Author: swampflix

Hack O’ Lantern (1988)

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fourhalfstar

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“But Mom, I like the taste of blood. Grandpa says it’s good for me.”

The bond between grandfather and grandson is a very special one, especially when the grandfather is the leader of a satanic cult and breeds his grandson to be the son of Satan. Director Jag Mundhra’s Hack O’ Lantern (aka Halloween Night) explores this specific type of grandfather/grandson relationship in one of the greatest “bad” horror films ever created. I knew that this was going to be a bad movie just from the title, but literally everything in the film was terrible. For starters, the main character, Tommy, is an 18 year old played by a balding 32 year old Gregory Cummins (Cliffhanger, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia). Now, even though Tommy is supposed to be the film’s main character, he’s present for probably less than half of the movie, and he barely has any lines at all. His grandfather is truly the most prominent person in the film, and his character isn’t even given a name. He’s simply referred to as Grandpa. Doesn’t this sound like a gem already?

Out of all the satanic themed horror movies I’ve seen (which is many), this one had the quickest satanic reveal ever. Within the first few minutes of Hack O’ Lantern, it’s known that Grandpa is a full-blown Satanist. After the opening credits, an innocent looking old man (Grandpa) driving a farm truck filled with pumpkins stops to visit his young grandson (Tommy). He gives Tommy a pentagram necklace along with a pumpkin of his choice and a little plastic skeleton. In one of the worst Southern accents I’ve ever heard, he tells Tommy that he’s “very special.” It didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on, and honestly, I was a little disappointed. I personally would’ve liked Grandpa’s character to be more mysterious.

Ten years after receiving the necklace, Tommy turns into a rebellious teen, and he is more than ready to make his satanic confirmation. One of my biggest laugh-out-loud moments was when Tommy and Grandpa shared this super-secret satanic handshake. They both make (incorrect) devil horns with their hands and press them together while straight up mean mugging each other. Shortly after this occurs, a really bad heavy metal music video, starring Tommy, pops out of nowhere. The video is for D.C. La Croix’s “Devil’s Son” and I swear, the song is just as annoyingly catchy as “It’s A Lovely Life” from May’s Movie of the Month, Crimes Of Passion. This was definitely my favorite part of the movie.

About 30 or so minutes into the film, a slasher element is introduced. An unknown killer wearing a horned devil mask and cloak goes on a Halloween killing spree using a pitchfork, shovel, and knife as murder weapons. Of course, no slasher flick would be complete without a couple of nude girls, and I swear, everyone woman in this film had the opportunity to shed their clothes at some point. What I really appreciated was how the film’s slasher element blended in with its satanic roots so well. One did not overshadow the other, and many other films have not been able to balance different themes as well as Mundhra did with this one.

Hack O’ Lantern is a classic 80s slasher flick with a hint of satanic horror metal, basically the perfect formula for a “terrible” movie. It has not been released on DVD, but in November 2014, Massacre Video stated that they have acquired the rights to Hack O’ Lantern and plan on releasing it on Blu-ray later on this year.

-Britnee Lombas

Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton (2014)

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threehalfstar

Initially pitched to the audience as a history of the underground hip-hop record label Stones Throw, Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton actually works a lot more like an in-depth mental profile of the label’s founder, influential DJ Peanut Butter Wolf. That’s because the label’s identity is so closely linked to Wolf’s. The periods of creative excitement & devastating losses that shape Peanut Butter Wolf’s life also shape the history of his record label. Stones Throw is Wolf’s life’s work, so it makes sense that his life would have so much influence over its general sound & direction.

It makes sense then that the story of Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton begins long before the founding of Stones Throw. Providing childhood photos & home videos from Peanut Butter Wolf’s youth, the documentary shows us a young nerdy white dude as he grows in his music tastes from funk & disco to new-wave & punk to hip-hop, where he finds his calling as a taste-maker. Even in his younger days, before the turntables, Wolf is shown making mixtapes & playing curator, a skill that will later prove vital to his legacy. It’s when Wolf begins to collaborate with young rapper Charizma that his music career takes a definite shape and it’s after Charizma’s tragic, far-too-soon death that he becomes determined to make something of it. This is just one of many tragic losses Peanut Butter Wolf would suffer over the years, and it’s not until he gets excited by working with new collaborators that he can truly move on & grow.

