The 2019 Concert Films that Saved Me a Ticket to Jazz Fest

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

We live only a few blocks away from the New Orleans Fairgrounds where the Jazz & Heritage Festival is staged every year. This means the festival is automatically a part of our annual social calendar, if not only because our house effectively becomes a cab stand for the occasion (which makes for some excellent front porch people-watching, I tell you what). In that way, we’re already a part of the Jazz Fest experience every day of the two-week ritual no matter what, but we also usually manage to attend at least a couple performances at the festival each year in-person for good measure. 2019 is the first year since we purchased a house in the Jaz Fest orbit that we weren’t able to actually attend the fest on-the-grounds – due to a lack of funds, comped tickets, and free time. We still got in some good people-watching on the periphery of the festivities, but the closest we got to attending a performance was hearing a voice just clear enough from our porch to tell that it was Alanis Morrissette’s but not clear enough to actually tell what she was singing. Thanks to a couple well-timed concert film releases over the past few weeks, however, I was more or less able to achieve the general Jazz Fest experience in the air-conditioned darkness of my living room & a nearby movie theater. It may not have been quite as pure of a concert-going experience as witnessing a Jazz Fest performance in person, but at least it saved me from my annual Jazz Fest sunburn – a ritual I was happy to skip.

For the outdoor, mainstage Jazz Fest experience, the recent Netflix release of the Beyoncé concert documentary Homecoming was extremely well-timed. Documenting her two instantly historic performances at last year’s Coachella, the film’s obviously imbued with a larger stage production, a harsher climate, and more massively overpacked crowds than anything you’ll ever experience on the Fairgrounds. Still, it took me back to the Hell of watching Elton John serenade an oversized crowd of dehydrated bullies a few festivals ago – making me grateful that Beyoncé documented this spectacle for posterity so that those of us without the money or stamina required for Coachella can enjoy it into perpetuity. A major departure from the diary-like intimacy of Lemonade, Homecoming finds Queen Bey entertaining her masses in grand spectacle – putting on one of the all-time great stage shows in the medium of pop music. Like Jazz Fest at its best, the project is also deliberate in its explicit preservation & exultation of black culture. Besides presenting a bewildering two-hour catalog of Beyoncé classics with mesmeric precision in craft, the film also functions as a feature-length love letter to Historically Black Colleges and Universities – particularly in its drumline & steppers percussions that accent the songs throughout. And, because HBCUs are specifically a Southern black tradition, the film’s sensibilities often incorporate a distinct New Orleans Flavor in their creative DNA. The marching band brass, DJ Jubilee bounce beats, Big Freeida vocal sample, and in-the-wild wild Solange sighting all felt at home to New Orleans more so than California, where it was actually staged.

Personally, I find the in-the-sun concert experience of Jazz Fest’s main stages a little overwhelming, even with only a fraction of the Beychella crowd in attendance. As a result, I often find myself hiding out from the major acts in the smaller tent venues, where the Sun can’t find me. The Gospel Tent is a required stop every year to complete the Jazz Fest ritual, then, an experience I was able to approximate in a movie theater thanks to the recent Aretha Franklin concert doc Amazing Grace. Originally filmed for television in 1972, Amazing Grace was delayed from release for decades – reportedly due to technical difficulties regarding its sync-sound editing, but mostly just so it could arrive at a nearby AMC at the exact year I missed my annual pilgrimage to the Gospel Tent. Filmed over two nights in a Los Angeles Baptist church, Amazing Grace is a raw, emotionally powerful showcase for Franklin’s soul-rattling vocals – which tear through a catalog of Gospel standards with a divine fury. Franklin isn’t offered the same stage show spectacle or auteurist control Beyoncé commands in Homecoming here, but the sweaty intimacy of being locked in a church with her incredible voice for two nights is almost enough to make you weep – even with the remove of a half-century and a movie screen. It’s the essence of the Gospel Tent amplified to thunderous effect. Mick Jagger even showed his face in the crowd among the attendees, which was more of the Stones than who showed up for this year’s Jazz Fest, even though they were initially the biggest act booked.

There are certainly more substantial comparisons to be made between Homecoming & Amazing Grace than how they can evoke a full music festival experience in tandem. These are two essential, transcendent documents of powerful black women performing at the top of their game – distinct achievements in the concert-movie medium that could inspire endless discussions of their subtext & nuance. CC & I even touched on some of these nuances ourselves in a recent podcast episode that paired the two films with Childish Gambino’s own recent Coachella-season release, Guava Island. For anyone who missed this year’s Jazz Fest like I did or anyone who just wants to let those post-Fest vibes linger a little longer, however, I do encourage you to pair these two incredible works to synthesize the general effect of physically attending the fest – without the crowds & heat.

