“Love For Movies Causes Boy, 10, To Lose A Week SAN LEANARDO, Feb. 10 (U.P.) Ten-year old Richard Allen was back home here today after a ‘lost week”—most of it spent inside San Francisco motion picture theaters. His father found him emerging from a theater after he had been missing for seven days. During that time Richard set he had spent $20 on 16 movies, 15 comic books, six games, 150 candy bars and a large number of hot dogs. ‘I guess I just like movies,'”
That 1947 United Press newspaper clipping regularly makes the meme rounds online and for good reason: it’s charming as hell. Even without dwelling on the price of movie tickets and candy bars in 1940s San Francisco, there’s something lovably old-fashioned about Richard Allen’s childhood mischief that feels more like the kind of behavior you’d see in the comic strip section of the newspaper instead of amongst the actual news. Just a few years later, on the opposite US coast, independent filmmakers Morris Engel & Ruth Orkin staged their own version of Richard Allen’s “Lost Week” in 1953’s Little Fugitive, a low-stakes crime caper about a 7-year-old boy who spends two days as an unsupervised runaway at Coney Island. Like the newspaper clipping above, Little Fugitive plays like a Sunday-funnies comic strip rendered in live action. It’s like an “Oops! All Sluggos” edition of Nancy, or The Little Rascals acting out a daytime noir. Personally, I’d rather “lose a week” at a San Francisco movie theater than a Brooklyn amusement park, but it’s the same hot-dog flavor of vintage mischief all the same.
7-year-old Joey Norton (played by one-and-done actor Richie Andrusco) is too small to do anything fun. He gets easily flustered watching his big brother Lennie play with other, older Brooklynites because he can’t throw rocks or hit baseballs half as hard as them, and they’re equally frustrated with having to look after a younger kid who’s effectively still a toddler. In an attempt to scare Joey off so they can play big-boy games without him, the kids prank the little tyke into believing he has shot his brother dead with a rifle, using a bottle of ketchup to simulate a bloody wound. Freaked out that he’s soon to be arrested for “moider,” Joey hides out from the law at the funnest place in the world to become anonymous: Coney Island. While Lennie’s worried sick about where his little brother has run off to, Joey deliberately makes himself sick on cotton candy, Coca-Cola, and “a large number of hot dogs.” Once he gets to the park, the movie drops the need for plot and instead just watches him “lose” two days riding rides and playing games, only occasionally having to duck the attention of cops, who have no idea who he is.
Little Fugitive is most often lauded for its on-the-ground, run-and-gun filmmaking style, serving as a direct precursor to French New Wave gamechangers like Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. Engel’s innovation in that lineage was applying his war-journalist experience to narrative filmmaking, carrying a small, reconfigured movie camera around a real amusement park to document little Joey’s antics without drawing the attention of the hundreds of unpaid extras. The film partly functions as a documentary of what a day spent at Coney Island might’ve looked like in the 1950s, jumping from attraction to attraction with the giddy enthusiasm of a child with no parents around to say no. However, most of Joey’s journey through the park’s carnival attractions is heavily subjective. The camera is held at Joey’s height, returning audiences to a childhood world where everything you experience is eye-level with adults’ butts. Circus clown automatons are shot from low angles, appearing as disconcertingly jolly jump scares. In the brief period when Joey runs out of money and hasn’t yet figured out a scheme to earn his keep collecting glass bottles, he becomes a kind of ghost, totally ignored by everyone else at the park, as if this were more of a meaningful precursor to Carnival of Souls than 400 Blows. It’s documentary, sure, but it’s all distored through a child’s funhouse mirror perspective on the world of adults.
