A Woman of the World (1925)

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I had a lot of fun revisiting Elvira: Mistress of the Dark this past Halloween, in which everyone’s favorite buxom horror host invades small-town America and freaks out the locals with her cinched waist & sex puns.  It felt like a distinctly 1980s story template, recalling other freaks vs. Reaganites narratives of the era like Polyester & Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.  Imagine my surprise, then, when I recently found a prototype for that exact 80s-comedy template in a pre-Code comedy from the 1920s – just with less boob jokes & cleavage.  Way less. 

A Woman of the World is a silent romcom about a European woman of “loose morals” who shocks close-minded American hicks when she moves to an anonymous small-town (Maple Valley, “any little town in the Mid-West”) and falls in love with the uptight DA who’s supposed to scare her away.  Pola Negri stars as the titular femme fatale, who describes herself as “a woman of the world, yes, but not the world’s woman.”  She arrives in Maple Valley cigarette-first, defiantly indulging in every scandalous vice she finds amusing, much to the outrage of the rocking-chair biddies who act as the town’s morality police.  Everyone’s immediately fascinated by her worldliness as a European countess (visiting her American cousin by marriage, in one of the flimsiest comedy premises around), but they’re scandalized by her libertine behavior and visible tattoo.  The DA feigns to join the mob-justice crowd who wants to send her right back to Europe, but he’s obviously mesmerized by her taboo behavior, and by the end he’s offering her a cigarette from his own case in their wedding carriage.

A Woman of the World is entertaining fluff, as long as you’re easily amused by misbehaved women causing a stir.  It’s got the same femme-fatale allure of other silent genre pictures like A Fool There Was, except it celebrates her flagrant misbehavior instead of condemning it.  The most the film is willing to wag its finger at her transgressions is when she scars her new boyfriend’s face with a leather whip in a fit of revenge, like an ill-tempered dominatrix.  Even then, the dude deserves it for being a cowardly worm, and she looks sexy committing the crime.  Even her scandalous tattoo is endeared to the audience when her mild-mannered, small-town cousin reveals his even bigger tattoo of a train across his chest & arms, which he makes undulate for the camera in a classic vaudeville routine.  She may be inked up, drunk on champagne, and smoking like a chimney, but she’s good company and the movie knows it.

I loved Mistress of the Dark as a prankish nose-thumbing at the puritanical attitudes towards sex in Reagan’s America. A Woman of the World feels like it was hitting the exact same satirical targets in a rambunctious era of Hollywood filmmaking that would soon be defanged by the Hays Code.  Given how morally sanitized most mainstream filmmaking is becoming in our current Disney-sponsored hellscape, I’d say we can use another revitalization of this century-old comedy template.  We should send more loose-moraled weirdo women into the uptight, small-town American public to shake them out of their sex-phobic moral panics.  It’s always funny.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #154 of The Swampflix Podcast: Last Year at Marienbad (1961) & Bad Vacations

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Welcome to Episode #154 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss movies about miserable vacations, starting with the hypnotic headscratcher Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Enjoy!

00:00 Welcome

01:30 Moonfall (2022)
04:47 Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)
15:42 Ema (2021)
20:30 Donkey Skin (1970)

28:11 Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
50:20 Vegas Vacation (1997)
1:14:03 Force Majeure (2014)
1:34:53 The Lost Daughter (2021)

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew

Little Fish (2021)

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As if it’s not already embarrassing enough that I’m a fully grown adult who treats every episode of the teens-in-peril melodrama Euphoria as appointment television, I have also spent a lot of my pandemic downtime watching its aughts-era prototype Skins for the first time.  Skins was an even more chaotic show than Euphoria in both its drama and its artistic quality, but I very much enjoyed catching up with its ludicrous teen-hedonist fantasies in recent months.  Maybe the most surprising thing about Skins is that—despite being a lasting cult favorite for horned-up, pilled-out Millennials—it didn’t launch many superstar careers for its revolving cast of troubled, adorable teens.  Dev Patel, Daniel Kaluuya, and Nicolas Hoult are obvious major exceptions, but for the most part the Skins cast have grown up to be anonymous character actors on cable television (or, worse yet, in years-delayed fantasy movies about lovelorn mermaids).  The one omission from that list that baffles me most is Jack O’Connell, who played James Cook on the show’s second “cycle.”  Cook just felt like a star, even more so than the three lucky kids who became one (judging by their work as scrawny youths, not talented adults).

My favorite episode of Skins involves Cook winning a Class President election on a platform of pure anarchy, essentially tearing the school down in raucous celebration.  Jack O’Connell was such an infectiously chaotic screen presence on the show that it was inevitable Cook would drive the student body into a collective, decadent frenzy – a perfect tonal counterpoint to that episode’s melodrama romance A-plot.  Apparently nihilistic chaos was his default mode off-screen at the time as well, as his rampant substance abuse & party-hard lifestyle kept O’Connell in British tabloids for pretty much the entire time he was filming Skins in Bristol.  I didn’t know anything about his personal life while watching the show, but a lot of what makes Cook such a compelling character is the authenticity of his chaotic presence, so that off-screen bad boy reputation makes total sense.  That’s why it was such a relief to see O’Connell pop up in the much calmer, more cerebral sci-fi romance Little Fish from last year.  I was honestly a little worried about his long-term health after seeing him play Cook, so it was just great to see him out there doing well, getting work, looking sharp.

