Reviews

Cowards Bend the Knee (2003)

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In retrospect, I was being redundant when I described last year’s The Twentieth Century as feeling like “watching Guy Maddin direct an especially kinky Kids in the Hall sketch that stumbles out into feature length in a dreamlike stupor.”  That assessment still rings true, but I could’ve lightened my wordcount by just saying it felt like “watching a Guy Maddin movie”.  I’m used to seeing playful flashes of violence & vulgarity in Guy Maddin’s work, but something about Matthew Rankin’s kink-soaked debut doubled down on both in a way that really spoke to my juvenile sensibilities.  It turns out my oversight was in comparing The Twentieth Century to the statelier, well-respected Maddin of recent years, the one who’ll interject a Sparks music video about a man’s addiction to “derrieres” in the middle of his narratives but will stop short of fixing his camera on an ejaculating cactus for a minutes-long visual gag.  Guy Maddin was once a young button-pusher himself, though, something that should have been obvious to me even before I made the time to watch his own early-career kink comedy Cowards Bend the Knee.  It turns out I was just a few years too late in my Guy Maddin appreciation to catch him in his prime as a juvenile provocateur.

In Cowards Bend the Knee (or The Blue Hands), Guy Maddin reimagines (and improves!) the silent horror classic The Hands of Orlac as a kinky sex comedy about hairdressers, prostitution, abortion, hockey, and revenge.  Instead of a morally simplistic body horror about a concert pianist who becomes murderous when his hands are surgically replaced with a serial killer’s, Maddin abstracts his version in a Russian nesting doll story structure that’s long been familiar to his features.  We start with scientists examining a sperm specimen under a microscope, revealing in close-up that the sperm cells are hockey players competing on ice.  The star player is Guy Maddin as “Guy Maddin,” the team captain and son of the distinguished announcer who calls the games.  He’s pulled aside from his championship victory celebrations by a distraught girlfriend who’s just discovered she’s pregnant, which leads the couple to a hair salon & brothel that triples as an illegal backroom abortion clinic.  Maddin leaves his girlfriend mid-abortion for the madame’s beautiful daughter, who will not let him touch her body until her father’s death is avenged.  Her plan for retribution, of course, involves her father’s severed hands being surgically attached to her new lover’s body to guide his way.  Also, his old girlfriend is now a ghost who works at the salon.

Like all of Guy Maddin’s movies, Cowards Bend the Knee is deliberately aged & battered to look like an authentic curio from the earliest years of silent cinema.  Images often stutter & repeat in harsh jags as if the projector is struggling to feed the deteriorating film from reel to reel.  That antiqued image quality offers a great contrast to the shameless sexual fetishism of the film’s winding Greek tragedy plot.  Despite its title’s mention of legs, this is a film that’s fixated on the perversity of hands in particular.  From the more obvious kink acts like incest, fisting, and female-dominant wrestling to the unexpected eroticism of a haircut, the film presents the shape & use of hands as if they were the filthiest appendages on our bodies.  And maybe they are.  Maddin even accentuated the film’s sexual transgressions by premiering it as an art instillation where viewers watched each six-minute chapter as individual vignettes through key holes, as if peering into a bedroom (or a sex dungeon).  It’s all very silly and tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also surprisingly thoughtful & genuine in its presentation of sexual fetishism and the way its magnetic pull can lead you to making desperate, self-destructive decisions.

The Saddest Music in the World taught me that Guy Maddin is a goofball prankster despite his work’s formalist exterior.  Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary taught me that he’s a bit of a luddite with a loving eye for the tones & textures of German Expressionist horror.  The Forbidden Room taught me that he works best in short-form vignettes that pulls the audience deeper into exponentially smaller worlds.  All of those aspects of his work were already firmly set in stone as early as Cowards Bend the Knee, but that one still taught me something about him that made me fall even further in love with his art: he’s also a filthy pervert.

