Attention, Swampflix readers in the New Orleans area! Swampflix will be selling zines this weekend (October 25-26) at the fourth annual ACAB Zine Fest along with a bunch of other super cool Arts, Crafts, And Books exhibitors, hosted by Burn Barrel Press. We will be selling the print versions of six Swampflix zines, including a new illustrated version of our Swampflix Top 100 list.
ACAB Zine Fest will take place Saturday, October 25, from 11am-5pm at The Fred Hampton Free Store (5523 St Claude Ave, New Orleans, LA 70117) in the 9th Ward, and Sunday, October 26, from 11am-5pm at Gasa Gasa (4920 Freret St, New Orleans, LA 70115) Uptown.
The 36th annual New Orleans Film Festival will be staged all across the city next week, hitting local venues like The CAC, The Broad, and both locations of The Prytania from October 23rd through the 27th (with virtual selections streaming through November 2nd). Usually, I recap highlights from the festival after it’s already concluded, but this year I’ve got a preview of a few selections from the program before they screen in person. The five titles listed below are movies worth seeking out during the festival, especially if you’re interested in catching smaller releases that won’t get the same wide theatrical distribution as NOFF’s flashier local premieres for new films by Rian Johnson, Bradley Cooper, Nia DaCosta, Noah Baumbach, and the like. It’s a rare chance to see them on a big screen with a packed, lively audience, which is the beauty of the local film fest experience.
I hope to catch more of what the festival has to offer in-person myself next week, with more reviews to come. I’ll also be joined by frequent podcast guest Bill Arceneaux for our annual festival recap once it’s all over, so there’s plenty more NOFF coverage to look forward to. In the meantime, here are a few select titles worth your time & attention, along with the corresponding venues & showtimes for their screenings. See you there!
We Are Pat
You might not expect that a three-decade old SNL sketch would be worthy of its own feature-length documentary, but the Julia Sweeney character Pat! proves to be a surprisingly rich cinematic subject precisely because it’s out of step with modern culture. Rowan Haber makes their directorial feature debut picking at the complicated legacy of vintage It’s Pat! sketches, in which the titular recurring character baffles everyone they meet by not conforming to an easily definable gender identity. Pat is more gender ambiguous than gender nonbinary, but they still offered some shred of representation for that specific queer community on mainstream television at a time when few others could be found anywhere in the wider public sphere. At the same time, the sketches’ punchlines often rely on a point-and-laugh derision of Pat as a freak of nature because they cannot be immediately categorized as a single gender based on traditional cultural markers, driving everyone in their immediate vicinity insane. A nonbinary artist who works almost exclusively in a community of trans collaborators, Haber uses this project as an opportunity to dwell in the tension between a childhood fascination with Pat as a mirror to their own burgeoning identity and an adult understanding of Pat as a public act of transphobic bullying. It’s the kind of movie that will admit in a single breath that, yes, Pat is a transphobic joke and, yes, Pat can also be very funny.
We Are Pat shamelessly commits a couple major modern-doc filmmaking sins (mainly, dragging the director and social media posts onscreen instead of sticking to the subject at hand), but it mostly gets away with it out of discourse-hijacking chutzpah. Haber assembles an impressive range of talking-head commentators on the Pat! phenomenon, ranging from gender-nonconforming indie musician JD Samson (who has no direct association with SNL or the larger comedy scene) to recent nonbinary SNL cast member Molly Kearney to Julia Sweeney herself, who extrapolates on how Pat helped her express frustrations with the social limitations of her own public gender expression. More importantly, they also assemble a writer’s room of trans & nonbinary comedians to write new, politically savvy Pat sketches that undo the harm of It’s Pat!‘s most egregious punchlines. The resulting sketch comedy that’s staged after those writing sessions is not especially funny, but the roundtable discussions of how to modernize Pat for a more expansive understanding of gender leads to fruitful discussions that help save the movie from becoming a simple I Love the 90s-style nostalgia fest. We Are Pat doesn’t attempt to reclaim Pat! as a gender-nonconforming queer icon so much as it uses Pat as an excuse to open a huge can of pop-culture worms just to watch them squirm. Screening Sun, Oct 26th, 5:15pm @ The Broad Theater (and streaming online from Oct 23-Nov 2)
Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt
Speaking of cultural relics that peaked in the 90s, NOFF will also include a screening of a new Butthole Surfers documentary, adorably subtitled The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt. The hole truth be told, I never really got the Butthole Surfers outside their one alt-radio hit “Pepper,” which is an undeniable Gen-X earworm. The musicianship on their records is impressive in an athletic sense, with complicated guitar riffs and punishing tribal drum patterns formulating a new kind of abrasive noise rock in a time when most underground music was a more simplistic, sped-up version of hardcore punk. I just could never find an in as a fan, an album that could be enjoyed from start to end. That is, until I saw them perform in a tent at Voodoo Fest sometime in the aughts, where their nonstop aural assault was matched with the bad-acid-trip visuals of film projectors, go-go-dancers, and clashing strobes. I finally understood the band’s appeal as a kind of circus side show after that performance, and this new documentary explains how that stage craft was constructed one component at a time. Butthole Surfers started as a few bored teenagers in Texan suburbia, naming themselves after an off-the-cuff quip that their brand of abrasive noise rock “sounds like surf music;” “Yeah, butthole surf music.” As they gradually added more musicians, light show technicians, and drugged-out stage performers, they toured the globe and crossed paths with people as famous as Richard Linklater, Johnny Depp, RuPaul, and their one-sided nemeses R.E.M., each of whom are featured in their own standalone anecdotes among testimony about their musical greatness from bands who I do regularly listen to: Fugazi, Melvins, Meat Puppets, Minutemen, etc.
Freaked! co-director Tom Stern breaks up the visual monotony of these talking-head testimonials by matching the band’s multimedia approach in his filmmaking style. The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt is a playful mishmash of stop-motion, crude zine animation, Crank Yankers-reminiscent puppetry, and warped VHS psychedelia, illustrating the band’s wilder, druggier exploits from the days before they could be captured on cellphone video. Like most party bands who continue nihilistic drug use past their early 20s, the vibe among members sours the longer the Butthole Surfers soldier on, and much of the back half of their story is mired in the hurt feelings between core contributors Gibby Haynes & Paul Leary, giving them room to grieve what’s been lost in their once-vibrant friendship. That getting-in-touch-with-your-feelings section of the third act might surprise longtime Butthole Surfers fans who fell in love with the band for mixing overly complicated noise rock with pre-recorded farts & burps, but hey, being a perpetually stoned, sarcastic prankster gets tiring after a while. Speaking of which, this film completes the unofficial trilogy of this year’s documentaries on the gods of sarcastic rock ‘n’ roll, after similar treatments for Pavement & DEVO. It’s time to place bets on whether the next one will be about Ween, The Dead Milkmen, or dark-horse choice (and apparently former Butthole Surfers collaborators) Bongwater. Screening Sun, Oct 26th, 6:45pm @ The Broad Theater
Move Ya Body: The Birth of House
For a documentary profile of a less scatological pop music phenomenon, check out Move Ya Body: The Birth of House, which presents an oral history of the early house music scene in 1980s Chicago. Much like with Butthole Surfers, I’ve always found house to be an especially difficult musical avenue to fully explore, since it’s a movement mostly built off DJ sets and mixtapes instead of a canon of must-listen albums. Move Ya Body doesn’t offer much of an explainer on the core texts to seek out when first getting into house, outside of its focus on the DJs signed to the Chicago-based D.I.Y. label Trax Records. Instead of getting nerdy about cataloging every notable track & DJ in the scene, it mostly digs into the cultural context of the racist & homophobic era that birthed the movement as a flashpoint of Black, queer political opposition. That story starts with the Disco Sucks! phenomenon, which peaked at a “Disco Demolition Night” rally in which a mostly white rock ‘n’ roll audience smashed & burned disco records on a Chicago baseball field before being dispersed by the cops, effectively turning into a race riot in the streets outside. The story eventually ends with the disco offshoot of house music becoming internationally popular due to the appropriation of the sound by major-label artists like Madonna, leading to the same white audiences joining in on the fun once it proved profitable. It’s a tale as old as time, or at least a tale as old as America.
