hollywood, which is painted as a foolish dream, but something that is important to her.  She's so in love with Beau in the end that she literally throws her plans away.

At the time, "Bus Stop" was a critical and commercial success.  Marilyn Monroe proved she was a star who could carry a film, Don Murray got an Oscar nomination for his work, and there was a spinoff television series that is well-regarded.  However, from a modern POV, nothing about the relationship between Beau and Cherie is okay, and Beau is possibly the best example I've found yet of blunt force "boys will be boys" male privilege being taken so lightly.  I was immediately reminded of a similar situation in Steven Spielberg's war comedy "1941," where the female lead spends the whole film trying to get away from a boorish corporal.  That character was portrayed as a villain, but the whole situation was still played for laughs, and there are several disturbing sequences where nobody will help the poor woman get away from an obviously unwanted suitor.  

If "Gone With the Wind" gets warning notices about the outdated portrayal of race relations, "Bus Stop" deserves one too for its utterly appalling misogyny.  Part of me wishes I could delete the film from history, it made me so disgusted, but then, it's better that it still exists as a warning of how bad things used to be, and far, far too recently.

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"Fargo," Year Four

Minor spoilers ahead.

I'm a little surprised at some of the reactions I've seen to this latest season of "Fargo," which takes place in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1951.  Some fans seem to strongly dislike this season, since it breaks away from the "Fargo" formula in some important respects, and makes certain choices with its use of humor and very large cast of characters.  I, however, strongly prefer this year's batch of weirdos to the last one, and I'm more than happy with how everything shook out for them.

Naming everyone involved with the story would take up too much of this blog entry, so I'm going to just touch on the highlights.  The action centers around two rival crime families, the Italian Faddas, and the African American Cannons.  Weaselly Josto Fadda (Jason Schwartzman) assumes control while his father is in the hospital, but the return of his hitman brother Gaetano (Salvatore Espoto) from Italy complicates his plans.  On the other side is Loy Cannon (Chris Rock), who worries over the fate of his son Satchel (Rodney L. Jones III), who the Faddas have taken hostage.  Then there's Ethelrida (E'myri Crutchfield), the too-smart-for-her-own-good teenage girl of mixed heritage, Oraetta Mayflower (Jessie Buckley), a nurse with a terrible habit of killing her patients, and Odis Weff (Jack Huston), a cop with OCD.  Timothy Olyphant,  Ben Whishaw and Glynn Turman also appear, though I think I'll leave the viewer to discover in what capacity.

"Fargo" this time around is ambitious and messy.  Noah Hawley is tackling big, important themes like family-run systems of business losing ground to corporate interests, how the African-American perspective gets lost in the telling of history, and how minorities are always left fighting each other for power.  One episode is presented mostly in black and white, and full of "Wizard of Oz" references.  Ill-timed flatulence is a plot point in another.  Some of these ideas work, and others just come off as exasperating, but the show is never boring.  I feel Hawly got a little overextended at times, and many of his characters simply do not have enough screen time to get their due.  On the other hand, the season's highs are as good as anything else "Fargo" has ever done.

As usual, the show depends on its proliferation of larger-than-life characters, mostly played by dependable character actors in this round, with relatively few big names in the cast.  Chris Rock is probably the most familiar face, playing a totally straight dramatic role here, and doing a decent job of it.  However, I was more impressed by the actors I didn't know, like Salvatore Esposito channeling the dearly departed Jon Polito for Gaetano, or Jack Huston as the hapless Odis.  Schwartzman and Buckley are probably my favorites, though, for pulling off some really dark comedy while being loveable and horrible at the same time.  Morally upstanding folk are pretty scarce, except for maybe Ethelrida and Satchel, who both have many shades of gray.  I think this contributes to the greater feeling of chaos and uncertainty this year that caught some viewers off guard.

The production values are especially good, and it was so nice, watching the first episode, to get situated back in the "Fargo" universe, with its beautiful cinematography and playful visuals.  Noah Hawley indulges all his usual filmmaking tics, with his split screens and abuse of framing devices.  No dance sequences, unless you count some sinister synchronized stomping.  There are still some references here and there to the Coen brothers canon, though these are mostly echoes at this point.  The only character with the Minnesotan accent is Nurse Mayflower.  

So, this latest season of "Fargo" was far from perfect, and indulgent as anything, but I thought it was a great time.  It had plenty to say, and didn't feel like a retread of any of the previous seasons.  It told an African-America genre story pretty darn well in a television season that has already featured some very good ones.  And it let Jessie Buckley create the most memorable female villain I've seen all year.  

It's a shame that the pandemic apparently screwed up the ending a bit, and caused unfortunate delays, but I'm just glad we finally got to see more "Fargo."  This remains one of my favorite shows on television.     

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"The Boys in the Band," 1970 and 2020

The only thing I knew about "The Boys in the Band," was that it was a landmark LGBT film that had been directed by William Friendkin, pre- "The Exorcist."  It was really the first major American film to delve into the lives of gay characters with any real depth.  Since producer Ryan Murphy and director Joe Mantello decided to remake it for Netflix last year with an all star cast, I figured it was a good opportunity to take a look.

Based on a stage play by Mart Crowley, "The Boys in the Band" revolves around the character of Michael (Kenneth Nelson), a gay New Yorker throwing a birthday party for his friend/rival Harold (Leonard Frey).  Guests from their circle of friends include the flamboyant Emory (Cliff Gorman), and a hustler named "Cowboy" (Robert La Tourneaux).  Complicating matters is the appearance of Michael's straitlaced college friend Alan (Peter White) at the party, who Michael suspects is closeted.  The film takes place mostly in the apartment of Michael and his boyfriend Donald (Frederick Combs).  

What struck me immediately was how bleak and bitter the characters were, and how so much of the dialogue is trading venomous barbs and indulging in everyone's angst and self-hatred.  It's very much in the vein of black comedies of that era like "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" and "Carnal Knowledge."  I don't know that I liked the film very much - it's technically well done, and well acted, but the story is so miserable and nihilistic at times, and it's depressing to think that this was one of the only LGBT films of its era.  It's a valuable snapshot of the gay community and New York's gay culture of the time, but it's also very dated in its views.  This is totally understandable, of course. 

I recognized none of the actors in the 1970 film, who were all members of the cast of the 1968 play, but I thought all of their performances were strong, particularly Laurence Luckinbill as the "straight-passing" Hank.  Roughly half of the cast was gay, and we lost many of them to the AIDS epidemic.  By contrast, the entire cast of the 2020 version is gay and out, including Jim Parsons as Michael, Zachary Quinto as Harold, Brian Hutchison as Alan, Robin de Jesús as Emory, and Charlie Carver as Cowboy.  Add Andrew Rannells, Tuc Watkins, Michael Benjamin Washington, and Matt Bomer, and the talent in the cast is off the charts.  And I really, really wish that they were making a different movie.

The 2020 version of the "The Boys in the Band" has been given the prestige treatment, and looks glody and expensive.  It's still set in 1968 New York, and the script's still largely the same, but now the color palette is rosier, the atmosphere warmer and more nostalgic.  The venom and bleakness have been reduced to bittersweetness, the barbs are now more catty and affectionate.  We get more glimpses of the characters living their lives outside of the apartment, including a montage of everyone quietly collecting themselves in the aftermath of the party.  The most notable addition is that flashback sequences are filmed to go along with the various stories about romantic encounters told by the characters in the second act.  Much of what was implied is made more explicit, though the most important ambiguities are preserved.   

And that's a perfectly fine approach, though I think it undercuts the material at times.  I find the bigger problem to be the performances.  Chiefly, Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto probably should have switched roles, and not just because Parsons is a vocal dead ringer for Leonard Frey.  I really have trouble buying Parsons in dramatic roles, because he can't seem to keep his comedic tics at bay.  This is especially deadly for Michael's big breakdown scene at the end of the film, which is a bust.  Quinto is playing the oddball Parsons should have played, and giving off entirely the wrong vibes for it.  However, I like Robin de Jesús as a more down-to-earth Emory, and Michael Benjamin Washington as Bernard, their lone black friend.     

Maybe it's because I'm more familiar with these actors, or maybe because I watched the 2020 version after the 1970 version, but the new adaptation just doesn't have the same verve.  The characters are more lovable and well-rounded, but lose verisimilitude and impact.  I suspect the biggest issue is that the 2020 actors are playing at being gay in 1968, while the original cast members were living it. There's really no comparison.     

  

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The Early 2021 Update Post

For those of you unfamiliar with my update posts, I write updates for a bunch of different posts together, because I don't have enough to say about them individually to warrant separate posts for each. 

