Bunny Ultramod, Hollywood Art Critic

Jurassic President, Episode 1 - American History X, Jude Buffum,...

fiveminutesintothefuture — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 22:26:45 -0400

Jurassic President, Episode 1 - American History X, Jude Buffum, I Am 8 Bit Gallery

Beware Black Hole at I Am 8 Bit Gallery.

fiveminutesintothefuture — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 22:23:08 -0400

Beware Black Hole at I Am 8 Bit Gallery.

Self Objectification Strategy, Scott Hove, La Luz de Jesus...

fiveminutesintothefuture — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 21:14:10 -0400

Self Objectification Strategy, Scott Hove, La Luz de Jesus Gallery.

Party of One, Scott Hove, La Luz de Jesus Gallery

fiveminutesintothefuture — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 21:12:20 -0400

Party of One, Scott Hove, La Luz de Jesus Gallery

Stencil, William S. Hart Park, West Hollywood.

fiveminutesintothefuture — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 22:55:45 -0400

Stencil, William S. Hart Park, West Hollywood.

Stencil, Sunset and Fuller.

fiveminutesintothefuture — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 16:49:50 -0400

Stencil, Sunset and Fuller.

Chihuahua mural, 7516 Sunset Blvd.

fiveminutesintothefuture — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 16:32:36 -0400

Chihuahua mural, 7516 Sunset Blvd.

Hollywood street art, Selma and Cherokee.

fiveminutesintothefuture — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 22:07:03 -0400

Hollywood street art, Selma and Cherokee.

Hollywood street art, Selma and Wilcox.

fiveminutesintothefuture — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 19:22:52 -0400

Hollywood street art, Selma and Wilcox.

Film: Casa de mi Padre

fiveminutesintothefuture — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 17:21:00 -0400

It’s hard to discuss “Casa de mi Padre,” the newest Will Ferrell film, without discussing idioms. And I am not just talking about the idioms of the Spanish telenovela, the limited-run soap operas that fill Latin American airwaves, which “Casa” spoofs. No, I am talking about comedy itself, which can be so idiomatic that the comedy of one region or historical era might be incomprehensible to another.

Some of what we react to, when we react to comedy, is the shape comedy takes. We recognize its structure and respond to that, to such an extent that there are comics who manage to have quite successful careers, telling jokes that are recognizably jokes, and that audiences respond to as jokes, despite not being funny. If you create something with a setup and a punchline, and clearly signal when the punchline happens, a certain percentage of an audience will respond to it, laughing uproariously despite the absence of anything particularly funny. It’s called selling a joke, and, if you’re a good enough salesman, you can even sell jokes that aren’t actually jokes.

I would say that “Casa de mi Padre” does the opposite. It’s an example of an avant garde sort of comedy that is very nearly anti-comedy, similar in spirit to the work done by graduates of “The State” and by the Tim and Eric Show. These are comics who eschew, and sometimes completely reject, typical comic idioms. There can be an experimental quality to this work, as though the artists are deliberately trying to create new idioms for humor, and daring us to find their work funny even when it does not take any form we recognize as funny.

I would say “Casa” does something else. Its creators, director Matt Piedmont and writer Andrew Steele, seem genuinely obsessed with the physical details of the telenovela, including the form’s trashy obsession with infidelity and criminality, its often minuscule budget (and the tricks it uses to work its way around budget constraints, including extensive use of slow motion), and its cowboy-cum-drug-lord sense of costume and set design. This is a film that manages to both look great and ridiculous: a drug lord, played with boyish enthusiasm by Gael García Bernal, wears a white suit, red shirt, gold chain, and white cowboy boots; he looks fantastic. He also smokes two long cigarettes simultaneously.

Everybody in this film smokes. Will Ferrell, playing a dense but honorable ranchero, rolls his own cigarettes, and does so badly. His brother, played by Diego Luna, only takes a cigarette out of his mouth long enough to sip from an ever-present cocktail, which he clutches even during a gunfight. The film is indulgent with these details. Sometimes it stops everything just to watch somebody smoke.

It also rarely tips its hat to the fact that it is satire — it’s been a long time since I have seen a film this deadpan. Yes, Will Ferrell speaks Spanish throughout the film, but he does so with as much competence as he can muster. It’s imperfect, but, then, the non-Spanish speaker Eric Estrada was a castmember on “Rosa salvaje,” a Spanish-language show, speaking dialogue that was fed to him through an earphone. There is precedent for imperfect Spanish, and Ferrell never plays his Spanish for laughs. This is a comedy, instead, of genre exaggeration. If a love scene in an actual Telenovela will consist mostly of relatively tame images of hands stroking bodies, “Casa” responds with a love scene that consists of an inventory of buttock grasps. If telenovelas often feature dummies in costume as background actors, this is a film where the dummies show up at dinner tables, or wedding scenes, or, well, love scenes, prominently displayed.

This is a comedy of missed eyelines, hand-painted sets, and crew reflections caught in mirrored shades. This is presented lovingly, rather than mockingly. The clumsiest effect, a white jungle cat that is supposed to be Ferrell’s spirit guide, looks entirely artificial, like an articulated child’s toy. That being said, it’s made by the Henson Creature Shop, and is sort of awesome, with expressive eyebrows and bared fangs. The film takes an obvious pleasure in the genuinely glorious qualities of low-budget filmmaking, where there is sometimes a thin line between cheap artificiality and folk art.

The studios seem like they’re not sure what to make of this film, offering it in limited release, which is sometimes a way of testing material that has them buffaloed to see if there is an audience for it. I can’t guess if there is or isn’t. There has been an audience for this sort of anti-comedy. “Black Dynamite” enjoyed cult success with its mix of genre pastiche and in-jokes about the technical difficulties of a low-budget filmmaking, whereas both filmmakers Jared Hess and Robert Rodriguez have found audiences for Latin American-based films that borrow both from the conventions of telenovelas and from Mexican design sensibilities. Perhaps the pump is primed.

I hope so. Whether large audiences enjoy the decidedly idiosyncratic pleasures of this film, it’s worthwhile to have studios occasionally take risks on movies that draw from different wells than your typical Hollywood fare, and have filmmakers who feel free to satirize popular artistic forms that are a bit outside Hollywood’s often myopic gaze. The telenovela is not an obscure form in America; neither are the ascetics that this film both celebrates and sends up. The Spanish language station Univision, as an example, ranks as the fifth most popular in the United States, and is even more popular among young adults. But the content they produce, including their hundreds of enormously popular telenovelas, might as well be invisible to the American entertainment industry. This is a sort of cultural blindness that is often maddening — after all, the entertainment industry is located in a city that is 47 percent Hispanic, and where it is possible to walk off the set of a film or television show in downtown LA and buy brain tacos, statues of santos, and Mexican wrestling masks, all on the same block.

