British model-turned-capable actress Suki Waterhouse has become indie cinema's de-facto psychedelic-sampling post-Burning Man desert wasteland wanderer thanks to two very similar post-apocalyptic films from this and last year, each with a hip pedigree and interesting touches that seem to stem from some writer's mind-blowing but alienating experiences from when Burning Man was still cool --Future World and The Bad Batch. I may be wrong but the comparison between Burning Man's metallic desert sun-gleaming fire effect neopagan artsy-gritty subculture and the aesthetic of the Mad Max series is so apparent it's hard not to wonder--after being sufficiently dosed/altered/mind-blown via whatever substance you happen upon (sources tell me toad secretions are 'in' again), wonder if Mel Gibson might tied up inside the big burning man, like Nic Cage in the Wicka Wicka Man. Apparently, filmmakers be going to the Burning Man and be going, man, I see Suki Waterhouse in the shimmer.
And let us not forget 90s trip-hop! Portishead shalt never die. Thus, Suki Waterhouse, once cast, shall look slowly around in slow motion to some really low end fuzzy bass, man--all deep deep deep down in the spinning world void man--lots of hair billowing in slow motion and colored lights flashing and a sense of unity with the night or the groove. Or wait, man - the night and the groove are one. I star see, I mean I see far... stars.. star-see... I see stars I mean seen sea and seen stars sea.
Dig it. Max would never be able to stay Mad with all that weird kinetic lysergic hydration in the wind. On the other hand, without the druggy raves, the vibe of these two recent apocalyptic world movies can seem more Fyre Festival than Burning Man, albeit after the richer kids have finagled a ride out and only the scrabble survivors are left, de facto homeless seen in low tracking shots. Nodding off on busted spring, legless outdoor couches and piles of trash, filth-encrusted wanderers stopping to either accept or offer single flowers to urchins; zonked cult leaders DJ-ing or coordinating fights to the death in an empty pool; stray acts of cannibalism and kindness; hardscrabble civilization reduced to a Dead show parking lot barter system; and whomever holds the water rights being in the band, and whomever has gas for a dirt bike shall run the equivalent of roughshod over the devil's yellow umber kingdom. Each film makes fine use of the peculiar desolation and meth-pocked tracts of the Salton Sea. Burned-out dispirit infects both films like a case of crabs, until hot Suki gambols into town to restore a sense of high fashion. Let the lamp affix its beam!
In FUTURE WORLD (2018) the ever-sketchy James Franco serves as co-director and producer/star, giving himself the dirt bag / dirt-bike-riding bad guy villain role of "Warlord" (which comes with godawful yellow-brown veneers he never gets tired of showing off). Leader of a marauding gang of bikers and outlaws, he controls the only robot left in the world, Ash (Waterhouse), a foxy, high-fashion killer android mix of Angelina Jolie in Cyborg 2, Pris in Blade Runner, Eva in The Machine, and SIRI (Warlord gives her commands by speaking into his remote). Once killer Ash is up and running, and dressed (in perfectly-fitted and stressed haute couture fatigues), Warlord shows her off by first ordering her to snog with, then strangle, one of his drooling gang. It's kind of self-defeating, he needs every warrior he can get, and rather slimy--but Suki's contented focus as she chokes the life out of a snickering misogynist type is, of course, satisfying to all concerned.
While Warlord and his gang roam the wasteland on their dirt bikes, far away at a spa-like desert oasis all is a sunny paradise... just waiting to be despoiled... by a well-armed biker gang. Fisher queen (Lucy Liu) is dying, and her dangerously naive son, "the prince" (Jeffrey Wahlberg - Mark and Donnie's nephew) decides to ride his own dirt bike off into the wasteland. He's seeking "Paradise," a rest stop that's supposed to have a cure for her ailment. Of course he's bound to lose his bike, his cash, his gun, and everything once he ill-advisedly stops off at the Snoop Dogg-operated, shock-collar sex worker-staffed 'Love World' to ask directions. Betrayed, tricked, suckered, beaten up, stretched over and over by the neck until he finally gives Warlord directions back to that cushy Oasis (apparently no well-organized desert outpost can stand up to six dudes on motorbikes). Luckily for the story, during pretty cool tracking shot ride through the desert, with Suki actually on a real bike, she switches to the prince's side and attacks the gang. It's then that the real action begins. Then is over.
