Longlegs Challengers The Raid

Chums! It’s September!

I just got back from two weeks training in the NY office and my brain is bursting with all the things I want to write but haven’t.

(That’s usually my cue to write you something and then disappear for another four weeks, so let’s see what happens?)

But for now, I think I'm gonna blab about movies I’ve seen and then if things go well this week come back and talk about comics.

Anyway in kinda reverse order:

Challengers: ah man, I’ve been wanting to see this forever, and so Edi and I rented it finally and….so, so good. Just really, really lived up to the hype in a way that seems kind of rare (though what do I know, I barely watch anything).

It’s a very deeply pleasurable movie, one that manages to do a fantastic job more or less sidestepping all the things it’s ostensibly about—competition and success and tennis and sex—while still managing to still be about them, but really ultimately becoming just a strangely successful instrument of craft? The script is great; the direction is great; the leads are great (that’s an aggregated average, I’d say: Mike Faist is great; Zendaya is ok; Josh O’Connor was fucking fantastic and his chemistry with Faist was phenonemenal).

Weirdly for me, it’s less important about whether the film succeeds in its theme—although it genuinely does, being so damn clear and clean it’s practically an allegory—as much as it’s just…so god-damned well done at what its doing that it’s a pleasure to take in. I guess it’s what big empty summer movies might’ve turned out to be if Star Wars had been a huge failure, or something, maybe?

(Or for an even odder alternate history take—and I’ll never take the time to go down this particular line of thought, I think—this is the kind of movie Quentin Tarentino might’ve made if Jackie Brown hadn’t “failed.” The timeline shenanigans, the constant screwing with audience expectation, the obsession with explicit and implicit power dynamics—hell, I’d even go so far as to say Luca Guadagnino’s thing for guys sweating feels a lot like Tarentino’s foot thing except it amazingly feels much less blucky.)

ANYWAY. It’s really good. Really, really good.

Longlegs: Splurged and bought a digital copy when the movie theater in New York didn’t have a showing starting before 2pm—on a fucking weekend? What the fuck happened to you, New York? Your ass used to be beautiful—so I watched it in bed with a laptop on my belly. (You know, the way filmmakers always talk about how they want their films watched.)

It was, in its way, a less successful version of the experience I had with Challengers—it was well-made and thoughtful enough to be very enjoyable…but in part because it wasn’t nearly as well-made or as well thought through as Challengers, it wasn’t nearly as good.

Maika Monroe finally breaks through to another level acting-wise and probably just in time, too: that kind of spacey, dreamy stare and little girl voice worked really well when playing a young woman, but I saw Watcher about three weeks before Longlegs and she just wasn’t cutting it as an American housewife in Bucharest. (Considering Monroe was literally two out of the three things just by casting and location, it shouldn’t have been that hard.)

But, in Longlegs, as FBI Agent Lee Harker, she really cut the pretty for severity, upped the sense of internalized anxiety, and she is there. And if she hadn’t been, the movie would’ve fallen apart, been just another bit of pretty Hollywood wallpaper.

As it is, it mostly works…though I made the mistake of chasing down interviews with writer-director Osgood Perkins in the hopes of clearing up intentions or if maybe the stuff that hadn’t really worked for me was due to me missing the intention and…wow. Perkins comes across really interestingly in the interviews, in that he’s often talking about Longlegs in a candidly ambitious way—”I really wanted a movie that would get people’s attention, and I felt like doing a version of The Silence of the Lambs, which is a type of movie everyone knows, gave me something I could then do my spin on.”

It could well be that Perkins is, still, even after making the movie and while marketing the movie, so protective of the very immaculately realized portrait at the core of the movie that he’d rather downplay it to an almost shocking degree? But it comes across more like Perkins is a big ol’ tool, the arrogance and ambition at best stemming from a loathing for the lies Hollywood people tell others and at worst…just stemming from an unseemly overly high regard for his own work.

You hope it’s the former because Longlegs isn’t that good. It’s better than, y’know, Last Night in Soho or whatever. There’s a visual sumptiousness, and Nicholas Cage shows up does what Nicholas Cage does, and there is a very quiet way in tries to evoke the same dreaminess of Demme’s Silence of the Lambs—like, sure, about nightmarish subjects and so possessing certain loosened binders on reality and verisimiltude, but shot and edited like a dream—but in a different way I found really admirable.

But to the extent Perkins is aware of, and protective of, and even willing to draw attention to himself as big ol’ douche in order to protect Longlegs’ very well-drawn center—that of a child so destroyed by the ways their parents lied to them them they’re now literally psychically attuned to pure chaos—then he should be aware that portrait works way more due to the performance of Maika Monroe. If I hadn’t believed in Monroe’s character the way I needed to, the movie wouldn’t have worked. It would be impossible to believe Longlegs is genuinely about anything, anything at all.

And maybe it’s not. In which case, it’s still neither nearly as well made or as pleasurable as Challengers?

But, y’know, it was good? I liked it. Aesthetically pleasing enough I could see myself coming back to it.

The Raid / The Raid 2: Two movies I’d been wanting to rewatch for a while now, The Raid for pleasure and The Raid 2 for curiosity—had I been too hard on Gareth Evans’ sequel because it wasn’t more of what I liked about the first film, but instead tried to be its own thing?

I’d watched The Raid several times already so no surprises there in all the best ways: by very cleverly measuring out everything in the budget to maximum effect, the low-budget actioner succeeded as both visceral martial arts film and as a taut suspense film: Assault on Precinct 13 layered successfully on Ong-Bak. It still works, and it’s still impressive that it works.

And The Raid 2 is, indeed, not more of the same—in one of those fun facts that probably didn’t get discussed in the promo interviews when it premiered, The Raid 2 was essenitally the movie Evans he’d tried to make before The Raid, and so he shoehorned Rama, the quietly devout and devoted policeman played by Uwo Iwais in the first film, into an undercover cop jockeying for position inside a Malaysian gang, itself jockeying for position of control of the very corrupt city.

One thing that’s a credit to Evans in both movies: he gets vivid performances from Joe Taslim in the first movie, and Uwais & Yahan Ruhian in both The Raid 1 and 2—in fact, Ruhian plays a different character in each that really are, despite both being nearly unstoppable asskickers, genuinely different characters.

And perhaps that’s what dismays about The Raid 2: Evans can’t wrangle anything nearly as strong, performance-wise, from Arifin Putra or Tia Pakusadewo or Ken’ichi Endô, despite the various strengths of those actors and the extensive screen time they get.

And at least part of the reason for that seems to be Evans doesn’t have much to say and what he does isn’t particularly original. It feels like super-derivative Scorsese by way of HK era John Woo, about which I’d be more forgiving (much more forgiving!) if every scene hadn’t felt like the same thing over and over with maybe the slightest variations in setting and color gel filters.

It’s almost as if Evans’s conception of his non-action scenes are the same as his action scenes—you shoot each character as well as possible, you give them a single goal to accomplish, and you watch them try to verbally batter each other into giving in.

Technically, that does fall under the confines of Drama 101, but because nobody’s relationship to one another ever changes, or really even their goal—most scenes end in a dramatic stalemate, one character usually angrily pointing at another—it just gets very old very fast.

(And despite what I said above about Uwais’s performance, it probably would’ve helped The Raid 2 a lot if we saw him genuinely developing caring feelings for Arifin Putra’s angry and anxious Urco, the in Uwais is given to get into the heart of the gang. But in part because Evans just seems too in love with playing Putra’s handsomeness against his emotional pettiness, Uwais’s choice to play his character as emotionally cautious around his ostensible friend is simultaneously incredibly sensible but dramatically inert.)

Don’t get me wrong, the action scenes are still pretty great and by the time you get to the finale, they’re are as brutal and inventive and wrenching as anything in the first film—quite possibly more so?

In fact, I’ve got to give The Raid 2 credit—the entire time I was rewatching both films, just about every scene had me going, “ok, is this the scene where the two guys face off and literally slide up against each other with a lethal familiarity?” and when it came, at the start of the final fight scene in The Raid 2, it was just as awesome and deserving of overshadowing everything else as I thought.

But. Man, what a comedown. Part of my interest in revisiting was watching the first season of Gangs of London—well, both seasons though the second season is less germane to my interests since Evans appeared to take a big step back after being such a big part of the first—and seeing if that show’s “amazing action / inert drama” indeed had its roots in The Raid 2.

Ok, that’s enough. I was strongly tempted to write about Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, in part because I think if The Raid 2 had been more dutiful to its predecessor the way Furiosa was, and Furiosa had been more eager to try for something else the way The Raid 2 is, both myself and the audiences for both films would’ve been happier….but as it is, I realize I can just say that here and you can either nod and go “good point,” or stop reading and check on what number the DMV counter is calling or whatever else it is you’re doing?

Me, I’m off to do some holiday chores before the workweek starts up again.

I hope you’re well! Thanks for putting up with me.

-Jeff