So viva “Casa de mi Padre.” Viva la telenovela!

Film: Showgirls 2

fiveminutesintothefuture — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 16:26:00 -0500

In 1995, a director named Paul Verhoeven made a big-budget film that may be the trashiest thing ever lensed. Called “Showgirls,” it was based on a script by the Hungarian-born screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, for whom trashy storytelling seemed like something of a career choice — he had recently become the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood for penning a killer-lesbians film called “Basic Instinct,” which netted him a reported three million dollars.

Eszterhas’s resume already had several erotic thrillers on it, and with “Showgirls” he made the ingenious decision to relocate a cliched Hollywood rags-to-riches story to the same world he set his thrillers in. Eszterhas’s women were the sorts who got themselves into trouble with the wrong men, fought viciously with each other, and frequently took their tops off. And so, for his trash version of “A Star Is Born,” he set the action in the world of Vegas showgirls. And not just any sort of showgirls — no, these were the sorts that danced in a topless revue.

The film tanked, despite its canny, often ironic direction from Verhoeven, who has shown himself again and again to be a very clever director when it comes to genre work. It’s become something of a cult legend since it came out, but its disastrous box office submarined any possibility of a sequel — a fact that may have only disappointed one cast member. On set, perhaps joking, Verhoeven claimed the sequel was going to ignore the main characters in Showgirls in favor of following a secondary character, a young dancer named Penny, played by Rena Riffel. Joke or not, it’s a great idea for a sequel — these rising star narratives traditionally end with the main character realizing there are ambitious up-and-comers behind them, preparing to take their place. It would make sense that a sequel would turn to one of these up-and-comers.

Alas, it was not to be. At least, not with Verhoeven at the helm, or with Eszterhas writing the script, and certainly not with the original film’s $45 million budget. But Rena Riffel never forgot the idea, and, last year, she went ahead made her own version of the sequel, ingeniously titled “Showgirls 2: Penny’s From Heaven.” And when I say she made the film, I mean that in an almost Arts and Crafts movement way, in the way Arts and Crafts authors would not merely write a book, but also design the font, make the paper, and do all the letterpressing themselves. So in making “Showgirls 2,” Riffel wrote the script, produced it herself, directed it, edited it, and is now distributing it. And, of course, she starred in it.

I have used the word “trashy” a few times already, and it will come up again in this piece, so I want to define it, and also explain that I adore it. The word is used a few times in the film, but is used dismissively. Riffel’s character is repeatedly referred to as trash, and in the film it means what trash usually means: refuse. But that’s not the way I am using it. No, when I refer to something as being trashy, I mean that is belongs to a genre that is considered exploitative and beneath critical evaluation. A lot of women’s literature is seen as being trashy, because it weds baroque, melodramatic plotting to an almost operatic focus on the spectacle of female emotion. So when the wonderful Jackie Collins, as an example, authors a book with a title like “Poor Little Bitch Girl,” in which three former Beverly Hills high school students, one now a madame, meet again when a movie star is shot to death, and the story is less concerned with the details of the murder and more concerned with the petty jealousies, sordid affairs, and massive drug consumption of its main characters — well, that’s going to get it classified as trash.

This sort of stuff doesn’t usually get a lot of attention in critical circles, although sometimes somebody like David Lynch will turn to exactly the same sort of material and then people become very excited about it. “Mulholland Dr.” behaves very much like a Jackie Collins novel, focusing on the relationship between a Hollywood ingenue and an amnesiac who may have mob connections, but then it loses its mind and starts switching out the identities of its characters, and it is undeniably art. By the way, Rena Riffel played a small role in “Mulholland Dr.,” as a ditzy prostitute named Laney.

I mention this, because Riffel’s “Showgirls” sequel is, at least thematically, also a sequel to “Mulholland Dr.”, a fact signaled by Riffel staggering under the sign for the titular Los Angeles street for an extended stretch toward the start of the film. In fact, if I were to characterize the movie in any way, I would say it’s what you might imagine David Lynch would produce is he were asked to direct a “Showgirls” sequel, but was only given a budget of $17.

Let me discuss the film itself for a moment, although its plotting is baroque, as is the way with really entertaining trash, and I don’t want to get lost in its many twists. Put simply, the story tells of Penny moving to Hollywood to star in a really-low-budget television dance show called “Star Dancers.” This is complicated by the fact that she has accidentally fallen in with a cult of wealthy theosophists who have, without her knowledge, started prostituting her to European royalty. Also, Penny is an untrained dancer, and attempts to remedy this by taking ballet lessons from an aging former prima ballerina, played by actress Shelley Michelle, who may be best-known as a professional body double, subbing in for timid actresses when cinematic love scenes require them to disrobe. The two become simultaneous lovers and rivals, especially when the ballerina gets the lead role on “Star Dancers.”

There is much more to the story, of course — the whole of it unspools over about two and a half hours, which, in fairness, is about the length of the original “Showgirls,” and is also about the length of “Mulholland Dr.” There is, for instance, the way Penny funds her Hollywood sojourn, which comes from a suitcase full of money Penny discovers when she is attacked by a murderous Marilyn Monroe impersonator. Penny goes spending mad, buying fur coats and hiring a maid, who doesn’t actually clean very well, but prances around Penny’s room in fetish wear prodding at things with a feather duster. The maid, as it happens, is studying criminology — a fact that will prove to be important later, when it starts seeming like the theosophists are pushing Penny toward starring in a snuff film.

But there, I am already getting lost in the story’s multiple twists, and I shouldn’t, because the point of this film isn’t plot. No, it’s the spectacle of Penny’s torment. Riffel is the right actress for this, especially in the way she has framed herself in the film — almost always with a grimace highlighted by bright lipstick, her eyes blank and stupified. Riffel has written Penny as perhaps the ne plus ultra of dingbats for this film, and the film doesn’t wallow in the depths of her misery so much as it thrills at the depths of her bewilderment. It’s what turns this film from being an exercise in agony into a comic tour de force, and, even more impressively, it is undeniably deliberate.

