The Crush (Shapiro, 1993)
By numbers early 90's erotic thriller, and not a very adept one at that.
The premise is similar to Lolita, as in it's very similar indeed to Lolita. As in it takes all the salacious elements and ditches everything else unceremoniously. In many ways then, The Crush is like the hyperreal expectation that still exists surrounding Lolita, of what audiences think that the book probably is vs what it actually is. So, it's unsurprisingly lacking in that narrative's redeeming and compelling verbosity. This is by way Adrian Lynn's Lolita, or closer to it than Nabokov or Kubrick's.
Alicia Silverstone stars in her debut as the objet du desir, plus there's a whole bunch of people I sort of recognise. The tale of a precociously manipulative fourteen year old temptress is collar-tuggingly gross from a 2022 perspective. The skeeviness is ramped to unbelievable levels, with lingering shots of Silverstone's body and close up montages of lip biting throughout. But it's guilty fun watching something so politically incorrect once in a while. The ghastly costumes keep things watchable, with the protagonist's shapeless early 90's jackets and Levis being a particularly vile highlight.
The symbolism is boorish and on the nose. Silverstone collects insects, much like Humbert Humbert's retiring lepidopterist. Unlike Humbert, the analogy is glaring, garish and doesn't quite make sense. Other screaming symbols that make little sense include a full size merry go round in the attic (perpetual childhood?) and assorted architectural phalluses.
It's vaguely artless and aimless, beyond banging out the erotic thriller tropes. It's not as stylishly confident as Sex, Lies And Videotape, as compelling as Fatal Attraction,as gloriously iconoclastic as Wild Things or even as compellingly batshit as Dream Lover. It's ultimately a shrug of a film in an already maligned and misunderstood subgenre. There's nothing exciting from a cinematographic perspective, and the mise-en-scene is muted and dull throughout.
It also raises the particularly ugly stereotype of the dangerously manipulative teenage girl, reflecting societal anxieties that have very much come to roost in the #metoo era. It feels like it needs a Disney-esque disclaimer, warning us of how far societal values have shifted since the, uh, 90's.
Also, bees. There's deadly bees in this film, much like My Girl And Candyman. Why was everyone so scared of bees in the 90's? The film even commits an unforgivable entomological sin by having bees step in for wasps in one particularly silly scene. It can't even do one thing right.
Storytelling (Solondz, 2001)
Solondz has carved out a niche of presenting impeccably made, unbelievably frank missives of middle class disaffection and utter nihilism. His films are often disarmingly, hilariously funny too. Far from the gross out comedies his ouvre is generally contemporaneous with, Solondz's films are often genuinely transgressive. His most famous, Happiness, regularly makes it on to 'most extreme films of all time' lists, which is itself hilarious considering how perfectly crafted and erudite his films are. It is even more hilarious when we realise that every atrocity carried out in Happiness is merely described, although often in torturous, harrowing detail.
Storytelling is no exception to Solondz's singular vision. Its structure is frankly bizarre. Split in to two, broadly unrelated stories, 'fiction' and 'non-fiction', both parts focus on the process of creating narratives, of the relationship between the storyteller and the characters, and, as the wonderfully chipper Belle And Sebastian song that concludes the film elucidates, the responsibility that the author has for their creations. It is both erudite and accessible, willfully avant-guard yet with another more mainstream quality. In fact, Storytelling has more in common with gross-out teen comedies of the early 00's than we might initially think. With confrontational, unflinching, jet black humour about race, class, sexuality and death, Storytelling has much more in common with something like Road Trip (1999), and this kind of witless, bloated, transgressive and fascinating American teen cinema of the turn of the 20th century.
However, Storytelling's central motif is far from the usual multiplex fodder. It is fixated on the responsibility to safeguard fictitious characters. This concept has been explored in texts as diverse as Blade Runner and Vertigo, although here it is verging on the diegeis breaking qualities of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author or even Kaufman's Synecdoche New York, albeit in much more subtle, grounded means. In Storytelling, it is gruellingly demonstrated that even literary creations have an autonomy due to the inherent power imported through re-presentation. The feckless teen, the sexual assault victim, the disabled student, the hopelessly decrepit Dominican housekeeper... all these archetypes and more are rooted in hyperreal constructs, and of course will affect the way in which these groups will be treated. Solondz is both mindful and horrified by the power he has been given. Never have I seen a director so inverse to the usual auteurial power trip inherent to film making.
The ineffectuality of systems; the family, the education system, and the arts, are all themes explored succinctly here. Storytelling isn't quite as brazenly audacious as Palindromes or as graspably nasty as Happiness, but it is certainty one of the most effective explorations of the ethnics of the representation I have ever seen.
Fargo (Cohen, 1995)
I had put off re-watching Fargo for years. When I first watched it, aged about 16, where I would regularly watch around four films every day (I had issues sleeping), Fargo frankly left me cold. Not so much for the setting (it's cold) or the narrative arcs (it's reasonably complex), it was more the overwhelming bleakness of William H Macey's arc. His awful, awful decisions that eventually and predictably lead to his utter ruin, both emotionally and financially just aren't very fun. I'm pretty sure the people who get off on this kind of misery porn have never been poor themselves. It's too close to home.
This time round, I appreciated how each Macys arc was simply one among many. In this film, every character and side character and supporting character and bit character leads there own lives. There's the quietly competent, amiable pregnant cop who solves the case single handedly, mainly through being very observant and very nice. There's her gormless, doting husband who's underemployed and filling the hours with fishing and painting. There's an old flame who appears to have mental health issues. And there are the feckless, ridiculous kidnappers who ultimately bungle the stupid plan.
Minnesota is a lot less appealing than I remember. Beautifully bleak snowdrifts of my memories are concrete hellscapes covered in filthy slush. The endless range of parking lots and dive bars and cracked side roads all take it's toll. But the characters are fascinating. It feels less like watching a film and more like watching a simulation unfold. As worst case scenarios casually and inevitably collapse in to one another, the most amiable characters, with the most ostensibly dull lives are the victors, in that their unexceptionally lovely lives are allowed to continue unimpeded. There's something very life affirming about this. I must have been too young to appreciate it first time.