brandon ledet

The Duke of Burgundy (2015)

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It’s difficult to explain in print exactly why, but Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy may be the most uncommercial film about a BDSM-leaning lesbian relationship possible. Although Strickland’s film has sensuality to spare, it deliberately strays from being exploitative, choosing to explore the central couple’s universally relatable struggles with selflessness & compromise instead of engaging in typical blank leering. There’s a sexual element at play in nearly every scene, but the film is more romantic than voyeuristic. The Duke of Burgundy is a portrait of a long-term relationship’s struggling to find balance, with the more unique elements of the role playing games shared by its same sex partners functioning more as a detail that provides specificity than as an overwhelming fetishistic obsession. Strickland has found a balance here that threatens to tip in a disastrous direction at almost every turn, but instead holds steady, much like the romantic balance found within the film’s central relationship.

It’s not only the refusal to perv out that will keep The Duke of Burgundy from reaching a mass scale audience. It’s also a deliberately “artsy” film that luxuriates in its own gorgeous images & atmosphere, like a sex-tinged The Spirit of the Beehive. Strickland carves out a natural world here (as he did before in last year’s Bjork concert film, Biophilia Live), filling the frame with running water, wriggling insects, rustling tree limbs, and beating wings of moths & butterflies. So much of the film is composed of nature, books, lingerie, and women (I don’t think a single man appears on-screen), that a distinctly insular vibe is achieved, as if the entire film takes place within a cocoon. It attempts more of a preciously delicate visual aesthetic than it does a traditional, straight-forward narrative.

The Duke of Burgundy’s varied shots of a butterfly & moth filled specimen room sets a tone for how the film operates. It’s a narrative that relies on repetition & ritual, much like the repetition of a specific butterfly specimen is repeated within the display cases. Similarly, each image is tacked to the wall, hovering to be appreciated like a precious, organic object. Strickland finds emotional resonance in the film’s central relationship, but he also spends inordinate amounts of time reveling in the textures of the world that surrounds them. Filming the couple through mirrors, fringes, and fabrics, Strickland finds the same reverence for the sense of touch here that he did for sound in his 2013 ode to giallo, Berberian Sound Studio. It’s a challenging prospect for viewers, but the rewards are glorious.

Warnings of tasteful sensuality & highfaluting cinematography aside, The Duke of Burgundy is a lot more playful than you would expect from art house fare of its caliber. Sure, the film has a stuffy, old-fashioned vibe with interiors that are far more likely to conjure the words “parlor” & “boudoir” rather than “living room” & “bedroom”, but it also lets on that it’s self-aware of that vibe as early as the opening credits when it provides a title card that reads “Perfume by Je Suis Gizella.” Also, although the film’s central BDSM relationship has a serious issue at the heart of its struggles with power balance , the movie finds plenty lot of effortless humor in that conflict. The emotional tug of war at the heart of the film’s romantic conflict reminded me a lot of a poem deceased artist Bob Flanagan reads in the documentary Sick that starts, “Smart-Ass Masochists: Those are masochists who can take anything– can take anything they tell you to do. Anything I tell you to do I’ll do it just for you.” The power dynamics of a BDSM relationship are more complicated than they may first appear to an outsider and The Duke of Burgundy has a lot of fun playing that aspect for both humor and emotional resonance.

It’s incredible that The Duke of Burgundy never loses its balance. It’s an affecting story about true love, but it also sports piss jokes. It’s a movie that features kaleidoscopic cunnilingus, but it never approaches being salacious. It values strong, isolated images over plot & pacing, but never feels like a slog. It’s a well-made, satisfying film that simultaneously stimulates the intellect and entertains on a simple, surface-pleasures level. In short, it’s a fantastic, must-see film that will find you saying “Thank you so much. This is all I ever wanted,” even before one of the protagonists gets to say it first.

-Brandon Ledet

Appropriate Behavior (2015)

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It’s difficult to describe Appropriate Behavior without using titles like Broad City & Obvious Child as reference points, but those comparisons truly do the film a disservice, as it’s much more emotionally satisfying than either of those titles (both of which I like very much). True, Appropriate Behavior is yet another raunchy, sex-obsessed comedy-drama centered on a New York City woman-child struggling to figure her shit out, but there’s something uniquely direct & honest about its approach to this aesthetic that distinguishes it from its peers. Its authenticity might have a lot to do with the overall strength of the writer/director/actress Desiree Akhavan, who delivers the material as if she’s lived it before, but what’s really arresting is the crippling, all-too-common sadness that anchors the story. The details of the protagonist’s Shirin’s lifestyle & personality may be specific, but her heartache is universal & familiar.