There is a line at the end of the film that indicates the knowingness of the entire film: Penny’s ex-boyfriend, Glen Plummer (one of several actors from the original “Showgirls” to reprise their roles) tells Penny that he’s decided she isn’t stupid at all. She just pretends to be stupid, so that people underestimate her. “You just play dumb,” he says.

“Like a possum?” she responds earnestly, destroying his thesis.

Film: Crazy Horse

fiveminutesintothefuture — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:25:00 -0500

There were six people in the audience for Frederick Wiseman’s newest documentary, titled “Crazy Horse,” when I attended at the Downtown Independent last night. It’s hard not to take this fact as something of an indictment, although it was just one show of several this weekend, and perhaps the paucity of audience members was just an accident of timing. Perhaps the 9:30 p.m. showing was overfull. It should have been.After all, this is Frederick Wiseman, the legendary documentarian whose career began with 1967’s epochal “Titicult Follies,” a genre-defining look into the mistreatment of inmates at Massachusetts’ Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He’s a particular sort of documentarian, in that his films are not narrated, and are made up of cooly observed scenes drawn from hundreds of hours of observation. And so one would expect Hollywood’s filmmaking community to be out in large numbers, but I was not there when this happened, if it did.

And then there is the subject of the film, a nightclub in Paris called “Crazy Horse” which offers a revue that is something of a strip show, in that female pulchritude is both the subject of the performance and on exquisitely art-directed display. Isn’t there a sizable community of adult film performers, exotic dancers, and burlesque artists in Los Angeles? They might have benefited from the film, but they were not present at the screening I attended. But Crazy Horse has, and has always had, significant artistic ambitions, and, in the past few years, has hired a succession of high-profile choreographers to revamp their show. This film details the efforts of Philippe Decouflé to produce a new show under significant artistic limitations. Decouflé is an antsy figure who sometimes seems like a spoilt boy, but he is a choreographer of no small accomplishment — in fact, he choreographed the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1992 Winter Olympics, garnering his work a television audience of about two billion people, making him one of history’s most widely seen choreographers. So you might think the Independent would have been flooded with dancers wanting to see new samples of Decouflé’s choreography. They were not there for the showing I attended.

There’s a longer list I could compile. Where were the dedicated eroticists who make such a fuss of their fascination with the female form? This film has quite a lot of it to look at. It’s all very mod film as well — the show’s creators cite filmmaker Michael Powell as their inspiration, probably referring to the director’s cinematic exploration of dance and music in “The Red Shoes” and “The Tales of Hoffmann.” But the production makes extensive use of almost-cheesy 60s-style lounge music, silhouettes on colored screens, and op art patterns projected directly onto the dancer’s bodies, making much of the filmed Crazy Horse show look like the opening credits to a James Bond film, or a 1960’s nudie cutie musical. There is a sequence in which two comely women in space helmets meet inside a mirrored spaceship and plunge into each others embraces, and, yes, it’s lowbrow, but, then, LA loves lowbrow. We created an entire fine arts scene with that name.

But the film is not a document of a performance, but, instead, a document of the creation of a performance. This continues a series of documentaries Wiseman has created with this theme, including 2009’s “La danse - Le ballet de l’Opéra de Paris.” And so the film spends a lot of time in the rehearsal process, and spends time with the company’s feisty, frustrated costume designer, and peeks backstage to the kitchen to watch the process of filling dozens of clear plastic ice buckets with ice and champagne bottles for the show. It peeks in on the performers gathered around a television, watching a decaying videotape of ballet bloopers and laughing at each missed step and stumble. It listens in on the self-serious but winningly passionate interviews the artistic staff offers about the artistic merits of the new show.

The film also spends a little time with the audience. They are cheerful, posing for photographs, and they are a smaller group than you might expect, as the red velvet-lined club is unexpectedly intimate. They’re also a group with at least a little money to spend, as tickets start at about $130 for the show. Of course, this comes with complimentary champagne. I saw it for under $10 in Wiseman’s film, including an extensive peek behind the scenes, but I had no champagne, and also, for some reason, almost no fellow audience members.

Why the David Denby story is nonsense

fiveminutesintothefuture — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 10:27:00 -0500

You’ve probably already heard the story, but if not, here’s a brief retelling of the story that, needlessly, seems to have all of Hollywood in an uproar. Sony Pictures allowed criticis a sneak preview of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” but imposed an embargo. David Denby, film critic for the New Yorker, broke the embargo, publishing an enthusiastic review a week before Sony would have liked him to. Studios prefer that everybody publish their reviews at the same time, because it is better for their business to get a rush of reviews simultaneously. Critics generally honor these requests, and, as a result, the studios seem to believe that an embargo is a contract: That by seeing the screening, the critic has implicit agreed to the terms of the embargo. As a result, “Dragon Tattoo” producer Scott Rudin contacted Denby is a snit to inform him that he will never again be invited to a preview. And he has that right — studios can invite whoever they like to previews. But Rudin also wrote Denby an aggravated email claiming that Denby broke his word, and here’s where things get silly.

An embargo is a request. You cannot give a journalist, even an arts journalist, information and then demand that they publish it at a time that is convenient to you; they are not part of your publicity department. And I know studios believe they have made some sort of compact with critics when they set up a screening with an embargo, but, if they are really interested in such a contract, they should have their lawyers draw up papers and have the critics sign them. What they are doing, instead, is exerting social pressure. They’re saying “Hey, you sort of passively agreed to the terms we set out, and therefore you’re breaking your word.”

Denby never actively gave his word, as far as I can tell. If I walk into a museum exhibit and there is a sign on the wall that says “By attending this exhibit, you agree to write a positive review of it,” I am not going to feel like my responsibility is to either write a good review or leave the exhibit. I never made the agreement the sign claims I made, and I am not bound by it. I will see the show, write an honest appraisal, and do it on my timeline.

Was Denby’s breaking the embargo a little unfriendly? Maybe. It definitely messed up Sony’s promotional push for the movie, although not in a significant way anybody can articulate. But, then, Denby is not Sony’s friend. He is a critic and a journalist. Once he saw the film, the promotional desires of Sony were not his concern. He typically honors embargo requests, but, in this instance, felt he couldn’t. Once in a while, somebody will ask you a favor, and you may find you cannot do it. That is what has happened here, and for Sony to behave as though Denby acted unethically is preposterous.

