brandon ledet

The Best of NOFF 2017 Ranked & Reviewed

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Here we are almost two months since the 28th New Orleans Film Festival has passed and I’m finally gathering all of titles I caught at the fest in one spot.  CC & I recorded a more fleshed out recap of our festival experience on Episode #45 of the podcast in case you’re interested in hearing about the weird goings-on at the handful of downtown theaters where the festival was held, the various short films that preceded some of those screenings, and the reasons why I’m wrong for hating I, Tonya. This list is more simplistic than that kind of recap: a better-late-than-never ranking from the best to . . .  the least best of the titles I managed to catch at this year’s festival.  Each title includes a link to a corresponding review. Enjoy!

1. The Florida Project: “The Florida Project doesn’t dwell on or exploit the less-than-ideal conditions its pint-sized punks grow up in, even when depicting their most dire consequences; it instead celebrates the kids’ anarchic energy and refusal to buckle under the false authority of adults.”

2. Tom of Finland: “Tom of Finland excels as a kind of filmmaking alchemy that turns an unlikely tonal mashup of Cruising & Carol into the feel-good queer drama of the year. Its high class sense of style & lyrical looseness in narrative structure feels like the best aspects of Tom Ford’s features, but without his goofy storytelling shortcomings. While its sexuality isn’t quite as transgressive as the leather daddy-inspiring art of its subject, it’s still a passionate, celebratory work that sidesteps the typical pitfalls of queer misery porn dramas, yet still manages to feel truthful, dangerous, and at times genuinely erotic. It’s hard to believe the film is half as wonderful as it is, given the visual trappings of its subject & genre, but its leather & disco lyricism lifts the spirit and defies expectation.”

3. She’s Allergic to Cats: “She’s Allergic to Cats hides its emotions behind an impossibly thick wall of ironic detachment. It even goes out of its way to reference infamous so-bad-it’s-good properties like Congo, Howard the Duck, Cat People (’82, of course), and The Boy in the Plastic Bubble to throw the audience of the scent of the emotional nightmare at its core. When its protective walls break down, however, and the nihilistic heartbreak that eats at its soul scrolls ‘I need help’ across the screen, there’s a genuine pathos to its post-Tim & Eric aesthetic that far surpasses its pure shock value peers. It’s a hilarious, VHS-warped mode of emotional terror.”

4. Love & Saucers: “David Huggins is entirely sincere about his reports of hundreds of encounters with space aliens, which are mostly sexual in nature. His impressionistic paintings that illustrate these encounters are more art therapy than ironic kitsch, and you could hear the terror & the sadness in his voice as he recounts the stories behind them. There’s inevitably going to be a contingent of viewers who view Lovers and Saucers as a ‘Get a load of this weirdo!’ line of humor at David’s expense, but the truth is that both the movie and the artist are tragically, horrifyingly sincere.”

5. Damascene: “Detailing a single, hour-long conversation shot on two bike helmet-mounted GoPros, Damascene boasts the bare bones storytelling of a one act stage play. It makes the best of its limited resources it can, though, reaching into the discomforting dark humor and emotional trauma typically reserved for deep-cutting stage dramas. It’s an exciting reminder that a great film doesn’t necessarily require a great budget, that a handful of people and a commercially-affordable camera are enough resources to produce top tier cinema in the 2010s.”

6. The World is Mine: “It would be easy to imagine a more traditional, informative documentary about Hatsune Miku’s history as a cultural phenomenon or Westerner cosplay as an act of cultural appropriation, but The World is Mine isn’t especially interest in either line of thought. Instead, Oren implies a simulated identity crisis performed for the camera through the guise of an already simulated character. Lines like ‘The problem with reality is that fairy tales are full of frauds,’ don’t help much in illuminating what Oren’s learned as a living doll modeled after a popular computer program. She’s just one physical copy of Hatsune Miku among many and the eeriness of her lack of a distinct personality is only amplified in the Miku fandom visually approaching a kind of ecstatic singularity.”

7. Young and Innocent: “Young and Innocent is a little stilted by its student film production values & depends heavily on audience familiarity with Hitchcock’s original film, but it plays so loosely with Psycho’s basic DNA that it generates a tense sense of mystery & dread all of its own. More clever than outright hilarious, Young and Innocent’s awkward romantic tension is endearingly cute, while still maintaining the original film’s sense of impending doom through surrealistic violence in its dream imagery and the basic vulnerability of following a runaway teen protagonist through a series of risky decisions.”

8. Mudbound: “Mudbound is at its weakest when it’s tasked to convey a sense of grand scale scope it can’t deliver on an Online Content budget. The voiceover narration and scenes of tank & airplane warfare are where the seams of the limited budget show most egregiously. Rees still delivers a powerful punch whenever she can afford to, though, making sure that the muddy & blood details of Mudbound’s smaller moments hit with full, unforgiving impact.”

9. Wallay: “Wallay feels significant in the way it adds a new wrinkle to the European housing block narrative by giving that community an external perspective. These kids really are caught halfway between two identities and I haven’t seen that cultural limbo represented onscreen quite like this before.”

10. Wexford Plaza: “At its heart, Wexford Plaza is a dark comedy about the difference between treating menial service labor as a consequence-free playground in your 20s and the way it becomes an escape-free economic rut you depend on for sustenance in your 30s & beyond. The movie can be frivolously funny in the aimless stoner comedy moments of its opening half, but evolves into a much more surprising, rewarding watch as its story unfolds onscreen.”

11. The Joneses: “I can’t recommend The Joneses as much of a transformative feat in documentary craft; if anything, the filmmaking style often gets in the way of the work’s best asset: its subject. As a work of progressive queer politics, however, it’s often endearing just for its patience in documenting a universally recognizable American family that just happens to have an adorable trans woman at the center of it. There’s a political significance to that kind of documentation the film should have been more comfortable with instead of pushing for immediate dramatic conflict.”

12. Serenade for Haiti: “There might possibly be a more informative documentary to be made about the grand scale aftermath of the 2010 Haitian earthquake, but by profiling members of a single music school within Port-au-Prince before & after the event, the film offers an intimacy & a specificity a more wide-reaching documentary could not accomplish. The filmmakers behind Serenade for Haiti would have had no way of knowing the significance of what they are documenting when the film first began production, but they stumbled into a personal, up-close look at a historic tragedy in the process.”

13. Play the Devil: “Play the Devil is effective in its evocation of a spiritual & cultural atmosphere, but the story it manages to tell within that frame is a disjointed mess. I assume that the movie was aiming to be a poignant coming of age drama and not the less fun The Boy Next Door remake with #problematic queer subtext in accidentally stumbled into, which is a total shame. The Carnival imagery almost makes up for it, but not quite enough to turn the tide.”

14. As Is: “The recent small scale documentary As Is details the behind-the-scenes production of a one-time-only multimedia performance staged by visual artist Nick ‘Not That Nick Cave’ Cave in Shreveport, Louisiana in 2015. The film documents all of the artist’s intent, production logistics, and cultural context in the weeks leading up to this performance, then stops short of documenting any of the real thing once it’s executed. It’s like watching the behind the scenes footage of a concert you weren’t invited to for a band you’ve never heard of before. It’s very frustrating.”

15. I, Tonya: The violence leveled on Harding throughout I, Tonya certainly makes her more of a recognizably sympathetic figure than what you’d gather from her news coverage. However, the nonstop beatings are near impossible to rectify with the Jared Hess-style Napoleon Dynamite quirk comedy that fill in the gaps between them. The film either doesn’t understand the full impact of the violence it portrays or is just deeply hypocritical about its basic intent.”

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #45 of The Swampflix Podcast: NOFF 2017 & Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985)

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Welcome to Episode #45 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our forty-fifth episode, we dive back into the risky, exciting world of Skype recordings & guest hosts. Brandon and CC review the overwhelming list of films they caught at this year’s New Orleans Film Fest, from the Oscar hopefuls to the never-to-be-properly-distributed rarities. Also, Brandon makes Pete Moran of the We Love to Watch podcast watch the classic Tim Burton debut Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985) for the first time. Enjoy!

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

-Brandon Ledet & CC Chapman

A Cure for Wellness (2017)

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Is it possible to love every frame of a motion picture and still think it amounts to a bad movie? A Cure for Wellness is a visually stunning, go-for-broke slowburner that somehow estimates a Hammer Horror by way of The Matrix aesthetic and still fails to succeed as a complete, satisfactory picture. It’s impressive that a major studio production directed by a man best know for helming the exhaustingly empty swashbuckling blockbusters The Pirates of the Caribbean could possibly be this deeply strange & willing to delve into exploitative cruelty. The problems that plague other major Gore Verbinski projects persist here, however; A Cure for Wellness is too long, too dumb, and too disappointingly self-serious for how well crafted it is as a visual object. A filmmaker with this meticulously inventive of an eye should likely have much better taste when it comes to telling stories, instead of applying that craft to something so idiotically pointless at its best, genuinely evil at its worst.

Dane DeHaan echoes the same goofy Keanu Reeves impersonation he took to outer space in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets in his lead role as a laptop-addicted Business Prick. While climbing the corporate ladder at The Big Company (I honestly have no idea what his job details outside getting visibly frustrated with incongruous graphs on various computer screens), he is deployed on a mission to recover a member of the the board who has gone AWOL. This path leads him to a Swiss spa/health retreat, where the man he’s tasked to bring back to the Corporate World has checked himself in as an AWOL permanent patient. Like the commune in the back end of [safe], this sanitarium/cult is presented as a cure-all for the ills of modern living. “Diseases” like self-doubt & the “illusion of material success” are “cured” through sensory deprivation, “water therapy,” and mysterious droppers filled with special “vitamins,” leaving all patients essentially lobotomized & stuck in a limbo. The more times DeHaan’s Business Prick upstart declares “I am not a patient!” as he struggles to complete his intended mission, the further he loses himself in the daily rituals of the spa cult, discovering long-buried secrets of incest, murder, brainwashing, collusion with the law, and immortality-seeking science experiments along the way. By the time castle fires & monstrous ancestors are introduced in the mix, the film could easily pass for a Hammer production or an entry in The Corman-Poe Cycle (if it were half as long and half as dumb).

