Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today my apartment is undergoing some impromptu spring cleaning owing to last week’s house fire, the second house fire we’ve suffered in roughly eighteen months. Fortunately the damage wasn’t nearly so severe this time, and our landlord is paying for the service, so hey: free apartment cleaning! You gotta take the victories where you can find them in this world of apparently perpetual house fires, and for me those victories tend to come in the form of unexpected new media treasures, films or series that totally catch me by surprise. Let’s pan for gold once more as we break down the Week in Review!
First up this week was A Night at the Roxbury, an SNL alumni project starring Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan as Steve and Doug Butabi: plastic flower salesmen in their dad’s shop by day, club-cruising playboys by night. Or at least, so they’d like to be; in truth, they mostly drive around bobbing their heads to “What is Love,” get shut down by women who rightly clock them as manchildren, and get blocked from entering the fabled Roxbury by its long-suffering bouncer. However, when a chance encounter with a celebrity opens the doors for our boys, they swiftly find themselves soaring towards the glamorous nightlife they’ve always dreamed of.
Like many SNL films, A Night at the Roxbury’s core joke doesn’t really have the stamina to rise from a three-minute skit into a feature-length production. The film wanders through narrative developments without much purpose or momentum, but there’s nonetheless a core comic appeal to watching two Johnny Bravos attempt to be genuinely cool guys, bobbing their heads at women like angry ostriches and perpetually retelling the story of how Doug ran into Emilio Estivez that one time. Ferrell is such a natural comedian that even this weak tea is mostly tolerable; I imagine fully paying attention to this movie would be burdening it with expectations it cannot possibly satisfy, but as a second-screen watch revealing the origin story of the “What is Love” meme, it’s a fine enough time-passer.
We then screened Life, a 2017 science fiction feature taking place largely aboard the International Space Station, which has just received a sample of dirt and debris from the surface of Mars. Investigating the sample, the six-member crew are elated to discover it contains dormant cells, which they soon motivate into a living multicellular organism they name “Calvin.” Unfortunately, both the creature’s rate of mutation and sheer malice prove too much for our poor scientists, and they swiftly find themselves in a fight for their life against their newest crewmate.
Life is a straight-up old-fashioned creature feature that knows precisely what it’s about, elevated through both its distinctive creature and its exemplary cast. Seriously, we’ve got Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Hiroyuki Sanada, Aariyon Bakare… even Ryan Reynolds is here, and actually fitting into the drama rather than snarkily commenting from above it. I’ve said a number of negative things about Reynolds in the past, but I’ll give him credit here: he absolutely sells having an alien lifeform consume his organs from the inside out, and I was personally delighted to see it.
Gruesome Reynolds death aside, Life is well-paced and tightly focused, rapidly establishing a sympathetic team and clear field of battle, and then letting Calvin run wild across the intricately designed yet agonizingly fragile space station. Both Calvin’s bids for survival and the crew’s counterplays feel natural and intelligent – the escalation of threat builds with uncommon grace, and the evolving destruction of the space station ensures Calvin’s menace doesn’t have to carry all of the dramatic weight. An altogether handsome little horror feature that understands its objectives and pursues them with energetic professionalism.
Our next feature was Melancholia, Lars von Trier’s mercurial meditation on depression and apocalypse. Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg star as sisters muddling through the end of the human race, as the heretofore hidden planet Melancholia threatens either a close fly-by or a genuine collision with earth. How do we grapple with simply living, and how do we contend with the end of life – these are the twin questions raised by Melancholia, each centered in one of the film’s two acts.
The film’s first act is a pure, unfiltered nightmare of socializing through depression, as Kirsten Dunst attempts to survive her own wedding reception while contending with the stark, overwhelming fact that getting married did not fix her. She’s not happier, she’s not more assured of her direction, she’s not even able to savor having fulfilled her family’s expectations – she’s as much of a depressed wreck as ever, only now having to contend with a party who all expect a glowing aurora of marital bliss, something she is utterly unprepared to offer. It’s ugly, it’s claustrophobic, and it’s undoubtedly one of the best articulations of living with depression while fending off the expectations of your well-adjusted peers that I’ve ever seen.
After that absolute nightmare, the second half’s slow march towards oblivion actually comes as a relief. Here is something Dunst’s character can contend with: after all, when has her life ever not been defined by shame and horror, by regrets and self-hatred and an understanding that things will never, ever get better? As Gainsbourg crumbles under the encroaching certainty of earth’s destruction, Dunst blooms into an even-handed oracle of apocalypse, at last existing in a world where everyone else feels the same overwhelming pressure she does. I do hope it would take less than the imminent death of humanity to make others understand quite how heavy life is when your brain chemistry refuses to let you see light in the world, but as an articulation of what such a long-sought unity of understanding might look like, Melancholia is a vivid character study, sumptuous visual experience, and altogether phenomenal film.
Last up for the week was The Kid With The Golden Arm, another Shaw Brothers classic by the reliable Chang Cheh. The film’s plot is as simple as can be: a group of accomplished heroes are tasked with shepherding gold to an impoverished region, a crew of bandits with distinctive specialties are determined to steal the gold, brutal martial arts exhibitions ensue. Featuring much of Chang Cheh’s consistent “Venom Gang,” Golden Arm is straightforward and savage, demonstrating a purity of intent that seems to reverberate across modern shonen, sentai, and general action cinema.
Golden Arm actually feels much like a bridge between Seven Samurai or The Wild Bunch and modern action features – which, given Cheh’s stated affinity for directors like Kurosawa and Peckinpah, is no great surprise. While maintaining the historical grounding and scope of his predecessors, Cheh leans heavily into the distinct pleasures of action as storytelling, crafting larger-than-life martial artists whose execution of their craft is its own vivid reward.
What results is a film as generous as a sprawling shonen epic, yet somehow packed neatly into a tight eighty-six minute package. There’s a drunken sheriff with the swagger and skills of Spike Spiegel, a self-declared hero who is saved from poisoning only to declare he must fight his savior in order to restore his honor, and a ranked collection of evil officers who each possess their own distinct signature weapon. There’s a contest between ax and spear that counts among the best-choreographed fights I’ve ever witnessed, and a forest path replete with poisoned needles and other nefarious trickery. There are secret doppelgangers and blind masters and daring escape plots, all granted an unexpected dramatic weight via the film’s effortlessly iconic characters. The Kid With The Golden Arm is golden age kung fu in all its glory, an accomplished riff by an absolute master of the genre.
