Reviews

Black Widow (2021)

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About every 1.6 weeks, someone gets on Twitter and asks some variation of “What’s the best tweet of all time?” There is always of course, the trotting out of the greats, like this one, this one, this classic, this jab, this burn, this zing, mockery of the New York Post, a personal favorite, someone who presumed the universality of a ludicrous idiosyncratic belief and chooses to dickishly ignore that they’re completely wrong, and of course, the truly greatest tweet of all time (and these two, which go out to my friends back home). But what’s “best” anyway? For me, all of these pale in comparison to this tweet, which I think about at least once a week: 

It came to mind again most recently yesterday, as I sat in a movie theater for the first time since Emma., watching Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh engage in a car/motorcycle/tank chase through the streets of Budapest and into the city’s subway, exchanging quippy dialogue all the while. In that moment, I flashed back to the similar car chase sequences in Berlin in Civil War, Seoul in Black Panther, San Francisco in Ant-Man and the Wasp, and [Cleveland as D.C.] in Winter Soldier, as well as probably others that I’m forgetting. And although this was another movie that largely stuck to the tried-and-true Marvel formula, I thought to myself, Why must a movie be “novel’? Is it not enough to sit somewhere dark and see a thrilling car chase through a metropolitan area, huge? After all, although this isn’t the first MCU film all about one of our lady heroes, it’s leaps and bounds better than Captain Marvel, which I gave a high star rating to upon release but was largely tepid about it in the review proper (I literally wrote “I’m hot and cold on this one”) and which I look back on now mostly with contempt, as its imperial Yvan eht Nioj underpinnings have only become clearer with the passing of time. 

I’ll admit here that, by and large, it’s pretty easy for a film to manipulate me emotionally (the people would like to enter into evidence my likewise high star rating for 2016’s Ghostbusters), and it’s also not just films that do it. The Alamo Drafthouse has, for the past few years, used the same simple animated introduction before new releases where several colored circles appear, then overlap, then space out to mimic planets orbiting a star, then come back together to embody the six circular cut-outs of the classic film reel canister. My description is overselling the complexity, I think, but I can’t find it online anywhere so forgive me. The sound design of it is fairly simple as well, but this time, after the theater darkened and the traditional Alamo font appeared on screen saying “We missed you,” the pre-show included a montage of clips of characters from the movies at the movies: Amélie, Taxi Driver, Cinema Paradiso, etc., and then the bonging tones of that intro came together, and I was overcome. It felt like coming home, and if I’m warmer to Black Widow than it truly deserves because of it, well, maybe the people will have to enter this review into evidence one day, too, but for now, I have to say, I really liked it. Even my best friend, who is generally apathetic to Marvel movies, thoroughly enjoyed it; immediately afterward, she said she would be willing to pay to see it again, and when we were considering watching another movie back home last night, she said she’d rather just watch television than another movie because she enjoyed Black Widow so thoroughly that she wanted to “marinate” in it a while before another cinematic experience watered it down. Take from that what you will. 

We open in Ohio in 1995, where a young Natasha (Ever Anderson, daughter of Milla Jovovich and Paul W. S. Anderson) rides her bike through suburban streets and into her backyard, where she plays with her younger sister, Yelena (Violet McGraw). When Yelena skins her knee, their mother Melina (Rachel Weisz) attends to her, and there appears to be some tension between Natasha and dear old mom. As night falls, Yelena notes the appearance of fireflies in their backyard, and Melina gives her daughters a little science lesson about bioluminescence. While they set the table, father Alexei (David Harbour) returns home, agitated. He shows Melina a 3.5’’ floppy and notes that “it” is “finally happening.” As Melina whispers a meaningful apology to Natasha at the dinner table, Alexei grabs a rifle and the entire family hops into their SUV and makes haste toward a small airstrip, with S.H.I.E.L.D. agents in pursuit shortly. After a tense shootout, the family manages to make their getaway in a prop plane and land in Cuba, where we learn that the “family” is comprised entirely of Russian agents, even the two children, and that the past three years in America have been part of a long term operation at a secret S.H.I.E.L.D. facility. Natasha attempts to prevent her separation from Yelena, citing that the younger girl is only six years old and too young for training, but Alexei notes that Natasha herself was even younger when she first began, and the two of them are forced apart on the orders of General Dreykov (Ray Winstone). 

After an opening montage (set to a downbeat cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”) gives us the general impression of what constitutes a Black Widow’s training in the “Red Room” (it’s not fun!) we move forward to 2016. The rest of the film is set parallel to the events of the aforementioned Captain America: Civil War, following Natasha (Johansson) in hiding after siding with Cap against Tony re: The Sokovia Accords. Elsewhere, Yelena (Pugh) and a team of fellow Black Widows tracks down and ultimately kills a rogue Widow, but not before her former ally exposes her to a red dust that acts as a counteragent to Yelena’s Black Widow programming, which we learn has grown beyond conditioning and brutal training to literal mind control. Natasha makes her way to a safe house in Norway with help from her friend Mason (O-T Fagbenle), who also delivers some things left behind at her last safe house in Budapest, which includes a package from Yelena that contains several vials of the red dust; the dust, in turn ends up drawing the attention of Taskmaster, Dreykov’s right hand killer, who has the ability to mimic the fighting styles of anyone from merely watching a video. Yelena and Natasha reunite and decide to destroy the Red Room once and for all. In order to do so, they must first rescue their “father” from the Siberian gulag to which he has been sent; the former “Red Guardian,” the only successful supersoldier equivalent of Captain America who was produced by the Soviet Union not relives his glory days in stories told to his fellow inmates and is mocked by his guards. He, in turn, leads them to their “mother,” who reveals that she was the scientist who worked on the beginnings of the mind control project. But can any members of this reunited not-really-a-family trust one another long enough to stop Dreykov? 

Look, this is a Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe consumable product. You’ve already decided if you’re going to see it or not, and if you’re going to see it, whether you’ll do so on a big screen, fork over an exorbitant amount of money to watch it on Disney+, or wait for a more affordable at-home option. It exists to sell toys, costumes, and trips to theme parks while continuing to build the Disney monopoly that we should all be more worried about since the overseers of antitrust laws are asleep at the wheel, and probably would be more worried about if we weren’t all (a) contemplating our insignificance and powerlessness to stave off the climate disaster that will boil, drown, bury, burn, smother, etc. us all alive, or (b) living in a state of denial of said looming extinction event. Its emotional beats are rote, its storytelling checkpoints are familiar, and the forward thrust of its characters is largely moot considering that, as of 2019, Natasha Romanoff is dead. For what it’s worth, at least Disney isn’t trying to insultingly push Black Widow as “empowering for girls/women” (one can read the text that way, but it’s not part of the metatext for once, and the film itself calls attention to the fact that Natasha’s dark past as an assassin renders her “hero” status among “little girls” problematic, to say the least). This film is also decidedly Not For Children, given its use of the visual language we associate with human trafficking to illustrate the horrors of the Red Room as well as the higher-than-normal profanity and a fairly graphic verbal description of the Red Room’s sterilization procedure. 

I’m sure that there will be some reviews that cite the film’s “heart,” although I would warn readers to take that with a grain of salt. The “reunited family that was really composed of spies but who could be a found family” element is present, and all of the cast (Pugh in particular) sell this angle in their performances, but how much it will resonate with you as a viewer will depend on a lot of factors that are external to the film proper. I wasn’t sold on it, but I still had a blast, and the setpieces here are some of the best that this franchise has brought to the table. Pugh is great in this first entry for her into the MCU, and Harbour brings an effortlessly comedic touch to the proceedings. Weisz has never given a bad performance ever, and her Russian accent here is a delight. It’s a shame that Johansson is finally given a vehicle in this series that is hers and hers alone and it must be an interquel due to the choices made in other films, but she’s been carrying films on her back since she was a literal child, so it’s no surprise that she delivers here in her postscript swan song. If you’re going to see it, see it, before we’re all dead.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Wojnarowicz (2021)

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Most documentaries about the lives & works of artists are majorly self-conflicted in their form & content.  The artist being profiled can be the most provocative, combative bombthrower in the history of their medium, and their retrospective documentary will still be the safest Wikipedia-in-motion overview of their life imaginable.  I don’t know that the recent doc Wojnarowicz ever matches the righteous fury of its own subject, but you can’t say it doesn’t try.  Fully titled (please excuse the incoming slur) Wojnarowicz: Fuck You Faggot Fucker, the film clearly attempts to recreate the in-your-face political activism of its subject’s ACT UP-era queer resistance & art.  It’s nowhere near as inventive, shocking, or confrontational as multimedia artist David Wojnarowicz was in his own time, but it’s at least bold & propulsive enough to convey what made his art so vitally incendiary.

It helps that almost all of the documentary’s imagery was created by Wojnarowicz himself, supplemented by audio interviews with the people who personally knew him.  Paintings, prints, stencils, photographs, 3D instillations, audio journals, and a soundtrack from his post-punk band 3 Teens Kill 4 overwhelm the screen, often as David himself rants about the grotesque injustices of the world at large and of 1980s NYC in particular.  There’s a vibrant, purposeful anger to his visual art and his recorded monologues that especially comes into sharp relief in discussions of the AIDS crisis and the Reagan administration’s genocidal indifference to that epidemic.  There’s no shortage of worthwhile targets for Wojnarowicz’s fury, though, and he throws well-observed punches at the irresponsible vapidity of news media, the grotesque elitism of fine art collectors, and the economic disparity that led him to hustling as a runaway teen, among other social ills.  When he was alive, most of Wojnarowicz’s contemporaries likely would’ve reductively described his unbridled anger as a mentally ill artist sabotaging his own success.  Here, his work is properly contextualized as confrontational, queer activism in direct opposition to economic exploitation & respectability politics.

The purposeful, incendiary provocation of Wojnarowicz’s art reminded me a lot of Marlon Riggs, along with the more obvious No Wave contemporaries in his social circle (most notably Richard Kern).  If Wojnarowicz had survived the AIDS epidemic to make this film himself as a self-portrait retrospective, I imagine it might’ve come out as invigorating as Tongues Untied, Riggs’s magnum opus.  Director Chris McKim instead does his best to recreate that exact era of queer-activist video art with the clips, scraps, and completed works that Wojnarowicz left behind after dying at the hands of governmental indifference.  The result is one of the few hagiographic documentaries on an artist’s life that approximate the shock & awe of their subjects’ actual work: Sick, Crumb, Marwencol, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, etc.  At the very least, it leaves you infuriated that Wojnarowicz and his immediate community were purposefully abandoned & encouraged to die by their own government at the height of the AIDS epidemic; he likely would’ve been proud of that effect.

