brandon ledet

Inside Out (2015)

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fourstar

I’m not usually one to give in to the charms of computer animation, which usually makes me feel like an outsider on a lot of Pixar’s output. The almost-universally loved animation studio has been running strong since the release of the first Toy Story movie in 1995. That means that after 20 years of animated feature dominance, Pixar now has two generations of children & young adults that have only known a life where the studio is on top, churning out the most well-received children’s media on the market. As a devotee to traditional, hand-drawn animation I sometimes miss out on the studio’s milestones, harboring lukewarm-at-best feelings about beloved titles like The Incredibles & WALL-E, having no patience at all for more dire properties like Brave & Finding Nemo (sorry, y’all), and having to shamefully admit that I haven’t even yet bothered with a few titles that I might actually like once I give them a chance, such as Up & Ratatouille. When the studio is on point it establishes a really vital connection with an enormous, diverse audience, which is a super cool thing for an animation studio to be able to accomplish these days, but I often feel like I miss out on that connection due to personal (and honestly, superficial) tastes regarding the movies’ visual format.

I don’t mean to point out this personal preference to distance myself from the Pixar Is Always Incredible, No Exceptions crowd, but just to provide context for my experience with their fifteenth feature film to date, Inside Out. I approached Inside Out with extreme caution due to reservations I had regarding the film’s ads. The general look of the movie had very little appeal for me (still does) and there were enough eyeroll-worthy moments regarding the difference between the sexes (yawn) that I had very little interest in the film. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that despite those reservations, I still found Inside Out remarkably touching & well-considered. Very similar in intent & execution to the 2007 short Anna & The Moods, Inside Out is a sincerely heartwarming look at the way a child’s psyche is remapped as they transition into young adulthood. While it did lose me on some of the traditional adventure plot trappings Pixar films tend to fall into, its idiosyncratic world-building that depicts exactly how a brain works & develops is more or less unmatched in media of its caliber.

The story Inside Out tells is bifurcated between the internal & the external (or the inside & the outside if you want to stick to the terminology of the title). As the protagonist Riley, an eleven year old hockey enthusiast anxious about her recent move to San Francisco, struggles to communicate about her newfound anxiety with her parents, her inner emotions scramble to take charge of the unexpected changes in her life in a productive way. The five emotions depicted in Inside Out (Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger) are expertly personified by a perfect cast of voice actors (Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Bill Hader, Mindy Kaling, and Lewis Black, respectively) who bring abstract concepts to life in a vivid, affecting way that everyone from young children to cynical adults can likely connect with. Making the abstract concrete & visible is exactly what Inside Out excels at as it methodically explains why sadness is a necessary emotion that should not be ignored in favor of unbridled joy. Until the still-developing Riley learns to accept sadness as an essential part of her emotional processing, she finds it extremely difficult to adjust to her new surroundings. It’s an incredibly important concept for young children to learn & Inside Out does a great job of framing the revelation in a traditional adventure story that is likely to be able to hold onto young attention spans for its entire 94min running time.

As stated, I didn’t completely buy everything Inside Out was selling. There’s no doubt in my mind that the film would’ve been more visually engaging if it were animated by hand, the adventure plot didn’t always metaphorically make sense, and there were uncomfortably gendered glimpses into minds outside of Riley’s (for instance her father’s psyche is controlled by anger while her mother’s is ruled by sadness), etc. However, these all feel like minor quibbles in view of what the film does right. The way Inside Out visualizes abstract thoughts like memories, angst, imagination, acceptance, and abstract thought itself is incredibly intricate & well considered. Its central message of the importance of sadness in well-rounded emotional growth is not only admirable, but downright necessary for kids to experience. Even if I downright hated the film’s visual aesthetic (I didn’t; it was just okay), I’d still have to concede that its intent & its world-building were top notch in the context of children’s media. As I’ve (hopefully) made abundantly clear, I’m far from a Pixar expert, but I’m confident it’s safe to say it’s the best film the studio has produced in the last five years, making it their best of the decade so far.

-Brandon Ledet

Dope (2015)

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threehalfstar

If you’ve seen the ads for Dope, it’d be forgivable if you mistakenly assumed the film was set in the early 90s. Very much conscious of its use of that visual palette, Dope is smart to declare itself set in 2015 from the get go, opening the film with the protagonist Malcolm explaining to his mother how Bitcoins work. For every 90s-soaked skateboard, flat top hairdo, and A Tribe Called Quest music cue, Dope also features references to memes, smart phones, and online black markets, presumably so you don’t lose track of exactly when the film is set. The reason for all the 90s cultural markers is fairly straight-forward: it’s been long enough that the era has been deemed vintage cool, at least by the three high school geek main characters. Of course, since they were but young pups during the 90s, their understanding of the era is flimsy at best, as hilariously skewered by A$AP Rocky (making his acting debut here) within the film in his role as Dom, a drug dealer who sets the plot’s wheels in motion, in one of the movie’s more amusing & self-aware exchanges.

