Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1970)

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Picture it. You’re settling in for Movie Night, and you know exactly what you’re in the mood for: a film about a bisexual demon twink who moves into a family home to seduce & ruin everyone who lives there.  Teorema is sounding a little too challenging that evening, but you’re not quite in the mood for the empty calories of Saltburn either.  What can you do to scratch that specific itch?  Thankfully, there is a perfect middle ground in the 1970 stage-play adaptation Entertaining Mr. Sloane, which is a little more sophisticated than an Emerald Fennell music video but not, like, Pasolini sophisticated.  It’s got all of the bisexual lust & thrust you’re looking for but lightened up with a little vintage Benny Hill-era British humor to keep the mood light.  Everything is falling into place . . . except that Entertaining Mr. Sloane isn’t currently available for home video distribution in America.  All you can access from the couch is the trailer on YouTube (which at least helpfully includes the film’s plot-summarizing theme song so you can imagine the rest).

I was lucky to catch this horny, thorny farce at The Broad earlier this month, when it was presented by filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell for the weekly WW Cinema series, with particular attention paid to the original work’s playwright Joe Orton.  Mitchell specifically recommended the 1987 biopic Prick Up Your Ears as background context for Orton’s queer agitator sensibilities, but none of that place setting is really necessary for being entertained by Mr. Sloane.  The tricky part is just finding a copy.  This is a work of broad humor & caustic camp.  Its stage play origins and its early arrival on the queer-cinema timeline afford it a sophisticated air, but it’s played directly to the cheap seats so that everyone gets a laugh.  A precursor to similar broad-appeal outsider art from the likes of John Waters & Paul Bartel, it played well to a raucous crowd of hipster weirdos, but there’s nothing especially exclusionary or esoteric about it that would turn off a broad audience.  It’s like an old TV sitcom with a premise that’s in such bad taste that the network deliberately lost its archival tapes.

Peter McEnery stars as the murderous demon twink of the title: an unscrupulous drifter who’s invited into a middle-class family home after he’s caught sunbathing in a nearby cemetery.  He’s picked up by a lonely middle-aged biddy (Beryl Reid) as a thinly veiled act of charity that both parties winkingly acknowledge as transactional sex work.  It would be out of the question to offer him room & board in exchange for sexual favors, but while he’s there . . . Also, because she’s an upstanding lady, there’s no proper way to express her desire for the younger, eager man, but if he were so overcome with passion that he sexually ravished her . . . Unsurprisingly, the men around the house (a classist snob played by Harry Andrews and Alan Webb as his ancient, ornery father) are just as repressed in their attraction to the smooth-bodied scamp.  No one can state out loud that they want to sleep with Mr. Sloane, but everyone jealously conspires to keep him away from the young girls around town whom he’s actually attracted to, meanwhile finding excuses to touch his body.  No one can state out loud that he’s a wanted murderer either, but they all know it to be true.

As a cultural relic, this pitch-black comedy feels like a response to the moral rot of the Free Love era.  Mr. Sloane’s selfishness & violence might reflect the amorality of that era’s hedonistic youth culture, but he’s not the main target of the satire.  Really, the bulk of the movie’s satire is rooted in the older generation’s response to the moral looseness he represents.  Beryl Reid’s girlish view of sexuality is absurdly repressed for a woman of her age, which gets increasingly uncomfortable once she starts treating him as a baby she’s coddling mid-coitus, like a child playing Mommy to her dolly.  Her closeted brother is no better, framing all of his lust for the houseguest through the misogynist mindset of boarding school bunkmates playing rough house.  He also treats Mr. Sloane as a kind of doll, dressing him head to toe in a tailored, fetishistic leather get-up under the guise of hiring him as a uniformed chauffer.  No one can express what they want from Mr. Sloane or how they intend to compensate him for it, but there’s a constant power struggle for his physical time & attention between the siblings that makes for a vicious tug of war.  And then the doubly-repressed lust expressed by their father makes things even uglier.

There are a few production design and shot composition choices that elevate Entertaining Mr. Sloane above its TV sitcom trappings.  Reid’s frilly lingerie and stuffed-animal-decorated teen girl bedroom are especially gorgeous, along with the continually hilarious prop of Andrews’s gigantic pink Cadillac, which appears to be undulating without shocks to match his clownish persona.  Occasionally, director Douglas Hickox & cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky will also frame out an absurdly over-curated tableau, like disembodied lips wrapping around a phallic popsicle against the grey backdrop of gravestones, or like a makeshift wedding ceremony staged at the altar of a fresh corpse.  Mostly, though, it’s the comedic voice of Orton’s source material that shines through, just as John Cameron Mitchell’s introduction to the film suggested.  Orton’s version of “The Straights Are Not Okay” social commentary manages to feel ahead of its time but also ingratiating enough to not entirely lose his contemporary audience.  Instead, he lost the future audience that’s more accustomed to that line of combative queer humor simply through scarcity in distribution, thanks to the current, dire state of home distro for any film made before 1990.  Catch it when it inevitably hits one of the only two streaming services that matter: Criterion or Tubi, whoever gets there first.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: Torch Song Trilogy (1988)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1988’s Torch Song Trilogy, is Harvey Fierstein’s big-screen adaptation of his own stage play about a drag queen’s life, loves, and heartbreaks in 1970s New York.  The film’s greatest accomplishments lie less in its queer political advocacy than they lie in its dramatic approximation of a full, authentic life for Fierstein’s protagonist – something gay men were rarely afforded onscreen at the time, even the cis white ones.  By all accounts, the original stage play version of Torch Song Trilogy approximated an even fuller, more authentic record of gay life in 1970s NYC, since it was twice as long as its movie adaptation.  One of the producers’ only contractual obligations for Fierstein’s screenplay was that the movie could be no longer than two hours, which meant a lot of tough-choice editing of a play that ran for four.  Instead of narrowing in on a few key moments in his life (through the fictional avatar of Arnold Beckoff), Fierstein decided to maintain the full breadth of the play’s story for most of the runtime, so that an inopportune bathroom break means that you could miss a half-decade of love & loss.

Torch Song Trilogy was unique but not alone in its no-big-deal dramatization of everyday gay life for a 1980s audience.  In general, independent filmmaking was a relatively robust industry in that era, which means there were plenty of gay filmmakers in that era who were eager to flesh out representation for their own demographic on the big screen.  If you’re curious to see other 1980s dramas about gay life in the big city, here are a few more titles to check out in addition to our Movie of the Month.

