The Things You Find On Netflix: El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (dir by Vince Gilligan)

Posted on October 11, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

As one might expect from the sequel film to Breaking Bad, the shadow of Walter White hangs over very minute of El Camino.

Physically, Bryan Cranston doesn’t have a large role in El Camino. Like many of the characters from Breaking Bad, he appears only in a flashback. Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) spends a good deal of this movie dwelling on the past, perhaps because the only way that he can have a future is by mentally forgiving himself for all the stuff that went on while he was cooking meth with Walter White and, later, for the Nazi bikers who kept him chained up in a cage like an animal. So, it makes sense that we would see a lot of flashbacks, the majority featuring characters who are no longer alive. Cranston’s Walter White only appears towards the end of the film, when Jesse remembers the conversation they had at a diner about what Jesse was going to do with the money that they were making. It’s a bit jarring to see them, largely because Walter still looks like an earnest and frail science teacher while Jesse is still young, loud, and more than a little obnoxious. It’s quite a contrast to what we know will eventually happen to both characters.

For obvious reasons, Walter White isn’t in much of El Camino but his ghost seems to following Jesse through the entire movie. For that matter, so does the ghost of Tod Alquist (Jesse Plemons). It’s not just that a good deal of the movie deals with Jesse trying to figure out where Tod hid all of his money. (Jesse is planning on using the money to hopefully escape New Mexico and start a new life in Alaska.) It’s also that Jesse has been scarred, both physically and mentally, by the Hellish time that he spent as Tod’s …. well, Tod’s pet. Tod treated Jesse like a dog, keeping him on a leash, punishing him for being “bad,” and then offering Jesse pizza as a reward whenever Jesse did something right. To be honest, the flashbacks with Tod take some getting used to, largely because Plemons has obviously aged quite a bit between the finale of Breaking Bad and the shooting of El Camino. But, still, Plemons is absolutely terrifying as the unfailingly polite but definitely sociopathic Tod. At one point, Tod casually brings Jesse over to his apartment so that Jesse can help dispose of the body of his cleaning lady. Tod murdered her because she came across some money that he was hiding in a hollowed-out book. Tod shrugs as he tells the story of her murder, as if his actions are as commonplace as waking up and going to bed.

Throughout Breaking Bad, Jesse spent most of the series being manipulated by evil men. What was ironic, of course, was that Jesse was the only one of those men who must people automatically considered to be a criminal. Everyone thought that Walter was a tragic family man. Tod was largely anonymous and those who did notice him usually assumed he was just an eccentric weirdo. Jesse, on the other hand, was the guy who was continually getting hauled in by the police and harassed by the DEA. He was the one who was viewed as being a danger to society even though he eventually proved himself to be one of the few characters with anything resembling a conscience. In El Camino, Jesse finally gets a chance to determine his own fate. Will he embrace the lucrative but soul-destroying greed of Walter and Tod? Or will he escape and try to make a new life for himself?

El Camino is a visually stunning tour-de-force, anchored by Aaron Paul’s empathetic performance as Jesse. Jesse is no longer as loud as he may have been in Breaking Bad. He’s a man haunted by the past and, watching the film, you know, regardless of whether he makes it to Alaska, the scars will never fully heal. He has the haunted eyes of a man who is never going to be fully okay, regardless of where he ends up. In fact, if we’re going to be realistic, he probably doesn’t have much of a future ahead of him. Those ghosts are always going to follow him and, as Robert Forster’s Ed sagely explains it, much of what has happened is due to Jesse’s own poor decisions.

Still, whatever mistakes he’s made in the past, you can’t help but wish the best for Jesse Pinkman.

He’s earned it.

Playing Catch-Up: The Neon Demon (dir by Nicholas Winding Refn)

Posted on January 22, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

What to say about The Neon Demon?

See, this is a film that you have to be careful about discussing. From the moment that it premiered at Cannes last year, The Neon Demon was the love-it-or-hate-it film of 2016.

Those of us that loved The Neon Demon really, really loved it.

And those that hated it — well, let’s just say that they really, really hated it. They complained that The Neon Demon was exploitive. They found the subject matter to be sordid. They accused the movie of being both pretentious and ultimately pointless. The plot made no sense, they complained. The film was overlong and featured about a handful of false endings. It almost seemed as if Nicholas Winding Refn was taunting anyone who expected him to make a typical melodrama about life in Hollywood.

All of that is true but, honestly, what were these people expecting? As a result of the success of Drive, many people have made the mistake of thinking that Nicholas Winding Refn is a mainstream director. He’s not. Refn is a provocateur. He is a director who often dares his audience to walk away. In The Neon Demon, each false ending challenges the audience’s assumption about how a story — any story — should end. Some people, I’m sure, would complain that Refn is all style and no substance. However, The Neon Demon is about a world where one’s worth is determined by their style. Style is substance. The world of The Neon Demon may be empty but the film is not.

For all the debate about the film’s deeper themes (or lack of them), The Neon Demon‘s story is a fairly simple and deliberately familiar one. A teenage runaway comes to Hollywood, finds some success as a model, and discovers that the world of show business is not as romantic as she may have initially believed. When we first see Jesse (Elle Fanning), she’s posing for her boyfriend and she’s pretending to be dead. Death, beauty, and sex go hand-in-hand in The Neon Demon.

