Whew, it has been a week. I finally got my COVID booster, which had me basically incapacitated for forty-eight hours. That, of course, invoked a rolling cascade of delayed responsibilities, meaning I’ve been rushing to catch up on projects while handling a variety of other outstanding responsibilities. It turns out as an adult, when you have a sick day, that day’s responsibilities don’t just float away into the ether; they get compacted into all your other days, punishing you for the audacity of possessing a feeble, mortal frame. Fortunately, I’ve mostly caught up at this point (or will have once I finish this article, then write up the first half of the next Week in Review, then watch the last four episodes of Sonny Boy, then write it up for my Year in Review), and believe I have managed to keep my external pandemonium from tarnishing the sanctity of my weekly film reflections. With all that bellyaching off my chest, let’s dive into the Week in Review!
I first continued my journey through Dario Argento’s filmography with Phenomena, starring Jennifer Connelly as a girl who uses her strange connection with insects to hunt down a serial killer haunting her Swiss boarding school. That premise might seem like it’d naturally lead to an extraordinarily bizarre film, but to be honest, Phenomena is actually pretty straightforward by Argento standards, and stands as a lesser entry in his catalog in terms of its visual invention.
Not to say Phenomena is a bad film – rather, it seems like I thoroughly spoiled myself by watching Suspiria and Inferno first, since the rest of his catalog has leaned towards more conventional murder mysteries. In spite of continuing this trend, Phenomena still possesses plenty of the signature strengths you expect from Argento. The mise-en-scene is detail-rich and evocative, the cinematography is alienating and poetic, and the soundtrack is elevated by lots of great Goblin tracks (though the choice to supplement them with American metal tracks is a terrible misfire). The plot is also full of the winding twists and bizarre flourishes that make giallo and anime such natural bedfellows; Phenomena might be lesser Argento, but lesser Argento is still a thoroughly rewarding experience.
After that, we decided to celebrate Nicolas Cage’s birthday by streaming a pair of his films. We naturally wanted to highlight both the critically acclaimed peaks and unjustifiably low valleys of his career, so we started off with one of his best-reviewed films, the Herzog-directed Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.
Bad Lieutenant represents a match made in heaven, as the director most in tune with the harrowing limits of man’s endurance teams up with the best actor since Kinski himself at portraying a man on the brink of self-destruction. Cage’s protagonist starts off callous, quick-tempered, and ambivalent to the letter of the law, and only unravels further from there, as his chronic pain leads him to manipulate everyone around him in search of more pain-killing narcotics. At the same time, Cage’s character is undeniably very good at his work, and pursues the orchestrator of a mass drug execution with a ferocity far beyond that of any regular salary worker. Cage is a man destroying himself simply to fuel his next six hours, balancing a dozen spinning plates in the air, and seemingly on the brink of detonation even before his exhaustion and pill cocktails start summoning imaginary iguanas.
If you can’t tell, I had a great time with this movie. Many people will find it hard to watch, as Cage’s character never becomes likable, and only occasionally offers a hint of conscience to balance his manic ferocity. But to those who enjoy Herzog’s explorations of fantastically ambitious, flawed, and self-destructive men, Bad Lieutenant feels like a natural companion to his earlier classics, complete with beautiful cinematography and plenty of delightful, idiosyncratic flourishes like those goddamn iguanas. Top that off with Cage doing his best to channel Klaus Kinski, and you wind up with an essential entry in both the crime drama and Herzog collections.
Cage has described his acting style as an attempt to move beyond Brando’s naturalistic revelations, embracing stylization evocative of baroque art or kabuki theater. Having watched so much cinematic history over the last years, I can see his point; naturalism is a choice, not just the “correct” acting style, and our general assumption of naturalism as the goal of acting reflects just how dramatically our conception of cinema has narrowed over the past fifty years. That said, no broader perspective on the aesthetics and utility of acting could find much to love in Drive Angry, the film my housemates chose to represent the lower strata of Cage’s career.
My housemates didn’t miss: Drive Angry sucks, nobody except Cage is even trying, and the film’s most noteworthy feature is all the debris flying at the camera, perpetually reminding you this was designed as a 3D feature. The film is clearly aiming for a winking grindhouse sort of appeal, but with all of its action scenes conveyed in unconvincing CG, there’s nothing here to keep the audience’s interest. I was happy to spend most of this screening grinding sidequests in my Yakuza 0 replay, a far more pulse-pounding experience than Drive Angry.
After that we checked out another classic western, the John Wayne/Dean Martin feature Rio Bravo. Rio Bravo lacks any of the reflection or revisionism you’d find in something like The Searchers; it’s an unabashedly feel-good action drama, co-starring a singer whose fame first inspired the term “teen idol,” and giving Wayne the improbable chance to fall in love with a card shark played by Angie Dickinson.
Rio Bravo was frankly a tad too indulgent to really grip me, but it’s nonetheless a top shelf exercise in tension and narrative economy. The whole film is constructed like a swiftly burning fuse, with the ostentatiously bravura silent opening establishing Sheriff Wayne’s stewardship over a local murderer. With the marshal six days away and that murderer’s brother commanding a powerful local gang, Wayne must rally his exceedingly limited forces, and maintain a tense standoff with all of the local killers.
Wayne is as reliable as ever, but it was Dean Martin who really impressed me in this picture. Given I’ve mostly known him as a singer and member of the Rat Pack, I figured he’d be one of those actors who only plays an idealized version of himself, like George Clooney or Brad Pitt. Instead, I received a performance rich in nuance and fragility, as he attempts to drag himself out of the bottle and back towards the man he once was. Rio Bravo’s script is frankly a little too broad and sentimental to really make the most of his character, but I was delighted to see him pull off a performance so off-type from his celebrity persona, and will clearly need to see more of his acting work. On the whole, Rio Bravo is simply a highly effective pre-blockbuster-era spectacle, demonstrating the ideal structure of a crowd pleaser before Spielberg shortened our collective attention span by thirty or forty minutes.
Along with our various film features, this week also saw my house charging through seasons 3 and 4 of Cobra Kai, the improbably successful Karate Kid successor. Cobra Kai’s first season was a delightful mix of tongue-in-cheek riffs on ‘80s macho culture, serving as a surprisingly moving coda to a series of so-so coming-of-age movies. By flipping the perspective from the victorious protagonist Daniel to the defeated rival Johnny, Cobra Kai was able to succeed both as an episodic action drama, and also as a quiet meditation on how both our values and failings are passed down through generations. I enjoyed the action, but more than that, I felt it made a genuinely moving statement on the insidious nature of toxic masculinity, as well as the complexity of establishing confidence as a teenager, particularly in a world where your tormentors have learned how to game the rules of adults.
Cobra Kai’s latest seasons have, well, not really been that. The show essentially made its point with the conclusion of its first season, and since then, it’s been layering on the melodrama at lightning speed. The second season’s introduction of Kreese, Johnny’s own brutal sensei, set Cobra Kai on an inexorable route towards absurdity, with that season ending in an all-out brawl across the central high school, and the third slowly building towards “former rival senseis must join forces against a greater evil!” In thematic terms, the show has mostly lost the acuity of its first season, with its initially sharp point fading into a general haze of “don’t let your past poison your future.” And in emotional terms, the clear initial motivations of its characters have been irreparably clouded by the show’s need for perpetual drama, which has essentially forced every character to switch to every possible side in order to keep the action going.
All that said, it’s still a damn fun time. Cobra Kai may no longer be a smart show, but it’s still an extremely entertaining one, featuring a likable ensemble cast and plenty of impressive fight choreography. The pointed pleasures of the first season have been replaced by concepts like “kung fu prom battle,” and as long as you’re game for the silliness, the show has yet to truly run out of ideas. I can’t imagine the show will ever again reach its initial peaks, but as far as popcorn entertainment goes, Cobra Kai is expertly salted and buttered to perfection.