-Brandon Ledet

Panic in the Streets (1950)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

Usually, when a Hollywood production is shot on-location in New Orleans, the expectation is that the audience will be doing some tourist sightseeing. 80s thrillers like The Big Easy & Hard Target where especially shameless about this, setting scenes in conspicuous tourist spots like Tipitina’s, Mardi Gras parade float warehouses, and Bourbon Street strip joints for easy, sleazy atmosphere as they drunkenly stumbled around the city. The 1950 health-epidemic noir Panic in the Streets aimed for an entirely different kind of local seasoning. Directed by respected dramatist Elia Kazan shortly before he fired off major hits like A Streetcar Named Desire & On the Waterfront, Panic in the Streets was something of an experiment & a gamble for the Studio Era way of doing things. The business of exporting productions to shoot entirely on-location in far-off cities wasn’t business as usual yet, which might explain why Kazan didn’t think to make use of the city in the now-traditional ways of visiting famous clubs, capturing Mardi Gras crowds, or just generally making a big deal about the environment where the action is staged. There are a few familiar shots of French Quarter exteriors that haven’t changed at all in the last 70 years and the film eventually concludes in a shipping dock warehouse setting that feels unique to its chosen location, but most of its drama is confined to the city’s interior spaces, which are familiar but not entirely unique. The novelty of shooting a Studio Era film entirely on-location did lead to a different, less frequently travelled path to local authenticity, though. Over 80% of the hired cast & crew for Panic in the Streets were local to New Orleans, which is still an unusual way of doing things by big-budget Hollywood standards, even with all the productions that film here for the tax credits. There may not be much documentation of what the city itself looked like in the 1950s here, but the film offers something a little more precious instead: documentation of and collaboration with the city’s people.

Outside its context as a New Orleans peoplewatching time capsule, Panic in the Streets is a fairly standard noir. Its central hook promises something novel beyond the standard antihero cops vs. wise guy criminals dynamic that usually defines the genre. NOPD detectives and representatives from the federal US Public Health Service reluctantly team up to track down a murderer who is now patient zero in a potential city-wide epidemic of the pneumonic plague, thanks to a comprised victim. This unusual medical angle to the crime thriller drama does allow for some distinctive detail unusual to the genre: scientific jargon about “anti-plague serums,” wry humor about tough-guy cops who are afraid of taking their inoculation shots, an excuse to burn all the evidence with the infected-and-murdered man’s body just to make the mystery killer’s identity tougher to crack, etc. Mostly, the plague angle is merely used to build tension by giving local cops & federal officials a tight 48-hour window to catch their killer before his contagions become a city-wide threat. There are some conflicts built around “college men” health officials and blue-collar detectives flaunting their authority in the investigation, but most confrontations mostly amount to angry macho men yelling about jurisdiction at top volume, which feels standard to most cop thrillers. The rest of Panic in the Streets is a faithful amalgamation of classic noir tropes: post-German Expressionist lighting, witty retorts muttered under hard-drinking cops’ breath, a villain who looks like he was plucked from a Dick Tracy lineup, more sewer-grate steam that New Orleans has ever seen, and so on. Anyone with a built-in appreciation for noir as a genre won’t need much more than the plague outbreak premise and the New Orleans locale for the film to be of interest, but it still doesn’t go very far out of its way to distinguish itself beyond those novelties – especially considering the prestige Elia Kazan represents behind the camera.

One noticeable auteurist touch Kazan brings to the table is an interest in this port city’s immigrant Greek population, which feels unique to him given that the director himself was born in Constantinople to Greek parents. Besides the expected police stations, race tracks, and shipping dock locations that naturally arise by setting a noir here, one of the few vintage local spots the film takes a documentarian interest in is a Greek-owned restaurant named Athena’s, presumably now long-gone. The rest of the local cast & crew are much less conspicuous, sporting neither the thick Y’at nor Cajun accents typical to Hollywood productions set here (or, at least they weren’t undetectable to this local’s ear). It’s nice to have a movie character pronounce “New Orleans” correctly on the big screen (a rarer occurrence than you might expect) and it’s a little funny how the plague victims’ dazed stumbling resembles the drunken zombie tourists of Bourbon Street, but most of Panic in the Streets’s local people-watching is just as subtly played as its minor deviations from the noir template. There’s a natural authenticity to the movie that arises from casting real-life characters in a majority of the roles, so that very few faces on the screen are the pristine, homogenous brand of Hollywood Beauty we’re used to seeing. For my taste, there are far too few women with substantial roles to paly in that dynamic (especially for the genre that effectively invented the femme fatale), but for the most part I was riveted just picking faces out of the crowd anyway. Shotgun Cinema projecting the film large & loud for a free screening at the Marigny Opera House was a major help in that regard. As a shot-on-location noir and an Elia Kazan procedural drama, Panic in the Streets is a solid genre entry, but not much more. As an act of local-history people-watching, however, it carries a lot of clout as something exceptional and I was glad to have the opportunity to share that experience with a live, local community.