Buddies (1985)

Torch Song Trilogy is notably one of the few gay 80s classics that doesn’t touch the communal devastation of AIDS, since it’s set before the darkest days of the epidemic.  It opens with a shot of a graveyard at the outskirts of New York City that visually acknowledges how cultural circumstances had changed between the film’s 1970s setting & 1980s production, but the mission of the story that follows is mostly to show an adult gay man living a full, healthy, normal life . . . filtered through the wry humor of Fierstein’s hyper-specific personality.  Arthur J. Bressan’s 1985 landmark Buddies does not sidestep the horrors of its time in the same way, but it does take similar interest in fleshing out its central characters’ lives & personalities, so they don’t register only as statistics.  The opening credits of Buddies scroll over a computer printout of deceased AIDS patients’ names to establish the scope of the illness’s death toll, but it then focuses on just two onscreen characters to humanize those names as full, real people.  Everyone else with a speaking role is a disembodied voice, heard from just off-screen.  The only people who matter are a man dying of AIDS-related health complications and a volunteer “Buddy” who’s been assigned to keep him company after he’s been left to die alone by family & friends.

Self-billed as “the first dramatic feature about the AIDS crisis”, Buddies has all of the furious politics of a Tongues Untied presented with the endearing tenderness of a Torch Song Trilogy, almost cleanly split between its only two onscreen characters.  Geoff Edholm stars as the dying man: a gay-rights activist whose commitment to communal advocacy proved to be no match to his community’s fear of transmission in the early, hazy days of AIDS research.  David Schachter is his assigned, volunteer buddy: a shy assimilationist who’s content to live a quiet domestic life with his boyfriend without any public acknowledgement of his sexuality.  Through lengthy stage-play conversations voicing their opposing views, they reluctantly learn from each other and become vulnerably intimate despite their opposing politics and lifespan expectancy.  It’s a painfully emotional watch, of course, especially after you learn that the actors’ real lives almost exactly mirrored the respective arcs of their characters.  Bressan’s own personality as an auteur is also just as clearly visible in the picture as Fierstein’s in Torch Song Trilogy, given that his two central characters bond by watching his earlier films together in a hospital room (from the political activism documentary Gay U.S.A. to the age-gap porno Forbidden Letters) and that Bressan himself soon lost his life to the AIDS epidemic as well as Edholm.

Parting Glances (1986)

Released just one year after Buddies, 1986’s Parting Glances offers a tempered middle ground between Bressan’s confrontational politics and Fierstein’s heart-on-sleeve melodrama. Unlike Torch Song Trilogy, it does contend with the unignorable presence of AIDS in contemporary urban gay life, but unlike Buddies it relegates AIDS to being just one aspect of modern gay life, not the totality of it.  Steve Buscemi plays the HIV+ character who bears the burden of that vital representation: a new wave musician with a once bustling social life who’s been shunned by his own community out of knee-jerk fear & stigma.  He remains defiantly playful & energetic despite being treated as if he were already dead by his chosen family, quipping his way through cramped-apartment cocktail parties and video-art recordings of his will.  Curiously, though, he is not the main character of the film; that designation belongs to his happily-coupled bestie who lives the quiet, assimilated domestic life that Fierstein craves in Torch Song Trilogy and Schacter starts to question in Buddies.  Both characters bounce their understandably jaded world views off friends, neighbors, and potential sexual partners while hopping around NYC social spaces, living a full life.  The contrast in the way they’re received by that community is drastically different, though, depending on their disclosed HIV status.

I may not have spent decades living in the big city like Harvey Fierstein, but I can name at least two things that were beautiful in 1980s NYC: the independent filmmaking scene and Steve Buscemi.  Parting Glances can’t help but feel a little restrained watching it so soon after its more confrontational precedent in Buddies, but every scene featuring Buscemi as a defiantly sardonic man with AIDS is electric. It says a lot that he’s not the main character but he’s the only face on the poster, affording the film the kind of strong, singular personality Fierstein impressed on Torch Song Trilogy and Bressan impressed on Buddies.  Like with Buddies, its open, honest discussion of AIDS during the violent silence of the Reagan regime only gets heavier knowing the history of the artists involved who also died of AIDS-related illnesses, including promising young director & playwright Bill Sherwood in this case, who did not live to make another film.

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

Believe it or not, not all urban gay life in the 1980s was confined to New York City.  They even had gay men across the pond back then, as dramatized in 1985’s My Beautiful Laundrette.  While gay men in America were fighting to survive Reagan, gay men in England were fighting to survive Thatcher, and the cultural circumstances on either side of that divide were remarkably similar.  So, My Beautiful Laundrette has to dig a little deeper into cultural specifics in order to stand out among gay independent cinema of its era, notably doing so here as the only film on this list with a non-white lead (albeit a closeted one).  Gordon Warnecke stars as a young Pakistani man who works his way up his uncle’s small-scale crime network until he can carve out a money-maker of his own by running one of the mobsters’ few legitimate businesses: a kitschy, old-school laundromat.  In order to help with the day-to-day operations (and to manufacture opportunities to have sex in the back office), he employs a childhood friend & potential future lover played by Daniel Day Lewis, who has betrayed their intimate bond by joining the ranks of some racist, fascist street punks. 

My Beautiful Laundrette takes so long to establish its premise that you forget you’re watching a Gay Movie until the leads start making out.  Decades later, it still feels remarkable to see a drama that treats that identity marker as background texture instead of it informing every single character decision & line of dialogue. There were infinite hurdles to surviving Thatcher; being a gay man was just one of them.  In that way, this is the film that best lives up to Torch Song Trilogy‘s presumed mission to depict a gay character with a full, fulfilling life.  It’s not exactly a healthy life, though, given that he has to navigate the racism of his community, the homophobic violence of the crime world, and his own internal questions of identity as a second-generation immigrant whose family hates the “little island” where they’ve raised him.  That doesn’t mean the movie is shy about his sexuality though.  If anything, it has the hottest sexual dynamics of any film listed here, with Daniel Day Lewis’s punk reprobate licking his employer’s neck, spitting champagne into his mouth, and playing into a class-divide role play dynamic that touches on all of the film’s hot-wire political issues at once. 

-Brandon Ledet

Ace in the Hole (1951)

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Within the first five minutes of Ace in the Hole, Kirk Douglas does one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen: hitting the carriage return button on a typewriter and while holding a match to the machine, igniting it so that he can light his cigarette. It’s also the last thing he does before we find out what kind of man he really is, and our respect for him is going to vary a lot over the next hour and a half. Douglas is Charles Tatum, a newspaperman extraordinaire, who’s worked in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and every other major news center in the U.S., and he’s lost his job in every one because he brings about libel suits, gets involved with the publisher’s wife, or gets caught drinking “out of season.” He tells all this to Jacob Q. Boot (Porter Hall), the editor, publisher, and owner of the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin, when he finds himself stranded in New Mexico. Boot, a man who is notably wearing both belt and suspenders, tells him that he’s also the town lawyer and edits every word before printing, that Mrs. Boot is a grandmother thrice over who would be flattered to be on the receiving end of Tatum’s attention, but that he won’t tolerate any liquor on the premises. Tatum sees this as an opportunity to start small and transition back to the big leagues, but after a year of dull news and a lack of anything exciting, he’s grown restless. 