Little Fish is one of those eerily pandemic-appropriate movies that happened to come out at the “right” time despite filming pre-COVID – joining the likes of Spontaneous, The Pink Cloud, Vivarium, and She Dies Tomorrow.  Olivia Cooke narrates as the heartbroken lead: a young vet with an art photographer husband (O’Connell), both of whom are living through a near-future global health pandemic that causes the infected to lose their memory en masse.  It’s like a viral, involuntary version of the Eternal Sunshine procedure, where two people who are very much in love are horrified by the idea that they will soon forget each other; then we gradually watch it happen.  Little Fish is almost too grim to enjoy while a real-life global health pandemic lingers outside, since it’s the kind of sci-fi heartbreaker that asks questions like “When your disaster is everyone’s disaster, how do you grieve?”  Since it was adapted from a 2011 short story and wrapped production in 2019, you can’t fault the film too much for how bleakly it recalls life & love during the COVID-19 pandemic (although there is a morbid humor to COVID preventing its planned premiere at Tribeca in 2020).  Considered on its own terms outside that unforeseeable context, it’s a great little doomed romance with a mild sci-fi bent.

There’s a lot to admire about director Chad “Morris from America” Hartigan’s visual playfulness here.  He tells the story through a fractured, remixed timeline that evokes the slipperiness of even a healthy memory; and he subtly erases or mutates the details of replayed scenes to illustrate those memories fading forever.  He also finds ways to visually amplify the story’s romance (most notably in an intimate sex scene illustrated in De Palma split screens) and global-scale panic (most notably in the ominous military presence that rumbles outside) without drawing too much attention away from the core dramatic chemistry between Cooke & O’Connell.  For me, it’s O’Connell who’s the real draw here, but only because I was so recently fascinated with his performance as James Cook.  Like with Cook’s authentic onscreen chaos, his performance as the memory-drained husband reads as an authentic portrayal of a former addict who’s gracefully gotten his shit together, only to lose all that personal progress to a pandemic that’s out of his control.  O’Connell’s wonderfully effective in the role, so much so that I’m willing to forgive his flat approximation of an American accent.

I’ll spare everyone the embarrassment of trying to guess what future stars are currently brewing on the Euphoria cast, since I’ve already been extremely unfair in preemptively declaring the vast majority of the Skins kids culturally irrelevant.  They’re all still young; there’s plenty of time, as long as they take better care of themselves than the self-destructive characters that made them semi-famous.

-Brandon Ledet

Strawberry Mansion (2022)

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I grew up in a time when Michel Gondry was a golden god to artsy teens everywhere and not a kitschy fad everyone’s embarrassed to admit they were super into.  Gondry’s proto-Etsy music videos for classics like “Everlong,” “Bachelorette,” and “Fell in Love with a Girl” might still hold nostalgic value, but there isn’t much of a vocal reverence for him as an established auteur these days.  No one’s going around sharing screengrabs from Mood Indigo or The Science of Sleep with copypasta tags like “We used to be a country, a proper country.”  I’ve always been on the hook for Michel Gondry’s distinct brand of twee surrealism, though, to the point where I still get excited when I see it echoed in films from younger upstarts who were obviously inspired by his work, like in Sorry to Bother You or Girl Asleep. Maybe I should be rolling my eyes at his visual preciousness now that I’m a thirtysomething cynic with a desk job instead of a teenage poetry student, but I’m happy to swoon instead.

So, of course I was won over by a twee fantasy epic about dream-hopping lovers dodging pop-up ads in a hand-crafted, near-future dystopia.  Strawberry Mansion continues the Michel Gondry tradition of playing with analog arts-and-crafts techniques to create fantastic dream worlds on a scrappy budget.  If you still get a warm, fuzzy feeling from stop-motion, puppetry, tape warp, and low-tech green screen surrealism, there’s a good chance you’ll be charmed by Strawberry Mansion too, regardless of whether Michel Gondry’s heyday happened to overlap with your internment in high school.  I have no evidence that directors Kentucker Audley & Albert Birney were consciously channeling Gondry here, but they demonstrate a similar knack for illustrating fantastic breaks from reality with the rudimentary tools of a kindergarten classroom.  Strawberry Mansion is likely too cute & too whimsical to win over all irony-poisoned adults in the audience, but if you can see it through the poetry & emotional overdrive of teenage eyes, it’s a stunning achievement in small-scale, tactile filmmaking.

In the year 2035, a humorless IRS bureaucrat is tasked with auditing the recorded dreams of an elderly artist who mostly lives off-the-grid.  He’s supposed to create a running tally of various props & cameos that appear in her dreams, each of which can be taxed for pennies.  However, he’s quickly distracted by how much freer & more imaginative her dreams are than his, which tend to be fried chicken & soda commercials contained to a single room (painted entirely pink like the sets in What a Way to Go!). It’s not surprising that his limited, commodified dreams are part of a larger conspiracy involving evil ad agencies and governmental control.  What is surprising is the romance that develops between the young tax man & the elderly artist.  They flee persecution for discovering the ad agency’s subliminal broadcasts by retreating further into the VHS fantasy worlds of the artist’s recorded dreams, forming a delightfully sweet bond in the most ludicrous of circumstances: demonic slumber parties, swashbuckling pirate adventures, cemetery picnics, etc.  The imagery is constantly delightful & surprising, even though you know exactly where the story is going at all times.

