Reviews

Radhe Shyam (2022)

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I am often in way over my head when choosing which mainstream Indian blockbusters to attend at the local multiplex.  Since most of the Bollywood & Kollywood titles that populate on AMC Elmwood’s marquee are not covered by Western press outlets, I usually have very little context to go on besides a one-paragraph plot synopsis and an un-subtitled trailer.  Finding my footing with the recent romance epic Radhe Shyam was even more of a challenge than usual, though, and it’s one I’m not sure I fully overcame until most of the way into its runtime.

Firstly, I could not settle on which language to watch Radhe Shyam in, since it was simultaneously filmed in both Hindi & Telugu, with two entirely different music composers hired for both audio versions.  I assumed checking what region the film was produced in would help solve that puzzle, but it was shot on-location in Italy, so I just went with the most convenient start time.  Then came the confusion over the film’s price tag.  While most movies I watch at Elmwood are $8 matinees, tickets to Radhe Shyam were $20 a pop ($24 with the AMC app’s outrageous service charges), which is more than I think I’ve ever paid for a single movie ticket in my life.  The best I can figure is that the distributors had to four-wall its theatrical run, since the Amazon Prime logo in the opening credits indicates that they will not be adhering to the rigid theatrical window that AMC demands.  If I were going by myself, I would have bailed as soon as I saw that ticket price and just waited to see it on streaming in — soon, apparently.  However, since I had dragged a friend to the theater (podcast co-host James), we were too fully committed to our playdate to turn back.  Which is how we ended up paying $48 to watch Radhe Shyam at 10:45am on Saturday morning in an otherwise empty theater.

My confusion over how to best approach this film did not end with that hasty ticket purchase.  Getting a firm handle on its tone & genre was also an adventure in itself.  Pre-intermission, Radhe Shyam is a cutesy romcom with an extremely broad approach to humor (to the point where punchlines are scored by bike horns & slide whistles).  Post-intermission, it’s an epic romance melodrama of Titanic proportions — complete with explosive, fist-pumping superheroics.  Altogether, it’s a thoroughly entertaining 128 minutes of volatile fluff, worth all 4,800 pennies.

Prabhas (headliner of the over-the-top action spectacle Saaho) stars as the world’s greatest palm reader, the Einstein of Palmistry.  Reading his own palm and finding no discernible Love Line, he decides there is no romantic love in his future and can only look forward to a series of casual Flirtationships.  His resolve is challenged when he meets a beautiful doctor played by Pooja Hegde, an adrenaline junkie with a bizarre fetish for hanging out the sides of speeding trains.  After a death-defying meet cute aboard one of those trains, they enter a whirlwind Flirtationship that tests the palmist’s conviction that he will never love.  If this were a mainstream American rom-com I’d say you could predict where the story goes from there, but it’s much more explosively entertaining than that.

Radhe Shyam is thematically hung up on binaries.  Because the central romance is between a medical doctor and a palmist, most of its scene-to-scene conflicts are built around the tension between hard-facts Science and faith in Hindu religion.  More importantly to the romance, it’s a story of Love vs. Destiny, as its two central lovers are decidedly not destined to be together but rebel against their pre-determined futures to transform their Flirtationship into a proper Relationship.  The early, comedic half of the film details their adorable courtship phase.  The late, thrilling half details their violent rejection of their fates in an all-out visual spectacle you’d never see in a Julia Roberts romcom.  That jarring genre structure is itself a binary, and it’s the one that makes the film an exciting novelty instead of just a cute diversion.

It’s near impossible to not be charmed by Radhe Shyam, at least not by the time its two destined-to-separate lovers are heroically cheating death to fight their way back to their sweet, flirtatious beginnings.  This is a movie that covers both major touchstones of Celine Dion romanticism—the flowy curtains of the bodice-ripper “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” music video and the ocean-liner disaster epic of Titanic—so you cannot reasonably claim that it doesn’t deliver the goods.  Whether a $24 theatrical ticket is too steep of an admission price for those heart-soaring pleasures is subjective, but I will say this: the go-for-broke action finale looked incredible on the big screen, and my audience of two had a great time cheering it on in that empty auditorium. 

-Brandon Ledet

Gangubai Kathiawadi (2022)

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I’ve been very slow to respond to the lulls between COVID spikes over the past couple years, waiting too long to poke my head out my turtle shell before the next variant sends me back inside.  As a result, I wasn’t fully ready to dive into the social deep end of Mardi Gras this past month, even though the gorgeous vibes and weather were making me terribly jealous of everyone out there celebrating early glimpses of a “post-COVID” life.  I’m gradually easing myself back into the world outside my living room, though, by which I mean I’ve returned to movie theaters for the first time since the lull between Delta & Omicron.  I generally appreciate the ways the theatrical environment enhances the joys of movie-watching for me, not least of all in how it forces me to ignore my phone for two-hour blocks – a near-impossible feat at home.  However, as I’ve returned to cinemas, I’ve found that the types of movies I’ve been watching on the big screen haven’t really changed.  If you ask most audiences, the only three movies of note to be released in the past year have featured Batmen, Spider-men, or Ghostbusters, and everything else has been either disposable or nonexistent.  I’m not feeling especially drawn to those big-name IPs as I’ve returned to the theater, though, whether that’s a safety precaution in avoiding indoor crowds or if I’m just out of practice in seeking out anything that’s not a low-budget indie that will soon be streaming anyway.  I’ve finally started leaving the house again, but I’m leaving it to watch the exact kinds of movies I was already watching on my couch.

The major exception to this loss of big-budget appetite is that I am ravenous for Indian blockbusters now that I’m back at the megaplex.  I enjoyed watching both Tamil-language actioners I caught at home last year—Karnan (an over-the-top blockbuster version of Bacuaru) & Master (an over-the-top blockbuster version of Dangerous Minds)—but I can’t say I loved them quite as much as I would have on the big screen, rattled by their booming sound & gargantuan visuals for their full three-hour runtimes.  So, the biggest change to my movie-going diet since I started leaving the house again is that I’m watching mainstream Indian cinema again, which I’m finding way more thoroughly entertaining (and way less conversationally exhausting) than its Hollywood equivalent.  While almost everyone I know was checking in with The Batman on its opening weekend, I sat down in a near-empty theater to gaze at another superhero of sorts: the fearless sex-worker advocate Gangubai.  The Bollywood drama Gangubai Kathiawadi is a formulaic, loose-with-the-facts biopic of its titular Indian political activist, depicted as rising to power from a victim of forced prostitution to a Mafia Queen to a populist hero of women’s rights.  As is tradition with most big-budget Indian productions, it delivers everything you could possibly want out of a movie, all at once: music, dance, laughs, danger, romance, tragedy, and shameless feel-goodery.  It’s also the rare Bollywood counterprogramming that’s actually shorter than the mainstream American blockbuster that’s currently crowding theater marquees.  Gangubai Kathiawadi is a half-hour shorter than The Batman and offers a much more impressive range of emotions & entertainment value.

For at least the first forty minutes of Gangubai Kathiawadi, I was worried I made a huge mistake in choosing which Indian crowdpleaser to return to theaters for.  The red-light Kamathipura district of Mumbai that the movie dwells in makes for a grim atmosphere.  Gangubai immediately looks cool & powerful at the start of the film, but she’s introduced in conversation with a child who’s being forced to start life as a prostitute after being sold to a brothel by her abusive, adult husband.  Asked to show the kid the ropes, Gangubai recounts her own story of being sold to a brothel by a boyfriend who promised her a career as a Bollywood actress.  Even with the rape & other violence mostly obscured offscreen, this early human-trafficking portion of the story is almost too dark to stomach, but that only makes the movie more satisfying once it starts hitting its feel-good biopic beats in the second hour.  Gangubai rescues the child from repeating that plight instead of condemning her to it, then recounts how she rose through the ranks in her own brothel to become the most powerful political voice in Kamathipura.  She essentially unionizes her fellow sex workers so they can set the terms of their employment, first as a low-level crime boss then later as a legitimate politician.  As she rose to power, I was hugely won over by the movie’s emotional stings & sex-work politics in a way that really surprised me, even if it took nearly an hour of squirming to get there.  By the time Gangubai shuts down all business in Kamathipura for a night so that her fellow sex workers can dance & celebrate instead of working for the first time in their lives, I cried.  Later, when she advocates in a radio broadcast speech that these women should be able to “Live with dignity” despite moralistic, hypocritical objections to their profession, I cried even harder.  It’s wonderful, hard-hitting schmaltz.

I am far from an expert in any of India’s varied, sprawling film industries, but I have finally seen enough of these movies to recognize a few of its main recurring players.  Gangubai is played by Alia Bhatt, who played the take-no-shit, tough-as-nails girlfriend in the “Bollywood 8-Mile” drama Gully Boy.  I was amazed by her fierce defiance in that performance, which she amplifies here to the point where she’s practically a sex-worker superhero.  Gangubai slaps anyone who disrespects her.  She openly drinks & smokes despite men’s moral objections.  She practically has a kink for making men sit on the floor to admire from below, which at one point manifests in forcing a young admirer to take her tailoring measurements in total awe of her body.  When she walks down the streets of Kamathipura, she immediately gathers a crowd of starstruck on-lookers, an effect that’s amplified by crunchy guitar riffs announcing her presence – like Gal Godot in Wonder Woman gear.  Just about the only thing she doesn’t do is lip-sync during her own musical numbers.  I have little context for how standard that is in modern Bollywood productions, but here it has an MTV-era music video effect, where she gets to strike powerful poses without worrying about emoting to the romantic lyrics.  Like an 80s action hero, Gangubai is presented as the coolest, most righteous person who ever lived, and Bhatt is incredibly adept at performing that badass self-assurance.  Between this film & Gully Boy, I’d even go as far as calling myself a fan, at least to the point where I’m looking forward to seeing her pop up as an “extended cameo appearance” in the upcoming S.S. Rajamouli film RRR.

