3 indies and an E-P-I-C.

Dune Part Two

Dune Part Two is a tremendous and moving visual experience that must be had in a movie theater. I regret not seeing it in IMAX, even though those hard, skinny seats are hell on my back. I saw it at Majestic, a Phoenix-based, independently-owned theater chain that took over the three Alamo Drafthouses in town in late 2021. When I sat in my seat, I noticed a big yellow stain in the middle of the screen, as did everyone in the theater.

“Excuse me,” I asked our server since the theater is also a full-service dining experience. “Is that yellow mark going to be there for the movie?”

“Unfortunately, yes. A bulb broke in our projector, and since it was expensive to fix, management decided not to do it.”

“Great.” I sarcastically said to my friends.

I had already ingested an edible, so I was not okay to drive somewhere else for another screening. So my two disappointed movie nerd friends and I sat there, watching the trailers before the movie, with a big yellow piss stain right in the middle of the screen. The most enjoyable trailer to watch with through this filter was Twisters, which my buddy, Tom, lovingly coined the re-title “PISSters” because every tornado was totally center screen and looked like an explosion of a dehydrated man’s piss. It was far less funny when the movie began, and every gorgeous shot was obscured by yellow fucking piss.

The most jarring of sequences to watch was the best sequence of the entire film. In this black and white colosseum brawl, Austin Butler‘s milk-tinted, bald heavy, Feyd Rautha, complete with squid ink chompers, slaughters a bunch of House Atreides men to sounds of cheering fans. That bright yellow piss stain was center screen the whole time, and when Butler opened his mouth to scream in a close-up, it looked like he was rainin’ down piss on his opponent. However, after a while and in a lot of shots, I could forget about the yellow piss stain – maybe that part of the sky is green, maybe Rebecca Ferguson spilled a pitcher of lemonade on the center of her dress, perhaps Zendaya contracted jaundice from the sand dunes, etc.

Looking past the yellow piss stain, the visuals in Dune Part Two are absolutely unbelievable. This is a milestone in cinema, at least from a technical standpoint. I felt the cinematography and blaring soundscape in my bones, along my spine, and yes, even where I myself piss. The story and characters, on the other hand, were either underdeveloped or underutilized. Everything human felt rushed and condensed, and to be honest, I wouldn’t have minded a 3.5 hour movie if I could understand and empathize with them more. What we got was Zendaya‘s character, Chani, really trying to have substantial moments with Timmy Chalamet‘s Paul, that were all but completely brushed off. The technicals dazzle and move you, but you don’t really care about anyone. Shit, you care more about the desert and sand worms than Paul Atreides or Chani.

I will say there are some really solid performances here – Austin Butler first and foremost is a pure delight. In fact, all the Harkonnens are fantastic – Stellan Skarsgard is in as fine a form as last time as the morbidly obese bald house cat, Baron Von Helsing, and Dave Bautista is dependably funny and even a bit terrifying as the Baron Rabbi Munchausen. Florence Pugh is great but underused, as is Rebecca Ferguson, who completely stole part 1. Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin add some much-needed humor as well. People have been knocking Zendaya‘s performance, but I think she’s much more effective than a surprisingly wooden Chalamet, whose “this is my dad’s finger tingle ring!” or whatever the fuck line read made me chortle so hard in the theater, Italian Soda squished out of my nose. Christopher Walken legitimately looked confused though, and not as a character, like the actor had no idea where he was. That breaks my heart; he’s one of our best actors, but he seems so lost here. They also give him nothing to do.

There’s no denying that Dune Part Two is one of the biggest technical achievements of the last couple years, and it makes for a very entertaining two hours and forty-five minutes. I only wish it didn’t leave me so cold on a human level, which seems like it will be the main thing holding it back from “all-timer epic” status. I’m afraid it’s no Matrix or T2. Grade: B+ (In Theaters)

Perfect Days

Perfect Days is a carefully observed character portrait by veteran German filmmaker Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire) with a terrific lead performance by veteran Japanese actor Koji Yakusho (Cure, Babel, Tampopo) as a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo. The movie never spoon feeds its audience and there’s never a contrivance in the plot. It runs down a long checklist on how to make a realistic, nuanced central character and yet I found myself frequently bored by Perfect Days. Perhaps it’s just my dumb American attitude but the first time I genuinely started to care and feel for this guy happens during a scene 90 minutes into the 2 hour movie. Hirayama, the name of Yakusho‘s mobile toilet cleaner, has a run in with his rich sister, Keiko, that hints at a bad relationship he has with their father, who is now sick and going to die. Keiko presses him to visit their dad, but Hirayama quietly refuses. This is the first time we learn something real and affecting about this character beyond the fact he likes collecting retro cassette tapes and observing nature. This even feels like the first real, tangible emotional stakes the movie gives us, and it sets off a chain of entertaining chance encounters and a very emotional and brilliantly acted ending close-up in the vein of Call Me By Your Name and The Long Good Friday. The soundtrack, one of the very best of the year, includes The Animals, Lou Reed, Nina Simone, The Rolling Stones, The Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Otis Redding, Van Morrison and even The Kinks. The best parts of this movie is when Hirayama takes a break from scrubbing shitters to go on an adventure and interact with humans. His face lights up when he gets to talk with something other than a toilet. This is a very well made film that stimulated me intellectually, but it rarely connected with me emotionally. Grade: B ($6 rental on VOD)

Dark Harvest

A certainly unique horror film from a solid enough director, David Slade (30 Days of Night, Hard Candy, Twilight Eclipse) that takes a really interesting half-premise and renders it incoherent.

