Anna and the Apocalypse (2018)

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Everything about Anna and the Apocalypse makes it sound like a one-of-a-kind novelty. Just the film’s basic descriptor as a Scottish, Christmas-themed, horror comedy zombie-musical screams cult classic in its uniqueness & specificity. That’s why it’s such a disappointment that watching the film is a safe, overly familiar experience, a deflating feeling that we’ve seen all this before. A thin smattering of its one-liners land; it has exactly one good Christmas-themed musical number; and it’s hung off an admittedly clever metaphor where the zombie Apocalypse (yawn) mimics teenage emotions of leaving your entire life behind after high school; but none of those minor successes are enough to overpower the feeling that everything onscreen is a well-trodden cliché. The R-rated campy gore is too safe & corny where it needs to be transgressive & over-the-top. Worse, it centers its narrative on the blandest Disney Channel-ready personalities it can conjure when there’s a much funnier, more distinct POV fighting for screen time as a side character – the worst case of that sin I’ve encountered since Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl.

The titular Anna is an escaped protagonist from a Disney Channel Original Movie – a high school teen worried about losing her friends & defying her dad’s wishes when she leaves town to travel after graduating high school. Her self-absorption about this personal crossroads compounds with the obnoxious atmosphere of Christmas Cheer to distract Anna and her friends from the fact that a Romero-type zombie Apocalypse is unfolding in the background – a longform gag lifted wholesale from Shaun of the Dead (except now filtered through Glee-style song & dance). In this new harsh reality, Anna no longer has the luxury of finding closure with her friends & loved ones when high school ends, as they are all eaten alive by the flesh-craving undead before her eyes. We tenderly say goodbye to characters one by one as if we’ve gotten to know them over seasons of television instead of a few short minutes of rapid exposition, while the least compelling one of the bunch is featured front & center as the inevitable Final Girl. The CG blood-splatter & Avril Lavigne level “punk” showtunes do little to flavor that genre-faithful tedium and Anna and the Apocalypse mostly plays like the Kidz Bop version of a more memorable picture.

I don’t want to portray this film as an entirely negative, worthless experience. A few flashes of humor do break through the Yuletide schmaltz to offer a taste of what could have been: a one-liner like “Christmas is quickly becoming my least favorite C-word” or a salacious song addressed to Santa Claus that offers to “warm his milk” and invites him to “unload his sack.” I was also often taken with an uptight lesbian side character whose quiet indignity throughout the zombie invasion is both hilarious & endearing in a way few other things onscreen are. All the specificity missing from the protagonist’s POV is hiding just offscreen with a put-upon ball of nerves who generates more pathos & comedic tension than the rest of the cast combined in what little screen time she can scrape together (in a movie-stealing performance from Sarah Swire). None of these momentary respites are enough to save Anna and the Apocalypse from its lowly status as camp cinema for normies. The movie doesn’t even have the decency to be over-the-top gawdy camp like The Greatest Showman. It instead achieves something as pedestrian as that one musical-themed episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Plenty of people love Buffy, and that’s okay. I genuinely hope they get a kick out of this movie too, as it has the structural bones of something that should have stolen my heart. Instead, I spent most of the film bored, wishing I could listen to the horny Santa Claus song again or, better yet, follow Swire’s character in a much weirder, more gleefully perverse horror comedy – musical or no.

-Brandon Ledet

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

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In the abstract, the concept of a 2010s CG animation Spider-Man origin story sounds dreadful. In practice, prankster screenwriter Phil Lord explodes the concept into a wild cosmic comedy by making a movie about the world’s over-abundance of Spider-Man origin stories (and about the art of CG animation at large). Into the Spider-Verse is a shockingly imaginative, beautiful, and hilarious take on a story & medium combo that should be a total drag, but instead is bursting with energetic life & psychedelic creativity. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t seen the feat achieved onscreen with my own two eyes – which are still sore from the vibrant, hyperactive swirl of interdimensional colors & spider-people that assaulted them in gloriously uninhibited 3D animation.

Even if Into-the Spider-Verse had stuck to a single, straightforward Spider-Man origin story, it chose the exact one that could have kept the formula fresh for a modern audience. Afro-Latino teen dweeb Miles Morales is a welcome deviation in representation from the countless white-boy Peter Parkers who have swung across the screen over the years. Miles inhabits a hip-hop centric version of NYC that’s largely missing from the rest of the Spider-Man canon- represented in graffiti bombing, boomboxes, earbuds blaring legitimate radio-rap tunes, and a social pressure to code-switch when attending a predominately white school for the gifted. It’s a refreshing perspective for a Spider-Man universe NYC . . . until the obligatory machinations of the Spider-Man origin story take over the plot. When Miles is bitten by a radioactive spider, the audience has an all-too-clear idea of where his story will & should go as he transforms into an unlikely, geeky superhero. Except, Phil Lord immediately dislodges this story from that well-established groove to chase something much more unpredictable & self-aware.

Two distinct narrative deviations disrupt the typical Spider-Man origin story trajectory once Miles is bitten by that spider. First, he becomes aware that he’s living in a comic book. His inner thoughts become deafening narration he cannot escape, and his world is suddenly contained in Ben Day Dots and sectioned-off panels. Second, he becomes aware that his is not the only Spider-Man comic book. In fact, there are countless variations on the Spider-Man origin story that exist in a vast multiverse that begins to perilously overlap with his own. These variations include novelty spider-people like Spider-Man Noir (Nic Cage) & Spider-Ham (John Mulaney), whose outlandishness could not be further from Miles’s grounded hip-hop version of reality. Miles’s first-act run-in with a radioactive spider (and subsequent heartbreak with the tragic death of a family member) may be as consistent with Spider-Man lore as the NYC setting, but the comic book environments & quest to reconstruct the multiverse in proper order that result form that bite feel wildly imaginative for the material.