-Brandon Ledet

Bad Girls Go to Hell (1964)

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I’ve been a voracious audience for Doris Wishman sexploitation cheapies over the past few years.  There’s a wholesome amateurism to the schlockteur’s decades of D.I.Y. smut that appeals to me as a fan of B-movies and kitsch erotica, especially in the context of her being one of the few women directors to “make it” in that industry.  I will admit that I’ve hit a wall with my appreciation of Doris Wishman’s back catalog, though.  It’s the exact same genre barrier that made parts of my Russ Meyer retrospective such a prolonged slog.  I hate “roughies.”  Somewhere between the cutesy nudist-colony novelties at the start of her career (titles like Nude on the Moon) and her late-career, absurdist whatsits (titles like Double Agent 73), Doris Wishman cranked out a lot of roughies.  They’re violent rape-fantasy films in which a female protagonist is stripped, exploited, and assaulted by every man she encounters on her journeys, her torment played purely for the audience’s sexual titillation.  A lot of Wishman’s auteurist quirks repeat throughout her roughies period—most notably her adorable obliviousness to what is and what is not erotic—but I’d much rather seek those pleasures out in a genre that’s less inherently grotesque.  It’s slowed me way down on seeking out her work, since the bulk of the remaining ones I haven’t seen appear to fall in that category.

I’m at least glad that my general distaste for roughies delayed me from seeking out Bad Girls Go to Hell sooner, despite it being one of Wishman’s most widely recognized titles.  My appreciation of the film is just as muted now as it would’ve been a few years ago when I was at the pinnacle of my Wishman binge, but the film’s presentation has changed in the meantime.  Whereas I’ve previously had to seek out Wishman novelties like Dildo Heaven or A Night to Dismember as fuzzy VHS rips on YouTube or sub-legal porn streamers, Bad Girls Go To Hell is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel – all cleaned-up and presented as Important Art.  It is a roughie in the strictest sense, following a sheltered housewife’s moral decline after she kills her rapist neighbor and flees from the law by bed-hopping across the country, mostly against her will.  The film is included in Criterion’s “Close to Home” programming, which highlights films shot in their directors’ homes & apartments (alongside another pre-hardcore erotica classic, Pink Narcissus).  I initially suspected it was added as a bizarro Pride Month selection, given that our housewife-in-crisis’s only consensual sexual encounter while on the run is shared with another woman.  Regardless, seeing a Doris Wishman film all cleaned up and prestigious on Criterion feels like a major cultural Event.  I just personally wish they had programmed something outside of her roughies period; almost all of her films were at least partially staged in her NYC and Miami apartments, so pretty much anything she’s directed could’ve fit the bill.

Despite my reluctance to dig any further, I’m sure that there’s a Doris Wishman roughie out there that will wholly win me over someday.  If nothing else, the women-on-top, femdom variation of the roughie format in titles like She Mob and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! appeal directly to my sensibilities, and it’s likely Wishman has waded into that exact territory sometime in her career – if not only through having made so many films in that genre.  There’s also plenty pure-Wishman goodness oozing out of Bad Girls Go to Hell as is.  Her instantly recognizable apartment is starting to feel like a nostalgic setting after seeing it repeat in so many of her classic-era pictures.  There’s a statement-piece glass ashtray always on display in her living room that’s used as a murder weapon in this particular appearance, and it feels like a surprise celebrity cameo.  Wishman’s camerawork is also as wild as ever here, sometimes tilting around the room as if her sex scenes were set on a carnival ride and sometimes statically fixating on the most mundane details imaginable: strangers’ feet on the sidewalk, pigeons, beaded curtains, etc.  I’ll even admit that Wishman is highly effective at times in highlighting the sleaze & grime of the roughie genre.  Her flashlit crime scene lighting and insert shots of lace panties resting on the corner of a mattress are incredibly lurid for a smut director who largely doesn’t seem all that interested in sex. 

Bad Girls Go to Hell is not the best Doris Wishman has to offer, but it’s maybe her most iconic – at least among Something Weird VHS collectors and other video store weirdos of that ilk.  It’s cool to see any of her work presented in such crisp, respectful packaging from a taste-making institution like Criterion.  Anything that gets me closer to owning Deadly Weapons restored in HD on Blu-Ray has to be counted as a victory, so I’ll gladly suffer a few more roughies to get there.

-Brandon Ledet

Voyagers (2021)

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I remember discussing Aniara and High Life as sister films when they first went into wide release in 2019: two ice-cold space travel narratives about the doomed prospects of humanity surviving the next few decades of Climate Change decimation.  And now we have met those sisters’ goofy little brother in Voyagers: a trashy YA space thriller on a similar subject but without their sense of purpose or coherence.  It’s difficult to say whether Voyagers is “about” the same existential concerns as Aniara or High Life.  If Voyagers is about anything at all, it might just be a grim warning that teenage hormones are dangerous for space travel.  Mostly, it’s just a mockbuster echo of themes that have been tackled in much more thoughtful, substantial works before it (including Equals and The Lord of the Flies, among the two already mentioned), ensuring that it will only be exciting to a teen audience young enough to not have seen this exact ground tread before.  Thankfully, genre filmmaking doesn’t have to be entirely novel to be worthwhile; it just has to be entertaining.

Like in Aniara and High Life, Voyagers follows a doomed, decades-spanning mission to preserve the human race in the farthest reaches of outer space, leaving a decaying Earth behind.  It skips over the more complexly philosophical and moralistic conflicts of its smarter sister films so it can quickly get to the good stuff: shirtless teen boys wrestling on a spaceship.  Where Aniara and High Life will ask big-concept sci-fi questions about the ethics of forcibly bringing children into a world that is already ending before our eyes, Voyagers instead rapidly ages those children until they’re hormonal powder-kegs, then smashes them together like Barbie dolls in PG-13 friendly make-out sessions.  It occasionally pretends to be about the chaotic selfishness of human nature or the dangerous appeal of populist right-wing politics, but it’s heart not really in it.  This is not a cinema of ideals or ideas.  This is a thirst-trap movie for teens where everyone involved is their age, horny, inexplicably heterosexual, and the boys among them love to wrestle.  The only reason it’s even set in outer space is that sometimes a hatch will open so the boys’ shirts will fly right off into the vacuum, revealing their abs for the swooning audience at home.