-Brandon Ledet

Impossible Horror (2017)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

I purchased a Blu-ray copy of Impossible Horror mostly as a means of contributing financial support to a podcaster I admire. The film’s director, Justin Decloux, cohosts The Important Cinema Club out of Toronto, where he also programs repertory genre screenings under the Laser Blast Film Society brand. The film arrived with an endearing thank-you note from Decloux’s creative partner Emily Milling, who scored, co-produced, and contributed sound editing on the film (likely among other duties). I’m mentioning all of this to note that Impossible Horror is very much a microbudget backyard production, a modern entry in the Regional Horror canon with all the charms & limitations that descriptor implies. Decloux & Milling briefly appear in the film themselves as side characters among a local community of friends & collaborators (including Important Cinema Club’s other cohost, Will Sloan) as their film’s “backyard” setting expands into the late-night urban streets of Toronto. Taking a gamble on these kinds of no-budget horror cheapies is always a tough sell for anyone outside the local social circles who appear on the screen in that way, but Impossible Horror is overflowing with enough creative ideas & genuine genre fandom that it’s well worth the effort. A 76min, dialogue-light sampler of a wide range of well-staged scares (ghost possessions, cursed VHS tapes, evil dolls, suicide cults, etc.), the film is very careful to not test its audience’s patience. Decloux & Milling are clearly fans of this D.I.Y. end of genre filmmaking themselves. Along with co-writer Nate Wilson, they energetically flood the screen with the ideas & imagery they love to see in these kinds of movies, conscious of just how easily the exercise could slip into tedium if they eased off the gas pedal. The result is surprisingly effective considering the limitations of their means, even if there are instances where they have to prompt the audience to [imagine a bigger budget here].

All this talk of backyard D.I.Y. art productions would normally be extratextual, but Impossible Horror is largely a film about outsider art & for-its-own-sake creativity. Sinking into the emotional slump that follows a devastating romantic breakup, our protagonist finds herself unsure what to do with her sudden influx of alone time beside throwing herself back into long-abandoned creative projects – drawing comics & making films. She first picks up her old video camera out of spite for The Asshole who left it behind in the breakup, but soon finds herself supernaturally compelled to see her new filmmaking project through. Unable to sleep through her heartache & her resentment of The Asshole, she finds herself going on late-night walks in those eerie post-midnight hours when, as Whodini would say, The Freaks come out. Suddenly, the absence of dialogue that comes with living alone is supplanted by a torrent of mysterious, paranoid ramblings from a newfound friend discovered on those late-night walks. From there, our once-lonely protagonist spends the rest of the film sinking further into her new friend’s own creative project: investigating a phenomenon of ghostly screams that routinely echo in the night and are always accompanied by mysteriously materialized objects – typewriters, VHS cassettes, dildos, hammers, etc. Solving the origin, meaning, and answer to this paranormal puzzle can often feel like trying to work your way through the storyline of a video game after skipping all of the dialogue screens that explain everything. What’s more important is that our protagonist reacts to this confounding experience by obsessively documenting it for an amateur film at the risk of her own safety & sanity. It can be difficult to track what the story is logically doing from minute to minute, but it all ultimately adds up to a Lovecraftian splatter comedy about amateur artists being driven mad by their own creativity. That’s a fitting theme for a no-budget movie made among friends that’s so ambitious in how it doles out its synths, gore, and ghosts that even this long-winded paragraph is only scratching the surface of its full narrative.

It does feel like a little bit of a betrayal to reduce Impossible Horror to its value as a backyard horror production & a nightmare-logic splatter comedy. Usually, horror films on this scale apologize for their limited means by leaning into their camp value, intentionally playing up their “so-bad-it’s good” humor. The earnestness of Impossible Horror is something much braver; its scares, jokes, and practical effects are all genuine attempts to make the best movie possible under the circumstances, all with a surprising success rate. The most poignant scene in the film is a voiceover performance from the protagonist as she shows her new ghost-hunter friend an old short film she made, continually apologizing for its quality in cruel self-deprecation. Every theme explored in the film is on display in full potency in that moment: how we’re haunted by our own past, the never-ending ways we self-harm, the insuppressible urge to keep making outsider amateur art even though putting your own work out in the world is fucking embarrassing. As fans of the microbudget horror genre on its own terms, Decloux & Milling instinctively understand the need to deliver the goods elsewhere, filling the screen with plenty gross-out gore & slapstick gags to entertain fellow fans of the Regional Horror tradition. What sets Impossible Horror apart from most of those self-published films, however, is its earnest, ambitious reach for something greater than a winking-at-the-camera joke. It’s wiling to comment at length about its own limited means, but only in a genuine exploration of how making art on this scale walks a fine line between partying with friends & overworking yourself into a lethal mania. Not everything it hurls at the screen to entertain the audience (and the creators) works, especially not all in tandem, but it does all amount to a genuinely satisfying reflection on the nature of loneliness & self-published art in the 2010s. It’s the kind of D.I.Y. art project that’ll make you want to seek out & support more outsider films on its scale & budget, if not make some of your own – perhaps to your own peril.

-Brandon Ledet

The Breaker Upperers (2019)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

Over the last decade, its gradually become clear that Taika Waititi is one of the greatest comedic directors of all time, full stop. From the farcical bloodbath of What We Do in the Shadows to the action-comedy grandeur of Hunt for the Wilderpeople, to the deep emotional incisions of Boy, Waititi has established a wide range of hilarious, finely-crafted comedic works in just a few features. He even overcame the Hollywood filmmaking odds to disrupt the MCU with some much-needed personality in series-standout Thor: Ragnarök. What’s much more interesting to me personally than what Waititi can achieve in the Kevin Feige Marvel Machine, however, is what smaller projects he chooses to fund with that massive paycheck. The Breaker Upperers, recently added to US Netflix, is an encouraging implication that Waititi’s still passionate about bringing smaller, personable comedies to the screen in the wake of his newfound success – cashing in his evil Disney Dollars to enact a real-world good.

