brandon ledet

Fan Art: An Ode to Black Phillip

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Imagine the depths of your infant American hubris, you bearded doofus:
“We will conquer this wilderness. It will not conquer us.”
Tough luck, paterfamilias. A black goat commands
your children’s spirits, his curved horns aimed to gore
the nearest patriarch unafraid of the old world horrors
of the woods. He commands a coven of vvitches bathed
in your baby’s blood & the light of an impossibly enormous moon.
You will meet Black Phillip soon, so clutch your holy axe

and ask yourself how you would respond to the goat’s temptation.
Wouldst thou like the taste of butter, a pretty dress?
Wouldst thou like to live deliciously? Ask the goat to guide
your hand as you sign your name in the mystic book.
He’s ceremonially holding court in the backyard barn
before the real party starts in the woods. Black Phillip’s whispers
to Thomasin are far from empty promises. He can help you transcend
the bounds of flesh & godliness. Even gravity & New England

heat are small concerns under his hooved feet. Black Phillip
pants heavily, lazily eating his allotted hay as your family
tears itself to shreds. Nature’s chaos is not a threat,
but an inevitability. Again, wouldst thou like to live deliciously?
Wouldst thou like to see the world? He affords these luxuries
to all, not just little girls. Baa baa baa, Black Phillip,
Dark Prince of the Puritan New World. His magic is pure American
wilderness. Baa baa, so says the rightful owner of your doomed soul.

[Black Phillip is a fictional goat from the film The Witch (2016)]

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 16: From Russia with Love (1963)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where From Russia with Love (1963) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 111 of the first edition hardback, Roger recounts watching the film at a theater in Cape Town, South Africa while studying abroad as a college student. At the box office he was informed that it was “not a theater for whites,” but he was permitted to enter anyway because he was American and “didn’t know any better.” His mistake was announced to the rest of the amused/bemused theater in Afrikaans & after the screening he was escorted back to his dormitory by local police.

What Ebert had to say in his review: Roger never officially reviewed the film, but he did write a piece titled “‘From Russia with Love’ and Its Place in the Bond Canon”. It begins, “‘From Russia with Love’ (1963) is one of the best James Bond movies and one of the first sequels to surpass the success of an original entry (‘Dr. No’). Its existence represents a crucial reason for the series having lasted until today. The picture is not be quite as good as ‘Goldfinger,’ but it provided a better influence on the following films of the series, with an ambience of suspense and danger that couldn’t be fully replicated until the recent arrival of the Daniel Craig Bonds.”

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As much as I love the stray dumb action movie or hard-edged cop drama, there are a few hyper-masculine film genres that I just fail miserably to connect with as an audience: Westerns, war movies, submarine-bound thrillers, etc. Voluntarily enrolling myself in the Roger Ebert Film School was bound to push me outside of my comfort zone at some point, though, so I’ve signed up to watch the occasional macho macho movie or two dozen as they pop up on the list of films Ebert happened to mention in his autobiography. Cool Hand Luke was a nice surprise in that way, proving to be much easier to connect with than I expected, given its external bravado was a front for something much more vulnerable & existential. I wasn’t quite so lucky with this go-round, though, as I encountered yet another man’s-man film genre I tend to ignore/avoid as much as possible: the James Bond picture. I could probably count on one hand the number of Bond movies I’ve seen in my life and there’s exactly one title from the never-ending series I can claim to have legitimately enjoyed: the delightfully campy Moonraker. From Russia with Love erased some of that lunar-bound goodwill & did little to turn me around on the idea of giving all two dozen Bond films a closer look, a task that seems more daunting & pointless as each year passes and yet another entry in the franchise gets queued up. If anything, the film solidified my prejudice & confirmed that the series would likely be of use to me only if I’m ever chronically having trouble falling asleep.

The second film in the ongoing James Bond series, From Russia with Love is a linear sequel to Dr. No, a film I never plan to see unless coerced. Secret agent James Bond goes on an undercover mission in Turkey where he is unknowingly being hunted by the Russian terrorist syndicate H.Y.D.R.A., I mean S.P.E.C.T.R.E. The evil S.P.E.C.T.R.E. plans to kill Bond in order to avenge the death of Dr. No or some such. Bond plans to use cool gadgets & seduce beautiful women. I’ll let you guess on your own which side of that coin prevails. I found it incredibly difficult to focus on this film, which played in my mind as the blandest of background noise movies with only the rarest glimpse of eye-catching camp to help keep me conscious. According to Ebert, From Russia with Love was an improvement upon the series’s debut, Dr. No, and the box office numbers agreed with that sentiment, racking up $79 million internationally off a $2 million budget. All I see here is another indistinct entry in an endless franchise, made memorable only by some Cold War jingoism & vaguely imperialistic tourist-gawking at Turkish customs, most notably belly dancing eroticism. Even after I watched the film in its entirety I felt like I hadn’t seen a single frame, as if my brain had filtered it for interesting content and held onto nothing. 1963 audiences & Bond enthusiasts alike have an entirely different experience with From Russia with Love that I’ll likely never understand. It’s a dog whistle situation in its purest form & I’m deaf to most of its charms.