Not everyone was impressed with the real-life Gangubai Kothewali’s portrayal in Gangubai Kathiawadi.  Her surviving family sued Bhatt, the film’s producers, and the authors of its source material for defamation, claiming that Kothewali was a social worker who was never employed by the brothels she serviced.  There are also news articles dismissing that controversy as a marketing ploy initiated by the producers themselves, so who knows.  All I can say for sure is that I don’t hold based-on-a-true-story Hollywood pictures accountable for being factually inaccurate, so I’m not sure how much that matters here.  The film was adapted from one thirty-page chapter in a much larger historical book about the Kamathipura red-light district called Mafia Queens of Mumbai, so it left itself a lot of room to build whatever story it wanted out of broad-strokes aspects of the real Gangubai’s life.  It went with the most formulaic, crowd-pleasing approach possible, typified by eye-pleasing symmetrical tableaus of vintage Mumbai street life and a romantic depiction of workers hooking by candlelight during a city-wide power outage.  It’s a big, beautiful mainstream heart-warmer with a shockingly grim opening and shockingly sharp political edge.  I’m more typically drawn to over-the-top Kollywood action thrillers than this sincere Bollywood drama, but I was fully satisfied by the movie-magic charms of Gangubai Kathiawadi in a way that I rarely am by American movies on its budgetary scale.  It was a satisfying return to a specific flavor of theatrical experience I’ve greatly missed over the past couple years.

-Brandon Ledet

Fresh (2022)

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Is Fresh the world’s first torture-porn romcom?  I have no clue how to go about verifying that claim, but it’s the exact kind of hook this movie needs to reel in an audience.  After premiering to positive reviews at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, it was picked up for quick, wide distribution by Searchlight Pictures.  That used to entail a gradual, platformed theatrical rollout built on word-of-mouth promotion . . . when Searchlight was owned by Fox. But since Searchlight is now a Disney subsidiary, it means Fresh was unceremoniously dumped on Hulu.  It may have topped a few online publications’ “What’s New to Streaming This Week” roundups the weekend it premiered, but in a month or so it will have effectively disappeared from the public consciousness.  So, let’s go ahead and confidently call Fresh the world’s first torture-porn romcom so it has fighting chance to get noticed at all; researching that claim could only spoil the fun. 

The first half-hour of Fresh is pure romcom.  Or it’s at least the kind of “indie” romcom about messy, listless twentysomethings that regularly premiere at Sundance year after year: Obvious Child, Together Together, The Big Sick, etc.  Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as a Los Angeles transplant who’s struggling to survive the anguish of first-date awkwardness in the Tinder era.  Some of the indignities of modern dating are genuinely harrowing, like the threat of unsolicited dick pics or the threat of violent physical retaliation after even the gentlest rejection.  Mostly, though, her dates with self-absorbed losers literally named Chad are played for cutesy comical effect.  Her luck turns around when she meets an eerily handsome & charming bachelor played by Sebastian Stan, who appears both well-adjusted and genuinely interested in her as a person; he’s the only potential match who asks her questions about herself, anyway.  It’s when they officially pair up that the opening credits finally roll, and the film perverts its modern romcom trappings with some unexpected torture porn viciousness.  I won’t reveal too much of the post-twist premise, but I’ll at least advertise that it encourages Stan to chew more than just the scenery as Edgar-Jones’s romantic foil, and he is ravenous.

Fresh‘s straight-to-streaming distribution path isn’t the only reason it needs a killer hook.  This is cute, sick stuff, but it ultimately doesn’t have much to say as anything but a style exercise.  You could sum up its entire thematic scope as a morbidly literal interpretation of the idiom “Dating apps are meat markets,” which is potentially a problem for a horror comedy’s two full hours in length.  The style is substance in this case, though, not only in the tension of its competing torture-porn/romcom tones but also in how first-time director Mimi Cave relentlessly disorients the audience with twirling camera work.  It’s especially impressive as a COVID-era production, given that most scenes only involve one-to-three actors sharing the screen at any time, but it doesn’t feel dramatically constrained by pandemic precautions the way a lot of recent thrillers do.  There’s a hungry audience out there who would appreciate what Fresh is doing if they only knew it existed, which is why I’m pushing to brand it with its own unique genre-mashup superlative.  There have been plenty of other cannibal comedies & romantic horrors over the years, so let’s give this one its own title to defend as the first of its niche: the torture-porn romcom.

-Brandon Ledet

Hellbender (2022)

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What should be the ideal goal of no-budget backyard filmmaking?  Is it enough to just document an insular community’s collaboration on a fun, collective art project?  Should it also approximate the production values of a “legitimate”, professional production as much as its resources allow?  Or should backyard filmmakers reject the aesthetics of professionalism entirely and instead distinguish themselves as outsider artists?

Your response to those big-picture questions will likely determine your enthusiasm for the low-budget folk horror Hellbender, which recently premiered on Shudder after a buzzy festival run in 2021.  I was charmed by the film’s backstory as a fun art project shared between a real-life family of outsider filmmakers, named—no joke—The Adams Family.  Where I’m skeptical of the film’s enthusiastic reception among horror nerds, though, is that it feels like it’s specifically being praised for the near-professional quality of its production values.  The camera is shockingly active in Hellbender, while most backyard movies rely on static shots due to limited gear & crew.  It’s got enough drone shots, CG effects, and psychedelic flashes of double-exposure horror imagery to pass itself off as a “real” movie – or at least a standard-issue, straight-to-Shudder horror streamer.  I can’t help but question the value of that achievement, though, as impressive as it is.  Backyard movies are best when they’re a little scuzzy & chaotic, touching on volatile images & personalities you won’t find in a professional Hollywood picture.  By that metric, Hellbender is almost competent to a fault: a little too slick to be especially valuable as a backyard movie but not expensive enough to feel fully legit.

The most satisfying aspect of Hellbender is the way its peculiar off-camera production circumstances are echoed in its onscreen drama.  The real-life mother-daughter duo Toby Poser & Zelda Adams play the fictional mother-daughter duo “Mother” & Izzy in the film. Together, they write playful, Jucifer-style metal songs in the fictional band H6LLB6ND6R – a mirror reflection of their real-life familial collaborations as outsider filmmakers (along with additional family members John & Lulu Adams, who also appear on-camera in minor roles).  As adorable as it is that a family can work closely enough to make intergenerational art together, there is something insular & cult-like about their isolation from the outside world, which the Adams are smart to make an explicit part of the text.  The mother strictly quarantines her daughter in a remote woodland cabin as a safety measure, raising her to believe she is too sick to be around outsiders.  It turns out what she means is the daughter is sick as fuck.  They both descend from a bloodline of witches, sharing an inherited power that can be dangerously addictive & destructive when paired with a teenager’s erratic behavior.  The resulting chaos of the daughter-witch inevitably being unleashed into the world unsocialized (a familiar chaos for any overly sheltered child who finally breaks free of parental control) is often cute, often gnarly, and sometimes even genuinely magical.  It just also feels like a cheaper version of superior teen-girl-puberty horrors like Jennifer’s Body, Ginger Snaps, and Teeth, when its outsider-art status means it had the freedom to become something much wilder & less familiar.

If I’m underselling the achievement of these resourceful, self-taught filmmakers shooting a near-professional movie in the woods, it’s probably because I’m undersold on The Adams Family myself.  I’m assuming that a lot of the ecstatic praise from horror nerds is a result of that niche audience having already been familiar with the Adams’ work, watching their craft evolve over the past decade of increasingly competent movies.  Hell, if you’ve been following the family’s career, you’ve practically watched their kids grow up onscreen, which must come with its own inherent emotional investment in their lives & art.  As someone who’s happily over a dozen films deep into the Matt Farley catalog of no-budget horror comedies, I can attest to these long-term collaborations among insular communities improving the longer you spend with the weirdos involved.  I enjoyed Hellbender enough to want to look back to older Adams Family titles like The Deeper You Dig & Halfway to Zen, especially since I’m apparently craving something a little rougher around the edges from them.  I’m questioning the merit of working so hard to make a backyard movie feel professional instead of feeling dangerously unrestrained, but I also wasn’t around for the family’s journey to this milestone.  Luckily, it doesn’t matter if there are a few mild naysayers in the audience like myself anyway, since the film was pre-emptively canonized in the recent folk horror documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched before it even hit wide release, so it’s already guaranteed to be cited as a significant work in that subgenre for decades to come regardless of its priorities or ideals as low-budget outsider art.

-Brandon Ledet

Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (1974)

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I was initially careful not to divulge too many third-act details when reviewing Godzilla vs Kong, but it’s been an entire year since it first premiered so I don’t mind spoiling it now.  The only reason Adam Wingard’s kaiju smash-em-up is the best American Godzilla film to date is that the monster fights promised in its title felt exceptionally tactile & novel for a modern CG blockbuster.  And what really launched those fights over the top was the WrestleMania-style surprise entrance of Godzilla’s mechanized doppelgänger Mechagodzilla in the third act, injecting an excessive rush of adrenaline into a movie was already plenty entertaining before the bionic monster’s arrival.  The delight of that last-minute surprise really leaves audiences on a fist-pumping high, forgiving all the mundane humans-on-the-ground storytelling it takes to get there.

Looking back at the delightful surprise of Mechagodzilla’s most recent onscreen appearance, I can’t help but wonder if the robo-monster should always be presented as a last-minute swerve.  At the very least, I can say for certain that its first franchise appearance in 1974’s Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla would’ve been greatly improved if its existence weren’t teased in the title & poster.  There’s a brief, glorious moment in the film when Godzilla is being framed for mayhem he didn’t commit by the mechanized imposter, frustrated that other kaiju and the citizens below believe he has turned heel.  The film could have been an all-time classic if that conflict was allowed to drive the plot, delaying the reveal of the “space titanium” under the faux-Godzilla’s “skin” as late in the runtime as possible instead of immediately degloving it.  Basically, I wish Mechagodzilla was the Gene Parmesan of the series.

There is plenty of novelty to be found elsewhere in Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla without that surprise reveal.  While Mechagodzilla is almost always a manmade weapon in subsequent films (including in Godzilla vs Kong), it arrives on Earth as space alien tech in its first appearance.  The sub-James Bond espionage antics that thwart that alien plot can be a little dull (an unfortunate holdover from the previous entry in the franchise, Godzilla vs Megalon).  The aliens themselves are amusing knockoffs of the Planet of the Apes creature designs, though, which adds a post-modern mash-up quality to the premise.  The film also doesn’t entirely rely on the novelty of Mechagodzilla to freshen up its monster roster.  It also features appearances from Anguirus (a spiky armadillo) and King Caesar (a personified Shisa statue) in its Royal Rumble rollout of surprise combatants.  It’s a fun picture as is, even if it had much greater potential as a kaiju whodunnit.