Voyagers is a bad movie.  It’s also a strangely compelling one.  There are some truly chaotic editing choices in its early stretch when the starbound teens first discover the joys of living horny & unmedicated, their minds’ eye opened to universe in rapid-fire montage of Ed Woodian stock footage.  Not since Lucy has a film so confidently dived headfirst into stock-footage psychedelia on this level of sublime inanity.  It’s too bad that editing-room giddiness cools down once the horny teen violence heats up; if they had worked in tandem this could’ve been worthy of Midnight Movie programming for decades into the future.  Instead, it’s the kind of so-bad-it’s-decently-entertaining novelty that you shamefully watch on the couch alone, shuttering the windows to hide your shame from the neighbors.  I wouldn’t recommend the film so much as I would bashfully admit that I had a fun time watching it – my appreciation crumbling under any scrutiny or pushback against its many, many faults.  If you want a Good Movie, watch High Life or Aniara.  That’s not what Voyagers is for.

-Brandon Ledet

Sator (2021)

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There’s a thin line between dread & tedium and, unfortunately, the cheaper your film is the likelier it is you’re on the wrong side of it.  It used to be that horror movies set on spaceships post-Alien would struggle most with that conundrum, as they often failed to match the exquisite tension of their inspo.  Now we’re officially in an era where The Witch inspires that same mediocrity in bulk, just in a woodland setting.  It took a lot of decent-to-great movies to get here (Hagazussa, Relic, The Other Lamb, The Ritual, Apostle, The Head Hunter, It Comes at Night, etc.) but we’re finally at the point where we simply just don’t need any more low-budget ~atmospheric~ horrors set in the woods, at least not for a while.  I can pinpoint the exact moment that line was crossed too.  It’s in the opening credits of Sator, which repurposes the final shot of The Witch as an early moodsetter instead of a last-second cathartic release.  It’s literally picking up where The Witch left off, highlighting its diminished returns before it ever has a chance to stand out on its own.  We’re done with the woods for a while, folks.  Time to pack up the tents.

To be honest, even without the shadow of The Witch lingering across woodland-horror cinema at large, you’d have to dial the clock back to even before The Blair Witch Project for Sator feel fresh or exciting in any significant way.  Its most attention-grabbing details are in the circumstances of its production: a no-budget family affair written, shot, directed, produced, edited and scored by Jordan Graham.  You can tell this is a deeply personal project for Graham, not only because of his obsessively auteurist control over the entire production but also because of his casting his own grandmother, June Peterson, in a central role.  Like the grandmother figure in Trey Edward Shults’s similarly underfunded Krisha, Peterson appears to be suffering enough from dementia that she’s not fully aware she’s participating in a movie production at all.  The film is structured around several trips to grandma’s house in the woods, wherein Peterson pontificates about a local demon figure named Sator who possesses the bodies of the spiritually weak.  She discovered the existence of this demon through automatic-writing exercises, which provide most of the loopy, vaguely menacing atmosphere the film can muster through her mumbled monologues.  The film that Graham builds around that automatic-writing core is some pretty basic Indie Horror 101 material.  Grainy black & white tours of a candlelit cottage are crammed into a boxed-in aspect ratio, scored with cassette tapes of Peterson’s audio journals and occasionally interrupted by the mythical Sator – a cloaked humanoid figure in a deer skull mask.  As much as I admire the scrappy, D.I.Y. feel of its production values, I just can’t shake the feeling that I’ve taken that exact haunted-cottage tour a dozen too many times in the past couple decades, if not just in the past five years.

My overriding thought throughout Sator was “Do I want a snack or am I bored?”  I ate some Ritz crackers, and the feeling did not go away.  In the abstract, I’m in love with the idea of automatic-writing exercises leading directly to demonic possession; I spent too many years chasing down a bachelor’s degree in Poetry for that premise not to appeal to me.  The actual text of those automatic-writing journals never feels specific enough in its mythology or iconography to land with any real impact, though.  They mostly just recall Bray Wyatt’s pro wrestling sermons when his in-ring character was Insufferable True Detective Fan.  They drone on with no clear sense of purpose, and the visual iconography that accompanies them never amounts to anything novel or substantial.  It’s likely not fair to single out this particular example of post-Witch woodlands horror as the subgenre’s tipping point, but hey, this is the one that dares to repeat the final image of Robert Eggers’s A24 Horror linchpin in its opening minutes.  Once that comparison is invited, it’s impossible not to look back to the steadily diminishing returns of the genre in the years since Black Phillip’s enticing offer of the taste of butter & a pretty dress and to long for the days when that kind of whispered oration felt goosebumps-fresh.

-Brandon Ledet

The Father (2021)

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At this point, there’s nothing especially novel about a movie simulating the first-person, subjective experience of dementia.  If nothing else, the reality-shifting dementia narrative has been attempted at least twice on the television shows Castle Rock & BoJack Horseman in recent years, which indulged in the exercise for one-off episodes.  It’s already become a genre template with its own firmly established rhythms & tropes, not much different than the stuck-at-the-airport or trapped-in-an-elevator episode templates of 90s sitcoms.  What those immersive dementia narratives don’t have in their arsenal, though, is the acting talents of Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins CBE (no offense meant to Sissy Spacek or Wendie Malick, who anchored their aforementioned TV episodes capably).  I don’t know if you’ve heard this before, but Anthony Hopkins is very talented.  Get this: he even won an Oscar for Best Actor this year for his work in his own dementia-driven actor’s showcase, The Father (his first win since 1992’s Silence of the Lambs).  And from the outside looking in, The Father looked like it was specifically designed for those kinds of Awards Season accolades, landing an already beloved, established actor enough highlight-reel worthy moments to look believably Oscar-worthy on a television broadcast.  In practice, though, The Father gives Hopkins much more to do than to simply collect gold-plated statues in a late-career victory lap.  It doesn’t reinvent the immersive-dementia-narrative template in any substantial, formalist way, but it does find a way to make it thunderously effective as an actor’s showcase, and Hopkins makes the most out of the opportunity in every single scene.

