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JUSTIN TANNER REVIEWS STRAWBERRY MANSION and X
STRAWBERRY MANSION
Kentucker Audley’s tongue gets a prominent slo-mo closeup near the beginning of the lovably strange sci-fi romance “Strawberry Mansion.” And it’s kind of breathtaking. Like everything else in this sweet embrace of a film, it has resonance beyond the moment; when the image returns later, its meaning has changed, like a memory seen through the lens of experience. Set in the dystopian near-future of 2035, “Strawberry Mansion” follows the nascent love story between a tax auditor named James Preble (Audley) and his auditee, a free-spirited artist twice his age named Arabella Isadora (the radiant Penny Fuller).
He’s a shy loner living in a tiny apartment, she’s an aging eccentric who shares her rambling pink mansion with a turtle named Sugarbaby. They have nothing in common except the piles of unreported taxable items she’s been hiding from the prying eyes of the IRS. Yet when Preble shows up on her doorstep, Arabella greets him with the warmest smile imaginable and offers him a lick from her ice cream cone; he accepts. And from the trip he and the audience soon embark on, it might just as well have been laced with pure LSD. “Strawberry Mansion,” is Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney’s sophomore writing/directing effort. (They made 2017’s delightfully quirky “Sylvio,” about a debt-collecting gorilla who wants to be a puppeteer). Here, as in that film, they manage to transcend the weirdness of the material by committing to a tone of heartfelt honesty. And they use their tiny budget (and boundless imaginations) as a creative springboard to transport us to a world that feels as real as it is unique. Talking animals, walking shrubbery, endless buckets of chicken and the glow of a budding mutual affection are all brought shimmeringly to life with an assist by Marnie Ellen Hertzler’s clever DIY props and the lush Dan Deacon score, which provides a layer of emotional inevitability to everything we see. But what finally makes all this whimsy hang together is the calming charm of Audley, the endearing warmth of Fuller and the clear-eyed sincerity of Grace Glowicki, as the younger ‘Bella. Together, they navigate the surrealist narrative like characters in a children’s book, dealing with blue demons and witches and dancing skeletons with dauntless surety, all the while proving that transformation is possible if only you’re brave enough to share your dreams. Streaming on Amazon Prime
X Director Ti West’s new horror film arrives straight from this year’s SXSW on a wave of adulation, heralded almost universally as a modern masterpiece of the genre. And from the stunning opening shot, with its sly homage to John Ford’s “The Searchers,” “X” certainly has the feel of a classic in the making. Set in rural Texas in the 70’s, with a bleached color palette that perfectly evokes the Grindhouse splatter films of the period, the film unfolds efficiently through the framing device of a grim, post-massacre crime scene investigation: mutilated bodies, blood-soaked farm implements and the promise of something even more horrible (and yet unseen) down in the cellar.
For the first third of “X,” Goth and her young costars bring loads of deft character work, smart-ass charm and pungent sex appeal to the story. The production design, the pacing and the multiple layers of self-referential humor pitch everything to a cinematic sweet spot where sex comedy hijinks collide joyously with anticipatory dread. And then we meet Pearl and Howard, the elderly couple who’ve unknowingly rented out their farm for the porn shoot, and the entire movie comes apart, because for some inexplicable reason the actors playing the seniors have been swaddled in layers of laughably unconvincing ‘old age’ make up, being clearly too young for the roles. Latex prosthetics have become the hot go-to effect for movie makers despite almost always looking precisely like an actor wearing a rubber mask. Even under the best of circumstances it’s distracting. In an early scene from “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” both Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield look hilariously like a couple of anthropomorphized chipmunks. I’m all for the suspension of disbelief, but I gotta stop laughing first. Perhaps casting a 27-year old as a 90-year old was a safer bet, given all of the naughty grandma antics of the Pearl character’s psychosis: The lurid strip tease, the predatory humping would be a lot to ask of an actress who was actually in her eighth decade. But having young people playing ‘dress up’ undermines the movie’s thematic points about the perils of aging (and what to do with the lingering erotic desire that finds progressively fewer outlets for satisfaction). It also removes all the real danger from West’s story. Scenes of inappropriate intimacy between the lithe Mia Goth and an actual octogenarian would’ve been kind of ghastly, but also kind of marvelous. Here it ends up looking like a cheat, like watching a magician who hasn’t quite learned the trick. You also shouldn’t start a film with someone looking into a basement and responding as if they’ve seen the mouth of hell, and then later show us what’s actually in the basement and it’s a big fat meh. In a way it’s not Ti West’s fault that “X” feels so underwhelming; every horror film this year is going to suffer in comparison to Mimi Cave’s mind blowing slasher/romance “Fresh.” It’s simply too hard an act to follow, relegating “X” to the film version of an Impossible Burger while “Fresh” provides the real meat. In Theaters X Photograph Courtesy of A24 Films
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Flashback 24 hours and we get introduced to the young nubile cast of soon-to-be pitchfork fodder led by the great Mia Goth, who does a bump of cocaine, climbs into a van with her film crew and heads out to a remote location to shoot a skin flick. 