I don’t mean to make From Russia with Love sound like an aggressively terrible film without a single redeeming quality. I found it to be bland, but competent. In order to play fair I guess I should point to a few campy touches I found amusing: an overwrought Cold War chess metaphor, a Dr. Claw prototype stroking his requisite white cat, an absurd Russian training facility not too dissimilar from the X-Men war room, a gratuitous cat fight, a shamelessly tawdry opening credits sequence projected onto naked flesh & bejeweled tits, an egregious example of Ebert’s Fallacy of the Talking Killer trope. I also never noticed before how surf rocky the Bond theme is and I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Sean Connery so young & so dashing, even if his only decent line was [watching a man climb out of a billboard advertisement’s mouth] “She should have kept her mouth shut,” a quip that’s more than a little gross if you think about it for too long. I’m also glad to now fully understand the porno-within-the-show title From Russia with the Love Bone from Trailer Park Boys, though I’m not sure the two of hours of boredom required to get there was worth it. The simple truth is that I’m not equipped to enjoy this kind of thing & From Russia with Love wasn’t especially interested in grabbing attention outside its inherent Bond-genre reach. The film made no effort to meet me halfway. Any day of the week I’d rather watch films like this spoofed in works like Spy, Top Secret!, or The Man from U.N.C.L.E. than watch the real deal. I realize there’s a large audience for these kinds of films out there, given their incredible longevity, but I can’t yet count myself among them, nor am I sure that I ever will. Oh well. At least I’ll always have Moonraker.

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Roger’s Rating: N/A

Brandon’s Rating: (2.5/5, 50%)

twohalfstar

Next Lesson: Lady Jane (1986)

-Brandon Ledet

Citizen Ruth (1996), Obvious Child (2014), and the Trajectory of the Modern Abortion Comedy

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July’s Movie of the Month, writer-director  Alexander Payne’s debut feature film Citizen Ruth, is a pitch black comedy about a woman pressured to have (or not to have) an abortion by political activists who care far less about her right to choose (or her unborn fetus’s right to life) than they do about scoring political points in the mass media. Payne intentionally chose the abortion rights debate as the moral crisis centerpiece of his film because he knew it was a hot button topic that would elicit strong reactions from his audience, one he could use to discuss the way a person’s humanity is stripped once they’re exploited as an issue instead of treated as an individual. This approach to abortion as a plot device in comedy is fairly typical. Movies that utilize abortion as a thematic focal point will often derive all of their dramatic weight from the decision about whether or not to have the procedure in this way, leaving the romance & humor of their narratives to separately function as relief from what is generally portrayed as a traumatic, life-changing experience. From classic examples like Fast Times at Ridgemont High & Dirty Dancing to recent comedies like Juno, Knocked Up, and Leslye Headland’s (sadly underappreciated) Bachelorette, abortion is almost always portrayed in cinema, even in comedy, as A Big Deal,  A Life-Changing Event, An Insurmountable Trauma. Citizen Ruth‘s major variation on that standard, besides its excruciatingly frank & honest discussion, is that it points the finger back at the political pundits that make abortion such a huge ordeal in the first place for the (fictional) woman who endures their grandstanding manipulation & exploitation.

The only comedy I’ve ever seen that casually engages with abortion as a normal, everyday subject instead of a life-altering crisis is 2014’s unconventional romcom Obvious Child. When we included Obvious Child on our Top Films of 2014 list, we praised it for “approaching a sensitive subject from a sincere & deeply empathetic place” and declared that it “deserves to be recognized as one of the all-time great romantic comedies. Or at least one of the best in recent memory.” In the film Jenny Slate plays a stand-up comedian who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant after a one night stand with a nice Midwestern boy who she knows essentially nothing about. Unlike all of the other abortion titles cited here, this film’s central crisis isn’t whether or not to have the abortion (a decision that’s made quickly & decisively), but how to negotiate its impact on the would-be mother’s social & familial circles, a question that’s complicated when she finds herself falling in love with the would-be father. Obvious Child may be the only abortion comedy to date where its central procedure is presented as not a big deal, just another aspect of a complicated, nuanced life, which is in itself a sort of political statement (though not one as loud or as pointed as Citizen Ruth‘s). The film borrows a little bit of Citizen Ruth‘s blunt honesty & dark humor, but in its protagonist’s particular story arc a terminated pregnancy is presented as a solution to a problem instead of the source of one. It’s a refreshing change from the bleak  norm of cinematic moralizing & browbeating typical to the abortion comedy, one both Citizen Ruth & Obvious Child manage to criticize in their own respective ways: either by examining the intent of that browbeating or by sidestepping it entirely.

The major differences between what Citizen Ruth & Obvious Child accomplish might boil down to a question of genre. Alexander Payne’s 1996 political provocation is a true blue dark comedy, committing itself to Todd Solondz levels of inhuman cruelty & utter despair. Obvious Child, on the other hand, is a genre-faithful romantic comedy that just happens to center on a topic that the play-it-safe romcom formula usually won’t touch with a ten foot pole. Laura Dern & Jenny Slate’s respective protagonists in these two works aren’t all that different from one another and the the movies’ sources for humor start from a similarly bleak place. However, the severity of their circumstances are drastically dissimilar. Both Dern’s Ruth & Slate’s Donna begin their respective journeys as depressed addicts. Ruth is a homeless woman addicted to huffing household chemicals & Donna is a much more typical heartbroken alcoholic type trying to deal with the fallout of a recent breakup. Donna has a support system of caring friends & family who coach her through her unwanted pregnancy while Ruth is hopelessly alone in the world & thus vulnerable to anyone looking to exploit her for political gain. The father of Donna’s fetus is a genuinely nice guy the audience roots for her to date while Ruth’s baby’s father is an abusive monster the film thankfully avoids much contact with, except when Ruth gloriously jeers him with the John Waters-esque insult, “Suck the shit out of my ass, you fucker!” from the window of a passing car. Even the reason for the two women’s delayed abortions is tonally telling: Ruth’s is delayed due to a national debate that supersedes her right to choose, while Donna is simply too early along in her pregnancy for the procedure.

