brandon ledet

Scenes from a Screenwriter’s Marriage

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We try our best to cover both the highest and the lowest ends of cinema here, from the finest of fine art to the trashiest of genre trash. Occasionally, those two polar-opposite ends of the medium intersect in unexpected ways. Last week, I found myself watching two seemingly discordant movies that covered the exact same metatextual topic – one because it screened in The Prytania’s Classic Cinema series during New Orleans French Film Fest and one because the Blu-ray was heavily discounted during an online flash sale. Both 1963’s Contempt and 1989’s The Black Cat are movies about screenwriters who jeopardize their marriages by taking on doomed-from-the-start film projects that put their wives’ personal safety at risk. The former was directed by French New Wave innovator Jean-Luc Godard at the height of his professional career, while the latter was directed by Italo schlockteur Luigi Cozzi in a sly attempt to cash in on his tutelage under his much more famous mentor, Dario Argento. They also both happen to be literary adaptations, at least in theory. While Godard was relatively faithful to his source-material novel, Cozzi’s film is an adaptation in name only, daring to bill itself as “Edgar Allen Poe’s The Black Cat” in its opening-credits title card before immediately abandoning its source text to leech off Argento’s legacy instead of Poe’s. Godard does indulge in his own allusions to an earlier, foundational filmmaker’s work in Contempt, though, by casting Fritz Lang as himself and including discussions of Lang’s early artistic triumphs, like M. You’d never expect these two movies to have anything in common at first glance, but The Black Cat really is Contempt‘s trashy cousin, long estranged.

Typically, I don’t think of Jean-Luc Godard’s signature aesthetic to be all that distant from the low-budget, high-style genre filmmaking ethos that guided the Italo horror brats of the 70s & 80s. At the very least, both sides of that divide would have been passionately reverent of Alfred Hitchcock as a cinematic stylist. However, Contempt is so far removed from the handheld, D.I.Y. crime picture days of Breathless that it’s hardly Godardian at all, at least not visually. Shot on location at seaside Italian villas in Technicolor & Cinemascope, Contempt is often breathtaking in its visual grandeur, especially in its 2023 digital restoration that aggressively pops the intensity of its colors. Godard presents star Brigitte Bardot in several magazine glamour-shoot set-ups that accentuate the otherworldly beauty of her body, with particular attention paid to her buttcheeks. Of course, vacationing with a beautiful woman in an exotic locale doesn’t fundamentally change who you are, so the usual self-defeating macho bullshit that plagues Godard’s protagonists follow him there too. Michel Piccoli co-leads as a cash-strapped screenwriter who takes a well-paying job doing re-writes on an already-in-production Fritz Lang adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Lang is making a much more abstract, artsier picture than what his American producer had greenlit, so Piccoli ends up in a sickening position where he must undermine the work of a genius he respects to instead please a meathead cad from The States who values commerce over art (Jack Palance, playing a pitch-perfect dipshit). Worse yet, the American pig has the hots for Bardot, and Piccoli does nothing to get in his way or to protect his obviously uncomfortable wife. This leads to an endlessly vicious, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-style argument between the couple, so that they spend much of their time in an Italian paradise bickering about the purity of their love and the corruption of money. Meanwhile, Fritz Lang amusedly shakes his head, as if he’s seen this all before.

The marital crisis of The Black Cat is much more outlandish & abstract, but it also starts with a filmmaker taking on an ill-advised project. Our protagonist is a Luigi Cozzi-style horror director who decides to make good use of the Italian film industry’s loose copyright laws to make his own unsanctioned sequel to Suspiria. The project is in the early writing phase, where he is collaborating with a writing partner to sketch out the backstory of the Third Mother referenced in Argento’s Suspiria, believing there was room for another cash-grab witchcraft story in that lore (after the Second Mother was covered in Argento’s Inferno, and long before the Third Mother was covered in Argento’s Mother of Tears). They foolishly decide to pull inspiration from a “real”, powerful witch named Levana, who is awakened from her cosmic slumber by the project. Specifically, once the wart-faced Levana catches wind that she will be played onscreen by the director’s wife, she flips the fuck out and invades the real world through a mirror in the couple’s home, puking a chunky green goo in the actress’s face and then generally causing havoc. From there, The Black Cat is a supernatural horror free-for-all, following its scene-to-scene whims without any care or attention paid to the pre-existing work of Dario Argento, Edgar Allen Poe, or high school physics teachers. The movie is a jumbled mess of demonically possessed space fetuses, witchcraft-practicing house cats, 19th Century ghost children, telekinetic explosions, laser-shooting eyeballs, internal organ ruptures, creepy-crawly spiders, and whatever else amuses Levana as she tears apart this doomed marriage, all because she doesn’t want a movie made about her. What a diva.

