The A.V. Club - The New Cult Canon

Film: The New Cult Canon:Glengarry Glen Ross

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

“Only one thing counts in this life: Get them to sign on the line which is dotted.” —Alec Baldwin, Glengarry Glen Ross For the film adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross—playfully dubbed Death Of A Fucking Salesman by the cast, for its colorful profanity—David Mamet added a scene specifically for Alec Baldwin, who appears early on as a real-estate-company slickster sent to deliver the details of a new sales contest. First prize: a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize: a set of steak knives. Third prize: You’re fired. (A friend of mine created an ingenious Glengarry ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Serenity

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0600

The Operative: “Are you willing to die for that belief?” Capt. Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds: “I am… but it ain’t exactly Plan A." —Serenity Passion matters. If there’s a lesson to be drawn from many of the films in the New Cult Canon—specifically the ones that died in theaters, only to find a following down the line—it’s that the passionate few speak louder than the passive many. That may not always register in dollars and cents, but it’s what keeps low-rated TV shows alive, sustains talented artists whose appeal often eludes the mainstream, and tends ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:The House Of The Devil

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0600

In the late ’80s, when I was a film-crazy teenager with a freshly laminated driver’s license in Marietta, Georgia, much of my idle time was spent trolling through the horror and “miscellaneous” aisles at the local Blockbuster, looking for the sort of movies my parents wouldn’t want me to watch. (And some classics, too: I was the weirdo checking out His Girl Friday and Orgy Of The Dead.) Needless to say, I’ve seen my share of Halloween, Friday The 13th, and A Nightmare On Elm Street sequels and knock-offs; the creative slaughter of countless horny babysitters, kids ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Synecdoche, New York

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0600

“Here’s what I think theater is: It’s the beginning of thought. It’s the truth not yet spoken. It’s what a man feels after he’s been clocked in the jaw. It’s love, in all its messiness. And I want all of us, players and patrons alike, to soak in the communal bath of it—the mikvah, as the Jews call it. We’re all in the same water, after all. We’re soaking in our menstrual blood and nocturnal emissions. This is what I want to try to give people.” —Caden Cotard, Synecdoche, New York ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:The Fall

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0600

Alexandria: “Why are you killing everybody? Why are you making everybody die?” Roy: “It’s my story.” Alexandria: “Mine, too.” —The Fall Tarsem’s The Fall is one of those movies that inspire modified praise, even from its most fervent champions—phrases like “flawed masterpiece,” “magnificent folly,” and from A.V. Club superfan Tasha Robinson, “the most glorious, wonderful mess put onscreen since Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.” One’s mileage for glorious messes tends to vary—the “mess” part is all Tasha and I can agree on with Gilliam’s recent The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus—but there’s great ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Let The Right One In

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0600

“I’d say you were within your rights to bite.” —Morrissey, “Let The Right One Slip In” Though the Swedish film Let The Right One In concerns a vampire and doesn’t shrink from the traditional mythology (eternal life, blood, neck-biting, resistance to sunlight, etc.) of other vampire tales, it isn’t really a horror film. In fact, its staunch resistance to—if not outright animosity toward—the expected genre thrills makes it difficult for an unabashed horror enthusiast like myself to get behind it completely. It’s an arch, “classy” piece of work, something critics who regularly turn their ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Man Bites Dog

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0600

“We’ll never have enough.” — Rémy Belvaux, Man Bites Dog Call it Tony Soprano Syndrome: If the lead character in a feature or documentary has enough charisma, we’ll stay with them no matter how terrible or irredeemable their actions. Toward the end of The Sopranos’ six-season run on HBO, creator David Chase and his writing team did everything they could to make Tony as repugnant as possible, a man without shame or scruples who uses therapy as a form of all-purpose absolution for the violence and betrayals of his past, present, and future. But no matter how much ...

Features: The New Cult Canon:Requiem For A Dream

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0600

“We got a winner!” —Tappy Tibbons infomercial, Requiem For A Dream Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem For A Dream is about a lot of things: addiction, exploitation, destitution, loneliness, institutional corruption, the toxins of the media and our get-rich-quick culture, and the false promises of the American Dream itself. But it’s mainly about visceral experience, in provoking audiences to feel these themes rather than sit back comfortably as the characters slowly circle the drain. It’s as powerful an anti-drug movie as you could ever wish to see—even those brief moments of heroin-fueled ecstasy are poised on the edge ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Zero Effect

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0600

To Sherlock Holmes, she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Bottle Rocket

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0600

“We did it, though, didn’t we?” —Owen Wilson as Dignan, Bottle Rocket Back when Fantastic Mr. Fox debuted a few months ago, the following thought occurred to me: “Wes Anderson is forever doomed to make Wes Anderson movies.” Here’s a director who did all he could to step outside his comfort zone, adapting someone else’s work for the first time—in this case, that of Roald Dahl, an author with his own singularity—and using stop-motion animation, a painstaking collaborative process that seems like it should suppress his auteurist instincts. Alas, Fantastic Mr. Fox is a Wes ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Bad Santa

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 12:14:00 -0600

“Wish in one hand, shit in the other. See which one fills up first.” —Billy Bob Thornton, Bad Santa Director Terry Zwigoff was responsible for the best—maybe only good—fart joke I’ve ever seen in a movie. In the middle of Ghost World, his excellent 2001 adaptation of Daniel Clowes’ comic, an irascible, middle-aged vinyl collector (Steve Buscemi) is sulking about his confusing relationship with a high-school graduate half his age. He retreats to the one room in his fleabag apartment where he feels at home, a sanctuary filled with old records and vintage pop art that cocoons ...

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 ...