Doom And Gloom
My thoughts on Paint, Ride On, Tori and Lokita and the return of The Doom Generation
Originally released in 1995, The Doom Generation, the breakthrough feature from writer-director Gregg Araki, told the story of two pretty but vacant teenaged lovers, Amy Blue (Rose McGowan) and Jordan White (James Duvall), who fall under the influence of sexually ambitious psychopathic drifter Xavier Red (Jonathan Schaech) and wind up going on the run with him on a road trip chock-full of violence and sexual tension that builds to a truly gruesome and ghastly climax. I saw it at the time when it first came out and confess that I did not particularly care for it. Outside of a certain undeniably punk energy that coursed through it and an undeniably head-turning and star-making turn from the then-unknown McGowan, it struck me as a mostly tedious combination of empty brutality and cheap cynicism that wore out its welcome long before it arrived at the conclusion of its relative brief running time. The film didn’t last long in theaters but it did go on to develop a cult following, albeit one that was forced to mostly make do via hard-to find videos that presented it in a heavily edited form (over Araki’s objections) and with a crummy-looking transfer that reduced its bold visual stylings to little more than a smear.
Now, nearly 30 years after it first appeared, the film is making a return in a restored version featuring every blood-spurting, semen-licking, appendage chopping moment to the form that Araki originally intended. Curious to see if my thoughts regarding it might have changed with the passing of the years, I rewatched it and I must confess that it still doesn’t really work for me. I admit that Araki was able to create an impressive-looking movie despite working with a presumably limited budget and the ambisexual underpinnings to the relationships between the three main characters still feels fresh and unusual even to this day. The McGowan performance also stills kills—whether she is munching on Doritos, navigating the tricky parameters of the anti-romantic triangle she is a part of or admonishing someone with the classic “Eat my fuck,” you cannot take your eyes off of her.
However, the story is little more than a grislier and more cynical take on the standard lovers-on-the-run narrative that is hampered by the resoundingly unsympathetic nature of practically every character on display and the use of deadpan ironic humor throughout (ranging from a store clerk continuing to scream even after his severed head lands in the condiment tray to cameos from the likes of Heidi Fleiss and Perry Farrell) tries but fails to conceal the fact that Araki has nothing to say here about much of anything. Even Natural Born Killers, the film that it was most often compared to back in the day, at least made an effort to be about something, as opposed to the self-satisfied nihilism on display throughout here. Although some people were predictably outraged by its excesses when it first came out (Roger Ebert delivered an exceptionally brutal pan), I have always found it to be more of an exercise in tedium and not even the cataclysmic orgy of violence at its climax was enough to move me in any way.
As I said, The Doom Generation is a film that has gone on to become a cult favorite over the years and I am happy for its fan base that they can now see it—many presumably for the first time—in the form that Araki originally intended. However, unless you are a hardcore fan of the film and/or Rose McGowan, I cannot recommend it because its mixture of mayhem and sarcasm, while undeniably audacious at times, was gross and insipid back in 1995 and has not exactly stood the test of time. Instead, I would point you in the direction of a couple of the films that Araki (who has been working exclusive in television for the last few years) made in its wake—the deeply moving drama Mysterious Skin (2004) and the cheerfully apocalyptic sci-fi/comedy hybrid Kaboom (2010). Both of these films are as bold and in-your-face as The Doom Generation but they actually have interesting and relatable things to say beyond the brash attitude and moments of carefully calculated outrage.
Anyone planning on seeing Paint under the impression that it is about Bob Ross, the late painter and public television host who became a bizarre cult phenomena a few years ago, should be aware that although star Owen Wilson emulates many aspects of Ross’s persona—the curly mane, the soft-spoken manner, the fascination with painting landscapes—it is not a film about him, at least officially. That would be fine but the problem with writer-director Brit McAdams’s film is that it doesn’t really seem to have any concrete idea of what, if anything, it actually is about. Wilson plays Carl Nargle, the star of Paint with Carl Nargle, a local PBS production that is the toast of Burlington, Vermont. Carl has clearly been coasting on his form of fame for a while—he keeps painting the same landscapes and devotes most of his apparent energies to quietly seducing the local women, especially those working at the station with him such as producers Wendy (Wendi McLendon-Covey) and Katherine (Michaela Watkins), the latter evidently being his first true love until she broke his heart. However, with ratings down and funding in possible jeopardy, the station head (Stephen Root) hits upon the brilliant idea of following Carl’s show with another painting show, this one hosted by young African-American artist Ambrosia (Ciara Renee). Her decidedly different style strikes a chord with viewers and her show soars in popularity while Carl finds himself trying to regain his position as Top Brush by any low-key means necessary.