Like a lot of the film, her defection skips over the how and why involved. This is a film that assumes you've seen 'the canon' of both AI and post-apocalyptic sci-fi. It fills in what those other films lacked and doesn't bother covering any familiar ground.
The scene stealer of the film is Milla Jovovich as the queen of Paradise. She does the manic speed freak psycho nutter trip better than most I've seen and her big slap-down with Franco once Warlord and his boys catch up to Ash and Prince is pretty unforgettable. On the other hand, Milla's 'World' (above) seems to be just a blown-out old Salton Sea-sided health club, now just a concrete foundation, some beams, an empty pool, some window frames (most glass long gone) and some "rooms," one of which operates as a kind of meth/heroin/MDMA lab (?) with all sorts of cures and remedies somehow churned out of a few test tubes in a lab so bare it would shame Dr. Eric Vornoff's in Bride of the Monster. There's also an under-directed and lifeless cage match inside the empty pool, wherein a few denizens of the place stand silently around, forgetting they're supposed to be cheering or banging on pots. Hey Franco, I know y'all have seen Escape from New York and Beyond Thunderdome or we wouldn't be here. Was the shoot too hard for you to maintain enthusiasm? Only Milla seems alive; her eyes alone make the film worth a late night nod.
If the cliches and the ugliness of Franco's teeth are to be overcome, it's going to be through this surprise coupling and, something that may be just as valuable: there's the idea Ash and the prince can have a strong bond, beyond loyalty or even siblinghood, where sex doesn't enter into it (i.e. he's not sulky or heartbroken he doesn't score with his hot model robot friend). The straight girl / gay boy friendship in cinema is by now so lionized and holy it is beyond reproach, but the straight boy / lesbian version has been oft-maligned (and as a past sponsor of lesbian AA-ers, it always irked me).
Finally, maybe, our time has come... in the future! (END SPOILER)
SUPER SUKI MOMENT: Near the 1 hour 18 min 30 sec mark--during the climactic chase--Suki dismounts a spinning out motorbike by corkscrewing herself into a vertical position via a reverse twirl as the bike spins beneath her, done with such ease of serpentine hip movements--keeping her neck and back fluid and long the whole way--it's like this former top model is strutting the catwalk. From the start of her sharp turn /skid-out on through to walking back towards her quarry there's not a moment when she's not H2T fierce. This girl is so cool and graceful the camera barely knows how to capture her. Did the director even notice how damned cool she was in this moment?
FORMATIVE BURNING MAN CONVEYANCE: I visualize the idea for this film coming while someone was zipping around the outskirts on a noisy dirt bike, high on mushrooms, imagining being a marauding Viking from the future coming in to pillage.
THE BAD BATCH (2017) is the second feature from Iranian skateboarder Anna Lily Amirpour, and marks a return to all the things that made Girl Walks Home Alone so unique: genuinely trippy rave scenes; fingers in mouths (Amirpour's choice form of erotic contact); skateboards (her choice mode of transport); and White Lines (her choice of 80s bands), and the way falling in love means sticking by someone even when they eat you (Batch) or drink your father (Girl). Suki Waterhouse is Arlen, an unsmiling southern-accented girl in smiley face yellow shorts who finds herself exiled to a vast and semi-hostile desert that serves as a hybrid of Manhattan in Escape from New York (or LA) and Trump-era Mexico. Immigrants, crooks, radicals, hippies, i.e. America's 'bad batch,' are thrown across the fence into the zone. The desert seems to have enough sources of water (not sure where) to keep things going and there are copious drugs and free acid, but then cannibals and free-roaming marauders on the outskirts of some cool welcoming oasis. Almost everyone she meets seems more interested in foxy Arlen as a source of food rather than sex. She goes from being kept alive only as so much livestock, slowly dismembered for irregular meals by a loose cadre of taciturn desert families, to escaping while lying on back of her skateboard (one leg and one arm already gone), to rescued by an unrecognizable Jim Carrey and delivered to Comfort (the hydrating druggie enclave), to kidnapping of one of the cannibal's children and killing his wife, to becoming an incumbent sister wife to 'the Dream' (Keanu Reeves) in a mansion with AC, a pool, cocktails, and endless drugs, and onwards. We never learn where she got the artificial leg, or how it just happened to fit her. Or where she gets a gun. But she seems to do all right for herself in Comfort in the space of a single dissolve. Hey, it's her business how she came by all these goodies or how it happens that drugs flow plentiful everywhere (the cannibals even shoot Arlen up to ease the pain before cutting off her limbs). Maybe that's a gift from the America that rejects them? Did Amirpour think any of these things through.