To be fair, I’m not sure Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla needed to be especially novel to be worthwhile, considering that it was already arriving fourteen films deep into the Godzilla canon.  Fifty years and twenty-two Godzilla movies later, there have been plenty of boring, uninspired kaiju duds with way less to offer than this standard-issue monster flick.  At the very least, it attempts to establish its own playful sense of style between the kaiju battles in its cave-painting illustrations, Brady Bunch news-report grids, and double-exposure shots of religious prophecies.  It’s no Godzilla vs Hedorah in that respect, but few movies are.  Most importantly, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla gets by on the exact same merits that made Godzilla vs Kong such a delight: the inherent entertainment value of its pro-wrestling style kaiju fights (which are often shockingly bloody in this case, imagery that was often softened in its American edits).  I just can’t help but wish that it also held back Mechagodzilla for as long as possible in the same way Godzilla vs Kong did, though. It could have been an all-timer instead of just another good’n.

-Brandon Ledet

Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (1968)

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Whenever I’m overwhelmed by a flood of apocalyptic news on the old doomscroll machine, I like to remind myself that every generation thinks they’re going to be the last.  It’s been the “end of times” for centuries, if not forever.  Eventually, one generation will be right; humanity’s time on Earth will end and, who knows, maybe we’ll be the lucky ones to win that guessing game.  The comfort in that continuum is not in scoffing at previous generations for being wrong about “living” through the apocalypse; the comfort is in knowing that our exact cultural anxieties have been expressed before, often through persistently relatable art.  I was thinking a lot about that doomsday continuum during the low-budget horror whatsit Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell as characters pulled at their own hair, complaining that “The world’s a mess” and “People have gone insane” as global chaos escalates just outside their periphery.  It’s an exasperation that’s tied to a very specific era of cultural horror & grief—post-nuclear Japan—but the world has continued to be “a mess” in the decades since in a way that keeps the film relevant to current global-political turmoil, in both disturbing & comforting ways.

Goke, Body Snatcher form Hell is not unique in the way it processes Japan’s national grief over the US dropping atomic bombs in Hiroshima & Nagasaki through outlandish fantasy metaphors.  The 1954 film Godzilla is obviously the largest-looming behemoth in that genre, but there are plenty of other examples that followed in the King of Monsters’ wake: Genocide, Twilight of the Cockroaches, Atomic Rulers of the World, etc.  What distinguishes Goke is that its anti-nuclear-war political metaphor is not illustrated by a single monstrous threat but rather a series of baffling, discordant events that mirror the chaos of the world outside the cinema in the chaos of its narrative.  Goke is presented as a straightforward alien-invasion creature feature, but it’s really more of an anything-goes descent into supernatural mayhem.  Long before its space-vampire alien invaders are introduced onscreen, the film has already jolted its audience with bomb threats, international espionage, birds suicidally crashing into airplane windows, and a daytime sky that has turned inexplicably blood-red.  Even the aliens themselves are difficult to pin down to a single, understandable form.  They arrive as a metallic goo that creates a vaginal opening in their human victims’ foreheads, so they can physically hijack their brains and turn them into vampiric drones.  When I first heard the film reviewed on the We Love to Watch podcast a few years ago, they labeled it as “bug-nuts”, and I still can’t conjure a more apt descriptor.

Goke is one of those constantly surprising low-budget novelties where it feels like absolutely anything can happen at any time, while most of the actual imagery between the special effects shots is just a handful of characters debating a plan of action in a single room.  While its bug-nuts vampire plot recalls the absurdly expensive special effects showcase of Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce, it’s executed in the style of retro British horrors like The Earth Dies Screaming.  The space vampires’ victims huddle in the cabin of a crashed airplane, relying on newspaper & radio broadcast reports of the world outside to afford the film’s supernatural chaos a sense of global scale.  A Freudian academic character presents their imprisonment on the airplane as a intriguing sociological experiment, coldly declaring it “a fascinating scenario for a psychiatrist to ponder” like a total sociopath.  In truth, there’s nothing especially complex about the individual characters or their interpersonal relationships that’s worth pondering.  They’re mostly buying time between the film’s jabs of horrific special effects, which are fascinating scenarios to ponder: aliens baiting humanity into nuclear war, aliens luring humans onto liminal sound-stage UFO sets, aliens oozing into human brains, etc.  It’s ultimately okay that the movie treads water between these go-for-broke genre payoffs, since they’re all incredibly cool & surprising whenever they do pop up.   It’s money wisely spent.

While Goke may not take its interpersonal human drama all that seriously, I do think it’s sincere in the way it expresses abject horror at the doomsday scenario of nuclear war.  The film often devolves into a slide show of still photos documenting real-life war atrocities, often citing the early stirrings of The Vietnam War as the conflict weighing heaviest on its mind.  I can’t think of many contemporary genre films that match the go-for-broke, bug-nuts energy of this film’s constantly evolving alien threat.  That’s not too surprising if you consider modern movie studios’ addiction to “safe bet” investments in pre-existing IP, let alone modern audiences’ obsession with boring metrics of quality like “plot holes” and “logic”.  It’s a shame, though, since the chaos of modern global politics feels outright apocalyptic in a way only this bug-nuts, constantly shifting plot “structure” can accurately illustrate.  Even if we never see our nightmare world reflected in these kinds of free-wheeling genre pictures again, at least we have relics of a wilder genre cinema past to look to for comfort.  The world has been explosively volatile for a long time, so there’s a long history of art to draw from.