You can assume a lot of what was on Godard’s mind while he was making Contempt just by watching the movie. Between the intensely bitter (and even more intensely gendered) marital argument that eats up most of the runtime and the art-vs-commerce argument that eats up the rest, you get a pretty clear picture of what was going on in his internal & professional life at the time. Even after watching the “Cat on the Brain” interview included on the Blu-ray disc, I cannot begin to tell you what Cozzi was attempting to communicate in The Black Cat. During the interview, he describes the picture as “science fiction,” likening it to his Star Wars knockoff Starcrash, with which it only shares a few extraneous insert shots of outer space. I’d say it’s much more spiritually in line with his supernatural slasher film Paganini Horror, which hooks the audience with the undead spirit of famous composer Niccolo Pagnini for a familiar starting point, then launches into a series of hair-metal music video vignettes where he just does whatever amuses him from scene to scene. Both of these vintage European relics might generally be about the artform of screenwriting, but only Contempt seems to put any sincere thought into that craft, while The Black Cat is much more about trying whatever looks cool in a scene, internal logic be damned. Something the two pictures do have in common, though, is the assertion that the basic labor & finance of filmmaking will ruin your marriage, whether through the intrusion of jackass Hollywood money men or the intrusion of evil mirror-dimension witches. If two movies so far apart in philosophy, tone, and intent happen to come to that same conclusion, I have to believe there’s some truth to it. Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be screenwriters.

-Brandon Ledet

Eephus (2025)

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I am not sure how, but my grandfather watched a baseball game for the entire span of my childhood. No matter when we stopped by his house, that one Atlanta Braves game was playing on the television, with no beginning or end. No one ever won or lost. Nothing especially interesting ever happened on the field. It was just plain, old baseball for all of eternity. I never understood the appeal until I attended a game in-person as an adult. With a couple beers and an Italian sausage in the stands, the endless stasis of plain, old baseball became pleasant instead of confounding. It was a calm background texture, an occasional distraction from the casual conversation & junk food consumption I would be indulging in anyway. Baseball is, essentially, the hangout movie of sports.

The new gloomy hangout comedy Eephus understands the spirit of that sport more deeply than any other baseball movie I can name. It’s a slow-paced, aimless picture that feels like watching a sub-professional baseball game played in real time. None of the players are especially athletic, much less talented. They’re playing a game so pointless that they can opt to get drunk & nap in the outfield with no direct effect on the final score. And yet, the dead-space background texture of the sport leaves a lot of room for what really matters in movies: detailed observations of human behavior, character quirks, and the poetic graces of life. Every single dialogue exchange & character detail of Eephus is deeply charming, riotously funny, or both, making for an exceptionally pleasant day at the park.

The occasion of this specific baseball game is the closing of Soldiers Field in Nowhere, Massachusetts. Before the site is demolished to make room for a school, two recreational-league teams of middle-aged men gather for one final game. They complain about the cruel absurdity of building a school on such hallowed ground, as if their field were being replaced with a strip mall or prison. The next-nearest field is only a 30-minute drive away, which they consider an insurmountable distance, deciding instead to retire from the sport forever. As the sun sets on their final game, the field lights never kick on, so they play in the dark, unable to see the ball or accurately call a play. They can barely haul their sagging dad-bods around the bases, joking “They should put me down” as if they’ve fully outlived their usefulness. There’s no real momentum or purpose to the game beyond going through the motions to give the field a proper send-off. When they celebrate with fireworks after the final play, we don’t even watch the display. There’s no sense of ceremony here, just lives being lived.

