Entertainment
How IHeartComix's super creativity took the event company from the L.A. music scene to Marvel
Things were getting weird again between mission control and the space station S.A.B.E.R. For one thing, both places were crawling with cats, turning a high-concept livestream from Marvel Entertainment into a chaotic scene of tumbling, jumping, eating, purring felines that just might have been extraterrestrials in disguise (a.k.a. “flerkens”).
Mission control was on the back patio of the CatCafé Lounge in West Los Angeles, where creative marketing agency IHeartComix positioned a row of video monitors and computer gear amid dozens of wandering cats. Jesus Rivera directed the day’s cosmic live broadcast on YouTube, clad in a burgundy tracksuit and white fedora, a scorpion ring on his right hand. “Cue music,” he said to the crew around him, his monitor showing a closeup of a cat’s furry face. “Throw the balls in!”
Fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe were introduced to flerkens in the 2019 hit movie “Captain Marvel,” starring Brie Larson; the creatures are back for a sequel, “The Marvels.” But at the time, with the end of the Hollywood actors’ strike still weeks away, and no cast members available to promote the film’s November release, the MCU turned to a different kind of hero: IHeartComix, a company known for inventive and immersive events for Adult Swim, Vice and Hulu, colliding the epic and ridiculous, the flamboyant and sublime.
For IHC, herding flerkens was just another strange day at the office.
Hype and marketing are nothing new in Los Angeles, but when major artists and movie studios want to roll out their new music, film or TV project and make a memorable (and viral) splash, they frequently turn to the creative team at IHeartComix. The firm didn’t emerge from a traditional business plan, rising organically from L.A.’s indie-dance scene.
IHeartComix founder Franki Chan, right, sits for a portrait with co-workers, from left, Sarah Fleisher, Carina Gutierrez, Jesus Antonio Rivera and Jess Doren on Dec. 14, 2023.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
“They’ve come to appreciate us for the ideas that we come up with that are usually pretty wild or wacky or unique,” says Franki Chan, IHC’s soft-spoken founder, at the CatCafé clad in a “Love and Rockets” comics T-shirt, with traces of black and red polish on his fingernails. “It’s not so traditional.”
This month, IHeartComix marks its 20th anniversary, two decades after the name first appeared on a flier for a party called “F— Awesome” at Beauty Bar in Hollywood. From there, the company evolved into a promoter and producer of various L.A. parties, concerts and content. Now as a marketing and culture agency, IHC found a sweet spot by bringing their energy and style from the music scene into the movie world.
While competing agencies are often great at making things to order, says Chan, 45, “We’re the opposite. We want to have a point of view. We want to have a voice. We only want to work on the things that we like.”
IHeartComix created this Guardians of the Galaxy Knowhere pop-up bar and screening in Los Angeles
(David Morrison)
Last spring, the firm built a space-traveler’s cantina in the desert en route to the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival to promote the third “Guardians of the Galaxy” film, giving festival-goers a roadside attraction for Instagram snapshots and TikTok posts. And when the Rolling Stones prepared for the October release of their album “Hackney Diamonds,” the classic rock legends had IHC create an elegant rock ‘n’ roll setting in Manhattan for a surprise performance on a small cabaret stage at the 650-capacity club Racket NYC.
The main directive from frontman Mick Jagger was simple, recalls IHC project manager Sarah Fleischer: “It needs to be like a sexy club show, not a toothpaste launch.” So there was flowing red drapery, tabletops decorated with flowers and smashed crystal hearts (echoing the album cover art), and animated graphics on video screens.
Things have only gotten bigger for the firm since 2018, when it created a party at New York Fashion Week for Marvel’s “Black Panther” film, drawing inspiration from the fictional African nation of Wakanda. Chan’s team collaborated with Disney Consumer Products and a group of Bronx-based chefs called Ghetto Gastro to create a night called “The Taste of Wakanda,” with six different dishes, one desert and three beverages, offering an imagined cultural experience from the country.