He and the paper’s young photographer Herbie Cook (Robert Arthur) are sent on a trip to cover a rattlesnake hunt, but when they stop for gas in a place called Escudero, they find the station and its attached diner empty, save for a grieving older woman who does not greet or notice them. Realizing that there’s some ruckus going on behind the place at some nearby caverns, they start to drive up and come upon Lorraine Minosa (Jan Sterling), who tells them that her husband has been caught in a cave-in while exploring some “Indian” caves (the film never identifies the tribe other than a reference to the Minosa’s cafe selling Navajo blankets, and since Escudero doesn’t seem to be a real place, we don’t even have a region that would allow us to determine the tribe from a territory map). They drive up to the mouth of the cave and Tatum talks his way past the deputy and, given blankets and coffee by the buried man’s father, enters the cave, where he meets Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) and, turning on the charm, convinces the man to trust him. 

Intending to capitalize on the potential human-interest story, Tatum sets up shop in the Minosa’s motel/gas station/cafe and gets to work, taking the story of a veteran trapped in a cave-in and pairing that with the sensationalist story that he may have been the victim of vengeance from “Indian spirits” due to his treasure hunting in the appropriately ominously named “Mountain of the Seven Vultures.” When he discovers Lorraine preparing to leave the next morning with the eleven dollars she takes from the till and convinces her to stay, at first attempting to appeal to her wifely love for her husband and, when this tack doesn’t work, promises that she’ll find herself rich enough to take off with a lot more than eleven dollars if she sticks around and plays along. Tatum manipulates all involved, as he charms the sheriff (Ray Teal) as well, promising him re-election as he will play the part of the local hero coordinating activities; the sheriff, in turn, manipulates the engineer in charge of getting the man out to switch from his initial plan of putting in supporting struts to secure the passageway and getting Leo out in about a day to a more involved, visually striking plan to drill down through the mountain to get him out, which will stretch the operations out to five to seven days. The whole thing turns into a media circus — literally at one point, as the number of people drawn in by the spectacle starts to enter quadruple digits and the carnival is brought in. As Tatum becomes more energized and starts getting calls from the big city papers again, he continues to gamble with Leo’s life (hence the title) as he tries to get back on top. 

This is a whip smart movie with fast, witty dialogue, so sharp that it could shave your chin. Douglas is phenomenal, bigger than life, so much louder and more boisterous than everyone around him that you can see clearly that it’s not just his ability to read people and offer them exactly what they want; it’s his pure charisma and the way that he takes up all the air in the room. Sterling’s performance, however, is the standout to me. You’d think it would be impossible to make us like a woman who’s willing to use her husband’s physical entrapment as an excuse to escape, but she so effectively captures the boredom and tiredness of being trapped in a desert nowhere. When Tatum invokes her need to repay her husband for marrying her and giving her a life, she tells that him that she was fooled by his promise that he owned sixty acres and “a big business,” with the acres amounting to useless sand and the business being a place where she “sell[s] eight hamburgers a week and a case of soda pop” while Leo continues to treasure hunt in a clearly unsafe cave. She’s been repaying him for five years, she says, and she’s ready to get out; she’s vain and apathetic about her husband’s situation, but she’s also got a point. 

She’s among the few people who can give Tatum a run for his money in the sass department, including an early defining character moment when he asks if they can put him up for the night and she responds with “Sixty beautiful rooms at the Escudero Ritz. Which will it be, ocean view or mountain view?” Tatum’s editor Boot can also go toe-to-toe with him on occasion, as evidenced by him pulling a nickel out of his pocket and handing it over to Tatum when they first meet and Tatum negs the Sun-Bulletin by way of leading up to the offering of his services. Perhaps most fun, however, is the one-scene appearance of Richard Gaines as Nagel, a fiery, tempestuous New York editor who makes J.K. Simmons’s J. Jonah Jameson look like a bored Brian Williams. The people who can’t compete with him generally fall under his spell. The sheriff, for his part, is utterly guileless in his corruption and ability to be manipulated and goes so far as to have “Re-Elect Gus Krentz for Sheriff” painted on the side of the mountain one night, which is so comically odious that you almost have to respect him. He’s not as smooth or as clever as Lorraine, but he is devious, and willing to twist any arm that he can get his hands on, if it puts a penny in his pocket. 

The thing about gambling is that you can only ride a lucky deal for so long, and if you keep on going and keep on pushing, your luck will eventually run out. Tatum’s right about the cynical nature of the public—eighty-four people trapped in a mine is not as newsworthy as one man—but he’s also haunted by the same flaws that cast him out of the metropoles and into the desert in the first place, including his insistence that he doesn’t “make things happen, [he only] write[s] about them.” By the time he starts drinking again, he’s already lost his way completely, not that he was ever the most respectable member of the fourth estate. It’s not merely enough that he’s coercing reality into a narrative that he can sell, it’s that he’s also pushing the limit of Leo’s endurance, as he starts to develop pneumonia due to being unable to move for days, and he’s corrupting sweet Herbie all the while. 

There’s really only one way this could all end, but I won’t give it away, as this is one that should be experienced in its entirety. And if you know the Hays Code, you know that everyone here has to be punished for their sins, although how that plays out is still a fantastic watch, and this has become my new favorite Douglas performance. The film is marred by some casual racism; the widespread use of the blanket term “Indian” is definitely a product of a different time, and it’s worsened by Tatum’s treatment of a Native American employee of the Sun-Bulletin, whom he first greets with “How” and later calls “Geronimo.” Still, there’s a reason that this one was rediscovered after many years being treated as a failure. Openly critical of both the police and media, it was an embarrassment to the studio, only becoming more widely known since its 2007 Criterion release. It’s not perfect, but it is great. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League – Throne of Atlantis (2015)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

It’s been a bit since our heroes first met and all of that during Justice League: War, and they’re not exactly keeping in touch. When a U.S. submarine carrying nuclear warheads is sunk, Cyborg is tasked with investigating, and as he examines the wreckage, he uncovers that the nukes have been stolen, before he is attacked by unseen enemies. Back at headquarters, he manages to get the team to assemble to watch a holographic recreation of his investigation, which reveals the form of his assailants; Wonder Woman recognizes them as the sea-dwelling Atlanteans. Elsewhere, new character Arthur Curry is drinking his grief over his recently deceased father at a seaside bar and expositing about his woes to a lobster in a tank. When said crustacean is selected to be another patron’s dinner, this escalates to an altercation in which Arthur finds himself squaring off against four other men, and emerging victorious – even having an attempted stabbing fail as the blade breaks in his attacker’s hand. This is reported to Queen Atlanna, the widowed ruler of Atlantis and Arthur’s mother, who sends her lieutenant Mera to bring Arthur home. As the child of two worlds—Atlantis and the surface—she hopes that his ascension to the throne will build a bridge of peaceful coexistence. Unfortunately, her younger son Orm has his sights set on becoming king, and he’s willing to fly as many false flags as needed (and commit matricide) to get there. 