-Brandon Ledet

Titane (2021)

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Julia Ducournau’s coming-of-age cannibal horror, Raw, was a ferocious debut – one that was misinterpreted as a pure gross-out body horror when it’s actually something much slipperier and difficult to pin down.  Beyond all Ducournau’s obvious strengths as a visual stylist & provocateur, I really loved how resistant that film was to being saddled with a 1:1 metaphor.  In a time when so much modern horror functions as on-the-surface parables about hot topics like Trauma, Grief, and Gentrification, it’s refreshing to chow down on a movie that’s impossible to tether to a single, concise message.  Raw is clearly about some kind of youthful, sinister awakening & appetite that extends beyond the literal consumption of human flesh, but any attempt to summarize its full meaning feels reductive & inadequate.  I think that’s wonderful.  And I’m even more impressed that Ducournau doubled down on that ambiguity in her follow-up to Raw, the same way that Jordan Peele left a lot more room for interpretation & discomfort in Us than he did the tightly written metaphor machine of his own debut, Get Out.  Like Us, I suspect Titane will be more divisive than Raw precisely because it’s messier and more difficult to encapsulate in a single interpretation; also like Us, I think it’s an improvement from Ducournau’s debut for that exact reason.  All I can really articulate myself is that I loved squirming my way through this distinctly macho, thematically elusive nightmare.

Titane follows a stone-cold serial killer’s journey from despising all of humanity to learning how to love & depend on at least one other human being.  She starts off as a car-show stripper who shares more intimacy & eroticism with the machines she grinds on than with her fellow dancers or family at home.  Her favorite ways to blow off steam are to murder strangers and have sex with hotrods.  I will not recap the details of her fairy tale journey once her cover is blown and she’s left running from the law, but I will say that she does begrudgingly stumble into a genuine social connection with another emotionally steeled loner in her travels.  There’s a pithy, reductive way to discuss Titane as a movie “about” found family, but that barely scrapes the surface flesh of this prickly beast.  If there’s any thematic organization to the dark fairy tale realm Ducorneau explores here, it’s in her antiheroine’s immersion in a world of pure machismo.  Strippers, flames, fistfights, car engines, and steroid-injected muscle brutes carve out the film’s aggressively macho hellscape, while all the Cronenergian body horror that unfolds within is a hardening & a grotesque mutation of AFAB bodily functions.  As with the perpetually underseen & underappreciated The Wild Boys (the very best movie of the 2010s), Titane is a nuclear gender meltdown with no clear sense to be made in its burnt-to-the-ground wreckage.  It’s a thrilling experience in both cases, both of which find unlikely refuge in the violence of pure-masc camaraderie & social ritual.

Titane directly calls back to distinct images & motifs from Raw that reinforce Ducorneau’s voice as a fully formed, new-to-the-scene auteur: under-the-sheets writhing, silently suffering fathers, itchy skin, and even a small role for Raw‘s central anti-heroine, Garance Marillier as Justine.  It’s her films’ discomforting ambiguity that really excites me about what’s she’s capable of, though.  When she wants to convey the excruciating experience of relating to a fellow human being, she doesn’t externalize that social dysfunction as a metaphorical monster; she instead contrasts how disgusting & pathetic our bodies are against the slick efficiency of shiny chrome car parts – framing the machines with a fetishistic beauty rarely seen outside of a Russ Meyer or Kenneth Anger film.  So, what does it mean within that thematic paradigm when the human body starts gushing motor oil?  Your guess is as good as anyone’s, which is exactly why this is great cinema.

-Brandon Ledet

Untitled Horror Movie (2021)

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It makes sense that the next evolution in Scary Movie horror parodies would take aim at the “screenlife” genre.  The only other major developments in the past couple decades of horror filmmaking are much more difficult to mock in a joke-a-minute comedy:  the slow-moving dread of elevated “A24 Horror”, the politically conscious “social thrillers” that have followed in the wake of Get Out, the big-budget reboots of iconic horrors from foreign markets or the distant past, etc.  It’s not that our recent horror trends are unimpeachable; they’re just tricky to parody in any succinct, recognizable way.  Meanwhile, screenlife movies (found footage thrillers framed through the POV of a laptop screen) like Unfriended, Sickhouse, Spree, and Searching have very clearly defined aesthetics & tropes that can easily be mocked for cheap-shot humor.  As a huge fan of screenlife filmmaking as a distinctly modern aesthetic, I was stoked to see someone take aim at such an obvious parodic target.  That’s why it’s such a shame this early attempt at a screenlife parody is an unfunny dud.