I don’t mean to compare the two films’ disparate dramatic situations to claim that only one holds any significant weight and the other is a breeze. Donna has also suffered. She begins Obvious Child as a rejected lover unceremoniously dumped in a dive bar men’s room and suffers monetary dilemmas similar to (but not nearly as drastic as) the economic desperation that drives the plot of Citizen Ruth. I just mean to illustrate that Obvious Child stands as a tonal shift for the heavy-handed place abortion usually occupies in the modern comedy. Citizen Ruth represents an early moment of cinematic clarity where abortion is debated openly & honestly instead of being shamefully & superficially used as a plot device (or as shock value in throwaway gags, like in John Waters’s cult classic Polyester), as is typical for movies brave enough to approach it at all, including a lot of movies I greatly enjoy. Obvious Child latches onto that honesty & runs so much further with it, however, showing what it’s typically like for a woman (with a decent support network & a “livable” wage) to have an abortion & subsequently move on with her life. Donna & Ruth both start from a place of heartbreak & end on a note of open-ended success, but Donna’s journey is sadly funny in a much sweeter way, finding humor in details like sleeping with someone because they farted in your face or having to schedule an abortion on Valentine’s Day. The stakes are much lower than Citizen Ruth‘s life or death descent into poverty & addiction and, although it’s amazing that Payne was able to find humor in such a dark place, it’s much more encouraging that Obvious Child could move the conversation along while downplaying the abortion debate’s necessary emotional impact on a story.

The trajectory I’m detailing here is the same kind of effect as a Hollywood production passing homosexual romance off as no big deal instead of only portraying it as an inevitable tragedy where at least one of the characters involved dies & there’s no possible happy ending, as has been the Big Studio standard for decades. Citizen Ruth starts a frank & open conversation about abortion most comedies would typically exploit for dramatic or shock value beats. Obvious Child was yet another game changer that makes that need for a debate feel almost entirely insignificant in a modern context. It presents abortion as a normal, everyday thing people go through, opening the door for cinema to move on & let the debate die forever. Together, they help define the heights & boundaries of the abortion comedy as it stands today as well as the inevitable trajectory for a more honest, open-minded future (assuming that last bit’s not just wishful thinking on my part). We’re lucky to have them both.

For more on July’s Movie of the Month, Alexander Payne’s abortion-themed black comedy Citizen Ruth, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? (2016)

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fourstar

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James Franco’s 2016 remake of the Tori Spelling Lifetime Original Movie Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? is a biting sociopolitical commentary on pervasive homophobia, sexism, and rape culture issues that plague college campuses in the 2010s. That’s a half-truth. The film is also a shameless, leering camp fest about lesbian vampires that sometimes borders on the less-than-prestigious realm of dime store erotica. Either way you look at it, the film is easily the most outrageously entertaining  work I’ve seen from Lifetime in decades (unless you include those Mommie Dearest marathons they do on Mother’s Day; those are hilarious). It’s funny, it’s trashy, it’s dirt cheap, and it’s more than a little bit sleazy: pretty much the perfect calibration for an instant Lifetime classic. Better yet, its penchant for cheesy sleaze feels 100% earnest, never truly crossing into the winking parody of an Asylum mockbuster or a ZAZ-style spoof, despite what you may assume from its pedigree. If this vampiric “re-imagining” is an indication of where Lifetime programming is currently headed, we’re in for some tawdry good fun in the years to come, a second golden age of made-for-television schlock.

In the mid-90s version of Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?, Tori Spelling plays a perfect teen daughter who falls head over heels for a bad seed her mother suspects to be a thug & a murderer. It was a fairly standard rehashing of the classic “road to ruin” B-pictures of the 1950s, which was essentially Lifetime’s bread & butter in its heyday and the exact kind of crap that made that channel’s original content memorable in the first place. Franco’s remake finds a way to blow all that to hell while still paying respect to its source material’s basic aesthetic appeal. The essential plot overview is still the same here –an overly nosy mother (this time played by Spelling) worries that her teen daughter is falling for someone who could lead to her ruin; and she turns out to be right! — but the major details are replaced to heighten the absurdity of the scenario: the daughter’s dangerous love interest is a lesbian vampire and it’s her sapphic coven of undead “nightwalkers” that pose a threat,not her. What we have here is star-crossed lovers being torn apart because they’re from different worlds: box wine suburbia & bloodsucking lesbian murder covens, respectfully. Its tragic romance is something out of a Shakespearean play, an element Franco’s production plays up by centering the film around a Shakespearean play, specifically Macbeth. Life is but a stage & Franco seems intent on masturbating in every corner of that stage, an impulse that plays beautifully in the made-for-TV schlock landscape.

You’d be forgiven to find some James Franco projects a little insufferable for their artistic pretensions (you’d certainly have a lot of projects to choose from there; the man never sleeps). That pretension totally works in this garbage bin smut context, though. In the film Franco himself plays a college campus theater director staging a girl-on-girl erotica adaptation of Macbeth, with the film’s director, Melanie Aitkenhead, sitting at his right hand, nodding approvingly. The two cohorts gleefully eat up their own slash fiction filth from the comfortable distance of a theater audience. There’s a comment on the artificiality of the whole production built into that device, but it’s mostly a nod to Franco & Aitkenhead knowing & enjoying the exact kind of campy smut they’ve staged here. There’s also a couple college classroom lectures our danger-sleeper-wither protagonist attends titled “Vampires & Sexuality” and “Virginity & Sisterhood” that casually dig up thematic implications like homophobia & teen sexuality in titles like Dracula & Twilight with no intention of actually exploring those topics in any insightful way. Franco, who receives a “story by” credit here on top of being an executive producer, constantly reminds the audience that he knows how to make a smart, poignant vampire picture; he just happens to be more interested in making very softcore sapphic porn.

The one way Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? might be mistaken for something mildly insightful is in its depiction of college campuses as a dangerous hellscape for young women. Although it’s true that a gang of fanged lesbians dressed in Hot Topic lingerie are out to turn our troubled protagonist into a “nightwalker,” they are mostly treated as an afterthought in light of the film’s true villains: men. In order to ethically sustain themselves on human blood, our spooky The Craft knockoff vampire coven feeds on frat house rapists & dude bro Redditor types, of which its college campus setting has plenty. This moral center unravels under even the slightest scrutiny, though. They murder rapists, sure, but they leave their victims’ drained bodies next to the girls they were going to assault, carelessly setting them up to take the blame. That’s hardly model vigilante behavior, but what’s even worse is that when they accidentally turn the film’s most egregious example of toxic rape culture into a nightwalker, they just accept him as one of their own and allow him to go about his usual predatory business. It’s probably not too smart to dissect this film’s thematic trajectory, honestly. It’s much less of a thoughtful, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night style of vampire flick than it is a trashy Jennifer’s Body-type. Despite what Franco’s play-within-a-play self reflection might invite you to believe, it’s most likely best to enjoy the film for its laughable melodrama and its purty pictures.

Speaking of purty pictures, Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? is damn ugly, just truly hideous stuff. Of course, due to its subject matter, it’s hopelessly buried under what I consider the absolute worst era of pop culture aesthetic: late 90s nu metal/mall goth. The film’s Charmed/Twilight/Disney’s Descendants Spirit Halloween Store cosplay was almost entirely unavoidable, though. What really stands out is its endless establishing shots of bland drone-POV cityscapes, its watery-purple stage blood, and its Dr. Phibes by way of a Halloween-themed T.A.T.U. music video masquerade parties, all just perfectly hideous in a way only television can get away with & not get called out for it. It’s tempting to assume that the film’s visual cheapness was an intentional means to point to its own artificiality, like the college lectures or the Macbethean play-within-a-play machinations. The truth is, though, that the film is naturally hideous because it’s so damn earnest. If it were a more ironic production it likely would’ve tried avoiding its television-ugly genre trappings, but this is one remake that stays true to its dirt cheap Lifetime roots, a shoddy authenticity that helps sell its intrinsic camp pleasures beautifully.

It’s a well-informed balance between heady subject matter & campily melodramatic execution that makes Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? such a riot, a formula that holds true for all of Lifetime’s most memorable features whether they focus on co-ed call-girls, wife-mother-murderers or, in this case, lesbian vampires. This film has the gall to approach topics as powerful as grieving over familial loss, coming out to your parents, and the horrors of date rape, but does so only as a means to a tawdry end, namely inane mother-daughter shouting matches & young, lingerie-clad girls making out in spooky graveyards. It’s wonderfully trashy in that way, the best possible prospect for made-for-TV dreck. If when you were watching Refn’s fashion world horror The Neon Demon you wished it were instead cheap & awful, this film’s fashion photography montages & horrendous pop music are going to blow your trashy mind (also, you are ridiculous). If you think Ren Faire goth never got its fair shake as an aesthetic turn-on, you are about to get all worked up by this TV-14 smut (with little to no payoff, of course). If when you were watching the Paul Rust/Gillian Jacobs romcom Love, you found yourself curious what the fictional show-within-a-show witchcraft drama Witchita might feel like instead, you are in luck, you silly thing.

Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? only appeals to the basest of your television pleasure zones, assuming that if you tuned in for a Lifetime movie, you’re in the mood for some really trashy shit. The one thing it changes up from the normal formula is that it mixes its awful Tori Spelling-brand acting (she really has not improved an inch in the last two decades; she’s impressively stubborn in that way) with some stubby-fanged, throat-tearing gore (it’s not called Mother, May I Sleep with Safety?, after all). Throw in some supernatural baloney about vampires never needing to feed if they find their one true love (no word on if that’s reversed if it winds up being just a college fling), some of the world’s sloppiest blood-eating, and a few stray howler lines like “I’m going to turn you into a nightwalker, bitch!” and you have one strange, campy delight. Again, Franco & company trust that if you show up for this picture in the first place, you’re going to be down for some tawdry smut along the way. They’re not wrong. I had a lot of shameful, lowbrow fun.

-Brandon Ledet

Wiener-Dog (2016)

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threehalfstar

I was more than a little weary about venturing out to see Todd Solondz’s latest pitch black provocation, the ensemble cast “comedy” Wiener-Dog, last weekend. I hadn’t seen a Solondz flick since 2001’s mostly-forgettable anthology piece Storytelling and I’m a lot less cynical than I was in my college days when I would have listed Happiness as one of my all-time favorite films. I was right to worry too, not because Wiener-Dog is necessarily bad or mediocre Solondz, but because it’s very much steeped in the niche he’s carved out for himself as a storyteller. The writer-director works the absurdist cruelty that made him something of an indie scene name in the 90s with titles like Happiness & Welcome to the Dollhouse into the everything-is-connected (and equally hopeless) anthology structure of Storytelling, constructing an amusingly odd & deeply painful existential crisis that is unmistakably his own style & tone. What’s most interesting here, though, is how much of Solondz’s own personality is displayed & dissected onscreen. The director not only stubbornly recommits to the bleak trajectory of his life’s work; he also steps back to question why he would make such pointless, nihilistic art in the first place. Solondz coldly asks the audience what is the point of anything at all, but is smart to include his own art & existence in that query. The answer is far from concrete, but it’s haunting in its abstraction.

In a basic, structural sense Wiener-Dog is a road trip tour through Todd Solondz’s America. Similar to the black comedy Baxter, the film follows its titular dog, a dachshund, as it changes ownership though various tragedies & betrayals, providing a window into the dreary homes & familial structures that typify a nation Solondz finds . . . distasteful. A young cancer survivor (whose visage playfully cribs from the Linklater landmark Boyhood) falls in love with the dog as his first pet; an old woman tenderly cares for it as her last. A vet tech takes the pup on a road trip; a lonely college professor contains it in his tiny office & apartment. Every owner the dachshund encounters is vulnerable & alone in a cruel world eager to punish them for any display of open-hearted earnestness. Together, they form an American patchwork that paints the country as “lonely”, “sad”, “depressing”, “like an elephant drowning in a sea of despair.” Solondz’s America is brimming with strip clubs, alcoholism, superhero movies, hipster irony, mental disability, misogynistic video games, heroin, diarrhea, and a beyond-broken economy. People lie, threaten, and manipulate each other in a never-ending cycle of cruelty and the folks who suffer the most damage from that time-honored American tradition are the ones most capable of empathy & selflessness. The one exception might be Solondz’s surrogate, a frustrated film school professor who can’t overcome his own bitterness, lest you think the director himself wasn’t also complicit in that cycle. It’s dark stuff.

So, where does the innocent wiener-dog fit in all of this? As Danny DeVito’s bitter film professor/Solondz surrogate puts it, “You need a schtick. Everyone loves a little schtick.” If in Solondz’s America the earnest & the eager are the most harshly & frequently punished, a dog is the best possible manifestation of that concept, since all the little pups of the world really want to do is please us & be loved. Watching the wiener-dog ride skateboard or wear a cute costume is a great way to grab an audience’s attention & force them to focus on something uncomfortable, a gimmick Solondz pulls off openly & deliberately. During an old-fashioned intermission our canine talisman is represented as a larger than life, fiercely American tall tale with her own theme song, a moment that reinforces the empty artificiality of filmmaking as an art. After this break, the dog’s ownership changes hands without explanation, moving away from the linear storytelling of the first half & becoming an explicit plot device (quite literally in one particular moment of workplace terrorism, yet another American pastime). Solondz gets bored of his own structural schtick & begins to point his cinematic weaponry back at himself, asking questions like, “Why do you want to be a filmmaker?” and addressing criticisms of his work like, “The general consensus is that you’re too negative.” By the last shot the dog doesn’t matter at all and is reduced to the most meaningless of abstract art piece reflections on the mundanity of existence & mortality. It wags its tail & barks, but that action signifies nothing.

It’s difficult to figure out how to sell Todd Solondz’s films, which tend to occupy an uncomfortable space between comedy & tragedy that’s more likely to make you squirm than laugh or cry (despite what their oddly generic trailers indicate). Wiener-Dog seems to be a self-examination piece on the cruel stage play absurdity & ultimate pointlessness of that art/schtick’s place in this world and, more specifically, its function within a spiritually drained, soulless America. Just as I questioned what significance a modern Solondz work could possibly hold in my life, the director himself seems equally eager to prod at that conundrum in the context of life at large. There are some great performances along the way (DeVito, playwright Tracy Letts, Julie Delpy, Ellen Burnstyn, Kieran Culkin, Greta Gerwig in an all-growed-up Welcome to the Dollhouse role), that might each have served as a worthwhile character study in an indie dramedy had Solondz followed through on any particular full-length narrative, but the director doesn’t seem to think telling these stories from front to end is worthwhile. Exhausted with the soulless journeymen efforts of “What if? Then what?” screenplay writing, he instead reflects on an artform & a nation that he feels have failed us all. You can see that despair plainly in a tender, delicate pan over an endless display of canine diarrhea.  Solondz displays the skills required to deliver a great film were he interested, but the exercise seems increasingly empty to him. Watching him mull over that emptiness and the great, hopeless expanse of the country & mortality that contain it is largely what makes Wiener-Dog fascinating, if not soul-crushingly depressing, which is par for the course in the context of Solondz’s catalog. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if that kind of dispirited existential crisis & self-examination sounds at all palatable to your tastes for an evening’s entertainment.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #10 of The Swampflix Podcast: Top Ten Time Travel Movies & Martyrs (2008)

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inaworld

Welcome to Episode #10 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our tenth episode, James & Brandon discuss their top ten time travel films of all time with author/blogger/friend Bryan Perkins. Also, James makes Brandon watch the French-Canadian “extremist” horror Martyrs (2008). Enjoy!

Production note: The musical “bumps” between segments were also provided by James.

-James Cohn & Brandon Ledet

Timecrimes (2008)

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threehalfstar

The only thing I knew about the Spanish sci-fi thriller Timecrimes going in is that people often accuse the time travel horror Triangle of blatantly ripping it off. It’s easy to see how that accusation gets tossed around. Both films feature a similarly-masked killer and a tortured/confused protagonist stuck in a Groundhog Day-type time loop that becomes increasingly inevitable each time it plays out & progresses. Although Timecrimes beat Triangle to the punch in some ways I found myself less in love with what it delivers than the much more supernaturally bizarre film that followed. It’s probably best for Timecrimes‘s sake to ignore that comparison entirely & enjoy it for its own small scale, economical thriller charms. It works perfectly well outside that context & is a must see time travel thriller for sci-fi junkies on its own terms.

Timecrimes begins with a fairly typical horror film setup: a married, middle-aged man is violently punished (stabbed in the arm) for ogling a young topless woman through binoculars while he is supposedly bird-watching with his wife. Things get much stranger form there once he’s tricked into entering a time machine that brings him back to that exact same time of day. In order to avoid altering the trajectory of time already established he forces the young woman, a kind stranger, to disrobe so his alternate version can ogle her through binoculars. You can already see where this is headed, I’m sure. A lot of the fun in Timecrimes is in watching the ever-complicating plot set up its Rube Goldberg machinations & to scratch your head over its self-creating paradoxes. You know exactly where the plot is headed, but expect many twists & betrayals to be revealed in the process and it’s fascinating to watch a character climb into his own grave and then retroactively dig it. As the time machine operator puts it, “The machine doesn’t solve problems. In fact, it creates them.” As these “problems” stack up to an insurmountable fever pitch Timecrimes finds a nice little groove for itself, like needle slowly spiraling inwards on a record.

Although nicely layered, Timecrimes‘s plot structure is a lot less complicated than similar time loop features like Triangle or Groundhog Day or, the most complex of them all, Primer. What I most appreciated about the film, though, was not its structural complexity, but its interest in constructing a moral dilemma. It’s difficult to tell for sure if the film’s protagonist is an objectively bad person or just a victim of circumstance doing objectively bad things in order to maintain the integrity of his preferred timeline. It’s also interesting how the film turns the passive ogling of a stranger’s body into something much more violent & predatory. By the end of the film when he proclaims, “I had no choice” in regards to his escalating mess of questionable offenses, it’s all too easy to call bullshit. He had plenty of choices. He just chose to be selfish & self-preserving at every turn.

Timecrimes was obviously made on a shoestring budget, which often shows in the acting & script (I’ve never seen anyone so goofily trick a stranger into a time machine outside a UCB sketch before), but it makes the most out of its resources. Time-marking talismans like Blondie’s “Pictures of You” & the masked killer’s Darkman-esque getup are brilliant uses of simple tools at the film’s disposal and it really does get a lot of mileage out of the moral crisis of its plot despite its trashier impulses. If Triangle “borrowed” heavily from Timecrimes, I’d say it improved on its formula significantly, but the film really is an enjoyable, efficient sci-fi thriller in its own right and there’s more than enough room in this world for both works to be their wonderfully strange, independent selves, regardless of when they were released in time.

-Brandon Ledet

Primer (2004)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

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threehalfstar

In some ways Primer is the film The Martian was only pretending to be. The Matt Damon sci-fi action “comedy” (well, comedy by the Golden Globes’ measurement, anyway) was a hit last year that had people praising its supposedly ultra-scientific nerd-speak for not talking down to its audience & constructing a plot around basic old-fashioned problem-solving. Personally, I had a hard time seeing The Martian as much more than a crowd-pleaser balanced between a rescue mission drama & a big budget disaster pic, maybe with a little found footage thriller tossed in for flavor. Shane Carruth’s dirt cheap time travel paradox Primer, on the other hand, feels like truly authentic problem-solving nerd-speak. I can tell it’s authentic because I have no idea what’s going on and will probably need several more viewings & a notepad to catch up. The Martian may have charmed audiences into thinking they were getting the pure, uncut nerdy goods, but Primer was the real deal primo shit. I don’t think that it’s necessarily a better or more admirable movie for not speaking to a wide audience in a more toned-down, accessible version of nerd-speak, but I do think it was much closer to the intricate, intelligent movie a lot of people seemed to think they watched when they describe the much more audience-friendly The Martian.

Shane Carruth writes, directs, produces, scores, edits, and stars in this cerebral sci-fi cheapie about two tech world bros who accidentally discover a closed circuit version of time travel that allows them to loop into the future & back into their temporal starting point. It’s a little like a microwave that makes an instant, self-contained Groundhog Day experience. Before they realize what they’re even working on (it’s initially referred to as “the thing” & “the device”) the film pokes a little insider fun at the in-the-garage tech startup world of properties like Steve Jobs & Silicon Valley. Ancient analog equipment & other corner-cutting attempts to save money are played for subtle humor. All tech bros wear a Mormon-like uniform of a white dress shirt & striped tie. Corporate lingo is casually tossed around in a condescending tone. Carruth obviously knows this world intimately & it shows on the screen, but Primer doesn’t really come alive until it leaves the tech startup world behind & dives head first into the unknown. It’s about 30min into the film’s very slim runtime when mutliple timeline paradox versions of our unreliable narrator bros start constructing a mind puzzle for the audience to tinker with as they pull rugs, reveal betrayals, and get too comfy with a powerful force of nature they have no business manipulating in the first place: time.

I haven’t seen Carruth’s sophomore film, Upstream Color, since it left the theater in 2012, but I found that work to be an unmitigated masterpiece, one I mentally return to often just to mull over its many cerebral pleasures. In that context Primer feels like a young director with a limited budget just getting his legs. Much like Patrick Brice’s dual 2015 releases Creep & The Overnight, Primer is an exciting example of just how much a filmmaker can accomplish with a great script & a near-nonexistent budget (reportedly $7000 in Primer‘s case). The acting isn’t quite up to snuff with the writing here. The leads have a tendency to read their lines in a mumbled, stabby attack that often makes them difficult to decipher, especially in early scenes when they’re constructing & tweaking “the device.” However, the film has a lot of fun both tangling up a plot that would take hundreds of viewings to fully unravel & in delivering weird time travel one-liners like “Are you hungry? I haven’t eaten since later this afternoon,” and “It’s going to be a long day,” (meant literally). Primer makes a virtue out of telling, not showing and I feel like a lot of true-nerd science geeks probably would get the most out of its paradoxical conundrums & moral dilemmas.

Personally, I enjoyed & appreciated the film’s small-scale, verbal pleasures, but found a whole lot more to unpack in Carruth’s followup that was a hell of a lot more interesting than just mapping out what transpired plot-wise (which apparently is a thing entire fan sites Primer has inspired to do). Folks who enjoyed the nerdy step-by-step problem solving of The Martian would probably get even more out of it than I did. However, be forewarned. This movie is actually the real deal.

-Brandon Ledet

The Fits (2016)

/ swampflix / 14 Comments

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fourhalfstar

The closest I can relate to the protagonist of The Fits‘s crossroads crisis is when I’m choosing a lazy evening’s campy entertainment, a sadly frequent conundrum. Do I want the over-the-top masculine gender performance of pro wrestling or the cartoonishly feminine gender performance of drag? This is an exceedingly trivial, inconsequential choice of which lights & noises I want blasting through my TV for an hour, but it does in a way mirror The Fits‘s central character, Toni, as she floats between the rigidly separated & gendered worlds of boxing & dance. Her decision on where to fall on that divide reminds me of my outsider’s fascination with both pro wrestling & drag, except her choice of which world to explore has much more significant implications on the trajectory of her life, her identity, and her sense of autonomy. It also leads to a supernatural occurrence of divine transcendence, which is not the kind of thing I normally experience while drinking box wine on my couch.

Toni is a tomboy, or at least she’s perceived that way. Her brother trains her to be a tough-as-nails boxer at their local community center, where she silently, sternly fits in with his peers’ aggressively masculine atmosphere of blood, puke, bruises, and concussions. The gym where they train presents a literal barrier between the masculine & the feminine and Toni begins to curiously peer into the dance troupe practices that share a dividing wall with the boxers. There’s a palpable, magical magnetism to the dance team practices that draws Toni towards them (something anyone who’s enjoyed a marching dance troupe’s Mardi Gras parade routines should be able to relate to). Her brother is surprisingly supportive of her sudden interest in the dance team and sagely advises her, “The only way you can lose a fight is if you don’t get in the ring.” She eagerly accepts the encouragement & joins the team as an underling. At first she’s unsure about her assigned routines/moves except when she’s punching the air, but she eventually finds her own feet & friends within her newfound community. The problem is that as she explores this new space, that community suffers a wave of unexplained convulsions, seizures, fits. That’s when things get weird. You’d be forgiven, based on the above description, for assuming that The Fits is a fairly standard coming of age story, but the truth is it’s unlike anything you’ve seen before, a uniqueness & distinction that’s often one of cinema’s highest forms of currency.

So, if The Fits isn’t a standard coming of age drama, what is it? A medical thriller? A supernatural horror? First time writer-director Anna Rose Holmer sidesteps genre classification here and aims more for an art house tone poem than a traditional A-B story structure. The point of The Fits isn’t solving the mystery of why the seizures epidemic is happening, but more negotiating how it relate sto young Toni’s newfound identity & sense of self. As she curiously gazes at the mystic power of gold glitter paint, sequin dance uniforms, and pierced ears, a new mystic power of the uncontrollable bodily convulsion arises & develops into a strange rite of passage somewhat synonymous with puberty or menstruation, but only in the vaguest of terms. The unexplained phenomenon throws an entire community into a confused state that matches the fish-out-of-water uncertainty of our overwhelmed protagonist. All of this otherworldly disorientation is intensified by an ambient, uneasy jazz/noise score and grounded in intensely still, symmetrical camera work. Also, the film’s setting is limited to a few very specific locations — mostly the community center and a yard outside a Cincinnati housing project — that gives the whole film the dreamlike POV of a child’s imagination, like a more muted Beasts of the Southern Wild or a George Washington. The near-total lack of adults onscreen (and, even more refreshingly, white faces of any age) set up the central conflict of The Fits as something Toni & her peers have to handle on their own. At first Toni’s merely learning how to divide her time between her tomboyish & more traditionally feminine interests, but that personal bifurcation leads to a much more fascinating, vulnerable leap into the unknown where she must discover her own sense of identity entirely separate from outside influence. It’s tied to her burgeoning sense of her own femininity, but encompasses so much more than that. There’s a strange, new, self-actualized power building inside her & she’s the only one who can set it loose.

Last year’s Girlhood offered a rare cinematic glimpse into young, modern, black femininity and Creed did the same for the masculine side of that coin. In just 72 minutes The Fits breaches the barriers between them using their own respective cultural markers –dance & boxing– and pushing their collective coming of age narrative structures into quietly bizarre, seemingly supernatural territory that’s bound to leave a lasting effect on you whether or not you’re on board with its ultimate destination. Besides having what has got to be the single greatest name in Hollywood, young actor Royalty Hightower is incredibly stoic & measured in her performance as Toni, especially considering her age. Even if The Fits were a more standard coming of age drama about a young girl deciding between the rigidly divided realms of dance & boxing, Hightower’s performance & the camera’s striking sense of symmetry would make the exercise more than worthwhile. There’s something a lot more special going on here, though. As Toni becomes more sure of herself she learns to remove the arbitrary masculine-famine divides between her interests & creates her own confident space with some kind of dance-boxing hybrid (no word yet on if I’ll ever get a similar drag-wrestling hybrid in this lifetime). In these moments it looks as if she’s training for some kind of upcoming, unknowable battle, but the truth is she’s more or less ramping up for a epiphany of self-realization.

How this personal journey towards knowledge-of-self is linked to the film’s central epidemic of “the fits” is largely up to interpretation, but the two conflicts do communicate with each other nicely and I love the way Holm is comfortable with dealing in their ambiguity. A less confident work might’ve put too fine of a point on the two conflicts’ connection, but then we would’ve been cheated out of the transcendental beauty of the film’s conclusion, which will surely prove to be one of this year’s defining moments of pure cinematic pleasure. The Fits is a small production with near-limitless ambition, the exact kind of film that asks to be championed & rewards you for your full attention. Seek it out & surrender to its spell as soon as you can.