Shirin is a young, bisexual Brooklynite party girl with a journalism degree & Persian heritage. Not everyone is going to relate to certain aspects of her sex life, such as safe-words, strap-ons, group play and hiding her sexuality from her Iranian-born parents.  However, the film’s central romantic conflict is an about as universal as they come. Appropriate Behavior details the depressing, gradual detangling of two people exiting a long term relationship. The film thankfully doesn’t dwell solely on the couple’s post break-up gloom, but instead adopts a flashback structure that allows it to show the former couple in better times, like in a flirtatious exchange when the first meet where Shirin says, “I find your anger incredibly sexy. I hate so many things too.” When the broken relationship Shirin’s mourning is first detailed it looks too toxic to be worth the heartache. The flashbacks reveal that it was at one time something playful, something worth saving. It allows the film to run through the entire cycle of a romantic tryst from first meeting to fucking to fighting to eventual dissolution.

Although the universal relatability of this cycle is what makes the film affecting, it’s the specificity of Shirin’s world that makes it special. The film’s Brooklyn setting provides a lot of room for lampooning of ludicrous personalities like social justice comedians, Kickstarter gurus, pothead businessmen, and absurdly pretentious performance artists. Shirin’s open, playful sexuality is an invitation into a world of group sex, kink play, and drag queens. Her Persian heritage is a window into both the culture’s familial intimacy & rituals as well as its malignant homophobia. At the center of this Venn diagram is a very relatable Shirin. She calls Brooklyn hipsters out on their nonsense, asking  “What is up with your placid disinterest in everything?” She laughs in the faces of people who take their kink play seriously and finds a way to reconcile her sexuality with her family in a somewhat disheartening “don’t ask, don’t tell” type of equilibrium.  A lot of Shirin’s life goals amount to “a good time”, which is more than understandable for a woman in her twenties.

It’s incredible how much Shirin’s zest for fun shines through when Appropriate Behavior finds her in such a dark time. It’s a familiar balance to anyone who’s experienced true heartbreak: trying to party away the pain like it doesn’t matter, but the superficial hedonism always feeling empty. She pretends like she doesn’t care, but she continuously ends up alone & hurt after the high. No matter your relation to the specifics of Shirin’s background & lifestyle, it’s easy to see yourself in her sadness when she curls up in a ball and says, “I’m going to lie here and forget what it feels like to be loved. Could you please turn off the light?” It’s a sadness that feels like it’s never going to fade, but it always does . . . eventually. Shirin can’t move past it until she gets wrapped up in her own project, a distraction that finally allows her to let go of the past. The thing that saves her? An elaborate fart joke. That’s the exact kind of clash between emotional devastation & goofball irreverence that makes Desiree Akhavan’s debut such a strong, relatable film, even for those worlds apart from her protagonist’s exact circumstances.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Crimes of Passion (1984)

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Every month one of us makes the other two watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Brandon made James, Britnee, and (our newest contributor) Kenny watch Crimes of Passion (1984).

Brandon: Director Ken Russell was a madman. Whether exploring the farthest reaches of his twisted psyche in projects like Altered States & Lair of the White Worm or making more commercial projects like the musical film Tommy, Russell had a knack for finding the surreal in the mundane. His films would reach for cinematic mindfuckery that audiences would expect in dignified art films, but his particular brand of on-screen madness was typically grounded in a mundane, often tawdry context. For instance, both Tommy & Altered States are overflowing with bizarre, dreamlike imagery but one is essentially a glorified The Who music video and the other is (reductively speaking) about a dude on drugs in a bathtub. Russell’s films are simultaneously both artful & cheap, an unholy marriage of high & lowbrow art and that’s partly why I love his work so much

In some ways Crimes of Passion, a 1984 sex thriller starring Kathleen “Serial Mom” Turner as a fashion designer by day & prostitute by night, is the prime example of Russell’s self-conflicting nature. It’s a visually stunning work that uses a Bava-esque attention to lighting to create an otherworldly playground of sexual fantasy & escapism, but it’s also just pure smut. It occasionally attempts to laud the virtues of sex work, but also uses the profession as a means to leer at naked bodies. It reads like an intentionally cruel vilification of marriage & monogamy that also has a lot to say about the hypocrisy of self-righteous religious piety, but it’s also just a long string of dirty one-liners like “Don’t think you’re getting back in these panties; there’s already one asshole in there.” Crimes of Passion is thoroughly bewildering in its refusal to be engaged with as either high art or low trash, but instead insists that audiences simultaneously appreciate it as both. In other words, it’s pure Ken Russell.

Kenny, what did you make of the film’s tonal mix of art house solemnity and tawdry sex jokes? How did its leering salaciousness interact with its more sincere views on monogamy & religious faith for you?