Eephus lingers somewhere in the vast liminal space between Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets & Field of Dreams, but its moment-to-moment charms are more kinetic than that description indicates. There are seemingly no repeated camera set-ups as cinematographer-turned-director Carson Lund (Ham on Rye, Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point) finds infinite angles from which to shoot a generally unimpressive recreational field. Standalone shots of an empty dugout, a good cloud, or the moon peeking out in daylight register with a quiet, warm beauty, but Lund never allows the tempo to drift from hangout movie to slow-cinema abstraction. He mostly finds the humor & humanity in the minor, unimportant behaviors of his small cast of minor, unimportant men. Meanwhile a series of local Halloween-themed radio commercials and an opening news broadcast voiced by Frederick Wiseman keep the energy up with loud, frantic background chatter. As an end-of-an-era movie about people who’ve outlived their purpose, it’s unavoidably melancholy, but it moves quick, looks great, and delivers constant laughs as it waits out the final hours of the day.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Nowhere (1997)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Gregg Araki’s Los Angeles teen brain-rot comedy Nowhere (1997).

00:00 Welcome

03:30 Urban Legend (1998)
15:00 Juliet of the Spirits (1965)
19:23 Contempt (1963)
22:45 The Black Cat (1989)
27:35 Video Violence (1987)
30:51 Fade to Black (1980)
34:34 Possible Films – Short Works by Hal Hartley (1994-2004)
42:13 Mickey 17 (2025)
50:04 Goodfellas (1990)

59:52 Nowhere (1997)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

That Gum You Like is Back in Style

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I had a classic theatrical experience at the downtown location of The Prytania this Wednesday, when I caught a double feature of the new Looney Tunes movie and the new Soderbergh. Since both films mercifully clock in around 90 minutes a piece, it was not an especially exhausting trip to the cinema, but more importantly they paired well as a charming throwback to theatrical programming of the distant past. The next morning, I read a series of confusing headlines about how “Moviegoers Want More Comedies, Thrillers and Action Titles,” so they haven’t been showing up to theaters for lack of interest in what’s currently out there. The survey generating those headlines is obviously flawed, since moviegoers simply don’t know what’s currently out there. Anyone claiming they don’t regularly go to the theater because “They don’t make ’em like they used to,” has lost sight of what’s actually on theatrical marquees, a problem that could be solved if they’d just glance up. The Day the Earth Blew Up & Black Bag are both exactly how they used to make ’em; it’s more that audiences “don’t watch ’em like they used to.” The habit of checking the newspaper for listings of what happens to be playing this afternoon or physically stopping by the nearest theater and catching whatever has the most convenient showtime is a lost cultural practice.

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie is about as classic as they come. Sure, its sexual & cultural references are a little more up to date than the anarchic sex & archaic pop culture parodies of Looney Tunes past (with innuendo about anonymous truck stop hookups and visual allusions to sci-fi horror classics like The Thing, Invasion of The Body Snatchers, Jurassic Park, and Night of the Living Dead). At its core, though, it’s just an extended Merrie Melodies short, following the goofball exploits of Daffy Duck & Porky Pig as they desperately attempt to hold onto their entry-level jobs at the local bubblegum factory while simultaneously fighting off a space alien who wants to poison that gum with a mind-controlling goo. Classic stuff. The humor ranges from vaudevillian slapstick to Ren & Stimpy gross-outs in a cacophonously loud celebration of all things loony, all rendered in glorious 2D animation. In a better world, every movie would open with a condensed version of this kind of goofball novelty as an appetizer for the Feature Presentation, maybe accompanied by a short news report about The War or what Lana Turner wore to her recent premiere. Instead, we live in a Hell dimension where its day-to-day box office uneasiness is a bargaining tool in backroom negotiations about whether the other recently completed Looney Tunes feature should be released to theaters or deleted from the Warner Brothers servers for a tax write-off. It’s grim out there.

For the adults in the room, Steven Soderberg has put a pause on his recent unsane genre experiments to instead re-establish his presence as one of Hollywood’s more classical entertainers. Black Bag finds the director returning to the suave professionalism of past commercial triumphs, this time casting Michael Fassbender & Cate Blanchett as a married couple of international cyber-spies who would literally kill for each other despite their shared need to constantly lie in order to do their jobs. The spy plot is a tangled mess of double-triple-crossings involving two “interlocked counterplans” to break this elite marriage part (and take over the world in the process), but none of that really matters. The project is more about signaling a return to the handsome, timeless world of tweed caps, stirred cocktails, and wholehearted monogamy. Soderbergh puts in a Herculean effort to make monogamous marital commitment sexy & cool. It’s a trick he finds much easier to pull off with Fassbender’s love of administering polygraph tests to fellow spies, since those come with their own bondage gear that signals sexiness from the jump. Setting all of this laidback, horny sophistication in the swankiest corners of downtown London and then going out of your way to cast a former James Bond actor in a prominent role (Pierce Brosnan, as the spy agency’s untrustworthy head honcho) all feels like a deliberate callback to the kind of classic thriller surveyed moviegoers claim to want, even if they’re not used to seeing it filtered through Soderbergh’s personal kink for commercial-grade digital textures.

In a word, Black Bag is cute. It’s a nice little treat for Soderbergh casuals who prefer the classic sophistication of Ocean’s 11 over the erratic playfulness of Ocean’s 12. I’m happy for that audience, even though I can’t relate. Similarly, The Day the Earth Blew Up is cute. It’s good for a few sensible chuckles and a few outright guffaws (the origin story for Porky Pig’s trademark stutter got an especially big, unexpected laugh out of me), but it’s in no way attempting to invent or innovate. It’s classic Looney Tunes buffoonery, a familiarly pleasant offering for anyone who’s looking to get out of the house and chomp some popcorn at The Movies. Watching it as a warm-up for a handsomely staged spy thriller about the timeless beauty of a traditional marriage felt like an experience that I could have had at the picture show at any time in the past century. People largely seem unaware that these traditionally entertaining movies are out in the world right now, though, since only the occasional Event Film (i.e., reboots, superhero flicks, live-action remakes of Disney cartoons) seems able to cut through the social media babble to grab their attention. It’s a problem I don’t really know how to fix, but thankfully I’m not in marketing, so it’s not really my job to fix. I just like going to the movies. Every week, I check my local listings and pop in to see what’s being offered to me. It’s a constantly rewarding hobby, one that requires minimal effort.

-Brandon Ledet

Urban Legend (1998)

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The 1998 college-campus horror Urban Legend resides at the crossroads of two major 1990s cultural projects, both involving the legacy of Wes Craven. First & foremost, it’s a post-Scream third wave slasher, coasting on a deluge of self-aware meta horrors starring young, hot teen actors who are conscious they are in a horror movie and provide live commentary on the tropes of the genre as they’re systematically killed. In this case, the famous-at-the-time teenyboppers in question (Alicia Witt, Jared Leto, Tara Reid, Joshua Jackson, etc.) attempt to guess the next patterned kill of a serial murderer who’s recreating long-debunked urban legends rather than recreating famous movie scenes—like in Scream—but the effect is the same. The secondary project of Urban Legend was part of a larger 1990s effort to reclaim the public reputation of Robert Englund as more than just the creep who played Freddy Kreuger, presenting him instead as a kind of effete academic. His late-80s turn as the Phantom of the Opera transported his Freddy Kreuger persona to the more refined cultural space of a period-piece opera house.  He later turned up as himself in Craven’s proto-Scream meta slasher A New Nightmare, appearing out of Kreuger drag as a thoughtful, classically trained actor haunted by the grotesqueries he was typecast as post-Elm Street fame. In Urban Legend, Englund’s past professional triumphs as Freddy Kreuger still linger in the audience’s mind as his character is floated as the most obvious suspect in the serial-killer investigations, but he’s quickly cleared of guilt and presented as something much more respectable: a bespectacled, leather-patched college professor and the leading expert in his field, which conveniently happens to be urban legends.

Of course, the only reason to return to Urban Legend all these decades past its expiration date is to pinpoint what, exactly, is the most 1990s-specific detail about it. There are plenty of late-90s time capsule contributions competing for that honor: frustrations with dial-up internet connections tying up a shared phone line, Joshua Jackson’s frosted-tips Peroxide hairdo, a meta joke at the expense of Jackson’s Dawson’s Creek fame, “Goth 4 Goth” campus hookup message boards, needle drops from Stabbing Westward and Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. When I saw the film was screening on a Monday evening down the street from my house, I didn’t attend in hopes that it would hold up as a wrongly dismissed 90s classic, à la The Rage, The Craft, or Cherry Falls. I attended out of nostalgia for the film’s value as a retro Blockbuster Video rental, watched alone on my bedroom VCR when I was old enough to crave teenage transgressions but too young to experience them first-hand. It was a pleasant time to return to, if not only to reminisce about a moment when teen slashers were slickly produced, hot commodities. Every exterior scene involves a completely unnecessary crane shot, and every nighttime slashing sequence is set during a music video-style thunderstorm for atmospheric effect, flaunting money most modern slashers couldn’t afford to scrape together. The only embarrassing thing about the movie, really, is watching the adults in the room have to play archetypes for mouthbreathing teens’ entertainment: Brad Dourif as a creepy gas station attendant, Loretta Devine as a Coffy-obsessed campus cop and, of course, Robert Englund as a learned professor of the macabre.

