Reviews

Podcast #218: Nightcap (2000) & Chabrol x Huppert

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Welcome to Episode #218 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss the longtime creative partnership between French New Wave director Claude Chabrol and powerhouse actress Isabelle Huppert, starting with their chocolate-flavored psychological thriller Nightcap (2000).

00:00 Welcome

02:45 Trap (2024)
08:05 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
14:44 Three Amigos (1986)
20:51 La Piscine (1969)

26:58 Nightcap (2000)
48:42 Story of Women (1988)
1:01:34 La Cérémonie (1995)
1:13:41 The Swindle (1997)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Hundreds of Beavers (2024)

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Hundreds of Beavers is a film that doesn’t seem like it would be able to sustain its premise or its vision for the entirety of its 108 minute runtime, but it somehow manages to do so. This movie made me laugh aloud, on average, about every thirty seconds all the way through. I don’t know that it will work for everyone, but it certainly did for me. Shot in black and white, this is a Looney Tunes sketch stretched to feature length, about a man named Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), a successful applejacker who loses everything in a fire after imbibing a bit too much one night and finds himself alone and cold in the Canadian wilderness. After several unsuccessful attempts at catching wild game, he finally manages to put together a few Wile E. Coyote-esque traps (without any assistance from ACME at all) and sustain himself. Eventually, he stumbles upon a fur trader (Doug Mancheski) and his lovely daughter (Olivia Graves), decides to become a fur trapper himself in order to win her hand, and sets out to acquire the furs of the titular hundreds of beavers. Oh, and did we mention that every animal in this film is portrayed via high-quality mascot costumes? 

Our generation (and those bracketing it, so don’t think you’re not included in this, dear reader) usually encounter the animated shorts of the past at such a young age that their surreality is lost on us. The language of it is simple and straightforward in a way that we understand, even when we’re still piloting safety scissors with mushy, mushy brains. In Wackiki Wabbit, when Bugs Bunny ends up on an island with two castaways who look at him and see not a cartoon rabbit but a piping hot, meaty entree, we don’t give it a second thought. Seeing that gag translated to live action, and then grow more bizarrely envisioned and strangely realized each time the increasingly starved Kayak fails to gather eggs or catch a fish, one comes face to face with just how surreal the cartoon world is, and that makes it all the funnier as these man-sized fursuit beavers start to demonstrate a human-like complexity of thought. They go from animals that are slightly too clever to be caught by Kayak’s first attempts at traps to full on rocket scientists as the film moves along, and it happens so gradually that you find yourself trying to remember where everything went off the rails before you remember this happened moments after you started the movie. 

I recently had some trouble trying to figure out what to say about Spirited Away for similar reasons. It was hard to explain what works so well about Spirited Away because you find yourself simply recapping the movie, which undersells what makes it so special. It’s really best for you to discover all the things that it has in store for you by watching it, because no description of any of the film’s gags will do justice to taking it in with your own (presumably two) eyeballs. But, since you’re already here, I might as well list some of my favorites, right? At one point in the film, Kayak is taken under the wing of an older, wiser fur trapper (Wes Tank), who teaches him how to master the art; said trapper uses a dog-driven sled, and each night, the dogs (remember, every animal is a person in a mascot suit) play a card game. As they camp in a wolf-ridden forest, the dogs are slowly taken in the night, so that we go from a full table of dogs in the iconic “dogs playing poker” mold to a single, shivering dog playing solitaire alone. It’s a gag on top of a gag on top of a gag, and that’s Hundreds of Beavers to the core: gags all the way down. I was also particularly taken with a very droopy, stoned-looking frog puppet and was delighted when it reappeared later in the film, and the commitment to the humans-as-animals bit extends all the way to having the horses in the film be that stereotypical sitcom get-up of two people acting as the front and rear of a mare. It never gets old, and that’s the real treasure here. The film never lets you catch your breath long enough to get tired of its schtick, and that kind of sustained humor is a rarity. 

You (yes, you!) can watch Hundreds of Beavers, for free, right now, as long as you have your library card, and you’re stateside. As of this writing, the film is still streaming for free on Hoopla, the service that provides you with four free borrows a month via your local library. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Spirited Away (2001)

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Nearly a decade ago, when I was getting ready to move away from Baton Rouge, a friend of mine was likewise preparing to head back west to be with her now-husband. We had a dual garage sale in which we tried to get rid of some various knick-knacks. We didn’t have much that anyone would want, and we weren’t very successful. As a joke, she had priced her DVD of Spirited Away at a million dollars, because she didn’t actually want to part with it, and when she realized that I had never seen it, she gave it to me. I’m ashamed to say that in the interim, half-remembered bits of other Miyazaki films blended together during a rewatch of several of them shortly after my accident in 2018, making me think that I had watched it. When I sat down to do a rewatch in preparation for the culmination of Swampflix’s upcoming ten-year anniversary project, it turned out that I hadn’t, so this was a beautiful first-time watch for me. I have a friend who has only recently come into my life but with whom I’ve grown very close very quickly was looking forward to sharing this one with me at a screening at our local arthouse theater as it was a huge part of his childhood, plans which were dashed when we both tested positive for COVID the day before the screening. Since we both had it, however, we decided to push forward with our plans and watch it together that same night anyway. 

I’ve been digesting it ever since, and I’m still not fully sure what to say about it. It’s not just a movie; it’s a magic spell, a fairy tale journey, an unconventional narrative composed of little condensations of fantasy that moves blithely from storybeat to storybeat without ever stopping to catch its breath. It introduces and resolves so many things so quickly that the pacing reminds one of an episode of golden-age Simpsons, where a bag-boy strike in act one leads to near-death on an African waterfall at the climax. It runs on feverish imagination, unrestrained by the need to adhere to any real act structure at all. 