Kenny: “A Priest, a hooker and a husband walk into a motel…” This sounds like all the makings of a bad joke, but instead these are the ingredients to a perfectly balanced portion of 80’s cinema. The film walks a very tight line, carefully trying to not be cast as weighty or absurd. Without question, the director maintains a perfect tonal balance with the film’s mix of the “sacred against the profane.” However, the thing to marvel in is how Russell frames the context. What is sacred is absurd (ex. “holy sex toy”). What would be filth, the viewer comes to recognize as sacramental. I love the way it flips the norms on the viewer.

Speaking of flipping societal norms, how cool is Russel’s vision of China Blue? She has all of the makings of a kick-ass comic book anti-heroine. A successful woman in fashion, who finds herself trapped by the dated expectations of how “normal” people should behave, escapes to her seedy lair in the underbelly of the city to find a safe haven among the deviant. I love how she is placed in a position of power throughout the film, and how her independence as a woman is never compromised.

Did anyone else care for Ken Russell’s reversal of traditional gender roles? What are your thoughts on the dynamic of the strong female and the meek male character in need of saving?

Britnee: China Blue (aka Joanna) is the definition of an independent woman. Kathleen Turner is a total goddess that is known for portraying strong women in film, so she was perfect for this role. Russell really did an excellent job switching up traditional gender roles in Crimes of Passion by giving China Blue the power to create and control her own world while both major male characters, Reverend Peter Shayne and Bobby Grady, are both pretty weak and cannot function without their China Blue fix. The Reverend is the scariest, most unstable individual that one could ever imagine, and I was really shocked at how she wasn’t intimidated by him whatsoever. She didn’t run and hide from him, but instead fought him at his own game. Also, I think it’s important to mention that Russell didn’t end the film in a traditional way by giving China and Bobby an over-the-top wedding that leads to a happily-ever-after marriage. China didn’t need to marry Bobby in order to make a better life for herself; she already had her shit on lock.

One thing that really stuck out to me when we watched Crimes of Passion was how it seemed like two different movies mixed into one. The beginning was like an insane fever dream, but the second half of the film had a much more mild tone and was more on the serious side. It’s known as an erotic thriller, but it didn’t really feel like a thriller in the beginning. If there were any elements of a thriller in the beginning, they were definitely overshadowed by the all the peculiar incidents.

James, do you think that there was a significant change in the style of the film towards the latter half? If so, what are some of your thoughts/opinions of why Russell would do this?

James: Besides the completely bonkers ending, I agree that Crimes of Passion shifts to a subtler, more character driven direction in its second half, but tonal shifts are kind of a Russel trademark. As Brandon addressed in his opening remarks, Russell loves to have trash coexist with highbrow art and all of his films have done this with varying degrees of success. (Crimes of Passion is definitely up there). For me, the real heart of Crimes of Passion lies in its subdued second half, as these deeply damaged characters come more into focus.

The scenes of Bobby and Amy’s crumbling marriage and China Blue meeting with a dying man, in particular, are outstanding and it’s refreshing to see Russell, whose stylistic tendencies can sometimes overpower his actors, give them center stage and let their performances drive the movie. Turner, Laughlin, and especially Perkins pull out all the stops (he apparently huffed real nitrous between takes), putting in more effort than maybe the film deserves. I say this because, in the end, I am skeptical that Russell had a clear message he was trying to convey with Crimes of Passion. Much of the film feels like Russell being a prankster provocateur, which is not to diminish the visceral, surreal experience of watching it.

Brandon, what do you think Ken Russell set out to do with Crimes of Passion? Was he trying to make a genuine statement about relationships and sex or is he merely being a “prankster provocateur”?

Brandon: My short answer would be that he’s doing a little bit of both. There is an undeniable central message to Crimes of Passion, it’s just not a particularly deep one. The film essentially boils down to the thesis that monogamy = bad. There’s a vivid contrast between the miserably drab home life of the central married couple and the wild escapist fantasies of China Blue’s sex work that intentionally makes seedy, New York City prostitution feel divine in comparison to the straight life’s cruel bickering. China Blue has fun with her stable of johns’ perversions, never arguing with them until the minute she has a truthfully passionate impulse and falls in love. That moment is what tips the film to the slower, more grounded second half, so in a way monogamous love even has the gall to spoil the fun of the film itself.

And then there’s Russell’s prankster sensibilities running rampant in details like Anthony Perkins’ deadly “superman” vibrator and a nameless john’s terrifying bait & switch rape fantasy mined for dark humor. Russell was nothing if not a series of absurd contradictions and the contrasting anti-monogamy message & sex-obsessed pranks of Crimes of Passion can best be observed in harmony in the film’s soundtrack. I wasn’t keeping a tally, but I want to say that the not-so-subtly sarcastic, anti-monogamy ditty “It’s a Lovely Life” plays more often in this film than “That Thing You Do!” plays in That Thing You Do! Every time I thought they were finally playing a new tune, a stray bar from the chorus of “It’s a Lovely Life” would interrupt and remind me that there really is only one song on the soundtrack, like the movie was one overlong, salacious music video for a parody of a rock song. I’m definitely willing to chalk up that effect to Russell being a “prankster provocateur” (nice descriptor for him, by the way).