After a little bit of a rocky start, this franchise is operating like a well-oiled machine at this point: functional and reliable. And when we’re talking about machinery, that’s what we’re hoping for: that our car starts when we’re ready to go somewhere, that our coffee mugs and spoons come out of the dishwasher free of debris, that our oscillating fans both fan and oscillate. We don’t really pay attention to those things until the car doesn’t start, your drinking glasses have crud on them, or you wake up in the middle of the night and you’ve sweat through your pillow (again). There’s nothing bad to say about Throne of Atlantis, but I’m trying to think of adjectives other than “serviceable” and “adequate.” I didn’t see the live-action Aquaman (I have my limits), but I’m positive it’s better than that – no offense to Nicole Kidman, who I’m sure had a bit of fun and could hardly be bothered to care about the film’s reception in this here swamp.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing that stands out. Mera’s “hard water” powerset is fun and is used in a lot of fun ways, and her slaying of swathes of enemy combatants and sea monsters of approximate sapience is fun to watch, especially given how grisly it is. There’s a Lovecraftian monster down in the deeps that our heroes have to fight; that’s pretty neat. Arthur even gets to throw in a declaration of “Outrageous,” which was the catchphrase of Aquaman in The Brave and the Bold, the characterization that, alongside his appearances on Justice League, credited with “saving” the character from the sillier version of him that appeared in Superfriends and became the primary image of him in pop culture. If you cared about that fact, you would probably already know it, but heaven help me if I don’t mention it. The humor mostly lands, especially with regards to Hal Jordan’s ongoing rivalry with Batman; in this one, he responds to the Caped Crusader’s delay in responding to a memo by going straight to Gotham and helping him take down the goons he’s tailing, except now he’s ruined the fifth step in a ten step investigation with his showboating. These little character touches are what are most pleasant about these films overall, and is the thing that most makes them feel worthwhile.

This one’s good. It’s not going to be anybody’s favorite (other than dyed-in-the-wool Aquafans), but it’s violent, colorful, funny, and seventy-two minutes long. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Mulholland Drive (2001)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss David Lynch’s Hollywood psych thriller Mulholland Drive (2001).

00:00 Welcome

04:05 Dodgeball (2004)
08:57 My Lucky Stars (1985)
12:43 The Lair of the White Worm (1988)
15:14 Notorious (1946)
17:28 Ace in the Hole (1951)
24:52 Monkey Man (2024)
28:01 The Sweet East (2024)
35:58 Justice League vs Teen Titans (2016)
41:05 Mars Express (2024)
49:26 She is Conann (2024)

56:40 Mulholland Drive (2001)

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

– The Podcast Crew

She is Conann (2024)

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Bertrand Mandico is the greatest filmmaker currently alive & working.  Across three features and dozens of shorts, he’s gradually established a cinematic language all of his own that feels simultaneously ancient & futuristic.  His debut feature The Wild Boys voyages into the past to obliterate gender for a more liberated, libertine future.  His follow-up After Blue sought alien worlds prophesized by the likes of James Bidgood & Kate Bush.  Now, his third feature reshapes the Conan the Barbarian myth into a lesbian fantasia built on ego death and the cruelty of having to make art in a decaying world.  No one has dared to hijack the movie-making dream machine for their own perverse pleasure in the way Mandico has.  He’s perfectly attuned to the medium’s ability to evoke powerful ideas & feelings out of pure, hand-crafted imagery.  There are allusions to luminary provocateur directors in She is Conann that indicate Mandico thinks of himself as the modern equivalent of a Kenneth Anger or a Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but he’s actually our modern Méliès: an illusionist who’s pushing the form more than he’s subverting norms.

Specifically, the Anger & Fassbinder allusions are contained in a single leather jacket worn by Mandico’s longtime muse & collaborator Elina Löwensohn.  The jacket is modeled after the title-card fashion centerpiece of Anger’s Scorpio Rising, but instead spells “Rainer” in metal studs.  Löwensohn plays the jacket’s owner, Rainer, as an on-screen avatar for Mandico.  Rainer’s a photographer who orchestrates and documents the brutal violence around him, eventually shouting for his camera’s subjects to be “Sexier! Crazier! More barbaric!” out of frustration that he cannot reach the lofty artistic ideal envisioned in his head.  Löwensohn previously played a very similar role as the pornographer Joy D’Amato (a reference to real-life pornographer Joe D’Amato) in Mandico’s Apocalypse After, but this time she shakes it up by switching genders and hiding under a prosthetic dog mask.  Rainer’s houndish loyalty to the titular, similarly-genderflipped warrior Conann is both as an opportunist and as a hedonist.  Rainer adores Conann’s capability of bone-crunching, head-severing violence more than he adores her personally, and he’s eager to follow at her heels as she swings her sword through the gushing bodies of her enemies across centuries of reincarnation, translating her violence into art.

The role of Conann is filled by a lineage of six actresses, all of whom kill their predecessor to claim her sword & identity.  As a violent brute who lives in the moment, fueled by revenge against the ugly world that shaped her, Conann refuses to accept the normal patterns of aging & death.  Instead of growing and maturing naturally, she instead reaches into the past to assassinate her younger self in a ritualistically violent act of self-reinvention.  Her warpath leads the audience through the violence of Medieval fantasy realms, a 1980s music video interpretation of The Bronx, Europe’s crumbling under Nazi fascism, and a post-human future made almost entirely of glitter.  She’s briefly distracted along the way by love & romance, but her essential barbarism eventually takes over and the body count continues to pile.  Each generation’s bloodlust directly feeds into the next, until Mandico concludes the saga with a punchline about that human impulse transforming into art instead of violence.  He appears to believe that the long history of humanity’s selfishness & viciousness has been concentrated into the work of careerist, self-obsessed artists who do not realize they’re also barbarian brutes.  Or he at least thinks that’s a funny conclusion to make.