While Hopkins’s performance as the titular, increasingly demented father is the film’s centerpiece, much of the credit for that performance’s impact is owed to first-time director Florian Zeller.  Adapting his own eponymous stage play for the screen, Zeller dutifully follows the standard tropes & rhythms of the immersive dementia narrative.  We follow Hopkins through his subjective experience of place & time.  The physical details of the apartment he occupies and the faces of his caregivers transform as he loses track of where & when he is in the labyrinth of his own mind.  His nonlinear sense of reality prompts him to recall future events, while he also conveniently forgets past traumas in an endless loop of repeating, excruciating conversations.  It’s a mildly surreal experience, but not an unfamiliar one if you’ve seen it done on TV before.  What really distinguishes this example is the complexity and sudden stabs of cruelty in its stage play dialogue, all excellently performed (including supporting performances by other talented Brits like Olivia Coleman, Olivia Williams, and Imogen Poots).  Watching Hopkins viciously tear down the few people in his life trying to help him cuts through the narrative’s familiarity like a dagger, especially since you never stop feeling for him even when he’s at his worst.  His basic persona shifts just as much as his sense of reality & time.  Within a single conversation, he’ll transform from an adorable flirt to a heartless monster, devastating the family members & nurses who’re struggling to care for him despite his stubborn pride & prickly demeanor. 

Sometimes Hopkins is deeply befuddled, his mind visibly buffering to reorganize the details of his environment until they make sense.  Sometimes he’s scarily sharp, psychologically eviscerating his loved ones with a throwback Hannibal Lecter sense of caustic wit.  That alternation between vulnerability and cruelty feels directly tied to stage play writing, recalling the tender-vicious turns of dialogue in works by Edward Albee, August Wilson, or Tracy Letts.  This movie earned a lot of attention for the subtle shifts in its set design and the surrealism of its demented reality.  Its real strengths are much simpler and even more familiar than its immersive dementia narrative, though.  It’s most impactful for providing an astonishingly talented actor with complexly written dialogue and setting him loose on the stage.  Unfortunately, time is linear, so it’s likely we won’t see many more virtuoso performances from Hopkins as the years march on, much less any of this high caliber.  His Oscar win was mildly controversial due to this year’s messy, Soderberghian Oscar ceremony billboarding a tribute to Chadwick Boseman that never came together.  That might’ve made for an embarrassing television broadcast and a major disappointment to Boseman’s most ardent mourners, but at least the work that was rewarded instead of Boseman’s stands out as something substantially, recognizably great.  If Boseman’s nomination had been upstaged by Gary Oldman for Mank or Rami Malek for Bohemian Rhapsody there’d be a lot more to be angry about.

-Brandon Ledet

Some Kind of Heaven (2021)

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I’ve been watching a lot of reality competition shows over the past year, as that format is about the upper limit of what my brain can handle right now.  I particularly enjoy competition shows where contestants collaborate on art projects (especially fashion competitions), as opposed to the much more plentiful variety of shows where they compete for romantic connections.  After 15 months of burnt-out pandemic brain, I feel like I’ve completely depleted the backlog of worthwhile, currently-streaming shows that hit that exact dopamine sweet spot.  Since March of last year, I’ve watched Project Runway, Next in Fashion, Making the Cut, Legendary, Glow Up, Blown Away, America’s Next Top Model, Great British Bake-Off, Great Pottery Throwdown, Interior Design Masters, Big Flower Fight, Full Bloom, Nailed It, Making It, Haute Dog, Dragula and more spin-off series of RuPaul’s Drag Race than I care to recount.  I couldn’t tell that I was scraping the bottom of the competition show barrel until recently, though, when I found myself watching the Hulu show Exposure.  Exposure is essentially a 6-hour commercial for Samsung Galaxy smartphones, presented as a competition show for aspiring “smartphone photographers” – i.e., L.A. area Instagram hipsters.  It’s trash, and I watched the entire thing in a single weekend between hammering away at my own home renovation projects and hiding from in-the-flesh social interactions.

As vapid as Exposure is on a conceptual level, it did get me thinking a lot about the art of smartphone photography and Instagram curation.  Yes, the show was cynically designed to sell one specific brand of smartphone, but it’s also one of the few instances of popular, legitimized media I’ve seen acknowledge the labor & artistry that goes into smartphone photography.  Most of us take pictures with our phones, and most of us are atrocious at it.  Despite the democratization of the tech, there’s a highly developed skill level and shared aesthetic among the masters of the artform that most of us will never put in the time to match.  Exposure could’ve been a show entirely about the art of the selfie alone and still had plenty of formalistic challenges to cover over the course of a season.  If most of the professional photography we engage with on a daily basis is now relegated to the confines of smartphone tech and social media curation, it’s outright odd that Exposure is one of the few instances of that artistry spilling out into other, more legitimized media.  It seems inevitable that the look & feel of Instagram photography in particular would start to influence the formalist approach of proper cinema, if not only because most young cinematographers in the industry likely got their start taking photos on a commercial-grade smartphone.

