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Bonus Features: A Night in Heaven (1983)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1983’s A Night in Heaven is an oddly forgotten studio drama about a bored Floridian college professor who cheats on her husband with a young student, who happens to moonlight as a male stripper.  Yes, a major Hollywood studio distributed a Magic Mike prototype before I was born, and it’s somehow not a certified cult classic (yet), even though it helped popularize the eternal synthpop banger “Obsession”.  Here we have the rare mainstream picture that sincerely engages with and markets to female sexual desire, tempting its timid protagonist to step outside the complications & safety of her suburban marriage to enter a more dangerous, thrilling world of hedonistic excess.  In some ways, it softens the danger of her transgressions by making the object of her desire a boyish, twinky goofball that she has immediate power over as his professor, but by indulging her urges she also turns her husband into a potential mass shooter, so I guess it all evens out.

A Night in Heaven was released decades before Soderbergh cornered the market on male stripper movies, and it’s somehow become an out-of-print obscurity instead of a regular rowdy-screening cult favorite.  However, considering that Disney now owns the 20th Century Fox repertory catalog and there are several shots of the hot twink’s exposed peen, maybe it’s less incredible than it is just shameful.  There’s nothing especially vulgar or raunchy about A Night in Heaven outside those brief flashes of male nudity and the fact that the zipper to stripper Ricky Rocket’s pants is centered in the back instead of the front.  Still, it’s still shocking to see a retro movie so sincerely stoke women’s libidos, since that’s such a rare mode for Hollywood filmmaking.  It’s wonderfully endearing to see that a sexy strip club movie with a softcore porno title was marketed to that eternally underserved audience, even if only as a fluke inspired by the fad popularity of Chippendales.  Unfortunately, there aren’t many other high-profile male stripper movies to recommend alongside A Night in Heaven as a result, but there are plenty of other contemporary movies set in 1980s strip clubs that match & complement its vintage sleaze aesthetic.  To that end, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to see more 80s stripper movies that share in its distinctly retro grime & glamour.

Flashdance (1983)

A Night in Heaven’s biggest hurdle to earning long-term cult status might have been its short-term battle with Flashdance.  Adrian Lyne’s aspirational welder-by-day-stripper-by-night story of a wannabe ballerina making her way in The Big City overshadowed A Night in Heaven so completely that People Magazine dubbed the latter film “Flashdunce” in its review.  It’s not hard to see why.  While A Night in Heaven is charming in its internal identity crisis, swinging wildly in genre & tone from scene to scene, Flashdance knows exactly what movie it wants to be and leaps gams first towards that goal.  Flashdance is just as manically ambitious as its 18-year-old-with-three-jobs protagonist, hammering away at its early MTV fantasy aesthetic so hard in every scene that it’s practically a feature length music video.  When Jennifer Beals welds, she’s surrounded by fantastical splashes of sparks & purple smoke.  When she strips, the physical stage disappears to allow her (and her wig-wearing body doubles) to bounce around impossible otherworldly voids.  When she practices ballet, she doesn’t really.  She reinvents the artform of dance entirely, giving physical expression to a hip cassette tape soundtrack you’re directed to buy on your trip home from the theatre.  A Night in Heaven can’t help but look small & dorky next to the biggest strip club fantasy movie of 1983, partly because Flashdance is one of the coolest-looking movies ever made.

I’m saying all this as a general skeptic of Adrian Lyne’s signature works, too.  Flashdance delivers all of the messy, sweaty erotica of Lyne’s trademark sex thrillers, except with the bitter misogyny swapped out for high-style MTV escapism.  It’s unquestionably his best film, challenged only by Jacob’s Ladder.  It’s also very likely the best strip club movie of the 1980s, even if it has to pause mid-film to contrast its impossible high-art erotic dance gallery space against a much more realistic, grubby strip club where women actually take their clothes off for money.

Stripper (1986)

There aren’t many 80s stripper movies that demand to be taken as seriously as Stripper.  The semi-staged hangout documentary was directed by Pumping Iron producer Jerome Gary, presenting a sincere portrait of North American strippers as artists & craftswomen doing their best to make a living.  The six women profiled on camera are all seemingly genuine & passionate in their explanations of why they strip for money, interviewed in front of a blank Sears family photo backdrop to help dampen the subject’s inherent salaciousness.  At the same time, the documentary is structured around a stripper convention’s fictional Golden G-String competition that’s inorganically staged for the camera, so that the women have a goal to achieve beyond day-to-day survival.  That in-film kayfabe likely mattered a lot more to serious film critics of the 1980s, which is likely why it isn’t as widely canonized as its bodybuilding equivalents in the Pumping Iron series.  Its flagrant dishonesty matters less & less in a post-reality TV world, though, where its mixture of high artifice & subcultural anthropology feels distinctly ahead of its time.  Modern audiences are well used to parsing out what’s real and what’s kayfabe in semi-documentary television, and it’s fascinating to see that format pioneered in such a distinct subcultural context at such a distinct era in the stripping profession.

Stripper is just as self-conflicted in its tone as A Night in Heaven.  It wants to present its titular profession as just another working-class side job, providing a borderline wholesome public service that’s been an American pastime since the old-timey saloon days of its sepia tone photographs.  It can’t help but lean into the glam & smut of its 80s strip club milieu, though, and the only inclusion of male strippers among its hot-babe interviewees are the drunk oglers who join them onstage in sarcastic pantomime.  On a documentary level, it’s about as academically rigorous as any random episode of HBO Real Sex, but it still makes for great peoplewatching & anthropological texture if you’re willing to peer beyond the sheer veil of fantasy in its onstage strip routines.

Vamp (1986)

It’s a shame that there aren’t many other male-stripper movies of the era to lump in with A Night in Heaven, since that’s the major detail that makes the film special.  A Night in Heaven was released in an era when light-hearted erotica was defined by frat bro boner comedies like Animal House, Porky’s, and Revenge of the Nerds, when most sex objects depicted onscreen were women, not student-by-day-gigolo-by-night college age twinks.  So, if you’re going to pair A Night in Heaven with one post-Porky’s boner comedy about strippers, you might as well watch Vamp: the one where a gang of neon-lit vampire strippers led by Grace Jones torture the horndog frat boy protagonists.  Often cited as a prototype for From Dusk til Dawn the way A Night in Heaven is a prototype for Magic Mike, Vamp is a cutesy horror comedy that can only ogle women’s bodies for so long before those bodies transform into bloodsucking ghouls and turn the tables of power.  In a way, it’s got the same older women preying on younger men sexual dynamic of our Movie of the Month, but the “preying” just happens to be a lot more literal & monstrous.

There’s nothing especially innovative or unique about Vamp, at least not once you get past Grace Jones’s centerpiece strip routine (which features set & body paint designs by legendary artist Keith Haring).  It’s basically a David DeCoteau movie with a proper budget, a pure-80s novelty.  As a vibe check of what audiences most stripper media served in that era, though, it’s at least a pleasant novelty – not least of all because that audience’s frat boy avatars are punished for their sins by one of the coolest, most powerful women to ever grace the stage.

-Brandon Ledet

I’m an Arnie Girl in an Arnie World

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Every year, I watch an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie on my birthday as a gift to myself.  This year, that personal celebration happened to coincide with the national celebration of Barbenheimer: our newest, most sacred federal holiday.  I didn’t participate in the full Barbenheimer meme myself, largely because I didn’t understand the value in cramming Gerwig’s & Nolan’s latest into an incongruous double feature simply for the LOLs.  Instead, I paired Oppenheimer with fellow unfathomable-weaponry-of-war “Dad movie” Mission: Impossible, Dead Reckoning, and I sought out an appropriate Schwarzenegger classic to watch with family the same day as Barbie.  Luckily, Last Action Hero happens to be celebrating a 30th birthday milestone of its own this year, and it proved to have a surprising amount of thematic overlap with the summer’s biggest hit.  In a way, Last Action Hero is Barbie for Boys™, which is to say that its fictional character’s real-world existential crisis at the opposite extreme of the gender spectrum made for a surprisingly rewarding double feature – much more so than I suspect I would’ve found in the all-day Barbenheimer mind melter.

Margot Robbie stars in her own existential meta comedy as Stereotypical Barbie, a plastic ideal of girl-power pop feminism whose insular dollhouse world is shaken when she’s introduced to real-life human problems, emotions, and politics.  Barbie is both a delirious celebration and a pointed critique of the world-famous Mattel toy brand – combining the bubbly pop feminism of sleepover classics like Legally Blonde with the menacing, high-artifice movie magic of Old Hollywood nightmares like The Wizard of Oz.  It’s fantastic, an instant classic.  Last Action Hero is more of a cult curio that had to gradually earn its cultural footing over time, but it approaches Schwarzenegger as a household brand the same way Gerwig’s film approaches Barbie.  Schwarzenegger stars as both himself and as a typical Schwarzenegger action hero, Jack Slade, who does not initially realize he is a fictional character sidestepping the harsher consequences of life in the Real World.  When a magical golden movie ticket frees him from the silver screen and he gets a taste of reality, Slade is confronted with the limitations of his once indestructible body and his insatiable addiction to macho hyperviolence, sending him into an existential tailspin.  There are few things more hack than assigning movies a strict placement on the gender binary in the year of our Dark Lord 2023, but both of these meta comedies are specifically about the ways gender stereotypes are established & reinforced by corporate pop media products, to the point where they become kitsch and, ultimately, targets of satire.  It’s just that women had to wait an additional three decades to get a Last Action Hero equivalent specifically marketed to them, to Hollywood’s shame.