It’s difficult to tell a story through a child’s worldview without becoming overly saccharine, but Engel & Orkin manage just fine. Young Joey’s obsession with horses (inspired by his addiction to cowboy-themed TV shows) starts as a cutesy character detail, but it gets outright pathological by the time he’s collecting armfuls of bottles for another small taste of the 25¢ pony rides. Despite the title, he’s never in any real danger or trouble, and the only threats to his innocence are in having to learn how to make his way in the world. He quickly learns that if he wants to ride the ponies again, he’s going to have to work hard enough to earn the money himself, which in this case entails collecting trash from distracted adults who are making & passing out on the nearby beach. In that way, the film also starts to resemble another much-memed phenomenon from recent years: the Japanese game show Old Enough!, in which young children are tasked to run errands usually handled by their parents, while filmed from a safe distance. Regardless of whether it’s in reality-TV gameshows, vintage newspaper clippings & comic strips, or classic French cinema, it’s fun to watch kids figure out how to navigate the world without adult supervision. The trick is just to keep in mind that they’re people—however small & inexperienced—not adorable, chipper mascots who say the darndest things.
In an effort to promote Celine Song’s blank-eyed romcom Materialists last summer, A24 listed the director’s “movie syllabus” for similar big-screen romances that would set the mood for the picture, ranging from obvious Jane Austen-inspired connections like Autumn de Wilde’s Emma. to headscratchers like the Robert Altman murder mystery Gosford Park (huh?). This year, Emerald Fennell promoted her “Wuthering Heights” adaptation with a similar syllabus of inspirations compiled for the BFI’s Letterboxd account, with obvious choices like Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet clashing against headscratcher inclusions like David Cronenberg’s Crash (huh?). This “movie syllabus” trend is far from the most obnoxious promotional gimmick in an age where filmmakers are pushed to chug hot sauce, take lie detector tests, and play video games to reach audiences through TikTok & YouTube; at least it’s about the movies. Still, there’s a kind of “Show your work” eagerness to the maneuver that feels pre-apologetic, asserting that the filmmakers have done their homework and know their stuff, therefore the movie they’re promoting is Legitimate Cinema. It’s the same feeling I get when biopics conclude with real-life footage of their subjects in the end credits sequence, proving that they were well cast, styled, and researched regardless of whether the final product of all that effort was any good, as the point of making movies was accuracy, not artistry.
In a way, Baz Luhrmann’s new documentary EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is a two-hour argument for his 2022 Elvis biopic‘s historical accuracy, extending the “Show your work” credits sequence bragging to feature length. Constructed entirely from the archival footage pulled for reference material while staging the Vegas residency sequence of the Elvis biopic, EPiC hammers home just how accurate Luhrmann’s team was in recreating Vegas-era Elvis’s sets & costumes. The 16mm footage from those Vegas shows, its rehearsals, and the resulting roadshow American tour is cleaned up & restored to the same vivid HD image quality as the narrative feature it inspired, to the point where you can hardly tell the difference between Austin Butler fellating his microphone vs. Elvis doing the same (except that Elvis is slightly goofier about it, and more beautiful). Like with the other “Show your work” maneuvers of its ilk, however, that doesn’t retroactively make Elvis a great movie, just because it’s proven to be a visually accurate one. It is a lot more useful to an audience than an email screenshot, a Letterboxd list, or an end-credits stinger, though, since it stands on its own as a separate work of art. As a concert film, EPiC is equally garish & scatterbrained as the last picture Luhrmann made about Elvis, but it does have a leg up on its bigger, louder predecessor in that it’s anchored by its reverence for the archive, and it isn’t frequently interrupted by Tom Hanks blathering about “snow jobs” under several pounds of prosthetics.