At its most potent, cinema is the closest we get to sharing a dream, so I’m an easy sucker for movies that are about that exact phenomenon: Paprika, The Cell, Inception, etc.  I’m also always onboard for a psychedelic Dan Deacon score, which adds a needed layer of atmospheric tension here.  Even so, Strawberry Mansion joins the rare company of films like Girl Asleep, The Science of Sleep, and The Wizard Oz that feel like totally immersive dreamworlds built entirely by hand.  They evoke the childlike imagination of transforming a cardboard refrigerator box into a backyard rocket ship, except that every single scene requires a new arts & crafts innovation on that level – more than history’s most creative child could possibly cram into a single adolescence.  No matter how sinister this film tries to make its corporate-sponsored dystopian future (or how grim Gondry tries to make his own doomed relationship dramas), nostalgia for that lost childhood whimsy cuts through.  The closest we can ever get back to it—without the aid of movies or drugs—is in lucid dreams.

-Brandon Ledet

Ema (2021)

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I’m currently catching up with this year’s Oscar nominees in my down time, a shameful ritual that I mostly use as a motivational deadline for movies I planned to seek out anyway.  The Oscars can’t bully me into watching keeping-up-with-the-discourse titles like Belfast or Don’t Look Up!, since I have no personal interest in their existence beyond how they might play into this year’s ceremony.  The nominations are useful for pressuring me to seek out prestige flicks leftover from the Best of 2021 listmaking season, though, and I’ve recently enjoyed catching up with titles like Parallel Mothers, Nightmare Alley, Summer of Soul, and The Worst Person in the World since they were announced.  So far, there has only been one major disappointment in this year’s catch-up ritual: the Princess Diana biopic Spencer.  I hate to say it, because I’m generally a fan, but Kristen Stewart’s performance as Diana Spencer is the only reason it did not work for me, and it happens to be the only category the film was nominated for (Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role).  Spencer‘s retro couture, ghostly imagery, and suffocating tension are all consistently effective, but Stewart’s the anchor of every dramatic beat and it all just rings as embarrassingly phony.  It feels like a Kate McKinnon parody instead of the genuine thing.  That didn’t bother me so much when Natalie Portman channeled Jinkx Monsoon in its spiritual predecessor Jackie, but Spencer feels like it’s running away from the laidback cool of Stewart at her best, and the gamble just didn’t pay off.

What’s most frustrating about Spencer‘s dramatic disappointments is that director Pablo Larraín did deliver a stellar, accolades-worthy picture in 2021 that’s mostly going unnoticed while the inferior one’s out there chasing awards statues.  Ema would not have qualified for this year’s Academy Awards even if it were the kind of picture that institution tends to recognize (it’s far from it), since COVID derailed its distribution in a messy, years-long path from its festival run in 2019 to widely accessible screens.  I would at least have liked to see it celebrated on more critics’ Best of the Year lists, though, which tend to have a less pedantic approach to citing a film’s official release (i.e., accounting for wide distribution rather than limited screenings in elitist hubs like Cannes, Venice, New York, and LA).  Even I failed to highlight Ema as Best of 2021 material on my own modest platform, waiting to access a DVD copy as a library loan instead of spending $5 to see it VOD before weighing in on Swampflix’s Top 10 list for the year.  That DVD was eventually put on hold for me this February, and if I were re-drafting my personal Best of 2021 list again today Ema would have ranked among my top three favorites of the year (along with Titane & I Blame Society, all great films about violently transgressive women).  I can at least take solace in knowing that it ranked on Hanna’s personal Best of 2021 list for this site and, more importantly, that none of this listmaking or awards-season bullshit ultimately matters anyway.  It’s all an overly complicated movie promotion machine, a process I can sidestep at any time simply by saying this: Ema is a great movie, and I highly recommend you seek it out.

Part erotic thriller, part domestic melodrama, and part interpretive dance, Ema feels like Almodóvar doing Climax, which I mean as the highest of compliments to Larraín.  A young couple become pariahs in their Chilean town by returning their son to his adoption agency after ten months of parenting, as if they were returning a faulty home appliance.  The son’s absence haunts their household like the ghostly presences of Jackie & Diana in Larraín’s political psych-thrillers.  Only, Polo is alive & retrievable in a nearby home – adopted out to a new, more affectionate family.  Gastón (Gael García Bernal) is content to deal with the fallout of Polo’s exit by endlessly debating who was the worse parent with his wife/employee, Ema (Mariana Di Girolamo).  Ema takes a more pro-active approach to restoring order to the family, scamming her way into Polo’s new household Parasite-style and—no exaggeration—burning down half of their town with a flamethrower until she gets what she wants.  She leaves her subservient life as an anonymous member of her choreographer-husband’s avant-garde dance troupe to form a vicious girl gang who are willing to fuck, scratch, dance, and burn the world to the ground in Ema’s name.  Meanwhile, she only grows more powerful the further she drifts away from her husband’s petty criticisms of her moral character (ranging from her ineptitude as a mother to her ill-reputable taste in reggaeton dance music).  The film can only end with every character in Ema’s orbit observing her infamy in stunned silence, impressed but horrified by how much chaos she’s willing to unleash in order to get her kid back – a kid she once casually tossed away.

As the title and synopsis suggest, the film is in awe of Ema as a character more so than it is interested in the logistics of its drama.  She recalls the subversive anti-heroines of erotic thrillers past – like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, with a severe bisexual haircut to match.  It’s like being intensely horny is her superpower, a force so overwhelming it bends everyone to her fucked-up will.  Wielding a napalm-dripping flamethrower is only her second most dangerous weapon, considering how much more societal terrorism she achieves through sex (along with her harem of fellow dancers).  Ema the character is alone a spectacle to behold, and it feels like every other aspect of the film exists only in service of admiring her from different angles.  The domestic melodrama she shares with Gastón only exists to highlight her viciousness, as the doomed couple use memories of their collective failure as parents to inflict maximum pain on each other in constant emotional cheap shots.  The reggaeton & interpretive dance sequences add a lyrical exuberance to her city-wide mayhem, making it clear that she’s having fun ruining the lives of everyone around her in the relentless pursuit of her selfish goals.  Even poor Polo is only a mirror reflection of Ema’s fantastic wickedness, as his maternally inherited hedonism & pyromania are exactly what drove him back to the adoption agency in the first place.  And the flame thrower?  That just makes Ema look like a badass, like Rambo wielding a rocket launcher.

All the things I admired about Jackie & Spencer are readily present in Ema: the unbearable tension, the over-the-top costuming & theatrics, the fascination with the inner lives of Complicated Women, all of it.  The difference is that the historical drama is an inherently more restrained genre than the erotic thriller, no matter how much Larraín tries to mussy up his performance-piece biopics with arthouse mystique.  Ema is totally free to be its fabulous, fucked-up self with no respect owed to historical figures or the conventions of good taste.  It’s a shame that its distribution was so muddled by the chaos of COVID, since it at least could have earned as big of a cult following as Titane in the right circumstances (which landed on Hulu within months of winning the Palme d’Or).  I can only hope that Ema gradually cultivates that kind of following over time, and I encourage anyone who enjoyed Titane to give this sinister spectacle a shot as well; it’s the closest any film has come to besting it for my favorite release of 2021. 

-Brandon Ledet

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)

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Between the 2018 version of Halloween, last year’s revision of Candyman, and this year’s update to Scream, the legacy sequel appears to be the hottest trend in mainstream horror filmmaking.  Rebooting iconic horror IP without disregarding the continuity of the original source material is the exact kind of “safe bet” investment Hollywood Money Men love. It simultaneously drags old customers back to the theater with a nostalgia magnet while luring in fresh-faced Zoomers with allowance money to burn.  Tobe Hooper’s grimy cannibal classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an absurdly ill-fitting candidate for the legacy sequel treatment, though, no matter how tempting it must be to cash in on its decades of name-recognition.  Nine films into the franchise, there’s still no clear continuity in either story or tone across the various Texas Chainsaw sequels & reboots.  Each individual entry is a chaotic outlier with no solid tether to the rest of the series beyond the chainsaw-wielding maniac Leatherface.  It’s also been almost a half-century since the Tobe Hooper original, which means that Leatherface and his first-one-that-got-away “final” girl would easily be pushing 70 years old in a modern-day sequel.  And that’s to say nothing of the tastelessness of dragging Sally back into Leatherface’s chow zone after the original actor who played her, Marilyn Burns, died in 2014.  The 2022 Texas Chainsaw Massacre recasts Olwen Fouéré (of Mandy notoriety) in the Sally role, feigning to give her the same long-awaited revenge mission Laurie Strode’s pursuing in the new Halloween cycle, only for that subplot to be treated as a callous joke with an abrupt, dismissive punchline.  That gag is poorly conceived, needlessly cruel, and ultimately just an excuse to participate in extratextual Online Discourse that has nothing to do with the movie’s central narrative – the exact three qualities that make the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre such a sickening hoot.

Besides the all-growed-up-final-girl revenge plot, another goofy hallmark of the legacy horror sequel is giving its youngsters in peril jobs that did not exist when the series originated.  Both the new Halloween and the new Slumber Party Massacre go the obvious route, unleashing The Shape & The Driller Killer to attack true crime podcasters who treat their heyday slayings as entertainment #content.  The new Texas Chainsaw Massacre goes the long way, staging a showdown between Leatherface and wealthy social media Influencers who want to transform his small Texas town into a big-city Liberal utopia – a rural cult for terminally online Zoomers.  It’s a ludicrous premise, one the film only uses an excuse to directly comment on hot topics like cancel culture, gentrification, “late-stage Capitalism”, school shootings, and the Confederate flag.  Leatherface’s new crop of victims aren’t characters so much as they’re pre-loaded Twitter talking points (even with Eighth Grade‘s Elsie Fisher doing her damnedest to perform her Culture War discourse with a genuine pathos as the new final girl).  Worse yet, the film decidedly falls on the Right-Wing side of that cultural divide, taking the positions that the Confederate flag is more a symbol of heritage than of racism, that automatic assault rifles are necessary to survival, and that today’s socially progressive youth are inherently weaker & more superficial than the rural townies they condescend to as small-minded bigots.  Texas Chainsaw Massacre only floods its small Texas town with big-city Influencers as targets for Leatherface’s chainsaw, but every single time it’s obliged to give their presence a narrative purpose, it defaults to complaining that kids today are whiny Liberal wimps – a sentiment that only gets queasier the longer it fixates on their ritualistic disemboweling once the slaughter begins.