I could be totally wrong about Mandico’s thematic intent here.  He is foremost a visual stylist, pushing for imagistic extremes in every frame through outrageous fashion, rear projection, strobe lighting, practical gore, and more glitter than any production has seen since Ridley Scott’s Legend.  His allusions to previous works are all on the surface but oddly refracted through a postmodern lens, from the misspelling of the title to the leather Rainer jacket to the background billboard that simply reads “naked lunch” in lowercase letters for no discernible reason in particular.  Finding coherent meaning in Mandico’s work is a personal journey.  The only guarantee is that he will immerse you in a fanatically vicious world you’ve never seen before; what you make of that world while you visit is entirely up to you.  There just aren’t enough people around me who’ve seen his films to tell me I’m reading too much into his metatextual commentary on art & hedonism.  Maybe one day he’ll become widely beloved enough for me to finally see his work in a proper, packed cinema instead of subjecting a small batch of friends to it on my living room couch.  For now, I’m perfectly happy gazing into his glitter-slathered hellscapes at home, unchallenged about the immense passion & beauty I find in his horny tableaux.

-Brandon Ledet

Mars Express (2024)

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So far this year, I have seen two French science fiction films set in a future dominated by A.I.  In Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, our inevitable A.I. dystopia is mostly a just a framing device for a cyclically doomed love affair that spans multiple lifetimes, beginning in period piece romance and ending in sci-fi futurism.  The less-discussed Mars Express is much more typical to what you’d expect from sci-fi, sketching out a near-future technocracy in which humans & machines struggle to co-exist now that the machines are gaining sentience.  Whereas The Beast aims to alienate viewers with the uncanny, Mars Express‘s genre familiarity is a warm nostalgia bath, recalling vintage VHS era sci-fi titles like Blade Runner, Robocop, Minority Report, and T2: Judgement Day.  Although it premiered at Cannes, Mars Express is not some stuffy festival-circuit art film; it’s a populist sci-fi action blockbuster that happens to be an independent French production.  It’s just familiar enough to make you wonder why Hollywood studios aren’t regularly making large-scale, immersive sci-fi anymore, and then its ambitious third act shoots for the stars in a way that clearly distinguishes it from its most obvious reference points. 

The story follows the expected path of a cyberpunk noir, trailing an alcoholic detective with a traumatic past as she struggles to sober up just long enough to solve the political conspiracy that unfolds before her bleary eyes.  She starts by investigating the isolated crimes of small-scale hackers who have been “jailbreaking” (i.e., liberating) the A.I. workers who operate alongside humans, opening their programming to dangerous, illegal abilities like independent thought & free will.  When one of those hackers is reported murdered on a college campus, her investigation gets much jucier, eventually leading her up the food chain to suspect the corporation behind the future’s most exciting tech of an upcoming power grab that could leave society in shambles.  The detective is more of a misdirect than a proper protagonist, though, as the inner lives of her A.I. partner and his synthetic brethren gradually take over the narrative until the central mystery means much less to the audience than their search for a sense of personal identity.  It turns out that most jailbroken robots just like to have sex & get high with each other all day—which should be their right—but they eventually reach for a greater, cosmic purpose beyond those momentary pleasures that gives the movie something transcendent to build towards between the chase scenes & gunfights.

I have intentionally buried the lede here by not mentioning that Mars Express is animated, since its medium feels secondary to what it wants to accomplish.  The animation can be visually exciting, but it generally stays true to what a live-action version of this same story would look like with a Hollywood-scale budget.  It’s much more likely to simulate a split-diopter shot than it is to bend the rules of physics for the sake of artistic expression, making it questionable why it was animated in the first place.  The choice appears to be a primarily financial one, as if the entire feature were a storyboard for an R-rated sci-fi film for adults that’s still yet to be made.  Regardless, it is beautiful, with only a slight hint of computer-smoothed effects distracting from its elaborate 2D-animation artistry.  Animation frees up Mars Express to dream big, creating A.I. characters with holographic heads floating over their physical bodies, setting high-energy chase scenes through packed nightclubs, and filling the screen with intricate production-design detail that likely would have been scrapped by budgetary restraints if it were staged in live action.  As long as these kinds of films aren’t being produced in traditional form, we have no choice but to celebrate their animated bootlegs.

If you like your French films challenging & inscrutable, turn to Bertrand Bonello.  If you miss the robust American sci-fi blockbusters that have been woefully absent the past couple decades, hop onboard the Mars Express.  It saves all of its narrative abstraction & existential pondering for the final minutes of its runtime, and by then your vintage genre filmmaking nostalgia has been so carefully catered to that you’re ready to see something new.

-Brandon Ledet

The Contestant (2024)

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Japanese television personality Tomoaki “Nasubi” Hamatsu has lived an incredible life.  As with anyone who’s lived an incredible life, that means he’s doomed to be immortalized in a bland documentary or biopic, often one after the other.  The British documentary The Contestant has bravely stepped forward to get the ritual going, sitting Nasubi down for talking-head interviews about his traumatic years in the public eye, supplemented by late-90s archival footage of the horrors he describes.  The details of his life make for a great Wikipedia page but not necessarily a great feature film, as evidenced by the final half-hour of the runtime spinning its wheels detailing Nasubi’s post-fame charity work instead of sticking to the subject at hand.  Most Wikipedia biographies aren’t illustrated with video clips, though, so I suppose The Contestant saves you the additional time & effort you’d spend opening a second tab for YouTube searches while you’re scrolling on the toilet. 

It feels cruel to refer to Hamatsu by his nickname, since it started as a schoolyard insult.  Bullied for being born with a “long face”, the name “Nasubi” refers to the “eggplant” shape of Hamatsu’s head.  That bullying followed him into young adulthood too, as the aspiring comedian struggled to find a healthy balance between making people laugh vs being laughed at.  His desperation for approval led him to becoming the star of the “A Life in Prizes” game show segment of the Japanese variety show Danpa Shonen, in which his bullying escalated to full-on torture.  At the instruction of producer Toshio Tsuchiya (an obvious villain that the film nudges you to boo & hiss at in his own appearances as a talking head), Nasubi was isolated in a room with nothing but postcards and a rack of magazines for fifteen maddening months, with the goal of earning ¥1 million’s worth of prizes from sweepstakes contests.  Provided no clothes and no food (beyond an occasional packet of crackers to keep him alive), Nasubi’s semi-voluntary imprisonment for “A Life in Prizes” was presented as an experiment to see if someone could survive on magazine contest winnings alone.  Really, though, he was televised as a one-man geek show for an entire nation to mock, often with a nightmarish laugh track underscoring his daily suffering.  As you’d likely assume, the experience fucked him up psychologically, and it’s taken him decades to find any joy or mutual trust in humanity again.