The most exciting aspect of The Breaker Upperers is that it finds Waititi funding new creative voices with his newfound industry power rather than merely amplifying his own. The film is written, directed by, and starring two comedians from within his New Zealand community: Madeleine Sami & Jackie van Beek, who are obviously less widely known to the outside world. Although they share a certain local sensibility with Waititi’s own creative voice, Sami & van Beek bring a meaner, raunchier, more femme point of view to this debut feature — something I’d be eager to see more of in future follow-ups. They appear onscreen here as best friends & business partners — mercenaries who own a breakup-delivery service. The two women fake affairs, deaths, and pregnancies to help expedite the breakup process for cowards who can’t muster the courage to admit the truth to their partners that it’s time to move on. Eventually, the moral toll of lying for a living catches up with them, but the movie has as much fun with its initial premise as possible before the business of telling an emotionally satisfying story gets in the way.

There’s something distinctly 90’s-specific about The Breaker Upperers’s premise, as if it were a Kiwi-flavored soft-remake of the Norm MacDonald classic Dirty Work. As vintage as its plot may appear, however, the film nimbly avoids feeling stale or uninspired in its presentation. This is partly because it wastes no time establishing a first-act reason or backstory for its breakup-for-hire business the way the Happy Madison equivalent of this premise would. We join the women at work mid-stream, as if this were a The Movie adaptation of a sitcom that has already been running for years. The character nuances & the mercenary cruelty of the breakup-for-hire business are immediately well-defined enough for the rapid-fire editing to squeeze in as many goofs, gags, and friendship-dynamic crises as it can in its wonderfully slim 90min runtime. In their most inspired storytelling maneuver, Sami & van Beek establish their characters’ entire backstory as friends & business partners over the course of a single Céline Dion karaoke performance. It’s an efficiency that’s not only refreshing in the post-Apatow era of improv looseness, but also leaves more time for the character quirks & moment-by-moment gags that matter more than the plot anyway.

If you’re at all familiar with the Waititi comedy catalog, you’ll recognize plenty of faces among the film’s cast – including van Beek herself, who was a significant player in Shadows. More importantly, the film expands the New Zealand comedy scene’s presence in the word at large by offering Sami & van Beek their own platform where than can make us laugh on their own terms. This is a raunchy, queer, femme, goofy-as-fuck comedy with a big, earnest heart. It’s nice to know that something that distinct could be made on the back of the Mickey Mouse machine. Once again, Waititi has found a way to stand out as one of our most vital comedic voices, this time by signal-boosting the voices of others with his newfound industry clout.

-Brandon Ledet

Movies to See in New Orleans This Week 5/9/19 – 5/15/19

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Here’s a quick rundown of the movies we’re most excited about that are screening in New Orleans this week, just in case you have some free time outside the Mother’s Day Mayhem.

Movies We Haven’t Seen (Yet)

Pokémon: Detective Pikachu – Look, Ryan Reynolds turning Pikachu into Lil’ Deadpool sounds excruciating, but there’s still something incredibly exciting about watching a live-action Pokémon story on the big screen. We’ve had fun with a couple of the animated Pokémon movies in the past, so hopefully Reynolds’s snarky annoyances will be outweighed by the massive cuteness of seeing a big-screen Squirtle or whatever.

Wild Nights with Emily – Molly Shannon stars as Emily Dickinson in this playful revisionist drama that attempts to recontextualize the supposed reclusive-spinster poet as someone much more passionate & raucous. Playing only at The Broad.

Movies We’ve Already Enjoyed

Amazing Grace – A 1972 Aretha Franklin concert film that wasn’t fit for distribution until this year because of technical issues in its production (original director Sydney Pollack forgot to use clapperboards while filming, making editing the footage together a logistical nightmare). A one-of-a-kind theatrical experience nearly a half-decade in the making. Playing only at the new & improved Zeitgeist cinema in Arabi.

The Wrong Man (1956) – I’ll let Hitchcock himself describe what distinguishes this picture from his other thrillers that regularly play at The Prytania, borrowing his own introduction for the film wholesale: “This is Alfred Hitchcock speaking. In the past, I have given you many kinds of suspense pictures. But this time, I would like you to see a different one. The difference lies in the fact that this is a true story, every word of it. And yet it contains elements that are stranger than all the fiction that has gone into many of the thrillers I’ve made before.” Screening as part of The Prytania’s Classic Movies series Sunday 5/12 and Wednesday 5/15.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast Movie Report: Homecoming (2019), Amazing Grace (2019), and Guava Island (2019)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

For this week’s new-releases podcast report, Brandon and CC discuss three recent music-related features to commemorate festival season: Beyoncé’s Homecoming (2019), Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace (2019), and Childish Gambino’s Guava Island (2019). Enjoy!

