"London Fields" and Bad Movies as Palette Cleansers

Please welcome new contributor Tony Ruggio...

Have you ever wondered why Film Twitter is more fickle than critics? If you spend a reasonable amount of time there you’ll find deep pockets of hate among many non-professional critics for critical darlings as varied as Birdman, La La Land, even Black Panther. Critics, often dismissed as snobs or "the elite", actually appear to enjoy more films per year than other journos, pundits, and regular Joe or Jane cinephiles on social media. Critics are the only animals in our film bubble ecosystem who are forced to watch everything, even the bad ones. Others might skip the latest Adam Sandler romp or Netflix original dump, but critics (many of them anyway) see it all and I'm here to argue that it gives them perspective. Bad movies have a place, and can serve an under-discussed purpose, and that purpose is encouraging a greater appreciation for what the Inarritus and Andersons of the world are putting out there.

Art is subjective, yes, but most of the time we know a BAD movie when we see it. On the heels of SXSW, I was drowning in good cinema. Between Captain Marvel the week before, Jordan Peele’s near-masterpiece Us, and a few little gems I could find nowhere else, the festival had given so much yet deprived me of a proper palette cleanser. London Fields was it, a gonzo film noir so inept and ill-advised that I was left more than a little awestruck...

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Soundtracking: "Across the Universe"

We're talking the 10th anniversary of Across the Universe in Chris Feil's weekly column on music in the movies!

Across the Universe came to the screens just as jukebox musicals were becoming especially grating on Broadway, but more of a curiosity for the big screen. The film promised stunning Julie Taymor-directed imaginative images set to a massive catalog from The Beatles - and delivered us something a bit more uneven than the creativity explosion that sounds like. Perhaps the high bar already set by invoking the biggest band in the history of popular music was an impossible goal, but the film does provide at least a fun reimagining for some of the best music of the century. A Beatles musical in any context? Yes please (with trepidation)!

The film plays best when it side-steps the plot in its musical sequences...

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Would you rather...?

WOULD YOU RATHER

...model rompers with Taika Waititi?
...pay tribute to Antonio Banderas with Miguel Angel Silvestre?
...soak up some sun with Elizabeth Banks?
...study a screenplay with Saîd Taghmaoui?
...have a peroni with Zoe Kravitz and Karl Glumsan?
...appreciate your sycophantic base with Charlize Theron?
...eat a slice with Laura Dern and Jim Sturgess?
...or do some facepainting with Paul Bettany?

Photos are after the jump to help you decide...

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Tribeca: Posturing Bank Robbing Beauties in "Electric Slide"

More from Nathaniel at the Tribeca Film Festival

Electric Slide
There's something about the Killer Films logo, that has me rooting for the film that follows every time. Christine Vachon's company has shepherded so many confrontational and interesting indie films and voices into the arthouse over the years that it has both a nostalgic pull AND an edge, and those things rarely come conjoined. 

Electric Slide, about a bank robbing loser in 80s Los Angeles, definitely has the confrontational edge part though it's not what you might call "interesting". The only likeable characters are way on the periphery (Vinessa Shaw is engaging despite very little to do as a furniture store employee) like the pretty bank tellers who really sell their brief moments of victimization and carnal attraction to Eddie. But as a film it's intensely narcissistic, less concerned with what you think of it, than what pose it's striking and whether you'd hate-fuck it. Eddie, the protagonist, is a slurry-voiced fey womanizer (Jim Sturgess, A-C-T-I-N-G, for better and mostly worse) who is a perpetual delusional fuck-up. Early in the film he speaks of Los Angeles as suffering from "Success Exhaustion" but he doesn't have that problem. He owes everyone money including a violent French gangster (Christopher Lambert in Eurotrash mode). He steals from wives he's sleeping with (Chloë Sevigny, owning her awesome wardrobe and Patricia Arquette, just owning). He takes up with a young beauty (Isabel Lucas) who is his only rival for empty vacant posturing, they're aspirational fashion models in place of characters. Or maybe that is their character in a soulless Bling Ring kind of way? Instead of repaying his debts withs his loot he keeps spending it. 

Electric Slide employs a countdown format with 10 'chapters' and though the film does become slightly more tense as it progresses what's actually happening in the scenes is so similar that the countdown is reduced to affectation rather than a storytelling technique. And much of the film feels arbitrary - you could remove any of its subplots or any single scene and it'd be the same film. Still, and all, the film is pretty to look at with enticing cinematography and interesting frame composition from debut director Tristan Patterson and his DP Darran Tiernan so I'd love to see another film from the pair. The production design (Michael Grasley, from Sympathy for Delicious) and costuming (Jennifer Johnson whose biggest gig in the past was Beginners) fetishize the 80s well, too. If it adds up to nothing more than a gorgeous hipster fashion editorial, so what? With so many indies so indifferently shot from either budget constraints or the lack of an eye for visual storytelling, sometimes surface beauty is its own reward. 

Visuals: A-; The Rest of It: C-