Icarus File No. 10: 88 (dir by Eromose)

Posted on September 4, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Femi Jackson (Brandon Victor Dixon) is a recovering alcoholic with a pregnant wife and a past-due mortgage who totally and completely believes in a presidential candidate named Harold Roundtree (Orlando Jones). A former baker-turned-politician, Roundtree is running for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination on a platform of small government and personal responsibility. That really doesn’t sound like a platform for success in a Democratic primary but whatever. Let’s just go with it.

Femi has been hired as financial director for a SuperPAC that is raising money for the Roundtree campaign. Femi notices that many of the donations are being submitted in numbers that add up to 88. When he takes this news to his friend Ira Goldstein (Thomas Sadoski), Ira reveals that 88 is a code that Neo-Nazis use to identify each other. Femi and Ira do more digging and they discover that, throughout his entire life, Roundtree has been receiving financial aide from various rich men, all of whom sent Roundtree’s sums of money that all add up to 88. Femi questions why Neo-Nazis would do something that makes it so easy to identify them. Ira replies that they’re marking their territory.

While Howard Roundtree records an interview with a left-wing commentator (William Fichtner), Femi tracks down and meets with an elderly and repentant Neo-Nazi (Jonathan Weir), who now needs an oxygen tank to breathe and who lives in an isolated house with his black wife. Femi is later approached by a volunteer in the SuperPAC’s office, who informs him that the only way that White Supremacy can survive is by latching onto a black politician like Harold Roundtree. Femi and Ira prepare to meet with Rountree, with Femi still convinced that he has no idea who is secretly funding his campaign.

While this is going on, Femi’s wife (Naturi Naughton) tries to help an ex-con achieve a bank loan despite the opposition of her sister (who also works for the bank) while Femi’s son, Ola (Jeremiah King), gets in trouble at school for showing his classmates a video of a school shooting. It turns out that Femi’s brother-in-law is not only a cop but he’s also white and he agrees to drive Ola to school so that Ola can see that not all cops are bad. Ola’s obvious fear as he walks out to the squad car indicates that the experiment, no matter how well-intentioned, is probably not going to work.

88 is certainly an ambitious film and the opening minutes, which features Femi’s wife explaining why Black Panther is not the empowering and progressive film that Femi believes it to be, suggest that the film has the potential to be interesting. And throughout the film, there are little moments that do work, like the scene where Femi tells his son how to react if he’s ever pulled over by a cop. Unfortunately, the majority of the film is a clumsily-acted and talky mix of melodrama and heavy-messaging, one that tries to duplicate the style of Spike Lee’s agitprop but instead ends up feeling more like a secular and politically progressive version of the God’s Not Dead films than anything else. The film drags on for 2 full hours with Brandon Victor Dixon’s nerdy blandness failing to provide the narrative momentum to keep the action interesting. As well, Orlando Jones is perhaps the least convincing presidential front runner that I’ve ever seen in a film, speaking a cadences that appear to be specifically patterned on Barack Obama but suggesting none of the charisma that would be necessary to captivate a nation. Again, the film deserves some praise for having the ambition to actually be about something more than just selling toys and comic books but, in the end, it’s earnest dullness and heavy-handed messaging fails to hold one’s attention.

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Icarus File No. 7: Last Days (dir by Gus Van Sant)

Posted on August 3, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

From 2002 to 2005, director Gus Van Sant offered audiences what he called his “Death Trilogy.” 2002’s Gerry followed two friends as they got lost in the desert and it featured what appeared to be a mercy killing. 2003’s Elephant was a mediation on the Columbine High School massacre and it featured several murders. Finally, with 2005’s Last Days, Van Sant ended the trilogy with a film about a suicide.

Michael Pitt plays a world-famous musician who is suffering from depression. Though the character is named Blake, no attempt is made to disguise the fact that he is meant to be Kurt Cobain. When we first see Blake, he has just escaped from a rehab clinic and is walking through a forest. There are no other human beings around and, perhaps not coincidentally, this is the only moment in the film in which Blake seems to be happy. He even sings Home on the Range, shouting the lyrics like a little kid.

When he reaches his home, Blake’s demeanor changes. He walks around the house with a rifle and pretends to shoot the four other people — Luke (Lukas Haas), Scott (Scott Patrick Green), Asia (Asia Argento), and Nicole (Nicole Vicius) — who are sleeping in his house. Later, when those people wake up and attempt to speak to him, Blake is largely unresponsive. When a detective comes to the door and asks if anyone has seen Blake, Blake hides. When a record company exec calls to tell Blake that it’s time for him to tour again and that he’ll be letting down both his band and the label if he doesn’t, Blake hangs up on her.

Who are the people staying in Blake’s house? Luke and Scott are both musicians but apparently neither one of them are in Blake’s band. When Luke asks Blake to help him finish a song, Blake can only mutter a few vague words of encouragement. Scott, meanwhile, appears to be more interested in Blake’s money. Everyone in the film wants something from Blake but Blake wants to be alone. In the one moment when Blake actually gets to work on his own music, his talent is obvious but so is his frustration. With everyone demanding something from him, when will he ever have time to create? With everyone telling him that it is now his job to be a rock star, how will he ever again feel the joy that came from performing just to perform?

As one would expect from a Van Sant film, Last Days is often visually striking, especially in the early forest scenes. In many ways, it feels like a combination of Gerry and Elephant. Like those previous two films, it is fixated on death but stubbornly refuses to provide any answers to any larger, metaphysical questions. Like Elephant, it uses a jumbled timeline to tell its story and scenes are often repeated from a different perspective. However, it eschews Elephant‘s use of an amateur cast and instead, Last Days follows Gerry’s lead of featuring familiar actors like Michael Pitt, Lukas Haas, and Asia Argento. Unfortunately, though, Last Days doesn’t work as well as either one of the two previous entries in the Death Trilogy.

