Panos Cosmatos’s violent revenge thriller is like every other violent revenge thriller and yet unique, owing mainly to its stubborn insistence on describing a specific place and time that has no discernible purpose. Set somewhere in the California wilderness in 1983, Mandy could have been set in a suburb of Indianapolis in 2010 with no change in theme or plot, and yet Cosmatos keeps throwing signifiers at us, as if he expects the viewer to pick up allusions that might explain the protagonist’s disturbing behavior. In that regard, the only thing that makes sense is the casting: Nicolas Cage may not have been born to play the grieving lumberjack, Red, but given his recent tendency to take every part offered to him, including terrible ones, he seems preternaturally suited to play this sympathetic monster.
The title character is Red’s lover (or wife? it’s not clear), played by Andrea Riseborough. If the time frame means anything, it forces this couple to live in true isolation, before the Internet and social media, but because they seem to be living in a cabin far from even the smallest rural town, their situation is already that of outcasts, and it’s easy to form the opinion that Red’s desultory but often creepy demeanor means he can’t live with other humans comfortably. His love for Mandy, perhaps as a corollary, is pure and direct. It eventually becomes obvious that Red is a recovering alcoholic, allowing Cage to channel some of the latent self-loathing from his Oscar-winning gambit in Leaving Las Vegas. The age difference is also played up. Red’s peculiar form of damage could be PTSD (Vietnam?) or simply the healing of scars from a time when men were supposed to be men, while Mandy has a kind of post-hippie chic about her, with her vintage rock T-shirts and flair for nature.
This idyll is compromised formally by Cosmatos’s use of a harsh synth score by the late Johann Johannsson and a muddy palette overflowing with deep reds and oranges, and soon enough the idyll is shattered narratively with an unannouced and seemingly random home invasion by a religious cult headed by a Jesus-wannabe named Sand Jeremiah (Linus Roache). They kidnap and drug Mandy while Red is away, torture and expose her to Jeremiah’s misogynistic brand of spiritual redemption and then kill her for making fun of it, an extremely clever way of getting the viewer to identify with the victim, since Sand is a ridiculous figure from the get-go. Still, he seems to have some sort of conduit to genuine demons, who double as a biker gang. When Red exacts his very messy revenge using everything from chainsaws to a kind of mystical axe he forges himself, it’s as much a release from the self-hatred he’s contained as a former addict as it is a righteous unleashing of Biblical might. It’s also supremely macho but not in an off-putting way, since it’s presented as a kind of bad LSD trip and thus beyond the purview of sexual politics—heavy metal culture for woke aeshetes, and it’s powerful while being totally ludicrous.
Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645).
Mandy home page in Japanese.
photo (c) 2017 Mandy Films, Ltd.
In it’s own limited way, the biopic of the British band Queen is as narratively compromised as the group’s creative output was musically compromised. Leader Freddie Mercury was always open about how his approach to rock was not doctrinnaire; that while he loved rock music and what it had undergone in the post-Beatles world of English pop, he loved theatricality even more, and so many of Queen’s best-loved songs combine prog-rock technique with Broadway glitz, and the movie honors this legacy by avoiding anything that smacks of subtlety or even verisimilitude. When people say that Rami Malek’s impersonation of Mercury is the best thing about the movie, what they’re saying is that the actor falls for Mercury’s preternatural need to show off. Even in the expository passages, showing how Mercury overcame his immigrant insecurities, his self- esteem problems, and, eventually, his hesitancy to acknowledge his homosexuality, you almost expect him to break into song in a bid to make these scenes even more emotionally fraught. Queen fans will love it, and Queen skeptics still won’t get it for the same reason.
The “Ten Years” series started in Hong Kong in 2015 with an omnibus of shorts depicting the former British territory ten years into the future, and was notably dystopian in tone, which is to be expected, and not just because of the city’s special circumstances of being stuck halfway between a Western-influenced conclave in Asia and the point-of-the-spear for China in the international economic order. Any movie that attempts to specifically predict what’s going to happen in the future is probably going to have cautionary aspects. In any case, Beijing was quite alarmed at the film, and it may have been that aspect which sparked similar productions using the concept in Taiwan, Thailand, and Japan.
The pleasures and edifications of Michael Moore’s latest broadside attack on the power elite comprise more of a mixed bag than any of his previous polemics, which tended to focus on a specific, albeit broadly characterized, subject matter. Though Donald Trump is the ostensible target, Moore ranges far and wide to explain the forces that he thinks conspired to get Trump elected, taking in everything from establishment Democrats to the mass media and even Gwen Stefani. And while Moore’s explications don’t always stand up to rigorous scrutiny as journalism, there’s less of his patented working-guy-confrontation shtick, which had been getting old more than a decade ago, and it makes all the difference in the world.
There’s an over-familiar quality to this movie about an elderly man coming to terms with his mortality that is both exacerbated and dismissed by its Indian setting. The story’s particulars—a man’s reckoning with the inevitable, his son’s reactionary intransigence, the comic second act that attempts to soften the blow of death before giving in to its terrifying inevitability—don’t differ substantially from other films of this sort, but by placing it all in the context of the holy city of Varnasi on the sacred Ganges River, it becomes more edifying, even, presumably, to Hindus.
Norman Oppenheimer (Richard Gere) is a freelance political fixer, and in popular fiction terms such a description conjures up visions of slick men in three-piece suits juggling cell phones and commanding transactions of millions of dollars in fees and payoffs. Norman is anything but. We first see him badgering his nephew, a lawyer named Philip Cohen (Michael Sheen), for the contact information of one of his clients. Though Norman talks as if he’s experienced in the world of political connections, Cohen’s reaction is caution veering toward alarm. There’s something between the two men that’s unexplained but points to general mistrust on Cohen’s part of not only Norman’s motives, but his effectiveness. Norman is a hustler, but unlike the stereotype, he’s not a particularly good one.
What’s immediately compelling about Aneesh Chaganty’s thriller is its cleverly curated mise en scene, which takes place on a computer desktop. The story unfolds in a series of screenshots depicting photo files, browser searches, chat messages, Tumblr posts, Facebook timelines, and, most provocatively, Skype conversations. By obviating the need for placing the viewer’s POV directly into the action, Chaganty has more control over the mystery elements of the story, which is just as well because that story is pretty trite.
Jackson Heights, located in the western part of Queens and serviced by numerous subway and bus lines, has been called the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in the world. Add to this legend the fact that it was the first place in New York City to launch an annual Gay Pride parade in the wake of the murder of a gay Latino man, and you’ve pretty much got the reason for why Frederick Wiseman spent the better part of 2014 patrolling the streets, hanging out at community meetings, and visiting the myriad small businesses that service the area. In Jackson Heights runs more than three hours, and yet you get the feeling that Wiseman only scratched the surface. His main concerns are commerce and ethnic dignity. He loves just pointing his camera at store fronts and dropping into nail salons, tattoo parlors, and gay bars just to see what’s going on. He also spends a lot of time with a group of Spanish-speaking business owners trying to come up with a strategy in their battle against developers who are finally targeting the neighborhood because it seems to be the last low-rent but vital commercial stronghold in not only New York City, but the whole New York metropolitan area. These confabs are fascinating in the way they not only explain what these people are up against, but also their philosophy about making business something that gives as much to the community as it takes.
Though the sardonic comic style that drives the best parts of this feature has become the default mode for Hollywood animation of late, the physical gags are more in line with the classic Looney Toons shorts of yesteryear, so it’s no surprise that Warners produced and distributes Smallfoot. Set in the Himalayas, the movie is given plenty of opportunity for characters to drop long distances into the snow, screaming all the way.
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