The list of Peanut Butter Wolf’s collaborators interviewed in Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton is a staggering who’s-who of underground hip-hop & outsider indie music: Madlib, J Dilla, MF Doom, Common, and Anika are only a fraction of voices heard here. The interesting thing about these interviews is that the subjects are all too-smart-for-their-own-good nerds who are super awkward when faced with the scrutiny of a documentary crew. Because its subjects are so soft-spoken & nervous, the film has essentially no choice but to let the work speak for itself. An original score by Madlib (one of the label’s most influential contributors), throwback animation sequences, and rare footage of reclusive acts that don’t normally get a lot of face time all combine to show exactly what makes Stones Throw’s vibe so special. As Peanut Butter Wolf puts it, he sees his label as a stomping ground, a launching pad for people to move on from. The work isn’t always spectacular (to the documentary’s credit it doesn’t look away when Wolf gets into producing some really douchey Los Angeles weirdness), but it’s incredible how much work was made possible by a single man who knows great music when he hears it & knows how to bring out the best in his collaborators. For anyone interested in exactly how everything Peanut Butter Wolf’s put together came to be, Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton is an essential document. I’m not sure anyone who’s not a hip-hop nerd will be as pleased, but they might find themselves nerding out despite themselves.

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015)

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three star

At this point in time, twenty years after his untimely death, Kurt Cobain’s life is a fairly well-documented story. It’s not initially a problem, then, that the documentary Montage of Heck is so dedicated to the “montage” part of its title. Creating an impressionistic image of Cobain as a person instead of a rock idol through a series of almost entirely disconnected sounds & images, Montage of Heck is very light on information & heavy on aesthetic. At first this whirlwind of glimpses into Cobain’s childhood photos, personal journals, anecdotes, and cultural influences is overwhelmingly captivating, feeling like it has the potential to be the best document about a musician since (my personal favorite) The Devil & Daniel Johnston. However, once Cobain’s drug addiction & marriage to Courtney Love hijack the narrative, this lack of substance becomes a much uglier, much less engaging proposition.

Much like with last year’s dark comedy Frank, Montage of Heck is mostly focused on the idea that fame is not always a positive influence for artists, regardless of the quality of their work. Surrounded by far too many ecstatic fans & scrutinizing journalists Cobain shrinks into himself and turns to drug abuse as a coping mechanism. Seemingly completely disinterested in how his music was produced or the cultural climate that surrounded it, Montage of Heck strips Cobain of everything that makes him special, instead just posing him as a normal dude who happened to write some great songs. At first this every-guy approach is fascinating, playing right into punk’s traditional DIY ethos. Once heroin takes over and his music career begins to fade, however, the story becomes much less engaging. It’s a lot more difficult to be interested in an every-guy when he’s babbling & nodding off instead of making art with his friends.

It’s of course possible that this energy shift was entirely intentional. The early kinetic montage of the film looks & sounds absolutely great, like a top notch music video, and is effectively snuffed out by a somber, heroin-induced letdown of a finale. In a lot of ways this mirrors Cobain’s actual life: a burst of creative energy stopped short & made less special by substance abuse. As an anti-drug PSA, Montage of Heck is pretty damn effective, but as a documentary it’s very thin on the information end, so when it loses its momentum to heroin addiction, there’s not much else to hold onto. If it had either kept the same structure, but included more interviews or somehow kept up the impressionistic montage weirdness of its first half, Montage of Heck could’ve easily been one of the most incredible documentaries of all time. As is, it’s pretty good, but feels divided & misshapen, like it desperately needed a push in a more confident direction.

-Brandon Ledet

Welcome to Me (2015)

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fourstar

A few years back there were frequently broadcast infomercials advertising a strange novelty product called The Perfect Polly. Polly, in case you somehow don’t remember, was a small plastic bird that would sing & move its head whenever prompted by its motion-activated sensors. The commercial was memorably amusing in the way infomercials sometimes are, especially in its assertions that Polly was a life-like substitute for real parakeets (it wasn’t), but there was more to it than that. It was also deeply sad. A lot of the ad consisted of lonely-looking people, mostly the elderly, interacting with the plastic bird as if it were their only friend in the world. As the narrator cheerily chirps, “By the window or on the shelf, with Perfect Polly you’re never by yourself!” the tone is decidedly dark. It makes total sense, then, the first image you see in the dark comedy Welcome to Me is a television playing the Perfect Polly ad in a lonely woman’s apartment.