I don’t personally care much for Elvis Presley’s music, especially during his Vegas period, when he had strayed so far from rock-n-roll that he had become a kind of lounge-singer circus act. Luhrmann frequently draws attention to the contrast between Elvis’s 1950s rock-n-roll beginnings to his 1970s stage-musical crooning by juxtaposing early television-broadcast performances of songs like “Hound Dog” with the proggy monstrosities they had become by the time they reached Vegas. It’s a different genre of music entirely, one that prefers broad spectacle over lean aggression, which is exactly what makes Luhrmann such a great fit for the material. Even if you don’t vibe with the music of EPiC, the spectacle of its onstage pageantry is still worth a gawk. Elvis is working in James Brown mode here, conducting every guitar stab and drum fill of his backing band with the suggestive wiggling of his caped & jumpsuited body. He belts, patters, and sweats with the best of ’em, performing more as an athlete than as a musician. In the most deranged sequences, Elvis takes a break from singing to instead run laps around the concert hall, making out with untold dozens of women in the audience one at a time without concern for personal violation or illness. It’s more of a space alien encounter than it is a live concert (the kind where everyone in the audience clearly wants to fuck the alien), making him the perfect subject for a Baz Luhrmann stage show.
On a formal level, there isn’t much Luhrmann is doing here that can’t be found in other recent music docs; he’s mostly just following the modern industry standard. In sequences where Elvis’s stage show is interrupted by rehearsal footage from behind the scenes, EPiC recalls the Beyoncé concert film Homecoming. In the frantic introduction that provides context for Elvis’s pre-Vegas career before the show begins, Chris Smith’s recent DEVO doc comes to mind. The brief sequences of pure restoration recall the Aretha Franklin concert film Amazing Grace, especially in the third act, when Elvis goes Gospel. David Bowie has recently seen both extremes of that treatment, both in the restoration of his concert film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and in the post-modern kaleidoscope edit Moonage Daydream. I enjoyed all of those movies to varying degrees, mostly because I enjoy listening to those artists’ music, so it was obviously more of an uphill battle to get on board with a singer whose songs I don’t care about. If the two entries in the Luhrmann-Elvis project have done anything for me musically, it’s in convincing me that “Suspicious Minds” is a pretty good song, one that Luhrmann was smart to make the core theme of his Elvis thesis, both sonically and lyrically (leaning on the “caught in a trap” motif when depicting the Vegas residency as the apex of Colonel Tom Parker’s abusive mismanagement of Elvis’s career). If the project’s done anything for Elvis’s legacy, it’s in posthumously fulfilling the singer’s wish to appear in “better movies,” which he was frequently blocked from doing after returning from WWII (again, through Parker’s mismanagement). Luhrmann should be prouder of that accomplishment than the lesser feat of “showing his work” by restaging the Vegas Elvis lookbook, which is a victory usually celebrated in more by-the-numbers biopics like Rocketman or Bohemian Rhapsody.
Steven Spielberg’s sharksploitation progenitor Jaws celebrated a 50-year anniversary last year, and the occasion was marked by a wide theatrical re-release, followed by an extensive, interactive exhibition at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles. I assume, then, that its most noteworthy porno parody, 1976’s Gums, will be receiving the same 50-year fanfare later this summer. If one is not already in the works, it’s not too late to slap a theatrical re-release together, thanks to the fine folks at the American Genre Film Archive already having a cleaned-up scan of the curio on-hand, ready to roll. Gums is included as a B-side bonus feature on AGFA’s Blu-ray release for Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers, the only other film of note from director Robert J. Kaplan. In a way, Gums does recall that earlier, mightier title by hiring porno queen Terri Hall to swim through an underwater garden of sea cucumbers (i.e., a coral reef composed of gigantic cocks), but it’s overall too restrained and too straight to match the delirious heights of Kaplan’s hippie-NYC masterwork. It’s a straight-up, few-frills Jaws parody with a one-joke premise: What if, instead of a killer shark, a beach town was terrorized by a killer mermaid who bites off men’s penises mid-fellatio. In 1976, there was enough pot smoke in the air to land that kind of novelty in movie theaters across the country, allowing Gums to contribute to Jaws’s legacy in a way that deserves some official acknowledgement, however small.
