The A.V. Club - The New Cult Canon

Film: The New Cult Canon: Observe And Report

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0600

“I believe every man has a path laid out before him. And my path is a righteous one.” —Seth Rogen, Observe And Report “Now I see this clearly. My whole life has pointed in one direction. There never has been any choice for me.” —Robert De Niro, Taxi Driver There a scene early on in Jody Hill’s Observe And Report where Brandi, a make-up counter floozy—we never see her signature, but there’s an implied heart over the “i”—has just encountered the flasher who’s been terrorizing the mall parking lot. As a small scrum of co-workers ...

Film: The New Cult Canon: Dazed And Confused

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:01:00 -0600

“When I was making it, I was horrified, because I was reliving my past point by point. I’d be on the set and I’d look around, and I would be back in 1976, a freshman in high school again. And those weren’t necessarily good memories. I was revisiting sorrows and horrors. I was making it from a distance, so it perhaps came out more positive than negative, but it’s not all fun and games.” —Richard Linklater on Dazed And Confused Richard Linklater’s Dazed And Confused tanked badly when it hit theaters in 1993. Blame any ...

Film: The New Cult Canon: The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, And Her Lover

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0600

“Try the cock, Albert. It’s a delicacy, and you know where it’s been.” —Helen Mirren, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, And Her Lover Peter Greenaway has always been a man out of time, an arch classicist who’s nonetheless forward-thinking about what cinema can do. Of the objects of his contempt—and there are so many, you should presume you are one of them—the staid refusal of cinema to evolve beyond mere storytelling is foremost among them. What’s the point of having this relatively new medium if so few are interested in advancing it? (Typical ...

Film: The New Cult Canon: Diggstown

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0600

“Do you know the difference between a hustler and a good con-man? A hustler has to get out of town as quickly as he can, but a good con-man—he doesn’t have to leave until he wants to.” —James Woods, Diggstown “It’s better to burn out than to fade away,” as Neil Young says, and in the realm of critical perception, there’s no better example of this than director Michael Ritchie, who might have been as exalted as Hal Ashby had his career ended at the same time. From the late ’60s to the mid-’70s, Ritchie ...

Film: The New Cult Canon: Anaconda

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0600

“Buenos noches, beautiful.” —Jon Voight, Anaconda Cult movies generally imply some active engagement on the part of the viewer. These are films that are often unsuccessful or misunderstood, and thus need to be sought out and championed, passed around a network of like-minded friends or revived for the midnight/repertory circuit. This is how commercial catastrophes like Donnie Darko or Pootie Tang get a second life, and it affirms the cheering notion that great (or at least singular) movies will find an appreciative audience someday, even if it’s many years down the road. Such are the thoughts to which ...

Film: The New Cult Canon: The Human Centipede (First Sequence)

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:01:00 -0500

“[muffled cry]” —The Human Centipede At political conventions, they call it “red meat.” In the lead-up to the night’s keynote address—or, in the case of Sarah Palin ’08, the keynote address, too—a succession of speakers are brought on stage to fire up the audience. This is not a time for soaring language or elegant turns of phrase, but searing-hot rhetoric, served to an audience that eagerly scarfs it down, even if it ultimately clogs the arteries or poisons them with salmonella. Same thing goes for about half the slate at Midnight Movie sections like the (excellent) one ...

Film: The New Cult Canon: Black Dynamite

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:01:00 -0500

“Fiendish Doctor Wu, you done fucked up now.” —Black Dynamite Shameful confession: It took me some time to catch up with Black Dynamite, co-writer/star Michael Jai White and director Scott Sanders’ inspired send-up of blaxploitation movies. Though word was positive on balance—critical consensus pegged it as a clever film that overstayed its welcome, even at 84 minutes—two related thoughts kept me from rushing out during its very brief stay in theaters. One was that blaxploitation spoofs had been done before, to fitfully amusing returns, in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka and Undercover Brother. The other was ...

Film: The New Cult Canon: Shaun Of The Dead

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0500

“Look, I don’t care what the telly says, all right? We have to get out of here. If we don’t, they’ll tear us to pieces, and that is really going to exacerbate things for all of us.” —Simon Pegg, Shaun Of The Dead Much like a contagion spread through, say, gnawing on someone’s arm or feasting on brains, zombies plagued the ’00s, beginning with the lightning-quick super-zombies in 2002’s 28 Days Later and metastasizing from there. Before the decade was over, we were treated to zombie epidemics (I Am Legend), zombie sheep (Black Sheep), zombie ...

Film: The New Cult Canon: Inside

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0500

“I want one.” —Beatrice Dalle, Inside How much is too much? That’s a question that’s gone through my mind both times I’ve seen Inside (A L’Intérieur), an exercise in French extreme cinema that I find enormously skillful and repulsive in roughly equal measure. As a rule, I’m reluctant to draw any hard lines on what horrors are beyond representation, because I recognize how subjective that can be. For example, I find the trailer for 2012 far sicker in its bloodless apocalypse fetishization than anything I’ve ever seen in “torture porn” genre, but clearly ...

Film: The New Cult Canon: Zodiac

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0500

“Do you know more people die in the East Bay commute every three months than that idiot ever killed? He offed a few citizens, wrote a few letters, then faded into footnote.” —Paul Avery, Zodiac There may be arguments over which David Fincher film is the strongest—the existential noir of his endlessly imitated serial killer movie Seven, the plugged-in portrait of modern masculinity in Fight Club, the Rashomon-like complexity of Facebook’s origins in The Social Network—but there’s no question which is the most Fincherian. That would be Zodiac, his 2007 recounting/reinvestigation of the unsolved ...

Film: The New Cult Canon: May

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0500

“I like weird. I like weird a lot.” —Jeremy Sisto, May True to a movie about a disturbed young woman who busies herself with sewing things together out of disparate pieces, Lucky McKee’s May fashions an original whole out of a patchwork of horror influences. There’s Frankenstein, of course, the paradigmatic example of an obsessed loner creating a living thing out of exhumed parts. There’s Carrie, another sympathetic treatment of an intensely awkward, virginal girl whose psychotic episodes can mostly be blamed on her overbearing mother. There’s Psycho, with its relationship between Norman Bates and a ...

Film: The New Cult Canon: Schizopolis

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0500

“When I say this is the most important motion picture you’ll ever attend, my motivation is not financial gain, but a firm belief that the delicate fabric that holds all of us together will be ripped apart unless every man, woman, and child in this country sees this film and pays full ticket price, not some bargain matinee cut-rate deal. In the event that you find certain sequences or events confusing, please bear in mind this is your fault, not ours. You will need to see the picture again and again until you understand everything.” —Steven Soderbergh, Schizopolis The ...

Film: The New Cult Canon: The Vanishing

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0500

“My daughter was bursting with pride. But I thought that her admiration wasn’t worth anything unless I could prove myself absolutely incapable of doing anything evil. And as black cannot exist without white, I logically conceived the most horrible deed I could envision at that moment.” —Raymond, The Vanishing [Warning: The ending of The Vanishing has likely been as spoiled by now as the ending of The Sixth Sense, but on the off chance you’ve lived the last 23 years in the dark and wish to remain so, watch the movie and come back later. The ending of ...

Film: The New Cult Canon: Double Team

Thu, 05 May 2011 00:00:00 -0500

“You can bet your ass they’ll blame me for this one. I wonder what the fine will be.” —Dennis Rodman, last line, Double Team Throughout a career spent mainly logging time in generic action vehicles, often with “death” in the title—Death Warrant, Sudden Death, Wake Of Death, Until Death—Jean-Claude Van Damme, “The Muscles From Brussels,” has shown an instinct for action cosmopolitanism. Though cultists were keenly aware of the flowering of Hong Kong action cinema in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Van Damme played a key role in bringing HK style to Hollywood. While plenty of ...

Film: The New Cult Canon: Slither

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0500

“How can you blame someone for acting according to their own nature?” —Grant Grant, Slither At the point in James Gunn’s Slither where Grant Grant, an imposing and relatively wealthy figure played by Michael Rooker, says the line above, his transformation into a squid-like alien beast is nearing completion. His head looks lumpy and flush with red, as if his skull were turned inside-out; his mouth stretches out over gnarled, pointy teeth; and his skin resembles a plastic figurine that’s been cooked in the microwave. Never that handsome on his best day—and always a conspicuously odd match ...

Film: The New Cult Canon: Birdemic: Shock And Terror

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:00:00 -0500

“Man, that was a good movie, An Inconvenient Truth.” “That is it. I am getting myself a car that’s environmentally friendly.” —Birdemic: Shock And Terror Good movies are hard to make under any circumstances. But competent movies are hard to make, too, and the reason most people don’t realize that is because grossly incompetent projects either don’t get distributed, or never get bankrolled from the start. If you’ve spent any time in film school, you get a sense of how easily (and frequently) neophytes can mangle the most basic cinematic syntax: simple spatial relationships and blocking ...

Film: The New Cult Canon: Highlander

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

“There can be only one.” —Practically every character, every 15 minutes or so, Highlander The first time I saw the 1986 film Highlander—and the last, until now—was in 1991, under optimal conditions, in front of a large, appreciative midnight-movie audience. I was in misery from the jump, as the camera swirled drunkenly around a wrestling match at Madison Square Garden; to paraphrase Leonard Maltin’s one-and-a-half-star review, I was already reaching for the Dramamine. Director Russell Mulcahy made a name for himself as a music-video pioneer, responsible for the first video to appear on MTV (“Video Killed The ...

Film: The New Cult Canon: Enter The Void

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0600

“DMT only lasts for six minutes, but it really seems like an eternity. It releases the same chemical your brain receives when you die. It’s a little like dying would be the ultimate trip.” —Alex, Enter The Void “Die? Well, you don’t scare me, doc, ’cause dying would be a stone groove.” —Homer, The Simpsons (“Homerpalooza”) There’s no question director Gaspar Noé, a world-class provocateur, seeks to challenge, almost for sport, the limits of what an audience can handle. And he does it with a certain degree of swagger, too: His 1998 debut feature, I Stand Alone ...

Film: The New Cult Canon: Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0600

“We had all the momentum. We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark, that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” —Raoul Duke, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas Let us marvel, for a moment, over the existence of Terry Gilliam’s Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. Movie buffs like to swoon—and rightly so—over the American Renaissance ...

Film: The New Cult Canon: The Last Seduction

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0600

“I believe what we’re looking for is a certain horse-like quality.” —Linda Fiorentino, The Last Seduction To put it broadly, film noir was more a cultural moment than a viable, long-lasting genre, arising naturally—and without such a label—from the darkness and cynicism that gripped the country after World War II. While, say, Westerns could be endlessly revised to accommodate more modern ideas of violence and history in movies like The Wild Bunch, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, or The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, attempts to update noir are inevitably afflicted by movie-movie self-consciousness. They ...