The Good, The Bad, The Weird

My thoughts on By Design, Crime 101, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die and Nirvanna The Show The Band The Movie

With such recent works as Please Baby Please and Give Me Pity!, writer-director Amanda Kramer has been creating singular works of often bizarre and occasionally transgressive cinema—the kind of films that would be favorites on the midnight movie circuit if such a thing still existed—and with her latest work, By Design, she may well have topped herself in terms of sheer weirdness with this surreal spoof of consumer culture and those who partake in it. The film stars Juliette Lewis as Camille, a woman who longs to find some kind of meaning in her existence but is content to simply engage in meaningless exercises like endless luncheons with her vapid friends, Irene (Robin Tunney) and Lisa (Samantha Mathis). After one such outing, the three go shopping at a pretentious boutique where Camille become practically hypnotized by the sight of a brown wooden chair with a handsome look and an exorbitant price tag. Although she doesn’t purchase it then, she decides to go back the next day and get it with her saving but when she arrives, she is crushed to learn that it has been purchased by a woman named Marta (Alisa Torres) as a goodbye present to her now-ex-boyfriend, a musician named Olivier (Mamoudou Athie). She decides to touch it one last time and in doing so, her soul is somehow transplanted into the chair, leaving her in a barely sentient state. When the chair arrives at Olivier’s apartment, he initially scoffs at it but the moment he sits in it, he becomes obsessed, taking it with him wherever he goes and refusing to let anyone else sit in it. Meanwhile, Camille, who is now essentially little more than a piece of furniture herself, finds that she has become more popular with her friends and family, who not only fail to notice anything strange about her but remark about how she is a “good listener.”

Like Kramer’s earlier films, By Design is clearly not a movie for everyone and if the above description fails to pique your interest, there is virtually no chance that you are going to have enough patience to make it to the end. And yet, as odd as the film is, there is the sense that Kramer is trying to go for something more mainstream than usual, at least by her standards, due to the higher percentage of familiar faces in the cast as well as an omnipresent narrator (voiced by Melanie Griffith) that primarily seems to exist that all of the subtextual ideas regarding consumer culture and our tendency to objectify and exalt our possessions, if only to help ourselves justify our desires for them, do not go over the head of a single audience member. The voiceover conceit doesn’t really work—long after we have pretty much figured out what Kramer is trying to say, it continues to overexplain pretty much every. That said, while it may not be quite as out there as some of Kramer’s other films, it still has a number of things going for it, such as an undeniably striking visual style that give it a look suggesting a world inspired entirely by old catalogue photo shoots and a morbid sense of humor that occasionally scores big laughs, such as the scene in which a home intruder (Clifton Collins Jr) breaks into Camille’s apartment and is so thrown by her passivity that it inadvertently leads to his doom. Best of all is the performance by Juliette Lewis, who somehow manages to do a lot without actually appearing to do much of anything in a turn that needs to be seen to be believed. Again, By Design is not a film for everyone or even for most people. That said, if all you want to do is see a movie that is not a remake, retread or ripoff of things you have already seen more times than you can count, this might be right up your alley

.On the other hand, if you would prefer to see a film that is almost achingly familiar in every possible way, then you should consider Crime 101, a would-be thriller that, despite its numerous pretensions, is about as basic and entry-level as its title suggests. That said, the 101 refers to the California freeway that is utilized by enigmatic thief Mike Davis (Chris Hemsworth) as an escape route for his meticulously-planned and violence-free crimes in which he robs couriers of millions of dollars in valuables. He’s very good at what he does—as his palatial apartment and casually elegant outfits suggest—but when the heist that opens the film doesn’t go quite as planned, he decides that he will do one last big job and get out of the business for good, one that requires him to recruit the services of an insurance adjuster (Halle Berry) who has grown increasingly disenchanted with getting passed over for promotions at work that end up going to men with less experience and talent. Unfortunately for Mike, there are a few hitches to this plan. For one, this close-to-the-vest man who never ever forms personal relationships that he cannot abandon in a heartbeat ends up beginning a relationship with Maya (Monica Barbaro), who doesn’t know that he is a criminal but who knows that there is something up with him. For another, he winds up breaking with his usual fence (Nick Nolte), who responds by bringing in hothead punk Ormon (Barry Keoghan) to follow Mike, figure out his score and then rob him once he pulls off the job. Meanwhile, rumpled cop Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo), who couldn’t be more of an analog cop in a digital world if he tried, detects that Mike’s seemingly patternless crimes actually form an obvious pattern and when he cannot convince his superiors of this (despite the fact that the pattern is so obvious that even Frank Drebin could pick up on it), he is determined to do whatever it takes to prove his theory and take his quarry down.

Crime 101 marks the feature debut of writer-director Bart Layton, whose overwhelming ambition here appears to have been to make a film that would suggest what Michael’s Mann’s justly celebrated crime epic Heat might have been like if it had been made by Rob Weiss instead—unfortunately, he has succeeded in that task. This is not to say that the film, based on a novella by Don Winslow, doesn’t crib from other sources as well but the parallels between Heat and this film, in terms of both the narrative and the characters, is so striking that it eventually becomes somewhat absurd. Perhaps Layton might have gotten away with this if he found some kind of fresh spin on the material but he never does—the whole thing is so meticulously impersonal that it not only feels as if it was written by an AI system set to “enigmatic,” you get the sense that it was directed by one as well as it never ventures beyond going through the motions in both the action beats and the more character-driven moments. The same goes for the cast of remarkably strong actors who can’t find a way to make much of their surface-level characters—Hemsworth tries way too hard to come across as cool and mysterious without ever getting a chance to demonstrate to sense of sly humor found in his best performances, Ruffalo is stuck playing the same kind of mensch investigator role that he has done so many times before while the rest (including a bewilderingly brief appearance by Jennifer Jason Leigh in a part that, for all its ultimate importance, could have been done by a day player) don’t really have much of anything to do. If you have never seen a contemporary crime drama before, maybe Crime 101 will come across as more than the hollow collection of by-the-book allusions to other, better films and filmmakers that it ultimately is. That said, if you have somehow never seen a contemporary crime drama before, be assured that there are much better places for you to start

.As Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die begins, a seemingly crazy-looking guy (Sam Rockwell) bursts into a Los Angeles diner and announces to the patrons that a.) he is a time traveler from a future that has seen humanity all but devastated by a particularly insidious and infectious form of AI technology, b.) he needs some unknown combination of those there (he has apparently done this over 100 times without finding just the right ones) to help him stop that particular program from being uploaded and instigating the end of everything and c.) not all of them will survive the night. Among those picked are a pair of schoolteachers (Michael Peña and Zasie Beetz) who have seen their students growing into near-zombies constantly scrolling their phones, a grieving mother (Juno Temple) who learns of a way to resurrect her son, recently killed in a school shooting, as a clone, albeit a cheaper ad-supported variety, from a company that specializes in such things and a woman (Haley Lu Richardson) who is not only literally allergic to most forms of modern technology but has just lost her boyfriend to the allure of a brand new V.R. system, one whose in-game slogan gives the film its title. Over the course of the evening, the group makes their way through the increasingly chaotic streets to their ultimate destination, fighting off obstacles along the way ranging from violent cops and street crazies to oddities that I leave for you to discover.

The film marks the first project in nearly ten years from writer-director Gore Verbinski (the guy behind such things as the American version of The Ring, Rango and the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies) and there are times when it feels as if he is trying to cram all the films that he might have ordinarily made during that stretch into this one. Even at 134 minutes, this is a seriously overstuffed film with virtually every frame crammed to the breaking point crammed with wild ideas and bizarre visual curlicues in a manner that will remind many of the films of Terry Gilliam, particularly Brazil and 12 Monkeys. For a while, it is driven along by its sheer audaciousness and jet-black humor (particularly in regards to the extended flashback involving the mother and her reconstituted child), not to mention the effective performances from Rockwell, Richardson and particularly Temple but at a certain point, it becomes more exhausting than exhilarating and the final section, where the still-surviving members of the group confront the entity behind the destructive AI system, more or less devolves entirely into the kind of climactic sound-and-light show that we have seen done before in any number of similar films. That said, Verbinski’s message about the ultimately ugly nature of artificial intelligence and the myriad ways in which humanity is perfectly willing to sacrifice itself in exchange for superficial comforts and conveniences, while not exactly subtle, is delivered in a generally bracing manner that won’t be forgotten by those who see it anytime soon

.Almost as bizarre and audacious as Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, a crazypants Canadian export that fuses together the basic premise of Back to the Future with the filmmaking approach of Borat into a work so wildly strange that you can hardly believe it exists even as it unspools before your eyes. An offshoot of a web series and subsequent television show, the film stars Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol (who also wrote the screenplay with the former also directing, his follow up to Blackberry) as Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol, best pals who are first seen in 2008 embarking upon an elaborate scheme to get their band a gig at the Toronto music venue The Rivoli despite having more ambition than actual songs. When the story picks up nearly 20 years later, they are still trying to con their way into an appearance at the Rivoli and when Matt’s latest gambit—the two of them parachuting off the CN Tower into a Blue Jays game to hype their at that point nonexistent concert—goes badly, it finally drives a wedge between them and Jay decides to sneak out and drive their RV to Ottawa in the hopes of landing a solo show. What he doesn’t know is that a.) Matt is in the back of the RV, where he has spent the night trying to build a time machine in order to go back and redo the CN Tower stunt and b.) that by accidentally spilling a bottle of the long-defunct soft drink Orbitz into the system, he has actually made it work and lands them back in 2008. After hopefully planting the seeds for future success, they return to the present day and find that things have changed considerably, leading to trouble for both and no more Orbitz to help them try to fix things.

Admittedly, a film based on an obscure Canadian cult television show based around a couple of somewhat abrasive knuckleheads who continually get themselves into bizarre forms of trouble due to their own idiocies may not seems particularly appealing to some viewers and indeed, NTBTSTM is as much of a love it/hate it proposition as I have seen in a while. That said, despite having no previous exposure to either of the previous incarnations, I must say that I laughed a lot while watching it. While it would not be fair to spoil any of the jokes, despite the sheer abundance of them, I will state that the brand of absurdist humor on display is pretty inspired throughout, though your mileage may vary. What is particularly astonishing about this is not so much the film itself as it is the way in which it was put together. A number of the scenes that we see are clearly unscripted bits in which Johnson and McCarrol, in character, are seen interacting with real people who are unaware (at least at that point) that they are being filmed, most notably in a bit in which we see them going into the actual CN Tower in order to leap off the outside observation deck and trying to explain away the tools they have brought along while disguising the parachute badly hidden under their coats. (I won’t reveal what happens afterwards but the result did leave me wondering exactly how the hell they did that.) The result is fascinating—a work that seems rambling and digressive on the surface but which has been put together by Johnson and McCarrol so that only when it is all over to you realize how carefully constructed it has all been. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is clearly not for everyone (the audience I saw it with was clearly befuddled, judging by their demeanor once the lights went up afterwards) but to these eyes, it is one of the funnier films to come around in a while. Besides, any film that features a glimpse of an old ad for Treasure of the Four Crowns as a wall decoration is all right in my book.