“We created all the serving utensils from scratch, the forks, the spoons, the cups, the plates, the serving trays, the bars, and then the environment around it,” Chan recalls. “All of the cast was there. They actually ended up spending most of the time in the kitchen with us because they just loved the food.”
IHeartComix founder Franki Chan sits for a portrait on Thursday, Dec. 14, 2023.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
It was a transformational event for company, says Chan, a knockout production that showed the range of IHeartComix stretched far beyond the music scene that birthed it. “It was really unique and different,” says Dustin Sandoval, Disney’s vice president of digital marketing, who often calls on IHC for promotional events for Disney, Marvel and more. “That’s the kind of thinking the IHeartComixteam brings to the table, and their passion just shines through because they are true fans of this more than anything.”
At the height of the pandemic, IHC moved its offices into an old Hollywood house near Sunset Boulevard. Chan also lives there, like a flashback to his early years living and working out of a small apartment or warehouse space. The living room shelves are filled with vinyl records, and in the corner is an ancient “Pac-Man” machine. On top is a dragon made of leather named Chester. A replica of Thor’s hammer rests nearby.
Handmade props from past events are everywhere. The firm only recently cleared out a garage filled with layers of ephemera from a few years of projects, but the backyard is still guarded by a green statue of a Tyrannosaurus rex.
Over two decades, Chan has steadily expanded beyond his early role as a force on the L.A. club scene to conceiving these high-concept events with his creative team. The goal is always to reach well beyond the experience of the party itself.
“None of it matters if no one posts,” says Chan, noting the viral imperative. “It’s all about creating the press headline: ‘Guardians of the Galaxy goes to Coachella.’”
On the other hand, a room filled only with influencers is not much fun either. “That party’s going to be boring because those people don’t know each other. There’s no relationship there,” Chan explains. “They’re all people that only care about themselves and want to take pictures of themselves. There’s not going to be any vibe.
“People respond to genuine things. You can tell if someone’s genuinely having a good time and having a real experience versus posting something for money.”
The name of IHeartComix means exactly what it says: Chan relocated from Seattle to Los Angeles in 2003 with dreams of becoming a comic book artist. He landed in L.A. after selling out a self-published comic book at Comic-Con International in San Diego, expecting more success to follow. When that didn’t happen, he was soon broke and sleeping in his car most nights.
In Seattle, he’d been in punk bands and then a promoter-DJ, but now was scraping by as a holiday temp at the Virgin Megastore in West Hollywood. He sometimes got gigs as a background extra on TV series. (He appeared on “The OC” as either “high school student” or “pedestrian.”) By chance, the brother of a Seattle friend was manager of a new club in Hollywood called Beauty Bar, and he needed DJs.
Chan immediately signed up. The idea then was just “to help pay the bills (and mainly to meet people so we had couches to crash on).”
The bar quickly took off, and by the next month, the DJ nights became a hot event, with Chan, Har Mar Superstar and DJ Steve Aoki at its core. That evolved into the larger Cinespace Tuesdays. The nights were documented with style in the pre-Instagram era by a teenage photographer calling himself the Cobrasnake (a.k.a. Mark Hunter). Chan and Aoki, among others, became characters in the Cobrasnake’s popular nightlife photographs.
“You’re taking pictures and you’re posting it on the internet, and people could see what the party looked like, which was a radical idea at the time. He was the first person to do that,” says Chan.
Within a year of that first night, they were also hosting parties in New York, and being hired to create events at Sundance and for various corporate entities. On the decks, Chan’s playlist mingled eclectic tunes from Jay-Z, the Neptunes and Beyoncé to Daft Punk, LCD Soundsystem and Le Tigre.
IHeartComix was the name of Chan’s indie record label, which had early success with the Brooklyn duo Matt & Kim, and their playfully raw pop single “Yea Yeah.” His partnership with Aoki split in 2006 into competing parties as Chan created Check Yo Ponytail under his new IHeartComix banner. Aoki was on his way to becoming a superstar DJ, and there was real tension between the camps, but it had the effect of helping the scene double in size.
