plug: Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)
"Something truly goddamn strange is going on here!!"
Goddamn, season of the witch, harvest moon and all that, one week and what a batshit October it’s been already. Trump gave covid to all his cronies, Melania has apparently joined the War on Christmas, Bond AND Batman have been delayed … again, and the rest of us are out here with nothin’ to do but dance ourselves into the tomb.
And whatever wild atrocities the next four weeks have in store for us, you’ll find me here at ESH, mostly riffin’ on horror movies through it all.
Our first plug for Spooky Season is Velvet Buzzsaw, a criminally underrated satirical horror film from last year that takes delightful aim at the banal upper crust of the LA art world.
Netflix, in its baffling, distractingly algorithmic search for clout has been putting out good movies at a rate that now exceeds its time and devotion to good shows (btw, I’ll never forgive you for canceling GLOW this week Netflix. Bullshit move). Still, “clout” is the key word here. Netflix won’t finance just anyone’s movie these days. They’re systematically narrowing down their prospective pool of hired guns to people like Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Michael Bay, Adam Sandler and the like who already have a career’s worth of clout that the algorithm can siphon.
As usual, I can’t quite figure out how this whole scam works, but I’m glad that Dan Gilroy — a veteran industry screenwriter who just started flexing his “auteur” muscles in 2014 helming the excellent Nightcrawler— was able to take advantage of it and get this weird little horror joint out to the masses.
Gilroy takes a Altman-esque, top-view approach to Velvet Buzzsaw’s story and setting — fusing, as I wrote for Nightmarish Conjurings last year, “the hyper-stylized, supernatural proto-slasher revelry of Mario Bava with his own propulsively modern flare — filling his satirical LA-artworld setting with a pitch perfect cast of deliciously vapid characters to weave a timely yarn about art, commerce, and the self-sabotage of wealth, fame, and capitalism.”
This movie’s sweetest pleasures are in its artful dialogue and ensemble of great actors vibin’ with each other in delicious passive-aggressive social power-battle scenarios. Think House of Cards with a touch of Bunuel’s Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Jake Gyllenhaal serves as the film’s de facto star, and he really goes for it as art critic Morf Vandewalt (he’s also doing something totally different than his previous work with Gilroy in Nightcrawler), but everyone else from Toni Colette to Rene Russo to John Malkovich to Daveed Diggs is so good when it’s their turn to blow up the screen it’s hard to call anyone out in particular.
And it’s the combination of all of that with the horror elements that really makes Velvet Buzzsaw such a gem. When Josephina (Zawe Ashton) uncovers a life’s work of paintings by a man who just died in her apartment building, she starts dolling them out to her boss, gallery owner and former punk star Rhodora Haze (Russo), setting off a chain reaction where almost every character tries to monetize the paintings for themselves in some way or another. Real “price of everything/value of nothing” type shit. Most of these characters experience a gruesome demise at the hands of the malevolent spirit that haunts the paintings, making for some truly inventive horror sequences that blend practical effects with artful CGI in ways that shouldn’t work, but do.
Velvet Buzzsaw is one of several terrific and terrifying late-stage capitalism satires to come out of the late 2010s (Sorry to Bother You, Us, Parasite), but revisiting it this year got me thinking of Hal Ashby’s Shampoo — a 1975 film about the death of the 60s as experienced by an ensemble of Beverly Hills socialites on Election Day in 1968. Velvet Buzzsaw is like a mean horror version of Shampoo for 2020, capturing the final days of an era that’s both in turmoil and somehow still more innocent than the apocalyptic days ahead, where the tumbling wave of culture breaks and sinks into the sands of greed.