How much weight does lineage hold? L.A. producer and DJ Steven Ellison, aka Flying Lotus, has managed to distill his perfectly.
The great-nephew of jazz pianist Alice Coltrane and cousin of saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, Ellison's ear has been finely tuned by history and genetics. His palette of beats, samples, and breaks made last year's stellar third LP Cosmogramma (Warp) required listening, mainly in that headphones should be required, and it should be approached as a whole album, with one song feeding the next.
So, the inevitable question: How would it sound live?
It's not easy to watch a DJ, especially of the laptop variety, but Ellison was always engaged in the music, eyes shifting from one piece of equipment to another, scanning for the right cosmic mix. Jazz, soul, and hip-hop are the points in his constellation, no doubt polished from bouts at L.A.'s weekly beathead meetup, Low End Theory.
Snippets of the low-key "MmmHmm" and Tyler the Creator's strident "Yonkers" made their way into the mix as well, as Ellison tried to keep the peace between all the factions. Stuttering, offbeat, slinky.
Rumors of Erykah Badu joining him evaporated, but it would have been nice to have an emcee or live band, even for a few songs. Ellison occasionally yelled a phrase ("Party like there's no Monday!"), but relied mostly on the syrupy beats he was weaving.
The energy of the set was high, and Ellison had a smile on his face most of the time, shrugging off any expectations of a detached DJ. That genuine love for the music made his alien sounds even more impressive, challenging the way people listen to it live, the mass of nodding heads and cloud of smoke hanging above them the seal of approval.
The story of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster is now over 200 years old, with Mary Shelley’s book having been adapted or referenced in close to 500 films. Less common is the character of The Bride of Frankenstein, which existed in the original text but has more often than not been excised in adaptations. Writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal has tried to rectify that by giving the character a big showcase in her new film, The Bride!.
Gyllenhaal has reimagined the story as one in which a woman named Ida (Jessie Buckley) becomes possessed by the spirit of Shelley (also Buckley). At the same time, the already-existing Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) approaches Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), who specializes in reanimation, with the request to make him a wife. When Ida falls to her death in an “accident” involving her boyfriend (John Magaro), the ideal corpse becomes available.
After Ida’s resurrection, she and the monster become restless being studied by Dr. Euphronius and decide to break out to experience the world. The world, naturally, is not exactly welcoming to them, and soon the couple are on the run for causing mayhem, including a few murders. In hot pursuit are detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant, Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), as well as other authorities.
It’s clear that Gyllenhaal wanted to merge the Frankenstein story with Bonnie & Clyde, especially since she sets the film in the mid-1930s. And that wouldn’t have been a bad idea if having the monster and The Bride going on a crime spree was truly the focus of the movie. But most of the time there’s less intentionality in their misdeeds and more confusion, leading to a muddled plot with no clear direction or end goal in mind.
One of the biggest problems is that Gyllenhaal starts the energy of the film at an 11, giving her and everyone else nowhere to go but down. She dabbles in multiple different tones, at times going the straight drama route and other times making what seems like full-on camp. At one point, she even has the monster and the Bride in a dance sequence set to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” which would be hilarious as an homage to Young Frankenstein if the film weren’t so disjointed.
Most baffling of all is what Gyllenhaal wants from The Bride character. She morphs multiple times over the course of the film, from close to unintelligible at the beginning to rough-and-tumble at the end. There are hints at the lack of control she has over her autonomy, including Shelley’s possession of her and the monster lying to her about her past, but any commentary that Gyllenhaal might be trying to make gets lost amid the oddity of the film as a whole.
Both Buckley and Bale are all-in for their performances, which definitely fall in the “love it or hate it” dichotomy. Each scene is pitched so high that there’s little nuance to either of them, and neither is on par with their previous Oscar-caliber roles. The high-powered supporting cast of Bening, Sarsgaard, Cruz, and Jake Gyllenhaal is watchable based on previous roles, but none of them elevate this particular movie.
Whatever intentions Maggie Gyllenhaal had in making The Bride! are only halfway legible in a film that can never find its tonal footing. There has rarely been subtlety in movies featuring Frankenstein’s monster and related characters, but this one makes all the others seem like stuffy dramas in comparison.
