The Media Tourist

Movie Review: Vampires attack a 1930s juke joint in ‘Sinners,’ a heady horror movie about…a bunch of things

Sinners
Starring Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Canton & Delroy Lindo
Directed by Ryan Coogler
Rated R

In theaters Friday, April 18

A phantasmagoric, blues-infused parable with a lot on its mind, Sinners brings together history, lore, music and mystical mojo into a spicy golly-whopper of a tale about lookalike twin veterans who return to their Mississippi homeland in the Jim Crow South after serving overseas in World War I.

Known as “Smoke” and “Stack” (and both played by Michael B. Jordan), the bros—toting a satchel of cash, likely from some gangsta-like postwar activities up north, in Chicago—want to open a social club where local blues artists can perform, people can gamble, drink, party and dance, and the money will flow.

But some vampires—yes, vampires—have other ideas. And they’re out for blood.

Director Ryan Coogler, who made his hit-movie bona fides with the Rocky spinoff Creed and Marvel’s Black Panther, shows he’s also adept with a rip-roaring, rampaging thriller about the undead, set to a vibe-rich soundtrack of deep-dish delta blues. Vampires, as you might recall, have always been depicted as seductive, sexually voracious creatures, and Coogler doesn’t shy from reminding us of that longtime connection. In Sinners, both the living and the dead clearly enjoy the pleasures of the flesh.

These vampires are also seductive in another way, “inviting” the living to join their ranks and exist for eternity, out of time, where all are welcome, regardless of credo or skin color.

The vampires represent several other things, too, including the “blood” ties of ancestry, the cross-pollination of cultures, a timeline connecting past and present, and the breaching of “boundaries” separating the living and the dead. The movie clearly evokes the fable of blues guitarist Robert Johnson, who was so “unnaturally” gifted that the story arose he must have breached that boundary, meeting the devil in a crossroads and selling his soul in exchange for musical talent.

In the movie, young guitar-toting “Preacher Boy” Sam (newcomer Miles Caton, making a most impressive movie debut), is chastised by his evangelist father (Saul Williams) about playing in honkytonks, making music for “drunkards and philanderers” and doing a dangerous “dance with the devil.” Sam is clearly the movie’s Robert Johnson surrogate, with Sinners suggesting that music has an almost otherworldly potency, a connective, life-changing power that can even open supernatural portals—like when the juke joint is suddenly filled for a dreamlike sequence with dancers and musicians across centuries. We see Native American spirit dancers mixing it up with hip-hoppers, twerkers and even a funkadelic guitarist. It’s a marvelously eye-popping head trip, just like when, later, a field full of vampires break into an extended Irish jig and a folk song, suggesting yet another regional current of musical heritage.

Hailee Steinfeld (above) is a femme fatale. Veteran actor Delroy Lindo plays Delta Slim, a bluesman with stories to tell. Britain’s Jack O’Connell is Remmick, the vampire chieftain.

It’s all woven into a rich, vibrantly detailed tapestry of the Great Depression South, with allusions to the region’s history of ugly volatility between Black and white culture, the concept of sin and transgression, themes of separation and segregation, and the thin line between faith and fear. It goes a bit gonzo in its second half, almost like Quentin Tarantino took the reins for the finale, when the blood finally flows and spurts, the vampires crash the party, and everything takes an explosively hyper-violent turn.

How does it all pan out? Well, you’ll just have to watch to see, but trust me, it’s a wild ride. Stay for the credits for a flash-forward with one of the central characters, now elderly (and played, in a nice touch, by real-life blues guitarist Buddy Guy).

A zestfully fresh take on thangs with fangs, Sinners invites you sink your teeth into the juicy, boldly unexpected turns of this spicy and sensual deep-South honky-tonk horror show.

—Neil Pond

Movie Review: “Art For Everybody,” about landscape artist Thomas Kinkade, shows the darker side of the so-called “Painter of Light”

Art For Everybody
Directed by Miranda Yousef
Unrated
In theaters Friday, April 18

This superbly crafted, warts-and-all documentary about the one of the world’s most commercially successful artists of all time pulls back the curtain on Thomas Kinkade, the self-proclaimed “Painter of Light,” to show how he wasn’t always so bright and sun-shiny.

Kinkaid rose to fame in the early ‘90s for his artwork featuring unnaturally illuminated pastoral landscapes, often glowing intensely with illumination from the inside of bucolic cottages in lushly rendered fairy-tale settings. His work was hyper-stylized, surrealistically calm and blatantly nostalgic. “I don’t really paint the world the way it looks,” Kinkade notes in an early interview. “I paint the world we all kinda daydream it could be.”  Fans lapped it up like syrup, and Kinkade became a multimillionaire through mass merchandised reproductions of his paintings and all kinds of spinoff lifestyle products, services and collectibles. He hawked his wares on TV’s home-shopping network QVC, and hundreds of Thomas Kinkade specialty stores sprang up in malls and retail centers across America.

But as the movie points out, critics were often dismissive of Kinkade, calling his work gaudy, garish and kitschy—or, as one says in the film, “really, really, really bad art.”

Kinkade offered populist, easily digestible, imaginatively wholesome alternatives to the edgier, often controversial and more “challenging” offerings of the modern-art world. In other words, he did paintings for the masses, art for everybody—or everybody else. Many fervent fans were drawn to his frequent professions of faith, seeing his paintings as calming, welcoming extensions of the Christianity he seemed to ardently embrace. Many of his pictures depicted religious stories or passages from the Bible.

But was all of it fakery, performance art or even fraud? Was Kinkade living a double—or triple, or quadruple—life, a man with multiple personas and personalities? The Painter of Light, as one of his daughters says, “was a side of him. But he had all these other sides.”

Told through archival film clips and narration by Kinkade’s family members, business associates, supporters, other painters and art experts, it’s a fascinating portrait of an artist who ultimately became “suffocated” by the commercial juggernaut he’d created. His empire eventually collapsed in lawsuits, financial ruin, allegations of fraud, a swirl of sexual indiscretions, and reports of aberrant, drunken behavior (urinating on a Winnie the Pooh character in a Disneyland hotel, fondling a woman’s breasts). He was accused of using evangelical Christianity as a cloak, a disguise to deceive—and sucker—an impressionable audience. Kinkade died, at age 54 in 2012, overdosing on booze and Valium.

“He had it all,” says his former wife. “And he threw it away.”

The most fascinating part of the film shows Kinkade’s now-adult daughters digging deep into his vault, a locked-away room where their father kept everything he’d ever drawn, showing us his early works and sketches—sometimes grotesque, turbulent and even violent depictions that suggest a much more tortured and troubled soul floundering in darkness rather than basking in the light he’d later make his brand. Maybe, suggests Kinkade’s sister, it had something to do with their abusive father, their parents’ divorce and growing up in a California “shack” often without heat or electricity.

In revealing the deeper demons that haunted—and possibly consumed—Kinkade, Art for Everybody shows how even the Painter of Light had a dark side. And how, as one critic notes, a cottage with such an unnatural glow just might be, in his oil-on-canvas fairy-tale world, an ideal deception for a wicked witch inside, waiting to gobble you up.

—Neil Pond

“Death of a Unicorn” is a galloping, gonzo horror comedy that skewers the rich

Death of a Unicorn
Starring Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega & Richard E. Grant
Directed by Alex Scharfman
Rated R

In theaters Friday, March 28

If you think, by the title, that this must be some pretentious, snooty foreign drama about the listlessness of a marriage, the unraveling of an idyllic dream, or the melancholic end of childhood—well, I can clear that up for you. It’s not.

In this galloping, gonzo horror comedy, a group of characters coalesce around the body of a young unicorn that’s been hit by a car on a mountainous road through the Rockies. Instead of trying to “help” the wounded creature, they instead finish it off with a gun and a tire iron—and then make plans to make a killing on the mind-blowing, magical potency of its blood and its glowing, serrated horn.

And they soon find out there’s also a mama and papa unicorn out there in the mountains, and boy, are they pissed.

The ensemble cast is full of familiar faces, and everyone is aboard for the thrill-ride terrors spiked with satirical skewerings of fat-cat rich folks who want to hubristically capitalize on something wild, wooly and wonderful that they don’t understand. Everyone gets their share of quick-witted quippery, snide remarks and snippy, character-revealing jibes. Paul Rudd plays a widowed lawyer who brings his daughter (Jenna Ortega) along to help him curry favor with the family of a dying pharmaceutical-company oligarch (Richard E. Grant). Téa Leoni is a spoiled wife, Will Poulter is a spoiled son, and Barry’s Anthony Carrigan is a put-upon butler. Steve Park and Suniti Mani are scientists called in for consultation about the little unicorn’s restorative powers, which can apparently clear up acne, rebuild failing vision, cure cancer—and maybe even thwart death.  

“We’re gonna live forever!” someone crows enthusiastically. Well, not so fast.

When the parents of the junior unicorn—the junicorn, I guess—come looking for revenge, they begin skewering, impaling, eviscerating and stomping everything, and everyone, in sight. Blood flows, guts spill and heads get crushed. The “adult” unicorns are majestically monstrous fanged creatures with talons on their massive hooves, like the raptors in Jurassic Park crossed with bulked-up plow horses. And the movie certainly sets up its unctuous characters so we’ll root for the unicorns, eager to see who’ll get taken out next, with only a handful of exceptions, and how.

There’s a bit of mushy (human) family drama in the middle of all the gleefully gory goings-on, but it’s mostly a distraction. The special effects—the unicorns—don’t look very special, especially in the wake of some four decades of hi-tech FX advancements.  

Ortega, who garnered multiple awards nominations for the Netflix Addams Family spinoff series Wednesday, plays Ridley, who feels a spiritual “connection” to the animals. It’s through her we learn of the legendary beasts’ deep-rooted place in folklore, mythology and religion—and how a “pure-hearted maiden” may be the only thing capable of taming them. And Rudd, with more than 130 acting credits in a spectrum of movies and TV shows, gets to do something he’s never done before: run for his life ahead of a unicorn as terrifying as a dinosaur. We didn’t see that in Anchorman.

And—in this age of declining biodiversity, intense droughts, polluted water, severe wildfires, rising sea levels and catastrophic storms, all brought on or exacerbated by human activity—Death of a Unicorn reminds us, yet again, that we abuse Mother Nature at our peril. Cause payback can be a real bitch, even if you don’t end up getting ripped apart by a couple of angry unicorns.

—Neil Pond

In “Novocaine,” Jack Quaid dives into danger as a man with no feelings…sort of

Novocaine
Starring Jack Quaid & Amber Midthunder
Directed by Dan Berk & Robert Olsen
Rated R

In theaters Friday, March 14

When his office crush gets abducted, a young bank assistant manager sets out to rescue her. That sounds like it could be the setup for any number of flicks, but this gonzo action comedy hinges on the “ordinary” hero’s rare genetic disorder, which prevents him from feeling pain.

We learn that Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid, from TV’s The Boys) grew up with the nickname of Novocaine, given to him by bullying schoolmates who delighted in making him their recess punching bag; they enjoyed seeing him take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’. (P.S., Nathan’s condition is a real-world thing, CIP, or congenital insensitivity to pain, which affects a spectrum of bodily sensitivities.)  On a tentative first date at a diner, he tells Sherry (Amber Midthunder) that he dares not ingest solid food (he might chew up his tongue and not know it), and his wristwatch timer is reminding him to take a bathroom break (because he doesn’t get a natural “signal” that his bladder needs emptying).

But when the bank gets robbed and Sherry gets taken as a hostage, Nathan isn’t thinking about pee breaks as he plunges into a gauntlet of pain-free heroics, encountering sneering bad guys, booby-trapped lairs, flying bullets and body-slamming brawls. I must give the movie credit for finding, ahem, creative ways to illustrate just how impervious Nathan is to pain. He gets walloped in a wide variety of ways, like the coyote in a real-life Road Runner cartoon. He breaks his thumb to slip out of handcuffs and turns a broken bone—his own protruding tibia—into a lethal weapon. He has his fingernails pulled out with pliers, gets plugged with an arrow from a crossbow, almost crushed under a garage car lift, impaled with a medieval mace and calmly digs out a bullet from his arm.  

But here’s the thing. Nathan is no John Wick, no James Bond or Deadpool. He can be grievously injured, or even killed—he just doesn’t “feel” it, which puts him in even more peril. People with CIP won’t know spilled coffee can scald their hand, because they don’t get the “Ouch! That hurts!” message. That sets up the subplot, about how Nathan might not register physical discomfort, but he’s not immune from emotional distress. (The movie opens with REM’s “Everybody Hurts.”) Quaid, the son of actors Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, has an amiable everyman quality that squares with Nathan as an average guy, certainly no superhero, who removes the “dis” from his “disability” and dives right into danger.

And people do get killed. The movie’s rampaging dark humor doesn’t really jibe with all the blood and body goop, or when people expire via bullets or beatings.

Amber Midthunder, who has appeared in FX’s Legion and starred in The CW’s sci-fi drama Roswell, New Mexico, brings a tantalizing dash of ambiguity and vulnerability to her role as the “love interest,” noting that we’re all scarred by something, hiding a part of ourselves until someone lets us know it’s OK to show it. Matt Walsh, from TV’s Veep, gets in a few droll quips as a sports-obsessed cop.

But mainly, Novocaine wants to show Nathan enduring an avalanche of mayhem and make audiences squeal with perverse glee seeing him rebound from every body-abusing, bone-breaking, skin-scaring whack, crunch, burn, blast and kaboom. You may think it’s all giddy popcorn fun, but for me, I didn’t particularly enjoy being turned into a movie surrogate for those schoolyard bullies, who kicked Nathan’s ass repeatedly, every day, because they knew, hey, he can’t feel it.

At least, in The Road Runner, when the coyote gets flattened with an anvil to the head or smushed by a bolder, well, it’s only a cartoon—with no squishy viscera or protruding bones.

—Neil Pond