Untitled Horror Movie is a COVID-era production in which five L.A. actors (all playing parodies of L.A. actors) separately filmed their contributions to a central script.  Those exact production conditions led to last year’s excellent British indie horror Host, which is clearly one of the very best films produced in the screenlife genre to date.  Meanwhile, Untitled Horror Movie does absolutely nothing interesting with the limitations of its production except to constantly point them out to the audience by casting actors as actors.  Instead of coordinating a clear, linear script between each contributor, the-film-within-the-film asks each actor to read the exact same lines as each other in overlapping edits that make no sense in tandem.  They’re supposedly collaborating on making a screenlife horror film together in their downtime between filming seasons of the fictional TV show that employees them, but their shared line readings imply they’re all playing the same character in the script-within-the-script.  When we take breaks from those screenlife horror samples, it’s only to hear actors squabble about agents, auditions, movie studios, and co-writing credits.  It’s all very lazy & confused, and I have no clue how recognizable performers (including Kal Penn and Never Have I Ever‘s Darren Barnet) were roped into something so uninspired while the best films in this genre are often populated by talented nobodies.

Maybe my issue here is that I’m looking for Untitled Horror Movie to joke about the tropes of its genre, when it’s much more interested in the lifestyle tropes of the vain, vapid L.A. actor.  Even then, the only performer that comes halfway close to being funny here is Katherine McNamara’s schticky exaggeration of the industry’s blonde-ditz archetype, and you can never get past the sense that she’s a poor substitute for Meredith Hagner’s performance as Portia on Search Party.  The only commentary it has to offer on screenlife genre filmmaking is to shoehorn the word “meta” into every other scene so that its premise and title appear to be much cleverer than they actually are.  The film-within-the-film is met with a bidding war between Lionsgate & Netflix for a robust distribution deal.  Meanwhile, this real-life movie was first presented in a livestream premiere and then sold its streaming rights to some sub-Tubi ad platform called Plex.  There is a ton of potential in the screenlife horror parody as a concept, and this leaves all of it on the table for something much less distinct.  Hopefully someone else scoops up the idea for a much funnier movie with a clear parodic POV.

-Brandon Ledet

Malignant (2021)

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Of course, there’s no sincere argument to be made that the COVID-19 pandemic has been good for the movie industry.  Ensuring the safety of film production has raised the price & risk for all new content, while the return on investment at sparsely attended movie theaters has simultaneously lowered the reward.  This pandemic has been absolute hell on the financial logistics of mass-marketed moviemaking as a business.  However, I do think the current dysfunction of movie distribution occasionally does wonders for a movie’s street cred – especially when it comes to mainstream horror releases from the past two calendar years.  While delayed release dates & theatrical-only distribution strategies have cooled public appetite for once-anticipated horror releases like Nia DaCosta’s Candyman remake, out-of-nowhere mainstream horrors like The Empty Man have earned gradual word-of-mouth street cred as “cult classics” despite the major studio support system behind them.  The most recent specimen of that COVID-era phenomenon is James Wan’s Malignant, which enjoyed a day-and-date streaming premiere on HBO Max the same weekend it was released into mostly empty theaters.  Just like The Empty Man, Malignant is a seemingly well-behaved mainstream horror that takes some wild creative stabs in a go-for-broke third act, earning instant cult prestige as a “hidden gem” despite its robust budget thanks to the dysfunction of COVID-era distribution.  I personally found The Empty Man the more rewarding experience of that pair, but you gotta appreciate these big-budget crowd-bafflers whenever you can find them, especially when they manage to drum up wide audience enthusiasm in an era when most movies fail to.