Move Ya Body features some stock footage and dramatic recreations of nightclub life in 1980s Chicago, but it’s overall much more of a sit-down interview presentation than the Pat! or Butthole Surfers docs. The entire point of the picture is to offer the sidelined DJs of Trax’s early days to tell their side of the story after being overshadowed by major-label artists like Madonna & Beyoncé in the global exportation of house. It’s a story with clear heroes & villains too, not just a vague gesture toward the broad concept of Black queer joy as a form of political resistance. At the very least, the looming figure of Screamin’ Rachael emerges as a perfectly loathsome heel, self-proclaiming herself to be The Queen of House despite only being included in early recordings as a hired hand. It would be like if Deborah Harry continually claimed to be the Queen of Hip-Hop for her vocals on “Rapture.” She’s part of the story but miles from the center of it, and so her shameless self-aggrandizing as a white woman who happened to be invited to the party crosses a line that affords the movie some genuine dramatic tension (despite its images mostly being restricted to people sitting in chairs). Screening Sat, Oct 25th, 8:45pm @ The Contemporary Arts Center
Your Own Flavor
One of the highlight shorts blocks featured at this year’s NOFF is titled “Body Horror Shorts: Picking Scabs”, commemorating the festival’s proximity to Halloween. Within that collection, I found a subcategory of short films about the bodily embarrassments of sex & dating, which play more like comedy sketches about the follies of hookup culture than genuine body horror. The animated shorts Caries and Mambo No.2 fixate on the embarrassments of inopportune bowel movements and the stink of oral bacteria when would-be lovers are trying to get into the mood, and the standout short of the bunch, Your Own Flavor, goes a step further to make the acting of hooking up itself to be a source of grotesque horror. After being stood up on a date, a young twentysomething is lured into buying ice cream from a rolling-cart vendor in a public park. That vendor is Chompers, a magical hand puppet who owns & operates Ice Guys ice cream. Chompers uses some of his vaguely defined puppet magic to cheer up the jilted lover with a song & dance routine about how she will one day prove to be someone’s favorite flavor of ice cream, making the temporary embarrassments of online dating worthwhile. Then, Chompers’s demeanor takes a nasty turn, as all (n)ice guys’ temperaments inevitably do. In short, it’s a Wonder Showzen update for the Tinder era.
The brief runtime of a 10-minute short film typically demands a simple set-up and punchline structure, which Your Own Flavor satisfies by making sure its punchline hits hard and hits funny. It’s got a bright, cartoonish visual panache to it as well, especially in its follow-the-bouncing-ball singalong sequence, set against a handmade, 2D cardboard ice cream factory backdrop. Not all of the shorts included in that “Body Horror” block satisfy the “horror” portion of the descriptor, but they consistently deliver on the gross-out gags associated with the genre, appealing to audiences who miss getting stoned after midnight to peak-era Adult Swim. Within that gross-out alt-comedy context, Your Own Flavor is a standout. Screening Sat, Oct 25th, 9:00pm @ The Contemporary Arts Center (and streaming online from Oct 23-Nov 2)
West of Greatness: The Story of the Weswego Muscle Boys
Of course, one of the major advantages of going to a local film festival is getting to see local films, so it’s my duty to recommend at least one selection from the program’s “Made in Louisiana” category. The narrative feature West of Greatness: The Story of the Westwego Muscle Boys is hyper local New Orleans cinéma verité, as if someone hired Sean Baker to direct a TV spot for a Westwego gym. It’s the story of two scrawny West Bankers who enter a bodybuilding competition despite their cartoonishly nerdy physiques. One is an aspiring actor who hopes the prize money will fund an escape from LA for a brighter future in L.A., while the other hopes it will pay to move out of his abusive home with his sibling in tow. Both are followed by a fictional documentary crew, and they become unlikely friends in the months leading up to the competition, mostly because they’re the only rail-thin nerds training in a gym packed to the walls with legitimate muscle boys.
West of Greatness is endearing enough as a hopeless underdog sports story, but its real achievement is in its verisimilitude. Director Jared LaRue and crew staged a real-life local bodybuilding competition to stand in for the fictional Greatest Gains competition of the narrative, so that all periphery players afford the low-budget production some impressive authenticity. The mise-en-scène’s gym rituals, protein shakes, posing coaches, and baby-faced bros bulk up the credibility of the documentary format and open the story up to larger themes of Alpha Male cultural trends outside the tiny lives of its scrawny leads. There’s also a semi-documentary aspect to those actors’ physical progress, pulling some solid sports-movie pathos out of the transformations of their bodies from string beans to disconcertingly jacked string beans. It’s a remarkably ambitious project given the obvious limitations of its budget, especially in its tension between manufactured drama and documented reality. Screening Fri, Oct 24th, 7:45pm @ Prytania Theatre & Mon, Oct 27th, 8:00pm @ The Broad Theater (and streaming online from Oct 23-Nov 2)
It may just be a marketing term coined by fans, but the existence of Universal’s “Famous Monsters” brand suggests that there must also be a Famous Monsters B-List. Every celebrity industry has its own power-rankings hierarchy, with public-figure colleagues competing amongst themselves for job opportunities and name recognition. Within Universal’s early horror successes from the 1930s through the 1950s, the C-List is easy to define, as it’s mostly made up of semi-literary characters who get excluded from the nostalgic posters and action figures celebrating the brand: Mr. Hyde, The Phantom of the Opera, the bitchy little freaks Lugosi & Karloff play in The Black Cat, etc. Differentiating the B-List from the A-List is more of a case-by-case judgement call. To me, the official roster of Universal’s Famous Monsters can be cleanly split in half. The A-List celebrity monsters are Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man. They’re the ones who most often cross-pollinate each other’s sequels, and they’re the ones whose likeness you’re most likely to see on generic Halloween decorations year after year. That leaves The Mummy, The Invisible Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon as B-List celebrity monsters, the ones whose numerous sequels and knockoff plastic masks collect dust on the shelf while the A-List monsters get to run wild in the streets every October into perpetuity.
The most curious case of B-List monster celebrity has got to be The Mummy, since his first appearance in the lineup immediately followed the success of Universal’s Frankenstein & Dracula, a decade before The Wolf Man. The problem is that the poor walking corpse spent his entire career following Frankenstein & Dracula’s heavy footsteps, never truly becoming his own thing. 1932’s The Mummy was penned by John L. Balderson, who is most famous for writing the 1924 stage play version of Dracula that starred Bela Lugosi and was eventually adapted to the screen by Tod Browning, kicking off the Universal Monsters brand. Balderson was seemingly going through the motions in his secondary contribution to the canon, writing yet another story of a foreign-born romantic ghoul who uses his evil powers of hypnosis to woo a young woman he believes to be the reincarnation of his one true love. Only, that archetype is instead played here by Lugosi’s career-long professional rival Boris Karloff, whose monstrous figure is most closely associated with Frankenstein’s monster, further minimizing The Mummy as a Famous Monsters footnote. Stuck between the lecherous behavior of one A-List Famous Monster and the walking-corpse physicality of another, The Mummy was destined to be relegated to the horror celebrity B-List, to the point where his initial onscreen outing is often confused for details from its various sequels & spoofs.