Enter Some Kind of Heaven, a highly stylized documentary that owes a lot of its visual appeal to the visual language of Instagram.  A sweet, lightly surreal portrait of the largest “retirement community” in America, Some Kind of Heaven is relatively reserved in its subject & themes.  The people & setting are interesting enough to hold your attention, but it’s really the cinematography that makes it sing.  The film’s boxed-in, 4:3 aspect ratio should probably recall the studio-lot artificiality of the Old Hollywood era when the similarly squared-off Academy Ratio was basically an industry standard.  Instead, its fetishistic obsession with symmetry and its formalist, posed portraiture can’t help but feel driven by the visual language of Instagram.  As a documentary, it’s a fairly standard exercise human-interest journalism.  As an art object, it feels like an Internet Age update on Lauren Greenfield’s oeuvre, modernizing the art of formalist portraiture with an Instagram-driven sense of framing against a bizarrely artificial backdrop.  Of course, those two aspects of the film cannot be detangled from each other.  First-time director Lance Oppenheim credits editor Daniel Garber as the film’s “co-author”, and I assume he’d include cinematographer David Bolen in that sentiment as well, considering how much of its eerie, otherworldly appeal is due to its Insta-era visual slang.

There’s an obvious, blatant clash between form & content here.  While there’s a youthful modernism to the film’s post-Instagram aesthetic, the subjects being profiled live in a world populated only by the elderly.  Some Kind of Heaven is entirely contained to the sprawling “retirement community” of The Villages, FL.  The conflicts suffered by its four main interview subjects are largely specific to geriatric life: drug dependency, homelessness, loneliness, declining mental cognizance and physical health, etc.  Those conflicts just happen to play out in the surreally artificial world of The Villages, self-described as “Disney World for retirees.”  The people are recognizably real, but their playground is an extravagant illusion, which is where the film’s form & content work together in harmony.  When we look at a slickly curated Instagram feed, we know we’re seeing an authentic person abstracted & distorted by a shamelessly inauthentic artform.  That exact clash is echoed in this film’s fascination with how its subjects’ messy lives contrast against the fabricated surrealism of their intensely Floridian backdrop.  Some Kind of Heaven makes for stiff competition with Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar for the most Floridian film of the year, and it didn’t have to build sets to achieve that status.  It merely stumbles into a pre-existing alternate reality to gawk at the set dressing already in place.

As far as I can tell, Some Kind of Heaven was filmed on professional-grade digital movie cameras, not smartphones.  It’s a little reductive for me to tie its meticulous visual artistry so closely to Instagram formalism, then, but I can’t help making the connection.  If bottom-of-the-barrel competition shows like Exposure are going to be the only legitimized media outlets that recognize the artistry of cell phone photography, we’re going to lose sight of what makes this specific era of photography visually distinct from better-respected modes of the past.  It’s only a matter of time before the chaotic irreverence and rapid-fire edits of TikTok overtake the Insta generation’s cinematic moment, so it’s worthwhile to consider which films are actually preserving & engaging with the aesthetic while it lasts.  Of the few Insta-driven movies I can think of—Ingrid Goes West, Assassination Nation, Woodshock, etc.—this might be the most visually striking of the batch.  There’s something wonderfully bizarre about that achievement being tied to such an explicitly geriatric subject, since Instagram celebrity has been so closely tied to youthful beauty since its inception & popularization.  And, hey, if anyone out there wants to borrow my idea for a reality competition show about the art of the selfie you can have it for free.  I need more mind-numbing bullshit to watch on the weekends anyway.

-Brandon Ledet

Lapsis (2021)

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The daily experience of working and living right now is exhausting on a cellular level.  I’m not even referring to the specific context of the ongoing global pandemic, which has only amplified problems that have been humming in the background of our lives & work over the past couple decades.  Everything is fake now.  Meaningful, tangible experiences have been distorted and “disrupted” beyond recognition by the most power-hungry dipshits among us – tech bro vampires who mistake their inherited wealth for personal genius.  Most jobs aren’t really jobs anymore; they’re one-off assigned tasks performed by “independent contractors” for mega-corporations with incredible talent for innovating new ways to avoid taking care of their own.  Most personal interactions have lost their intimacy; they’re abstracted and commodified for social media broadcast, creating a constant pressure to be “on” all the time that makes even our idle hobbies feel like a secondary mode of labor – paid out in likes.  The modern world is uniquely empty and cruel in a way that’s becoming increasingly difficult to satirize.  There’s no artistic parody that could truly match the exponential inanity of the real thing, at least not in a way that won’t be topped the very next week by some other cosmic Internet Age blunder.

Lapsis gets close.  A high-concept, low-budget satire about our near-future gig economy dystopia, it’s a bleak comedy but not a hopeless one.  The wonderfully-named Dean Imperial stars as an old-fashioned working class brute who struggles to adapt to the artificial gig work of the Internet Age.  Our befuddled, belly-scratching hero takes on a new job running cables in the woods as infrastructure for a new, so-called “Quantum” internet service.  His daily work is assigned through an app that gamifies grueling, daily hikes with a point system and a competitive social media component with fellow contract “employees”.  He struggles to comprehend the basic functions of the app, requiring constant assistance from younger hikers who find smartphone tech more familiar & intuitive.  Yet, he ignores their attempts to unionize, focusing instead on sending all his hard-earned digital money back to a younger brother suffering from a vaguely defined type of medical exhaustion with the world called “omnia”.  The app heavily regulates hikers’ rest, like Chaplin being chided for taking an extended bathroom break in Modern Times.  They compete for tasks with automated delivery robots that trek on in the hours when their human bodies need sleep.  Their wages are taxed into oblivion by small, daily expenses that should be funded by the mega-corporation that “employs” them.  It’s all eerily familiar to the inane, artificial world we occupy now, with just enough exaggeration to qualify as science fiction.