The film kicks into weird gear when Arlen wanders out into the desert on LSD and bumps into one of her cannibal assailants, Miami Man (Momoa) who's looking for the daughter, not knowing Arlen stole her and shot his wife, or maybe he figures it's fair since his family ate half her limbs.
SUPER SUKI MOMENT: Near the 1 hour 18 min 30 sec mark--during the climactic chase--Suki dismounts a spinning out motorbike by corkscrewing herself into a vertical position via a reverse twirl as the bike spins beneath her, done with such ease of serpentine hip movements--keeping her neck and back fluid and long the whole way--it's like this former top model is strutting the catwalk. From the start of her sharp turn /skid-out on through to walking back towards her quarry there's not a moment when she's not H2T fierce. This girl is so cool and graceful the camera barely knows how to capture her. Did the director even notice how damned cool she was in this moment?
FORMATIVE BURNING MAN CONVEYANCE: I visualize the idea for this film coming while someone was zipping around the outskirts on a noisy dirt bike, high on mushrooms, imagining being a marauding Viking from the future coming in to pillage.
THE BAD BATCH (2017) is the second feature from Iranian skateboarder Anna Lily Amirpour, and marks a return to all the things that made Girl Walks Home Alone so unique: genuinely trippy rave scenes; fingers in mouths (Amirpour's choice form of erotic contact); skateboards (her choice mode of transport); and White Lines (her choice of 80s bands), and the way falling in love means sticking by someone even when they eat you (Batch) or drink your father (Girl). Suki Waterhouse is Arlen, an unsmiling southern-accented girl in smiley face yellow shorts who finds herself exiled to a vast and semi-hostile desert that serves as a hybrid of Manhattan in Escape from New York (or LA) and Trump-era Mexico. Immigrants, crooks, radicals, hippies, i.e. America's 'bad batch,' are thrown across the fence into the zone. The desert seems to have enough sources of water (not sure where) to keep things going and there are copious drugs and free acid, but then cannibals and free-roaming marauders on the outskirts of some cool welcoming oasis. Almost everyone she meets seems more interested in foxy Arlen as a source of food rather than sex. She goes from being kept alive only as so much livestock, slowly dismembered for irregular meals by a loose cadre of taciturn desert families, to escaping while lying on back of her skateboard (one leg and one arm already gone), to rescued by an unrecognizable Jim Carrey and delivered to Comfort (the hydrating druggie enclave), to kidnapping of one of the cannibal's children and killing his wife, to becoming an incumbent sister wife to 'the Dream' (Keanu Reeves) in a mansion with AC, a pool, cocktails, and endless drugs, and onwards. We never learn where she got the artificial leg, or how it just happened to fit her. Or where she gets a gun. But she seems to do all right for herself in Comfort in the space of a single dissolve. Hey, it's her business how she came by all these goodies or how it happens that drugs flow plentiful everywhere (the cannibals even shoot Arlen up to ease the pain before cutting off her limbs). Maybe that's a gift from the America that rejects them? Did Amirpour think any of these things through.
The film kicks into weird gear when Arlen wanders out into the desert on LSD and bumps into one of her cannibal assailants, Miami Man (Momoa) who's looking for the daughter, not knowing Arlen stole her and shot his wife, or maybe he figures it's fair since his family ate half her limbs.
It doesn't make any sense, but hey - Arlen likes those muscles, leading to an ending that's straight-up Morocco, if you get the thirsty drift.
 |
| Suki receives lysergic communion |
Luckily, Suki again hits the ground running: her uneducated southern yokel accent is usually spot on; her terror, trippy wonder, and courage are all vividly etched on her perfect features. She's the kind of model-turned-actress where you don't get the feeling--as you kind of do with the hot warlord wives in Mad Max: Fury Road--that they just flew in from Belize and haven't had a real post-apocalyptic day in their lives. She may be gorgeous but she also looks like she's present. Jim Carrey is also good ass the saintly old mute hermit, his skin blackened to leather by the sun, wearing cardboard slit glasses to reduce the glare, shuffling slowly from one lone piece of shade to the next, never seeming to die of dehydration. As the cult leader, Keanu Reeves, one of those few sterling actors who seem cumulatively saintly nowadays, gives us a rare side of himself too: slightly soft around the edges, big black mustache and tinted shades and evoking a touch of Jason Molina in Boogie Nights albeit if he was flanked like Manson with armed female harem (flash forward 10 years, and he could be Fury Road's War Daddy).