"Charlie Brown" Leaves the Airwaves - Apple, after the backlash, worked out a deal so that "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" and "A Charlie Brown Christmas" aired on PBS last year, ad free.  This feels less like a win for viewers than a temporary stopgap, and we'll see where the classic "Peanuts" specials pop up in the future.  Meanwhile, Apple is going ahead with more "Snoopy in Space," and new "Peanuts" specials for Mother's Day, Earth Day, and New Year's Eve (more "War and Peace" readings or we riot).

The Misinformation Age - Well, QAnon certainly blew up, didn't it?  I didn't write anything about the Capitol Hill insurrection at the time that it happened because I had no idea how to parse it in any way that had anything to do with the usual content of this blog.  Like the election, I obsessed over it and drove myself crazy following the fallout, but I have nothing to add to the conversation except "I told you so."  And we don't need "I told you so" right now.  We need Twitter and Facebook and the other tech companies  to zero tolerance and deplatform the bad actors, which I'm very glad to see happening, if far too late.  

Mourning the Movie Year That Wasn't - 2021 is going pretty badly for theaters so far, with most major releases (except the Warner/HBO Max titles) being delayed later and later into the year.  We have many titles now delayed eighteen months or more solely due to the pandemic, including the "A Quiet Place" sequel and "No Time to Die."  The new delays aren't hitting me so hard this time, though, because I've been actively trying not to have too many expectations for how the year is going to go.  I haven't written up any "Most Anticipated" lists for new movies, I haven't registered most of the new round of schedule changes, and I've barely been aware of the awards season this year, thanks to the Oscars being pushed back. And on that note…

Why Are They Pushing Back the Oscars? - The Academy's delay tactics feel like they didn't have any real effect at all.  The handful of major contenders like "Minari" and "Nomadland" that were delayed to February ended up having simultaneous online premieres anyway.  I think "The Father" is the only real holdout left that doesn't have some kind of digital premiere lined up.  Anyway, there turned out to be plenty of good films in contention this year, and the way releases are being planned, there will be plenty in contention for 2022 too.  "Mank" turned out to be pretty lackluster, so I'm rooting for "Nomadland."  

 

On Media in the Time of Corona and Late Night Under Quarantine - Well, it was fun while it lasted.  As the use of Zoom for interviews has normalized, bubbles and testing protocols have been rolled out, and many sectors of television and film production have gotten back to work, all those special Corona-era webseries and podcasts have been mostly running their course.   This hasn't been without the usual bumps and setbacks, of course.  There was the notorious Tom Cruise rant, a slew of the CW shows were paused due to testing delays, and several reality shows have been suspended indefinitely.  And, of course, there are the unlucky programs, like "GLOW," that Corona has killed off entirely.

"Sandman" is Coming - Oh boy, it's actually happening.  We've got an initial casting announcement!  Gwendoline Christie is playing Lucifer!  They genderswapped Lucien(ne)!  Good luck everyone, and don't screw this up!

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Rank 'Em - The "X-Men" Spinoffs

Back in 2016 I did a "Rank 'Em" list of the "X-men" films, leaving off the three spinoff films that existed at that time.  Well, now there are six: the three Wolverine films, the two Deadpool films, and "The New Mutants."  With the FOX-produced "X-men" films essentially kaput at this point, though "Deadpool 3" is still inching forward, I thought it would be a good time to look back on these "X-men" adjacent films, as we close the book on this part of the franchise.  I'm still sad we never got that Gambit movie.

From best to worst, here we go:

"Logan" - You could argue that this should really count as an "X-men" film, because it stars two of the franchise's major characters: Wolverine and Professor X.  However, it's also one of the most wildly off-brand of the "X-men" universe films, and the prime example of FOX being willing to take creative risks that none of the other studios were willing to with their superhero properties.  This is a film about endings and death, an elegiac neo-Western that finally let Wolverine be the star of an R-rated production in the best way possible.

"Deadpool" - A meta-heavy, low-budget, R-rated, anti-hero assassin superhero comedy that took ages to get off the ground, the story of how "Deadpool" got made is almost as interesting as the movie itself.  There's no disputing, however, that Ryan Reynolds and Deadpool were made for each other.  The subversive, irreverent, referential humor, and the anarchic nature of the character were a great way to inject some new life into the wider "X-men" franchise and finally push Reynolds into the A-list.  However, the joke got stale pretty quickly...   