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

– Brandon Ledet & CC Chapman

The Bedroom Window (1987)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Steve Guttenberg has a knack for playing silly characters.  Whether he’s roller-skating the streets of New York City in Can’t Stop the Music or goofing off as a wacky cop in Police Academy, Guttenberg’s natural comic essence always has a way of making me smile. How could he not with those innocent brown eyes and big rosy cheeks? In 1987, Guttenberg did something completely out of his realm and starred in Curtis Hanson’s psychological thriller, The Bedroom Window. To my surprise, he did a damn good job in what was essentially his first serious role in a major motion picture.

In The Bedroom Window, Guttenberg plays the role of Terry, a young professional having an affair with his boss’s wife, Sylvia (Isabelle Huppert). During one of their trysts, Sylvia witnesses a woman being attacked from Terry’s bedroom window. Thankfully, the assailant flees the scene after the woman begins to scream and a couple of people go out into the street to help her. Shortly after the incident, a woman turns up dead not far from Terry’s apartment, and Terry feels obligated to tell the police about what was seen from his bedroom window when the prior attack occurred. The only problem is that Terry didn’t actually witness anything; only Sylvia saw the attack. To protect Sylvia and keep their affair under wraps, Terry gets as much detail about the indecent from Sylvia as he possible can, and he lies to police about being a witness. From this point, Terry’s life goes to hell in a handbasket.

The surviving victim from the attack Terry fake-witnessed is a young waitress named Denise (Elizabeth McGovern), and she meets Terry when they both attempt to pick out the attacker from a police lineup, which they are not able to accomplish. One of the guys in the lineup, Carl (Brad Greenquist of Pet Sematary fame), sort of fits the description that Sylvia gave to Terry, so Terry does his own investigating. After following Carl in secret, Terry becomes positive that he is the attacker, and he immediately tells the police that he suddenly “remembered” seeing Carl attack Denise. He just keeps creating lie after lie to put Carl behind bars. Terry gets himself into this massive web of lies for two reasons. One reason is that he wants to protect Sylvia and report vital information that could potentially get a killer of the streets. The other reason, the more selfish reason, is that Terry wants fame. He wants to be the reason Carl goes behind bars, saving women from being murdered and assaulted. Unfortunately for Terry, everything sort of blows up in his face.

What I thoroughly enjoyed about this film is Guttenberg’s acting and McGovern’s surprising takeover of the screen. Guttenberg’s inherent innocence was vital for the role of Terry. Regardless of the douchey things that Terry does, we can’t help but be on his side. We want him to come out of this mess as the winner. If an actor that wasn’t as likeable as Guttenberg played Terry, The Bedroom Window would have played out very differently. As for McGovern, for the first half of the film, she’s in the background. We only know her as the victim of an attack, and she shows up in scenes very sparingly. Towards the latter half of the film, she becomes a total badass and plays a huge role in taking down her attacker. Of course, she and Terry become somewhat of an item, which is such a cliché, but you can’t help but love them.

The Bedroom Window is far from being one of the top films in the thriller genre, but it’s a good watch. There’s enough mystery and edge-of-your-seat moments to hold your attention until the very end, and most importantly, it’s got Guttenberg.

-Britnee Lombas

Pierrot Lunaire (2014)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Stuck between the sincere emotional devastation of Boys Don’t Cry and the over-the-top camp of Desperate Living, the 2014 adaption of Pierrot Lunaire is the story of a trans man’s tragic romance with a cisgender woman like no other filmmaker except Bruce LaBruce could tell it. The legendarily filthy queercore filmmaker first adapted the opera for the stage in 2011, clips of which are incorporated into this short, energetic feature in harsh collage. Filtering the story through a Guy Maddin-style Silent Era throwback, the text of the opera is not translated into English, but conveyed instead in frequently humorous silent film intertitles. The sounds of the opera itself are also interrupted by the pounding rhythms of gay club music, a stark contrast to the Marianne Faithful-esque vocals of the backing track. Vaudevillian pantomiming complicates the genuine raw emotion of a trans man struggling to be accepted as he is in the ancient past of the late 1970s. The titular “butch dandy” will humorously complain about the “foul indignity” of having to squat to piss in one breath of purple prose, then beat his own bound breasts with genuine, devastating pathos in the next. It’s strange; it’s self-contradictory; it’s both flippant & heartfelt. It’s queer as fuck. For better or worse, Pierrot Lunaire is pure Bruce LaBruce.