Jesse’s an interesting character, one who constantly challenges our assumptions. At first, Jesse seems like a typical innocent. She’s a virgin who is so introverted that she can barely carry on a conversation. She lives in a cheap apartment, under the menacing gaze of her sleazy landlord (Keanu Reeves, having fun playing his skeezy character). She has a boyfriend and on their dates, she tells him about how she’s always dreamed of being a star. It’s only as the film progresses that you start to realize how little you actually know about Jesse. That she’s a runway is implied early on. We never learn what led to her running away. In fact, we learn next to nothing about who she was before she appeared in Los Angeles.

In Los Angeles, Jesse is everything that the fashion industry values. She’s beautiful and, even more importantly, she’s young. We watch as Jesse goes to a casting call and we’re struck by the blank-look on her face. We wonder if there’s anything going on underneath the surface. Jesse has hallucinations, seeing a shining triangle and kissing her own reflection. Someone asks her what it’s like to be desired. She replies, “It’s everything.”

Jesse befriends Ruby (Jena Malone), a makeup artist who lives in a gigantic mansion, overlooking an empty swimming pool. When Ruby isn’t working in the fashion industry, she works at a morgue, applying makeup to corpses and occasionally engaging in necrophilia. She makes the dead beautiful so that they can be buried looking their best. Again, beauty and death are intertwined throughout The Neon Demon.

Ruby has two other friends, Gigi (Bella Heathcote) and Sarah (Abbey Lee). They’re both models, struggling to maintain their careers even as younger models, like Jesse, continue to flood into Los Angeles. Gigi has had so much cosmetic surgery that none of her original features remain. Gigi is neurotic and fearful. Sarah, on the other hand, is confident and sarcastic. When asked what she did the last time another model screwed her out of a job, Sarah calmly replies, “I ate her.”

Sarah isn’t necessarily joking either. Without giving too much away, The Neon Demon features, among other things, a character eating an eyeball that another character has just thrown up. Not surprisingly for a Refn film, there’s a lot of blood in The Neon Demon. It’s a film that opens with fake blood and ends with very real blood.

Combining the visual sense of Dario Argento with the thematic concerns of Jean Rollin, The Neon Demon is a triumph of pure style. The visuals are so strong that it’s impossible to look away, even when the film’s themes are deliberately obscure. The Neon Demon is a surreal journey into the dark side of Hollywood, a mixture of ennui, alienation, decadence, and sacrifice. It may not always make sense but it’s always fascinating to watch.

Personally, I think The Neon Demon would make a great double feature with La La Land. Two triumphs of style, two very different views of Los Angeles.

Film Review: Wild (dir by Jean-Marc Vallee)

Posted on January 6, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Wild opens with Cheryl Strayed (played by Reese Witherspoon) standing on the edge of a cliff. She has been hiking for days and, because her hiking boots are too small, she’s limping and in a great deal of pain. She takes off a boot and a sock and stares at her bloody big toe. With trembling fingers, she removes what is left of her big toenail. And then, she throws her boot over the edge of the cliff while screaming, “FUCK YOU!”

And, from that moment, Wild had me.

For the next two hours, I sat there and I was absolutely enthralled as Cheryl, an aspiring writer and a recovering drug addict who was still struggling to come to terms with the death of her mother (played, in heart-breaking flashbacks, by Laura Dern), hiked her way from the Mexican border up to the Canadian border. I watched as she learned how to survive in the wilderness, how she cautiously learned to trust some of her fellow hikers, and as she dealt with sexist rangers and creepy hunters.

And there were a lot of reasons why Wild held me so enthralled. There was Reese Witherspoon’s performance, for one thing. Reese is on screen during every minute of Wild and, for a lot of that time, she’s alone with her thoughts and her emotions. She gives an amazingly focused performance, one that should regain her some of the respect that she sacrificed by appearing in movies like This Means War and publicly asking, “Do you know who I am?” Both the film and Reese’s performance resist the temptation to idealize Cheryl. Instead, both the film and the performance feel real and because Cheryl comes across as a real person (flaws and all), it makes her journey and her achievement all the more powerful.

I couldn’t help but relate to Cheryl. Like her, I’m an aspiring writer. Like her, I’m still learning how to deal with the loss of my mom. Like her, I have trust issues. Like her, I am sometimes too stubborn for my own good. Like her, I like to leave quotes in guest books. Like her, I always pack a few paperbacks before I go on a trip and I like to write in my journal. Like Cheryl, I’m a survivor and I’m proud of it.

Unlike Cheryl, however, I’ve never gone hiking and I doubt if I ever will. As much as I loved Wild (and it’s definitely one of my favorite films of 2014), it didn’t leave me with any great desire to go on a hike. That’s largely because of that first scene. When Cheryl threw away her boots and screamed, I thought to myself, “That would so be me.” Of course, the difference is that Cheryl did that after hiking for a month. I would probably end up doing that after the 2nd day. And then I’d turn around, go back home, and spend the weekend watching Netflix.

But here’s the thing: Wild is not really about hiking. Wild is about the journey. What’s important is not that Cheryl hiked but that Cheryl accomplished what she set out to do. No matter how difficult it got, no matter how many people told her she should give up, Cheryl walked from Mexico to Canada. By the end of the film, I felt like, if Cheryl could do that even with boots that were too small, than there was nothing that I could not do.

As a result, Wild is not only one of the best films of 2014.

It’s the most empowering as well.