Kenny, considering that Crimes of Passion was released just a few years after the launch of MTV, can you see ways in which it was influenced by the music video as a media format?

Kenny: This movie couldn’t be more MTV if it had a Billy Idol music set in the middle. The cinematographer’s love of neon had to be the envy of any 80’s music video director. Sharing what I like to call an “80’s noir” look with other films such as Nightmare on Elm Street, Weird Science and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, I can certainly see how the director would use the look of the film to amplify the fever dream feeling Britnee spoke of. However, nothing in the movie seemed more 80s than the performance from Tony Perkins.

Britnee, did you find Russell’s decision to cast Perkins to be a bit of type casting at play?

Britnee: Absolutely! Type casting is definitely something that I get annoyed with from time to time, but I’ll let it slide for this one because Perkins was disturbingly perfect as The Reverend; he was a complete psycho, so who would be better for this role than the original “Psycho“? As crazy as this may sound, I find Perkins much more terrifying in Crimes of Passion than he is in Psycho. He’s just as demented as Norman Bates, except he’s got a sick religious obsession with a hooker and a bag of dangerous sex toys.

Crimes of Passion is not a very popular film. Even just in the group of Ken Russell films, it’s still more unknown than others. I don’t understand why it’s so underrated because it’s actually an amazing film with a star studded cast. It doesn’t even have that much of a cult following, which absolutely blows my mind. This movie is perfect for elaborate midnight showings. Picture it, a crowd full of fans dressed as China Blue singing along to “It’s a Lovely Life”; it’s just meant to be.

James, why do you think Crimes of Passion wasn’t a a bigger hit? Why doesn’t it have a large cult following?

James: I totally agree that Crimes of Passion should have a much bigger cult following but I think the film’s bizarre mixture of sex, violence, and humor was probably a turn off to mainstream audiences in 1984 who were expecting a more straight forward erotic thriller. This is also the exact reason that I enjoyed the film so much and why I think the film would play better for audiences today who have a more ironic, postmodern sensibility.

Lagniappe

Brandon: In some ways “should’ve been more popular” feels like the story of not only Crimes of Passion, but of Ken Russell’s entire career. Sure, he had a huge hit on his hands with his The Who musical Tommy and I know he has his die-hard fans, but his name is not one you typically hear when weirdo auteur names like Cronenberg & Lynch get tossed around. His films The Devils, Lair of the White Worm, and Altered States are just as arresting & cerebral as anything in those directors’ repertoires. Crimes of Passion has a little bit of a lighter hand than these titles, but its affinity for cheap sex jokes makes it even more of an anomaly than some of his other works. Sex sells, after all. Russell should’ve been more of a household name and the playful sex-obsession of Crimes of Passion should’ve been his foot in the door.

Kenny: Crimes of Passion is a must see for any 80s film buff. The lighting, the set pieces and art design, along with the acting, will give any film fan the nostalgic feeling of watching the dream sequences of A Nightmare on Elm Street combined with the eroticism of The Red Shoe Diaries.

Britnee: Crimes of Passion was a hoot! It’s been well over a month since we all sat down to watch it, and I still catch myself singing “It’s a Lovely Life” while reminiscing about all the insanity that occurred in the film. Also, I’m just realizing how China Blue kind of looks like a sassier version of Disney’s Cinderella. I’m not sure if Russell did this for any reason whatsoever, but it’s just something to think about.

James: Overall, the film is nuts, features memorable performances, and deserves a rightful place among Ken Russell’s best work.

Upcoming Movie of the Months:
June: James presents Blow Out (1981)
July: Britnee presents Highway to Hell (1991)

Invisible Invaders (1959)

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three star

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Although it’s a lot more small-scale charming than hilariously inept, the black & white cheapie Invisible Invaders shares a lot with the alien takeover by way of zombie mind control plot of Ed Wood’s trashterpiece Plan 9 From Outer Space, right down to the over-reliance on stock footage and the 1959 release date. An essential difference between the two pictures, however, can be detected in the “Invisible” half of Invisible Invaders’ title. In Ed Wood’s Plan 9, the Earth invaders are sassy, overdressed fops who re-animate lifeless corpses as a Plan B (or “Plan I” really, seeing how far they got down their list of options). In Invisible Invaders, the plot to “inhabit the bodies of dead Earth men” is not only the initial plan, but also a necessary one, as the aliens who invade our planet are invisible alien spirits without physical bodies to call their own (which isn’t too far from the “Thetans” of Scientology).