-Brandon Ledet

Metropolitan (1990)

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One of my very favorite films of 2021 was the jaded, delicately surreal comedy French Exit, which cast Michelle Pfeiffer & Lucas Hedges as idle-rich Manhattanites who sail away to a self-destructive vacation in Paris.  It took all my restraint to not compare the film’s Upper Manhattan wealth-class humor to the teen soap opera Gossip Girl in my review, since I recently caught up with all seven seasons of the show (and counting!) for the first time, and it was my closest pop culture comparison point to that milieu.  A much more apt, highbrow comparison might have been the various films of Whit Stillman, whose work feels like a major influence on the absurdly literary dialogue in French Exit, along with their shared hoity-NYC setting.  Even the characters on Gossip Girl likely would have caught the Stillman influence of French Exit (it’s a very cinephile-friendly show!), but I’m not as cultured as those champagne-sipping high schoolers.  I’m a thirtysomething office drone from Chalmette who gets by on box wine & Union coffee, and I just saw my first proper Whit Stillman movie.

Stillman’s calling card debut, Metropolitan, is a much funnier film than I expected.  Although it’s less surreal, it reminded me a lot of what I loved about the overly affected dialogue in French Exit, and it had me laughing just as hard throughout.  The film is mostly a series of late-night living room “after parties” following debutante balls, where wealthy teenagers on the verge adulthood share cocktails & gossip until dawn in their tuxes & gowns.  They’re essentially sleepover slumber parties, but they’re treated as if they were historic, era-defining salons, where every minor social maneuver is treated as a political, philosophical act.  Characters debate the advantages of Socialism vs. Marxism with the same self-seriousness that they select their escorts for the following night’s dance.  They’re playing at being grown-ups & intellectuals, dressing up in early-90s gala finery and floating hot-take opinions on literature they’ve never read.  And it’s all delivered in a formal, deliberately chosen vocabulary that underlines just how absurd their political parlor games sound to an audience of outsiders.

While my recent viewing habits have me comparing Whit Stillman’s signature style to Gossip Girl & French Exit, it’s much more common (and likely more accurate) to call Metropolitan a 1990s update to Jane Austen’s comedies of manners.  There are plenty of Austen novels that track the overtly political maneuvers of gossip & romantic pairings as they play out in a series of ritualistic parties & dances, often among unmarried youth.  The only other Stillman film I’ve seen to date was even an adaptation of one of those novels: 2016’s Love & Friendship.  Metropolitan can easily be understood as a 1:1 update to that exact social battlefield, just with its 90s NYC combatants calling cabs instead of carriages.  Before you have a chance to pat yourself on the back for making that connection independently, characters openly debate the merits of Jane Austen’s fiction onscreen at length – signaling that Stillman knows exactly what he’s doing.  Please forgive me for pointing out that Gossip Girl also had a habit of repeating plots & tropes from well-known works, and then directly citing those titles in-dialogue for the teens taking notes at home.  I even doubt it’s fully a coincidence that both GG & Metropolitan feature a heartbreaking “it girl” heiress named Serena at their center of their respective dramas; Serena van der Woodsen registers as a direct homage to Serena Slocum in retrospect.

French Exit is somewhat of an outlier in the pop culture tryptic I’m framing here, in that it’s about bitter, self-deprecating upper-classers at the end of their ropes, while the preppy youths of Metropolitan & Gossip Girl are adorably full of life despite their pretentious airs.  It still matches the hyper-specific verbal & circumstantial humor of Metropolitan, though, and I find it difficult to convey what makes either film so funny to anyone who isn’t instantly on their shared wavelength.  In both cases, it’s the worst-behaved, most out of touch Manhattanites in the main cast that land all the best, most peculiar zingers: Michelle Pfeiffer as the suicidal, past-her-prime “it girl” in French Exit and Chris Eigeman as the world’s most pretentious cad in Metropolitan.  I cannot convey exactly why Eigeman describing dancing the cha-cha as “no more ridiculous than life itself” or his caddiest rival as “one of the worst guys of modern times” is one of the funniest performances I’ve ever seen onscreen, no more than I can convey why Michelle Pfeiffer sharpening kitchen knives in the dark or describing the nature of dildos as “sad” hit me in the exact same comedic sweet spot.  I’ve already demonstrated to myself that I’ll watch hundreds of hours of a chaotically varied quality soap opera set in this exact wealth class bubble, so of course I’m also a total sucker for the couple instances when Gossip Girl‘s insular, largely frivolous conflicts are played for high art.

-Brandon Ledet

Golden Eighties (1986)

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When reviewing movies for this blog, I often push myself to contextualize them within how they relate to my personal life or the current moment in pop culture at large.  I doubt many people are reading these webcasts into the abyss anyway, so I mostly treat these posts as diary entries that help me tether my moviewatching habits to a specific moment in time or personal headspace.  If I’m going to be entirely honest in these personal moviewatching diaries, I have to admit that there isn’t much room to contextualize my thoughts on Golden Eighties within a larger discourse, either personal or universal.  I watched Chantal Akerman’s shopping mall romcom musical simply because its screengrabs looked beautiful, and I loved it for that exact surface-level reason.  The film’s pastel cosmetic palette and soft neon blue lighting registered as a vision of 80s Shopping Mall Heaven in my mind, and my only frustration with it as a motion picture is that I can’t find a way to drink those colors through a funnel.  It’s not a movie I wanted to watch so much as it’s one I wanted to drown in, but I still greatly enjoyed the experience of firing it up on the Criterion Channel.

