I’m not fully sure where the current film culture consensus is on the Duplass Brothers. They’ve been quietly making low-budget indie dramedies for two decades now, and the larger cultural response to their work has remained at the same low, continual hum. Back when they started in the mumblecore days of the early 2000s, however, their performatively unpretentious filmmaking style made a relatively big splash in the industry, enough to convince established heavy hitters like Jonathan Demme to try their own hand at aggressively casual digicam dramas like Rachel Getting Married. I suppose I feel some personal affection for the Duplasses as Metairie-boys-made-good locals who’ve survived in an industry that’s since moved on after mumblecore’s brief moment in the Sundance sunshine, but I only occasionally dip into their work when it touches on genres I frequent, like the camcorder horror Creep or the sci-fi whatsit Biosphere. Given the wider cultural apathy for their indie cinema contributions (alongside an even harsher indifference to fellow mumblecore pioneer Joe Swanberg), I was surprised, then, that their breakout debut The Puffy Chair was given a 20th anniversary victory-lap release this month, celebrating two decades of quiet, low-budget crowd displeasers from our old pals Mark & Jay.
Mark Duplass stars in this go-nowhere road trip drama, co-written and co-directed with his brother Jay. It’s partially a movie about brothers, contrasting the frustratingly rigid, stubborn personality of Mark’s protagonist with the free-spirit openness of his fictional brother, a habitually jobless artist (Rhett Wilkins). More so, it’s a movie about bros, examining the quirks & kinks of the modern hetero male ego and finding the entire gender lacking in morality & merit. Our two brothers in crisis embark on a road trip to purchase the titular La-Z-Boy recliner as surprise gift for their father’s birthday, hoping to stage a family reunion with a familiar relic from their familial past in tow. They butt heads on the trip, as brothers do, but most of their personal issues arise from their relationships with women. The free spirit in the van falls in love just as quickly as he falls out of it, while our egotistical anti-hero drags out a doomed romance with a long-term girlfriend (Katie Aselton) whom he’d rather bicker with than commit to. The entire trip is shot on handheld, commercial grade digicams as if it were a documentary, and the only major splurge in the budget is the puffy La-Z-Boy, which goes through as much anguished hell as the characters who drag it down the highway. It’s all low-stakes, mildly funny malaise until late-night alcohol binges make the romantic arguments too vicious to bare, and the characters take their frustrations out on the chair instead of parting ways like they should.
The broey sensibilities of The Puffy Chair aren’t an accident; they’re deliberately evoked as a kind of self-skewering. Every detail about Mark Duplass’s self-assured asshole protagonist is seemingly designed to parody an early-aughts indie-scene bro archetype: his floppy hair cut, his American Apparel hoodie, his tighty-whities, his entrepreneurial pursuits as a failed musician turned band manager, his name being Josh. This very clearly a “depiction ≠ endorsement” situation, with the film’s main mission being a character study of the minute ways that Josh is a self-centered prick. Still, there is a kind of default-macho POV emanating from behind the camera that doesn’t feel entirely pointed or intentional, and that broey sensibility might help illuminate why the Duplasses have quietly drifted from the center of the indie filmmaking scene over the past couple decades. The same day that I watched The Puffy Chair in theaters, I had streamed Shudder’s feminist talking-heads documentary 1000 Women in Horror at home, in which women filmmakers are interviewed about their participation in & appreciate of the genre. In it, actor-turned-director Brea Grant relays an anecdote about her early days as a performer where she frequently had to ask male screenwriters what her character does for a living, since she could get no sense of who they were as a person outside their relationships to the male leads. That question echoed in my mind hours later watching The Puffy Chair. Does Josh’s girlfriend have a job? Does she have a life outside the world of Josh? It’s impossible to say.
It’s funny that this movie’s quiet re-release has coincided with a wider cultural celebration of the TV series Nirvanna the Band, which got its own theatrical victory lap earlier this year with Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Both movies parodically skewer the same early-aughts indie scene bro archetype; Nirvanna the Band just has an easier time winning an audience over with overt humor while The Puffy Chair feels sadistically eager to dwell in discomfort. Between them, I feel like I’ve accidentally stumbled into a cursed time machine that only goes back to my worst college years. Their respective soundtracks are a major part of that temporal displacement, with Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie kicking off on a vintage Ben Folds track, while The Puffy Chair includes college-radio hits from Death Cab for Cutie, Spoon, and Of Montreal – all bands that have been collecting cultural dust since the dingiest days of the flip-phone aughts. While last year’s Secret Mall Apartment attempted to revive the new-sincerity hopefulness of the 2000s indie scene, The Puffy Chair & Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie brought me back to that decade as I actually remember it: grotesquely broey, depressed, poorly dressed, in standard definition. To their credit, The Duplasses appear to have been hyper aware of the era’s faults & foibles as they were happening, ready to be captured on MiniDV tapes for Sundance festival audiences’ squirmy mortification.
What’s the ultimate disco movie? Most people’s immediate thought would be Saturday Night Fever, but that’s because they’re picturing the few minutes of strutting & dancing that interrupt the other two hours of abject human misery that make up the rest of the runtime. Boogie Nights almost qualifies from a nostalgic throwback angle, but it’s more about disco partiers’ day jobs as pornographers than it is about their nighttime dance routines. Both the Village People vehicle Can’t Stop the Music and the Olivia Newton John musical Xanadu are strong contenders, but it’s hard to say that with a straight face without being laughed out of the room. That leaves 1978’s Thank God It’s Friday as the only legitimate pick for the ultimate disco flick, by which I mean it’s the one that you’d most readily show audiences who were too young or too square to be there and say, “This is how it was.” I assume that was the thinking behind the film’s recent screening at The Broad, anyway, which was programmed by the disco-themed Mardi Gras dance krewe Disco Amigos. Thank God It’s Friday may not be the best or most popular disco movie, but it is the most illustrative, like a cocaine-fueled time machine back to the most over-packed, overpriced nightclub of the 1970s.
