brandon ledet

Quick Takes: Last-Minute 2019 Catch-Ups

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I am terrible at watching movies this time of year, like bad at the actual act of doing it. Most of the Awards Season titles that light up pro critics’ lists don’t do much for me personally, and I’ll play catch-up with movies I’ve been dying to watch for months and genuinely think things like “This is really good but is it Best of the Year good?” Shameful. In the few instances where a surprise gem stands out as something special (Luz being my most recent example), I then fret over how to make room for it on my already overstuffed list of favorites from the year. I’m extremely grateful to have finally pushed through to the lawless chaos of January Dumping Season. Now we can all binge on gimmicky genre trash no one really gives a shit about; this is when I shine brightest.

Instead of entirely discarding the few last-minute splurges of 2019 catch-ups that I enjoyed but failed to be wowed by, I figured I’d collect them here in a short list of quick takes. Because I was aiming to cram in as many titles as possible, I knocked out the five shortest movies on my watchlist. They were all good-to-okay, and probably (definitely) all could have benefited from being viewed outside this unholy end-of-the-year cram session season. Here they are listed by shortest-to-longest runtime (with corresponding star ratings) in case you too want to rush through a few more interesting titles before we wrap up the list-making process and leave 2019 behind us forever, forgotten and discarded.

This Magnificent Cake! – 44min

A satirical series of stop-motion vignettes that mock the imperialist brutes of Belgian-occupied Congo as absurd grotesqueries. The soft felt & yarn materials used to construct the stop-motion puppets and the Looney Tunes-style modes of death—including discarded banana peels & falling pianos—clash horrifically with the real-life horrors of colonialism & racial subjugation. The film mostly interprets its setting through the nightmares of the oppressors, but it’s oddly reserved for something so steeped in surrealism & historical cruelty.

I never quite fell in love with it, but its combination of ambling dream logic & ice-cold Roy Anderssonian slapstick humor at least felt freshly upsetting in an interesting way.

Share – 87min

A dramatically realistic crossroads between Unfriended & HBO’s Euphoria, in which a high school athlete & honor student discovers a disturbing cellphone video of herself from a night she doesn’t remember. Our troubled teen protagonist wants to put the (almost certain) possibility that she was assaulted while blackout drunk at a party behind her, but the nature of social media & modern tech means her experience with the trauma cannot be handled privately. While the teen boys who filmed her (and likely physically assaulted her) mostly avoid legal & social repercussions due to a lack of physical evidence, their victim is the only one who’s effectively punished. Isolated, forced to dwell on the details of the event for months on end, and missing out on the best stretch of high school play, she sinks further into a private, internal misery while the outside world moves on, unchanged.

While the examination of rape & victim-blaming in the digital age is obviously a tough topic, the film nimbly deals with the aftermath & trauma of the scenario without succumbing to the potential for exploitation or alarmism. Its sickly digi-cam footage & fluorescent lighting were also very much on-brand with the Evil Internet media I’m always a sucker for. I’m ashamed to admit it, but with a supernatural horror element & a creepy synth score, this likely would have been one of my favorite movies of the year. Instead, it’ll have to settle for just being really good.

The Banana Splits Movie – 89min

A SyFy Channel Original that’s somehow a genuine delight? The Banana Splits Movie imagines a world where its eponymous Hanna-Barbera children’s show (which was a real-life TV program in the late 1960s) starred killer animatronic robots instead of failed actors in mascot costumes. At a live taping of the decades-running pop culture relic (which only lasted three years in real life), a Chuck E. Cheese-style cast of rock n’ roll robots go haywire and murder select, obnoxious members of their audience, contrasting a cutesy Saturday Morning TV setting with amusing fits of horrific gore.

I had a lot of fun with this, or at least more fun than I expected to. The dramatic writing is about on par with what you’d expect from a SyFy production, but the practical gore gags are a nasty delight once it gets cooking. It’s goofy & violent enough to be worthwhile despite how thin the character work is, which is more than you can say for most of the originals that network broadcasts.

Relaxer – 91min

The writer & star of 2015’s Buzzard (Joel Potrykus & Joshua Burge) team back up for yet another exercise in grotesque slackerdom. This time they deliver a magical-realism period piece set during the final weeks before the Y2K Apocalypse. Two shithead brothers locked in a one-upmanship game of escalating, pointless dares they call “Challenges” seemingly bring on the Apocalypse by attempting to beat an unconquerable level of Pac-Man in a single sitting. Unable to leave the couch until the Challenge is complete, Burge’s antihero slacker rots in his own putrid filth for months on end while the world crumbles around him and the Pac-Man lights & noises help pass the time. Also, the trusty pair of 3D glasses he uses as a security blanket when upset may or may not give him superpowers.

I appreciated this slightly more than Buzzard, but I’m still not totally sold on this duo’s variation on artful slackerdom. I got a few queasy laughs out of it, though, and the supernatural angle was a plus. Mostly, I just walked away from it disgusted with the human body and fearful that if I ever lived alone, I’d quickly devolve into this exact couchbound purgatory of filth.

Pihu – 91min

This movie has an incredible ripped-from-the-headlines premise. Left alone with a mother who commits suicide, a two-year-old toddler fends for herself for several days, unsupervised. Like a horror movie variation on Kore-Eda’s Nobody Knows, this Indian melodrama follows the toddler around her (upscale, but messy) apartment for days as she attempts to accomplish simple tasks like feeding & entertaining herself without suffering a gauntlet of potentially lethal obstacles: pills, fire, heights, sharp objects, live electricity, hot irons etc.

It’s an anxiety-inducing nightmare of a premise (one we’re told is “based on a true story”), but it’s also one that undercuts its own in-the-moment effect in a few disappointing ways. There’s a cheesy After School Special quality to the way its themes of suicide & domestic abuse are dramatized, not least of all because the actor who plays the toddler’s father (mostly as a disembodied voice) is excruciatingly awkward & insincere. Worse, the movie opts for a soothing, gentle sitar score to contrast the in-the-moment danger of its pint-sized protagonist, when it really needed a Mica Levi-style nightmare of creepy ambiance. Still, if you’re looking for a novelty horror version of Baby’s Day Out, its central hook is strong enough to carry it through its minor distractions & shortcomings, even if just barely.

-Brandon Ledet

Luz (2019)

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In the mad dash to gobble down as many potential Best of the Year List contenders as possible before we start making ranking our personal favorites films of 2019, only one last-minute title has jumped out at me as a worthy dark horse entry. The bewildering thing is that it’s a student film, the thesis project of first-time director Tilman Singer. A 70min genre exercise with a small cast and just a few sparse locations, Luz is maybe the most unassuming indie gem from 2019 to achieve such a sublime must-see cinematic effect. Its ability to hypnotize & disorient an audience into a state of total delirium in just an hour’s time is a commendable act of cinematic black magic, an effect unmatched by any other last-minute 2019 catch-ups I’ve flooded my brain with in recent weeks.

This barebones genre gem is a story of demonic possession. A visibly shaken, scraped-up cab driver is held for questioning at what appears to be a late-1970s police station. Apparently driven mad by an encounter with her last customer, the cabbie is subjected to hypnotism at the hands of a creepy doctor under the cops’ employ for further interrogation. Unbeknownst to anyone in the room, the doctor is possessed by a demon who is obsessed with our dazed cabbie, waiting for its most opportune moment to strike. We cut between the interrogation, the ill-fated cab ride, the dive bar where the doctor became possessed, and the Catholic school where the cabbie first encountered the demon in a disorienting kaleidoscope of narratives that only becomes creepier the more they shift & overlap.

On an aesthetic level, Luz is a thoroughly pleasant genre throwback indulgence in all the ways you’d expect: grimy celluloid grain, analog synth score, candlelit Satanic rituals, the full works. There are plenty of other movies that can deliver that exact brand of Euro-horror genre nostalgia, though. What really stands out here to me is the narrative ambitions that disorient time & place with an aggressive, deranged fervor. As the story’s various competing fractions combine into one sharp-edged mosaic, the film achieves a deranged, sweaty, deliriously horny nightmare that all demonic possession media strives for, but few titles ever achieve. The closest comparison point I have for its accomplishments are the supernatural horrors of giallo greats like Argento & Bava in titles like Suspiria & Kill Baby Kill. That’s an impressive echelon for a film school thesis project to sneak into, which alone makes Luz stand out as one of the year’s most unexpected treasures.

-Brandon Ledet

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

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The icy 1940s murder comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets is one of the funniest pieces of comedic writing to ever reach the screen. It just also happens to be one of the driest pieces of comedic writing to ever reach the screen, going down like a tall glass of cold sand. The closest the film comes to approaching the over-the-top slapstick antics we’ve come to expect from comedic filmmaking as a medium is a proto-Klumps gimmick in which British stage legend Alec Guinness plays several broad archetype characters of the same family throughout the film – a vaudevillian artform that later made a mint for actors like Eddie Murphy, Tyler Perry, and (maybe closer to Guinness’s pedigree) Peter Sellers. Everything else is emotionally distant cruelty and callous bitchiness penned by a serial killer mutation of Oscar Wilde. That’s not a comedic tone that’s going to resonate with every viewer, but when it hits the right target it kills.

Dennis Price stars as the callous son of a disgraced noblewoman in the early 1900s. Bitter that he was raised in poverty because his mother married for love instead of land & title, our fey anti-hero schemes to reclaim his rightful place among landed wealthy gentry. He expedites his path back to this birthright like Jet Li in the nü-metal sci-fi thriller The One: murdering everyone ahead of him in line for his familial inheritance of a proper title. The humor of this selfish, greedy mission is in how these absurdly genteel murders are arranged to look like accidents, while our POV serial killer protagonist treats the deaths like domestic chores. The way he looks for “good” news in the Obituaries section of the paper and treats a diagram of his family tree like a hit list is outrageously cold & distanced. This is the kind of movie where the announcement of a murder investigation is described by the police as “a matter of some delicacy.” It’s also narrated as an after-the-fact epistolary memoir, underlining just how much of the humor is rooted in its post-Wilde writing style.

Alec Guinness does make an impression as the killer’s rotating cast of dipshit wealthy family members, whom the audience perversely want to see dead as well. His most popular collaboration with producer Michael Balcon—The Ladykillers—is a much more traditionally humorous farce, however, where his performance(s) is allowed to be more memorably pronounced. If anything, Guinness’s multiple personae in the doomed family line here only underline the multiple personae Price’s sociopathic killer tries on to gain access to the wealthy spaces his victims occupy. Guinness’s wealthy dolts don’t even turn out to be the killer’s ultimate nemesis; that honor belongs to a childhood “love” who shares his ruthless pursuit of money (just with shrewd choices in marriage partners, not murder).

Maybe the key to loving this movie’s frozen, impossibly dry heart lies in sharing that central vice of money envy – so that you get a perverse thrill from watching a working class fop murder his way into a more . . . comfortable living. More likely, it probably just takes an appreciation for the flippantly cruel way that thirst for wealth is written on the page, as that’s where Kind Hearts and Coronets‘s most exquisite artistry & outrageously funny zingers lie.

-Brandon Ledet

Kathryn Bigelow and the Loveable Scumbag

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On of the more popular theories as to why Kathryn Bigelow is the only woman to ever win an Oscar for Best Director is that she almost exclusively makes movies about men. Her prestigious war dramas aren’t exactly jingoistic love letters to American patriotism, but they do appeal to a kind of macho sensibility that helps explain why they would be praised over women-led projects with a quieter, more introspective bent. I don’t believe this is some calculated, cynical angle Bigelow chose in order to earn Awards Circuit accolades, though. The nature & textures of masculinity (and masculine violence) have been an auteurist preoccupation for the director dating all the way back to her early career as a genre film toughie. Her breakout success Point Break is a passionate bromance between an undercover cop and a dirtbag adrenaline junkie. Her cult classic vampire Western Near Dark follows the seduction & indoctrination of a macho farm boy into a subservient role among a clan of ghouls. Her Y2K sci-fi epic Strange Days—our current Movie of the Month—follows history’s greasiest anti-hero’s exploits in worming his unwanted, uninvited way back into his ex’s life. Masculinity is the thematic through-line throughout Bigelow’s decades-long career. It’s even one that concerns her debut feature.