The funny thing about Barbie & Last Action Hero‘s shared purpose is that in both cases the call is coming from inside the house.  There is potential, legitimate criticism to find in Gerwig’s decision to make a crowd-pleasing commercial for a Mattel product, even if her script (written with partner Noah Baumbach) includes direct, damaging punches to the Mattel brand.  She’s participating in the same Art Vs. Commerce tug of war that all mainstream Hollywood movies wrestle with, but she makes that struggle a blatant feature of the text, even casting the Mattel execs toying with her script behind the scenes as on-screen buffoons and comic relief (led by Will Ferrell).  Likewise, Last Action Hero was initially conceived as a spoof of excessively violent, comically tropey action movies of its era: films like Rambo & Commando.  Hilariously, the project was written & directed by two of the filmmakers most directly responsible for the exact tropes it mocks: director John McTiernan (Die Hard, Predator, The Hunt for Red October) and screenwriter Shane Black (Lethal Weapon[s] 1 – 3).  When Barbie features a TV commercial for Depression Barbie or when Last Action Hero features a trailer for a shoot-em-up version of Hamlet, the movies are mocking the exact pop media tropes and real-world social ills the industry behind them helped create in the first place.  They’re self-conflicted, but in a way that adds authenticity to their parodic intent.  Last Action Hero‘s goofball ZAZ gags are much funnier in the visual context of a typical John McTiernan action flick, just as Barbie‘s intrusive existential thoughts and feminist rants are much sharper in the visual context of a legitimate Mattel toy commercial.

The truth is that you don’t have to look far to find direct comparison points for Last Action Hero.  It wasn’t even the only self-spoofing action hero meta comedy of 1993, since Schwarzenegger’s fellow Planet Hollywood investor Sylvester Stallone had his own macho-fish-out-of-water satire in Demolition Man that same year.  And that’s not even counting the more generalized action genre spoofs of the era like Hot Shots & Naked Gun, nor their more recent smartass superhero equivalents in the Deadpool series.  Meanwhile, most of the aesthetic & tonal touchstones I can think to compare the new Barbie movie to are all relics of the VHS rental era: Josie and the Pussycats, The Brady Bunch Movie, Romy & Michelle’s High School Reunion, Spice World, the aforementioned Legally Blonde, etc.  Those titles have all stood the test of time as obsessive-rewatch classics not only because they’re all sharp-witted and visually vibrant, but also because Hollywood hasn’t bothered to offer up-to-date replacements in the same high-femme register in the decades since.  The instant, participatory enthusiasm for Barbie is reflective of an audience starved for a kind of women-marketed satire that Hollywood doesn’t regularly make anymore.  Meanwhile, Last Action Hero bombed in its time, failing to take on its opening weekend rival Jurassic Park the same way Barbie trounced Oppenheimer.  It still has its own dedicated-to-the-cause cult audience, though, mostly among lifelong Schwarzenegger super-obsessives like me who grew up with it as a childhood favorite.  There’s just so much other self-mocking action schlock out there that it’s a little more difficult to immediately recognize it as something special.

-Brandon Ledet

Weapons of Mass Distraction

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Like most other bored, overheated Americans, I spent the third Friday of July hiding from the sun in my neighborhood movie theater, watching an all-day double feature.  I didn’t directly participate in the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, though, partly due to scheduling inconvenience and partly out of general bafflement with the incongruous pairing.  As a longtime movie obsessive, it was wonderful to see more casual audiences out in full force, dressed up to participate in a double feature program; or it was at least a more endearing moviegoing meme than its recent “Gentleminions” predecessor.  I still like to program my double features with a little more consideration to tone & theme, though, and I can’t imagine that either Nolan’s or Gerwig’s latest were served well by the pairing – which was essentially a joke about how ill-suited they were for back-to-back binging in the first place.  However, I’m not immune to pop culture FOMO, which is how I wound up watching Oppenheimer in the first place.  Nothing about the film’s subject, genre, or marketing screamed out to me as essential viewing, other than the assumption that it was going to be a frequent subject of movie nerd discourse until at least next year’s Oscars ceremony.  So, I dragged my old, tired body to the theater at 10am on a weekday to sit down with Christopher Nolan’s three-hour rumination on the placid evils of nuclear war, and then paired it with a movie I suspected I would like just to sweeten the deal – the ludicrously titled Mission: Impossible 7, Part 1 – Dead Reckoning.  It was essentially the same dessert-after-dinner double feature approach most participating audiences took with Barbenheimer (which, considering that sequence, likely should’ve just been called “Oppie”), except applied to two feature films on a single subject: the abstract weaponry of modern war.

As you surely already know, Oppenheimer stars Cillian Murphy as the titular nuclear physicist, credited for leading the development of the atom bomb at the end of WWII.  His story is told in two conflicting, alternating perspectives: his own version of events in full color (as told to a military security-clearance review board) and a black-and-white version recounted by a professional rival (as told years later in a Congressional hearing).  It’s an abrasively dry approach to such an explosive, emotional subject, even if Nolan does everything possible to win over Dad Movie heretics like me in the story’s framing & editing – breaking up the pedestrian men-talking-in-rooms rhythms of an Oliver Stone or Aaron Sorkin screenplay with his own flashier, in-house Nolanisms.  Oppenheimer strives to overcome its limitations as a legal testimony drama by drawing immense energy from a three-hour crosscutting montage and relentless repetition of its own title at a “Gabbo! Gabbo! Gabbo!” rhythm.  After so many years of tinkering with the cold, technical machinery of cinema, Nolan at least seems willing to allow a new sense of looseness & abstraction into the picture to disrupt his usual visual clockwork (starting most clearly in Tenet).  Young Oppenheimer’s visit to an art museum as a student suggests that this new, abstracted style is inspired by the Cubist art movement of the setting’s era, but the editing feels purely Malickian to me, especially when covering the scientist’s early years.  My favorite moments were his visions of cosmos—micro and macro—while puzzling through the paradoxes of nuclear science, as well as his wife’s intrusive visions of his sexual affair while defending himself to a military panel.  These are still small, momentary distractions from the real business at hand: illustrating the biggest moral fuck-up of human history in all its daily office-work drudgery.  Most of the movie is outright boring in its “What have we done?” contemplations of bureaucratic weaponry-development evil, no matter how much timeline jumping it does in its character-actor table reads of real-life historical documents.

In all honesty, the most I got out of Oppenheimer was an appreciation for it table-setting the mood for the much more entertaining Mission: Impossible 7.  To paraphrase Logan Roy, I am not a serious person.  The great tragedy of Nolan’s piece is watching a Jewish, Leftist man’s attempts to stop his people’s genocide get exploited by the American military’s bottomless hunger for bigger, deadlier bombs – ultimately resulting in a new, inconceivable weapon that will likely lead to the end of humanity’s life on planet Earth (if other forms of industrial pollution don’t kill us first).  Oppenheimer doesn’t realize until it’s too late that his team’s invention did not end WWII; it instead created a new, infinite war built on the looming international threat of mutual self-destruction.  The immediate consequences of the atom bomb were the devastation of two Japanese cities, leaving figurative blood on the haunted man’s hands, which he attempts to clean in the final hour of runtime by ineffectively maneuvering for world peace within the system he helped arm.  The long-term consequences are much more difficult to define, leaving a lingering atmospheric menace on the world outside the theater after the credits roll.  Instead of sweetening that menace with the pink-frosted confectionary of Barbie, I followed up Oppenheimer with a much vapider novelty: the latest Tom Cruise vanity project.  Speaking of history’s greatest monsters, I was also feeling a little uneasy about watching the latest Tom Cruise stunt fest (especially after suffering through last year’s insipid Top Gun rebootquel), but credit where it’s due: Dead Reckoning was a great time at the movies.  Unlike Oppenheimer, M:I 7 is built of full, robust scenes and complete exchanges of dialogue instead of the de-constructed Malickian snippets of a three-hour trailer.  It’s a three-hour frivolity in its own right, but it’s an intensely entertaining one, and it immediately restored my faith that I can still appreciate mainstream, big-budget cinema right after Nolan shook it.  Also, there was something perverse about it doing so by toying around on the exact Cold War playground Oppenheimer mistakenly created.

If there’s a modern equivalent to the abstract, unfathomable power of the atom bomb (besides, you know, the still-growing stockpiles of nuclear weapons in many countries’ arsenals), it’s likely in the arena of digital espionage and the development of A.I. technology.  The seventh Mission: Impossible film runs with the zeitgeisty relevance of killer-A.I. weaponry at full speed, creating an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-everything-everywhere A.I. villain that looks like a vintage iTunes visualizer.  It’s about as well defined as the young Oppenheimer’s intrusive visions of nuclear particles, but neither Cruise nor his in-house workman director Christopher McQuarrie are especially interested in figuring out the scientific logic behind it.  Dead Reckoning‘s A.I. villain—referred to simply (and frequently) as The Entity—is mostly just an excuse for the creepy millionaire auteur behind it to stage a series of increasingly outlandish stunts.  By some miracle, the new Mission: Impossible nearly matches the absurdly convoluted humanity-vs-A.I. combat of Mrs. Davis and the absurdly over-the-top espionage action spectacle of Pathaan, making it the most entertaining American action blockbuster of the year by default.  Unfortunately, like a lot of other American blockbusters this year, it’s also only half a movie, ending on a literal cliff-hanger that won’t be resolved until a three-hour Part 2 conclusion of the miniseries reaches theaters in a couple years.  Since that double feature isn’t currently screening in its entirety, I had to settle for pairing it with Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which at least helped give its over-the-top A.I. espionage theatrics a sense of real-world consequence.  The only recognizable threat behind The Entity’s abstract swirl of LED lights is that it’s smart enough to fool & manipulate nuclear-capable governments.  It could bring the world to an end with the weaponry we’ve already created ourselves, and it wouldn’t be too surprising if Dead Reckoning, Part 2 includes a gag where Cruise diffuses an actual, active nuclear warhead while riding it in the sky like Slim Pickens before him.