We’re in an odd era now, one in which publicity departments feel they have more and more of an obligation to shape an eventual story. When they set up interviews, they map out a list of questions journalists can’t ask. They step in and answer questions on behalf of their clients. They demand that press photographers turn over their pictures, and they demand the right to select which pictures get published, and demand ownership of the photos. They insist on the right to read stories before they are published, and make editorial changes.

And they also think that, via embargo, they can set the date at which a story will be published. They don’t actually have any of these rights, and all of them overstep what you can fairly demand from a journalist. The American press does not work for their client, and is not required to share a press agent’s concerns about what may be best for their client. Now, there is a certain schmoozy quid pro quo in journalism, and especially entertainment journalism, where journalists are more likely to honor requests from publicists, because it makes access to a story easier. I have always felt that there were problems with this, but, then, entertainment writers need not always be adversarial with the subjects they write about — it’s a pretty rare pop star that bombs civilians in Mogadishu, and so we need not treat them like war criminals.

Still, the unintended consequence of this sort of coziness is that, every so often, PR people get the idea that their requests have the force of law. And every so often it is useful to remind them that journalists may stand by the bed, taking notes, but are not in bed with their subjects. Entertainment journalists pursue their own stories, on their own timelines, and sometimes that isn’t 100 percent convenient to the subjects they write about. If there is a quid pro quo going on, in which writers occasionally make concessions to publicists, there needs to be reciprocity — that the publicists make concessions to journalists, knowing that sometimes they will write the story they want to write at the time they want to write it. Journalism is not the freelance wing of American PR, and should not be treated as such.

Film: Twilight: Breaking Dawn

fiveminutesintothefuture — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 23:54:47 -0500

I went to the first “Twilight” film when it debuted in 2008, not having read the Stephenie Meyer book upon which it was based, but intensely curious. It was a midnight screening at Block E downtown, and I wasn’t sure who, aside from me, might show up for it. It turned out that the theater was nearly full, mostly with young women, most of whom had come in groups. I quickly realized I wasn’t particularly the niche audience for this film, but I had some good things to say about it anyway.

Don’t get me wrong, there is an underlying preposterousness to this story. It is, after all, about a fairly nondescript young woman in the Pacific northwest who finds herself in a love triangle between a Native American werewolf and sparkling vegetarian vampire. The whole of it comes off as an unexpectedly successful example of an especially juvenile approach to writing, in which the plot is pure wish fulfillment, with a character who is instantly recognizable to critics of fan fiction as a “Mary Sue” — a thinly disguised and idealized version of the author herself. Bella, the lead character, suffers a lot in the series, but Mary Sues always suffer. It’s a sort of suffering that attracts a lot of affectionate attention from beautiful people. The whole series reads as a sort of literary version of Münchausen syndrome, in which patients fake ailments because they crave the piteous attention that comes with it.

Nonetheless, I thought the first film was surprisingly well handled. Bella is notoriously a nonentity in the books, having barely anything resembling a personality, but the film cast Kristen Stewart in the role, and she possesses an impressive collection of appealingly dorky mannerisms. The film also did an especially nice job of drawing her relationship with her estranged father, in which every gesture of affection felt somehow forced and awkward.

I didn’t bother with any of the other films, but word started getting out that, as the series progressed toward its climax, it got weirder and weirder. And suddenly I was the target audience for this new film, incomprehensibly called “Twilight: Breaking Dawn,” which is a bit like naming a story “Midnight: 6 a.m.” There are two things about this film I was bound to find appealing. Firstly, it has, I think accidentally, recreated one of the great tropes of trash literature: The town with secrets. And it’s the same sort of secrets you’ll find in a town like “Peyton Place,” including murderous clan rivalries, incestuous families, secret childbirths, etc. Except, in this town, the closets have actual skeletons in them, and the biggest secret is that an increasingly large percentage of the town’s population is made up of supernatural monsters.

The other thing I was bound to like about this film is that Meyer seems to have gone off the rails, narratively speaking. This is, after all, a film that opens with Edward, the romantic lead, confessing to having committed what sounds like hundreds of murders in the past. I don’t think I am spoiling anything by telling you this, as Kristen Stewart shrugs it off, Edward heads out to a party, and the subject never comes up again. The film is far more concerned with the fact that the vampire and the girl are about to be wed, and the problems of their honeymoon. Specifically, he might accidentally kill her when they consummate their marriage. Indeed, she ends up pretty bruised, and somehow the entire bedroom is trashed, for which Edward is awfully apologetic. Stewart’s character doesn’t seem to care one way or the other, though — a fact that some critics have pointed to as inadvertently justifying domestic abuse.

Certainly whatever message is being sent is inadvertent — if ever there was a piece of work where subtext is unintentional, it is this. But I get a different subtext from this, that Bella just likes it a little rough, and, in my opinion, whatever happens in somebody’s bedroom, as long as it is consensual and safe, is none of my business. A few bruises don’t instantly mean domestic abuse. They could instead mean mild bondage.

No, the real subtext comes as a result of these few nights of unseen BDSM — against all odds, Bella gets pregnant, which isn’t usually supposed to happen when you bed down with a vampire. Worse still, the fetus has its father’s inhuman strength, and immediately, and accidentally, starts killing Bella.

And, for me, this is where the film gets really interesting. Because the film suddenly becomes about the question of abortion, with nearly everybody attempting to persuade Bella to terminate the pregnancy, which leaves her a convincingly emaciated wreck. But, for reasons she keeps to herself, Bella won’t, and suddenly the accidental subtext of the film is reproductive freedom. It’s a sort of mirror image of your usual abortion narratives, where a woman wants to terminate a pregnancy but can’t. Nonetheless, the film treats the decision to keep or not keep the fetus as her choice exclusively, and it’s one that the film’s various vampires and werewolves respect, even if they disagree.

And the film never equivocates. The vampires, for some reason, have an entire medical clinic set up in their house, and, if they wanted to, they could just drug her and terminate the pregnancy without her permission, but the idea is never broached — this despite the fact that there are at least two characters who seem to have their own plans to murder the infant the moment it is born. And perhaps, ultimately, it is easier to make a story about choice when the choice is to have the child, rather than terminate the pregnancy, but nonetheless this is a film that presents women as having exclusive agency over their reproductive decisions. I don’t know if this is what Meyer intended, but, in the end, authorial intent doesn’t matter, particularly when the author seems to have no control over subtext. Whether Meyer intended to tell a pro-choice story or not, that’s what we have wound up with.