To put it as reductively as possible, Golden Eighties is a Young Girls of Rochefort for the Madonna era.  Besides restricting all its action to a single shopping mall, there isn’t anything especially challenging or avant-garde about its tangled web of unrequited loves – at least not on the level of what you’d expect from a Chantal Akerman film.  The drama mostly concerns three parallel tales of missed romantic connections: a lonely waitress who trades long-distance love letters with a beau who moved abroad, an elderly couple who reunite after having their flame extinguished by The Holocaust in their youth and, the main attraction, a she-loves-him-but-he-loves-the-other-one love triangle you’d find in just about any 1950s teen musical.  There are some political, often Feminist angles to how these relationships play out onscreen, especially in Akerman giving the equal space to an older, Jewish woman’s romantic & sexual desires (through her Jean Dieleman avatar Delphine Seyrig) among the vast cast of young, buxom Gentiles.  Mostly, though, the drama is kept intentionally light & swoony, and it all culminates in the declaration that falling in love with different suitors is like trying on pretty dresses: not all of them fit you, but it’s fun to explore.

Akerman’s arthouse background shows more in the surrealism of the cheap sound stage setting than it does in the romantic themes.  In real life, shopping malls are public, bustling spaces, but this deliberately frothy melodrama plays out in an insular, self-contained world consisting entirely of a clothing store, a hair salon, a movie theater, and a café.  It’s an odd effect, especially as those limited, rigid settings fill with a chaotic flood of singing, dancing, chattering, fashionable women.  I was fully convinced that the obligatory wedding climax was going to be staged right there in the food court, but it never came to that (unfortunately?).  I don’t know that the dreamlike artifice of the faux shopping mall was entirely intentional, since Akerman spent years scraping together funding for a larger production she never got to realize.  It really heightens the romance & melodrama at the film’s core in a way that makes it feel like a singular work of art, though, as evidenced by my desire to drown in the beauty of its screenshots.  Every frame is a gorgeous beaut, as long as you have an affection for pure-femme 1980s commercialism, as I apparently do.

Golden Eighties is imperfect, and I suspect Chantal Akerman would’ve been the first person to admit that.  Its shambling, let’s-put-on-a-show quality is just as charming as its playfully risqué pop music dance numbers, though, and my only real complaint at the end is that I wanted more songs and more costume changes.  I went in desperate to see more of its dreamlike mall-world imagery, and I left with that same insatiable hunger, which I’ll chalk up to it being a total success despite the shortcomings of its production.

-Brandon Ledet

The Cockettes (2002)

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I’m often alienated by hagiographies of late-60s hippie culture, where Boomers & burnouts wax nostalgic about the time that they almost saved the world through the power of Positive Vibes.  The early 2000s documentary The Cockettes is the one major exception to that personal distaste.  The grimy San Francisco drag scene it profiles feels like it’s only hippie by default, emerging too early to be D.I.Y. punk and too late to be an echo of the Beats.  The only other countercultural icon of the era that speaks to (and, honestly, guides) my sensibilities is the Dreamlanders crew, headed by John Waters.  It’s no surprise, then that Waters and partner-in-crime Divine feature prominently in the film as Cockettes-adjacent artists at the fringes of the scene.  It’s the one snapshot of hippie culture where I’ve ever genuinely felt “These are my people.”

Although their bottomless appetite for LSD and their complete lack of a work ethic often made their stage shows sloppy to the point of incoherence, the Cockettes had a clearly defined point of view as a visual art collective – at least in the medium of drag.  They were basically a never-ending carnival where every single attraction was a bearded lady, freaking out even their fellow hippie communes with their 24-7 dedication to glamor & hedonism.  Their version of drag makeup was distinctly modern, defined by exaggerated eye lines and mountains of glitter packed into their unshaved beards.  Cisgender women were equals among the crossdressing men in the collective, establishing an aggressive genderfuck ethos long before that term was coined.  While their makeup was cutting-edge, their wardrobe was purposefully old-fashioned.  Most of their stage shows consisted of hard-tripping, half-naked drag queens singing showtunes & acting out Busby Berkeley chorus lines in the discarded rags of 1940s Hollywood starlets who’d left their gowns & furs behind with the changing times.  The gimmick only worked because everyone in the audience was on the exact same drugs as the performers, but the documentary allows us to enjoy their visual artistry as a gorgeous lookbook in motion while members who survived the dual epidemics of heroin overdoses & AIDS outbreaks gush about the best of times in reverent “You had to be there” tones.  It’s fabulous to behold, even when their half-forgotten anecdotes drift into “Kids these days” bitterness.

Of course, having John Waters on hand as your bearded-lady-carnival barker helps tremendously, as he’s one of our great living storytellers.  Hearing him vouch for the Cockettes as “hippie acid freak drag queens” who conjured “complete sexual anarchy” out of the Peace & Love movement is a huge boost to the film’s entertainment value, and he’s interviewed extensively throughout to capitalize on that infectious enthusiasm.  It’s a justified inclusion too, as the Cockettes’ San Francisco venue—The Nocturnal Dream Show at The Palace Theatre—was the first cultural institution outside of Baltimore to embrace early Dreamlanders pictures like Multiple Maniacs, and the Cockettes themselves were the first subculture to treat Divine like a legitimate celebrity (along with iconic queer soul singer Sylvester).  Any excuse to hear John Waters riff on a subject he’s passionate about is well worth the time investment, but this particular queer-culture doc does way more than most to justify the indulgence.