The Mummy pictured in the Universal Monsters branding never appears onscreen in 1932’s The Mummy; that’s a mummy of a different name. At the start of the picture, Karloff’s mummified Egyptian sorcerer Imhotep does appear wrinkled & bandaged as another monster creation from legendary make-up artist Jack Pierce, who also crafted the actor’s more famous look in Frankenstein. We just never see him moving outside the confines of his sarcophagus while wearing that get-up. After dismissing ancient curses warning against it as Egyptian “mumbo jumbo,” some naive archeologists invade Imhotep’s tomb to pilfer cultural artifacts for career-making museum exhibits, mistakenly activating the long-dormant loverboy’s corpse by reading the forbidden scrolls he was buried with aloud. Once awakened, Imhotep immediately leaves his tomb & rags behind to work on reclaiming his lost love through ancient magic spells, transforming from a dried up corpse to a mildly disconcerting gentleman with sun-damaged skin and glowing, hypnotic eyes. We never get to witness this bodily transformation, nor is there any shot of Karloff schlepping around in the famous mummy rags before putting on a more respectable fez-and-robe ensemble. The mummy’s walk out of his tomb is left mostly to the audience’s imagination, as the movie is more of a classy mood-setter than it is a proper creature feature. It leaves that cheap business to its many sequels, headlined by an entirely different mummy.
Although its many sequels frequently repurpose footage from the flashbacks to the undead Imhotep’s days as a living priest and self-proclaimed King of the Gods, they immediately swap him out for a new mummy named Kharis. Since the first of Universal’s Mummy films only has a couple shots of its titular monster in the iconic bandages, the sequels have to start over and dream up something more recognizable (i.e., more marketable) without relying on the familiarity of Boris Karloff’s mug. Weirdly, that leaves the 1940 follow-up The Mummy’s Hand both more archetypal and lesser seen than the original film it was tasked to rework. Getting ahead of the next decade’s trend of pairing Universal’s Famous Monsters with Abbott & Costello, The Mummy’s Hand already stars two over-their-heads Brooklyn goofballs who get into a scrape with the famous monster. The out-of-place American archeologists are desperate for a big score while shopping the markets of Egypt, where they again ignore locals’ warnings & curses and pry open the tomb of a long-dormant mummy, in this case Kharis. Again, that mummy is liberated from his sarcophagus and immediately seeks to reconnect with his supposedly reincarnated soul mate, but this time he never ditches the rags. This is where the image of The Mummy skulking around in full uniform is born, finally becoming his own thing (even if actor Tom Tyler plays him like Karloff’s Frankenstein with a bum leg).
Once Universal found a mummy they could market in Kharis, the rest of the sequels can only work to boost his stats to match the more formidable figures of Dracula, Frankenstein, and newcomer hotshot The Wolf Man. 1942’s The Mummy’s Tomb further legitimizes The Mummy by dressing up Lon Chaney, Jr. in the make-up for an otherwise pointless sequel, which is essential to the brand (see also: Son of Dracula, The Ghost of Frankenstein, and the many appearances of Lawrence Talbot, a.k.a. The Wolf Man). Then, it proceeds to delegitimize the Mummy by further developing him into a blurry photocopy of Frankenstein’s monster; Kharis giveth, Kharis taketh away. Not only does Kharis start to carry around his unconscious, reincarnated loves with the exact posture of Karloff’s Frankenstein, but he’s also brought to a fiery end by an angry mob at the film’s climax, directly alluding to James Whale’s visual iconography. 1944’s The Mummy’s Ghost continues that work by finally giving Kharis an official Bride of Mummy counterpart, complete with the white streaks of hair at the temples in the unmistakable style of Elsa Lanchester. At this point in the series, the perils of reckless archeology are no longer a concern. Once Kharis reaches American soil in Tomb & Ghost, the series fixates on red-blooded American men protecting their women from the corrupting forces of seductive foreigners. The most impressive thing about Ghost is that it commits to the bit in a shocker ending, finally allowing The Mummy to successfully steal away his reincarnated love, sinking into the swamp with her dangling in his arms as her body rapidly ages to close their centuries-scale age gap in mere seconds.
There’s some incredibly shameless runtime padding in The Mummy’s Tomb, starting off an hour-long sequel with over ten minutes of “Previously on . . .” recapping before setting The Mummy loose on American soil. It’s an instructive reminder that these sequels were produced before the invention of home video and, subsequently, VHS rental stores. Since audiences couldn’t easily rewatch a classic movie on a whim, the studios would just remake that same movie again and again to scratch that itch, as a matter of routine. The later Mummy sequels have no interest in being their own thing; they just take the same old Mummy out for a walk. Even the choice to relocate Kharis to Cajun swamp country in 1944’s The Mummy’s Curse affords the series little novelty outside the amusement of hearing Old Hollywood’s goofy misinterpretations of the Cajun-French accent. The Mummy started as Egyptian Dracula in his first outing. Then, he gradually, improbably became New England Frankenstein. For his last trick, he emerges as Cajun Swamp Thing. He’s a true international playboy, seducing a new woman at each stop along the way, including a choice to leave The Bride of Mummy behind here in favor of a new The Mummy’s Princess love interest (future Folgers Coffee spokeswoman Virginia Christie, who looks incredibly hip here with some Bettie Page bangs). Even the novelty of seeing The Mummy trudge along in a swampy locale isn’t especially distinct to this famous monster, though, considering that Lon Chaney, Jr. had already appeared there in the previous year’s Son of Dracula (under the hilarious pseudonym Count Alucard). That’s not even getting into the obvious concerns of what would happen if you dragged your dried-out mummy through a humid swamp. The whole enterprise is one big afterthought.
Of course, the final indignity for all of Universal’s Famous Monsters is to officially sanction Lou Costello’s buffoonery, which The Mummy was tasked to do in 1955’s Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy. It’s here that the Mummy, forever following in Frankenstein & Dracula’s footsteps, has finally Made It. Even so, he’s way late to the party, taking his turn with the comedy duo after they already met Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll & Mister Hyde, and “The Killer, Boris Karloff” in similarly titled comedies. Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy was the very last of the comedians’ onscreen run-ins with Universal’s Famous Monsters, as it also marked the end of their overall contract with Universal Pictures. There are a few stray laughs scattered throughout the picture—mostly catering to fans of “mummy”/”mommy” puns—but the bit had very obviously been exhausted before The Mummy’s number was called, and it feels like just as much of a tired exercise as proper Mummy sequels like The Mummy’s Curse. None of the later Mummy films are especially great, but they are all mercifully short, and by the time you meet up with anyone for the sixth or seventh time they start to become your friend, so it’s fun to see him goof around in this final outing. It’s just that The Mummy is more like your work friend, whereas Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Wolf Man are true buds you look forward to seeing on the weekend.
Like most horror franchises that stumble past their obvious expiration date, The Mummy’s initial outing is a great film in its own right, and its numerous, goofy follow-ups are only made endearing by their familiarity and nostalgic value. There’s nothing iconic about The Mummy’s lore, really. His tana-leaves medicine regimen, crime-scene contaminating mold, and smoky flashback pool have all been forgotten to time, as opposed to other Universal-specific details like Dracula’s hypnotic hand gestures or the bolts on Frankenstein’s neck. The Famous Monsters roster would feel thin & incomplete without him, but he’s mostly a background player. The biggest claim to modern fame for The Mummy is that its 1999 remake is by far the most success Universal has had in its attempts to revitalize its Famous Monsters brand for new generations. It succeeded where fellow studio titles like Renfield, Van Helsing, and Dracula Untold have failed. Even so, that accomplishment only further cements the original Mummy in a B-List status. When someone references the movie The Mummy in conversation, most people immediately picture Brendan Fraser, not Boris Karloff. The audience who remembers any of the Kharis titles in the series—Hand, Tomb, Ghost, Curse—is shrinking every year, despite that version of the monster being the one that appears on all of the throwback posters & Funko Pop boxes. Meanwhile, cinematic references to Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man immediately conjure the likeness of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney, Jr., which is what makes them official Famous Monster A-Listers. Everyone else is just lucky to be on the guest list.
There two high-style, blunt-force sports thrillers in theaters right now, neither of which are especially successful. Both Justin Tipping’s football-cult horror curio Him and Benny Safdie’s cinéma vérité MMA story The Smashing Machine reflect on the damage young men accept in their bodies in order to make a lot of money very quickly as wannabe-star athletes. In the fanciful former, that damage triggers a supernatural transformation into a kind of permanently concussed god, and in the more reality-grounded latter it results in a debilitating addiction to opiates. Unfortunately, neither movie is as invested in exploring the nuances of that shared theme as they are in platforming the surface-aesthetic visual experiments of their respective directors and the dramatically severe acting turns of their respective unconventional movie stars: former sketch-comedy clown Marlon Wayans and former professional wrestler Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. As a result, they both look very pretty but ring a little hollow, cushioning the bodyslamming impact of their damaged muscle men with superficial distractions that have little to do with the bodily exploitations of professional sports. Pity.
