Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I have a confession to make: I am currently typing to you from some point in the indeterminate past, having watched so many recent movies that I’ve actually developed a “Week in Review buffer.” Look, it’s not my fault: first we ran out of new One Piece episodes, and then we beat our Playstation 5 games, and now we’re back to relying on the endless bounty of cinematic history to keep us distracted. I’m currently writing this introduction while gazing in horror at the list of films I’ve already got to review for next week’s post, so I suppose you can all be assured that The Content Will Flow for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, please enjoy this fresh set of film reflections, and know I’m hard at work excavating the content mines of the future!
Our first selection this week was Christine, which I believe completes my collection of John Carpenter’s essential and quasi-essential selections. It was a bit exhilarating to realize I’ve run through the whole career of one of my favorite directors, which helped lessen the sting of Christine itself being an emphatically mediocre entry.
Carpenter himself has admitted he just directed the film because it was difficult to get any projects approved after the failure of The Thing (yep, his masterpiece was actually a failure on release), and that the fundamental concept of a killer car isn’t that frightening. That holds true throughout Christine; the titular car is always more goofy than menacing, but fortunately, the film works well enough purely as a teen culture time capsule. With Christine essentially drawing its new owner Arnie into the aesthetic of a ‘50s greaser, the film contrasts ‘50s and ‘70s youth to engaging effect, and Carpenter is too accomplished of an entertainer for the movie to ever feel genuinely boring. Not an essential film by any means, but a reasonably entertaining ride for any other Carpenter completionists.
After that we checked out Blood Simple, the debut production of the Coen brothers. Blood Simple is precisely what you’d expect from the young Coens on a shoestring budget: a black comedy neo-noir character drama, brimming with their idiosyncratic dialogue and bleakly humorous worldview. Blood Simple also features the debut of Frances McDormand as Abby, the wife of a cruel bar owner named Julian, who cheats on her husband with Ray, one of the bartenders. Unfortunately for them, Julian has already hired a PI to track his wife – and when he learns of her infidelity, his thoughts turn from jealousy to revenge.
As in almost every Coen brothers movie, everyone in Blood Simple is simply terrible at crime, and their fumbling efforts ignite a pyre that threatens to take all of them with it. For the Coens, the appeal of crime doesn’t seem to be the glamor or danger, though they’re capable of celebrating both. Instead, they’re interested in both the white-hot feelings that inspire a crime of passion, and the steady disintegration as that choice winds to its inevitable end.
Blood Simple’s characters are clumsy and vulnerable, ill-equipped for the consequences of the choices they’ve made, while the Coens light and shoot their misadventures with a skill that could only come from careful study of noir and westerns. And through it all, Frances McDormand proceeds with the seemingly effortless submergence into character that would ultimately affirm her as one of the best actors of her generation. Blood Simple isn’t fully developed Coen, but hearing McDormand reflect that “you and Julian don’t say much. But the things he doesn’t say are mean, while the things you don’t say are nice,” it’s clear that their genius in both constructing films and choosing collaborators is already flourishing.
Next up we checked out Stardust, an adaptation of a Neil Gaiman story about a boy in search of a falling star, who ends up finding a great deal more magic and adventure than he intended. Stardust is Gaiman at his most playful, a whimsical fantasy romance that proceeds with the cheeky inventiveness and sudden turns of a just-conjured bedtime story. His tale is winding and weird, demonstrating his keen study of classic fairy tales, as well as his ability to wander outside of traditional narrative lines in order to challenge them, or simply to show us something new. The cast clearly understand the nature of the material; Claire Danes and Charlie Cox are charming as the leads, but it’s Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert de Niro who steal the show, each of them chewing on as much scenery as possible in their larger-than-life roles. With a solid cast (outside of a brief appearance by that jackass Gervais), reasonable visual effects, and Gaiman’s quality myth-making to guide it, Stardust makes for a pleasant, refreshingly original fable.
We followed that with Legacy of Lies, one of the fifty million action films Scott Adkins has filmed in the last four years. That framing might seem like a critique, but honestly, I have yet to watch an Adkins film I dislike; the dude can kick and punch like nobody’s business, and seeing him get physical in a fresh hallway or prison cell or whatever is always a good time. Legacy of Lies features plenty of all that, boasting some solid choreography to accent Adkins’ inherent physical abilities. And Adkins also gets to show off a bit of personal charm, evincing a convincing warmth with his character’s daughter. Few of Adkins’ costars can act (heroine Yuliia Sobol is a particular drag), and the plot is also terrible, but is that why you’re watching an Adkins movie with a title like this? No, obviously not, so sit down and enjoy the violence.
