Tony (2026)

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Canadian prankster extraordinaire Matt Johnson has been taking a much-deserved victory lap all year, having brought his cult sitcom Nirvanna the Band the Show to the big screen, his chilling found-footage comedy The Dirties to adoring Bleak Week audiences, and his burgeoning career as a go-to director for lowkey biopics up to the A24 tier of marketing & distribution. So, it’s a little surprising to find him hitting such a bummer note in his latest tale of rambunctious male bonding, a coming-of-age biopic about Anthony Bourdain’s college years. Tony finds Matt Johnson entering his sad boy era. He carries over all of the bro-ey, sinister scheming of his run & gun days shooting The Dirties, Operation Avalanche, and Nirvanna the Band, but now his buddy-comedy antics are soured by more hangovers, artistic pretension, and pensive brooding than ever before, due largely to the looming legacy of his latest subject. There’s an unavoidable sadness in depicting Bourdain’s life as a young man, given that the globally loved & respected suicide victim described himself at that age as being a “spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” in a quote that Johnson dutifully transcribes in an opening title card. Some audiences might be surprised to see the notoriously swaggering Bourdain portrayed as such a scrawny, conniving little twerp in Tony, but the depiction feels true to how he portrayed himself in his career-making memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Matt Johnson appears to see a kindred spirit in the way that vulnerable little kid in Bourdain was masked by his more boisterous, smirking surface, and the recognition of it bums him out.

We spend the summer of 1975 with a college-age Bourdain on the beaches of Provincetown, Massachusetts, the same year Jaws turned that East Coast setting into an iconic moment in American pop culture. Dominic “Holdovers” Sessa plays the future celebrity chef as the saddest boy in America: an aimless, sniveling punk with no discernible motivation in life other than following around his Vassar campus crush like a puppy dog . . . until he’s hit with the realization that she already has a boyfriend. He sells himself to anyone who’ll listen as a writer of great future importance, always on the verge of writing the great American novel but never actually seen sitting in front of a typewriter. His self-aggrandizing lies & schemes in Vassar’s literary circles leave him stranded & penniless in Provincetown for the summer, where he drunkenly falls backwards into a kitchen job washing dishes for an enigmatic Brazilian chef, played by Antonio Banderas. Bourdain’s discovery of a latent love for cooking brings him to life in that kitchen, giving him something to care about other than getting the girl, pissing off his parents, or always being recognized as the smartest prick in the room. Between endless staff meals, beer runs, dirty dishes, and oyster shuckings, he forgets his scheming pursuits of his nearby crush just long enough to develop a personality that she might actually be attracted to, and it saves him from his own self-loathing inertia in the process. A Matt Johnson movie adapting Kitchen Confidential’s later chapters about Bourdain going feral in the backrooms of New York City restaurants might’ve been more fun to watch, but it also would’ve been more expected. Here, Johnson plays his same usual tune entirely in minor notes, portraying Bourdain less as a one-of-a-kind culinary mind than as a textbook example of what it’s like to work in kitchens when you’re dangerously young & aimless, finding both romance and sorrow in the precarity of that state.

Once upon a time, Kitchen Confidential was the official Bible for the bro-iest chefs with knife tattoos you’d ever work alongside in professional kitchens, and Tony makes no apology for the homophobic name-calling, homoerotic horseplay, and general juvenile machismo that pervades that industry. That’s exactly what makes it fit in so snuggly with the rest of Matt Johnson’s filmography, which is just as romantic about toxic, obsessive male bonding as it is disinterested in the women who decorate those men’s lives. Johnson seems to be telling these stories from a position of personal self-examination, at least, constantly picking at whatever fragments of male adolescent psychology are still leftover in his overgrown adult-child persona, with little interest in or insight into anyone else’s worldview. Other overt Johnsonisms carry over here from previous films too, most notably in the wall-to-wall needle drops from setting-appropriate bands like The Modern Lovers, which are only occasionally interrupted by a near self-parodic score of sappy piano twinklings from longtime collaborator Jay McCarrol. Much like in BlackBerry, the period setting puts some limitations on how much of Johnson’s trademark street-level spontaneity can be carried over from his sitcoms to his biopics, and most of that job is left to comedian Stavros Halkias as Bourdain’s most obnoxious, Bluto-like coworker (a task marked clearly by his billing in the final credits as playing himself). Without those auteurist touches echoing from previous Matt Johnson works, Tony largely looks & acts like a fairly thoughtful, well-behaved biopic on an indie budget, which is how most audiences will inevitably receive it. In that context, its lowkey mood, its limitation in scope, and its pronounced disinterest in lionizing its subject all speak well to its success as a tasteful film about Bourdain’s life, when it’s all too easy to imagine what a tasteless one would look like. As a result, it’s more likely to charm than to wow. The biggest reaction it got out of the audience at its advance screening in New Orleans was in a scene when Bourdain attempts to shuck an oyster without holding it in a rag to protect his hand, a moment that the local, oyster-familiar crowd treated like a horror movie jump scare. It became clear in that moment that an overwhelming majority of the room had likely worked in kitchens at some point in our lives and, thus, could see some version of ourselves in this “spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout” — a position of quiet recognition rather than one of celebrity hero worship.

-Brandon Ledet

Saccharine (2026)

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Saccharine is the latest supernatural horror film from Natalie Erika James, who previously directed Relic. Midori Francis stars as Hana, a queer medical student who struggles with her weight. While out one night with classmate Josie (Danielle Macdonald), Hana runs into her high school acquaintance Melissa (Annie Shapero), who was overweight in adolescence but has now slimmed down significantly. She offers Hana a couple of capsules of “Grey,” a new non-government-approved weight loss supplement that she says did wonders for her, although she warns her that the medication is extremely expensive. Hana, who has a crush on Alanya (Madeleine Madden), a personal trainer at the university gym, sees rapid progress in her weight loss journey after only one capsule, but when she learns that the price for Grey is five thousand dollars, she opens the second capsule and runs it through spectroanalysis, at which point she discovers that the miracle drug consists of human cremains. She sneaks back into the cadaver lab and retrieves some biowaste from her class group’s assigned corpse (cruelly nicknamed “Big Bertha” by one of her groupmates because of the dead woman’s obesity), cremates it, and begins taking it. By the time she realizes that in so doing she has made herself the object of haunting by Bertha’s restless (and hungry) ghost, it might be too late for her. 

There was some discourse last year with the sudden appearance of Ozempic/GLP-1s on the market as a weight loss medication, with many relating the too-good-to-be-true results of the treatment and the abject horror of seeing perfectly healthy celebrities and athletes appearing in advertisements for it to the 2024 film The Substance. The Substance is a film about a culture that prioritizes aesthetic conformity to a Eurocentric beauty standard upheld by a porn-addled populace over real “health,” pre-saging Ozempic, and is about the kind of world that creates the “need” for GLP-1s. Saccharine is a film that lives in the post-Ozempic world, a character study into a person whose lack of control over their binging episodes leads them to sacrifice their health in more ways than one in order to have the body that they want. It’s indirectly grappling with GLP-1s, but it’s also casting a wide enough net that its central metaphor can also easily be seen as a parallel to a fad diet or bulimia. It’s not exactly breaking new ground, but it’s also well-studied in the way that it treats the characters who struggle with their weight, often as the results of coping mechanisms and self-destructive habits that they have very little conscious control over. 