For the first 80 minutes or so, you can definitely tell Malignant was directed by a mainstream horror mainstay who’s delivered modern industry-standards like The Conjuring, Insidious, and Saw over the past two decades.  The film’s setting & tone are traditional to the point of feeling stale.  Every set piece is overloaded with the ~spooky~ visual clichés that leaked out of movie theaters and into local haunted house designs as long ago as the early aughts: fluorescent green lighting, moldy wallpaper, creepy hospitals, found footage, jump scares, surgical gore, etc.  It details the police investigation of a serial murderer named Gabriel (a very 90s horror villain name) who shares a mysterious psychic bond with a freaked-out woman struggling to uncover her true familial history prior to her childhood adoption, and why she keeps dreaming the murders through Gabriel’s eyes in real time.  If you’ve seen a few horror movies in your time, you can approximately guess the inevitable reveal of how Gabriel and the Final Woman are connected.  What you cannot guess is the goofball delirium of how that twist is executed, both in the visual design of Gabriel as a fully onscreen killer (as opposed to the more typical masked & gloved slasher villain role he serves in the first hour) and in the unembarrassed humor Wan finds in his own audacity.  Late in the game, Wan breaks free from his reputation as the humdrum Conjureverse auteur to have some over-the-top action horror fun as the goofball responsible for movies like Dead Silence, Furious 7, and Aquaman (you know, the one where the octopus plays the drums).  It’s a last-minute twist in story & tone that’s going to turn a lot of fun-adverse audiences off for being too wonderfully stupid, but it’s so daringly committed to its own inanity that everyone has to see it no matter how they’ll individually feel about it.

I really wish Malignant didn’t take over an hour to fully let its hair down, but it does push Gabriel’s image & backstory to enough of a goofball extreme that it’s well worth the effort it takes to get there.  Better yet, the way the film pretends to be a totally normal, by-the-numbers slasher before the Gabriel reveal means it has a much better chance of luring an unexpecting wide audience in for its prankish finale – recalling other recent go-for-broke horror finales like in Orphan or The Boy.  My guess is that Wan believes he’s having as much fun as possible with the material for the entire runtime too.  The way Gabriel is cross-lit, gloved, and forging his own personally branded murder weapon in a Rambo-style workshop feels like a horror-nerd catalog of at least forty years of movie tropes collected from various Euro thrillers & American blockbusters.  Wan’s digitally aided camera is “mounted” to ceilings, floors, washing machine doors, and spinning industrial fans as he amuses himself with his studio-budget haunted-house set pieces, struggling to make them look novel despite the familiarity of their mainstream horror iconography.  There’s also something to be said about the way the film is averse to overt moral or political messaging, aiming to expose its audience to Freaky Shit instead of pursuing some grand overriding metaphor – the usual mode of modern horror storytelling.  I wasn’t as personally amused with the material in the first hour as the director appeared to be, but he more than earns that indulgence by the time the credits roll.  Malignant feels reverse-engineered to be divisive—appreciated only by the sicko few—but it presents its most outrageous ideas in a familiar package that could potentially lure a wide audience into its fucked up, goofball orbit.  It’s hard for any movie to make noise on a massive scale right now, so I have nothing but admiration for the few weirdo visions that can pull it off.

-Brandon Ledet

General Invincible (1983)

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I’ve been greatly enjoying my time with Gold Ninja Video‘s Pearl Chang boxset Wolf Devil Director over the past year, and I’m a little sad to have now officially run through all four of the Taiwanese martial artist’s feature films as star/director/producer.  Maybe Pearl Chang was sad to see her career winding down in her own time too.  Her final film, General Invincible, is more somber than her previous work.  It boasts all of the gruesome bloodshed, fabulous costume changes, and low-budget psychedelia that make her films so delightful, but it lacks her slapstick humor that usually lightens their tone.  Although it shares no narrative continuity with any of the other films in her modest catalog, it plays like the final episode of a long-running TV show or the third act of a 3-hour epic.  It feels like a heartfelt goodbye to the low-budget wuxia auteur, who indeed did disappear from the public eye in the years following the film’s release.

