brandon ledet

The Bat (1926)

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fourhalfstar

One scene into The Bat I felt an intense swell of confusion & disbelief as if I had just won the movie lottery. The film’s titular antagonist appeared in the black & white haze of degraded celluloid with the general look of the familiar, but in a completely foreign shape. It was like running into a dear friend’s close relative & mistaking them for your pal. Batman as we know him may not have made it to the cinema until his incarnation in 1940s serial shorts, but his misshapen ancestor The Bat appeared onscreen two decades earlier, predating even the first Batman comic. I’m not sure what I was expecting when I sat down to watch this silent era crime mystery, but it surely wasn’t the prototype of a movie franchise hero I grew up loving dearly.

There are some major differences between The Bat & The Batman that I should probably get out of the way early. The Batman flirts with criminality in his vigilantism, but The Bat is an outright criminal. In fact, his background as a jewel thief & a bank robber makes him much more akin to a masculine version of Catwoman in Batman’s clothing. Speaking of the clothing, the two characters’ costumes also deffer in a few significant ways. While The Batman is a smoothed out, leather-clad ideal of what a humanoid bat might look like, The Bat is much more realistic to his animal kingdom inspiration. He has goofy, gigantic ears like a horror show version of Mickey Mouse. He’s also much furrier, with a terrifyingly accurate mask the film smartly waits to reveal until the third act. He also carries around his weapons/tools in an old doctor’s bag instead of the utility belt rocked by the Caped Crusader.

Whatever. This is still a masked man in bat costume, complete with black cape & gloves, who runs around the rooftops of an Art Deco metropolis. He climbs the sides of buildings by rope like a far less campy Adam West. He casts a goddamn bat signal across an interior wall using a car’s headlamp. He spends mot of his runtime skulking around an old, city-side mansion that looks like gothic castle & contains secret rooms that house illegal acts. Why take my word for it, though? Comic book artist Bob Kane cites the film’s 1930s talkie remake The Bat Whispers (which shares a director with this version’s Roland West) as  a direct inspiration for the creation & design of Batman as a character. So, there you go. The Bat is in itself an adaptation of a Broadway stage play, so maybe Batman’s roots go back just a little further, but his existence in cinema undeniably starts here, an impressive forever ago.

As for The Bat‘s achievements outside its eventual massive influence on modern pop culture, the film works just fine as a tiny murder mystery & heist thriller. For the stretches where The Bat doesn’t appear onscreen, the film’s plot isn’t particularly flashy or experimental in any recognizable way. The only thing that stands out as a sore spot is the comic relief of a ditzy maid who continuously misguesses the identity of The Bat. “Maybe he’s The Bat!” “Maybe he’s The Bat!” “That Jap butler gives me the willies […] Maybe he’s The Bat!” I’m not sure I’m allowed to go any further into the details here, since ht film opens with the stern talking-to, “Can you keep a secret? Don’t reveal the identity of ‘The Bat’. Future audiences will fully enjoy this mystery play if left to find out for themselves.” Yes, I can keep a secret, especially since the film’s stage play mystery structure isn’t the most significant thing at work anyway.

The Bat is a must-see work of seminal art. It’s not some antiquated bore with an antagonist that was plucked from lowly ranks for a higher purpose. The film directly influenced the creation of Batman, but it also achieves its own, exquisite Art Deco horror aesthetic that recalls the immense wonders of the Hollywood classic The Black Cat, except with more of a creature feature lean. Its stunts are impressively dangerous-looking. Its actors are dwarfed by its beautifully immense sets. Shadows creeping up city walls & perfectly lit gunsmoke shooting down a stairwell make for some unforgettable imagery/cinematic history. It’s no wonder, really, that the film has been remade twice (the second was in 1959 with horror legend Vincent Price) or that its influence reached into comic books & beyond. It’s a gorgeous & violent work of early horror/crime cinema that caught me off-guard with its power & improtance as soon as the first scene.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #7 of The Swampflix Podcast: Daredevil Cinema & Possession (1981)

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inaworld

Welcome to Episode #7 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our seventh episode, James & Brandon discuss the Marvel character Daredevil’s humble beginnings on the silver screen in the early 2000s with illustrator Jon Marquez. Also, Brandon & James discuss the art house romance horror masterpiece Possession. Enjoy!

Production note: The musical “bumps” between segments were provided by the long-defunct band Trash Trash Trash.