Next up was Donnie Darko, a film that I, as a mopey teen growing up in the American ‘00s, had obviously seen several times already. I’ve mostly outgrown my inherent Donnie-ness, but this film is still an effective portrait of adolescent alienation, combined with a confidently ambiguous scifi/horror twist. Donnie Darko’s outright horror-adjacent scenes are likely its most effective, drawing incredible value from that freaky bunny mask, and possessing a confidence of function that greatly amplifies their surreal impact.
From a position two decades on, Donnie Darko also feels interesting as a snapshot of two eras in conversation: the cultural touchstones of the late ‘80s, reframed through the authorial perspective of the late ‘90s. Donnie’s cynicism seems mirrored by the director’s own, resulting in a streak of meanness that hems the narrative’s reach, making it more of a comment on teen anger than human nature more generally. Also, Drew Barrymore makes for the least convincing English teacher I have ever seen. An interesting, messy, distinctive artifact.
Our last film of the week was Bullet Head, a film about a group of thieves who hide out in an abandoned factory after a job gone wrong, only to discover that factory is now populated by an underground dog fighting ring. Pursued by an angry mastiff, the thieves take shelter where they can, while also finding some time to reflect on their own past relationships with the animal kingdom.
Bullet Head takes a somewhat preposterous premise and absolutely commits to it, resulting in a surprisingly cathartic revenge film. First off, it helps that the core cast are all A-listers: our two main thieves are played by Adrien Brody and John Malkovich, while the ring is owned by a smoldering Antonio Banderas. These stars are given plenty of juicy material to work with; rather than focusing on chasing or heisting, most of Bullet Head is spent taking shelter, as Brody, Malkovich, and their young addict compatriot (Rory Culkin) wait for a replacement driver, reflecting on the paths that brought them here.
The film is essentially constructed around three flashbacks, starting with Malkovich’s bleakly funny story of stealing a fish for his daughter, leading into Brody’s tale of why he learned to love dogs, and concluding with Culkin’s brutal reflection on the dog his father wouldn’t let him have. Over the course of these stories, as well as the supplementary context provided by Banderas, the mastiff haunting this factory shifts from a figure of terror to one of tragedy, an innocent soul trapped in the cruelest possible circumstances.
The mastiff’s trust and hope, in spite of all that’s been committed to it, make it the true hero of this film; ultimately, it is the mastiff’s fundamental goodness that convinces Brody he can be more than this life as well. Bullet Head is at times a difficult watch, but it is so infused with righteous fury at those who’d do harm to animals that its conclusion lands like the hammer of god, a cathartic statement of love for all animals suffering under the evil men do.
And yes, we indeed checked out Netflix’s live action Cowboy Bebop adaptation, which I frankly don’t have too much to say about. Netflix’s adaptation is bad in all the ways you’d expect it to be, embodying all the artistic disappointments of our current Content Tube era. Gone is Cowboy Bebop’s idiosyncratically charming dialogue, replaced by interchangeable, self-aware gags that fall somewhere between Seinfeld diner scenes and Joss Whedon scripts. Gone is the original’s rich, cinema-literate aesthetic blend, replaced by the same canted angles and CW-ready set design that every hack production team is applying to every straight-to-streaming property. Gone is the original series’ confident narrative economy, replaced by overlong episodes that explain every single detail, because who wants the idea of an expansive or mysterious universe when we could just get more lore, right? Gone is the graceful implementation of one of anime’s greatest soundtracks, with iconic tracks now being fired off with the same “does this make you happy” insecurity that likely inspired Newfaye to literally state “I’m not gonna carry that weight.” And for that matter, gone entirely is Faye Valentine, replaced by an amoral quip-spouting Action Girl with no meaningful personality.
New Cowboy Bebop embodies everything that is artless, soulless, and endlessly replicable about Disney and Netflix’s modern production system. Watching it, and even writing about it, serve as a reminder of why I’ve moved away from formal reviews: I just don’t find it very interesting to watch or write about bad art. There is rarely complexity in artistic failure, particularly when that failure is borne of something so basic as “this production system is designed to make safely cost-recouping mediocrities.” There is little that’s interesting about new-Bebop, so ultimately I’m just thankful that Bebop’s return to the cultural conversation gave me an excuse to write about how great the original is, and actually put all this cinema screening to work. I’m a better-educated student of film now than I was a year ago, and that‘s exciting to me – rather than lament works that could theoretically be better, I’m happy to keep munching on works that are already good.