The dual disappointment of these bone & spirit crushing sports thrillers is mostly due to the high expectations set by the names of the filmmakers involved. Him is especially victim to its own marketing hype, with producer Jordan Peele’s name being foregrounded in the ads to compensate for first-time director Justin Tipping’s professional anonymity. Considering Tipping’s newcomer status, he does fairly well with the material at hand, shooting his football bootcamp torture film with the slick, luxury-brand commercialism of a Nike ad. The rhythmic repetition of its young, concussed football star (Tyriq Withers) suffering seven days of choreographed, ritualistic abuse from his childhood sports idol (Marlon Wayans) gets to be punishingly monotonous by the time it reaches the “Day 5” title card, but the movie does have visual panache to spare. It’s stylish enough in a Martyrs-for-meatheads kind of way that it probably would’ve gotten better reviews if it went straight to Shudder under the title The Goat instead of bearing the weight of Peele’s name in the studio system marketing machine, but instead it’s had the misfortune of being a flashy mediocrity in front of a lot of people. There’s no doubt that Tipping & Wayans’s work in particular could have been repurposed into something truly, brutally spectacular if the quality of the screenplay had matched their gusto.
Speaking of wasted talent, it’s been decades since The Rock has made any notably daring choices in his acting career, with early titles like Southland Tales and Pain & Gain having long disappeared in the Fast & Furious rearview mirror. And even in those early, wild jabs, he was still playing off his larger-than-life wrestling ring charisma to pummel his audience into being entertained. The Smashing Machine is a different beast, asking The Rock to play a real-life, complicated human being under a layer of face-obscuring prosthetics. The Rock has been famous for longer than he’s been an actor, so it’s impressive to see him disappear into a role for the first time this deep into his career, mimicking the gentle-giant politeness of pioneer UFC fighter Mark Kerr as profiled in the 2002 documentary of the same name. The problem is that there isn’t much else to the movie besides giving The Rock that opportunity to flex his recently atrophied acting muscles, regardless of how well he makes use of the spotlight. It’s easy to see why director Benny Safdie might have been interested in Mark Kerr as a cinematic subject, given his previous thematic preoccupations with failed athletic gambles in Lenny Cooke & Uncut Gems and with drug addiction in Good Time & Heaven Knows What. He just doesn’t make much of an attempt to communicate why the audience should care about this retired athlete’s unremarkable what-could’ve-been story, besides gawking at The Rock’s acting chops.
Dramatically, there’s a lot more muscle on The Smashing Machine‘s bones than there are on Him‘s. The Rock’s chummy chemistry with frequent scene partner Emily Blunt is mutated into something squirmy & toxic here, with Kerr and his longterm girlfriend prolonging an explosively volatile relationship long past its obvious expiration date. Blunt’s role in that mutually corrosive romance is embarrassingly thankless, since the Mark Kerr story is mostly retold here in service of spotlighting The Rock. Still, the little ways they dig at each other in exponentially violent domestic arguments scores way more in-the-scene dramatic points than the mentor-protegee tensions of Him. Safdie might not arrange those individual pixels into a larger, satisfying picture, but they’ll make for great out-of-context awards season clips as The Rock launches yet another militaristic PR campaign. There’s a version of The Smashing Machine that might’ve been a thrilling relationship drama with the UFC backstory used only as a distant backdrop, but instead the major dramatic payoffs are staged off the back of Kerr’s performances in a career-defining Japanese tournament and the woulda-coulda-shoulda introspection of where he fits into the larger UFC story today. In the end, the movie feels like just as much of a sports-industry advertisement as the stylistic markers of Him, promoting both the UFC and The Rock as decades-spanning sports institutions.
I went into this double feature hoping to see a dramatic reckoning with the physical & emotional toll that professional sports take on young men’s fragile bodies, and I left still craving that reckoning. All that you’ll find here are a few inspired visual choices in how those bodies are commodified in sports-world iconography and a few inspired acting choices in how Wayans & Johnson subvert the more cartoonish archetypes they’re more famous for portraying. That’s all to say that just because neither movie is entirely successful doesn’t mean they’re entirely disposable. To misquote an infamous tweet, why must a movie be “good”? Is it not enough to sit somewhere dark and see a muscular bod, huge?
Attention, Swampflix readers in the New Orleans area! Swampflix will be selling zines this Saturday (October 4th) at the annual Art for Art’s Sake event on Magazine Street. We will be selling the print versions of six Swampflix zines, including “flash art” collections of hand-drawn illustrations from past reviews.
Art for Art’s Sake will take place from 6 to 9pm on Saturday, October 4th, all along Magazine Street. Swampflix will be stationed outside Tattooagogo at 4421 Magazine St, 70115.
Over the past few months, I have consistently watched one to two classic episodes of Law & Order every night around dinner time. The ritual started as a fascination with the high cinematic quality of the show’s early seasons, especially in contributions from all-star cinematographer Ernest Dickerson and maniacally intense screen actor Michael Moriarty. Now that I’m about five seasons deep into the show, though, both of those notable names have departed, and I can no longer tell if I’m impressed with the craft anymore or if I’m just addicted to the storytelling format. There’s a hypnotic satisfaction to the show’s procedural narrative rhythms that soothes something deep in my otherwise anxious brain. It’s so hypnotizing, in fact, that every movie I watch just reads as different flavors of Law & Order now. The last time I went to a repertory screening was to see the grimy 80s crime thriller Night of the Juggler, which just played as an especially trashy episode of vintage Law & Order (with extended chase scenes that would’ve blown the show’s weekly budget). This week, I got to see a double feature of films by Akira Kurosawa and Spike Lee at The Prytania, and I still could only interpret them as variations of Law & Order. 1963’s High and Low? That’s classy Law & Order. Its new straight-to-AppleTV+ remake? That’s Law & Order as early-aughts melodrama, with some occasional twerking in the courthouse. Everything is Law & Order for those with eyes to see (and access to a family member’s Hulu log-in).
I would like to extend myself some grace for mentioning my new Law & Order habit in yet another classic movie review, since High and Low and Night of the Juggler share a similar first-act premise that invites the reference. Both films start with a crazed criminal kidnapping the child of a wealthy businessman they envy & loathe, only to discover that they have abducted the wrong kid by mistake, complicating their chances of collecting the demanded ransom. While Night of the Juggler uses that premise to launch into a Death Wish-style campaign of brute-force vengeance against the scurrying sickos of NYC, High and Low is much more thoughtful & introspective about the wealth disparity issues of Yokohama, Japan. Longtime Kurosawa muse Toshiro Mifune stars as an executive at a ladies’ shoe manufacturer who’s in the middle of a complex negotiation to take over the company when he’s informed by telephone that his son has been kidnapped. Only, his servile chauffer’s son has been abducted by mistake, which corners Mifune’s hard-edged business prick into a tough moral quandary: whether to use his life’s savings to fund the purchase of his business or to fund the return of an innocent child whose father cannot afford the outrageous ransom demands otherwise. While he struggles to make his choice, his wife, his grieving chauffer, and the detectives assigned to the case look on in horror, amazed that he would consider for a second to choose shoes over the life of a child. He eventually relents.