Those comic book environments & psychedelic multiverse overlaps do more than just open the Spider-Man origin story to exiting new avenues; they also allow for experimentation in CG animation that feels like a huge creative breakthrough for the medium. Where most modern animation pictures feel flat & unimaginative in their design, Spider-Verse is overflowing with ideas. The Ben Day Dots, panel divisions, and deliberately off-set screen-printing effect of its comic book design afford it a distinctly retro visual style, one enhanced by the claymation effect of its off-kilter frame rate. The endless possibilities of its collapsing multiverse also invite a total surreal meltdown of psychedelic colors & shapes, transforming Miles’s grounded NYC into a melted-candy nightmare. I usually dread CG animated kids’ movies even more than I dread the latest needless reboot of Spider-Man. Both of those well-worn mediums subverted & exploded my expectations for what they could achieve in this out-of-nowhere visual stunner, often multiple times in a single scene.

The only arena in which Into the Spider-Verse falls a little short is in eliciting a genuine emotional response for Miles’s journey from geek to hero. It’s a little difficult to lose yourself in his story when the visual language of the film is so (literally) flashy, and when other Spider-Men are on-hand to make self-aware, Deadpool-lite references to things like the character having “an excellent theme song & a so-so popsicle.” Every time a new, outlandish spider-person appears to announce, “Let’s start from the beginning one last time,” it’s an amusing joke at the expense of the character’s endless parade of reboots. However, by extension that also means it’s at the expense of Miles Morales, who likely deserved to have a straight-forward, gimmick-free Spider-Man origin story more than any other version of the character we’ve seen in the countless live action adaptations before him—one that’s likely to never arrive now.

The most emotional I got in Into the Spider-Verse was in an end-credits acknowledgement of the character’s creators – Steve Ditko & Stan Lee, who both died last year. Whether or not its boundless creativity left room for genuine pathos, Into the Spider-Verse feels like as perfect of an encapsulation of everything that collaboration inspired as you’ll ever see – both in its scramble to gather every variation of the character it can and in its vivid graphic artistry. I went into Spider-Verse expecting a humorous, satisfactory reboot of a character who’s been through the ringer too many times to yield any true surprises. I was frequently surprised and more than merely satisfied by the psychedelic, playfully meta spectacle that unfolded, then imploded before me instead. By the end of the film I could only cite one unturned stone that felt like a true missed opportunity, and then that exact gag ended up being a standalone scene after the end credits. The movie is that good.

-Brandon Ledet

Brandon’s Top Films of 2018

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1. The Wild Boys – As an art film oddity & a transgressive object, this gem lives up to the “wild” descriptor of its title in every conceivable way, delivering everything you could possibly want from a perplexing “What the fuck?” cinematic bazaar. More importantly, though, Wild Boys is thoroughly, defiantly genderfucked – a freshly radical act of nouveau sexual politics represented via the tones & tools of the ancient past. All of its psychedelic beauty & nightmarish sexual id is filtered through an early 20th Century adventurers’ lens, feeling simultaneously archaic & progressive in its subversions of gender & sexuality. It looks like Guy Maddin directing an ancient pervert’s wet dream, both beautifully & brutally old-fashioned in its newfangled deconstruction of gender.

2. Double Lover – Not your average, by-the-books erotic thriller, but rather a deranged masterpiece, a horned-up nightmare. Double Lover’s basic premise is a familiar template, but as it spirals out into total madness there’s no bounds to its erotic mania, which is communicated through an increasingly intense list of sexual indulgences: incest, body horror, gynecological close-ups, bisexual orgies, negging, pegging, “redwings,” erotic choking, and nightmarish lapses in logic that, frankly, make no goddamn sense outside their subliminal expressions of psychosexual anxiety. It’s a gorgeous work of fine art that disarms its audience with its nonstop onslaught of inelegant prurience as a means of crawling under our skin and rotting us from the inside.

3. Mandy – So sinisterly beautiful & deafening that its aesthetic indulgences become a grotesque, horrifying display. This is less of a revenge thriller than it is a Hellish nightmare, a dream logic horror-show that drifts further away from the rules & sensory palettes of reality the deeper it sinks into its characters’ trauma & grief. Nic Cage may slay biker demons & religious acid freaks with a self-forged axe in a neon-lit, alternate dimension 1980s, but Mandy is not headbanging party metal. It’s more stoned-and-alone, crying over past trauma to doom riffs metal, where the flashes of fun & cosmic absurdity are only reminders of how cruelly uncaring & meaningless it can feel to be alive.

4. Dirty Computer – A fifty-minute narrative film stringing together an anthology of music videos with a dystopian sci-fi wraparound, this “emotion picture” delivers on the genre film undertones promised in Janelle Monáe’s early pop music career while also advancing the visual album as a medium to a new modern high. There are seven different directors listed as having collaborated on individual segments of Dirty Computer, but Monáe clearly stands out as the auteur of the project. A large part of that auteuism is how the film works as an expression of her newly public identity as a queer black woman navigating an increasingly hostile world that targets Others in her position, to the point where a tyrannical government facility is literally draining the gay out of her in tubes of rainbow ooze before she rises against them in open bisexual rebellion.

5. Sorry to Bother You – Incredibly dense, gleefully overstuffed sci-fi satire about the Amazon Prime-sponsored hellscape we’re already living in today – just bursting with things to say about race, labor, wealth, and the art of selling out. I can see how this movie’s third-act rug-pull could make a lot of people wince at it for going too far over-the-top, but that’s exactly when it went from good to great for me. The fact that it’s never satisfied with exploring one idea at a time when it could just as easily flood the screen with thousands is what endears it to me as one of the year’s clear stand-outs; more films cold benefit from being this wild & unrestrained, subtlety be damned.

6. Paddington 2 – There has always been dissent against the wholesome tweeness of visual artists like Michel Gondry & Wes Anderson, but those naysayers typically don’t give full credit to the deeply devastating sadness that lurks just under their works’ meticulously manicured surfaces. Paddington 2 nails both sides of that divide – the visually precious and the emotionally fragile – while teaching kids an important lesson about applying simple concepts like politeness & manners to their interactions with social & cultural outsiders. We always say we wish more children’s films were ambitious in their craft & purposeful in their thematic messaging; Paddington 2 wholly satisfies both demands.

7. Annihilation – It’s a shame more people didn’t take a chance on this Alex Garland sci-fi stunner when it was on the big screen. On one level, it’s just a visually gorgeous, weirdo monster movie that reimagines Tarkovsky’s Stalker with a Tumblr-ready pastel color palette & more traditional genre thrills. On a deeper level, though, it’s a powerful reflection on how grief & trauma transform us into entirely different people, to the point where that change becomes physical & irreversible. Haunting stuff.

8. Upgrade – The very real, very macho anxiety of approaching obsoletion at the hands of automated future-tech is shown in gloriously over-the-top extreme, where a once-mighty macho man now needs a computer’s help to even move a single muscle, much less stage a gory revenge mission against an effete Elon Musk archetype. Upgrade has an entirely different plot & satirical target than RoboCop, but the way it buries that social commentary under a thick layer of popcorn movie Fun that can just as easily be read at face value is very much classic Verhoeven. It’s a subversive, playing-both-sides tone that’s exceedingly difficult to pull off without tipping your hand, which is what makes this sci-fi action gem so instantly recognizable as a modern genre classic.

9. Cam – Between its Unfriended-style user interface horror about the Evils of the Internet and its smutty Brian De Palma modes of building tension through eerie sexual menace, this movie is so extremely weighted to things I personally love to see in cinema that my adoration for it was practically predestined. A neon-lit, feminist cyberthriller about modern sex work, Cam was custom-built to be one of my favorite films of the year just on the strengths of its subject matter & visual aesthetics alone. It’s only lagniappe, then, that the film is excellently written, staged, and performed – offering a legitimacy in craft to support my default-mode appreciation of its chosen thematic territory.

10. You Were Never Really Here – Director Lynne Ramsay’s latest grime-coated vision of a real-world Hell obscures the emotional release of traditional macho revenge thrillers by focusing only on the violence’s anticipation & resulting aftermath, never the act itself. You Were Never Really Here’s artistic merits are found almost entirely in its editing room tinkering, searching for freshly upsetting ways to depict onscreen violence by both lingering on its brutality and removing all of its tangible payoff. In crime thriller terms, this resembles the skeletal structure of a Liam Neeson-starring Dadsploitation power fantasy, but its guts are all the emotional, gushy stuff most action films deliberately avoid. And because this is a Lynne Ramsay picture, those guts are laid out to rot & fester.

11. BlacKkKlansman – As its buddy cop & blacksploitation throwback narratives power through their natural conclusions, BlacKkKlansman pretends to be a straight-faced, well-behaved participation in old-fashioned genre tropes meant to leave audiences entertained & satisfied. Then all of that easy, comforting payoff is swept away with an epilogue that effectively punches the audience in the gut, reminding us that we’re not supposed to feel good about the way the past has shaken out, that the modern world remains messy & nauseating in a way that can’t be captured in a fully satisfied genre exercise. Spike Lee knows exactly how storytelling conventions have trained audiences to expect easy, comforting resolutions to even the most sickening thematic territory, and he’s found potent, purposeful ways to weaponize that against us.

12. Unsane – Filmed on an iPhone and shamelessly participating in every mental institution thriller cliché you can imagine, Unsane is a Soderberghian experiment in the lowest rung of genre filth. It uses that unlikely platform to explore themes ranging from capitalist greed in modern medical & prison systems to male-dominated institutions’ flagrant dismissal of the concerns of women to the power dynamics of money & gender in every conceivable tier of society. Unsane experiments with a teetering balance between microbudget exploitation cinema & power-skeptical radical politics. They’re two flavors that shouldn’t mix well together in a single container but do find a chemically explosive reaction in the clash.

13. Flames – A collaboration between two filmmakers & conceptual artists documenting the rise & fall of their own romance, Flames presents a scenario where not being able to tell what’s genuine & what’s performance art can have emotionally devastating effects on a real-life relationship. Instead of merely manipulating audience perception, the filmmakers manipulate their own understanding of what’s even happening in their own lives, turning the already volatile emotional powder keg of a passionate romance into a daily terror of bruised egos, questionable motives, and petty acts of self-serving cruelty. It’s deeply fascinating, but it’s also deeply fucked up.

14. Shirkers – This documentary figuratively hit close to home with me in its profile of a D.I.Y. art project tragedy, but it also literally, geographically hit close to home with me in the trajectory of its narrative. I was pleasantly surprised to personally connect with the film as a self-portrait of a socially tactless, self-sabotaging D.I.Y. artist; director Sandi Tan got through to me via the merits of her brutal self-honesty & her authentic zine culture aesthetic. More superficially, she also got through to me with her story’s exponentially rapid trajectory to my front doorstep. It’s shocking how much of this story about a conflict that begins in Singapore finds its way to Mid-City New Orleans.

15. Eighth Grade – With a piercingly astute eye for the way social media has reshaped & mutated adolescent anxiety into an entirely new beast, Eighth Grade excels both as a snapshot of what life online looks like in the 2010s and as a distinct, character-driven drama even when removed from its of-the-moment focus on social media. Reductively speaking, it also excels as an anxiety Litmus test. You can either read its plot as a relatively low-stakes depiction of an adorable teen girl’s final week of middle school or as a horrifyingly relatable depiction of an anxious mess puzzling her way through a world that no longer seems conquerable & a changing self-identity she has little control over. I was personally watching it through my fingers as if it were a jump scare-heavy slasher.