An unmedicated recluse with borderline personality disorder, Welcome to Me’s protagonist Alice Klieg spends most of her days memorizing VHS recordings of old Oprah broadcasts alone in her apartment. She has a surprisingly strong support group that includes her parents, her ex-husband & his lover, and an unbelievably selfless best friend, but Alice is still for the most part alone in the world. This changes when she wins the lottery through a magical turn of events (the numbers on her winning ticket are announced in their exact sequence) and rashly decides to spend her new-found fortune by producing her own Oprah-like talk show at a local television station. The station is more than happy to oblige (read: take advantage of) her. Alice’s ambitions are realized and her own self-obsessed talk show, also titled Welcome to Me, begins to snowball in terms of scale & production costs. Described by her mother as an “emotional exhibitionist”, Alice uses the platform to recreate & interact with emotionally traumatic events from her past as well as offer a charmingly blunt brand of TMI like the tidbit, “I’ve been using masturbation as a sedative since 1991.” At first it’s expected that people will react to Alice’s exhibitionism like a jokey, Tim & Eric type of programming, but instead her brutal honesty cuts through the laughter and leaves her audiences stunned, especially by the time she’s cathartically performing veterinary surgeries live on the air.

Much like the Pretty Polly ad that kicks it all off, Welcome to Me starts off as oddly amusing, then goes pitch black in tone, then brings it back around to find a surprisingly strong balance between the two. Kristen Wiig’s central role as Alice might be her greatest performance on record, building off of her usual awkward brand of humor, but tempering it with a nuance that makes Alice deeply empathetic (kind of the way Melissa McCarthy’s schtick culminated in something special with last year’s Tammy). It helps that Wiig is surrounded by a stacked cast of character actors here. Produced by Will Ferrell & Adam McKay, Welcome to Me features supporting roles from Linda Cardellini, Wes Bentley, Jason Marsden, Tim Robbins, Alan Tudyk, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and a delightfully crass Joan Cusack as a no-nonsense television producer. In lesser hands the film could’ve devolved into empty, pointless indie quirk, but instead a much darker sense of humor is struck here and it’s one that hits a lot closer to home than you’d expect, given some of Kristen Wiig’s past work, which is often hilarious, but not always this touching.

-Brandon Ledet

The Threat of Masculine Entitlement in Crimes of Passion (1984)

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In our coverage of Ken Russell’s acidic sex farce Crimes of Passion, there’s been a very essential bait & switch that we have not yet touched upon. In our Swampchat discussion of the film we claimed that its central message was almost entirely restricted to the simple idea that monogamy = bad. Upon further reflection, I think that might be a little disingenuous, as it doesn’t entirely account for the relationships formed between the film’s three central characters: fashion-designer-by-day-prostitute-by-night Joanna Crane/China Blue, adulterous private investigator Bobby Grady, and type-casted-Anthony-Perkins-psycho Rev. Peter Shayne. When viewed as a group, this unlikely trio reveals that Russell had a little more on his mind than just tearing down heterosexual monogamy through satirical pop music & tawdry sex jokes. He also had another target in mind: masculine romantic entitlement.

If you’re going to make the case that monogamy is not the film’s main villainous conflict (although it almost certainly is), that leaves Anthony Perkins’ reverend, with his amyl nitrite-fueled sermons & killer vibrators, to fill the role as antagonist. Indeed, Reverend Peter Shayne does fill the role of blood-thirsty villain quite well, acting almost as a sex-obsessed Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers. In his obsessive stalking of sex worker China Blue, Rev. Shayne invades her personal space, questions her self-esteem & moral fortitude, and although he doesn’t know her beyond a few brief encounters, claims that he knows her more than anyone else, going so far as to say “I am you.” The subversion at work here is that Rev. Shayne is not the same as China Blue, as he suggests, but rather is the same as Bobby Grady. Bobby also invades Joanna’s personal space, spying on her at work & showing up unwanted at her apartment, just as the reverend does. He calls into question her self-worth & sense of morality, shaming her into leaving the sex trade, something she clearly has fun doing. He even claims that the two of them belong together after one passionate, but brief sexual tryst that instantly sours their relationship. Despite what the Rev. Shayne suggests, he is not the same as China Blue. He’s just a more honest & straight-forward Bobby Grady. While Shayne poses his obsession with China Blue as religious piety, Grady conceals his own emotional manipulation & sense of entitlement under the guise of “true love”. Either way you slice it, they’re the same threat to her self-worth & happiness.

The thing is that the Blue-Grady-Shayne love triangle is not a separate conflict from Crimes of Passion’s fear of the evils of monogamy. In fact, it’s just a more honed-in aspect of the same idea. The reason that heterosexual monogamy is bad (according to the film anyway), is that entitled, inflated, fragile male egos like Rev. Shayne’s & Bobby Grady’s are not content to merely spend time & connect with the Joanna Cranes & China Blues of the world. Instead, they feel a need to possess & claim them for their own individual purposes. Two sides of the same monster, Shayne & Grady are the idea of masculine romance personified & skewered. There is a feminine side to the Crimes of Passion’s monogamy-bashing, like in Mrs. Grady’s eternal grumpiness & Joanna’s self-hatred, but it’s the masculine possessiveness of Shayne & Grady that turn something as sweet & fun as sex into something sour & destructive. In other words, their passion for China Blue is a crime in itself.

For more on May’s Movie of the Month, 1984’s Crimes of Passion, visit our Swampchat, our list of tawdry sex jokes from the film, and last week’s note on the film’s maddeningly repetitive soundtrack.

-Brandon Ledet

Spring (2015)

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fourstar

As you may expect based on its title, the movie Spring begins with death & finality and gradually blooms into a colorful array of new life & reproduction. The muted, brownish haze of depression in the film’s color palette slowly changes into something much more vivid. The film’s own energy & creativity works this way as well. At first Spring feels like a cloudy, almost run-of-the mill romance story, but then it develops into something fresh & exciting. Halfway between a sci-fi horror Before Sunrise and a rom-com Possession, Spring refuses to be understood in the context of a strict genre. Instead, it feels like the blooming of something new & unknown.

It’d be difficult to explain too much of Spring’s plot without ruining what’s special about it. The bare bones premise is that a young American named Evan travels to Europe as a means of forgetting the mess that’s been made of his life. After a brief period of playing tourist with some wastoid jocks (“Bro, I fucking blazed the Wi-Fi code!”), Evan falls for an Italian woman named Louise that gives his life a new sense of purpose & excitement. There’s a struggle to convince her that their romance deserves a chance and the relationship becomes an outrageously exaggerated form of “it’s complicated”. Revealing too much about Spring’s story would be a disservice to you so I’m just going to have to stop there and ask you to take my word for it: it’s a great movie.

To illustrate how difficult the tone & intent are to pinpoint here, check out the genre listed on the film’s Wikipedia page: “supernatural romantic science fiction horror”- expialidocious. You can go ahead and add the word “comedy” to that list as well, as the film is frequently hilarious in a satisfyingly adult way, like the line “Mention WWII and every American becomes a historian” or in a scene where the main characters are arguing about whether an art exhibit is “fertility imagery” or “Roman porn”. The two leads at the heart of the film’s romance in the film may not be fully developed characters (little is done to define Evan as a person besides contrasting him with Wi-Fi code blazing macho types). Louise similarly is defined less by her personality and more by her circumstance. Much like with a lot of sci-fi, though, character development is not the apex of the film’s ambitions. Instead, their relationship is more of a launching pad for exploring ideas like the vulnerability of falling for a complete stranger & what it means to desperately beg someone to love you, even if you know they’re dangerous. The film becomes more & more funny-scary-sweet-sad-surprising as it delves into these ideas and it literally starts crawling with life: lizards, bugs, bunnies, howling cats, etc. Spring is just as rejuvenating & full of promise as the season it’s named for.

-Brandon Ledet

Seventh Son (2015)

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witch

three star

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Okay, here’s the thing: Seventh Son is a bad movie. It’s just awful. It’s already been called “staggeringly bad” “a creative miscarriage”, “a quickly forgotten pile of junk”, and maybe “the worst movie of the year”. I’m not arguing with any of those assessments. They’re true enough. I’ll even back up the complaints that the bland, medieval fantasy epic is even politically regressive. Indeed, its main plot involves two white men beating up & setting fire to the movie’s only female & POC-cast characters, who are all invariably evil. So, yeah. Seventh Son is a bad movie in almost all ways you can mean that phrase.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it. It’s a mind-numbingly dumb & old-fashioned attempt at establishing a franchise (à la I, Frankenstein & Dracula Untold), but I honestly found the blatantly simple-minded picture kinda low-key entertaining. Watching a drunken, wizardly Jeff Bridges battle a half Dragon/half Disney villain Julianne Moore was lizard-brain cool enough to forgive almost any cliché plot points or b.s. franchise ambitions for me. This is the kind of fantasy realm nonsense that is overstuffed with dragons, blood moons, witches, ghosts, evil queens, ogres, and haunted forests. Better yet, it’s overstuffed with laughable scenery-chewing from two actually-great actors redefining what slumming it truly means. Jeff Bridges mumbling wizardly nonsense and a metal-clawed Julianne Moore cooing commands like, “Help yourself to the blood cakes, little one” were enough to make me glad that I gave the movie a shot despite it’s (well-deserved) awful reputation.

I’m not saying that you should support Seventh Son with your hard-earned dollars or even give it a chance when it’s streaming for free. I’d just be lying if I said I hated it. It’s a laughable failure of a film that won me over by laughter more than it lost me with its failure, especially in the final minutes when it promises (threatens?) a sequel that most certainly ain’t coming. Thankfully.

-Brandon Ledet

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2015)

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twohalfstar

Even when Spike Lee’s films fail, they always have a fascinating quality to them that’s difficult to describe in words. This sensation is apparent as early as the opening credits in Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, which features an oddly earnest sequence of slow-motion break dancers. It’s a vision that, like a lot of interpretive dance, is both excitingly strange and embarrassingly awkward. That compromised tone is relentless for the entirety of the film’s run time, to the point where it’s difficult to say which reaction rules over the other-excitement or discomfort.

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is the story of a wealthy black scholar in an all-white community who just happens to be a blood-sucking vampire. Lee is heavy on the vampire genre’s inherent draws: gore, sensuality, religious iconography, and spacious room for metaphor (among others here, he suggests that as the most violent nation in the world, the US is a blood-based society). He also makes room a compelling romance between the central vampire and a no-nonsense woman who says blunt things like “I don’t believe in ‘if’s. If I had two balls & a dick I’d be a bloke. Fuck ‘if’s.” None of these elements ever really come together to form a satisfying whole, though; they just kind float around in individually. The effect is persistently odd.

The oddest aspect of all is that Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is actually a faithful remake of an even more inscrutable film: 1973’s Ganja & Hess. Unfortunately for Lee, Ganja & Hess (although nearly 40 years older) feels like a much more naturally bizarre & experimental, especially in its bold sexuality bucking of racial expectations. In remaking the film, which has a very quiet reputation, Lee has done little but remind the general public that it exists and it is awesome. Capturing Ganja & Hess’s magic in a bottle proved itself difficult and the results are mixed, but at least he’s getting the name of that weird little cult film back out there in the world. Ultimately, though, I would have rather have seen what an original idea for a Spike Lee vampire movie would’ve been instead of a restaging of a film that already worked on its own terms.

Side note: It was super cool to see Felicia Pearson (who played Snoop on The Wire) in a feature film and she delivers the best line uttered by anyone here: “Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends.” Words to live by, Snoop. Now if every movie producer out there could start casting her in everything they make ASAP I would be much obliged.

-Brandon Ledet

Stories We Tell (2013)

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three star

By definition, Stories We Tell is likely to be the most literally personal project of Sarah Polley’s career. An actress since she was just a small child (picture her as the youngster in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen for context), her first documentary credit is just her third turn as a director, and the very first instance I know of where her own past & familial structure were the subject of scrutiny. This kind of navel-gazing has both inherent charms and flaws. The intimacy of Stories We Tell’s revelations about Sarah Polley’s past & family structure is striking. It’s highly unusual for a public figure to expose so much of themselves & their immediate loved ones in this honest of a way and that vulnerability alone makes Stories We Tell a memorable experience. On the other hand, the story at the heart of the documentary isn’t quite as fulfilling & engaging to outsiders as it is to the people who lived it and the film has a tendency to over-explain its own intent instead of simply allowing  the story to unfold.

Without revealing too much about the story Polley tells here, I’ll just say that it’s focused on a nagging question about her paternity. Interviewing her siblings, her parents, and friends of the family, Polley looks back to her birth & childhood and retraces the steps of her deceased mother to hopefully answer lingering questions about who fathered her. Because the story of her childhood is told through many voices, it has a fractured, almost Cubist structure that calls into question the difference between truth & observation. Even though Polley is mostly interviewing her own family, she is relentless in her pursuit of “the truth”, referring to her own tactics as an “interrogation process.” It’s her unforgiving honesty & tendency to push her loved ones to their limits that make the documentary an unusual & interesting experience.