Dope is the coming-of-age story of three high school geeks who are used to pursuing good grades unexpectedly getting suckered into selling drugs. Set in a neighborhood called “The Bottoms”, a particularly rough area of Inglewood, CA, the protagonists are basically just trying to survive. Of course, because they are teenagers, they’re also trying to look cool & get laid, which complicates the task at hand at nearly every turn. Dope has a lot to say about racial identity, social inequality, and teen sexuality, but at its heart it’s really just a sweet story about three awkward high school students finding themselves having to grow up very quickly (due to a misplaced hand gun & an enormous bag of drugs). The movie doesn’t get everything right in the details (the trio’s “punk band” plays songs hilariously over-produced by Pharrell), but it’s mostly on point in capturing a very specific cultural subset that’s never received the big screen treatment before.

Watching Dope, I was reminded of my experience with Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, except with the manga & video game references swapped out for 90s hip-hop. I enjoyed the film, but like with Scott Pilgrim. I’m certain that a very specific target audience of younger folks are going to latch onto it much, much more enthusiastically than I ever could. There’s no doubt in my mind that this is going to be someone out there’s favorite film, if nothing else because they’ve never seen themselves represented on the screen before. Where I see a fairly funny, vibrantly shot high school movie with wonderfully eccentric moments & a killer soundtrack (the Pharrell songs excluded), I expect someone else will see The Greatest Movie of All Times Forever.  Even if that’s all the movie accomplishes, that’s still pretty dope.

-Brandon Ledet

Spy (2015)

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fourstar

The absurdist genre-spoof comedy that hit its apex with cult classics like ZAZ’s Airplane & Top Secret has sadly become a dying art in recent years. Titles like Not Another Disaster Movie & Scary Movie 19 have tarnished the genre’s cultural cachet and more or less reduced its target audience to twelve year old boys who are emotionally stunted even for twelve year old boys. There have been a couple great exceptions in the past decade that give me hope for the genre’s future, though. The Judd Apatow comedy Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, while posed as a spoof of the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, was a brilliant take-down of the entire biopic genre. Walk Hard somehow included every single biopic cliché & American genre of music into one silly, but intellectually extensive spoof. The Will Forte vehicle MacGruber did more or less the same thing with the violent action flick genre that saw its heyday in the 1980s. The difference is that instead of limiting itself to brilliant send-ups of films like Commando & Cobra, MacGruber went a step further and created one of the most vile, pathetic protagonists in all of cinema. Both Walk Hard & MacGruber breathed fresh air into the genre-spoof, but they’re just two titles in a sea of bad examples.

After a single viewing of Spy at the theater, I’m already confident enough to include it along with Walk Hard & MacGruber on the list of the best spoof movies of the past decade. Sure, the James Bond international spy genre has been spoofed before in movies like Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Casino Royale (1967), and Our Man Flint, but Spy distinguishes itself from its predecessors by feeling distinctly modern. There’s a self-aware, crass irreverence to the film that feels distinctly 2015. Although it’s riffing on an entirely different genre, Spy is very much in the vein of MacGruber more than it is in the very 90s Austin Powers. Besides the general crassness of its script & general improv-enhanced vibe of its sense of humor, Spy also continues MacGruber’s undermining of alpha male action movie types that turns the typical hero (this time as a frivolous side character hilariously played by Jason Statham as opposed to MacGruber’s central protagonist) into vile worms of the lowest order. As Statham’s misogynist prick brags to the main character that he is immune to 179 varieties of poison & can water-ski blindfolded, it’s easy to see how an exact MacGruber successor would’ve been born if he was the central character, but Spy is smart to leave him sidelined while the more morally-palatable, but just as crass Melissa McCarthy serves as a much more relatable audience surrogate.

McCarthy hit her creative peak for me last year with the goofy road trip comedy Tammy, which felt like a wonderful culmination of everything she’s been building towards since Paul Feig’s breakout comedy Bridesmaids. Feig, who also worked with McCarthy on the similarly crass buddy cop comedy The Heat, finds an entirely new kind of role for her to play in Spy. In Tammy, McCarthy was a complete mess, more raccoon than human in her thoughtless pursuit of laze-about surface pleasures. While I found that character incredibly charming, she was a far cry from the in-over-her-head every-woman McCarthy plays so well in Spy. There are flashes of Tammy’s feral nature in Spy, but they’re dialed back enough to allow McCarthy to shine though as a relatable human being. With Spy, Feig has not only created a modern classic in genre spoofery, but also helped to open a door for an incredibly talented comedic actress who’s more or less hit a typecasting wall she hasn’t been able to sidestep since her wonderful turn on Gilmore Girls nearly a decade ago. Let’s hope he can keep the productive streak going when he works with her on their fourth film in a row together, the all-female cast Ghostbusters reboot.