-Brandon Ledet

Swiss Army Man (2016)

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fourstar

The art of the tagline can sometimes outshine even the movie it’s trying to sell. For instance, this summer’s Kevin Hart/Dwayne Johnson buddy cop comedy Central Intelligence boasts the tagline, “Saving the world takes a little Hart and a big Johnson.” That is such a beautifully constructed one-liner that it’s difficult to believe the film it’s selling could possibly ever live up to it. The gallows humor flatulence comedy Swiss Army Man presents a similar conundrum in its two-sentence elevator pitch the director team Daniels employed to convince actor Paul Dano to star in their debut feature: “The first fart will make you laugh. The last fart will make you cry.” There’s an audacious ambition in trying to make an audience cry at a fart that I greatly respect (and, of course, find very amusing). I don’t think Swiss Army Man quite lives up to that promise (the first fart made me laugh and the last fart also made me laugh), but I admire the Daniels for trying to get me to find genuine heart in a dead body’s flatulence. It was a lofty goal.

Paul Dano begins Swiss Army Man as a lonely shipwreck survivor attempting to hang himself in order to escape the horrors of boredom & dehydration. The film takes its gallows humor quite literally as he’s hanging from a noose and is saved from his lonely island nightmare by a farting corpse that washes ashore before him. Daniel Radcliffe plays this gaseous corpse with dead-eyed deadpan, at first silently filling the role of Wilson in this indie pop version of Cast Away, but eventually holding his own against Dano’s troubled protagonist. Dano seemingly continues his unhinged Brian Wilson impression in an alternate universe where his Love & Mercy character makes friends with a flatulent corpse instead of turning into John Cusack. He fights through personal neuroses & sings sweetly to himself as a way to cope with a world he finds cruel & a body (or two) he finds embarrassing. Much of the film’s journey is in learning about Dano’s broken heart protagonist as he bounces his skewed, dysfunctional ideas about the world off of Radcliffe’s lifeless body. The other part of that journey is in learning just what that lifeless body can do. Besides producing violent, body-shaking farts, Radcliffe’s corpse can also start fires, produce water, ride like a jetski, fire like a gun, etc. Although dead, he’s a verifiable Swiss Army man, or as the characters put it in the film, a “multi-purpose tool guy,” one with a magical, boner-driven navigation system that helps Dano find his way home. He also finds the ability to speak, despite being very dead, and because he has no recollection of his life before he was a rotting sack of farts, Dano spends much of the film teaching him how the world works (as filtered through is own hangups & neuroses). More importantly, he teaches his undead buddy about the value of love.

Did I mention that Swiss Army Man is a heartfelt love story? Did I mention that it’s also a road trip buddy comedy? Did I mention that it’s also, improbably, a musical? The director duo Daniels first cut their teeth helming music videos and it shows in their reverence for this film’s Animal Collective-style indie pop soundtrack, which bleeds beautifully into the narrative with a significant sense of thematic purpose. They’re unfortunately a lot less confident on where to take the romantic implications stirring at the movie’s core, a very exciting, unexpected turn that unfortunately peaks early & fizzles out before any meaningful destination is reached in the final act. I don’t want to fault this farting corpse buddy comedy too much for losing track of its emotional core, but it does feel as if the film were flirting with a line of romantic ambiguity it simply didn’t have the nerve to follow through on, which was admittedly disappointing even though I enjoyed the film as a whole. Swiss Army Man is overly ambitious in so many ways. Not least of all, the film tries to answer the question, “What is life?” with a full-hearted sincerity that erratically alternates between optimism & pessimism at the flip of a switch. The undead half of the central duo is essentially a child, curiously admitting, “I have a lot of questions about all the things you just said,” while the neurotic, living half explains his personal philosophy about the way things work through a depressing adherence to societal norms, fear of embarrassment, and the Law of Diminished Returns, a special cocktail that leaves him forever lonely and more than a little bit creepy. It’s possible that Swiss Army Man didn’t follow through on all of its thematic inquiries because it bit off more than it could chew, but there’s certainly no shame in that kind of wide scope ambition.

I don’t think the Daniels’ promise of a climactic fart that could make me cry ever came close to being fulfilled, but Swiss Army Man is mostly successful anyway. There may be an emotionally-distancing dedication to absurdity & artificiality at the film’s core that might’ve prevented me from connecting too closely with its central relationship, similar to the arm’s-length scholarly absurdism of this year’s equally ambitious The Lobster. Swiss Army Man has something The Lobster doesn’t, though, and it mostly takes the form of violent, body-shaking farts. The movie is genuinely fun & free-flowing from front to end, even when it’s fixated on morbid topics like how the human body relieves itself & becomes organic garbage the second it dies. Daniel Radcliffe puts in a solidly entertaining performance as the film’s undead catalyst, somehow finding weird energy in a character who resembles the Frankenstein monster after a hearty dose of heroin. (Speaking of which, after Victor Frankenstein this makes two films in a row where the actor participates in a vaguely homoerotic zombie comedy, right? Weird.) His body is also solidly entertaining as it spits, shoots, ignites, launches and, duh, farts its path through an escalating gauntlet of minute-to-minute obstacles. Paul Dano also holds his own here with a mentally/spiritually broken weirdo archetype he’s become very comfortable portraying and the always-welcome Shane Carruth & Mary Elizabeth Winstead both briefly poke their heads in just to remind you that they’re always getting involved in weird outlier projects and that you love them for it.

The Daniels also toss in a handful of reverent references to Jurassic Park & other Spielbergian fare (the Spielberg-produced Cast Away obviously among them) in a way that hammers home the idea that they love the movies & they’re giddy that they got away with making one about a farting corpse with a magical boner. They also nearly got away with making said farting corpse picture a teary-eyed romantic journey, but fell just short of that distinction. Overall, though, Swiss Army Man is far more memorable for its humor & ambition than its third act narrative shortcomings. I really enjoyed their debut, but I’m convinced the Daniels will have even better films coming down the pipeline once they learn to listen to their hearts the same way they ask the audience to listen to their farts. In the mean time, it just feels good to laugh along the scatological bleakness & divine absurdity they’ve constructed here. It’s okay that both farts made me laugh. I like to laugh.

-Brandon Ledet