My disparate reactions to Oppenheimer and Dead Reckoning likely have more to do with personal taste & disposition than the movies’ objective qualities.  Whereas self-serious lines of dialogue like “How can this man, who saw so much, be so blind?” and “Is anyone ever going to tell the truth about what’s happening here?” had me rolling my eyes at Oppenheimer, I was delighted by Mission: Impossible’s equally phony line reading of “Ethan, you are playing 4D chess with an algorithm,” delivered by Ving Rhames with the same unearned gravitas.  Maybe it’s because I don’t expect much out of the big-budget end of mainstream filmmaking except for its value as in-the-moment entertainment.  I don’t think Oppenheimer‘s internal wrestling with its protagonist’s guilt over inventing The Bomb or our government’s mistreatment of his professional reputation in The McCarthy Era amounts to all that much, except maybe as a reminder that the threat of Nuclear Apocalypse is an ongoing Important Issue.  It obviously can’t solve that issue in any meaningful way, though, unless you put a lot of personal meaning into Hollywood’s ability to convert Important Issues into Awards Statues.  It’s a movie, not a systemic political policy.  I personally see more immediate value in Mission: Impossible‘s ability to delight & distract (both from the real-world horrors of nuclear war and, more maliciously, the real-world horrors of its star), since that’s using the tools of mainstream filmmaking for what they’re actually apt to accomplish.  Oppenheimer is a three-hour montage of Important Men played by “That guy!” character actors exchanging tight smirks & knowing glances in alternating boardroom readings of historical testimony.  Dead Reckoning, Part 1 is a three-hour Evil Knievel stuntman roadshow punctuated by abstract info-dumps about the immense, unfathomable power of A.I. technology.  The closest Nolan comes to matching Cruise in this head-to-head battle in terms of pure entertainment value is the visual gag of a doddering Albert Einstein repeatedly dropping his hat. 

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: A Night in Heaven (1983)

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Boomer: I first saw A Night in Heaven on my 31st birthday, at Weird Wednesday in May of 2018, with a couple of friends. Jazmyne Moreno, who had programmed the film for that week, looked out over the audience and said, and I paraphrase, that she was surprised to see so few women and so many “burly men” in the audience (“bears” is the term she was looking for). Normally, when I tell this story, I follow that part up with a joke that this was followed by chants of “Show us the twink! Give us the twink!” from those in attendance, but that part’s purely fiction. Or is it? 

A Night in Heaven is a romantic drama that isn’t really all that romantic, or maybe it’s an erotic thriller that’s not quite thrilling, but either way, it’s … unique. Directed by John G. Avidsen seven years after he helmed Rocky and one year before the release of his next hit, 1984’s The Karate Kid (and as unlike either of those movies as you can imagine), the film tells the story of Faye Hanlon (Lesley Ann Warren), a teacher at Titusville Community College in Florida, one hour from Orlando. Her husband Whitney (Robert Logan) is a NASA rocket scientist and amateur recumbent bicycle designer at a career crossroads, finding himself being tasked with ballistic missile design instead of the astronomic rocketry about which he is passionate. Forming the third leg—no pun intended—of the love triangle at the center of the film is Rick Monroe (Christopher Atkins), a student in Faye’s speech class whose flippant attitude toward his final presentation leads her to give him a failing grade for the semester. That night, Faye and Rick’s paths cross outside of the classroom when her vacationing sister Patsy (Deborah Rush) drags her out to a male strip revue called Heaven, where she discovers that her student is an exotic dancer under the name “Ricky Rocket,” and they experience an intimate moment when he gives her a personal dance. 

Faye returns home horned up, and attempts to initiate sex with her husband, who turns her down and tells her that he’s been fired, leading Faye to wonder if there is a future for their relationship. Her feelings are further complicated by Rick’s ongoing flirtations with her as he tries to convince her to let him retake his final exam, and since her sister is staying at the hotel where Rick’s mother and sister work, they keep running into each other. She tries to avoid admitting her attraction to the younger man, but when Patsy has to go home a day early because her daughter is ill, she convinces Faye to stay the night in the paid-for hotel room rather than try to drive back late. Faye spends most of the night trying to reach her husband at home but there’s no answer (we see him reconnecting with a recently-divorced old flame that he runs into), and she ultimately ends up spending the night with Rick. An unwise phone call from Patsy, now back home in Chicago, leads Whitney to realize that his jealousy isn’t baseless, and he travels to the hotel. Faye realizes that she’s been used when she catches Rick in the shower with his girlfriend Slick (Sandra Beall), and it all comes to a head when Rick and Whitney have a confrontation. 

I don’t always feel the need to provide such a thorough recapitulation of a plot when we discuss a movie for this feature, but I did this time, since the Wikipedia plot summary is confused, to say the least. It cites that “Faye is going through a slump in her marriage to Whitney Hanlon, a rocket scientist who has just been laid off,” and that this is the reason that Patsy takes her out to Heaven to cheer her up, but that’s not the case. For one thing, it skips a few plot points ahead, given that there’s no real indication that the Hanlons’ marriage is on rocky ground at the outset, other than that Whitney’s been working nights and he can’t convince Faye to play hooky with him when she has finals to perform. The first indication of strife happens when Whitney isn’t interested in intimacy because of his firing, which Faye only learns about after coming back from the club. I’m not sure it’s the fault of the editor of that wiki page, however, as the film does seem to be missing a few plot points of its own – a fairly common issue with low budget films of this era. This is one of those movies that I feel probably had a more thoughtful script, since there are the vague outlines of something more nuanced and deeper going on at the edges.  Patsy’s description of the failures in her own marriage read like they’re supposed to echo something that’s happening in Faye’s marriage, but Faye’s issues are so vague that they don’t track. It also feels like we’re supposed to track that Whitney’s experiencing something of a crisis because he fears replacement in his relationship with his wife by a younger, sexier man while also confronting failure in finding a new job, citing “they hired a 14-year-old instead,” but again, it’s lacking. It’s not that the movie is just playing coy and being subtle, it’s more that there are gaps in the story, and that would be frustrating, if you come to the movie for that. Most people aren’t though; they’re here for the flesh. 

As thin and threadbare as the movie may be in other areas, one thing that it really has going for it is a striking soundtrack, which far outshines the film itself and has remained in the public consciousness for far longer. There are three undeniable bangers that were written specifically for this film, two of which are still pop culture touchstones while the third is (unfairly, in my opinion) largely forgotten. The first is the title track, which happens to be “Heaven” by Canadian singer-songwriter Bryan Adams, which plays in its entirety while Whitney rides his recumbent bike home after a night shift, creating some unintentional bathos. The song hit #9 on the Billboard charts with that release, and it also ended up on Adams’s album Reckless later that year, putting it back on the Billboard as the third single from the album, reaching #1 in April of 1985, completely eclipsing A Night in Heaven as far as cultural cachet and longevity. Perhaps almost as notable was the track “Obsession,” which was written and performed by Michael Des Barres and Holly Knight, and which was covered the following year by LA-based synth-pop band Animotion, becoming the biggest single of that band’s career, ensuring a pop culture legacy that’s more fondly (and more often) remembered than the film from which it spawned. Finally, I have a real fondness for “Like What You See,” which was composed by the film’s music supervisor Jan Hammer, a Czech-American composer with a long history of collaboration with a variety of household names like Mick Jagger and Carlos Santana. The track, performed by Hammer and the band Next, is a real treat, a peculiar blend of sultry and yacht rock-adjacent synths, and it’s undeniably sexy, even when it’s not paired with erotic dancing. 

What did you think? Did you like the soundtrack or was there a dissonance caused by the presence of much more famous music? Would you call this a romantic drama, an erotic thriller, or something completely different? 

Brandon: If I was at all distracted by the pop tunes plugged into the soundtrack, it was only in the immense difference in quality between the aforementioned “Heaven” & “Obsession” – respectfully, one of the all-time worst and one of the all-time best pop songs of all time.  Personal taste aside, as a pair they do exemplify what is so jarring about the movie’s volatile sense of tone, which alternates wildly from scene to scene.  “Heaven” represents its penchant for soft romantic melodrama, in which a troubled couple negotiates a rough patch in their marriage through teary-eyed phone calls and kitchen table heart-to-hearts.  By contrast, “Obsession” amplifies the erotically thrilling hedonism of the wife’s trips to the strip bar and her cuckolded husband’s parallel trips to the shooting range, an explosive recipe for sex & violence that thankfully only pays off on the sex end.  The way the film alternates between those two opposing tones can be a little clumsy, but the tension between them is also what makes the story so compelling.  Here we have the rare mainstream picture that sincerely engages with and markets to female sexual desire, tempting its timid protagonist to step outside the tedious complications and relative safety of her suburban marriage to enter a more dangerous, thrilling world of hedonistic excess.  In some ways, it softens the danger of her transgressions by making the object of her desire such a boyish, twinky goofball that she has immediate power over as his college professor, but by indulging her urges she also turns her husband into a potential mass shooter so I guess it all evens out. 

In a way, it’s incredible that a major Hollywood studio distributed a Magic Mike prototype decades before Soderbergh cornered the market on male stripper cinema, and it’s somehow become an out-of-print curio instead of a regular rowdy-screening cult favorite.  However, considering that Disney now owns the 20th Century Fox repertory catalog and there are several shots of the hot twink’s exposed peen, maybe it’s less incredible than it is just shameful.  There’s nothing especially vulgar nor raunchy about A Night in Heaven outside those brief flashes of male nudity and the fact that the zipper to Ricky Rocket’s pants is centered in the back instead of the front.  Still, it’s shocking to see a retro movie sincerely marketed to stoke women’s libidos, since that’s such a rare mode for mainstream Hollywood filmmaking.  There’s a detectable relishment over the film’s financial & artistic missteps in its contemporary reviews (including a New York Times writer declaring it “Flashdunce”) that’s typical to most media that dares to market directly to women.  Hell, maybe even my aversion to Bryan Adams’s “Heaven” is a result of that extremely gendered form of cringe, which rejects feminine artistic aesthetics as automatically lesser-than.  It’s a tough habit to shake.  In hindsight, though, it’s wonderfully endearing to see that a sexy strip club with a softcore porno title was marketed to that eternally underserved audience, even if only as a fluke inspired by the fad popularity of Chippendales male stripper shows.  The early exchange “I just flunked that kid,” “You did WHAT?” between girlfriends would have still been a mainstream-media novelty when Sex and the City was a zeitgeist changer two decades later, so it probably shouldn’t be surprising that America wasn’t ready to spend a night in Heaven when Reagan was still president.