Saccharine’s greatest weakness is in its pacing. At 112 minutes in length, it moves pretty quickly in its first and final acts, but the middle tends to drag, with the scenes of Bertha-possessed-Hana eating in a fugue state beginning to feel redundant. The storytelling in Act I is very economical, giving us a lot of story visually without any of it feeling expository. We learn that Hana’s a med student, that she has a crush on Alanya, that she struggles with her weight, that she has a tendency to binge eat, that she’s a lesbian, and that she over-identifies with the morbidly obese corpse she and her classmates are tasked with dissecting (they even wear the same nail polish) — all within the first ten minutes of the film. But after the half-hour mark, the pace slows to a bit of a crawl. There is also a mostly well-done subplot about her parents’ marriage from which we infer a lot about Hana’s childhood. Her mother Kimie (Showko Showfukutei) is a typically overbearing mother whose parental concern takes the form of constantly monitoring her daughter’s weight and food intake and providing unwanted housekeeping; her father remains completely offscreen except as a shambling cryptid-like presence in the periphery, a shut-in who has grown too fat to leave the house. In the one real scene with him, Hana visits him while her mother is out of country (perhaps having left him for good) and lambasts him for “giving up” and the way that this affected his family. As a “the monster is the metaphor” horror film, this one comes a little too close to reaching Smile’s “oops, too obvious” territory in these scenes, and can be particularly frustrating at this point since the narrative seems to be spinning its wheels, but the final act manages to get the energy back on track to reach an interesting conclusion. The film’s unwieldy length results in an epilogue scene which follows the climax feeling less like a well-considered final rug-pull and more like a tacked-on extension, which wouldn’t be the case in a film that was ten minutes shorter. In a film with this subject matter, it’s hard to resist the urge to make a joke about trimming some of the fat around the middle, but it really would have helped the film overall. 

One of the things that I thoroughly enjoyed about Saccharine was that it also explores some largely uncovered ground by having its main character be a scientist, someone not only capable of finding out what’s in the miracle pills and replicating it but also who tackles her apparent haunting with scientific rigor; the film smartly explores this rigorousness as an almost pathological means for Hana to take some agency and control in her life, when she doesn’t have control over her body. That’s good stuff! One also initially gets the sense that Alanya will be more of an antagonistic presence: a hot, mean, physically attractive woman who will inevitably reject or otherwise hurt Hana. Instead, she becomes the film’s love interest, and she’s also both reasonable in her concerns that Hana is losing weight too quickly and compassionate about Hana’s compulsive night eating (which is actually Bertha acting through her, but Alanya can’t know that). I also really liked the relationship between Hana and her best friend Josie, who is a breath of fresh air every time that she appears. Although there are moments where her dialogue threatens to become a little too Afterschool Special, like when she tells Hana “You say ‘fat’ like it’s a bad word!”, she’s pretty well characterized throughout. Although the film wastes some time at other points, we don’t have to sit around waiting for Josie to believe Hana about the ghost that’s haunting her, since Bertha makes her presence known while Josie is there pretty immediately. All of that works, and works well. Perhaps most surprisingly, the film decides to suddenly become much funnier in the final act, which is a bit of tonal whiplash but which I appreciated, since it helped jump-start things again after the slothful midsection. 

This one is not quite as subtle or meaningful as Relic, and admittedly, I don’t think it’s trying to be. Moving away from the mostly single location setting of that film to the more varied environments of this one creates more opportunities for visual flourish. That’s mostly successful, as there are beautifully composed shots of triangular university stairwells and other fascinating images, and the more immediately apparent supernatural premise of this film means that we get to see some great ghost images early on. I also want to shout out the end credits, which are some of the coolest that I have seen in a long time. I’m not sure how I feel about some of the more regressive depictions of overeating, however. There are images of a mouth (presumably Hana’s) gorging in the opening, and many more throughout, and it feels very Shallow Hal to have the area around our lead actress’s mouth smeared with jelly and grease when she’s gorging herself during her “fat” period, slovenly and intentionally off-putting, then have her scarf just as much when she’s got her haunted metaphorical tapeworm taking the brunt of it in her “slimmed down” appearance. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it’s worth mentioning. All in all, this one isn’t quite as smart as some of the director’s previous work, but it’s making up for that by dialing up the style and expanding the scope of the lens. I look forward to her next one, and I hope it’s a little bit more concise.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Her Private Hell (2026)

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Anytime I catch myself wondering “Where have they been?” about a specific actor or director, the answer is always television. Nicolas Winding Refn has produced two high-end TV series since he last graced cinemas with the best film of 2016, which from my limited perspective means he’s spent the last decade enjoying an early retirement. Then, out of nowhere, he premiered his new film Her Private Hell at this year’s Cannes, once again baffling & frustrating fans & critics alike with another slow-motion adventure into his own neon-lit subconscious. Her Private Hell presented an opportunity for a grand Refn comeback tour, dragging the acquired-taste auteur out of the hazy obscurity of luxury TV streaming series and back into the glamorous spotlight of festival-circuit red carpets. Instead, he chose to double down on the prickliest, most alienating aspects of his work with no apparent urge to gain new fans or win over old haters. It’s like the 50-something filmmaker skipped the middle period of his career so he could rush directly into his “late style” era. Imagine if Coppola had fucked off for ten years after making The Godfather and then immediately came back with Megalopolis, or if David Lynch had jumped straight into Inland Empire after Blue Velvet, without laying the decades of artistic & thematic groundwork that earns an audience’s trust & good will. Older, venerated filmmakers of that stature are given a lot of leeway to go big and go vague without guiding the audience along the way with the usual handholding tactics of Narrative, Structure, Entertainment, and Taste. There’s something extremely bratty about Refn acting as if he’s entitled to that same reverence & grace at such a relatively young age, and so long since he last pleased a crowd with his jacket-and-soundtrack-selling hit Drive. As always, I admire the audacity.

Structurally, Her Private Hell combines the two most alienating titles from Refn’s back catalog—The Neon Demon & Only God Forgives—into a crude, volatile mash-up where they never quite gel into a new singular work. Sophie Thatcher stars in the Neon Demon half, playing a jaded, sneering actress in a sci-fi dystopia who gets back at her emotionally checked-out father by sexually pursuing his wife (and her former bestie, played by Havana Rose Liu). Charles Melton headlines the Only God Forgives half, playing an American bruiser in post-WWII Tokyo, who’s willing to crush infinite skulls and suffer infinite tortures in his pursuit to get his daughter back from gangster kidnappers. How these two temporally dissonant stories are related is anyone’s guess; they share a thematic impulse to reunite broken families, but they’re otherwise rigidly segregated. Certain sequences of the edit suggest that Melton’s buff, shirtless soldier of a forgotten neon-noir past has been entirely dreamed up by Thatcher’s lonely, horny actress from our neon-melodrama future, as the story often shifts to his perspective at the exact moment that her head hits a pillow. More directly, they are connected by a mysterious mist that hangs heavy over both of their rotten cities, physicalizing the ambiguity of the temporal & geographical settings Refn sketches out here. Another figure who emerges from that mist is an entity known only as The Leather Man: a hulking presence dressed head to toe in black leather, studded with diamonds, who occasionally rips women’s chests open with his bare hands as if he’s spatchcocking a turkey. If the mist is a physical manifestation of the film’s ambiguity, The Leather Man is a physical manifestation of its dread – a walking, stalking avatar of Bad Vibes. All three of these central figures are really just isolated figments of Refn’s imagination, relegated to their own distinct movie realms, only accessed by dreams, only connected by mist.

While Her Private Hell mostly operates on post-giallo dream logic, it announces itself as a futuristic fairy tale with a wry Hans Christian Andersen name-drop in its very first scene. Instead of the usual driving synths that provide a sense of momentum in Refn’s otherwise static tableaus, this outing is scored by old-timer Pino Donaggio with the fluttering harps & strings that usually accompany bedtime fairy tales, marking the exact moment that a character falls asleep and drifts into a magical other-realm. Thatcher’s attention-starved protagonist makes that framing clear in her direct references to her love interest (and familial rival) as her “Wicked Stepmother,” while debating whether to fuck or kill her as retribution for the betrayal of marrying her father. If Her Private Hell is a bedtime storybook, though, it’s one that’s only suitable for overly patient perverts who’ve already flipped through all of the available Bertrand Mandico, Yann Gonzales, Jane Schoenbrun, Amanda Kramer, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani titles on the shelf and are looking to add one just more neon spotlight to their oncoming dream. When The Neon Demon first hit theaters a decade ago, there was a “What am I even looking at?” quality to it that has since faded as so many other, hungrier auteurs have made names for themselves playing Refn’s game. The diamond & leather studded killer and the characters who are named after punk icons like Johnny Thunders & Nico can’t help but recall Mandico’s work in particular, even if Refn was already doing his thing well before The Wild Boys. Appreciation of Her Private Hell requires an appreciation of all beautifully lit, eerily empty film genres, as exemplified by Thatcher & company seemingly working on a Planet of the Vampires remake in-between their semi-incestuous sexual rivalries and inert fashion magazine editorials, adding 60s sci-fi kitsch to the already sky-high pile of retro genre references. Refn is in some ways very giving here, offering the audience a whole lot of everything while, paradoxically, lulling us to sleep with a cold, mystifying sparseness. Everything he loves is carefully arranged on the screen but rarely set in motion, with little care for whether there’s an audience out there who loves him back.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Hairy Bird (1998)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the ensemble-cast boarding school comedy The Hairy Bird (1998), a.k.a. All I Wanna Do, a.k.a. Strike!

00:00 Christopher Nolan
14:00 The Odyssey (2026)
33:00 War and Peace (1965-1967)
37:48 Conan the Destroyer (1984)
40:40 Red Sonja (1985)
46:30 The NeverEnding Story (1984)
53:20 Her Private Hell (2026)
1:00:11 The Taste of Tea (2004)
1:04:55 Millennium Actress (2001)
1:10:46 The Invite (2026)
1:20:12 After Hours (1985)

1:27:20 The Hairy Bird (1998)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Under Capricorn (1949)

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In Douglas Brode’s book Edge of Your Seat, he writes of Under Capricorn: “Tepid, uninvolving mishmash set down under, with stars utterly unbelievable as Aussie husband and wife […] in a creaky, soap-operish plot that goes absolutely nowhere and, worse still, takes forever getting there.” Of all of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers listed forty thrillers in the book, this is one of only two single-star reviews (the other is Topaz). In Truffaut/Hitchcock, the master of suspense recalled a contemporary NYT review that stated the first suspenseful moment comes at 100 minutes into the run time. In his autobiography Vanity Will Get You Somewhere, leading man Joseph Cotten called the movie “Under Corny Crap,” and the film’s box office likely suffered due to the scandal surrounding Ingrid Bergman that same year, when she became pregnant with the child of Roberto Rossellini (they were both married at the time). To circle back to Mr. Brode’s notation above, he makes two major errors: first, both Sam (Cotten) and Hattie Flusky (Bergman) are Irish expats living in Australia (though they remain “utterly unbelievable” as Irish folks as well), and secondly, this is not a thriller, but a melodrama that cribs from Gaslight in its final moments. Audiences at the time had come to expect something different from the filmmaker; in the preceding decade alone, he had made Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt (also starring Cotten), and Notorious, just to name a few. Under Capricorn, I would imagine, shares more in common with his earlier British non-thriller dramas like The Skin Game or Rich and Strange, and I would also go so far as to posit that it’s filed with his suspense films less because of the content of the feature itself and more because forty makes for a nicer, rounder number for a list of “Hitchcock Thrillers” than thirty-nine does. 

Not only is this a melodrama, it’s also a period piece, which meant it was already starting on the back foot for me. Taking place in the 1830s in New South Wales, then still a penal colony under British rule, the film finds Charles Adare (Michael Wilding) arriving in Sydney with his second cousin, Sir Richard, whom the crown has appointed as the region’s new governor. Charles is the youngest son of his family, and the practice of primogeniture means that he is set to inherit nothing, so he has come to the colony to seek his fortune. Although he’s a man of good humor, he’s fairly disinterested in honest work. After meeting with a local bank manager to discuss his prospects, he meets Sam Flusky, seeming to recognize the name; the manager tells him that Flusky is a successful landowner but also an emancipist (someone sent to Australia for penal reasons who has since served their time but remained on the continent). Despite being warned against becoming socially linked to Flusky, whose newfound wealth has not resulted in his acceptance in high society (such as it is) in Sydney, and being directly forbidden from associating with him by his cousin, Charles accepts an invitation to a dinner party at Sam’s. The dinner is attended solely by several local gentlemen, all of whom deliver poor excuses for the absence of their respective wives. The reason becomes clear when Sam’s wife, Hattie, descends the stairs in a drunken stupor. Surprised, Charles recognizes her as a childhood friend of his older sister’s, and suddenly recollects that she left Ireland suddenly when she eloped with a man below her station. Said man was her stable boy, Sam, who was sentenced to seven years on the chain gang for the slaying of Hattie’s brother Dermot. 

Sam, recognizing Charles’s immediate rehabilitative effect on Hattie, asks him to stay with them in his manor house; this raises the ire of Flusky’s housekeeper Milly (Margaret Leighton), who has become accustomed to running the household in Hattie’s stead, all while enabling and facilitating Mrs. Flusky’s all-hours stupefaction. What follows is a series of vignettes, as Charles manages, over time, to wean Hattie off the bottle and encourage her to reassert herself as mistress of the house. When Milly purposefully embarrasses her in front of the other servants, Hattie retreats back to her room and locks herself in; Charles climbs up to the balcony and lets himself in, setting her right again. Sam is not entirely unaware of the love that Charles begins to have for Hattie, but he also adores his wife and believes that she deserves to re-enter the society that shunned her while she waited seven years for her husband to be freed from imprisonment. When Charles’s various subterfuges pay off and Hattie attends a ball at the governor’s mansion, Milly poisons Sam’s mind with thoughts of their potential infidelities, resulting in Sam arriving and embarrassing Hattie so thoroughly that her rejection from high society is confirmed. Poor horseman Charles departs the Flusky home on the back of Sam’s wild mare, and the animal breaks its leg, forcing Sam to shoot the old girl and put her out of her misery. A confrontation with Charles follows, and Charles is shot, albeit nonfatally, leaving him delirious and intermittently unconscious; since Sam is a previously convicted felon, he is likely to be hanged for the crime. 

This prompts Hattie to admit that it was actually she who shot her brother, and that Sam took the fall for her. When she confesses to the governor, he tells her that she will have to return to Ireland to stand trial, but Sam refuses to corroborate her version of events. Reluctantly, Sam decides he will return with her and leave his life as a nouveau riche gentleman behind, much to Milly’s chagrin. To keep him in Australia, she tries to poison Hattie, but is exposed, as is her scheme of making Hattie believe she’s losing her mind by leaving shrunken human heads in the lady’s suite. Charles recovers enough to claim that his shooting was an accident, and we all end happily ever after, with Sam and Hattie’s love having conquered all, and Charles returning to Ireland in disgrace, but cheerful. 