In the cold-open kill, a young man skinny-dips fully nude instead of a young woman — the camera zooming in on his flaccid penis before it’s castrated via mermaid. Once detached, it then floats to shore as a disembodied dildo. That dildo is the closest thing you’ll see to an onscreen erection in this film, since Gums opted to stick to a softcore rating in order to swim its way into as many theaters is possible, treated more as a campy midnight-movie novelty than a Porno Chic marital aid. Like the shark in Jaws, Terri Hall’s cock-chomping mermaid is mostly hidden from the audience in the first half of the (mercifully short) runtime, leaving the audience to hang out with her horned-up macho victims for far too long. Spending so much downtime with such beloved Jaws-spoofing characters as Deputy Dick, Dr. Smegma, and Captain Clitoris, I was reminded of Roger Ebert’s “First Law of Funny Names,” which declares that “funny names, in general, are a sign of desperation at the screenplay level.” Gums has no clue what to do with itself when not filming Terri Hall swimming between killer blowjobs underwater, as it cannot fill its runtime with hardcore sex without censoring the action with comic book panels of phrases like “Pork!” and “Slurp!” So, it stages a collection of go-nowhere bits, throwing anything it can think of at the audience to reach feature length: stock footage of real-life beavers, a buzzard puppet with a human hard-on, home movies of mating pet dogs, a Mel Brooks-style Nazi spoof, and whatever else got a chuckle from the crew while passing joints around the set. It’s all obnoxious nonsense, but it’s at least constantly surprising obnoxious nonsense. When the non-mermaid main characters are abruptly replaced by puppets in the final scene, there’s no possible reaction other than “Sure, yeah, whatever.”
The only dialogue exchange in Gums that got a genuine laugh out of me, was when Dr. Smegma (the Hooper stand-in) explains to Deputy Dick (the Brody stand-in) that true mermaids don’t have actual fish tails, that their tails are “psychological.” It’s a hilariously labored, unnecessary excuse for the lack of craft in Terri Hall’s costuming, which essentially amounts to some dramatic drag-queen eye makeup and a coral tiara. It’s also one of many instances in which the script seems to be working out its core gimmick in real-time, sometimes even workshopping what the eventual title will be with alternate options like Deep Jaws (in reference to Deep Throat) and Thar She Blows! (which is repeated at top volume ad nauseum). For all of its failed humor and self-censored sensuality, though, Gums does achieve some semblance of arts-and-crafts beauty in its underwater photography, whenever it drops all of the schtick onshore to instead focus on Hall hunting down her next victim. Maybe there’s not enough substance there for it to earn its own year-long Academy Museum spotlight, but maybe it could be included in the ongoing Jaws celebration as a backroom exhibit, hidden behind a red curtain like the porno rooms at the video rental stores of old. All they’d need to add is a few video arcades showing loops of Terri Hall swimming around pantsless in her underwater sea-cucumber garden to demonstrate the kind of effect Jaws had on the wider culture (beyond inventing the summer blockbuster as we know it). Gums doesn’t deserve much, but it at least deserves that.
The No Wave filmmaking movement of the early 1980s produced a smattering of stone-cold classics that are routinely celebrated by in-the-know film nerds (Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames, Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens, Bette Gordon’s Variety), but most of its cinematic output never escaped containment the way the same scene’s musical acts did (Sonic Youth, Bush Tetras, Swans), give or take the later post-No Wave successes of Jim Jarmusch. That’s largely because wide commercial success was never the goal. The No Wave scene could only exist because early-80s NYC living was cheap enough for artists to afford treating the city like a playground, running around filming plotless movies and playing structureless noise music for no audience other than themselves and their own burnout friends. That is, until core No Wavers Scott B & Beth B scaled up their usual no-budget, no-permit production style in the 1982 neo-noir Vortex, aiming to make A Real Movie for A Real Audience instead of just circulating aggressively anti-commercial art films amongst peers. Their attempts to upscale the No Wave aesthetic seems small in retrospect. They shot on 16mm instead of Super-8 to attract legitimate distributors; they shot on sound stages instead of running around city streets; they hired working actor (and part-time gravedigger) James Russo to star opposite their usual muse & collaborator Lydia Lunch; they even completed a script before shooting scenes so as to not waste time of the additional crew needed to operate all their new, fancy equipment. The result is a film that halfway-sorta resembles a professionally-produced studio picture but maintains the deliberately aimless, abstracted arthouse sensibility of No Wave proper. It’s stuck in a cinematic limbo, neither one thing nor the other.