-Brandon Ledet & James Cohn

Chuck Norris vs. Communism (2015)

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fourstar

Don’t be fooled by its meme-minded title. Chuck Norris vs. Communism is a powerful documentary that offers a fascinating history lesson of Romanian oppression in the mid 1980s. I’d place it up there with Corman’s World & the Golan-Globus doc as a means to get excited about the potency & cultural significance of trashy 70s & 80s action cinema as a form of high art. Hell, it might be one of the best documentaries about cinema as a powerful form of storytelling & a source of comradery in an even more general sense. The film’s title recalls the proto-meme of Chuck Norris jokes that flooded the internet in the early 2000s, but it actually has very little to do with the content of this work as a whole. There’s a great deal more going on here.

Under the totalitarian rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu in the 1980s, Romanian citizens lived a very hushed, secluded life. Foreign media was severely censored & everyone under Ceaușescu’s rule feared surveillance from the government’s secret police force. Almost all entertainment available to the Romanian consumer was some form of government-sanctioned propaganda. VHS cassettes changed all that. Almost overnight a black market for foreign (mostly Hollywood) films began smuggling VHS contraband into Romanian living rooms like hard drugs or military-grade weaponry. This influx of forbidden art not only gave Romanian citizens access to free speech & expression in a way they hadn’t before experienced under Ceaușescu’s ever-tightening grip; it also opened up a world of travel, wealth, and excess they had been shut off from their country’s restrictive borders (even if it was through passive consumerism). Imagine a county-wide version of The Wolfpack & you’ll have  pretty good idea of what’s being documented here, except there’s a much less participatory/celebratory spirit at its center.

Part of the reason I’m not in love with Chuck Norris vs. Communism‘s title is that it drastically downplays the film’s true hero: Irina Nistor. Nistor risked imprisonment (or worse) by translating American films into Romanian dubs at a bewildering six to ten films a day at her peak. Nistor became the voice of American cinema for Romanian audiences. She voiced every single character in nearly every film illegally distributed. Chuck Norris and similar action stars like Van Damme, Schwarzeneger, and Stallone may have captured the imaginations of Romanian people. Norris’s Golan-Globus production Missing in Action might’ve even been a particular nexus for their dreams of escape & retribution. However, this film is really Irina Nistor’s story. She’s not a name that would do the film any commercial favors, but she is undeniably its most important facet.

As a documentary, Chuck Norris vs. Communism has an interesting way of experimenting with form. It works mostly as an oral history of the underground VHS market as told by the Romanian people who lived it, backed up by a dramatic re-enactment of Irina Nistor’s personal story. This combo recalls the high production values & word-of-mouth narrative of works like The Nightmare & Thin Blue Line, but by far the most interesting aspect of this film is its content, not its form. There’s an inspiring story at work here about the growing political unrest fueled by illegal Movie Night screenings secretly held in Romanian living rooms. The movie works best when it lets this renegade secrecy grow on its own & may over-extend a little in the back end when it claims that smuggled VHS tapes were the spark that eventually flamed into an overthrow of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime. It’s in the smaller, more intimate moments when Chuck Norris vs. Communism excels, especially when it lets Irina Nistor’s fascinating story & the nostalgic potency of the VHS-grade cinema she translated speak or themselves.

-Brandon Ledet

This Must Be the Place (2012)

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twostar

Like a lot of thrifty New Orleans music nerds, I recently stumbled across an opportunity to see goth legends The Cure perform for cheap at my alma mater’s lake shore campus. It was a wonderful experience that unfortunately inspired me to embark on a disappointing one immediately after. I’ve been curious about the Sean Penn indie dramedy This Must Be the Place since it was first released four years ago and the option of it conveniently streaming on Netflix combined with my post-bargain bin Cure show glow to finally push me into pulling the trigger. The gun backfired. On paper, a movie starring an aging Sean Penn as a Robert Smith stand-in on a quest to murder his father’s concentration camp Nazi tormentor sounds fascinating, if not mind-blowingly incredible. Throw in some cameos from the always-welcome David Byrne & Harry Dean Stanton (with only the former portraying himself, unfortunately) and you have a must-see proposition. Like a lot of The Cure lyrics will explain to you, though, the reality is a much gloomier, more depressing experience than that romantic ideal. This Must Be the Place is one of those thorough letdowns that teases you with all the puzzle pieces required to make a great film, but leaves them messily scattered across the kitchen table, never bothering to carefully slap them together.