The only other modern labor-exploitation satire I can recall in the same league as Lapsis is 2018’s Sorry to Bother You.  Lapsis doesn’t aim for the laugh-a-minute absurdism of Boots Riley’s instant-cult comedy, but it’s maybe even more successful in pinpointing exactly how empty and draining it feels to live & work right now.  Visually, it makes the most out of its budget in its art instillation set pieces that juxtapose its hiking-in-the-woods nature setting with impossible tangles of internet cables and the imposing cube-shaped modems they link to.  Satirically, it’s most impressive for walking a tightrope between observational humor and moralistic allegory.  Despite all of the tangible, recognizable parodies of modern gig-work tech it lays out in its early stretch, the film is most commendable for its more abstract, big-picture metaphors about inherited wealth, capitalist exploitation, and soul-deep exhaustion with modern living – all of which play out within the absurdist specificity of its near-future premise.  I was especially delighted that it strives towards a hopeful solution for our fake-as-fuck hellscape instead of just dwelling on its compounding problems.  It dares to sketch out a hopeful vision for labor solidarity between young, very-online Leftists and more traditional working-class Joe Schmoes, where it could just as easily point out the specific ways things are fucked right now without bothering to offer an exit strategy.  We need that kind of hopeful vision right now, even while we acknowledge exactly what’s wrong with the world as-is.

-Brandon Ledet

Freak Orlando (1981)

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If there’s any one arthouse auteur whose films I’m desperate to track down right now, it’s Ulrike Ottinger.  Her filmography still promises the thrill of discovery in a way her New German Cinema contemporaries no longer can, as their work has been routinely assessed & dissected over the decades while hers has been locked away, collecting dust.  Surely, the recent critical push to rediscover & reappraise ignored female auteurs will inevitably result in an Ulrike Ottinger boxset from Kino or Criterion or some other film-snob curator.  Her kinky, high-fashion, Lesbian cinema holds an enigmatic cool that can currently only be enjoyed in Google Image results (legally, at least), as most of her work lacks any proper American distribution.  However, individual Ottinger films have populated in niche online streaming spaces over the past year, suggesting that a broader critical interest in her work is growing.  Last summer, I was able to watch her feminist ode to alcoholism, Ticket of No Return, for free via the We Are One Global Film Festival.  And now, this summer, The Criterion Channel has added Freak Orlando—her abstract perversion of the Virginia Woolf novel Orlando—to their Pride Month streaming package.  These individual releases were frustrating in their obscurity and distance apart, but that presentation did help make them feel like an Event in a way most home viewing experiences have failed to over the past year.  Each bite-size morsel of Ulrike Ottinger’s filmography feels like a small appetizer enjoyed one locked door away from the entire buffet.

With a year’s anticipation between them, I think I personally got more out of watching the more linear, coherent Ticket of No Return than I did its direct follow-up.  “A theater of the world in five episodes”, Freak Orlando often feels more like a collection of performance art pieces than it does an actual Movie (especially in the way scenes defiantly loiter long past their welcome).  The individual images in its living tableaus are undeniably sublime, but their overall effect swings wildly from patience-testing to hilarious to outright shrill with no concern for tonal modulation.  Ottinger’s style lands much closer to Derek Jarman’s abstract, queer-punk headscratchers than it does to the aggro melodramas of R.W. Fassbinder, her New German Cinema contemporary.  Some of her intended humor is lost across culture & time, but you can tell there’s a flippancy to her work that deliberately disregards both audience and critical expectations.  I can’t even tell you with any certainty where the five individual “episodes” of Freak Orlando start and end; my only anchor in the film is Orlando themself – the one actor who maintains the same role throughout while all other feature players try on new personae from vignette to vignette.  Still, I enjoyed being mesmerized and confounded by the experience.  And I can easily see how being trapped in a movie theater with the film—unable to be distracted from its long, repetitive tableaus—would have made it even more abrasively hypnotic.  That environment enhanced Jarman’s The Garden greatly, anyway, which is my closest reference point to what Freak Orlando appears to be up to.

Our titular time & gender traverser arrives at the gateway to Freak City, makes a brief pitstop to suck on Mother Nature’s teet, then proceeds to integrate themself among the freaks within.  Orlando is presented mostly as a bearded lady in dominatrix gear (one of many in Freak City, it turns out), who takes a centuries-long tour of various horrors of violence and oppression leveled upon society’s marginalized outcasts.  I won’t make any concrete guesses how individual tableaus like 1950s housewives tending to ovens on a castle lawn or a crucified Christ singing opera in a Taffy Davenport dress relate to that central theme, but the overall feeling is that social outcasts are inevitably steamrolled by the fascist majority – a tragedy that repeats itself across time as a cultural routine.  This isn’t a misery piece by any stretch, though.  In every instance of fascist violence, the oppressed freaks band together as a tight-knit, self-celebratory community, often with Orlando as their figurehead.  The concluding vignette hammers this point home with an adorable talent show thrown by The Society of Ugly People, who have welcomed Orlando into their ranks with a “One of us!” style ceremony à la Tod Browning.  If there’s any central thesis to Freak Orlando it might be that “a pain shared is almost half a pleasure”; this world may be shit for the freaks among us, but at least we have each other.  Framing the film with any kind of clear meaning or messaging feels a little reductive, though.  In a lot of the individual scenes you can tell Ottinger is just having fun projecting weird shit onto the screen, which is its own half a pleasure.