-Brandon Ledet

The CrazySexyCool World of TLC Cinema

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I was recently presented with a question that I never expected to be asked: “Would you be interested in free tickets to see New Kids on the Block, TLC, and Nelly in concert?” As far as surprise concert tickets go, this event felt particularly odd because I couldn’t piece together exactly why these three acts would be touring together. They’re all coasting on nostalgia at this point, sure, but their heydays were all entrenched in separate decades. Having been an impressionable youth in the 90s, TLC was the most exciting act on the roster for me. If I were born a decade earlier it would’ve been NKOTB; a decade later & it would’ve been Nelly. While TLC didn’t put on the most spectacular show out of the three (that honor belongs to the surreally over-the-top NKOTB performance, another story for another day) they did touch on very emotional pleasure zones of my brain, unlocking a forgotten past of obsessively listening to the album CrazySexyCool for the majority of 1995 & beyond.

The strangest thing of all about TLC’s appearance on the concert bill and, naturally, their set itself was the absence of their deceased member Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes. Far from a dutiful background singer, Left Eye was one of the group’s strongest voices, a hip-hop vocalist that dominated their earliest effort Ooooooohhh…On The TLC Tip and helped distinguish their later records from more one-dimensional R&B fare. Left Eye’s death raised some questions about how TLC would continue to tour in her wake. Would they replace Lopes with another rapper to mime her contributions, karaoke style? Would they just skip her verses entirely? The answer happened to be neither option. Instead of altering Left Eye’s contributions, the group simply played her verses through the sound system, with her words & image displayed on a screen above the stage. It was the most tasteful option possible, for sure, and one I’m glad that they ultimately pursued.

In the days before the concert, I decided to get myself psyched up by watching the few TLC movies available for the world. It turns out that all three pieces of TLC media I uncovered were produced by VH1. In tone, they ranged from lovingly sentimental to grotesquely exploitative, each one’s good will surviving on their treatment of Left Eye’s life & death. In their three TLC movies, VH1 alternates between abusive & loving, not sure how to reconcile its own feelings on the group. I had a similarly complicated relationship with the details of their legacy, both wanting to know the grisly details of Left Eye’s untimely demise and wishing that she’d just respectively be allowed to be remembered for  how she lived, as TLC’s surviving members T-Boz & Chilli allow her to be in concert.

CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story (2013)
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The most recent entry of TLC Cinema also happens to be the best & most comprehensive. A made-for-TV (VH1’s still on TV, right?) biopic about the group, CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story is about as trite & by-the-books as a TLC movie could possibly be. Assuming you have a tolerance for made-for-TV biopics, CrazySexyCool (much like the album of the same name does for their music) defines the heights of where TLC cinema can go as a genre. Posed as a rags-to-riches story that follows the three budding starlets from humble Atlanta beginnings to international stardom, the film relies on constant narration from actresses portraying all three group members, offering the story as not the Official Truth, but with the framing “Here’s what I remember . . .”

The movie is heavily concerned with establishing the respective personalities of each group member. For short-hand: Left Eye is crazy, Chilli is sexy, and T-Boz is cool. In the film, T-Boz is posed as the group’s most aggressive member, standing up to the men in her musical scene & fretting over being reduced to being in a “girl group.” Chilli is locked in an extended, tumultuous affair with a record producer. Left Eye is a free spirit who begins her career rapping on sidewalks for tips, muses about how when she was a little girl all she wanted to do was to “be in the jungle with animals and just be free,” and dreams about taking the group’s aesthetic into the futuristic territory they eventually sought on the album FainMail (as epitomized in the music video for “Scrubs”). Although the real-life Left Eye was not around to tell her third of the story, the film is smart to portray her as a real person instead of an angel. It doesn’t glaze over petty conflicts she had with the group or the more infamous instances of her romantic conflicts (including the one where she accidentally burned down a mansion).

Although CrazySexyCool hits every possible biopic cliché within reach, including the classic hearing-your-song-on-the-radio-for-first-time freakout, it still manages to find ways to feel cool in its own authentic way.  The 90s fashions on display here are pure gold, especially in an early scene set at an Atlanta roller rink. There’s also a thorough breakdown of how a pop group can sell millions of records and still be in debt, a sequence involving a veritable girl gang breaking into a record label’s office to take back what’s theirs, and an aggressive feminist bent in statements like “Safe sex: that’s our message, okay? We’re girls that stand up for ourselves.” It’s not all hunky-dory, though. A particularly regressive scene that depicts an abortion as The Worst Thing That’s Ever Happened was a nice reminder of why films like Obvious Child are still refreshing & necessary. Despite its strict adherence to genre & brief foray into pro-life politics, however, CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story was a surprisingly enjoyable watch, a must-see for fans of the pop group. Its seamless inclusion of real-life music video & crowd footage, tasteful depiction of Left Eye’s death & aftermath, and overly sentimental statements like “Every single one of our songs came from the heart. The love we had & the loss we went through: those songs told our stories. For real,” all ended up winning me over, despite genre-specific reservations.

Behind The Music: “TLC” (1999)
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While the documentary series Behind The Music isn’t typically known for good taste, it’s still surprising that the same television network that produced such a loving portrait of TLC with the CrazySexyCool biopic was once so mean & exploitative about their career’s pitfalls. The Behind The Music episode hits a lot of the same Wikipedia bullet points as the biopic, as to be expected, but without any of the film’s tenderness. The 1999 special aired around the financial success of FanMail & looked back at the group’s bankruptcy, label disputes, and mansion burning as points of interest. A later, “remastered” version of the episode was released to update their story with Left Eye’s passing. The original 1999 airing is highly recommended, as it not only features more in-depth interviews with the group’s estranged manager Pebbles (who was publicly spanked in the biopic), but also just shamelessly rips into Left Eye’s mansion incident with phrases like “sickness, arson, and bankruptcy”, “TLC was almost reduced to ash when one of their own exploded in a fit of rage. The blaze turned up the heat on TLC’s red hot career,” and, I swear to God, “TLC burned up the charts and Lisa Lopes burned down the house.”

There’s some new information to be found in the Behind The Music episode that wasn’t covered in the biopic, like a second teddy bear fire that caused a lot less damage & some really cute baby photos, but for the most part CrazySexyCool makes the whole affair feel redundant. Left Eye’s math lesson about how a successful group can owe their record label money, an anecdote about how a rainbow inspired the rap verse in “Waterfalls”, and remembrances of eating “watermelon & popcorn for dinner” as a maker for childhood poverty were all later included in the biopic in much more satisfying ways. The most interesting thing here is just how trashy VH1 can get, despite their later affectionate portrait of the group (and their reality show Totally T-Boz).


The Last Days of Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes (2007)
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If Behind the Music was an experimental dip into trashy territory, The Last Days of Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes just gives up and gobbles the trash with wanton abandon. Part of the VH1 rockDocs series, the exploitative documentary aims to finish a project Left Eye began while still alive by capping it off with grisly images of the scene of her death. As suggested in the CrazySexyCool biopic, Left Eye had a desire when she grew up to be “In the jungle, naked, with friends with animals.” In her Last Days documentary, she documents herself achieving this dream in the jungles of Honduras. Left Eye films herself during her final 26 days of life. She obsessively documents her final trip to Honduras, vowing “I’ll never shut my camera off. The camera will follow me into my dreams.” Because she was so interested in preserving that time of her life on film, it’s difficult to say whether or not VH1 was morally wrong for releasing the film onto the world. There’s an undeniably grotesque feeling to the whole production, though, which is not helped at all by the way the film was completed after her death.

It’s difficult even to say if Left Eye was in the right state of mind to even authorize the release of such footage. The camera acts as a form of therapy, if anything, and the whole affair feels like a private diary of someone losing grip of their mind.  Left Eye found her way to Honduras via Dr. Sebi, a natural healing guru who introduced her to numerology & homeopathic medicine. On this final trip she brought along a girl group she was managing called Egypt, intending to introduce them to Sebi’s spiritual way of life. As she opines, “You’re not just a physical being, okay? You are an entity with an energy source that is responsible for your physical well-being,” and “Day 15, 1 +5 = 6, 6 = love, 6= jealousy, 6 = sexual tyranny” it’s difficult to believe she was recording this trip out of sound mind. There’s just too many personal revelations, like her comparisons of her own mother to Mommie Dearest, her admission that she liked the strictness of rehab because it reminded her of her father, and the rehashing of her experiments with suicidal cutting for the movie to be read as anything but utterly tasteless, something that should’ve remained private.

Outside of some talent show footage of her rapping & dancing as a young teen, a mention of a group called 2nd Nature that she was in before TLC, and the assertion that she was the TLC member that called out the record label for their thievery, there isn’t much new here that feels like we should be privy to. A lot of The Last Days helps sketch out a detailed portrait of who Left Eye was as a person, especially in casual moments where she’s simply drawing or sowing while talking about her past, but it’s not necessarily our business as an audience to be exposed to that side of her. By the time the film is reveling in the actual footage of the car accident that ended her life & photographs of the resulting wreckage, the entire existence of the film feels wrong, spiritually bankrupt. It’s an interesting film, but not in a way that ever justifies its own exploitative existence. I left the film with some engaging questions about how Left Eye’s obsessive return to nature relates to the futuristic aesthetic she reached for with FanMail (as well as her solo album Supernova), but those were ideas that were also touched on in the biopic. And the biopic has the distinct advantage of not exploiting her death to appeal to viewers’ morbid curiosity.