Because all her work was rapidly produced in the same era & genre, it’s near impossible to discuss General Invincible on its own terms without comparing it to Pearl Chang’s other films.  As with all the titles in the Wolf Devil Director boxset, Chang stars as a reclusive female warrior who reluctantly returns to society to avenge the slaughter of her family, guided by the mystical teachings of a retired kung fu master.  In this particular instance she’s a war general named Sparrow, honor-bound to stop a wannabe emperor’s aspirations for the throne by laying waste to his mercenary assassins one by one.  There are a few distinguishing details in General Invincible you won’t find elsewhere in Pearl Chang’s oeuvre: an uneasy romance with a sensitive warrior who believes himself her equal, a vicious rivalry with the other warrior-woman who pines after that same loverboy, the usurping emperor’s obsession with obtaining magical “crystal knives” as the ultimate weapon, etc.  For the most part, though, this is the exact same rapidfire low-budget wuxia psychedelia Pearl Chang always delivers, just now with a somber tone.

As an unofficial, unintentional send-off for Pearl Chang’s career, you couldn’t ask much more out of General Invincible.  Sparrow’s inner journey in the film is a meditative, self-reflective effort to “reach the state of Infinity and discover Emptiness”.  She cannot become her most powerful warrior self until she “achieves Nothingness,” a state she doesn’t discover until she’s crucified and left for dead in the midday sun, recalling the blinding psychedelia of King Hu’s genre-defining wuxia epic A Touch of Zen.  When watching her filmography in order, it’s as if Pearl Chang doesn’t retire into anonymity, but rather transcends this Earthly plane through total inner enlightenment (after indulging in a few flying-swordsmen beheadings along the way).  It’s kind of sweet & touching, as long as you can distract yourself from the more unfair, practical limitations of her real-life career in an industry gatekept by men.

The Wolf Devil Director box set is a must-own, and Gold Ninja Video put a lot of care into contextualizing what makes the films within so unique to Pearl Chang as an auteur.  Still, it feels like an audition for a much better-funded boutique label to pick up these same films for a proper restoration.  I often found myself squinting through these public domain transfers imagining how much greater these same films would be with an HD clean-up.  It’s easy to see why Wolf Devil Woman is Pearl Chang’s most popular film; it’s her best work.  I believe that General Invincible & Matching Escort are pretty much on its level, though.  The Dark Lady of Kung Fu is her weakest for being a little too goofy, but I dug that one too.  All her films are good-to-great, and all of them deserve a higher genre-nerd profile with better-funded preservation & distribution.  The Wolf Devil Director boxset is a great start, but there’s more work to do.

Pearl Chang’s Filmography, Ranked:

1. Wolf Devil Woman
2. Matching Escort
3. General Invincible
4. The Dark Lady of Kung Fu

-Brandon Ledet

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2007)

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It’s been five years since I first saw Makoto Shinkai’s blockbuster anime Your Name. on the big screen, and it’s getting difficult to recall exactly why that movie felt so fresh & unique at the time.  That’s mostly because the years since have been flooded with shameless Your Name. knockoffs, from Fireworks to I Want to Eat Your Pancreas to the director’s very own Weathering With You.  The cost of breaking box office records is that other movie producers smell chum in the water, diluting the uniqueness of your product with countless cash-in copycats.  At least, that’s how I’ve been thinking about all the recent anime romances that combine big-teen-emotions with supernatural sci-fi & fantasy phenomena.  Maybe I’m giving Your Name. too much credit for its uniqueness in that genre.  Maybe I just haven’t seen enough teen-marketed anime in general to understand how all of these Your Name. “knockoffs” are just part of a much longer, more popular tradition that I’m just personally unaware of.

I’m mostly wondering about my genre ignorance here because I was outright shocked by the release date of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.  Its own indulgences in soaring teenage emotions and far-out time travel sci-fi make the film feel like a contemporary or direct precursor to Your Name., but it was released an entire decade earlier than Shinkai’s international hit.  The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was seemingly met with much quieter fanfare than Your Name., so it’s less likely to have inspired an entire subgenre of copycats in the same way, but its director Mamoru Hosoda (Wolf Children, Summer Wars, Mirai) is a big enough name in the industry that Shinkai would certainly be aware of, if not outright inspired by his work.  I’m not saying that Your Name. is a carbon copy of what Hosoda achieved in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.  If nothing else, the earlier film is working with much lower stakes and lacks the post-emo Radwimps soundtrack that makes Shinkai’s film so perfect for teen summer viewing.  Their cross-decade parallels just suggest a much larger world of romantic teen sci-fi anime that I feel completely ignorant to, an oversight I desperately want to correct.

