Destroy Everything You Touch

A Review of DESTROYER (2018)
Directed by Karyn Kasuma
Written by Phil Hay and Mat Manfredi
Cinematography by Julie Kirkwood
Score by Theodore Shapiro
Staring Nicole Kidman, Toby Kebbell, Tatiana Maslany, Scoot McNairy, Bradley Whitford, Toby Huss, and Sebastian Stan

Stop me if you've heard this before, but, I have a soft spot for certain kinds of movies. European technothrillers are one of them. Cops-on-the-edge are another. There is just something deeply compelling about people with a strong sense of right and wrong headed for a brick wall at a hundred miles an hour. Destroyer is definitely one of those and it's a pretty good one of those, at that.

The strength of Destroyer is that it's a film that does not want to be liked. It's characters are all assholes and they're all making obvious, if logical mistakes. It stays true to the sub-genre and doesn't ever feel the urge to make its characters have hearts of gold or secret doubts. No, they're just scared apes with shoes that are just smart enough to know that they'll be dead soon. It's a tragedy by way of a police procedural and while it isn't anything shocking or new, it is well put together

The plot of the film centers around Erin Bell (Nicole Kidman), a Los Angeles Police Department detective at the end of her tether. A body is found on the banks of the LA river and Bell, on her own accord, descends into the hell of an undercover case she worked from the beginning of her career. 

And, because we live in a post-True Detective world, her journey takes place across split times, weaving flashbacks into the narrative, showing Kidman’s Erin Bell before she was a complete waste-oid. The film bounces back and forth between young make-up and old make-up until the two narratives meet in a fairly unexpected way and, of course, Bell ends up where all bad cops in these sorts of movies end up: Exactly where she deserves.*

(It's also worth stating that in between the "beginning" of the film and the end of the film, we're treated to several botched bank robberies, lots of scenes of hangovers, and one of the saddest handjobs in all of cinema-- a point of distinction, to be sure.)

Nicole Kidman is the heart of this movie. Without her-- even with the odd bits of brilliant direction-- there is no film. As much as this movie throws wigs and dentures and weird make-up on top of her, Kidman never stops acting natural. She is believable as a bright-eyed young thing, as well as a boozed-up mom that should have been put out to pasture years ago. It's not so much intense as it is this slow motion garbage fire. It's a lot of fun to watch and it's the human heart beating at the center of what could have been an otherwise dreary bit of nihilism.**

One choice that stands out in the film is just how impervious Kidman's Bell is to cop one-liner bullshit. On multiple occasions, the older embittered Kidman character runs up against cops giving  her a ribbing and she just looks at them, as one should any time anyone tries to break your balls, with a look of confusion and contempt. It's a character choice and a script detail that I deeply connect with.

Would I say that I'm a Sebastian Stan stan? Yes, I would.

Sebastian Stan co-stars as a fellow cop/co-conspirator/lover and, as it typical with somebody juggling so many different jobs, it doesn't go great for him. It's always good to see Sebastian Stan and it's especially nice to see him acting in something that is more interesting than a house payment. I like him a lot, both in this movie and in general. I’ve liked him ever since Kings (a show that me and three other people watched). Anyways, go watch Kings.

Oh yeah, I guess he's pretty good in it. I mean, just look at him. He's great. But, also, I really just wanted to mention Kings. It was a great show and it had a lot going for it and the timing just wasn't right for it.

Man. Kings. . .

And speaking of fan favorites and True Detective, this movie has Scoot McNairy! And for once in his fucking career, he gets to play a normal guy who gets to live a normal life! I'll watch him in anything, but it's an especially nice change of pace when you're not counting down the minutes to him getting shot in the back of the head or whatever.

And, to clarify, Scoot was not in Kings, but you should still try to hunt it down anyways.***

The score from Theodore Shapiro is perfect for the film. Like the film itself, it vaccilates between these moments of well-composed beauty to ugly, droning heavy metal****. Like every great score, it both helps establish and amplify the sun-bleached horrorshow world of Destroyer.

Again, maybe I'm a sucker, but I do love me some sunbleached LA set to distorted violin strings. Or maybe it's because I'm American and I've got fuckin' taste.

Like a lot of movies, Destroyer is a movie that kind of came and went. And like a good chunk of those movies, it doesn't deserve that fate. While it isn't anything shockingly new, its stand out achievements in direction and acting elevate the picture above the usual morass of these sorts of stories-- and the sorts of movies that make all of the money these days. Destroyer is a work with a perspective and it sells its ideas with skill and with beauty-- albeit the beauty of a brush fire.

FOOTNOTES:
* And that's maybe why these movies are still tolerable: They're the only avenue in which bad cops actually get what they deserve. What a cool thing.

** On an ironic level, it's also fun to watch Nicole Kidman play "against type," meaning "what if she wasn't attractive?"

*** Seriously, watch Kings. It was only one season long and it's greatest sin was that it came out on network TV right before streaming and prestige TV blew up. It had Ian McShane and Bryan Cox on it!

**** I'm a little less hot on the droning metal part of the soundtrack. Again, as much as I'm a sucker for that sort of a thing, I do find it slightly annoying that, as a society, we all decided that traditional symphonic scores were just going to be replaced by synths being records in the next apartment over. I mean, whatever. It usually works. I shouldn't complain.

James Kislingbury is a writer, podcaster, and does not smoke indoors. Must be losing his touch. You can listen to him here and here. You can shovel piles of lucre at him here and here.

Some Thoughts on the Latest Space Madness Movie

A kind of review of High Life (2019)
Directed by Claire Denis
Written by Claire Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau
Starring Robert Pattinson, Mia Goth, Juliette Binoche, and Andre Benjamin

High Life is a dirge. That isn't to say that it's a bad film and it is certainly too rich to throwaway as being "interesting."

I think back to Gravity-- a film only similar on a surface level-- which I wrote with my hands still shaking from the experience and I am writing about High Life only having just walked out of it. In the case of Gravity I hadn't had a chance to come down off of the high of watching that movie. In the case of High Life, it is a movie that I am still digesting. That I'm not sure how I feel about it or that I'll ever really know how I feel about it.

But I doubt confusion bordering on ambivalence is what Claire Denis was going for when she set out to make this movie (a story that she had wanted to tell for going on fifteen years, apparently).

Or maybe not. I can't say that I know too much about Claire Denis (and that's on me).

That it accomplishes a consistent funereal tone might be what makes it worth while and it might be why I'd tell you to miss it entirely. It isn't a whole lot of fun.


That said, it's a film with a few stand out sequences that I probably won't stop thinking about until the day I die. There's a big one towards the beginning of the film (if you've seen it, yes, it's the one you're thinking of), but there are also a lot of little moments. Strange, flitting moments in the memories of these characters that are beautiful and haunting and are as relatable as they are alien. There is a flashback of Monte (Robert Pattinson) walking through the woods with his dog. There is Boyse (Mia Goth) living as a rail-borne tramp back on Earth. There is a completely out-of-the-blue sequence in which a guru (I think?) talks to a French student about the premise of the film. Each of these scenes are so light and so out of the blue that you can't help but feel that they must have meaning. Little brush strokes of color in the middle of all of this gloom that feel like real art. That somebody has something to say. And then you go back to Monte and his crew slowly succumbing to space madness and you know that there is something here, but you just can't say what it is.

This takes two hours. I wish I could be more definitive about how I feel about the movie. It sucked. It rocked. It was a thrill ride. Whatever. But taking something like that-- especially as of this moment-- and distilling it down to five hundred words seems. .  . Vulgar? Low? High Life has too much going on for me to treat it like that.

Like the movie, me feeling on it are a mystery, even to myself. I can't say that it's an entirely enjoyable feeling. What I can say is that it is cinema and looking around at movies these days and at the world in general, I think we could us more things like that.

James Kislingbury is a writer, podcaster, and has had enough of regular old Earth madness, thank you very much. You can listen to him here and here. You can shovel piles of lucre at him here and here.

I've been saying this shit for years!

(Author's Note: In preparation of a bit of writing on Hannibal, here's something about a show that I have previously ranted about. I don't think anyone listened that time either.)

People need to be watching Foyle's War!

Besides Foyle's War being a well made and well researched procedural set during WWII, it also very obviously draws from The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

Speaking of brassy gals from the second world war, Agent Carter of Captain America, from her design to her character, is also cribs from the same source material as Foyle's War. Considering that Agent Carter is going to have her own TV show, you should get caught up on these things if you want to remain ahead of the pop culture curve. I say this for your own sake, not for mine.

To summarize: I have an essay in the works. Furthermore, Foyle's War-- which you can watch on Netflix and Amazon Instant-- is quite good. I mean, its wigs aren't as good as Downton Abbey's wigs, but then again, whose are?

That Time That Guy Richie Decided to Get Back to Making Movies

It's good to see after the turgid, self-indulgent whatever-the-fuck-that-was of Revolver, the hideously unfunny Swept Away, and the pointless, cash-grab that was Rock n' Rolla, Guy Richie decided to make a movie again.

And, you know what? It's pretty good.

It's a fairly average tab-A into slot-B mystery-romp, where it differentiates itself from what would have been a run of the mill thriller is that it is set in Victorian London, which is always a fun place to look at (also a place more needing of shampoo than maybe even the city of Deadwood). On paper the treatment sounds like a turkey receipe, thankfully the reality is that, like so many films, it works much better in motion than it does as a static idea.

Plus, it reminds me of the Guy Richie I spent my junior high years obsessing about. In this movie, he's the fun Guy Richie that's full of camera tricks and Jason Statham and not the Thing That Married Madonna. Even though I like the slow, brooding London of a Masterpiece Theater episode, it's fun to see it handled like a high budget action blockbuster or a music video instead of a reassuring period piece engineered to lull dowagers into hibernation. It's a pleasant novelty, which is what a blockbuster like this should be, I guess, if nothing else. I love that time period and I love those aesthetics, so if only for that, I dug this movie.

Moving swiftly along, I want to talk about the guns in this movie, because, boy, this movie has some guns in it. While the whole of the movie doesn't really hold up as a collection of idiosyncrasies as I would like it to, it's got quite a few-- the first being the Victorian setting, the second being antique firearms, and the third being a drugged up bulldog named after a British general that fought in the First Anglo-Afghan War, which is a fixation I didn't know that I had until now.

And for fun, let us revel in Guy Richie's failures:

(As I understand it, when Revolver was coming out, Guy Richie said that he wasn't going to make anymore crime movies like Snatch or Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, and that he was only going to make bizarre, intellectual, art-housey films like this instead. Well, I think we all know what happened with that. Looking at it now it strikes me as an artist going as far as he possibly can with his talent, which is noble in its own way. In that way it also reminds me of Magnolia. Take with some salt, if you get the chance.)

And now, once more, with feeling: