It makes sense that the notoriously media-combative rock star Annie Clark (a.k.a. St. Vincent) would choose at the height of her notoriety to release not a conventional behind-the-music documentary about herself but, instead, a tricky hall of mirrors take on the genre that technically gives the world more access to her but fundamentally obscures her even more.
The Nowhere Inn professes to be about a failed behind-the-scenes documentary Clark tried making with Carrie Brownstein (of Portlandia and Sleater-Kinney fame) while the former toured her 2017 album MASSEDUCTION. (One of the first things we see in the movie is Clark, positioned uncomfortably close to the camera, giving a present-day talking head-style interview hinting at how things soured.) But it doesn’t take us long to understand that the mockumentary-like The Nowhere Inn isn’t actually what it claims to be at all — a subversive move that winds up being more intriguing conceptually than in practice.
Real-life friends Brownstein and Clark, both proficient actresses, are really playing heightened versions of themselves here. And the movie itself is more than anything a shiny device through which Clark and Brownstein, who wrote the movie together, can nod at their frustrations with the over-scrutinizing media; ruminate on the psychic toll of people preferring your persona to your genuine self; consider the vagaries of artist-subject power dynamics; and broadly make fun of the contrivances guiding backstage documentaries, a genre that ostensibly uncovers what’s “real” but still nonetheless relies on heavy editing — and “performing” by its subjects — to create compelling narratives. (Think 1967’s Dont Look Back or 1991’s Truth or Dare.) To paraphrase Pitchfork’s Eric Torres, The Nowhere Inn can most simply be looked at as a vanity project about a vanity project implicitly critiquing other vanity projects.
Directed by Bill Benz (who collaborated often with Brownstein on Portlandia), The Nowhere Inn may sound refreshingly rebellious and just generally interesting when compared to other music documentaries, a genre the film embodies with quotation marks and a lot of winking. But “The Nowhere Inn” never effectively delivers on its playfully meta concept. It’s rarely funny, for one thing. (The movie mostly comprises a series of quasi-sketches in which documentarian “Brownstein” tries to coax relative normie “Clark” into feigning her persona offstage for the cameras.) And it doesn’t develop its faux versions of Clark or Brownstein enough to anchor the progressively absurdist direction the plot and visuals drift toward.
The Nowhere Inn might have been better left a free, YouTube-accessible short film accompanying the MASSEDUCTION album. Maybe even a back-to-basics concert movie gussied up with a little more visual panache than what is the norm. The film’s at its best not when it’s tinkering with Brownstein’s and Clark’s identities and frustrations but when the latter is on stage. In those few-and-far-between live moments, Clark is so poppingly electric to watch that we’re reminded why we were drawn to this whirligig of a movie at all.
IN PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND, a sometimes giving-his-all, sometimes phoning-it-in Nicolas Cage plays a man only known to us and those around him as Hero. As the movie starts, he’s in a cell in a dystopian Japanese village called Samurai Town, carrying out a sentence springing from a failed robbery that resulted not in bags of stolen cash but numerous civilian deaths. (Hero’s partner, named — really — Psycho, strayed from their plan and went ballistic.) But after the “governor” lording over the land (Bill Moseley) discovers that his much-adored step-granddaughter Bernice (Sofia Boutella) has run away, Hero is recruited to rescue her. Supposedly he has a good-enough reputation around carrying out this sort of thing. Hero isn’t given many options before the governor has encased his body in an explosives-rigged jumpsuit to make sure this criminal tries neither escaping nor anything funny with Bernice. Hero gets five days to pull off this abrupt and difficult mission; you can assume what will be made of him if time runs out and his hands remain empty.
Prisoners of the Ghostland marks the first collaboration between Cage and the notoriously nutty Japanese filmmaker Sion Sono. (Prisoners of the Ghostland is the latter’s first majority-English-language movie.) In most moments, the director and his American muse seem like a great match. Cage, whose frequently cuckoo acting style seems only to get more endearing with time, is generally a good fit for a hero’s-journey movie that sees oddball run-ins with zombie-like beings, swordsmen with bones to pick, angry cowboys. Not very many actors besides the game-for-anything Cage can waffle between mainstream crowdpleasers and committedly weird pulp adventures like Prisoners of the Ghostland, which is largely an outré cross between old Westerns, classic kung-fu cinema, and ‘80s-era American horror (particularly evoked by the Tangerine Dream-style music from Joseph Trapanese), without very much trouble.
But the movie overarchingly isn’t as seamless as Cage’s fitting into it. While most of its images sing (Samurai Town in particular is like a cosmopolitan Vegas casino reimagined as a city you want to explore), Prisoners of the Ghostland is so amused with its own strangeness that it forgets to be equally consequential. It gives you a lot to look at but not much to feel.
Peterson Reviews 