thread of mandy (2018), melted psychedelic drone directed by panos cosmatos

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my review: exudes a cosmic darkness 10/10

I'm excited to see this, hopefully tomorrow.

really really want to see this on the big screen, but it's not playing anywhere even remotely nearby. i've petitioned the local arthouse but to no avail

It has its moments but no way should it have been two hours long.

yeah it should've been at least three

(the crawling pace is part of why it's great)

Loved this and love Cosmatos' seemingly obsessive control over all aspects of his mis en scène. Watched "Beyond The Black Rainbow" last night and indeed it never falters.
Those "Nu Cenobytes" were also creepy af.

Control over soundtrack as well is enormous.

my two favorite scenes were:

1) ATVs showing up to meet the van
2) mandy's face slowly morphing back and forth with jeremiah's - that was perfect

I think I liked this? Practically every shot in the movie has stuck in my head, which is rare.

a friend got me to watch this extreme nonsense without me knowing anything about it other than it starred n cage. I don't know the films it's apparently referencing, found quite a bit of it tedious and didn't really know what to make of it.

what films do you think it's referencing?

both of his movies are more indebted to an era/genre of film (giallo-inflected lsd-damaged proto-slasher '70s horror intermingled with other contemporaneous genres) than they are referencing specific films afaict

2) mandy's face slowly morphing back and forth with jeremiah's - that was perfect

― 1-800-CALL-ATT (Karl Malone), Tuesday, October 9, 2018 9:07 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah everyone i've talked to about this movie mentions how amazing this scene is

I was told there was a hellraiser reference? I think I would give this another go

the dudes on the bikes resemble cenobytes that is true

a lot of movies try to recreate the psychedelic experience but that was one of the most realistic, true-to-life trippy things i've ever seen on film

the face morphing, that is

otm

i've had this movie in my head for almost a week now

it made me so happy that anyone would make something like this

I kinda wish they'd kept Mandy in the movie and not done a revenge plot. She was really good.

It's amazing how many different faces Andrea Riseborough is able to adopt.

i know a lot of ppl who share that opinion and i don't disagree at all, but i also love that the movie kinda literally curdles as soon as she dies, like it can't keep itself together so it just goes straight into death drive mode. quoting simon from the nic cage thread

Mandy (the character) was easily the most fleshed-out person in the entire movie - we get to know her tastes, a bit of her work, a bit about her past, and a lot about her personality from how she handles Jeremiah. so when she dies it feels like a real loss that alters the fabric of reality, not just a cheap bit of character motivation - so much so that all that's left for Red is revenge-movie, horror, and fantasy tropes to process his grief (see also the animated sequences).

I also thought the thing intermittently tedious and it should've been 70 minutes tops.

we know

there's only 70 minutes worth of things happening, but the movie is not about things happening

I will see this cuz this guy's visual sense is incredible, but sounds like he hasn't quite evolved much from the pacing/plotting problems in Beyond the Black Rainbow

the movie is obviously about jung's red book according to taylorholmes.com
https://taylorholmes.com/2018/09/16/the-movie-mandys-beginning-middle-and-ending-decoded/

pacing/plotting problems

this is style, imo, but yeah this movie is only marginally less slow than black rainbow (but i've also found that ppl who find black rainbow tedious can think this one's a real thrill ride, who can say)

i argue that the movie is also about setting up a scenario that involves a chainsaw battle

re: pacing, i watched Mandy a day after watching The Sentinel for the first time, and it seemed to fly by

chainsaw vs. extended chainsaw was when i gave myself over to the second half of this movie completely

if I wasn't clear on the other thread, my problem with Black Rainbow wasn't with how slow it was as much as it was that the film retained that glacial pace even when all the tension and dread had already been leached out of the story - ie, everything that happens after she escapes the compound. The ending is one of the stupidest deus ex machina copouts I've ever seen, and he dragged it way the fuck out. At that point the pacing worked against the film.

you might like this one a lot more then

i also don't really know how the ending of black rainbow is a deus ex machina but i'll take your word for it. i find that movie's gradual transformation from a moody '70s cronenbergian body horror thing into a traditional slasher extremely charming

which, mandy does a similar thing: it pretty fearlessly goes wherever it's going to go

I preferred Beyond the Black Rainbow, which I know is bizarre.

i also don't really know how the ending of black rainbow is a deus ex machina but i'll take your word for it

SPOILIDAD

the central conflict is resolved by the villain *tripping on a fucking rock and braining himself* iirc

yeah he does that bc the protagonist is psychic

if all she had to do was make him trip on a rock why did she spend all that time running away

i mean, she freezes him in place and the moment he tries to break out of her control he dies in an embarrassing and dumb way, which i think is a fitting end for an acid-melted entitled male monster

but the particular path mandy takes is more satisfying/cathartic and less anticlimactic than the end of black rainbow so again i'm pretty certain you'll like it more

I'm guessing if I don't like gore/brutality Black Rainbow is a better choice?

hard to say, i remember the deaths in black rainbow all being pretty gross in one way or another

splitting heads hairs imo

you're either into his super slow mutated sense of pacing or not tbh, it's not really more complicated than that

The slowness of Mandy wasn't a problem. It does have a peculiar way of leaving in slack moments which most movies would cut, and uses tons of slow fades where most movies would have a hard cut. This worked really well in the creeping ambience of the first half. The slightly more tedious moments for me were the less visually compelling ones, like the visit to the pharmacist in the radio tower.

That felt like a nod to the eye clinic in Blade Runner to me. But it didn't quite pull off the febrile deranged feeling he was clearly shooting for.

pls someone let Cosmatos take over on the new Dune movies

this was super agonizing to watch, very few parts i enjoyed (such as chainsaw battle), would not do it again

this was prob the best time i've ever seen it, they cranked the volume at momi and it was almost uncomfortably loud and i was so high, waves of vibrations, total sensory overload

in the q&a aaron stewart-ahn referred to magic mike xxl as a masterpiece, my kind of person

I follow him on twitter! I can’t remember when I did so, but it was way before Mandy. I think he interacted with or knows s1ocki?

magic mike xxl is a fucking marvel

excited to fry my friends' brains w/ this today

also apparently the shared cinematic reference between stewart-ahn and panos for this film was cyborg

well this certainly delivered

in a funny way it felt like every scene was better than the one before it

not untrue imo, it just keeps building in about fifteen different ways as it goes on

Friend introduces me to "panos"

Me after shaking his hand to friend: "panos cosmatos?"

In hindsight he could totally hear.

How not to be.

so was it

Yes

I saw a midnight screening of Mandy last night. (Sadly underattended; The Room and Rocky Horror proved to be bigger draws. And I brought a flask to drink along with the bathroom scene.) What got me is that both Mandy and Midsommar culminate in triangular structures, built for ritual purposes. Was this a coincidence, or do such buildings commonly occur in vernacular architecture?

Also, between these two movies I'll never look at folkloric embroidery the same again. But then I never was the customer for such garments.

How is it that I'm only just now realizing that the director of Mandy is the son of the director of Cobra?

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OMG what if Mandy's demon bikers are just Cobra's axe-clanking cultists after thirty years of drug-induced mutation? I don't care if it's incoherent, I declare it to be so.

cobra is definitely batshit in a not-entirely-dissimilar way to mandy but its derangement is based in hyper-reaganite leather-glove-fetishism instead of melted psychedelic drone

wait until you find out his first film was paid for by dvd residuals from Tombstone

Love is showing off your Cheddar Goblin t-shirt to your out-of-town guests only to learn that they've each arrived with their own different Mandy-related t-shirts.

🥰

really love the whole story about cage insisting that he play red

Well, when I first met with Panos, he told me he wanted me to play Jeremiah Sand, and I said, “Why?” And he said, “Well, I see him as the California Klaus Kinski.” And I said, “Well, I am the California Klaus Kinski, but I want to play Red.” ... I did not want to play Jeremiah Sand. I felt that I had gone through enough life experience. Not that I can’t work from the imagination, I normally do, but I had enough life experience contending the failure of my third marriage and still trying to recover from the loss of my father after many, many years. Still not just quite over it. As I look at these footnotes here from the talking points that coincide with Panos himself, that I … having had experiences with loss, certainly family loss, I was in step with that.
I felt I could play Red authentically and organically and put those feelings of loss in a productive place as opposed to a destructive place, and a constructive place. And so, that’s why I gravitated towards Red. I just felt that I could go after the cult and the demon bikers in a way that was in his world, but had some sort of sound of truth.

― american bradass (BradNelson), Thursday, June 27, 2019 8:31 PM (three months ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is why I love Nic Cage and why this movie really works. There’s such a genuine core of raw emotion underneath the fantastical trappings

It's amazing how many different faces Andrea Riseborough is able to adopt.

Watched Mindhorn yesterday and she looked kind of familiar but it was a while before it clicked, oh hey, Mandy! Same with Oblivion which I liked her in.

mandy fans, seek out Brandon cronenberg's Possessor immediately.

I had a DVD of Antiviral but have a feeling I never watched it all. Can't remember if because I found it a bit rubbish or too unpleasant.

it's much better than Antiviral

but possibly even more unpleasant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAZiUYql2oE

Sacred Bones Records
65.9K subscribers

'Lift It Down,' the unearthed album by Children of the New Dawn leader Jeremiah Sand, is out October 30.
Preorder: http://sacredbonesrecords.com/product...

In 1974, Jeremiah Sand and his nascent cult The Children Of The New Dawn decamp LA for the Shasta Mountain region and Redding, CA. They set up shop, begin printing leaflets, hold gatherings and start growing their ranks through recruitment. Jeremiah and the Children are not necessarily an odd addition to Redding in 1974. Since the 1930s, psychonauts and spiritual seekers have been drawn to this area in Northern California under the shadow of the dormant volcanic cone of Shasta. By 1974, urban California hippies worn down by direct political engagement with state security forces have started drifting North and the towns along the border with Oregon state are filled with ad-hoc spiritual organizations, commune builders and lost souls. Jeremiah and the Children fit right in. A few years prior to assembling his flock, Sand had self produced and released an album of psych-folk that was unremarkable in almost every way, save for the unrelenting vanity and egoism on display in the lyrics. This early album is one of the only existing documents of Sand. The commercial failure of the album became the catalyst for Sand to leave Southern California and settle in a place where his "truth" would be "received by pure and open hearts". By mid 1974, the Children have grown in rank and Jeremiah becomes obsessed with recording "his masterpiece"...a musical message to the world, communicating a “Truth” that only he has been given spiritual access to. This project becomes the central focus of the Children. His lieutenant Brother Swann overhears that there is a small recording studio just North of the city. He arrives one day at the reception with a large gym bag full of cash and instructs the owner to cancel all sessions on the books. The studio will now focus on one thing and one thing only: helping Jeremiah realize his vision. Tents and rough structures appear on the surrounding property as the Children make the studio and its grounds their new home. They hold recruitment meetings where Jeremiah evangelizes in between endless recording sessions. The owner and his staff begin to feel as though they're being held hostage but the money is good and the Children keep paying. Overpaying. This goes on for years. New members drift into the sessions. A disgraced professor from the Electro Acoustic Music program at Evergreen state arrives with a full Buchla system he's "liberated" from the university, Jeremiah is entranced by it and for a few weeks the only sounds coming from the studio are blasts of atonal, corroded noise underpinned by ominous chanting. The mood changes. The town begins to turn against the Children. A few people have gone missing. Some teenagers. A studio engineer. By the Spring of 1977, the entire session has broken down into hallucinogen and cocaine fueled chaos. Bad vibrations. One night in early March, after a particularly grueling mixing session, the producer and owner of the studio is startled awake by an extremely agitated looking Brother Swann. Swann is sweating and wild eyed, casually holding a gun, explaining to the producer that "plans have changed" and that Jeremiah has "heard a calling and a Great Summons". They are leaving. All of them. That night. Swann directs the producer to put the existing reels in a lock box along with a short 16mm film, lyrics, album art and scribbled notes. Swann tells the producer Jeremiah will be back to finish his masterpiece. It all goes in the box and it's not to be opened until the Children return. They never do.

In 2018, wildfires rip through Redding, CA and burns it to the ground. Over a thousand of homes are incinerated. One rough structure north of the city is partially saved. There's a massive concrete basement filled with smoke and water damaged recording equipment and in the back...a lockbox.

No one knows who originally took the tapes out of the charred ruin of the studio but in a few months, a very strange album is making the rounds in the more esoteric circles of the underground. A long and confusing chain of custody ensues. A lost artifact of the transitional period between the late 60s and late 70s. A flawed and malignant sounding unfinished thing, clearly the product of a psychotically inflated ego and hubris. The album is by turns: amateurish, haunting, deranged, ridiculous and (for those attuned to these things) filled with crackling negative psychic energies. So much so that Light In The Attic flat out refuses to reissue it. Eventually, it lands in Calebs lap and Sacred Bones decides to restore the audio and give it a general release all in the name of preserving a historical document of a very weird place and a very weird time.

Pitchfork = 7.8/10, just missed BNM.

omg they did it

The album is by turns: amateurish, haunting, deranged, ridiculous and (for those attuned to these things) filled with crackling negative psychic energies. So much so that Light In The Attic flat out refuses to reissue it.

:D

er, sorry, in itt :D =

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the film was shown on Film4 in the UK a few days ago, so i caught it for the first time.
yeah, its not like anything else i have ever seen.
absolutely loved it.
definitely on the hunt for the DVD/blu-ray during my charity shop adventures from hereon.

Mandy is discussed on the latest Horror Vanguard podcast.

joe bob briggs' shudder show the last drive-in showed mandy (w/ dead and buried) on friday; joe bob doesn't really provide a lot of new insight for me because i've already read a lot about the making of this movie but it's still fun to watch him talk about it

his episode of cabinet of curiosities rules

It really does! Best of the bunch by a long shot.

Peter Weller absolutely kills it, in a good way I mean

watched this last nite, loved it

Thought it was a long build-up to not much, unfortunately. Weller was fun, can't remember the last time I saw him in something. Eric Andre and Charlyne Yi also very good.

I finally saw "Mandy." I don't know if it's any good, but it's definitely great.

It's both

I want FromSoft to make a Souls game about it

Beyond the Black Rainbow is decent as well. I'm starting to like what this director does, despite not really being in the mood for Mandy the first time I attempted watching it.

It felt like a cross between "Evil Dead II" and (appropriately enough) "Raising Arizona."

I saw Mandy just once when it came out but one thing I recall is that it's free of firearms? Like tons of crossbow violence but no actual guns

I think one of the devil bikers fires a gun at Cage before he gets run over.

Watched this a second time recently with my kids, who hadn't seen it. I think I enjoyed it even more the second time, just sinking into the spacey lunatic vibe.

Probably make a good double feature with that Nic Cage Lovecraft movie.

It's just, how do I put this, a confluence of all the aesthetics I like and it's the film that really made me appreciate Cage

I'm still on the fence about him. I just read "The Age of Cage" and couldn't come to any conclusion other than: sometimes his stuff works, sometimes it doesn't, it really has little to do with the quality of the film he's in, and I'll miss him when he's gone. There were a couple of really specific things in this one that I suspect he inserted, like references to the Carpenters and Galactus, and honestly, I found them distracting enough (however fleeting) to take me out of the movie a bit. I also thought he was maybe a little too old for the role, but when you're one of one there aren't a lot of alternatives. Though the bad guy gave some serious Cage vibes himself.

Cage was originally going to play the bad guy. I admit I'm so-so about the Carpenters thing because, much as I get what he's trying to do, the idea that you'd have to be a narcissistic psychopath to enjoy them doesn't chime well with me

I liked this a lot more in the first half than the second - still great to look at but the slow creeping dread was much more interesting than the bloody revenge flick.