Britnee: I am so grateful for being introduced to A Night in Heaven. This confusing mess of a movie is extremely entertaining, and I’ve already put rare DVD copies on my eBay and Mercari watchlists. I need this in my collection to watch over and over again. First off, I adore Leslie Anne Warren. Her performances in two of my favorite films, Victor/Victoria and Clue, are iconic, and she killed it as Susan Mayer’s mother, Sophie, in the Desperate Housewives series. She was perfect in the role of Faye, the conservatively dressed academic with a suppressed wild side. 

The question Boomer asked is the same question I had when I finished watching the film: “What genre is this?” It’s not romantic enough to be a romance. It’s also not purposefully funny, and not really erotic either. It’s a slightly sexy wholesome drama? I really don’t know the answer. All I know is that it’s a mystery that makes for a damn good time. The extended, pointless Bryan Adams bike ride really set the tone for what was to come! I laughed so much while singing along to “Heaven”. Yes, I’m a Bryan Adams fan, so I really enjoyed the soundtrack, especially the early original version of “Obsession”. That song is on just about every 80s mixed CD I’ve ever made. The soundtrack itself is a mixed tape that encapsulates everything the film does or is trying to do, and I think that’s wonderful.

What I wanted so badly was for Faye and Ricky Rocket to have multiple trysts and a stronger sexual connection with each other. The initial Ricky Rocket dance scene was insanely hot (and I watched it multiple times), but that was as strong as the tension between the two got. I wanted this to be more of a genuine age-gap romance like White Palace rather than a douche bag trying to get a passing grade by flirting with his professor. Why couldn’t Faye unleash her inner cougar with a young stud who was legitimately attracted to her? And then leave her boring husband for her new lover? I wanted this to be trashier, dammit!

Alli: Wow, maybe it’s my recent interest in trashy romance novels, or maybe it’s just from identifying strongly as a woman for most of my life, but I had a lot of fun with this. There’s a kitsch quality to it that directly hits my brain’s pleasure center: the straight laced, tight bunned school marm who’s secretly a hotty if she would only let down her hair; the nerdy husband who will do anything for her; the temptation, some kind of snake (wink wink, nudge nudge). It’s a parade of archetypes that just work. I can’t believe that this movie has somehow slid into obscurity, regardless of its pop songs. It just highlights the lack of cultural hype around movies about women’s pleasure and desires. (From what I’ve experienced on romance-novel-internet, books are not suffering from the same treatment somehow despite being far more numerous.) I hope that this Swampflix feature at least partly helps rectify that obscurity.

Something that really hit me, in terms of kitsch and lush texture, was the art direction and lighting. Yes, the changes in costumes mark shifts in character. Okay, now she’s the hot teacher because she let her hair down and put on a “racy dress.” Okay, look at these stripper outfits and how they differ from regular day to day. The night-time versus the daytime. Yeah, these shifts are obvious, but I love it. It’s so rare to see such blatant shifts outside teen make-over comedies. And the lighting here is perfect for it, especially the contrast between the regular classroom, office, daytime, household lighting versus the lighting in Heaven, where Ricky Rocket at one point literally has a Byzantine halo made of the colored lights above as he’s giving a lap dance. I was absolutely living for it.

As far as whether or not this is a romantic thriller or drama, it feels much more like a drama to me. Yeah, eventually a gun is involved, but it feels so minor compared to the switches between boring wife-dom and the straight woman paradise of Heaven. It plays so much more like a fantasy than a drama. Faye gets to have her cake (sleeping with Ricky when her marriage feels stagnant) and eat it too (going back to her husband with better communication and knowledge of her needs). The fact that she’s not punished for desiring a younger man is so refreshing. 

Lagniappe

Britnee:  I was surprised to see so much exposed man pubes here. Truly, A Night in Heaven walked so Magic Mike could run.

Alli: In a world full of male fantasies about big men hoarding guns, setting off explosions, and saving the world, we need more counter programming like this. We need more soft fantasies about young (of legal age) men desiring school teachers. Or, you know, just generally about women getting to explore their sexuality without drastic consequences. There’s a reason this is such a HUGE genre of literary fiction.

Brandon: I would like to personally welcome Jerri Blank’s stepmother, Deborah Rush, back to the Movie of the Month family after such a long hiatus following her early appearances in the screwball comedy Big Business and the cosmic horror The Box.  As a Strangers with Candy obsessive, I am so used to Rush being an ice-cold suburban terminator who “drinks to kill the pain” that I was shocked & delighted to see her bubblier 80s side as the sassy, squeaky sidekick here.  If y’all ever want to pivot this feature into a Deborah Rush Movie of the Month ritual instead, I am totally down.

Boomer: I’m very pleased that this one went over so well. This movie is disjointed—there’s no denying it—and its tonal inconsistencies could be a turn off, but I knew this would be this gaggle of freaks and weirdos to appreciate it. 

-The Swampflix Crew

You Can’t Wake Up if You Don’t Fall Asleep

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I am no longer a true believer in the oft-repeated Ebert quote, “The movies are like a machine that generates empathy.” Or, I at least no longer believe that empathy is the most interesting or noble thing the movies machine can generate.  The more I’ve succumbed to incurable cinephilia in recent years the less interested I’ve become in the movies’ ability to document or reflect objective reality back at the audience, as if we don’t get more than enough real-life tedium outside the theater walls.  Even if there’s value to learning and vicariously experiencing the intimate details of each other’s lives through cinema, reducing the artform to its ability to generate empathy feels small & unimaginative, especially if that’s the only thing on a movie’s mind.  Subtlety, restraint, and adherence to real-world logic are boring, self-imposed restrictions for a medium that’s so apt for dreams & poetry.  It’s just as much of a well-worn cliché, but I’ve come to the point where cinema’s function as a machine that generates shared, communal dreams is its primary cultural value to me.  Empathy is a useful byproduct of the movie dream machine, but it’s at best secondary to the way cinema can deeply submerge us in the subconscious id of the artists behind it.  If a filmmaker is using the art of the moving image to achieve anything other than full sensory intoxication or communal mesmerism, they might as well write prose or record a podcast instead.  There’s so much more to the medium than farming empathy in the documentation or dramatic retelling of each other’s daily drudgery.

At least, that’s what I was thinking about while watching a double feature of this summer’s most critically lauded works: Wes Anderson’s ensemble cast sci-fi comedy Asteroid City and Celine Song’s long-distance relationship breakdown Past Lives.  I likely shouldn’t have bothered seeing Past Lives at all, since subtle, tastefully underplayed dramas aren’t really my thing.  I do allow myself to get talked into seeing a few gloomy exercises in real-world restraint every year, though, if not just to see what everyone else is gushing about while I’m seeking out high-style histrionics & novelty.  I had about the same experience with Past Lives as I had with last year’s similarly lauded & restrained Aftersun: respect for its craft but bafflement over its ecstatic praise, since practically every film festival is overflowing with similarly subtle, underplayed titles just like it (most of which never land proper distribution).  In contrast, I watched Asteroid City for the second time in 24 hours on that double bill and found its dreamlike artifice much more emotionally rewarding than Past Lives‘s real-world resignation.  In The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson self-assessed how his fussy live-action New Yorker cartoons function as populist entertainment; in Asteroid City, the self-assessment peers inward, shifting to their function as emotional Trojan horses. I found the former funnier but the latter more affecting, sinking several layers of framing-devices deeper into his subconscious to pick at the same somber tones of yearning & heartbreak as Past Lives with less of a literal, straight-forward approach.  It likely says less about the merits of the movies than it says about my facilities as an audience that I needed to puzzle at the complex narrative structure & fussy visual craft of Asteroid City (a movie within a stage play within a television special) to enjoy its small, intimate character moments for their own pleasure, while Past Lives was willing to serve those pleasures to me directly. Apparently, to fully appreciate the small things I need them buried under a crushing excess of style & artifice; I need to feel like they came to me in a dream.

The pattern repeated with my library DVD haul that same week, which happened to include two coming-of-age stories about young women: the 70s-set Judy Blume adaptation Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and the French dirt-bike crime thriller Rodeo.  One was a critically-lauded empathy machine that documents and validates the awkwardness & inner turmoil of puberty in all young American girls who are impatient to become young American women.  The other alternates between the quiet restraint of a crime world docudrama and the sensory free-for-all of a legitimate art piece, submerging the audience in the dreams & volatile emotions of one particular teenage reprobate with an ecstatic passion for racing stolen dirt bikes.  You can likely guess which one I preferred.  Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is less extraordinary than it is warmly familiar.  It reminded me of a lot of classic comfort watches that I grew up with in the 1990s: Mermaids, My Girl, Now & Then, etc.  It’s a pleasant movie about pleasant people, one that directly asks you to empathize with common, everyday rites of passage.  Rodeo is a much thornier picture.  It documents the experiences of real-world dirt bike stunt racers by casting them as their own fictional avatars and—in the case of its disgruntled antiheroine—inviting you into their prophetic nightmares of self-destruction & immolation.  There’s no reason to contrast & compare the two movies other than that my public library requests for them happened to be fulfilled on the same day; they’re as structurally & aesthetically distinct from each other as the vintage postcard artifice of Asteroid City and the real-world melancholy of Past Lives.  The same questions of which film was making better, more purposeful use of their shared medium were rattling around in my empty skull, though, and I again came down in favor of the dream machine over the empathy machine.

I’ve been writing reviews for this humble movie blog for eight years now, which is a long enough duration that I can’t help but reflect on what I value in this artform I’ve spent so much time admiring & picking apart.  Wes Anderson’s spent at least three decades admiring & picking apart the artform himself, and Asteroid City appears to find him arriving at similar conclusions.  Throughout the film, performers within his multi-layered narrative break character to question the meaning behind their dialogue & actions as written, as well as their place within specific framing devices at specific times.  The Anderson avatar who wrote the piece they’re performing has no clear answers for the reasoning behind his words, only that they work to express subconscious emotion.  In a climactic scene that lovingly parodies The Twilight Zone, the performers stare at the camera directly and chant “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” in a rhythmic, zombified monotone, reinforcing that to experience & share in that subconscious emotion the audience must give into the artifice of the work and forget the reasoning behind it.  We have to dream.  As thoughtful & empathetic as they are, neither Past Lives nor Are You There God? ever fully fall asleep; they are awake to the logical restrictions of the real world.  Rodeo drifts along in that in-between state you feel just before you fall asleep, purposefully confusing a documentation of reality with the shared-dream intoxication of cinema, only fully letting go of the handlebars in its emotional climax.  Of this group, only Asteroid City fully falls asleep, and I found its emotional provocations the most effective among them because they were allowed to be as indirect and inexplicable as our own internal responses to the world outside our heads.  It would be foolish to expect every movie to interact with (or entirely ignore) reality in that way, but the ones that do so are the ones that are most fully engaging with the tools, methods, and uses of the artform.

-Brandon Ledet

Ranking the Mystery Men

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As ubiquitous as superhero cinema has felt in the past couple decades, it’s worth remembering that we’ve been here before, even within my lifetime.  Tim Burton’s Batman series was a cultural behemoth when I was a kid and inspired a robust generation of comic book adaptations in the 1990s the same way the 2010s was overflowing with various studios’ desperate attempts to echo the box office success of the MCU.  In 1997 alone, there were over three dozen announcements of major-studio comic book movies in development, a few of which actually arrived on screens: X-Men, Blade, The Fantastic Four, Daredevil, etc.  One of those many rushed-to-market cash-ins on the Burton & Schumacher Batman series was a spinoff of the satirical Flaming Carrots comics, titled Mystery Men.  It’s a sarcastic Gen-X riff on that era’s superhero boom, stuck somewhere between the smarty-pants irony of the recent Deadpool comedies and the kid-friendly goofballery of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, which were also adapted from superhero spoofs.  Even twenty years ago there was enough superhero media on the market that there was room for a movie making fun of the common tropes & trappings of superhero media; the only difference, really, is that studios used to produce other kinds of movies for adults at the same time.

There was something a little redundant about Mystery Men parodying the Batman series so soon after Schumacher already went full goofball cartoon in Batman & Robin a couple years earlier, the same way Scary Movie is redundant for parodying Scream.  Kinka Usher’s background directing the “Got Milk?” & Taco Bell Chihuahua ads made him a great fit for the material, though, balancing out the slacker irony of the comedians in the cast with sincere commercial-filmmaking aesthetics — complete with a tie-in Smash Mouth single.  I knew that Mystery Men was a comedy as a kid, but it didn’t feel out of step with Jim Carrey’s manic antics as the Riddler in Batman Forever or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s non-stop onslaught of cold weather puns in Batman & Robin.  I was tickled by Mystery Men‘s fart jokes & superloser anti-heroics in the theater, not quite old enough to see how it was spoofing the genre instead of genuinely participating in it.  As an adult who’s now lived through so many superhero action epics and their own subsequent waves of warped parodies (most recently in The Boys, Extra Ordinary, and Freaks vs The Reich), its jokes at comic book movies’ expense have somewhat dulled with time in a way Schumacher & Usher’s earnest breakfast cereal commercial energy haven’t, but there’s at least an interesting tension between those two sentiments in the production.

One thing that has unquestionably improved about Mystery Men in the two decades since I first saw it in the theater is my general fondness for the cast.  The screen was already overflowing with familiar faces in the 1990s, but twenty-plus years of pop media obsession has only made the crew assembled here even more incredible.  It’s the most shocked I’ve been by the talent assembled for a studio comedy since I revisited Galaxy Quest a few years ago; I’d even say it’s got Galaxy Quest beat, at least in terms of recognizable, always welcome faces.  And so, I feel the impulse to list the full cast of low-effort superheroes assembled on the titular Mystery Men team (not including other key contributors like Geoffrey Rush as the villainous Casanova Frankenstein, if not only to avoid copying & pasting the full IMDb cast list).  Here are the members of the Mystery Men, ranked by how important they are to the success of the film as a Gen-X comic book spoof, not how powerful they are as superpowered crimefighters — a nine-way tie for last.

1. Wes Studi as The Sphinx

Superpower: Cryptic doublespeak

Contribution: Wes Studi may be the least famous underpowered hero in the cast, but he’s a solid “That guy!” character actor who rarely gets to fire off as many punchlines as he’s armed with here.  The Sphinx arrives halfway into the film after the Mystery Men team is fully formed, stepping in as a Mister Miyagi-style philosophical trainer.  His pretzel-twisted wisdoms like “He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions” and “When you care what its outside, what is inside cares for you” are absurdly inane and consistently land the film’s biggest laughs.  His official superpower is the ability to cut firearms in half with his mind, but his real skill is in cutting apart the English language until it means nothing at all.

2. Greg Kinnear as Captain Amazing

Superpower: Inherited wealth

Contribution: Captain Amazing is even less of an official Mystery Men team member than group mentor The Sphinx, but he completes their missions and ungratefully takes advantage of their assistance often enough that I’m lumping him in with the crew.  A vague amalgamation of Batman & Superman (complete with Clark Kent’s magical glasses & Batman’s infinite funding), Captain Amazing is the perfect Handsome Chad counterbalance to official team’s bitterly inert slackerdom.  Greg Kinnear is perfectly cast for the role, weaponizing his generic good looks to play Amazing as a shameless fame chaser who’s more spon-con celebrity than genuine hero.  The visual gag of his superhero uniform being checkered with NASCAR-style sponsor patches feels ahead of its time, fully satirizing the property-protecting fascist leanings of all superheroism years before The Boys would make the same joke.

3. Janeane Garofalo as The Bowler

Superpower: Daddy issues

Contribution: The official spokesperson for detached Gen-X cool, Garofalo was the most aspirational character to me as a kid.  She carries around the film’s coolest prop—a sentient bowling ball that suspends her father’s telepathic, browbeating skull in clear resin—while glowering at the world through her trademark black eyeshadow.  She also carries the rest of the cast, establishing chemistry and cohesion among each of her fellow Mystery Men that would be totally absent without her.  Garofalo was reportedly an early believer in the project and put her legitimizing comedy-scene credibility behind Usher’s crassly commercial vision to bring the full production together.  Mystery Men wouldn’t be much of anything without Garofalo, which you could just as credibly say about 90s Gen-X comedy at large.

4. William H Macy as The Shoveler

Superpower: A strong work ethic

Contribution: In a film starring at least a dozen big-name comedians with selfish ambitions to steal the show, William H. Macy’s straight-man role is an essential tonal anchor, one that becomes its own metatextual punchline the more the film relies on him.  The Shoveler is a no-nonsense hard worker with a loving nuclear family waiting at home.  His supershovel is an off-the-rack “weapon” purchased from a hardware store, which he carries to work with quiet dignity as if her were punching the clock at a construction site.  An accomplished dramatic actor, Macy is overqualified for the role, which is partly why it’s so funny to watch him work alongside so many Looney Tunes lunatics.

5. Kel Mitchell as Invisible Boy

Superpower: Invisible invisibility

Contribution: Invisible Boy’s unconfirmable power to turn invisible only when no one is looking is a genius encapsulation of the Mystery Men’s team-wide ineffectiveness.  The plot’s machinations to engineer a situation where that power could be at all useful, even if only for a second, is also one of the film’s most inspired moments of comic book spoofery.  Most importantly, Kel Mitchell’s casting in the role was a smart marketing move in appealing to 90s kids, to whom All That & Good Burger were the absolute pinnacle of comedy as an artform.  At least that’s how I remember it.

6. Paul Ruebens as Spleen

Superpower: Hideous farts

Contribution: Likewise to Kel’s casting, you could not appeal to children’s comedic sensibilities in the 90s any more effectively than by casting Pee-wee Herman as a revolting superhero with rancid, long-range farts.  The only reason Spleen doesn’t rank higher here is that adults’ patience for his wet lisp & flatulence is stretched much thinner than their kids’, no matter how much of a cultural event it is to catch a glimpse of Ruebens outside his iconic grey suit.

7. Ben Stiller as Mister Furious

Superpower: Impotent white-boy rage

Contribution: Ben Stiller is ostensibly the star of the show, and his career-long rapport with fellow Ben Stiller Show alum Jeneane Garofalo affords Mystery Men a lot of its comedy-nerd street cred.  His heart just clearly isn’t in the project as much as Garofalo’s, and a lot of his stilted improv as an all-rage-and-no-skills Batman knockoff fails to land on any solid laughs.  The joke in the movie is that Mister Furious’s directionless, un-super anger isn’t especially useful to the team, and unfortunately the same is mostly true of Stiller’s chime-ins as the self-elected team leader.

8. Tom Waits as Doc Heller

Superpower: Tech savvy

Contribution: Doc Heller is another unofficial member of the Mystery Men team, but since he supplies the super-underachievers with high-tech weaponry his contributions to their vigilante crimefighting are invaluable.  In entertainment terms, his non-lethal superweapons encourage Usher to indulge in as much 90s-era CGI spectacle as the budget allowed, which helps date the film in an increasingly charming way.  It also means that one of the most notable members of the cast—barstool crooner Tom Waits—is sidelined for most of the action, which is unfortunate, since any amount of his presence contributes to the film’s general Gen-X cool.

9. Hank Azaria as The Blue Raja

Superpower: Fork-throwing

Contribution: Unfortunately, Hank Azaria’s cultural-appropriating silverware tosser is a one-man catchall for all of Mystery Men‘s worst qualities: Stiller’s go-nowhere improv, Ruebens’s grating vocal choices, and the vague threat that the next incoming punchline is going to be an actual hate crime.  Azaria’s onscreen way too much for a performer bringing so little to the table, but thankfully he’s got a full team of much funnier contributors backing him up with much funnier bits.

-Brandon Ledet

Quick Takes: Summer Flings

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It’s summertime, which means every movie marquee in America is clogged with corporate slop, and even the more artistic counterprogramming offered at your local multiplex is going to be a frantic superhero IP refresher like Shin Kamen Rider or Across the Spider-Verse.  There’s no refuge for weirdo cineastes in these conditions, which means that I won’t be leaving my couch much until Halloween & Oscars schlock reclaim their rightful screen space in October.  Naturally, I’m still watching movies, but I’m trying to keep everything light & low-key instead of getting my brain hammered smooth by the fast & furious transformer machinery of the summer’s new release schedule. 

As a result, I’ve been watching a lot of quiet indie films about love & romance in recent weeks, none of which will be lighting up my personal Best of the Year list at the end of 2023 but all of which have been a pleasant distraction while soaking up AC at my home box office.  So, here are a few short-form reviews of the smaller-scale, smaller-budget romances I’ve been watching this summer.

Rye Lane

When I try to name the most romantic movies of all time, the walk-and-talk European meet cute Before Sunrise is high on the hypothetical list.  Its 2023 equivalent, Rye Lane, continues the Before brand tradition of casual first-date swooning but shakes up the usual Beformula by transporting the action to the mostly Black neighborhoods of South London.  Meeting by chance at a mutual friend’s hilariously hacky art show, two South Londoners endlessly chat on what spirals into an accidental all-day first date, despite their recent, respective heartbreaks over failed relationships.  Their getting-to-know-you banter is decidedly low-key, but their walking tour of hip city neighborhoods provides a vibrant, near-psychedelic backdrop of food, art, fashion, sex, and music.  One sequence involving a petty heist temporarily raises the stakes (as our giddy couple breaks into an ex’s flat to liberate a vinyl copy of The Low End Theory), but for the most part the will-they-won’t-they tension of their tryst has an obvious, inevitable and, most importantly, adorable conclusion.

Rye Lane offers all of the usual chaotic, inexplicable behavior of a bubbly romcom, except now matched with chaotic, inexplicable camera work.  The whole thing is shot with a Soderberghian fisheye lens, bending a familiar modern comedy template around the constantly surprising visual flourishes of music videos & vintage animation.  Its central hook-up story of a meek man shaken out of his comfort zone by a manic pixie dream hedonist isn’t ever mind-blowing, but its warped visual presentation often can be.  In short, it’s a feel-good Before Sunrise for the Instagram era, and it’s a shame that its direct-to-Hulu distro means it has a much smaller chance of making a splash as that 90s indie-scene charmer.

Emily

Wuthering Heights may be the greatest romance ever written, but its story of life-long ferocious obsession & betrayal isn’t likely to be described as “small” or “low-key” by anyone who’s actually read it.  However, this factually loose biopic of its author imagines a brief, intimate affair that might have inspired its tale of feral, soul-destroying love, dragging it down to the level of a more recognizable, real-world romance.  Emma “Maeve from Sex Education” Mackey stars as a teenage Emily Brontë doing field research (i.e., getting her heart broken) before writing the novel that made her infamous.  According to the movie’s made-up version of events, her source inspiration behind Cathy’s wild, untamed desire for Heathcliff is split between the only two young men in her life: her libertine brother and their isolated village’s local curate. Thankfully, the story never tips into full-on incest (although that wouldn’t be too out of place in a Wuthering Heights context).  Instead, the young Brontë shares a fiery, oft-consummated passion with the clergyman – which is just sinful & blasphemous enough to justify its supposed connection to the novel, especially once the curate breaks her spirit by abruptly breaking things off.

Emily may not be useful as a historical text, but its deviations from the facts of Brontë’s sheltered bookworm life help make it an entertaining tribute to the greatest romance ever penned.  There’s something especially endearing about the way her handwritten prose & poetry are too powerful for the small-minded prudes around her to gaze at directly (including her sister & fellow author Charlotte, whom the film slanders as a proto-Karen scold).  Once a grief-stricken Emily sits down to scribble the entirety of Wuthering Heights in a single, furious tantrum, the fictionalized power of her writing can come across a little goofy, but it helps that the novel in question has stood the test of time as an incendiary work that either enraptures or enrages its readers to this day.  More importantly, the film itself is a gloomy love letter to all angsty goth girls everywhere, often making Brontë’s imagined loves & literary triumphs secondary to her iconoclastic status as a teenage “free thinker” who dabbles in opium, dirty poems, and the occult.  It’s romantic in its portrayal of a doomed fling that can only last a single season, but it’s also romantic in its aspirational posturing as a ghost story about the original shy-girl goth kid who became infamous for her dark-sided art and her intense brooding on the moors.

Sanctuary

It’s not exactly true that there’s no artsy counterprogramming in theaters right now.  In some ways, I’ve just been trained over the pandemic to treat this kind of low-budget, low-stakes movie as a small-screen experience that I’ll eventually catch whenever it hits streaming.  So, I have admittedly shot myself in the foot several times over the past month, skipping out on local showings of Past Lives, Monica, You Hurt My Feelings, and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.  I guess I’ll be cramming in those titles in the mad scramble to bulk up my Best of the Year list in December.  In the meantime, though, I did recently venture out of the house to see the single-room two hander Sanctuary, despite it being no bigger nor flashier than those competitors.  I suppose after already being suckered into watching Piercing, any movie where Christopher Abbott is tortured by a high-class dominatrix is something of an Event Film for me, although I can’t say either example so far has been especially exceptional.  In Sanctuary, Abbott’s pro-domme tormentor is played by Margaret Qualley, who refuses to take “No” for an answer when her millionaire hotel-heir client (Abbott) decides to break off their professional relationship just as he takes over his dad’s business and the real money starts flowing in.  Feeling like he owes his success to her sexual “training” and like their sessions have transcended a purely transactional nature to something more sweetly romantic, she holds him hostage in his luxury hotel suite until he caves and gives her everything her volatile whims demand.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of Sanctuary.  It’s either a disappointingly flat erotic thriller or a charmingly daffy romcom.  Maybe it’s both.  It needed to feel like a finely constructed stage play to fully work, but its ditzy internal logic is written more in the spirit of online erotica.  The result is something like an off-Broadway adaptation of Succession fan fiction (a Roman Roy fantasy, specifically), which can be adorably goofy in the moment but quickly falls apart under any prolonged scrutiny.  I did laugh at the camera movements that simulated the power dynamic flipping between characters by literally flipping the frame upside down (a move that’s coincidentally mirrored in Emily, which enters the twisted mind of Emily Brontë by literally twisting the camera’s zoom-in on her dark goth-girl eyes).  I also chuckled at the baffling, seemingly arbitrary decisions those characters make every few minutes, either to convey the frustration & desperation of someone who’s wildly horny or to convey the frustration & desperation of a screenwriter who doesn’t know how to keep the story going.  I appreciated that Qualley kept the mood light by playing her domme persona bratty instead of severe, but I can’t say that her performance wouldn’t have been better suited for, say, a Rachel Sennott or a Mia Goth or a Mia Wasikowska – one of whom has already proven her worth in this exact Abbott-teasing scenario.  I don’t know.  I’m the exact target audience for this kind of perversely playful filth, and yet I walked away from the theater only mildly satisfied, so I can’t imagine most people will work up much enthusiasm for it.  At least there are no green screen backdrops, and Christopher Abbott isn’t playing a superhero?  Arthouse victories can feel so minor this time of year, but I’m still thankful that they’re out there.

-Brandon Ledet

Where Has All the Millennial Pop Art Gone?

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The great, wide world of popular media has done its damnedest to make sure I am nostalgic for the Power Rangers this year.  Between seeing the original mighty morphin’ Rangers resurrected for cheap nostalgia pops in Netflix’s Power Rangers: Once and Always, seeing them spoofed for laughs in Quentin Dupieux’s absurdist horror anthology Smoking Causes Coughing, and seeing the vintage television aesthetics of their Japanese source material echoed in Hideaki Anno’s recent Ultraman reboot, the Power Rangers have been on my mind all year.  Of those relentless nostalgia stokers, Once & Always felt the most accurate to the schlock TV I loved as a kid, in that it’s mostly just subprofessional actors bullshitting around in open fields until actual martial artists who know what they’re doing jump into the frame to save the day.  It rides an uneasy imbalance between rushing out more anonymous background television for children under the Power Rangers brand and comforting those children’s parents with background garbage familiar to their own Millennial youth.  If the one-off reunion special were only 20 minutes long and broken up by toy & cereal commercials it would have been perfectly in step with the way I remember the Power Rangers as my 1990s mechadino babysitters, as if the original show were never cancelled and its teen stars slowly succumbed to death & wrinkles on air week to week for decades on end.  In some ways, I suppose the special itself is the commercial, in that its entire purpose is to re-spark interest in the Power Rangers brand, which has effectively been dormant since its excellent-but-failed franchise starter in 2017.  I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Netflix currently holds the streaming rights for the original Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers TV series, which officially makes Once & Always, as cheap & underdeveloped as it is, the most effort they’ve ever put into advertising one of their shows to date.  And since most exhausted, world-weary Millennial parents aren’t going to have the time, patience, or awareness to seek out niche, higher quality Power Rangers-adjacent media like Smoking Causes Coughing, they’re going to scratch that nostalgic itch in the quickest, most convenient way possible – never venturing outside what’s available on Netflix.  Not me, though.  I’m different.

Because I’m first & foremost a movie nerd, I had to scratch my mighty morphin’ nostalgia itch by returning to 1995’s Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie.  To my shock, it was not available to stream through subscription, rental, nor library loan despite the opportunity for profit raised by Once & Always, and I had to blow the dust off my early 2000s DVD copy to watch it again.  In a way, I get why the Power Rangers movie would be allowed to slip out of general public access, since it’s getting just as old & dated as it is goofy & vapid.  I was eight years old when I first begged my parents to see Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie in the theater, and so it has always felt like a prestigious cultural event to me when compared to the more casual, tossed-off nature of the television show it was cashing in on.  Everything I loved about the show as a kid was given a high-end upgrade for the big screen, from the teenage superheroes’ regular-size power suits to their kaiju-size mechabeasts.  As a result, it remains an excellent time capsule of the niche bullshit only a 90s Kid™ could possibly care about, starting with a preposterous Star Wars scroll that quickly explains the Power Rangers’ lore as intergalactic teen crimefighters recruited by a noble space alien named Zordon.  Watching it as an adult, I was amused imagining my parents suffering through its endlessly inane babble about morphing, morphological beings, zords, megazords, ninja zords, ectomorians, and electromagnetic deadlock as if any of that means anything to anyone.  Its convoluted lore is all in service of incomprehensibly edited fight choreography, surreally dated CGI, eXtreme sports posturing, and rushed one-liner insults labeling the bad guys “Mr. Raisin Head” (because, as you will surely remember, Ivan Ooze is purple) and “dingledorks” (that one explains itself).  Power Rangers: The Movie is idiotic pop art at its finest, all sloppy live-action cartoon nonsense from top to bottom.  It’s a crowd-pleaser for a crowd of 8-year-olds and, presumably, an extreme bore for their baffled parents, a tension that only gets funnier as the decades pile on and no one age-appropriate is left around to care.  So few people care, in fact, that it’s been allowed to slip into distribution limbo so the only audience who can legally access it are the dingledorks who happened to fish it out of Wal-Mart’s $5 DVD bins two decades ago.