16. Vox Lux – Brutal and coldly funny like a Yorgos Lanthimos film, yet absurdly earnest like a Mommie Dearest melodrama. A distanced philosophical statement on the current shape of Western pop culture, but also a gleefully perverse, intimate portrait of a woman behaving monstrously. Like mother!, Vox Lux is a divisive, shamelessly unsubtle work that gets outright Biblical in its internal, philosophical conflicts. It dares you to hate it, then asks for forgiveness. It spits in your face, then blows you a kiss.

17. The Favourite – No matter how wild or devilishly cruel The Favourite may seem in a costume drama context, it’s also a rare glimpse of Yorgos Lanthimos on his best behavior. Part of this smoothing out of his most off-putting impulses is due to the setting; an 18th Century royal court is the exact right place for buttoned-up, emotionally distanced mockery of “civility,” whereas it often feels alien or robotic in his more modern settings. Still, the jokes fly faster & with a newfound, delicious bitchiness. The sex & violence veer more towards slapstick than inhuman cruelty. The Favourite is Lanthimos seeking moments of compromise & accessibility while still staying true to his distinctly cold auteurist voice – and it’s his best film to date for it.

18. Beast – Partly a murder mystery concerning missing young girls in an isolated community, but mostly a dark romance tale about two dangerous people who can’t help but be pulled into each other’s violent orbits. There’s a distinctly literary vibe to Beast, nearly bordering on a Gothic horror tradition, that almost makes its modern setting feel anachronistic. The intense, primal attraction at the film’s core and the seedy murder mystery that challenges that passion’s boundaries make it feel like Wuthering Heights by way of Top of the Lake, like a modern take on Beauty & the Beast (except with two beasts).

19. Good Manners – On a horror movie spectrum, this is more of a gradual, what-the-fuck mind melt than a haunted house carnival ride with gory payoffs & jump scares at every turn. Descriptors like “queer,” “coming of age,” “romantic,” “body horror,” and “creature feature” can only describe the movie in spurts as it loses itself in the genre wilderness chasing down the details of its own nature & narrative. It’s an unconventional story about unconventional families, one where romantic & parental anxieties are hard to put into words even if they’re painfully obvious onscreen. Anyone with a hunger for dark fairy tales and sincerely dramatic takes on centuries-old genre tropes are likely to find a peculiar fascination with the subtle, methodical ways it bares its soul for all to see. Just don’t expect the shock-a-minute payoffs of a typical monster movie here; those are entirely secondary, if they can be detected at all.

20. Hereditary– Requires a little patience in allowing it to establish its peculiar version of atmospheric dread, but once the nightmare imagery & themes of familial resentment start piling up it more than makes up for the unease of that early stretch. Where it overachieves is in anchoring all of its glorious 70s-throwback horror vibes & stage play familial viciousness to the best Toni Collette acting showcase since Muriel’s Wedding (give or take a season of United States of Tara). You can’t overvalue a novelty like that.

-Brandon Ledet

Movies Screening in New Orleans This Week 1/3/19 – 1/9/19

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Here’s a quick round-up of the movies we’re most excited about that are screening in New Orleans this week.  In case you can’t tell, we’re starting to get into that glorious time of the year where Oscar Hopefuls trickle down South from NY & LA while dirt-cheap genre films simultaneously get dumped into wide-release. It’s a very satisfying, weirdly incongruous overlap.

Movies We Haven’t Seen (Yet)

If Beale Street Could Talk – Barry Jenkins follows up his Best Picture winner Moonlight with an adaptation of a James Baldwin novel set in 1970s Harlem. From what I can tell without spoiling it for myself, it appears to be brimming with gorgeous costumes, sensual romance, and a seething indictment of America’s inherently racist system of “justice.” Looks heavy, but emotionally powerful.

Escape Room – Whether it’s “Truth or dare?,” Pokémon Go, or CandyCrush, it seems like there’s always an early-in-the-year horror release waiting to exploit a silly game or novelty fad for cheap, goofy scares. This year, the random topic generator landed on escape rooms, which should be as good for a dumb-fun time at the movies as anything.

Mortal Engines – A steam punk action-fantasy epic about warring cities on wheels. Appears to fall halfway between Howl’s Moving Castle & Mad Max: Fury Road.  I doubt it’s half as good as either of those comparison points, but it looks impressively silly and this is likely its last week on local big screens.

Movies We Already Enjoyed

All About Eve (1950) – A classic Big Studio melodrama starring Bette Davis as an aging Broadway star who must fight to maintain her profession & fame in the face of a power-hungry fan who intends to usurp her. It won an impressive six Academy Awards in its day (including Best Picture) and is as excellent of a Bette Davis acting showcase as any you’ll see. Playing Sunday 1/6 & Wednesday 1/9 as part of Prytania’s Classic Movies series.

The Favourite – Yorgos Lanthimos follows up the stubbornly obscure The Killing of a Sacred Deer with his most accessible feature yet: a queer, darkly funny costume drama about a three-way power struggle between increasingly volatile women (Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, and Rachel Weisz). It’s both a gorgeous laugh riot and a pitch-black howl of unending cruelty & despair. Fun!

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse – In the abstract, the concept of a 2010s CG animation Spider-Man origin story sounds dreadful. In practice, prankster screenwriter Phil Lord explodes the concept into a wild cosmic comedy by making a movie about the world’s over-abundance of Spider-Man origin stories (and about the art of CG animation at large). Spider-Verse is a shockingly imaginative, beautiful, and hilarious take on a story & a medium that should be a total drag, but instead is bursting with energetic life & psychedelic creativity.

