Issue #33: These Violent Delights đȘ
Mandy + Die Hard With A Vengance
Evey now and then, something happens that makes you realize that the only way to make it through this one little life weâre all given is to just go for itâballs to the wall, bonanza nonsense is the cure for what ails us. And as is the tradition when art imitates lifeâevery so often a film comes along that embodies this ethos, discarding any and all sense of normalcy or ârealismâ in favour of utter, delicious chaos.
This week weâre looking at two such films. First, Cate on the drug-addled euphoria of Mandy, then Zosha on the layered delights of Die Hard with a Vengeance. Weâre a month into the new year. The Sundance Film Festival has begun. The vaccine is on its way, (if slowly) and thereâs a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel. Letâs go crazy, but keep going.
Cate on Mandy
If I told you that Mandy was a rock opera soaked in blood, what exactly would you envision? The âpsychedelic action horror filmâ from Greek filmmaker Panos Cosmatos is less film and more experience, but itâs worth the journey if youâre open to stories that rely more heavily on mood and tone than they do on plot.
The plot of Mandy is straightforward enoughâMandy (Andrea Riseborough) and Red (Nicholas Cage) live a quiet, reclusive life in the mountains in 1983. One day, Mandy crosses paths with a van carrying members of the Children of the New Dawn cult and their leader Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache). Sand becomes enamored with her and instructs his subordinate Brother Swan (Ned Dennehy) to bring her to him. Swan enlists the help of The Black Skullsâa drug-running demonic biker gang who became murderous after consuming a bad batch of LSD. The Black Skullls kidnap Mandy and Red, but when Mandy responds to Sandâs sexual advances with ridicule, he burns her alive in front of Red. Red, badly injured and grieving then embarks on a bloody quest of vengeance to murder everyone involved in his wifeâs death.
Mandy does commit the cardinal sin of fridging a female character to give a male character narrative purposeâand the titular role, no less. But once itâs past that point, it becomes something that is not quite more than the sum of its parts but is oddly captivating nonetheless.
To say the film is psychedelic is something of an understatement. Sandâs cult drugs Mandy when she arrives and so the scenes we spend with them are all framed through her drug-induced haze. Cosmatos uses a palette of yellow, purples and blues to blur the perception. Clever editing melds Sandâs face with Mandyâs literally tricking the viewerâs eye and subjecting them to some of the disorientation of an LSD trip. The delayed neon light effects lean into the sense of a loss of time, and lull you into an easy confusion. It is unnerving and exciting all at once.
But unfortunately, Riseborough gets little to do here besides look ethereal and laugh and Linus Roacheâs penis. This is a Nicholas Cage film through and through, and he is in top form in all his rage-Cage glory. Once he enters the third act, Cage revels in the bloody kills and grotesque villains, wielding not just his personally forged battle-ax, but a crossbow with custom-built arrows and a chainsaw. By the filmâs end, he is drenched in the blood of his enemies and hallucinating the return of his beloved wife. As he leaves the scenes, the landscape before his dances and shifts, bending to the will of the massive pile of cocaine he inhaled 20 minutes prior.
Mandyâs heavy metal influences come through loud and clear, not just in the booming soundtrack but in the filmâs mechanics itself. Every scene is the climax of a music video in a slightly different context, but there are lots of bloody kills too if thatâs what youâve come for.
To put it bluntly, this is not the kind of film I would usually consume and I will likely never watch it again. Itâs not a secret that Iâm much more adept at writing about commercial films, and itâs a niche I enjoy. But Iâm glad I made time for this because it forced me to consider how films can bend the form away from traditional narrative structures and evoke stories rather than simply tell them.
Zosha on Die Hard With A Vengeance
Here is my basic understanding as someone who was barely alive while some of these films were being released: Die Hard wows the world. Die Hard 2 does not. Speed is a knockoff of Die Hard, commonly referred to as âDie Hard on a bus.â Speed wows the world. Bruce Willis looks for a Die Hard 3 script that wonât retread the first (and basically second) again. Through a bit of studio wizardry, the script âSimon Saysâ becomes a Lethal Weapon sequel becomes Die Hard 3, Die Hard with a Vengence. The movie is a lot like Speed.
I say this with admiration, honestly; it is not often that a third film in the franchise is as weirdly wild and taut as Die Hard with a Vengence, and it is to its credit that the movie does all that while also standing on so many films shoulders before it. Die Hard with a Vengenceâs freshness stems perhaps from the fact that its connection to the rest of John McClaneâs story is so simple and tenuous that you donât have to concern yourself with it: Hans Gruberâs brother Simon sets a bomb off in New York City. He tells the police that if they donât want more bombs to go off, John McClane must do a series of tasks that Simon Gruber will ladle out through the course of the day.
The whole first segment is wholly objectionable, utter trash: dropped in Harlem in his underwear wearing a sandwich board with a slur on it, you can feel the producersâ jittery excitement at the idea of touching a third rail with their little action franchise. The entire sequence is there to get Zeus (Samuel L. Jackson), a Harlem-based electrician, roped into McClaneâs day of action. Itâs hamfisted and dumb as hell!
Once the pair get roped in, the action stays pretty locked for most of the film. Of course Simon Gruber is up to more nefarious things than just fucking with the cop that killed his brother, but then again, doesnât it work pretty well as a cover that he would just be jerking him around? Again, the strength lies in the sort of facile stupidity of a tacked-on connection: whatever seems muddled in Simonâs plan is a shell game, and McClane and the audience have to figure out whatâs what.
Even McClaneâs wisening up the situation feels smart because itâs so stupid. Too often in these cat-and-mouse thrillers a cop will randomly pull up and see the bigger picture â sometimes weâre privy to why, but almost always it feels borne out of plot necessity rather than actual intelligence. In Die Hard with a Vengence the moment comes because McClane is so overwhelmed by the slapstick silliness of the situation: Simon tasked him and Zeus with stopping a bomb in the park by solving a riddle, involving a 3-gallon jug and a 5-gallon jug, and a scale expecting 4-gallons of water. Two of the people I was watching with solved it before McClane and Zeus, and when the film does explain their thinking itâs half-hearted, a hasty âah Iâve got itâ for what we all know will be a side quest. So of course McClane is able to question whether all this is really worth it and realize, of course it isnât.
Time and again, Die Hard with a Vengeance builds something out of nothing â a clever action sequence trapped in an elevator, a villain whose motivation loops through vague back into the unmistakable â and it does it with little thought to building a cohesive franchise. No doubt this will cut the other way for people as well, interested in more consequence to McClaneâs narrative overall, or the idea that there should be cohesion to his story. But perhaps what those fans forget is that Die Hard 1 also sort of stalls out a bit in the final act, going big as opposed to just going home. (I mean this genuinely: what was the Gruber familyâs home life like, such that both men are taken to such extreme, public terrorism to achieve a basic heist? Was this life before Oceanâs 11?) John McTiernanâs direction is as game as ever, and Jackson is lionhearted as any other role of his. Itâs Jackson whoâs the only one whoâs really as much fun to watch as Jeremy Irons as Simon, who almost walks away with the film with the sort of cool calculation that might entrance any of us into some sort of warrior cult.
Die Hard with a Vengence is so much like any other action cop-robber thriller movie youâve seen. But wisely it takes all that to become the best kind of extension of that: something new. Like the first film, Die Hard 3 has a mayhem to it, played out and heightened by the New York sprawl just as much as Die Hard was by the LA containment (how ironic). It was probably the best version of what you could hope to pull from a pile of Die Hard sequel contenders. The worst would be Troubleshooter, which had McClane doing Die Hard but on a Caribbean cruise line. That one became Speed 2: Cruise Control.
Assorted Internet Detritus
Cate: Hereâs the rundownâa reminder of the women who got us here, why Bridgertonâs sex scenes didnât quite do it for us, the lie of celebrity relatability, and two perspectives on the excellent new novel Detransition, Baby.
Zosha: A very, very long read on the unlikely friendship between Tom Hanksâ assistant and Ann Patchett, feat. psilocybin and the pandemic. Interrogating (more) the queasy ending of Promising Young Woman, a film I love. A deep dive on Wandavisionâs history within the comics, and what the treatment of the relationship means in the show! If you hang with the first bit of this thing on Dickinsonâs hair truth it weaves its way into something neat.
Zosha + Cate <3
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