Chihiro is an elementary-aged girl who, along with her parents, is moving to a new home. Along the way, her father takes a detour down a road that ends at a red pedestrian gate in a wall that extends as far as the eye can see in either direction. The trio enters the area, which her father believes (and perceives) to be an abandoned amusement park; her father and mother unquestioningly eat food which they stumble upon while Chihiro explores further, meeting a boy named Haku, who implores her to take her parents back across the river before sunset. When Chihiro returns to her parents, however, they have been turned into pigs by the spirit food, as the place reveals itself to be the home of innumerable kami spirits. She refuses to leave them behind and becomes trapped there, while various parties attempt to locate her as they can smell a human amongst them. Haku helps her to evade capture and directs her to find and seek employment with a spider-like spirit named Kamaji, who runs the boiler that powers the baths of the bathhouse that serves as the primary location for the film. She proves herself to him and he asks Lin, a more humanoid bathhouse worker, to take Chihiro to Yubaba, the witch who runs the bathhouse (and is responsible for her parents’ transformation). Yubaba attempts to scare Chihiro into running off, but when she is unable to do so, she gives the girl a job, although her contract is Faustian. She takes part of the kanji of Chihiro’s name away, leaving only “Sen,” which becomes the girl’s new name. Chihiro/Sen later learns from Haku that this stripping of one’s name also leads to the loss of one’s memory, and that he is also cursed to work for Yubaba since he cannot remember his own true name. 

It’s hard to describe Spirited Away other than to outline the plot like I have above, but it goes in so many interesting directions with such vivid and luscious imagery that simply recapitulating the narrative diminishes it. Chihiro is the kind of kid everyone wishes they could have been: stalwart in the face of overwhelming odds, unrelenting in her devotion to saving her parents and returning to the real world, and compelled by an abundance of compassion that seeks no reward but nonetheless is granted them. She’s Dorothy Gale, and she’s Alice, and she’s also completely her own character, brave and fierce but always kind and thoughtful. She’s unwilling to trade her freedom for anyone else’s, and although this morality seems alien to the spirits who inhabit the world around her, it also gives her fresh eyes that grant her the ability to resolve issues the spirits can’t, like finding the source of a polluted river spirit’s pain and removing it like the thorn from the paw of Aesop’s lion, healing it. When she fails, it’s never because of her lack of ingenuity, it’s merely because she fails to grasp all of the social rules of a culture that she’s only recently found herself within. 

Visually, the film is stunning. After nearly two decades, it’s still as vibrant and gorgeous as it was the first time audiences saw it. Each sequence is beautiful, and every frame is filled to the brim with baroque details of the spirit world, but it’s almost impossible to try and explain it, because this is a movie that one has to see in order to really understand. It’s like trying to explain a painting to someone who’s never seen it; it has to be experienced, has to be felt, has to wash over you and make you a part of its world. It’s magic.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Longlegs (2024)

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We’re Oz Perkins fans around these parts. Brandon gave both The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Gretel and Hansel four-star reviews. While the director’s first feature, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, got a cooler reaction from him, it remains my favorite of his works. (Admittedly, part of that might be the fact that I find Ruth Wilson to be one of the most utterly watchable and magnetic performers currently working). Or it was my favorite … until Longlegs came along. 

Set in Oregon sometime during the Clinton administration, Longlegs is the story of Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a young FBI field agent whose preternatural hunches catch the attention of her superiors, resulting in her reassignment to a decades-long hunt for a serial killer known as “Longlegs” (Nicolas Cage) based upon Zodiac-like notes that he leaves behind at the scenes of brutal murders of entire families. As she spends time working on the case, she concludes that Longlegs’ targeting of families of young girls whose birthdays all fall on the fourteenth of the month is Satanic in nature, and that when plotted out on a calendar, it becomes clear that Longlegs is creating an image of an inverted triangle, which Harker finds in occult literature. Her boss, Carter (Blair Underwood), is impressed by her initiative and insight, and after a night of bonding, he gets drunk and asks Harker to drive him home, where she meets his family: wife Anna (Carmel Amit) and precocious daughter Ruby (Ava Kelders). Their relationship is slightly complicated when Carter discovers that on Harker’s ninth birthday, her mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) filed a police report about a strange man approaching the young Lee when she was home alone. Ruth, with whom Lee is in frequent contact, lives in a dilapidated farmhouse that is choked with hoarder ephemera, and when she directs her daughter to take a look through some Polaroids that are still in a box in her childhood bedroom, Lee suddenly remembers the day that she—barely—managed to avoid becoming one of Longlegs’ victims. Of course, why that is the case turns out to be much more complex (not to mention sinister) than is immediately apparent. 

The biggest influence on the film, and the one that is most often cited in criticism, is The Silence of the Lambs. That much is apparent, from the setting to the choice of a young female FBI agent as the lead, all the way down to Longlegs’ not-quite-Buffalo-Bill basement lair, where instead of making suits out of women’s flesh he crafts lovingly faithful doll reproductions of the young girls who, along with their family, are killed at his hands. There’s also a bit of other Thomas Harris Lecter-containing media in play here; the walk-through of one of the crime scenes is straight out of Manhunter (or Red Dragon, if you prefer), and Underwood seems to be channeling a bit of Laurence Fishburne’s portrayal of Jack Crawford from the Hannibal TV series. 

