Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I hit another milestone in my reader projects, as I followed up my Evangelion episodic writeups with a piece on the final Rebuild film, attempting to put my many contradictory thoughts on this franchise revival to bed. I’m quite happy with the result, and also feel profoundly liberated in knowing that I might at long last have said everything I need to say about Evangelion. I’ve also been rewatching some One Piece and enjoying how damn good the show looks in its pre-time skip era, when absurd talents like Naoki Tate were actually regular contributors. The show continues to enrich my understanding of animation, offering more “hey, I recognize that animator” moments with each revisit. I’m still deciding on what my next major backlog project will be now that Sailor Moon is behind me, but in the meantime, I’m keeping busy as usual with film viewings. Let’s get to it!
First up this week was Dave Made A Maze, a fantastical 2017 horror-comedy about Dave (Nick Thune), who has made a maze, and his girlfriend Annie (Meera Rohit Kumbhani), who returns home to find said maze (cardboard) arrayed across their living room floor. Asking Dave to leave his maze, she learns that he has apparently “gotten lost” and that it’s “bigger on the inside.” Shaking the cardboard contraption, she hears a diverse cacaphony of noises that could not possibly coralate to the pile of boxes in front of her. Thus, after summoning several friends as backup, Annie chooses to brave the maze itself, and contend with its terrible wonders in search of her stupid boyfriend.
There are clearly some thematic nuggets buried in the heart of Dave’s maze, including reflections on finding value and purpose as an aging millennial, as well as the ways our performances of “playing house” can be either aspirational or paralyzing. But these threads are given little time to mature beyond their description here; what this film is actually about is its production design, and lord is its production design marvelous.
In order to simulate the concept of a magically growing cardboard maze reflecting the diverse passions and anxious psychology of its maker, Dave Made A Maze’s team took the obvious route, and just actually made that fucking maze. Every new scene offers a fresh variation in the labyrinth, from the hall where paper cranes oversee a breathing cardboard goliath, to the hall of disco lighting where shadows with no source dance and beckon, to the corridor where everyone becomes cardboard puppets for a while. The perpetual novelty of Dave’s maze makes the film an inherent visual delight, and that fundamental strength is well-furnished with deadpan jokes, excellent character chemistry, and a general understanding of the malaise engendered by aging with passion yet no purpose. I was actually reminded of the book that likely inspired my fascination with hostile architecture, though House of Leaves would be another fine reference point. An easy, delightful watch.
We then checked out Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, continuing our journey through the dubious later entries in this most storied of slasher franchises. As the title desperately attests, this entry featured the return of the franchise’s original killer, after Carpenter’s attempt to curve the franchise towards an anthology format with Season of the Witch proved a financial non-starter. As such, number four sees Halloween returning to its roots, as Michael scares up a new generation of victims ten years on, with Dr. Loomis still doggedly pursuing him.
Frankly, Halloween 4 could have used a little more reverence for its predecessors, or at least a better understanding of what made them work. The original Michael Myers was implacable, but also unknowable – a specter around the corner, a barely-glimpsed face in the night. In Halloween 4, Myers faces off with Loomis in exploding gas stations, acting more like the T-1000 than “evil itself,” as Loomis is so fond of proposing.
Halloween is a franchise of variable pleasures, but few of them are in appearance here. The original film used the killer himself sparingly, creating an implication of surveillance and the sense that he was actually “haunting” his targets in some supernatural way through his occasional surfacing in the background of pans or suburban long shots. In the sequel, subtlety was traded for spectacle, and we were treated to a tasteless but undeniably generous collection of gruesome kills. Halloween 4 possesses neither subtlety nor grimy payoff, and frankly, it doesn’t even get the mask right. Hard plastic or plaster, not this pliable rubber crap! What are you guys even doing here.
Next up was Who Am I?, a late-‘90s Jackie Chan feature by his Hong Kong team, back when Jackie was essentially an industry in his own right. Filmed in English and featuring some less-than-stellar dubbing, the feature sees Chan crossing the globe as an amnesiac and would-be secret agent, tracking down an explosive meteorite sought by international arms dealers, and just maybe discovering who he is in the process.
Honestly, the film’s story is convoluted and largely forgettable, an overbaked muddle of spy tropes that don’t really congeal into a dramatically arresting collective. The best Jackie films tend to just get out of the guy’s way, letting him engage in his incomparable mixture of martial arts fluidity, silent comedy farce, and sheer willingness to throw his body in harm’s way. This one takes altogether too long to get there, but after a rambling series of investigations and betrayals, Who Am I? eventually lets loose with some of the best Jackie action in his catalog. A two-on-one battle on a sprawling rooftop serves as the astonishingly choreographed climax of the film, followed by an insane, desperate run down a sloped roof that features prominently in basically any Jackie best-of compilation. It’s a winding road there, but Who Am I?’s last twenty minutes are impeccable.
Our last viewing of the week was Rebel Ridge, a recent Netflix release that Stephen King described as a “thinking man’s Rambo.” Well, First Blood is already the Thinking Man’s Rambo, but Rebel Ridge is also a very good feature, and I can see why a man with King’s plot-focused proclivities might prefer it. Brought to you by the unsparing director of Green Room, Rebel Ridge offers a vicious portrait of small town police philosophy, a relentless, ever-escalating thriller, and an astonishing splash by its star Aaron Pierre.
Pierre stars as Terry Richmond, a former marine headed to post bail for his cousin, a one-time police informant and current marked man. Run off the road by local cops, he has his money stolen by the entirely legal and utterly corrupt process of civil forfeiture, putting him in a race against time to free his cousin before he is killed in general population. However, the cops are hiding larger misdeeds than individual asset thefts, and Terry’s investigations soon have the entire rancid department on his tail.
Between this and Green Room, it is clear that director Jeremy Saulnier is a master of breathless tension, and also a keen observer of the worst people in the universe. Having explored an overt neo-nazi compound in Green Room, Saulnier now turns his gaze towards the implicit neo-nazi compound that is every heartland police station, finding an equally contemptuous replacement for Green Room’s gloriously against-type Patrick Stewart in Rebel Ridge’s gloriously against-type Don Johnson. Wielding his office’s powers like a wire-wrapped bat, Johnson escalates with grotesque enthusiasm, burning every offered bridge until Terry is forced to take matters into his own hands.
Both Saulnier and Johnson impress, but it’s Aaron Pierre who steals the show. Apparently cast as a last-second replacement, his measured affect and slow-burning intensity feel irreplaceable, as he shifts from a determined yet accommodating negotiator to an angel of reckoning, wreaking holy vengeance upon Johnson’s pompous officers. Culturally, the main thing that has changed between Green Room and Rebel Ridge is that the nazis are now loud and proud, cheering beneath the banner of a presidential candidate that embodies their every moral deficiency. The world might be going to hell, but at least Saulnier and Pierre are here to swing a tire iron into the face of evil.
