brandon ledet

Europe in the Raw (1963)

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threehalfstar

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By the time Russ Meyer made his fourth consecutive nudie cutie picture, the dull-yet-oddly-chaotic Wild Gals of the Naked West, his boredom with a genre he had inadvertently created was starting to show. What did not become boring to the tireless pervert, however, was large, naked breasts. As a result, Meyer’s fifth picture, Europe in the Raw, attempted to shift away from the “cutie” part of the nudie cutie format & moved the director’s work ever so closer to the much darker, stranger territory he would later revel in for decades. Unlike his later works, however, Europe in the Raw was far from unique in terms of genre. Part of what made Meyer’s debut, The Immoral Mr. Teas, such a wild, controversial success was that it for the first time combined moving pictures of naked girls with the mainstream comedy. Pre-Teas nudie films usually snuck past censors by treating their own sexual content derisively (when not vainly disguising  themselves as “documentaries” about nudist camps). An old sexploitation tactic was to get away with showing copious amounts of “depraved” behavior by demonizing the participants & punishing them for their transgressions (often pre-marital sex & the resulting back alley abortions) with a well-deserved death in the final act, in effect denouncing the very thing that made the picture fun & interesting in the first place. Europe in the Raw is hilariously guilty of this strategy.

In its opening narration Europe in the Raw boldly promises to be “undoubtedly the most unusual & intriguing documentary film every brought to the screen” that will expose “the stark realism of contemporary life in Europe.” Uh huh. What the film actually exposes is Russ Meyer’s Jingoistic/xenophobic thoughts on the sex trade in Europe (where he had learned his craft as a combat photographer during WWII) & deeply bizarre, self-contradictory relationship with women, whom he simultaneously worshipped & completely misunderstood. It’s fascinating stuff. Packing only short reels of film so they could pass as tourists, Russ & then-wife Eve traveled to a slew of major European cities to film this fiercely American diatribe: Paris, Stockholm, Hamburg, Venice, Rome, Amsterdam, Brussels, etc. The original plan was to film candid footage on a (loudly humming) camera conspicuously “concealed” in a briefcase with a comically visible window cut out to expose the lens. This was ill-advised. Meyer soon discovered that attempting to film sex workers without their knowledge was a dangerous, life-jeopardizing tactic & decided to instead fake a significant portion of the footage once he was back on American soil. What’s left is a lot of touristy photojournaling, obviously staged footage in which the “hidden” camera itself is filmed in multiple scenes, occasional glimpses of the actually-real, actually-dangerous candid footage Meyer managed to sneak in a couple scattered red light districts (including one terrifying sequence in which he is essentially chasing a leather-clad dominatrix down the street), and some beautiful documentation of European strippers doing their thing. To borrow a phrase from Dana Carvey’s Johnny Carson impersonation, it’s weird, wild stuff.

As with Meyer’s previous four pictures, nearly all of the audible dialogue in Europe in the Raw is provided by an offscreen narrator, in this case Vic Perrin (who would return for Meyer’s next picture & final nudie cutie Heavenly Bodies!). Perrin’s industrial film intonations are strange glimpses into Meyer’s self-contradictory thoughts on both women & Europe, two subjects on which he is far from qualified to comment upon. Meyer’s simultaneously straight-laced & perverted views on these two subjects feel uncomfortable as soon as the opening monologue, where he states that Europe is, like a woman, a “land of many moods […] On the surface it is usually cheerful & happy, but somewhere underneath this pleasant exterior lies cruelty & lust,” going on to describe the continent as “sometimes a virgin, sometimes a libertine.” This is the first true glimpse into the bitter, bizarre war of the sexes that would populate nearly all of Meyer’s future works, to an almost obsessive degree. Europe in the Raw is full of these strangely acidic, but openly salacious musings. In one passage, he describes Amsterdam as “the most prostitute-infested Dutch city” where women are “displayed like sides of beef in the windows of a chop house”, potrays one red light district as “a cesspool of cheap hotels, tawdry bars, and wanton women”, and says of another that “The street clamors with the sound & fury of unbridled passion & manufactured lust, peddled wholesale at outrageous prices.” Worst of all he claims that in these supposed moral cesspools every sexual aberration can be bought except for rape, because every woman walking the street was for undoubtedly for sale. What an vile, insane thought. As enjoyable & transgressive as Russ’ films could be, he was always eager to remind you that at heart he’s a hopelessly cruel misanthrope & a bully, a real piece of shit.

What’s so peculiar about Meyer’s vilification of “women of easy virtue” & his skewed view of a Europe where “exhibition is the rule rather than the exception”, of course, is that he himself is, in essence, a peddler of smut. It’d be much easier to believe Europe in the Raw‘s prudish dialogue if its writer/director hadn’t previously made a fortune selling pin-up photographs & inventing the nudie cutie, essentially establishing himself as a remarkably talented softcore pornographer. For instance, when the narrator half-heartedly scorns European beaches for being “infested with bevies of bikini busters,” the first things that comes to mind is “Bikini Busters!”, the openly-drooling, dubious history of the bikini segment in Meyer’s previous film Erotica. Part of what makes Meyer’s best work so fascinating is this absurd sense of self-contradiction, especially in his treatment of women. Despite the often misogynistic war of the sexes vibes that infect much of his work, Meyer has a God-given knack for making women look powerful on film, (Tura Satana’s turn as Varla in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! being the most infamous example). Although Meyer speaks ill of sex workers & burlesque dancers in Europe in the Raw, he also films them beautifully from drastically low angles that make them look gigantic & powerful. He had a way of verbally tearing women down in his films & in the press, but his obvious reverence for the gender permeates his visual work in an undeniable way and that bizarre dichotomy is noticeable for the first time in his career in Europe in the Raw.

With Europe in the Raw, you can feel the real Russ Meyer starting to show his true colors, hideous warts & all. Even so, he manages to incorporate some of the hokey humor from his previous nudie cutie work, like in an extended ping pong match staged at a (ridiculously fake) Dutch nudist camp, a gag where a chamber pot is emptied on a passing pedestrian, a scene where the Leaning Tower of Pisa rotates full circle like the hands of a clock, and (my personal favorite) an ungodly long sequence of German street signs that feature the words “Fart” & “Fahrt”. Speaking of the “Fart” sequence, finally coming into its own here is Meyer’s talent for blinding, rapid-fire editing. Flashes of European street signs, advertisements, food, bikes, toilets, neon lights, fine art and, of course, bare breasts overwhelm the viewer in a bewildering assault that would eventually reach a fever pitch in his 1970 picture Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Commercial vessels, automobiles, and steel architecture are also filmed in the same low, reverent angles the director films his burlesque dancers, establishing an aesthetic that what would eventually solidify itself as Russ Meyer’s America. All of the basic building blocks of Meyer’s ouevre are present for the first time in Europe in the Raw, right down to the lingering brutality of WWII. Meyer even once described the film (which he was evidently not too proud of, despite its obvious superiority to dreck like Eve & The Handyman and Wild Gals of the Naked West) simply as “Tits and War”. Honestly, if you had to boil the man’s entire career down to just two words, that wouldn’t be a bad place to start. Similarly, if you wanted to watch the majority of Meyer’s career without tuning in for the stinkers between the milestones, Europe in the Raw wouldn’t be a bad place to start either.

-Brandon Ledet

Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962)

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twostar

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After the vignette structure that loosely held together his third “nudie cutie” picture, Erotica, Russ Meyer returned to feature length narratives for his fourth film, Wild Gals of the Naked West. Unfortunately, the same narrative slightness that worked well enough for The Immoral Mr. Teas to become a breakout success & singlehandedly launch the nudie cutie genre had become tiresome as soon as Meyer’s second picture, the impossibly dull Eve & The Handyman, and near sadistic by the time Meyer made Wild Gals of the Naked West. Wild Gals expands upon the strange quick cuts & surreal pastel-colored voids that distinguish Meyer’s work from other Mr. Teas imitators, but outside of a couple sparse visual quirks there’s nothing too remarkable about the film. It’s difficult to shake the feeling that Wild Gals was more or less an an excuse for Meyer & friends to play Western-themed dress up in the desert. And, of course, to display bare breasts.

Our host for this burlesque take on playing cowboys & Indians is an old, drunken Western coot played by Jack Moran. Moran had previously provided the besides-the-point narration that made Erotica a mildly enjoyable, disorienting experience, but this was his first full collaboration with Meyer, both as an onscreen presence & as the sole credited screenwriter. Moran would later go on to pen some of Meyer’s best work of the 1960s (including the cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!), but it’s hard to see too much promise in the razor thin screenplay he provides for Wild Gals of the Naked West. Even less dignified than his razor-thin screeplay is his onscreen portrayal of the old coot narrator, decked out in a hideously cheap costume complete with horrendously fake-looking eyebrows & mustache.

Much more exciting in her introduction to the Russ Meyer landscape is the actual old coot Princess Livingston, a toothless howl of a loon that would later appear in notable Meyer pictures like Mudhoney & Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (not to mention an appearance in the Pufnstuff movie, of all things). Princess Livingston has a wild authenticity to her, making crazy eyes for the camera, cackling like a drunken witch, and calling to mind future featured players in Meyer-devotee John Waters’ films like the late, great Edith Massey. Wild Gals of the Naked West tries its best to cultivate a sense of unbridled chaos in shoddy, vaudevillian gags involving gorilla costumes, crossdressing, and pranks involving outhouses, but none of the film’s thematic shenanigans can even approach the cinematic lunacy Princess Livingston commands simply by being her wonderful self.

Besides the introductions of Jack Moran & Princess Livingston, Wild Gals is mostly significant in its over-indulgence in the pastel voids that made The Immoral Mr. Teas‘ hallucinogenic glimpses of nudity quaintly fascinating. Here, all visions of Old West saloons & brothels are confined to these otherworldly, pastel-colored spaces, populated by quick cuts of hand-drawn pianos, pasties-covered breasts, hideous drunks downing untold gallons of liquor, strange rubber masks, and six-shooters going off indiscriminately. If the entirety of the film’s action was contained in these nudity-filled bursts of drunken chaos, Wild Gals of the Naked West might be among the best of Russ Meyer’s nudie cutie work. Instead it’s severely bogged down by hokey gags involving the aforementioned gorilla suit, sex workers lassoing johns onto second floor balconies, and truly awful Native American caricatures (although I did admittedly enjoy the ones where the Native men were operating WWII gear like grenade launchers & Tommy guns). All in all, Wild Gals may be mildly fascinating for a Russ Meyer completist looking for early glimpses of Jack Moran, Princess Livingston, and the director’s trademark rapid-fire editing, but after previously watching three similarly vapid nudie cuties from Meyer in a row, I found the ordeal somewhat tiresome.

-Brandon Ledet

Sinister (2012)

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three star

Horror is one of those genres where you honestly don’t have to try too, too hard to succeed. Yes, it’s of course preferable that any film would stand out as a unique property that breaks all expectations of its context & genre, but it’s never that big of a deal when a horror film shrugs off that kind of ambition. With its own set-in-stone tropes & built-in audience, horror allows a lot of breathing room for films to just sort of coast on the long line of work that came before them. Innovation isn’t entirely necessary for each individual horror picture as long as they deliver a few basic elements: suspense, some good scares, maybe a memorably creepy creature or two, etc. As long as they play by the rules, all a passably decent horror film really needs to do is not drop the ball. In a lot of ways, Sinister is such a film.

There’s nothing really too special about Sinister. Ethan Hawke plays a “true crime” journalist who moves into the house of a slaughtered family in order to research his new book, some kind of In Cold Blood derivative. Of course, the house is haunted. Of course, the project drives him mad. Of course, there’s a Boogieman-type demon helming the entire horrid affair. Well, the film actually takes that last part quite literally. Known to historians as Bughuul & to possessed, homicidal little demon children as “Mr. Boogie”, The Boogieman is a real character in the film, orchestrating all of the haunted goings on from the protective distance of some super 8 films mysteriously discovered in Hawke’s attic. It’s curious that, since he exists largely in the imaginations & drawings of little children, Mr. Boogie isn’t represented here as I would’ve drawn him in my youth (a man-sized booger in a trenchcoat) but instead appears as some sort of Industrial Goth enthusiast in corpse paint. No matter. Despite Bughuul’s prominence in Sinister‘s mythology, he’s entirely nonverbal and doesn’t do much besides makes some guest cameos in the haunted super 8 films to look all goth-like & mean. The children under his spell do most of the heavy lifting & are much more effective at producing some great onscreen scares.

The haunted super 8 films that drive Ethan Hawke’s true crime journalist mad depict The Boogie Man’s child army calmly, methodically executing their respective families for the benefit of home video in a variety of unsavory ways: drownings, fires, lawn mowers, etc. These films are where Sinister excels most as a unique property, almost functioning as an old-fashioned horror anthology. There’s a lot of visual care that goes into depicting the projection equipment that screens the films and in other minute details (such as throats being slit in the reflection of Hawke’s glasses as we’re watching him watch a projection) that’s otherwise missing from the film’s more run-of-the-mill haunted house & creepy children formula. During these screenings the film’s sound design also takes on a special importance (including a kickass soundtrack) , reaching for some deeply unnerving vibes that can’t be accomplished simply through gore makeup & jump scares. Sinister may take a while to build up its own mythology & its central Nine Inch Nails Superfan villain may be a little underwhelming, but its haunted films concept is satisfying enough to make for a decent horror picture once the ball is finally rolling. Besides, creepy, murderous children are always an easy sell for fans of the genre, which allows the film to more or less coast.

-Brandon Ledet

Ejecta (2015)

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onehalfstar

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I’ll be the first to admit to having a list of certain topics & genres that always lure me in, no matter what the apparent quality of the individual pictures may be. If a film has something to do with one of my pet obsessions, such as pop music, witchcraft, pro wrestling, etc. I’m highly likely to tune in no matter what. One of the absolute easiest ways to get my butt in a theater seat, for instance, is to slap a sci-fi tag on a film. Just this year alone I’ve been burned by the likes of Jupiter Ascending, Alien Outpost, and The Lazarus Effect all because they promised sci-fi content & I couldn’t resist.

And now you can go ahead & Ejecta to the list of 2015’s shoddiest sci-fi movies that hold promise solely in the potential of their genre, delivering nothing of interest once they get you sitting in front of the screen. Getting pulled in this way has also introduced me to some great pictures that’ll stick with me for a long time coming, such as Spring, Ex Machina, and Predestination, but every now & then a slog like Ejecta will make me question whether or not those rewards are worth the pained efforts required to find the gems among the trash. The film declares its shitty quality early, opening with an on-screen blog post that reads “Tonight the universe is no larger than my head. It’s time to make room for visitors,” & following that empty sentiment with an angsty prologue about how “We’re all so stupid” (meaning we Earthlings) and so on & so forth. Well, I did continue watch Ejecta after the one minute mark, so I guess that last part is actually fairly accurate.

A found footage sci-fi horror cheapie with a framing device in which one interview flashbacks to a second, earlier interview, Ejecta is a thoroughly frustrating exercise in weak storytelling. While being interrogated by some government suits about a possible encounter with “advanced life forms”, our protagonist Bill tells his side of the story by flashing back to the day before, when he was interviewed for a documentary called Extraterrestrial Territory: Things Beyond Our Atmosphere, an exposé only the most dedicated Coast to Coast AM fans could love. As the government bullies start torturing Bill with some Disturbing Behavior-esque headgear in order to coax more information out of him, it’s all too easy to sympathize with the tormentors more than the victim. Tell us what happened, Bill! Show us some aliens already! Bill himself, played by an emaciated Julian Richings (who was much more fun playing villain in the recent Cabbage Patch horror flick Patch Town), is easily the most alien thing we’re shown onscreen for much of the film’s run time. Tormented by some kind of Freddy Krueger-like extraterrestrial invasion that occupies his mind instead of a physical space, Bill only allows himself several hours of sleep every few days or so & he totally looks it.

A competent, strange-looking lead actor can hardly support a feature film on its own, though. As much as Ejecta reaches for every out-there sci-fi idea it can think of (including alien autopsies, UFO crashes, and body snatching), watching a freaked out Julian Richings dispense one piece of info at a time without actually showing us any of the action (outside of a very brief shot of a Humanoids from the Deep-type alien filmed through wooden slats) just doesn’t cut it. The movie promises all & delivers nothing. It’s genuinely hard to believe that it only ran for 82 minutes, adding a meta layer of audience-participatory time travel to an otherwise mundane experience that I swear dragged on for several hours. It’s a terrible film & trying to piece together details of it now makes me feel just as ragged & tortured as Bill looked trying to remember his extraterrestrial experience onscreen. It’s not a sensation that I can recommend.

-Brandon Ledet

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015)

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fourstar

I’m not sure exactly why Guy Ritchie’s latest foray into highly stylized action cinema, a big screen adaptation of the 1960s television show The Man from U.N.C.L.E., has more or less flopped at the box office. Personally, I might at least be able to attribute my own reluctance to catch up with the picture to a little bit of superspy fatigue. So far this year the cinemas have been bombarded from the superspy likes of Kingsman: Secret Service, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, American Ultra, and a spoof of the genre simply called Spy. That’s not even taking into account the upcoming Stephen Spieldberg/Tom Hanks collab Bridge of Spies & the latest James Bond feature Spectre. If 2014 was the Year of the Doppelgänger, 2015 is certainly the Year of the Spy & The Man from U.N.C.L.E.‘s returns may have suffered somewhat from a crowded market. It’s by no means been a devastating financial blow like Ritchie’s disastrous Madonna vehicle Swept Away, but it has struggled to earn back its $75 million budget, earning less than half of that sum in its U.S. theater run. What’s even more difficult to account for, however, is it the film’s middling reviews. I’m no Guy Ritchie fanboy, having seen less than half of the films that he’s released, but U.N.C.L.E. was easily the most fun I’ve ever had with the director’s sleek action movie aesthetic, however delayed my trip to the theater may have been.

Opening with a traditional James Bond credits sequence populated with sultry soul music, harsh red hues, and Cold War/Atomic Age stock footage, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. maintains a distinct sense of 60s-tinged, smart mouthed swank throughout its entire runtime. Sometimes its modernizing of the 60s superspy genre feels true to its sources. CGI-aided car chases work similarly to the manually sped-up action scenes of yesteryear. The classy noir lighting of 60s fare is brought into the 2010s with rainbow-colored lens flairs. Throwaway lines about “Hitler’s favorite rocket scientist”, enriched uranium, and smuggled Nazi gold all feel native to the era it’s evoking. At other times this modernization can work a little too much like borrowed Tarantino cool, especially in small details like the yellow grindhouse subtitles and the pop music & whistling on the film’s soundtrack, but even Tarantino borrowed those elements from older sources, so the similarities are more than forgiveable. What most distinguishes The Man from U.N.C.L.E. from, say, an Inglourious Basterds, is its calmly restrained chase of a smarmy, handsome aesthetic instead of Tarantino’s cartoonishly over-the-top tendency towards excess (which, of course, has its own distinct set of charms).

Speaking of calm restraint, just as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. remains poised & smugly handsome throughout its runtime, its American spy lead Solo (expertly played by Henry “Man of Steel” Cavill) prides himself on never losing his cool. As the CIA operative/international playboy Solo butts heads with quick-tempered KGB agent Illya (Armie “Winklevoss Twins” Hammer) & sexy German mechanic Gaby (Alicia “Ex Machina” Vikander) on a multinational mission to prevent a Nuclear Holocaust, he tries his damnedest to remain as coolly suave as if he were simply enjoying cocktail hour. A lot of humor is derived from watching Solo & Illya try to out-macho each other in activities as disparate as fistfights in restrooms to arguing over women’s fashion. Most of the film’s comedy, however, is dependent upon the sexual tension between all three leads & their escaped Nazi enemies (including a young married couple who look like an evil combination of Jason Schwartzman & Freddie Mercury and a character Tilda Swinton could play in her sleep). There’s an onslaught of innuendo in the film’s script, like when the art thief Solo offers to “fill the gaps” in a woman’s collection or to “take bottom” when divvying up which locks he & Illya will pick. By the time characters are nonchalantly delivering lines like “Want to have a go?” & “I wish I could stay to finish you off myself” the film’s earned enough goodwill to evoke full belly laughs instead of the light chuckles the first couple sexual quips elicit. Armie Hammer also gets great comedic mileage from the KGB hothead Illya, especially in the way he sweetly refers to mechanic Gaby as his “little chop shop girl” & the comically American Solo as “cowboy.”

No matter what the reasons for The Man from U.N.C.L.E.‘s muted reception, I do feel the film has been a little shortchanged & I regret waiting so long to catch it in the theater. It has a distinct sense of smart, sexy glamour to it that suggests an alternate universe where Mad Men was an action-packed world of superspies instead of a slowburn of an existential crisis. The film’s sexual quips, use of wrestling as foreplay, gender reversal of the damsel in distress trope, and genre-faithful plot riddled with doublecrossings & double-doublecrossings all make for a fun, sleek picture that I’m sure will have a second life on Netflix & the like even if it’s not currently doing so hot in the theater. On top of these surface pleasures, Guy Ritchie makes some satisfyingly unique visual choices such as mounting cameras to the bows of boats, the fronts of safes, and car door mirrors for a effect that feels highly stylized, but genuinely earned. He’s also confident enough in his screenplay to imply offscreen action instead of showing every little explosive detail & to allow certain scenes to breathe for maximum effect, such as a particularly sublime moment when Solo is enjoying a picnic as his partner fends for his life in the background. As far as 60s throwback action & Nazi-killing revenge fantasies go, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is about as handsome & as confident as they come. If you’re like me & have been putting it off due to superspy fatigue, I’d suggest giving it a shot somewhere down the road. It has enough universal appeal that you’re likely to enjoy yourself.

-Brandon Ledet

While We’re Young (2015)

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threehalfstar

As I explained in my review for Mistress America, Noah Baumbach is remarkably talented at making me feel like shit while also enjoying a good, old fashioned nervous laugh. I ended up appreciating Mistress America a great deal more than I did Baumbach’s earlier release from this year, While We’re Young, but the pair did work together nicely as two sides of the same coin. In Mistress America, we’re swept away by & quickly grow disgusted with a pretentious free spirit who lives a frivolous life in the magical version of NYC that only exists on film. In While We’re Young, on the other hand, we’re similarly disgusted by a go-getter of a young documentarian who embodies every disdainful idea about what it means to be a hipster to an infuriating degree in an all too real NYC we wish didn’t exist in real life. Part of the reason While We’re Young‘s self-absorbed sociopath of a subject doesn’t excite the audience in the same way Mistress America‘s does is that he feels more like a carefully selected collection of quirks than a real person, never really evolving beyond much of a caricature, so your feelings towards him are much less complex. He is exceedingly fun to hate, though. Baumbach at least got that part right.

The sycophant in question is Jamie, a role Adam Driver plays like a bizarro world version of Joey Ramone where everything he does & says, right down to the basic motions of his limbs, are vile affectations worthy of vitriol (just look at the way he holds beer cans if you’re looking for something to angry up your blood). Jamie’s latest victims/”friends” are a middle aged couple played by Ben Stiller & Naomi Watts, who are attracted to the excitement of meeting younger versions of themselves in Jamie & his girlfriend Darby (Amanda Seyfried) because it allows them to escape a dull life where their contemporaries use peer pressure to convince them to do things like have children instead of younger-oriented fare like experimenting with drugs. In the compare/contrast portion of the movie, Jamie’s victims are portrayed as Gen-X squares who watch digital television & listen to CDs instead of enjoying the finer antiquated formats of vinyl records & VHS tapes. Despite how things may seem on the surface here, however, the true difference between the two couples is that the older set is a normal pair of human beings while the younger ones are a curated set of dishonest affectations.

While We’re Young is most alive when it aims for cringe comedy in the never-ending gauntlet of indignities that accompany a midlife crisis. Once Stiller & Watt’s older couple start dressing younger, wearing stupid hats (including indoors! at the dinner table! yuck!), tripping & puking at an phony shaman’s apartment, and failing miserably to look competent at hip-hop dance classes, the movie not only earns most of its genuine laughs, it also effectively depicts modern life in NYC to be a nightmarish hellscape. That’s not to say that Baumbach goes anywhere near the jugular here. If you’re looking for a full-on scathing takedown of the Brooklynite hipster, you’re much better off watching the Tim Heidecker vehicle The Comedy. The saddest moments in While We’re Young mostly amount to minor embarrassments & the distinct feeling of losing touch with old friends while chasing new ones. There may be a bitter remark here or there about The Baby Cult of new parents or rampant cellphone addiction or how the millennial generation are a collection of “entitled little brats”, but for the most part the film is well aware that it’s being an old curmudgeon in these moments. That’s not to say that there isn’t a good deal of venom in the portrayal of Adam Driver’s horrendous hipster abomination Jamie, who is at one point described with the phrase, “It’s like he once saw a sincere person & has been imitating them ever since.” The movie is ostensibly willing to let him off the hook for his transgressions, though. In the end what Jamie is up to doesn’t really matter, because he’s young & frivolous. It’s the emotional journey of the film’s middle aged characters that carry most of the film’s heart, which makes for a serviceable cringe comedy & lightly romantic indie drama depending on the scene in question. It’s nowhere near the forceful impact of the more pointed Mistress America, but While We’re Young is another success for Baumbach nonetheless.

-Brandon Ledet

Mistress America (2015)

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fourstar

Noah Baumbach is extremely adept at making me feel like shit. While from the outside his signature films The Squid & The Whale, Margot at the Wedding, etc. may look like the kind of cutesy indie dramas that often earn the quaint moniker “Sundance darlings”, they actually pack much more of a devastating emotional punch than you’d first expect. Baumbach’s parade of broken, often vile characters truly get under my skin, mostly because they’re so real & so relatable. What’s even worse is they have the nerve to make me laugh at the same time, despite myself. Even if I don’t personally identify with the moral reprobates Baumbach brings to the big screen, I can at least recognize their traits in real life people that stalk this cursed Earth, often people I love or at least find amusing. For instance, the deeply unpleasant film Greenberg hosts a lead performance from Ben Stiller so heartlessly misanthropic & cruelly self-centered that I left the film shaking so thoroughly with anger that I couldn’t help feeling as if part of my discomfort was that I recognized aspects of his destructive behavior in people I know intimately or, shudder to think, myself at my worst. It was so tempting to reduce my reaction to Greenberg to “Fuck that movie!” but at the same time it was near impossible to ignore that it had struck a chord, unpleasant or not. In a lot of ways, Baumbach’s latest film Mistress America is the spiritual opposite of Greenberg, yet both films somehow strike that dark, too-close-to-home chord of discomfort.

Mistress America, which Baumbach co-wrote with actress Greta Gerwig (who portrays the titular human anomaly Brooke), strikes a funny, but acidly damning portrait of Millennial pretentiousness. Brooke is anything & nothing simultaneously. She’s a creative spirit with no follow-through to finish any of the many projects she conceives. She drifts in & out of people’s lives without ever emotionally engaging with them in any specific way, leaving behind a trail of destruction that she is far too self-absorbed to even notice. She constantly rags on “rich people”, but obviously coasts on a certain level of privilege she won’t acknowledge. Brooke tries to be everything to everyone, even going as far as adopting different costumes (sometimes on an hourly schedule) depending on the task at hand: pencil skirts for business meetings, workout gear for the health nut part of her day, non-prescription glasses & sweaters for tutoring sessions, etc. While tutoring a math student she’s shown describing the nature of “x” as a variable that “can’t be nailed down”, which is very much on the nose. However, when she later describes herself as “kind & fearless”, she’s completely off the mark. Brooke may think she knows every last thing about how the world works, but the truth is she doesn’t even know the first thing about herself.

At the same time, though, her boundless energy & roaring self-confidence can be intoxicating, especially to a young admirer. Brooke’s soon-to-be stepsister Tracy (played by Lola Kirke) is mildly critical of, but completely starstruck by Brooke, who is, by all means, an impossible person (the kind that lives in Times Square & spontaneously gets invited onstage at concerts). Alone on a college campus in New York City, Tracy is an emotionally vulnerable freshmen who is looking for a sense of self-purpose & personal identity. Tracy yearns to be a pretentious literary type, but just doesn’t have the heart for it. In Brooke she sees the unbridled moxie she wishes she possessed herself. As she fawns over & begins to imitate Brooke, the film gets similarly excited, picking up speed in a delirious manner & getting drunk on self-awarded power. However, Brooke’s modern day Holly Golightly lifestyle is not nearly as glamorous as it may seem on the surface & Tracy quickly discovers that her hero is a broken, selfish narcissist not so gracefully transitioning from the twilight of her frivolous 20s into a much less flattering frivolous adulthood.

In a lot of ways Brooke is more of a collection of empty platitudes & thinly veiled attempts to be quotable than a real person. While casually posing for a friend’s Instagram photo she asks, “Must we document ourselves all the time? Must we?!” When Tracy explains she wants to be a stort story writer, Brooke responds “I read that TV shows are the new novel.” Other self-generated clichés include “You can’t really know what it is to want until you are at least 30,” & “There’s no adultery when you’re 18. You should all be touching each other all the time.” She’s also prone to introducing herself to new friends with the account that “I watched my mother die […] Everyone I love dies,” a personal catchphrase that feels all the more disquieting because she sounds like she doesn’t mean one word of it. It’s no wonder that Brooke is so proficient at Twitter fame, schmoozing businessmen, and coaching a spin class. Her vapid phrasings can be downright inspirational at times . . . as long as you don’t pay attention to what she’s actually saying.

It’s possible that not everyone will engage with Brooke in the same adversary way that I did. Like Tracy (who Brooke deems “Baby Tracy”) it’s feasible that some audiences could fall for her surface charms. It seems like no mistake to me, though, that the more Tracy imitates Brooke, the less unique & likable she becomes as a protagonist. In a lot of ways her newfound confidence turns her into an insufferable jerk & a bully. Also amplifying this feeling is the vibrant 80s synth soundtrack, which always feels like it’s building to a significant breakthrough moment that it never actually reaches. In so many ways, this echoes Brooke’s entire, vapid existence. She thinks that she’s the star of the show (and life is certainly nothing if not a staged production in her case), but she’s actually the butt of its cruel joke.

Mistress America pulls an incredible trick of not only exposing that fragile emptiness behind Brooke’s Everything Is Perfect & So Am I façade, but also making you feel sort of bad for her when the illusion crumbles. Like Tracy, we want to believe that someone so free & so in tune with The Ways of the Universe could actually exist, but by the end of the film you’re left with the feeling that the very idea of someone living that impossible lie on a daily basis is not only far from admirable, it’s also deeply sad. Brooke is the kind of person you’d love to talk to at a party & someone you could have a general sense of concern about, but not a presence you’d want to connect with on any intimate level. She’s far too fleeting & brutally egotistical for that & Mistress America has an emotional bodycount to prove it. Like with a lot of Baumbach’s work, it’s the kind of film that makes you feel truly awful for laughing, a conflicting sensation I personally enjoy very much.

-Brandon Ledet

Erotica (1961)

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After the somewhat labored narratives of his first two nudie cutie films, The Immoral Mr. Teas and Eve & The Handyman, Russ Meyer stripped away a few layers of narrative pretense for his third feature, Erotica. A series of ostensibly erotic vignettes, Erotica is little more than a loosely connected series of in-motion pin-up shoots strung together to reach a feature length (barely more than an hour, all things told). After the mundane & oddly nudity-light slightness of Eve & The Handyman, however, Erotica‘s loose anthology of naked girls & disorienting narration set-ups feel like a godsend. Just as the narrator of Mr. Teas hilariously droned on about such non sequiturs as the absurdities of modern life & the history of bathing while the screen was filled with the film’s true main attraction (bare breasts), Erotica‘s vignettes are each nudity-filled exercises in dissonance, establishing a strange contrast between the images on display & the completely besides the point narration (provided by Jack Moran, who would later write one of Meyer’s undeniable classics, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) that compliment them.

The wraparound

The segment that binds this loose anthology is a self-reflective piece about the production of nudie cuties in general. In Erotica‘s opening minutes Moran rambles on about how a film evolves from an idea to an outline to a treatment to a shooting script until, eventually, “projectors explode their images across the movie screens of America.” Posing the nudie cutie to follow as a series of “intimate, moving portraits of women […] made by adults, for adults”, Erotica bends over backwards to remind you that it is but a simple, entertaining diversion that amounts to “one hour, a very small segment of the day”. In other words, don’t get your hopes up for anything too significant.

“Naked Innocence”

Perhaps the least disorienting of the film’s five segments, “Naked Innocence” makes the brave decision to actually match the off-screen narration to the action on display. A woman explains that she was, more or less, just too damned horny & tired of being stared at by strange men on city streets so she retreated to the woods to calm down. Stripping nude & enjoying an impromptu tanning session & nude dip in a stream, our narrator starts to muse about how even Nature is trying to seduce her. She describes the Sun as a “hot, burning eye probing my bareness” & the feeling of water on skin like “many hands moving against you.” Originally escaping city life to avoid the oppressive male gaze, she discovers that even in Nature she is not safe from salacious oggling. If nothing else, this is a much stranger idea than anything you’d encounter in Mr. Teas or The Handyman, but at the same time all three properties really don’t amount to much more than a reason to gawk at naked women, the very thing this character is trying to escape.

“Beauties, Bubbles”

The second vignette keeps the first’s weirdness improbably rolling with an even stranger idea. Upping the on-screen nudity from not one, but three beauties, “Beauties, Bubbles” depicts a trio of nude models bathing each other in a swimming pool in what, without the narration, could’ve just have easily been titled “Boobs, Boobies”. As with the first segment, it’s the narration that makes the accompanying images so odd. As the girls bathe each other using swimming pools, trash cans, and army helmets full of soapy water (sometimes in the pastel voids that populate Meyer’s other nudie cuties), an offscreen East Coast plumber poses the segment as a PSA to help promote the act of daily bathing in hopes of boosting work for plumbers in general. There’s a goofy dissonance between the plummer’s nonsensical words & the pin-ups in motion imagery at here that’s enjoyably disorienting . . . when it’s not testing your patience.

“The Bare & The Bear”

Speaking of testing your patience, the exact same format from the plummer’s segment is repeated in “The Bare & The Bear”. There’s only one mild variation: instead of promoting bathing, this segment is promoting the sales of bearskins by, how else, showing a nude model wearing nothing but a bearskin intercut with images of real life bears. It’s a very strange sensation to flip back & forth from monstrous bears to a woman rolling around in the nude, especially once the narrator goes off on tangents about “beatniks & coffee drinkin’,” but back to back with the plumber segment the weight of the film’s mercifully short runtime becomes a little laborious.

“Nudists on the High Seas!”

Continuing the diminishing returns of the film’s segments, a narrator drones on about “damsel deckhands” & the history of women being excluded from sailing as the titular “Nudists on the High Seas” sun their nude selves of the deck of a sailboat. It’s nothing much to speak of.

“The Nymphs”

Seemingly becoming bored with itself, Erotica completely devolves here. The narration erratically switches from rambling about subjects as varied as botanical gardens, the sex life of the amoeba, and proper card-playing etiquette, the movie just completely falls apart & loses faith in itself in an irreverent & self-referential way as the models combine previous segments’ affinity for bathing & sunbathing into a single incomprehensible vignette.

“Bikini Busters!”

Falling apart even further, Erotica concludes with a chaotic segment about the history of the bikini. In the only segment to approach the purple prose absurdity of the “Naked Innocence” opener, “Bikini Busters!” features this insane thought: “This is a bathing suit. And this is a girl. Separately these are both in a sense aesthetic, appealing, but together a certain chemistry takes place & the living compliments the inanimate.” “Bikini Busters!” is deliciously empty work that features not only Meyer’s affinity for visually comparing a well-built woman to a well-built steel structure, but it also calls back to both the half-hearted disgust with the male gaze of the first segment (this time featuring the only on-screen men of the film, all ogglers) & the self-referential musings about the nature of the nudie cutie in the wraparound segment, making direct nods to the two Meyer pictures that precede Erotica by displaying their advertisements poolside. “Bikini Busters!” follows the history of the bathing suit from the time the biblical Eve first covered herself with a leaf through a possible future of space-age pasties, a very silly & improbable endeavour that I doubt was well-researched.

By the time an over-excited Russ Meyer (presumably playing himself) falls into a swimming pool trying to film the nude models on display & breaks his (amusingly fake-looking) camera at the end of “Bikini Busters!” Erotica reveals itself as what it truly is: a light romp without too much of anything on its mind outside of bare breasts & cheap jokes. It’s neither the height nor the depth of Meyer’s nudie cutie work, but it is occasionally amusing in its narrative dissonance & surprising attacks on the male gaze in its opening & closing segments (considering that the film itself is an act of leering). However, you could easily cut out at least three of the film’s six segments & retain its full range of amusement, which isn’t exactly high praise for an anthology film that barely lasts an hour from front to end.

-Brandon Ledet

Eve & The Handyman (1961)

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Russ Meyer’s goof of a debut film, The Immoral Mr. Teas, made the future cult cinema giant a filthy pile of money for something that was basically a pin-up picture in motion. Even Meyer himself, usually prone to larger than life arrogance, admitted that Teas was  dumb idea that happened to get lucky due to excellent cultural timing. He once explained to biographer David K. Frasier, “It musn’t come across as some kind of great planning. I did it as I went along. […] Teas was a fluke, an absolute fluke. I had no real idea when I started. All I had was [Bill] Teas, three girls, and my dentist and my attorney for assistants.” Filmed over just a few days with limited resources, Mr. Teas, fluke or not, earned a name for Meyer & established an entire new genre of exploitation film-making: the “nudie cutie” (essentially a mainstream, winking, soft-core version of the stag film). It’s no wonder, then, that Meyer immediately returned to the Mr. Teas format & basically imitated his own creation for his next five features. There are varying levels of quality to Meyer’s Teas-imitating, by-the-numbers nudie cutie pictures, but it’s fairly safe to say that his second feature, Eve & The Handyman, is the worst, most unimaginative one of the bunch.

The titular Eve of this nudie cutie stinker is no other than Eve Meyer, the second (but by no means the last) wife of the film’s pervert director. In his pre-movie career, Russ had a ball photographing his buxom wife in the nude for “glamor magazines” & pin-ups. When it came to committing her body to moving pictures, however, Russ refused to deliver the goods & hides her top model body behind a loose-fitting trench coat for much of the film. The only charm that overlaps with Mr. Teas is in Eve’s off-screen narration (which she reportedly wrote herself, despite Meyer’s “written by” credit at the film’s beginning) which coos vague phrasings like “I’m a big girl in a big town with a big job” as she silently spies on a handyman for reasons that are withheld until the film’s final gag. There’s much less nudity than there was in Mr. Teas (with none contributed by the titular Eve), which means that the strange pastel voids that added a visual flair to most of Russ’ nudie cutie work is mostly absent, save a few isolated scenes. When it comes to the climactic moment that the extended burlesque act has been building to, Eve drops the spy act & removes her trenchcoat, revealing herself to be a “Strump Brushes” salesman hunting down the titular handyman for a business deal. It’s possible that revealing that gag in this review may have spoiled the movie for you uninitiated, but I promise watching it in real time spoils the experience even more.

Eve & The Handyman is, above all, a waste of time. The film starts with an ungodly gag in which a shrill alarm clock rings incessantly despite attempts to turn it off. At first I was turned off by this incessant annoyance, but by the end of the picture I was desperate for the alarm clock to return & make me feel anything at all. The best laugh I got of out of the entire film was the opening credits, in which Russ thoroughly makes sure that you know he produced, directed, wrote, photographed, and edited the picture himself. As for Eve Meyer, she was far from a captivating screen presence here, but her contributions to Russ’ sexploitation work thankfully didn’t stop with this nudie cutie stinker. Eve went on to produce nearly all of Russ’ 1960s films under the moniker Eve Pictures well after the dissolution of their marriage, proving to be extremely useful both in taking financial risks on his batshit insane visions and in nailing down distribution deals & getting deadbeat cinemas to pay up their share. I hope that Eve & The Handyman served as some kind of cherished compensation for all she did for Russ down the line (especially considering how awful he could be to women), because it’s doubtful the film will bring much pleasure to anyone other than Eve herself.

-Brandon Ledet

The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959)

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In more ways than one, The Immoral Mr. Teas is a right place, right time kind of motion picture success. Long before legendary cult movie director & eccentric asshole Russ Meyer set the world on fire with films like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls & Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, he was a combat photographer that found a post-WWII career shooting pin-up models for “glamor magazines”. With nudist camp “exposés” & the high class pornography of Playboy magazine paving the way for mainstream acceptance of nude modeling on film, it was only a matter of time until someone brought nude photography out of underground screenings of stag films to much more visible (not to mention more profitable), conventional cinemas. With The Immoral Mr. Teas, Russ Meyer simply filled a need. While many exploitative sex films of the time heavily moralized & scolded the very salaciousness they depicted in order to sneak pass the censors, The Immoral Mr. Teas combined moving pictures of naked girls with the comedy genre for the first time since the Hays Code first took its chokehold on Hollywood. Although it’s hard to see exactly what the fuss about the relatively tame & decidedly hokey film was in the context of modern sensibilities, Mr. Teas essentially opened the floodgates for playful nudity on film, giving birth to a genre adorably named “the nudie cutie” & fighting many a censorship battle across the country, from which Hollywood would later benefit greatly.

Presented as a sort of comedic documentary on modern living, Mr. Teas only thinly pretends to be anything more than an excuse to display naked breasts. As the only dialogue heard throughout the film is a hilariously overwritten narration, the film’s endless visual gags & gradual stripteasing call to mind both the artforms of vaudeville & burlesque. The titular Mr. Teas, played by Meyers’ war buddy Bill Teas, is a horny, bargain basement version of Charlie Chaplan’s Tramp. Early in the film Teas openly oggles the barely-covered breasts of dental assistants & barkeeps in a leering way that well earns his “immoral” moniker in the film’s title. True to burlesque fashion, Meyer’s camera gradually reveals more & more female skin as the nudity escalates. What starts with cleavage escalates to a leg being bared to a pin-up photo shoot on the beach (as a nod to Meyer’s profession/passion) where breasts are cleverly obscured from the audience behind objects like a well-placed elbow or a camera. After a loosely defined incident at the dentist that leaves Teas magically altered by Novocaine, our peeping tom protagonist is suddenly struck by intense reveries that overrides his mind with hallucinations of every woman he meets in the nude, giving birth to the “nudie cutie” picture. At this point, the narration fades a great deal, leaving us alone with a shrill, accordion-heavy soundtrack & what will eventually become Meyer’s onscreen calling cards: insane editing choices & strikingly large breasts.

Although lighthearted nudity in motion obviously doesn’t hold the same shock value today that it would’ve fifty-six years ago, there’s plenty of jarring weirdness to The Immoral Mr, Teas that makes it worthwhile as a cultural relic. Much of the charm is dependent on the overreaching narration, which adds a level of snarky commentary on the absurdities of modern living that feels very much in tune to the early works of (my favorite band of all time) DEVO. Much like the gradual escalation of nudity, the narration ratchets up its absurdity over time. It starts by contrasting the calming nature of rocks & trees to the much more constricting traffic, pills, and tight underwear of modern man, but eventually gives way to over-the-top, Criswell-esque statements like “Modern man must, in the course of his endeavors, always keep his eyes on the future. For who knows how the windy zephyrs of fate may twist & cross two lives?” & “And so ends another day, another seeming eternity in the complex scheme of things.” I think the best laugh I got from the entire film was when the off-screen narrator, voiced by Edward J. Lasko, droned about photosynthesis, the density of water, famous discoveries made by sea, and the history of bathing all to justify Teas peeping on women as they skinny dip. It’s a ridiculous, disorienting moment & a tactic that Meyer will repeat several times in his five redundant nudie cuties that immediately followed Mr. Teas.

In addition to the film’s historical significance & ludicrous narration, Mr. Teas is also an early glimpse into the visual weirdness Meyer would eventually push to absurd extremes in Faster, Pussycat & Beyond the Valley. His odd Dutch angles, rapid cuts of mechanical equipment & ample bussoms, and general sense of feverish horndoggery are all present in the film, just on a smaller scale. In order to avoid having the film’s shoots shut down for indecency, he also filmed all of Teas’ hallucinations indoors, placing the film’s naked women in these strange pastel-colored voids that feel like they exist outside of space & time. It’s a genuinely strange touch that, like the besides-the-point narration, would be repeated incessantly in his five nudie cutie follow-ups to Teas. You can tell that Meyer had a ball filming & editing his first foray into motion pictures & it’s no coincidence that the director’s cameo in the film is as a rowdy strip club patron shouting emphatically at a burlesque dancer. The Immoral Mr. Teas is nowhere near the heights (or the depths, honestly) of where Meyer’s career would eventually go, but it is an appropriately silly start for a man whose passion was making movies about large breasts.

-Brandon Ledet