So, to recap: the teens are annoying, the dialogue is clumsy, the themes are reactionary, and it’s all a flimsy excuse to stage 80 minutes of for-its-own-sake hyperviolence.  By those metrics, the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre is pretty faithful to slasher tradition, which has never had a functional moral compass, nor a reliable system of quality control.  I’d even go as far as to call it a great slasher, despite its atrocious politics.  Texas Chainsaw Massacre ’22 is careless when it comes to its characters, its debt to its source material’s legacy, and its broader cultural commentary, but it pours a lot of careful consideration into the craft of its kill scenes.  And since the movie is mostly kill scenes, it mostly gets away with it.  Leatherface’s chainsaw rips into a party bus packed with panicked social media addicts, tears townie challengers to chunks, and chases our new final girl through crawl space floorboards like an upside-down shark’s fin.  The violence is constant and constantly surprising, drowning the screen in so much goopy stage blood that you can hardly squint past it to see the rotten Conservative politics blurring up the background.  For better or worse, that gore-hound payoff will seal this movie’s legacy.  There will be vocal backlash against its reactionary Culture War politics for about a decade, then it’s going to be gradually reclaimed as one of the better entries in the Texas Chainsaw franchise as those talking points become 2020s kitsch.  Certainly, there are first-wave slashers from the 1980s with a more overtly bigoted, misanthropic worldview that have been reclaimed as cult classics with retrograde politics that are “of their time.”  The new Texas Chainsaw Massacre is of our time in the ugliest, most gruesome way possible.  It will similarly age gracefully as an adorable time capsule of our worst present-day filmmaking & cultural impulses.  All you can really do in the meantime is enjoy the novelty of the individual chainsaw kills, of which there are plenty to indulge.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: I Declare War (2012)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 2012’s I Declare War, is a darkly comic fantasy thriller that illustrates a children’s game of Capture the Flag as a gritty war story.  Unfortunately, it’s one of our rare Movie of the Month selections that did not hit home for me, personally.  Its premise is fun enough, and I was mostly charmed by its low-budget backyard filmmaking aesthetics, but the overall vibes are just . . . off.  Specifically, I was tripped up by some of its more dire #edgelord one-liners, and I’m not sure that it ever escalates its high-concept premise beyond its initial novelty.  Then again, that novelty was in playing children’s playground imagination fantasies as a straight war film, and that’s just not my genre.  I found myself alternating between boredom and annoyance for most of its runtime, which is typically how I react to even well-respected war movies, so it might actually be successful as the genuine thing.

As disappointed as I ended up being with I Declare War as a finished product, I still think there’s a fun germ of an idea in its central conceit.  It’s just also one that you can see executed in better, earlier films.  To that end, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month (or at least the idea of it) and want to see more films where children’s playtime war games are treated with the severity of a genuine war epic.

Son of Rambow (2007)

Maybe the reason I Declare War made me squeamish was that the cast of kids are so unashamedly gross.  They have the talk-shouting acting skills of a Disney Channel Original, but they also take transgressive delight in cussing and making 4-chan level jokes about blowjobs & altar boys.  It’s off-putting.  By contrast, I was thoroughly charmed by the 2007 twee comedy Son of Rambow, in which the kids are rambunctious but sweet in their fictional battlefield mischief.  Like I Declare War, Son of Rambow is guided by a childlike sense of imagination, as indicated in its tagline “Make believe, not war.”  The difference is that the kids in Son of Rambow are adorable little scamps, while the kids of I Declare War are gross little internet trolls.  It may be a less authentic depiction of childhood personalities, but it’s a lot easier to stomach at feature length.

In Son of Rambow, two mismatched British schoolboys bond while making a D.I.Y. sequel to First Blood with a camcorder in the woods.  Their bootleg Rambo sequel recalls the cutesy backyard-moviemaking aesthetics of similar comedies like Brigsby Bear & Be Kind Rewind, focusing more on the anything-can-happen chaos of a child’s imagination than the grim logistics of real-life warfare.  While the kids of I Declare War are obsessed with the traditional war-epic plot machinations of the movie Patton, the kids of Son of Rambow toss in whatever spur-of-the-moment whimsies pop up in their playtime: ninjas, flying dogs, killer scarecrows, whatever.  You’ll either find their playtime antics cloying or wonderful depending on your relationship with twee whimsy.  Either way, it offers a sweet counterpoint to the bitter battlefield grotesqueries of I Declare War.