Caveats and irregularities aside, the flea market art direction is sublime: the dwellings really do look like junk, the dumps look truly toxic. It can't possibly smell good there. Amirpour nails the way language vanishes in the haze when people bargain human captive meat supplies for gasoline cans.
Caveats and irregularities aside, the flea market art direction is sublime: the dwellings really do look like junk, the dumps look truly toxic. It can't possibly smell good there. Amirpour nails the way language vanishes in the haze when people bargain human captive meat supplies for gasoline cans.
And after all that suffering in the first half, just seeing Arlen with a cool blue drink in her hand and an enraptured look on her face, brings tears to one's eyes. With her Iranian outsider's eye cast towards America's consumer society--the divide between the rich and the poor, young and pretty, hungry and fed, showered and filthy, old and withered--I'm sure it's tempting to just be relentlessly downbeat and judgmental, but Amirpour's film is full of stray grace notes. She's like Claire Denis balanced by Agnes Varda. Still, the cannibalism as capitalism metaphor is mighty weary, even for the French!
But as with Future World's 'big' desert dance party, the highlight is the editor's intensive use of delay-trail imagery for drug trips. Between these two films and Mandy, the year of 2018 seems to have arrived at the place I used to dream of around the start of this site back in 2003. I dreamt that one day psychedelics would be seamlessly integrated into film and therefore society. I dreamt of a time they would be not demonized or glorified, but accepted as both a heightening of and escape from reality. I dreamt of a time they would make a path for film to unmoor from our stodgy structuralist signifier chains and see the world anew, all labels and reductivist shortcuts temporarily lifted, making us, in a sense, children (or schizophrenics), or Godard, that drugs would make post-structuralist cinema in the mainstream in ways it hadn't been in this country since 1968. Alas, the devil's bargain of the poison path is that the sudden drive and vision to change the world quickly succumbs the torpor and derangement that keeps us from doing anything about it. Thus the vision for a post-structuralist cinema usually becomes yet another psychedelic rave scene that goes nowhere but to the inevitable hangover and disorientation of the following day.
Even Armirpour's vivid depiction of rave-desert sky freedom is undercut in BATCH when Arlen is given a silly voiceover inner dialogue narration while wandering the starry desert high on a Comfort tab. "Wow, it's so big... is that what it always looks like?" Oy vey!
In fact, this creates in a way a kind of opposite reaction to any sense of proxy wonder in the viewer. Prior to it, we're kind of an Antonioni/Jess Franco amnesiac cinema headspace. Signifiers are gone. When a drifter materializes out of the horizon heat shimmer, we don't know if they are friend or foe, whether they are going to eat Arlen, help her, or ignore her. As I discuss in Amnesiac Cinema, this taps into the European language gap, which inadvertently makes Europe more susceptible to emerging trends in art. American viewers aren't used to this sort of thing, they need orchestral cues and ominous foreshadowing to tell them who is who, unless they're cool, as in broad-minded, psychedelically 'experienced' or globally inclined. As in the best parts of Amirpour's previous film, A Girl Walks Home Alone, a blessed unknowingness overtakes us watching The Bad Batch. But with the acid voiceover, however, we're suddenly situated in language's prison..
Waterhouse really brings the knowing tripping-at-Burning-Man starry desert night sway to it all though, which helps. When she finds herself gyrating against the heaving muscles of Somoa, that she would forgive him for eating half her limbs makes sense. A lot of us would give it all up to follow Suki into the desert, even after she eats our hearts. That's death is for a purpose - ex fictione verum.
In the meantime, we can always dance. It's the ones who never stop dancing in Climax, after all, that don't get into any self-immolating mischief. Until the hungry ghosts swoop in. And unless you hide even farther out past the fences, they always do.
SUPER SUKI MOMENT:
Holding a gun to the belly of one of the pregnant sister wives in order to rescue Miami Man's daughter, all without changing her deadpan expression (above).
FORMATIVE BURNING MAN CONVEYANCE: Zipping around the festival perimeter on a golf cart while zonked on martinis and LSD, winding up getting lost in the desert at night, driving around in circles, looking up at the stars, wishing her skateboard could roll on sand.