The title The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is almost hilariously literal.  Our heroine is a high school student who stumbles onto a time machine device that allows her to physically leap through time.  More specifically, she can travel backwards through short bursts of time like a rotary dial, using her newfound supernatural power for petty, small-minded goals like acing a pop quiz, catching a missed baseball, and avoiding Mr. Bean-style slapstick mishaps.  Her “time-leap” abilities initially save her from riding her bicycle into an oncoming train, making her out to be a cutesy superhero variation on Donnie Darko.  However, she mostly uses them to repair her reputation as a forgetful, clumsy, unlucky, hopelessly tardy nerd.  That is, until the source, rules, and mechanics of her time-leap abilities are revealed in a mindfuck twist ending that ramps up the emotional, temporal, and romantic stakes of everything we’ve been watching her adorably stumble through. 

For most of its runtime, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is low-key charming & cute.  After its third-act twist, it pulls off a surprisingly powerful time-travel Teenage Romance that’s been slowly simmering until that point, to the extent where song lyrics like “Some feelings are more powerful than time” feel more appropriate & heartfelt than cloying.  I honestly have no clue how much of an anomaly the film is in the larger teen sci-fi anime canon, but I do know that the soaring emotions of that third-act romantic shift felt remarkably close to what impressed me in Your Name. so many years ago.  I like to imagine there are more films out there that pluck those same emo-teen heartstrings that I just haven’t discovered yet.  I’m pretty much guaranteed to enjoy them if so, whether or not they dilute the uniqueness of the first film that turned me onto the genre.

-Brandon Ledet

Fish Story (2009)

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When I think of punk, I think fast, cheap, amateur, messy.  It’s a chaotic genre, usually delivered in short, aggressive bursts of unchecked youthful id.  That’s why I’m a little shocked by how belabored & sluggish the 2009 punk film Fish Story can feel.  A fractured anthology film about how a punk song improbably saves the world from a near-future apocalypse, Fish Story is weirdly patient & calm.  It’s guided by erratic indulgences in horror, action, and sci-fi genre tropes, but they’re all collected in a low-key, overlong journey through time – loosely sketching out the ways an unpopular, largely forgotten punk song can change the world if it falls into the right hands at the right moment.  Its pacing & story structure feel more befitting of a prog rock concept album than a punk-single 45.

In the not-too-distant future of 2012, an aloof record store owner rattles off obscure punk trivia to his few scraggly customers while a giant meteor outside the window threatens to destroy the entire planet in mere hours. His fixation on the obscure punk single “Fish Story” (which plays at least a dozen times throughout the film) turns out to be more relevant to Earth’s impending doom than the record store burnouts could possibly imagine.  The movie splits its time between seemingly unconnected characters in the decades since that single’s recording in 1975.  We meet nerdy record collectors on a sleazy road trip in 1982, a Nostradamus-worshipping death cult awaiting the apocalypse in 1999, a martial-artist “champion of justice” thwarting terrorists in 2009, as well as the band who recorded the song that improbably connects them all (and the post-WWII author who directly inspired its lyrics).  It’s all very sprawling & complicated and in no rush to connect its disparate dots until the very last minute before the meteor is supposed to strike.

If I had to guess why Fish Story feels so bogged down by its sprawling narrative, it’s because it’s adapted from a novel.  This feels like the kind of adaptation that chose to keep Everything from its source material rather than thoughtfully translating it to the more expedient, visual qualities of its new medium.  It does admittedly tie all its loose-end timelines together in a satisfying way with an uncharacteristically concise, powerful ending, but that only amounts to about five minutes of relief after two hours of mediocre build-up.  To be honest, the film works best as an advertisement for it source material.  I can totally see how its everything-is-connected story structure and pop-culture-obsessive references to media like Power Rangers, Gundam, Under Siege, and Armageddon would be a blast to read on the page, even as they feel a little too weighed down on the screen. The movie itself is fine, I guess, but I can’t imagine ever watching it again when much punchier Japanese punk films like Wild Zero & We Are Little Zombies are sitting right there.

-Brandon Ledet

The Man in the Hat (2021)

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A few months ago, a friend recommended the low-key Euro comedy The Man in the Hat to me as “stress relief/anti-anxiety medication.”  One waitlisted library DVD loan later, I totally get what he meant.  The Man in the Hat is a fluffy, distinctly French comedy of whimsies (despite its British director). It follows a mostly wordless man’s casual escape from mild-mannered gangsters, both sides traveling in teensy tiny Euro cars across the French countryside.  There’s a vague threat of violence in that chase, and a hint of sadness in the affable protagonist’s desperate grip on a black & white portrait of his wife.  Those motions towards conflict are only an excuse for a provincial road trip, though, so we can eavesdrop on the quirky characters, feral kittens, and communal parties that decorate rural France.  It all amounts to an unrushed, calming amusement, interrupted only by snack breaks and an occasional folk tune.

The most obvious comparison point for The Man in the Hat‘s gentle, largely silent storytelling style is the equally French (“and fucking proud of it”) comedy of Jacques Tati, particularly the Monsieur Hulot series.  In practice, it reminded me a lot of the low-key dark humor of Aki Kaurismaki, especially in its clash of twee whimsy with crime-world brutality and old-fashioned rock n’ roll cool.  As calming & endearing as The Man in the Hat feels for most of its runtime, its central drama is hinged on some truly bleak motivators: a dead spouse, a botched suicide attempt, an accidental witness to a body being dumped into a city canal.  In the Kaurismaki version of this story (in the tradition of The Man Without a Past or The Other Side of Hope), there would be much sharper shocks of gang violence, character-quirk humor, and political commentary than what The Man in the Hat is interested in delivering.  This French/British echo of the Finnish humorist’s work is too mild-mannered to attempt anything other than self-amused twee, but it does match Kaurismaki’s eye for low-key romance & communal joy in the harshest of circumstances – even ending at an outdoor concert that feels like a direct hat-tip to his work.

To underline its function as “anti-anxiety medication”, The Man in the Hat often looks like a TV commercial for anti-depressants (or maybe just antihistamines, depending on the set-piece).  Most of the sun-dappled road trip through lightly breezy vistas is populated by cautiously optimistic archetypes learning to have fun again in open fields, European cafes, and spontaneous block parties.  Occasionally, the mood will shift in a wistful music video interlude lit by red brake lights or sparsely placed candles, but we’re often back on the road seconds later, “walking on sunshine” on our road to recovery.  This is by no means a flashy movie, nor a challenging one.  It’s just nice.  There are likely more effective “anti-anxiety medications” out there on the market, but none that would pair this safely with a glass of wine (much less any that you could access for free through your local public library).

-Brandon Ledet

The Astrologer (1976)

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I often wonder what, exactly, drives the rapid canonization of specific cult films.  Most batshit, off-the-rails midnight movies totally deserve their Cult Film status, but there are plenty of other titles that’re just as deliriously bonkers in their filmmaking but never grow the audience needed for that communal glorification.  Pinpointing what makes a cult movie like Birdemic or Troll 2 more worthy of crowded midnight screenings than underseen trash gems like Mardi Gras Massacre or The Flesh Eaters can be outright confounding. By contrast, the recent push to canonize the mysterious 1976(?) cult curio The Astrologer at least has some obvious indicators of how it so quick skyrocketed up the Cult Movie power rankings in recent years. 