Bigelow’s debut feature as director, The Loveless, is an early 60s motorcycle gang pastiche. It essentially remakes the Brando beefcake classic The Wild One as in introspective art piece (as opposed to Cool as Ice, which remade it as a breakfast cereal commercial). A young Willem Dafoe stars as a tragically beautiful biker brute in his first lead role. Unlike the mouthy charmer Ralph Fiennes plays in Strange Days, Dafoe hardly speaks a word in his leather biker get-up. Rather, his classic machismo is communicated though intense stares and hardened body language. Occasional poetic voiceover about how “the endless blacktop is [his] sweet eternity” suggests there’s a poet’s mind behind his stern eyes and supermodel cheekbones, but that suggestion of vulnerability only makes his machismo more dangerous. When Dafoe’s biker gang parks in small-town middle-America on their way to the races at Daytona, his pronounced male beauty inevitably captivates local women – leading to their ruin at the hands of jealous, abusive townies. Dafoe’s biker beauty isn’t as actively malicious as Fiennes’s scumbaggery is in Strange Days or Patrick Swayze’s hedonistic thrill-seeking is in Point Break, but his leather jacket & rockabilly lifestyle is still a destructive force for those seduced by his allure. His masculinity is both a pleasure & a bane, something Bigelow would expand upon in later works.

Fortunately, her sense of filmmaking craft & narrative purpose would expand as well. The Loveless is visually sumptuous in a way Bigelow’s later features consistently are (reflecting her formal education as painter). However, it’s also frustratingly inert – often feeling like a nostalgic fashion magazine shoot rather than a proper feature film. Willem Dafoe is so goddamn beautiful to gaze at in his leather get-up that it’s hard to complain too much about the film’s narrative shortcomings, but its 82min runtime still manages to linger for a relative eternity. The closest the film comes to exhilarating action is in a climactic, crazed shootout at a townie dive bar. However, it’s a violet display Bigelow later perfected to a very similar effect in Near Dark – making this early trial run feel trivial in retrospect. The entire point of the film, then, is the visual seduction of Dafoe’s macho posing & posturing. It was Bigelow’s very first film and she was already fixated on what masculinity means, what it looks like, and what effect in manifests in the world. There can be a debate as to why that fixation is rewarded in critics’ and awards institutions’ circles over the preoccupations of other women auteurs, but it’s clear to me that the impulse in Bigelow is at least personal & genuine. Like Angela Basset in Strange Days, Keanu Reeves in Point Break, and Marin Kanter in The Loveless, she can’t help but fall for a loveable scumbag.

For more on December’s Movie of the Month, Kathryn Bigelow’s Y2K sci-fi epic Strange Days (1995), check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, our look at the director’s continued fascination with police brutality in Detroit (2017), and last week’s comparison of its police brutality themes to those of Blue Steel (1989).

-Brandon Ledet

Drag Queen Confidence vs. Drag Queen Protagonists

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Drag has been having something of A Moment in recent years. Thanks largely to the visibility of RuPaul’s Drag Race on television, the sheer amount & variety of drag entertainment has practically exploded this decade. Just watching the pageant drag traditions of New Orleans alone mutate into fresher, weirder art in recent years has been bewildering in scale. In general, I don’t know if it’s so much that drag has fundamentally changed as an artform (at least not since the NYC Club Kids days of the 80s & 90s) so much as that society has changed around it. An increased social awareness of the nature & fabrication of gender has been a major cultural shift in the 2010s and it’s no surprise to me that an artform built on gender performance & gender subversion has increased in popularity along with it. I don’t know that this cultural change has been properly represented in our cinema yet, though, at least not through the eyes of drag queen protagonists. If anything, most of my all-time-favorite drag movies arrived in the 1990s: Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Too Wong Foo, Vegas in Space, etc. Drag movies in the decades since have seemingly focused less on the drag queens themselves, but rather on how their performance & exaggeration of gender inspires confidence in cis, hetero protagonists who use them as sources of personal inspo.

The foremost example of the Drag Queen Confidence movie I can think of was something I first discovered as a Broadway musical performance during a television broadcast of The Macy’s Day Parade (the one time of year I listen to showtunes). The 2005 Drag Confidence melodrama Kinky Boots has somehow gradually transformed from a middling Sundance Festival novelty to a beloved stage musical over the last decade, making it one of the more significant drag cinema success stories of recent years. In the film, Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a London drag queen whose need for large, sturdy high-fashion heels saves a struggling shoe factory that’s threatening to go bankrupt. Facing the inevitable truth that traditional cobbler labor is a dying art, Joel Edgerton serves as our protagonist in this drag-adjacent story – a man who must save his (shoe fetishist) father’s struggling factory by pivoting to designing “kinky boots” for beefy drag queens. Ejiofor’s drag queen side character, Lola (presumably named after the Kinks song, right?), isn’t portrayed as trans, but never appears out of makeup—even offstage—because women’s clothes give him confidence. His fearlessness in entering the small-town North England factory while dressed to the nines even inspires confidence in the straight-cis-white-male protagonist to be his own man and forge his own path outside everyone’s expectations of him. Kinky Boots is a fun movie, especially in Ejiofor’s plethora of cabaret performances of drag standards like Marlene Dietrich & Eartha Kitt. There’s also some extremely satisfying montage footage of shoes being assembled on an old-fashioned assembly line that could be repurposed as one of those viral video supercuts of perfectly functioning machinery. When you boil its story down to its basic parts, though, it’s a movie that somehow combines “white savior” (in Edgerton rescuing Lola from back alley harassment & dangerously flimsy footwear) & “magical negro” (in Lola saving Edgerton’s factory & personal life for no gain of his own) tropes into one efficiently iffy package.

The 2018 Netflix film Dumplin’ is even more egregious in sidelining its drag queen inspo characters as afterthoughts without inner lives of their own. In the film, Patti Cake$‘s Danielle MacDonald stars as the nonplussed, plus-sized daughter of a small-town beauty queen played by Jennifer Aniston – Miss Teen 1991. Sick of quietly suffering fatphobic microaggressions in her mom’s beauty pageant social orbit and fueled by the defiant spirit of her favorite pop diva—Dolly Parton—she enters the local pageant as a vaguely defined political protest, one that dredges up a lot of personal insecurities with her own body & personality. Where does she find the confidence to follow through on this attention-grabbing political protest? At the local drag bar, of course, where a gaggle of nameless queens devoid of inner lives (including Drag Race‘s own veteran “glamor toad” Ginger Minj) teach her how to strut in heels and perform traditional femininity with pride. Dumplin’ is a cute, harmless movie that reimagines Drop Dead Gorgeous as a wholesome melodrama about the value of friendship & self-worth. If nothing else, it’s near impossible to not fall for the charms of its feel-good Dollyisms like “It’s hard being a diamond in a rhinestone world.” However, its drag queen characters are essentially props & cheerleaders that only pop in to teach our down-on-her-luck protagonist how to be a self-assured, glamorous woman. They have no wants, needs, or crises of their own. The exist only to serve her story and seemingly disappear into vapor as soon as their offscreen.

Curiously, my favorite Drag Queen Confidence movie of recent decades is the one with the most viciously negative reviews. The 2004 slapstick farce Connie & Carla effectively ruined the career of My Big Fat Greek Wedding creator Nia Vardalos, who cashed in on her surprise megahit to make a deeply silly buddy comedy opposite Toni Colette (who wouldn’t?). A cross between Sister Act & Victor Victoria, the movie follows two tragically mediocre cabaret performers with an airport lounge act who hide from the mafia by posing as dive bar drag queens, until their act becomes so popular that their cover is blown. Connie & Carla has the broad humor of a decade-stale mid90s studio comedy and its “Cis women drag queens?!?!” premise has become eyerollingly outdated in the last decade (I’ve been to several shows with all-lady queens in the past year alone). Still, I found it to be a total hoot. Toni Collette is especially fun to watch (duh) in the movie’s frequent, elaborate cabaret routines – doing increasingly blue material with the “male” privilege drag affords her and lighting up the screen with a drag version of Jesus (as a woman dressed as a man dressed as a woman dressed as a man, a total gender meltdown). The movie often trips over its own feet politically—both in its eagerness to forgive homophobia and in its plastic surgery-shaming version of body positivity—but as far as Drag Queen Confidence movies go, it’s the most resoundingly successful film of this batch. It does right by its drag queen characters. Not only do the queens who help Connie & Carla learn to be confident women have their own lives & conflicts offscreen & on, but Connie & Carla themselves become actual, legitimate drag queens by the film’s end – not just beneficiaries of the artform’s confidence boost.

As much as I was tickled by Connie & Carla as a broad slapstick farce, even that enjoyment was small consolation for the general lack of quality drag cinema at large in recent years. If there are still great drag queen movies being made post 1990s (or at least post Hedwig in 2001), it’s all work that’s being done in the documentary sphere: The Sons of Tennessee Williams, The Gospel of Eureka, Drag Becomes Him, Gracefully, etc. The occasional, miniscule movies like Hurricane Bianca, Alaska is a Drag, and Holiday Heart that actually have drag queen protagonists aren’t cutting it; their limited resources don’t give them a fighting chance. If a drag-themed movie is being put together with a proper, professional budget, it’s far more likely that the queens will only pop in as quirky side characters – a dash of whimsical flavor and a selfless confidence boost to the hetero protagonists. They’re a road stop on Lady Gaga’s path to being born a star or Channing Tatum’s path to rediscovering his stripper mojo. They’re rarely, if ever, the stars themselves in professional-grade narrative cinema anymore, which is a total shame. Drag has become much more popular & varied since the 1990s, but the scope of actual drag queen movies paradoxically appears to be shrinking.

-Brandon Ledet

Movies to See in New Orleans This Week 12/26/19 – 1/1/20

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Here are the movies we’re most excited about that are playing in New Orleans this week.

Movies We Haven’t Seen (Yet)

Little Women – Greta Gerwig’s directorial follow-up to Lady Bird is an ambitious literary adaptation that scrambles the timelines & narrative structure of its source material to break free from the expectations set by its cultural familiarity. Major bonus points: yet another featured role for 2019 MVP Florence Pugh, who had a legendary year between this, Midsommar, and Fighting with my Family. Playing wide.

Uncut Gems – The Safdie Brothers revise the sweaty desperation of their traumatizingly anxious thriller Good Time by casting Netflix Doofus Extraordinaire Adam Sandler in the lead role, making this a spiritual follow-up to Punch Drunk Love. Looks wonderfully stressful. Playing wide.

Movies We’ve Already Enjoyed

Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project – A documentary about the D.I.Y. archivist who diligently recorded thirty years of American TV news on 70,000 VHS tapes only to be ostracized as a crackpot. A vindicating portrait of an absolute fucking genius, and a must-watch for anyone with an archival or librarian sensibility. Probably the best documentary I’ve seen all year. Playing only at Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge.

Parasite – The latest from Bong Joon-ho (director of Okja and Swampflix’s favorite movie of 2014, Snowpiercer) is a twisty, crowd-pleasing thriller about class resentment that’s been selling out screenings & earning ecstatic critical praise for months as its distribution exponentially spreads. Guaranteed to be in discussions of the best movies of the year, so don’t miss your chance to see it big, loud, and with an enraptured crowd. Playing only at Chalmette Movies.

-Brandon Ledet

Slut in a Good Way (2019)

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Christmas may be my least favorite holiday on the calendar, so I’m usually not one to dwell on Christmas movies as a genre. If I’m going to actively seek out a Christmas film to cover for this site, then, it will typically be one that overlaps with a genre I do especially enjoy. This novelty usually comes by way of Christmastime horror deviations like Rare Exports, Black Christmas, Krampus, or The Children. This year, the French-Canadian indie Slut in a Good Way offered me a much rarer treat as a Christmastime genre crossover, overlapping with a genre much less familiar with the holiday than horror: the teen sex comedy. In the recent tradition of high school sex romps like Booksmart, The To Do List, Blockers, and Wetlands, this low-budget gem attempts to subvert the raunchy teen sex comedy format by updating it with a femme perspective & a newfound sense of earnestness. It just happens to do so while wearing a Santa hat, which automatically makes it my favorite Christmas movie of the year.

Three 17-year-old high school friends take seasonal department store jobs at The Toy Depot to meet cute boys. One refuses to sacrifice her political ideology in order to be more attractive; one struggles to lose her virginity to the exact Mr. Right; and the third (our de facto protagonist) emerges as the staff’s foremost slut – “in a good way!”. Rebounding from a long-term romance that ends before our story begins, she discovers a newfound sexual confidence that encourages her to sleep with every one of her cute-boy coworkers. Mortified that she’s the last person to realize that she’s banged the entire Toy Depot roster, she ropes the other girls into a Lysistrata sex pact: no boinking until Christmas, to teach the boys a lesson. There’s a very old-fashioned Boys vs. Girls gender divide in that set-up, especially once you realize no one on the all-teen staff is gay, or even bi (in 2019??? no fucking way). For the most part, though, this low-stakes sex farce feels remarkably true to some version of a lived teenage experience; an early sequence involving a water bottle bong & public playground equipment felt true to my own at least. Its setting over Winter Break instead of Summer affords it a distinctly Canadian sensibility too, a specificity I appreciated all the way from the boiling swamps of Louisiana.