Dark Harvest is like Children of the Corn mixed with Rumble Fish and a dash of Jeepers Creepers. It takes place in a small Midwest town in 1962, following a couple of greaser teens who are competing for better lives for their families in something called “The Run”. What’s “The Run”? It’s basically a very dangerous witch hunt where the teens have to chase this ghost demon that is born every Halloween night in the town’s corn fields, who has a pumpkin as a head and loves decapitating teens. Parents starve their children for days so they..?????…have the drive to capture and murder this monster whose innards are made of treats. Yes, you read that right – treats. Like Sour Punch Straws and Twizzlers, mostly gummy and licorice candy from what I observed – no chocolate – and the winner who eventually kills SawTooth Jack, that’s the creature’s name!!, wins a new Corvette to drive out of town in (to live in a place where evil scarecrow demons don’t exist) and a big ass house with a pool and stuff for their family.

Still with me? Cause it gets weirder. If SawTooth Jack makes it to the old church before midnight, a big tornado will appear and destroy the town’s crops for 1-5 years. So using guns and pitchforks and machetes, the abused/starved teens must kill Jack – but he murders like 40 of them every year. These teens are terrified of this monster, but their parents want a swanky new house and a new Corvette…so when a teen tries to get back into his house cause he’s scared, his parents say, “Goddamnit, be a man!” and then watch as SawTooth Jack explodes their kid’s entire body.

I guess this movie is trying to make a statement about how parents exploit their children to get what they want sometimes? Maybe it’s a Vietnam allegory? Like how this country sent its children to Vietnam to die for purely financial reasons? That was around this time, three years later to be exact. I don’t know, I’ll have to watch some behind-the-scenes interviews to hear some cast member mumble-stumble through how the film is a metaphor for Discount Tire or some shit. Maybe it’s about how we’re poisoning our children with junk food? Everyone eats crap and acts like a psycho in this movie.

The cast is solid on paper but doesn’t really pop on screen. Most successful is the lead teen played by Casey Likes, he’s very convincing despite a dumb script. Less successful are the veterans. Top notch character actors like Jeremy Davies (Saving Private Ryan, Justified) and Elizabeth Reaser (The Haunting of Hill House, Twilight) have very little to do and seem totally unsure of the tone of the piece. Another top notch character actor fares even worse – Luke Kirby (Lenny Bruce from The Marvelous Miss Maisel) chooses a very weird and distracting accent for the sketchy town sheriff. Everyone feels like they’re in a different movie and that’s because it seems even the director doesn’t understand the tone of the material. Does director David Slade want it to be tongue and cheek and if so, why is it so depressingly bleak? There’s even a post end credits scene that tries to contextualize the mythology of this ancient creature and even then, it falls flat on its face.

This is a shame because there is some great atmosphere tucked away in the movie. Slade definitely knows how to create a mood but this only adds to the aggravation of experiencing something as disjointed and completely unsure of itself as Dark Harvest. All the parts seemed to be working, except for the script, which ended up tanking the entire project. Grade: C- (Amazon Prime)

Nowhere (1997) – Uncut, 4K Restoration

Talk about a find! Writer/director Gregg Araki‘s little seen 90s artifact about the profoundly empty lives of dozens of Los Angeles teens has finally been unearthed. The good people at Strand Releasing have released a fully uncut, 4K restoration. Much like Araki‘s The Doom Generation, which I reviewed a couple weeks ago, this is a truly bizarre and often flippant exploration of disillusioned youth in America. It’s cynical, satirical and was considered too graphic (read – gay) for the time, but I have to say it’s frequently hilarious and surprisingly insightful in how it obscurely skewers Hollywood. Araki stand-in James Duvall and The Craft‘s Rachel True play a bisexual couple in an open relationship, planning to attend the wildest party in LA. Getting to this rager is basically the largest the stakes get in this movie, even given that multiple characters are killed or attacked along the way. And speaking of along the way, there’s this conveyer belt of now stars that the protagonists encounter including Heather Graham and Ryan Phillippe as a couple of boardwalk rats obsessed with chocolate and buttholes, Traci Lords, Shannon Doherty and Rose McGowan as a trio of vapid valley girls, a television evangelist played exquisitely by John Ritter, and a Baywatch actor playing himself (Jaason Simmonds) who proves to be a sadistic sociopath. Throw in a giant human-sized cockroach covered in blood with intimacy issues, a serial-killing fish man alien monster, a militia of Atari-obsessed outlaws armed with gigantic ray guns, a trio of hyper masculine drag queens, and even well meaning Swedish parents played by none other than Peter and Jan Brady (Christopher Knight and Eve Plumb), and I still left half off the list. This is a movie that’s hard to describe because it doesn’t really have a plot and is entirely about the experience you have by watching its dozens of characters interact with each over the course of 83 minutes. Many will hate it, but I found it be both bizarre and bizarrely honest, a movie that will hopefully find its audience in the less conservative age of today. Grade: B+ ($5 rental on VOD)