Child’s Play 3 (1991)

Maybe it’s wrong to soften the harsh reality of warfare with twee whimsy.  Maybe a proper alternative to I Declare War would have to sweeten its bitter truths with a different kind of genre-bending novelty.  Child’s Play 3 is at least more somber in its approach to children playing soldiers in the woods, in that it’s set in a somewhat realistic military academy where young kids are forced to play make-believe that they’re adult killing-machines.  Its most direct connection to I Declare War arrives in the third act, when their traditional wargames simulation is made tragically lethal – their guns’ paintball ammo swapped with actual bullets.  Of course, the novelty in that premise is provided by the mischievous villain who supplied that live ammo: the supernatural killer doll Chucky.

To be honest, even Child’s Play 3 sticks a little too close to traditional war movie genre tropes for my tastes.  Having to spend even 90 breezy minutes in its drab military school setting feels like being punished alongside Andy for crimes I didn’t commit.  Chucky does a lot to break up the monotony of that rigidly uniform setting, though.  It’s easily my least favorite of the original Child’s Play trilogy, but it’s late enough in the series that Chucky fully comes into his own as a mainstay slasher villain, quipping his way through every kill with fun catchphrases & cheap one-liners.  Also, my boredom with its war-film tropes is rewarded with a last-minute trip to an amusement park in an incredible finale.  That’s more than I can say for I Declare War, which never leaves its D.I.Y. military bases in the woods.

3615 code Père Noël (aka Deadly Games, 1989)

The ideal neutral ground between the cutesy whimsy of Son of Rambow and the military-school machismo of Child’s Play 3 is likely the 1989 French home-invasion thriller Deadly Games, making it the perfect counterpoint to I Declare War‘s playground wargames tedium.  The problem is that it’s blasphemous to watch Deadly Games any month but December, since it’s explicitly a Christmas film.  In the movie, a spoiled rich child plays macho protector to his empty mansion against a psychotic invader who’s dressed as Santa Claus (whom the boy mistakes for the real deal).  To eliminate this threat, the boy suits up as a miniature Rambo, armed with an endless arsenal of high-tech gadgets & children’s toys to weaponize against the killer Santa.  He treats his mission with the deadly seriousness of a real-life war skirmish, which is good, because the adult Santa very well might kill him.

Director René Manzor was reportedly pissed that his film was “plagiarized” by the massive 90s hit Home Alone, and it’s easy to see the connections between the two films’ shared boobytrap defense systems & Christmas Eve home-invasion premises.  However, whereas Home Alone‘s boobytrap antics are played for broad slapstick humor, Deadly Games is deadly serious about the threat its enemy encroachment presents.  The child’s response to the invading Santa Claus is charmingly imbued with playtime imagination, especially in his plastic weapons of choice.  The severity of the resulting battle is genuinely thrilling, though, even more so than most actual Rambo movies.  It skillfully toys with the exact boundary between childhood whimsy & wartime brutality that I Declare War clumsily aims for, but no self-respecting adult should watch it any sooner in the calendar year than the day after Thanksgiving.

-Brandon Ledet

Kimi (2022)

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Of course, of all the big-name Hollywood filmmakers you’d expect to thrive in spite of COVID-era production troubles, Steven Soderbergh has been thriving the brightest.  Three decades into his career, Soderbergh still conveys a playfulness and adaptability that have got to be near impossible to maintain in an industry that’s increasingly hostile towards anything that’s not pre-established, multi-billion-dollar IP.  While most legendary auteurs have struggled to get no-brainer projects off the ground, Soderbergh remains a scrappy, resourceful innovator who’s still making exciting work at the margins of the industry – the kind of movies you’d expect out of a director in their twenties with something to prove.  Adding the circumstances of the COVID pandemic to his already unstoppable filmmaking routine is just another obstacle for Soderbergh to navigate his way around, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was genuinely delighted by the challenge.  Two years into the pandemic, he’s already made and distributed three feature films, making it look disgustingly easy while most of the Hollywood machine feels like it’s still on pause.  I’m halfway convinced that he’ll be up to four COVID-era features by the time I finish typing this paragraph.

Although Soderbergh has already delivered other experiments in COVID-era cinema (all for HBO Max), his latest dispatch, Kimi, is the first that feels like it was produced during the pandemic.  While Let Them All Talk & No Sudden Move would’ve felt right at home in any other year of Soderbergh’s post-“retirement” era, Kimi directly acknowledges the ongoing pandemic and integrates it into its narrative.  It initially plays like Soderbergh making an easy exercise out of updating Rear Window for the COVID era.  Zoë Kravitz stars as a low-level surveillance tech who reviews and solves technical issues for an Alexa-style personal assistant gadget called Kimi.  An agoraphobe whose anxiety about leaving the apartment is only worsened by the pandemic, she’s limited almost all of her in-person social interactions to physical communication with the tenants of the apartment building opposite her window.  Given how most COVID-era productions have shifted to screenlife thrillers contained to laptops and single-location living spaces, you’re trained to expect the entire movie to play out in this one beautiful, but restrictive Seattle apartment.  Instead, Soderbergh turns that familiar set-up into an excuse for a totally Unsane remix of The Net.  While working her surveillance data-collection job, Kravitz discovers evidence of a violent crime.  Reporting it puts her in danger of suffering a similar fate of the victim she’s trying to save, as the corporate suits at Kimi will literally kill to prevent the resulting public scandal.  So, she has to go on the run outside her apartment to escape violent, corporate thugs, which is really just an excuse for Soderbergh to play with the unique anxieties of what it feels like to exist in public right now.