Check Yo Ponytail landed an open-ended residency in 2010 at Echoplex, hosting a wide range of cutting-edge DJs and live acts, from the rediscovered Detroit protopunk act Death to haunting singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe. Chan also continued to promote events at Sundance, South By Southwest and other major gatherings across the country.
“We didn’t want to be a local party,” Chan says now. “We wanted to be a national brand.”
The Rolling Stones were joined by Lady Gaga at their “Hackney Diamonds” album release show at Racket in New York City.
(Kevin Mazur)
In 2013, as the Rolling Stones were celebrating 50 years as a band, they wanted to play a Los Angeles warm-up show in a small L.A. venue a week before launching a U.S. tour. The Stones chose the Echoplex, on a night already reserved for Check Yo Ponytail, which put Chan in a key role for hottest ticket in town that week.
“We didn’t tell the Echoplex who was playing” until two nights before the show, Chan remembers. “It was so secret.” It was also a milestone for what IHC would become.
Chan calls the stretch of time between 2013 and early 2017 “our puberty years,” a time of left turns and general risk-taking, with streaming content and even developing a TV pilot with Seth Rogen. “We were always on the verge of going out of business and experimenting a bunch and trying to start the engine of something new without really understanding what we were trying to do.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic landed in March 2020, all live entertainment stopped. IHeartComix revenue was down 60% that year. Rather than lay off staff, IHC experimented with four streaming shows that covered music, comedy, politics, and a talk show called “Hot Chats” hosted by Chan. No money changed hands for those shows, but they led to opportunities later.
“In February of 2021, I was more poor than the day I moved to Los Angeles,” Chan recounts now. “IHeartComix was totally broke. I put all my money in because we didn’t fire anybody. Even though the money was bad, we were having so many conversations. I was like, ‘I just gotta hold on long enough.’ Then we ended up at the end of ‘21 doing better than we had the last five years combined.”
The first big job as the pandemic receded that year was creating an immersive, action-packed premiere event for the Bob Odenkirk thriller “Nobody,” which unfolded on the Universal Studios backlot with speeding cars, guns, explosions and a dozen stuntmen from the movie. Because of the lingering coronavirus work slowdown, the lot was surprisingly available, along with first-rate cast and crew. Among the guests to witness it was singer Billie Eilish.
That led to an invitation to pitch ideas for the release party for Eilish’s highly anticipated second album, “Happier Than Ever.” IHC came back with a lavish party on an eight-acre private estate in Beverly Hills, designed around lyrical themes on the album. There was a 1950s bedroom with ancient TV sets showing Eilish footage, a koi pond and red footbridges, a palm tree painted blue, green grand piano, a creamy white 1955 Thunderbird, and a pool surrounded by dolphin-shaped fountains. At the party, Eilish welcomed her guests and then dove into the pool fully clothed.
“That’s Franki’s Midas touch: He knows how to throw a good party with good music,” says booking agent Tom Windish, who counts Eilish among his clients. “The Billie one was fantastic, but it seems like they’re generally pretty great, with really nice production. They don’t have a corporate feel to them.”
Chan is contemplating a movie from IHeartComix, and a documentary to recollect its history. But even as the firm celebrates in 2024, its roots in the indie music scene are as important as ever, says Chan, who still DJs a few times a month.
“It’s definitely not a career, but since the pandemic I’ve found a renewed love for it,” he says of performing. “We can never go backwards. It makes more sense for us to move forward with the lessons that we’ve learned and the tools that we’ve built — to take the essence of the scene that we’re from and the things that we love and contribute back to it in new ways.”
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: March 8th, 2026 / 08:00 PM
THE BRIDE movie poster | ©2026 Warner Bros.
Rating: R
Stars: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Penelope Cruz, Jeannie Berlin, Zlatko Burić
Writer: Maggie Gyllenhaal, based on characters created by Mary Shelley and William Hurlbut and John Balderston
Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Release Date: March 6, 2026
“THE BRIDE!” (as with the recent “WUTHERING HEIGHTS,” the quotation marks are part of the title) is awash in homages, and not just the ones we might reasonably expect in a movie that takes its most obvious inspiration from 1935’s BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN.
There’s that, of course, plus its source, Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel FRANKENSTEIN; OR THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, and its sober 1931 film adaptation FRANKENSTEIN. But there are also big nods to wilder takes on the legend, including YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN and THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW and even movies that have nothing to do with FRANKENSTEIN, like BONNIE AND CLYDE.
Writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal casts a wide net in metaphors and ideas and looks. Sometimes “THE BRIDE!” is a comedy, sometimes it’s a crime drama, sometimes it’s a love story, occasionally, it’s even a musical.
Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) narrates the tale to us from beyond the grave. She is haughty and naughty, intoxicated by verbiage and her own literary genius. She is going to tell us a story, she says, that she didn’t even dare imagine while alive.
We’re in 1930s Chicago, where a young escort (also Buckley) is having a really awful evening out at a fancy restaurant with some of her peers and a bunch of crass gangsters. Shelley dubs the woman “Ida” and takes possession of her, causing her to speak and act in ways that get her escorted outside. There she stumbles and takes a fatal fall.
The two goons who were with Ida are happy to describe her tumble as the result of their intentional actions to their horrible gangster boss (Zlatko Burić). Ida was suspected of talking to the cops.
Around the same time, Frankenstein’s creation (Christian Bale) – let’s just call him “Frank,” like everybody else does – comes to Chicago to seek out the groundbreaking scientist Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), whose published works he has read.
Frank wants the doctor to create a companion for him. His appearance is unusual, but the most alarming injuries are covered by clothing, so he’s not as extreme-looking as, say, Boris Karloff in the role. This isn’t about sex, Frank explains when Euphronious asks why he doesn’t just hire a prostitute. After over a century of loneliness, he seeks a soulmate, and he is sure this can only be achieved by reviving a corpse.
So, Euphronious and Frank dig up the grave that turns out to belong to Ida (we never do learn how they know it belongs to a soulmate candidate as opposed to a shot-and-dumped male gangster). Euphronius revives her. Ida remembers how to walk and talk, but not who she is or what happened, so Frank and the doc tell her she’s been in an accident.
Even without Ida’s beauty, Frank is already devoted to the very notion of her. A more accommodating suitor would be hard to find. Frank has another passion, the musical films of Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal, the filmmaker’s brother), a Fred Astaire-like star. Frank imagines himself in the midst of those dance routines, and we get some more within “THE BRIDE!”’s “real” action.
One thing leads to another, Frank and Ida go on the run, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. They are pursued all over the country. Among those seeking them are sad-eyed police detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his secretary Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), who’s better at this whole crime-solving business than he is.
It’s all very kaleidoscopic and energetic, occasionally impressive and sometimes very funny. Bening as the frazzled, worldly Euphronious has some great moments. Buckley, currently and justifiably Oscar-nominated leading performance in HAMNET, juggles the very unalike personas of Mary and Ida with impact.
Oddly, Bale underplays Frank. We get that he is trying his hardest not to spook Ida (or anyone else), but it seems like he should have a bit more spark. Cruz, going for a snappy ‘30s working woman, has her own style that works.
But in addition to being entertaining and eye-catching, Gyllenhaal has a message that gets very muddled. This is less because it’s so familiar by now that it feels a little redundant, and more because a crucial part of the set-up collides head-on with the feminist slant.
Ida seeks to be her own person, but she is literally bodily controlled by Mary Shelley, who puts her creation in danger with her outbursts. This may help get Ida out of the clutches of the mob, but it is possession, the aftereffects of which the character understandably finds confusing and upsetting.
If Gyllenhaal wanted to discuss or dramatize the clash between what Mary, as a woman, is doing to this other woman, that would make sense, but it seems we’re just meant to somehow overlook this while being immersed in how men control women. The resulting cognitive dissonance adds another layer to a movie that already has more than it can comfortably service.
Additionally, when Mary has one of her outbursts while inhabiting Ida, the plot comes to a screeching halt until she’s finished. Many viewers will wish Mary would stop declaiming and just let Ida be herself.
“THE BRIDE!” succeeds in being trippy and some of it is memorable. By the end, though, it is more disjointed than even a movie about experiments and a character made up of multiple people’s body parts ought to be.
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Entertainment
‘Sinners,’ ‘The Pitt’ win big at Writers Guild Awards after L.A. ceremony cancellation
The already highly decorated “Sinners” was among the top winners at the 78th Writers Guild Awards on Sunday in New York City.
The horror film, directed and written by Ryan Coogler, won the award for original screenplay, and its biggest competitor for the best picture Oscar, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” clinched the win for adapted screenplay. “Sinners” star Miles Caton accepted the award for the former, and “One Battle” cast member Shayna McHayle for the latter.
“Sinners” star Miles Caton and “One Battle After Another” actor Shayna McHale accepted the awards for original and adapted screenplay, respectively.
(Cindy Ord / Getty Images for Writers Guild of America East)
In the TV realm, “The Pitt” made a splash with awards for drama series, new series and episodic drama.
As for lifetime achievement honors, Robert Smigel presented Stephen Colbert with the Walter Bernstein Award for critiquing the power elite on his late-night show, which will air its final episode in May. Terry George received the Ian McLellan Hunter Award for Career Achievement from Don Cheadle, and Diana Son earned the Richard B. Jablow Award for Devoted Service to the Guild from last year’s recipient, Kathy McGee.
Most years, the Writers Guild holds simultaneous ceremonies in New York and Los Angeles. But the East Coast edition became a solo affair after WGA West canceled its ceremony amid an ongoing strike by its own staff union, who claimed guild management had “surveilled workers for union activity, terminated union supporters, and engaged in bad faith surface bargaining.”
The L.A. ceremony was set to honor James Cameron with the Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement, Don Reo with the Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television Writing Achievement and Mstyslav Chernov with the Paul Selvin Award for “2,000 Meters to Andriivka,” which won the award for documentary screenplay Sunday evening.
While WGA West’s board of directors said the ceremony was postponed to give members “an uncomplicated celebration of their achievements,” the Writers Guild Staff Union characterized the cancellation as an attempt to sow division between management and unionized staff, which is ill-timed given upcoming contraction negotiations between the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents Hollywood studios and streamers. In 2023, the WGA went on its longest-ever strike, lasting 148 days.
Comedian and Emmy-nominated producer Roy Wood Jr., who this year hosted the WGA’s East Coast ceremony for the third time, during his opening monologue offered (in jest) his predictions for the negotiations, which begin later this month.
“First, I predict somebody’s gonna lose their s—,” the host said. “Cooler heads are gonna prevail, and then somebody else is gonna lose their s—.”
Here is the full list of Writers Guild Award winners:
Original screenplay: “Sinners,” written by Ryan Coogler; Warner Bro. Pictures
Adapted screenplay: “One Battle After Another,” screenplay by Paul Thomas Anderson, screen story by Paul Thomas Anderson, inspired by the novel “Vineland” by Thomas Pynchon; Warner Bros. Pictures
Documentary screenplay: “2,000 Meters to Andriivka,” written by Mstyslav Chernov; Frontline Features
Drama series: “The Pitt,” written by Cynthia Adarkwa, Simran Baidwan, Valerie Chu, R. Scott Gemmill, Elyssa Gershman, Joe Sachs, Noah Wyle; HBO Max
Comedy series: “The Studio,” written by Evan Goldberg, Alex Gregory, Peter Huyck, Frida Perez, Seth Rogen; Apple TV
New series: “The Pitt,” written by Cynthia Adarkwa, Simran Baidwan, Valerie Chu, R. Scott Gemmill, Elyssa Gershman, Joe Sachs, Noah Wyle; HBO Max
Limited series: “Dying for Sex,” written by Sheila Callaghan, Harris Danow, Madeleine George, Elizabeth Meriwether, Amelia Roper, Kim Rosenstock, Sasha Stewart, Sabrina Wu, Keisha Zollar; FX/Hulu
TV & streaming motion pictures: “Deep Cover,” written by Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow; Prime Video
Animation: “Shira Can’t Cook” (“Long Story Short”), written by Mehar Sethi; Netflix
Episodic drama: “7:00 A.M.” (“The Pitt”), written by R. Scott Gemmill; HBO Max
Episodic comedy: “Prelude” (“The Righteous Gemstones”), written by John Carcieri, Jeff Fradley, Danny R. McBride; HBO Max
Comedy/variety series – talk or sketch: “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” senior writers: Daniel O’Brien, Owen Parsons, Charlie Redd, Joanna Rothkopf, Seena Vali; writers: Johnathan Appel, Ali Barthwell, Tim Carvell, Liz Hynes, Ryan Ken, Sofía Manfredi, John Oliver, Taylor Kay Phillips, Chrissy Shackelford; HBO Max
Comedy/variety specials: “Marc Maron: Panicked,” written by Marc Maron; HBO Max
Quiz and audience participation: “Celebrity Jeopardy!”, head writer: Bobby Patton; writers: Kyle Beakley, Michael Davies, Terence Gray, Amy Ozols, Tim Siedell, David Levinson-Wilk; ABC
Daytime drama: “The Young and the Restless,” associate head writers: Jeff Beldner, Marla Kanelos, Dave Ryan; writers: Susan Banks, Amanda L. Beall, Marin Gazzaniga, Rebecca McCarty, Madeleine Phillips; CBS/Paramount+
Children’s episodic, long form and specials: “When We Lose Someone” (“Tab Time”), written by Sean Presant; YouTube
Short form streaming: “The Rabbit Hole with Jimmy Kimmel,” writers: Jimmy Kimmel and Jesse Joyce; YouTube
Documentary script — current events: “Trump’s Power & the Rule of Law” (“Frontline”), written by Michael Kirk and Mike Wiser; PBS
Documentary script — other than current events: “Forgotten Hero: Walter White and the NAACP” (“American Experience”), written by Rob Rapley; PBS
News script — regularly scheduled, bulletin or breaking report: “Devastating Flooding in Texas” (“World News Tonight with David Muir”), written by David Muir, Karen Mooney and Dave Bloch; ABC News
News script — analysis, feature or commentary: “Remembering Palestinian Journalists Killed by Israeli Forces” (“Ayman”), written by Lisa Salinas; MSNBC
Digital news: “An Isolated Boarding School Promised to Help Troubled Girls. Former Students Say They Were Abused.,” written by Sebastian Murdock and Taiyler Mitchell; HuffPost
Radio/audio documentary: “Jerry Lewis’ Lost Holocaust Clown Movie” (“Decoder Ring”), written by Max Freedman; Slate
Radio/audio news script — regularly scheduled, bulletin or breaking report: “ABC News Radio Top of the Hour News”, written by Robert Hawley; ABC News Radio
Radio/audio news script — analysis, feature or commentary: “The Life and Legacy of Jimmy Carter,” written by Gail Lee; CBS News Radio
On air promotion: “CBS Comedy,” written by Dan Greenberger; CBS
Times staff writers Stacy Perman and Cerys Davies contributed to this report.
Movie Reviews
‘Heel’ Review: Why Did Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough Sign on for This Contrived Debacle?
The original title of “Heel” was “Good Boy.” The new title is probably more accurate, though an even more accurate title might be “Painfully Annoying Punk Idiot.” I jest (a bit), since the title of “Heel” is actually a verb. The film wants to tell the story of a budding hooligan who needs to be brought to heel. That said, does anyone seriously want to see a movie about a 19-year-old British sociopath who gets chained up in a basement so that the weird upper-middle-class couple who’ve kidnapped him can modify his behavior? “Heel” is like “A Clockwork Orange” remade as the year’s worst Sundance movie.
