RETURN TO THE 36TH CHAMBER: Kung-Farce

This review is the third in a Martial Arts Movie retrospective commissioned by Arthur Robinson. Many thanks to Arthur for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon. All other film reviews in this retrospective will be found here. The first 36th Chamber review is here.

Director: Chia-Liang Liu
Writer: Kuang Ni
Cast: Chia-Hui Liu, Lung Wei Wang, Hou Hsiao, King Chu Lee
Runtime: 99 mins.
1980

In 1973, legendary spaghetti western director Sergio Leone decided to try his hand at comedy. The result was My Name Is Nobody, which he considered to be "a Sergio Leone film directed by someone else." He conceived of the film and handed it off to his loyal disciple Tonino Valerii. It's about a man named Nobody who tries to convince his idol to take on the Wild Bunch. It's a piss-take on Leone's typical mythic melodrama, bastardizing those elements with wordplay, farce, and goofy bits. Although the strongest pieces of the movie shine, it's a bit of a failed experiment. I remember the fun meta-commentary; I also remember the endless scene based entirely around a painfully long fart joke.

Return to the 36th Chamber shares a lot with My Name Is Nobody: it is a reworking of a genre masterpiece from a genre master that blends its signature style with farce, to diminished effect. There are two key differences, the first being that The 36th Chamber of Shaolin's director and star both return for the sequel. The second difference is that Return ultimately succeeds in its project.

PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE: Let Music Set You Free

This review was requested by Brian Kapustik. Many thanks to Brian for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Director: Brian De Palma
Writer: Brian De Palma
Cast: William Finley, Paul Williams, Jessica Harper, Gerrit Graham, George Memmoli
Runtime: 91 mins.
1974

Phantom of the Paradise is as scatterbrained as its Wikipedia genre description: 'a rock musical horror comedy film.' It begins casually enough, with an opening voiceover by none other than "The Twilight Zone" voice actor Rod Serling about the infamy of Swan (Paul Williams). This titanic music producer has a stranglehold on the industry, Serling tells us, one that he wants to enrich with his new music club, The Paradise. That monologue lasts about a minute. Then we are dumped into a whirligig of stimuli as an unseen Swan watches potential musical headliners from the balcony. Swan's current cash cow, Beach Boys throwback band The Juicy Fruits, just won't do for the Grand Opening. He needs something new.

He falls in love with the music of our protagonist Winslow (William Finley), which Winslow explains is a cantata inspired by Faust.* Trouble is, Swan needs the music, not the musician. He screws Winslow out of his intellectual property in a transparently one-sided deal that really should have been obvious to Winslow considering his obsession with Faust.

*We see snippets of Winslow's cantata throughout, as well as other music acts. The Paul Williams-produced soundtrack is exactly right for what the movie is doing.

Our first indication that we're in for something bonkers comes a few minutes in, when hired muscle and talent headhunter Philbin (George Memmoli) turns to the camera and addresses us directly-- as if we ourselves are Swan. In most films a stroke this bold this early would be a statement of intent: expect more of this style to come. Here, neither voiceover nor direct address appear in the rest of the movie because it is busy advancing every other experiment it can think of. Paradise shifts its identity every scene like a quantum particle: we can never pin down exactly where it is, and we don't know how it got there, but it never becomes anything other than itself.

UNFRIENDED: Hyperlink Theatre

This review was requested by Marcus Michelen. Many thanks to Marcus for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Director: Levan Gabriadze
Writer: Nelson Greaves
Cast: Shelley Hennig, Moses Storm, Matthew Bohrer, Renee Olstead, Jacob Wysocki, Courtney Halverson, Heather Sossaman
Runtime: 83 mins.
2015

In the late 1800s Sigmund Freud made the revolutionary claim that hysterical symptoms are not rooted only in the physiological, but issue from trauma undergone at some point in the past. Hysteria is a social disease, and must be dealt with on psychosocial terms. These studies in hysteria would unlock his theories of repression and the unconscious mind, thus inventing the framework for an entirely new understanding of the human personality. Freud argues that human behavior is never surface level; it is shrouded from ourselves by ourselves. Our pathologies exist at the nexus of personality and patriarchy, body and politic.

