‘Drive-Away Dolls’ and ‘Land of Bad’
‘Drive-Away Dolls’ and ‘Land of Bad’
Okay, ‘Dune: Part Two’ is sold out. What else is there?
I REVIEWED DUNE: PART TWO last week; it’s out this Friday and I assume you’ve already got tickets to see it in IMAX. Maybe Dolby if sales have maxed out on IMAX. But what if the biggest screens are all gone? What might you turn to at the multiplex for movies where spectacle matters slightly less?
Allow me to humbly offer you a couple of recommendations.
First up is Drive-Away Dolls, the lesbian neo-noir from director Ethan Coen, cowritten with his queer wife and movie-making partner, Tricia Cooke.
Set in 1999 in Philadelphia, we open on the mysterious murder of a man (Pedro Pascal) carrying a briefcase. In a sequence replete with Dutch angles and a patina of absurdity slapped onto jarring violence, this little vignette sets the tone for what’s to come: what we will see is deadly serious and a little silly and if you can’t cotton to that, well, that’s understandable, but maybe this just isn’t the movie for you.
Cut to Jamie (Margaret Qualley), engaged in some passionately athletic lesbian sex and dodging phone calls from both her friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) and girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein). Marian’s stuck in an Office Space-style existence, arguing semantics with a guy who can’t take a clue she’s just not that into him (or anyone else of his gender); Sukie’s driven to a violent breakup with Jamie; and Jamie’s ready to get out of town. So is Marian. So they head to Curlie’s Drive-Away, where they can pick up a car headed for Tallahassee and start their new lives in the Florida Panhandle.
Curlie (Bill Camp, in a delightfully understated turn) sends them off in a car he was supposed to hold for goons Arliss (Joey Slotnick) and Flint (C.J. Wilson), who are tasked with recapturing the girls and the car and its contents by their boss (Colman Domingo).
So really what we have here is a lesbian neo-noir hangout road trip movie, and your forbearance for all the silliness that follows will be determined by just how much you enjoy witty repartee and quick-tongued dialogue that isn’t instantly quotable but is apt to make you giggle in the moment. The humor comes from the clash of personalities in the two cars speeding down I-95: Marian is a little uptight and Jamie is a loose-lipped free spirit; Arliss thinks he can sweet-talk the information needed out of anyone, while Flint is more apt to start throwing fists.
Two things leapt out at me as I was watching this film. The first, and this is not a novel observation, is just how interesting it is to compare Ethan Coen’s raunchy Drive-Away Dolls, with its vaguely absurdist tone and exaggeratedly comic camera moves, and Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, with its black-and-white German expressionist set design and its more subdued comedy. It’s like one of those old comic book stories where a mad scientist splits a hero into two different people, each embodying the hero’s core traits. As a longtime Coen-head, it’s fascinating to see the comic elements of The Big Lebowski, Hail, Caesar!, and Raising Arizona in Drive-Away Dolls while simultaneously wishing for a slightly heartier visual dash of Blood Simple or Miller’s Crossing or No Country for Old Men.
Second, Drive-Away Dolls is probably an instant cult classic, the sort of movie that doesn’t quite click with audiences or critics the first time around, but will find admirers once it hits home video, picking up steam as the years go on. The Coen Bros. filmography is littered with these, from The Big Lebowski to The Hudsucker Proxy to Burn After Reading to Hail, Caesar! The last time I had this feeling was while watching Under the Silver Lake, a movie I didn’t quite grok on first viewing but one that quickly revealed itself as a key cinematic text of our age and has earned a devoted fandom in the ensuing years. Drive-Away Dolls feels likely to join this pantheon.
If quirky comedy’s not what you’re in the mood for, see if you can track down a theater showing Land of Bad. An awkward title for what amounts to a straightforward, competently made action programmer of the sort we used to get several times a month, Land of Bad is gripping and tense and rousing and just amusing enough to keep from ever turning dour.
Air Force Sgt. J.J. Kinney (Liam Hemsworth) is the JTAC (joint terminal attack controller) assigned to a trio of operators dispatched to an island in the Sulu Sea, which a title card helpfully informs us is a hot zone where a secret war against terrorists in the Philippines is underway. They’ve been dispatched to find and rescue an undercover asset; guiding them from the sky is drone operator Air Force Captain Eddie ‘Reaper’ Grimm (Russell Crowe) and SSgt. Nia Branson (Chika Ikogwe).
Cowriters David Frigerio and William Eubank (who also directs) sketch out the characters in broad, efficient strokes. This is Kinney’s first mission in the field, and he’s so nervous he can’t choose between Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops; when he forgets both boxes altogether, the veteran operators stick him with a cereal-based nickname. Eddie Grimm is both OCD—angrily rearranging the coffee pods when they’re moved; annoyed his preferred chair has been hijacked—and averse to authority, a fact betrayed both by the tone he takes with his colonel and the fact that he has captain’s bars glued on to what appears to be a Hawaiian shirt.1
And the villains, when we finally encounter them, are ruthlessly evil. After Kinney and his squad find the base they’re seeking, it’s attacked by Abu Sayyaf, a band of Islamic terrorists and pirates that the slow-burn war in the Sulu is there to take out. Their boss shoots the arms dealer they’re there to see square in the chest and screams Allahu Akbar! while cutting the head off a woman. Kinney’s operators won’t let them do the same to a kid, and that’s when things kick off.
There are undoubtedly some who will be made uncomfortable by the straightforward real-world villainy depicted. The dirty little secret about this sort of film is that it doesn’t work despite being propaganda of a sort—a movie about decent Americans getting a little banged up and getting their hands a little dirty while bringing all their might to bear against wicked savages—but rather because of that fact. It’s the most efficient way to get the audience to cheer for guys who, despite being outnumbered 30 to 1, aren’t really underdogs in a film of this sort, not when they can call in Hellfire missiles at a moment’s notice.
The action filmmaking here isn’t revolutionary, but it is executed at a pretty high level; most striking are the nighttime sequences, the dark of night illuminated by burning wreckages, the flash of tracer rounds leading the way. It’s also interesting to see how director Eubank uses drone camera footage. I’m pretty sure at one point he sent a drone flying into an explosion caused by a missile fired from a military drone, which was an amusingly meta moment that also demonstrated once again that directors are grasping for new cinematic syntax as they play around with this novel visual toy.
Whether Crowe in his current, ah, dimensions would pass Air Force fitness requirements is a question I leave to the “What x gets wrong about y” brigade of film writers.