It’s possible the most important missing or ill-fitting piece in this particular production is Sean Penn’s lead performance. Although Penn is dressed in Robert Smith’s hairspray, make-up, and legacy, he plays the part with the quietly obnoxious energy he brought to the ill-advised mental handicap melodrama I am Sam. Every weird, lispy, half deaf sound Penn makes in this film is a singularly bizarre choice that just doesn’t pay off. The most enjoyable moment in his performance is the opening credits sequence of him wordlessly applying make-up in a mirror. It’s all downhill from there. The performance is even more baffling if you’re familiar with the real Robert Smith’s speaking voice. In interviews the aging goth rocker sounds like a perfectly normal British man, just as he always has. Penn instead sounds like David Sedaris made faint by a bout with pneumonia. He gives a delicately odd, grandmotherly performance that’s arrestingly bizarre, but never recommendable the same way, say a Nic Cage train wreck might’ve been. There’s no pleasure to be had in it, only confusion.

The real shame is that Penn’s distinct awfulness feels completely out of sync with what everyone else is doing on camera. As mentioned, Harry Dean Stanton & David Byrne are their usual wonderful selves in trumped up cameo roles that serve as desperately needed breaths of fresh air in a film that could use a little more charisma along the same lines. Byrne is especially welcome here, bringing some much-appreciated Lynchian energy into a scene where plays a bizarre musical instrument of his own invention an an entirely unearned, but pleasant moment when he sings the Talking Heads song the film borrows its title from. Frances McDormand is also wonderful as always, playing an entirely thankless role as Not Robert Smith’s divinely patient wife whom he doesn’t deserve. Only Penn stands out as a sore thumb annoyance here and a lot of the film’s faults lie squarely on his apparently incapable shoulders.

It’s really no wonder this film bombed so miserably at the box office, but I guess it’s not entirely Penn’s fault that it failed to find an audience. Much like its soft-spoken weirdo protagonist, This Must Be the Place is entirely unsure of itself. It floats between so many tones & genres that it’s difficult to pin down exactly why it feels so off other than it has no idea what it’s doing or what it wants to be from minute to minute. This is a first draft work in need of a severe revision, either swinging hard to the character-based indie dramedy or the Nazi-hunter revenge thriller directions it flirts with or, hell, swinging to both. It instead hovers like a Ouija board reader hesitating to decide on a path. There’s some really interesting imagery on display, finding surreal details in unlikely sources like an above ground swimming pool, a buffalo, and a naked old man roaming the desert. There’s also some interesting sources of internal conflict, like Penn’s retired musician’s guilty over two dedicated fans’ suicides or his quest to avenge the tormentor of a father who disowned him due to his gender androgyny.

These individual pieces, again, never amount to a cohesive whole. Even if they did, though, Penn’s choices in his lead performance might’ve been enough to sink the ship on their own. Everything feels half-cooked & out of place here, just as self-opposed as Penn’s Robert Smith image vs. his non-Robert Smith demeanor. I’d even argue that the parenthetical half of the title of its Talking Heads source material, “Naive Melody”, would’ve made for a better choice in moniker. Everything at play is just exactly off & ill-advised in that way, except maybe David Byrne. He can do no wrong.

-Brandon Ledet

The Darkness (2016)

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three star

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Early summer’s kind of a weird time of the year to release a goofy, low-rent horror. The Darkness might’ve been more at home among the year’s earlier horror cheapies like The Boy or The Forest or maybe held off until  whatever lackluster PG-13 terrors await us this Halloween season. Instead, it arrived now, begging to be drowned among blockbuster releases like Captain America: Civil War & X-Men: Apocalypse. Even I, connoisseur of bland horror cheapness, almost passed over the film based on its not so memorable ad campaign. It was the IMDb plot synopsis that drew me back in: “A family returns from a Grand Canyon vacation, haunted by an ancient supernatural entity they unknowingly awakened and engages them in a fight for their survival.” Now that sounds silly enough to work. Obviously, I would rather would rather see a Mt. Rushmore ghost story, but a Grand Canyon one is enough to raise my eyebrow & get my ass to a theater.