In fact, this dominates the film, briefly putting aside the question the story has wrestled with since the first film: Will Bella get to be a vampire or not? And I never found that an interesting question, as Meyer, once again seeming to be oblivious of subtext, named her Bella, which is a bit like naming her Nosferatu or Vlad. I mean, if you have a zombie film, and you name the main character Stagger Stiffly, you’ve pretty much already tipped your hat to the story’s conclusion. No, this film is much more interesting, as it darkly starts suggesting that the climax might be less like a traditional vampire film than the chestburster scene in “Alien,” and how could I resist that? Juvenile Mary Sue fantasy or not, when the going gets this weird, the weird are likely to go.

Film: Immortals

fiveminutesintothefuture — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:38:59 -0500

A few years ago I heard an interview with Russell Crowe, which I shall paraphrase. He was asked about “Gladiator,” and he opined that, although it took a drubbing from a few critics, its popular success would lead to a slew of similar films, and after watching those, in retrospect, we would realize how good “Gladiator” was.

Well, here’s to you, Russell Crowe. You may be best known for throwing telephones and menacing electronica musician Moby, but, if you choose it, you also can claim a career as a prophet. Because we are in a new golden age of sword and sandals movies, and they make “Gladiator” look decidedly stately by comparison.

Not that I’m complaining. This is a genre, after all, that was first defined by having overdubbed Italian strongmen battling giant puppets, and so it has always been a trashy (and unintentionally homoerotic) spectacle. This is a lowbrow pleasure, and I don’t need Russell Crowe moping around in a pepla to see these films. In my opinion, “Gladiator” was actually made by Joaquin Phoenix’s arch, maniacal performance as the villain — he really caught the spirit of things.

And so “Gladiator” is probably a better film than, say, “Immortals,” which opened to impressive box-office sales this weekend. At least “Gladiator” was a better film by Oscar standards — finer lead actors, better costume design, arty but restrained direction. But, in its own way, “Immortals” is a better sword and sandals film. Because it’s perfectly, and delightful, ridiculous.

The film was directed by Tarsem Singh, who has, one supposes, been preparing for this moment for his entire professional life — back in 2005 he directed a Pepsi commercial that featured Britney Spears, Pink, and Beyoncé as female gladiators rising up against an emperor who is hoarding the beverage. They took the despot down by singing Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” Singh has since gone on to direct a pair of films defined by a lurid, occasionally incomprehensible visual sensibility, and now he’s offering up his version of the tale of Theseus, sort of.

Those of us who remember our Greek myths probably remember Theseus as the guy who battled the minotaur, and, yes, that appears in this film, after a fashion. It’s both encouraging and perplexing that ancient myths can still be mined for popular drama, even if that drama is so kitschy, in the classic definition of the term — when it described plaster of paris statues of Greek nymphets that tourists to Europe would purchase to make their suburban tract homes look fancy.

“Immortals” pays about as much attention to actual Greek myths as, say, “300” paid to actual Greek history. No, these old stories are really just a pretext to get well-muscled men stripped down to their greaves, and little else, and then art direct their surroundings at they hack away with short swords, long spears, and that odd trident and fishing-net combination that sometimes shows up as paired weapons in these films.

Let’s specifically discuss the pleasures of “Immortals.” The whole of it is green screened, as with “300” (the films share producers), but while the earlier film seemed designed to look like panels from a comic book, “Immortals” looks like Carraviagio’s Renaissance-era portraits of classical themes. It’s oddly luxurious and dreamlike, with such unreal trappings as a sea of oil and a village set into the side of a cliff. Director Singh doesn’t seem to have much interest in the film’s heroes — they’re bland nobodies, despite the fact that one of them is played by Stephen Dorff, an actor who can make almost every role seem like a moody, slightly naughty rock and roll star. No, Singh’s real interest here is in the villain, and he has cast Mickey Rourke as the leader of a ravaging, almost subhuman horde of invaders.

The scenes with Rourke have the quality of a nightmare set in a contemporary art gallery. All of his men have a taste for perverse arts and crafts, so they make themselves uniforms that look beaten out of soft lead and barbed wire. Rourke himself wears a helmet that has pointed blades that surround his face like teeth and is topped by rabbit ears. Rabbit ears! I could describe his performance, but, by now, Rourke’s feverish muttering and scowling has almost become an acting convention of its own. Suffice it to say he Mickey Rourkes it up in this film, and it’s the sort of film that benefits from somebody Mickey Rourking it up.

Perhaps the oddest and most bemusingly entertaining element of the film is its presentation of the gods. They hang about on Mt. Olympus in gold armor, peering over the side at the world of men, and sort of stamp about petulantly, frustrated that they can’t participate, thanks to an edict by Zeus. If they seem like anything, they seem like the male models in “Zoolander” — beautiful, and spectacularly stupid. This is a film that has been rather discreet with its violence, but when the gods finally come down, all bets are off. When Hephaestus swings his hammer, heads burst like water balloons. Poseidon wields a trident, of course, and it is eviscerating. It’s a perfectly lunatic moment, the sort of thing that make these films so much fun. WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH THOSE MALE MODELS! THEY HAVE GONE CRAZY! SOMEBODY STOP THEM!

This is, by the way, the subtext of every sword and sandals film ever made.

Film: The Skin I Live In

fiveminutesintothefuture — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 22:11:00 -0500

Like a lot of kids, I grew up reading comic books. I wasn’t especially more devoted to them than anybody else, and never grew into somebody who obsessively collects from a single series, and rushes to the comic-books store when the new releases are shelved, a credit card in one hand, a polypropolyene bag with acid-free cardboard backing in the other.

But I suspect I was a more curious collector than some. I tended to haunt garage sales and the discard bins of corner stores, which were filled with comics that nobody really wanted, usually selling for five cents. I wound up getting exposed to some genuinely mind-warping things as a result — I stumbled across my first stash of underground comix as a fifth-grader, including one called “Funny Aminals” [sic] that included a very rough early draft of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” bundled in with illustrations that can fairly be described as pornographic. I wound up with pirate-themed comics, sports-themed comics, and a large number of horror comics.