Today we understand that the condition Freud's contemporaries called "hysteria" was a cobbled together mass of quackery and convenient sexism. Freud's work redefines hysteria as a pathological snag in the relationship between our conscious and unconscious mind. Trauma displaces desire, and hysterical symptoms tattletale on the parts of our mind that we don't have access to. It is the job of the analyst to circumvent a patient's denial of that trauma by closing the narrative circuit.

I am invoking Freud's work to better discuss Unfriended, which is an unprecedented work in its own right. So unprecedented that it may be the only feature film of the 21st century so far to invent an entirely novel way of telling stories. I have yet to hear a term for the medium pioneered here, so I call it Hyperlink Theatre. With one ignorable exception, the entirety of the film takes place within the interface of the protagonist's computer display. We follow Blaire (Shelley Hennig), more specifically Blaire's cursor, as she clicks around social media and talks to the floating Skype heads of her friends. No edits, and arguably no 'cinematography,' as the filmmakers cannot adjust the camera, only futz with the 'production design.'

In the year of our Lord 2020, the innovation on display here might fail to wow us. These plaguey days, theatre has made an awkward transition to a similar style of floating head Zoom storytelling out of necessity. Not to mention the meteoric rise of Twitch, a new medium that has rewired our brains so much that it makes Unfriended's unique interface seem pedestrian. At the time, though, this film came as a blistering insight.

A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION: Once Upon a Time in the Midwest

This review was requested by Nate Biagiotti. Many thanks to Nate for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Director: Robert Altman
Writer: Garrison Keillor
Cast: Garrison Keillor, Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Virginia Madsen, Woody Harrelson, John C. Reilly, Maya Rudolph, Lindsay Lohan, Lily Tomlin, L.Q. Jones, Tommy Lee Jones
Runtime: 105 mins.
2006

As far as subject matter goes, your enjoyment may vary depending on how into white people singing about rhubarb you are. The down home aw shucks folksy podunk salt of the earth wisdom of the dirt vibe is not my favorite, and this movie is nearly two hours straight of it. For this is the final night of the live radio play "A Prairie Home Companion," whose theater has been bought out by A Corporation. The film more or less matches the runtime of the play, so we are constantly flitting between charming old people singing charming songs and charming old people swapping charming backstage banter. The troupe expresses their grief at the closure in a panoply of ways, while Garrison Keillor (or "GK" as the movie styles him) occupies the center of it all, stalwart and stubborn about performing his job exactly as he always does.

Like all great art, A Prairie Home Companion is about far more than its topic. You don't have to be a fan of musical cowboys telling lewd jokes about erections to appreciate art about the people who brought such a thing into existence. What's interesting about the show within the movie is the way it telescopes the personal stories of performers who have been intimately tied to the production for decades. Keillor knows that stories are about people foremost, and director Altman obliges in shaping a tricky, busy script into something successfully personal.

PALM SPRINGS: You May Kiss the Now

Director: Max Barbakow
Writer: Andy Siara
Cast: Andy Samberg, Cristin Milioti, J.K. Simmons
Runtime: 90 mins.
2020

How do you show the passage of time onscreen? How do you shape an era, or an eon? How do you characterize the empty periods, the boring moments? How do you establish an existential weight? Films only have an hour and a half* to tell their story. They don't carry the same longevity or interiority as a novel.

*or three and a half if you're producing a contemporary blockbuster

Palm Springs makes the void of time its entire project, and it communicates that void almost entirely through implication. Nyles (Andy Samberg) has been stuck in a classic Groundhog Day-style time loop at a wedding in Palm Springs. Though he is our protagonist, our perspective character is Sarah (Cristin Milioti), sister of the bride. Nyles tries to seduce her and accidentally gets her stuck in the same time loop. There is no choice but to introduce her to the life of nihilism and dull despair that he has been living for cycles beyond count.

Palm Springs is an Andy Samberg comedy, but it's not about the goofy time loop jokes (though there are plenty good ones, like Nyles's infinitely bored sexual explorations). Instead it is a character study first and foremost, a rather subtle one that ought to cement Samberg on the long list of comedic actors with immense dramatic talent. Samberg doesn't play the buffoon here. Maybe Nyles was once a buffoon, but any antic energy has long since withered into acid irony. The luster has left Nyles's life long ago; the bare minimum is all he can muster. Even when he's navigating a perfect sequence of moves across the dance floor, or grabbing the attention of the room with a surprising speech, his eyes are hollow. There's a sense that anything he can do is always already played out.