Last Days runs into the same problem that afflicts many films about pop cultural icons. Kurt Cobain has become such a larger-than-life figure and his suicide is viewed as being such a momentous cultural moment that any attempt to portray it on film is going to feel inadequate. No recreation can live up to the mythology. The film itself feels as if it is somewhat intimidated by the task of doing justice to the near religious reverence that many have for Cobain. As enigmatic as Gerry and Elephant were, one could still tell that Van Sant knew where he wanted to take those films. He knew what he wanted to say and he had confidence that at least a few members of the audience would understand as well. With Last Days, Van Sant himself seems to be a bit lost when it comes to whatever it may be that he’s trying to say about Cobain. This leads to a rather embarrassing scene in which Blake’s ghost is seen literally climbing its way towards what I guess would be the immortality of being an icon. One might wonder how Cobain himself would feel about such a sentimental coda to his suicide.

Last Days is a film that I respect, even if I don’t think it really works. It does do a good job of capturing the ennui of depression and one cannot fault Van Sant for his ambition or his willingness to run the risk of alienating the audience by allowing the story to play out at its own slow and deliberate pace. But ultimately, the film cannot compete with the mythology that has sprung up around its subject.

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Icarus File No. 5: mother! (dir by Darren Aronofsky)

Posted on October 29, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

You have to admire the courage of a filmmaker like Darren Aronofsky. After receiving some overdue Oscar love for Black Swan, Aronofsky probably could have settled into the type of career that Tim Burton currently has: i.e., the self-styled quirky director who makes safe studio films. Instead, Aronofsky has continued to chart his own course as an artist by following up Black Swan with two films that seemed specifically designed to challenge audiences and annoy the complacent.

With Noah, Aronofsky dared to suggest that God’s mistake with the Great Flood was to allow anyone to survive at all. Then, he followed up Noah with 2017’s mother!, which was a film that practically dared confused and alienated audience members to stand up and walk out. And walk out they did. mother! was one of the few films to score an F on Cinemascore. I mean, typically, a bad movie will at least get a C. You have to really piss off the audience to get that F rating. Watching mother!, it’s obvious that pissing off the audience was a part of the film’s design.

Paramount Picture advertised mother! as being a horror film and, to a certain extent, it is. Jennifer Lawrence plays the Mother. She lives in a beautiful house with a poet named Him (Javier Bardem). Him spends a lot of time talking about how much he loves the Mother but it quickly becomes apparent that he’s rather self-absorbed. People are constantly showing up at the house to speak to and eventually worship Him and he continually lets them, regardless of how difficult it makes things for the Mother. The Mother is reduced to begging people not to make a mess but no one listens to her. As the crows gets bigger, fights break out. There are sounds of war and explosions rock the Mother’s meticulously cared-for home.. Him can only smile and shrug while his visitors trash the house. The more the Mother complains, the more cruelly she’s treated by the crowds.

Among those who show up are the Man (Ed Harris) and the Woman (Michelle Pfeiffer). They have two teenage sons who have developed a dangerous rivalry. Him seems to be very concerned with them but the Mother just wants them all to leave. Once they finally do leave, Him is inspired to write his greatest work which, of course, just leads to more people showing up. It’s a dangerous cycle….

I could actually relate to what the Mother was going through. I tend to be a little bit on the neat side, which is a polite way of saying that I’m obsessed with keeping the house clean and tidy. Nothing annoys me more than when a stranger comes in and drags dirt or leaves or whatever across a freshly vacuumed carpet. When Jennifer Lawrence was reduced to begging people to just make the most basic effort towards not messing up the house, I totally sympathized with her. Jennifer Lawrence yells so much in this movie that she actually starts to lose her voice in a few scenes. I could relate.

Of course, Jennifer Lawrence is not just playing a homeowner who doesn’t want her house to get trashed. And Bardem isn’t just playing a poet. As you probably already guessed, Bardem is God and Jennifer Lawrence is the Earth and Ed Harris and Michelle Pfieffer are a surprisingly old version of Adam and Eve. The entire film is a biblical allegory and it all gets a bit heavy-handed. Aronofsky has said that the film was a result of “anger and anguish” but it’s obvious that all of that anger and anguish prevented him from considering that mother! would have worked better as a 15-minute short film than a two-hour epic. It doesn’t take long to figure out what’s going on and the film occasionally gets almost embarrassingly obvious in its attempt to push it metaphor. Aronofsky, at times, seems to think that his film is more enigmatic than it actually is.

Still, despite the fact that the film goes on for way too long and is never quite as much of a mindscrew as Aronofsky seems to think that it is, you have to admire not only the courage of Aaronofsky but also the dedication of Jennifer Lawrence. This film was not the first high profile Jennifer Lawrence film to not be a hit with audiences (Passengers wasn’t exactly beloved) but it is the one that’s most often cited whenever anyone writes an article about why Jennifer Lawrence’s star is a bit dimmer today than it was back in the days of The Hunger Games. Undoubtedly, some people did go to the film expecting to see a “typical” Jennifer Lawrence film, just to suddenly be confronted with Javier Bardem ripping her heart out of her chest. But, at the same time, you have to appreciate a star who is willing to take a chance and that’s what Lawrence did her, lending her star power to a project that was thoroughly out of the mainstream. Both Aronofsky and Jennifer Lawrence took a chance with mother! and, even if the film is not quite the triumph that some viewers may want it to be, you still respect them for having done so.