Under Capricorn is notable in that, like its immediate predecessor in Hitch’s C.V., Rope, the film is shot almost entirely in long, unedited shots, although the breaks here are a little more obvious than in his previous film. Unfortunately, they don’t end up amounting to much. There’s a credit for the use of Technicolor here, but it feels like a waste of that technology, as this a mostly beige and brown movie; Charles wears a couple of blue and green waistcoats, but the color of them is so muted that it hardly seems like costuming should have gone through the effort at all. That’s not to say that the film looks bad, but it certainly doesn’t leap off of the screen. Since this was a melodrama and not a suspense thriller, I couldn’t help but think about Douglas Sirk’s films in the genre. The snow in All That Heaven Allows is so pure and white that it almost looks blue, and the absurdly pink bedroom of Lana Turner’s daughter at the end of Imitation of Life is doing some excellent environmental storytelling; there’s not a single image in this film that’s as visually arresting as the scenery that Sirk worked with. The extended shots display a mastery of the craft, but it’s no surprise that Hitchcock made precisely two movies composed entirely of “oners” and then went back to using the technique only when it matters. In Rope, the film’s real-time nature makes that work for the entire thing, whereas its use in Under Capricorn feels like a failed experiment. It’s an interesting technical exercise, but nothing more. 

I viewed this as a Kino Lorber release, and while their print looks quite good, the quality control on the subtitles is, frankly, unacceptable. Flusky’s Roger Corman-quality matte painting house is named “Minyago Yugilla,” which supposedly means “Why weepest thou?”, and every time someone translates this for another character, the captions substitute “though” for “thou,” and that’s only one of the many errors that makes one wonder who’s minding the store over there. (I’m personally willing to accept, at a very reasonable rate, any proofreading jobs that any boutique physical media retailer has to offer, if there are any companies that are still offering this kind of work instead of outsourcing it to AI to be botched.) It’s not even as if the dialogue is all that difficult for a captioner to understand; to say that anyone in the film is failing at an Irish (or Australian) accent would be a lie, because it would imply that there is a single person in the cast who’s making the effort to even try one. There’s not much to speak of when it comes to extras on the disc, either, if that’s of interest to you. 

All of that being said, I went into this expecting a much worse film, and perhaps because my expectations were so low, I didn’t despise it the way that Brode, Cotten, Hitchcock, and the film-going public did. It held my interest well enough, even if it wasn’t terribly exciting, and I don’t think that I’ll ever revisit it or recommend it to others. This may be the worst performance of Bergman’s storied career; it is, at least, the worst one I’ve witnessed. Not helping matters is the hideous period dress that she’s forced to don on several occasions. Every bonnet they put on Bergman is more ostentatiously ugly than the last, and there’s a set of nightclothes that she wears that are meticulously decorated with lace that seems strategically placed to make one ask “Why?” There is already a nineteenth century period piece in which Bergman plays a wife driven to madness, featuring the presence of a sullen housemaid and Cotten in a lead role, and in which Bergman is publicly embarrassed at a societal function when she dares to leave the house for the first time in years. It’s Gaslight, obviously, and it’s a much, much better picture than this one. Under Capricorn is for completists only, and only the kind of completist who needs to either (a) see every Hitchcock ever made, or (b) who needs to watch all of the master of suspense’s thrillers while also needing the number of the said films to be an even forty.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

After Hours (1985)

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The time of another adaptation of The Odyssey is upon us, which means that it’s time for the underemployed to crack their knuckles and start making Letterboxd lists of films that are spiritually similar. One that’s been popping up more often recently is the Martin Scorsese film After Hours, one of the director’s more underdiscussed pictures. The 1985 dark comedy, set in the wee hours of the morning in New York City, follows word processor Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) on, well, an odyssey across the city as he faces various challenges in trying to get back home from Soho. In a diner one night, he’s reading a Henry Miller novel when the lovely Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) strikes up a conversation with him. They flirt, and she tells him that she’s staying with a sculptress friend, Kiki (Linda Fiorentino), whose work includes making plaster bagels with cream cheese. Intrigued, he calls Kiki’s loft later that night and Marcy invites him over, but he ends up losing the only cash he has on him, a $20 bill, when it’s blown out of a cab window. 

This is only the beginning of Paul’s troubles for the night. As it turns out, not only is Marcy already married (albeit separated from her husband, whose fetishization of The Wizard of Oz has made him incapable of orgasming without screaming “Surrender Dorothy”), she’s also already got a boyfriend, with whom she quarreled earlier in the night, prompting her flirtation with Paul in the first place. She behaves erratically, tells harrowing stories about her past that may or may not be true, has a book of images of horrific burns, and is constantly leaving the room to giggle and whisper conspiratorially with Kiki; she is, in short, a manic pixie nightmare woman. Paul sneaks out of the apartment but is unable to make his way home as he’s short the fare for the subway, as there was a price change that went into effect at midnight, and he makes his way to a late night bar, where he befriends bartender Tom (John Heard) and finds himself the object of desire for dissatisfied, forty-something cocktail waitress Julie (Teri Garr). Tom takes pity on Paul and offers to give him the dollar that he needs to get home but is unable to open the register. Paul leaves his own apartment keys as collateral in order to take Tom’s keyring and collect the spare register key from Tom’s place. On his way out, he’s spotted by some of Tom’s neighbors, who accuse him of being the neighborhood burglar who has been hard at work in the area in recent weeks, but he manages to convince them otherwise. 

Returning to the bar, he comes upon the real prowlers (Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong) loading Kiki’s life size papier-mâché sculpture of a screaming man into their van, and he scares them off. Returning the sculpture to Kiki’s apartment, he finds her in the middle of a BDSM session with a hulking man named Horst, who scolds him for running off on Marcy. Paul attempts to apologize to Marcy but finds that she has overdosed on barbiturates. When he goes to Kiki and Horst for help, he finds that they’ve left a note saying they’ve gone to a club. Paul calls the police to report Marcy’s death and returns to the bar to return Tom’s keys. Tom has closed the bar for half an hour, but Julie, who lives across the street, invites him in from the rain. Her apartment matches her beehive hairdo, which shows that she’s stuck in the 1960s; it’s pink, decorated with the occasional rainbow, and stocked with an entire shelf of Aqua Net. After a few more contrived coincidences and turns of the vice that’s gripping Paul, he ultimately finds himself at the mercy of a mob that’s out for the blood of the neighborhood burglar, led by an irate ice cream truck driver named Gail (Catherine O’Hara). Will this be the end of Rico? 

After Hours is a very funny movie, and it’s a shame that it’s not considered one of the essentials in the director’s oeuvre. Paul’s initial situation is a familiar one, in which one finds themself in the home of someone that they barely know but slowly comes to the realization that instability can present as cute quirkiness on first impression, and has to extricate oneself with as much finesse as possible. From there, the continuous downward tumble and increasingly hostile interactions with the bizarre characters who haunt Soho’s streets during the darkest hours of the night make for a hilarious, anxiety-inducing social nightmare. It reads like an early version of Beau is Afraid, in which an ill-equipped everyman must grapple with an increasingly bizarre reality. Here, it’s because everyone involved is connected (Tom is, of course, the boyfriend with whom Marcy had a fight earlier in the night) and are caricatures of normal people with their neuroses turned all the way up. This makes for some very funny characters who are still well-observed. One of the bits that I enjoyed the most was when Julie invites Paul up to her apartment out of the rain while he waits for Tom to reopen the bar, and she puts on a Monkees record. When she realizes that Paul is in a somber state after finding a dead body, she soundtracks the new mood by playing Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning,” seamlessly changing the records. From the punks who try to forcibly shave Paul’s hair into a Mohawk at Club Berlin to the woman who lives beneath the club in a cluttered museum of antiques to a neighborhood that’s as trigger-happy for mob justice as Springfield, everyone is a portrait of a weirdo, and I loved After Hours for that. 

Three years after After Hours, screenwriter Joseph Minion would pen Vampire’s Kiss, known to the general public as the image source of an infamous Nicolas Cage meme, but which has a similar sense of humor to this one. This came right on the heels of another Scorsese comedy, The King of Comedy, which found a balance between being a funny comedy and a genuine thriller, and King continued the Scorsese tradition from Taxi Driver of having the source of danger be the character that we spend the film with. This one not only breaks that tradition by making Paul more of a Hitchcockian falsely-accused-man-on-the-run archetype who’s mostly the victim of circumstance (and a few poorly considered lies), but also in tone from King, having more of Minion’s fingerprints on it than Scorsese’s. There are no long tracking shots that are a hallmark of the director’s filmography, no fancy camera movement, just workmanlike competency, but this allows more room for the comedy to breathe, to the film’s benefit.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Odyssey (2026)

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For the first hour of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, I found myself somewhat bored. As I sat in the theater, staring up at the screen, I felt a sense of dread creeping over me as I wondered whether the whole film would play out as that first third did, like a well-produced but ultimately faithful-to-a-fault PBS adaptation of Homer’s poem. As a filmmaker, one of the things that makes Nolan’s work so widely accessible is his ear for expository dialogue. If it weren’t for all the spectacle that accompanies his films, most people would find them overly explanatory in a way that feels like educational media. I have gone on record as being unimpressed with one of this year’s most acclaimed and discussed films, Obsession, and admitted that my dislike for it was that I really thought it would be something new, fresh, and exciting, but found myself bored and frustrated with what, to me, was a conceptually stale piece of art. For sixty minutes of The Odyssey, I found myself asking the same questions that I did during Obsession: Why are we here? What’s the point of creating a film if it can’t bring something novel and noteworthy to an idea that I’ve seen dozens, perhaps hundreds of times before? Who is this even for? (In the case of Obsession, it turns out that the answer is “everyone but me, apparently,” but I digress.) Even the film’s first major effects sequence, which recounts the encounter that Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his men have with the cyclops Polyphemus, was both well-executed and a bit of a yawn. Was this really going to be all that The Odyssey would be? A very expensive, well-made adaptation of a very familiar story? Then, at around the hour mark, Circe (Samantha Morton) enters the film, and everything shifts. By the end, I was pleased with the journey, even if it was one that I had taken many times before, because Nolan had successfully managed to make the narrative resonant in a new way, even if every plot beat was familiar. 

You probably know this story. If you didn’t read it in college or high school, then you probably saw the nineties miniseries in one of its endless repeats on the Syfy (at the time the Sci-Fi) Channel, or you saw O Brother, Where Art Thou?, or you saw Odysseus played by a Jack Russell Terrier on Wishbone (my first exposure was an episode of DuckTales). After years of unsuccessfully sieging the walled city of Troy under the command of Greek king Agamemnon (Bennie Safdie), the clever hero Odysseus lights upon the idea of concealing a contingent of men within a hollowed out wooden horse to be presented to the Trojans as a gift and taken within its walls. Once inside, Odysseus and his men open the gates of Troy to Agamemnon and his waiting army, who storm Troy and pillage the city. Eight years later, Odysseus has yet to return home; his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) has spent the last few of these years being forced by the divine laws of hospitality to entertain a number of suitors who wish to marry her and take the throne of Ithaca. Chief among these is the boorish Antinous (Robert Pattinson), who loves to falsely recount his desire to join the Trojan campaign, claiming that Odysseus personally asked him to watch over his family instead. In reality, Antinous was drafted via lottery and traded places with a shepherd’s boy, Sinon (Elliot Page), who died in the sand of Troy’s shores. Penelope’s only real allies are Eumaeus (John Leguizamo), a blind herder of pigs who remains devoted to Odysseus even in his long absence, and Odysseus and Penelope’s son Telemachus (Tom Holland), who hadn’t even been weaned when Agamemnon summoned his vassals. 

Odysseus’s attempt to return to Ithaca alongside Eurylochus (Himesh Patel) and bring the men under his command home is long and arduous, as he follows the stations of the canon that most of us already know: the Cyclops shepherd, Circe turning the Ithacans into pigs, losing ships to the Laestrygonians (here reimagined as 10-foot men in otherworldly armor), wax in the ears to drown out siren song, the consultation with Tiresias’s spirit in the afterlife, navigating between Scylla and Charybdis, Odysseus’s men eating Apollo’s sacred cattle; it’s all here. As with a lot of modern “realistic” retellings of classics that were composed in an era when the contemporary audience believed that their deities walked among them, Nolan excises all of the gods and goddesses from this version, reassigning their roles in the events to others. The sole exception is Athena (Zendaya), who appears only to Odysseus and is mostly an externalization of his guilt over his role in the downfall of Troy and, by extension, the collapse of the myth of civilization. 

This extends into other realms, of course, as the overall “gritty” look of the film requires the excision of the more fantastic parts of the setting as well, like making Circe a woman in a roughhewn stone cottage wearing coarse, muted clothing rather than a daughter of the sun with all of the magnificence thereof. There are also concessions made for time and pacing, like removing the isle of lotus eaters entirely and moving the memory-clouding flower to Calypso (Charlize Theron)’s story and allowing the framing device of Odysseus recounting his journey to Nausicaa to be converted to his memory coming back as the effect of the lotus wears off. Telemachus’s travels are simplified to a single outing to visit Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) and Helen (Lupita Nyong’o) to learn about the fate of his father. Even this condensation of plot elements to make the narrative tighter is nothing new. This is a foundational narrative that’s nearly three thousand years old, and it’s changed and had more permutations than could ever realistically be traced. 

So what’s Nolan doing with it here? He blends in sources from The Iliad and even extra-Homeric texts (Sinon appears in neither The Iliad or The Odyssey, and his role here as the deceiver of the Trojans is taken from Virgil’s Aeneid) to weld together a cohesive story, but also leaves out certain factors that some readers would consider integral to the narrative. The one that I find most revealing about Nolan’s motivation is that he’s made Odysseus’s guilt the central focus of his character motivation, but only his guilt about the sacking of Troy, not about his role in the instigation of the Trojan War itself, which is entirely left out. Odysseus’s love for Penelope led him to introduce the pact that allowed Agamemnon to call his vassals to war in the first place, but Odysseus doesn’t blame himself for the war in Illium because his era is one in which such scrabbling is part of the natural order. His world is one that is utterly alien to us in the modern era, one of gods and monsters and “apparent magic,” but which is nonetheless undergirded by its own sense of morals and ethics, just as our society is. 