Sorry if this trip proved meaningless, man. By the 100th trip, no matter how much toad secretion and shrooms and MDMA we guzzle, or how cool and slyly gorgeous is our navigator, it's just not the same Burning Man. Just the name "Burning Man" used to pack a Summerisle-ish cult edge that if you were tripping hard enough gave you an uneasy chill. If you went, you worried the man being burnt alive that night might well be you. If you were high enough, it became a certainty. The paranoia was good for you, as the burning man was you- your old self- in effigy, leaving you free, soul cleaned of barnacles.
But as with Future World's 'big' desert dance party, the highlight is the editor's intensive use of delay-trail imagery for drug trips. Between these two films and Mandy, the year of 2018 seems to have arrived at the place I used to dream of around the start of this site back in 2003. I dreamt that one day psychedelics would be seamlessly integrated into film and therefore society. I dreamt of a time they would be not demonized or glorified, but accepted as both a heightening of and escape from reality. I dreamt of a time they would make a path for film to unmoor from our stodgy structuralist signifier chains and see the world anew, all labels and reductivist shortcuts temporarily lifted, making us, in a sense, children (or schizophrenics), or Godard, that drugs would make post-structuralist cinema in the mainstream in ways it hadn't been in this country since 1968. Alas, the devil's bargain of the poison path is that the sudden drive and vision to change the world quickly succumbs the torpor and derangement that keeps us from doing anything about it. Thus the vision for a post-structuralist cinema usually becomes yet another psychedelic rave scene that goes nowhere but to the inevitable hangover and disorientation of the following day.
Even Armirpour's vivid depiction of rave-desert sky freedom is undercut in BATCH when Arlen is given a silly voiceover inner dialogue narration while wandering the starry desert high on a Comfort tab. "Wow, it's so big... is that what it always looks like?" Oy vey!
In fact, this creates in a way a kind of opposite reaction to any sense of proxy wonder in the viewer. Prior to it, we're kind of an Antonioni/Jess Franco amnesiac cinema headspace. Signifiers are gone. When a drifter materializes out of the horizon heat shimmer, we don't know if they are friend or foe, whether they are going to eat Arlen, help her, or ignore her. As I discuss in Amnesiac Cinema, this taps into the European language gap, which inadvertently makes Europe more susceptible to emerging trends in art. American viewers aren't used to this sort of thing, they need orchestral cues and ominous foreshadowing to tell them who is who, unless they're cool, as in broad-minded, psychedelically 'experienced' or globally inclined. As in the best parts of Amirpour's previous film, A Girl Walks Home Alone, a blessed unknowingness overtakes us watching The Bad Batch. But with the acid voiceover, however, we're suddenly situated in language's prison..
Waterhouse really brings the knowing tripping-at-Burning-Man starry desert night sway to it all though, which helps. When she finds herself gyrating against the heaving muscles of Somoa, that she would forgive him for eating half her limbs makes sense. A lot of us would give it all up to follow Suki into the desert, even after she eats our hearts. That's death is for a purpose - ex fictione verum.
In the meantime, we can always dance. It's the ones who never stop dancing in Climax, after all, that don't get into any self-immolating mischief. Until the hungry ghosts swoop in. And unless you hide even farther out past the fences, they always do.
SUPER SUKI MOMENT:
Holding a gun to the belly of one of the pregnant sister wives in order to rescue Miami Man's daughter, all without changing her deadpan expression (above).
FORMATIVE BURNING MAN CONVEYANCE: Zipping around the festival perimeter on a golf cart while zonked on martinis and LSD, winding up getting lost in the desert at night, driving around in circles, looking up at the stars, wishing her skateboard could roll on sand.
Sorry if this trip proved meaningless, man. By the 100th trip, no matter how much toad secretion and shrooms and MDMA we guzzle, or how cool and slyly gorgeous is our navigator, it's just not the same Burning Man. Just the name "Burning Man" used to pack a Summerisle-ish cult edge that if you were tripping hard enough gave you an uneasy chill. If you went, you worried the man being burnt alive that night might well be you. If you were high enough, it became a certainty. The paranoia was good for you, as the burning man was you- your old self- in effigy, leaving you free, soul cleaned of barnacles.
This year, the man might not be a man at all - why not a woman? And can she be holding a Sprite can?
And then, just Ash wondering if there'll even be a wind left for her dust.
And then, just Ash wondering if there'll even be a wind left for her dust.
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