In the ’70s, horror comics were in a strange sort of twilight. They were pretty explicitly forbidden by the self-applied Comics Code, a reaction to the vivid nightmares with O. Henry twists that E.C. Comics had made its bread and butter. But, for some reason, magazines were exempt from the Code, and so there were a number of horror-themed E.C. knockoffs printed in magazine-sized pages. Sex was also forbidden by the Code, and so these magazines went ahead and sexed up their material. And I suspect it was a hapless vendor, thinking he was purchasing old copies of “Psycho” or “Nightmare,” that wound up getting some Spanish horror comics, which then wound up in my hands.

These were not magazine-sized, but the size of a TV Guide. They had titles like “Escorpion” and “Fantom.” And, if American horror comics were sexed up, these displayed a degree of graphic sexuality that made underground comics seem tame by comparison — especially since the horror of these comics was frequently mixed with gruelling images of sexual violence. Generally, the tales, as far as I could make out, were simple ones of supernatural revenge, but this structure gave the creators license to create scenes of genuine sadism.

These books should certainly never have gotten into the hands of a child, but, then, I grew up in the ’70s, which I remember as a clash between too much sophistication and not enough. Book vendors would naively sell us copies of “Wifey” by Judy Blume, an author well-known for writing juvenile fiction, but who also produced Erica Jong-styled adult fiction with vivid depictions of sexuality. We read “Flowers in the Attic,” perhaps the trashiest book ever written, openly in classrooms. The woods were filled with bongs and copies of “Oui.” The world of adults kept leaking into the world of children, almost aways under the eyes of unknowing adults.

This is a protracted intro, I know, but I am going to talk about Pedro Almodovar’s film “The Skin I Live In,” and I have no point of comparison except those Spanish comic books from my childhood. This is a film that is not unlike other pieces by Almodovar, in that it seems to either be attempting to elevate low popular culture to high art, or perhaps invigorate high art by smashing into it influences from melodrama, soap operas, exploitation films and similar cultural detritus. His films have long made use of disquieting sexual themes, including linking sex to violence, and creating circumstances of perplexingly ambiguous sexual violence.

It’s all there in “Skin,” but, now, more than ever before, Almodovar’s influence seems to be those Spanish horror comics I wrote about. It’s very difficult to discuss this film without spoiling important plot points, so forgive me if I am a bit circumspect, but the film tells of a mad scientist (played with weary gravity by longtime Almodovar castmember Antonio Banderas) who has kidnapped a woman (Elena Anaya) and is performing experiments on her. There is an assault by a man in a tiger costume, a flashback to an explosive car crash, a mad teenager, and a protracted and deeply unsettling act of surgical revenge. It sounds like a horror movie, and, indeed, loosely borrows its plot from a thriller called “Tarantula” by Thierry Jonquet.

But Almodovar’s mood in this film is like that of Banderas — sullen and contemplative. Almodovar described the film as being “a horror story without screams or frights,” and, indeed, the central image isn’t one of violence, but that of a woman in a catsuit and mask, like a character from an especially mod heist film. And the theme of the film doesn’t seem to be fear, but instead a perverse take on Stockholm syndrome, when hostages start to sympathize with their captors. In this instance, both the hostage and the captor seem to have developed a perverse love for each other.

This is a different sort of horror, one that doesn’t seek to startle or shock, but instead one that crawls under your skin, creating a sense of unease and discomfort that last long after the film has ended. I’m an adult now, well into my middle age, but Almodovar reminds me that I can still be upset by the world of adults.

Podcast: Jordan, Jesse, Go!

fiveminutesintothefuture — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 16:15:00 -0500

I’ve been listening to a lot of the podcast called Jordan, Jesse Go! lately, and I’m a bit uncertain as to why. Certainly the show has its enjoyable qualities, which would encourage an occasional — or even weekly — listen. It consists of about an hour of gabbing between two friends. The first is Jesse Thorn, who also hosts The Sound of Young America, a very good interview show that, from the sound of things, may soon be changing its name. The second is Jordan Morris, a comic performer and occasional television show personality. The two have spent years making each other laugh, starting with a radio show at their college radio at UC-Santa Cruz, and so the show is regularly funny. They have frequent guests, often drawn from LA’s standup comedy community, a community that Jordan and Jesse could fairly be described as being boosters of. The results tend to be an atypically entertaining conversation between friends, at least in part because both Jordan and Jesse have great curiosity about the world, and like to discuss whatever is puzzling them the most at the moment.

But I have gone beyond being a weekly listener. I went back and downloaded all 198 episodes, representing about four years of podcasting and 12 days of continuous listening. I’ve worked my way through about the first year, and that’s quite a commitment to a single podcast, especially one that is, for the most part, just schmoozing. And I am not sure I will listen to all of it, but, for the moment, there’s something about it I find encouraging.

It only took a few episodes for the podcast to lock into shape. It went untitled for a few episodes, and then the pair settled on Jordan, Jesse, Go!, and it was off to the races, including a distinctive, children’s record style theme song by the Free Design called “Love You.” The edit they use for the podcast highlights the song’s middle section, which is a list of juvenalia: “Bicycles, tricycles, candy sticks.” etc.

The song is especially apt. I don’t imagine there was any great deliberation about this, and there is no way the pair could have plotted out the course of four years’ worth of podcasting. But what interests me about “Jordan, Jesse, Go!” is that, perhaps inadvertently, the pair have created a show that is primarily about growing up.

Both were somewhat young when the podcast began — early 20s. Both were starting their respective careers, and were new to Los Angeles. And so the show has charted the experiences of seeing a new city with a transplant’s eyes. It has documented Jordan’s odd career in the trenches of cable television, and Jesse’s growing audience as a podcaster and public radio interviewer. As the show progressed, the two became more entrenched in the local comedy scene, and guests transformed from first-timers into repeat visitors, and, in a few cases, were added to Thorn’s developing mini-empire of podcasts.

This is the sort of thing we might see on any podcast or radio show that spans a half-decade. But there is more to it. Jordan Morris, in particular, has used the show to crowdsource his transition into adulthood — he has a very keen sense that the sort of things that worked when he was a college student are going to increasingly seem inappropriate as he gets older, and has repeatedly reached out to his audience for suggestion on how to dress like an adult, how to do the sorts of things adults do, and how to behave like an adult. This is done genially and unhurriedly — one doesn’t get the sense that Morris feels like some developmentally stunted manchild. But one does get the sense that Morris understand that the world of adults is not like the world of children, and that we can offer each other advice and suggestions on this shared experience.

