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JUSTIN TANNER REVIEWS BODIES BODIES BODIES
BODIES, BODIES, BODIES When I was in college, my best friend’s dad sold real estate, and one weekend a group of us packed our sleeping bags, brought along some marijuana and booze, and had an all-night party in a totally empty two-story house in the deep San Fernando Valley. We got obliterated, watched George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” skinny dipped in the leaf-infested pool, and eventually ended up playing “Zombie,” our version of a “murder in the dark” game. I hadn’t thought about that insane night in decades, but it all came rushing back to me while I sat in a packed downtown LA theatre to watch Halina Reijn’s English directorial debut, “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” about a group of 20-something friends who get together in an isolated house and play their version of a “Murder In The Dark” game, in which a real killer brings a touch of throat-slashing authenticity to the proceedings. Mixing big laughs with jump scares and mild gore, Reijn’s film lands us in the center of a Gen Z wet dream, both honoring and sending up the hard-to-pin-down group; giving us a guided tour through their various neuroses while gently ribbing them for “instagramming while the world is burning.” Case in point: when a genuine hurricane descends on the party, no one seems particularly worried. Even as the pool furniture is being tossed around outside like thrown dog toys, the partiers are busy practicing their moves for a planned Tik Tok video. Then the real disaster strikes: the WiFi goes out and the inability to broadcast their every moment sends the app-addled kids into an existential crisis that only the presence of a saber-wielding murderer can alleviate.
From the very first frame — an extreme close up of two mouths kissing furiously — director Reijn keeps the camera tightly pinned to the action. A dance scene thrusts us — with an insistent, throbbing night club vibe — into the middle of a pile of bouncing, flailing bodies; deep in the sweaty tangle of motion and heat. (The hip-hop music, with sexually charged titles like “Hot Girl,” “Daddy as Fuck,” and “100 Boyfriends,” uses repetitive catch phrases to dig their way into your brain with the annoying insistence of a helicopter circling overhead, coupled with the incessant bleating of a spoiled newborn). And later, when everyone gets slapped (hard) in the face before doing shots of tequila, we feel the visceral kinetic whack of each hit. It’s raw and crazy and, like most of this terrific film, wobbling precariously on the verge of spinning out of control. The plot of “Bodies Bodies Bodies” is as old as the hills: a group of friends (plus a few outsiders) reunite, get drunk, do drugs and start telling secrets about each other. Old grievances resurface, feelings get hurt, jealousies boil over, alliances shift, and the official pecking order gets knocked out of whack. Eventually there are tears and hugs and some resolution. Only here, there’s also the crazed murderer in the mix who’s hell bent on thinning the herd by the use of various implements (blades, guns, blunt objects, drugs, etc). It’s kind of like “The Big Chill” meets “And Then There Were None,” or Whit Stillman’s “Metropolitan” meets Mario Bava’s “Twitch of the Death Nerve.” Except Reijn and screenwriter Sarah DeLappe manage to create their own very modern, very original take on a genre mash-up that plays as YA rom-com, pulse-pounding slasher flick, and darkly comic social satire all at once. (It helps that DeLappe’s fresh and nimble script contains more real laughs than any other picture this year).
In fact, I could’ve easily just listened to these marvelously solipsistic and entitled brats chatter on about how hard their lives are without the body count: Yes, the characters are all deliciously irritating, but the actors are so charismatic and winning, I was even a little sad every time one of them got the axe. Amandla Stenberg (of "Dear Evan Hanson") as the wealthy “just out of rehab,” Sophie and Oscar nominee Maria Bakalova ("Borat Subsequent Moviefilm") as her working class girlfriend Bee (the make out couple from the opening shot) are both terrific; richly navigating the intricate chess game of their ever-shifting emotional needs. The men: Pete Davidson (”SNL”) — who does wonders with his wafer- thin acting range — and the very sexy Lee Pace ("Pushing Daisies"), have some great moments together as bitter rivals. The scene where they idiotically argue over the phrase “the best defense is a good offense,” feels like the definitive example of the ‘men will fight over anything’ trope. Best of all is Rachel Sennott (Shiva Baby) as the neurotic and needy Alice. Her brand of self-obsession is both deeply touching and absolutely hilarious. Her manic riff about the psychological problems and fears she faces (as a wealthy white person) brought spontaneous applause from the audience. Before the final revelation and the unmasking of the killer (which induced genuine gasps), the film threatens to lurch right off the rails: scenes of intense hysteria, screaming, and wrestling over a gun; of objects getting smashed and bodies getting thrown over railings - the filmic assault ratchets the tension and energy so high it very nearly stops being fun.