Like all great Law & Order episodes, High and Low really gets cooking in its second half, after the crime has been fully defined and all that’s left to do is exact punishment. It’s not only satisfying to watch detectives zero in on a prime suspect by listening for evidence of specific streetcar rattles in his recorded phone calls or by staging stake-outs to catch him purchasing heroin in an American GI jazz bar, but the way the investigation’s success is dependent on how public sentiment plays out in the press adds another layer of tension to the on-the-ground drama. As the walls close in around the working-class maniac who takes a wild shot at a corporate goon above his station by fucking with his family, the “high” and “low” signifiers of the title become increasingly literal, recalling the geographically “upper” & “lower” class distinctions of Parasite. The businessman’s invaded home is revealed to be perched at the top of an otherwise economically dire neighborhood, a symbol of financial superiority that visibly mocks the struggling workers below. As cruel as the kidnapper is for threatening the life of a child (and murdering his accomplices with overdoses of pure heroin) while rocking ice-cold mirrored sunglasses, the source of his resentment is vivid, and the businessman’s innocence in their clash is proven to be a matter of law, not of morality. The Law & Order connections also become unignorable in the back half once the detectives start interviewing the kidnapper’s neighbors for clues while they continue to work their manual-labor jobs at fish markets, junk yards, and bus depots. All that’s missing is the show’s iconic reverberated gavel-banging sound effect to punctuate each change in locale.
I wish I could say I got as much out of Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest as I got out of the Kurosawa film. His modernization of the classic crime picture is one of those conceptually baffling remakes that only invites you to question its changes to the source material instead of engaging with it as a standalone work. Lee casts Denzel Washington (one of the few working actors who could credibly be said to be on Mifune’s skill level) as a record company executive instead of the more logical hip-hop version of the original character: a sports sneaker magnate. Instead of mistakenly kidnapping the son of an anonymous employee, a disgruntled rapper who couldn’t earn his way on to the exec’s label (A$AP Rocky, holding his own against Washington’s trademark intensity) kidnaps the exec’s godson, as the chauffer in this version is a close family friend (the always-welcome Jeffrey Wright). That major change to the central dynamic weakens the tension of the businessman’s moral dilemma, but Lee makes other changes elsewhere that feel more thoughtful & pointed. At the very least, the update from tracking public sentiment in the press to tracking public sentiment in social media memes helps make it apparent why Lee might have thought to remake High and Low in the first place (even if it appears that he hasn’t seen a meme in at least fifteen years). Likewise, when the record exec and his chauffer decide to seek vigilante justice outside of the official, sluggish detectives’ investigation, it opens the movie up to broader social commentary about how true justice is achieved. There’s also some interesting visual play in how Lee relocates the final showdown between businessman & kidnaper on either side of a plexiglass barrier from prison to recording booth, but then he stages that same showdown a second time in a prison cell anyway, so the point of the exercise starts to muddle.
Questioning Spike Lee’s every minor decision does not stop at how Highest 2 Lowest relates to its source material. It’s constant. The movie opens with the worst Broadway showtune I’ve ever heard in my life, with its title populating onscreen in a childlish Toy Story font. The first half of the story, before the kidnapping victim is returned, is scored by an oppressive strings arrangement that makes every familial heart-to-heart play like TV movie melodrama instead of a big-screen thriller from a major auteur. The whole thing reads as laughably phony, especially by the time Washington has one of those melodramatic heart-to-hearts in his teenage son’s bedroom, which is decorated with a Kamala Harris campaign poster. Again, baffling. At the same time, Lee does occasionally convey total awareness of how he’s trolling his audience, pairing Jeffrey Wright’s casting with a full art-gallery collection of Basquiat paintings, drawing attention to his casting of Allstate TV commercial spokesman Dean Winters by nicknaming one of Wright’s handguns “Mayhem”, and having Washington erroneously refer to Law & Order: “SUV” like a true out-of-touch millionaire. The most generous reading of these small, playful touches could link them to Kurosawa’s own jokey details, like staging his kidnapping during a child’s game of Sherriff & Bandit or delegating the police-artist suspect sketches to a child who can barely fingerpaint. Personally, I don’t find any comparisons between the two films to be especially flattering to Lee. He seems to be having fun in Highest 2 Lowest, and I suppose it’s overall worth seeing for his trademark fleeting moments of brilliance, but its lows are much lower than its highs are high. It resembles the modern, corny version of Law & Order I had assumed the show had always been, whereas Kurosawa’s High and Low recalls the classic, refined version I never knew existed until this summer (which is somewhat ironic given Lee’s professional connection to vintage Law & Order cinematographer Ernest Dickerson).
I have owned the same used copy of the Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi actioner The Running Man for as long as I can remember. It’s been so long that the DVD itself has become just as kitsch as the cheesy 80s movie it stores. Between its standard-definition transfer, its double-disc presentation of both wide & full-screen formats, and its 3D-animated menu transitions, it’s a time capsule of physical media’s ancient past. What really dates that Special Edition DVD set, however, is its special features menu, which includes two short-form documentaries explaining The Running Man‘s continued cultural relevance into the early 2000s. One disc includes a featurette titled “Lockdown on Main Street,” which links the film’s themes of totalitarian government surveillance to the privacy-violating overreach of the Bush Administration post-9/11. Topical! The other disc’s featurette “Game Theory” covers the prescience of the film’s game-show premise in predicting the dystopian state of reality TV in the early aughts, which had then recently mutated from early human-interest documentaries PBS’s An American Family & MTV’s The Real World to more preposterous, sadistic programs like Survivor & Fear Factor. The titular, fictional TV game show The Running Man is a government-sanctioned crime & punishment program in which prisoners fight for their freedom against homicidal American Gladiator types with deadly weapons & pro wrestler gimmicks. The real-world state of reality TV hadn’t gotten quite that malicious by the early 2000s, but the other fictional programs advertised during its fictional television broadcasts—Paul Verhoeven-style—weren’t too much of an exaggeration. For instance, the commercial for a show titled Climbing for Dollars, in which contestants climb a rope over a pit of barbed wire & rabid dogs, no longer felt all that outlandish in a world that had already produced Fear Factor or the Japanese game show “A Life in Prizes” (as documented in last year’s The Contestant). Even when that Special Edition DVD was produced in 2004, the film’s dystopian game show America still seemed plausibly achievable by its far-away future setting of 2019.
The Running Man‘s quirks & charms have not changed much over the years. As a pun-heavy action showcase for a spandex-clad Arnold Schwarzenegger, it’s just as amusing now as it was four decades ago. The worst you can say about the way it has aged is that it’s been outshone by its Verhoeven-directed contemporaries RoboCop & Total Recall, which make for much sharper & more vicious satire. Oddly, the short-doc featurette “Game Theory: An Examination of Reality TV” feels much more out of date, since it speaks to current trends of reality TV production in the early 2000s instead of predicting what the format might evolve into in the future. There’s something surreal about watching talking heads explain the basic components of reality television after decades of drowning in household-name series like Real Housewives, Below Deck, Love Is Blind, The Bachelor, etc. Everything from those shows’ reduced production costs to the way they’re cast for conflict to the way their semi-scripted & heavily edited version of “reality” is a far cry from pure documentary filmmaking is spelled out as if the audience is considering those factors for the very first time. Even if obvious to a modern audience, there is still something validating about hearing former Survivor contestants and Fear Factor showrunners explain that what they’re attempting to capture is a genuine reaction to artificial scenarios — a conscious mix of reality & artifice. Sometimes, it does help to hear an everyday concept defined in simple terms like that, even if in this case it feels like explaining the existence of water to a fish. The fictional TV program The Running Man could not be more artificial; it has a pro-wrestling promotion’s relationship to Reality. The pain, shame, and death that contestants suffer on the show is real, though, which is why it’s totally plausible that massive audiences would tune into its bread-and-circuses entertainment spectacle as nightly appointment viewing. It’s the same sadistic impulse that recently inspired Netflix executives to greenlight a “real” version of The Squid Games to cash in on the popularity of the fictional one, with predictably inhumane results.
