Joan Crawford, Kenan and Kel, and the Empty Man, Now Available to Stream

Very few emotional responses are fixed forever. As we’re now a full year removed from the beginning of the creeping domestic spread of COVID-19, we’re reaching the point where retrospective thinkpieces are already surfacing. I’m sure few people would think of themselves as being exactly the same person they were a year ago, and that’s something to keep in mind as we slip into the occasional retrospectacle. Things change, a lot, even if you haven’t been going out and doing anything. Let the films and music of your life be more than just one-night stands. Build something enduring out of what art does for you. As always, here are some suggestions. See more in past issues of the Scene: March 26, April 2, April 9, April 16, April 23, April 30, May 7, May 14, May 21, May 28, June 4, June 11, June 18, June 25, July 2, July 9, July 16, July 23, July 30, Aug. 6, Aug. 13, Aug. 20, Aug. 27, Sept. 3, Sept. 10, Sept. 17, Sept. 24, Oct. 1, Oct. 15, Oct. 29, Nov. 5, Nov. 11, Nov. 26, Dec. 3, Dec. 17, Jan. 6, Jan. 21, Jan. 28, Feb. 4.

Good Burger on Netflix

There’s a special kind of surreality that proliferates in kids’ programming, and if it hooks you at the right time, it can help map the structure of your comic DNA forever. Encountering the Muppets or SpongeBob SquarePants or Bé-Bé’s Kids (the animated film) at precisely the right moment ensures a response to the world built on a genial elasticity, and it can serve you well when the universe gets up to its bullshit. Good Burger, spun off from a recurring segment on Nickelodeon’s ’90s kids’ sketch show All That, came along long after I thought my comic aesthetics were set. But working in the weirder outposts of the fast-food industry has several lessons to teach anyone who ends up in that position, and thanks to gracious co-workers and not a few wine coolers, Good Burger — like its ideological sibling Showgirls (both VHS tapes kept in the trunk until the higher-ups went home and third shift could handle business) — became a sort of background ritual. For my colleagues and me, it was a litany for cleaning conveyor belts, preparing frying mechanisms, figuring out just what the deal was with those beetles that kept dive-bombing the dumpsters, or just trying to metabolize the evil that customers would vent on us through the day. Some days you’re the Dexter. Some days you’re the Otis. And most days, it’s Ed city. I’ve never met Kenan Thompson or Kel Mitchell, but they’re in that part of the brain where all past co-workers live, where memory is a thicket of colors and smells and jokes you’ve heard countless times, and so many special sauces.

Rain via Turner Classic Movies

For far too long the enduring legacy of Joan Crawford has been tied to Mommie Dearest, both the Christina Crawford book and the Frank Perry film. But long before wire hangers and Pepsi-Cola reshaped how contemporary culture talks about Crawford, she was doing the work and giving daring performances that were shocking even for audiences of the early ’30s. 1932’s Rain is a great example of the pre-code film, wherein Hollywood was unbound by the restrictive and hollow Hays Code, telling adult stories of ribaldry and transgression that have the potential to shock even today — especially for folks who think of black-and-white cinema as visual shorthand for something unchallenging and demure. Miss Sadie Thompson (Crawford) is a sex worker whose vacation gets derailed by a possible cholera outbreak, leaving her, a boatful of on-leave sailors and a repressed missionary couple stuck in the sensual overload of Pago Pago while they wait to resume their travels. Sadie likes to party, and the Rev. Davidson is horrified by her actions. So the game is afoot in this intense and provocative adaptation of a W. Somerset Maugham short story, and the issues that Rain engages with are still very much with us today. Beyond all that, though, is Crawford, who simply commands the screen. If you only know her work from the Golden Age of Hollywood, or from her later career adventures in exploitation films and the infamy brought by Mommie Dearest, you are in for quite a surprise.

The Empty Man via Video on Demand or Amazon Prime

I missed this one the first time around, and that’s on me (and the misleading trailer with which it was dumped into the public sphere in October). The Empty Man played at the Montana Drive-In outside Tullahoma, and it’s hard to think of a better way to experience a nasty marvel like this than on a giant screen with the chill of night seeping in all around you as you realize how alone you are, cosmologically, regardless of how many cars surround you at the time. The abysmal trailer promises what you might call teenage creepypasta drama giving way to a police procedural; and while that is correct insofar as both of those elements are part of the total package here, there is so much more.

A prologue set in the ’90s in the mountains of Bhutan is the first indication that there’s more going on with The Empty Man than initially promised. It’s not just a perfectly executed tale of the unspeakable, which in itself could have been extracted from the film as a whole and laid waste to film-fest shorts programs throughout the world — it is also a trap. The best scary stories always are. As we move into “the present day” of 2018 Missouri (the film was finished in 2018, then left to languish by a bewildered 20th Century Fox, eventually to be thrown by Disney into the pre-Halloween no-man’s-land of movie theaters in October 2020), we get to know James Lasombra. He’s played by James Badge Dale, from 24, radiating soap-opera authority and muscle-hewn gravitas. Nowadays he runs a shop that helps people find self-defense items. Sometimes he’s a private detective when things need finding. And when the daughter of a past lover of his gets tangled up in a mystery involving a local urban legend, Lasombra decides to investigate. As in any film noir, when you start pulling at threads, things unravel. And Dale is simply great in this role, perfectly inhabiting this brick wall of a man barreling his way through something vast and labyrinthine to get at secrets hidden away in the oddest of places.

There are several films that would make very useful comparisons, or pairings for hypothetical double features, to prepare you for where this beast of a film goes. But the fact that you’ve read this far already indicates a curiosity of some sort on your part. And in that case, you’d be well-served by checking this film out — ideally without reading anything more about it, especially the kind of film it becomes. But if the hook must be baited further: Stephen Root is in this. So is Marin Ireland (transcendent in Light From Light and The Dark and the Wicked, visceral and real here). And when The Empty Man ended after 137 minutes, I wanted nothing more than to immediately watch it again.

Because sometimes a film is more than just a film. Sometimes a film requires more of the audience than to just be a viewer. Sometimes it requires a witness.