Chief among these divinely demanded statutes is xenia, herein referred to as one of “Zeus’s Laws,” which was an ancient nigh-universally observed mandate from on high that travellers and beggars be treated with hospitality. Odysseus’s decision to falsely enter Troy by pretending to offer up a tribute to a goddess worshipped by both parties is the equivalent to a war crime. It’s so unthinkable that it effectively destroys the fabric of society itself, exposing an existential truth that the world of observed communal social order is a thin membrane on which we all float above a roiling abyssal ocean of darkness and mayhem, reinforced only by our shared belief in it and our commitment to upholding it. For as slimy as he is, Antinous only ever bends the rules of xenia, or takes advantage of them for his own benefit, but even he never conceives of the entire system being upended. Odysseus bears the weight of understanding that his “brilliant” war tactic has plunged the world entire into a darkness that he created and cannot escape, represented by many characters voicing their fears about the fabled “men from the sea” who terrorize the coasts and don’t follow Zeus’s laws. Even before he realizes that these rumors are about him and his men, he seems keenly aware that he has brought an end to civilization as he knows it. As a new take on this text, it justifies its existence.

That having been said, this film still falls victim to the pitfalls of Nolan’s work and mainstream filmmaking in general. This month, I watched all four parts of the Soviet-produced War and Peace adaptation from the 1960s, and I was continuously struck by the raw, miserable, hellish conditions of war that Sergei Bondarchuk captured with his lens. It left me thinking a lot about the criticism that Western cinema can never be truly anti-war because of the nature of our filmic language and the way that our cultural narratives justifying mass slaughter trickle down into everything that we create. The Odyssey has this problem. I’m fairly confident in my reading of Nolan’s authorial intent regarding Odysseus’s motivations in this telling, so I have little doubt that he intended to make the scenes of the sack of Troy harrowing, but the heavy stylization and action movie editing undermines any anti-war sentiment that the film might be trying to capture. I think Nolan probably believed that he was making something with that thesis, but he just can’t help himself when he’s got his hands on an IMAX camera. 

I’ve long been critical of The Dark Knight Rises, a film that I think is best consigned to being forgotten as a piece of reactionary propaganda. Defenders of the film cite that the infiltration of the Occupy Gotham movement by Bane and his terrorist cronies is a statement about the ease with which progressive movements can be co-opted by fascists. I can’t abide this reading, since the film that I watched was one that was narratively patronizing to progressives as sheep who can be easily misled, a film in which everything goes to pot when the police are disempowered in a city that can only be saved by getting the police back on the streets, a story in which a character living in a hellish Gotham under fascist control proudly says “Look around, this is what we wanted!” That film may not seem like it came out all that long ago, but it hasn’t even been 15 years. The state of our society has just fallen so far since then that it feels like an artifact of a time that’s almost as alien as Homer’s. 

I don’t think that Nolan himself is a reactionary the way that many of his detractors do (I mostly lay my issues with TDKR at the feet of David S. Goyer), but his Odyssey feels like an attempt to grapple with the reality of a dissolved social order. The sack of Troy is predicated on the breaking of a sacred trust, one that results in the dissolution of the social order and the end of an era of certainty built on universally accepted norms. It is the January 6th of antiquity, the act that unmakes civilization not because of its inherent violence but because it exposes how fragile our “reality” is, the end of normalcy before a dark age. For all of the discourse online from those whose moral compasses are broken, who racistly criticize the casting of Nyong’o or insist on misgendering Page, they’re all utterly missing the point that their effigy of “woke” Christopher Nolan overlooks the direct rebuke of reactionaries and right-wingers. He’s doing so by invoking traditional moderate values—implicit acceptance of institutionalized, lineage-based rulership, great man theory of history, and even the disruption of social order as chaotic and inherently negative—but their frothing madness at the perceived slights of a non-white Athena and Helen means that they’ll never even see the real way that Nolan is criticizing them. It may be one of his more visually impressive works, but it’s not the most thematically consistent, perhaps for reasons that Nolan is unable to see from within the horizon of his own self-understanding. It’s worth seeing as an insight into the director’s soul, and if it gets more people to read pre-modern literature, I’m all for it.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

War and Peace, Part IV: Pierre Bezukhov (1967)

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At the end of this final installment of the War and Peace tetraptych, my viewing companion and I sat in stunned silence. After a few minutes, I said “That was a stupendous thing.” I tried to think of something else to say, then simply repeated, “That was a stupendous thing.” Although what these films have managed to accomplish thus far was already breathtaking, the final film, subtitled Part IV: Pierre Bezukhov, pushes into something even more astonishing. After three films in which war is a metaphorical hell, an endlessly churning pit of misery, pain, despair, and death, this film opens with Field Marshal Kutuzov, who has mismanaged every battle he has overseen so far, surrounded by a small war council. Kutukov refuses to answer Napoleon’s demands for surrender, citing that in so doing his legacy would be forever tarnished as a coward with no honor; he instead has the Russian army retreat and leave Moscow behind. One of the other attendees cites that “the game” is not over, harkening back to Prince Andrei Bolkonsky (Vyacheslav Tikhonov)’s soliloquy in Part III that conceptualizing war as a game is a monstrous thing. Moscow is evacuated; Count Pierre Bezukhov (Sergei Bondarchuk, who also directs once again) demands that his servants find him peasant’s clothing and a pistol so that he can stay behind, with the intention of assassinating Napoleon. This leads him to part ways with the Rostov family, including young Natasha (Ludmila Savelyeva), as they flee the city. The Rostovs allow their carts and carriages to be used to assist in the evacuation of injured soldiers. Although they are initially unaware, they find themselves spiriting away none other than Andrei himself, who is dying after the Battle of Borodino. 

What follows is one of the most harrowing things that I have ever seen. Part IV takes the metaphorical hell of war and makes it as literal as possible, as the historic Russian tactic of setting Moscow ablaze in retreat to prevent pillaging by the French army turns Moscow into Perdition itself. After his tearful goodbye to Natasha and her family, including young Petya, who demanded to be allowed to join the army at the beginning of Part III, Pierre wanders a city engulfed in flames. Cyclones of large pieces of ash fill the air like swarms of birds as fire consumes everything; the air is filled with wailing, crying, and screaming. French soldiers loot the city, tearing down religious icons and pilfering precious metals, running about with mad glee like the minions of the devil himself. The evacuees from Moscow can see the entire city burning on the horizon, turning the night sky a disconcerting red. I will be haunted by it. Pierre manages to befriend a French captain by preventing him from being murdered by a drunken Moscovian, then rescues a child from a burning building, but when he attempts to stop a French soldier from assaulting a beautiful woman, a brawl with several soldiers breaks out. Pierre manages to put up an impressive fight but is eventually arrested. He is declared a Russian spy by a French general and incarcerated, where he befriends a man who, despite his many injuries, still sees beauty in life, and even shares his meager rations with a dog that has followed the death march that Pierre now finds himself part of. In the midst of this, he is forced to watch as several of his fellow prisoners are tied to posts and killed via firing squad, including a teenage boy, and he observes as several of the young soldiers who hold the rifles weep openly as they are ordered to shoot. 

When Andrei is recognized, the Rostov family takes him back to his estate, where he is reunited with his young son and his sister, Princess Maria, who, alongside Natasha, nurses him in his final days. When Natasha first goes to him, his failing vision captures her in her white nightgown as a blurry figure somewhere between bride and angel, and she begs his forgiveness in his final hours, which he grants (although I’m still not entirely certain that she really did anything wrong, at least not to my modern eye). It’s then that the film transitions into one of the entire seven hour experience’s most astonishing sequences: the death of Prince Andrei. After a tear-filled conversation with Natasha (Bondarchuk does something really masterful here by composing the screen as if they are looking into each other’s eyes, but Natasha is ever so slightly further from the camera, so that they are each looking directly ahead but not making eye contact, as if they are already no longer on the same “plane”), Andrei has a series of dying visions that are surreal in a way that nothing prior to this has been. He sees a mass of people walking toward him, the din of their voices incomprehensible, appearing as phantom projections on a wall and then disappearing, with the collapse of Andrei’s vision conveyed via a first person point of view shot that shudders and falls. Andrei, suddenly clean shaven and whole again in his mind’s eye, wearing his crisp white dress uniform, becomes translucent and crosses the room in which he’s dying in order to try and hold a door closed against his inevitable end, only to fail and then see himself, tiny and distant, a minute white figure in a great and dark expanse. It’s confusing and frightening while also being comforting, which is quite a feat to pull off in any medium. 

Death is described in Pierre’s inner monologue almost immediately thereafter. As the occupying French troops retreat from Moscow before winter comes and either freezes or starves them to death, their prisoners are forced to march with them, and any stragglers who fall behind are shot without hesitation. This happens to Karataev, the man whom Pierre befriended, and Pierre has his own psychedelic experience as he grapples with the meaning of all of this horror. “He had flowed forth and disappeared,” Pierre says, “it’s all so simple and clear. How was it that I had not known before? Life is everything.” He sees the world as a globe, which becomes an out of focus image that may be a dandelion, and as he has a breakdown when the prisoners and their guards make camp for the night, he looks up at the stars and, as if drawing the lines in a connect-the-dots puzzle, perceives the connection between all men, between all life. “Who is doing this to me?” he asks himself at one point in the film, and sees the faces of his enemies. Pierre realizes that he is both the imprisoned and the imprisoner, that he and every one of the people around him and beyond are the same, not individual souls but all facets and fragments of a singular humanity coming into conflict with itself, confronting and fighting, loving and dying, meaningful and meaningless. 

In the final half hour, the French spirit is broken, although not before the last battle of the war costs the life of one more innocent, Natasha’s younger brother Petya. He falls on the field of battle after spending the previous evening playing about the camp and imagining the war to come, before his innately sweet nature causes him to prompt the camp’s leader to allow a captured French drummer boy to dine with them. His death feels as if it’s supposed to have some meaning, but I’m also not entirely certain that I ever fully discerned what the thesis of this massive epic was supposed to be. I’ve written before that I’ve interpreted the many scenes in which the generation that preceded Andre and Pierre’s was one afflicted with an intentional blindness to reality, and there are scenes here that seem to continue that idea, most notably the denial and disbelief that Countess Rostova experiences when she learns of Petya’s death. In the end, however, the literally half blind Field Marshal Kutuzov gives a rousing speech that is positioned as a counterpoint to one delivered in voice over (via letter) by Napoleon, in which he praises the Grande Armée for their spectacular victories in the European theater of war. It is self-aggrandizing (“It is my wish that you should see your emperor clothed in grandeur and glory worthy of the sovereign of the first nation of the world,” and so on), and as he speaks, the camera glides past a seemingly endless line of dejected French soldiers marching homeward in the snow, the ground around them littered with the fallen, frost-bitten, frozen bodies of their comrades in arms. When Kutuzov’s men are reunited with the freed prisoners, including Pierre, the marshal tells his men that although they could not spare themselves in time of war, they can show mercy to their enemy, before laughing and saying, “No one invited them anyway.” I half-expected him to have the French POWs slaughtered in that moment, but instead he rides off on his white horse in triumph, which I found baffling as a goodbye to a character I was theretofore certain we were supposed to despise. 

In the final minutes, Pierre returns to a Moscow that is being rebuilt. The narration reveals that Pierre has realized “with his whole being and life” that “man is created for happiness,” “joyfully” contemplating “the ever-changing, great, incomprehensible, infinite life.” As he is reunited with Natasha, our view becomes that of God flying over the countryside, as the narrator closes the film by saying that “all thoughts that have tremendous consequences are simple.” 

There is very little more to say about War and Peace other than “That was a stupendous thing.” Try as I might, I cannot fully comprehend the effort that putting on a production of this scope and magnitude required. It is one of the finest pieces of art with which I have had the good fortune to commune, and perhaps the most harrowing depiction of the hell that men make for one another on this earth. The enormity of it alone would make it one of the greatest films ever made, but at no point does the scale of the work supersede its beauty, or its invoked ugliness. That this magnificent film is available to anyone in the world with an internet connection via MosFilms’ YouTube channel is a blessing, one that should be taken advantage of at the reader’s earliest advantage. Staggering, harrowing, beautiful, and timeless.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Irony, Sincerity, Hilarity, Clarity

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Does a comedy owe its audience even an ounce of heartfelt sincerity, or is it enough to just tell jokes? Is ironic detachment an open excuse for artistic laziness, or can it be a useful tool that cuts deeper than straightforward sentimentality when wielded with intent? I recently took in a double feature of new-release comedies that challenged my relationship with ironic, bad-on-purpose humor, which I used to enjoy without reservation half a lifetime ago. In my early 20s, I would’ve been over the moon for David Wain’s latest ironic joke-fest Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, which is so relentlessly, purposelessly stupid it’s almost indistinguishable from a hack studio comedy from a lesser mind. Instead, I swooned for the equally ironic but much more purposeful Maddie’s Secret, a new John Early vehicle that parodies hack TV movies & afterschool specials of a bygone era while also honoring their ability to make an audience cry.  Both were funny on their own terms, but only one made me genuinely feel something, which is an effect I didn’t know I needed in a comedy until I saw it was possible.

To paraphrase the great Robert Bresson, Gail Daughtry offers neither beautiful images nor necessary ones. The film starts in Everywhere, Suburbia, mimicking the imagistic sensibilities of a studio comedy from at least two decades ago. When our titular plucky hairstylist (Zoey Deutch) leaves the safety of the suburbs behind for a life-changing adventure in Los Angeles, the images shift to mimic the B-roll stock footage of an Entertainment Tonight segment showcasing the glitz & glam of Hollywood living . . . also from at least two decades ago. Everything you see in Gail Daughtry is intentionally, hideously stale, and much of its humor relies on its jokes being punishingly unfunny, all for the sake of above-it-all ironic detachment. If there’s any emotional investment in its low-effort mockery of pre-existing entertainment, it’s in the film’s broad parody of the Old Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz. Gail Daughtry’s name is a mirrored slant-rhyme of Dorothy Gale’s. The wizard she hopes to meet in the emerald city of Los Angeles is Jon Hamm (playing himself), whom she’s desperate to sleep with after her fiancée improbably acts on his own “celebrity sex pass,” to even the score. Along the way, she gathers a ragtag group of daffy bozos: a brainless management-agency desk clerk (Ben Wang), a heartless paparazzo (Ken Marino), and the cowardly John Slattery (again, himself). Along for the entire ride is her pet gay bestie Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), another anagrammatic reference to Toto. The Wizard of Oz homages are genuinely cute & heartwarming throughout, acting as the one shining beacon of effort & sincerity in a comedy that would otherwise rather not bother.

Maddie’s Secret is a different story. Ostensibly, the film is a winking, ironic parody of the made-for-TV “women’s issues” movie Kate’s Secret (1986), now set in the modern world of culinary “content creators.” Only, it’s not clear exactly how much of that parody is meant to be taken as a joke. John Early stars as the titular Maddie, reviving the same exaggerated drag mannerisms he brought to his 2021 “redux” parody of Showgirls. Early’s performance is a kind of post-ironic magic trick, one that can only be compared to Divine’s domestic melodrama performances in Hairspray & Polyester. You immediately forget that Maddie is a woman played by a male comedian; you just accept her as a person worthy of the world’s love, from the hairs on her stringy blonde wig to the everyday commonality of her sagging breasts (arguably, the MVP movie prop of the year) to the sensible shoes on her feet. Maddie’s in-movie audience loves her too, as she finds fast fame online making relatable cooking videos that outpace the view counts of her more pristinely put-together coworkers (most notably, Claudia O’Doherty as her test kitchen employer’s queen bitch). The fame gets to her, though, exacerbating her private struggles with bulimia so violently that she’s voluntarily institutionalized. From there, the movie takes a detour into Girl, Interrupted homage, introducing the audience to a clique of other women in crisis to fall in love with (including Vanessa Bayer as her ditzy roommate and Kate Berlant as her predatory lesbian sidekick). Everyone involved is technically putting in ironic, going-through-the-motions comedic performances, but the effect of the scene-to-scene drama is still deeply, painfully heartfelt. It’s a lot like watching an actual vintage made-for-TV melodrama on Lifetime, in that it can make you laugh and cry, often simultaneously.

Some of the disparity between Maddie’s Secret & Gail Daughtry‘s respective relationships with visual, effortful beauty is that the imagistic standards of all media have declined over time. Gail Daughtry may borrow its story structure from The Wizard of Oz, but its visual cues mock the pedestrian, smartphone-quality digital footage of modern filmmaking — intentionally deglamming & demystifying the Hollywood dream factory. Meanwhile, Maddie’s Secret is set in the world of digital content creation, but it pulls its visual cues from an era when even made-for-TV movies were expected to be relatively beautiful. The standards of basic craft were just higher in past decades, so that certain lighting & framing choices in a TV movie about bulimia could be mistaken for a Fassbinderian homage to Douglas Sirk. As such, I should probably cut Wain’s film some slack for being so aggressively ugly & mundane, since its lifeless visual aesthetic is itself a critical commentary on modern comedic media production. It’s just difficult to do so while there’s another comedy in theaters that proves ironic humor does not necessarily require a lack of effort, emotion, or purpose. Maddie’s Secret looks great, lands laughs, and earns tears while maintaining the same dedication to feature-length ironic parody. It can be done, and it is worth the effort.

-Brandon Ledet

Conan the Sequelian

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It would be ridiculous to claim that the sword & sandal genre is having “a moment” in Hollywood right now, given that two isolated examples do not equal a trend, and the two examples in question—Christopher Nolan’s epic Odyssey adaptation and Mattel’s failed He-Man reboot—are more of a “hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby” situation than they are brothers in arms. Regardless, spending so much time watching ripped men wield swords against wizards & monsters in theaters this year (over 300 minutes of combined runtime) had me thinking back to the ultimate icon of muscly fantasy cinema: Conan the Barbarian. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s casting as the sword & sandal comic book warrior Conan made for some gorgeous meathead action-fantasy imagery, and much of the original 1982 Conan the Barbarian film plays like high art as a result, despite its thoughtless participation in the lowliest of genre tropes. That mix of high & low makes Conan one of the quintessential examples of its genre, but what’s to be made of its two lesser-seen, lesser-loved sequels? Are they also high-art pop cinema like Nolan’s The Odyssey or are they ironic toss-offs with open disdain for their childish audience like the new Masters of the Universe? The answer, of course, is yes; they’re both.

As hyper-violent & hyper-horny as the original Conan film can be, the audience who most gleefully latched onto it were children in the same age range as its source-material comic book’s demographic. At least, that appears to have been the thinking behind its 1984 sequel Conan the Destroyer, which softens Conan’s sex & violence just barely enough to step down from an “R” rating to “PG” (in the precarious months just before the invention of “PG-13”). Conan is in live-action He-Man mode here, thrusting his giant sword against goofball monsters (like the pro-wrestler goblin played by a rubber-masked André the Giant), and picking up a goofball sidekick to crack wise along the way (Tracey Walter, whose performance splits the vast difference between Rob Schneider & Peter Lorre). Still, blood spews by the gallon from open wounds, and decapitated heads still fly across the screen, so Conan the Destroyer ends up playing like a remarkably gory kiddie feature. The highly sexualized casting of Wilt Chamberlain & Grace Jones as Conan’s companions on a mission to transport a young princess with her virginity intact feels like a winking joke that the movie’s school-age audience is too young to get. What they would get, however, is some insanely age-inappropriate violence, like in the climactic battle where Conan slowly rips the bleeding horn out of a yonic demon’s skull while it screams in agony.

While Conan the Destroyer exposes its school-age audience to adult-level bloodshed, the 1985 Conan spinoff Red Sonja exposes them to adult-level sexuality. Red Sonja technically isn’t a Conan the Barbarian film at all, since it’s adapted from a different property penned by Conan creator Robert E. Howard, and Schwarzenegger is officially credited as playing “Lord Kalidor.” Whatever, he’s Conan; the audience cannot be fooled. The only non-Conan thing about him is that he plays second-fiddle to the titular female lead, the red-haired warrior Sonja. Major kudos to series producer Dino De Laurentiis for managing to find an actress who could match Schwarzenegger’s cartoonishly wooden line deliveries in Brigitte Nielsen; Sonja & Conan make a lovely bonehead couple, especially in scenes where they use violent swordplay as an act of foreplay — teasing their mutual intent to “conquer” each other. The only problem is that there’s now a literal child onscreen jealously watching these foreplay bouts, acting as the audience surrogate and the would-be couple’s pint-sized sidekick. Also, the story starts with Sonja’s violent rape (which scares her off of men until she meets the godlike Conan), then goes on to include footage of a topless belly dancer and jokes about the child companion’s enormous penis. On paper, I’m not sure “misandrist rape-revenge saga” screams “kid-friendly adventure comedy,” but that’s exactly how it plays out, which is probably  the reason why Red Sonja is considered the nadir of the series.

Despite their dire reputations, I was mostly amused by Red Sonja and Conan the Destroyer. The only major disappointment, really, was that for kiddie version of Conan the Barbarian, they don’t make full use of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s talent for delivering groaner one-liners. There are a couple of jokes in Red Sonja that heroically go for the cheese, such as Arnold’s quip, “Tomorrow, I start my diet,” while crawling through a collapsed cave or “How’s the food around here?” when crashing a party in an enemy’s palace. For the most part, though, the wisecracking is left to the other sidekicks in his traveling parties, and no one comes near matching his comedic chops. There’s no reason why Conan the Destroyer had to have Conan punching out poor, innocent horses for the audience’s entertainment, but would it have killed them to have Arnold punctuate the gag with a deadpan line reading of “Quite horsin’ around”? Much like in the original Conan the Barbarian, he’s mostly used in the sequels as a visual symbol rather than a genuine acting talent, when he’d soon become one of the funniest comedic actors of his era, ironically or not. Neither of the Conan sequels go fully goofy with it, which leaves them trapped between violent action spectacle and kitschy kiddie fluff — a no man’s land for finding & pleasing an audience.

-Brandon Ledet