Three Films Make A Post: The Love Story is Never the Whole Story

Deep Water (2022): Adrian Lyne’s attempt at adapting Patricia Highsmith is most definitely the worst Highsmith adaptation I’ve seen. It’s not a terrible film, exactly, but Lyne, as is the director’s wont, is all about the surface level thrills, without any of the depth and insight into broken and often horrible people you get from Highsmith and most adaptations of her work. So there are many slick looking scenes of Ana de Armas being naked and Ben Affleck repeating his performance in Gone Girl, but worse in so far as Affleck mostly goes for constipation than actual acting. There is, alas, little to see on screen that ever provides any insight into why the characters here are the way they are, the way they explain themselves to themselves when they are alone; I’d love to believe the film is supposed to be about exactly that inner emptiness, but neither film nor actors do anything to convince me.

Even less well realized is the portrayal of the social connections between these bored rich people. Most of the time, you can’t even tell in whose house these bores are partying.

Strawberry Mansion (2021): There’s quite a bit of positive buzz about this twee SF indie arthouse comedy thing directed and written by Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney (who also star and act a little in here, respectively) in mid-brow critical circles (we are of course always low-brow around here). It is, admittedly, difficult to hate a film that’s so clearly made with as much blood, sweat and tears as this one is, and that has an aesthetic so genuinely its own. My problem is, said aesthetic is so unbearably, relentlessly twee (and I’m someone who loves Gondry, Wes Anderson etc), and the film’s main “they are putting ads into our dreams, maaaaan!” metaphor so simplistic and half-baked, I found myself reacting to the movie mostly with pained annoyance.

Lux Æterna (2019): This is never going to be my favourite Gaspar Noé movie. There’s a bit too much of the whiny tone particular arthouse filmmakers love to take on when speaking about the filmmaking process, not made better by couching it in irony, which ruins the middle part for me. What stays with me, however, are the early sequence of Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg talking – clearly improvising – about an actresses’ life in filmmaking country and witches, and the climax, when the whole film breaks down into its director’s beloved epilepsy inducing visual and acoustic drone and the leads have rather fantastic breakdowns, swallowed by art, the shittiness surrounding it, or the whims of their director.

Three Films Make A Post: The Price Is Blood

Climax (2018): Leave it to very French director Gaspar Noé to make a film about a group of dancers getting dosed with LSD and going on a shared trip of dance, sex, violence and death that can feel excessive and abstract at the same time, breaking taboos without getting smug about it. Stylistically, it goes through the sort of intensities of colour, movement and behaviour a viewer will by now expect of the director – an audience not okay with strobe lights and a lot of shrieking need not apply – yet the film never feels to be the wrong kind of self-indulgent, Noé always getting to a point eventually even if his films seem to be meandering. Style in this director’s case is still an important part of the substance of his movies.

Under the Silver Lake (2018): This, the film writer/director David Robert Mitchell made after the brilliant It Follows, on the other hand is very self-indulgent indeed. It’s yet another one of those LA movies apparently made explicitly so that filmmakers existing in their LA bubble can wink and smile smugly at the other inhabitants of said bubble watching, full of in-jokes only the LA-obsessed will tolerate and apparently vacant of any wish to communicate with the rest of the world. Add to this general air of group masturbation a pie made out of badly digested Pynchon and Lynch, and you have a film I want to punch in the face rather badly, even though I’ve only got a tiny non-punching guy’s fist available, and am not into punching on general principle anyway.

There’s certainly a lot of technically excellent filmmaking on display here, but I’ll wait for that to be applied to something other than a bloated, 140 minute in-joke, thank you very much. Though, given how different this one is from Mitchell’s other two features, and those from one another, I might not have too long to wait; at least, one can’t blame the man for simply repeating himself.

Breaking Away (1979): Rather better at using an actual place – in this case the somewhat unglamorous and therefor infinite more interesting Bloomington, Indiana – to actually speak about something of interest to people not living there is this coming-of-age comedy by Peter Yates (also a man of very different films). It treats the feelings of young working class men of not belonging into the world of their parents but also being blocked from participating in the world the people born rich or richer seem to enjoy so much with delicacy, dignity, and a sense of whimsy, not going the poverty porn route of painting everyone and everything in the bleakest possible way yet also not looking away from shit.


Yates’s treatment of the material is so clear-eyed and even-handed, he even sells a climactic cycling event as meaningful and exciting to a guy like me who could care less about people riding bikes in circles (even though it’s a nice metaphor for the human condition). There’s also brilliant, idiosyncratic use of classical music in a context where most movies would go for Springsteen or would-be Springsteen, and great performances by Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern, a tiny Jackie Earle Haley, Barbara Barrie and Paul Dooley.

Three Films Make A Post: Watch. Learn. Don't have nightmares.

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014): If you’re like me, and going into Mark Hartley’s documentary expecting to learn anything more about Cannon and its films than you could via a Wikipedia entry, you’ll quickly realize you’ve come to the wrong film for that. This is nearly exclusively a series of chronologically sorted anecdotes and jokes as told by various talking heads once involved with Cannon. Some of the anecdotes are funny, and the film is well paced, but I can’t say I found myself all that riveted by this one, perhaps because I expect from a 100 minutes plus documentary to actually have something to say about its object, or because I found the large swathes of irony the filmmakers use to hide their own opinions about Cannon and what it was annoying. It’s a rather un-visual film too, with a lot of short, often decidedly random feeling clips from Cannon films breaking up lots of footage of interview subjects sitting in front of a black background, and very little reason for this not to be a piece made for the radio. But then, I’m quite clearly not the audience this was made for.

Last Shift (2014): Rookie cop Jessica’s (Juliana Harkavy) first shift as an actual cop is the last shift in an old police precinct, where she’s working a night watch job alone. Unfortunately, the station is haunted as all get out, and a past concerning a dead cult leader and Jessica’s own father just won’t stay buried. For most of its running time, Anthony DiBlasi’s satanic cult leader ghost movie (that’s a genre, right?) is a rather focused and effective little number. Sure, there’s a decided lack in originality on display, and the film has the tendency to throw in the whole kitchen sink of spooky phenomena but DiBlasi handles most of this stuff with enough aplomb it results in a rather entertaining, if not particularly new feeling, time.

Enter the Void (2009): I had avoided this particular void until now because most of what I had read about Gaspar Noé’s inspiring and self-indulgent head trip of a movie let me assume this to be one fast, flashy, loud, yet still very long piece of sensory overload.

It’s rather the opposite, apart from the sensory overload, though, the film winning its often dream-like quality through a calm and floating approach to, well, everything, Noé hitting the spot where a just ridiculously showy sounding visual approach feels rather natural, and like the only way this particular narrative could have been realized. The floatiness of, well, being dead, makes a fantastic contrast to the rawness of the characters’ emotions.

From time to time, particularly in the last third or so, the film does drift off into moments I don’t think are supposed to be funny yet are, pat Freudianisms make themselves known, and the silliest money shot never to have made it into a porn movie makes an appearance. Of course, Noé makes up for that with what looks like a deep compassion for some deeply messed up characters to me, as well as with the little fact there’s  little else quite like Enter the Void.