Like all visual fetishists, Ottinger has perverse fun with the costuming of the fascist state of Freak City, dressing its citizens in clear plastic future-couture and its military in leather kinkster gear.  The film might be reluctant to participate in any straight-forward narrative cohesion, but it’s feverishly committed to pushing the D.I.Y. fantasyscape of its production design & costuming to the furthest possible extreme.  Even when you’re lost about what’s happening or why, there’s still plenty to gawk at.  It’s like recalling the details of a dream you had directly after watching Jarman’s Jubilee or John Waters’s Desperate Living – just as grimy as the films proper but much looser in its logic and sense of purpose.  I personally crave a little more of a narrative anchor than what Freak Orlando felt like offering me, which is likely why I slightly prefer flippant nihilism of Ticket of No Return.  Still, the ideas and images bursting out of this strange beast suggest there’s much, much more to discover in Ottinger’s inaccessible back catalog.  There will likely come a time when all of her work is readily available and I’ll burn myself out by binging it in bulk; for now, every morsel offered is a delectable tease that has me salivating for more.

-Brandon Ledet

The Amusement Park (1973, 2021)

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Certified master of horror George A. Romero was never shy about the political messaging of his work.  An entire industry of repurposing zombies as metaphors for various social ills was built on the foundation of Romero’s decades-spanning Living Dead series, which touched on subjects as varied as Civil Rights Era racial tensions (Night of the Living Dead, 1968), consumer-culture excess (Dawn of the Dead, 1978), and the grotesque showmanship of George Bush-era Conservatism (Land of the Dead, 2005).  None of these overt message pieces were especially subtle in their central metaphors, despite the complaints you might hear from online goons about how much better horror was when it was “apolitical”.  Yet, Romero really outdid himself on that front with his “lost” 1973 horror curio The Amusement Park.  Commissioned by a Lutheran church somewhere between production of Season of the Witch and The Crazies, The Amusement Park finds Romero graduating from presenting his movies’ politics as thinly veiled subtext to directing a full-on, straight-up PSA.  Unfortunately, The Lutheran Service Society of Western Pennsylvania found Romero’s other filmmaking interests (i.e. his obsession with the fragility of the human body) too morbid for public consumption despite the director’s do-gooder politics, and so The Amusement Park was allowed to fester unseen for decades … until it was recently restored and properly released for the first time by IndieCollect.

The Amusement Park is an aggressively unsubtle message piece about America’s cruel disregard for the well-being of our elderly.  There is no room for interpretation of that thematic purpose, as it’s stated directly to the camera—in plain terms—twice.  Actor Lincoln Maazel addresses the audience about the horrors of being geriatric in the United States, especially if you’re lower class.  The loneliness, exploitation, and abuse he describes hasn’t changed much in the half-century since this hour-long PSA was filmed, so it’s not as if its politics have become at all irrelevant.  They’re just a little hammy, recalling classic scare films about the dangers of recreational drug use that caution you to consider whether you’d like to have scrambled eggs for brains or take so much LSD that you scream at a hotdog.  Maazel explains that the film is meant to make the audience “feel the problem” of ageing in a country that treats its elderly like week-old garbage.  He warns “One day, you will be old” in what feels like an outright threat.  Then, once all that thematic groundwork is laid to justify the indulgence, Romero starts playing with the Lutheran church’s money, staging a nightmare-logic horror show in a traveling-carnival setting – featuring Lincoln Maazel in-character as an avatar for our nation’s abused elderly as he stumbles through the indignities of This Amusement Park We Call Life.

Since it’s so thematically blatant and thin, The Amusement Park is most worthwhile for its grimy D.I.Y. surrealism.  Romero obviously cared a lot about the political messaging in his work, but you can also tell he’s just having fun inserting jarring, horrific images into the film’s mundane carnival scenarios.  Lincoln Maazel starts his journey in a sterile, all-white prototype of the Good Place lobby.  He emerges from that limbo through a magical door to a carnival of metaphors, where various elderly victims are bullied around from attraction to attraction by disrespectful youts.  The bumper cars are subject to traffic laws enforced by disbelieving cops who disregard elderly women’s statements as the mutterings of old biddies.  Rollercoasters post unfair eligibility requirements for ticketholders, declaring you must be THIS wealthy to ride.  Fortune tellers predict young lovers will grow old together in lonely, decrepit slums with no social infrastructure to help them age in good health or dignity.  It’s all very obvious and to-the-point, but Romero treats each set-up with a matter-of-fact absurdism that feels daringly artistic & nightmarish for a Christian-funded PSA.  It’s hard to tell exactly where he crossed the line for his Lutheran backers (the eerie intrusions of The Grimm Reaper in the back rows of carnival rides? the vicious beatings & head wounds suffered by Maazel’s cipher protagonist? the time loop narrative structure?), but it’s also not shocking that this isn’t the PSA they felt they had agreed to fund & distribute.

There are certainly better places to find the kind of grimy, low-budget surrealism Romero plays with in The Amusement Park – from Carnival of Souls to Messiah of Evil to even the director’s own Martin.  Still, this is a wonderfully disorienting curio with some genuine anger behind its dirt-cheap mindfuckery.  The artificial version of life presented here is confusing, overwhelming, exhausting, and lonely.  Our most vulnerable populations are doomed to be taxed, robbed, neglected, beaten, and imprisoned in nursing homes until they die alone, out of sight and out of mind.  No matter how much fun Romero is having in the background with carnival barker parodies and rubber monster masks, you can tell he’s fired up about the political task at hand.  You just don’t have to go digging for what that political messaging might possibly be, as it’s announced loudly and often like ticket prices at a carnival booth.

-Brandon Ledet