BULLET HEAD (2017)

Posted on March 17th, 2018 by Adam-Troy Castro

Last’s night’s sleazy little b-movie you would expect to have a no-name cast but which oddly doesn’t on Netflix Streaming: BULLET HEAD (2017).

A trio of unarmed safecrackers on the run from a citywide manhunt hole up in a labyrinthine and decaying warehouse, only to find themselves being hunted by that warehouse’s other resident: a mastiff rendered murderous by a dog-fighting ring.

Now, you think you know what you’re going to get here. A low budget. A dingy indoor set the moviemakers repurposed from industrial infrastructure. Lots of creeping through dark spaces, to try to get past the dogs. Lots of profane exchanges. Temporary safety as the dog is locked out of places, sudden carnage as the dog finds its way into places. Discussion of how this was supposed to be the one last job, and now look at how badly they’re all fucked.

What you do not expect is for the film to have a cast made up of Oscar bait, and soliloquys.

The gang is made up of Adrien Brody as the relatively young crook who just wants to get back to his girlfriend, John Malkovich as the grizzled old veteran, and Rory Culkin, as the screwup kid with the bad heroin cravings. Plus there’s a villain, seen at the beginning but active at the end, played by Antonio Banderas. And I must tell you that though there are a number of chases involving the dog, the most interesting of which involves school buses and a piano, and though the climax brings in a murderous Banderas, the movie really does see itself as a contemplation of this life in which the criminals find themselves, and there are breaks in the action in which every single one of them gets to tell a lengthy anecdote from their respective pasts, in which their life choices and their fate is prefigured by how they once interacted with a dog. The Malkovich and Brody stories alone are worth the price of admission.

So what you have here is that oddest of all hybrids, the nasty little direct-to-video cheap but high-concept thriller, and the actor’s showcase (which is likely how the makers got a cast of this caliber to sign up not just out of financial necessity, but also with some enthusiasm).

Trigger warnings for bad shit happening to dogs. The mastiff’s brutal past in the ring is evoked, and the disposal of dogs who have died or been put down is shown. The movie knows that this dog is a tragic figure, and I know this is full of Nope for many of you.

Not a great film. Call it a dirty little thriller that would not be worth much if it didn’t have those intervals of greatness in it.

Tags: Adrien Brody, John Malkovich, Movies | Category Movies

No, The Racist Deputy in 3 BILLBOARDS Gets No “Redemption Arc”

Posted on March 5th, 2018 by Adam-Troy Castro

The backlash against THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MO may have cost it the Best Picture Oscar. It’s hard to judge such things. It didn’t cost the film a couple of well-deserved acting nods, but it didn’t help.

The one thing I want to tell folks who have read the film spectacularly wrong is that it’s not about a racist cop who gets a redemption arc.

He does not.

He honestly does not.

The screenplay actually takes pains to deny us that redemption arc.

Look, the whole movie is about unresolved rage, right? The grieving mother, the brutal deputy. Both are angry the whole film and both do horrible things because of it.

The deputy is a piece of shit. Honestly. He’s an ignorant, stupid bully. We are told that he has been the source of a couple of racial incidents that have embarrassed the department. And just before he gets fired by the new black police chief — a dignified and principled man, there to clean up the joint; remember that? — he goes across the street in a fit of rage and trashes the local advertising agency that has rented McDormand’s character the three billboards, a rampage that culminates in him throwing the guy who runs the place — a sympathetic character — out a second story window.
So when he overhears the conversation that MIGHT be a confession from the rapist-murderer and goes to extreme self-punishing lengths to obtain the bastard’s DNA, that is a rather extreme demonstration that he might not be a totally unredeemable piece of shit.

But then what happens?

Brilliantly, it turns out that the solution to the mystery has not fallen in his lap after all.

The suspect turns out to be not his man.

The crime is not solved.

He does not get his job back.

The black police chief tells him that he has done a brave thing, but does not hand back his badge and say, “I was wrong, maybe we can make a good cop of you yet.”

Easy redemption is denied.

At the end of the film, when the deputy and grieving mother form a partnership and commence a road trip that might end in the vigilante murder of a man they merely suspect of rape, they both say that they’re not sure whether this is the right thing to do, or what they’re going to do when they reach their destination.
People mistake this as his redemption arc, but honestly, it is not. Arcs are completed. An arc would be him making a neat speech to the effect that racism is bad, making restitution, and maybe volunteering to trim hedges at the local black church. Instead, what we get at the end is something that is inherently more challenging to dramatize: the change in direction. Two people are going to do something. They just don’t know what. There is no pretty bow on it. Nobody says that his actions up to this point, or even McDormand’s, are all right. Nobody even says that what they’re about to do is all right. Only that they’ll figure it out when they get there.

Which is a pretty good summary of life.

What’s that? He’s an unworthy character to even receive a hint at redemption? Racist, brutal cops are beyond redemption?

I sure see where you’re coming from.