The same is true of Thorn, although perhaps not as plainly. Jesse Thorn doesn’t regularly make his experience of growing up into group projects on the program. He does, however, spend time discussing the experience, and he’s had quite a few over the life of the show, including getting married and having a child. In the first year of broadcast, he recounted an especially painful story of getting a dog and then, just as his affection for the little fellow had deepened into the sort of passionate love affair we humans sometimes have with our pets, having to put the animal down due to illness. He spent 18 minutes discussing this in deliberate, intimate, unsparing terms, and later seemed a little apologetic about the fact.

He needn’t have been. Nowadays it seems like every single comedian has started their own podcast, and they tend to be pretty glib and pretty shallow. There’s a place for that, of course. But we also need podcasts from people like Jordan Morris and Jesse Thorn.

Or, at least, I do. I feel like I have spent the past six years in the company of people who not only refuse to grow up, but have taken the exact personality traits that mark them as immature and claimed them as sources of pride. And I am in my 40s now, and have seen how this sort of thing can calcify during somebody’s 30s, so that mild neuroses and vaguely immature behavior gradually turns into somebody’s defining characteristics. The people who possess this sort of behavior often see themselves as quirky, or uncompromising, or whatever other attractive euphemism they seize on to describe their refusal to grow up. But to those of us who are their friends or coworkers, it is frankly exhausting.

So I suppose this is why I have been listening to the podcast so often. Because, for an hour or so, now and then, it is nice to spend time in the company of people who aren’t afraid to grow up, and approach it as an adventure, or as an experience worth having and talking about.

Film: The Catechism Cataclysm

fiveminutesintothefuture — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:41:00 -0400

I recently mentioned attending “Punisher: War Zone” at the New Beverly as part of Patton Oswalt’s Deeper in the Dark series, but there was another film playing on that bill, and I feel I should mention it, as it’s utterly mad.

The film is titled “The Catechism Cataclysm,” made by a man named Todd Rohal, who the internet tells me was once badly frightened as a boy when several Scout leader faked their own deaths as part of a first aid demonstration. Word was he was working on a film about that experience. I cannot say for certain that this film was the result, but it wouldn’t be an unfair guess, as this is a film about a canoe trip that goes very badly.

The film is built around the considerable and very particular talents of Steve Little. The actor is best known for his work on “Eastbound and Down,” where he plays a band teacher with a mixture of oppressive sincerity and spectacular thickness. Here he plays a variation of that — an awkward manchild who has somehow wound up as a priest, and still nurses a childlike fascination for his sister’s high school boyfriend, played by Robert Longstreet, who has aged into a gruff, disappointed spotlight operator for Ice Capades-style shows. The two take a day off to canoe together, despite the fact that Longstreet has almost no memory of Little.

Longstreet’s character has a knack for telling short, strange, ambiguous stories about people thrust together by a universe with a perverse sense of humor, and he doesn’t realize it, but he’s living one of those stories. Their canoe trip starts off as a series of amiable, if combative, conversations. But as they work their way through their beer supply and realize they may have become lost, the two grow increasingly irritated with each other. Further, the whole film has been interrupted by smash edits and roaring metal guitar chords, both suggesting a horror film, rather than a road comedy.

Eventually, three fellow travels join them. Two of them are young women from Japan and one is an African-American man in a track suit, reading glasses, and a murderous glare. They insist their names are Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Jim, respectively, and they have brought some sort of electronic musical device with them. And this is the moment the film goes off the rails, and I refuse to explain further, except that it ends with a protracted scene of Steve Little running through the woods, sobbing and gibbering.

What I have skipped is likely to outrage a percentage of audience members. No less than Hitchcock complained about these sorts of narrative events, saying that putting surprises in a film is a gimmick and unlikely to satisfy an audience. He was right, to a certain extent. It’s very easy to have a story make a sudden, outrageous turn, and it tends to irritate audiences more than it entertains them. In this instance, however, the film has been hinting throughout that it will just break down into lunacy at some point.

I would argue that films often make this promise, and then deliver an utterly quotidian idea of madness. It’s rare that a movie offers something genuinely demented, as this one does. I watched it with a certain fear that, when the events ended, we would discover that they were a fantasy or a dream. But, no, the film refuses to take back anything it has done, and refuses to explain any of it. To my tastes, the results were hilarious and horrifying in equal measure. It never really stops being a comedy, although a decidedly oddball one — Steve Little’s eventual hysterical attempt to sum up the events of the evening are a comic tour de force. But his fear is sharpened by the fact that there is real reason for it, and for the fact that they are beyond comprehension. There’s real horror there, and it is a horror that I’m not sure I have seen before.

For one night, the usual rules of the world were turned off. The universe expressed its sense of humor, and it turned out to be more perverse and mad than could have been predicted.

Art: Neck Face and Fuck This Life at New Image Art

fiveminutesintothefuture — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 01:25:00 -0400

I want to take a moment to talk about going to a recent exhibit at the New Image Art Gallery on Santa Monica, because it was extraordinarily satisfying. You know you’re going to see something worthwhile when its a bit of an ordeal. Art is always best when there is a velvet rope thrown across it, either literally or figuratively.

There were posters hung around Los Angeles that look like an invitation to an especially crappy punk rock show — a hand-lettered photocopy that read “Neck Face & Fuck This Life: 2 of Amerika’s Most Wanted,” and how could that be more exciting! Punk rock shows are best when they are crappy, and the poster could only have been better if Amerika had been spelled with three K’s, rather than one. Best still, Neck Face and Fuck This Life are not bands, but artists.

John Waters once told me that the best galleries are impossible to get into. I had never had this experience until the New Image. When I went to see the show, the gallery was closed and all its lights were off, but there was a note on the door explaining that the gallery office was just a few doors down, and one could, if one wanted, call over or even just knock at the office to be let into the show. So I walked next door and knocked. Eventually, a puzzled looking, punky young woman appeared, cell phone pressed to her ear, looking bewildered. I told her that I wanted to see the show, but could return later, if this was a bad time.

“Um … ” she answered, looking confused. She thought about it for a while, as though she had just now found out there was a gallery nearby and wasn’t sure what to do. “Um … No. No, I can let you in.”

I walked to the gallery and waited for at least five minutes — long enough to suspect I had just been tricked, and she had fled out the back way. But, no, eventually the back door opened and the young woman entered, dressed in a parka with a fur hood, as though she had just trudged through the tundra to reach the gallery. She opened the door and flipped on the lights, then went to a chair at the back of the gallery and collapsed in it, seemingly exhausted, phone still to her ear.