By the time I saw TLC live they had smartly decided not to replace Left Eye or erase her presence. They weren’t always that considerate. A mere three years after their collaborator’s death, T-Boz & Chilli launched a reality show on the now-defunct UPN network called R U the Girl? in an effort to replace their missing member. It took time & wisdom to learn how to continue the group in her absence in a respectful, non-exploitative way. It turns out that this was a struggle that VH1 had to live through as well. By the time they produced the CrazySexyCool biopic, the network had released more or less the perfect TLC movie. Everything else that came before it was on highly questionable moral ground.

-Brandon Ledet

The Secret of Kells (2010)

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threehalfstar

I personally have a very rough time getting accustomed to modern animation’s transition into computer-animated territory. Every time I see an ad for a CG animation, even for positively-received features like the recent Pixar flick Inside Out, I tend to let out a pained groan. There’s a depth of artistry to hand-drawn animation that I just don’t believe translates to its computer generated counterpart. It may be curmudgeony of me to complain about the way things are shifting to the digital spectrum, but I just don’t connect to movies animated that way. It’s more of a matter of personal taste than a choice of critical conviction, but it still remains true.

The Irish animated feature The Secret of Kells did a great job of helping transition CG animation skeptics like myself into the digital realm. While the computer-animated aspects of the film were somewhat flat & uninteresting to me, they were also luxuriously fleshed out by intricate chalk line drawings & geometric framing that made the CGI more visually engaging. Like with classic story book illustrations, a lot of The Secret of Kells’ visual artistry lurks in its borders where expressionistic symbols & shapes are given space to flourish. In this way, the movie finds a fantastic middle ground between tradition and innovation, making the ancient palatable for young tastes while not losing sight of hopeless luddites like myself.

The story told in The Secret of Kells also looks back through Irish tradition & mythology for its inspiration, but rarely manages to match the heights of its visual accomplishments. It’s a simple tale about an impending Viking attack on a settlement run by Irish monks who must choose between protecting their people and preserving their own book-making traditions. Like with the animation, the story is most interesting when it allows itself to flow freely, musing about ancient spirits of the woods, reflecting on the constant struggle of man’s destruction of Nature, and a particularly fantastic tangent in which a house cat named Pangur Bán is transformed into an out-of-body spirit.

There’s an admirable quality to the film’s message about the balance between academia and “real” life, best captured in the exchange “You can’t find out everything from books, you know.” “I think I read that once,” but it’s truly the balance between CG and “real” animation where The Secret of Kells shines brightest. I suspect it was the technical aspects of the animation, not the film’s story, that earned it a nomination for a Best Animated Feature Oscar. Alas, it was a tough crowd to beat that year, since the other features nominated were Pixar’s Up (which won), Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mister Fox, Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, and Laika’s Coraline. Although The Secret of Kells may not have been the best of its peers in a particularly great year for animation, it did accomplish a balance between the old guard & the new that deserves its own accolades. It’s a compromise of forms I’d like to see explored a lot more often.

-Brandon Ledet

My Mistress (2015)

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three star
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One of the most unexpected genre revivals I’ve noticed recently is the return of the 90s style erotic thriller. From major releases like 50 Shades of Grey to trashier fare like The Boy Next Door, there seems to be a veritable resurgence of erotic thriller media. This might be a little disheartening to defenders of good taste & decency, but for cinematic trash dwellers like myself, it’s a godsend. Bring on the expensive-looking echoes of crap that used to play at 2am on Showtime & Cinemax, I say. Bring it on, ya garbage peddlers.

It’s with that attitude that I welcome, without a safe word even, the arrival of My Mistress to Netflix’s Recently Added stockpile. An Australian film that grapples with questions about grief, maternal love, and the therapeutic powers of BDSM play, My Mistress doesn’t quite match the campy heights of fare like The Boy Next Door, but it also doesn’t try to. Although its story about a dominatrix who becomes involved with her teenage neighbor sounds adventurous, the film mostly plays it safe. It’s at heart a pleasant, but low key melodrama about two people who’ve been badly hurt & find solace in each other’s company. This kind of melancholy ambition doesn’t do much for the film’s erotic thriller appeal, admittedly. If it were to be a true addition to the genre one of the two love birds would have to flip out and start threatening to murder the other, but that’s just not the kind of story told here.

That’s not to say that there aren’t trashy elements at play. My Mistress may be hinged on the devastating grief suffered by two lonely souls, but it knows exactly how tawdry the erotic elements of its BDSM subject are. While the movie never gets overly kinky outside a couple whippings, there’s enough leather bullet bras & doggy costumes to give the whole thing a campy undertone. Watching a teen boy try to seduce a grown woman by smoking cigarettes and playing tough with lines like “I’m bad. Really bad. Evil sometimes,” is the kind of playfulness the movie tries to get away with while still dealing full-on with the more tragic plot developments. There’s also some uncomfortable, Oedipal vibes in the contrast between the two central mother-son relationships that the film is smart not to push too hard, but it still adds an extra layer of tawdriness to the affair.