Because I am weak in will & intellect, my 90s nostalgia trip did not end there.  One of the major 90s-specific pleasures of the Power Rangers movie is its tie-in CD soundtrack, which includes contributions form artists as disparate as Van Halen, Devo, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Snap!.  As formidable as some of those names are in the music business, though, the soundtrack’s biggest get was “Trouble,” the international breakout hit of British pop duo Shampoo.  I vividly remember the song dominating kids’ media in the 90s, to the point where I still sing its delightfully obnoxious “Uh oh, we’re in trouble, something’s come along and it’s burst our bubble, yeah yeah” chorus to myself every time something minorly inconvenient happens in my daily life.  What I did not remember is that its initial promotion in America was tied so closely to the theatrical release of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie.  Not only does it underscore a children-only block party at the film’s emotional climax, but it was also domestically marketed through the lost artform of the tie-in music video, featuring the Shampoo singers dancing in Deee-Liteful psychedelic voids alongside the Power Rangers and their neurotic robo-sidekick Alpha5.  A proper DVD release of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie would have included that music video as a Bonus Feature, but my Wal-Mart discount bin copy instead includes a useless “Behind the Scenes” advertisement for the film where Amy Jo “Pink Ranger” Johnson bravely compares her big screen debut to the special effects spectacles of Star Wars & The Wizard of Oz.  Thankfully, the Power Rangers version of the “Trouble” music video was at least uploaded to YouTube where, as of this posting, it can be enjoyed in glorious, grainy 480p.  This indulgence, of course, led me down an entirely new 90s-tastic pop culture rabbit hole as I allowed Shampoo music videos to autoplay after the sassy Brits were done dancing alongside their new intergalactic crimefighter friends.  What I discovered was that Shampoo has a deep, rewarding catalog of post-riot grrrrl, pre-Girl Power classics that never reached the US with the same ferocity that “Trouble” managed to, partially because they could not call on the power of the mega ninja zords to boost their signal every single.

The commonly accepted narrative is that Shampoo never made it as big as they could have because they were immediately eclipsed by an intense international obsession with the Spice Girls, who smoothed out the smaller group’s rougher, punker edges into pure bubblegum pop.  The real heartbreaker there is that Shampoo even had a single called “Girl Power” that debuted only one week before the Spice Girls broke out with “Wannabe”, which is a shame since “Girl Power” opens with the lyrics “I don’t wanna be a boy, I wanna be a girl. I wanna do things that will make your hair curl.  I wanna play with knives. I wanna play with guns.  I wanna smash up a place just for fun.”  It’s wonderful.  I don’t mean to mourn Shampoo’s premature downfall at the expense of shading the Spice Girls, though, who were just as substantial superheroes in my childhood mind as the Power Rangers, thanks specifically to the strength of “Wannabe” and to the group’s own cash-in pop art movie Spice World.  Tragically, Spice World is also currently unavailable to rent or stream through legal means in the US, so I again had to blow the dust off an ancient DVD copy from my modest collection – this time presented in a luxurious Full Screen frame.  Although my DVD copy is “guaranteed” to be “packed with girl power” in a way no streaming service would dare to ensure, I still find the state of the film’s availability to the general, streaming-service-reliant public shameful.  Way more shameful than the lost-to-time Power Rangers movie, even, since Spice World is a much more competently made, purposefully goofy artifact of 90s kitsch.  It plugs the Spice Girls into a high-femme variation on A Hard Day’s Night, sending the 90s pop group on episodic, for-their-own-sake adventures where they get to be immensely charming on camera while interacting with Elton John, James Bond, Bob Hoskins, Riff Raff, and other various space aliens.  Its most pivotal scene is a montage where the girls cosplay in different cute outfits that don’t quite fit their individual vibes and then switch around personas by cosplaying as each other in a playful pop art photo shoot.  Spice World is cute, it’s joyful, and the only reason it isn’t more beloved as an MTV era pop art classic, really, is that the MTV-produced Josie and the Pussycats movie bested at its own game just a few years later.  Well, that and it’s got a shamefully shitty post-DVD distribution history in the US.

My rapid spiral into full 90s nostalgia was finally sated by the time I revisited Spice World (and then—full disclosure—rewatched all available Shampoo videos a second time through).  Although it’s heavily indebted to the pop art past of Swingin’ 60s London, it’s an aesthetic object that could have only existed in the period when I was most media obsessed as a child, which is where we all tend to retreat when we’re looking for comfort in cinematic junk food.  In the process of pulling out both my Spice Girls & Power Rangers DVDs, though, I did a quick inventory of what other childhood junk media I own that’s not currently streaming.  One title that jumped out at me was the movie version of The Worst Witch, which stars a young Fairuza Balk and features the heavily memed “Anything Can Happen on Halloween” musical number performed by Tim Curry against surreally cheap green screen effects.  You’ll likely always be able to watch that music video tangent out of context in low-res YouTube clips alongside your favorite Shampoo jams, but if you want the entire Worst Witch movie available to you at all times for a full warm bath of 90s Kid™ Nostalgia, you have to resort to illegal torrents or purchases of used physical media.  I was also reminded in this process that I ran into friends at French Quarter Fest a few weeks ago who said they had recently watched the animated Super Mario Bros movie that’s currently dominating the box office and were dismayed afterwards that they could not access the live-action adaptation of the video game that alienated the world when we were children (despite being a Power Rangers-level camp classic in my mind & household).  I, of course, offered to lend them my DVD copy, which was a service they could not even access through the public library.  Plenty of the other pop art novelties fron my youth I’m holding onto are currently streaming in higher quality than you’ll find on my used Blockbuster & thrift store DVDs: Howard the Duck & Teen Witch (Tubi), Big Time Pee-wee (Showtime), Barb Wire & Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze (VOD), etc.  Any of those statuses might change as soon as next week, though. The illusion that everything we could possibly want or need to watch will always be available to stream at home is being constantly undermined, but it’s especially absurd when titles promoted & regurgitated by contemporary nostalgia stokers like the new Power Rangers & Super Mario Bros movies aren’t conveniently offered to the consumers being targeted.

-Brandon Ledet

Giving Aster Enough Rope

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I’ve been getting lazy about how & why I group films together in these self-published reviews.  My methodology boils down to comparing movies I happened to see around the same time regardless of their genuine connections, which is why I’m about to unfairly compare A24’s poster Enfant Terrible against The Master of Suspense.  I happened to watch Ari Aster’s latest crowd-troller Beau is Afraid on the same day (and the same bus line) as Hitchcock’s dinner party thriller Rope, which recently screened in The Prytania’s Classic Movies series.  Watching such a messy, sprawling odyssey so soon after seeing Hitchcock at his tightest & most controlled didn’t do Beau is Afraid many favors, but the comparison was more damning to the way the movie industry has changed in recent decades than it was to the young filmmaker working in that hellscape.  This blog post isn’t an argument in favor of returning to the clockwork Studio System that propped Hitchcock up for cinematic worship & infamy, or at least that’s not how I intend it.  What I’m more interested in is the pressure imposed on these two filmmakers by their public to deliver historic greatness with every single picture, a cultural impulse that’s become exponentially hyperbolic with the modern invention of online movie fandom – something Hitchcock was lucky to die before witnessing.  When Ari Aster makes a movie that alienates his audience, fanboy freaks vocally rage against the screen, demanding that the studio executives at A24 be “held accountable” and that no fellow patrons in the theater “better fucking clap” in appreciation.  By contrast, Hitchcock didn’t make much of a name for himself until his third feature film, the silent Jack the Ripper thriller The Lodger, which did already have some hyperbolic critics declaring it “the finest British production ever made” but didn’t inspire widespread audience obsession with the boardroom politics of the studio that greenlit it, Gainsborough Pictures. Once Hitchcock really was directing the finest thrillers ever made, he had dozens more titles behind him.  Rope was his 37th feature film; Vertigo was his 47th; my personal favorite, Psycho, was his 49th.  Ari Aster will never reach those numbers with this kind of A24 fanboy scrutiny pressuring him to outdo himself with every project, a problem I’m only compounding by comparing him to a master of the artform.  If anything, it feels as if Aster’s artistry has already imploded under the pressure just three features into his career.

I enjoyed Beau is Afraid.  Lately, I’ve been struggling to get onboard with Charlie Kaufmann-style journeys into the artist’s mind, having been disappointed by big-swing solipsism epics like I’m Thinking of Ending Things, The House That Jack Built, White Noise, and Under the Silver Lake.  Beau is just as guilty of tedious self-obsession as those overlong annoyances, especially as Aster uses Joaquin Phoenix’s put-opon avatar as an excuse to voice his own struggles with Anxiety, Guilt, and Mommy Issues.  The visualization of those struggles is often darkly hilarious, though, literalizing an anxious introvert’s fears so that the world looks as hellish as it feels to navigate.  I appreciated Beau is Afraid most for its big-picture statements on modern life, not its insular ruminations on life inside Ari Aster’s head.  In its most powerful form, it’s a grotesque caricature of modern American paranoia, taking a misanthropic view on everyone from violent urban maniacs to suburban security freaks to self-absorbed artists & off-the-gridders to the outlandishly cruel ultra-rich.  We’re all monstrous & unworthy of love in our own way, at least as portrayed in this elaborate Aristocrats joke at our expense.  At the same time, I’m not convinced that Aster was fully ready to make a statement that grand & all-encompassing.  He’s still finding his voice as an artist, and yet he’s already blurting out everything he has to say just in case he’s never handed a microphone this loud again.  Beau is Afraid drips with the desperation of a filmmaker who doubts he’ll ever get the opportunity to make another picture on its scale, so he better exorcise all thoughts about life inside & outside of his skull lest they be trapped forever.  And if the studio-obsessed C.H.U.D.s in the audience who are throwing literal rotten tomatoes in his direction had their way, he’d be proven right.  Aster belongs to a small class of young, instantly famous filmmakers who are carrying immense anticipation to deliver an era-defining classic with each subsequent project, joined only by the likes of Robert Eggers & Jordan Peele.  It even feels perverse to say that I enjoyed Beau is Afraid just fine; it was neither the greatest nor the worst movie I saw this past week, much less the greatest or worst movie of all time.  That kind of mixed-but-leaning-positive reaction can’t take up much real estate in modern movie discourse, though, not while violent nerds are calling for Aster’s head on a pike, acting exactly like the crazed ghouls they just watched onscreen.

In a way, Rope is just as showy & virtuosic as Aster’s latest; it’s just much less desperate.  The thing most audiences remember about Hitchcock’s real-time howcatchem is its early prototype of the single-shot stunt film, which would not be practically possible until movies went digital.  Restrained by the length of his film reels, Hitchcock cleverly “hides” his cuts to simulate the experience of one, unbroken 80-minute take.  Only, he doesn’t really.  Most of the “hidden” cuts are shamelessly blatant zoom-ins on the back of the same character’s dinner jacket, as if Hitchcock were so confident that his audience would follow along for the ride that he felt no need to impress us with variations on the gimmick.  He finds other ways to show off without ever leaving the loft, gliding the camera to expertly timed character observations and shoehorning in his trademark onscreen cameo as a neon silhouette in the apartment window.  What most impressed me watching it with an audience on the same day I watched Beau is Afraid is that it managed to provoke the exact reactions Aster was looking for without ever making a big show of it.  Hitchcock had the audience laughing at cruelty & violence against our better judgement.  Speaking personally, he also took me on a journey of immense interiority, clashing both sides of my personality against each other onscreen: the flamboyantly wicked artist Brandon & the timid, guilt-ridden Cancer who ruins all his plans.  Those two unlikely murderers strangle an acquaintance they consider intellectually beneath them in the very first screen, purely for the perverse pleasure of the act.  Then they throw a dinner party on top of his corpse, earning big laughs out of the morbid tension of their misdeeds with every bitchy academic ice-queen bon mot at his expense.  Even knowing the story could only end one glaringly obvious way, I had the time of my life riding the tension to that predetermined destination, and I’d much sooner return to the theater to rewatch that glorified stage play than I would Aster’s Herculean attempt to capture everything everywhere all at once in a single, unwieldy container.  Rope somehow really was one of the greatest films I’ve seen in my life. It was also a routine matter of course for its director, who was just trying to deliver his 3-dozenth entertaining genre picture, not a flailing attempt by an upstart youngster trying to deliver one of the all-time-greats right out the gate.

As I already acknowledged, I’m contributing to the exact problem I’m citing here by comparing Aster to such a Film Studies syllabus titan, but I can’t help that the comparison is what happened to be on my mind that sunny Sunday afternoon.  I’m an indoor kid, and I chose to hide from the beautiful weather in two different movie theaters on different sides of town, despite the hellish experience of interacting with strangers along the way.  I at least hope that this aimless, self-defeating rant is somewhat in the spirit of Beau is Afraid, a film I can’t seem to write about any more clearly or directly.  I also hope, against all logic, that Aster gets to make dozens more aimless, self-defeating rants just like it so that he fully develops his craft and—sometime in the 2040s—gets to make his batshit epic equivalent of Rope when he’s at his most confident & efficient.  It’s a lot more likely that audience pressure & hyperbole will make that ideal outcome impossible, though, so I suppose it’s for the best that he settled for making a pretty good version of that movie now while he has the chance.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1957’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, finds Jayne Mansfield at the height of her manic bimbo superpowers.  Mansfield already strutted her outrageous proportions & bubbly-ditz persona to great comedic effect in her first collaboration with Looney Tunes legend Frank Tashlin, 1956’s The Girl Can’t Help It, but she wasn’t allowed to step outside her usual cultural designation as the Great Value™ Marilyn Monroe in that picture.  In Rock Hunter, Mansfield finally strayed far enough outside Marilyn’s looming shadow to pioneer her own territory in high-femme comedic vamping. Mansfield is pure bimbo mayhem in Rock Hunter, turning every inhale of breath into an orgasmic squeal and every costume change into a mind-blowing reveal.  Instead of playing an exaggeration of Monroe, she’s playing an exaggeration of herself – complete with verbal, metatextual references to her Girl Can’t Help It stardom.  It’s like watching a pro wrestler get assigned a go-nowhere, bad-vibes gimmick and then somehow win over the crowd by playing it as a ludicrous self-caricature.  It’s the film where she out-Marilyned Marilyn to such an absurd extreme that the comparison is obliterated entirely. 

No viewing of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is complete without also having seen its rock ‘n roll sister film The Girl Can’t Help It, but if you’ve already graduated from The Frank Tashlin School of Jayne Mansfield Studies, there’s still plenty more of Mansfield’s career left to explore.  Mansfield has a few dozen credits to her name on IMDb, ranging from dead-serious noirs to ribald slapstick comedies.  None that I have seen can compete with the sublime silliness of her collaborations with Tashlin, but there’s still more to Mansfield’s screen persona than those two consecutive roles.  So, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to bask in more of her weaponized bimbo glamour.

The Wayward Bus (1957)

In 1957’s The Wayward Bus, Mansfield plays a famous stripper on the run, dodging unwanted nudie magazine notoriety on a bumpy bus trip down to a Mexican hideout.  That makes the film sound a lot lighter & sillier than it is in practice, which is evident as soon as the title card announces its literary prestige as “John Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus,” a serious drama for serious adults.  Mansfield stars opposite several character actors running away from their problems on the titular Sweetheart bus (including a young Joan Collins as the bus driver’s violently alcoholic wife), but much of the drama revolves around how difficult it is for her fellow passengers to avert their eyes from her striking figure.  It’s both the only movie I’ve seen where Jayne Mansfield was actually asked to Act, and the only one where her outrageous silhouette was treated as a liability instead of a superpower.  A sordid little stage drama set in motion by the magic of rear protection in the bus’s windows, The Wayward Bus suffered a long line of production delays that eventually made room for Mansfield in the cast after cycling through bigger-name actors like Marlon Brando, Gene Tierney, Joanne Woodward, Robert Mitchum, and Shelley Winters, despite being a relatively standard-issue studio picture.  That delay was a blessing in giving Mansfield some space to test out her dramatic chops, but also a curse in that it pushed its release to one year after Monroe’s similar roadside noir Bus Stop – to which it was inevitably, unfavorably compared in the press.

Too Hot to Handle (1960)

Mansfield also plays a jaded, troubled stripper in 1960’s Too Hot to Handle (alternately titled Playgirl After Dark), but she’s not asked to be as dramatically vulnerable here.  Her character has graduated from stripper to stripper-manager at the seedy nightclub The Pink Flamingo, run by her doomed gangster boyfriend (and Christopher Lee as the gangster’s disturbingly young, handsome, mustachioed right-hand man).  In genre terms, this film finds Mansfield working in the sex comedy realm that made her famous, but its British sensibilities afford it more of a dry martini-soaked sarcasm than what you’ll find in Tashlin’s sugar-addled farces.  With underplayed zingers like “That’s a very nice dress you’ve nearly got on,” it’s not a knee-slapper so much as it’s a muted chuckler, and so Mansfield gets a chance to tone down her absurd femme-caricature persona to a smokier, more detached register.  Even if not consistently hilarious, it’s shocking that this day-drunk British noir bothers to be as wryly funny as it is, since its main attraction is obviously the opportunity to watch Jayne Mansfield model outrageously tight, see-through outfits while puffing on the world’s longest cigarette holder.  Self-billed as an “expose of sexy, sordid Soho, England’s greatest shame,” the film relies heavily on her physical presence to attract an audience, going as far as to rile up censors with completely transparent gowns that got it harshly edited in America.  The fact that it manages to land a few one-liners on top of that drunken burlesque act is just lagniappe.

Promises! Promises! (1963)

It turns out see-through gowns are not enough to keep your horndog audience coming back forever.  Eventually, you’ve got to take off the gowns entirely.  While Mansfield reached her highest artistic peaks in her Frank Tashlin collaborations, she might be better known for her starring role in the mainstream nudie cutie Promises! Promises!, which delivered on its Playboy-publicized promise to become the first sound-era Hollywood film to feature a nude female star.  In the very first scene of Promises! Promises!, Mansfield is introduced taking a bubble bath, making sure to rise above the suds just enough to give the audience a full look at her outrageous, unclothed figure.  In the next, she disrobes of that pretense, going shamelessly topless as if Russ Meyer were leering behind the camera.  Unfortunately, the rest of the picture does not have the magic Russ Meyer touch.  You might wonder what this cornball sex comedy is going to do with its remaining 70 minutes after it gets Mansfield’s publicity-stunt nude scenes out of the way in the first 4.  The answer, apparently, is shamelessly repeat those same images in clunky dream sequences to milk them for all their worth.  The schticky German psychologists, sissy hairdressers, and stock footage of cruise ship shuffleboard players that pad out the rest of this farce are desperate & dire, and the only genuine fun to be found in the entire picture is in Mansfield’s two brief, breathy musical numbers.  Still, being the first actress to go nude in a mainstream, post-Hays Code Hollywood is a major distinction Mansfield could claim that her professional superior Marilyn Monroe could not (if not only because Monroe’s own attempt at that ground-breaking achievement, Something’s Got to Give, was derailed by the star’s tragic death). Unfortunately, that only helps relieve some of the sting of Marilyn’s own boat-ride farce Gentlemen Prefer Blondes being one of the most beloved comedies of all time while Promises! Promises! is mostly just a giant pile of ship.

-Brandon Ledet