The A.V. Club - The New Cult Canon

Film: The New Cult Canon:Army Of Darkness

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

“Because it’s a brilliant film. It’s so funny and violent and the soundtrack kicks fucking ass. I never thought I’d say this, but can I go work now?” —Jack Black on Evil Dead II in High Fidelity Most weeks here at New Cult Canon, I offer some highfalutin reason why some lowdown piece of genre fare in fact aspires to some deeper significance beyond its surface pleasures. Ginger Snaps is not just a femme-centered teenage werewolf movie, but a metaphor for the terrifying anxieties of becoming a young woman. Stuck may seem like ripped-from-the-headlines exploitation, but it ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:In The Company Of Men

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:00:00 -0600

“Women. Nice ones, the most frigid of the race—it doesn’t matter in the end. Inside, they’re all the same: Meat and gristle and hatred, just simmering.” —Aaron Eckhart, In The Company Of Men [Note: Just a reminder, The New Cult Canon is not a spoiler-free zone. Major plot developments at the end of In The Company Of Men will be discussed in this article. Consider yourself warned.] Neil LaBute’s 1997 directorial debut, In The Company Of Men, attracted such a heap of controversy at the Sundance Film Festival that most distributors didn’t want to touch ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Hedwig And The Angry Inch

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

“I gave a piece to my mother I gave a piece to my man I gave a piece to the rock star He took the good stuff and ran.” —“Hedwig’s Lament,” Hedwig And The Angry Inch “This is San Francisco? But it’s so clean!” Every time I think about Rent—or really any enterprise that repackages unruly culture for mass consumption—the Mr. Show sketch “San Francisco: The Theme Park” inevitably springs to mind. Thanks to the omnipresent, all-powerful GloboChem corporation, a once-scary city known for “hippies, angry lesbians, and Chinese” has been transformed into a happy-faced amusement ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Ginger Snaps

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500

“Something’s wrong, like, more than you being female.” —Emily Perkins, Ginger Snaps There are horrors aplenty in Brian De Palma’s Carrie, but none quite as discomforting as the opening sequence, in which Sissy Spacek, playing the doomed wallflower of the title, happens to start her first period in the shower after gym glass. It’s bad enough that she has to shower in front of other girls in the first place; as De Palma’s slo-mo, soft-focus camerawork makes agonizingly clear, her classmates are all more developed than she is, and they stride around the locker room with ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Army Of Shadows

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500

“And what if I hadn’t run?” —Lino Ventura, Army Of Shadows In the final act of Jean-Pierre Melville’s rediscovered 1969 masterpiece Army Of Shadows, Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura), the dogged head of a Resistance network in occupied France, has been captured for the second time, and almost certainly the last. As the Germans escort him and a group of detainees to face a firing squad, Gerbier steels himself for the inevitable: “It’s impossible not to be afraid of dying,” he narrates. “But I’m too stubborn, too much of an animal to believe it. If I don ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:The Stepfather

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500

“You know, a house like this should really have a family in it.” —Terry O’Quinn, The Stepfather A moment near the end of 1987’s The Stepfather crystallizes the elusive fantasy that motivates Jerry Blake, the damnably old-fashioned serial killer of the title. Played with deranged wholesomeness by Terry O’Quinn, a great character actor who most will recognize as Locke on Lost, Jerry moves from one tree-lined, family-friendly town to another, searching for single mothers in need of a decent, hard-working husband to stabilize the house. As one family situation falls apart, Jerry creates a new identity (along ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500

“I didn’t do anything wrong.” —Frank, Pusher In the alternate moral universe of the Pusher trilogy, a micro-epic docudrama about the Copenhagen drug scene from Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, Frank (Kim Bodnia), the lowly dope dealer in the series’ first entry, is correct: He didn’t do anything wrong. Throughout the trilogy, Refn focuses acutely on various minor or semi-major players in the drug trade without broadening his scope to the pernicious effects of drugs and criminality in society-at-large; in that sense, it’s like the inverse of The Wire, deliberately avoiding “the big picture” in order to ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Head-On

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500

“I want to live, Cahit. To live and to dance and to fuck!” — Sibel Kekilli, Head-On Save for maybe the spoof, there’s no subgenre with a lower batting average than the modern romantic comedy, and that includes slasher films, torture porn, and other categories of ill repute. Whenever I see a movie like The Ugly Truth or Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past—every couple of weeks or so, basically—I ask myself the same rhetorical question: Why do they have to be so bad? And since I enjoy answering rhetorical questions, I submit the following reason: Because love is the ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Napoleon Dynamite

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500

“I caught you a delicious bass.” —Napoleon Dynamite Early in the cult phenomenon Napoleon Dynamite, a phone conversation takes place between the eponymous hero, a mouth-breathing high-schooler played by Jon Heder, and his mustachioed 33-year-old brother Kip, played by Aaron Ruell. Napoleon has just gotten beaten up by some bullies, who were decidedly unmoved by his tall tale of wolverine hunting in Alaska, and he wants to be taken home. On the other end of the line, Kip is busy grating a foot-long block of cheddar over tortilla chips and can’t be bothered; as a half-measure, Napoleon asks that ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Slacker

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500

“Sorry I’m late.” “That’s okay. Time doesn’t exist.” — sample exchange, Slacker If there’s a single word that defines director Richard Linklater, the one that leaps immediately to my mind is “curious.” He isn’t a filmmaker with a clear, strong, imposing vision or a particular urgency to his storytelling, and his wide-ranging interests tend to obscure any easily discernable authorial stamp. A philosopher by nature, Linklater seems to approach his career as a kind of pleasant reverie, drifting through live-action and animation, playful indie experiments and Hollywood crowd-pleasers, genre pictures and Eric Rohmer-esque conversation pieces. Though ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:The Lovers On The Bridge

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

“Paris can stay in bed.” — last line, The Lovers On The Bridge There was no chance that Leos Carax’s delirious 1991 opus The Lovers On The Bridge was going to be anything but a total fiasco, because it needed to be a fiasco in order to realize its ambitions. In that way, it’s like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, another grand, crazy, spectacularly indulgent vision that needed to go wrong in order to be right. Coppola needed to go upriver with Captain Willard, and he needed the hassles of Martin Sheen having a heart attack, Dennis Hopper ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Stuck

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

“I’m going to have to come up with a new word. ‘Indifferent’ isn’t enough. ‘Cruel’ isn’t enough to say. ‘Heartless’? ‘Inhumane?’ Maybe we’ve just redefined inhumanity here.” —Tarrant County, Texas prosecutor Richard Alpert “Why are you doing this to me?!” —Brandi Boski, Stuck In spring 2002, a juicy little news story out of Fort Worth, Texas briefly lit up the tabloids: “Man Stuck In Windshield Left To Die.” Seems that a nurse’s aide named Chante Mallard hit a homeless man with her car, drove home with him stuck headfirst in her windshield, and kept him ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Dead Ringers

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” — Elliot Mantle to Beverly Mantle, Dead Ringers In the opening sequence of David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, a pair of eerily precocious 9-year-old identical twins—two boys whom we’ll later know as Elliot and Beverly Mantle—step off their front porch and walk stride for stride down the street, mid-discussion on human sexuality. Elliot tells his brother that the only reason humans have sex is because they don’t live underwater; otherwise, they would just lay eggs and have them fertilized. People have sex because, in Elliot’s words, they have to ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:The New Cult Canon: Naked

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

“You can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs. And humanity is just a cracked egg. And the omelet stinks.” — Johnny, Naked The majority of us go through life dodging the essential questions: Who are we? Why are we here? Is there a God, and how is His presence (or lack thereof) important? And what possible significance could our tiny lives—in a tiny fraction of time on a tiny little island in the infinite space of the universe—have in the grand scheme of things? Johnny, the bedraggled misanthrope played by David Thewlis in Mike Leigh’s ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Beetlejuice

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500

“It’s showtime!” — Michael Keaton, Beetlejuice To my mind, Tim Burton has never matched the sustained invention of his debut comedy, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, a near-perfect synthesis of two sensibilities (the other belonging to Pee-wee creator Paul Reubens) stuck in the blissful Neverland of eternal childhood. This was well before Burton’s love of outsiders curdled into the mopey self-pity and “misunderstood genius” of Edward Scissorhands, and more purely celebrated the imagination’s power to create worlds within worlds. In his quest to retrieve his stolen bike, Reubens’ Pee-wee is forced to leave the safety of his cloistered playhouse ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Pootie Tang

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500

“Sa da tay!” — Pootie Tang Oh, to be a fly on the wall when writer-director Louis C.K. slouched into the cool, vaguely Asian-themed office space of some Paramount bigwig with the pitch for his film Pootie Tang. In 20 words or less: It’s Dolemite meets The Last Dragon meets the Zucker brothers meets Jean-Luc Godard, and everything the hero says is complete gibberish. What? Not sold yet? Try these other hooks on for size: The entire movie is supposedly one long clip from a biopic called Sine Your Pitty On The Runny Kine, as presented to Bob Costas ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Lost Highway

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500

“I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.” —Fred Madison, Lost Highway Based wholly on my one and only viewing of David Lynch’s Lost Highway back in 1997, I was prepared to write something like the following paragraph: “The first 45 minutes of Lost Highway are as sustained a stretch of brilliance as any in Lynch’s career—a self-contained, carefully constructed mini-masterpiece that takes the form of a waking nightmare. Contrast that with the final 90 minutes, which are as wide-open and diffuse as the first 45 were ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Darkman

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500

“What is it about the dark? What secrets does it hold?” —Liam Neeson, Darkman “Who Is Darkman?” In the summer of 1990, that was a question not on anyone’s lips, despite Universal’s best efforts to sell Sam Raimi’s original antihero on the cheap in the dregs of late August. Though I’m not entirely convinced Darkman could be a hit in any era, at least without first being branded by Marvel or DC, the film was nonetheless a good decade ahead of its time. Despite Tim Burton’s efforts to add some darker shadings to the Batman ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:I Heart Huckabees

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500

“Nobody sits like this rock sits You rock, rock You show us how to just sit here And that’s what we need” — Poem, I Heart Huckabees Well after its release, David O. Russell’s daring existential comedy I Heart Huckabees was hijacked by popular culture, first for leaked footage of Russell’s epic shouting matches with star Lily Tomlin, and later as headline fodder for the political aspirations of Face In The Crowd-like populist Mike Huckabee. All of which has been a distraction from the movie itself, and maybe a welcome one for many, given how abrasive, difficult ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Quick Change

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Security guard: “What the hell kind of clown are you?” Bill Murray: “The crying on the inside kind, I guess.” —Quick Change That’s Bill Murray in a nutshell. Murray was the sad clown long before Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, and Jim Jarmusch explicitly drew out the melancholy that always simmered just below his hilariously sardonic persona. Even in vehicles as purely frivolous as Meatballs, Caddyshack, Stripes, and Ghostbusters, Murray never falls back on excessive wackiness to push a joke across; he’s more the type to sit back on the sidelines, offering commentary on the foolishness that comes into ...