My Mistress is not likely to be a movie that’s going to change anyone’s life. At best, it might help you fill up an afternoon. Its worst fault might be that it somewhat plays into the typical BDSM Folks Just Need to Meet Someone Sweet to Lower Their Defenses triteness you usually encounter in these kinds of films, but that only adds to its trashy charms in some ways. It’s a pleasant movie that finds a way to have it both ways, playing with titillating 90s Skinemax erotica and exploring the sad nuance of romance & grief. I liked the balance it struck, even if it didn’t push its worst impulses into deliciously over-the-top JLo territory.

-Brandon Ledet

Top Five (2014)

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three star
Sometimes a single, ill-advised scene can destroy an entire movie-going experience. There’s such a moment in the (excuse the pun) back end of Chris Rock’s magnum opus Top Five that involves hot sauce, a tampon, and a butthole. Without getting any further into the particulars, the scene begins with moderately cringe-worthy views on bisexuality & heterosexual prostate play that then veer into vile, regressive, homophobic territory almost immediately. In a dumb Farrelly Brothers comedy from over a decade ago the scene might be somewhat excusable or at least easy to ignore. In 2015, however, it just sours what was otherwise the most impressive work of Rock’s career so far.

What hurts so much about Top Five’s brief foray into casual homophobia (besides the hot sauce) is that the movie that surrounds it is so smart & so funny. Even once the sting of the horrendous gay gag wears off, there’s still an underlying sense of “they really should’ve known better” hanging in the air.  The rest of the film does a lot to cover up this ugly blemish, though. The movie’s single-day structure & use of flashbacks & interviews to piece together ideas about racial identity, sobriety, the nature of stand-up comedy, the highs & lows of fame, and the vulnerability of falling in love is a refreshing turn for a comedian whose talents have always been far too pronounced to be reduced to roles in dire films like Down to Earth & Grown Ups 2. Chris Rock wrote, directed, and headlined Top Five and you can really tell his heart was in this one. It’s the clearest his own voice has been outside of his stand-up specials & acclaimed sketch comedy show. That’s why it sucks so much that a single gag is its Achilles heel.

Of course, Rock has always been a button-pusher & there are bound to be people who can willfully overlook or even take pleasure in the regressive moment that soured the film for me. There’s certainly a lot to love. From the Hammy the Bear action-comedy spoofs to the beautiful image of Jerry Seinfeld making it rain inside of a NYC strip club, Top Five is packed to the gills with smart comedy writing and occasional gut-busting one-liners. The film itself even struggles with whether or not a movie’s surface pleasures can be overwhelmed by its political implications, supposing that “Sometimes a movie is just a movie,” a sentiment that is later countered with “It’s never just a movie.” Somehow, though, this level of self-awareness just makes its misstep hurt even worse.

I liked a lot of Top Five. The chemistry between Rock & co-star Rosario Dawson was lovely, the script was both intricate & refreshingly loose, the meta-text of Rock’s protagonist’s struggle with art & entertainment was on-point, the sequence where Rock’s protagonist bottoms out in Houston was gleefully dark, etc. It’s just a shame that a two minute sequence was enough to knock the whole thing down from Fantastic! to Pretty Okay for me. I guess I ended up siding with the “It’s never just a movie.” argument, a position I’m honestly not used to taking. It’s just difficult to ignore a fault so stupid in a film this smart. Also, after a long life of unhealthy Southern living, I’ve been accustomed to hot sauce being a trustworthy companion, a best friend, a culinary guiding light. It’s never been used to burn me so harshly before. That’s another offence worth getting chafed over, I assure you.

-Brandon Ledet

I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story (2015)

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Although he’s enjoyed a daily, masterful presence on television for over four decades now, Caroll Spinney is not a name or a face most people would recognize. With his quiet, reclusive demeanor & truly awful Prince Valiant haircut, Spinney hardly casts the image of a living legend, but his humbly dorky looks are entirely deceiving. As depicted in the profile documentary I Am Big Bird, it’s only when he transforms into the characters Big Bird & Oscar the Grouch on the children’s television program Sesame Street that Spinney’s true, wonderful self comes to light. There’s something magical hidden in those gigantic, yellow & tiny, green costumes that release Spinney’s inner child (& hopeless grump) and allow him to be himself in an extroverted way that he cannot even attempt out of costume. Part of what makes Jim Henson’s muppets so special in comparison to other puppet media is that they legitimately feel like real people. What’s special about Spinney’s relationship with the muppets he operates is that they also make him feel like a real person.

Instead of solely asking the I Was There, Man types in Spinney’s life to talk about how great he is, I Am Big Bird also digs into exactly why its subject is so hermetic. Since his dedication to puppetry dates back to his formative years and his first name happens to be Caroll, Spinney suffered abuse from his childhood peers in which he was subjected to homophobic slurs and asked questions like, “Oh Carroll, are you playing with your dolls?” The abuse persisted in his home life, where his doting mother could do little to compensate for the explosive, violent treatment he received from a father who also disapproved of his artistry. As an adult, Spinney continued to struggle to connect with others. On the Sesame Street set he felt like an outsider, struggling to connect with Jim Henson as a friend & a equal, because of his overwhelming sense of awe that tinged their relationship (can’t blame him there). When he had to deal with romantic, self-worth, and suicidal crises on the set, he had essentially no one close to turn to and would sometimes weep while wearing the Big Bird suit, a thought that will haunt me forever. Today, Spinney is a happily married man who’s proud of his life’s work and the legend he will leave behind, but it was not an easy journey for him. In countless ways, Big Bird & Oscar saved his life.

Although it’s Spinney’s emotional turmoil that anchors I Am Big Bird, the documentary also makes time to deliver a lot of behind-the-scenes information on Big Bird’s & Sesame Street’s history. There’s some insight into how Spinney operates the suit, who will take the reins once he retires, and anecdotes about the feature films & live tours of the show’s past. When Spinney was young he wanted to do something “important” with puppets and it’s a miracle that he found a home on Sesame Street, posed here as a researched educational experiment that has no doubt changed countless lives for the better since its premier in the idealist times of 1969. The story of Caroll Spinney’s career as Big Bird & Oscar the Grouch is extensive & populated with big personalities like Jim Henson’s & Frank Oz’s, but what I enjoyed most about I Am Big Bird is that it looks past the typical Wikipedia bullet points a lot of profile docs would stick to. It instead digs deeper to expose a very sensitive soul the world usually doesn’t get privy to under all of that green & yellow felt & feathers.

-Brandon Ledet

 

Berberian Sound Studio’s (2013) Sound-Obsessed Roots in Blow Out (1981)

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During our Swampchat discussion of June’s Movie of the Month, the Brian De Palma political thriller Blow Out, I pointed out that “Blow Out is in some ways a movie about making movies, but more specifically it’s a movie about how essential sound is to film. It boils the medium down to one of its more intangible elements. In that way it’s much more unique than a lot of other movies about movies, arriving more than three decades before the film it most closely resembles in this approach (that I can recall, anyway), Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio.” The entire time I was watching Blow Out I was aching to revisit Peter Strickland’s oddly engaging Berberian Sound Studio to see how the two films compare. It turns out that while Blow Out distills the process of making movies into a single element, recording sound, Berberian Sound Studio breaks it down even further until there is nothing left. De Palma used sound recording as an anchoring element for a story that had great impact outside the world of film-making, a world tainted by serial murders & political intrigue. Strickland’s film, on the other hand, rarely allowed the audience to leave the recording booth & gets lost in its own sound-obsession.

Although they are working within separate genres with their own respective aims & are separated by three decades of film-making, it’s not at all difficult to draw a connection between the two works. First of all, they’re connected by their basic movie-within-a-movie structure. In Blow Out, Travolta’s sound technician protagonist is working on a cheap slasher film for which he cannot find an actress with the perfect scream to match a brutal shower stabbing. When asked if he ever works on good films, Travolta responds “No, just bad ones.” The befuddled sound technician in Berberian (expertly played by character actor Tobey Jones), on the other hand, is hired for an Itallian giallo film called The Equestrian Vortex that also gradually proves itself to be a tawdry, violent horror film (although the director insists they’re making art). We’ve explored the giallo lineage of slasher films before in our discussions of former Movie of the Month Blood & Black Lace, but the connection is rarely as clear as it is in the comparison here. While Travolta is looking for a single scream to accompany his cheap slasher movie (when he’s not investigating assassinations in his free time), Berberian Sound Studio depicts countless micro-searches for the exact same thing. The exact sound of a neck being sliced or a witch’s hair being yanked from the scalp or even the standard damsel’s death rattle are all meticulously sought after here. Berberian depicts a wizardly crew of demented Gallaghers smashing melons, pulling turnip roots, and tormenting actresses to capture the perfect sounds for what amounts to a slightly artier version of the trash that Travolta’s is mindlessly cranking out in Blow Out.