As interesting as Stories We Tell is in concept & execution, the story does wear itself a little thin in the final half hour, especially once the truth about Polley’s paternity is revealed. After the story has effectively been told from beginning to end, the documentary makes the mistake of over-explaining itself. Polley directly tells the audience that her film’s not only about that story in particular, but about the nature of memory & storytelling in general. Polley’s not giving herself enough credit there. The film had already spoken for itself, especially in its fractured interview structure & super-8 recreations of significant memories (like a critical phone call & café meeting that cracked the story wide open). It would’ve been a much better movie if it had ended once the story was over, instead of continuing to provide context when it wasn’t needed in a conclusive half hour that felt more like a DVD extra than a proper part of the documentary. As is, it’s a fairly solid documentary that shows a lot of promise of where Polley’s directorial career might go in the future, but isn’t exactly essential or even necessary either. I believe she’s got even better, more important work in her that will play much more confidently once she allows it to speak for itself.

-Brandon Ledet

Paris Is Burning (1990)

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Although the subject of the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning (ball culture) is unmistakably NYC-specific, it’s not difficult to see its connection to a more recent New Orleans trend: sissy bounce. There’s very little connecting the two geographically-disparate movements in the decade or so that separates them, but there’s still a similarly effortless punk spirit & vibrant defiance that binds them in my mind, a superficial connection or not. NYC ball culture was a fashion-minded escape fantasy for the city’s POC, queer, transgendered, and often homeless youth who used the platform to feel empowered instead of disenfranchised. Where sissy bounce offers New Orleans’ queer & transgendered POC youth access to the largely homophobic & hyper-masculine world of hip-hop, ball culture offered that same minority access to wealth & the world at large. That access may have been to more of a fantasy than a reality, but it was a transgressive fantasy that was so goddamn fabulously punk that there’s really nothing else like it, sissy bounce included.

We don’t have a worthy documentary about New Orleans’ sissy bounce culture yet, but there is a more than worthy NYC ball culture doc to be found in Paris Is Burning. As a culture, the film’s subject has everything necessary for a great film: sights (in the homemade fashion), sounds (in the music & dancing that accompanies the runway “voguing”), and narrative (in its long history as told through the eyes of old-timers who had occupied the scene decades before the film’s camera crew arrived in 1987). Part of what makes the film so arresting is its combination of both surface pleasures & much deeper, more meaningful aspects. Sure the film is stuffed with lush, beautiful fashion and the absurd hyroglypics-inspired dance moves of voguing, but there’s a lot of real heartbreak at the center of the culture’s need for escape.

These are marginalized people who’ve been abandoned by their families & society at large; they depend mostly on petty theft & sex work to get by. Although there is an aggressive, competitive aspect to ball culture, there’s also an intense comradery that includes makeshift families called “houses”. Ball competitors are seeking to better one another for a chance at a “legendary status” or at least a trophy for their troubles that night, but they also serve as their own support network, giving each other a place to go and something to look forward to when practically everything else has been stripped away. As the MC at one ball puts it to the more “vicious motherfuckers” in the crowd, “We’re not going to be shady, just fierce.” There’s a catty atmosphere on the surface of ball culture, but it’s a thin veneer on something much more thoughtful & fulfilling.

It’s a little sad, then, that the isolated act of voguing was assimilated & diluted into a much larger, uncaring pop culture by enterprising folks like Madonna the same way New Orleans’ bounce maneuver twerking was assimilated (poorly) by folks like Miley Cyrus. It’s sad that such a rich, complex culture had been boiled down to such a singular, somewhat superficial detail, but that’s often how mainstream success works. Part of what makes Paris is Burning so rewarding is that it arrived in time to capture that culture before it was exposed to the public at large. There’s still time for sissy bounce to receive the same reverent treatment , but not much. The recent national fetishization of twerking makes it feel like the moment has already passed. Of course, I may be oversimplifying both sissy bounce & ball culture by linking them with such a concrete tether, but I’m certainly not the first one to do so. There was even a huge event thrown last year celebrating their spiritual sisterhood. Although one had voguing & the other twerking and one was stationed in Harlem & the other in New Orleans, there’s still a rebellious, punk spirit of inclusivity for groups of young people who are normally excluded from everything. As one of the ball culture’s old timers puts it, “If more people went to balls and did less drugs the world would be a better place, wouldn’t it?” If balls were anything like the way they’re represented in the near-perfect Paris Is Burning, I’m inclined to agree.

-Brandon Ledet