The brilliant thing about Kimi is that it feels like a throwback to mid-budget tech thrillers of the 1990s like Sneakers and The Net—the exact kind of movies that most Hollywood studios neglect to make anymore—even though it has distinctly modern sensibilities in its technophobic satire & production circumstances.  The film’s paranoia about the illusion of online privacy, its dual use of the Kimi tech as both a weapon & a punchline, and Kravitz’s e-girl haircut are all firmly rooted in modern internet culture, but they’re treated with a retro Hollywood thriller sensibility in the film’s plotting.  Meanwhile, Soderbergh is having fun playing with his filmmaking toys, as always.  He shoots Kravitz’s nervous escape on the streets of Seattle with a sped-up skateboard video aesthetic that recalls the anxious discomforts of Unsane.  He stunt-casts comedians David Wain & Andy Daily in bit dramatic roles that recall similar casting pranks in The Informant.  Most importantly, he continues his reign of filming the ugliest, drabbest office settings in the biz, depicting our current corporate hellscape as a fluorescent-lit nightmare we’d all be lucky to wake up from at any second.  If there’s anything that unifies Soderbergh’s filmmaking sensibilities beyond his continued playfulness in craft, it’s that all his films maintain a sternly anti-Capitalist political bent – capturing the cruelty, tastelessness, and absence of Life in our soul-drained modern world like no other filmmaker working today.  It’s all very honest about the exact corporate power structures that are crushing the few good things left in this world, while also recalling the phoniest blockbuster thrillers of Hollywood past.  Exciting stuff.

I have no idea how much longer COVID will continue to disrupt the production logistics of traditional Hollywood filmmaking.  I’ve stopped trying to predict the future after these last two years of watching a global health crisis get unnecessarily prolonged in a game of profit-over-people politics.  Still, I can say with full confidence that Soderbergh will continue to make movies as long as he’s alive on this planet, and his movies will continue to confront those exact misanthropic politics for what they are.  They’ll also continue to be wonderfully entertaining; he’s always dependable for that, even if his modes of professional survival are forever in flux.

-Brandon Ledet

Last Night in Soho (2021)

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I was left so unexpectedly cold by Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver that I spent my entire review of the film apologizing for my apathy.  Surely, if I was shrugging off a stylish heist thriller with an #epicplaylist from the director of the beloved action comedies Hot Fuzz, Shawn of the Dead, and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, the problem must’ve been with me, not with the movie.  Five years later, I’m a lot more confident in shrugging off Wright’s follow-up to Baby Driver, whether that confidence is a “fool me twice” lesson learned or just a growing trust in my own tastes.  A couture-culture ghost story styled to recall post-giallo Euro horrors like Suspiria & The Psychic, Edgar Wright’s latest genre exercise is tailored to appeal to my exact sensibilities.  I was fully prepared to defend Last Night in Soho against its initial critical backlash (the same way I took mild delight in last year’s other maligned fashion-student thriller, Cruella).  I regret to report that it’s somehow even worse than Baby Driver, despite the genre alchemy of its Italo ghosts & high-fashion setting.  Its first hour is cute but a little boring; its second hour is less cute and super infuriating.  Combined, they’re dull & disastrous enough to convince me to swear off all future Edgar Wright projects entirely.

Thomasin McKenzie stars as a mousy country bumpkin who enrolls in an elite London fashion school.  Skeezy men creep on her from all sides, while the girls in her dorm bully her for being out of step with big-city tastes.  Like in Suspiria, things get worse when she moves to an off-campus apartment to enjoy some solitude & independence, only to be haunted by the ghosts of London’s seedy past.  Our troubled heroine has carefully cultivated two personality quirks that make her Not Like Other Girls: psychic abilities as a spiritual medium and an obsession with retro “Swinging 60s” kitsch.  Both quirks bite her on the ass in her new apartment, where she’s transported in dreams to the 1960s, passively observing her room’s former tenant (an absurdly stylish Anya Taylor-Joy) from the frustrating safety of a mirror realm.  This nocturnal time travel starts as wish fulfillment for the teenage fashionista, but it quickly turns into a bitter nostalgia check, revealing London’s supposedly glorious past to be a misogynist hellscape.  The Swinging 60s Barbie of her dreams pursues a career as a nightclub singer but is manipulated into prostitution by her manager instead.  Meanwhile, the CG ghosts of the singer’s long-dead johns leak out into the fashion student’s waking life, driving her past the brink of madness.  As if dwelling on the grim circumstances of forced prostitution wasn’t punishment enough, the audience is then treated to an idiotic twist that reveals how the chanteuse fought back against her rapist captor & his customers, devolving into a #girlboss vigilante finale that feels shamefully regressive – even for horror.