The late 90s and early 2000s were an ugly time for pop culture, most vividly reflected in the early stirrings of reality TV.  Nasubi’s 15 months of fame only slightly predate the most obvious Western comparison points for “A Life in Prizes”—Big Brother and The Truman Show—and it doesn’t feel much eviler than most of what followed that decade.  I’m sure someone could slap together a sinister montage of Jerry Springer clips that would make America look like a vicious hell pit, for instance, and maybe someone should.  Still, even if Tsuchiya’s manipulation of his pet reality star isn’t more extreme than behind-the-scenes stories from the sets of shows like The Bachelor or Below Deck, that doesn’t mean he’s not a monster.  Nasubi barely survived his time on Danpa Shonen, winning over a huge audience of fans with his goofball celebrations of receiving prize packages of car tires, camping tents, and dog food, but that micro-celebrity did not translate to a sustainable career once Tsuchiya ran out of ways to extend the gimmick of his imprisonment.  It took a long time for Nasubi to rebuild his identity and his sense of place in the world after the entertainment industry spat him out, so it’s easy to forgive The Contestant for its third-act cheerleading of his charitable work in the years following the Fukushima nuclear disaster.  That doesn’t make for great cinema, necessarily, but it’s at least a kinder impulse than what guided the last camera crew to center him in the spotlight.

The Contestant is not a great documentary, but it is great trash TV, in that it allows you to indulge in several of the most popular genres of trash TV (reality, game show, true crime) while still feeling morally superior to them.  No matter how much disgust the film expresses for Danpa Shonen‘s exploitation of Nasubi, it can’t get around the fact that its own existence perpetuates that exploitation.  The reason most people will watch The Contestant is to see the bizarre, out-of-context clips of a naked, lonely man starving to death on TV for mass entertainment, so it’s a little rich for the movie to act as if it’s above its subject.  If I learned anything about Nasubi that I didn’t retain from reading his Wikipedia page, it’s that he’s credited for inspiring the association of the eggplant emoji with the penis, since his nudity was censored by producers with a floating eggplant symbol.  Otherwise, the only reason to watch the movie is to watch Nasubi suffer, as opposed to just reading about his suffering in plain text.  It’s the same perverse enjoyment that true crime obsessives get out of looking up crime-scene photos and serial-killer mugshots after hearing about them on podcasts.  I can’t claim that I’m above that impulse either, since I chose to watch this documentary out of my own morbid fascination with its subject; I just wish it had chosen to challenge me a little more and indulge me a little less.

-Brandon Ledet

The Sweet East (2024)

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I’m not really sure how to feel about The Sweet East. There’s a neat little Through the Looking Glass theme that’s threaded throughout that I really enjoy (even when it gets the occasional wire-crossed with Adventures in Wonderland, like most Alice-homaging media does), Talia Ryder gives a magnetic performance amongst a half dozen fully realized supporting roles, and it even manages to get a little surreal on occasion despite being shot with documentary-evoking post-production that effectively contributes to its sense of realism. But I’m not sure if I liked it, or if it was good. This is one that’s best discussed with a plot summary, so if you don’t want to get spoiled, skip ahead to the paragraph that begins “What I straightforwardly love . . .”

Lillian (Ryder) is on a high school field trip to Washington D.C. While out with the group, which includes a guy that she hooked up with and his girlfriend, she is in the bathroom when the very place she is in is attacked by a gun-wielding QAnon lunatic who’s pulling his own Pizzagate. A platinum-haired punk with greatly gauged ears (Earl Cave, bad seed of Nick Cave) pulls her back into the bathroom and, in attempting to get out through the ceiling, discovers that the bathroom’s mirror conceals a secret passage through which they escape through a series of tunnels, avoiding the occasional teddy bear and tricycle. She goes with the punk, named Caleb, and his friends back to their communal crust house, where he eventually shows her his dick under the pretense of showing off his piercings (of which there are too, too many, and some of which seem anatomically impossible). She smokes a bowl with a woman named Annabel who tells her about how she recently left a man because he hit her, then falls asleep. The next morning, she joins a group of a dozen or so of the punks on an expedition to a park in Trenton, where they intend to get into a physical altercation with right-wingers they have been told will be there. The place turns out to be more nature preserve than picnic ground, and the punks run their mouths so much amongst themselves that they pass by the group that they’re looking for without noticing, while Lillian (who stopped to pee) hears them nearby as soon as the punks are out of earshot. 

She wanders into what turns out to be a neo-Nazi cookout, where she immediately attracts the attention of the awkward Lawrence (Simon Rex), who makes his way over to her and introduces himself. Thinking quickly, she gives the name Annabel, and Lawrence, who turns out to be a Poe scholar, just about creams himself; she even takes Annabel’s story about fleeing an abuser, and Lawrence immediately buys her some clothes and food and gives her a place to stay in his family home, which he now occupies alone. Lawrence is a character that puzzles me, because it’s him that I’m least sure what to think of. He displays plenty of overt bigotries above and beyond his closeted Nazism, including wiping a glass of water delivered to him by a Black waitress with a napkin before touching it and using the slurs t****y and f****t conversationally and with his whole chest. He’s handsome because Simon Rex is handsome, and he’s erudite and doesn’t talk down to Lillian/Annabel, but his singular obsession with Poe and what one presumes is at least a decade of no social interaction other than delivering lectures means that he’s a one-track bore on top of being a Nazi piece of shit. Some of this is played for comedy, and some of it lands. When giving her the initial tour, he tells her that she won’t want for reading material as he gestures at shelves full of books like she’s the Belle to his Beast, but when we see any of these shelves up close, they’re full of material of the obsessive war history variety, and she ends up reading a book about the history of trains, if I recall correctly. Later, he shows Lillian the semi-biographical short Edgar Allen Poe from 1909, directed by (yes, that) D.W. Griffiths, and overexplains the way that the film abbreviates and combines various parts of Poe’s life as if this seven-minute short is his Zapruder or Godfather, which is a funny bit. Although Lillian attempts to seduce him are unsuccessful, she does convince him to let her go along with him on a trip to New York, a trip that involves him delivering a duffel bag provided by a skinhead to a rendezvous there. When left alone in their hotel, after convincing Lawrence to move them into a single hotel room so that she could have access to the duffle, finds that it’s filled with cash and absconds. 