The premise of Paint has potential, I suppose, and there are certainly a number of gifted comedic actors in the cast but it doesn’t do anything with them. Instead of coming up with sharp and incisive things to say about misogynist attitudes in popular media, artistic expression, cancel culture or any of the other notions that it occasionally flirts with, McAdams instead gives us a weirdo hybrid of Amadeus and Butter that never quite gets out of first gear and which relies on Wilson’s impression of Ross’s familiar persona to do all of the heavy lifting. As impressions go, it is pretty good but what might have proven to be reasonably amusing over the course of a tropical SNL skit grows fairly monotonous at feature length and since no one else has been given much of anything to do, most viewers will find themselves mentally checking out long before it arrives at its final punchline, which, like the film preceding it, is not nearly as funny as it thinks it is. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that watching Paint is duller than watching actual paint dry but at least in the case of the latter, you have a better chance of ending up with something more memorable than this.
In his latest film, Ride On, Jackie Chan plays the kind of character that he himself might have become if he hadn’t become an international movie star celebrated for performing his own thrilling and oftentimes incredibly dangerous. He plays Lou, an aging one-time stuntman who was once one of the leaders of his field but is now reduced to selling tourists photos of themselves with Red Hare, the stunt horse that he raised from a foal and personally trained. Needless to say, he is in deep debt and when some thugs try to grab Red Hare from him as collateral for his debts, he and the horse fight them off in a skirmish that goes viral and inspires a former protege to hire them for a bit in his latest film, unexpectedly leading to a resurgence in his career. At the same time, a company that purchased the assets of Luo’s old studio steps in to claim the horse as their property and with nowhere else to turn, Luo is forced to turn to his estranged daughter, law student Baio (Liu Houcoun), for help. After some initial wariness, she and her fiancée, Mickey (Kevin Guo), agree to help and father and daughter grow closer, with her even serving as the de facto agent for his return to filmmaking. However, Luo’s insistence in continuing to do dangerous stunts, even when modern technology has made such risks unnecessary, threatens to put a wedge between them again.
Basically, there are two different movies at play in Ride On and I can definitely say that I vastly preferred one over the other. The stuff involving the daughter and the horse (which is a fairly obvious CGI creation during the more dangerous sequences) is genial and well-meaning, I suppose, but it is stuff that we have seen many times before and not even the always-ingratiating Chan can do much with it. However, when the movie shifts its focus, especially in the second half, and becomes a tribute to the art and craft of stuntpeople , it becomes infinitely more interesting. The film clearly celebrates their accomplishments (even utilizing a number of film clips and bloopers from Chan’s own amazing oeuvre to represent Luo’s work) but also takes care to illustrate the physical and emotional toll the job takes on those who do it (not to mention their loved ones) as well as the upheaval that they inevitably go through when they are no longer able to do it effectively. Although he is fine throughout, these are the scenes that Chan seems infinitely more interested in and they are the best moments in the film. Other than that, Ride On is a film with a few funny/touching moments, a few unbearably mawkish ones (especially towards the ending) and just enough in the way of fancy moves from Chan to let you know that even at the age of 69, he is still far more spry and agile than most people that you or I could mention.
In the opening scene of Tori and Lokita, the latest film from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Lokita (Mbundu Joely), a teenager who has recently arrived in Belgium from Benin, is being grilled by immigration officials determining her eligibility for residency papers. The focus on the questioning centers on her relationship to a young boy named Tori (Pablo Schils) who does have the necessary papers and who she claims is her younger brother. Perhaps inevitably, the meeting does not go well, with Lokita unable to credibly answer some key questions, but to be scrupulously fair, the questioning is somewhat justified because the two are not actually related at all. We never quite learn exactly how they came together in the first place but the journey to Europe and the promise of a better life has created a strong bond between them that the world seems intent on testing at any given moment. In order to repay the trafficker who smuggled the two of them into the country, Lokita and Tori deliver drugs being sold by the chef (Alban Ukaj) of a local Italian restaurant, a man who also regularly sexually assaults Lokita. In order to finally make enough money to clear the debt, Lokita agrees to go away alone for three months to work at a hidden marijuana farm, only to discover that she is not allowed to contact Tori during that time by the people to whom she is now virtually enslaved.
Like the vast majority of the Dardenne’s oeuvre, Tori and Lokita is a work of angry social realism that is more concerned with presenting harsh realities—the plight of immigrants trying to get by in a world filled with people (a number who were presumably immigrants themselves) willing to exploit them and social services willing to let them simply fall through the cracks—than in trying to present them in the form of a fairy tale in which everything sort of works out for the characters in the end. However, the best of their films, such as Rosetta (1999) and L’Enfant (2005), has told such tales in ways that do not minimize the grimness of their situations but still manage to lace the darker elements with the occasional hard-earned moments of hope for their characters. This time around, there is no such hope on display at any given point for Tori or Lokita—the closest they come is a sense of vague indifference from the official authority figures they come across—and while the Dardenne’s present their troubles in a relatively non-exploitative manner, the miseries that they endure throughout are so relentless that they end up losing their power to provoke after a while and culminate in a finale that is perhaps the clumsiest thing that they have ever put on the screen. The performances by the non-professional leads are strong and convincing, to be sure, but their efforts are not matched by the film as a whole, which may have begun with the best and noblest of intentions but which eventually feels more like a hollow exercise in cruelty that lacks even a trace of the kind of grace or humanism that one can usually count on the Dardennes to provide.