As much as Slut in a Good Way participates in teen sex comedy & Christmastime romance traditions, the film I would most readily compare it to falls in neither category: Ghost World. There’s something about its teenage melancholy & frustrated search for identity that feels directly rooted in that film (which meant a lot to me in high school). Little aesthetic touches like a D.I.Y. Bollywood ending & a leather-fetish cat mask make me suspect that association was intentional. If nothing else, the film asks to be taken seriously as a wistful indie drama on top of being a mildly naughty teen sex comedy. Its digital black-and-white patina & French-language dialogue allow it to function as the pretentious French smut counterpart to Booksmart (or French-Canadian smut, to be more accurate) while being just as tonally light & playful in its own moment-to-moment gags. That’s the exact kind of genre familiarity I’ll always be on the hook for, regardless of my aversion to Christmas cheer. I’m not going to pretend I prefer this film’s Yuletide sex antics to Christmas horror novelties, but if I’m going to occasionally stumble into watching a film centered on this (incredibly stressful) holiday, it’s nice to find some variety where I can.

-Brandon Ledet

Diamantino (2019)

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In the opening sequence of Diamantino, our bimbo antihero achieves a euphoric state of internal bliss while doing the one thing he’s good for: playing soccer. With all the world’s eyes on his every move, the greatest living footballer dissociates from his game-winning drive by mentally escaping to his Happy Place. Glittery pink storm clouds flood the screen, accompanied by stadium-scale puppies galloping along with our titular galoot as he scores the goal of a lifetime. There are two ways to achieve that kind of internal peace & total calm: years of practiced meditation, or starting off already empty-headed. The beautiful sweet idiot Diamantino falls firmly in that latter category, and the tragedy of the film is him losing that transcendent state of blissful ignorance (a natural gift he refers to as “The Fluffy Puppies”) as soon as he gains just a little knowledge of how awful the world truly is.

In that way, Diamantino is like a hotter, more chiseled version of Chauncey Gardner, the Peter Sellers character from Being There. Sexy enough to know he can get away with living an exclusively shirtless life but so intellectually sheltered from the real world he doesn’t realize how bizarre it is that he’s an adult virgin, this Zoolander-level underwear model of a man is too naïve to be real. And so, he functions mostly as a political allegory. While yachting with his overly controlling family who leach off his wealth, Diamantino discovers the existence of political refugees – spotting a raft of starving, petrified victims of war drifting towards the Portuguese coast. This revelation that the displacement of refugees and general human suffering are real-life social ills completely blows his feeble mind, which was previously only occupied by a narcissistic self-obsession and an ability to play soccer real good. The fluffy puppies disappear and Diamantino loses his sexy footballer mojo, making the only possible triumph of the film a path back to blissful ignorance.

Once exposed to the existence of human suffering & political turmoil, Diamantino falls down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theory intrigue, allowing the movie to take wild, unsubtle jabs at the disasters of MAGA & Brexit culture in particular. As soccer is described to be the true “opium of the masses,” disparate groups like the Portuguese Secret Service, The Ministry of Propaganda, and the James Bond-style corporate entity Lamborghini Genetics all conspire to exploit Diamantino’s celebrity for their own political gain. Meanwhile, the beefy oaf just wants to make himself feel better about the refugee crisis so he can frolic in the pink clouds of his own empty head with the Fluffy Puppies again. It’s a delightfully absurd political farce, bolstered by surreally cheap CGI and a peculiar sense of humor that alternates between wholesomeness & cruelty at a breakneck pace. The whole thing just winds up feeling like a fantasy movie adaptation of this meme (which I swear I mean as a compliment):

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #98 of The Swampflix Podcast: Head (1968) & Psychedelic Musicals

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Welcome to Episode #98 of The Swampflix Podcast. For our ninety-eighth episode, Brandon is joined by Aaron Armstrong of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss the stoney-baloney world of psychedelic musicals, with a particular focus on The Monkees’ irreverent war protest freak-out Head (1968). Enjoy!

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

-Brandon Ledet & Aaron Armstrong

Kathryn Bigelow and the Tough-as-Nails Heroine

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One of the more popular theories as to why Kathryn Bigelow is the only woman to ever win an Oscar for Best Director is that she almost exclusively makes movie about men & masculinity. That’s not to say she doesn’t have an active, genuine interest in the topic as auteur, but rather that it’s curious that the filmmaker fixated on telling men’s stories happens to be the one woman director to ever win her field’s top prize. Bigelow’s preoccupation with macho, dirtbag men is especially noticeable in our current Movie of the Month—the Y2K sci-fi epic Strange Days—in which a scumbag anti-hero played by Ralph Fiennes is inexplicably centered in the film’s narrative instead of the more traditionally heroic badass played by Angela Bassett. Bassett’s stunt-driving, punches-throwing, testicles-kicking, politically radical heroine is a true wonder—a spectacle in herself—which makes it all the more tragic that even she is helpless to Fiennes’s greasy macho charms in the main role. That letdown is an intentionally frustrating aspect of the script (which Bigelow penned with her creative partner and already then-former husband James Cameron), but it still left me wondering what the film might have played like if Bigelow were more interested in Basset’s inner life and instead centered the woman as the lead. It would at least have been a novel departure from her usual mode.

As far as I can tell, Bigelow’s 1990 cop thriller Blue Steel is her only feature film to date with a woman in the top-billed role. Jamie Lee Curtis stars a rookie NYC police officer with a violent streak that immediately lands her in hot water. She’s not exactly the tough-as-nails badass Bassett portrays in Strange Days, but that archetype is exactly what she aspires to be. When pressed by her male colleagues about why she wants to be a cop in the first place, she “jokes” about coveting the violent authoritarianism of the position, musing “Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to shoot people.” The truth turns out to be more that she grew up powerless to stop her abusive father from physically assaulting her mother, and her new badge & gun armory allows her to wield power over him and other abusers. The first time she dons her blue uniform, she struts down the street with newfound, first-in-her-lifetime confidence. During her first night on the job she overreacts to the threats of an armed suspect and unloads every bullet she’s got into his chest. She just as capable of violence as Bassett’s tough-as-nails heroine, but lacks that role model’s cool, even hand and moral sense of justice. It’s a dangerous inner conflict that the film eventually likens to the sociopathic impulses of a deranged serial killer – a man. Naturally, this wouldn’t be a Bigelow film if there wasn’t some destructive, alluring force of masculinity present to steer the central conflict.

Blue Steel’s grotesquely macho villain subverts Jamie Lee Curtis’s hero status at the film’s center by realigning her with the Final Girl archetypes that first made her famous. Ron Silver costars as a dangerously narcissistic Wall Street brute turned serial killer, essentially laying out the entire American Psycho template in an underpraised stunner of a role. This mustache-twirling villain is first inspired to kill when he witnesses Curtis decimate her perp on her first night of patrol. His fetishistic obsession with her (and her gun) quickly escalates into erotic thriller territory, a tension he relieves by shooting randomly selected victims on the NYC streets. He also shoehorns his way into the rookie cop’s romantic life with his Wall Street wealth, so that she’s unknowingly dating the very killer she’s professionally hunting. While the film is willing to link the trigger-happy cop’s penchant for violence with the Wall Street creep’s own sociopathy, this largely becomes a tale of a woman who’s boxed in on all sides by macho bullies. Between her abusive father, her gaslighting boyfriend, and the police force higher-ups who do not believe her accounts of being attacked by creeps on the street, Blue Steel’s heroine is awash in a flood of insidious machismo. For at least this one film, Bigelow proves that she can center a woman protagonist’s story why still satisfying her auteurist preoccupations with the nature & textures of masculinity. In that way, Blue Steel deserves to be regarded as one of the director’s foremost texts.

There are plenty of other reasons why Blue Steel deserves higher critical prominence in the Bigelow canon that have nothing to do with its tough-as-nails heroine. From the harsh noir lighting to the ice-cold atmospheric score & eroticized gun violence, this deeply creepy, mean thriller finds Bigelow at one of her most stylistically indulgent moments as a director. She’s channeling some serious 80s Friedkin vibes here, which I mean as a high compliment; all that’s missing is an elaborate chase scene & a Wang Chung soundtrack. Still, the most readily recognizable significance of the film within the director’s larger catalog is the rare chance to see her center a woman protagonist while remaining true to the violence & masculinity of her typical milieu. It’s not exactly the hypothetical “What if Angela Bassett was Top-Billed in Strange Days?” scenario that genre nerd audiences are likely to hope for, but it is the closest Bigelow has ever gotten to satisfying that ideal. It’s also, notably, an exquisite chiller of a film in its own right.

For more on December’s Movie of the Month, the Kathryn Bigelow’s Y2K sci-fi epic Strange Days (1995), check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and our look at the director’s continued fascination with police brutality in Detroit (2017).

-Brandon Ledet