As with other recently canonized Midnight Movies like Fateful Findings & The Room, The Astrologer is a self-aggrandizing vanity project from a mysterious weirdo whose life & persona only become more fascinating the longer you read (the largely unconfirmed, likely apocryphal) trivia about them.  Unlike with Breen & Wiseau, however, Craig Denney’s feature-length monument to his own ego has the added bonus of seemingly arriving out of nowhere.  Discovered by the American Genre Film Archive in a lot sale of assorted pornos, the film was first mistaken for another picture titled The Astrologer that was produced in the exact same year.  Delighted by the discovery, AGFA was frustrated to find The Astrologer unlicensable, thanks to Denney’s insane decision to use multiple tracks from the rock band The Moody Blues (and to advertise the band’s participation on the promotional poster) without ever compensating them or even asking for permission.  As a result, The Astrologer has built cult interest as an item of intrigue through its scarcity, unavailable for (legal) public screenings or home video due to the high price tag of its soundtrack.  It wasn’t until this year that the film was leaked to YouTube & torrent sites in a glorious HD scan, and by then it had enough articles written about it with titles like “1975’s The Astrologer is the Greatest Cult Classic Film You Might Never Get to See” that it carried a certain mystique as a “lost” cultural object.

Craig Denney was a so-called “self-made” millionaire astrologer who, according to his own PR, created a computer program that read the astrological charts of giant corporations to help them make crucial business decisions.  In The Astrologer, Denney plays a crook-turned-astrologer named Craig Marcus Alexander who becomes a millionaire by creating that very same computer program.  The film is, of course, all about how awesome Craig Denney is, including a third act plot development where he turns his awesome life into an awesome movie called The Astrologer that’s a runaway success, making him millions of more dollars.  The cast is populated by amateurs in Denney’s real-life social circle, including his longtime best friend (who has provided most of the available public information on the real-life Denney) and his first cousin (who plays his love interest, whom he makes out with for scenes on end).  What’s shocking about that is that it otherwise appears to have a massive budget & unusually respectable production values for outsider art of this nature.  Tommy Wiseau poured a grotesque amount of money into the production of The Room, but it looks like dog shit and makes use of three, maybe four locales.  Meanwhile, The Astrologer includes helicopter shots, underwater photography, and totally unnecessary location shoots in Kenya & Tahiti. 

Although it often looks like a legitimate production, you can feel the unchecked id of The Astrologer‘s outsider art status in its dialogue & editing.  There’s an urban legend that the film had no script, and that its daily shooting schedules & on-the-fly storyboarding were guided by Denney reading astrological charts for inspiration.  That claim has not been verified by a primary source, but it’s a great anecdote and it does seem to jive with how loosely improvised a lot of the dialogue can feel.  It’s the harsh, psychedelic editing that really makes the film sing, though.  There’s a punishing, Russ Meyer style rhythm to the way The Astrologer is structured, with jarring cuts to gunshots, picnics, and children working on chain gangs that take valuable seconds to register how they fit into the story before you’re thrown into the next thrilling chapter of Craig “Alexander’s”s life.  I get the sense that Denney believed his life was too full of adventure, cunning wit, and self-made success to fit snuggly into one movie, so he had to rush through it all with a Citizen Kane-esque gusto to make room.  It isn’t until 40 minutes into this 70min movie when Craig “Alexander” finally gets into Astrology as a profession.  By then, you’ve already seen two or three movies’ worth of swashbuckling adventurism from the conman cad, who presents himself as a carnie trickster who accidentally discovered he had a real-life gift of astrological premonition after he was already “reading” Tarot cards for local rubes.

I don’t know that I would have singled The Astrologer out as the one-of-a-kind trash gem its most passionate fans see it as, but I’m still glad it was rescued from the bottom of the bin.  This is high-budget, high-energy trash from a total weirdo who only gets more mysterious & stranger the more you read about his life.  While the scarcity of The Astrologer‘s availability has mostly been resolved, the allure of Craig Denney as an outsider filmmaker and entertaining conman remains as potent as ever.  There are even legitimate questions of whether or not he faked his own death in the 1990s, which means he very well may have lived to see his movie finally reach a wider, appreciative public all these decades later.  I like to imagine Craig Denney’s still out there, scrolling through Google alert notifications of his own name the same way his “character” Craig “Alexander” proudly watches himself on TV once he makes it big in the film.  Hi, Craig.  Thank you for making such an entertaining picture.

-Brandon Ledet