No Wave legend Lydia Lunch stars as Angel Powers, playing a noir detective archetype with the lethal sultriness of a femme fatale. After discovering the assassination of a corrupt senator via a mysterious tasing weapon, she finds herself investigating shady weapons dealings in a noirish soundstage otherworld, getting increasingly close & personal with the Big Bad’s jumpy right-hand man (Russo). From there, it’s more a collection of images than it is a story worth retelling. New York artist Bill Rice’s presence as a Dr. Claw-style supervillain constantly on the verge of assassination or world domination provides some recognizable semblance of a plot, but Lunch & Russo mostly just have sex behind his back while deciding whether or not they should kill each other. The actual weapons-trading investigation doesn’t matter as much as the framing of Lunch reading top-secret superweapons manuals in the bathtub while ripping a cig and wearing a full mug, looking like a goth-punk Jayne Mansfield. Beth & Scott B have a lot of fun with the broad look and tropes of noir, shooting most scenes in black sound-stage voids where their characters are shrouded by shadows from all sides and goofing off with for-their-own sake visual gags involving decoded spy messages & jazz club barrooms. You can tell the obligation of having to write a complete script ahead of shooting was a chore for them, though, as there’s little life or meaning in the words their characters exchange while posing in those surreal post-noir environments. With all of the multi-media artists around in the scene who dabbled in poetry (including Lunch herself, who’s celebrated more for her spoken word work than any other facet of her career), you’d think they could’ve found someone who’d put just as much thought & passion into the artistry of the words as they put in the artistry of the images.
While Vortex is paranoid nonsense, it’s at least stylishly paranoid nonsense, so it had me leaning in looking for things to love. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that it was one William S. Burroughs script punch-up away from being truly brilliant. Whether it was the assassinated senator, the Mr. Big supervillain, or the detective’s junkie ex-partner, I kept fantasy casting Burroughs into various roles throughout the film, desperate to hear his much more poetic way of rambling paranoid nonsense about the shady backroom dealings of NSA-type G-Men. The dialogue is already recited in his cadence, but it’s sorely missing his creaky gravitas. Between Lunch, Rice, and future Bongwater-frontwoman Ann Magnuson, however, the film already had a sizeable collection of grungy NYC art heroes on-hand even without Burroughs’s involvement, and it has thus maintained a small cult-cinema legacy as a major milestone in the No Wave movement. It also proved to be the last collaboration between Beth & Scott B, who broke up their cheekily named B Movies production team after staging their biggest project to date. Beth B continued to direct confrontational underground art in the video sphere, most notably in 1991’s Stigmata and 1996’s Visiting Desire. Scott B went the safer route by picking up professional work directing made-for-cable documentaries for outlets like The Discovery Channel. As collaborators, Vortex was quite literally The Bs going for broke, and it broke them (to the point where Vortex is often cited as the official end of No Wave cinema, with the more famous titles referenced above considered to fall outside of the official canon). It’s both amusing to see what a Big Swing major motion picture means in the context of such a deliberately small & disorganized art movement and frustrating that the final product isn’t slightly more coherent or poetic — stuck in a limbo between the two.