Last Night in Soho is way too frothy to justify its gendered political provocations, especially considering their sour aftertaste.  It feels like a one-off time travel tangent from a TV show with a bored writers’ room, like a trip to the Star Trek holodeck or a standard episode of Sliders.  Something that superficial has no right to be this irritating, just like how a movie directed by a supposed visual stylist has no right to feature CG ghosts this anonymously bland (at best recalling the unmasked killer reveal in last year’s time-loop slasher Lucky, a film with a small fraction of this one’s budget).  And the CG shards of broken mirrors look even worse.  Still, Last Night in Soho does have a few core saving graces: the relatable depiction of youth as an embarrassing collection of ill-fitting hipster affectations; the inherent entertainment value of ghost story clichés; and the even more potent entertainment value of watching Anya Taylor-Joy model pretty clothes.  They aren’t enough to save it from tedium & misery, but they might be enough to make it more interesting to think about & rewatch than Baby Driver, despite being the worse film.  If I’m smart, I’ll do my best to not think about any Edgar Wright films ever again, as our tastes are obviously drifting further out of sync as we grow old.  Then again, he recently announced he’s developing a new project with his original muse Simon Pegg, which is just enough of a draw to remind me of what I liked about his movies in the first place – like Road Runner guiding Wile E. Coyote off yet another cliff.

-Brandon Ledet

Bigbug (2022)

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One of the more delightful side effects of Netflix spending ungodly amounts of money producing in-house Originals is that they often fund dream projects for established auteurs who’re struggling to adapt to a post-MCU movie industry, where every single production has to be either a multi-billion-dollar tentpole or an Oscars prestige magnet to be deemed worthwhile.  There’s something wonderful about the likes of Scorsese, Fincher, and Cuarón finally enjoying total creative freedom and unrestrained access to a corporate checkbook, all for a profit-loss streaming giant that has no tangible plans to make short-term returns on those investments.  It’s wonderful in concept, anyway.  Despite sidestepping the creative & budgetary restrictions of the traditional Hollywood production process, none of these legendary directors have been doing their best work on Netflix.  Mank, Roma, and The Irishman are all perfectly cromulent Awards Season dramas, but none can claim to match their respective auteurs’ creative heights in previous works made under more constrictive conditions.  Netflix should be an auteur’s paradise, but somehow the work they’re platforming from cinema’s most distinct artists is coming out bland & sanded down in the process.

What I cannot tell about Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s first Netflix project is how much of its blandness is intentional.  The basic premise of his sci-fi comedy Bigbug feels like classic Jeunet in that it’s a collection of oddball characters competing to out-quirk each other in a retro-futuristic fantasy realm.  However, Jeunet abandons the lived-in grime of his usual schtick to instead try out an eerily crisp, overlit production design that recalls the Spy Kids franchise more than it does anything he’s directed before.  It almost feels as if Jeunet is making fun of the Netflix house style with this cheap, plastic playhouse aesthetic, as it resembles the bright colors & bleached teeth of other Netflix Originals more than it does the sooty, antiqued worlds of films like Amélie, Delicatessen, or City of Lost Children.  I don’t know how much credit you can give Jeunet for making a film that’s bland on purpose, especially since plenty of Bigbug‘s slapstick gags & shrill one-liners are 100% intended to be funny and land with a miserable thud instead.  At the same time, Jeunet breaks up this single-location farce with totally unnecessary fade-to-black commercial breaks, reinforcing its production values as a TV-movie in an act of self-deprecation.  Questions of how good, how self-aware, and how critical of its own straight-to-streaming format Bigbug is persist throughout its entire runtime.  It’s undeniably the least idiosyncratic film in Jeunet’s catalog to date; the question is how much of its familiar, off-putting artificiality was the intention of the artist.

The truth is likely that Bigbug‘s plastic, sanitized production values were a circumstance of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and not a metatextual joke at the expense of the Netflix house style (a likelihood reinforced by a dire one-liner about a COVID-50 outbreak in the distant future).  In the film, several mismatched couples are locked inside a futuristic automated home to wait out an A.I. revolution that’s raging outside.  The humans in the house are all desperate to find privacy in lockdown so they can have sex.  The home-appliance robots they share the space with are desperate to be respected as fellow autonomous beings, mimicking the humans’ shrill, erratic behavior in idolization.  Both factions—the robots and the humans—must join forces to outsmart the fascistic A.I. supersoldiers that inevitably invade their prison-home, but the movie doesn’t feel all that invested in the terror of that threat.  Instead, it works more as a brochure for fictional automated-home technology, like the retro-future kitsch of 1950s World’s Fair reels promoting far-out kitchen appliances.  Treating this trapped-inside surveillance state premise as a thin metaphor for the limbo of COVID-19 lockdowns, Jeunet doesn’t stress himself out too much in pursuit of a plot.  The setting is mostly an excuse for a series of one-off gags involving navel-gazing vacuum cleaners, short-circuiting dildo bots, and the ritualistic humiliations of Reality TV.  It’s all extremely frivolous & silly, and some of it is even halfway funny.

At its best, Bigbug plays like The Exterminating Angel reprised on the set of the live-action Cat in the Hat.  At its worst, it plays like excruciatingly dull deleted scenes from the live-action Cat in the Hat.  I honestly don’t know what to make of that cursed imbalance, but I do know that it is at least a huge creative departure for Jeunet as a visual stylist.  All Netflix-spotlighted auteurs have done their blandest, most overly sanitized work for the streaming behemoth, but only Jeunet has leaned so far into that quality downgrade that it feels at least semi-intentional.  No one makes a movie this bizarrely artificial by accident – least of all someone whose work usually looks like it was filmed at the bottom of an antique ashtray.

-Brandon Ledet