As for the urban-legends-obsessed serial killer conceit, even the teenage victims point out that the premise is “a bit of a stretch.” There are a few obvious go-to urban legends that map well to the teen slasher format. There’s the classic “The call’s coming from inside the house” story of the babysitter being killed by a home invader, restaged here in a frat house much like how the foundational 70s slasher Black Christmas restaged it in a sorority house. The first kill involves an axe murderer hiding in the backseat of a woman’s car, played for ironic humor as she sings along to the “Turn around” refrain of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” painfully off-key. The killer’s motivation being a disastrous prank version of the “flashing headlights gang initiation” legend is similarly effective. Three or four clever kills are not enough to fill the 100-minute runtime, though, which inspires the movie to reach for urban legends that don’t fully map to the genre. In the most egregious example, one character is force-fed a combo of Pop Rocks & Drano in a violent escalation of the schoolyard myth that combining Pop Rocks & soda will explode your stomach. Otherwise, things get exceedingly silly when the legends are updated with modern twists, like switching phone calls for online chatrooms or creating new teen slang in which victims-to-be each share their “favorite U.L.” at the campus coffee shop. With the gnarly exception of a microwaved dog, the violence of the film is never especially gruesome, but it does find plenty of novelty in its post-Scream meta slasher premise. It’s a wonder there were any legends left for its two less-remembered sequels; it seems like this one ran through all the standards.

If you want a smart, level-headed version of this movie, you’re much better off revisiting the 1992 classic Candyman, which starts with a grad student recording a broad range of urban legends before settling on one specific, hyperlocal one that destroys her life. The modern folklore academia of Urban Legend is much broader, and it only serves two cynical purposes: cashing in on the popularity of Scream and making Robert Englund appear intellectual. A couple decades later, the only cultural significance the movie has gained is as a reminder that Jared Leto was once passable as a normal, functional human being, albeit a strikingly pretty one. Everything else is pure late-90s nostalgia, the cinematic equivalent of binging Stabbing Westward & Cherry Poppin’ Daddies music videos on YouTube.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #234: Nashville (1975) & Altman’s America

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Welcome to Episode #234 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss the portrait of America stretched across Robert Altman’s filmography, starting with his 1975 country-music industry drama Nashville.

00:00 Pearl Jam
01:23 Striptease (1996)
05:06 Incendies (2010)
08:01 La Moustache (2005)
10:30 American Sniper (2014)
17:13 Rambo I – V (1982 – 2019)

25:20 Nashville (1975)
54:50 McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
1:15:30 Come Back to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982)
1:36:05 Short Cuts (1993)

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

– The Podcast Crew

Fade to Black (1980)

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“Why don’t you live in the real world with the rest of us?”
“No thanks.”

During the opening credits of the early-80s horror curio Fade to Black, our serial killer anti-hero Eric Binfold (Dennis Christopher) is mumbling to himself about Bogart & books, likely in reference to the Howard Hawks noir The Big Sleep. He’s then revealed to be lounging in his underwear, studying local TV broadcast & repertory theatre listings in the newspaper to plan out his week. His bedroom is wallpapered with movie posters for violent genre films like Don’t Bother to Knock, Frenzy, and White Heat. His first kill, halfway into the film, is pushing his wheelchair-using adoptive aunt down their apartment stairs, inspired by an infamously vicious murder in Kiss of Death. He is later depicted masturbating to a Marilyn Monroe poster while wearing a Nosferatu t-shirt. He changes his name from Eric Binfold to Cody Jarrett in honor of James Cagney’s performance in White Heat, reflecting the way he deals with his mommy issues by violently lashing out against the world. Eric Binfold is living my exact life and watching the exact same movies I am, except that he’s a sociopathic murderer, and it scares me.

Fade to Black is an uncomfortably prescient film about how anyone with a Letterboxd account is an antisocial degenerate. It makes visual allusions to early slashers like Psycho & Halloween to help guide the audience with genre-template guardrails, but the horror classic it most closely resembles is Willard. All Eric Binfold wants to do is be left alone to watch his movies, but he keeps being hassled by family, coworkers, and bullies who interrupt his hobby. Like how Willard eventually exacts revenge on the world by weaponizing his own hobby of training rats, Eric snaps and goes on a killing spree using The Movies as his weapon of choice. He dresses as vampires, cowboys, and classic-noir gangsters, hunting anyone who belittles his favorite pastime of sitting alone in the dark, watching a glowing screen. Dennis Christopher gives an intensely nervous performance in the role, calling into question why Willard got the Crispin Glover remake treatment instead of this one. He’s also, of course, a prototypical incel – not committing his first murder until he’s stood up by an Australian flirt who happens to vaguely resemble Marilyn Monroe. What a dweeb; I hate that he’s so relatable.

The real horror here is the isolation & frustration of dedicating every waking thought to the antisocial pursuit of Watching Movies. It’s an unhealthy lifestyle, but given the choice between “escapist trash” and the cruel mundanity of the real world, it’s a relatively attractive one. The trick when “going to the movies a lot” is “your thing” is to remember how to talk & relate to other people in the hours you inevitably have to spend outside the theater. You can’t just fire off movie trivia at normal, functional human beings and consider the exchange Polite Conversation. Universal’s Famous Monsters aren’t famous to everyone; you have to recognize that you are the town freak, not the local genius, and adjust your behavior accordingly. When Eric’s killing spree spirals fully out of control and he takes the Marilyn impersonator hostage at gunpoint, the taboo he can’t wait to break is touching a movie theater screen with his hands, something that wouldn’t register as a blasphemous transgression to most. He’s an avatar for Cinephile Brain Rot at its most rotten, another reminder to periodically step outside the cinema and touch some grass.

-Brandon Ledet

Juliet of the Spirits (1965)

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The standout sequence in Juliet of the Spirits that dropped my jaw lowest in the theater was its ugliest & most mundane. The 2015 restoration of the 1960s Fellini classic is, for the most part, a gorgeous swirl of vibrant color. It’s a dark fantasy movie in which the Italian master invents the cinematic language for later texts as disparate & monumental as Lynch’s dream sequences, Jodorowsky’s circuses, and Friedkin’s exorcisms, all rendered in sinfully lurid Technicolor. That was all expected, though. What really caught me off guard is when Fellini pauses his gaudy reverie to also invent the cinematic language for the television program Cheaters. It happens in the sequence where his real-life wife & muse Giuletta Masina visits the private detective agency that’s been trailing her husband, and they play back to her a full week of documented adulterous behavior. The way the head dick in charge narrates the sepia-tone surveillance footage with time stamps and sneering innuendo is so specific to the Joey Greco era of Cheaters that I now understand that reality TV show to be a loving homage to the film’s legacy. Such is the power of Fellini.

Much like an episode of Cheaters, watching Juliet of the Spirits feels like intruding on a private domestic dispute that’s really none of our business. Our director is working through his real-life conflicts with his wife by illustrating his own adulterous behavior onscreen, through the avatar of actor Mario Pisu. Giuletta Masina stars as Giuletta Boldrini, a wealthy but lonely housewife who’s increasingly isolated by the extramarital indulgences of her husband Giorgio, played by Pisu. As Giorgio spends increasingly long stretches away with his latest fling, Giuletta seeks spiritual advice from the dark arts, meeting with a series of psychics & mystics in search of a calmer, wiser perspective on her broken marriage. This pursuit opens her mind to a loud circus of perverted spirits & ghosts that constantly parade through her head, pulling her out of her Catholic comfort zone towards a larger religious truth: pleasure is the true religion, and she should be cheating too. The whole thing plays like a plea from Fellini to his wife to start cheating on him to help balance things out and to take her mind off the marital injustice he initiated.

Unlearning Catholic guilt is easier said than done. The proto-Exorcist imagery results from a childhood memory in which Giuletta starred as a martyred saint in a church play, burned alive for the transgression of accepting Christ in her heart. Anytime the adult Giuletta considers indulging in an extramarital affair (with a handsome ghost, demon, or otherwise), her mind flashes back to this scarring memory, which has taught her to associate Earthly pleasure with guilt & pain. Everyone around her is fully enjoying what being alive has to offer—especially in the pleasures of the flesh—and yet Giuletta continues to fret, unable to let go and enjoy herself as much as her wandering husband. Buried somewhere in the film’s increasingly dreamlike imagery, there’s eventually a healing moment in which she frees her flaming inner child from her Catholic shackles and comforts her with a motherly embrace, but it’s still not enough to fully make up for what Giorgio has done to their marriage. Maybe Fellini’s admitting personal guilt there more than he’s attempting to shake his wife loose from her own self-limiting Catholic guilt. Again, it’s not really any of our business.

For all of its messy offscreen domestic drama and the deep psychological pain caused by religious repression, Juliet of the Spirits is often a light confection. Snazzy jazz scores the backyard wanderings of a mystic housecat and the Italo-fashion beachwear modeling of Giulietta’s fabulously amoral neighbor with no attempt to underline the dark-fantasy elements of the plot with any palpable menace. Fellini feels just as preoccupied with injecting eye-searing beauty into every frame of his first in-color picture as he is with working out his domestic issues with his wife. Even the candlesticks in the couple’s home are tinted lavender instead of the typical white, just to squeeze more color into the frame. It is, without question, the most gorgeous, surreal episode of Cheaters in the history of the show; and yes I am including the one where Joey Greco got stabbed on a boat.

-Brandon Ledet

Universal Language (2025)

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Matthew Rankin makes great movies, but I’m not yet fully sure what makes a Matthew Rankin movie specific to Matthew Rankin. His first film The Twentieth Century is one of the best debut features of this decade, and yet the most accurate way to recommend it to the uninitiated is as the best Guy Maddin movie not directed by Guy Maddin. I found myself reaching for similar hypotheticals while watching Rankin’s latest picture, the low-key absurdist comedy Universal Language. What if Wes Anderson directed My Winnipeg? What if Roy Andersson directed True Stories? What if Quentin Dupieux directed Where is the Friend’s House? Thankfully, Matthew Rankin is quickly becoming a distinct enough directorial voice that I won’t have to come up with these lazy rhetorical scenarios for much longer, but there just isn’t enough material out there to fully pinpoint what makes his work unique, at least not yet. For now, its greatness is still familiar to its most glaring reference points.

Set in a parallel-universe version of Winnipeg that’s just as influenced by Iranian culture as Canadian, Universal Language casually slips between Persian & French dialogue & text as a mirror reflection of its characters’ liminal cultural identities. We start at a French immersion school, with Persian students anxious to break away from their eccentric teacher’s disciplinary shouting so they can have wholesome adventures in the Canadian snow. Outside, their small-scale schemes intertwine with the daily toils of a Winnipeg tour guide and a stranger (Matthew Rankin, essentially playing himself) who’s returning to town to visit his ill mother after years of estrangement. In stage-comedy tradition, their stories converge in a single apartment at the story’s climax, but much of the film leaves them traveling & plotting in isolated vignettes. The tour guide is the most solid narrative anchor in that respect, providing the audience a sense of place as he shows off the many uninspiring wonders of Winnipeg’s cultural monuments: an endless tangle of grey interstate highways, a Beige District of nondescript brick buildings, a briefcase that was abandoned on a park bench in the 1970s and left undisturbed due to general Canadian politeness, etc.

Universal Language lounges in a calm, unrushed mood, warming its frozen hands with a hot glass of tea in avoidance of the harsh winter outside. It’s quietly hilarious, though, with an excess of absurdist gags about turkey beauty pageants, sentient Christmas trees, local TV-commercial celebrities, and schoolboy Groucho Marx impersonators that each land with a warm chuckle rather than a full-bellied laugh. Its visual trickery is similarly subdued, especially in comparison with the German Expressionist fantasia of The Twentieth Century. There are two scenes in which a shot-reverse-shot sequence triggers a harshly mundane psychedelia: one that maps out the cubicle-walled limbo of a government bureaucrat’s office and one that swaps two characters’ personae mid-film, recalling Lynch’s Lost Highway. Another isolated sequence of low-key surrealism makes the audience dizzy with double-exposure images of a figure skater dressed in silver like a spinning disco ball. It’s all purposefully underplayed deadpan, so its merits as Great Cinema are much less obvious than they were in Rankin’s previous picture. It’s also much sweeter & more communal, though, suggesting that Rankin is investing more heart into his characters than his production design as he hones his directorial voice. Although many immediate comparisons come to mind while describing what he’s achieved so far, I still can’t fully predict where his mind is going next. He’s an exciting Artist To Watch as a result, even as someone who’s not yet making fully distinct art.

-Brandon Ledet

Working Girl (1988)

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I’ve been thinking a lot about Harrison Ford lately, mostly by happenstance. He’s in TV commercials promoting a new Captain America film as a tomato-red variation of The Hulk transformed by the magic of CGI. He’s lurking in the background of Awards Season ceremonies, disrupting live broadcasts with his signature geriatric-stoner aloofness. When I last went to the theater, he unexpectedly appeared against-type as a young, stone-faced villain in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Harrison Ford is everywhere, as long as you happen to be making the exact programming choices I am. So, when I was flipping through my stack of unwatched DVD purchases, I had to follow the pattern and watch the first movie that featured Ford’s handsome face on the cover: Mike Nichols’s late-80s romcom Working Girl, where Harrison Ford plays the lead romantic interest for star Melanie Griffith. Despite Ford’s lengthy screentime and central importance to the plot, it turned out to not be an especially great watch if you’re looking for pure Harrison Ford content. He’s mostly used as a sex-symbol prop, an object to be ogled. Like in my recent everyday life, he’s just kind of . . . there.

Besides the film being a star-vehicle for Melanie Griffith, the reason Harrison Ford doesn’t make much of a strong impression in Working Girl is that the cast is overflowing with a surplus of supporting players, of which he just happens to play the primary hunk. Alec Baldwin plays Hunk #2, a perfectly cast meathead himbo. Sigourney Weaver gives a hilariously broad performance as Griffith’s boss & romantic rival. Joan Cusack plays her even more eccentric bestie. Oliver Platt appears as her workplace enemy, a Wall Street slimeball. Kevin Spacey plays an even slimier Wall Street slimeball. David Duchovny shows up as a background player at her surprise birthday party. Working Girl has the kind of stacked cast of character actors that has you shouting “Holy shit, look who it is!” all the way until the final minute. The last one that got me was Suzanne “Big Ethel” Shepherd from A Dirty Shame delivering exactly one line as an unnamed receptionist in the final few minutes, one of two single-scene appearances from John Waters players, including an earlier appearance from Ricki Lake. Casting director Juliet Taylor was a real over-achiever, as evidenced by roping in someone as classically charismatic as Harrison Ford to just stand around and look handsome.

Working Girl is essentially a fish-out-of-water comedy about a Staten Island party girl (Griffith) who struggles to be taken seriously in the Big Business world of Manhattan across the bay. She rides the ferry to work every morning in her stockings & tennis shoes, switches to the sensible heels stored under her desk, and struggles to keep her hairspray-sculpted lioness mane vertical while battling sexist stereotypes in the lion’s den of stock trading. Her big break arrives in the form of a broken leg, when her much more refined Manhattanite boss (Weaver) injures herself skiing and is briefly taken out of the picture. Our titular working girl makes a power move by taking over her boss’s life & wardrobe, Single White Female-style, and attempting to broker a major corporate-buyout deal with a hotshot fuckboy broker (Ford) before she’s discovered to be a fraud. After the movie comes dangerously close to kicking things off with a date-rape meet cute, they genuinely fall in love and a series of silly deceits & misunderstandings ensue. The entire two-hour runtime is dedicated to the contract negotiations of their singular business deal together, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is Griffith’s self-described persona of having “a head for business and a body for sin,” a line so perfectly written it belonged on the poster instead of in the dialogue.

Griffith’s sinful body is frequently put on display here, as lacy, overly complicated lingerie appears to be just as much of her Big Business uniform as her pencil skirt; she even vacuums in it. Harrison Ford is tasked to strip too, for a sense of balance, at one point taking a whore’s bath during a phone call in his glass-walled office while his female coworkers gawk & applaud. As a Reaganite cultural clash between the small-town vulgarity of Staten Island and the big-city sophistication of Manhattan, Working Girl is a little conceptually vague. As a collection of always-welcome faces, however, it’s exceedingly charming from start to end (Spacey excluded). You can tell it’s charming just by clocking that there are two overlapping cast members from Moonstruck featured here (Cher’s mom & Cher’s hairdresser), which is the undisputable masterpiece of this 80s NYC romcom subgenre. Harrison Ford is just one handsome face among many. He hadn’t yet learned how to be a dazed, scene-stealing agent of chaos, but thankfully there were plenty of other over-the-top performers around to pick up the slack (with Weaver & Cusack doing most of the heavy lifting in that respect).

-Brandon Ledet