There’s a new entry in the small canon of high-style comedies in which Harry Melling plays a new-to-the-game BDSM sub who discovers a latent desire to serve leather daddies, following several years’ wait after Amanda Kramer’s Please Baby Please. Die-hard fans of that two-film genre haven’t been waiting as long as devotees of the equally small canon of British melodramas about homosexual bikers with turbulent home lives, who’ve been waiting several decades for a follow-up to 1965’s The Leather Boys. Pillion is a worthy addition to both of those micro-genres, both wryly amusing in its depiction of post-Tom of Finland kink play and sincerely dramatic in teasing out the romantic tensions within that scene. Harry Melling’s sheltered protagonist is adorably in-over-his-head as the newest addition to a gang of leather-clad biker brutes, playing against Alexander Skarsgård as the disconcertingly handsome dom who takes him on as a pet. The power dynamics of their sexual play is clear from the start, but the dynamics of their romantic life are much fuzzier & unstable, given that Skarsgård’s smirking hunk mug is impossible to read, leaving Melling’s mewling underling with lots to think about while awaiting commands. It doesn’t help that onlookers universally treat their pairing as a sight gag, baffled by how a little imp who looks like Melling could score such a chiseled Adonis (with obvious emotional baggage and a pathological aversion to even the smallest peck of a kiss).
At the movies, most BDSM romances are told from the POV of a newly initiated sub who’s excited by the thrill of being bossed around but unsure of their personal boundaries or desires within that new role, until the dom overexerts their power and breaks the spell. In real life, it’s the sub who wields all the power, having pre-planned and negotiated all the things they want done to them during playtime while pretending it was all the dom’s idea all along once the games begin. Pillion starts as the movie version of a BDSM romance, then ends on the reality. Harry Melling plays an uncloseted but embarrassingly inexperienced gay man who still lives at home with his parents well into his 30s, until he lucks into the exact thing he wants: a big, exciting biker hunk who bosses him around and adopts him as a pet. He’s beamingly proud of his “aptitude for devotion” within this new relationship, but he’s also unsure about much of himself he should commit to it, because he cannot decide which master’s expectations to meet: his dom’s or his parents’. His terminally ill mother (Lesley Sharp) is especially concerned that what her sons sees as a game might cross over into emotional abuse, and he’s desperate to ease her mind without disappointing his new owner. The struggle within the relationship is that by the time he learns to assert himself to his mother’s liking, it becomes clear that he’s hitched his wagon to a damaged top, and the whole dynamic falls apart.
The attraction to telling these kinds of kink-dynamic stories on the screen is that they make the small power negotiations within all romances vivid & explicit. Not for nothing, they’re also hot. Before he realizes that he’s owed power that his top refuses to allow him (like a bad dog owner who neglects to take their pup on walks), Pillion finds a lot of awkward humor in the excessive gratitude its protagonist shows to his new hunky lover for even stooping to notice him, much less fuck him. It also finds a lot of on-screen steam in the actual fucking, dwelling on the minor physical gestures of its wrestling matches, blowjobs, and exhibitionist picnic-table sodomy. There’s also some intoxicating poetry in its nocturnal bike rides, when our POV sub finally finds a way to get out of his own head and live in the excitement of the moment — a subliminal headspace that carries over into the bedroom. The only thing he needs to learn is that he has a lot of say in how that mental subspace is reached, whether or not the first dom he meets agrees. So, for a gay leather-kink indie drama, Pillion really does have something for everyone: funny jokes, hot sex, and personal growth to be enjoyed by all. The film is even bookended with Christmas scenes, so you can gather the entire family around the TV to watch it next holiday season, joining other beloved Yuletide British rom-drams like Love Actually and About a Boy.
Welcome to Episode #259 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Hanna discuss the earlier works of this year’s Best Director Oscar nominees, starting with Paul Thomas Anderson’s ensemble-cast drama Magnolia (1999).
There’s a fun storytelling device in Susan Seidelman’s Sex and the City pilot that greatly added to the casual, Gen-X appeal of the show’s early seasons, before being dropped from its format entirely: the direct-to-camera confessionals. In early episodes of Sex and the City, main characters and single-scene players alike were introduced to the audience via street-interview soliloquies, adding to the show’s simulated confessional candor about modern New Yorkers’ sex lives. I used to assume that Seidelman staged those documentary-style interviews as a way to mimic the blind-item anecdotes of Candace Bushnell’s original “Sex and the City” newspaper column, maybe borrowing some visual language from reality TV in the process. In retrospect, that device may have been borrowed from an entirely different early-90s Gen-X relic, separate from the MTV Real World confessionals that they coincidentally recall. Structurally, Cameron Crowe’s 1992 grunge-scene dramedy Singles is a major stylistic precursor for the initial Sex and the City aesthetic, profiling the sexual & romantic lives of lovelorn slackers in the same confessionals-and-vignettes rhythms that Seidelman helped establish for the show. The differences between them are matters of perspective & tone. Singles is set in Seattle instead of New York, it’s cuter than it is raunchy, and its characters are idealistic twentysomethings looking for love instead of jaded thirtysomethings looking to settle.
The core friend group profiled in Singles are connected through the exact kinds of cultural hubs you’d expect to find in early-90s Seattle: warehouse concert venues, hipster coffee shops, and the single-bedroom apartment complexes that give the film its title. All of its characters teeter between remaining single forever and halfway committing to serious relationships, unsure whether they can trust each other or if their hearts are being played with in pursuit of sex. The women are universally adorable: Bridget Fonda as the plucky optimist, Kyra Sedgwick as the cynical pessimist, Sheila Kelley as the A-type stress magnet. The men are varying levels of dopey: Campbell Scott as the careerist yuppie, Jim True-Frost as the dorky wannabe, Matt Dillon as the true-believer grunge scene burnout. They clumsily mix & match as best as they can while struggling to maintain that classic Gen-X air of apathetic cool that shields all raw emotion behind untold pounds of oversized sweaters, flannels, denim, and leather. The story’s scatterbrained vignette structure sets it up to function as a kind of backdoor sitcom pilot à la Sex and the City or Melrose Place, appealing specifically to teens just a few years younger than its characters, itching to move out of the suburbs and live adult lives in The Big City. Instead, it had to settle for reaching those kids through its tie-in CD soundtrack, which was such a successful cash-in on The Grunge Moment that it’s much better remembered than the film it was commissioned to promote.
Singles is so performatively laidback & low-key that it’s easy to underestimate its accomplishments as a Gen-X rom-dram. Consider it in comparison with 1994’s Reality Bites, for instance, which is so overly concerned with signaling its rebellion against Corporate Phonies and the sin of Selling Out that it becomes a kind of phony corporate sell-out product in its own right. Crowe’s handle on the era is much more humanist, recognizing that no matter how much Gen-X pretended to not give a shit about anything, they were still just lonely kids like every other generation before them. Where Reality Bites cast Ethan Hawke as a hunky poster-boy for disaffected slackerdom, Singles cast Matt Dillon as a goofball parody of the same burnout musician archetype, inviting the audience to lean in and search for the lovable lug below his jaded surface instead of shoving his charms in our faces. Crowe’s background as a music journalist doesn’t hurt Singles‘s credibility either, as it allowed him to include progenitors of “The Seattle Sound” like Pearl Jam & Soundgarden onscreen to vouch for the movie’s authenticity. Having his characters awkwardly flirt at an Alice in Chains concert gives the movie just as much cultural & temporal specificity as having Carrie Bradshaw order a Cosmopolitan at a swanky NYC nightclub. Their desires & behavior are universally relatable, though, even if you weren’t around for grunge’s first wave; anyone who’s ever suffered through an uneasy situationship in their 20s is likely to see themselves in it, no matter where or when.