You see, the titular Invisible Invaders have been around for a long time. A really long time. According to their initial contact in the film they, in fact, conquered & eliminated all life on the Earth’s moon more than 20,000 years ago, converting the natural satellite into their own impregnable space base and have been just kinda . . . chilling there ever since. Makes total sense, but what would prompt these superior, unseeable beings to finally snap out of their moon haze and set their eyes on the main planet? Because the film was produced during the cold war, the answer is, of course, that our rapid development of space travel & atomic weapons alarmed them to the point where they had no choice to intervene.  Their mode of intervention just happened to be raising & weaponizing our dead to work against us.

Even when this story is not being spelled out in detail by the invisible (yet very talkative) space aliens in question, it’s also reinforced by narration that just refuses to quit (or at least fade into the background temporarily). The endless narration is a blessing in disguise, as the film’s continuous use of stock footage & mock headlines would make very little sense without a vocal guiding hand. There’s a lesson at the heart of Invisible Invaders (that is thankfully spelled out for those not paying attention) that there are dangers in “the race for atom supremacy” that could be avoided if the nations of the world decided to stand side by side in a common cause instead of competing for the top spot in global supremacy. That message, however, is a little weak in comparison to the film’s surface, Ed Woodian charms: a body-snatching zombie plot; hilariously disconnected stock footage; very sciencey science labs featuring all kinds of smoking, bubbling liquids; and the kind of adorable practical effects you would expect in a 50s film in which you weren’t allowed to show aliens physically attacking the planet, due to their invisible nature. It’s a lot more likely that a modern audience would find the film entertaining for those cheap, campy thrills than its moralizing about the nuclear arms race, but it’s an adorable film all the same.

-Brandon Ledet

Charles Bradley: Soul of America (2012)

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There’s sometimes a punishing redundancy to profile documentaries. If the subject has been in the public light for long enough, a profile doc can often feel like a Wikipedia article in motion, like a flip through a scrapbook of events everyone already remembers. There’s an inherent nostalgia to the format that can make the experience pleasant, but ultimately unnecessary if the life being detailed is already well known to the audience. Soul of America, a profile of soul singer Charles Bradley, sidesteps this problem by tackling a subject that has never had his story told on a large scale before. Bradley is in a unique position as a subject in that he struggled to make it in the music business for 42 years before finally recording his debut album, an instant classic titled No Time for Dreaming. Soul of America follows Bradley for the 50 days preceding that album’s release, allowing him to reflect on his troubled past and muse about the promise of his future. Charles Bradley’s life makes for an interesting profile in that he has a long, storied past that’s still fresh to his audience, as it’s only ever been told to them through his songs.

A black soul singer in his early 60s, Charles Bradley is as unlikely of a debut recording artist as any. His eventual success story is remarkable just based on his age alone, but Soul of America makes it out to be even more of an anomaly by providing the details of where he’s been hiding for those 60 years. Bradley had already been performing live music sets before he recorded No Time for Dreaming, but he wasn’t performing original songs. As an impeccable James Brown impersonator performing under the name Black Velvet, Brown had earned the moniker “James Brown Jr.” Although his work as an impersonator was respected for its authenticity, it was a far from glamorous life, as is revealed through scenes touring the home Bradley shares with his aging mother in a cramped housing project, his anecdotes about riding subways to keep warm, and a visit from his tutor, who reveals that he is operating on a 1st grade reading level. As dire as that situation sounds, Bradley is infectiously optimistic about his future and there’s a general sense that things are gradually getting better. His goal through his reading lessons is to be able to write down his own lyrics (instead of relying on the help of his young musician collaborators) and although he is the baby of his family who seemingly loves his mother dearly, his childhood stories make it sound like he takes better care of her now than she did with him in the past. There’s an incredible perseverance at the core of Charles Bradley’s story that makes it all the more satisfying to watch him succeed.

Although Charles Bradley’s perseverance and dedication to his craft despite the shitty, shitty odds is a large part of what makes his story so fascinating, it’s his incredibly emotive personality that shines brightest both in Soul of America and in his studio recordings. There’s an arresting sincerity to the man that you can read on his face just as well as in his voice. Whether he’s meekly asking for Sharon Jones’ autograph, getting giddy over seeing his picture in the New York Post, choking up over how much he loves everyone in the world, or struggling to tell the story of his closest brother’s murder, Bradley is a rawly emotive man. As one of his collaborators puts it, “He wants to reach every single person in the audience” and he has a uniquely genuine quality to his personality that allows him to do just that.

The soul music powerhouse Daptone Records have found a real gem in Charles Bradley both as a talented vocalist & songwriter and as an admirable human being who would have every right to be bitter & distraught, but somehow chose another path. The documentary Soul of America is a great introduction to his story & his personality, but there’s really no substitute to listening to his just as genuine records & live performances. There’s an inspiringly honest sense of hope surrounding Charles Bradley that makes him a worthwhile subject in any format, but the power of his music is what makes him truly special.

-Brandon Ledet

Big Eyes (2014)

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threehalfstar

It’s tempting, but not exactly accurate to think of Big Eyes as a return to form for Tim Burton. Although it recalls the vibrant cartoon suburbia of classic titles like Edward Scissorhands, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, and Beetlejuice and the biopic format of the masterful Ed Wood, it’s not quite like anything Burton’s ever made before. In some ways Big Eyes is a by-the-numbers biopic of kitsch painter Margaret Keane, elevated only by performances by always-welcome names like Amy Adams, Krysten Ritter, Jason Schwartzman, and Christoph Waltz. The most interesting play with form here is the way Waltz’s controlling husband steals the movie from its subject the same way his real-life counterpart stole the limelight & credit for her life’s work, kitschy paintings of depressed children with oversized eyes. For the most part, however, Big Eyes is a straightforward genre exercise, low-key in its scope & ambitions. At this point of Burton’s career, though, a low-key genre exercise is a welcome change from the long string of CGI remakes he’s been releasing since the early 2000s. It’s the most fun, relaxed, and memorable film he’s made in years, even if it bears little resemblance to the cartoon goth aesthetic of his 80s & 90s heyday.

That’s not to say that the film is devoid of Burton’s traditional modes of comical horror; it’s just that the horror takes on a much different form. In this case, Waltz’s sleazebag showman plagiarist (who takes a very Warholian approach to art as commerce) is the threat that plagues the film’s characters. Amy Adams’ Margaret Keane begins the film by leaving one abusive relationship and slipping immediately into another, with Waltz’s crazed pathological liar husband sucking up all of the life & freedom she barely had left over from her first marriage. As she explains it, “I’ve never acted freely. I was a daughter and then a wife and then a mother.” Even as a painter she’s treated as a subordinate, her personal expressions converted into commerce by an abusive, manipulative man. The creepy thing is that he’s so sleazily charming even while he’s ruining her life. Waltz is hilarious, hamming it up as much as he’s allowed, chewing scenery like a hungry dog who’s food’s about to get taken away. His performance is an impressive balance between funny & creepy and before you know it he’s forced Adams’s Keane to take a backseat to her own story the same way the true life plagiarist sidelined his kitsch artist wife. He’s not a headless horseman or a bloodthirsty Martian or a fabricated man with scissors for hands, but he most certainly is a monster.

I spent a lot of Big Eyes’ run time trying to figure out exactly what inspired Burton to tell this story. There are aspects of art as show business, the uselessness of critics, and the redundancy of an artist endlessly repeating themselves that could invite comparisons to Burton’s own work as a filmmaker, but none with too concrete of a conclusion. Maybe he was drawn to telling a story about how it sucked to be a woman in the 50s or he’s just a huge Margaret Keane fan and wanted to tell her story (which is quite interesting). Whatever the reason, it’s a welcome change of pace from Burton’s recent output and his catalog could benefit from more low-key, straightforward works like it. I’m not sure Waltz needs to be set free to ham it up more often, but it works here and the rest of the cast offer a good, calm counterbalance to his eccentricities. For now, it was great to see him steal some spotlight and for Burton’s aesthetic to receive some much-needed sunshine & relaxation.

-Brandon Ledet

Buzzard (2015)

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three star

Slacker culture is surely alive & well in 2015, but there was something unavoidably ubiquitous about 90s MTV slacker culture. Pretty much the definition of a low-stakes drama, Buzzard feels oddly old-fashioned in its portrayal of an apathetic underachiever, Marty, who feels like a cultural relic from a bygone lackadaisical era. Cheaply filmed and intentionally flat in style, Buzzard seemingly cares as little as Marty does, echoing his “It doesn’t matter” mantra with every fiber of its being. Buzzard portrays a world of petty victories & major losses where the odds are stacked so highly against Marty that he really has no incentive to try or care about anything and the movie itself has its own apathetic crisis in the same vein.

An angry, depressed loser with a go-nowhere job as a temp for a bank, Marty’s petty victories involve eating junk food, listening to metal, jumping on his bed, watching pornos while wearing a Halloween mask, and scamming suckers for small increments of cash. His half-assed scams typically pay off as long as the person on the other end cares as little about the transactions as he does. The problems that Marty faces only get rolling once the people he’s scamming start to care & take notice of his chump-change crimes. Marty amps up the damages of his mistakes as well when his most significant petty victory of all comes to fruition: a homemade Freddy Krueger glove that gives his “nothing matters” attitude some real-life consequences.