If Pierrot Lunaire has one Achilles heel it’s that, even at a mere 50 minutes, its narrative concept is too slight to fully support a feature. This is the exact kind of Guy Maddin-type experimental territory that’s typically relegated to the short film medium. Pierrot’s quest to be seen & treated as a man by his unwitting girlfriend & her “fat capitalist pig” father has a kind of inevitable tragedy to it, both due to the narrative structure of most operas & due to the types of gender transition stories that are most often told onscreen. LaBuce may color within those lines narratively, recalling far too many Oscar-thirsty misery tales to leave much of a storytelling impression, but the aggressively queer, expressionist lens he filters it through feels entirely foreign to the genre. Poetic double exposures of the full moon & projections of how Pierrot sees his true self in the mirror clash with over-the-top line deliveries of zingers like “Marlene Dietrich is more man than you’ll ever be,” & “I’m going to get the bottom of this if it’s the last bottom I get to.” Forever the artful pornographer, LaBruce also fills the screen with modern kink iconography: leather-clad masc strippers, strap-on dildos, burlesque routines, S&M gear, etc. The only element of straight-world prestige filmmaking present is that the film’s costumes were designed by Zaldi (costumer for heavyweights like Lady Gaga and RuPaul). The rest of the film is wild, queer, D.I.Y. punk excess with very little concern with taking the shape of mainstream trans tragedy narratives, defiantly so.

The politics of onscreen trans representation has evolved drastically since LaBruce first staged Pierrot Lunaire in 2011. Casting choices in his most recent film The Misandrists even suggests LaBruce has evolved with it. That means this film’s half-flippant, half-tragic tonal clash isn’t going to sit or age well for all audiences, the same way that Hedwig & The Angry Inch has awkwardly mutated over the past decade. As an experiment in avant-garde, genderfucked theatre, however, Pierrot Lunaire is far bolder & more adventurous than even Hedwig was in its own heyday. It’s a film that only concerns itself with extremes. When adapting a tragic trans story into a musical, it has to be a gut-wrenching opera and a vaudevillian Silent Era pastiche. When taking on notes of vintage horror it has to treat gender dysphoria as a self-endangering form of body horror and include sillier indulgences like Franksentein-style sci-fi, zombies, and glory hole guillotines. LaBruce will settle for no less than being a pornographer and a serious artist, a prankster and an emotive auteur, a radical philosopher and a campy provocateur. Pierrot Lunaire might struggle to keep up with the ever-evolving standard of representation politics or justify a feature length runtime, but it satisfies all of those self-contradictory goals with ease – no small feat.

-Brandon Ledet

High Life (2019)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

Oddly enough, two nights after I went and saw Knife+Heart, I took in a screening of High Life, the new English-language sci-fi horror film from French director Claire Denis, the visionary behind Un beau soleil intérieur and Beau travail. When asked by a friend how I liked them, I said “I loved Knife+Heart! It’s so French!” followed immediately by “I hated High Life! It’s so French!”

CW/TW: Discussion of on screen sexual assault. That’s way more of a warning than this movie gives you. Also, you know, there’s a scene in this movie where a female character rapes a sedated man to acquire his ejaculate, then squats and drips it out into her open palm so she can impregnate someone else. You know, for science.

In its defense, High Life is not a bad movie. It’s beautifully framed and edited, and the extended lingering shots of both the macrocosmic and the microcosmic–from the depths of space and all the beautiful delights and terrors that it contains to close-ups of eyes and protracted shots of delicate droplets of water on leaves—make for a beautiful experience on the big screen. But there’s also sexual assault aplenty, shot with the same cold indifference, not to mention flat performances from almost every member of the cast, all of whom you’ve seen give stronger, bolder performances in other things.

High Life tells (in non-chronological order) the story of Monte (Robert Pattinson), a mostly unwilling astronaut on a damned voyage. A convict serving a life sentence, he and other young prisoners in the same situation are placed aboard a utilitarian space ship for the purpose of determining if black holes can be used to provide a source of renewable energy. The captain, Chandra (Lars Eidinger) is the only person who is not a felon, and the life support on the ship demands he make a log entry every 24 hours, or the crew will die. The real authority, however, is Dibs (Juliette Binoche), a medical officer who killed her own children and now oversees the regulation of sedatives among the crew and is engaged in her own side experiment to try and create a perfect offspring, although her efforts have largely been in vain and none of the children survive, even if they make it to term. Members of the crew use “The Box,” a masturbatorium, to relieve their pent-up sexual frustrations, and Dibs collects DNA from all aboard as part of her “scientific” enquiry, most notably Ettore (Ewan Mitchell). Other crew members/prisoners of note include Tcherny (André Benjamin/3000) and Boyse (Mia Goth, of Suspiria); Tcherny is Monte’s only real friend, who reminisces about life on earth and the family he left behind, while Boyse is a deeply troubled and unpleasant woman who is the first and only mother on the ship to successfully bear a child, as the result of two separate sexual assaults.

I’m really not quite sure what to make of this movie. Were it directed by a man, we could call this film troublingly sexist and degrading and call it a day, but with Claire Denis at the helm, it’s not so easy. A lot of this is bound up in the treatment of Boyse, and the questions that revolve around her. She is utterly unlikable in every imaginable way, which speaks to Goth’s range, considering how much I enjoyed her turn in Suspiria. There’s something to admire in her declaration that “[her] body obeys [her]” after Ettore sexually assaults her, but we never learn what her crime was that landed her in prison and thus on this shit detail in the first place, and her willingness to kill Nansen (Agata Buzek), who attempted to come to her defense, further obscures any possibility that we could really understand Boyse. She’s more than just an animal running on instinct, but she’s wild in a way that makes it impossible to understand her actions or desires.

In addition to being non-linear, the film is deliberately obtuse and obscure when revealing details. No one on the ship ever recounts why they ended up there; we only learn of this from a brief scene aboard a train in which a young reporter interviews a man credited only as “Indian Professor” (Victor Banerjee). Very little takes place planetside: this Professor rides inside of a train, two children play with a dog that later dies, and Ettore and Boyse are also seen riding on the tops of a train (presumably not the same one but who knows) while Monte discusses what it was like to be a societal castoff and outcast. The traintop scenes are shot in the first person, but the audience is never given clarification of whether these are Monte’s memories or not, or if they are projections of his assumptions; after all, we later learn that the crime for which he is incarcerated occurred when he was a child, so it makes very little sense for him to be free and enjoying the lifestyle of a crusty wanderer as a young adult. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it shouldn’t matter. But to me, it does.

At a very cursory glance, the film seems to be attempting to create a narrative about the dehumanizing treatment of the incarcerated, perhaps weaving that together with a statement about overpopulation or resource allotment, or even eugenics. As a statement about any of these topics, the film is fairly shallow. Is the film about the fact that all human progress in some way relies upon exploitation of the labor of a lower class? Is it about historical precedent of experimentation on prisoners? Is it about countering the idealized speculative fiction narratives of Star Trek and its cohort that point toward a lofty future of post-scarcity humanitarian egalitarian utopiae by showing that space travel and technological advancement will really only show us our true, animalistic selves? Yes! To all those things! Maybe(?)! It’s also about 110 minutes long, but that still doesn’t really tell you anything, does it?

That’s what I mean by the film being “too French.” High Life is has awful lot of Big Ideas, but not much in the way of Big Statements. It would be intellectually dishonest to say “This film does not demonize the prison system,” because it clearly wants to and expects the audience to fill in those gaps; at the same time, it would be a more straightforward lie to say “This film demonizes the prison system,” because it never really does. We see that there are outright dangerous people in the system, like Dibs, as well as seemingly good people like Monte (it helps that his crime was one of passion that was in defense of a helpless animal, which is almost laughable in its lack of subtlety), and others who were perhaps decent but were pushed beyond their limits as the result of the dehumanization of incarceration, like Boyse and perhaps Ettore (I’m not saying that Ettore’s aggressive assault of Boyse isn’t morally reprehensible or that it’s an unavoidable consequence of being involuntarily celibate, just that the film might be making that argument). Is Denis’s thesis that even good and moral people will become monsters in a captive prison state? If so, it follows that murder and rape are inevitabilities in such a broken system, absolving the individual from both agency and responsibility, which is grotesque. The only person that we see rise above these moral lapses is Monte, whose only stated difference from his shipmates is the fact that he is voluntarily celibate, going so far as to even abstain from the dubious pleasures of “The Box.”

I’ve never seen any of Denis’s other work. The friend with whom I saw this movie is very pro-Denis; when I asked if he wanted to check this one out, he cited her as his favorite living director. He was rather pleased with this cinematic experience, noting that she had directed his favorite movie about cannibalism, which led to me asking about Raw (we also saw that one together), and he made the statement that Raw wouldn’t exist without Denis. That’s all well and good, but as my first foray into her oeuvre, I’m not sure that I’m impressed. The musical score is haunting, every actor gives a great performance, and many of the visuals are pure visual art, but on the whole, this is a film that I’m not sold on, and I’m not sure I’m sold on Denis. Looking back over her filmography, she’s made multiple films with Vincent Gallo, and even wanted him to star in this one, which makes me question a lot about her instincts (if you’ve ever accidentally swallowed something that had a label on it that says “Induce vomiting if consumed,” here’s a self-aggrandizing, Trump-worshipping essay by Gallo to get you started; my favorite commentary on it came from The Playlist, which wrote “[we] reached out to Roger Ebert for comment, [then] remembered that Roger Ebert passed away in 2013, and that Gallo is picking a fight with a dead film critic.”).

I’m not here to pick fights with anybody. Honestly, I’ve given a lot of other films credit that they didn’t deserve. But this one? Not so much. Its unimaginative plot is given the semblance of originality through an irregular nonlinear narrative structure, but that doesn’t make up for making a film that is a sad slog through human misery.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Knife+Heart (2019)

/ swampflix / 33 Comments

Never before have I ever seen a movie that was made for me the way that Un couteau dans le cœur (Knife+Heart) was. Seventies-set giallo featuring a masked killer in black leather gloves? Check. Queer story that focuses on a troubled woman who drinks herself into unconsciousness on a nightly basis and is unable to let go of a lost love? Check. Vertigo/Body Double-esque plot points about obsession with apparent doppelgangers? Check. M83-as-Goblin soundtrack? Check. A plethora of shots of old school film editing equipment being put to good use? Check. A peek behind the curtain of the seventies gay porn scene? Check! Women in white wandering around a forest as gales of wind blow all about them? You betcha. A strangely centric fable about grackles? Is it my birthday?