This early-2000s “Game Theory” understanding & definition of reality TV is both accurate & incomplete. It gets across the reality TV audience’s bottomless sadism, but it largely ignores the sexual voyeurism that also makes the format so enduringly popular. The success of Survivor & Fear Factor may have made it seem like society was headed towards more physically violent & punitive television programming in an impending Running Man dystopia, but it’s arguable that the format has veered towards a more sexually pornographic impulse instead. While early reality-TV breakouts like The Real World & Big Brother offered brief, night-vision glimpses into its contestants’ private sex lives, more recent shows like Love Island, Temptation Island, FBoy Island,MILF Manor, and Naked Attraction have disposed of any pretense that the audience cares about anything else but sex. While The Running Man & “Game Theory” only acknowledge the format’s sex appeal in context of casting hottie hunks & babes as eye candy, there were other early examinations of the format that fully understood its reliance on sexual voyeurism. For instance, No Wave filmmaker Beth B’s 1996 documentary Visiting Desire plays like a direct response to & escalation of the sexual voyeurism of MTV’s The Real World. Triangulating the middle ground between Annie Sprinkle, Marlon Riggs, and the street interview segments of HBO Real Sex, Visiting Desire is a social experiment shot in the cultural dead zone between reality TV & amateur pornography. It starts with a sequence of therapists & psychologists explaining the function of Fantasy in healthy adult sexuality, staged in a black-box void to look like an especially risqué episode of Charlie Rose. Then, Beth B points her camera at a series of NYC pedestrians, who ruminate on what fantasy they would want to play out if they could share a bedroom with a stranger for 30 minutes, no boundaries. Finally, she puts that scenario to a live test, bringing two strangers at a time into a sparse set decorated with only a bed, a chair, and a box of Kleenex, with 30 minutes to act out a fantasy of their choosing. It looks & feels like the set-up to an amateur porno, but the bridge from fantasy to reality becomes too intimidating in the moment for most participants to cross, and it ends up playing like an art-gallery video loop instead.
Already a few years into the initial run of The Real World, Visiting Desire totally understands the basic appeal of reality television. Beth B has set up an intensely artificial scenario (30 minutes of filmed fantasy play with a total stranger) hoping to illicit & capture a genuine human reaction (sex, or something like it). It’s not accurate to call it a failed experiment, exactly, but the range of genuine human behavior captured in the film isn’t as sexy nor as gratifying as its premise promises. Some participants are committed to the semi-scripted fantasy of their choosing: trading spankings, swapping clothes & gender roles, instructing a stranger to masturbate, etc. Unsurprisingly, NYC punk scene legend Lydia Lunch is especially game to lean into her dominatrix persona for the camera, fully playing out each fantasy prompt she’s confronted with regardless of whether she shares any attraction with her scene partner. Most participants completely chicken out, though, shying away from the fantasy they entered the room ready to perform and, in several instances, breaking down crying. That fear and that emotional release still count as unexpected genuine reaction to the artificial “reality” of the project, but they also so obviously miss the mark of what Beth B initially proposed that the cast often apologizes to the camera for not giving her what she wants. While the Running Man “Game Theory” undersells the pornographic aspect of reality TV, Beth B’s take on the format also misunderstands an essential component of what makes it work in the first place. 30 minutes is simply not enough time for her cast to adjust to her artificial environment or, more importantly, to her camera. In “Game Theory”, a former Survivor contestant describes how awkward she felt during her initial hours in front of the cameras, but then she became a more natural version of herself a few days into the shoot as she adjusted to their presence. All Visiting Desire has time to capture is that initial, awkward awareness of the camera without breaking through to the comfort that allows for genuine human response to its artificial scenario. If it were a multi-episode TV show instead of academic video art, it might’ve gotten somewhere genuinely interesting (and genuinely sexy). Instead, it’s a mixed-results experiment that’s neither pure documentary nor pure pornography.
If there’s anything instructive about this early reality-TV academia, it’s that Edgar Wright’s upcoming Running Man adaptation is unlikely to have much new to say about the violent or pornographic extremes that make the format popular. The Running Man-style violence of game shows like Survivor & Fear Factor peaked twenty years ago, while the pornographic avenues the genre has recently taken instead have no relation to the film’s Stephen King-penned source material. It’s difficult to imagine a new Running Man could even be dated in the fun way, not without Arnold Schwarzenegger quipping, “I’ll live to see you eat that contract, but I hope you leave enough room for my fist, because I’m going to ram it into your stomach and break your goddamn spine!” in his trademark Austrian accent. The cartoonish action cinema of the original Running Man movie was already outdated by the 1990s, and the American game-show dystopia it predicts was already in full swing by the 2000s, long before its 2019 setting. So, what’s even left for a new movie adaptation to accomplish? Based on current trends, the future of reality TV looks a lot more like the semi-pornographic artifice of Beth B’s Visiting Desire, flaws & all. Maybe that’s what we should be remaking instead, now that TV producers know exactly how to manipulate game show contestants into fucking on camera. It would likely make for some very popular major-network primetime porn, à la Love Island UK (or whatever happens to be your island-themed softcore game show of choice).
Let’s ignore for a second who’s directing it. It’s insane that hordes of young movie nerds are buying tickets to an adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey a full year in advance of its release date next summer. Of course, what those nerds are actually buying tickets to is The New Christopher Nolan Picture, as they’d show up to just about anything with that director’s name on it, in blind faith. There’s nothing culturally current or relevant about Homer otherwise, at least not in the decade since JLo was wooed with a thrifted “first-edition” copy of The Iliad in the dipshit erotic thriller The Boy Next Door. So, there’s something incredibly funny about Nolan leading Dark Knight die-hards into Greek Lit scholarship for the next year, studying ancient verse and Wikipedia summaries in anticipation of the biggest summer blockbuster of 2026. I won’t be purchasing an advanced Odyssey ticket myself (partially because they’re already selling out), but I can’t pretend I’m above that kind of literary hoodwinking either. In fact, in the past week I’ve watched multiple 3-hour epic adaptations of ancient literary texts that I wouldn’t have any personal interest in if they weren’t repackaged as Movie Nerd fodder. Whether I was lured in by the director, the genre, the screengrabs, or—my biggest weakness—a physical media flash sale, I found myself spending hours getting lost in maddening odysseys into literary adaptation every night after work this week, finding way more academia than usual in my cinematic escapism.
Watching Federico Fellini’s 1969 adaptation of the ancient Roman epic Satyricon, it becomes clear why humanity bothered to invent the film camera in the first place: pornographic opera, operatic porno, and everything in-between. Every image elicits a “Whoa,” while every sound earns an “Eww,” splitting the difference between Hollywood Babylon extravagance & Grand Guignol grotesquerie. It’s also an impossible adaptation, as entire chapters of its source text have been lost to time, leaving gigantic holes in the story Fellini dared himself to tell. What’s left is a long journey in which our hero Encolpius attempts to reclaim a lost love slave who was stolen & sold by his best frenemy, Ascyltus. Much like Odysseus finding his way home after the Trojan War, Satyricon is an episodic adventure in which Encolpius repeatedly fails to reclaim ownership of his beautiful boy-slave while repeatedly running into Ascyltus having the time of his life no matter what perils the former bros find themselves in from scene to scene. There’s often no connective tissue between the individual set pieces, since entire chapters of the book are missing. So, it mostly functions as a collection of living tableaux, with Fellini striving to create images as beautiful and, to quote him directing the background actors on-set, “as wild & crazy as possible!” In some scenes, characters lament that fine arts like poetry, painting, and sculpture are not what they used to be while chatting in the ancient Roman equivalent of an art gallery. Other scenes are built around fart jokes & sexual farce in which the cure for impotence is getting your tush spanked by a harem of late-60s hippie babes. For your sanity, it’s best not to pay too close attention to the beat-to-beat progress of the story and instead save that energy for planning the next decade of Mardi Gras costumes around what lewks the hundreds of extras are modeling in the background.