The opening sequence is actually promising. It depicts, in rapidly edited documentary-like montage, a reckless night out on the town by Tommy (Anson Boon) and his friends. They’re hopped-up club kids, and Tommy is their snarling, curly-haired, sexually coercive wastrel ringleader, living in the moment, pouring drinks down his throat, snorting coke and popping pills, dancing and carousing and puking and rutting in the bathroom, pushing himself to a higher and higher high, until he winds up collapsed on the sidewalk — a ritual, we gather, that has happened many times before. Only this time his crumpled body is gathered up by a mysterious stranger.
When Tommy wakes up, he’s in the basement of a stately stone house somewhere in the British countryside. He’s got a metal collar around his neck, and it’s chained to the ceiling. The film has barely gotten started, and already it’s cut to the second half of “A Clockwork Orange”: Can this monster delinquent be rehabilitated? Theoretically, that’s an interesting question, except that the way this happens is so garishly contrived that we can only go with the movie by putting any plea for reality on permanent hold.
Who are the people who have kidnapped Tommy? Chris (Stephen Graham) is a mild chap in a toupee who goes about his mission with a puckish vengeance disguised as gentility. His wife, Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough), is so neurasthenic she’s like a ghost. (She has suffered some trauma that isn’t colored in.) The two have a cherubic preteen son they call Sunshine (Kit Rakusen). And why, exactly, are they doing what they’re doing? We have no idea. Trying to make a bad person into a good person is not, in itself, a terrible notion, but the conceit of “Heel” — that Tommy is locked in a dungeon, being treated like a dog, because that’s what it will take to change him — is like a toxic right-wing fantasy that the film somehow reconfigures into an implausible liberal “family” allegory.
Ah, plausibility! How unhip to gripe about the absence of it. Yet watching “Heel,” I found it impossible to suspend my disbelief for two seconds. The entire movie, directed by the Polish filmmaker Jan Komasa (“Corpus Christie”) from a script by Bartek Bartosik and Naqqash Khalid, is just a grimy monotonous conceit. It’s been thought out thematically but not in terms of recognizable human behavior. It’s like a film-student short stretched out to an agonizing 110 minutes.
Anson Boon, a charismatic actor who did an okay job of playing Johnny Rotten in Danny Boyle’s TV miniseries “Pistol” (though he never conjured Rotten’s homicidal gleam), infuses Tommy with a loutish energy that in the early scenes, at least, makes him a convincing candidate for either prison or the contemporary equivalent of shock therapy. And yet the character is exhaustingly obnoxious. As a filmmaker, Komasa doesn’t dramatize — he uses one-note traits to clobber the audience. Stephen Graham’s Chris is as quiet and circumspect as Tommy is abrasive. He tries to train Tommy by showing him motivational tapes, and by subjecting him to Tommy’s own depraved TikToks. He then rigs up an elaborate system of gutters on the ceiling so that Tommy, in his metal leash, can wander around the house, a sign that he’s been housebroken.
Tommy has to grow and change, since there wouldn’t be a movie otherwise. In the process, he gets less annoying but also less interesting, because “Heel” sentimentalizes his transformation. Komasa seems to have missed the key irony of “A Clockwork Orange”: that the behavior modification of Alex is as brutalizing as his original state of punk anarchy. In “Heel,” Tommy’s evolution is singularly unconvincing — by the end, he’s practically ready to be the suitor in a Jane Austen drama. But that’s all of a piece with a movie so false it puts the audience in the doghouse.
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Wisconsin1 week agoSetting sail on iceboats across a frozen lake in Wisconsin
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Massachusetts6 days agoMassachusetts man awaits word from family in Iran after attacks
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Maryland1 week agoAM showers Sunday in Maryland
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Florida1 week agoFlorida man rescued after being stuck in shoulder-deep mud for days
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Pennsylvania4 days agoPa. man found guilty of raping teen girl who he took to Mexico
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