This all-in-one-Friday-night ensemble cast comedy is set entirely inside and around the fictional LA disco club The Zoo. Much like the titular club in Xanadu (and, by extension, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”), The Zoo is an impossible fantasy space that offers multiple levels of amoral hedonism. There are multiple bars, an arcade, a makeout room, a crow’s nest DJ booth overlooking the dance floor, and multi-story bird statues seemingly themed after Baba Yaga’s home for reasons unknown. There isn’t a plot so much as there is an whole lot of chaotic busyness leading up to a climactic Commodores concert, which includes a much-anticipated dance contest for the audience. Thank God It’s Friday does a great job of keeping a fun party vibe going in the leadup to that payoff, despite its struggles as a comedy with an excess of whiny characters and no discernible jokes. Every single person who enters the club complains at top volume about how crowded, expensive, and awkward it is to be there, except in the few blissful sequences when they’re dancing too vigorously to talk. The only true standouts in the cast are a young Jeff Goldblum as the nightclub’s sleazebag owner, who spends that evening wooing an uptight married woman (Andrea Howard), and Donna Summer, who spends it trying to trick the DJ into allowing her to perform “Last Dance” as The Commodore’s unofficial opener. The DJ eventually relents (while the tempted housewife ultimately doesn’t), and “Last Dance” got enough of a main-stage spotlight to earn a much deserved Oscar for Best Original Song. Then, The Commodores perform “Too Hot ta Trot” to leave you on a strobelit high note, convincing you that this sweatily unfunny comedy was overall a pretty good time. In the movie’s own words, “Dancing! Everything else is bullshit.”
The best parts of Thank God It’s Friday‘s recent screening at The Broad were more a matter of presentation than of content. The showtime was scheduled during a pop-up poster sale run by Deadly Prey Gallery, who sell reproduced artwork inspired by hyper-violent horror & action flicks, hand-painted by artists in Ghana. When I arrived at the theater, the Disco Amigos were doing happy-faced disco routines in the sunshine, the exploitation genre freaks were gawking at art-gallery grotesqueries inside, and the city itself has rarely felt so beautiful. There was a second dance break during the film’s climactic rendition of “Too Hot ta Trot,” which the Disco Amigos performed quietly shuffling the dark, bravely pushing through the brief interjections of dialogue that lowered the song in the sound mix. They also handed out free kazoos at the door for a Rocky Horror-style call & response game that I still don’t fully understand, since I cannot recall a single kazoo appearing in the actual film. After Krewe da Bhan Gras’s recent screening of Mississippi Masala, that’s the second time I attended a Mardi Gras krewe’s promotional event at The Broad this year. In both instances, I felt like I was crashing someone else’s party, since both audiences were packed with krewe members and their immediate family, and in both instances I felt a warm welcome in the room anyway. I recommend keeping an eye out for future events from those krewes and other Mardi Gras contingents on The Broad’s monthly calendar more so than I recommend revisiting Thank God It’s Friday in particular. Like disco itself, it’s largely a “You had to be there” phenomenon, better experienced than described.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Brandon & Britnee discuss the drugged-out indie romance High Art (1998), directly following its recent Gap Tooth screening at The Broad.
00:00 Vinegar Syndrome Denver 10:16 Fackham Hall (2025) 14:05 Thank God It’s Friday (1978)
This movie has everything. Bald-headed Peter Lorre hyperfixating on BDSM theater. Sad little orphans with weak spines. A condemned man praising the Hoover Dam. Evil hand transplants. Carnies being guillotined. One—and only one—Caligarian German Expressionist interior set. A wax Galatea. Drunken double vision cockatiels. Train derailments. It is a masterpiece. And not even seventy minutes long!
Dr. Gogol (Lorre) is a masterful surgeon, a veritable miracle worker who spends his spare time occupying the same balcony seat for every performance at a “theatre” in which Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake) is kinkily tortured, night after night, in a scene that perfunctorily depicts some historical event. When he learns that not only has Yvonne been married for the entire period of his distant infatuation but also that she’s leaving for England to be with her up and coming pianist/composer husband Stephen (Colin Clive), Gogol is bereft. As luck would have it, a train bearing both Stephen and a skilled knife-thrower being escorted to his execution gets into an accident; Stephen’s hands are crushed and require amputation, but a desperate Yvonne begs Gogol to save her husband’s hands, and he lights upon the idea of using the executed criminal’s appendages to save Stephen’s livelihood. Even after months of expensive physical therapy, Stephen finds himself unable to play like he used to, although he seems to have developed an acute ability to throw sharp objects, all while his temper seems to grow ever worse.
I was looking for something to wash out the bad aftertaste of seeing Lorre in brownface in Secret Agent, and I could not have asked for a more perfect palate cleanser. Dr. Gogol is one of Lorre’s greatest characters, easily the equal of the impulsive, pathetic monster Hans in M or the perpetually sweating Abbott in The Man Who Knew Too Much, just an absolute freak whose gifted talent as a surgeon makes him a respectable member of a community that can never know just how much of a deviant pervert he is behind closed doors. Just when you think the film can’t get any more exciting, there he is in the distance putting a negligee on the wax figure of Yvonne he saved from being destroyed when her stage tenure came to an end. Then Gogol one-ups himself when a bid to frame Stephen for the murder of his own stepfather leads to a scene that features Yvonne coming face to face with this harrowing image, and all of us in the audience are close to crawling out of our skin.
Of course, much of the film’s success depends on the masterful direction of Metropoliscinematographer and later The Mummy helmer Karl Freund. The film is hauntingly gothic in its imagery, even when the subject matter is lewd, manic, or quite funny. Even the opening credits get in on the action, as the film’s stars are listed on a pane of glass that’s shattered by an angry fist. The script is also a delight, with my biggest laugh coming in the moment that the condemned murderer, Rollo, asks for a moment to speak with a nearby reporter named Reagan who happens to be American; their discourse is brief but ends with Rollo’s underwhelming final words, “Oh well, so long.” I can’t even fully put into words how wonderful this one is; you’ll just have to see it for yourself.
The last fifteen minutes of Number Seventeen are representative of Alfred Hitchcock at his finest: tense, thrilling, laden with spectacle, and very fun. It’s unfortunate that for a film with such a short runtime (under 65 minutes!), it spends its first three quarters treading water in a sloppy, lousy, mishmash of an Agatha Christie locked room mystery and an Oscar Wilde farce.
The titular location is a seemingly abandoned house where a number of figures converge over the course of a dark and stormy night. There’s an awful lot of farting about during which the difficulty in telling all of the characters apart is made even more complicated by the fact that a lot of proper names are thrown around—Fordyce, Sheldrake, Brant, Barton, etc—among four of the five men, but the characters give false identities at different times and swap them about between each other. Two of the men even have matching hats and identical moustaches! The gist is that a very expensive diamond necklace has been stolen, some number of the men are criminals, one of them is probably a detective, a seemingly dead body is actually alive (twice!), and one of the criminals is accompanied by a woman named Nora (Anne Grey) who is pretending to be deaf and mute, for reasons that are never entirely clear. The only man who seems to be what he presents himself to be is a squatter named Ben (Leon St. Lion, who had previously appeared in the stage version), an alcoholic who has a much-abused sausage in his pocket. It’s all even less thrilling than it sounds.
