Remember that brief period when Marvel was scooping up hot indie directors, throwing money and a big-name IP at them, and hoping they’d got a blockbuster out of the deal? That was the story with Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who had been arthouse faves since they helped Ryan Gosling get his first Oscar nomination with addiction drama Half Nelson before going higher, further, faster as writer/directors of Captain Marvel.
The big question, of course, is “what next?” To stay in the big budget world, or to head back to smaller, passion-driven projects? Six years later, their answer comes in the form of Freaky Tales, a retro anthology of five interwoven chapters that tries to straddle the gap between A-listers and newcomers, the fantastical and the gritty, but ends up wobbling between the two.
Technically, the real answer was that Boden and Fleck piloted two episodes of Apple TV+ WWII aviation epic Masters of the Air, but their return to film work is undoubtedly not work-for-hire. Instead, it’s an oddly personal recollection of a quasi-mystical vision of Oakland in 1987. On the surface, Freaky Tales feels like a very belated addition to the post-Pulp Fiction school of grimy crime hyperlink films – and Tarantino’s finest is undoubtedly in the DNA somewhere. But at a deeper level Freaky Tales calls on a mix of two films from 2018: Ryan Prows’s deliciously skeezy hyperlink film Lowlife and Blindspotting, Daveed Digg’s love letter to a changing Bay Area.
The stakes are too low. Pulp Fiction got away with an opening focused on failed heist artists Pumpkin and Honey Bunny because they were played by Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer working from a Tarantino script. Boden and Fleck begin with a bunch of punks taking on the neighborhood Nazis. It’s a brief glimpse into the post-Dead Kennedys era of alternative community building, and maybe would have carried more weight if the young cast weren’t all playing it too cool for school, like they found the last ludes in the Bay Area. Even an appearance by real-life Oakland ska heroes Operation Ivy can’t get the blood pumping, although a turn to Oakland’s rap history finds more of a rhythm with Normani and Dominique Thorne as a pair of aspiring rappers facing misogyny on the stage and in their day jobs.
Yet neither segment seems to know how to balance the everyday narratives, drawn from Fleck’s own experiences growing up in Oakland, and the mystical subplot about a glowing, misty energy that erupts occasionally over the city. Far more adroit at bending those lines is Ben Mendelsohn as the epitome of the crooked, racist, sexist cop. He knew Boden and Fleck from before they all went to the House of Mouse, as he starred in their 2016 gambling buddy pic Mississippi Grind. Mendelsohn seemingly brought Pedro Pascal over from their shared day job in the Star Wars mines. The star of The Mandalorian is suitably understated as a low-level enforcer for loan sharks, even while he’s getting blown off the screen by a hilarious and unexpected cameo from another one-time Bay Area resident, former Oakland Coliseum hot dog vendor Tom Hanks.
The balancing act is much easier for Jay Ellis as a heavily fictionalized version of real-life Golden State Warriors point guard Eric “Sleepy” Floyd. Embracing the “freaky” part of the title, Boden and Fleck throw him straight into a hyper-stylized hip hop kung fu showdown that has more of Wu Tang Clan’s Staten Island than narrator Too $hort’s East Oakland to it.
Yet it’s hard to blame the actors for not grasping the tone when it seems to elude the filmmakers. The punks versus Nazis sequence in particular seems like a wasted opportunity, the kind of story that the deeply humane Boden and Fleck specialized in earlier in their career. Here it’s blown off with a silly, wish fulfillment gang fight that sells the setup short, and is merely a prelude to better sequences. It’s a genuine shame that such a clearly personal project for the filmmakers gets so lost.
This article appears in April 4 • 2025.