Kevin Baton is the paterfamilias of a dysfunctional family vacationing at The Grand Canyon. His autistic son angers ancient spirits by stealing mystic pebbles from a forbidden cave. Some dumb teen we thankfully never see helpfully explains, “There’s all kinds of creepy old shit in this place.” He’s not wrong. The caves & curves of The Grand Canyon have an ancient, old world magnetism to them that can really chill you in their enormity. That’s why, I’m assuming, The Darkness spends as little time there as possible & scuttles the family back to their standard issue suburban home as soon as it gets the chance. You wouldn’t want the majestic beauty & ancient spookiness of a natural phenomenon getting in the way of a familial melodrama after all, especially not in a cheap horror flick. No way. The Darkness is mostly of a portrait of a family unraveling where each member is dutifully assigned a personal struggle to overcome (adultery, alcoholism, autism, an eating disorder) and evil pebbles that open dimensional gateways to the Native American version of the Apocalypse are reduced to manifestations of bad karma due to a business dad’s selfishness in choosing work over family. Oh yeah, and Paul Reiser stops by, which I guess is scary in its own way too.

The Darkness is never truly scary, but it can occasionally be amusing in its ineptitude. I especially found it humorous when the film claims that autism puts children in a more spiritually receptive state, which is why its spooky-autistic tyke who steals the Apocalypse stones befriends a ghost he names Jenny & opens a portal to a ghost dimension on his bedroom wall (a plot detail that’s very reminiscent of last year’s Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension). If turning a mental disorder into a source of cheap horror isn’t goofily offensive/insensitive enough for you, the film is just as willing as any 80s misfire you can think of to other Native American societies as some kind of spooky mystics and only portray them performing spooky-mystic rituals involving chants & feathers. There’s also more standard-issue cliches the film tosses out (I assume) for a laugh: crows as foreshadowing, husbands ignoring their wives’ claims of hauntings, spooky Google (em, “E-web”) search results, etc.

Had The Darkness stayed in the desert it might’ve borrowed some of the same location-specific horror that colored properties like Pitch Black, The Descent, and 127 Hours in a memorable way. Had it portrayed evil spirits a little more menacing than a dude wearing fake wolf hide to Burning Man it might’ve convincingly threatened an imminent Apocalypse. Had it not reduced autism or Native American rituals into cheap gimmicks & novelties I might not have laughed in its face. As is, it’s a fairly run-of-the-mill PG-13 horror with just enough goofy misfires to make the experience enjoyably corny & mildly offensive, as if the Lifetime Channel had started producing late night creature features (which is a racket Lifetime totally should break into).

-Brandon Ledet

A Bigger Splash (2016)

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threehalfstar

Chalk up A Bigger Splash as yet another fine example of one of my favorite dramatic subgenres: The Party Out of Bounds. A wealthy, white music industry couple get away from it all on a Sicilian island only to be rudely interrupted by a loud mouth producer/ex-lover and his hungry-for-trouble daughter. At first the couple tolerates the boisterous presence of their old friend but as he continually overstays his welcome the situation turns violently sour & then breaks in half. I love bottled up dramas when folks sickened by each other feel compelled (usually by a dangerous combination of lust & alcohol) to verbally duke it out in a cramped space instead of calling off the party & sending everyone on their not-so merry way. In A Bigger Splash‘s best moments it’s a wonderfully sadistic drama in this way, cramming four stage play-ready characters into a tight space & turning their cautious love for one another into murderous hatred.

Tilda Swinton stars as David Bowie’s less ethereal stand-in, an on-hiatus rock star recovering from a vocal surgery in romantic bliss with her recovering alcoholic husband. Their serene getaway is short-lived as the party’s crashed by the hopelessly crass, self-absorbed social terrorist music producer who haunts their past. Ralph Fiennes does a fantastic job as this obnoxious catalyst, turning the pathetic sadness of reliving your glory days into a mission statement & a battle cry. Dakota Johnson rounds out the cast as the producer’s hot-to-trot daughter, a literal siren on the rocks intending to seduce the blissful couple into annihilation from the other end. This is a huge step up for Johnson, who’s coming off a hot streak of stinkers like 50 Shades of Grey & How to Be Single to put in a well-measured performance that proves she can (emotively) duke it out with the best of them. Swinton is as consistently magnetic here as always, even with the power of speech mostly removed from her arsenal. It’s Fiennes who’s given free reign to chew scenery, though, and he does a wonderfully maniacal job driving the party as far out of bounds as he can, at times recalling Ben Kingsley’s dastardly crass performance in (the far superior work) Sexy Beast.

Unfortunately, A Bigger Splash has an occasional tendency to release steam from the dramatic pressure cooker in a way that relieves the central tension a little too easily. I’m thinking particularly of the flashbacks to Swinton’s & Fiennes’s glory days as a coked-up power couple on top of the rock & roll world. There’s too much escapism in those moments, distracting from the cramped discomfort of the the mounting resentment at hand even when they refer to past conflicts. That might be a personal bias, though, as it was the exact same problem I had with Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs film last year. I also thought showing Swinton performing her rock act in these flashbacks was a mistake. The film puts so much pressure on her voice/the music to be amazing that there’s no possible way for the reality to live up to it.

Still, director Luca Guadagnino does a great job here of turning a small cast drama into an intense visual display and a powder keg of lust & hurt feelings. Every body involved is a target for sexual leering. Unusually sharp focus of food, drink, and spinning records intensifies the sensual bacchanal of the central conflict. Up-close, direct to the camera line delivery recalls the discomfort of a great Bergman monologue. Even though he makes a few missteps in turning down the heat when it should be blasted, Gudagnino gleefully searches for the Devil in the details & employs an especially game Fiennes as a romance monster hellbent on tearing the whole world down so he can start from scratch (or dry hump the ruins). Although A Bigger Splash isn’t wholly successful, it is a remarkable experience that refuses to shy away from the violent urges of romantic jealousy & party-out-of-bounds societal unraveling. It’s impressive even when it stumbles and easily could’ve been much less memorable in less capable hands.

-Brandon Ledet

The Sons of Tennessee Williams (2011)

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fourstar

In my review of the exquisite ball culture documentary Paris is Burning I mentioned that New Orleans’s queer bounce scene deserves its own myth-making documentary, especially in light of those two subcultures’ remarkable similarities. It turns out that New Orleans already has its de facto version of Paris is Burning in The Sons of Tennessee Williams (not that a “sissy bounce” doc wouldn’t’ still be an essential historical document). Chronicling 50 years of gay Mardi Gras culture in New Orleans, The Sons of Tennessee Williams is a priceless archive of an LGBTQ subculture that amazes merely by existing. To think that the footage, photography, and history detailed here was ever recorded in the first place is incredible, given the danger it would’ve put its pre-Stonewall subjects into, not to mention the successive physical damage decades of hurricanes would later pose. It’s a thorough, definitive work that makes almost any attempt to follow up on or retell its story redundant.  If you’re at all interested in gay Mardi Gras tradition in New Orleans, The Sons of Tennessee Williams is the only logical place to begin.

The film splits its time between documenting the current state of the last two remaining gay Mardi Gras krewes, The Krewe of Petronius & The Krewe of Aremeinius, and constructing an oral history of those two social clubs’ storied past. The more reflective, anthropological segments of the film fascinate in a more unique way than the up-to-date check-in. Elderly gay men describe in detail the peril of growing up queer in the American South before the civil rights movements of the 1960s. In a time where homosexual public association was explicitly illegal, Mardi Gras stood as the one day a year when gay men could legally gather in a public space. In the face of ridicule, violence, and police harassment (under the vice cops’ crackdown on “crimes against Nature”), gay men began forming their own social structures by gathering in certain French Quarter bars as safe havens.

Eventually, this subculture craved legitimacy and a break from the secretive, dangerous nature of cruising undercover and sought official, legal status of a traditional Mardi Gras krewe. This urge was likely born of the simple desire to gather in celebration and to join the pageantry of traditional Mardi Gras balls, but it also saw a marginalized group bonding together to form a strong political voice. And since the formation of The Krewe of Petronius occurred before The Stonewall Riots, the film convincingly posits gay Mardi Gras krewes as “the earliest civil rights for gays” on record. It’s a story that isn’t told as often or as loudly as it should be and this film offers the rare treat of hearing directly from the mouths of the men who lived it and survived to tell the tale.

As rough as some of its subjects’ backstory can be, The Sons of Tennessee Williams is largely a celebration. These men survived societal persecution, the AIDS crisis, and Hurricane Katrina with their numbers dwindled, but their traditions unscathed. Although the modern check-in portion of the documentary is somewhat less compelling than its central history lesson, it’s still an uplifting reassurance that gay Mardi Gras culture is still alive & intact. It’s even had enough time to grow into a venerable institution, joining the old-fashioned pageantry of other krewes’ ball traditions and inspiring straight people & politicians to beg for an invite to exclusive social events that were once considered a disgrace by “polite society”.

I do think that The Sons of Tennessee Williams is an essential historical document that should be seen by as wide of an audience as possible, but I’ll also admit that being a local made it strike a particular chord with me (as it must also have with documentarian Tim Wolff). I live down the street from The Krewe of Aremeinius’s headquarters. I’ve personally taken Polaroids of some of the costumes on display in the film on Mardi Gras Day in The French Quarter [included below]. Seeing 1940s footage of homemade costumes on Canal Street fills me with a certain hometown pride that might not translate as powerfully to outside audiences, etc. The Sons of Tennessee Williams is as much of a celebration of New Orleans culture along the lines of the classic Les Blanc doc Always for Pleasure as it is a gay culture landmark akin to Paris is Burning. It’s a thoroughly New Orleans story that deserves to be told around the world instead of the way it’s been locked away & forgotten. I urge anyone interested in gay Mardi Gras tradition to seek it out immediately.

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-Brandon Ledet

Tale of Tales (2016)

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“Every new life calls for a life to be lost. The equilibrium of the world must be maintained.”

It’s almost a cliché concept to explain at this point, but traditional fairy tales are not the saccharine Disney romances they’re often believed to be. Fairy tales are often horrifically brutal stories of otherworldly magic meant to warn real world people, often children, about the dangers of human follies like lust, greed, selfishness, or curiosity. It isn’t often that an authentic-feeling, appropriately brutal fairy tale makes to the big screen. It’s even rarer that it’d be live-action and an original property, rather than an adaptation of a Brothers Grimm or a Hans Christian Andersen tale. Tale of Tales is a once-in-a-lifetime gem in the way it not only fills this requirement, but also excels as an intricately detailed piece of high art & cinematic finery.

I didn’t expect to see a more exquisite, idiosyncratic work than Hail, Caesar! all year, but Tale of Tales might’ve blown it out of the water. It’s like The Fall, Pan’s Labyrinth, and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover all rolled into one hideous fairy tale directed by Cronenberg in his prime. It’s beautiful, morbidly funny, brutally cold, everything you could ask for from a not-all-fairy-tales-are-for-children corrective. It’s sometimes necessary to remind yourself of the immense wonder & dreamlike stupor a great movie can immerse you in and Tale of Tales does so only to stab you in the back with a harsh life lesson (or three) once you let your guard down. This is ambitious filmmaking at its most concise & successful, never wavering from its sense of purpose or attention to craft. I’d be extremely lucky to catch a better-looking, more emotionally effective work of cinematic fantasy before 2016 comes to a close. Or ever, really.

The film opens with Salma Hayek & John C. Reilly sitting as the king & queen of a fantasy realm kingdom. Hayek is perfectly regal on the throne while Reilly feels plucked from an especially expensive episode of Wishbone, recalling his blissfully clueless husband role in We Need to Talk about Kevin. There’s a strain on their relationship and, thus, the kingdom as it’s revealed that the couple cannot conceive a child as a future heir. Advised by an old, wizardly fella who lives in a cave, the royal couple addresses this problem by slaying a sea beast & eating its heart after it’s cooked by a virgin. The trick works & the queen carries her pregnancy to term over the course of a single night. And that’s when things get weird.

I reveal this plot detail only to illustrate just how varied & far-reaching the territory Tale of Tales covers can be. The tale of the sea monster’s heart is just one facet of just one story that continues to spiral out from there over the course of the film. All told, there are three tales covering three adjacent kingdoms that give this film its shape. Inexplicably, the Hayek & Reilly royalty aren’t even the most interesting characters of the bunch. Tale of Tales is crawling with witches, ogres, giant insects, and the like that all make magic feel just as real and as dangerous as it does in The Witch, albeit with a lavish depiction of wealth in its costume & set design the latter can’t match in its more muted imagery. The three tales told here all stand separately strong & immaculate on their own, but also combine to teach its characters/victims (and, less harshly, its audience) about the dangers & evils of self-absorption. Each character featured here suffers a hideous fate because of their own obsessive selfishness. And if there’s any who don’t, they likely suffer at the hands of others’, especially the ones who supposedly love them.

I urge you not to watch the trailer to this film if you can avoid it. It both spoils way too much of the plot(s) that you’re better off discovering on your own and completely misreads the tone of the film as a whole. Tale of Tales fearlessly alternates between the grotesque & the beautiful, the darkly funny & the cruelly tragic. Its cinematography as well as its set & costume design will make you wonder how something so delicately pretty can be so willing to get so spiritually ugly at the drop of a hat (or a sea beast’s heart). Don’t be fooled when the film threatens to devolve into modernist showboating with its explicit gore or its exploitative lesbian make-outs in the early proceedings. It’s very much in the tradition of fairy tales in their purest form, immense beauty, cruelty, warts, and all. I highly recommend lending it your full attention & willing imagination, especially if you have the chance to watch it on the big screen. You’ll both love & loathe the places it takes you.

-Brandon Ledet

Daikaijû Gamera (1965)

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fourstar

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I’m far from an expert in kaiju cinema, but recently catching a couple outliers in the genre, Reptilicus & Pulgasari, has sparked my interest a great deal. I’ve sen a good number of films that feature Godzilla & King Kong, who seem to be the top brass of kaiju fare, but there are so many other giant monsters of creature feature past that I’m missing out on between those borders. You can’t only listen to The Beatles & The Stones and claim to know the totality of rock n’ roll, right? As many times I’ve seen drawings or action figures of kaiju like Gamera, Mothra, and Mechagodzilla, I don’t think I’ve ever given their originating films a solid, up-close look, which feels like a blind spot in my horror/sci-fi film education.

Daikaijû Gamera (literally translated Giant Monster Gamera and re-cut & released in the US as Gamera: The Invincible) doesn’t do much to buck the idea that once you’ve seen one kaiju film you’ve seen them all. It plays remarkably like the original Godzilla film (which was then a decade old) in terms of tone, production, and plot. The most crucial difference between the two works, of course, is the design of their titular monsters. Yes, Daikaijû Gamera is essentially a too-soon remake of Godzilla, but it’s a Godzilla remake that features a gigantic, fire-breathing turtle that can turn its shell into a flying saucer. I don’t think I need to explain any more than that to get the film’s basic appeal across. It’s a concept that pretty much sells itself.

Illegal Cold War nuclear activity in the Arctic frees an ancient beast known a The Devil’s Envoy, Gamera. Yes, The Devil’s right hand demon is a gigantic, fire-breathing turtle that once plagued the lost continent of Atlantis (according to the Eskimo tribes that witness his rebirth, at least). Scientists expect that the nuclear fallout that freed Gamera from his icy prison will be the creature’s very undoing. That is not the case. Gamera not only breathes fire. He inhales it. All weaponry, industry and nuclear destruction thrown in his path only make him stronger. Nations must put aside their potential World War III tensions to peacefully plan Gamera’s undoing, calling into question the way the unnatural power of nuclear war can loosen & anger forces of Nature like typhoons, dead aquatic life epidemics, and fire-breathing turtles the size of mountains. At one point an observer asks, “Something must really be wrong with Earth, huh?” The answer is a resounding yes and a lot of anxieties about the destructive nature of modern life is clearly on display here in the guise of giant monster mayhem.

Although Daikaijû Gamera is a direct echo of Godzilla & in many ways feels like a standard issue kaiju flick (on the sillier side of the genre), it also did a lot to establish that standard in the first place. There’s a brief scene involving a beatnik surf rock band & a major storyline about a little boy obsessed with turtles (and turtleneck sweaters, apparently) that telegraph a lot of the winking camp tone in kaiju films to come. At this stage of kaiju cinema the monsters are supposed to be majestic & terrifying, but Giant Monster Gamera hints at a future world where they function as heroes of children & monsters with a sense of humor. Godzilla may be the most looming influence over the entire spectrum of kaiju as a monster movie subgenre, but Gamera‘s impact is a lot more readily recognizable in the DNA of the genre’s goofy, 70s future in titles like (my personal favorite) Godzilla vs The Smog Monster.

Again, though, there’s really no need to sell Giant Monster Gamera as an innovator or a historical landmark to make its genre thrills feel worthwhile. You can get its basic plot in any number of 1960s kaiju movies, but where else are you going to get a giant, fire-breathing turtle that occasionally functions as a flying saucer (besides its eleven sequels)? This is a genre that survives on the strength and/or novelty of its monsters & Giant Monster Gamera did not disappoint on that end, not one  bit.

-Brandon Ledet

Mulan (1998)’s Gender Identity Exploration is Only Convincing for the Length of a Single Ballad

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

EPSON MFP image

I’m not entirely sure how it came to this, but I recently found myself watching Disney’s Mulan for the first time nearly two decades after its initial release. It was somewhat wise to avoid the movie for so long on my part. I’d hate to complain at length about something that was never made for my enjoyment in the first place, so I’ll avoid being too harsh here on the film’s flat CG slickness or its garbage comedy routines starring Eddie Murphy as a pipsqueak dragon. Instead of fully restraining myself from the conversation, however, I would like to touch on the one aspect of Mulan that makes it an interesting outlier in the realm of Disney-animated romance/fantasy: its exploration of gender identity.

You’d expect that a children’s movie from one of the world’s largest media conglomerates with a crossdressing protagonist would get a lot of praise for its bravery in exploring gender identity & expression on such a large, international stage and, indeed, a quick Google search of “Mulan trans” heeds a wealth of Tumblr posts doing just that. What was interesting to me as a first-time viewer, however, was that the movie itself was not fully committed to this ideal of trans representation. The titular Mulan is not presented to the audience as a trans man. Donning male garb & persona to serve in her aging father’s place in the Chinese Emperor’s army, Mulan joins a long history of women who crossdress (especially during war time) to gain agency & autonomy. She wears men’s clothes to escape hateful remarks like “Teach your daughter to hold her tongue in a man’s presence,” not because she necessarily identifies as a man. The film treats crossdressing in the classical comedic sense of a Shakespearean farce. It’s  a source of amusement & never reaches past a depiction of transvestism to genuinely explore/represent transgender issues.

That is, not officially. Although Mulan doesn’t actually identify as male, there is an undeniable trans subtext to the film. Her peers & ancestors call her a “crossdresser”& a “lunatic” in outrage, which surely resonates with at least one viewer or two out there who’ve suffered similar bullying when expressing their gender identity in public. There’s also a lot of attention paid to Mulan’s efforts to “pass”. She’s depicted wearing a binder over her breasts. She’s coached into using a deeper register voice, walking with gait, acting like a violent oaf, etc. Even though Mulan herself is not a trans man, a lot of her conflict seems true to certain facets of the trans experience. You could even argue that Mulan’s distress with having to live & appear as a man despite her true gender identity is a reflection of the way forcing someone to live a lie based on societal norms is emotionally abusive. However, this gender identity subtext is never as explicit in the movie as it is during an early scene where Mulan sings the song “Reflection”.

“Reflection” is such a strong, emotionally fragile ballad that cuts through nearly all of the Disney bullshit to reveal something truly heartfelt and vulnerable. For much of the film, Mulan is treated like a crossdresser and a source of shame, but “Reflection” almost changes the meaning of those exchanges entirely. The song makes it feel as if Mulan is a trans man, just one without the proper words or context to express that identity. Within the plot of the film, it’s meant to play as a mere expression of frustration with performing certain gender & societal roles that would please her family. The song appears even before the first time she dons male garb, after all. The subtext goes much, much deeper than that, though. It’s hard to even explain how striking & powerful the song plays when considered as trans subtext. It’s something you have to see & hear to believe:

Look at me
You may think you see
Who I really am
But you’ll never know me
Every day
It’s as if I play a part
Now I see
If I wear a mask
I can fool the world
But I cannot fool my heart

Who is that girl I see
Staring straight back at me?
When will my reflection show
Who I am inside?

I am now
In a world where I
Have to hide my heart
And what I believe in
But somehow
I will show the world
What’s inside my heart
And be loved for who I am

Who is that girl I see
Staring straight back at me?
Why is my reflection
Someone I don’t know?
Must I pretend that I’m
Someone else for all time?
When will my reflection show
Who I am inside?

There’s a heart that must be
Free to fly
That burns with a need to know
The reason why

Why must we all conceal
What we think, how we feel?
Must there be a secret me
I’m forced to hide?
I won’t pretend that I’m
Someone else for all time
When will my reflection show
Who I am inside?
When will my reflection show
Who I am inside?

Holy shit.

I don’t think  Mulan‘s a particularly good or handsome or even entertaining movie. The one time I remember being struck by what it accomplishes on a technical level is during a brief synth-scored suiting up sequence where its titular protagonist wears armor for the first time. The rest of the film was mostly me rolling my eyes at the sassy dragon or the drag jokes or whatever other CGI-aided abomination was boring me to tears from minute to minute. Still, I don’t think it’s fair to hound Disney for not fully committing to the trans narrative of its unorthodox protagonist. Any kind of representation on the queer spectrum would’ve been a lot to ask for a children’s film released 20 years ago by a conservative media giant. All I’m really saying here is that the massive power of “Reflection” turns all of that on its head. The song subtly, devastatingly warps Mulan’s central story & emotional arc, calling into question the exact meaning of everything that follows. Disney may have openly, deliberately addressed the fundamental nature of societal gender roles throughout the film, but none of that feels as strong or as subversively progressive as the trans subtext of “Reflection.” It’s a really powerful, truly vulnerable moment in a mostly lifeless film that could’ve used more like it.

-Brandon Ledet