If Buzzard was intentionally looking to cultivate the 90s MTV slacker aesthetic it was astute in including outdated cultural markers like Nintendo NES, CD towers, and Freddy Krueger posters & merchandise. Although its ambitions & style feel like little more than a vintage throwback, its themes exploring the isolation of poverty, corporate culture, and poor mental health still resonate. Although it’s unlikely that Marty will ever approach anything that resembles a “successful” life, it’s still satisfying to watch him achieve short-term goals like the construction of his Krueger glove or eating a massive plate of spaghetti in a luxury hotel room. Due to Marty’s (and Buzzard’s) lack of motivation, regard, or enthusiasm for anything, it’s hard to celebrate too much of his life other than with surface-level observations like “Cool Demons t-shirt, dude,” but in a world where he has very little room to achieve much of anything, that line of shallow praise has considerable amount of significance.

-Brandon Ledet

Escape from Tomorrow (2013)

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threehalfstar

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The tale of Escape from Tomorrow’s production is much more infamous than anything within the film itself. As the story goes, writer/director Randy Moore was hammering out some daddy issues he associates with the Disney World theme park in Orlando, Florida by staging a guerilla film shoot within the park. Filmed without Walt Disney’s permission, Escape from Tomorrow follows a family of tourists around the park, including shots staged in the resort hotel rooms, restaurants, and the amusement park rides themselves. Promising to turn the fantasy land into a live-action nightmare, the film has essentially been reduced to an anecdote about its production, without a whole lot being said about its actual quality. I went in expecting a dark, twisted sci-fi slow-burner that milks the park’s artificiality for an unnerving effect, but what was actually delivered was much more playful & amusing.

Backing up the director’s claim that he made the film as an exploration of his relationship with his father, Escape from Tomorrow’s protagonist is a hapless, lecherous doof of a man who drags his miserable family through Disney World as a means to forget his troubled employment status & loveless marriage. The characters sport the subtlety & nuance of an 80s sitcom family here. The kids are more or less whiny brats. The mother is a humorless shrew. The father is slack-jawed lecher that gets obnoxiously drunk & openly ogles giggling teen girls in the park in plain view of a wife he openly despises. As I’m sure happens often in that Florida sunshine, this group of Disney World tourists is having a full familial meltdown, even without the more sinister aspects of the plot & imagery coming into play.

The acting leaves a lot to be desired in Escape from Tomorrow (I desperately wish the idiot dad were played by Rob Huebel or Ken Marino), but there’s a sense of purpose to the family’s phony, exaggerated mannerisms. The whole film just feels playfully & intentionally . . . off. There are CGI decapitations, a pious reverence to the Epcot dome as a religious symbol, intentionally crude green screen shots that counteract the documentary feel, real life evil Disney queens (sex-crazed, of course), and a persistently cheesy Old Hollywood score that underlines the intense artificiality of the whole affair. It’s not a subtle film. It is, however, a delightfully goofy & irreverent one.

Anyone looking for a deep, prodding indictment of the nuclear, American family unit or a super creepy sci-fi freakout are likely to be disappointed by Escape from Tomorrow‘s who cares/nothing matters tone. The film succeeds in its quest to compose a film almost entirely from shots “stolen” from within Disney World (although the word “Disney” is bleeped out for legal reasons), but much like with all merchandise shoplifted from within those gates, the narrative it runs away with is frighteningly empty, like well-crafted kitsch. Much like with a lot of Disney products, it looks great & has an interesting backstory, but it’s a lot more satisfying as an eccentrically goofy trifle than a work of “serious” art.

-Brandon Ledet

Predestination (2015)

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fourstar

There has been a recent push to update the sci-fi genre in varied, interesting ways. While there have certainly been a few throwbacks to the traditional rocket ships & gunfire Flash Gordon adventure epics like Guardians of the Galaxy & Edge of Tomorrow, titles like Upstream Color, Under the Skin, Coherence, The Congress, and Beyond the Black Rainbow are searching for new territory for the genre to mine. They’re all unique works that can hardly be compared to one another individually, but as a group they feel like a refreshing revitalization of a genre that can sometimes get trapped within its own tropes & clichés. No matter how much I love these movies and what they’re attempting to accomplish, however, there’s just no denying the inherent draw of the sci-fi aesthetic of yesteryear. My favorite film from last year was Interstellar, not because it carved out new sci-fi territory, but because it felt authentic to old school sci-fi pulp you could read serialized in special interest quarterlies or hear in long gone radio plays. There’s a draw to this old fashioned sci-fi aesthetic that I’m glad to see hasn’t been left by the wayside in the wake of our recent crop of experimental exercises in the genre.

With its muted noir tone & a setting that spans from the 1950s through the 70s, Predestination firmly plants itself within this brand of sci-fi throwbacks. Based off of a 1959 Robert Heinlein short story titled “All You Zombies” (which was first published in an issue Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine, the exact type of old school serials I’m describing), the film has an authentically old fashioned take on sci-fi as a genre. It is undeniably cheap & trashy in the way its twists & turns are revealed to the audience (some of those reveals are not nearly as surprising as the movie seems to think they are) but that potential flaw is severely undercut by its straightforward style of storytelling. On paper the movie’s plot about time travel, secretive government agencies, and self-fulfilling paradoxes wouldn’t add up to much of value, but the way the story is framed as a drunken, embittered bar patron spinning a yarn for the barkeep is a perfect, no-nonsense approach to material that is nothing but nonsense.

There are some typical sci-fi adventure aspects to Predestination, like virtual reality helmets, “time jumps”, and young girls recruited to be male astronauts’ “companions” (an idea that reminded me of the similarly pulpy Journey to the Seventh Planet), but they’re counteracted with more concrete, noir-influenced images like trench coats, smoke-filled bars, homemade bombs, and a fedora on fire. Just as the always-tricky time travel aspect of the story starts to get overwhelmingly intricate, it also boils down to a typical action movie plot of trying to prevent a bomb from going off and catching the bad guy before he gets away. Even the story’s peculiar play with gender identity, which you would expect to mark it as a modern work, feels old fashioned & outlandish as it’s dealt with here, but straightforward performances from the two leads Ethan Hawke & Sarah Snook anchor that aspect well, just like the barroom storytelling framing device anchors the movie’s outlandish plot.

Predestination is neither a wholly unique work nor an exercise in good taste. It is, however, an example of the virtue of sincere, traditional acting & storytelling and how those elements can elevate ludicrous material into something special. Although its major twists & reveals may occasionally be telegraphed, it’s fascinating to watch the film reach those conclusions in its own time and on its own terms. There’s a sci-fi tradition to its sincere pulp sense of tonal balance, but it’s a vintage tradition that’s unconcerned with the new territory the genre’s been exploring in recent years. I appreciate the movie the way that any audience can appreciate a great storyteller, especially a rapt audience in a late night barroom who has nothing better to do than listen to a good yarn that becomes increasingly more outlandish as it stretches on.

-Brandon Ledet

Beyond the Black Rainbow (2012)

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In its opening minutes Beyond the Black Rainbow prepares its audience for its slow motion, abstract tone with phrases like “a state of mind”, “a way of being”, “a practical application of an abstract ideal”, and “the dawning of a new era in the human race and the human soul.” Beyond the Black Rainbow is not a straightforward cinematic experience, but instead works more like ambient music or a poem. In an age where the lines dividing cinema & television are becoming increasingly blurred, there’s an exponential value in movies that work this way. Recent mind-benders like Beyond the Black Rainbow, It Follows, Upstream Color, Under the Skin, and The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears are much-needed reminders that there are still things cinema can do that television can’t, no matter how much HBO wants you to believe otherwise.

That’s not to say that Beyond the Black Rainbow is an entirely new, unfamiliar experience. Its 1983 setting intentionally recalls vintage psychedelic sci-fi titles like Zardoz & Phase IV that turned a hangover from optimistic hippie mysticism into something much more sinister. Instead of apathetic dystopias & mutated killer ants, however, it mines its horrors from new age psychiatry, or what it calls “therapeutic technologies”. Although it’s set thirty years in the past, Beyond the Black Rainbow occupies a decidedly futuristic hellscape made up of telekinesis, television static, clouds of smoke, melting walls, and intense hues of red & blue. It packs the same unnerving punch of a traditional horror movie experience, but that effect is distilled in a futuristic void. This becomes increasingly apparent as the movie’s killer, an . . . unorthodox psychiatrist named Dr. Nile, behaves more & more like a traditional horror movie villain until he reaches full Jason Voorhees status late in the film.

The slow, methodical pace of Beyond the Black Rainbow is not going to win over everyone in the audience, but for those who aren’t in a particular rush for the plot to be pushed along are sure to be wowed by its plethora of mind-bending, often horrifying images. It is a decidedly cinematic experience, one that depends greatly on the strengths of its potent sounds & images instead of more traditional markers like plot & dialogue that carry less hallucinatory films. It’s impossible to imagine Beyond the Black Rainbow working in the television format and there’s an increasingly valuable virtue in that aspect of its design. Go into the film with an open mind & diligent patience and you may find the experience to be therapeutic, especially in a time where some people claim that television has surpassed cinema as a superior visual art form.

-Brandon Ledet