Within minutes, Lillian is stopped on the street by two filmmakers, producer Matthew (Jeremy O. Harris) and director Molly (Ayo Edebiri), who immediately enlist her to read for a part in Molly’s film. The two of them talk more at her than to her about what the film is about than what it is, in a hyperactive sugar rush of academia/filmcrit brainworm buzzwords that, unfortunately I understood more of than I would care to admit, which is going to be really embarrassing if there turns out to have been no authorial intent involved. After a brief audition, she meets her onscreen love interest in international heartthrob Ian Reynolds (international heartthrob Jacob Elordi), and the two end up being photographed together by the tabloids. Unfortunately, this ultimately leads to the aforementioned skinhead tracking her down to the shooting location in a rural location, and when Ian’s fooling about with a prop pistol causes a shootout to occur, Lillian is rescued by Mohammad (Rish Shah), a crewmember on the film. He manages to whisk her away to a farmstead across the border in Vermont, where he hides her away in an attic room of a barn and warns her not to let her presence become known, as he has to hide her not just from the neo-Nazis but also his brother Ahmad (Mazin Akar), who is leading some kind of Islamic community, one that includes physical training, assault rifles, and—for all intents and purposes—sweatin’ to the oldies, as Lillian observes from her single window. 

Mohammad continues to keep her locked away by telling her that the killers from what has been dubbed the “Mohawk Valley Massacre” are still loose, but when she manages to get out one day when everyone is away in town, she finds a newspaper indicating that they have been in custody for some time. When the group of men living on the compound return, she manages to convince a charmed Ahmad that she is a local girl who got lost looking for her missing dog, and escapes, only to fall asleep in a snowstorm and be rescued by another long-winded man, this time a priest (Gibby Haynes) who tells her that the police are coming to take her home and then starts to lecture her about the Chapel of the Milk Grotto before she slips back into unconsciousness. She wakes up back home; all of the girls that were in her senior class are pregnant, and people have adjusted to her return, but then her entire family is shocked when the television shows that an apparent terrorist bombing has occurred at the football stadium that was hosting the game they were watching. Who did it isn’t important—the crust conclave, the Trenton neo-Nazis, Ahmad’s group, or even someone completely unrelated—at this point, Lillian has seen a great deal of the east, and the only unifying factor in all of the groups that she has met is that they are all frustrated with the status quo, and ready to do violence. She walks away from the family as they gather to watch in horror, passing in front of a flag with forty-eight stars as we head into the credits. 

What I straightforwardly love about this one is the fairy tale narrative of it. Caleb the white haired punk with the noteworthily droopy ears is our White Rabbit, leading Alice behind the looking glass (even though he is a Wonderland character, you rarely get Alice without him regardless of which work is being adapted); Molly and Matt are the film’s equivalents of Tweedledee and Tweedledum, whose language clearly shares the same words as Lillian/Alice’s but are nonetheless fitted together in ways that she is unable to follow. Some of the other elements are less obvious, as when Lillian is taken for a walk by Mohammad while the others are away and he impresses her by naming every tree that they pass, in an inversion of the scene in Looking Glass in which Alice crosses the “wood where things have no names.” One of the most subtle ones relates to rivers and streams, which in Looking Glass portray the boundaries between the rows of a chessboard in keeping with that book’s motif, and Lillian’s crossing of several rivers and other boundaries on her journey. First, we see the Potomac when she is in DC, and when Lawrence first tells her about his home, he says that it’s “right on the Delaware,” and we see the two of them boating there together. When she’s on location for the shooting of As It Churns, she’s seen sitting on a rocking chair on a dock beside a river, smoking. Later, the crossing of the state border into Vermont is important enough that this film’s segment, as displayed on the interstitial title card, is entitled “First Time in Vermont?” As a Looking Glass Easter Egg hunt, it’s a fair bit of fun. 

Lillian’s actions throughout the film are fun. In each new encounter, she uses something from the previous vignette to her advantage. First, it’s stealing Annabel’s name and backstory when she encounters Lawrence. Later, she cherry-picks an observation from one of Lawrence’s lectures about how Europe perceives America as a young nation that will eventually “evolve” into their “decadent socialism” when it matures, which she turns on the pompous Ian Reynolds when he’s giving the filmmaking group a hard time while out one night. From Molly, she learns that there’s a certain way that she purses her lips when she’s acting that reads as completely genuine, and she uses this exact face on Ahmad in order to come off as naive and dim in order to escape the compound. I’m less enthralled with Lillian as a character. This film has the misfortune of being released after the sustained success of Poor Things, a film with which it shares themes and narrative beats, which is to The Sweet East’s detriment in any comparison. Both feature a naive protagonist who goes on an odyssey of being guided by different people, mostly men, who desire her carnally, and whom she must constantly and continuously evaluate and negotiate with as they attempt to teach her something or institutionalize her into accepting their proffered marriages. 

Talia Ryder is more than up to the challenge, and she’s stunning here, but I don’t love that Lillian is so fond of the r-slur, which is a big hindrance. I don’t expect my protagonists to be perfect, but it sends mixed messages when placed alongside Lawrence’s own bigoted language, which I can only assume is there to remind us that no matter how eloquent he is, he’s an unrepentant racist whom we are supposed to disdain. (In fact, Lillian also uses the f-slur at one point, which I had almost forgotten about.) I’m also not enamored of the “both sidesing” of the various groups we see. The crust punks, who I might remind you we last see setting out to do the good work of bashing in some Nazi skulls, are presented as ineffectual, all while also being mocked for being unable to get organized properly and containing individuals, like Caleb, who are posers with rich parents who are raging to rage, not because they’re at all affected by the machine. Molly and Matt are a parody of what middle Americans think of coastal media elites and pretentious film folk, and we can only assume that Mohammad was planning to keep Lillian captive until she was fully Stockholmed (although there’s sufficient evidence to argue that his brother’s camp is actually a gay boot camp thing). Lawrence is a man whose ideas are objectively evil, but he’s treated with the softest gloves by the narrative, and I don’t like that. It’s possible that there’s something I’m missing here, and I could be completely wrong, but I don’t like this. 

Overall, this one is a mixed bag. There’s a lot that’s great going for it cinematically (director Sean Price Williams was D.P. on my beloved Queen of Earth), and there’s something interesting about the interplay between all of these individuals and communities that Lillian interacts with, but I’m just not sure that it nails down all of its theses as surely as it could and should. Worth seeing, but not internalizing. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Monkey Man (2024)

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The story of how Monkey Man came to be seen by anyone is a narrative about power, capital, and the cowardice of corporations that underscores the themes of the film in a metatextual way. Initially intended to be released on Netflix, that organization was planning to shelve the film, as its straightforward criticism of Hindu nationalism in India, which is gaining power in a time of rising fascism globally, was considered inappropriate while Netflix is courting international expansion into the subcontinent. The film was seen by Jordan Peele, who flexed his not-inconsiderable muscle to get Monkey Man released theatrically stateside, and it’s now available for digital purchase as well. The film itself—directed by, produced by, and starring Dev Patel—follows a fairly straightforward narrative of revenge, but one which is wrapped up in political and state violence and the corruption of faith by seekers of power.