Except that we have movies about hit men who become better people, criminals and other rotten cads who become better people, and sometimes these dramatic epiphanies are fed to us in a couple of quick vignettes, and it’s over.

We have movies about terrible parents who hug their kids once by the end of the film and thus signal that all personal growth is completed.

Terrible people inching toward enlightenment is a staple of drama, and always has been.

It’s cheap when the enlightenment comes too easily, when the text lets them off the hook too easily.

Sometimes, it’s just the change of direction that makes it a story.

The last letter that deputy receives from the dead sheriff he idolized tells him that he could be a better person. Could be. Isn’t.

He doesn’t get a redemption arc. He gets a moment that might be the launch of a redemption arc, one that might also be a terrible mistake. There’s even dialogue to the effect that we don’t know yet.

By no stretch of the imagination does the movie take the position that he is now a good man, or that his previous sins were just wacky missteps, or that the new boss should have forgiven him and given him his badge back.

You could only think so if your understanding is binary, that the second this guy shows a little self-knowledge, he suddenly starts wearing a white hat.

That is not the case, and the film did not invite such an interpretation.

Tags: 3 Billboards Outside Ebbing Mo, Movies | Category Uncategorized

Joss Whedon Quit the BATGIRL Movie For All The Right Reasons

Posted on February 23rd, 2018 by Adam-Troy Castro

Joss Whedon has stepped down from scripting duties on a proposed BATGIRL movie, saying he just couldn’t come up with a story.

I suspect he had some other reasons, some of which speak well of him and some of which don’t, but that’s a boring subject. (So is whether there should be a Batgirl movie, period. Let’s just say that my personal enthusiasm at this point, is limited. We have more than enough movies in this genre, thank you.)

But let us talk of his stated reason for having so much trouble with the character: paraphrased, he couldn’t think of a reason why this girl’s head would be so messed up she would start doing this thing.

And instantly you know that he doesn’t get the character at all and that stepping away was a good thing.

You see, the premise that a person’s head must be “messed up” in some way to become a hero in this genre is based on only a very few examples.

Batman is certainly messed up by grief.

Spider-Man is certainly messed up by guilt.

The Punisher is certainly messed up by hatred.

Daredevil, as understood today, is messed up by all sorts of things.

But move beyond that: Captain America is driven by duty. The Flash by the knowledge that he has this crazy power and that something beneficial needs to be done with it. Wonder Woman was raised in a warrior culture and she believes in the fight.

Superman?

Is at heart just a really, really nice, caring guy with the powers of a God.

So not all these characters are demented by trauma.

They’re just…not.

Take the multiple iterations of Robin. You would expect them all to be cookie-cutter versions of the same generic kid, but as written they have never been.

One, Dick Grayson, was a grieving kid taken under Batman’s wing, trained to channel his loss into positive action. The next, Jason, was canonically a messed-up kid who Batman, showing spectacularly poor judgment, was trying to provide some emotional stability. The next after that, Tim Drake, was….just a really smart and good kid who wanted to help Batman.

Different motivations. It’s what makes them different characters.

The next most famous Robin is Carrie Kelly, from Frank Miller’s THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, who became Robin out of…enthusiasm.

That’s right. Batman saved her from a mugging and possible rape, and the first thing she did was go home and make herself a Robin costume, without his encouragement. Not because she was so traumatized by her close call. But because she was excited. Because she was enthused. Because she had become passionate about something she could believe in.

Not messed up at all. (Not within the context of superhero comics, anyway; in real life, it shows a dearth of common sense.)

Barbara Gordon, Batgirl?

She was a nice middle-class kid working as a librarian, whose father was the police commissioner, who in the comics was heading for a costume party in a distaff Batman costume when she encountered some bad guys in the midst of evil doings, made short work of it, and decided, “You know what? I can do this!” And then commenced building on the natural gifts she already had.

And this is why we came damn close to a couple of cinematic Superman iterations where he was, in one case, an embittered outcast living in the Metropolis sewer system, and in another, a freakish outcast unable to fit in with the rest of humanity, fighting crime out of manic compulsion; as opposed to what has never been hard for comics writers to convey, that he was JUST A NICE GUY, brother to humanity.

The people trying to get those projects off the ground had no handle on, “Honestly, he’s just a sweet guy.”

Why Joss Whedon thought he needed a reason for Barbara Gordon to messed up, when all he really needed was a reason to tap into that far more difficult motivator: sheer joy.

Honestly: not everybody needs to be motivated by trauma.

Certainly not a bright, motivated girl who dotes on her father the police commissioner.

So yeah.

I think Whedon has done some remarkable work over the years, and I don’t look down on him for this decision, when it would have been just as easy for him to just bullshit something that would have passed muster as long as it had enough action scenes.

But what he has told us is that he didn’t get the character at all.

Tags: Batman, Comic Book Movies, Joss Whedon, Superman | Category Comics, Movies