But happily, when the sun comes up and the hurricane has passed, things calm down and the movie pulls together. The themes of suspicion and betrayal, how friendships can hinge on a text or an Instagram post, how little lies can turn into colossal symphonies of treachery, make the movie an invaluable snapshot of the vagaries of the Gen Z mindset. And it shows, once again, that at this moment in the culture, the female directors (Ninja Thyberg, Mimi Cave, Mariama Diallo, Sophie Hyde, Mattie Do, Quinn Shephard, etc.) have their fingers on the pulse of a new, heretofore untold, exciting, scary/funny truth about women that’s bubbling up from the collective id. Because they’re showing us — in a way that men have only been able to scratch the surface of — the multifaceted face of the deeply flawed female character. As ugly and mean and loving and broken and sexy and fragile and strong as human beings can be - these consummate directors are not afraid to show us everything. And it’s making for a thrilling year in cinema. IN THEATERS
THIRTEEN LIVES On June 23, 2018, twelve boys (ages 11-16) from the Wild Boars, a local Junior Football team, and their 25-year old assistant coach, went exploring in the Tham Luang cave system in Thailand's Chiang Rai province. Soon after they entered, a sudden and continuous rainfall flooded the cave, trapping them within a maze of tightly twisting tunnels — some as narrow as fifteen inches wide — two and a half miles from the entrance.
With most of their exit route completely underwater, there was nothing to do but sit in the pitch black darkness and wait for rescue as their oxygen supply dwindled and rain from the impending monsoon season threatened to submerge them completely. A story fraught with so much built-in tension should’ve made for a nail-biting thrill ride, yet Ron Howard has settled for a stately, almost drowsy approach, which aided by Benjamin Wallfisch’s Swedish massage of a score, James D. Wilcox’s soporific editing style and the ambient soundscape (with its gentle murmur of rain, calming burble of water, and meditative sigh of escaping oxygen) wastes no time wrapping us in a Klonopin embrace, ensuring a nice, slow heart rate, accompanied by occasional opiate drool. The cinematography, though pretty at times — with sequences that look like well filmed vacation footage, and some de rigueur drone shots of lovely distant mountains — has the generic, depersonalized feel of second unit work. When pieced together it’s like watching footage from randomly intercut security cameras.
Most of the film takes place inside dimly lit underground caves, with seemingly-interchangeable divers swimming tranquilly through murky water, occasionally bumping their heads — Ooops! Ouchie. But director Howard doesn’t have a grasp on how to convey distance or continuity. We get silly-looking overlaid schematics onscreen that let us know elapsed time and the area traveled, but we never get a real sense of space. For all we know, it could’ve been filmed in a swimming pool. And William Nicholson’s script reads like a dashed-off first draft, or more accurately, like a spitballed outline. There is no attempt to define the characters, leaving it up to the individual actors to bring whatever personal traits they can to the blank declamatory dialog. To misquote an old, nearly forgotten writing manual from my college years: “When a character’s speeches could be delivered by any character in the screenplay, you have a problem.” So it’s a good thing that the superb Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell, Joel Edgerton and Tom Bateman are in the cast. They manage to bring great depths of history and exhaustion to their nonspecific roles. But it’s not enough to make the movie work. When the stars are offscreen, there’s nothing to hold our interest. On the plus side, the film is never loud or intrusive, and the story beats keep repeating on a loop every ten minutes so it’s easy to take breaks without the fear of missing anything.
And it’s immensely moving to see the great Tom Batemen, after ferrying a young Thai boy through an underwater maze for three and half hours — and being told that the boy has survived — show his relief and joy and exhaustion in a short ten second reaction shot that has more impact than anything else in the film. It’s hard to know what Ron Howard was thinking. Or if he was thinking at all. His similar “Apollo 13” is an example of a real life drama brought to the screen with excitement and finesse. But in “Thirteen Lives” he’s left any point of view on the cutting room floor, creating a film so artless it could’ve been shot by AI. And like a driverless car, you may get to where you’re going, but it’s hard to forget there’s not a human being making the decisions. AVAILABLE ON AMAZON PRIME
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