Hello folks, and what the heck is up. Personally, I’ve been feeling pretty good about my progress getting back into regular jogging – there were a disappointingly sedentary couple of years there, but I’ve recently been sticking to three runs a week, and feeling both physically and emotionally better for it. Anyway, we’ve got an excellent set of films to run through today, ranging from a David Lynch classic to some actual goddamn anime. Meanwhile, I’ve still been plugging away at One Piece, and recently wrote up a Whole Cake-centric exploration of family. I’m frankly not emotionally prepared for One Piece to exit my life, and you’ll be getting an article soon about how that feels as well, but for now I’m enjoying Wano with all the passion I can possibly muster. In the meantime, let’s peruse some fine film selections, as we sort through another Week in Review!
First up this week was Midnight Run, a road trip comedy starring Robert De Niro as Jack Walsh, a bounty hunter attempting to transport an obnoxiously friendly accountant (Charles Grodin) from New York to Los Angeles. Meanwhile, Grodin is simultaneously being pursued by the FBI (represented by Yaphet Kotto), as well as the mobsters he ripped off to the tune of fifteen million dollars.
Midnight Run sticks to the odd couple fundamentals, and wisely lets the chemistry between its absurdly talented cast carry the film. Grodin’s amiable persona is a perfect foil to De Niro’s implacable scowl, with much of the film’s humor arising from De Niro continuously failing to evoke the steely gravitas his roles generally embody. De Niro is over here snarling and brooding and conveying fifty shades of fatigue through one twitch of his eyebrow, while meanwhile Grodin is waving his arms and grinning and shouting “hey, whatcha doin’ Jack, whatcha doin’?”
Grodin eventually wins De Niro over, as these characters tend to, and their ultimate friendship is just as charming and lopsided as their earlier antagonism. Meanwhile, Yaphet Kotto’s intense magnetism, as well as his ability to snap between fierce and friendly on a dime, bring a remarkable sense of personality to a role that could easily have faded with a lesser actor. Basically, nothing about Midnight Run is surprising, but the actors chosen for the principal roles are so talented, and play off each other so well, that the film soars regardless. With a fine script that seems custom-tuned to highlight both Grodin’s energy and De Niro’s meaningful silences, Midnight Run is an altogether delightful watch.
After that, we checked out a film I’ve been meaning to see for a while, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Blue Velvet centers on a young college student named Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), who returns home to his idyllic American suburb after his father suffers a stroke. Jeffrey stumbles across a severed ear resting in a field, and with the help of the police chief’s daughter Sandy (Laura Dern), soon finds himself embroiled in a seedy nether-world he never knew existed.
Blue Velvet amplifies basically every Lynchian instinct I’ve come to recognize. The film takes place within that same timeless Americana of works like Wild at Heart or Twin Peaks, where the amenities of the eighties coexist with styles and sentiments of the fifties and sixties. This world is inherently, transparently false – it is a sun-bright façade over a rotting core, which was in Twin Peaks exemplified through the strange journey of Laura Palmer, and is here brought to life through Jeffrey’s morbid adventure.
The very first sequence of Blue Velvet essentially summarizes what it’s about. We begin with a treacly fifties pop song and the brightly lit suburbs – too brightly lit, and with colors too saturated to feel natural. Peace and domesticity seem to rule all, and then Jeffrey’s father collapses in his yard, a moment of suburban fantasy cut short by violence. Then the camera pans down, down, down into the grass, peering through soil to eventually reveal a sea of crawling insects, the true bedrock of our brightly lit society.
Over the course of this film, Jeffrey takes a misguided joy ride through that crawling sea, as he becomes preoccupied with a singer named Dorothy who’s suffering abuse from a dangerous man. Shots consistently emphasize how he is essentially stepping through a portal into another world – the ear canal of that severed ear serves as one of the first, but the stairs up to his fascination’s apartment also feel like a partition between realities. In that world, he is both literally and metaphorically cast as an observer, hiding in a closet as violence and sexual terrors are visited upon this woman he could not possibly understand. When he is discovered, he chooses to embrace this dark world – but he is not truly an inhabitant of it, and his attempts to play detective-hero are, ultimately, just a form of youthful lifestyle tourism.
Blue Velvet doesn’t outright condemn Jeffrey for his perspective – I mean, this is a David Lynch movie, so there aren’t going to be any easy moral conclusions. Instead, it more often revels in the strange disconnect of his traversal between worlds, with the distinct realities of the surface-world Sandy, Dorothy, and her wild abuser all featuring their own signature songs. Dorothy’s “Blue Velvet” is the liminal space between these distinct realities – she sings of beauty, but only in the past, and as if she’s staring at a world she could never inhabit. Jeffrey stares back from his own world, but the curtain separates them – and when she at last collapses, desperate for Jeffrey’s help, he withdraws into his surface world.
In the film’s most electrifying sequence, Jeffrey is literally taken on a joyride by Dorothy’s oppressor, during which he is fully submerged in this foreign world. His visit to a drug dealer’s apartment feels like something out of a fever dream, and when he is eventually beaten for his transgressions, it is to the tune of his enemy’s favorite song, while a stripper dances erratically on his car. It’s nightmare and farce all at once, an experience so distant from his own that someone like Sandy literally cannot face it. When confronted with the consequences of Jeffrey’s choices, and a naked woman screaming that “he put his sin inside me,” Sandy flees outright. “I love you, but I can’t, I can’t…” she later tells him.
Blue Velvet never resolves the tension between its worlds, because that tension cannot be resolved, because one of these worlds is a comforting illusion and the other is an intolerable reality. Its surface characters flee back into the American idyll, content with having “resolved things” at the first sign of an exit ramp. The last shots feel like the most deceitful sequence in a film that delights in lies and half-truths, with their ostensible gaiety only emphasizing the question of what actually happened. Perhaps, as Blue Velvet’s survivors decide, it is better not to know.
Next up was Lucky, a recent Shudder addition about May Ryer (Rhea Grant), a self-help author whose house begins to suffer nightly invasions from a dangerous man. The introduction of this man is one of the film’s greatest moments, as her half-asleep husband Ted (Dhruv Uday Singh) waves away her claims of a man in the yard. “Oh, that’s just the man,” he says. “What man?” “The man who comes into our house to kill us every night.”
Ted’s completely blasé attitude towards The Man Who Tries To Kill Us Every Night immediately grounds Lucky in a beautifully deadpan, absurdist reality. The film’s first few minutes are some of its best, as May comes to understand that basically no one else in the world is worried about this mysterious (and seemingly invincible) assailant, because that’s just how things are now. C’mon May, there’s a guy who tries to kill us every night, and that’s how it is. Why are you getting so irrational about this?
That said, Lucky’s unabashedly surreal tone is also one of its greatest limitations. As May continues to defend and investigate this mysterious man, we are given almost nothing to hold onto in an emotional sense. No element of her reality is consistent, and the supporting cast are all stilted, zombie-like cyphers, meaning the story’s “drama” essentially just exists on the level of metaphor. The film is clearly about how society has normalized violence against women, and how their experiences are minimized or distrusted as a general rule. That comes through quite well – but by abandoning any sense of character or place in service of that metaphor, the film comes off as more of a thought experiment than an actual story.
What solidity the story does possess is entirely a reflection of Grant’s excellent performance. Grant is assigned the difficult task of portraying a mentally fraying person in a world where everyone else has already lost their minds, and she pretty much nails it. That, plus the film’s unique style of surrealism, make for an interesting, if also structurally unsound experience.
Finally, we checked out a Makoto Shinkai film I’d never seen before, Children Who Chase Lost Voices. I’ve gotten pretty accustomed to Shinkai’s general star-crossed lovers model at this point, so Lost Voices came as a bit of a surprise narrative-wise. The film seems to represent Shinkai deliberately stepping outside of his comfort zone, and creating something more in the classic adventure model. In doing so, he creates a film that feels like a Shinkai-tinted tribute to Miyazaki movies.
The similarities are close and numerous enough for Lost Voices to feel like a genuine pastiche of Miyazaki films, borrowing most heavily from Castle in the Sky, but also containing fragments of Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke. In the film, a young girl named Asuna (along with her cat companion, of course) journeys into the underworld, hoping to reunite with a strange boy she met only briefly. Along the way, she and her grief-stricken teacher come across an array of strange wonders, fighting off strange beasts as they approach the Door of Life and Death.
In retrospect, Children Who Chase Lost Voices feels like a bit of an odd middle child in Shinkai’s development. It’s more polished than his earlier films, and generally “works” as a narrative, though its reflections on grief felt a little too thinly articulated to have much impact. But it lacks the melodramatic gut-punch of his recent films, where he seems to have finally squared his desire to make heart-on-sleeve romances with the fantasy blockbuster template. The film’s biggest limitation is likely its character art and animation. Lost Voices lacks the rich, incidental expressiveness of the films it’s emulating, and thus cannot match their ability to construct character through acting alone, or carry a scene purely through the playfulness of motion. It’s an interesting, worthwhile watch, but ultimately can’t quite emerge from the shadow of its influences.
