brandon ledet

Nosferatu (2024)

/ swampflix / 11 Comments

Wouldst thou like to live maliciously?

I attended my first live ballet performance this October, when the New Orleans Ballet Company staged its modern-dance interpretation of Dracula.  It was an easy entry point into the medium, not only because it fit in so well with all of the horror movies I was binge-watching at the time anyway, but also because the Dracula story in particular is something I’ve seen repeated onscreen dozens of times before.  From the more faithful early adaptations of Bram Stoker’s novel by Browning & Murnau to its weirdo outlier mutations in titles like Shadow of the Vampire & Dracula 3D, the Dracula story is well familiar to anyone who’s seen a horror movie or two.  It’s even been staged onscreen as a ballet before in Guy Madden’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary.  So, when the New Orleans Ballet Company had to cut some narrative & financial corners in depicting Jonathan Harker’s cross-sea travels to score a real estate deal with Count Dracula in Transylvania or in depicting the infamous vampire’s subsequent travels back to Harker’s home turf to seduce & destroy everything he holds dear, I never felt lost in the progression of the story – no matter how abstractly represented.  That trust in the audience’s familiarity with the source material plays no part in Dracula‘s most recent big-screen adaptation, since director Robert Eggers is more of a history-obsessed purist than a Guy Madden-style prankster of poetic license.  Eggers is as faithful to the original story structure of Stoker’s novel as the F.W. Murnau film from which he borrows his title, which itself was faithful enough to nearly get sued out of existence for copyright infringement by the Stoker estate.  Audiences can expect to see every progressive step of the Dracula story dramatized onscreen—including the all-important legal signing of real estate documents—with full reverence for the Murnau classic as a foundational cinematic text.  What they might not have seen before, however, is the intensity of the violence & beauty in the Dracula story cranked up to their furthest extremes, which accounts for Eggers’s other directorial specialty besides his kink for historical research.

Ever since he jumped ship from A24 to the major studios, Eggers has softened the more alienating, unconventional touches of his first couple films so that he can stage his exquisite, traditionalist images on a larger studio-budget scale.  As a result, his version of Nosferatu does not add much to the ongoing ritual of reinterpreting Dracula, except in its attention to the period details of its 19th Century Germany setting (and in accidentally making a contrast-and-compare argument that Coppola’s version is the best adaptation to date).  He dutifully, earnestly goes through the motions of a traditional Dracula movie plot with what his Van Helsing stand-in (Willem Dafoe) would describe as a sense of “grotesque tediousness.”  The film makes for a great Yuletide ghost-story moodsetter, offering a Christmas Carol alternative for bloodthirsty freaks, but you can clearly hear some thematic preoccupations with the source text screaming for him to break from that literary tradition to deliver something new.  If there’s any new angle in Eggers’s version of this familiar story, it’s his interest in the internal struggles of his Mina figure (Lily-Rose Depp) as she finds herself undeniably drawn to the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård, the copyright-infringing Dracula) despite her recent marriage to a doomed dupe of a real estate agent (Nicolas Hoult).  There’s a dark, soul-deep lust in her attraction to Orlok that affords the film a genuine sense of Evil at its core, with Depp pleading to anyone who’ll listen to answer the one question that haunts her, “Does evil come from within us or from beyond?”  Since she starts the film as a young girl possessed, years before she meets Orlok or his dopey real estate agent in the flesh, the answer is clear from the outset, but her personal journey to accepting that answer gives the movie a fresh, personalized take on the material.  So, it’s a little disappointing to spend so much time retracing the standard Dracula movie plot beats outside that central struggle.  Following Hoult on his journey to sign the legal documents that seal his life-ruining real estate deal is a little like watching Bruce Wayne’s mother’s pearls hit the pavement in yet another Batman origin story.  We’ve seen it before; you can stray your focus elsewhere without losing us.

No matter where Eggers’s Nosferatu may be a little straightlaced as a literary adaptation, it’s still a gorgeous, heinous nightmare in pure visual terms, which obviously goes a long way.  Anyone who was frustrated with the director’s looser, atmospheric approach to horror in The Lighthouse & The Witch will find much more traditional genre pleasures here, delivered through a series of jump scares and horny gasps.  If Eggers had fully drilled down into Depp’s acceptance of the darkness within herself and never left her sweaty bedside, the movie would lose Orlok’s absurd introduction of his What We Do in the Shadows voice & domesticity and Dafoe’s maniacal prancing among the vampire’s army of plague-carrying rats, which together account for most of its deviant levity.  When Eggers fully settles into the supernatural cuckoldry of the central trio in the third act, things get thematically exciting in a way that makes you wonder why he bothered depicting anything else, but Skarsgård’s Orlok is a spooky enough image in itself to keep the tension up until that payoff arrives.  Eggers’s longtime cinematographer Jarin Blashke puts in typically astounding work as a visual stylist, finding a terrible beauty in natural on-set lighting and the immense darkness it barely keeps at bay.  It’s a ghoulish ghost story told over candlelight on a blistering winter night, which keeps it from feeling like the most daring onscreen interpretation of Dracula to date but still manages to scare & chill despite its narrative familiarity.  I would’ve loved to have seen what the gonzo Robert Eggers who made The Lighthouse would’ve done with the erotic Mina-Dracula tensions of this film at feature length, but the more restrained, traditionalist Robert Eggers who made The Northman is almost just as good.  If it sounds like I’m complaining more than praising here, it’s only because I’m holding the director to the impossibly high standard that he set for himself early on.  It’s a very good, traditionally satisfying horror picture by any other metric.

-Brandon Ledet

FYC 2024: Enter Stan Man

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

It took a while to arrive, but 2024 was finally Sebastian Stan’s year.  Ever since the strikingly hunky actor found early fame in the wide-appeal franchises Gossip Girl and The MCU, he’s been attempting to pull off the Robert Pattinson trick of convincing cinephilic snobs that he’s more than just a handsome face.  Stan has been deliberately eroding his pretty-boy persona by taking on increasingly odd, unlikeable roles in titles like I, Tonya, Fresh, and The Bronze, but audiences have yet to take him seriously by any other name than Bucky Barnes.  It’s clear to me that 2024 was the critical breakthrough in that effort, with Stan earning many impassioned accolades for his two most recent film roles in The Apprentice and A Different Man.  Weirdly, that career boost may have been indirectly assisted by the recent re-election of Donald Trump, whom Stan portrays as a young man in The Apprentice.  Or it was at least assisted by his fellow actors’ cowardice on the subject of Trump, since Stan vented that he was invited to participate in Variety‘s annual “Actors on Actors” interview series, but nothing ever came of it because no actor (or at least no actor’s publicist) dared to discuss Trump or the election on the record.  This news item led to a fresh new wave of critics praising Stan’s fully committed portrayal of the president-elect as a young ghoul in training, reinvigorating discussion of a film that had for the most part faded into the Awards Season background since it premiered at Cannes.  It’s not all just empty political posturing, either; he deserves the praise.

In The Apprentice, Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi (Border, Holy Spider) attempts to diagnose the illness at the heart of contemporary American politics by pinpointing the exact moment when Donald Trump transformed from human being to monstrous caricature.  Trump is already a shit-heel capitalist at the start of the film, when Sebastian Stan is introduced as a racist landlord collecting rent payments & shutting out Black tenants in 1970s New York City.  The punk, disco, and street noise of the era appear to rattle young Donny just as much as his legal troubles and his father’s withheld affections.  Then, the figure of Roy Cohn appears from across a crowded barroom, played like a beckoning Count Dracula by Succession star Jeremy Strong.  In the first third of the film, Strong’s verbal & physical mannerisms are more closely aligned with the SNL-parody version of Trump we’re all used to, and the acting challenge of the piece is for Stan to gradually grow into the role as he learns from his vampiric mentor.  His transformation from status-obsessed dork to the most powerful carnival conman in America is physically manifested in peculiar contortions of the mouth and verbal jabs of one-upmanship against his own previous sentences while bragging to the press, and he learned it all from watching Cohn do the same.  What Abbasi & Stan most clearly understand about Trump is how unfortunate it is that he’s a funny guy in addition to being an evil one, so that The Apprentice ends up becoming a kind of It’s Always Sunny-style dirtbag sitcom featuring talented actors playing despicable ghouls.  It’s not especially insightful as a political text, but it is impressive as an acting showcase, which is exactly what Sebastian Stan needed to break through into critical legitimacy.

The only hindrance to The Apprentice announcing Sebastian Stan’s arrival as a formidable actor is that he only gives the second best performance in his own movie, as he’s often outshone by Jeremy Strong’s scenes-stealing performance as Roy Cohn.  Funnily enough, that actor-vs-actor tension is the exact conflict that torments Stan’s lead character in his actual-best performance of the year.  In A Different Man, director Aaron Schimberg ventures further into the ethical & psychological labyrinth of rethinking onscreen disfigurement & disability representation that he first stepped into with Chained for Life, this time with less third-act abstraction.  Sebastian Stan does incredible work building complex layers in the lead role as a failed actor with neurofibromatosis, which hides his face under a mountainous mask of noncancerous tumors.  After an experimental drug chemically removes those tumors in a miraculous transformation that reveals Stan’s Hollywood Handsome face, he remains a failed actor, finding that his lack of confidence & charisma had little to do with his disfiguring medical condition.  Then enters Adam Pearson (Chained for Life, Under the Skin) as the world’s most affable guy, who charms every room he walks into despite the fact that his own neurofibromatosis remains untreated.  Pearson is hilarious as the carefree bloke who completely wrecks Stan’s entire life simply by being pleasant company, but it’s Stan’s performance that affords the movie most of its emotional complexity.  It’s impressive to watch him intentionally play someone who is disastrously bad at acting in a movie where we can all clearly tell he’s a great actor, maybe even with potential to become one of our best.

A Different Man is a great, darkly funny comedy about the tensions between internal & external identity, teased out through the pronounced artifice of stage theatre.  By the time Stan is wearing a 3D rendering of his former disfigurement as a mask while playing a fictionalized version of himself on-stage, it’s clear that Schimberg has created something incredibly complex here, and he found an actor who was up for the task.  A Different Man is a much smaller, quieter film than The Apprentice, which made enough of a stir to be publicly threatened with lawsuits by its subject’s legal team the week of its premiere.  That threat certainly contributed to the good will behind critics’ defense of Stan’s right to discuss his craft in portraying Trump onscreen, but A Different Man is still the title of the pair that’s more likely to land on hipper publications’ Best of the Year lists.  The Apprentice is, at heart, a kind of phony drama that excels solely as an acting showcase for its two leads, who make great use of the opportunity; it’s Awards Season fluff.  By contrast, A Different Man is the real deal; it’s cinema.  In combination, they suggest that Sebastian Stan has finally achieved the creative success he’s been seeking as an actor ever since he first achieved financial success as a handsome face.  Let’s hope all these critical accolades only embolden him to get weirder & more off-putting, since he’s such a joy to watch in that mode.

-Brandon Ledet

FYC 2024: Difficult People

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

This is not my time of year.  While every multiplex in town is overbooked with screenings of four-quadrant crowd-pleasers like Wicked: Part 1, Moana 2, and Gladiator 2, my e-mail inbox is overflowing with FYC screeners for the critical favs that premiered at festivals months ago but distributors have held back for optimal last-minute Oscar buzz.  Neither option is especially appealing to me, personally, as most of my favorite new releases tend to be the high-style, low-profile genre titles that quietly trickle into local arthouse cinemas during the first half of the year, playing to mostly empty rooms.  Still, I make an effort to catch up with what hipper, higher-minded critics single out as The Best Movies of the Year, mostly as an effort to stay informed but also somewhat as an effort to not waste my time & money on the corporate IP currently clogging up American marquees.  It’s during this holiday-season FYC ritual that I’m most often confronted with my most hated & feared cinematic enemies: Subtlety, Nuance, and Restraint.  It’s also when I watch the most capital-A Acting, since these tend to be projects greenlit & distributed with the intent of stirring up awards buzz for a particular performer on the poster.  If there’s any one theme to the trio of FYC screeners I happened to watch over Thanksgiving break, it’s that they were all easy-to-watch dramas about difficult-to-handle people, each highlighting the acting talents of their headlining performers by allowing them to get socially & emotionally messy onscreen without other cinematic distractions getting the way – petty details like dynamic, daring cinematography and editing, the art of the moving image.

If you’re ever in the mood to watch a movie that values acting over any other cinematic concern, you can always look to actors-turned-directors to scratch that itch.  Jesse Eisenberg’s second directorial work, A Real Pain, is a two-hander acting showcase for himself and screen partner Kieran Culkin, who are both good enough in the movie that it’s been in The Awards Conversation for almost a full year since it first premiered at Sundance.  Jesse Eisenberg stars as a Jesse Eisenberg type: a nervous New Yorker who can barely finish a conversational sentence without having a panic attack.  Kieran Culkin is his socially volatile cousin: a bi-polar timebomb who breaks every unspoken social convention imaginable while still managing to charm every stranger he meets.  Structurally, the film is a travel story about the cousins’ journey to Poland to reconnect with their Jewish heritage in the wake of their grandmother’s recent death, which leads to a lot of solemn sightseeing at major sites of The Holocaust.  From scene to scene, however, it functions as a darkly, uncomfortably funny comedy about two men who love each other very much but have incompatible mental illnesses that make it impossible for them to share a room.  No one wants to hear their Awards Season drama described as a breezy, 90min Sundance dramedy about The Holocaust, but that’s exactly the movie that Eisenberg made.  A Real Pain‘s saving grace, then, is the strength of the performances the two central actors deliver as absurdly difficult people.  Culkin’s social brashness and emotional volatility makes his difficulty more immediately apparent, but Eisenberg gives himself plenty of room to do his Nervous Fella schtick as much as possible.  It’s an anxious archetype that Culkin’s character aptly describes as “an awesome guy stuck inside the body of someone who’s always running late.”

Marielle Heller is another actor-turned-director who has made empathy for difficult characters a core tenet of her artistry, most successfully in Can You Ever Forgive Me? and The Diary of a Teenage Girl.  Her new adaptation of the Rachel Yoder novel Nightbitch doesn’t reach far beyond that search for empathetic cheerleading, though, and the movie is mostly a dud as a result.  Amy Adams stars as a visual artist who has put her creative pursuits aside to raise a child while her husband travels for work.  Spending weeks in isolation with only her young child for company, she loses her adult social skills and essentially goes feral, convincing herself that she is physically transforming into a dog.  Suppressing her artist’s spirit to play housewife breaks her brain, causing her to hallucinate monstrous canine hair, tail, and nipple growth in the mirror and to act out wildly in public (barking, stealing food off strangers’ plates, dressing her son in a leash, etc.).  Where her internal fantasy of motherhood bringing out her most animalistic traits ends and her external, real-life social misbehavior begins is intentionally kept vague, as Heller is more concerned with seeing the world through her protagonist’s color-blind eyes than with constructing genuine, heartfelt drama.  Nightbitch is conceptually amusing as a body-horror metaphor for how motherhood physically & mentally transforms you, but it’s pretty lackluster in execution, especially as a page-to-screen adaptation.  There are long stretches of narration in which Adams recites passages from Yoder’s book, as if Heller’s relationship with the material was more admiration than inspiration.  She’s so concerned with landing its political jabs about gendered, invisible domestic labor that she forgot to make its characters feel like real people, so the whole thing ends up hollow & phony no matter how committed Adams’s performance is as the titular Nightbitch.  It should’ve been an audiobook.

Mike Leigh did not start his career as an actor, but he does have a career-long history as a stage theatre director, which is a very actorly profession.  That background heavily informs the sparse, minimalist approach to familial drama in his new film Hard Truths, which sits with its characters’ interpersonal conflicts rather than resolving them.  As the most difficult person of all in this triple feature, Marianne Jean-Baptiste stars as a middle-aged grump who wages a one-woman war against the “smiling, cheerful people” of the world for 100 relentlessly sour minutes, including her own loving sister. Her performance is intensely funny and bitter, as she finds so much to complain about every second she is awake that she cannot even sit comfortably in her own home without obsessing over the activities of the pigeons, foxes, and bugs outside the window.  There are multiple scenes that start with her gasping in horror at the sensation of waking up from a nap, and her nonstop tirades against the waking world’s many offenses leads to the highest incredulous-teeth-sucking-per-minute ratio I’ve ever seen in a movie as her audience is held hostage by her hostility.  Meanwhile, a softly droning violin draws out the pathos of her pathological misery, especially in scenes where her much better adjusted sister gently attempts to diffuse her anger.  Leigh pays careful attention to the social & economic circumstances of the sisters’ past that would’ve burdened one with awareness of the world’s wretchedness while leaving the other unscathed, but most of the thematic & emotional impact of the picture is achieved through the forcefulness of Jean-Baptiste’s performance, which is exactly how all of these movies work, even the lesser ones. 

If any of these movies indulge in the Subtlety, Nuance, and Restraint that torment me during the Awards Season screener deluge every year, it’s Hard Truths, which is what makes it so unfortunate that it’s the best of this batch.  If all of the cinematic value of a picture is going to be invested in the difficulty & thorniness of a central performance, that performance might as well reach for the extremity of Marianne Jeanne-Baptiste’s, which is a cinematic spectacle in and of itself.  The problem with Amy Adams, Kieran Culkin, and Jesse Eisenberg’s performances—if there is one—is that you always get the sense that their respective directors need you to like their characters, so they’re careful not to push their difficult-person conflicts far enough to abandon the audience.  Mike Leigh is fearless in that respect, even if he restrains himself elsewhere.  Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s hopeless grump is somewhat lovable as a movie character, but you wouldn’t want to be in the same room as her for ten consecutive minutes, whereas you could easily imagine yourself splitting a bottle of wine with Adams, Culkin, or Eisenberg’s grumps to hear more of their side of things.  If I’m going to watch a low-key movie about a high-maintenance individual, I’d prefer that character to be as high-maintenance as possible.  Make them a real pain, a real bitch – a really, truly difficult person.

-Brandon Ledet

The Last Showgirl (2024)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

“Why must a movie be ‘good?’ Is it not enough to sit somewhere dark and see a beautiful face, huge?”

That 19-word tweet from Mike Ginn is one of the most concisely insightful pieces of critical writing on cinema in the past decade.  It’s also never been so strenuously tested since it was first tweeted in 2018 as it is in Gia Coppola’s latest feature, The Last Showgirl, which relies heavily on the simple pleasure of seeing Pamela Anderson’s beautiful face, huge.  The Last Showgirl is not a Good Movie in an artistic sense, or it’s at least too phony & hollow to pass as a well-constructed drama.  It’s got a nice visual texture to it, though, which helps make it an effective advertisement for Anderson’s reinvented screen presence as an anxious, fragile Betty Boop.  Anderson stars in the film as a traditional Las Vegas showgirl who’s aging out of her decades-long stage act, echoing her real-life career as The 90s Babe who was quietly forgotten after the end of her signature decade.  She’s overly delicate & vulnerable here in a way we’ve never seen her in more youthful, forceful titles like Baywatch & Barb-Wire, which is a great benefit to the movie, since it otherwise only shows us things we’ve seen before.  If you’ve seen Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler or any post-Starlet title from Sean Baker, you’ve already seen The Last Showgirl done better.  You just haven’t seen it with Pamela Anderson’s beautiful face on the screen & poster.

Even so, The Last Showgirl doesn’t do entirely right by Anderson, since it allows her more forceful costars to steamroll her daintily sweet performance whenever they want the spotlight.  Jamie Lee Curtis is the guiltiest of her scene partners in that respect, playing a too-old-for-this-shit cocktail waitress who still stubbornly carries the self-assured boldness that Anderson left behind in the 90s.  Dave Bautista is innocent as the only male member of the central cast and the only costar who tones himself down to match her low-key volatility.  Meanwhile, the three actresses that she takes under her wing as daughter figures, only one biological (Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song, Billie Lourd), each hungrily scrape for single-scene impact that will allow them to stand out in a movie built entirely around an already-famous actor’s persona.  The result is a long procession of phony interactions that feel like out-of-context scenes from a longer movie where these personal relationships actually mean something to the audience beyond an acting showcase.  The important thing, though, is that Pamela Anderson gets to model gorgeously tacky Vegas showgirl outfits while either whispering or screeching dialogue that no one would have dared to feed her when she was a 20something sexpot.  It’s an audition for a better movie that can make full use of what she has to offer, now that we know it’s on the table.

There isn’t much of a story to speak of here, just fragments of one that gradually unravel and dissolve.  At the start of the film, Anderson’s titular showgirl is given two-weeks’ notice that her decades-running show of employment, Le Razzle Dazzle, is being closed to make room for more exciting, novel acts.  She’s distraught by this professional blow, not only because she’s unlikely to find new stage work but also because no one around her seems especially nostalgic for what’s being lost.  Everyone from her fellow dancers (Shipka, Song), her estranged daughter (Lourd), her romantic-interest stage manager (Bautista), and her cocktail-waitress bestie (Curtis) all see Le Razzle Dazzle as just another tits-and-glitter show – a way to pay the bills.  In her mind and, presumably, the audience’s, it’s more substantial than that. It’s a moving work of visual art and a relic of Old Vegas kitsch, which Anderson’s showgirl likens to Parisian traditions like shows at The Crazy Horse.  That’s a great starting place for a film, but Coppola never finds the way to develop her premise into a plot.  Individual scenes from those two depressing weeks in the showgirl’s life clash against each other in gentle, splashing waves, then the whole movie just recedes away from the audience in a low tide, leaving us dry.  Of course, though, just because it isn’t any good doesn’t mean it isn’t worth seeing Pamela Anderson’s face in it, huge.

-Brandon Ledet

FYC 2024: Queens of Crude

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

There are few genres cozier than the talking-heads documentary about a subject you already love.  It’s like switching your brain off to reality TV, except you get the vague feeling that it’s somehow good for you.  In my case, I love kicking back to talking-heads docs about vintage smut – the kinds of movies that exist solely for Boomers to wax nostalgic on-camera about how grimy New York City was before Mayor Giuliani ruined everything.  This year has seen the wide-release of two notable documentaries in that specific cozy-viewing category: Queen of the Deuce and Carol Doda Topless at the Condor.  Split between opposite ends of the US coast, they both cover the professional lives & exploits of women who became infamous sex-industry titans of the 1960s & 70s.  One’s about a stripper, one’s about a porno distributor, and both were great low-effort watches to enjoy with a warm cup of tea on my couch.

Unsurprisingly, the more famous of the two women was profiled in the better documentary of the pair, as her talent for publicity left more archival material behind for her biographers to work with.  Carol Doda Topless at the Condor is a glowing portrait of “The Queen of Topless,” America’s first topless dancer. A woman of many professional aliases, Carol Doda was first publicized as “The Girl on the Floating Piano,” since she was the only dancer brave enough to do her go-go routine on the Condor night club’s hydraulically lifted & lowered piano.  She then transformed San Francisco’s striptease scene forever by being the first dancer brave enough to perform in the “monokini” (a topless swimsuit) and, thus, kickstarting “the topless craze” that made the city a global tourist destination for vice entertainment.  Her first topless performance also happened to coincide with San Francisco hosting that year’s Republican National Convention, which allows the movie to argue that the city’s strip club scene was an epicenter of 1960s Civil Rights activism, while also shamelessly indulging in the vintage softcore of Russ Meyer’s America.  Carol Doda Topless at the Condor is overflowing with smutty stock footage, interview clips, rock & roll performances, and mafia-connected murder conspiracies involving the infamous Floating Piano.  It’s got everything a bored pervert could want; it just doesn’t break any cinematic conventions delivering it.

Queen of the Deuce is not so fortunate.  Its subject, Chelly Wilson, was more of a behind-the-scenes player on the NYC porno theatre circuit, so you can only catch direct glimpses of her in home-video footage and a single tape-recorded interview.  When you hit the 2D animation in the first few minutes of the documentary, you might panic that there’s not enough archival material to justify a feature, but it is worth sticking around to get to know the singular Wilson . . . in other people’s words.  Queen of the Deuce is a real-life girlboss story about a Greek lesbian Holocaust survivor who became an unlikely porno magnate in 1970s NYC.  She worked her way up from importing Greek romances & comedies that reminded fellow immigrants of home to producing & screening hardcore pornography in cinemas like the all-male venue The Adonis (immortalized in the Golden Age porno A Night at The Adonis).  Her life is retold as a flip through her family photo album, with her grandchildren fondly reminiscing about the long climb up the porno-theatre stairs to grandma’s apartment and listening in on the “cabal of Greek witches” who would chain-smoke there – some of them lovers, all of them friends.  It’s not an especially impressive movie and it can barely drag itself across the finish line of a feature-length runtime, but it’s a warmly pleasant watch, especially if you’re the kind of audience who perks up in your chair when an interviewee drops names like Jamie Gillis, Al Goldstein, and Gerard Damiano.

Although Carol Doda Topless at the Condor was the better, more energetic documentary of the pair, I still got great cozy feelings from the vintage smut of Queen of the Deuce.  It may not have had the bottomless wealth of archival clips to work with as its West Coast counterpart, but it did have me reaching for my notebook more often to write down the titles of other vintage schlock to check out later, most notably a pantyhose-fetish roughie Wilson produced titled Scarf of Mist, Thigh of Satin and a vampire comedy her grandson filmed inside The Adonis titled Gargoyle and Goblin (which sadly appears to have only ever screened once at the NYU Student Film Fest).  As cinema in their own right, neither film is especially daring or groundbreaking; they both fall into the rigid template of the standard talking-heads doc without many bells & tassels getting in the way.  Their entire goal is to introduce you to badass women who briefly held power in small corners of the traditionally macho sex industry, so that they are not forgotten to time.  It is indeed a pleasure getting to know them, even if a simple one.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast # 227: Madame X (1966) & Self-Reinvented Women

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Welcome to Episode #227 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss a grab bag of movies about women who reinvent themselves with made-up identities, starting with the 1966 Lana Turner drama Madame X.

00:00 Welcome

01:31 Hot Frosty (2024)
05:25 Mother’s Instinct (2024)
07:33 Endless Love (1981)
11:22 My Old Ass (2024)
18:30 Out of the Blue (1980)
24:16 The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978)

31:00 Madame X (1966)
55:00 A Woman’s Face (1938)
1:12:22 Sleeping with the Enemy (1991)
1:30:07 The Last Seduction (1994)

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

– The Podcast Crew

Urgh! A Music War (1981)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

After over a decade of avoiding the evil conveniences of streaming music on Spotify, I have finally given up.  I’ve been enjoying the exploitative service for a full year now, contributing fractions of pennies to my favorite artists and turning my head when Belly’s “Delete Spotify” profile-pic message appears while their songs play.  As proof of this shame, I’ll share my Spotify Wrapped data for 2024 below.  As you might expect, it’s changed my music-listening habits quite a bit, fracturing the full-album sessions I get listening to LPS & cassettes at home to instead rely on shuffling songs on discordant playlists while I’m on the go – something I haven’t experienced since owning iPods in the aughts.  That fracturing is not entirely inherent to the digital-listening era, though.  There were plenty of artist-showcase compilations that preceded the LimeWire playlist era, and some were even released into movie theaters.  I remember being especially blown away by the near-impossible line-up of the 1964 concert film The T.A.M.I. Show, which improbably included performances by Chuck Berry, Smoky Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Lesley Gore, The Beach Boys, The Supremes, James Brown, and The Rolling Stones.  That roster is nearly indistinguishable from hitting shuffle on a 1960s playlist on Spotify, and I have since discovered its 1980s punk equivalent in Urgh! A Music War.

Urgh! A Music War is a no-nonsense marathon of live performances from early-80s New Wavers, attempting to document the exact moment when punk got weird. It’s like stumbling into a local Battle of the Bands contest and discovering your all-time-top-10 favorite acts in just a couple hours . . . mixed in with a bunch of other bands that are pretty good too.  The MVPs of this live-performance playlist include Devo, Oingo Boingo, The Go-Go’s, Klaus Nomi, Gary Numan, Joan Jett, The Cramps, Gang of Four, Dead Kennedys, Au Pairs, Echo & the Bunnymen, Pere Ubu, Magazine, X, XTC, and I guess The Police, if you’re into that kind of thing.  There is no narration or context provided to connect these acts and, unlike the single-event documentation of The T.A.M.I. Show, the performances are split between separate concerts in the US & the UK.  Urgh! makes more sense as a live compilation album than as a feature film, which might help explain why it was released on vinyl a full year before the movie version hit theaters, and why it mostly faded into obscurity outside a few cable broadcasts and a subsequent made-on-demand DVD-R release from the Warner Archive.  Still, it’s a staggeringly impressive list of new wave & post-punk acts to collect under one label, as long as you’re willing to look past the disconcerting number of white Brits playing reggae in the mix.  I even made a couple new-to-me discoveries in the process, adding some tracks from Toyah to my “Liked” playlist on Spotify and finding no results on the app when I searched for the band Invisible Sex.

The major triumph of Urgh! is entirely in the assemblage of its line-up, since most of its filmed performances are straight-forward rock & roll numbers; such is the essence of punk.  Only The Police introduce a stadium-rock grandeur at the film’s bookends, concluding this breakneck showcase on a bloated, dubbed-out medley of “Roxanne” and “So Lonely” that’s drained of whatever punk ethos the band might’ve had in them before they blew up.  Without the sing-along crowd participation that bolsters The Police, the 27 other bands on the docket have to stand out through pure rock & roll energy, since the camerawork & editing do little to back them up besides occasionally scanning the crowd in the pit and on the curb for streetwear fashion reports.  The political reggae band Steelpulse spices things up with a skanking Klansman.  Lux Interior from The Cramps enthusiastically fellates his microphone while teasing the exposure of his actual dick, which is barely concealed by sagging leather pants.  Spizzenergi vocalist Spizz goes a little overboard trying to add novelty to the band’s performance of their punk-circuit hit “Where’s Captain Kirk?”, putting more energy into spraying the crowd & camera with silly string than into reciting his lyrics.  Since the talent on hand is so overwhelming in total, each band’s memorability relies on small moments of novelty.  That is, except for Devo, Gary Numan, and Klaus Nomi, who incorporated a keen sense of visual art to their stage craft that translates exceptionally well to this medium.

Urgh! A Music War is glaringly imperfect. As amazing as the line-up is, it’s sorely missing The B-52s, whose Wild Planet-era material would’ve fit in perfectly.  Of the acts included, there are a few like X, XTC, and Peru Ubu that appear to be suffering late-in-the-set exhaustion, not quite living up to the energy they bring to their studio recordings.  The imperfections and inconsistences frequently account for the appeal of this musical-styles mashup compilation, though; it’s the same appeal in listening to a well-curated Spotify playlist on shuffle.  The cut from Gary Numan’s future-synth phantasmagoria to the no-frills rock & roll of Joan Jett and The Blackhearts is especially jarring and says a lot about the precarious identity of punk at the start of its new decade.  It’s the same thrill I get when my Spotify “Liked” list jumps from City Girls to Xiu Xiu to Liz Phair, except that it used to be immortalized on vinyl & celluloid instead of relying on the whims of a malfunctioning algorithm.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2024)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Romanian gig-economy comedy Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2024).

00:00 New Orleans Bookfair 2024

02:46 Heretic (2024)
08:08 Wicked – Part 1 (2024)
20:07 Noirvember
22:08 High Sierra (1941)
26:17 Human Desire (1954)
30:52 Coma (2024)
34:48 Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
38:25 Am I OK? (2024)
42:31 The Apprentice (2024)
45:12 The Last Showgirl (2024)
47:21 The End (2024)
52:01 A Different Man (2024)
56:04 Carol Doda Topless at the Condor (2024)
58:32 Queen of the Deuce (2024)
1:00:31 A Real Pain (2024)
1:02:59 Nightbitch (2024)
1:05:07 Hard Truths (2024)

1:07:52 Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2024)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

The End (2024)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

When questioned on why the lighting & color grading of Wicked: Part 1 was so muted & chalky when compared to the Technicolor wonders of the classic MGM adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, director Jon M. Chu explained that he wanted to “immerse people into Oz, to make it a real place […] Because if it was a fake place, if it was a dream in someone’s mind, then the real relationships and stakes that [the characters] are going through wouldn’t feel real.”  Given the immense popularity of the film, I have to assume that most audiences understand the appeal of that desaturated, “real stakes” take on the movie musical and are hungry for more reality-bound singalongs just like it.  Luckily, they do not have to wait an entire year for the arrival of Wicked: Part 2 to scratch that itch.  Joshua Oppenheimer’s climate-change musical The End has arrived to immediately supply what the people demand: a drab, real-world movie musical with grim, real-world stakes.  Set entirely in a single, secluded bunker after our impending global environmental collapse, The End is as grounded in reality as any musical has been since the semi-documentary London Road.  The stakes are the continued survival of human life on planet Earth.  The relationships are strictly parental or economic.  Oppenheimer even has the good sense to luxuriate in a near three-hour runtime, just like the first half of Wicked.  With an immersive approach like that, it’s sure to be a hit.

George MacKay stars as a twentysomething brat who’s spent his entire life sheltered from the apocalypse in his family’s luxurious bunker, located inside a salt mine.  His only social interaction has been confined to his erudite parents and their small staff: a cook, a doctor, and a butler.  Playing the mother, Tilda Swinton frets nervously with her fine-art home decor with the same sense of existential dread that she brought to Memoria.  Playing the father, Michael Shannon maintains order & civility while grappling with his first-hand contributions to the environmental disaster as a vaguely defined executive in The Energy Business.  The domestic fantasy of their life underground is disrupted by the arrival of a starving, haunted survivor of the world outside, played by Moses Ingram.  The newcomer’s only potential place in the house is as a mate for McKay’s poorly socialized, brainwashed rich boy, which is not verbally acknowledged but weighs heavily on her every decision.  Helpfully, every character confesses their internal emotional conflicts to the audience in song, which never escalates from patter to barnburner but at least adds a minor note of escapism to an otherwise grim, limited setting.  The musical numbers are conversational, recalling the sung-through movie musical style of films like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (or, more recently, Annette), except they’re much more sparingly deployed among the more traditional, reserved dialogue.

With The End, Oppenheimer has leapt from documentary to the deep end of narrative filmmaking: the movie musical.  Or, at least, that’s what the movie musical should be.  Jon M. Chu’s quotes about making Oz “a real place” where audiences can “feel the dirt” is entirely antithetical to the pleasures of movie musical filmmaking, a fundamental misunderstanding of the artform.  By contrast, Oppenheimer appears to understand the artform but actively seeks to subvert it to make a political point.  The End is a movie musical about the economics of surviving climate change; it only cares about the “real relationships” between the ultra-wealthy and their small staff within the terms of economic power & control.  It speaks in Old Hollywood musical language but limits its setting to what would traditionally account for one isolated set-piece song & dance, contrasting the grandeur of the salt mine to the smallness of its characters’ hermetic world.  I can’t say that he fully manages the discordance between movie magic & political doomsaying with anything near the success of his breakthrough triumph The Act of Killing, but The End is at least occasionally uncanny in an interesting, provocative way, as opposed to uncanny in a cowardly way.  Anyone who’s praising Wicked for its political allegories about fascism & repression will surely find their next favorite musical in the new Oppenheimer film . . . unless everyone’s just needlessly making excuses for enjoying assembly-line Hollywood spectacle.  Its current state requires many such excuses.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #226: I Love You, AllWays & NOFF 2024

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Welcome to Episode #226 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Moviegoing with Bill‘s Bill Arceneaux to review the films they caught at the 35th annual New Orleans Film Festival, starting with the local drag scene documentary I Love You, AllWays.

00:00 Welcome
07:46 I Love You, AllWays
33:06 On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
40:07 Memoir of a Snail
46:26 Ghetto Children
54:21 Taste the Revolution
1:16:52 Mysterious Behaviors
1:22:51 Any Other Way – The Jackie Shane Story
1:28:00 Eponymous
1:33:46 2024 Catch-up

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, or by following the links below.

– The Podcast Crew