-Brandon Ledet

Parisian Love (1925)

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If you ignore the Hollywood Babylon-type tabloid coverage of her life, the most outstanding thing about Old Hollywood starlet Clara Bow is the sheer volume of work she managed to produce in the 20s & 30s. Starring in nearly 60 pictures total, as one of the few performers who successfully transitioned from the Silent Era to talkies, Bow was often locked in a Roger Corman-type schedule of filming several projects at once. As such, it’s a little difficult to determine which titles are worth your time. In 1925 alone, Clara Bow starred in 14 feature films, making nondescript titles like Parisian Love seem like they’re worth slightly less than a dime-a-dozen. Her career-making performance in 1927’s It inspired the term “it girl;” her early-career fashion choices in films like Poisoned Paradise & Daughters of Pleasure helped inspire the character design for Betty Boop (along with singer Helen Kane). By comparison, Parisian Love is just another face in the crowd; it wasn’t even the most significant film of that year for Bow, not in when compared to commercial hits like The Plastic Age. Still, as an hour-long taste of the boundary-testing, plucky sexuality that made Bow such a magnet for public fascination, it feels like a significantly risqué, defiant work.

Clara Bow stars as a street-tough “Apache” – an early 20th Century hooligan running wild in the streets of Belle Époque France. Working small-level con jobs, dressing in male drag, staging bar fights, and openly mocking police & social elites, she’s a Turn of the Century punk – one who only cares about her fellow Apache lover. Most of Parisian Love concerns a revenge mission to win this lover back when a member of the wealthy Parisian elite effectively “steals her man” by making him into a proper gentleman. After a botched burglary of the house of an upstanding science professor, their intended mark takes a liking to her injured lover and takes him under his wing, much to Bow’s jealousy. The queer implications of this love triangle are not subtle. The professor is obviously in love with his Apache ward – using the sexual surrogate of wealthy women worthier of his class to make-out with the injured thief while he looks on intently. Bow’s lovesick scamp also witnesses these commissioned kisses and enacts her revenge by seducing & marrying the professor to effectively rob him blind while rousing the jealousy of their shared rags-to-riches lover. It’s a story that would traditionally end in tragedy, but instead plays out here in straightforward romantic melodrama.

The queer implications of its love triangle feel slightly risqué for its time and the story is refreshingly reluctant to punish its criminal Parisian street punks for their transgressions the way it would have under the soon-to-come Hays Code, but that’s not what makes the movie a joy to watch. Parisian Love is mostly enjoyable for allowing Bow to play a lying, stealing, punch-throwing, crossdressing badass on a mission. She kicks wealthy old men who sexually corner “the help” at parties. Her tendency to dress in drag on her heist jobs gives the appearance of two “men” kissing onscreen. Her confidence in rallying other Apache toughies to aid in her revenge mission (with promises to share the professor’s stolen wealth, of course) is refreshingly non-“ladylike” for an Old Hollywood sex symbol. I watched Parisian Love the same day that the racetrack near my house opened for its first race of the season. It’s a Thanksgiving tradition, where young New Orleans punks & weirdos dress up like the social elite in a kind of wealth-drag for early afternoon cocktails before dispersing for family meals. I got the same sense from Clara Bow in Parisian Love – a snotty punk gone undercover among socialites, dressed in their garb but not in their values. I can’t pretend to have seen enough Clara Bow pictures to know how that image fits into her massive catalog, but it did feel incredibly, defiantly punk in a 1920s context – making it clear to me why people fell in love with her so thoroughly in her heyday.

-Brandon Ledet

L’Age d’Or (1930)

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The short-form collaboration between surrealist masters Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou, is standard Film Class 101 material by now. I’m saying this as someone who’s never actually taken a proper film course, but has been shown the film in creative writing lectures, heard it referenced in Pixies lyrics, and (most recently) seen Agnes Varda mull over its legacy in her recent art instillation documentary Faces Places. The juxtaposed images of clouds intersecting the moon and a cow’s eyeball being cut-open with a straight razor are an especially gory slice of early cinema just as fundamental to the medium as Méliès’s trip to the moon, Charlie Chaplin’s sliding through machine gears, and a steam engine train rapidly approaching the screen. It feels ignorant, then, that I was not aware of the 17min short’s feature length follow-up, L’Age d’Or. His second collaboration (and final, due to a social falling-out) with Salvador Dali, L’Age d’Or was Buñuel’s first feature-length film. It maintains the surreal juxtaposition of highly political, violently non-sequitur imagery from Un Chien Andalou, but this time hung off a more recognizable narrative and sustained for a full hour. As that story is remarkably thin & self-subverting, however, L’Age d’Or often plays like a loose anthology of comically surreal vignettes; it’s essentially a sketch comedy revue with a fine art pedigree. That kind of highfalutin pranksterism is very much on-brand for both Dali & Buñuel (who would later reuse a lot of images & political tactics from this feature debut in works like The Exterminating Angel) so it’s bizarre to me that this work isn’t cited more often along with Un Chien Adalou as a significant text.

In addition to being a loose collection of silly non-sequiturs, L’Age d’Or might also be undervalued because it’s such a cheaply horny work. The thin narrative that binds its anthology of vignettes concerns a romantic couple among social elites who really want to fuck, but keep getting cockblocked by the wealth class & The Church. The pair lustily make eyes across the room at various social get-togethers until they passionately go at it, right there in public, only to be pulled apart mid-coitus. Even considering the flagrant sexuality of Pre-Code Hollywood films like Baby Face, this animalistic lust feels absolutely scandalous in a 1930s context—something Buñuel gleefully juxtaposes with the rigid social propriety of wealthy social events & religious ceremony. The sexual activity depicted onscreen is far from pornographic, but it is scandalous all the same: fantasies about a woman’s stockinged legs, muddy bouts of public exhibitionism, the fellating of fingers & toes, a minutes-long tribute to de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, etc. These acts themselves doesn’t matter as much as the elite’s response to them. High society types ignore incongruous, troubling events like the murder of a child, the intrusion of a comically oversized chariot helmed by drunks, and the posthumous decay of Catholic higher-ups who rot on beaches in their finest robes. However, any display of sexual impropriety sends them into a riotous uproar, and they continually tear the two lovers away any chance they find to go at it. It’s all the same hypocritical tension between proper manners & animal desires that would continue throughout Buñuel’s career. Yet, its arrival at such an early stage of cinema combines with the ramshackle DIY energy of a creator at the beginning of their career to make for something distinctly fascinating.

It’s said Buñuel was a new adapter of cinema as a medium around the time of Un Chien Andalou & L’Age d’Or, so it’s difficult to pinpoint which aspects of his work were intentional rule-breaking pranks and which were novice mistakes. Buñuel shot L’Age d’Or entirely in-sequence and without cutting any footage in the editing room; all exposed filmstock is included in the final product. One of the earliest French films to use sound, the film features both spoken dialogue & silent film intertitles as if it weren’t sure what to do with the technology. Often, the only auditory elements included beyond the music are of sound effects like gun shots & slaps. Sometimes this feels like an uneasy filmmaker not properly using all the tools in their arsenal. Often, however, it plays like just as much of a prank as the film’s horned-up plot, especially in the case of a toilet flush sound effect accompanying the image of bubbling water. Buñuel opens L’Age d’Or with a short documentary about scorpions that seemingly has nothing to do with “plot” in any direct, discernible way, but its inclusion feels like an artist who knows exactly what reaction they’re intending to evoke. Later, he documents modern Rome with the wildly uneven cinematography of someone who’s never held a camera before in their life. In either case, it’s a young, defiant personality thumbing their nose at the already-established rules of a still-developing artform, while weaponizing that new artform against the hypocrisy & wealth disparity of an amoral, grotesque society. That throwing-punches-before-figuring-out-the-rules attitude affords L’Age d’Or an infectious DIY punk spirit, even if Buñuel would later better hone his skills in more put-together ruminations on the same topic.

As a lover of both pretentious smut & silly hijinks, I couldn’t help but be enamored by L’Age d’Or. The ancient cinematic depictions of gore & fornication fully satisfy my instant-gratification need for pure entertainment value, while the inclusion of Surrealist heavy-hitters like Dali & Max Ernst (who appears in a minor role) as collaborators allows me to pretend I’m watching Important Art. I understand how the prurient subject matter & the extended runtime might keep it from being as standard of a classroom tool as Un Chien Andalou, but you can easily detect its influence on important, artsy-fartsy filmmakers as wide-ranging as David Lynch, Ken Russell, Roy Andersson, Guy Maddin, and Monty Python throughout. That’s wonderful to able to say about a series of sketches detailing a romantic couple’s thwarted attempts to fuck in public.

-Brandon Ledet

Zama (2018)

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In the opening sequence of Lucrecia Martel’s Zama, the titular government goon stands on a South American beach, longingly staring at the open water. His anguish in that thousand-yard-stare is twofold: a lonely desire to reconnect with his wife & children in his Spaniard home country and, more prominently, a soul-crushing boredom. All around him indigenous people are living their normal lives: sunbathing, chatting, playing in the sand with loved ones. Meanwhile, his own life is locked in a permanent stasis, as if his assigned post as a magistrate for the Spanish crown were a prison sentence, not an honor. It’s an excruciating fate, but he deserves worse.

Diego de Zama’s fate of being permanently stuck in a foreign land he finds to be a soul-crushing bore is a purely existential kind of torment. He pleads to higher-ups in the Spanish government from every possible angle, including letters to the Crown, to release him from this hellish Limbo, to no avail. If Zama were a moralistic tale about the evils of 17th Century colonialism, this professional prison where its wicked lead awaits a transfer that’s never to come might play like a just, torturous punishment for the sins of Spanish occupation he’s in charge of administering in Paraguay. Instead, the film plays the torture as a more surreal, existential plight; his punishment is made all the harsher & more satisfying because it is entirely meaningless and void of intent.

The bored, anguished stasis of Zama pushes beyond real-world logic to reach the surreal, philosophical existentialism of works like The Exterminating Angel & Waiting for Godot. The film’s mocking of civility is especially Buñuelian, as Diego de Zama & his fellow in-Limbo cohorts foolishly attempt to maintain their homeland nobility despite the indignity of their posts. Their white legislative wigs & vibrantly dyed fabrics look absolutely absurd in the Natural environments they’re tasked to occupy & govern. The juxtaposition of their heartless brutality & mannered civility is often allowed to clash for dark humor, as in scenes where the Spanish government goons enslave or beat locals and then politely kiss each other on the cheek according to custom. Just as often as it’s bleakly humorous, however, Zama allows the out-of-place quality of its damned protagonist to hang in the air for eerie surreality.

I won’t pretend that I fully understood the themes or drama of Zama beyond its existential anguish & mockery of civility, but I was often struck by the potency of its imagery anyway. Lamas, fish scales, naked children, and skin dyed red & blue disorient the eye with continual surprise, despite the contained, reality-bound premise. Diego de Zama is tasked with capturing a local rapist/murderer and bringing him to justice. This seems like a straightforward enough task, but it’s somehow played to be as pointlessly absurd as any of his other assigned duties. His distanced relationship with his family and his treatment of local black bodies as tools & furniture seem similarly ripe for narrative propulsion but are left to rot in discomfort along with the protagonist. Mostly, Zama functions as an eerie nightmare of Natural images, like a costume drama version of Icaros: A Vision. There are certainly historical & thematic elements of the film that sailed miles over my head, but being perplexed by a well-crafted image is its own kind of pleasure.

-Brandon Ledet

Sylvie et le Fantôme (1946)

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The final film in the Claude Autant-Laura box set Four Romantic Escapes from Occupied France (for our other reviews look here), Sylvie et le Fantome is the most famous of the four due to its clever visual effects and a starring role for future beloved director Jacques Tati. Before writing, directing, and starring in the ‘Monsieur Hulot’ films, a youthful Tati incorporates his signature graceful slapstick physicality into the co-titular role of “le Fantome.” As the only real ghost in the film and the only one not wearing a bedsheet, he pirouettes unseen around the living with his adorable side-kick, a floppy incorporeal spaniel also known (in my heart, at least) as Puppy Ghost. In my opinion, this film should be famous for Puppy Ghost rather than Tati, but you should decide for yourself.

Sylvie et le Fantome is a lovely romantic fantasy involving a lovelorn girl on her birthday and an assortment of ghosts, both real and hired. Sylvie (played by Odette Joyeux, who stars in every entry in this series) is a spiritual predecessor of Beetlejuice’s Lydia Deetz, a dreamy girl who has convinced herself she in love with the ghost of her grandmother’s long-deceased lover, Alain de Francigny, who died in a duel for her honor. Although Sylvie’s once-wealthy family lives in a large castle, they are reduced to selling off their antiques to an art dealer. In both an effort to raise money and wean Sylvie from her impossible infatuation, her father schemes to sell of an heirloom painting of Alain from under Sylvie’s nose using the house’s secret tunnels. During an encounter in the tunnels, the son of the art dealer develops a crush on Sylvie and unintentionally rattles Alain from his long-slumber. Now freed, Alain, played by Tati using some very clever visual effects, notices and appreciates Sylvie’s affection. He gently teases her and her relatives with simple ghost tricks—blowing out their matches, preventing Sylvie from blowing out her birthday candles, etc. At the same time that Alain and the art dealer’s son, Frederick, are sneaking around the castle, a reform-school dropout turned petty thief has also managed to break in, but becomes trapped when the police begin combing the countryside for him.

Sylvie’s father gets the idea to hire an actor to play Alain de Francingy at Sylvie’s birthday as a fun midnight surprise during an adorable scene where his butler reads him bedtime ghost stories. When Frederick and the thief, Ramure (aka Branch, “It’s my winter name”), get caught by Sylvie’s father he simply thinks they were sent by the actor’s agency. By the time Sylvie’s birthday starts, we’re up to three fake ghosts and one real ghost all playing overlapping tricks and having separate encounters with Sylvie. Romance and ghostly hijinks ensue as Sylvie becomes confused about which version of Alain’s ghost she’s truly in love with, while all four “phantoms” (including the real one) compete for her affection.

Sylvie et le Fantome does not offer the frothy costuming of Le Mariage de Chiffon and Lettres d’Amour, nor the emotional depth of Douce, but it is still a playful delight. Despite the sophisticated effects and the overwrought comedy of errors plot, this film seems like the only one of the four that could work as a play. It has the same nimble wordplay as the other three, but a greater number of intimate moments between characters that would translate well to the stage. Overall, this was the least political, but most poetic of the series. Perhaps it was the cachet of Jaques Tati, but it was probably the utter-adorability of Puppy Ghost that cemented this film as my favorite in the box set.

-CC Chapman

The Misandrists (2018)

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Queer punk prankster Bruce LaBruce’s latest work is a little too cheeky & misshapen to stand out as my favorite movie of the year but it is the most John Watersiest film I’ve seen all year, which, close enough. Although he has been making films long enough to have been lumped in with the New Queer Cinema movement of the early 90s (a descriptor he rejects in favor of association with the “queercore” punk scene), LaBruce still traffics in transgressive, microbudget outsider art that recalls John Waters’s trashy protopunk beginnings in the early 1970s. The Misandrists has clear thematic & aesthetic vision and a distinct political voice, but its commanding ethos is still aggressively amateur & D.I.Y. Its burn-it-all-down gender & sexual politics are sincerely revolutionary but are also filtered through a thick layer of over-the-top-camp. You might be justified in assuming The Misandrists was a film school debut from a young, angry upstart with a still-fresh appetite for shock humor & pornography, but it’s got the clear vision & tonal control of an artist who’s been honing their craft for decades – like John Waters at his best.

Set “somewhere in Ger(wo)many” in an alternate timeline 1999 (near the release of Waters’s similarly militant Cecil B. Demented) The Misandrists establishes a femmetopia comprised of man-hating revolutionaries who train to violently overthrow the Patriarchy. The women’s testosterone-free environment is disrupted by three types of intruders before their pornography-funded political revolution is fully launched: a male anti-capitalist revolutionary harbored under the noses of their leadership, pig cops searching for that persona non grata, and the trans & non-binary comrades already in their midst despite their cis-femmes-only recruitment policy. There are abundant red flags early in the film that suggest it subscribes to grotesque TERF ideology, but that outdated lack of intersectionality & inclusivity becomes its exact political target if you allow it time to get there. It affords characters air time to voice repugnant trans-exclusionary ideals, but when one of its most disruptive outsiders declares “It’s time to reconcile your revolutionary beliefs with your sexual politics,” the sentiment rings genuine in a way few of its radical extremist bon mots do.

For the stretch of The Misandrists that does voice rad-fem, TERFy ideology, it does so only to indulge in over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek exaggerations of what feminism looks like in an exploitation cinema context. The femme “comrades” of the film form a “separatist commune” disguised as a convent of nuns-in-training. They’re actually training as “an army of lovers” looking to establish a self-sustaining lesbian society free of men, whom they consider “repulsive,” “despicable,” “contaminating,” and “the cops of the world.” Their political ideology playfully crosses the line into religious dogma, as they form a new femme version of Christianity around “The Mother, The Daughter, and The Holy Cunt.” Terms like “(wo)manual,” “herstory,” and “womansplain” roll off the tongue as if they were commonly spoken phrases instead of humorous perversions of idioms. As the title suggests, The Misandrists presents an exaggerated version of what shithead men imagine when they hear the word “feminism”: militant man-haters & lesbians gearing up to steal power from all men everywhere in a violent overthrow. When depicted so crassly & without nuance, that imaginary version of feminism is a hilarious, over-the-top cartoon. It’s also, unsurprisingly, badass.

What’s most distinctive about The Misandrists is how LaBruce finds ways to express his true, genuine ideology through pornography while still allowing rad-fem caricatures to voice the politics he’s openly mocking. Two femme comrades watch masc gay porn for “research,” voicing violent disgust for the very sexual acts LaBruce is infamous for including in his art. The film itself often crosses the line from militant feminism-spoofing exploitation cinema into full-on lesbian porno, leering at girls making out while a tender pop song dryly intones “Down, down, down with the Patriarchy.” A transgressive, queer filmmaker, LaBruce goes out of his way to make sure this display is not straight-guy masturbation fodder. He not only plays extensive clips of hardcore gay pornography in an early scene, he also includes graphic footage of a real-life gender reassignment surgery and disrupts the straight eroticism of the lesbian sex scenes with perverse kinky defilements of food (including the filthiest use of eggs that I’ve ever seen in any film, including Tampopo). When a character proclaims, “Pornography is an act of insurrection against the dominating order,” it feels like one of the few moments when LaBruce is expressing a genuine political thought, as opposed to an over-the-top cartoon caricature of feminism. Of course he believes pornography could be a useful tool for funding a queer revolution – he’s already been using it that way for decades.

If you’re looking for a shocking, over-the-top slice of campy schlock, 2018 isn’t likely to offer a much more perfect specimen than The Misandrists. That might be the only way in which the film is “perfect,” as it deliberately traffics in imperfections & insincerities to prove a larger political point and to stay true to LaBruce’s D.I.Y. queercore sensibilities. Every year I ask myself which calendar release I would most want to watch with John Waters, The Pope of Filth, and I imagine this sarcastic, pornographic, politically angry act of feminist camp would tickle him like no other 2018 release I’ve seen.

-Brandon Ledet

The Wild Boys (2018)

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The long-vintage buzzword “genderfucked” might be an outdated term that’s since been replaced by descriptors like “genderfluid” & “non-binary,” but I can’t think of a better way to describe the nightmare fantasy piece The Wild Boys. If any movie was ever genderfucked, it’s this one. In a way, the outdated status of the term (combined with its confrontational vulgarity) only makes it more of a perfect fit. The Wild Boys feels like an adaptation of erotica written on an intense mushroom trip 100 years ago. All of its psychedelic beauty & nightmarish sexual id is filtered through an early 20th Century adventurers’ lens, feeling simultaneously archaic & progressive in its depictions & subversions of gender & sexuality. It looks like Guy Maddin directing an ancient pervert’s wet dream, both beautifully & brutally old-fashioned in its newfangled deconstruction of gender. As an art film oddity & a transgressive object, The Wild Boys lives up to the “wild” descriptor in its title in every conceivable way, delivering everything you could want from a perplexing “What the fuck?” cinematic sideshow. More importantly, though, the film is thoroughly, deliberately genderfucked – a freshly radical act of nouveau sexual politics represented through the tones & tools of the ancient past.

In The Wild Boys, adult femme actors play unruly young boys who are punished for their hedonistic crimes in a magical realist fashion that violates their gender & sexuality. Untamable rapist hooligans who act like the Muppet Babies equivalent of the masked ruffians of A Clockwork Orange, the boys find themselves in legal trouble when their depravity results in the death of a drama teacher after an especially lewd rehearsal of Macbeth. They’re punished with the same boot camp treatment unruly teens are subjected to on shows like Maury – shipped off for behavioral rehab with a mysterious, authoritative sea captain who claims he can reform the worst boys you can throw at him. The captain takes them on a journey that’s part Edgar Rice Burroughs colonialist fantasy & part William S. Burroughs genderfucked eroticism. They reach a giant oyster-shaped island overgrown with perverse sexual delights: phallic tree flowers that spurt delicious milky liquids, vaginal shrubbery that sexually clasps around human lovers like penis fly traps, testicle-shaped fruits that transform the bodies of those who consume them. It’s in that fruity transformation where the nature of their punishment and the point of the women-cast-as-boys conceit starts to make sense – as much as anything in this deliberately obscured art house fantasy ever could.

The Wild Boys is more of a sensory indulgence than a logical narrative. Silent Era cinematic textures & stark washes of purple lighting recall the intensely artificial, tenderly pornographic tableaus of James Bidgood’s art photography. It’s the same kind of intimate, gay, surreal imagery that obsessed Todd Haynes in early New Queer Cinema features like Poison. Boys’ drunken playfighting devolves into operatically beautiful orgies among a continuous drizzle of soft pillow-feathers. Out-of-proportion rear projection backdrops fill the screen with old-fashioned romanticism. As erotic & alluring as the film’s sexuality can be, however, The Wild Boys is also a work of intense supernatural menace. Gigantic tattooed dicks, dogs with glowing human faces, and an all-powerful demonic glitter-skull named TREVOR overpower the setting’s more paradisiac delights. The boys are forced to ask tough questions like “How much hairy testicle fruit can you possibly eat?” and “What will you do with your dick once it falls off?” Sex alternates between violence & sensual pleasure in an uncomfortable, artificial sensibility more befitting of delirious erotica than anything resembling real life. The resulting effect falls somewhere between Guy Maddin & Bruce LaBruce – a decidedly not-for-everyone-but-definitely-for-someone combination if there ever was one.

If recommending The Wild Boys in the 90s I might have told you to go get genderfucked. If recommending it 100 years ago I might have told you to save it for a stag party where you trusted no one would call the cops. The film’s sexuality, gender, and violence are of both those eras and, paradoxically, very much of the zeitgeist now. I guess that’s the quality that prompts people to call a work of art “timeless”, but I can’t refer to this movie as anything but hopelessly, beautifully fucked.

-Brandon Ledet