As a child, our protagonist, who is given no name other than “Kid,” lived in a village that was razed to the ground by corrupt police officer—redundant, I know—Rana Singh (Sikandar Kher), under the direction of Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande). Shakti is a widely respected faith leader whose apparent religious devotion is a cover for his ever-expanding empire of factories, which he claims to the press are simply “communes,” and the destruction of Kid’s home is merely one in a long line of such actions, where the survivors are either forced to flee or become little more than chattel slaves in the factories that are built over the land they once called home. Like most murderous and fanatical entities, like (for instance) the Zionist terrorist state, they arrive with “records” that indicate these sites “historically” belong to someone else, and that the land is being “returned,” and in so doing rape, pillage, burn, and murder innocents while pretending that they are offering them the opportunity to flee. Now an adult, Kid scrapes by in an underground kickboxing ring as Monkey Man, the monkey-masked “heel” who puts on a good show before taking the fall against “face” characters like King Cobra, Shere Khan, and Baloo the Bear. The monkey mask means something different to him, however, as it represents his connection to Hanuman, a Hindu deity who was the subject of his mother’s devotion. The film opens as he prepares for his roaring rampage of revenge, setting up the theft of the handbag of Queenie Kapoor (Ashwini Kalsekar), the foul-mouthed owner-operator of a luxury brothel called Kings, then returning it to her with a sufficiently believable cover story and rejecting her offer of a cash reward in exchange for a job.

From there, he ingratiates himself to Queenie’s henchman Alphonso (Pitobash) by giving him inside information about the kickboxing matches, and he works his way up to a penthouse party that Singh is attending. He manages to almost complete his assassination of the man, but his impulsive need to deliver an action hero one liner to Singh, “Blessings from my mother,” allows an opening for the officer to get the upper hand. A wounded Kid flees and falls into a polluted river, where he would have died were he not rescued by a group of hijra, a community of transgender, intersex, or eunuch people who live communally (and in some nations in South Asia are recognized officially and legally as a third gender). Earlier in the film, during a broadcast that Kid watches after taking another dive in the ring, the TV cuts from a journalist’s softball interview with Shakti to coverage of anti-trans violence at the hands of right-wing agitators, although, as with media in the west, their failure to make a connection between the two stories is a deliberate obfuscation of that connection. Alpha (Vipin Sharma), the guru of the hijra community, nurses Kid back to health, and the community at large helps renew his vigor as he approaches another opportunity to take down both Singh and Shakti.

Taken at nothing more than face value, this is a fun action movie, where the choreography of the fighting is absolutely stellar. The film references its most overt influence, John Wick, on its sleeve by mentioning the film by name, but Patel has cited Korean action flicks Ajeossi (aka The Man from Nowhere) and I Saw the Devil as well. I haven’t seen the former, and, unfortunately, it’s been so long since I saw the latter that my memory isn’t clear enough to pull out specific influences. The action here is stunning, with long sequences that remain exciting through a combination of dynamic camera work, novel shot choices, exciting locations, and the kind of frenetic energy that feels like speeding. There’s a bathroom brawl that’s the equal of, if not better than, the one in M.I.: Fallout, and the sequence there is a franchise highlight. A flight from police on foot and then via electric rickshaw (complete with a Fast & Furious style NOS-injector) is a ton of fun, and the final assault on Kings owes a lot to The Raid—that certainly wasn’t the first film to have our protagonist(s) take out a building floor by floor as they approached their boss battle, but it arguably perfected it. This comes off not as a compilation or recitation of hits, but as something exciting and worthwhile in and of itself, and even if that’s all that one takes from it, this is still a great action movie.

I appreciate the depth of this one, though, and I especially love the way that the hijra are treated with respect and dignity, and that they get to fulfill an important narrative role in the story not just as the community that nursed the hero back to health and was saved by him in the end, but that they get to be the cavalry that backs him up when all seems lost. Queerness in India isn’t something that I have a scholarly knowledge of, obviously, but I have been privy to anecdotes, and I think that there is something in the nature of fascism that tells on itself in the discrepancy between the homophobias here and abroad. In the U.S. and the larger West, the supremacy of fundamentalist Christian politics plays a key role in instilling, inscribing, and disguising bigotry in the hearts and minds of the populace — that is, being queer is wrong because (their reading of) their scripture says so. In India, even though the population is predominantly Hindu and fundamentalist Hindu politics are a key role in that nation’s contemporary authoritarianism, Hinduism and the texts thereof are full of queer deities and heroes that are absent from the canonized Old and New Testaments. Fire god Agni had a husband and a wife and there are tales that explicitly reference him having sexual encounters with men; Ardhanarishvara (whose temple is attended by Alpha and the other hijra in the film) is a split-down-the-middle merging of Shiva and his consort Parvati; and many others characters like Shikhandi and Arjuna are transformed between sex and gender. There’s no “scriptural basis” (as we would call it in the West) for the homophobia and transphobia of the rising right wing where Monkey Man takes place, but it still happens because those bigotries are inherent to fascism, not to faith. You’re not going to see a movie made in the West where a group of transwomen get to be the cavalry that rescues the hero outside of the occasional shoestring-budgeted envelope pusher, but you can see it here, and that’s lovely.

The only thing that really doesn’t fit here is the presence of the love interest, Sita (Sobhita Dhulipala). There’s a reason that we’ve gotten this far without mentioning her. Sita is one of the sex workers employed at Kings, and the fact that she seems to be Singh’s favorite is made known does little to affect motivation or characterization — with Kid already seeking to kill Singh for assaulting and murdering his mother, there’s no real need to give him additional reasons to want the man dead, and in fact muddles things a little. Her major contribution to the film is that she’s the one who takes out Queenie so that we don’t have to see our hero shoot a woman, and that means she’s more plot point than character. Other than that, however, this is just about a perfect action film, and one with a lot going on under the surface, which it draws attention to through its continuous motif of roots; Kid’s mother shows him the roots of the trees in and around their village and teaches him about their spiritual significance; the people who are threatened with being forcibly relocated, including Kid’s community and the hijra are implicitly and explicitly being uprooted, and the temple in which Alpha and their people live is one with roots that run deeper than a man is tall. As a text and an action film, this one is definitely rewarding and worth seeking out.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond