Census Bloodbath: He May Be Bad, But He's Perfectly Good At It

If you’re an avid reader of Census Bloodbath, first of all, bless your heart. Second, you may notice that I’ve backtracked a tiny bit. Although I’ve already run a post-mortem on the slashers of 1980 and 1981, a second round of research has added a couple more titles to my list: mostly foreign and obscure stuff, but also titles with dubious connection to the genre that I found myself being more lenient with this time around. I’ll be working back through these extra titles as we also continue to push forward into 1982.

Year: 1980

Director: William Friedkin

Cast: Al Pacino, Paul Sorvino, Karen Allen

Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

One of those titles that received a less lenient treatment this time around was Cruising, an Al Pacino crime thriller from The Exorcist and The French Connection auteur William Friedkin. It’s hard to judge a movie’s slasherness sight unseen, but I was dead wrong about this one. Hell, it’s more of a slasher than half the crap I covered from 1980; don’t let the presence of prestige film mainstays fool you.

I don’t care how many Oscars you have between you, this movie has a higher body count than The Stepfather.

Cruising made the highly controversial decision to set a cop thriller in the milieu of New York’s gay S&M leather bar scene. This outraged moralistic heterosexuals, but it also caused a stir in the gay community who objected to the film’s narrow representation and violence against gay men. Fortunately, this is the rare occasion where time has been rather kind to a film’s controversial subject matter. Gay stories are becoming more abundant in the media, so this isn’t the only representation out there, and Cruising has now become something of a historical document capturing a particular urban scene a mere year before AIDS arrived on its doorstep and permanently decimated it.

There’s no denying that the depiction of the sexuality and activities of gay men is depicted with a certain sense of goggle-eyed horror, but removed from the stern gaze of Al Pacino, it’s also unflinchingly erotic, in a way that certainly had never been seen before in mainstream cinemas. It’s hard to watch this film from any perspective and not be awash with conflicting feelings, but it’s possible to read it in a way that doesn’t feel like an attack (as long as you’re aware of the strict conventions of the slasher formula).

I should probably get to the plot. Rookie cop Steve Burns (Al Pacino) is given an undercover assignment by stern father figure Captain Edelson (Paul Sorvino); he must pose as a gay man and roam New York’s leather bars to attract the attention of a killer who has been cruising the area and murdering his hookups.

He easily befriends his harmless playwright neighbor Ted (Don Scardino of He Knows You’re Alone) but this deep dive into this psychosexual underworld is causing turmoil in his own mind and in his relationship with Nancy (Karen Allen).

But really, what doesn’t cause Al Pacino turmoil?

The sexual subtext present in every slasher film is incredibly transparent here. Most slasher killers are sexually repressed for one reason or another, and that repression requires a release, causing them to fly into murderous rages, penetrating those who commit the sin of tempting them, using the blade of a knife rather than anything naughty. It’s been this way from Psycho to Sleepaway Camp, and for what I believe is the first time, Cruising flips that concept on its head.

Especially in the 80’s and before, sexual repression is tragically prevalent in the gay community. Many of us are taught from birth that the way we feel is sinful and wrong, and that’s before we add a layer with a fetish like BDSM. The symbolism of the reasonably bloody kills in Cruising (the murderer always stabs his victims in the back) is unmistakable, and the motivation – while twisted – has a sad basis in real-life crimes. 

Symbolism? What symbolism?

For this reason alone, the killer would be terrifying, but combine that with his creepy whispered mantra (“Who’s here? I’m here. You’re here…”) and menacing silhouette, and you have yourself a tremendously chilling and memorable antagonist.

I didn’t even mention that he wears huge sunglasses and a leather jacket, which are pretty memorable in their own right.

Unfortunately, after a stellar first half exploring life and death in this fascinating lost community, Cruising turns its focus to its single weakest element: Al Pacino. His presence in the film was never interesting to begin with (he just silently wanders through bars gawking at men in leather hats groping each other, his only character development being the increasing amount of accessories he wears), but he fails to stick the landing on the two most crucial elements the third act needed to survive: Steve’s descent into madness and the solution to the mystery.

The reveal of the killer is a dud, as it doesn’t involve any of the characters we’ve come to know or any real agency on the part of Steve Burns. He sits around glowering, he’s handed a piece of evidence by the chief, and then he surveils the suspect in a montage so idiotic and cheesy that the film literally irises in on Pacino to underline that fact that he’s in the scene we’ve been watching him be in for three minutes. It’s a fat load of nothing, and it forces the villain’s exciting presence offscreen for far too long.

This devastating lack of action also decimated whatever feeble attempt at a character study there is in Cruising. The idea is supposed to be that Pacino gets too deep undercover and begins to question his own identity, but you get none of that in the man’s poisonously flat performance, which chokes on its own ambiguity. And the screenplay never commits to escalating his behavior to any real degree other than committing to be hog-tied once during a sting operation. It’s so easy to picture the third act that Cruising wanted to have and easily could have created, but it flinches, forcing us to suffer through 40 minutes of Pacino sitting around twiddling his thumbs until we reach the deliberately ambiguous ending that the bungled setup thoroughly failed to earn, and in fact renders completely nonsensical.

You can’t have a cop movie with a cop that doesn’t do anything, and it’s infuriating that this dreadful third act mars a film with this good a setting and villain. The lurid, saturated color and casually explicit sexuality of the first hour are so incredible that the fact the movie falls so hideously short of being a masterpiece is just devastating.

Killer: I’m honestly not sure.

Final Girl: Is there even a girl in this movie?

Best Kill: The momentum is brutally murdered at about minute 56.

Sign of the Times: One of the victims lives above a Radio Shack.

Scariest Moment: A man in a sling gets fisted in the middle of a bar. I’ve never been to New York, but I’m pretty sure that violates the health code.

Weirdest Moment: Sitcom icon Ed O’Neill briefly shows up as a homicide detective.

Champion Dialogue: “If that bulge in your pants ain’t a knife, why don’t we take a walk?”

Body Count: 4

1. Loren Lukas is stabbed in the back.
2. Eric Rossman is stabbed in the back.
3. Martino Perry is stabbed in the back.
4. Ted Bailey is killed offscreen.

TL;DR: Cruising is a waste of the monumental potential that the first hour sets up.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1263

Just Keep Swimming

Year: 2016

Director: Andrew Stanton & Angus MacLane

Cast: Ellen DeGeneres, Albert Brooks, Ed O'Neill

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

So, Pixar. Not something that has been talked about frequently on Popcorn Culture despite its prominence in the blogger’s childhood. Let’s get into it, shall we? The groundbreaking studio that combines digital animation with humor and heart has been in a very weird creative space lately. As every animation studio and their mother have hopped on the computer-generated train (including Pixar’s literal parent, the Disney company), Pixar has been having a harder and harder time keeping their heads above the creative water.

Obviously, with films like Up and Toy Story 3 in their recent repertoire, Pixar hasn’t exactly fallen behind the curve, but for every glittering gem they produce they’ve also been bogged down by patently anonymous entries like Brave and (god help us) The Good Dinosaur, or lesser franchise fare like Cars 2 or Monsters University. Their most recent feature Inside Out has definitely boosted their credibility once more (seriously, let’s just pretend The Good Dinosaur doesn’t exist – it’s easy because I guarantee you haven’t seen it), but in the buildup to Finding Dory it was hard not to be a little nervous.

A thirteen-years-later sequel to one of their most beloved films that also acts as a  spin-off about an endearing sidekick with a one-note personality? That’s like mixing a bowl of plastic explosives using a stick of dynamite. It’s a recipe for disaster. But here we are. It has arrived. It’s in theaters, ripping through the box office like a money-devouring golem. So… How is it?

You’ll find out after this word from our sponsors.

In Finding Dory, Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) is a blue tang suffering from short-term memory loss. After helping the clownfish Marlin (Albert Brooks) find his son Nemo (Hayden Rolence, replacing the original actor, who is like 80 years old by this point), memories begin to surface of her own parents (Diane Keaton & Eugene Levy, who at this point has been an onscreen father to pretty much every living actor). She sets out to find them, but her slippery memory provides a mounting challenge. She, Marlin, and Nemo end up at a marine research institute, a  rehabilitation center/aquarium where Dory was born. The adventure might not be as large-scale as the cross-country trek of Finding Nemo, but travelling between he exhibits is tougher than it sounds when you’re just a lil fish with a spotty memory.

When Dory and the clownfish get separated, she must rely on new and old friends like Destiny (Kaitlin Olson), a nearsighted whale shark, Hank (Ed O’Neill), a grumpy octopus, and – eventually – herself.

There might be other fish in the sea, but none of them are quite like Dory.

As with any review of a Pixar feature, we must begin with a slight interruption to discuss The Short. This short in particular, “Piper,” is such a vast improvement upon last year’s treacly mess “Lava” that just the first frame is enough to bring tears to one’s eyes. Set at a beach, where a baby sand piper is learning how to hunt for food while facing its fear of the ocean, it’s a stunning piece of work. The story is lean, simple, and charming, but the animation is the true standout, an unparalleled achievement in photorealistic digital imaging that consigns all competitors into oblivion. The ocean… The feathering on the birds… The sand! Oh, I could rhapsodize about that perfectly replicated sand for hours. It’s a beautiful piece, capturing the look and feel of reality while delicately blending it with the rounded edges and welcoming cuteness of a cartoon. It’s brilliant and I won’t hear a word against it.

Now, about that pesky movie it’s attached to. Honestly, it’s pretty good. Pixar isn’t knocking on the door of a second Golden Age, but they’re at least not coasting anymore. Finding Dory is playing in the shallows, but it’s having a lot of fun. With its small-scale setting comes small-scale themes (plenty of family movie standbys: the power of friendship and/or family, believing in oneself, all that good stuff) and small-scale characters (the only new character given any depth whatsoever is the surly Hank, who is welded onto an Odd Couple arc older than cinema itself), but it’s still bursting with energy like a 5-year-old who figured out the child locks on the Oreo cupboard.

Perhaps the most significant thing about Finding Dory is that it’s practically immune to sequelitis. Although there are a handful of intensely pandering moments (we get an origin story for the “Just Keep Swimming” song, which is about as patently useless as finding out how Professor X went bald), this movie isn’t just a Finding Nemo greatest hits collection. Returning characters are integrated fairly well into the new story in places where they organically belong. OK, a cameo by the surfer turtles is a little unpleasant, but justified. And the movie never really figures out what to do with Marlin and Nemo until the third act. But we’re thankfully not forced through a gauntlet of grotesqueries, with doppelgänger scenes visiting the vegetarian sharks, the aquarium escapees, the dentist’s daughter, and so on. Finding Dory is well aware of its history and its universe, but it rarely feels the need to repeat itself.

Which is ironic, considering that’s pretty much Dory’s M.O.

So much of Finding Dory is new, and while none of it is quite on the level of the original plot and characters, could it ever be? The new side characters here are bright and fun even if they’re not so engaging, and a pair of lounging sea lions are an excellent substitute for the much-beloved seagulls. And everything that isn’t new is classic Pixar, which ain’t a bad place to be. There’s plenty of humor derived from the anthropomorphic nature of our inhuman leads, depicting in increasingly wacky ways how one might reasonably travel through the various sectors of an aquarium when one isn’t exactly inclined to breathing air.

And then of course, there’s the obligatory part that takes a machete to the heartstrings. The emotional moments in the climax feel a wee bit rote, but any time you’re treated to a flashback of young Dory with her parents, you’re going to wish you had gills, because otherwise you’re going to down in saltwater tears. Baby Dory is so devastatingly adorable and her separation from her parents is so straight-up brutal that the combined cuteness and sadness will overload our system.

I’m pretty sure renting your kid a Pixar movie qualifies as child abuse.

All in all, it’s a cleverly organized, silly movie about overcoming your disabilities and discovering your inner strength. The title Finding Dory isn’t just a franchise tie-in it’s a thematic manifesto. Whether or not it’s a truly great Pixar movie is beside the point. It’s a very good one, and we should be happy it’s around.

TL;DR: Finding Dory is a fun, energetic sequel that stays true to its story even if it's dealing with shallower material than its predecessor.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1190