Outside of that franchise, what I was most reminded of while watching the film were two separate novels by South African writer Lauren Beukes: The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters. The former is about an early twentieth century serial killer and drifter who happens upon a house that is itself a nexus of evil, allowing him to exit into any time between 1929 and 1993 and directing him to seek out and murder certain women (the titular “shining girls”) for unknown purposes. When he brutally stabs a teenage girl named Kirby Mizrachi in 1989, he leaves her for dead, but she survives and, years later, she seeks her still unidentified attempted murderer. That 1990s setting, a killer who targets specific young women based on direction from a malevolent entity, and a main character has an encounter with her would-be killer in her youth and becomes the impetus behind his demise in her adulthood are all details that Longlegs shares, although the stories are markedly different in almost every other way. 

The connection to Broken Monsters is a little more oblique, as the narrative of that novel features an ambitiously (and fruitfully) large net of point of view characters, but of whom one is a serial killer who creates “art” out of body parts of humans and animals alike, not unlike several of the killers from the aforementioned Hannibal series. When with other characters, the narrative is alternatively a straightforward urban crime drama (the homicide detective), a little bit Hard Candy (her daughter), an ironically voiced view of Detroit’s art scene that provides important context for the killer’s motivation (the aging hipster journalist), etc. When we are in the killer’s point-of-view chapters, their point of view includes being forced/inspired by an ominous force that the reader assumes is a manifestation of the killer’s broken mind … until the same thing appears in a chapter that’s focused on one of their victims, revealing that the demonic entity is, in fact, very real. That happens here as well, as Longlegs shifts from an unconventional homage to Silence of the Lambs with the slightly supernatural narrative conceit that the lead character has preternatural insight into a horror that all-but-literally goes to hell.

I haven’t really engaged with the discourse about the movie, so I’m not sure whether this is being cited elsewhere, but it’s worth noting that this film was very funny. Underwood is a natural charmer, so Carter’s interactions with the stoic, reserved, and frankly spooky Harker are fun to watch, and this moved into outright laughter for me when Harker meets young Ruby and she asks her parents if she can show Harker her room. As the two awkwardly sit next to one another, Harker notes that Ruby has one those canopies that some kids have and asks her, stiltedly, “Do you … go … in it?” I saw this with a very responsive audience, and this got a big laugh. There’s also a great scene with the flamboyant administrator of a mental facility where the sole survivor of one of Longlegs’ family slayings resides, and a forensics nerd who gets far too excited about a strange doll that’s found hidden at one of the previous murder sites. I’ve heard reports that some screenings have had people laughing in response to Nicolas Cage, but I’m happy to say that this didn’t happen at my screening, and I found his performance terrifying. It’s the overcorrection to Harker’s stoicism, which I think is played for laughs at certain points; I can see people finding it too much, but it worked for me. I’ll also say that Alicia Witt is phenomenal here; as a longtime defender of Urban Legend, she’s one of my favorites that I feel like we never get to see enough of. I did spend a chunk of the movie thinking that Ruth was being played by Samantha Sloyan, but I’ll let you Google that yourself and tell me if you think I’m that far off the mark. 

Over on the podcast, we often talk about when a film “Does That Thing I Like,” which is when a horror movie features up a deliberately ambiguous premise that could conclude with either a rational explanation for events or a supernatural one, and, instead of going the well-worn route of concluding with “[the devil/witchcraft/possession/ghosts/whatever] [is/are] real!” (I’ll admit that if the ratio of demonic-to-scientific rationales were reversed, movies would be both a lot more boring and most of them would end exactly like an episode of Scooby-Doo, but I still appreciate it when it happens.) Unfortunately, there are so few of these movies that mentioning any of them would spoil them, especially given how often the twist is simply that there’s a boy living in the walls. Longlegs is like the platonic ideal of how to “Do the Thing I Think Is Tired” but make it fresh, new, exciting, and scary. I am a person who has lived alone for most of his adult life and who can count the number of nightmares he has had in that time on just two hands, but the night after I saw this movie, I got up and went to the bathroom in the night, I had to turn the light on, not because I needed it to find my way, but because I needed it to dispel the shadows before I could get out of bed. The reason why The Thing I Like is The Thing I Like is because I live in the real world; I’m not afraid of ghosts or demons or swamp monsters (other than alligators, obviously), so they don’t scare me in the movies, either. Your Ghostfaces, your various Thomas Harris serial killers like Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill, even that home invasion scene in Fargo—slapstick as it is—those are things that get my anxiety up; those are the reason that I occasionally have to pull the shower curtain back or check my closets. When we briefly discussed the film on our recent podcast episode about Planet of the Vampires, Brandon noted that Longlegs is a movie that feels evil. And that’s as succinctly as I can put it. Nothing in this film is something that I am afraid of in real life, but its evil is so palpable and real that I had to turn on the lights in the middle of the night. I don’t know that I can give a movie higher praise than that. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Kim’s Video (2024)

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In the new documentary about the lost & recovered legacy of the cinephilic wet-dream video store Kim’s Video, narrator & co-director David Redmon surveys the current tenants of the building that used to house Kim’s famed collection of rare tapes & DVDs.  On the first floor, there’s a barcade; on the second, a gym; on the third & fourth, a karaoke restaurant.  These businesses that have physically replaced Kim’s storefront are presented as evidence of some great cultural loss and the emptiness of our current capitalist dystopia.  I’m not so convinced.  If anything, it’s somewhat comforting to know that the location was taken over by other small businesses that all have a strong social aspect built into their trade.  In a big picture sense, there’s really not all that much actual cultural difference between a video store & a barcade; they just service slightly different customer base of hopeless nerds.  Who knows, there might even be a future documentary in the works about the weirdos who regularly meet at that barcade and consider it their subcultural refuge from the unforgiving chaos of the Big City outside.  Maybe there’s a high pinball score on one of that bar’s machines that means a lot to those weirdos the same way a bootleg VHS of Godard’s Historie(s) du Cinéma would mean a lot to me. 

There are two reasons Kim’s Video is afforded a hagiographic spotlight that’s unlikely to be repeated for the workout gym that’s replaced its second floor.  The most obvious reason is that it was located in a large enough city to support a strong repertory cinema scene.  Thousands of aspiring filmmakers, NYU academics, and gorehound punks frequented the store in its pre-streaming heyday, finding access to a much larger, more adventurous library than what most American VCR owners could pick up at the nearest Blockbuster.  The documentary namedrops the Coen Brothers as former Kim’s Video members as a signal to the store’s historical importance, but the picture is much better sketched out by the slate of New York rep scenesters it gathers for testimonials.  Alex Ross Perry, Sean Price Williams, Eric Hynes . . . Its talking-heads cast list reads like a typical panel of guests for the Film Comment podcast.  The other major reason the store matters to inner-circle cinephiles is that the store’s owner, Yongman Kim, is one of them.  A failed filmmaker turned successful businessman, Kim made superheroic efforts to amass the best-curated video library in the world, out of love for the art and love for the hunt.

A lesser documentary might have stopped after collecting a few interviews about how great Kim’s Video was and profiling the eponymous Kim, who was coldly mysterious to the store’s members & employees.  A lot of its nostalgia waxing about the bootlegs & rare tapes Kim collected in the store ends early on, but after you catch a glimpse of the owner’s own rare feature film as a director (a post-Tarantino crime picture about a monk who spies on a teenage sex worker through a peephole, titled One-Third), you kinda get the sense that he’s just another dweeb who’s obsessed with movies.  He just happens to be tall & handsome as well, which makes him an anomaly on the scene.  Short of cataloging the 10,000 videos left in the Kim’s Video collection through a nonstop slideshow, it’s worrisome that there’s nothing left for the movie to accomplish just a few minutes in.  Thankfully, the mission shifts from that point to launching a David Farrier-style investigative piece about where, exactly, the collection ended up after the store closed.  Most of the rest of the documentary is relocated from NYC to Salemi, Italy, a small Sicilian village where the video collection was relocated in full.  I won’t spoil how the story develops after that expansion in scope, but it does include enough mafia threats, heist planning, and political intrigue to justify in-crowd New Yorkers making a feature-length documentary about their favorite video store.

Admittedly, the hunt for and return of the famed Kim’s Video library gets legitimately juicy as its story escalates, but a lot of this falls neatly into two familiar categories of mediocre pop media docs: the good kind (a montage of clips & posters of better movies to watch later) and the bad kind (navel-gazing diaries from a nerd who finds themself more interesting than the audience does).  The biggest hurdle in appreciating Kim’s Video as its own standalone movie is warming up to David Redmon’s personality.  He maintains a Michael Moore-style omnipresence onscreen, so that all of the film’s observations about the importance of cinematic preservation are heavily filtered through his specific POV.  It’s clear that Redmon loves Movies, but his personal version of cinephilia ultimately just isn’t all that interesting.  He has a strong handle on what qualifies as The Canon (frequently citing Godard, Hitchcock, Scorsese, Varda, and all the other usual suspects), but you can find The Canon in most public & university libraries.  When it comes to the obscure microgenre relics that made Kim’s collection special, he’s much spottier.  A stray title like Dream Demon or Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger will occasionally interrupt the endless parade of clips from Intro to Film 101 standards like Bicycle Thieves, Blow-up, and I am Cuba, but you get the sense that they’re only important to the documentary because they’re important to Redmon; they’re the ones he happened to rent from Kim’s or happened to catch on late-night cable as a child.  All of the grimier horror, porn, and experimental titles that you could exclusively find on the shelves at Kim’s only appear as VHS covers, indicating that Redmon only finds them interesting for their surface aesthetics.

The real shortcoming, though, is not in which clips Redmon and co-director Ashley Sabin select to illustrate their international movie heist; it’s how those clips are introduced.  It’s not enough for them to juxtapose images of Charles Foster Kane’s collection of treasures with the treasure vault of Kim’s video tapes.  Redmon also has to explicitly state out loud that looking at the collection reminds him of a scene from Citizen Kane.  It’s already a little on the nose for them to include clips from The Godfather to illustrate his travels to Sicily, but Redmon still feels a need to verbally explain the connection in narration.  Not only is that presentation a little clunky, but it also suggests that Redmon doesn’t fully trust in the visual medium he professes to love so much, or he doesn’t fully understand it.  I shouldn’t pick on him too much, though.  He loves Movies, so do I, and so do the other former Kim’s Video members who’d be curious to watch this and find out what happened to the treasure trove of rare tapes that used to be stored just a few subway stops away from their cramped apartments.  The documentary is ultimately a communal celebration, and Redmon & Sabin deserve kudos for turning that celebration into an entertaining story instead of a purely self-indulgent memorial for one small cultural access point among many.  I don’t know that its entertaining yarn about the recovery of Kim’s tapes is ultimately more valuable than the inevitable Letterboxd list that will catalog every title in the current collection, but it’s at least more entertaining to me, personally, than a documentary about a very special membership gym would be.

-Brandon Ledet

Asphalt (1929)

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I am by no means well studied in the broader history of German Expressionism, but I have seen a horror movie or two.  When I think of the German Expressionist visual style, my mind immediately conjures up the fantastic, transportive images of titles like Nosferatu, M, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Man Who Laughs, The Hands of Orlac, Destiny, The Golem and, of course, Metropolis.  Even the cultural impact of those films’ innovative directors & cinematographers emigrating to America has always been most immediately apparent in early Hollywood horrors like The Black Cat & Dracula, given their surrealistic production design and shadowy visual play.  It was surprising, then, to find no supernatural dream logic in the once-lost German Expressionist drama Asphalt, which might account for the film’s relatively low name recognition in that field.  In terms of narrative, Joe May’s tragic story of mismatched lovers feels more familiar to early Hollywood dramas about misbehaved women than it does to the nightmare-realm horrors more typically associated with German Expressionism.  However, all of the ecstatic visual flourish associated with that film movement is in full swing, as the camera sways wildly in an attempt to capture the bustling urban chaos of Berlin, where its doomed love story is set.  Its plot synopsis might sound like the German equivalent of early US films like A Fool There Was, The Red Kimona, Parisian Love, or A Woman of the World, but it’s way less restrained & stage-bound than any of those titles.  It’s pure cinema, made by the people who established the language of that artform in its infancy.

Metropolis star Gustav Fröhlich plays a bumbling, naive cop who’s not quite streetwise enough to handle the streets of Berlin.  Else Heller (doing her best Louise Brooks drag) plays the young man’s downfall: a cunning, compulsive thief he catches robbing a jewelry store when he should be directing traffic his first day on the job.  The poor rube buys her sob story about needing to steal to survive, as she is perilously close to being evicted onto the harsh streets of Berlin.  An unlikely romance blossoms between cop & criminal as his sympathy grows, until she can’t stand his naivety any longer and fully confesses her betrayal of trust.  She does not, in fact, steal for survival.  She steals because it’s thrilling to get away with taking home diamonds & furs.  She steals for the fun of stealing.  What ruins the fun is the way her flirty pickpocket lifestyle gets her new beau into steep trouble, both with the macho brutes of her past and with the strictly law-abiding members of his own family.  The dramatic entertainment value of Asphalt is in watching a young, fashionable woman thieve, lie, and cheat in hedonistic excess, even if the morals of the era require it to eventually condemn her for crimes against morality.  No matter how deplorable the femme fatale’s behavior is in the abstract, the movie takes obvious delight in watching her smoke cigarettes and smolder in a heated bathtub, treating herself to a life of luxury that she would be denied through any legal path.  She might not steal to survive, exactly, but she does steal to make life worth surviving.

Asphalt intuitively takes for granted that crime is sexy & fun, so it gets to spend a lot of its time playing around with new, exciting ways to move the camera instead of complicating its central romantic dynamic.  It opens with kaleidoscopic mirroring of Berlin street traffic and sweeping montages of the rain-slicked asphalt beneath those cars & feet.  The camera is in constant motion, either evoking the mania of navigating a city’s cacophonous busyness in exterior scenes or taking inventory of individual objects & players on interior sets.  It represents an end of an era for ecstatic, inventive German filmmaking, but there’s no solemn, settled maturity to its cinematography.  It’s desperate to impress.  Like Metropolis, a complete print of Asphalt was considered lost media for decades, until it pieced back together through archival discovery & recovery in the 1990s.  Unlike Metropolis, it’s been largely forgotten to time a second time since that restoration.  There just isn’t as much of a completionist streak among romance & crime film enjoyers the same way that horror & sci-fi freaks will seek out anything that falls into their genre of choice.  I’m as guilty of that bias as anyone, having never heard of this film until a used DVD copy fell into my hands at the Minneapolis record store Electric Fetus.  Meanwhile, I’ve actively sought out at least a dozen horror films from the German Expressionist era in my frantic search to guzzle down all things horror.  It turns out they were making romantic dramas in that period too, just like in Hollywood (except way dreamier & prettier).

-Brandon Ledet

Wicked Little Letters (2024)

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They may not be respected as taste-arbiters or as models of good theater etiquette, but the elderly moviegoers of America are the core customer base that keep cinemas running.  While movie studios are flailing in their courtship of a teenage audience that would rather be playing videogames or watching influencer ads at home, the Senior Discount crowd is keeping the industry afloat with only minimal pandering.  Every local film fest, repertory series, and daytime matinee in the nation owes a significant chunk of its cashflow to geriatric retirees, who generally have a much more adventurous approach to art-film programming than younger audiences, who tend to save their trips to the cinema for major Event Films instead of taking a chance on whatever happens to be out from week to week.  It’s a shame, then, that most movies that are cynically marketed to the 65+ age demographic are so … safe, so toothless.  Senior Citizen Comedies like Book Club and 80 for Brady mostly function as feature-length advertisements (for 50 Shades of Gray and the NFL, respectively), relying on the excess charm of their all-star casts without actually giving those actors much to do.  There’s a hint towards sexual naughtiness in their playfully saucy humor, but the movies are afraid to follow through on anything genuinely risqué, in fear of offending or alienating the morals of its target audience.  They take their customers’ attendance & amusement for granted.

Within that context, Wicked Little Letters is essentially a John Waters comedy for the senior set.  A 1920s period piece about women’s changing roles in public life post-WWI, it looks & feels like a routine BBC Films production that packs cinemas for weeks without ever attracting a single attendee under 30.  It doesn’t sound like those movies, though, since its dialogue features long strings of profane, nonsensical insults referring to various characters as “mangy old titless turnips”, “bloody fucking old saggy sacks of chicken piss”, and “fucking old steaming bags of wet leaking shit.”  I know Mrs. Harris was met with an icy response when she went to Paris, but I don’t remember it being that extreme.  Wicked Little Letters is about a pre-Internet shitposting campaign in which a not-so-mysterious letter writer bombards her otherwise wholesome British community with handwritten outbursts of extreme profanity.  Set against the backdrop of women “losing their decorum” after taking on traditionally masculine roles in public life during the war, it’s a comedic overcorrection wherein one especially peculiar woman takes a little too much delight in being able to express herself through cuss for the first time in her pious life.  It played very funny at home, but I imagine its pottymouth punchlines got even bigger laughs in the theater among its target demographic, considering the uproarious response to Mr. Molesley laying out the wrong silverware or whatever in the Downtown Abbey movies.  Its biggest swing is that it does not baby its very much grown-up audience, which is a rarity in this style of comedy.

As a gumshoe mystery and subsequent courtroom drama, Wicked Little Letters is less of a whodunnit than it is a howcatchem.  Olivia Colman & Jessie Buckley star as next-door neighbors with unlikely mutual admiration.  Buckley is a loudmouth, hard-drinking Irish lass who says & does exactly what she wants at all times, unburdened by any filters of ladylike public behavior.  Colman is Buckley’s older, more socially restrained frenemy, mostly as a result of the strictly religious, emotionally abusive oppression of her father (Timothy Spall).  Colman is also the sole recipient of the first barrage of pottymouth hate mail, which is immediately blamed on Buckley, given her public disregard for decorum.  Unconvinced that a woman that brazen would hide behind the anonymity of a pen, a local policewoman (Ladyparts guitarist Anjana Vasan) launches an off-the-books investigation of who’s really behind the transgression, which quickly escalates beyond a neighborly spat to instead terrorize an entire community.  It’s immediately obvious who is guilty, and a lot of the early comedic tension is in watching her barely contained amusement with her own naughtiness give herself away.  The fun of the investigation is in watching a small group of women join the effort to expose the truth and vindicate their foul-mouth lush of a friend.  Like with John Waters’s classic suburban invasion comedies, the movie pits the hypocrisy of the upstanding Christian majority against the winning charm of “queers and drunkards” in the court of public opinion and declares a clear, populist victor.  It’s delightful.

Of course, you won’t find any singing buttholes, cannibalized cops, or drag queens eating dog shit in Wicked Little Letters.  All of its naughty profanity is purely verbal, but when contrasted against the typically safe, toothless comedies of manners in this milieu, it’s more than enough to earn its laughs.  I’m sure the real-life gossip column story that inspired the movie is much grimmer & more complicated than how it’s presented onscreen, but I don’t know that there’s any way to depict morally uptight Brits reading the words “You’re a sad stinky bitch” without inviting an audience to laugh.  This audience deserves that laugh, too.  They’ve been drawn to the theater with the promise of naughty, risqué comedies so many times that it’s nice one finally decided to deliver the goods. 

-Brandon Ledet

Pumping Iron II: The Women (1985)

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The 1977 competitive bodybuilding documentary Pumping Iron isn’t especially thoughtful or artful in presentation.  It’s presented as an observational, fly-on-the-wall document of a peculiar subculture in its natural state, but too much of its dramatic framing and direct-to-camera interviewing feels phony for that approach to land convincingly.  Still, the movie has endured as a cult classic for the past half-century thanks to the genius decision to center a pre-Hollywood Arnold Schwarzenegger as its main subject.  Pumping Iron is essential Schwarzenegger cinema for two reasons: it constantly finds new, novel angles to point the camera at Arnie’s extraordinary body, and it perfectly illustrates his uncanny ability to make being the most arrogant man alive charming & fun to be around.  If Pumping Iron documents anything substantial, it’s Schwarzenegger’s dominance as a world-class bodybuilder and a world-class blowhard, taking an unnecessary victory lap as Mr. Universe before moving on to Real Fame as the star of Real Movies.  He’s hilariously obnoxious as the biggest of fish in the smallest of ponds, openly negging his younger, hungrier competition (including a twenty-something Lou Ferrigno) and bragging that his life is so great that every waking moment feels like a continuous orgasm.  The movie itself might not be much of a wonder, but Arnold Schwarzenegger certainly is.  He singlehandedly rescues Pumping Iron from registering as a second-rate Maysles or Wiseman doc to instead excel as a hilarious precursor to Christopher Guest comedies.

The central star of its lesser-known sequel, Pumping Iron II: The Women, is much humbler than Schwarzenegger, both by design and by default.  Like Schwarzenegger in his time, Bev Francis was very clearly the best of her competitive bodybuilding field when she was profiled for a documentary feature. Unlike Schwarzenegger, she was not properly celebrated for her physical accomplishments.  Excuse me for spoiling this decades-old curio, but she doesn’t even win the competition she’s favored to crush.  As the movie illustrates, that’s because the rules & standards of women’s bodybuilding competitions are much more muddled & controversial than men’s, like all forums for judging & regulating the human body.  In Arnie’s movie, the man who can convincingly display the biggest, best defined muscles wins.  By those standards, Bev Francis is the clear dominator.  Only, in her movie, judges are looking for defined muscles to be displayed within the strict confines of a traditionally “feminine” physique, which Francis has deliberately trained beyond to build as much muscle as possible.  As a result, the movie becomes less about the peculiarities of her personality than the original Pumping Iron is about the peculiarities of Arnie’s.  Instead, it’s a movie about the general ways women’s bodies are overly regulated & critiqued in ways men’s bodies aren’t.  Its obvious, ludicrous unfairness only becomes stranger once you realize that the competition the film documents is a one-off promotion created specifically for the camera’s benefit. 

Overall, the Pumping Iron producers’ erotic dance competition movie Stripper is much more successful as The Feminine Version of Pumping Iron, as it relies on a similar subcultural interview structure in a mirrored, gendered setting.  What makes Pumping Iron II interesting is that it gets surprisingly political & academic by attempting to define what “feminine” means in the first place.  Bev Francis’s absurdly muscular body type would’ve fit right in with Schwarzenegger’s & Ferrigno’s absurdly muscular body types in the first film, but when compared against the intentionally slimmed-down dancer types of her own competitive class, she’s a disruption to the entire system of competitive bodybuilding as a rigidly gendered sport.  The judges don’t know what to do with her, since she’s clearly got the biggest muscles on display, but her physicality short-circuits their personal & cultural definitions of what a Woman is.  The obvious phoniness of the 1983 Caesars World Cup of Women’s Bodybuilding staged for the film matters less & less in a post-reality TV world, where audiences have been well trained to parse out what’s real and what’s staged.  It’s clear that Francis’s challenge to the gendered aesthetics of women’s bodybuilding genuinely rattles the sport’s seasoned judges, who have a hard time articulating their opposition to her sculpted physique without sounding like fascist, misogynist ghouls. 

Among this trio of films in the Pumping Iron canon, The Women is my least favorite as cinematic entertainment, but that’s only because Stripper and the Schwarzenegger pic delight me as artifacts of vintage cheese & sleaze.  The Women is clearly the contender with the most on its mind, the one with the most to say.  The fact that fascist, misogynist ghouls like Matt Walsh are still asking disingenuous questions like “What is a woman?” with their own rigid, limiting definitions in mind only reinforces its continued academic resonance.  It’s also required viewing for anyone who’s enamored with Rose Glass’s muscular erotic thriller Love Lies Bleeding, since it had obvious influence on that film’s period-specific costume & production design, especially when pumping iron in the women’s home-town gyms.  Meanwhile, the only thing the original Pumping Iron is currently relevant to is the timeless tradition of imitating Schwarzenegger’s Austrian accent for a goof among friends, since it’s second only to Commando for his scene-to-scene quotability.

-Brandon Ledet

The Rover (2014)

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It may seem like we’re not far enough past the 2010s for the decade’s distinguishing cultural markers to be fully clear in the rearview, but recently returning to pop media from that time has convinced me it’s been long enough.  They’re especially clear when watching episodes of reality TV shows from a decade ago, where the dated fashions & attitudes of the 2010s are already vividly distinct.  You don’t have to be a freak like me to find those cultural timestamps in old episodes of Top Chef or Total Divas, though.  Those shows are meant to be disposable fluff, not anthropological time capsules.  Look instead to the 2014 road-trip thriller The Rover, which was only released ten years ago and already feels like it was made on another planet.  A somber, stylish revenge mission set in Mad Max’s near-future Australia, The Rover should still feel like a relatively fresh take on a road-worn template, but it’s already coated with a thick layer of dust from the past decade of pop culture progress.  A lot’s changed since we first cracked open a new decade, which is surprising considering that most of us spent the first couple years of the 2020s in a state of domestic stasis, avoiding the outside world.

Following an intentionally vague global economic collapse, Guy Pearce solemnly spends his days in the Australian heat drinking hard liquor and neglecting to shave.  His lonely, self-destructive routine is disrupted when his car is stolen by a small gang of reprobates, giving him an excuse to be destructive towards someone else for a change.  The only lead on his stolen car is an injured member of the gang left to die in the road, played by Robert Pattinson.  The two men reluctantly bond on a road trip towards dual, parallel acts of revenge: one for stolen property, one for heartless abandonment.  The most readily apparent way the pop culture landscape has changed since The Rover‘s initial release is that this kind of relentless post-apocalyptic trudge is no longer as overly prevalent now as it was in the early 2010s, when it would have competed with titles like Take Shelter, Snowpiercer, These Final Hours, The Book of Eli, The Road, Mad Max: Fury Road, World War Z, The Walking Dead, and so on.  It had a hard time standing out in that crowded field even though it’s more committed than most to distinguish itself with bleak tones and off-kilter character quirks (including an extensive sequence of Pattinson mumbling “Pretty Girl Rock” to himself that felt custom-designed for a David Ehrlich countdown video).  That’s not the only thing that’s changed, though.

I assume The Rover was initially compared to the in-over-his-head antihero plot of Blue Ruin (since there’s a lot of crossover in the small group of movie obsessives who’d happen to catch both titles), given Pearce’s blatant lack of a Taken-style “set of skills” that would make him suitable to fight off a gang of thugs as a lone wolf.  He’s just an ordinary man who happens to be extraordinarily angry about the theft of his car.  At this point on the cultural timeline, though, no revenge mission movie can get by without being unfairly compared to John Wick, which was released just one year later.  It’s unlikely that The Rover & John Wick would’ve been directly compared at the time, but John Wick has since set a definitive template for modern revengers that The Rover happens to fit into: stories about ultra-violent heroes overcorrecting seemingly petty wrongs.  Usually that means slaughtered pets (the dog in John Wick, the pig in Pig, the bees in The Beekeeper, etc). In The Rover‘s case, it’s a stolen, unremarkable sedan that leads to a bloody body-count. Of course, there’s always a deeper well of Trauma hidden under those surface-level revenge missions, but the macho brutes at the center can only express themselves through Violence so it takes a while to gather the details.  When Pearce finally confesses what awful incident broke his moral compass halfway through the picture, it’s not so much a major dramatic reveal as it is one more grim detail passing by in an endless parade.

Something else that’s obviously changed in the past decade is A24’s brand identity as a film distributor. They were already making bold acquisitions like The Rover, Spring Breakers, and Under the Skin in their first year, but they didn’t really become a recognizable, dependable marketing machine until 2015’s The Witch.  It’s impossible to say whether The Rover might have been a hit if it had come out after A24 fully won over the hearts of the coveted Film Bro audience, but it is the exact kind of tough-exterior-soft-interior thriller that appeals to young men of that ilk, so it’s possible.  At the very least, it was better suited for a cult audience than the similarly somber post-apocalyptic tale It Comes At Night, which lucked into a higher level of name recognition by arriving later in the A24 film-bro ascendancy.  Releasing The Rover after Robert Pattinson’s recent turn as Batman couldn’t have hurt on that front either, considering that he was still mostly known as The Guy from Twilight in 2014.  By now, anyone paying attention knows that Pattinson is a talented actor with good taste for adventurous projects, but the combination of this & Cosmopolis were only the early signs that was the case (to the measly dozens of people who saw them in initial release).  The Rover is very much a film of its time, to its peril.  Its distinctive virtues are just as apparent to a 2020s set of eyes as the difference between the current Women’s Division of the WWE vs the Divas division of the 2010s, which you can now plainly see in any random episode of Total Divas but was a lot more difficult to parse in the thick of it.

-Brandon Ledet

Carny (1980)

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One venue in which enthusiastic moviegoing is still alive & well is the Outdoor Movie Night, especially the free, inflatable-screen showings of Family Friendly favorites like Coco or Moana.  Those screenings are more of a community event than your typical, isolating trip to the cinema.  Families spread out on picnic blankets, halfheartedly try to keep their kids in eyesight as they play around with new friends and, whenever bored enough, pay attention to the movie being projected.  It’s cute.  The Broadside offers that same kind of Outdoor Movie Night experience with a little more formal structure & focus, having built a Family Friend compound next to The Broad Theater for regular concerts & laid-back screenings.  The recent Wildwood showing of 1980’s Carny made great use of that communal atmosphere.  To play off the movie’s traveling-carnival setting, they invited face-painters, stilt-walkers, tarot readers, and cotton candy spinners as a pre-show warmup, concluding with local musician Brookiecita (of LSD Clownsystem) introducing the film over a slideshow of her own childhood photographs from growing up on the carnival circuit.  There were indeed kids running around the grounds too, this time eating cotton candy and enjoying the “VIP room” of inflatable pools.

That Outdoor Movie Night atmosphere is worth noting here because Carny is absolutely not a Family Friendly affair.  This is one of those teenage Jodie Foster roles that edge right up to the line of being too slimy to stomach without ever fully crossing it (see also: Taxi Driver, Foxes, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane).  Foster plays an underage waitress who’s bored with the tedium of small-town living, so she joins a traveling carnival on a whim after lusting after its most boisterous performer (Gary Busey in horrifying clown makeup).  Struggling to establish her place in the carnival beyond her function as The Dunk Tank Clown’s girlfriend, she briefly auditions as one of the striptease dancers in the “hoochie coochie” tent.  This decision lands the teenager in multiple compromising scenarios: modeling lingerie for hooting drunkards, getting body-slammed onto the stage by said drunkards, and eventually getting tied to a bed by a villainous goon who threatens to sexually assault her before her fellow carnies intervene.  The worst part is that her much older boyfriend knows exactly how old she is (while she lies to everyone else about already being 18), and the safer, more appropriate job he eventually finds for her is still as sexual bait in one of the carnival-game booths – this time working marks for pocket change, which we see play out in a lengthy sequence of lesbian cruising.

All of this dangerous flirtation with Jodie Foster’s early cinematic persona as Teenage Jailbait is eased by the film always implying its sex scenes instead of fully illustrating them and by its characterization of her as a consenting participant in her own seduction & indoctrination.  It’s also eased by the fact that Carny isn’t really about her seduction into the carny lifestyle at all.  It’s more of a love story about the two best bros she gets between: Busey as the clown and musician Robbie Robertson as his “midway” hustler trailer-mate.  Busey & Robertson love each other with furious devotion, often expressing their mutual affection in drunken acts of group sex with women they pick up on the road.  It throws off their dynamic when Busey catches real feelings for Foster, then, and that goes double for when Robertson inevitably has sex with her too.  Their seething jealousies & whispered bickering just outside of her earshot end up taking over the foreground of the movie while her own coming of age carny-life story fades into the background, so that it’s less of a love triangle than it is a tortured bromance.  That helps steal some attention away from the situational leering at Foster’s body, but Carny still made for an intensely uncomfortable watch at times, especially in an Outdoor Movie Night setting.

Of course, discomfort was the intent.  The movie opens with Busey smearing on his greasy clown paint before hopping into the dunk-tank cage, antagonizing every mark who strolls by like a screeching gorilla.  It concludes with a classic hall-of-mirrors horror sequence in which the carnies plot to scare off local thugs who are shaking them down for obscene payouts, essentially borrowing its climax from Tod Browning’s 1930s cult classic Freaks.  Despite those intentionally scary images and the amoral sexual politics of Foster’s seduction into the carny lifestyle, Brookiecita introduced the movie as a humanizing, empathetic portrayal of traveling carnival folk as a type of found family.  Likewise, Robertson co-wrote, produced, and partially scored the picture based on his own experiences as a teenage carnival worker, fondly remembering his time in the business.  Personally, I got my own “seedy underbelly of the carnival” crash course from Bikini Kill’s “Carnival,” not The Band’s “Life is a Carnival,” but I like to think I still got the message.  In Carny, Robertson seemed to be acknowledging both the warmth of the carnival community when dealing with their own and the grimy, violent hucksterism they could stoop to when dealing with outsiders.  In a way, that clash of familial warmth and carnival grime actually made it a perfect Outdoor Movie Night selection, the best one I’ve seen since The Broadside screened Demons with live prog-rock accompaniment.

-Brandon Ledet