"The New Mutants" - Frankly, this is not an especially good film, and is getting a lot of extra points for its willingness to take some big risks and for some good casting.  It does a decent job of setting up its new group of teen mutants, and prepping them for more adventures down the road.  I like its haunted house premise and the way it uses bits of the established franchise mythology.  The trouble is, it's a teen horror film that isn't scary, and the limited budget and inexperienced filmmakers are very apparent.  I appreciate that it's doing something different, but that only goes so far.   

"Deadpool 2" - I won't say that I didn't get some good laughs out of "Deadpool 2," but it's doing so much of the same thing that the first film did, just with a bigger budget.  It's way too complicated, bringing in Josh Brolin's Cable, Zazie Beetz's Domino, the kid from "Hunt for the Wilderpeople," and even X-force briefly.  The underdog angle and raging insecurity/trauma of Deadpool himself get totally lost, replaced with a weirdly generic pro-family theme.  All the scruffiness and rough-edges of the first movie are gone, and the result is awfully bland.  I've also seen the "Once Upon a Deadpool" version, and got nothing out of it - cute idea, but meh execution.    

"The Wolverine" - The best thing I can say about "The Wolverine" is that it got director James Mangold into the franchise and set up "Logan."  Otherwise, the story of Wolverine's adventures in Japan is pretty underwhelming stuff.  I could tell what they were going for - a more serious, more dramatic character spotlight that the more mainstream "X-men" films couldn't accommodate.  Logan deals with the death of Jean Grey in "The Last Stand" here, and gets to play modern day samurai for a while.  However, the love story with Tao Okamoto is so boring, and the Orientalism gets really off-putting.  It's better than the first "Wolverine" movie, but that's a low bar.  Speaking of which...

"X-men Origins: Wolverine" - It's been a while since I've seen this one, and have no urge to revisit it.  The fanboys have taken particular umbrage to this film over the years because it screws around too much with the established mythology around the characters, and is especially awful to Deadpool.  I disliked it because it was just very forgettable and parts of it were poorly made. It amuses me to no end that the film's reputation is so bad, both"X-men: Days of Future Past" and "Deadpool 2" took pains to retroactively erase it from the film series' continuity.     

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My Top Ten Films of 1960

This is part of my continuing series looking back on films from the years before I began this blog. The ten films below are unranked and listed in no particular order. Enjoy.

Zazie Dans Le Metro - Paris as seen through the eyes of a precocious child, is a magical realist playground.  Combining sequences of breathless slapstick, soaring fantasy, and sly whimsy, you may become exhausted by "Zazie," and its title character, played by the winning Catherine Demongeot, but never bored.  It always makes me a little sad that director Louis Malle would rarely return to such full-throated, playful  comedy in the future.

Psycho - Alfred Hitchcock's most iconic film broke a lot of rules in the name of suspense, including some of his own, and left an impression that no one will soon forget.  Watching the film now with more context, I marvel at the way Hitchcock played on the audiences' expectations, the established screen personas of his actors, and how he took full advantage of the black and white cinematography.  Bernard Hermann's score, however, is still the MVP.

The Apartment - My favorite leading man of this era is Jack Lemmon, a wonderful comic performer with such a loveable everyman presence.  Billy Wilder pairs him up here with the equally formidable Shirley MacLaine, who is at her most charming.  The dialogue is crackling, the farce is elegant, and the romance is sweet.  This is romantic comedy at its most entertaining and most endlessly quotable, and I wish more modern films would take their cues from it.     

The Virgin Spring - Some credit this Ingmar Bergman film for birthing the slasher genre, since it would be an influence on some of the classics of that genre.  This is a great irony, since Bergman's film is far more interested in the spiritual and psychological effects of seeking revenge than any of the acts of violence depicted.  Max von Sydow gives a bleak, powerful performance as a father who loses himself to the grip of wrath after the loss of his child.  

Two Women - Vitorio De Sica and Sophia Loren were a formidable pair in Italian cinema, and "Two Women" was the height of their collaborative success.  From a script by Cesare Zavattini, the film follows the harrowing journey of a mother and daughter pair in the thick of WWII.  It's an intense, difficult film that depicts the loss of life and loss of innocence in very stark terms.  Loren's commanding performance is the lynchpin, one that nabbed her the Best Actress Oscar.  

Le Trou - One of the few thrillers that pulls off such a shocking reveal that I screamed out loud in a screening.  This is a prison escape movie of rare delights, full of betrayals, schemes, and double-crosses.  All the characters are rotten scoundrels, but their machinations are so absorbing, and the filmmaking is so strong, the viewer can't help but be caught up in their plotting.  Director Jacques Becker used a documentary-like style with few frills, heightening the immersion.

Never on Sunday - A romp set in Greece with Melina Mercouri in her breakout role.  It's a reverse "Pygmalion" tale that pits a free-spirited prostitute against an American tourist who is determined to save her from a life of vice.  Mercouri is an absolute joy as Ilya, who dances and sings with abandon, and is keen on living her life to its fullest.  One has to wonder why she bothers to try and engage with the rigid American, but she clearly has a lot of fun loosening him up. 

Spartacus - Stanley Kubrick's sword-and-sandals epic is probably the least Kubrick-like picture he's ever made.  However, it boasts such a wealth of talent, stuffed to the gills with big stars like Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons, Tony Curtis, Peter Ustinov, and Charles Laughton.  The scope is epic, the production spares no expense, and the spectacle is off the charts.  Best of all, its success would give Kubrick the clout he needed to become, well, Kubrick.  

The Bellboy - Jerry Lewis films can be something of an acquired taste, but I think he's at his best with simpler material.  With "The Bellboy," which Lewis wrote and directed as well as starred in, there's no real plot - just a series of extended gags.  He plays a hapless bellhop at a Miami Beach hotel who can never get a word in edgewise.  Full of physical comedy, sight gags, and slapstick, this feels very much like a silent era comedy, and a good one at that.

Eyes Without a Face - Finally, here's a curious horror film from France's Georges Franju.  At its center is one of the era's rare female monsters, the disfigured Christiane, whose father is a mad scientist intent on giving her a full face transplant.  Due to significant censorship concerns in Europe at the time, pains were taken to emphasize Christiane over her monstrous father, and there's almost no gore - just beautiful, macabre imagery hinting at the depraved.

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The Pandemic Superbowl Ads

This post is about the Superbowl LV commercials and presentation and not the actual game. I don't have much interest in professional football, and I have no business commenting about gameplay. However, I am a fan of spectacle, and a Superbowl being conducted during a pandemic is something that hasn't happened in living memory. So, I actually watched the game live for the first time in ages. I was curious to see how the various advertisers were going to handle the Superbowl ads this year.

Because if you haven't heard, the major corporations have been nervous this year about pandemic politics, and spending so much on big game ads. So was no Budweiser commercial this year (though Sam Adams still brought the Clydesdales, and Anheuser Bush had ads for two of its other brands). There are no Pepsi or Coke ads. Nothing from Hyundai or Audi. Movie ads were largely MIA, except for "Raya and the Last Dragon," "Coming 2 America," "F9," "Nobody," and the M. Night Shyamalan film "Old," and only three of those aired during the game proper. Many companies cited economic instability for sitting out the event, while others, like Planters, are donating to charities instead.

The ads that did run were noticeably more subdued this year. There was little frat-boy behavior or crass humor, little partying on display, and even overt sexuality was in short supply (with one exception discussed below). Instead, there were a lot of more earnest, life-affirming ads that were all about getting through adversity together, and looking toward the future. There were also a lot of unexpectedly poignant spots, like the one for the Indeed job search platform reminding us about the unemployment crisis, or the Jeep ad with Bruce Springsteen coaxing us toward national reconciliation while carefully dancing around specifics. Only one ad directly alluded to the recent election - a Fiverr ad set at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Probably the best ad of the night was an Anheuser Busch ad produced by David Fincher and scored by Atticus Ross, showing groups of co-workers and friends drinking beers together. It may be the happiest thing that David Fincher has ever been involved with.

There were still plenty of funny ads, and an avalanche of celebrities. It was absolutely gobsmacking how many celebrities were in these ads, often so many they were cancelling each other out. A Michelob ad even mocked this by casting their ad with a cavalcade of celebrity look-alikes, including a Christopher Walken sound-alike for narration. The celebrity-heavy ads were often the worst ones, including a truly awful Cheetos ad where Ashton Kutcher attempts a Jamaican accent while singing "It Wasn't Me." The better celebrity-fronted ads were the more absurdist ones, like the Tide ad featuring a hoodie with Jason Alexander's face on it, and a Jimmy Johns ad with Brad Garrett playing a sandwich-obsessed mobster. Also, all props to whoever got Timothée Chalamet to play the son of Edward Scissorhands in the Cadillac ad. I'm always a little wary of car ads revisiting the beloved movies of my childhood, but this one was so well conceived, it won me over.

Then there was the Amazon Alexa ad, which sexually objectifies Michael B. Jordan in the same way that Superbowl ads have objectified women for many decades.  While I'm aware of the double standard and understand the concerns, on the other hand sexualizing a black man and depicting a black woman's sexual desire is still rare enough that it's actually kind of empowering to see.  Also, it was clearly self-aware enough and tongue-in-cheek enough that it strikes me as pretty harmless.

The Superbowl itself did its part in signaling unity and caution. The opening montage highlighted the work of health care workers, there were masks everywhere on the field and in the bleachers (even incorporated into the halftime show), and there were a slew of other pandemic safety protocols in place, including the event being totally cashless, and stadium attendance being capped at 20%. Production limitations meant that 4K and HDR streaming were unavailable. Somehow, a streaker still got through during the fourth quarter, apparently part of a misguided porn site marketing stunt.

He was more memorable than a lot of the expensive ads this year, so I'll give him that.


Here's a quick top ten of my favorite ads of Superbowl LV, unranked and ordered by when they were aired during the game.

 

TurboTax 

M&Ms 

Chipotle: Can a Burrito Change the World? 

Indeed: The Rising 

Tide: The Jason Alexander Hoodie 

Jimmy Johns: Meet The King 

All-Electric Cadillac LYRIQ 

Anheuser Busch: Let's Grab a Beer 

Jeep: The Middle 

Amazon: Alexa's Body

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The First Five of "Atlanta"

I've noticed that I've been having trouble with sitcoms lately, or more specifically that I can't seem to find one that will hold my attention for very long.  I don't know if it's that the humor is not to my taste or that I need something with more narrative momentum to keep me interested, but since "The Good Place" went off the air, the only episodic comedies I've been watching tend to be animated ones like "Rick and Morty."  

So, I went into "Atlanta," one of the shows that's been on my "To Watch" list for way too long, hoping for the best.  At this point "Atlanta" has been widely recognized as being one the best, and most innovative African-American-centric television comedies.  The entire core cast is highly sought after, and have all showed up in major films over the past few years.  I'm not surprised that there's been such a long delay between the second and third seasons because everybody has been busy even before the lockdown.  

The series stars Donald Glover as "Earn" Marks, a Princeton dropout who has been reduced to odd jobs and low level grifting to scrape by.  He becomes the manager of his cousin Alfred "Paper Boi" Miles (Brian Tyree Henry), an upcoming rapper and fairly affluent drug dealer.  The third banana of their trio is Darius (Lakeith Stanfield), a genial weirdo with a talent for getting himself into odd situations.  Most of the series follows the three of them trying to boost Alfred's rap career or trying to hustle for funds.  We also regularly see Earn's on-again-off-again girlfriend Vanessa (Zazie Beetz), the mother of their infant daughter Lottie.

"Atlanta" reminds me of much older comedy acts, because the characters are all operating at or below the lowest rung on the socioeconomic ladder.  Earn balefully hocking his cel phone for quick cash or trying to buy a fast food kids' meal to eat himself, are all too relatable problems, but they're the kind of thing we've seen so much less of as sitcom families have become more affluent over the years.  At the same time, Earn and his friends are put in a position to observe and comment on the foibles of the middle class and the media in a way that most TV characters aren't.  My favorite episode so far has been the one with Earn and Vanessa's date, where a waitress keeps mercilessly upselling them to the point where Earn's only recourse is to report his debit card stolen.  A big part of "Atlanta" is playing around with the stereotypes attached to rappers and black culture, but they've also happily skewered social media influencers, gun culture, and talent agents so far.

And I've found it all very accessible, despite having next to no working knowledge about rap music or Atlanta.  All the characters are likeable and the performers are wildly charismatic.  I could watch Lakeith Stanfield read the phone book as Darius.  The show that "Atlanta" reminds me of the most is "Louie," since it has a similar tone that's a mix of comedy and drama, and uses occasional touches of surrealism and formal experimentation.  Justin Bieber is black in the "Atlanta" universe, for instance.  I'm also looking forward to the notorious "Teddy Perkins" episode coming up in the second season, which features a creepy whiteface character based loosely on Michael Jackson.  "Atlanta" also feels very personal to Donald Glover's own experiences growing up - he and his younger brother Stephen have writing credits on the bulk of the episodes.  Hiro Murai, who has been turning out increasingly wonderful projects over the last few years, directed all the episodes I watched. 

           

Still, I have to admit that it's probably going to be a struggle for me to get through the rest of "Atlanta," as short as it is.  It has nothing to do with the quality or subject matter of the show, and everything to do with the fact that it is an episodic sitcom.  At the end of every episode, Earn, Alfred, and Darius more or less go back to their status quo, and can be expected to stay there.  And I find it harder and harder to stick with these slice-of-life comedies that don't have some serialized element to keep me more engaged.  I never made it past the first season of "Louie" or "Master of None" because of the same issues.     

I enjoy "Atlanta," but the sparks just aren't there.

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Watching "2010" in 2021

So, we're fully in the age of the "legasequel," media that functions as both as a sequel and as a reboot/remake to a beloved classic.  These films are often made many years after the original source material, and lean heavily on the audience's nostalgia.  This term can be applied to far too many recent properties to list, but include the likes of the recent "Star Wars'' sequels, the "Ghostbusters" reboots, and "Doctor Sleep."  Some are better than others.  However, the legasequel template isn't new, nor is it born of any radical new impulse.  I noticed that the '80s had a good number of films that fall into this category too - the "Psycho" sequels, the "Absent-Minded Professor" and "Parent Trap'' TV movies, and the film we're going to talk about today: "2010: The Year We Made Contact," released in 1984, sixteen years after "2001: A Space Odyssey."

I found "2010" fascinating, not because it was particularly good, but because it was such a time capsule of its era and presents such a great example of all the pitfalls that legasequel films often fall into.   

Arthur C. Clarke got the ball rolling with the publication of "2010: Odyssey Two" in 1982, and the film version follows the novel pretty closely.  We follow a Soviet spacecraft, the Leonov, that travels to Jupiter with American and Soviet astronauts to investigate what happened to the Discovery One.  They encounter more monoliths, reboot HAL 9000, and even find David Bowman (Keir Dullea).  "2010" recreates and reuses much of the imagery and audio that made "2001" so iconic, often to great effect.  It opens with the last line of the previous film - "My god, it's full of stars!"

However, its weaknesses are also very evident.  The film does boast a lot of good practical effects work, but also uses rudimentary CGI that has aged very poorly.  Instead of Kubrick's ultra-clean, coldly precise aesthetics, the world of "2010" is much grungier and more industrial-looking, in the same vein as "Alien" and other science-fiction films of the time.  The film is also very much a product of the '80s in its preoccupations.  The Soviet/American rivalry gets a lot of screen time and emphasis, and Roy Scheider plays the lead character, an almost stereotypically brash, overconfident American astronaut named Heywood Floyd.  We get a few scenes with his cute nuclear family to get the audience invested in his safety, a device that Kubrick's film neatly subverted.  

I might have passed over "2010" completely if it weren't for the cast, including Scheider, John Lithgow, and Bob Balaban as the three American astronauts, and Helen Mirren as the leader of the Soviet crew.  Director and screenwriter Peter Hyams, however, is not someone with a great track record.  In fact, I chiefly remember him as the director that Harlan Ellison memorably lambasted for taking too many liberties with scientific accuracy in making "Outland."  His approach to "2010" is very earnest, but also very conservative and safe.  He puts his characters at the forefront where Kubrick was more interested in the ideas.  He leaves less to interpretation, providing clear explanations for all the phenomena we see generated by the monoliths.   

Still, there are several sequences in "2010" I found impressive, chiefly a spacewalk sequence where John Lithgow's character hyperventilates, and a tense countdown with HAL 9000 and Bob Balaban's Dr. Chandra.  Possibly the most important casting decision of the film was to bring back Douglas Rain for HAL, which helps immeasurably in summoning all the menace and strangeness of the AI character.  And Hyams is able to pull off some strong scenes of science-fiction spectacle.  The encounter with Bowman is suitably strange and alarming. 

