52 Pick-Up # 25 – Bound (1996)

Welcome back to 52 Pick-Up, my year long, semi-random journey through 52 movies will be encountering for the first time this year. The fun of going in new like this means I'm just going off the immediate reaction.

In a case like this, that means me going 'Oh God, why did I wait this long to watch this?'

As I said up top, and somewhat at the end of last week, I wanted to do something specifically queer to round out June for Pride Month (and after indirectly dedicating three entries to Bleak Week, I wanted to do something besides the already on the books John Waters movie.) With this in mind, the time came to finally check out the Wachowskis' directorial debut feature, the 1996 neo-noir Bound.

As you might have guessed from the start, yes – I liked this one. I REALLY liked this one. Its reputation had me expecting good, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this.

But, I should stop myself before going straight into gushing. This has evolved something of a format, so on with the elevator pitch.

Bound is your classic story – girl meets girl, girl flirts with girl over several encounters before they finally act on their mutual desires, girl learns girl is under the thumb of a violent mobster, girl helps girl come up with plan to rip said mobster off, leaving him holding the bag at the hands of his peers, except his own violent tendencies cause the plan to rapidly spiral into a bloody double-cross which both girls now have to fight to get out of alive.

You know. Classic story. Or as classic as I can make it without getting too spoilery.

Get you someone who can (consensually) eye hump you as hard as
either Corky or Violet is doing to one another in this scene.

Like last week, the casting is definitely a point in this film's favor. In particular, the core three performances by Gina Gershon, Jennifer Tilly, and Joe Pantoliano. Gershon and Tilly as the movie's leading ladies, Corky and Violet (respectively) have a chemistry and tension together that hits early and stays constant throughout the movie. Especially impressive is how quickly it gets going, starting with a non-verbal moment the two share in elevator that is already charged before the two even properly introduce themselves. From there, the sexual tension escalates quickly, and even after it's consummated, the two play well as a couple linked first by desire, then, as the stakes raise, by keeping alive. Part of me wants to see if they've gone on to work together any time after this or not. Rounding out the trio, and another case of 'I expected good, but hot damn', I can see why Pantoliano considers Caesar some of his best work. He's had a lot of great roles outside of this, but there is a genuine sort of 'caged animal' menace he brings here I don't think I've really gotten to see him flex in other roles. Watching that played off of Tilly and Gershon does a phenomenal job of ramping up the tension of the movie's third act.

Unlike last week, where I feel like the casting really helped save a kind of rocky movie, this is a case where it takes an already good movie and enhances it THAT much more. Watching this there were points where I had to double check and confirm this was the Wachowskis' debut movie, simply because it's always a pleasant surprise when you see a first feature come together this well. Which isn't to say it doesn't happen, let me be clear. Not every directorial debut is weak, but it's rare they also get it this strong out of the gate. For every Eraserhead or The Producers, there's a Dark Star or Mondo Trasho (maybe a slight spoiler on that last one for next month.) Bound definitely lands more in the former camp, with the Wachowskis hitting the ground with a confidence and control over the noir style here that, again, gives the sense they would have had more experience going in. Honestly, I'd love it if they could come back to this genre, but I can understand why they might figure if, between this and the heavy noir influence on the Matrix movies after, they might feel like they've already done all they needed or wanted to with the style/genre to this point.

If this and Love Lies Bleeding have taught me anything,
it's that one of the best things you can do with your partner
is take an opportunity to set up a mutual enemy with a plan
that leaves them holding the bag.

Which, on the one hand, a bit of a shame. On the other, hey, makes a good case for appreciating how good their offering was already.

But, if they ever want to come back to this (and hey, bonus points if said noir wants to go this queer and horny on top of that) I will not say no. More likely, I will be asking 'When's the release date?'

As an additional moment of plugging goes – if you can and haven't looked into it yet, the Criterion 4k for this takes a good looking movie and makes it look THAT much better.

No, I'm not getting paid to say that, though again – if they're offering, I could be persuaded.

But, that's business for a later day. With this, June comes to a close here and next week marks the official halfway point for this project.

So, what do I have on deck for the big halfway AND for the 4th of July?

How about some Canadian indigenous folk horror?

Well, too bad. Cause that's what I rolled and I'm looking forward to seeing how it plays this week with 1991's Clearcut.

Till then.

Blue Velvet (1986)

 Hello and welcome back for another round of the Criterion Challenge to close out July.

First, my apologies again for the shorter entry last time. Been working with some tech difficulties (non-film related piece of advice - Dell laptops are not your friend!) Also, the more I looked at the film through this particular lens, the more I realized my takeaway was 'This movie is great, but damn if time hasn't left it a grim aftertaste.'

I would still recommend giving it a watch, just - bear in mind, with the angle I was trying to write that from, it got kind of darker than I intended. It's still a great time in its own right.

In hindsight, this is probably NOT the best way to set up an entry on Blue Velvet, but we're rolling, so too bad!

 

 
Like last time, I knew this movie was a definite pick for this theme. Which, given it's David Lynch, is amusing to me - for as much as his work has been studied, scrutinized, debated, and picked apart in film circles - Blue Velvet is arguably one of his most straightforward feature. So much so that, in discussing it with a friend recently for this, she put it best saying it's a movie that lets you know what it's about within the first few minutes.

Granted, it doesn't just say it, but the visual language is clear enough: opening with a scene of sunny, everytown Lumberton, USA, subsequently disrupted as a man has a stroke, collapsing in his yard. From his fall, Lynch keeps cutting closer, moving past him to the insects scrabbling in the dirt under the pristine green grass.

That single beat encapsulates the journey protagonist Jeffrey Beaumont (Lynch alum Kyle MacLachlan) will find himself on. Digging past the charming hometown he grew up in and remembered to discover the dark, rotting underbelly hiding under the smalltown charm, best embodied in the psychopathic Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper in one of the definitive roles of his career.)

It's certainly not a particularly new idea to fiction - Stephen King alone could put together a mini-library about the number of works he's done that dissect the assumed morality of small town America - but it's clearly an idea that resonated for Lynch. So much so that it became one of the major threads he dug into with the series Twin Peaks years later.

All the same, there's something striking about how it's addressed in Blue Velvet - particularly because it feels almost uncharacteristically straightforward for Lynch. The movie has several of his stylistic tells to it, and some of the direction and editing gives certain scenes a dreamlike feel even if the story itself is meant to be seen as more 'real' than the subsequent TV series that shares its themes and some cast members.

That 'real' aspect is, I think, part of what I've found myself dwelling on the most this time around. Particular with regards to the dynamic between Jeffrey and Frank.

One of the things that really strikes me about Frank as a villain in this is that, thematically, he's not presented as an outsider. He's not some 'other' who's come in to corrupt the pure people of Lumberton. The implication is that Frank, and just about everyone around him could easily be just that person down the street. In fact, the one figure in the movie that could almost be seen as an 'other', Isabella Rosselini's Dorothy Vallens, is herself a victim of Frank and his group.

It's honestly the scariest part about Frank - he's not framed as some strange outside monster. Just based on what we see, he could be a home-grown, all-American maniac that Jeffrey simply never noticed growing up. In fact, there's a scene between Jeffrey and Dorothy that even seems to suggest that there is the potential for someone like Jeffrey to become like Frank if he lets himself.

Which is where I come to the weirdest realization I took away from this rewatch - despite this being easily the darker the two movies watched, thematically, I came away from this with a slightly more optimistic sense than I did with watching Lost in America through this lens.

A big part of this is due to the fact that, ultimately, though this movie is about that darker heart under 'wholesome' America, it's also a movie that advocates the idea of not ignoring it, trying to confront it for what it is. The movie makes it clear that Jeffrey's own attempts to investigate it nearly get him killed at multiple points, but it also puts him in a position where he can't simply ignore everything he has seen and learned over the course of the film.

Yeah, in the end, it almost feels a bit too clean (as partly shown by the discourse over the fake robin in the final scene - a prop that Lynch has admitted was born of function rather than theme) but there is still something oddly encouraging about that stance in this day and age. Framing it not as an act of machismo or anything like that, but simply recognizing it's the right thing to do.

No. Really.
For all the discourse over whether the clearly
fake robin symbolized a false happiness,
Lynch admitted they just weren't able to get a
live robin the day of the shoot. This was the solution
from props.

And again, coming into this after reflecting on Lost in America and realizing "Wow, we learned nothing from this," there is a certain strange sense of therapy that comes with a movie that flat-out says 'It's out there, and pretending it isn't won't make it go away.'

Okay, so that brings an end to a thematically darker month than I intended.

Tell you what? Pack your bags everyone. We're going on a vacation next month.

Better yet, we're going on a couple of vacations!

So see you guys again in August, where we're taking some trips.

Till then!