The most immediately apparent problem in A Cure for Wellness is its gleeful cruelty in its approach to sexual assault. This starts very early with an out of nowhere racist prison rape joke and culminates in a scene involving an underage girl that goes on way longer than necessary to gets its point across, easily slipping into exploitative cruelty. It’s a mean streak that has little, if anything, to do with the film’s core themes and likely should have been edited into oblivion, but it’s also a blatant flaw that doesn’t require much deliberation. What really drags the film down is unwieldy and underdeveloped it feels for a movie that’s nearly three hours long.

A Cure for Wellness‘s greatest strength is its absurdity as an overwhelming, bat shit crazy genre picture. Marrying high production values to a low trash premise that doesn’t deserve it, the film is loaded with weirdo imagery of slithering eels, steam punk machinery, medicine bottles, eels, ballerina figurines, soft naked flesh, eels, RoboCop action figures, and even more eels, sometimes all rapidly flashing on the screen in dream sequence montage. It just doesn’t contain enough of those visual pleasures to justify the massive weight of its runtime. In some respects, the weirdest choice the movie makes is withholding the answers to mysteries that are immediately apparent to the audience for several scenes, then treating their reveals like a big deal no one saw coming. Lies, accidents, past traumas, and untold motivations are kept under wraps in see-through gauze, essentially treading water instead of making the movie shorter or pulling the trigger immediately to make room for more oddities. For instance, why make a huge deal out of the mystery of what’s making DeHaan’s toilet tank rattle for three or four scenes if the reveal is only going to be that it was eels all along? We immediately knew it was eels. Everything in the film is brimming with eels. Delaying that reveal does not build tension; it just wastes time.

The ideal version of A Cure for Wellness is probably about an hour shorter and directed by Guillermo del Toro. On some level, I do very much appreciate the taste for excess that Verbinski brings to the project, especially when it comes to his eye for over-the-top visuals. Framing shots from the POVs of magnifying glasses, fish bowls, and taxidermy eyeballs, the film is about as tastefully overachieving as Michael Bay’s Armageddon and I love that kind of go-for-broke excess in my genre films. The eel imagery is also impressively chilling, even if employed often & never thematically justified. Equipped with that same imagery, I’d trust del Toro to deliver a much more satisfying narrative, though. Not only would the sexual assault mean streak lightly be softened or diminished, but there’s a fairy realm element to the Swiss spa (especially in how you’re not supposed to drink the water) I could see being better explored in his hands. Verbinski’s direction works very well when setting up individual scares gags (especially ones involving eels & dentistry), but his unwieldy, unending, thematically thin blockbuster approach to the Pirates movies has bled over here in a way that poisons what makes the movie enjoyable. A Cure for Wellness is an impressive visual achievement for sure, but not impressive enough to justify the enormity of its runtime or the exploitative cruelty of its ultimate destination. The resulting experience is endlessly frustrating, as it could easily be a much better picture with the right creative push, either towards brevity, away from sexual assault exploitation, or into another director’s hands entirely.

-Brandon Ledet

Blood Bath (1966)

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As a producer, Roger Corman’s tireless mission to miraculously make money out of scraps of garbage is legendary. He’d often reuse sequences from previous productions, purchase foreign films for American re-edits, rip off his own intellectual properties for self-cannibalized premises, and all other kinds of scrappy cinematic recycling imaginable just to sell a cheap genre picture for a tidy profit. I can’t argue that the 1966 Corman production Blood Bath is the pinnacle result of this kind of absurd, behind the scenes pragmatism gone mad, but it does deserve credit for gathering all of Corman’s penny-pinching schemes into a single project. Corman initially co-produced the Yugoslavian noir picture Operation: Titan with plans to reissue it as an American release. He then hired notable schlockmeister Jack Hill to direct new scenes to recontextualize the film for an American audience, which Hill did by transforming it into an oddly self-serious rip-off of the classic Corman comedy Bucket of Blood, a campy satire of beatniks & artist types. Unsatisfied with Hill’s treatment, titled Portrait in Terror, Corman then hired a third director, The Velvet Vampire’s Stephanie Rothman, who added an entirely new A-plot about a shapeshifting vampire to the mix. You’d think this cocktail of genres & premises would lead to an incoherent mess, which might partially be true, but the final version of Blood Bath Stephanie Rothman delivered is charming in the way that it’s blissfully insane. Corman threw every one of his tactics on how to cheaply scrap together a picture at the screen in a single go and the result is just as fascinating & amusing as it is creatively compromised.

The similarities between Blood Bath & Bucket of Blood’s basic plots are undeniable. A community of comically pretentious visual artists are disturbed when models form their community are reported dead or missing, then appear in the work of a colleague. Hill’s contribution to the film seems largely to be the Bucket of Blood-style humor of this arts scene drama, especially when the artists experiment with new processes for applying paint to canvas, such as shooting it out of a gun or directly applying it via a model’s face. According to Hill, Rothman “ruined” the picture with her vampirirc contribution, which shifts the work into a much more serious, psychedelic tone. If anything, she made it interesting & distinct, steering it away from a straight Bucket of Blood retread. Instead of the awkward bus boy Dick Miller plays in Bucket of Blood, Rothman crafts a villain that goes through Jekyll & Hyde transformations from passionate artist to centuries-old vampire with insatiable appetite. She maintains some of Hill’s humor, even including sequences that are essentially beach blanket parties with bikini babes. This humor is made to clash with a more serious, surreal tone, however, as her vampire/painter struggles with a classic Madonna-whore complex. He is romantically drawn to beautiful women, but transforms into a bloodthirsty monster whenever they make a pass at him, a dynamic that gives the movie a thematic point of view on top of a ridiculously fractured premise. I’m in love with the insane collage that emerges in the final draft of Blood Bath and that credit goes just as much to Rothman’s eye as it does to Corman’s machinations as a producer.

You’ll find very few films that can deliver this much movie in such a short amount of time. At just 60 minutes in length, Blood Bath is filled to the brim with seemingly incongruous, but oddly beautiful sequences: an underwater vampire kill, a rip-off of the carousel sequence from Strangers on a Train, surrealist scenes of women taunting the camera/killer from inside paintings & dreamlike desertscapes, interpretive dance, noir foot chases worthy of The Third Man, etc. Rothman & Corman’s mismatched film collage has no business even being watchable, much less as oddly fun & engaging as it feels as a “final” product (Corman later added several minutes of bikini-clad dancing to fill out more time for a TV-broadcast of the film). Jack Hill deserves some credit for lightening up the mood of the noir sequences with his own layer of beatnik-satirizing Bucket of Blood retreads, but it’s really Rothman’s surrealist eye & Corman’s insane production instincts that make Blood Bath so mesmerizing. Obviously, not all audiences are going to have a stomach for this kind of production-level incoherence, but I urge anyone interested in Corman’s weirdo decision making as a business man to give this picture an honest chance. Besides its easy-to-digest runtime and immediate appeal as an eccentric horror film, Blood Bath is also currently in the public to main and available to watch on Archive.org, so you really have no excuses to give this damned-from-conception Frankenfilm a chance.

-Brandon Ledet

Sacrilege (2017)

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We’re not the most harshly critical bunch over here at Swampflix, especially when it comes to cheaply-produced genre pictures. If you’re looking for a brutal evisceration of a micro budget indie horror like Sacrilege, we just don’t have it in our hearts. Still, I cannot give the film a hearty recommendation either. This Louisiana-produced VOD cheapie is difficult to get behind, even for the most forgiving of schlock junkies, but it’s not without its merits either. The level of care that went into staging its various jump scares & haunted house-style set pieces, as well as its various homages to classic titles from horror’s past is admirable, though not enough to compensate for the lack of care paid to its characters & plotting. The recent smash hit IT proved that exact dichotomy can be successful in an above-average film, but Sacrilege doesn’t have the same resources (namely time & money) to pull that trick off. What’s left, then, are a few decent horror spooks & gags that work well enough in isolation, but do little to salvage the picture at large. It’s honestly impressive that productions this cheap ever manage to accomplish more than that.

A group of (very unconvincing) college freshmen in their early 20s (?) find themselves on the wrong end of a demonic possession when the purchase a haunted music box from a yard sale. The ghost of a little girl who “lives” in the box torments their humble rental home by forcing each too-old-for-this-shit roommate to commit suicide one by one until they’re all dead or the curse is lifted, whichever comes first. There’s also an Insidious/The Conjuring-style paranormal investigative team that invades their space in an attempt to save the day, with mixed results. There isn’t enough gore or camp in Sacrilege to cover up the blemishes of its limited production values. This is wholly sincere digital schlock, not the winking live action cartoon of a WolfCop or Zombeavers. Because of that tonal restraint and the blatant deficiencies in authentic dialogue, human behavior can come across as amusingly odd in the film. Characters vocally reminding each other that they are college students after all or angrily insulting the very notion of yard sales at top volume convey the feeling of a horror script produced by a computer algorithm or a space alien. Still, Sacrilege manages to pack a fairly thin demonic possession premise with plenty of genre-specific hallmarks you’re not used to seeing in a single picture: vampire bites, creepy children, forced suicide, paranormal investigation, Catholic iconography, ghosts, exorcism, found footage, jump scares, and so on. The craft doesn’t often match the enthusiasm, but there’s a genuine love of horror necessary to assemble that kind of hodgepodge, a sentiment I appreciate.

There are two major studio horror releases from 2017 Sacrilege happens to superficially resemble: Wish Upon & Polaroid. I can’t fault the film for suffering the lower financial rung of a parallel-thinking happenstance, so my impulse is to blame the more expensive flicks for not applying their resources to a more distinctive idea. I also can’t really attack Sacrilege for its misleading cover art that promises the monstrous threat of demonic nuns who never appear or the awkwardness of its sub-professional dramatic performances; most of its faults seem like circumstances of its budget. Instead, I’ll say this: the parts of the movie where the effort feels focused & concentrated (namely the set pieces & scare gags) can often forgive the shortcomings of the much less intensely crafted dramatic & character-based beats. Drone shots & time elapse montage build tension released in moments where a bloody, demonic hand will reach out from within the evil music box to hover at the back of a character’s neck. Images in the dark are misinterpreted & reconfigured to throw off the audience’s sense of reality in the quiet lull before a jump scare. I don’t have it in me to tear down Sacrilege as viciously as the reception I’ve seen elsewhere online, because its (demonically possessed) heart is in the right place in that way. It’s just a shame these scare gags couldn’t be applied to a better-written, better-funded screenplay.

-Brandon Ledet

The Untamed (2017)

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I am aware that two examples do not equal a trend, but if there’s a new wave of sexually explicit “extreme” horror coming out of Mexico, I am eating that shit up. After months of talking up the surrealist, incestuous button-pusher We Are the Flesh as one of the best horror gems of the year, another prurient horror rarity from Mexico has caught my attention & admiration. The slowburn sci-fi horror The Untamed is not quite as structurally sound or as thematically satisfying as We Are the Flesh, but employs a similar palette of sexual shock value tactics to jar its audience to an extreme, unfamiliar headspace. It adopts the gradual reveals & sound design terrors common to “elevated horrors” of the 2010s, but finds a mode of scare delivery all unto its own, if not only in the depiction of its movie-defining monster: a space alien that sensually fucks human beings with its tentacles. The Untamed alternates between frustration & hypnotism as its story unfolds, but one truth remains constant throughout: you’ve never seen anything quite like it before. Even We Are the Flesh cannot fully prepare you.

The Untamed opens with a slow-moving asteroid floating in the void of outer space. The movie never returns there again. Instead, it immediately cuts to two contrasting sexual acts, where the remainder of the movie will dwell. In one, a woman stares blankly while mildly tolerating a passionless bout of morning sex initiated by her husband. Later she struggles to find time to masturbate in the shower while her children noisily prepare for the day elsewhere in the house. In the other opening sex act, an isolated space alien tentacle sensually withdraws from between a human woman’s legs, leaving its interspecies partner visibly satisfied & emotionally drained. It requires patience to see the connections between these two women become clearly established, but the movie is much more interested in the difference between these two sexual events. Sexually unsatisfying, frustrated, and abusive romances leave a number of characters, men & women, stumbling without direction in their lives. These lonely souls are drawn, compelled, to a nearby barn where the tentacle space monster from the opening minutes is waiting to seduce them on a dirty mattress, penetrating every orifice. Where this creature came from, what it wants form humanity, and what happens to it after the credits roll remains a mystery. All we know is that it’s a very satisfying lover.

The exact monster movie metaphor carved out by The Untamed’s space alien tentacle sex is unclear, but mesmerizing. It’s framed as an extension of pure, primitive Nature, especially in an orgiastic Noah’s Ark sequence (that might just contain the single most stunning shot of the year). It’s also aligned with abuse & addiction to toxic romance. Space alien sex leads to more satisfying, transcendent pleasures than the alternative, but can be just as life-threatening as the domestic violence & homophobic hate crimes that its victims already broke away from. The Untamed may contain more graphic sex (straight, gay, masturbatory, extraterrestrial, and otherwise) than what you’d typically see on the screen, even in “extreme horror” fare, but there are plenty of other Lovecraftian titles its unknowable pleasurable-transcendence-through-incredible-pain themes can be compared to: From Beyond, Possession, Martyrs, Splice, etc. I only specifically mentioned We Are the Flesh as a reference point because of the excitement of seeing two films from the same country touch such similarly out-there, taboo grounds in the same year of release. Even if it’s years before another sexually explicit “extreme horror” from Mexico solidifies this coincidence as a solid trend, The Untamed has left plenty visual & thematic threads for us to untangle in the meantime. Like most slowburn, “elevated” horrors of recent years, it’s a movie that defies simple explanation & classification, which is just as satisfying of an effect as any of its moments of sexual taboo shock value. The Untamed is a gorgeous puzzle of a work just as much as it is a shock-a-minute horror.

-Brandon Ledet

Nocturama (2017)

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I’m not sure the world necessarily needed a movie that makes acts of terrorism look sexy & cool, but with so few transgressive places left for cinema to go you’ve got to respect Nocturama for finding a way to push buttons in the 2010s. Nocturama is certain to ruffle feathers & inspire umbrage in the way it nonchalantly mirrors recent real life terror attacks on cities like Paris & London. That incendiary kind of thematic bomb-throwing is difficult to come by in modern cinema, though, considering the jaded attitudes of an audience who’ve already seen it all. It helps that the film is far from an empty provocation; it’s a delicately beautiful art piece & a hypnotically deconstructed heist picture, a filmmaking feat as impressive as its story is defiantly cruel. Its shifting perspective & out of sync editing style estimates a kind of cinematic Cubism, amounting to a picture that deserves to hang in an art gallery, yet quietly lurks on Netflix in a haze of streaming platform anonymity. It’s weird to see such a politically jarring & visually arresting art piece slip so quietly into the streaming deluge of #content, but there’s also no other place for Nocturama exist peacefully in the modern word; it is not a peaceful picture.

The major wrinkle in Nocturama‘s claim as a transgressive work of fine art is that it requires a massive amount of patience. The film is not only over two hours long, but its dialogue-free first half is very slow to explain its plot or the relationships between its characters. If Nocturama partially functions like a heist film, it disrupts the typical flow of that genre by starting with the climactic heist. In the film’s disorienting first hour, nearly every teen in Paris silently navigates the city’s public transit system and trades knowing glances as they move with mysterious purpose from building to building and accomplish small, seemingly unrelated tasks. We later understand these kids to be orchestrating a city-wide terror arrack, the planning of which is gradually revealed in after-the-fact flashbacks. Targeting the destruction of institutions & monuments, not people, and never explicitly stating their motivation for this violence beyond vague economic unrest & cultural ennuii, the brand of terrorism depicted in Nocturama resembles the political philosophizing of the German indie The Edukators far more than anything relevant to real life. Still, depicting the allure of the hip-hop & techno-scored gang of teens in leather jackets & tight jeans blowing up a city to make an ambiguous political statement & inspire general chaos is at least somewhat irresponsible & dangerous. That’s not a point that’s lost on Nocturama, as the second half of the film dwells in a what-have-we-done fallout as the kids watch the world crumble around them from the vantage point of an empty shopping mall (recalling a dystopic horror like Night of the Comet or Dawn of the Dead). Still, the discomfort of its highly stylized, teenage acts of mass terror is a major reason why the film sticks to the ribs.

Although the puzzling rush of its opening terror heist sequence is sure to steer the conversation around it, Nocturama doesn’t truly reveal its full nature until the extended denouement of that act’s shopping mall fallout. These kids play video games & stage techno dance parties with the same intensity that they plant explosives & ditch burner phones. With the exception of a stray familiar face like Rabah Nait Ofella (Raw, Girlhood) & Adele Haenel (The Unknown Girl), the film mostly boasts a cast of unrecognizable teenagers, so that it feels vividly real watching them blast pop music acts like Chief Keef & Willow Smith or “shop” for free clothes off the store’s infinite army of creepy mannequins. Driven mad by a lack of contact with the world outside the mall and the wait for a new day, the paranoia and guilt resulting from the first hour’s transgressive act begins to weigh heavily on their minds. There’s a myriad of visual pleasures in Nocturama that can intoxicate & mystify: a golden Joan of Arc statue aflame, a lipsynced drag routine set to “My Way,” a city in chaos, a gold-plated mask, etc. What cuts through those surface pleasures, though, is the existential frivolity of these kids, scared of their own actions, as they essentially wait for the world to end. As with the real world political implications of its opening half, Nocturama pulls no punches there either and ends on a silently methodical, Cubist conclusion of fractured, meaningless violence. The entire experience is puzzling, hypnotic, and requires both immense patience & amoral political philosophy. It might be one of the most challenging films of the year, which is odd to say of something so flashy in its violence & youthfulness, but it’s also one of the most rewarding in the way it stimulates complex reflections on life in the modern world.

-Brandon Ledet

Landline (2017)

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Obvious Child, the first collaborative feature from director Gillian Robespierre & actor/comedian Jenny Slate, was a wolf-in-sheep’s clothing bomb-thrower of a film. Robespierre snuck a realistic, formally honest drama on addiction & abortion into American theaters under the guise of a safe, by-the-books romcom. Slate’s persona in the film as an aggressively juvenile stand-up comedian made the experience even more sharply pointed, as it at least vaguely mirrored her own life & art. Unfortunately, I cannot report that their reunion for an Obvious Child follow-up is anywhere near that striking in concept. Detailing the lives of a family in crisis in the mid-1990s, Landline sidesteps the deeply personal politics of Obvious Child to tell a much more familiar, universal story. Slate’s natural persona is still allowed to inform her character, but it’s also diluted by a larger ensemble, including turns from indie scene notables John Tuturro, Jay Duplass, and (MVP) Edie Falco. There’s no real hook to Landline the way Obvious Child’s “the abortion romcom” elevator pitch is immediately distinctive, but Slate & Robespierre still manage to extend the fiercely honest sensibilities of their first collaboration into this less thematically confrontational territory.

A frustrated NYC teen (Abby Quinn) struggles with her idealistic sense of home life & self-identity when two dual acts of adultery disrupt her familial structure. Just when she discovers her playwright father (Tuturro) is likely cheating on her eternally stressed mother (Falco), her adult sister (Slate) also begins an affair behind the back of her fiancée (Duplass). The two sisters & their mother form a solid trinity of female perspectives that dominate this narrative, but the heart of the film lies mostly in the teen’s struggle to negotiate the balance between the ideal of honesty and the fact that the truth could destroy someone. She acts out in frustration, turning to recreational drug use & delinquency to enact a sense of control and starting petty name-calling bouts with both her her sister & mother. These insult trades can range from the harmless (“tattle tale,” “irritant”) to the bitterly harsh (“Fuck you, cunt!”), but order is gradually restored to their dynamic as the two romantic affairs naturally work themselves out. Huge, life-changing mistakes are made impulsively & with fervor and the teen at the center of the storm is petrified of repeating earlier generations’ follies at the expense of people she loves. (Honestly, introducing this family to Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson would be super beneficial in dispelling her fantasies about the private, romantic lives of East Coast intellectuals). Ultimately, though, familial bonds prove stronger than short-term resentments and everyone emerges a stronger, more forgiving person on the other end.

The most striking choice for Landline, stylistically, is its story’s 1995 setting, which thankfully extends beyond nostalgia markers like floppy discs & Oprah to touch on the historical drug addiction issues & limited forms of communication that shaped the era. The tagline “1995 – When people were hard to reach” is much tidier than the movie’s treatment of internal, familial conflicts of communication & honesty, but at least points to how the setting was integral to tapping into the film’s themes. The 1990s timeframe also allows for a wildly varied soundtrack ranging from Steve Winwood’s embarassing “Higher Love” to The Breeders’ delicate delight “Drivin’ on 9.” You can tell Robespierre employs the same cinematographer as she did for Obvious Child (Chris Teague), since interior spaces in both films visually share a kind of lamp lit intimacy, even if Landline is less thematically aggressive in its treatment of adultery as Obvious Child is in its politically casual look at abortion. There are moments in Landline that register as emotional devastation (“I’m flailing,”) and others that aim for broad, dark comedy (a Jewish character receiving head during a weepy drama about Nazis). The temporal setting & Robespierre’s tendency towards brutal honesty set the stage for both ends of that divide to hit with full impact, although they’re contained in a much more familiar, well-worn story than the one told in her debut.

-Brandon Ledet

Damascene (2017)

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The democratization of filmmaking technology has meant that it’s now affordable for anyone to have a voice in modern cinema, whether or not they have properly funded distribution or production values to back them up. Films like Creep, Primer, and Tangerine, while benefiting from traditional modes of distribution, have been exciting reminders of just how much a no-budget indie can accomplish with the right players & screenplay. The recent found footage dark comedy Damascene, which saw its world premiere at this year’s New Orleans Film Fest, isn’t nearly as high profile of a release as those shining examples of minimalist digital filmmaking, but is just as worthy to be lauded for the effect it accomplishes with severely limited, available-to-anyone means. Detailing a single, hour-long conversation shot on two bike helmet-mounted GoPros, Damascene boasts the bare bones storytelling of a one act stage play. It makes the best of its limited resources it can, though, reaching into the discomforting dark humor and emotional trauma typically reserved for deep-cutting stage dramas. It’s an exciting reminder that a great film doesn’t necessarily require a great budget, that a handful of people and a commercially-affordable camera are enough resources to produce top tier cinema in the 2010s.

Two old lovers reunite by accident after a long absence while biking to a mutual friend’s party. They film each other in conversation with their own helmet-mounted GoPros while cruising the streets, parks, and back allies of a sunshine-drenched London. The conversation starts amicably enough. The woman is guarded & perhaps even annoyed by the intrusion of her old boyfriend on what was a solo bike ride, but they find enough common ground to casually discuss as they leisurely make their way to the party: making fun of their friends for treating romance like a social media meme, reminiscing over half-remembered anecdotes and a shared political interest in war-torn Syria, pop culture touchstones like Friends, Event Horizon, Bukowski, etc. Thiis protective shield of social niceties eventually corrodes, however, and their rapport takes a dark turn. Picking at the barely-healed scabs of their failed romance uncovers a long-buried trauma and an unresolved act of violence that can’t remain undiscussed forever. The darkness at the heart of Damascene gradually creeps in with a casually tossed-out sexist joke or an alcoholism-blurred memory of an nonconsensual public groping, chipping away at the pair’s apparent camaraderie. Once the guard wall is fully breached there’s a full, unstoppable catharsis in the film’s tragic streak that poisonously overpowers any kindness or illusion of healing that came before it.

It’s initially tempting to view Damascene as a Before Sunrise descendant, if not only for its structure as a single conversation contained mostly between two romantically-linked characters. The film is so much more caustic than Richard Linklater’s melancholic romance series, however. Its thematic explorations of unchecked privilege, toxic masculinity, and lingering trauma sit heavy on the audience’s conscience, especially as they’re brushed aside with playfully dark social humor. It makes total sense that one of the two main players is a former playwright, since this mix of comic & tragic tones combines with the conversational storytelling to amount to a very distinct stage play aesthetic. Staging this conversation through hydraulic-smoothed GoPro footage makes this dialogue-based work feel inherently cinematic, though. The camera operators build tension by squeezing between cars in London traffic and offer an eye-level version of drone footage of the city that feels unique to its productions style. Better yet, it’s often easy to forget you’re watching GoPro footage at all, once the dread & mystery of the dark places the conversation is going commands the back half. Damascene is proof in itself that there are great films to be made out of less than ideal equipment, even if it is never distributed wide enough for most audiences to see that proof for themselves.

-Brandon Ledet

The World is Mine (2017)

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Truth is elusive & reality is a bore. Many modern, post-Herzog documentaries feel free to distort & subvert the “real life” facts of the stories they capture once they accept those basic tenants of their craft, which requires them to make a tidy, exciting story out of an untidy & frequently mundane existence. Ann Oren’s cosplay “documentary” The World is Mine is fully committed to this distortion, to the point where its presentation of a simulated, heightened reality is essential to both its form and its subject. As Oren appears onscreen herself, crafting a conspicuously false version of who she is and how she relates to the cosplay fandom she invades, she reflects the artificial, simulated existence of the pop culture character she dresses as throughout. Hatsune Miku is a “vocaloid,” a computerized simulation of a Japanese pop music diva who can be programmed to perform any song her democratized collaborators/devotees can conceive. Miku is a conduit, a non-person simulated as a human form only so she can fulfil the fantasies of as many people as possible. In The World is Mine, Oren attempts to serve the same function by dressing in Miku’s stylized persona & garb, hiding the truth of her own existence behind the false, fantastic shield of cosplay. As a documentary, her story has little interest in the truth of “real” life, instead searching for an eerie, distorted truth in a life that’s artificial by design. The results aren’t exactly informative in a traditional documentarian sense, but they are effectively uncomfortable and, at times, deeply sad.

As a documentary subject, I have no idea who Ann Oren is, where she’s from, or how she makes a living. I’m not even certain of whether or not she even speaks Japanese (she often smiles & nods silently to subtitled dialogue). She just appears as a conspicuous Westerner on a popular Tokyo street corner, already dressed as the Hatsune Miku character in search for strangers’ attention. We will never see her outside the costume. We learn slightly more about Miku “herself,” but only through incrementally-detailed interactions with the vocaloid’s rabid fandom. Oren presents herself to Miku’s fans and to the audience as an in-the-flesh extension of the anime-style simulated character who sings lost-in-translation pop music lyrics about “deciding to become a god” & “the homecoming of our future” in a roboticized voice throughout. Her camera infiltrates cosplay meetups whether pop culture obsessives dress as Miku & the like and, more surprisingly, “concerts” where hundreds of fans crowd to cheer for Miku’s onstage performances via a projection screen. Her drift through this obsessive fandom occasionally strays into the kawaii territory of aggressive, meticulous cuteness, but the ambient horror of the film’s score, the disjointed poetry of Miku’s song lyrics, and Oren’s own shaking hands as she pretends cosplay affords her confidence & contentment convey something much more sinister. Suggestions of BDSM-leaning age play & unspoken asexuality color her attempts to find romance as a human extension of Miku. Obsessive fans’ collections of Miku ephemera and Miku-adorned apartments & vehicles vaguely touch on the empty consumerism of obsessive fandom. Mostly, though, The World is Mine explores the alienation of living without a sense of self-identity, finding an awkward, upsetting tone of discomfort as its director & subject takes on an artificial life in a foreign culture with little use for who she “really” is.

It would be easy to imagine a more traditional, informative documentary about Hatsune Miku’s history as a cultural phenomenon or Westerner cosplay as an act of cultural appropriation, but The World is Mine isn’t especially interest in either line of thought. Instead, Oren implies a simulated identity crisis performed for the camera through the guise of an already simulated character. Lines like “The problem with reality is that fairy tales are full of frauds,” don’t help much in illuminating what Oren’s learned as a living doll modeled after a popular computer program. She’s just one physical copy of Hatsune Miku among many and the eeriness of her lack of a distinct personality is only amplified in the Miku fandom visually approaching a kind of ecstatic singularity. I don’t know how much of The World Is Mine to accept as true or personal to Oren, but I also don’t believe documenting real life was chief among her concerns while making the film. There’s an awkward, isolating eeriness to the film’s estimation of Hatsune Miku fandom that Oren’s much more enthusiastic about documenting than any kind of factual, historical, personal, or cultural reality. As long as you don’t need documentaries to be traditionally informative to be worthwhile and an evocation of a discomforting feeling is enough to satisfy with what you want from the picture, The World is Mine is an effective little chiller with a strong sense of eeriness in its mood.

-Brandon Ledet