The plot gets going at last when the necklace turns up and it’s revealed that the house sits atop an access hatch that allows one to descend to a set of railroad tracks that eventually lead to a train ferry. A few of the criminals manage to board it with Nora in tow believing that the necklace is in their possession despite it having been picked from one of their pockets by Ben, while the man who introduced himself as Fordyce attempts to head off their getaway by commandeering a public bus. This is when things finally get interesting, as the thieves crawl around on the outside of the train to take out its various crew when they refuse to accommodate their demands, leaving a few petty burglars at the helm of a runaway locomotive that they don’t know how to stop. This is intercut with the rapid approach of the bus, as we watch the riders’ initial thrill of it all before they start to get tossed around a bit, and there are even brief moments when it appears that the bus and the train will collide, only for the engine to divert to an overpass while the bus passes through a tunnel that goes under the tracks. All the while, peacefully and inexorably, the ferry ship is coming into port.
All of this is done with miniature work that most modern viewers would find laughable, but which I find utterly charming. That’s come to be one of my favorite things about revisiting his earlier films of late, from the impressive opening sequence of The Lady Vanishes to Young and Innocent’s delightful trainyard sequences. This was also a young director who just absolutely loved a train derailment, and Number Seventeen has one that involves smashing through a series of gates and crashing into a ship, with the train car bearing characters I presume we are supposed to care about are slowly sinking beneath the surface of the water like one of those convenient submarine air pockets that the photogenic leads on Baywatch were always finding themselves trapped in. It’s a delight, and it’s almost enough to save the film, but not quite. The final fifteen minutes alone in isolation are worth the ticket price, but if you can, just skip to that ending and don’t worry about the plot at all. Hitchcock didn’t.
During one of this year’s pre-screening introductions, it was announced that The New Orleans French Film Festival is the longest running foreign-language film festival in the United States. That’s an impressive feat for such a humble, unassuming event. Even though it’s a major highlight of the city’s cinematic calendar, French Film Fest is by far the more laidback of the New Orleans Film Society’s two annual festivals. It’s more of a for-the-locals event than the Oscars-qualifying red carpet pageantry of New Orleans Film Fest proper. That casual, low-stakes atmosphere is a major part of its charm. Every spring, French Film Fest takes over the original Uptown location of The Prytania for a solid week of French-language cinema from all over the world. It’s usually slotted in the lull between the chaos of Mardi Gras and the chaos of Festival Season, a time when there’s nothing better to do than hide from the few days of nice weather we’re allotted every year in a darkened movie theater. There are even short stints of time allotted to make friends outside in the sunshine, in line between start times. I make sure to never miss it.
I caught four films during this year’s festival. A couple were older titles, a couple were new releases, and they were all the exact kind of non-commercial art cinema that most audiences can only access streaming at home (unless they happen to live in a city with a bustling film festival calendar). It felt great to spend a weekend watching esoteric cinema with up-for-anything filmgoers in a century-old single-screener instead of puzzling through them alone on streaming, where they’d fight for attention with my diabolically addictive smartphone apps. It may be one of the city’s least flashy film festivals, but its casual, accessible, warmly friendly vibe is what makes it also one of our best. To quote every hack journalist who’s ever been flown out to Cannes … Vive le cinéma, vive la différence! And, while we’re at it, vive les théâtres!
Below, you’ll find a rating & blurb for every title I caught at this year’s New Orleans French Film Fest, listed in the order that they screened.
Orpheus (1950)
One of the more charming quirks of French Film Fest is the way it integrates The Prytania’s usual Sunday morning Classic Movies series into the program. This year, that repertory slot was filled by Jean Cocteau’s 1946 adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, which previously played in the same slot way back in the Before Times of 2019. The programmers took the chance to make a mini-Cocteau retrospective out of the event this time around, pairing Beauty and the Beast with the director’s second-most celebrated title, 1950’s Orpheus (and inviting Cocteau scholar Chloe Cassens to contextualize both presentations). As with Beauty and the Beast, it was a pure pleasure to experience Orpheus for the first time in a proper theater, rewarding my procrastination in not catching up with it sooner on The Criterion Channel. Also like Beauty and the Beast, it retells a long-familiar literary tale, aiming to wow its audience with visual splendor instead of twists in narrative. Cocteau recounts the entire Orpheus & Eurydice myth in the opening credits, fully laying out where his tale of a frustrated poet and his even more frustrated wife will go by the final reel. His major deviations from that plot template are temporal and illusionary: updating the story to a 1950s beatnik setting and playing around with cinematic magic tricks to convince the audience of its otherworldly surrealism. It’s ultimately more domestic & restrained than Beauty and the Beast, but it’s no less essential as pre-New Wave French cinema — only “cinéma de papa” if you happen to have the coolest papa in Paris.
Jean Marais stars as both Orpheus and as Cocteau’s onscreen surrogate, a famous poet who feels out of step with the chaotic Left Bank youth who are taking over his industry. Orpheus threatens to blow up his life and his marriage when he starts flirting with the personification of his own Death (María Casares), embodied as an ice-queen heiress who funds the hipper, buzzier work of his youthful competition. The introduction of Death into his household kicks off a supernatural domestic drama that straddles two worlds: life and the afterlife. His wife is transported to the afterlife first, and his efforts to bring her back mimic the more famous section of the Orpheus myth. The amazing thing is that Orpheus initially succeeds, bringing Eurydice back to the land of the living for as long as he can manage to not directly look at her. The resulting sequence is a kind of domestic screwball comedy that literalizes the emotional distance between married partners who are considering cheating on each other, as Eurydice finds an employee of Death of her own to flirt with. The husband cannot see his wife, and the marriage can only last as long as the pair can stand to not confront each other head-on. In a way, this makes Orpheus a great thematic pairing with last year’s repertory selection for the festival, Jean-Luc Godard’s domestic drama Contempt, despite the vast differences in their genre & tone.
Of course, Orpheus‘s main attraction as a cinematic relic is Cocteau’s more surreal visual touches, which are largely saved for the afterlife sequences. There, bodies move backwards and in slow motion, unmoored from the physics of real life, as if in an underwater dream. That otherworld is accessed through household mirrors, which become doorways through an unspoken magic commanded by Death. That’s where the movie really won me over. I’ve always loved when fantasy movies dive into a scary mirror realm, but I usually have to find those realms in schlocky horror films like The Evil Within & Poltergeist III or the supernatural porno Pandora’s Mirror. It was lovely to see that fantasy trope in a Good Movie for a change, one that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to recommend in mixed company. Orpheus is too closely tethered to contemporary Paris to compete with the visual extravagance of Beauty and the Beast, but when it leaves that realm to find another on the opposite side of a mirror, it’s splendidly surreal in its own way.
Dahomey (2024)
The other repertory title I caught at this year’s festival was a much more recent release. Mati Diop’s fine-art documentary Dahomey never screened locally between its 2024 premiere at Berlinale and its subsequent streaming release on Mubi, possibly because its one-hour runtime made it an awkward fit for proper theatrical distribution. Dahomey‘s quiet, distanced approach to documentary filmmaking does benefit from theatrical exhibition, though, so I’m once again grateful that my procrastination was rewarded by this festival. More importantly, it reflects well on the festival’s programmers that they thought to include such a politically combative snapshot of France’s cultural legacy, instead of merely coasting on the easy sophistication of beloved Parisian filmmakers from the past like Cocteau, Godard, and Varda. Diop looks to the past by tracking the recent return of two dozen artifacts plundered from the former Kingdom of Dahomey under French colonial rule to the modern nation of Benin. She attempts to give life back to these stolen & exported statues by literally giving them a voice, allowing them to narrate their own journey from European museums back to their African origins. We spend much of the film’s first half in the darkened crate during transport, then watch the statues’ identity emerge while being cataloged & contextualized once they’ve returned “home.”
For all of its art-house abstraction, I was most engaged with Dahomey in its second half, when the university youth of modern Benin were allowed extensive screentime to debate what those statues’ return means historically & politically, if it means anything at all. It likely does mean something that the conversation—much like the artifacts’ return—is left frustratingly incomplete, with many of the students pointing out the insult of only two dozen artifacts being returned out of the seven thousand that were initially stolen. Not all of the Beninese reaction to the statues’ return is verbal, though. Often, we silently observe the observers, as visitors to the artifacts’ new museum home are documented as reflections in the display glass. What does it mean that these objects are now stored in an African museum instead of a European one, still removed from their original ceremonial purposes? Diop asks this question with no intent of answering it, and the voice she gives the statues is just as confused about what to do to fix the evils of the French colonial past as anyone else. The displacement has already happened; what to do next is literally up for debate. All she can do in the meantime is document the unsettled dissonance of the present.
The Piano Accident (2026)
The two new releases I caught this year were directed by French Film Fest regulars, starting with a new one from returning prankster Quentin Dupieux. Dupieux’s talking-leather-jacket horror comedy Deerskin became Swampflix’s favorite movie of 2020 after its riotous premiere at the festival, mere weeks before COVID-era lockdowns made it one of the year’s only theatrical outings for the crew. I only mention that to note that this year’s The Piano Accident is Dupieux’s best movie since Deerskin, despite heavy competition in intervening Swampflix favorites Mandibles & Smoking Causes Coughing. The major constant in those three Deerskin follow-ups is Dupieux’s ongoing collaboration with French actress Adèle Exarchopoulos, who has been making a bigger & bigger fool of herself in each outing, seemingly relishing the opportunity to de-glam and de-sexualize her onscreen image. Whereas she previously appeared in Dupieux’s goofball comedies as a scene-stealing supporting player, The Piano Accident expands their collaboration into a leading role, casting Exarchopoulos as a sociopathic social media influencer with no redeeming qualities beyond her skills to debase herself for money. She takes great delight in making herself ugly, inside and out, and their ongoing collaboration reaches new heights of deliberately vacuous absurdity in the process.
The titular piano incident is a social media stunt involving a piano dropped from a great height, turning a classic Looney Tunes gag into a grisly tragedy. The monster responsible for that tragedy is a ruthless content creator who goes by the screen name Megajugs (Exarchopoulos, naturally). At first, Megajugs appears to be a collection of off-putting physical quirks. She has the obnoxious laugh, haircut, braces, cruelty, and sense of humor of a teenage boy, stunted in her maturity from earning online fame at an early age. Her ugliness is revealed to run much deeper than the surface, however, when she’s blackmailed into her first longform interview by a journalist who wants to dig past her blank-stare surface. What that journalist finds is a vast, terrifying nothingness. Megajugs saw an out-of-context clip from Jackass as a teenager, discovered that she can make money hurting herself for other people’s amusement in increasingly violent “pranks” on her own body (smashing her hand with a hammer, setting herself on fire, “testing” her family’s electric turkey carver, etc.), and has since devolved into a nihilistic routine of producing self-harm video #content for likes — partly for profit, mostly out of habit. Dupiuex invites you to laugh at her self-destructive online stunts (such as dropping a grand piano on her own legs from a ten-meter height), the step back and gawk at the horrific mindset of someone who would produce or consume that content for idle amusement.
If The Piano Accident has anything direct to say about our post-social media world, it’s that nothing means anything, and the internet has turned us all into miserable pieces of shit. Looking at the larger breadth of his recent output, I think he’s also been expressing a growing frustration with having to explain his own meaningless, absurdist pranks. In Yannick, a theatrical audience talks back in open hostility to a stage play they see no meaning in. In Daaaaaalí, famous surrealist Salvador Dalí evades explaining the meaning behind his work to a documentarian who attempts to sit him down for a sincere interview. The Piano Accident voices that artistic discomfort with audiences & journalists even louder, with the villainous Megajugs grunting in frustration over the expectation to interact with her fans or to explain her artistic intent to the press. She has no idea why she hurts herself for other people’s entertainment other than that she feels compelled to do so. It’s starting to become clear Dupieux feels similarly about his own work; it’s more a matter of routine & compulsion than it is an intellectual pursuit. Thankfully, in both Dupieux’s & Megajugs’s cases the art itself is consistently funny, so it doesn’t matter in the moment that there’s a menacing meaningless behind the cheap-thrills surface. That’s something for you to ponder on your own time, miserably.
The Stranger (2026)
François Ozon is just as much of a New Orleans Film Festival staple as Quentin Dupieux, with past Swampflix favorites When Fall Comes & Double Lover seeing their local premieres at the fest. His latest film, The Stranger, is an adaptation of the eponymous 1940s Albert Camus novel, about an eerily vacant white man who murders an Indigenous local in French-occupied Algeria for seemingly no reason at all. Thematically, it splits the differences between all of the other titles I caught at this year’s fest, combining the literary traditions of Orpheus, the anti-colonialist politics of Dahomey, and the disturbingly vacuous absurdism of The Piano Accident into a single picture. Compared to the rest of Ozon’s catalog, it’s a little too stately to register among his personal best, but it very well might be his prettiest. There’s something to the John Waters adage that “If you come out of a movie and the first thing you say is, ‘The cinematography was beautiful,’ it’s a bad movie,” but since The Stranger is partly a story about the vast nothingness lurking under the surface of things, I feel okay saying that the black & white cinematography was beautiful, and the movie was good. It just falls slightly short of Great.
Benjamin Voisin stars as the titular stranger, a coldly quiet twentysomething who gets by on his handsome looks despite his near-sociopathic detachment from all human emotion & empathy. We first meet him as he receives the news that his elderly mother has passed away, spending two days with him in near silence while he travels to her isolated nursing home to see her body buried. As a result, we initially have no idea whether he’s always this emotionally detached or if he’s merely stunned by his grief, but it gradually becomes clear that the problem runs much deeper than familial loss. He is decidedly non-reactive to the constant human atrocities around him, from the neighbor who beats his own dog to the even nearer neighbor who beats his own lover to the daily systemic injustices against the Arab locals who walk the French-occupied streets outside his apartment. By the time he participates in those injustices by firing a gun, his apathy curdles into something much more sinister and much less personal. The entirety of human existence is literally put on trial as the movie picks at his motivations, which feel random & instinctual rather than meaningful. He simply just is, and existence is horrifying.
Camus’s political & philosophical ponderings at how “we are all guilty, we are all condemned” eventually prove worthy of the time spent with this quiet, impenetrable protagonist, but it’s a long journey to get there. The 1st-person voiceover narration that would give the stranger’s actions immediate meaning is delayed until after his random act of shocking violence in the 2nd act, so it takes a while for the narrative significance of the 1st-act events of his life to become clear. Before the terrifying nothingness of his personality is exposed in a French courtroom, we mostly just watch him sip coffee, have sex, smoke cigarettes, and experience a sustained, lifelong ennui — the standard French existence. If you have the patience to discover how the unremarkable hallmarks of his persona implicate much larger, existential evils outside his immediate orbit, the movie ultimately rewards you for sticking it out. Notably, part of that reward is hearing The Cure’s debut single “Killing an Arab” over the end credits, which will be stuck in your head for most of the runtime leading up to that stinger anyway. It’s a thuddingly obvious needle drop, but by the time it arrives it’s a welcome relief from singing it internally yourself.
Practically every adult I know socially has either a tattoo or a body piercing, if not both. Even I, a total square, have a few small tattoos myself, which you’ve only ever seen if we’ve hung out in an environment where it was appropriate to not wear socks. It’s increasingly common to see visible tattoos, nose rings, and other low-level body modifications in professional settings, since they’re now so common that they’re no longer transgressive or taboo. It wasn’t too long ago that this wasn’t the case. I remember tattoos & body piercings signaling a much edgier, fringe personality type growing up in the 1990s, whereas they’re now just as casual of a fashion choice as a quirky hat or what color shirt to wear. You can track the timeline of that body-mod culture shift in the new documentary A Body to Live In, which profiles the life, art, and spiritual practice of “modern primitivist” Fakir Musafar. From his early experiments with corset-binding fetish photography in the 1940s through his educational body-piercing and body suspension workshops in the 2010s, Musafar’s entire artistic, spiritual, and professional life was dedicated to the practice of body modification, and he saw that practice evolve from private kink play to public fashion display first-hand, seemingly involved with every major milestone of the journey. So, the documentary doubles as both a portrait of Fakir Musafar and as a broader overview history of body modification in the American mainstream.
I had never heard of Fakir Musafar before seeing this documentary, but he lived such a Forrest Gumpish life across so many various subcultures that I am familiar with that he continually crossed paths with faces that were already familiar to me: fellow self-promoting ritualist Anton LaVey, feminist pornographer Annie Sprinkle, professional Bob Flanagan flogger Sheree Rose, etc. Musafar’s body-mod journey was inspired by pure impulse (charged, at least partially, by unresolved gender dysphoria), and his early photographs were all produced in private, mostly consisting of corseting his body to simulate a female figure and then piercing that figure with needles and heavy ornaments. Once he found likeminded spirits across underground queer subcultures in 1970s California, the practice became much more social & less insular, and he was involved with a seemingly impossible range of extreme subcultures: heavy leather kinksters, Radical Faerie hippies, gallery-scene performance artists, and whoever else would show a sexual or spiritual interest in the ritualistic piercing & contorting of the human body. A lot of ground is covered very quickly as he drifts from subculture to subculture, always positing himself as a kind of mystic elder for the young & uninitiated to up to for guidance. We get to witness the evolution of professional body modification from the very first body-piercing shop opening in 1970s San Francisco to their modern omnipresence in every small town’s strip malls, but it’s always filtered through Musafar’s very particular, singular worldview.
For how impressively influential is subject was in a wide range of hip vintage subcultures, A Body to Live In is surprisingly smart about not devolving into hagiography. Musafar’s most glaring faults & criticisms are out there in the open, including control issues in his private relationships and larger accusations of cultural appropriation. In describing his early, private body-mod practices, Musafar explains that he was often inspired by ethnographic photographs in National Geographic magazines but would not read the accompanying captions, because he did not want the imagery spoiled by journalistic “interpretation.” Later, while promoting his “modern primitivism” philosophy on daytime talk shows, he struggles to articulate the authenticity of his body-mod rituals when confronted by Indigenous audiences who find his pick-and-choose appropriation of their cultures politically offensive. Even the term “primitive” is directly challenged for its political implications in the opening minutes, which might not be expected of a documentary exalting the movement for its positive influence across American subcultures. It’s very thoughtful, measured, and yet sincerely participatory in the body-mod spirituality depicted, making sure to include voices of dissent & discomfort with the practices’ cultural insensitivity while also showing the therapeutic & political good it can do in the right contexts.
Director Angelo Madsen does his best not to personally intrude on the material, except in a brief expression of regret for not asking Musafar a couple clarifying questions while he was alive to answer them. The most stylistic imposition on the material is found in the colorful psychedelia of the photograph development process, which helps transition from still photo to still photo without the clinical rigidness of an art-gallery slideshow. Madsen also arranges individual photos and slides on the screen to deliberately create a frame-within-a-frame distance from the original images, drawing attention to how Musafar’s curation of his photographs pushed his practice further into a fine art sphere than mere personal documentation of religious ritual & sexual kink. Musafar publicized his work through a wide range of artistic mediums, from the still photography he experimented with in his parents’ basement to documentary hosting in 1985’s Dances Sacred and Profane to confrontational performance art in the post-AIDS 1990s. It’s clear that his own body was the medium he was most interested in expressing himself through, though, as evidenced by his decades-long development of his nipples into cylindrical ornaments of great public interest. There’s a range of debate offered by the documentary’s talking heads about whether his primary motivation for that art was sexual, political, intellectual, gendered, or purely spiritual, and it’s to the film’s benefit that no one could definitively answer the question. They’re all partially true.
There are many more direct sequels to James Whale’s Frankenstein than most people realize. Universal made eight Frankenstein movies in the famous monster’s original run across the 1930s & 40s, while most modern audiences’ experience with him stops at the second one: 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein, also directed by Whale. Whale was already in a “Okay, now let’s do a goofy one” mood by the time he made Bride, sacrificing some of the haunting beauty of his first Frankenstein film for screwball antics and intentional camp. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s new Frankenstein riff is largely going to be interpreted as a feminist reboot of that early Frankenstein sequel, since it directly references a couple of its more outlandish details: the living bell-jar specimens of the mad scientist’s lab and the fact that actress Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary Shelley (in the intro) and the titular monster bride (in the finale). Hot off her Oscar-winning performance as the violently grieving mother of Shakespeare’s children in Hamnet, Jessie Buckley is deployed to hit both of those goofball references in The Bride!, briefly appearing as a floating head in a bell jar and, more importantly, pulling double duty as both Mary Shelley’s ghost and the undead woman’s body she possesses. That decision to extend Mary Shelley’s screentime via body possession is part of what pushes The Bride! past its limitations as a Bride of Frankenstein modernization to instead reach the even more ridiculous heights of later Frankenstein sequels like The Ghost of Frankenstein or Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Gyllenhaal has effectively imagined an alternate timeline where Lanchester’s monster had continued to stumble through increasingly goofy Frankenstein sequels the way that Boris Karloff’s did in ours. Instead of spitballing, “Okay let’s put Chaney in the makeup this time, and now Lugosi’s Ygor plays a magical flute that controls him,” like Frankenstein producers of the past, she gets to riff, “Umm I don’t know, now she’s possessed by Mary Shelley’s ghost and we’ll dress up Fever Ray as The Joker or whatever. Let’s hit the road!” To be clear, this is why it rules.
Christian Bale co-stars alongside Buckley as the lit-famous Frankenstein, who assures the audience early on that it’s okay to call him that, since he took his scientist father’s name; for further convenience, he also goes by the nickname “Frank”. Having now roamed the Earth undead and lonely for over a century, he emerges from the shadows of 1930s Chicago to beg a mad-scientist woman in STEM (Anette Benning) to create a bride for him to love. True to the Frankensteins of old, he shows a surprising amount of tenderness & vulnerability for a monster, so the scientist eventually relents to what she initially sees as a piggish request. The corpse she revives as the titular monster bride is a recently murdered sex worker moll (Buckley), killed for her loudmouth blabbing about a local kingpin mobster’s evildoings after becoming possessed by the uninhibited spirit of Mary Shelley’s ghost (also Buckley). Once resurrected, she starts with a clean slate as a bratty agent of chaos who can’t remember much about who she is or why she exists, so she goes on a soul-searching road trip rampage with her newly assigned groom, acting like two giddy teenagers who just ran away from home . . . and who occasionally smash misogynist skulls along the way. They go to queer dance clubs soundtracked by a Jokerfied Fever Ray. They crash cocktail parties held by the wealthy elite, hiding in plain sight because no one would dare look directly at the help, no matter how grotesque. They kill any cops who try to stop their good times’ short, then feel immediate remorse for the transgression. Most importantly, they go to the movies. They go to the movies a lot, which is how they’re easily tracked down by an old-timey lady detective (Penelope Cruz) and her bumbling, good-for-nothing partner (Peter Sarsgaard). The Bride! is hyper aware of its temporal position in the long history of Frankenstein cinema, and it tracks the progression of the artform across a much longer timeline than what its 1930s setting should allow. Its character names are all inspired by Old Hollywood stars like Ida Lupino, Myrna Loy, Ginger Rogers and, of course, Elsa Lanchester. Jake Gyllenhaal frequently appears as the onscreen avatar for that era, performing Busby Berkeley dance routines that Frank imagines himself dancing along to in his fantasies. It also introduces the 3D craze to its onscreen cinemas decades before The Bwana Devil did so in real life, frequently dips into New Hollywood homage and, in its most blatant effort to modernize the material, has The Bride shout “Me too! Me too!” during her climactic fit of rage. Just like its tone, the timeline of The Bride!‘s vintage cinepehlia is all over the place, as Gyllenhaal seems to be following her own whims scene to scene without worrying too much about whether the audience is following along.
Besides killing cops and hanging out at the movies, another thing these monsters do is fuck. Given that the film includes tender, heartfelt monster fucking and concludes on a needle drop of the Halloween season novelty song “The Monster Mash,” it’s entirely possible that Gyllenhaal’s initial inspiration was cracking up to the recurring “Monster Fuck” bit from Comedy Bang Bang and wondering whether it could be adapted into a feature-length screenplay. Other stylistic influences seemingly include the bratty supervillain goof-around Birds of Prey and the sour-taste supervillain thriller Joker, the latter of which The Bride! shares a composer (Oscar-winner Hildur Guðnadóttir) & cinematographer (Lawrence Sher) with, among 100(!) other below-the-line crew members. As much as they delight me, personally, none of these references are especially revered as recent cultural touchstones, so it’s presumptuous for the film to prepackage a readymade Halloween costume in The Bride!‘s design (crafted by industry legend Sandy Powell) that spreads as a fashion trend among 1930s molls within the film itself. The Bride! has been immediately disregarded as a financial & critical flop, with no way of telling whether it will be reclaimed as a cult classic or forgotten to time in the long run. Any criticisms of it as a shallow work of pop-art feminism will miss the mark on what Gyllenhaal is accomplishing here. Its Feminism 101 political talking points are more than welcome in a cultural climate where teens are constantly bombarded with manosphere & trad-wife propaganda, and I find the dismissals of those themes just as misguided here as they were in the more cynical dismissals of Barbie. More importantly, Gyllenhaal puts too much of her own personal interests & obsessions on the screen for the movie to be seen as pure political allegory. It’s a family affair, with her husband & brother invited along to play silly onscreen. She also gives in to her cringiest Theatre Kid shenanigans, allowing Buckley to run wild with the multiple personalities fighting for dominance in her character’s undead body: the ghost, the monster, and the woman. She also frequently gets lost in the geeky love story shared by her two famous monsters, bringing their Old Hollywood cinephilia into the New Hollywood era via a feature-length homage to 1967’s Bonnie & Clyde. She is suffering from a severe case of Hollywood actor brain here, but the resulting spectacle is so chaotic and so specific to her personal interests that I can’t imagine any other response to it than admiration & delight. It’s like a version of The People’s Joker where Vera Drew had $100mil to play with and grew up obsessed with Frankenstein instead of Batman. Bless her corny heart.
