Author: swampflix

Rene Brunet Jr., Hitchcock, and the Prytania’s Classic Movies Series

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Oddly, the only time I’ve ever written about recently deceased local legend Rene Brunet, Jr. for this site was when I saw the storied theater operator introduce Cinema Paradiso for the Prytania Theatre‘s 100 Year Anniversary two long years ago. Brunet’s family has been in the business of local cinema operation since the 1900s and, at 95 years old, Rene had owned & operated many local cinemas himself over his seven decades in the profession. Within my lifetime, his name had become synonymous with the Prytania Theatre, which he had operated since the mid 90s. The last single screen neighborhood theater still playing movies in Louisiana, the Prytania is the physical manifestation of Brunet’s love of cinema history, a passion he’d fed into the co-authored book There’s One in Your Neighborhood: The Lost Movie Theaters of New Orleans and, more importantly (to me), the theater’s weekly Classic Movies series. Since the Classic Movies series began almost a decade ago, Brunet had been introducing his old favorites from cinema past every Sunday & Wednesday morning he could physically make it, usually with the same kind of anecdotes he preceded that Cinema Paradiso screening with. I’ve personally become very attached to those screenings over the past few months especially, thanks to the Prytania’s partnership with the New Orleans Film Society. Given that a particular week’s selection looked to be of interest, I’d make those screenings an essential part of my weekly movie-going routine. These aren’t the 35mm prints or 4k restorations of fancier art houses around the country (although the Prytania often programs those as well). Most films that screen for the Classic Movies series aren’t even presented in their intended aspect ratio. Besides the basic thrill of seeing them big & loud with an audience, Rene Brunet, Jr.’s passion for each selection is largely what made those screenings a weekly draw and I never heard him more passionate than he was when he was talking about Hitchcock.

The last movie Brunet introduced at those Classics screenings was The Wizard of Oz, a viewing experience that completely melted my mind in its Technicolor vibrancy, despite having grown up with its eternal repetition in television broadcasts. After a couple behind-the-scenes anecdotes, Mr. Brunet sweetly asked us if there were any bad witches in the audience, admitting that he could only see good ones. He would always deliver these routines from the perch of his wheelchair at the front of the crowd. Then, as he prompted the projectionist to start the feature, he’d be wheeled to the back while reminding us off-mic, as if he’d forgotten, to join him in the lobby for conversation after the movie, where “Coffee and cake are complimentary!” I never spoke to him in the lobby myself, but there was always something adorable about watching him hold court over the older patrons in his Three Stooges necktie as I made my way into the Sunday afternoon sunshine. I’d even come to get used to, if not sadly miss, the loud wooshing sounds of his oxygen tank at the back of the theater during the pictures, which was audible no matter where you sat. In a lot of ways, The Wizard of Oz was the perfect final picture to share with Mr. Brunet. Not only does it encapsulate the Old Hollywood movie magic he attempted to promote with the Classic Movies programming, but the pre-screening music at the Prytania is often a piano rendition it “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” so that space & that film are already forever linked. I will say, though, that I had come to most closely associate the series with the work of Alfred Hitchcock. I never knew Brunet personally enough to suppose who is favorite filmmaker might have been, but I got the sense that he always treated Hitchcock screenings with a special care & enthusiasm. They were always the highlight of the Classic Movies schedule and it’s downright eerie watching the director’s work at those Sunday morning screenings in Brunet’s absence.

In particular, I’ll always owe Rene Brunet’s enthusiasm in presenting To Catch a Thief for the series, a screening he prefaced with anecdotes about Hitchcock’s hatred of eggs & where to look for that distaste in the film. To my surprise, what’s often dismissed as one of the director’s more frivolous works quickly rocketed up to one of my favorites in his catalog. Surely, the benefit of seeing that Technicolor sex comedy (which is superficially dressed up like a heist thriller) big & loud with an appreciative crowd had a large part in my enthusiasm for the work. However, I’ve been to two Hitchcock screenings since Brunet’s career-concluding presentation of The Wizard of Oz and, while I’m not sure exactly how much the effect of his absence had to do with my reaction, I just didn’t feel nearly as strongly. For the deviously taut thriller Stage Fright, I may have been worried by the video introduction from Mr. Brunet, whose physical absence was alarming, given his age & the appearance of his health. By the time Strangers on a Train was presented, the news he had passed was weeks in the rearview, but still a difficult adjustment. This was the first time I’d ever seen Strangers on a Train, which is just as slyly funny & visually impressive as To Catch a Thief, but didn’t hit me with the same intensity. Several sequences within the film undeniably felt like Best of All Time cinema landmarks: the Love Tunnel stalking, the Life or Death tennis match, the spectacle of the out-of-control carousel crash, etc. I just wasn’t as enraptured with it as I was with To Catch a Thief‘s much cheaper sex jokes & Technicolor pleasures. That likely has a lot to do with my generally trashy tastes and the expectation levels set by the film’s respective reputations, but I’m sure the environment I saw them in didn’t help Strangers much either. With To Catch a Thief I saw a local legend cheerfully introduce a little-loved work from what appeared to be one of his favorite artists. With Strangers on a Train I had to reflect on the reality that I’d never share that experience with Mr. Brunet again, which is a sad enough circumstance to sour any theater-going experience. He wasn’t there to hold my hand through another long-overdue Hitchcock initiation and the absence of his enthusiasm was immediately felt.

While it is emotionally distressing that Rene Brunet, Jr.’s physical presence will no longer be a part of the Prytania or its Classic Movies series, his influence on that New Orleans culture cornerstone is promised to continue in perpetuity. His son Robert Brunet continues on as a co-operator for the theater as it transitions into its second century serving the neighborhood. His portrait that hangs in the lobby has been updated with a plaque commemorating his passing. Even more endearing is the decision to have Rene continue to introduce the Classic Movies series even though he can’t be there to offer complimentary coffee, cake, and conversation after the credits roll. When I saw Strangers on a Train, the feature was preceded with a short video clip of Mr. Brunet speaking to the audience from a seat within the theater, enthusiastically addressing us with a “Welcome to the big screen!” They even retitled the series Rene Brunet’s Classic Movie of the Week, a tweak I pray that sticks indefinitely. Even beyond those weekly screenings and that small brick building on Prytania Street, Brunet’s presence is something that’s going to forever linger in New Orleans film culture. Every time I see a Hitchcock classic for the first time I’m going to hear his excited voice encouraging me to take notice of the tiny details and backstage lore. Every time I attend a local film fest or indie cinema I’ll have to appreciatively keep in mind the loving care he put into keeping that culture alive, especially in a time when it felt like AMC was going to eat this city alive. Rene Brunet, Jr. is already dearly missed, but his near century-long enthusiasm for the local cinema experience means he’ll always be a part of how people in this city watch & appreciate movies, especially the classics.