On its own, "2010" is a mildly interesting space adventure film.  However, as a sequel to "2001," it's far too beholden to the first film, and stumbles every time it tries to evoke any of the mystery and grandeur that Kubrick achieved.  To be fair, it doesn't try very often, only briefly incorporating the more experimental elements of "2001" in more conventional forms.  I have trouble thinking of it as a proper sequel, however, and more as Peter Hyamns' love letter to a film he greatly admired, and wanted to play with the elements of.  It is nice to see HAL and Dullea again, and hear that glorious score.

Then again, a film can't be based on nostalgia alone, and "2010" isn't substantive enough to stand on its own two feet.  And I'm not surprised at all that it's been largely left to obscurity.        

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My Favorite Michel Gondry Film

Michel Gondry has been one of my favorite directors for a long time, and as we've been weathering a new wave of nostalgia for movies from the early 2000s, it struck me that this was the right time to be writing this post.  Gondry comes from a long tradition of French fantasists, and made a name for himself in the '90s through his surrealist music videos for Bjork, Daft Punk, and the White Stripes, among others.  His work often has an experimental feel, as he frequently pulls off whimsical ideas and wild transitions through low-tech solutions.  When he moved into features, he doubled down on this approach, favoring DIY aesthetics to express fantastical concepts.

He got off to a great start, collaborating on two features with Charlie Kaufman, before Kaufman would go off and direct his own scripts.  The second of these, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," remains a highlight of both of their filmographies.  It reportedly had a rough conception and production.  Gondry insisted on shooting nearly everything on location, and ran into trouble implementing some of his complicated, in-camera effects work.  The house being washed away by the incoming tide was all done practically, and involved putting a physical set in the ocean.  A scene with multiple versions of the main character was accomplished by literally having Jim Carrey run around to different parts of the set while the camera was pointed elsewhere.  To avoid artifice, the soundtrack even uses mostly diegetic sound.  

The result of all this effort is a high-concept, science-fiction film that is simultaneously a madcap flight of fancy and one of the most heartbreaking, intimate romantic dramas of the last twenty years.  The hero, Joel, travels through and revisits his memories of his relationship with his girlfriend Clementine, while those memories are being degraded and erased from his mind by unscrupulous scientists.  Some of his encounters with Clementine are farcical.  Others are horrific.  Most are terribly sad.  However, the whole journey is permeated with an atmosphere of nostalgic warmth and intense, bittersweet longing.  The Kaufman script and the performances of Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet as Joel and Clementine, do so much to ground the film in an accessible emotional reality, despite all the Gondryian madness around them.  

And the madness is certainly a big appeal of the film.  We watch Joel's memories warp and collide, and watch him try to fight back by regressing or hiding in different parts of his mind.  As the memories disappear, the physical worlds in his head are destroyed as though beset by physical apocalypses.  People and objects blink out of existence, or disappear into darkness.  Other removals are more violent.  Joel transforms into different versions of himself and tries to reorder his universe to hold on to cherished experiences and encounters.  It's very messy and very tactile, creating these beautiful images of destruction and loss.  It can be confusing to parse exactly when or where something is happening, except we're always kept aware that on a fundamental level, this is all in Joel's head. 

Reading about some of the struggles to get the film made have highlighted how important the collaborative nature of the project was to its ultimate success.  Gondry and Kaufman are both these outsized creative talents who sometimes have trouble reigning in their bad habits.  Their work has sometimes suffered as a result.  On "Eternal Sunshine," circumstances forced them to compromise their visions in many respects.  Gondry couldn't entirely avoid the use of CGI or artificial lighting.  Kaufman's script lost whole characters, and the original ending.  This sense of restraint extended to the cast - Jim Carrey is the most subdued I've ever seen him onscreen.    

But as a result, the film endures.  It's gained a cult following and a reputation for being one of the iconic breakup films of its time.  I've remained a fan of Gondry and Kaufman's subsequent work, but nothing they've made in the years since "Eternal Sunshine" has ever quite managed to capture the same poignancy and sense of wonder.  Not even "Synecdoche, New York," Kaufman's masterpiece, manages to make me feel for its characters as deeply as I do for Joel and Clementine.  And I suspect that lasting affection owes a great deal to Michel Gondry.  

What I've Seen - Michel Gondry

Human Nature (2001)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Dave Chappelle's Block Party (2005)
The Science of Sleep (2006)
Be Kind Rewind (2008)
The Green Hornet (2011)
The We and the I (2012)
Mood Indigo (2013)
Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? (2013)
Microbe & Gasoline (2015)

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