Undertone apparently began life as a radio play when it was first conceived by writer/director Ian Tuason, and it shows. It was also born out of his experiences taking care of his parents, who were both diagnosed with cancer in 2020; this, too, is apparent in the final film. It is, in many ways, deeply personal in a fashion that makes me feel bad giving it such a rotten rating, but while I hope that crafting the film gave Tuason the opportunity to process some of his grief, in so doing he created a piece of art for the public that treads no new ground and ultimately failed to connect with me on an emotional level, or deliver on much in the way of fear beyond the sufficient spooky atmosphere.
Evy (Nina Kiri) is the co-host of a podcast that she hosts with her friend Justin (an entirely offscreen Adam DiMarco), in which he plays Mulder to her Scully as they go through listener submissions of paranormal encounters. Having returned to her childhood home, Evy has spent a year caring for her terminally ill religious mother, with the 3 AM recording times of episodes of The Undertone serving as the only thing she has to look forward to, other than occasional visits to her non-helpful boyfriend, Darren. As Evy’s mother enters her final days, The Undertone receives ten audio files via email that begin with a man named Mike recording his pregnant wife Jessa’s sleeptalking, before those recordings escalate into aural terror.
There’s probably a really, really good short film in here. David F. Sandberg produced a no-budget short entitled Lights Out in 2013, which opened up the door for him to eventually make a feature of the same name in 2016. Smile and Night Swim followed suit as features that expanded creepy shorts into theatrical releases that have a decently functional core premise but which doesn’t have enough real substance to warrant a feature length picture. I was positive that this would prove to be the case for Undertone, but once I got home and looked it up, not only was this not based on a short film with a premise that was perfect for a 20ish minute runtime and which had imperfectly inflated to fill 90 minutes, but it also wasn’t a COVID-era script that spent the last half decade circling the drain in production purgatory (my other hypothesis about the film’s origins). It’s just a movie that looks, feels, and exhausts like one.
There’s plenty to praise here. Critics and audiences alike are agog at the sound design, which is admittedly exceptional. One would expect nothing less from a film about podcasting and which was originally planned as an audio narrative, but it’s praiseworthy nonetheless. Although the most recent Oscars ceremony has just passed, this is a strong early contender for a nomination in the sound category right out of the gate for next year. Kiri’s performance is likewise laudable, as she, like Rose Byrne in last year’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, is present in virtually every single frame in the film; other than her mother’s prone body, no other humans are ever visible on screen. While Legs spent most of its time in long close-ups of Byrne, Undertone balances that intimacy with long stretches in which the camera is distant from Kiri, isolating her at her desk in a third of the frame while the rest of the screen is filled with dark, empty space. That void invites the enlightened viewer, who knows about the subtle faces and figures in the edges of the frame in Hereditary and Longlegs, to lean in, searching for those subliminal demons here. The film foregoes the cliche of having something leap out of the darkness in a jump scare, which is also a strong point in its favor, instead opting for the audio equivalent by having Justin’s shattering of a glass play too loudly in Evy’s headset and other unexpected noises at unreasonable volumes. All of that’s good, and I again have to reiterate that this would likely make for a four star or higher short film, but as a feature, it just doesn’t work.
Despite Kiri’s strong performance, there’s very little to Evy. We know that she has a boyfriend, that she loves her mother, and that she hosts a podcast. Other than that we know she feels guilty about her exhaustion from being her mother’s caretaker and that she feels disconnected from her mother’s devout Catholicism, there’s not much to contemplate about her inner life. Evy’s lapsed sobriety is given an offhanded comment that doesn’t amount to anything at all, a Chekov’s gun hanging over the mantle, frustratingly jammed. Maybe her skepticism about the apparent hoax nature of the recordings bleeds out slowly as she tips the bottle more frequently, so that the fever dream of an ending represents her descent; leaving the loop unclosed on this character choice means that her first drink, followed by lying to Justin about it, just takes up space in the screenplay, irrelevant and dangling. It’s one of the textbook tells that the film doesn’t have enough ideas to hit the minimum time to be considered for theatrical release, as does the podcasting duo’s decision to listen to only a few recordings at a time. Rather than get through them in a single session (or a maximum of two), the film artificially and illogically stretches the virtual listening party out to four different recording sessions. The film’s repetition of (a) spooky recordings listened to/played with in an audio compiler, (b) Evy talks to a doctor on the phone, (c) Evy administers to her unconscious mother’s needs, (d) Evy has a spooky dream, then back around to (a) is repeated so many times that, when my bladder was full, I knew I only had to wait a few minutes until the film would lull again and I could make a quick run for the theater restroom.
Another thing that feels unsustainable about the premise is the inherent goofiness of following the narrative logic of “What if nursery rhymes contain secret evil messages?” to its conclusion. It’s not a secret that a great deal of folkloric melodies are based on schoolyard rhymes about historical events (or are retroactively diagnosed by later historians and critics as having been so) or that history is full of violence and ignorance, but the spooky, evil recording of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” really is a bridge too far into the absurd. Justin’s mind is frequently blown by reading the “origin and meaning” section of a Wikipedia page and acting as if he just got encrypted access to a declassified file, so when he downloads and sends the recording to Evy, he gets spooked by the coincidence that the version he found online is the same one that is playing in Jessa and Mike’s audio files. I don’t know, man, kinda seems like you and whoever is pulling this prank just landed on the same link on the first page of Google results for “spooky Baa Baa Black Sheep.” I know that I’m here to review the movie I saw and not rewrite it into the movie I wish it was, but when a film has this much potential only to squander it, I can’t seem to help myself. Imagine if Justin had masterminded this whole thing, that he had created Jessa and Mike’s recordings and sent Evy a version of an old song that he had deliberately backmasked in order to rattle her skepticism. From there, the story could delve into a more malicious reason for him to want to gaslight Evy (maybe her baby is actually his?), or keep it supernatural by having his audience-entertaining prank turn out to have actually summoned a demon. Instead, we get something that’s frustrating in just how much it’s held back by having too much imagination to dismiss as easy schlock and not quite enough to move the story in a less obvious, familiar direction.
The sprawling runtimes of amateur film-analysis videos on YouTube have seemingly inspired a new subgenre of documentary filmmaking among professional cinephilic directors: the durational essay doc. No longer restrained by what audiences would pay to sit through in a theater, essay films about niche cinematic topics are getting more unwieldy in length, aiming to be more exhaustive & definitive than they are concise. 2021’s Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched expanded what would normally be a 40min Blu-ray extra about the history of folk horror cinema to a three-hour flex, too gargantuan to be ignored. 2023’s We Kill for Love did the same for the history of the erotic thriller genre, exhaustively chronicling its straight-to-video period in a near-three-hour runtime (which I did thankfully get to experience in a theater, thanks to the fine freaks at Overlook Film Fest). That small canon has now expanded with Alex Ross Perry’s three-hour video essay Videoheaven, which has an official website advertising its availability for theatrical bookings but most audiences will watch streaming at home on The Criterion Channel. Videoheaven is arguably a more expansive project than We Kill for Love or Woodlands Dark, in that it doesn’t restrict itself to a single genre. It instead attempts to comprehensively catalog the onscreen depiction of video rental stores in all televised & cinematic genres, with all of its on-screen imagery pulled from vintage clips from movies, sitcoms, new broadcasts, commercials, and corporate training videos. It attempts to track the rise, reign, and decline of the American video store as a cultural institution by noting the ways it was characterized & documented over the past half-century of filmic media. It is, inarguably, more of an academic exercise than it is populist entertainment, but like other durational essay docs before it, its length & thoroughness transforms that exercise into an unignorable cinematic event.
Of course, these three-hour attention testers are only cinematic events for audiences who are already deeply nerdy about cinema as an artform. In the past, the durational documentary format was reserved for more socially or historically substantial subjects like Shoah‘s five-hour oral history of the Holocaust, Ken Burns’s eleven-hour recap of the American Civil War, or the unblinking institutional observations of any Frederick Wiseman film you can name. This new crop of post-YouTube essay movies about The Movies only offers a deviation from that tradition in the newfound frivolity of their subjects. It’s a newly achieved level of audience pandering, signaling to movie nerds that the micro-budget horror films and direct-to-video softcore schlock we waste our time with is Important, Actually. Within that new paradigm, Videoheaven already feels like the Final Boss of movie nerd pandering. It escalates the “Remember all these movies?” clip-show format from more routine pop docs to only include clips from movies that feature hundreds of posters for and references to even more movies. Not only are we revisiting televised & cinematic depictions of video rental stores, but we’re also leaning in to read the titles that populate the shelves of those stores. And since Perry is, himself, the same kind of movie nerd that he’s also pandering to, he shares his audience’s cinephilic interests to an almost uncanny degree. It’s not enough for him to include Matthew Lillard working a video store counter in John Waters’s Serial Mom; he makes sure to feature the scene where Lillard is watching William Castle’s Strait-Jacket on the store TV, doubling the reference. A wide shot of a video store exterior in Amazon Women of the Moon had me excitedly pointing to a poster for Russ Meyer’s Supervixens in the display window; Perry then immediately cuts to an image of Russ Meyer himself working that store counter, signaling that he shared in the same excitement. It was just as much of a pleasure to revisit longtime personal favorites like Muriel’s Wedding, Sugar & Spice, and The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert in clips as it was to spot VHS covers for more recent personal discoveries like 52 Pick-Up and I Heard the Mermaids Singing on the background shelves. One scene from an obscure McG-directed romcom called This Means War featured Reese Witherspoon & Chris Pine flirting in front of a video store display for DVD copies of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope in the exact edition I had just returned to my neighborhood public library mere hours before pressing play. I was indeed in video heaven: overly pandered, pampered, and validated.
The other tact Perry takes besides pandering to already-in-the-know cinephiles is claiming space on future university syllabi, functioning as a teaching tool for Gen Z & Gen Alpha students who might not have any direct personal experience in video rental stores. Gen Z gets their own form of audience pandering in the employment of Maya Hawke as the narrator, who appears onscreen in several clips as a video store clerk in the TV show Stranger Things (after opening the movie narrating her dad’s performance of an existential crisis inside a Blockbuster Video in 2000’s Hamlet, further justifying her involvement). She plays mouthpiece for Perry’s observations about the video store’s evolution in culture and on the screen, landing some fairly convincing observations about how the video store setting is a uniquely American filmmaking phenomenon, providing a space for the film & television industry to talk about itself and its audience. Where the script might slightly overplay its hand is in the claim that all modern depictions of the video store experience (such as on Stranger Things) are now commentaries about the past, as if any remnants of the industry are a form of retro-media nostalgia. I don’t know if that’s entirely true; not yet, anyway. Sure, most newly launched video stores (like Los Angeles’s trendy Vidiots or our local indie spot Future Shock) lean into kitschy 80s & 90s aesthetics, but there are also several major hangers on from the old days that are still operating as normal. Just a couple months ago, I watched a new indie drama called Two Sleepy People that features characters hanging out in the continually operational We Luv Video, and it didn’t play as a nostalgia trip to the past at all; it’s just a hallmark of living in Austin. Ross’s point will inevitably be proven right, though, and future generations of young people will need to have The Video Store Experience explained to them in order to fully grasp what’s happening in, say, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, in which the main character spirals into her own academic video essay project while working as a video store clerk. In the meantime, it feels as if Perry forgot the axiom that “You can never quarantine the past” (as posited in his previous documentary, Pavements) while mourning the recent loss of his own go-to video store, Kim’s Video in New York City. The real deal is still out there, even if it won’t last forever.
Although its subject may initially sound shallow to non-cinephiles, Videoheaven continually proves to be a rich text throughout its deliberately excessive runtime. It addresses the video store clerk as both a villainous know-it-all movie nerd archetype and as an aspirational archetype for those know-it-alls, hoping to become the next Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino by applying their cinephillic knowledge to the perfect indie screenplay. It pauses at length on the looming presence of the beaded “back room,” exploring mainstream America’s attraction-repulsion relationship with commercially available pornography (something younger generations will likely only experience in increasingly private spheres). Personally, I was most thrilled whenever the movie touched on subjects I’ve recently covered on this website—the trashier, the better—like the self-hating video store owner of Video Violence or the hostile video store takeover of Toxic Avenger III: Citizen Toxie, both of which are discussed at length as helpfully illustrative texts. It was reassuring to know that someone else out there finds this societally meaningless topic just as personally meaningful as I do, and I found a kindred spirit in Perry’s clip-to-clip interests at every turn. Academic exercises or not, the curation & duration of these exhaustive cinephila essay docs always end up revealing something personal about their respective directors’ obsessions & motivations. They’re achieving every video store clerk & customer’s dream: conveying good taste & cinephilic knowledgeability through media selection & consumption, establishing themselves as the intellectual champions of Watching Movies.
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