The gallery is long and narrow, and had a dozen pieces by each artist facing each other. Fuck This Life’s work consisted, for the most part, of an assemblage of found images, primarily of women dressed as witches, hardcore pornography, pictures of actual (and immensely disturbing) violence, and a surprising number of images of Lindsay Lohan. It’s the sort of art that one doesn’t quite know how to react to immediately, and I must confess that I was a bit taken aback by the images of violence. But there, in the upper left hand corner of one collection, was a picture of a lynched man. And not just any lynched man, but William Brown, who was killed by a mob in Omaha in 1919. I once wrote a play about William Brown, and it has been my most successful. It was hard for me to argue that Fuck This Life had no right to make use of such an image when I had based an entire play around it, and so, touché, Fuck This Life. I don’t know how you knew I was coming, but you made your point.

Opposite was Neck Face, a Sacramento-born anonymous graffiti artist. His work consisted almost entirely of drawings of devils. But “drawings” is too sophisticated a term for what he produced. The illustrations looked very much like the sort of thing a very bored, very stoned teenager might attempt with their non-dominant hand when there is a lull in shop class. The drawings are crabbed and primitive, and consist mostly of jokes about alcohol that might have been lifted from a cocktail napkin. In one, the devil is vomiting into a toilet, while above him, in bold cartoon letters, are the words “It’s a spewnami!” In another, the devil looks at a haggard woman with a martini glass and declares “Uhh, you look like I need another drink.”

Idiotic, I know, but I enjoy deliberate idiocy in art. It felt like the punk show that the posters seemed to promise — at least, it felt like the meticulously mindless provocation of The Ramones. I looked at the art and felt something that I always like to feel when I look at art: The urge to cry out “Oh, come on!” Sometimes the best provocation art can offer is to leave you wondering if it’s art at all that you just looked at, or some elaborate prank, with you as its victim. And it’s not uncommon for people to storm out, angrily declaring that a hoax is afoot, and the emperor has no clothes.

Sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes it is a hoax or a prank. But I always think it’s worth sticking around for a while, just to look. Because, every so often, the emperor looks gorgeous naked.

Film: Drive

fiveminutesintothefuture — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 22:55:00 -0400

“Drive” is getting a lot of people excited nowadays. It’s a heist-gone-wrong film, mostly set around the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles — one of my old neighborhoods, and I just complained that films rarely actually look like the places where they are set. But this looks like Echo Park, with its peeled-paint storefronts and unexpectedly lush esplanade. This was once the home of Steve McQueen, who was a fan of fast cars, and Art Ingels, an Indy race car builder who was also responsible for building the very first go-cart.

I mention these things because the unnamed main character in the film, played by Ryan Gosling, is a grease money and aspiring stock car racer. On occasion, at night, he’s the driver for heists, which we see in the very first scene in the film. We also see that he’s very, very good at driving — the sequence isn’t a car chase, but, instead, a cat and mouse game between Gosling and the cops, in which he is repeatedly able to evade them because he seems to know every little corner street in Los Angeles. And so Echo Park is a good location for his character, and it’s also appropriate that it seems set in and around the actual Echo Park.

This is a terrifically interesting film, and not just because it’s a solid story. “Drive” is as much a cinematic patchwork as any film by Quentin Tarantino, but it’s a lot less showy about it. Tarantino approaches film with the instincts of a collage-maker, combining hundreds of previous films into a crazy quilt patchwork that always tip their hat to their sources. His films are hyperkinetic, often benefiting from the rush of sudden transitions and a mad outpouring of entertainingly delirious dialogue.

“Drive” is very nearly the opposite. In some ways, there is no missing its influences. There is the opening credits, as an example, featuring pink handwriting that is obviously borrowed from 1983’s “Risky Business” — initially a puzzling choice, until you remember that the film told the story of a young man who crossed a local criminal, and features an exhilarating car chase in a Porsche. There are scenes in “Drive” that seem to deliberately evoke Michael Mann’s crime films from the ’80s, such as “Thief,” and the soundtrack, which recalls ’80s synthpop, might have been lifted from “To Love and Die in LA.” And, more than anything, Ryan Gosling is meant to evoke his Echo Park neighbor, Steve McQueen.

Gosling isn’t McQueen, of course; the latter had a wry, hangdog handsomeness, while Gosling looks a bit like a newspaper caricature of a pretty boy, with sharp features and a heroic jaw. But here Gosling shares McQueen’s laconic ease onscreen, as well as his taste for casual workingman’s clothes (Gosling is often in blue jeans and a white club jacket with a scorpion on the back; when he drives, he wears leather driving gloves). And he has almost no dialogue in this film — he and director Nicolas Winding Refn reportedly went through the script and erased any line of dialogue that seemed superfluous, which sometimes included answers to questions. People will ask him things in the film, and Gosling will just stare back, a strange, private smile playing along the corner of his mouth. His lack of dialogue means that he and other characters often communicate by staring at each other for a really long time, grinning. It’s like the whole film is in a private joke, and I suspect that’s part of its appeal — it’s hard to not want to be in on that joke as well.

Unlike Tarantino’s films, all of these borrowed details seem to be part of one complete film — one that is, in fact, a sort of standard-issue crime caper that used to be very well done in the ’70s, and is almost never well done nowadays. A pawn shop is robbed. A man is killed. There is a double-cross. And then the bodies start piling up. Crime is primarily a world of attrition, and when things really go wrong, nobody gets out alive. Director Refn takes great pains to emphasize that here — gunshots are deafening, and bloodshed is grotesque. Nowadays we see so much violence on the screen that it is easy to be numbed by it, but Refn seeks to un-numb us, again in the great tradition of ’70s cinema. (There’s another film that came out this weekend based on a ’70s film, “Straw Dogs,” by Sam Peckinpah, who was especially curious about this subject; out of the blue it’s 1971 all over again.)

There’s a moment in the film in which Gosling goes to confront a mobster, and Gosling wears a latex mask from a film set. It’s an enormous thing, bald and brutish, and it’s one of the few moments where the film seems to have taken great liberties with mood — it could be a scene from a slasher film. Even still, in a film in which violence is always treated as a disturbing spectacle, this feels appropriate. Nobody dies well, and sometimes death takes an especially bizarre form. It’s no wonder the film is dedicated to cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, who specialized in bizarre forms. This is very much a mainstream film trying to be a cult film. And I suspect it will succeed, both as a blockbuster and a midnight movie.