Paying too close attention to every narrative avenue of 1965’s The Saragossa Manuscript would also drive an audience insane, which in that case is entirely the point. A Polish adaptation of an early-19th Century novel written in French but set in Spain, it’s already a Russian nesting doll of international post-modern contexts before you get into the particulars of the plot. In the first framing device, Spanish & French officers on opposing sides of The Napoleonic War find the titular manuscript in a home that’s crumbling under gunfire. Illustrated with surrealist art & vulgar erotica, the manuscript appears to tell the story of the Spanish officer’s own grandfather, baiting him to continue reading with promised insights into his own heritage. Roaming a countryside populated almost exclusively by demons & “evil ghosts,” the Spaniard in the manuscript finds himself listening to the endless anecdotes & half-remembered dreams of fellow travelers (each with their own characters who have stories to tell), mapping out an impossible labyrinth of framing devices within framing devices so absurdly complex even Guy Maddin couldn’t find the exit. By the time he’s five or so layers deep into anecdotes within dreams within tales within sagas, the Spaniard complains that he has lost track of the border “where reality ends and fantasy takes over,” which fellow listeners helpfully compare to abstract concepts like Poetry and The Infinite. Nothing especially exciting happens in The Saragossa Manuscript. The story involves demons, ghosts, Spanish Inquisitors, dream-realm polygamists, and swashbuckling swordplay, but it’s all just as mundane as listening to a friend describe a dream they had last week (in which a dreamed-up character recounted their own half-remembered dream). The most thrilling plot development is a moment when the Spaniard within the manuscript places his hands on a copy of the manuscript himself and starts reading the book of his own life, making it clear that the audience is being relentlessly fucked with without mercy.
The narrative shape of Marcell Jankovics’s animated epic The Tragedy of Man is much easier to define than either Satyricon‘s or Saragossa Manuscript‘s. It’s just as maddening in its narrative ambition & scale, however, as it attempts to recount the entire history of everything — from the birth of the universe to its inevitable future collapse. Completed over several decades of hand-drawn animation, The Tragedy of Man is a psychedelic infographic that illustrates humanity’s entire existence through the visual art, philosophy sermons, and methods of power in each era depicted. It’s as visually stunning as it is intellectually exhaustive, not least of all because it is adapted from a 19th Century play cited as the pinnacle of Hungarian literature. It’s difficult to imagine what a staging of that play might look like based on the constantly shifting psychedelia rendered here, in which early humanity is depicted in a series of cave paintings, ancient Egypt is depicted in animated hieroglyphics, modern times are depicted in Ralph Bakshi-style pop art, and the distant future is depicted in unfathomable science fiction speculation. The stage-play source text makes sense in the constant dual-voiced dialogue between the Biblical figures of Adam & Lucifer, however, who spend the entire three-hour runtime narrating the evolution of man’s self-destructive introspection & philosophy. No matter how harshly the art style or historical circumstances shift from segment to segment, it’s a constant refrain that humanity’s main folly is our ambition for everlasting fame, which leads us only to harm ourselves & each other instead of being happy with our current, temporary lot in life. What’s staggering about the film is its millennia-spanning quest to prove that point with visual & historical citations across the entirety of time, which is too large of a scale for the human brain to fully comprehend, let alone contain in a single work of art.
Each of these epic-scale literary adaptations were immensely satisfying as self-contained art films, but I’m not convinced that they’re effective as advertisements for their source texts. I’m no closer to reading Petronius’s Satyricon now that I’ve enjoyed the perverse visual delights of Fellini Satyricon. Likewise, I doubt Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is going to spark a renewed cultural interest in ancient art & poetry beyond inspiring a few opening-weekend clickbait articles. These unwieldy, impossible-to-fully-adapt literary source texts are much more useful to filmmakers than they are to the resulting films’ audiences. They inspire grand-scale, abstract storytelling in a medium that’s at its best when it reaches for Poetry & The Infinite instead of getting mired in pettier concerns like Logic & Plot. According to The Tragedy of Man, that kind of transcendent ambition is corruptive to the human spirit, but since all we’re doing here is telling stories and making pretty pictures, I guess it’s okay in this case. Hopefully, adapting a saga as immense & sprawling as The Odyssey will help break Nolan away from the more clinical, reserved approach he generally takes to blockbuster filmmaking. And if he happens to sell a few paperback copies of The Complete Works of Homer in the process, all the better.
I’ve said it before on this blog, but the current New Orleans repertory scene really is stronger than it has ever previously been in my lifetime. While the original uptown location of The Prytania has continued its Classic Movies series that used to encompass almost the entirety of local repertory programming, The Broad has massively stepped up its game in recent years to play a wide range of classic arthouse cinema titles I never thought I’d get a chance to see projected in a proper theater, making for a weekly spoil of riches. That recent vibe shift was especially apparent during this year’s Pride Month offerings at The Broad, which included separate programs from both the regular Gap Tooth series and a one-off Pride series sponsored by a self-explanatory social club called Crescent City Leathermen. Together, they combined for an impressively robust month of queer repertory cinema in one convenient venue, including a list of Swampflix-approved classics like Nowhere, The Celluloid Closet, The Queen and,most surprisingly, Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same. It was an overwhelming bounty for a single month of programming, so I got to be extremely selective about which screenings to attend and narrowed it down to two titles I had never seen before from directors I love: Pedro Almodóvar & Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The beautiful thing is that I didn’t even have to leave my neighborhood to see them; what a gift.
While Gap Tooth was perfectly astute for programming 1991’s High Heels during Pride Month, it could have just as easily screened a month earlier to celebrate Mother’s Day. Almodóvar’s entire catalog is recursive & accumulative but, even so, High Heels plays like the scrappier, goofier dry run for his later commercial triumph All About My Mother (while still being fabulous on its own terms). Victoria Abril stars as a Madrid TV news broadcaster with a near-psychotic obsession with her lifelong-absent mother, a once-famous actress & pop star played by Marisa Paredes. As a child, she conspired to keep her mother to herself through Rhoda Penmark-level machinations, but she grows up abandoned anyway, inspiring a lifelong fetishistic obsession with a woman who doesn’t think much of her in return. When her mother makes a grand return to Madrid in her adulthood, the details of her obsession become overwhelming. Not only is her TV broadcaster career a pale imitation of her mother’s international fame, but she’s also married to her mother’s former lover & biographer and soon starts a sexual affair with a drag performer who impersonates the famous torch singer for cash tips. The strangely incestuous sexual tension between those four players gets even more complex as the mother resumes a previous affair with the daughter’s husband, who is soon found murdered by a mysterious visitor to his bedroom. As always, Almodóvar has a way of tangling the interpersonal conflicts & romances of all involved so gradually that it takes a long while to realize just how much of a melodramatic mess the plot appears to be when spelled out on paper. Even when introducing this sordid mother-daughter dynamic in childhood flashback, he simplifies the jealousy-and-indifference tensions of their relationship down to a simple symbolic object: an earring. When that earring catches on one of the women’s hairdo in the awkward hug of their adult reunion decades later, it’s carrying enough emotional weight to make you cry. At the same time, he’s clearly having fun with the gaudy tableaux of the melodrama genre in a way that verges on ironic humor, filling the screen with enough drag performances, dance breaks, high heels, and lipstick kisses to make getting imprisoned for murder in Madrid seem like a genuinely fun time for any woman lucky enough to get arrested. It’s just as funny as it is sincerely heartbreaking & sexy, easily ranking among the best of his works.