The shot-on-video punk scene relic Twisted Issues is difficult to categorize with a solid, workable genre definition. The project started as a no-budget documentary about the local punk scene in Gainesville, Florida, and scraps of that initial idea make it to the screen in-tact, detectable in lengthy scenes of D.I.Y. punk showcases in dive bars & living rooms and in montages of kids lazily pushing their skateboards down endless suburban pavement. However, sometime during production, someone decided to actually make money off of this endeavor, and the project deviated into the most viable option for low-budget, low-talent backyard filmmakers to earn a spot on video store shelves: it became a horror film. One of the skateboarding slackers became a monstrous horror icon who could hunt & kill his buddies in standalone vignettes, fleshing out the monotonous punk-show footage with the kinds of goof-off gore gags that could later be strung together in the edit to tell a somewhat linear story. It’s in that post-production edit where director Charles Pinion mutated the project a second time into something much stranger and less definable than either its documentary or creature feature versions could’ve achieved on their own. He transformed it into an oddly surreal piece of outsider art, constantly teetering between happenstantial genius and total incoherence.
True to its initial pitch, a large portion of Twisted Issues illustrates songs from local punk acts like The Smegmas, Hellwitch, and Mutley Chix with ironic news footage clips, unrelated skateboarding footage, and staged acts of violence that match the images suggested by their lyrics. The non-music video portions of the film follow one skateboarder in particular, who’s murdered in a hit & run by car-driving bullies straight out of The Toxic Avenger, then resurrected by a Dr. Frankenstein-style mad scientist to avenge his own death. The undead skater picks up a sword, hides his disfigured face behind a fencing mask, and screws his foot to a wheel-less skateboard that gives him a classic Frankenstein limp. Once loose on the streets of Gainesville, he kills his former bullies one at a time in standalone scenes that could be assembled in any order of Charles Pinion’s choosing without affecting “the plot.” The most curious decision Pinion makes, then, is including himself onscreen as a godlike figure who watches all of this gory violence and punk scene tomfoolery on his living room television. His character is clearly part of the scene, as he sometimes shares dead-eyed interactions with buddies who he later watches get killed on the TV as if he were tuning into late-night cable creature features or the local news. He’s also clearly in control of the film’s reality in some loosely defined way, as if everything we’re watching is only happening because he’s observing it through the screen. Is Pinion the punk rock Schrödinger? If a skater falls off his board and no one’s around to watch it, did he really scrape his knee? Could God videotape a gore gag so gnarly that even He couldn’t stomach it? The omniscient television set is the only element of the film’s narrative that can’t be fully defined or understood and, thus, it’s the one that elevates the picture from cute to compelling.
Twisted Issues grinds its metaphorical skateboard straight down the border between sloppily incoherent slacker art and sublimely surreal video art. Given the means and circumstances of its production, that TV-static-fuzzed incoherence was likely the only honest way for these kids to make movies, considering that every single suburban experience in that era was mediated through beer cans & TV screens. The filmmaking is, to put it kindly, unrefined. Every dialogue exchange is dragged out by awkward pauses that double their length. Each vignette is harshly separated by a cut-to-black transition. When it comes time for an original score to fill in the gaps between local punk acts, sequences are set to the most pained, aimless guitar solos to ever assault the human ear. The undead skateboarder’s accoutrements and the weapons used to fight back against him are all props that appear to have been collected from the local nerdy Sword Guy’s bedroom (credited to Hawk, who plays a nerdy Sword Guy mystic in-film to maintain verisimilitude). The whole thing is very obviously a document of friends goofing around on the weekends between punk gigs & service industry jobs, which in a roundabout way fulfills its initial mission. The way Pinion pieces everything together through the all-seeing eye of his bedroom TV set is impressively surreal, though, and it abstracts the entire picture into something that can’t be outright dismissed as home movies of local punk mischief. He mixes his friends’ goof-off hangouts with war atrocity footage recorded off TV news broadcasts. He matches local bands’ lyrics to scripted scenes of violence to the point of verging on making an SOV movie musical. Most significantly, he likens the act of shooting, editing, and watching all of this footage to a kind of godlike omnipotence that underlines the plasticity of reality in all media. He made art out of scraps.
Swampflix 