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jrobertfleming
Reviews
The Neon Demon (2016)
Self-Serious Mess Filled With Bad Laughs
So I guess female vanity is some kind of dark magic and you see the innocent virgin attracted to its glowing allure. As she is drawn into it she meets a coven of witches: a passover, a wannabe and a sorceress supreme, who all covet what she has. The passover wants to kill her, the wannabe is jealous of her and the sorceress supreme who occasionally turns into a wildcat attempts to seduce her, but, awake to the power within her, the innocent virgin instead opens herself to her destiny as the vessel of 'The Neon Demon'. The coven then kills her and eats her flesh to gain for themselves the powers of 'The Neon Demon'. Which is female vanity or the male gaze or some nebulous cloud of similar tropes referenced in terms of fashion modelling.
The bad laughs and eye-rolling material comes on early where our innocent virgin hits all those on-the-nose beats about falling from innocence in the big city. Speaking of 'beats', long expanses of the film seem like the cinematography was only there to provide a light show behind Carpenter-esque synth jamming. An example of this was a heavily abstracted scene where our innocent virgin is finally possessed by 'The Neon Demon'. I guess 'abstract' is the word for it. 'Stoner planetarium laser show' would also suffice. Within the narrative continuity, this possession is meant to have occurred when the innocent virgin is given the star slot in a famous designer's runway show. One is left with the suspicion that the filmmakers couldn't actually show this happen in the context of an actual runway show because they didn't have a clear idea of the reality of a runway show. The scenes bookending the sequence feature some of the most self-serious and unintentionally silly dialogue in the film.
After her possession, the film takes a steep dive into very silly territory. Our innocent virgin is presumably transformed now that she has accepted 'Teh Power', but Elle Fanning has none of the startling aesthetic presence attributed to her character either before or after. We're just meant to recognize her unique and startling attractiveness because it's written into the dialogue. By the foot of the second act, audience credulity on this point is strained.
There's a scene of the sorceress making out with a corpse, a ten minute sequence of the witches washing the innocent virgin's blood off their bodies in slo-mo under blue light while the sorceress, also covered in blood and glitter, gazes on and one of the witches heaves for ten minutes, in another ten-minute sequence of a character doing one thing, before throwing up an eyeball. There's more goofy stuff after that. There are a lot of party-bulb and blacklight shots which go on for way to long. A lot of bad dialogue. It's not a good movie.
Children of the Revolution (1996)
Promising Premise Wrought into a Cinematic Abomination
Perhaps you're like me. You'd just seen Reds and you want to wash the hopelessness out with some - any - evidence that there is a historical and moral conscience somewhere in the film industry with regard to Stalinism and Soviet Communism. You come across a little-known Australian production called Children of the Revolution which bills itself as a satire of the the western true-believers valorized in Reds; a comedy about a 'useful idiot' so starstruck by Uncle Joe, she flocks to Stalin as a groupie would and ends up pregnant and raising his love child.
Now, I, and I'm sure anyone, could imagine about a dozen ways this premise could be developed into a narrative coherent enough to be both cutting and entertaining. What instead ends up on screen is ... hard to explain. It seems like a pre-freshman effort, as if there were some producers with some money to make some movie and they selected the writer-director by opening the window and shouting down to the street, "Hey you! You wanna write and direct a feature film production?" and someone at the bus stop shouted back up, "Sure! I've seen at least a dozen movies!"
The movie starts out with the stated premise as a satire, but not very strongly. Then it changes form a half-dozen times as it slogs toward it's conclusion, becoming a romance, then a thriller, then a drama, then a tragedy then a thriller again and so forth. One thing follows the other in sequence only. Characters who have no natural reason to be in the same room with one another develop personal connections and weep together. There's a "race against the clock" thing in there which comes from nowhere and resolves to no consequence.
If there's some significant historical event connecting Australia to the Cold War, Children of the Revolution fails to make note of it. The movie is nonetheless set entirely in Australia and has an A-list cast of Australian actors. Taking this into consideration, an explanation for this cinematic abomination reveals itself. Children of the Revolution is the product of public grant money. The actors are fulfilling an obligation to whatever the Australian version of SAG is. We may assume that there was at some point a contest put on by the Australian Film Council, or something like that, and the 'auteur' who wrote and directed this thing was awarded a production grant and given carte blanc to make some kind of movie on the strength of his submission of a ten-minute short.