The Crescent City Leathermen’s screening of 1982’s Querelle landed on the exact opposite extreme of the masc-femme spectrum, staying true to the spirit of the organization’s namesake. Fassbinder’s late-career adaptation of Jean Genet’s novel is a crime story in which the only lawman on hand is a leather-daddy fetishist who operates more as a barfly than a proper detective. The film is a kind of pornographic opera, starring Brad Davis as the titular sailor & murderer who ruins the lives of any poor soul who happens to gaze upon his beefcake beauty. Querellearrives in the port city of Brest with the dual purpose of following naval orders from his superiors while, why not, orchestrating a massive opium deal with the local barkeep as a side hustle. In that bar, he stumbles directly into an already complex love triangle involving his own estranged brother, the aforementioned barkeep, and the barkeep’s wife. All three players are erotically obsessed with Querelle at first sight—brother inlcuded—but the sailor ends up bottoming for the barkeep first, while constantly protesting that he’s actually straight as an arrow no matter how much pleasure he takes in receiving anal sex. The sex scenes fall just short of pornographic, but they are incredibly lengthy, sweaty, and intense. To make up for the lack of onscreen penetration, the movie purposefully mistakes violence for a sexual act, having Querelle insert knives & bullets into the local citizenry as he gets increasingly greedy in his local, self-serving rise to power at everyone else’s expense. Not having read the novel, the character motivations & plot revelations can be confusing from scene to scene, but just like watching an opera in a foreign language, the overall emotion & eroticism of the piece shines through the fog. Querelle is a primarily visual piece, with Fassbinder bathing the screen in intense washes of orange & blue gel lighting and accentuating the dreamlike quality of the setting by mixing jazz-age speakeasy iconography with 80s-specific props like video game arcades. From Derek Jarman to Todd Haynes to Amanda Kramer, there’s no shortage of sensory comparison points in approximating the film’s visual aesthetic, but by the end I could only see it as the evolutionary link between James Bidgood’s Pink Naricssus & Bertrand Mandico’s The Wild Boys — an unholy trinity of operatic male lust & violence refracted through cinematic artifice.
Both Querelle & High Heels are titles I’ve been meaning to see for years, but I dragged my feet on clearing them from my watchlist due to streaming inaccessibility and the cost of collecting physical media. As has been frequently happening lately, my procrastination was rewarded by local theatrical showings of these historically underrepresented queer classics, something I never would have dreamed possible just a few years ago. Now that Pride Month is over, Halloween Season programming is months away, and Gap Tooth is officially on their Summer Break, that overwhelming flood of once-in-a-lifetime repertory screenings is likely to dry up over the coming weeks, but I’m still feeling incredibly spoiled by what was recently on offer just a few short bus stops away from my house. New Orleans still doesn’t have nearly the breadth of repertory programming as larger cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or even Austin, but the work that’s being done on the few screens we do have within city limits has been getting exponentially more impressive & adventurous in recent years. The offerings at The Broad alone are worthy of local pride.
Literary police detective Jules Maigret was featured in at least 75 mystery novels published from the 1930s to the 1970s. The Maigret series was such an immediate hit that the fictional detective was adapted to cinema starting in the first year of publication, and he’s such an enduring literary icon that he’s still being portrayed in prestige television series, most recently by Gerard Depardieu. There’s a statue erected in his honor in the Netherlands where the first Maigret novel was written, despite his fictional & cultural home base being Paris, France. Personally, I’ve never heard of the guy. Considering the near-century of continued circulation & celebration, I have to assume that Maigret is as popular of a literary figure as fellow mystery-novel icons Sam Spade, Philip Marlow, Miss Marple, and Hercule Poirot. However, the first time I ever saw his name in print was on the covers of used DVDs at a local Goodwill, where I recently picked up two 1950s adaptations of famous Maigret novels directed by Jean Delannoy. The completionist in me would normally be intimidated by a new movie-watching project like this, since getting the full scope of Maigret’s cinematic output would mean watching a half-dozen actors portray the character across at least a dozen films. I’m not doing all that. Delannoy only directed two of those Maigret features, though, and they both starred Jean Gabin in the titular role. That’s about as manageable of a crash course as possible for such a prolific film subject.
Unsurprisingly, Delannoy & Gabin’s Maigretcollaborations aren’t especially interested in introducing new audiences to the already-long famous character. They are both self-contained mysteries that presume audience familiarity with the titular detective, the same way a modern adaptation of The Hounds of Baskervilles wouldn’t feel the need to explain the basic character traits of Sherlock Holmes. So, 1958’s Maigret Sets a Trap is not especially helpful as an introduction to Maigret’s whole deal, but its central murder mystery is shocking & compelling enough for that not to matter. If anything, Jules Maigret is protective of his identity, hiding his personal feelings behind a mask of strait-laced, middle-aged machismo, with Jean Gabin playing the detective as the French equivalent of George C. Scott. As buttoned-up & conservative as Maigret can be, however, the crimes he’s tasked to solve are shockingly salacious. In this first outing, he must scheme to trap a serial “killer of sluts,” a psychosexual freak who’s been stabbing anonymous women in Parisian alleyways as punishment for the alleged sins of their gender. As soon as the audience meets the killer halfway through the film, his guilt is obvious, shifting the “whodunnit” structure into a “whydunnit” story instead, with Maigret boiling to an angry intensity as he hammers the suspect during interrogation into a full confession. The remaining mystery is in discovering his motivation and accomplice, untangling an unseemly tale of cuckoldry, impotence, and homosexual repression covered up by his doting mother & frustrated wife. The shadowy alleyways and mood-setting jazz of the early killings promise the genre trappings of a 1950s noir, but the details of the case eventually lead to Maigret Sets a Trap operating as a French precursor to Psycho & Peeping Tom. Maigret may not have the expressive charisma of a Sam Spade or a Norman Bates, but he does walk the streets of their shared sordid world.
In Delannoy & Gabin’s second Maigret outing, the detective becomes a little more personable to the audience through some nostalgic soul-searching. 1959’s Maigret and the Saint Fiacre Case sends him back to the rural hometown he left as a teenager to pursue a law enforcement career in the big city. There, he fails to protect the heiress of the local estate who was his first boyhood crush, and must spend the rest of the film solving her murder after it’s committed before his very eyes. At this point, it’s still difficult to fully understand what makes Maigret special detective after getting to know him over two films, but he can at least be narrowed down to a few scattered attributes: middle-aged, pipe smoker, mostly quiet but shouts during interrogations, detests ninnies & “dilettantes”, etc. This second case is much more of a traditional whodunnit than the first, with a wide field of nervous, effeminate weirdos serving as possible suspects for the overly severe brute to expose. Will the killer be the countess’s playboy heir, the gigolo art critic, the sexually repressed priest, or the pipsqueak bank teller who rides into town on a Vespa scooter? I found the field of suspects to be a clearly distinguished type but the exact guilty party to be entirely unpredictable. In a way, their contrast against the more traditional, stoic masculinity of the detective on the case is the greater crime that must be solved, which opens up this duo of films to a range of strangely reactionary sexual politics. At the very least, it seems like the appeal of these Maigret stories is partly that the mysteries he gets wrapped up in are way more salacious & distinctive than the detective solving them. He’d much rather be at home having a cup of coffee with his adoring housewife than getting his hands dirty with the effete riff raff of modern urban life, but duty calls, and it calls often.
As soon as its opening credits sequence, Maigret Sets a Trap nails down the iconography of Maigret’s detective work. Maigret is introduced through the silhouette of his signature pipe, casting a massive shadow over a map of Paris – an image that is violently interrupted by the stab of a dagger onto the city streets. That visual stylishness continues throughout the picture, with Dellanoy constantly moving the camera to capture every inch of the mise-en-scène and even experimenting with some 1st-person POV cinematography while navigating Parisian alleyways. The details of the case get surprisingly gruesome for a mainstream 50s production too, with frank depictions of rape, bloodshed, and male sex work upending standards & expectations set by Hays Code-inhibited Hollywood productions of the era. for In contrast, The Saint Fiarce Case is much more generic detective-novel fodder, with only occasional excursions to modern strip clubs & printing presses breaking up what’s essentially a by-the-books Old Dark House story. It’s most interesting as an attempt to pick at the personal backstory & hang-ups of a character who’s protective of his privacy even to his audience, whereas Sets a Trap stands on its own as a great film regardless of its connections to other Maigret tales. Jean Gabin was so celebrated for his portrayal of the character that he was later invited to return to the role in 1963’s Maigret Sees Red, well after Jean Delannoy had moved on to direct other projects. Personally, I didn’t get to know Maigret well enough over these two films to be on the hook for his continued adventures unless, like Maigret Sets a Trap, the mysteries he’s tasked to solve in them sound especially shocking or prurient. It would take another chance meeting at the second-hand shop to spend more time with the detective, so it’s unlikely I’ll ever fully get to know the man behind the pipe.
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