-Brandon Ledet

The Supernatural Romantic Tedium of Anomalisa (2015) & Schizopolis (1996)

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In our initial discussion of our current Movie of the Month, the irreverently cerebral Steven Soderbergh comedy Schizopolis, I asked Boomer how he felt the film’s tale of adulterous doppelgängers differed from the similar themes in Charlie Kaufman’s recent stop-motion drama Anomalisa. In Schizopolis, Soderbergh & (his real life ex-wife) Betsy Brantley play duel sets of doppelgängers who cheat on each other in existential searches for romantic passion, only to find more of the same in their “new” partners. To me, this “Love the one you’re with” messaging felt wildly different from Anomalisa‘s central conflict, in which a traveling businessman sees the entire world outside himself as one homogeneous personality except for the woman he’s currently cheating on his wife with, until she too is absorbed into the society of milquetoast doppelgängers that populate his life once the initial spark is gone. I asked Boomer for insight on this difference because I knew he’d be better at articulating it than I would. He wrote, “Schizopolis is a film about projection, but in a way that explores the various ways that multiple individuals categorize and compartmentalize their interactions between different people depending upon the intimacy (or lack thereof) of their relationship, the difference in their social classes and the power dynamic thereof, the emotional distance between them, libido, and other factors. Instead of Anomalisa‘s Michael facing the difficulty of seeing every person–strangers, his wife, his ex, his boss–as the same, Fletcher Munson’s interactions vary, demonstrating the dissonance between his words and his thoughts in his conversations with various people.” Those differences in varying social interactions & perspectives truly are essential to what distinguishes Schizopolis from Anomalisa. It still surprises me, though, how significantly the two works overlap in form to achieve their respective goals.

One of the most immediately striking aspects of both Anomalisa and Schizopolis is the crudeness of their visual forms. Shot with no solid script while palling around Baton Rouge, Schizopolis has a strikingly informal look to it, approximating the home movies & sketch comedy hybrid that defined the style of The Kids in the Hall. For its part, Anomalisa adopts the medium of stop-motion animation, which inherently has a kind of imperfect crudeness to its motions. Offsetting the leaps made in the medium by studios like Laika, however, this film intentionally shows the creases in its characters’ faces, calling attention to its own seams & artifice. Both films also dwell on the anonymity of utilitarian spaces & the empty babble of corporate speak. In Anomalisa, Michael’s depression is amplified by the doldrums of occupying a hotel room while away on business, with nothing especially exceptional about his transient spacial surroundings. The Baton Rouge office buildings & suburban homes Fletcher Munson drifts through in Schizopolis are just as unremarkable & devoid of personality. Munson’s job writing nonsensical speeches for the L. Ron Hubbard reminiscent cult leader of Eventualism & author of How to Control Your Own Mind is also reflected in the big speech on optimizing customer service efficiency (or some other empty form of corporate chatter) Michael travels to deliver. For two films about supernatural events in which bored businessmen drift into romantic entanglements with physical copies of their partners, Anomalisa & Schizopolis both make a point to keep their visual pallets anonymously bland & unassuming. They both seek to wring the supernatural out of the mundane, which requires the outlandishness of their premises to be rooted in visual monotony. The differences between their achievements have less to do with their respective visual styles than with how one story takes boredom with the hegemony as a freeing opportunity for irreverence while the other allows that boredom to fester into contempt.

As Boomer wrote in our initial conversation, “The biggest difference between the two films is in the fact that Anomalisa only gives us Michael’s point of view and insight into his particular problems with intimacy, communication, empathy, and humanity. […] Shizopolis gives us the points of view of several people, and highlights how each of them have their own problems with communication, which vary from person to person.” It’s arguable which choice of perspective makes for a more rewarding film, but being stuck in Michael’s head certainly makes Anomalisa the more uncomfortable watch. In Schizopolis, Soderbergh casts himself as a bland everyman. Anomalisa envisions a world where every man is bland. Not only is every character outside Michael’s head boring (and vaguely reminiscent of Michael Ian Black); they’re also an annoying, unremarkable sea of braying idiots with nothing unique to offer the world. I appreciate the bizarre accomplishments of Anomalisa from an emotional distance, but never truly fall in love with the film because it feels as if it should display just as much contempt for its villainous protagonist as he does for the rest of the world. Whether or not his perspective is the symptom of a chemical imbalance, the lack of empathy in Michael’s worldview makes him out to be an elitist monster who’s far more difficult to resonate with than Fletcher Munson’s more recognizably common suburban doldrums. Schizopolis is willing to examine its protagonist’s close-minded selfishness in its third act reversal of perspective that replays scenes through Mrs. Munson’s POV, while Anomalisa just dismisses Michael’s cruel boredom as “psychological problems,” as if they’re something universally experienced. The most perspective we get from Jennifer Jason Leigh as Michael’s titular love interest is a sweetly pathetic rendition of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” which is played more for pity than it is for empathy.

As much as I prefer the deranged silliness of Schizopolis to Anomalisa‘s bitter people-watching, Michael’s climactic speech about customer service optimization does devolve nicely into a kind of dual mission statement for both films. He asks himself (and his audience) “What does it mean to be human? What is it to ache? What is it to be alive?” in existential desperation, only to answer those questions with frantic repetitions of “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” These films approach that crisis and the oppressive mundanity of modern life from entirely different perspectives. Schizopolis searches for meaning in interpersonal relationships, finding its frustration with the ineffectiveness of language at truly connecting two human souls in a punishingly tedious world that increasingly doesn’t make sense. Anomalisa, by contrast, despairs at the punishing tedium of other people, who are just as uninteresting & personality-free as hotel room furniture. No matter which perspective you find more honest or worthwhile, it’s eerie how much these visually crude doppelgänger narratives overlap in form. Their supernatural romance dramas are rooted in two incomparable philosophies, yet they’re both staged in a common, tedious modern world setting with intentionally limiting means of expression.

For more on August’s Movie of the Month, the irreverently cerebral Steven Soderbergh comedy Schizopolis, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

The Chosen (2015)

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Movie night (which is, like, three nights a week) in the Boomer/Boomer’s Roommate household can be a chore sometimes. We are very decisive people when it comes to where and what we want to eat, who is and is not welcome in our apartment, and which Simpsons seasons are worth a damn. Of late, however, we’ve had to make a hard and fast rule: if we want to watch a movie, we have 10 minutes to browse Netflix (et al) and make a decision; if we can’t choose by the end of that time period, we give up and watch either one of our staple programs (The Simpsons, The Soup, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, or Next Gen) or whatever TV show we’re currently working our way through (it’s Caprica at the moment, for those of you who are curious, since we binged Battlestar after the election for obvious reasons and needed a break afterward). His particular idiosyncratic desires also make it a challenge, albeit a fun one. Case in point: last night, I wanted to watch a horror comedy along the lines of Housebound (which we both found delightful), but he wanted something that specifically had the twitchy horror effects from The Ring or The Grudge, but not an actual J Horror flick. That’s an impossible thing to search for, but our interest in The Grudge did prompt Netflix to suggest The Chosen, which was more impressive and interesting (and funny, much to my delight) than expected, especially given its nondescript name.

The film follows nineteen year old Cameron, played by distractingly good-looking uberbabe Kian Lawley, who is apparently a YouTube star of some kind, although I’ve never heard of him before (maybe I’m just out of touch)*. He has an odd family situation: he and his mother Eliza (Elizabeth Keener, sister of Catherine) live with her parents. Grandpa is in a persistent vegetative state, and Nanny is in a persistent state of pettiness. Also living in the house are Eliza’s brother Uncle Joey (Chris Gann) and Angie (Mykayla Sohn), Cameron’s niece and Eliza’s granddaughter. Angie’s mother Caitlin (Angelica Chitwood) has been exiled from the house by Eliza while she tries (with mixed success) to break free of her heroin habit, an echo of Eliza’s own alcoholism, although the older woman is twelve years sober.

While Eliza is out of town on a work retreat, Cameron sneaks Angie out of the house for a visit to her mother’s apartment. When he hears thrashing, the cries of a baby, and screaming next door, he investigates over Caitlin’s protests. He discovers that Caitlin’s next-door neighbor Sabrina (Melissa Navia) is in the process of attempting to kill her ex-husband, who escapes, only for the crying baby to be nowhere in sight and Angie to now suddenly appear to be physically ill and behaving strangely. As apparently supernatural evil seems to begin swirling around Angie, Cameron has to try and figure out how to stop the monster that is coming for Angie before it’s too late.

The critical consensus surrounding this film is overwhelmingly negative; there’s not a single review on IMDb that passes the five (out of ten) star mark, and it’s sitting at a 30% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes (there are no professional critic reviews, until this one, I guess, for a certain definition of “professional”). I can admit that I certainly see why the masses would be turned off by the film; it’s not very good from a lot of objective viewpoints. I remarked to my roommate during the film that I found Lawley to be a surprisingly good actor for an “unknown” his age (his YouTube stardom was only revealed to me when I looked up the Wikipedia article for the movie after our viewing), and he carries a lot of the film with his performance. Knowledge of his rise as an internet celebrity(?) may have colored the perception of his acting ability for others, but I don’t feel the need to rescind or attenuate or revise my praise for him after the fact.

Non-subjective negatives do abound, however. The special effects vary wildly in quality, from creepy subtlety in smoke and shadow to terrible-looking CGI demons that would look more at home in an Asylum/Syfy original co-production. There’s even a sequence in which Caitlin looks at a picture of infant twins that turn out to be Angie and her now-dead brother Jordan; the CGI on the photograph itself is terrible, and it only gets worse when Caitlin sheds a tear on the image and smudges it while trying to wipe the photo off. Maybe the assumption is that the target audience doesn’t know how physical photographs work (God help us all), but regardless of whether it does (or doesn’t) make sense logically, it’s still just awful to look at.

Other than that, the film’s first big narrative problem comes when Cameron has to revisit Sabrina once Angie starts acting strangely. She reveals all of the details about the movie’s supernatural antagonist, Lilith (yeah, that Lilith). There’s a right way and a wrong way to do exposition scenes, and this one is definitely on the far end of the scale from Raiders or Chinatown, erring very close to poor Frances Conroy’s infodump scene from Catwoman. At the very least, it serves its purpose and then moves along from there, if you can get past the cringe. Cameron’s final scene is also undercut by some notably bad acting, especially in comparison to the impressive subtlety he brought to other scenes; given that he’s supposed to be delivering a badass one-liner to the aforementioned bad CGI monster, it makes sense that a first-time actor would have some trouble pulling it off.

But enough about the negatives! It’s understandable that a film that turns its protagonists into, essentially serial killers (don’t overthink it; it’s not Psycho) wouldn’t have able to land every joke, but the roommate and I were both taken aback and cracked up when some out-of-context characters found their way into the film to stir up even more chaos. We also got a kick out of a slapstick scene of Cameron and his sister dragging a body and hitting every piece of furniture in the house with it, which was a refreshing moment of levity in a pretty dark flick. We also quite enjoyed some of the surprise twists; it’s rare that a movie manages to fool both of us, but this one did more than once.

It’s not going to be every viewer’s cup of tea, and I’d go so far as to say that it may deserve its poor critical score from an objective standpoint. But there’s too much that works in this film for me to give it a poor score. The film dives in immediately and throws the viewer into the unusual family situation with no belabored exposition, it contains too many interesting and funny characters to ignore, and it has surprises galore, including a very realistic depiction of addict behavior, surprises about bloodlines, and a likable lead that you find yourself rooting for even as his behavior becomes more erratic and unhinged. You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both, and there you have this movie. Give it a chance.

*I did check out Lawley’s YouTube channel after watching the movie. It’s terrible; it’s one of those “my buddy and I have a bajillion viewers for no discernible reason, we answer questions and laugh and such” channels. If you want a recommendation for what to watch instead, my favorite channels to which I subscribe are Red Letter Media (love me some Plinkett and Wheel of the Worst), Alison Pregler’s Movie Nights (Baywatching is a delight to me in these dark times), Every Frame a Painting for your film language critical needs, Pop Culture Detective, and Nerd Writer (even though I hate that “tired but overly emotionally invested adjunct” voice that he sometimes uses at the end of his video essays). Of course, the be-all end-all of YouTube brilliance is Lindsay Ellis, who has been an influence on me for years now and who never ceases to be brilliant. She’s basically doing a free class on the different disciplines of film theory through the lens of Michael Bay’s oeuvre right now, and it is a gift.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

IT (2017)

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One of the more exciting trends in the last few years has been the significant uptick in artsy fartsy horror productions. Our last two Movie of the Year selections for this site, for instance, were It Follows & The Witch, with plenty of titles like It Comes at Night, Raw, The Babadook, and The Neon Demon filling out the ranks below them in what’s starting to feel like a legitimate low budget horror renaissance. With this embarrassment of riches on hand, it’s easy to lose track of the few stray successes that have cropped up in mainstream horror production, since it’s easier now than it has been in a very long time to favor the underdog pictures over their major studio competition. The most recent adaptation of Stephen King’s 10,000 page novel IT is an excellent wake-up call to the value of mainstream horror filmmaking done right. IT is an Event Film dependent on the jump scares, CGI monsters, and blatant nostalgia pandering (even casting one of the Stranger Things kids to drive that last point home) that its indie cinema competition has been consciously undermining to surprising financial success in recent years. What’s impressive is how the film prominently, even aggressively relies on these features without at all feeling insulting, lifeless, or dull. Even more so than well-received franchises like The Conjuring, Sinister, and Insidious, IT fulfills the major studio promise that big budget horror filmmaking can still be intense, memorable, and above all else fun. While indie filmmakers search for metaphorical & atmospheric modes of “elevated” horror, IT stands as a declarative, back to the basics return to mainstream horror past, a utilitarian approach with payoffs that somehow far outweigh its muted artistic ambitions.

Seven middle school dorks suffer the worst summer of their lives when their problems balloon larger than the usual abuses laid on them by bullies & villainous adults to include a hundreds-of-years-old curse that haunts their small, suburban town. IT converts the childhood nostalgia pangs usually reserved for the 1950s to a more currently appropriate 1980s setting. Inconsequential references to New Kids on the Block, “Where’s the beef?” commercials, and Tim Burton’s Batman slightly update the material’s Scary Stand By Me aesthetic, but its sense of small town Americana feels timeless, mostly untouched by then-contemporary pop culture. The Losers Club avoids contact with their school’s feral teen bullies and their homes’ emotionally & physically abusive adults by hiding out at The Quarry or in the library. Their inner circle is a protective shield against the evils of bigotry, sexual trauma, physical violence, etc. that haunt the larger world, but struggles to stand up to the more metaphysical evil that drives those real world terrors, the titular “It.” A centuries-old demonic force responsible for generational catastrophes that befall the same town’s children every few decades, “It” shows itself in this 1980s context in the form of missing, abducted children. Adults remain in a daze as their children disappear, content to paper over each “missing” poster with the next one down the line, showing no enthusiasm for determining the source of the epidemic. As the ancient evil creeps closer to abducting their own members, The Losers Club are compelled to defeat “It” on their own without the help of clueless adults in a climactic Good vs. Evil showdown. They even find a physical manifestation of “It” they can focus their energy on destroying: a sewer-dwelling birthday clown named Pennywise.

Pennywise The Dancing Clown (a heavily CGI’d Bill Skarsgård) crystallizes The Loser Club’s childhood fears into more tangible iconography than the larger-looming traumas that haunt their private & public lives: clowns (duh), basements, darkness, isolation, and so on. His individual scares work with the routine precision of a rotary dial. Children slowly approach personalized manifestations of their respective fears with a cautious, quiet curiosity until a jump scare releases the tension and the rotary wheel is dialed back for another tense build. IT is a collection of haunted house attractions (sometimes literally) in this way, relying more on the thrill of individual scares & set pieces than overall atmospheric dread. The demonic clown that personifies these horrors with a familiar, if grotesque face is an excellent anchor for its more general, community-wide evils that would usually take several hours of mini-series sprawl or (in King’s case) hundreds of pages of exposition to fully cover in a satisfying way. Smartly, IT doesn’t afford much screentime to mythology outside some light library research & examination of old town maps. Instead, it builds the collective friendships & flirtations of The Losers Club as a single group unit and then cyclically breaks down their ranks into weakened, individual members through the routine of its jump scares. There’s an impressive efficiency in this approach that allows room for isolated scares to properly breathe without sacrificing the pace of the group narrative, with Pennywise’s Evil Clown antics & red balloon calling card serving as an essential lynchpin to the whole enterprise. As fascinating as the more intangible horrors of IT can be, it really helps that the story is also streamlined as a Children vs. Killer Clown narrative to keep things relatively grounded.

While director Andrés Muschietti does succeed in boiling a strange, sprawling narrative into a manageable mainstream horror package, he also allows himself to indulge in IT‘s more surreal, intangible menace in the background details. Pennywise’s drifting irises, the paradoxical positioning of background extras, and a peripheral television broadcast that encourages children to play in the sewers with their friends all subvert the more routine, by the books horror thrills of the jump scares in the foreground. One scene involving a malfunctioning slide projector in particular fully delivers on Pennywise’s potential as a metaphysical being, allowing “It” to take an outsized physical form through a distorted beam of light in what has to be one of the most striking images from any feature film this year, mainstream or otherwise. The movie also impresses in its R-rated willingness to deliver on its children-in-peril threats, tearing out young tykes’ limbs and sinking knives & fangs deep into their flesh. This onscreen violence nicely counterbalances coming of age hallmarks like a flirtatious skinny dipping sequence & a team-building housecleaning montage lifted directly from IT‘s 80s reference points to create something both warmly familiar & genuinely dangerous-feeling. While certainly a straightforward, mainstream horror affair built more on elaborate scare mechanisms than artsy fartsy atmosphere, IT doesn’t just function as a middle school-set slasher featuring a creepy clown with endless rows of sharpened teeth & red balloons. The movie’s more adventurous, unnerving touches may lurk in the background, but they’re essential to the overall effect. Its Scary Stand By Me veneer is deceptively simple, but highly effective, leaving plenty of room for more ethereal horror to creep in at the edges. If nothing else, IT is a succinct, revitalizing argument that Big Budget Horror might be dormant, but is neither toothless nor obsolete.

-Brandon Ledet

Girls Trip (2017)

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In a summer when many comedies fell flat & promptly disappeared, Girls Trip excelled as a surprise runaway success lingering in theaters for months longer than its closest competition (Rough Night, Fun Mom Dinner, etc.). It’s not at all difficult to see why the film would carry a wide appeal & resulting financial success. As a star-studded broad comedy (featuring heavy hitters Regina Hall, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Queen Latifah among pop music celebrity cameos from performers like P. Diddy & Estelle) that caters directly to black audiences, Girls Trip taps directly into a criminally underserved market desperate to see its POV properly represented on the big screen. In a more idiosyncratic sense, it also cast an impossibly wide net in terms of tone. Girls Trip is an unashamedly maudlin comedy about adult sisterhood that drowns its audience in melodramatic cheese in its reflections on motherhood, religious Faith, adultery, betrayal, and falling out of touch with loved ones. It’s also one of the bawdiest, most aggressively horny comedies of the year, with a turn from breakout star Tiffany Haddish steering the ship out of its Hallmark Channel waters towards the prankish filth of Divine’s turn in Pink Flamingos every opportunity she’s allowed at the helm. These two warring halves– the raunchy & the sentimental– make for a wholly unpredictable, tonally chaotic summertime comedy that’s bound to grab the attention of anyone within earshot. Very rarely is something with commercial appeal this vast is so energetically strange & memorable for its grand scale acts of depravity.

The four leads of this corny/raunchy comedy feel as if they were grown in a lab to appeal to every quadrant of middle aged women in 2010s America. Queen Latifah is a skilled journalist whose talents are going to waste writing click bait hit pieces on celebrity gossip. Regina Hall is billed as the second coming of Oprah, a successful woman who seemingly Has It All in public, but struggles to keep her family together in private. Tiffany Haddish is a nuclear element of chaos, an overgrown childhood id in an adult woman’s body. Jada Pinkett-Smith is an uptight Party Mom, a “nurturer”, which is in direct contrast to her real life persona fronting a nu-metal band (!) & raising America’s most adorable space aliens. Self-described as The Flossy Posse, this meticulously crafted crew reunites after their post-college fall-out for an extravagant trip to New Orleans, where they attend Essence Fest & generally raise hell. Half the plot concerns mending emotional wounds between Latifah & Hall’s estranged besties as they try to save face in discussions of their personal lives. The other half is a group-wide mission to get Pinkett Smith’s hopelessly milquetoast Mother archetype laid. Haddish operates entirely outside either concern, ensuring the film’s immortality in her Freddy Got Fingered levels of depravity. Haddish’s lengthy tangents about ripping men’s hearts out & storing drugs in her “bootyhole” are paired with acts of mimed fellatio & a firehose of sprayed urine to completely pervert & subvert all of the film’s more heartfelt reflections on betrayal, reconciliation, and True Friendship. Haddish is not the only Flossy Posse member with blue material; every character gets their fair share of one-liners about giant dicks, camel toe, etc. Her performance just pushes the material into all-timer territory in its commitment to depravity & its freedom to exist outside concerns of realism or grounding melodrama.

New Orleans is the perfect backdrop for these sordid/maudlin shenanigans, but I have to admit I was often distracted by the way my city was depicted onscreen. The laws of movie magic dictate that I cannot nitpick the logic of the Hotel Monteleone’s carousel bar being near-empty on a festival weekend, the convenience of cabs & hotel rooms opening out of nowhere, the inhuman ability for the Flossy Posse to down consecutive Hand Grenades™ without exploding into piles of vomit, or the lunacy of a character having their morning coffee at the Topical Isle daiquiri chain. I can let these minuscule details go. The sanitized amusement park look of America’s infected bootyhole, Bourbon Street, was laughably unrealistic, however, and as a local it’s always sad to see one of the most vital, dynamic cultures on the planet reduced to off-season Mardi Gras beads & public flashing. From a tourist’s perspective, this view of the city might right true, though. There’s genuine admiration for the city in the film’s loving shots of the Superdome and local music touches like a twerking-flavored bounce show or a brass band rendition of a Bill Withers classic. Essence Fest also plays a huge role in Girls Trip‘s basic appeal. Not only does it allow for pop music acts to break up more labored stretches of emotional conflict; it also leads to weird novelties like this being the only film you’re likely to ever see where Ava DuVernay & DJ Mannie Fresh are both featured in prominent cameos. On some level, Girls Trip works as a dual commercial both for New Orleans as a lawless playground and for Essence as a concert experience. I just hope that anyone who takes the bait is aware that they won’t have as effortless of a time with it as The Flossy Posse, even with Regina Hall money to throw around.

There are plenty of reasons why Girls Trip shouldn’t work nearly as well as it does. Besides its depiction of a pristine, non-existent New Orleans, the film is overlong, dramatically labored, and embarrassingly cheesy. You get a whopping taste of that cheese in its introductory stretch, which heavily features a lazily Photoshopped group portrait of The Flossy Posse standing in front of a green screen Superdome and (I kid you not) opens with a record scratch sound effect. It’s somehow easy to even be charmed by that opener, however, thanks to how a look back to the crew’s college days allows for open 90s nostalgia (a hot commodity right now, another reason why Latifah’s casting was perfectly calibrated). If Girls Trip is indeed a movie-by-committee proposition engineered to appeal to as many people as possible, I’ll admit I was not at all immune to its scheme. The film’s gleeful participation in overt, oversexed filth plays directly to my raccoonish tastes. Even if the massive runtime or clueless sentimentality had entirely soured me, I still would have walked away a fan of Tiffany Haddish, whose Jerri Blank-esque presence elevates the material immeasurably. I wasn’t necessarily negative on the film’s emotionally manipulate half either, though. Not every story beat about motherhood anxiety or the struggle to maintain the integrity of Christian Faith & public brands did something for me, but the film’s overall celebration of female friendship is undeniably infectious. It may be a story that could have been told more honestly & more succinctly, but the way its genuine pathos is perverted by the chaos of bar fights, hallucination, and male frontal nudity made for a delightfully subversive summertime comedy. I just won’t shed a tear if Girls Trip 2 happens to be set in another city, so I can focus less on setting & more on whom the Flossy Posse is banging, pissing on, giving a sincere heart to heart to, etc.

-Brandon Ledet

The Wiz (1978)

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While still feeling the high of seeing The Wizard of Oz projected on the big screen earlier that morning, I took the opportunity to catch up with one of its stranger cultural echoes. Return to Oz inspired many childhood nightmares and Wicked sparked plenty a backseat singalong, but the legacy of The Wiz is much more difficult to pinpoint. The most expensive movie musical ever made (at the time of its release), The Wiz was a massive critical & commercial flop. Star power as potent as Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and Richard Pryor all working in their 1970s prime did little to save it from pans & lackluster receipts in ’78, but did afford the film a cultural longevity. A Wizard of Oz-based musical with an all-black cast is a fascinating concept with instant cultural appeal, a memory many children of the ’70s remember fondly even if its reputation at the time was dogshit. Many cite The Wiz‘s financial failure as leading directly to white movie producers killing the era’s blacksploitation boom, believing black-led media to no longer be profitable. After all, if a musical spectacle starring former members of The Supremes & The Jackson 5 directed by one of the most well-respected filmmakers of his time can’t make money at the box office, what black-marketed film could? The problem, of course, was not a lack of interest in the market, but a legitimate deficiency in the product being sold. To put it lightly, The Wiz is a total fucking mess.

Besides the typical energy & passion deficiencies that haunt all cynical cashgrabs with ludicrously bloated budgets, the main problem The Wiz struggles with is authenticity. The film’s superstar cast and association with Motown Records (including a Quincy Jones soundtrack), suggest a black culture authenticity at first glance, but its white producers & filmmaking team undercut that perspective significantly. Directed by Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico) and written by Joel Schumacher (Batman & Robin, Flatliners, The Number 23), The Wiz often feels like an embarrassing, borderline offensive approximation of black culture. Sequences involving sweatshop workers & humanoid crows in particular feel dangerously close to a minstrel act (with the crows being no less embarrassing than the ones depicted in Disney’s Dumbo four decades earlier, sadly). Even the film’s Motown-flavored soundtrack feels watered down & whitewashed for a wider (read: whiter) audience. The Wiz also can’t help but feel like an oddly cheap knockoff of the 1939 Wizard of Oz film, because of its rights issues. Based off a musical stage play that shares the same source material with the Technicolor classic, The Wiz was legally allowed to reference the L. Frank Baum books, but not elements of the original film. Dorothy can click her slippers, but they have to be silver, not ruby red. She can journey across the yellow brick road, but she has to “easy on down,” not “follow” it. Everything about The Wiz just feels slightly off in that way. Its basic hook is fertile ground for an amazing Wizard of Oz adaptation (and a lot of people very much enjoyed the recent NBC broadcast staging of the same play), but every odd step in its production amounted to a massive miscalculation. The fact that it could be great with a different creative team and less of a Studio Notes ethos makes the experience of watching it all the more frustrating too. I really wanted to enjoy it.

Diana Ross stars as Dorothy Gale (duh), a twenty-something school teacher who spends nearly her entire life couped up inside her family’s Harlem apartment. Ross plays Dorothy as scared & fragile, with none of Judy Garland’s awe-filled excitability. Her stress dream about traveling to Oz is triggered more by her fear of leaving the safety of her home than anxiety over her dog & the weather, although Toto does venture outside just in time for the two to be swept up in a tornado (snownado? snowclone?) in the Harlem snow. Unlike in the 1939 picture, Oz is an enclosed environment. Dorothy smashes through the ceiling and lands in a giant bowl of grits (*eyeroll*). The story doesn’t deviate much from the source material from there, except in its production design & characterization details. Characters have a tendency to speak exclusively in slang (or Joel Schumacher’s estimation of slang) and the world they populate had a grey, concrete “urban” look instead of the 1939 film’s vibrant Technicolor atmosphere. Michael Jackson plays the scarecrow, protecting a sunflower patch outside NYC housing projects. Comedian Nipsey Russell plays the Tin Man as a theme park automaton attached to a Coney Island rollercoaster. The lion starts as a concrete statue; the Munchkins are animated graffiti; the poppy fields are a corner of street hookers, etc. etc. etc. Only Lena Horne’s presence as an astral version of The Good Witch & Richard Pryor’s befuddled version of The Wizard aren’t marinated in Urban Flavor to “modernize” the material, but the relative blandness and the movie’s interminable 130min runtime raise questions audiences should probably never had to ask, like “Will this ever end?” or “Is Richard Pryor funny?” Anyway, Dorothy & her pals ease on the road, get an eyeful in Emerald City, defeat an evil witch, and then magically will themselves back to Harlem after learning about the wisdom, compassion, and courage they had in themselves all along or whatever.

As The Wiz is an eternal limbo of white men misinterpreting black culture into an overproduced, bafflingly boring mess of a late 70s musical, the best modern audiences can hope to mine from it is novelty as a cultural relic. The music is just as soulless & forgettable as Diana Ross & Richard Pryor’s asleep-at-the-wheel performances; Nipsey Russell’s robotic one-liners about STDs & his ex-wife get lamer by the minute. That essentially just leaves Michael Jackson’s scarecrow to carry the weight of making this exhausting display of oddball decisions feel at all worthwhile. He does okay. The costume designers rob him of his youthful beauty by drowning him fleshy neck & chin prosthetics, but he’s still a consistently magnetic presence with a golden voice. My favorite image in the entire film is a subway-set scene where two sentient trash cans attempt to eat Michael Jackson alive. That pretty much sums up the entire enterprise. I was frequently impressed with the massive scale of The Wiz‘s production design; the disco number set at The Emerald City was especially gorgeous in that respect (before it had time to outlast your patience). Its look is much more drab than the Technicolor dreamscape of its 1939 predecessor, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The dour look of the film echoes its more decidedly tragic tone, at least in the way Ms. Ross chose to play it. The problem is that the story its visual achievements serve is both punishingly boring & embarrassingly miscalculated. I’d love to see what a modern black filmmaker could do with this same material (and it sounds like I should at least catch up with its recent The Wiz Live! revival), but Lumet’s film ultimately amounts to a fascinating misfire at best. As is, it likely shouldn’t even exist.

-Brandon Ledet

The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002)

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In professional wrestling, when a performer is incredibly talented in the ring but lacks the public speaking skills necessary to succeed in the business, promotions will usually pair them with a “manager,” a hype man who can do the talking for them. Paul Heyman currently fills this role for WWE champion Brock Lesnar, who looks like an absolute beast when he wrestles, but can’t match a fraction of the gusto conveyed by Heyman’s world class shit-talking skills on the mic. Movie producer Robert Evans could use a pro wrestling manager. A hotshot maverick who helped transform the cinema landscape as a Paramount Pictures executive in the New Hollywood era, Evans has an incredible story to tell, but few of the skills necessary to tell them well. In short, he’s an unlikable blowhard, one who barrels through his own boardroom war stories as if he’s vacuuming up rails of coke. His fast-paced, monotone voice-over delivery does no favors for his objectively fascinating anecdotes, besides maybe keeping them succinct. The history of Robert Evans’s professional life is a wild tale, but it’s likely one that should have been delivered by anyone else in the world besides the asshole who lived it, who’s so rushed & incomprehensible he borders on requiring subtitles to be understood. At one time in the 1970s, Robert Evans had everything he could want in the world, but to this day he lacks the one thing he needs most: a hype man, a manager.

The documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture makes the ill-advised decision of providing a platform for Bob Evans to tell his own story, read from his autobiography, despite his goddawful mic skills. Not only does this skew the truth behind what ends up being a great story anyway; it also constantly reminds you that it could not have happened to a bigger schmuck. It’s a testament to just how unlikely & compelling Evans’s E! True Hollywood Story is on its own merits that the documentary remains intensely watchable throughout, despite the giant asshole it’s meant to mythologize constantly getting in the way. Evans was the Vice President of a NYC sportswear company before being “discovered” as an actor poolside in LA. He’ll be the first to admit that he was only a “half-assed” actor, cast entirely for his looks instead of his skills, but the few roles he landed gave his business-minded brain an unignorable hunger for the movie industry. He used the publicity generated from his unusual entry into Hollywood to maneuver his way into a position as producer for Paramount Pictures. At the time, the studio was struggling for survival as the 60s were dying out & younger audiences were desperate for the New Hollywood adrenaline that was soon to come. Evans helped drive this Hollywood revival, developing a string of smash cultural hits that revitalized his studio: Rosemary’s Baby, Love Story, The Godfather, Harold & Maude, Paper Moon, Chinatown, etc. According to Evans, he personally had to fight to make sure every picture survived, explaining to the studio why they needed Roman Polanski to direct, how Sicilian mobster films could possibly be a hit, and so on. You’d think he was the greatest genius of all time by the way he tells it, but that didn’t prevent him at all from succumbing to the downfalls of cocaine, lawsuits, criminal cases, and having romantic partners wooed by Steve McQueen that end all tragic Hollywood stories. He’s a lot more stingy with the details on those particular anecdotes, but they do color the credibility of his all-out success stories.

I’m being very hard on Evans here, but after listening to him philosophize about “dames,” “Pollacks,” and the differences between Sicilians & Jews for 90 minutes, I couldn’t help but think of him as tacky at best, a raging asshole at worst. The Kid Stays in the Picture is a special kind of vanity project that not only glorifies its subject as The Greatest Genius Who Ever Lived, but also operates as a sort of CliffsNotes advertisement for his autobiography by the same name. I suppose Evans is somewhat charming in his old-fashioned brand of assholery. At the very least, I appreciate the abrupt, ornery way the movie concludes with a “I’m still here, you fucks!” sentiment. Directors Brett Morgan & Nanette Burstein also do an excellent job of assembling archival footage & photographs, not only of Evans hamming it up for the press, but of backstage gems like Mia Farrow dancing in her Rosemary’s Baby costuming. Digital cinematography detailing Evans’s New Hollywood mansion unfortunately has a cheap, television-grade quality to it, but otherwise the doc has a fantastic collage-in-motion effect that matches its subject’s energy nicely. I especially admire the way it assumes the audience recognizes every film & celebrity referenced onscreen and uses their imagery for artistic effect without over-explaining their cultural significance. Really, the only problem with the film is Evans himself; he really could have used a hype man as a narrator to cut down on his monotone bravado. However, the story is too good to toss aside just because it details the life of a schmuck and a blowhard.

-Brandon Ledet

The Well-Intentioned Letdown of When John Waters Targeted the Art World

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Starting with the mid-career course correction of Polyester, cult director John Waters had a kind of creative epiphany. In his earliest works of divine genius (Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, etc.), the trash-dwelling provocateur gave life to insular freakshows of over-the-top Baltimore personalities, outsiders who were naturally exuding a punk rock nastiness when hippie feel-goodery still ruled the counterculture. Polyester and its suburban-set follow-ups (Hairspray, Cry-Baby, Serial Mom) found an even more subversive platform for his cinematic freaks, contrasting their outlandish trashiness with the supposedly more well-behaved sect of Proper Society. Hairspray & Cry-Baby were especially adept at exposing suburbia for being a sea of hateful, racist, close-minded assholes in a way that wouldn’t be apparent in more insular settings like Desperate Living‘s Mortville, where the weirdos keep to themselves. After four consecutive films exposed this suburban evil, however, Waters was in need of a new target. Mainstream commercial success had entirely changed his outsider status as a renegade filmmaker & a provocateur by the mid-90s. Waters found himself the toast of both the suburban monsters he’d lampooned for the better part of a decade and the art world snobs who enjoyed his early works for their supposed dedication to irony. With suburbia thoroughly skewered, the director fired off two successive films that targeted the ironic hipsters & mainstream moviegoers who fundamentally misunderstood his passions & his appeal. The intent was admirably calculated, but the results were . . . mixed.

It pains me to write anything even remotely negative about a director I consider to be the greatest artist, if not greatest human being, of all times forever. The nu-metal vibes of the late 90s & early 00s were just poisonous for pop culture in general, though, so it would make sense that Waters would experience the worst creative slump of his career in that era. You can feel him introspectively reaching for something to say in his 1998 comedy Pecker, which continues his childhood period piece navel-gazing in Hairspray & Cry-Baby by centering on a weirdo teen artist who accidentally makes it big just by goofing around with his nobody loved-ones in Baltimore. I think the biggest misconception of Waters’s career, particularly in his early “trash” pictures, is that his portrayals of over-the-top Baltimore caricatures are entirely rooted in a sense of irony. Those pictures are actually coming from a place of feverishly obsessive love. There’s obviously a sense of camp that informs his humor, but Waters also deeply loves & admires early regulars like Divine, Mink Stole, and Edith Massey (as well as his home city of Baltimore) and seemingly only makes his films as a way to document & broadcast their art & their obsessions. Pecker is, above all else, a film about that clash between his intent & public perception of his work. Just as Waters obsessively made movies about his weirdo friends in 1970s Baltimore, he depicts a young photographer (Edward Furlong, the titular Pecker) who obsessively documents his loved ones & their surroundings on the same city streets. That’s why it’s such a betrayal when, in the film and in life, Big City hipsters latch onto those characters only with a sense of irony, laughing at them instead of with them.

Pecker is a film about obsession & authenticity. Even beyond the titular protagonist’s bottomless passion for photography, every character in his social circle has a sitcom-esque dedication to a singular interest: candy, laundromats, shoplifting, clothing the homeless, gay men, pubic hair, ventriloquism, teabagging, etc. These damned souls stay dutifully within their own lanes, only speaking on their one respective topic of interest whenever prompted for dialogue. Pecker finds their passions endearing & documents them within his own sole interest: photography. When his art takes off to an unlikely notoriety in New York City, he assumes everyone championing his photographs is similarly celebrating the beauty of his subjects. Instead, they’re ironically laughing at his “culturally challenged” family & friends for their perceived tackiness. Once this Big City hipster irony is revealed as a real world evil, the film eventually takes the form of a good-natured revenge tale. Pecker invites his new Art World “friends” to Baltimore for his latest show, where they’re given a taste of their own medicine as the derogatory subject of his photographs, a source of mockery. They’re briefly gawked at by Baltimore weirdos as the true freaks for once, until Pecker unites both sides for a climactic party where everyone shares indulgences in each other’s obsessions & collectively cheer, “To the end of irony!” The point being made in that celebration is admirable and I love that Waters took his audience to task for looking down on his weirdo friends as inhuman curiosities instead of genuinely joining in the celebration of their obsessions. The comedy just doesn’t feel as sharp or, frankly, as dirty as it should to match the laugh riot heights of earlier triumphs. Besides a few details involving strip clubs & gay bars (of which The Fudge Palace feels like an obvious ode to New Orleans staple The Corner Pocket), the film didn’t feel very much interested in its own subjects, at least not with the same obsessive intensity they were interested in things like candy & pubic hair. It seems in making a film about art & obsessions, Waters somewhat lost track of funneling his own passionate obsessions into his art.

Cecil B. Demented, the 2000 follow-up to Pecker, feels even more creatively exhausted. Waters shifts his focus slightly from the irony of Art World assholes to the slow death of modern cinema, which he sees as being completely drained of the obsessive artistic passions of his earlier work. Here, the director sides with the artsy types he previously lampooned in order to take aim at the corporate business end of film production. In an opening credits sequence that’s only become more relevant as the years roll on, movie theater marquees are overrun by sequels, franchise titles like Star Trek & Star Wars, comedies starring disposable knuckleheads like Pauly Shore, and art films dubbed from their original languages. As Pecker toasted, “To the end of irony!,” Cecil B. Demented cries, “Death to those who support mainstream cinema!” This is essentially a heist picture where a “teenage” gang (including early appearances from Michael Shannon, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Adrian Grenier) kidnaps a famed Hollywood starlet (Melanie Griffith, who has no trouble slipping into the role of Terrible Actress) and forces her into a guerilla film production that often borders on outright terrorism. Literally wearing their influences on their sleeves in the forms of tattooed names like William Castle, David Lynch, Herschell Gordon Lewis, and Kenneth Anger, they attempt to disrupt business-as-usual Hollywood filmmaking by bringing artistic obsession back to the forefront of the industry. There’s an unfortunate irony in this intense focus on authenticity, as the movie doesn’t feel nearly as dangerous or as personal as Waters’s own past in guerilla filmmaking. His murderous cinephiles are certainly silly, but you get the sense that he’s on their side, while still failing to live up to their impossible ideals. “Technique is nothing but failed style,” is a great line in isolation, but I’m not sure what it means in a work that’s Waters’s least funny, least stylish, and most obedient adherence to the mainstream technique of its time: the nu-metal Dark Ages.

By the mid-90s, John Waters’s outsider aesthetic had become an essential part of mainstream filmmaking thanks the gross-out comedy boom that followed the success of There’s Something About Mary. There’s an “Okay, what now?” quality to Pecker & Cecil B. Demented that might be a direct result of that assimilation. With a sensibility he was on the ground floor of establishing now the mainstream standard and his own personal obsessions already documented for infamy in previous works, Waters had to find new purpose for his art in a time mired in one of our worst modern pop culture slumps. I admire his ambition in tackling the commercial end of art production in Cecil B. Demented & the earnestness of the art consumer in Pecker, even if I believe those films to represent his worst creative period. Not only is it a half-assed put-down for me to call out a film or two for being the worst releases from my favorite director; this story also has a happy ending in John Waters eventually getting his groove back back in the excellent 2004 sex comedy A Dirty Shame, his most recent (and most underrated) film to date. Having proven himself in so many other titles that transcend these nu-metal era doldrums, Waters’s Art World potshots are worth having around if not only for giving voice to the director’s take on the art & commerce compromises of his industry. Characters describing Pecker’s photography persona as “a humane Diane Arbus” while Cindy Sherman (playing herself) walks around art galleries offering Valium to children or a dangerously horny Michael Shannon shouting “Tell me about Mel Gibson’s dick and balls!” are worthwhile indulgences for their own sake, even if they don’t match the obsessive passion of documenting Divine & Edith Massey’s exploits in the Dreamlanders era. I may wish that the final products were a little funnier & more artistically distinct, but I love that Waters took the time to dismantle art world pretension & empties commercialism once he was done vilifying suburban normies.

-Brandon Ledet

John Waters’s Period Pieces as Punk Culture History Lessons

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One of the most fascinating aspects of early John Waters pictures like Multiple Maniacs & Pink Flamingos is how at home they feel with punk culture despite being released well before punk even had a name. Waters’s early 70s freak shows arrived at a time when feel-good Free Love vibes dominated the counterculture, feeling completely out of step in their amoral nastiness & gleeful shock value chaos. The leopard print & leather costuming, bright hair dye, old cars, and return to straightforward rock n’ roll (as opposed to the era’s psychedelic folk & bloated arena rock) of Waters’s early films telegraphed & possibly influenced a lot of what the punk subculture would come to accept as identifiers & badges of dishonor in the years to follow. It’d be easy to think of Multiple Maniacs & Pink Flamingos as being ahead of their time in that way, but a lot of those signifiers of tackiness & bad taste were actually deliberately old-fashioned & out of style holdovers from the 50s & 60s. Waters’s freak show atrocities were poor, degenerate weirdos, conspicuously out of step with the times & repurposing fashion from their parents’ closets and secondhand stores around Baltimore. Waters’s early films suggest that punk culture had existed long before it had a name; watching teen rebels in 1950s garb devour cops alive in Pink Flamingos and defile Catholic churches with blasphemous ass play in Multiple Maniacs bridges the gap between early rock n’ roll rebels & the punk era’s return to that nasty simplicity by skipping over hippie niceness entirely. When the director made his move into mainstream filmmaking with the period pieces Hairspray & Cry-Baby in the 1980s, he made that connection even more explicit, detailing the undercurrent of punk culture rebelliousness that’s always existed among teen outsiders & societal rejects.

Waters often cites Hairspray as the most subversive film of his career. The idea that the unapologetically queer director of some of the greatest shock value films of all time somehow made a massively popular PG-rated comedy about the evils of racism definitely feels like a provocateur getting away with something. Set in early 1960s Baltimore, Hairspray recreates the American Bandstand era pop music mania of Waters’s youth both as a nexus of nostalgia for the time’s tacky fashions & as a platform to discuss the hypocrisy of cultural appropriation. The white teens of the film’s bygone suburbia structure their entire lives around dancing on television to black music, but refuse to integrate socially with actual black people. A baby-faced Ricki Lake stars as Waters’s chief rabble-rouser, who protests Baltimore’s local Bandstand knockoff (The Corny Collins Show) for failing to racially integrate beyond featuring black musicians as performers. This defiance (on top of her default outsider status for being heavier than other teen girls on the show) leads our hero down a back alley world of beatniks, hair hoppers, and black Baltimore teens she didn’t have prior access to at home with her worrisome parents (Divine & Jerry Stiller, history’s greatest power couple). Hairspray somewhat succumbs to the common Hollywood problem of glorifying white people for solving racism, but it also makes it clear that America’s worst monsters are smiling, white, suburban faces. As Edith Massey warns in Female Trouble, “The world of heterosexuals is a sick & boring life.” With the exception of the beatniks, whose portrayal’s even more cartoonish than the Roger Corman take in Bucket of Blood, teen counterculture is presented here as the sane alternative to the hideous norm. Hair hopper fashion is far from the signifiers of punk telegraphed in earlier Waters films, but it is equally garish and designed to outrage parents. The music may also be a much simpler, more soulful version of rock n’ roll, but it’s operating with the same rebellious spirit that punk aspired to echo as a disruption to hippie feel-goodery. Hairspray offers Waters’s tamest (and possibly most subversive) version of protopunk teen rebellion, but its historical sense of outrageous teen fashion & disgust with racial fascism are at least in line with punk ideology.

The punk undercurrent is much more immediately apparent in Hairspray‘s follow-up, Cry-Baby. Flipping the calendar back even further to the teen rebels of the 1950s, Cry-Baby is a movie musical pastiche of teen gang melodramas like The Wild One & Rebel Without a Cause (with a little Jailhouse Rick thrown in for good measure). Johnny Depp stars as the titular Cry-Baby, a teenage delinquent who constantly breaks laws to honor the lives of his dead criminal parents, but then cries for the evil things he has to do in their name. The leather jackets & straightforward rock n’ roll of Cry-Baby‘s world are a clear source of inspiration for punk’s barebones, no frills ethos. Although racism is certainly at play in suburban Baltimore’s hatred of its teen counterculture element, the movie distills its “squares” vs. “drapes” dichotomy by making teenage outsiders’ very existence the scourge that’s being targeted. When a young teenybopper dares to cross the social line dividing squares & drapes (becoming a “scrape” hybrid, according to Ricki Lake’s crony), she completes the transformation with a Bad Girl Beauty Makeover, which is very similar to the way young outsiders are inducted into punk culture with shaved heads, piercings, new names, etc. I’m not a huge fan of the songs performed during Cry-Baby‘s traditional movie musical numbers, but seeing the same mainstream production design from Hairspray being applied to a love letter to teenage delinquency in those moments of Hollywood Tradition feels like yet another subversive act on Waters’s part. Waters looks back to the Elvis musicals of his youth to draw a direct connection from the leather jacket rock n’ roll of that era to the protopunk outsider freaks he previously featured in his early Dreamlanders productions. He may have been ahead of the curve on punk culture, but he’s more than willing to provide historical context on why he wasn’t the first to get there.

Just in case you weren’t already clued in by the teenage delinquency and hair hopping social outrage of his two period pieces as punk culture history lessons, Waters also cast two punk icons in central roles in the films. In Hairspray, Debbie Harry features as the racist, uptight mother of one of the most popular dancers on The Corny Collins Show. Cry-Baby casts Iggy Pop as a wild-eyed societal outcast who never outgrew his rebellious teen spirit (not that he really stood much of a chance in avoiding that). Waters’s early 70s version of protopunk grime feels far less out of nowhere after the historical context laid down in these two period pieces, which is an invaluable history lesson on punk’s eternal spirit in teen awkwardness & angst, political or otherwise. More importantly, though, these two films allow Waters an opportunity to contrast the warmth & righteousness of those outsider communities with the grotesque horrors of straight, square suburbia. Polyester was an epiphanic moment in the filmmaker’s career where the aping of Douglas Sirk melodramas showed him the value of contrasting his societal freakshow outsiders with straight-laced, “normal” settings. Hairspray & Cry-Baby focused more intently on exposing these settings as hateful, destructive forces. By bringing his cavalcade of horrors to suburbia, Waters found a chance to emphasize how mainstream culture was so much worse, from the broken legal system to white women spouting hateful racism in the faces of black youth to the grotesque wet smacks of heterosexual teens making out (which is far more disgusting than watching Divine eat dog shit, to be honest). John Waters’s punk culture history lessons are not only a great reminder of the consistent presence of teenage delinquents & societal outcasts in modern American life, but also a necessary indictment of the hatefully homogenized culture those small scale rebels buck against with their mere existence. The great punchline to that joke, of course, is that the mainstream culture he skewered in those two titles ate up that shit & financially sealed his fate in filmmaking infamy. He not only profiled the evolution of punk spirit through the ages, but also sold that historical glorification to the very people who made punk politically & culturally necessary.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #38 of The Swampflix Podcast: NOMA’s John Waters Film Fest & Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype (1980)

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Welcome to Episode #38 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our thirty-eighth episode, we tackle the career of our favorite living artist/human being. Brandon and Britnee recap the New Orleans Museum of Art’s recent summertime John Waters Film Festival with fellow Krewe Divine co-founder Virginia Ruth. Also, Britnee makes Brandon watch the Golan-Globus horror comedy Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype (1980) for the first time. Enjoy!

-Britnee Lombas & Brandon Ledet