bad thing

Nostalgia for extreme tackiness is surely one of the funnier outcomes of a cult film’s success. (Does one sigh wistfully at such memories or smile through a grimace?) The gleeful cine-garbage factory Troma is, at 50 years and counting, now a hallowed name in outsider movie circles, with much of its reputation stemming from an ’80s output that seemed appropriate for the Reagan era. That especially goes for its 1984 monster comedy “The Toxic Avenger,” about a head-smashing vigilante forged from green chemical sludge. It was antipollution if you wanted to be charitable, but really, it was anti-everything. Haste plus waste, made for very bad taste.

Now, of course, we all recycle trash in our daily lives. But does it work as a film principle? Troma aficionado Macon Blair, a key on-and-offscreen collaborator of Jeremy Saulnier (“Blue Ruin,” “Hold the Dark”) and a Sundance-winning writer-director in his own right (“I Don’t Feel At Home in This World Anymore”), has taken up the challenge with his own “The Toxic Avenger,” starring Peter Dinklage as this version’s mutant hero, Toxie, and maybe the worst thing one could say about it is that it’s well-made.

Cue the disconnect when, expecting to be offended by garish, cheap filmmaking, one realizes that so much of the Troma style — gratuitous gore, filthy mouths, blunt-force parody — is ubiquitous to any regular genre diet in film or TV. That leaves matters of artistic character and there’s no getting around the fact that Blair has made the conscious decision that his “Toxic Avenger,” though rude, violent and goofy to a fault, wouldn’t look bad. It’s even got appealing stars: Kevin Bacon, Elijah Wood, Taylour Paige. Is nothing sacred?

But when even the biggest-budgeted movies now look terrible, everything’s already upside-down. What Blair has assembled, then, is diverting homage-schlock: a one-joke Halloween costume you’ll never wear again. Only this time, it asserts its environmental consciousness like a middle finger. The story’s Big Pharma outfit, called BTH, is a full-on villainous entity now, run by rapacious CEO Bob Garbinger (Bacon) who’s pumping consumers with harmful lifestyle drugs when he isn’t hiring a dim-witted punk band to kill a journalist (Paige) trying to expose him. (A muckraking mentor, seen only at the beginning, is called Mel Ferd, a shout-out to the original Toxie’s name.)

And yet things are also, in Blair’s setup, anchored in emotional sincerity (gasp). Dinklage’s affectingly drawn Winston Goose is no mere browbeaten BTH janitor — he’s a soft-spoken widower struggling to raise a stepson (Jacob Tremblay). Winston has also been diagnosed with a terminal illness and medical insurance won’t cover it. His Kafkaesque phone call about his employee plan is almost too realistic to find funny.

Trying to rob his employer one night with a mop dipped in toxic muck, Winston is shot and thrown into said slop. Instead of killing him, though, it transforms Winston into a disfigured creature (performer Luisa Guerreiro does the post-mutation suit work) with a removable eye, blood running blue, and — in a Tromatic touch — acid for urine. His gory dispatching of criminals notwithstanding, the mop-wielding Toxie becomes a community hero for calling out BTH as “ruiners.” But it also puts a target on his splotchy, misshapen head, especially when Garbinger senses in his nemesis an exploitable biofuel.

Whether poking at superhero cliches (there’s a choice post-credit scene) or trying to be kill-clever, it’s all in dopey, gruesome fun, although, to reiterate, a “Toxic Avenger” even normies can enjoy doesn’t exactly sound like a true Troma tribute. Which may explain why its trashmonger founder (and original “Toxic” co-creator) Lloyd Kaufman’s cameo, late in the film, is him crankily muttering next to Blair, who looks just as peeved. They probably had a blast filming it.

Ari Aster’s “Eddington” is such a superb social satire about contemporary America that I want to bury it in the desert for 20 years. More distance will make it easier to laugh.

It’s a modern western set in New Mexico — Aster’s home state — where trash blows like tumbleweeds as Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) stalks across the street to confront Eddington’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), whom he is campaigning to unseat. It’s May of 2020, that hot and twitchy early stretch of the COVID pandemic when reality seemed to disintegrate, and Joe is ticked off about the new mask mandate. He has asthma, and he can’t understand anyone who has their mouth covered.

Joe and Ted have old bad blood between them that’s flowed down from Joe’s fragile wife Louise, a.k.a. Rabbit (Emma Stone), a stunted woman-child who stubbornly paints creepy dolls, and his mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), a raving conspiracist who believes the Titanic sinking was no accident. Dawn is jazzed to decode the cause of this global shutdown; there’s comfort in believing everything happens for a reason. Her mania proves contagious.

Bad things are happening in Eddington and have been for decades, not just broken shop windows. Joe wears a white hat and clearly considers himself the story’s hero, although he’s not up to the job. If you squint real hard, you can see his perspective that he’s a champion for the underdog. Joe gets his guts in a twist when a maskless elder is kicked out of the local grocery store as the other shoppers applaud. “Public shaming,” Joe spits.

“There’s no COVID in Eddington,” Joe claims in his candidacy announcement video, urging his fellow citizens that “we need to free our hearts.” His earnestness is comic and sweet and dangerous. You can hear every fact he’s leaving out. His rival’s commercials promote a fantastical utopia where Ted is playing piano on the sidewalk and elbow-bumping more Black people in 15 seconds than we see in the rest of the movie. Ted also swears that permitting a tech behemoth named SolidGoldMagikarp to build a controversial giant data center on the outskirts of the county won’t suck precious resources — it’ll transform this nowheresville into a hub for jobs. Elections are a measure of public opinion: Which fibber would you trust?

Danger is coming and like in “High Noon,” this uneasy town will tear itself apart before it arrives. Aster is so good at scrupulously capturing the tiny, fearful COVID behaviors we’ve done our best to forget that it’s a shame (and a relief) that the script isn’t really about the epidemic. Another disease has infected Eddington: Social media has made everyone brain sick.

The film is teeming with viral headlines — serious, frivolous or false — jumbled together on computer screens screaming for attention in the same all-caps font. (Remember the collective decision that no one had the bandwidth to care about murder hornets?) Influencers and phonies and maybe even the occasional real journalist prattle on in the backgrounds of scenes telling people what to think and do, often making things worse. Joe loves his wife dearly. We see him privately watching a YouTuber explain how he can convince droopy Louise to have children. Alas, he spends his nights in their marital bed chastely doomscrolling.

Every character in “Eddington” is lonely and looking for connection. One person’s humiliating nadir comes during a painful tracking shot at an outdoor party where they’re shunned like they have the plague. Phones dominate their interactions: The camera is always there in somebody’s hand, live streaming or recording, flattening life into a reality show and every conversation into a performance.

The script expands to include Joe’s deputies, aggro Guy (Luke Grimes) and Bitcoin-obsessed Michael (Micheal Ward), plus a cop from the neighboring tribal reservation, Officer Butterfly Jimenez (William Belleau) and a handful of bored, identity-seeking teens. They’ll all wind up at odds even though they’re united by the shared need to be correct, to have purpose, to belong. When George Floyd is killed six states away, these young do-gooders rush into the streets, excited to have a reason to get together and yell. The protesters aren’t insincere about the cause. But it’s head-scrambling to watch blonde Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle) lecture her ex-boyfriend Michael, who is Black and a cop, about how he should feel. Meanwhile Brian (Cameron Mann), who is white and one of the most fascinating characters to track, is so desperate for Sarah’s attention that he delivers a hilarious slogan-addled meltdown: “My job is to sit down and listen! As soon as I finish this speech! Which I have no right to make!”

The words come fast and furious and flummoxing. Aster has crowded more pointed zingers and visual gags into each scene than our eyes can take in. His dialogue is laden with vile innuendos — “deep state,” “sexual predator,” “antifa” — and can feel like getting pummeled. When a smooth-talking guru named Vernon (Austin Butler) slithers into the plot, he regales Joe’s family with an incredulous tale of persecution that, as he admits, “sounds insane just to hear coming out of my mouth.” Well, yeah. Aster wants us to feel exhausted sorting fact from fiction.

The verbal barrage builds to a scene in which Joe and Dawn sputter nonsense at each other in a cross-talking non-conversation where both sound like they’re high on cocaine. They are, quite literally, internet junkies.

This is the bleakest of black humor. There’s even an actual dumpster fire. Aster’s breakout debut, “Hereditary,” gave him an overnight pedigree as the princeling of highbrow horror films about trauma. But really, he’s a cringe comedian who exaggerates his anxieties like a tragic clown. Even in “Midsommar,” Aster’s most coherent film, his star Florence Pugh doesn’t merely cry — she howls like she could swallow the earth. It wouldn’t be surprising to hear that when Aster catches himself getting maudlin, he forces himself to actively wallow in self-pity until it feels like a joke. Making the tragic ridiculous is a useful tool. (I once got through a breakup by watching “The Notebook” on repeat.)

With “Beau Is Afraid,” Aster’s previous film with Phoenix, focusing that approach on one man felt too punishing. “Eddington” is hysterical group therapy. I suspect that Aster knows that if we read a news article about a guy like Joe, we wouldn’t have any sympathy for him at all. Instead, Aster essentially handcuffs us to Joe’s point of view and sends us off on this tangled and bitterly funny adventure, in which rattling snakes spice up a humming, whining score by the Haxan Cloak and Daniel Pemberton.

Not every plot twist works. Joe’s sharpest pivot is so inward and incomprehensible that the film feels compelled to signpost it by having a passing driver yell, “You’re going the wrong way!” By the toxic finale, we’re certain only that Phoenix plays pathetic better than anyone these days. From “Her” to “Joker” to “Napoleon” to “Inherent Vice,” he’s constantly finding new wrinkles in his sad sacks. “Eddington’s” design teams have taken care to fill Joe’s home with dreary clutter and outfit him in sagging jeans. By contrast, Pascal’s wealthier Ted is the strutting embodiment of cowboy chic. He’s even selfishly hoarded toilet paper in his fancy adobe estate.

It’s humanistic when “Eddington” notes that everyone in town is a bit of a sinner. The problem is that they’re all eager to throw stones and point out what the others are doing wrong to get a quick fix of moral superiority. So many yellow cards get stacked up against everyone that you come to accept that we’re all flawed, but most of us are doing our best.

Joe isn’t going to make Eddington great again. He never has a handle on any of the conspiracies, and when he grabs a machine gun, he’s got no aim. Aster’s feistiest move is that he refuses to reveal the truth. When you step back at the end to take in the full landscape, you can put most of the story together. (Watch “Eddington” once, talk it out over margaritas and then watch it again.) Aster makes the viewer say their theories out loud afterwards, and when you do, you sound just as unhinged as everyone else in the movie. I dig that kind of culpability: a film that doesn’t point sanctimonious fingers but insists we’re all to blame.

But there are winners and losers and winners who feel like losers and schemers who get away with their misdeeds scot-free. Five years after the events of this movie, we’re still standing in the ashes of the aggrieved. But at least if we’re cackling at ourselves together in the theater, we’re less alone.

The death of Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson is an immeasurable loss for music and for California, both the place and the dream of it that Wilson conjured with his regal and tender compositions.

Wilson was the visionary of the defining American rock band, one who competed with the Beatles to move pop music into new realms of sophistication and invention, while writing songs capturing the longing of an ascendant youth culture.

His death leaves only two surviving members of the original lineup — Mike Love and Al Jardine, Wilson’s high school friend who sang lead on early hits like “Help Me Rhonda” and wrote songs for beloved later-period albums like “Surf’s Up” and “Sunflower.”

On the day the world learned of Wilson’s death, Jardine briefly spoke to The Times to remember his lifelong friend and bandmate. The guitarist, vocalist and songwriter — now on tour with his Pet Sounds Band playing Beach Boys hits with a focus on their 1970s output — looked back on six decades of writing and performing with one of the greatest minds of popular music.

Jardine’s conversation was edited for length and clarity.

I just lost my best friend and mentor. It’s not a good feeling, but I’m going to carry on and continue to play our music and perform with the Pet Sounds Band.

Brian was a great friend. We grew up together, we went to high school together. We were both dropouts, which is not a bad thing as long as you have a vision of the future. His and mine was to make music.

We were very good friends and very successful in part because of his great talent. He had an amazing ability to compose, very simple things and very complex things, all at the same time. He was a visionary.

We all grew up together musically, but he grew exponentially. He became a leader, and formed new ways of chord construction, things no one had heard before, and we rose to the challenge with him.

It’s been said that Brian invented the state of California, the state of mind. That’s a cute way of saying it, but he really invented a new form of music in the ’60s and ’70s. It was very sophisticated, but went way beyond that. He was a humble giant, a great American composer.

I don’t think anyone else could walk in his shoes, given all that he went through. I did write some songs he liked, and did help him get through treacherous times. It must be so frightening to be left in the wilderness by yourself and not know how to get home. He said one song I wrote helped him get through that, which is quite a compliment from the great Brian Wilson, who had his own demons to deal with.

Brian Wilson’s band was a reawakening of his professional life. He never enjoyed touring, so this band was a whole new life for him, to experience his own music and an adulation that he never had before.

The Beach Boys — Dennis Wilson, left, Al Jardine, Carl Wilson, Brian Wilson, Mike Love — perform circa 1964 in California.

(Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)

His legacy is of course in the music, and any interpreter of that legacy has to be sharp and devoted to it. We have the most devoted people that could be there to do that, so many original members of his band. My son Matthew, he’s Brian’s voice, and the DNA is there. With his arranger, Darian, arranging all vocals, we have all the muscle and genius to pull it off.

When Carl Wilson and I were singing those parts back then, we’d abbreviate things — you can’t do everything you did in the studio with only five of us. Now we’ve got 10 people onstage and I just heard some background parts yesterday that sounded just like we used to — you can hear Carl and Dennis in there.

When we take the band out, I have a little white piano onstage, like the one he played in the past. It’s a symbolic moment, the empty piano.

While the Beach Boys tour was a hit-based performance, with this iteration, we’re more introspective, deeper cuts, performing much of the 1970s catalog. There’s quite a few numbers the public hasn’t heard, exploring the heart and soul of those albums. I was hoping Brian would have been able to join us.

But it’s wonderful, we’re hoping this music should last forever, and be felt at the deep levels that Brian experienced it.

It sure is a great responsibility to play it, but it just feels natural to me. I’ve been doing it for so long, It doesn’t feel weighty. I’m confident, especially with this band being so remarkable. I’m still learning from Brian after all these years.