Thinking About Death
My thoughts on Blackout, Frida, High and Low—John Galliano and Remembering Gene Wilder
Thinking About Death
For over 30 years now, indie filmmaker Larry Fessenden has carved out a niche for himself in horror circles for a series of often-intriguing modern-day spins on such classic genre narratives as Dracula (Habit), The Thing (The Last Winter) and Frankenstein (Depraved). With his latest effort, Blackout, he finally gets around to having a go at the whole werewolf mythos. Our anti-hero is Charley (Alex Hurt), an artist who fled his hometown of Talbot Falls following the savage murders of a couple having sex in an open field under a full moon—the lone witness, migrant worker Miguel, says that the killings were done by a wolfman, though the locals poo-poo his claims and racist land developer Hammond (Marshall Bell) tries to convince them that Miguel is the killer, stoking latent racial divisions in order to protect his business interests. As we soon find out, it was Charley who committed the killings while in werewolf form and, with the full moon fast approaching, he has decided to return home in order to settle things with Sharon (Addison Timlin), the girlfriend he bailed on without explanation, Hammond (who also happens to be Sharon’s father) and his estranged late father’s legacy while clearing Miguel’s name before ending his reign of violence for good with the help of a local friend. Suffice it to say, thing do not go exactly as planned along those lines.
I have admired all of Fessenden’s previous genre experiments and while I like Blackout as well, I must confess that it is not quite as good as the more thematically and dramatically ambitious likes of Habit or Depraved. As he did in his previous films, he uses the classic horror tropes as a way of exploring modern-day concerns, this time touching on explicitly political concerns—with his ruthless business plans and his racially-motivated campaign against Miguel and the other local Hispanics, Hammond is clearly meant to evoke a certain past president and the film also explores issues involving environmental concerns and gun control as well. This is all written and acted decently enough but the metaphor of having both Charley and his hometown dealing with the loss of their respective humanities in increasingly violent ways is just a little too on the nose for its own good. When it sticks specifically to its horror elements, it is more interesting, especially in the way that it illustrates Charley’s conflict with what he has become—he is haunted by memories of what he has done while in wolf form but nevertheless uses those memories as fuel for his art. In the end, Blackout may be a lesser Fessenden film but it still has a number of points of interest—it has been made with a genuine sense of visual style that belies its presumably low budget and the performance by Hurt is quite good in the way that it illustrate both the good and bad points of Charley—and those looking for a horror film that is sometimes funny, sometimes spooky, sometimes sad and often very bloody will want to give it a look.
Having served as an editor on such documentaries of celebrated 20th-century women as Ruth Badger Ginsburg (RBG) and Julia Child (Julia), it makes sense that Carla Gutierrez would elect to do a similar film for her directorial debut and in Frida, she has certainly chosen a worth and formidable subject in Frida Kahlo, the painter whose bold and often surreal works, mostly portraits and self-portraits, explored themes of gender, class, race and identity in unique and deeply personal ways that reflected her own often-tumultuous life and would make her an iconic figure in the worlds of art, feminism and LGBTQ studies. Although a thorough analysis of her life and work would seem to be too much for a film clocking in at under 90 minutes, this one does a decent job of hitting most of the key points, utilizing judiciously-selected archival materials, a narration consisting of writings taken from Kahlo’s own journals and letters that are voiced by Mexican actress Fernanda Echevarria del Rivero, and, of course, images of her own striking and haunting works. It is in the handling that Gutierrez has made an aesthetic decision that is likely to annoy as many viewers as it entrances—she has elected to use 3D animation to bring a number of Kahlo’s familiar images to life and adds dashes of color to old black-and-white footage. Although these moments are technically well done, they tend to be more irritating than edifying as they too often are done so as to underline the emotions and ideas that Kahlo was usually able to convey with the need for motion. As a quick primer to Kahlo and her work for those just beginning to explore her legacy, Frida is perfectly acceptable but if you are looking for something more, you are better off consulting the acclaimed 1983 biography Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera (whose notes and interviews were utilized as source material here) or, even better, the works of Kahlo herself.
There have been so many documentaries about the world of fashion that have arrived in the last few years that it is tempting to look upon High & Low—John Galliano, the new film from Kevin Macdonald, as more of the same. As it turns out, this one is different in a number of ways, not all of them good. The subject is Galliano, the once-celebrated fashion designer who rocketed from obscurity to instant success until it all came crashing down in 2011 in the wake of a number of well-documented racist and antisemitic tirades. The film finds him looking back and trying to make a case for the rehabilitation of his reputation with Galliano attempting to position himself as someone so consumed and dedicated to his art that he never dreamed that his increasingly controversial behavior and actions might actually have consequences down the line. To back up his point, the film brings in a number of famous faces who worked with him in the past—including Anna Wintour, Penelope Cruz, Charlize Theron, Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss—to testify that he is a great guy and that it was the copious drugs he was taking at the time that were talking when he called one woman an “ugly Jewish bitch” and a man he happened to sit next to in a restaurant a “fucking Asian bastard.” To provide balance, of sorts, we meet the man who received the latter insult, who went so far as to forgive Galliano in court and has yet to receive any sort of apology from the man himself.
Needless to say, the resulting film is problematic in any number of ways. As a guide to his once-stellar career, it doesn’t quite work because even though there is a lot of archival footage of his increasingly elaborate fashion shows from over the years, Macdonald never quite manages to convey what it was about Galliano’s designs that made them unique and sparked the imaginations of fashionistas around the world for those viewers who aren’t up on such things. A bigger problem is that while it seems as if the film might delve into the potentially thorny questions regarding the subject of public atonement for their sins—particularly who deserves it and what they need to do in order to fully earn it—it essentially allows these issues to slide to the side to make room for the less-than-convincing claims of of rehabilitation from Galliano, who barely seems to acknowledge that he did anything in the first place, or the empty platitudes of his famous friends who have little else of value to add to the discussion. (Although most of them manage to avoid embarrassing themselves, some of Campbell’s comments are especially cringe-worthy.) In the end, the film is little more than a glossy advertisement for Galliano’s campaign to put all of the self-inflicted damage to his career to the side and a particularly unconvincing one at that.
Ron Frank’s Remembering Gene Wilder is about as basic of a celebrity-centered documentary as you can get—a look at the life and career of the late actor comprised of plenty of clips from his most notable movies and remembrances from a number of his friends, co-workers and admirers, including Mel Brooks, Alan Alda, Carol Kane, Eric McCormack and Ben Mankiewicz, that have been strung together with narration from Wilder himself culled from the audiobook of his autobiography. As a fan of Wilder’s work ever since my mother sat me down at what was an absurdly inappropriate age one afternoon to watch The Producers (yes, I saw that as a kid before Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory), it was fun to watch the clips from those films, along with other classics like Bonnie and Clyde, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein and to hear the commentators recounting various anecdotes about their production. However, as the film went on, I became increasingly frustrated with it because while it hit all the expected points—including his partnership with Richard Pryor, the loss of wife Gilda Radner to cancer and his own eventual passing from Alzheimer’s-related complications—the film doesn’t really delve into them in any detail and many of the movie-related discussions center around stories that will be familiar to even casual fans of those films. Meanwhile, other films in his career that might have yielded interesting tales are either given short shrift (such as all the films for which he served as writer-director) or ignored entirely (such as his appearance in the odd adaptation of The Little Prince or Another You, the troubled (and quite awful) fourth and final pairing with Pryor that proved to be Wilder’s final big-screen appearance, thereafter spending the rest of his career working in television). Although made with undeniably sincerity and heart, Remembering Gene Wilder proves to be little more than an extended version of one of those mini-bios that they run between movies on TCM and those looking for evidence of Wilder’s undeniable genius as a performer would be better advised to seek out one of his actual movies instead.