However, as stated, the films do have disparate aims for their respective sound obsessions. Blow Out uses sound as a doorway to a world outside the recording booth. It’s a dangerous world, but it’s an exterior one where big, important things are happening. Berberian Sound Studio, in contrast, becomes psychedelically insular. It not only gets lost in the recording booth, but also in the idea of sound itself. There’s so much horror & dissociation in the sound techniques employed in the film that it reaches an otherworldly state of mind that mimics the broken psyche of Bergman’s Persona just as much as anything it echoes from De Palma’s film. When you watch Berberian on Netflix with the closed captions enabled, the screen is filled with ludicrously long lists of sound descriptions desperately trying to keep up with every aural element in play. Early in the film a character ominously warns/promises, “A new world of sound awaits you. A world that requires all your magic powers.” It’s doubtful that the protagonist or most of the audience took him as literally as he meant it, but Berberian really is a lot more interested in the magic of sound than the more technically-minded Blow Out.

If I had to boil down the difference between the two films, I’d simply point out that Travolta’s protagonist spends most of his run time trying to piece together a crime scene & to capture a maniac killer, while Jones’ character is trying to get reimbursed for an airline ticket & to hold onto his basic sanity. De Palma’s approach weaponized sound to strengthen his political thriller’s arsenal. For Strickland, sound wasn’t a powerful tool; it was the entire point. The movies do share an impressive amount  of overlap, though, especially in Blow Out’s early, growling winds & in both film’s audiophile obsession with analog equipment. It’s difficult to imagine either film could be set in 2015 without being changed drastically. It’s doubtful that either film would mean much of anything once digital equipment removed a lot of the incidental sound from recording booths. The clacking & whirring of film projectors and tape recorders are essentially the two films’ lifeblood. Even the sound of the instruments that capture & display images are essential to cinema in these two films’ worldview. That’s the kind of synesthesia we’re working with here: there’s a sound even to the imagery. Blow Out just happens to use this attention to sound to open a door, while Berberian chooses to lock itself in the dark & swallow the key. They’re both overwhelmingly successful in their respective endeavors.

For more on June’s Movie of the Month, 1981’s Blow Out, visit last week’s Swampchat on the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Hits (2015)

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Earlier this year, when I was complaining about the Academy Awards’ most recent Best Picture winner (Birdman), as people often do, I said “Pitch black misanthropy has worked for comedies like Happiness & Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the past, but those movies are also, you know, funny. When a film hates all of humanity and only roughly 20% of its jokes land, it’s a remarkably dire experience. Just ask That’s My Boy or Nothing but Trouble. […] If you’re going to believe yourself to be above everyone & everything, you probably should at least succeed in the most basic requirements of your genre.” I still believe that to be true, but my resolve on the subject was somewhat tested by cult comedian David Cross’ directorial debut Hits. Hits was just as misanthropic as Birdman, lashing out at so many different kinds of people that there was seemingly no one left that it didn’t hate, but it was at least occasionally funny, something I didn’t find while watching Birdman. I’m not sure how to consolidate those two reactions & the resulting experience was more discomfort than anything.

“Based on a true story that hasn’t happened yet,” Hits employs a hugely talented cast (including Matt Walsh, David Koechner, Amy Sedaris, and Michael Cera) to attack basically everyone living in America. From right wing, small town yokels who drive big trucks & dream of being interviewed by Ellen Degeneris to mushy, liberal big city “citiots” who sell “feminist theory onesies” & artisanal cardboard, Hits hates everyone. It’s a scathing view of modern American culture where small town men are macho Tea Party dolts, big city liberals are effeminate hipsters, and women are obsessed with conceiving children or selling a sex tape as a means to become famous. Everything is scathing in Hits, but the film can be occasionally funny in its way. How can it not be? There’s too much comedic talent involved for all of the jokes to fall flat. It’s just hard to shake the feeling that the whole thing is hopelessly mean. For example, when a talentless white rapper is embarrassed by his peers (and then the world at large) on YouTube, the movie asks you to laugh. Instead, I felt bad for a teenager being bullied online. Maybe I’ve taken the anti-online bullying sentiment of The DUFF & Unfriended a little too close to heart. Or maybe I’m just not the bitter, hateful person Hits wants me to be.

I think the main problem with Hits’ hateful humor is that no one in the film ever seems even remotely like a real person. The idea of parodying modern Americans’ thirst for Internet fame could play well for black comedy, but when everything feels as fake and two dimensional as it does here, the idea just comes off as cheaply mean. What David Cross loses sight of in Hits is that every personality type depicted in the film, from bleeding heart liberals to secretly racist small town yokels, are actually real people. There’s no humanity in this hateful worldview . . . just hate. Sometimes its hate can be amusing, but without any sign that there’s anything worth being positive about in the world, and with the idea that everything is hopeless & cheap, Hits fails to mean much of anything. Instead, “like a wounded animal, it lashes out at every target within reach.” Even though it’s a lot less expensive & visually ambitious, Hits has what I’ll probably refer to as Birdman Syndrome from now on. The two films have very little in common structurally, but it’s easy to imagine them bitterly complaining to one another in a late night barroom about how the world has gone to shit. Hits just has the slight advantage of being the funnier of the vitriolic pair.

-Brandon Ledet