Revisiting this documentary on DVD after only having seen it on a taped-off-the-TV VHS was like wearing glasses for the first time.  The iconography of The Cockettes is visually splendid and, even two decades after its original printing, the Strand Releasing DVD does rightful justice to their visual art.  As inextricable as their art & lifestyle were from late-60s hippie culture (so much so that their genderfucked utopia quickly fell apart in the early 1970s), I still see a grimy D.I.Y. punk ethos to their version of counterculture theatrics that’s missing from most of the scene’s proto-Burning Man feauxlosophies.  If nothing else, I think it’s exceedingly easy to connect the dots from the Cockettes’ Old Hollywood carnival drag to the iconic costume designs of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which directly influenced the visual markers of punk fashion, if not punk’s sexual politics.  Their nostalgia for the long-gone days of functional hippie communism isn’t too different from the punk communes led by bands like Crass either.  And then there’s John Waters—the only other hippie-era counterculture institution who’s outright proto-punk in his personal philosophy & art—putting his stamp of approval on the entire experiment.  The Cockettes may have self-identified as hippies, but I’m claiming them as an example of ahead-of-their time punks, if not only so I won’t fee l so self-conflicted about waiting to re-watch this movie every goddamn day of my life.

-Brandon Ledet

Easy A (2010)

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There has been such a great wealth of teen-girl-POV sex comedies in recent years that it’s easy to take the genre’s gender-flipped resurgence for granted.  Titles like Blockers, Booksmart, Plan B, and Never Have I Ever have successfully de-Porkys‘d the high school sex romp entirely, to the point where the 80s straight-boy fantasies of yore are more of a distant memory than a ripe target for feminist satire.  It took years to ramp up to this new, de-jocked normal, though, and it’s easy to lose perspective on how far the genre’s default POV has come.  When The To Do List attempted to give teen girls’ libidos a spin at the wheel for a change in 2013, it got away with it by casting fully-grown adults in the teen roles and setting its horny hijinks decades in the past, filtering its transgression through an ironic remove.  In 2022, the Hulu series Sex Appeal borrows The To Do List‘s exact premise wholesale (in which an uptight honors student applies her academic work ethic to learning how to be good at sex) without having to soften its post-Porky’s hook.  The genre has come a long way in a relatively short period of time, especially considering how long mainstream comedies were specifically about boys’ quests to shed their virginities in opposition to the demure deflections of their female classmates.

2010’s Easy A might even be a clearer benchmark for the genre’s recent progress than The To Do List, since it’s a teen-girl sex comedy about its heroine not having sex.  Emma Stone stars as a precocious high school senior whose self-serving lie about losing her virginity to a college student spirals out of control, falsely labeling her as The School Slut.  As an early prototype for a Blockers-style revisionist sex comedy, it is embarrassingly restricted by how much sexual desire “good girls” were allowed to express onscreen in its time.  Our heroine has no interest in participating in the sexual adventures her peers imagine her to be indulging.  When a friend gifts her a vibrator as a thank-you present it’s played as a cheeky joke.  Of course, she wouldn’t use one of those.  She’s a good girl.  Easy A is set in a bizarre fantasy world where California high school students are having so little sex that it becomes the talk of the town when a senior loses her virginity (except don’t worry, she didn’t, really).  It makes a semi-progressive moral stance against slut-shaming gossip, but to get there it has to pretend that smart, well-mannered teen girls don’t actually want to have sex.  That’s still reserved for the realm of mouth-breathing boys (such as the leads of 2007’s Superbad, Emma Stone’s professional breakout).

Contemporary timidness about teen girls’ libidos aside, Easy A is cute.  If you haven’t noticed in her star-making decade that followed, Emma Stone is a charismatic, easily loveable performer who has no trouble commanding the spotlight.  Here, she’s saddled with a near-unbearable overload of voice-over narration—delivered directly to camera via a late-aughts webcast—which includes disastrously overwritten chapter titles like “The Shudder Inducing and Clichéd However Totally False Account of How I Lost My Virginity to a Guy at Community College.”  She handles the challenge ably, though, working in crash-course lit guides to The Scarlet Letter and twisty self-owns like “I’m not really as smart as I think I am” with a casual ease.  By the time she’s riffing with her absolutely delightful parents (Patricia Clarkson & Stanley Tucci), it even feels like she’s having fun (though not near as much fun as they’re having).  I don’t know that the movie ever graduates from cute to hilarious, but I also don’t fit its target demographic anyway: 12-year-olds who want to feel Adult.  The film is basically a slightly-growed-up version of a Disney Channel Original—tipped off by the villainous presence of Amanda Bynes—and for that, it’s endearing enough to get by.

Maybe I’m not giving Easy A enough credit for pushing mainstream-sex-comedy boundaries in the dark days of 2010s.  It blatantly announces to the audience (through rapid-fire montages) that it intends to mash The Scarlet Letter together with 1980s John Hughes comedies, and it certainly achieves that goal, however chaste.  It also takes a few pot shots at overly religious sex-negativity, assuming the audience shares its pronounced secular worldview, which does feel bold for the time.  I’m just hung up on the idea that it’s a teen sex comedy where no teens actually want to have sex (except one dastardly cad who propositions the lead for an act of prostitution).  Its idea of provocation is dressing Stone in lingerie top & blue jeans combos to test the boundaries of her school’s dress code.  That would certainly raise the eyebrows in any American high school, even today, but it still feels timid considering what similar comedies have done since.

-Brandon Ledet