It’s 1979, Paris. Anne (Vanessa Paradis) makes “blue movies,” better known as gay pornography, along with her best friend Archie (Nicolas Maury), cameraman François (Bertrand Mandico) and her lover of ten years, Loïs (Kate Moran), although that relationship has recently come to an end. Tragedy strikes when one of her actors, the insatiable “Karl” (Bastien Waultier), is stabbed to death by a man in a terrifying full face mask after a night out cruising. As a result, Anne is interviewed by Inspector Morcini (Yann Collette); back in the studio, she retitles their current production to Homocidal and recreates this interaction with Archie in her place and heroin addict Thierry (Félix Maritaud, of BPM and Sauvage) and José (Noé Hernández) in the roles of the police. Anne recruits a new actor, Nans (Khaled Alouach), who is noted for his twin-like resemblance (not his twink-like resemblance, although that could also apply) to a former star of hers named Fouad, which is fortunate; after Thierry is also murdered, most of the actors fear returning to set. In her personal life, Anne spends her days drinking straight from the bottle of whisky that she keeps on herself at all times and stalking Loïs around nightclubs when she isn’t too drunk to move. After a third murder, Anne traces the clues to a forest that, according to folklore, is used for faith healing via grackle—as with most gialli, it only makes marginally more sense in context—where she finds a small cemetery and the grave of Guy (Jonathan Genet), and the answer to the identity and motivations of the killer.

The only negative thing that I can say about Knife+Heart is that the fact that it now exists means that I may now never finish my own giallo script (titled Profundo Giallo, naturally, because I am a NERD), which features many of the same narrative beats, although for the sake of future copyrights I should note that Gonzalez and I were both drawing from the same well of archetypical giallo ideas. Still, it may end up being difficult to prove that we independently came to the idea of having a queer character (Loïs here, Oliver in PG) whose relationship with a primary protagonist ended poorly discover a vital clue while reviewing grainy footage. Really, we’re just both putting the same twist on the standard giallo trope that I call “Obscured Clues,” which was the most frequently recurring narrative element in Argento’s Canon; that is, a character witnesses something that they do not initially realize is a clue and then struggle to recall its importance.

Knife+Heart is a neon saturated fever dream, and yet it holds together in a way that is truly astonishing and thoughtful, considering that multiple people get stabbed to death by a knife hidden inside of a makeshift phallus. It’s surely no coincidence that the film is set in 1979, on the eve of what we would come to know as the AIDS epidemic; the establishment of the era, represented by the police department and their dismissive treatment of the killings of Anne’s actors, is largely unconcerned with a series of tragedies that befall society’s “undesirables.” This is made more manifest by the way that the pretty young things are killed: in cruising bars and by-the-hour hotels, in alleys with needles in their arms, etc. I could honestly live the rest of my life in happiness without ever seeing another AIDS allegory film, but this one manages to weave subtlety into this tapestry, which makes for a better narrative overall. That this can happen in a movie that also features an actor campily full-on humping a typewriter in one of Homocidal’s scenes speaks to a strong directorial vision.

Anne is no doubt destined to be a divisive character; in his review for MovieJawn, Anthony Glassman writes that Paradis’s character “metamorphoses from a drunken psychopath into a driven and caring mother figure,” and although I was fully within Anne’s headspace, horrible person though she is at times, I can’t really disagree. Repeatedly, we see that she is incapable of accepting that her relationship with Loïs has come to an end, and we realize that this love is far from healthy, given both Anne’s obsession and Loïs’s inconsistency as she verbally spurns Anne over and over again while also leading her on and admitting that she still loves her. That this leads Anne to stalk Loïs around a nightclub saturated with over-the-top radiant lighting and finally confront (and assault) her makes Anne despicable but no less sympathetic. The film almost dares you to try and hate Anne, but if you’ve a queer person who has ever had your heart broken to the point that you drink yourself into a stupor on a nightly basis and wake up in strange places, then you understand every drive that Anne has, even if her actions are occasionally unforgivable.

This is best epitomized in one of the most underrated scenes in the film (I’ve seen no mention of it in any other reviews that I have read), in which Anne attends an art performance at a lesbian bar where the two participants are a woman in lingerie and another woman in a bear suit. The human character begs for the bear’s love, and the bear attempts to refuse, claiming that to love the woman is to destroy her, but the woman doesn’t care. To love is to be devoured; to love is to devour. As the bear demonstrates its love for the woman, its claws leaving theatrical trails of stage blood all over her body, the woman begs for this destruction, demands to be completely destroyed, and the bear can do nothing but oblige, its love is so all-consuming that neither of them can stop. It’s so fucking powerful and real. To love is to die; love is to kill. Love is to consume and be consumed until there is nothing left but char and ash and fragments that say to every passerby: “A fire was here, and it destroyed all that it touched, but in those moments of destruction, each thing touched was brighter than the sun.”

I could go on and on about this movie for about 10,000 more words, but not without spoiling anything (the Golden Mouth is a delight!). This is a delightfully and unabashedly queer movie, and the world has never seen anything like it. I can’t wait to see it again and again.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond