brandon ledet

Serena (2015)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

EPSON MFP image

onehalfstar

campstamp

Serena is a masterclass in piss-poor editing. On paper, it’s baffling that a prestige costume drama featuring two of Hollywood’s currently best-selling acts, Jennifer Lawrence & Bradley Cooper, would skip a wide theatrical release and go straight to VOD. On film, it’s entirely understandable. Drowning under an endless flood of inept editing choices is the raw material for a potentially great movie that’s gasping for air, but never allowed to surface. Alternately, Serena is also just a few cuts away from being a brilliantly funny camp classic, but it’s not even allowed to be enjoyable as a terrible film. It’s downright fascinating how frustrating this movie can be. It’s rare that a Hollywood film is released this unpolished and . . . off, but that doesn’t help the fact that it’s not even entertaining as a total disaster.

On the side of the film’s fight for legitimacy there’s an oddly old-fashioned big studio classic feel to the whole affair. Having two of Hollywood’s biggest stars struggle to negotiate their romantic & professional dynamic in an ancient, treacherous locale feels like the exact kind of movie that would’ve been made by every major studio 50 to 80 years ago and it’s charming to return to that familiar Old Hollywood vibe. This is a world where brassy women assert their power with lines like “I didn’t come to Carolina to do needlepoint,” in traditionally male arenas occupied by lumberjack types with perma-stubble & prison tattoos. Cooper & Lawrence aren’t gruff enough to believably sell the dangerous frontiersman developer and his half-feral wife routine, but their natural charisma and the effortlessly pleasant nature of costume dramas in general makes me want to root for the movie to turn out well. If the pacing had the good sense to slow down and let any of these elements breathe it really could’ve been something. That is not what happened.

There is so much more arguing for the movie to go in the camp classic direction. We’re introduced to Jennifer Lawrence’s titular Serena as she’s galloping on a horse in slow motion, a horrendously tender acoustic guitar plucking away in the background. The music doesn’t improve from there, with its slow, sappy, meaningless musings poisoning nearly every moment. The emptily symbolic animal imagery doesn’t stop there either. Bradley Cooper’s character spends the entire film on a laughably maudlin, metaphorical panther hunt and Lawrence finds empty metaphors of her own in the repetitive scenes where she trains an eagle to hunt the snakes that have been biting Cooper’s workers. The animal imagery, like nearly everything else in play, is almost always followed by blunt interjections of Cooper & Lawrence fucking, as if the film were edited by a half-awake Russ Meyer on cough syrup. Immediately after we meet Serena on the horse she’s squirming under the sheets and she comes out of an abrupt montage a married woman. The same The Room-esque sex interruptions occur after her eagle kills its first snake and after she hits on her husband’s investors at a ball in yet another scene that goes nowhere (except back to the bedroom). The images in these montages all feel like placeholders for longer scenes to be added later, a task that no one ever got around to. Oddly enough, the one image afforded the most room to breathe is the most disturbing one of all, a vigorous bathtub fingering that I’m likely to never forget thanks to Cooper’s intense, empty stare. In time, that bathtub moment might be the only image from this film I remember all, both because it’s so uncomfortable and because the other contenders are way too brief to make a lasting impression.

The scale really is tipped for Serena to reach a camp classic status, but it just never gets there. Besides the sex & animals, there’s also an evil, jealous, homosexual henchmen and a mystic, murderous woodsman who has “visions” that both feel like odd caricatures out of a different, thankfully bygone era. Also, any credibility Serena’s struggle to assert herself professionally adds to the plot is severely undercut by her gradual transformation from a confident woman to a murderous Lifetime Movie sociopath in the wild, like a knife-wielding Nell. I promise that sounds so much more fun than the film allows it to be and just as the characters are prone to fast, flat mumbling, so is the film’s editing. Each scene in Serena bleeds into the next in a way that makes no particular moment feel any more or less significant than the one preceding it. A hand being chopped off feels just as important as miscarriage or a blood transfusion or a town hall meeting. It’s all fast, flat mumbling here.

I truly believe someone could recut Serena‘s raw footage into something worthwhile, (starting by pulling brief images out of the endless montages to allow them room to breathe and scrapping the entire awful soundtrack wholesale) and come out the other end with a polished finished project that would have audiences counterintuitively rooting for Cooper & Lawrence to chop down thousands of trees as well as impregnate & murder their employees. It’s entirely possible. It’d be even easier to cut it into an over-the-top melodrama ripe with Lawrence going full, feral Mommy Dearest on the frontier folk. It’s almost there. In Serena’s fight for either legitimacy or camp, it was decidedly much closer to camp, but thoroughly disappointing as either. If nothing else, if someone wanted to learn how not to edit a film’s separate parts together into a cohesive whole, this would be a great place to start.

-Brandon Ledet

Mood Indigo (2014)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

The word “twee” is a loaded descriptor that is sure to chase away a large section of any potential audience. A lot of people bristle at the mere mention of twee, generally construing it as a brand of unbridled, whimsical cuteness. That dismissive conception entirely disregards the bottomless depression of twee genre staples like Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Todd Solondz, and the music of Belle & Sebastian. It’s a bookish, sentimental sort of sadness, but twee generally plays its grief so close to the heart that it becomes extremely difficult to differentiate it from the heights of its cheery sweetness. Any twee work that’s worth a damn is just as depressing as it is joyful; the problem is that a lot of audiences don’t find any of it worth a damn to begin with.

Director Michel Gondry has received near universal acclaim for his music video work with acts like Björk & The White Stripes, but whenever he helms a feature film his name has a tendency to be an automatic turnoff for a lot of folks just as much as some people are turned off by the mere mention of the twee genre he often gets categorized within. His films, (titles like The Silence of Sleep, Be Kind Rewind, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) can be downright infuriating when you’re not on their wavelength, but they can also be deeply rewarding for those not alienated by their fanciful sentiments. Personally, I’ve always been a fan of Gondry’s, finding his films to range from pretty good to absolutely fantastic. My only slight qualm with his filmmaking style is that he always feels somewhat restrained by the format, like he needs to bend over backwards to justify the dreamlike loopiness of his practical effects visuals with a narrative purpose. In his short-form music video work, Gondry was free to experiment with visual techniques and surreal logic without having to provide context for their existence (like the video stores, dream sequences, and memory erasure in the titles mentioned above), but that sense of liberation has been difficult for him to translate to feature films.

In a lot of ways last year’s Mood Indigo finds Gondry at last discovering that sense of freedom on the silver screen. The film’s narrative makes no attempt to justify Gondry’s visual whimsy, but instead rolls with it as if it were a normal part of everyday life. It’s not a film that’s going to win over Gondry’s detractors, but it is instead one that caters to his established audience, assuming they are already game for the intricate, dreamlike quirk he is sure to throw at them. Entirely unrestrained, Gondry allows his imagination to run wild here, like an especially quirky Rube Goldberg contraption on the fritz.

Mood Indigo is just crawling with weird, loopy inventions like alarm bells that infest kitchen walls like bugs, pianos that mix hard liquor “harmonic cocktails”, see-though plexiglass limousines, elephant-shaped tanks, and a species of bird people that takes that concept even more literally than the movie Bird People. The film’s first half is a frantic flurry of Gondry whimsy that gets so overly excited that its elements blend together, causing a strange sort of synesthesia: vinyl records can be watched, food can be heard, sounds can be drank, etc. If the pace of the first half had kept up its blinding speed even I might’ve turned on the film. It’s a near-exhausting flood of strange ideas that begin to feel as if they are connected by no unifying concept at all, as if Gondry were the Richard Kelly of twee. Fortunately, if you stick with the film, it eventually relents and begins to reveal it does indeed have a very strict method to its madness. As the protagonist says to a friend, “Despite the complexity of your words you might be onto something.”

The loopy dream logic of Mood Indigo initially feels formless, but it’s eventually revealed that the movie’s fundamental reality is influenced directly by the mood of the characters that inhabit it. The film tells the basic full-cycle story of a life-long relationship from lovers being introduced by friends at a party to their blissful marriage to their eventual dissolution. The constantly shifting, optimistically energized mood of the first half (wherein everything from the food to the household appliances feels alive & happy) fades as the central couple suffers through sickness & poverty, a change sparked by a seemingly harmless water lily. As the mood sours, the pace slows tremendously; the walls literally start closing in, cobwebs form over once sunshine-blessed windows, characters age rapidly, and ominous shadows start coming to life. One character explains, “As you go through life spaces seem smaller.” It’s a sad statement that rings punishingly true as the ostensibly invincible young love from early in the film succumbs to the pressure of life’s heaviest burdens and the even the frame of the film itself begins to constrict & turn grey.

Mood Indigo is almost certain to alienate the twee-averse very early in its proceedings and may even push a large part of the remaining audience a little too far (the same way an increasingly fussy Wes Anderson has seemingly been testing how much Wes Anderson people can take in recent titles like Moonrise Kingdom & The Grand Budapest Hotel). From what I understand, the film’s original European cut was a full 40 minutes longer than the American home video version and that massive edits were made to cut down on its overabundance of ideas. Honestly, that extra 40 minutes probably would’ve poisoned even my viewing experience and I really, really liked the movie. As is, Mood Indigo is a spontaneous, lively film balanced out by the soul-crushing dread of its final hour. For audiences already on board with Gondry’s hyperbolic visual imagination, it’s refreshing to see the director set free by such a vague narrative structure as a gradually shifting mood and Mood Indigo might rank among titles like Eternal Sunshine as his best work. For those who find the idea of that lack of restraint insufferable, it’s best that you stay far, far away. If nothing else, the movie finds Gondry at his Gondriest, which can go either way for you depending on your tolerance of the heights & depths of both Gondry & twee.

Mood Indigo is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

-Brandon Ledet

The Congress (2014)

/ swampflix / 11 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

It’s difficult for a film to blend animation with live action in a credible way. It’s been more than 25 years since the release of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and I can’t think of a single picture since that does half as good of a job combining the two techniques. Last year’s The Congress sidesteps this problem by keeping its live-action & animation segments almost entirely separate. There’s a purpose to its partitioning of its separate halves, though. The front, live-action end of The Congress depicts a drab, near-future full of anxieties, disease, fears, and oppressive commercialism. The animated second half is an escapist fantasy that offers sanctuary from that depressing world, its own crippling faults buried deep underground. There’s a vibrant world of possibility (both elating & horrifying) offered by The Congress’ choice to animate its outlandish, dystopian future. It was a wise decision that saved the film from being a decent sci-fi exercise and instead made it an engaging cinematic oddity.

The opening, live-action segment of The Congress has an interesting way of providing flat, nonchalant reads of big concepts. Playing off the idea that movie studios literally want to own their talent (like in early Hollywood, if not like now), the not-quite-fictional powerhouse Miramount Pictures offers Robin “Princess Bride” Wright (playing herself here) a life-changing professional opportunity. They offer her a large sum of money to “hermetically scan” her likeness using a futuristic technology that would allow them to insert her digital self into any film project they want. The contract would prevent her from ever acting in the flesh again, but if she doesn’t sign it she’s also risking the studio erasing her work from the screen forever. It’s an interesting concept that brings to question a lot of notions we have as an audience about celebrities (real-life, breathing human beings) as consumable products. In addition to her contract negotiations with Miramount (she eventually signs the contract, of course) the film also interweaves some half-baked, purple prose musings about her son’s deteriorating health and obsession with kites & airplanes. The overreaching sentimentality of these scenes reminds me a lot of the soft sci-fi of the over-the-top camp fest Upside Down and a lesser movie would’ve stopped there and not pushed its crackpot ideas any further (like in Upside Down). The Congress, thankfully, keeps pushing.

After Wright allows herself to be “hermetically scanned” the film jumps 20 years further into the future into a world where people escape from the shackles of an unfulfilling reality by snorting a chemical that allows them to live in a vibrant, animated fantasy world. The “Animation Zone” is a complicated mess of art influences; like an art deco take on Dr. Suess’ wavy line landscapes with whales, dragons, constellations, rainbows, and genitals-shaped fish populating its blinding, neon color palette. It’s stunning. From this point on, it is difficult to tell exactly how much of the film is “real” and how much of it is happening only in Wright’s mind. As one character puts it, “Ultimately everything makes sense and everything is in our minds.” Playing off the celebrities-as-commodities concept of the first half, film studios in the animated future have found a way to convert actors into chemical compounds that can be eaten, drank, and ultimately copied. Instead of watching your favorite celebrities act out fantasies onscreen, you can now become them, so the world is littered with endless copies of familiar faces like Tom Cruise, Ron Jeremy, Jesus Christ, Michael Jackson, Zeus, Marilyn Monroe, Frida Kahlo, and Muhammad Ali. It’s terrifying.

The animated back end of The Congress is by far the more impressive half of the film, but its slow introduction through the “technophobic”, soft sci-fi of the first half is partly what makes it work. There have been a lot of recent films that attempt to tackle the emptiness of celebrity culture (Birdman & Maps to the Stars, for example), but none push their concepts to such a far, overreaching end as The Congress. The film isn’t entirely successful. The significance of the kite & airplane metaphors, while serving as a decent through line between the two segments, were difficult to grasp as a viewer; there’s an uncomfortable line of thought near the climax that risks making the entire film feel like a screed on anti-depressants; the stilted nature of the dialogue on the front end can be alternatingly amusing & frustrating, etc. However, its faults feel trivial in consideration of how ambitious & assertive the film plays as a whole. The Congress may be an overwrought mess in some ways, but it’s a fascinatingly idiosyncratic mess that’s impressive in its aspirations of pushing its musings on celebrity culture to the most far-reaching ends possible, putting good taste & tact aside in favor of a thorough, bizarrely unrestrained exploration of its themes. It’s the exact kind of mess I like.

-Brandon Ledet

Body Slam (1986) and the Often Superfluous Nature of Bloated Spectacle in Pro Wrestling

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

wrasslin

Like most adults find themselves doing from time to time, I spent this past Friday night yelling myself hoarse at sweaty, costumed men as they wrestled each other in a middle school gymnasium. It was my first exposure to New Orleans’ own pro wrestling promotion Wildkat Sports, at an event called Wildkat Strikes Back. Sitting in a cramped, hot gymnasium with a crowd that ranged from screeching children to their elderly grandparents to hardcore, middle-aged wrestling nerds to roving gangs of way-out-of-place crust punks was a welcome alternative to the way I usually enjoy the sport: in the cold, TV-provided glow of living rooms. There was an intense, communal vibe in that gym that can be lacking in the larger, televised promotions and it made me realize just how much of a spectacle the sport can be on its own merit. When stripped down to its bare bones (sans the slapstick comedy sketches, celebrity cameos, pyrotechnics and half-baked stunts that can exhaust a more bloated program), pro wrestling is still entertaining in a genuine, visceral way.

Sometime in mid-80s pro wrestling had reached its most bloated point in history. With the rise of Hulkamania, the undeniably potent likeability of Andre the Giant, and the cutthroat business-sense of juggernaut promoter Vince McMahon, WWE (then WWF) reached the pinnacle of its cultural dominance when WrestleMania III broke the all-time attendance record of an in-door sporting event with more than 93,000 fans present in the stands (a record that still holds today). The level of sheer spectacle that accompanies events like WrestleMania is as disparate from the brand of pro wrestling you’d see at events like Wildkat Strikes Back as the difference in size of their respective crowds, but that spectacle isn’t exactly necessary to make “sports entertainment” . . . entertaining.

Arriving just a year before that record-breaking crowd at WrestleMania III (and a whole three years before WWE got into the film business themselves with No Holds Barred), the 1986 film Body Slam similarly gets confused about what makes pro wrestling entertaining, putting more value into the spectacle surrounding the sport than the sport itself. In the film’s laughably convoluted plot (it is a comedy, after all) rock ‘n’ roll manager Harry Smilac is struggling to make it with only one client under his wing (a band called KICKS) when he fortunately expands his roster by signing on pro wrestler “Quick” Rick Roberts (played by “Rowdy” Roddy Piper), mistakenly assuming that he is a musical act. Despite his initial repugnance toward pro wrestling, Smilac discovers that there’s good money in the sport and pretty much dives head first into the wrestling business until he (late in the film) has the brilliant idea of combining KICKS & Quick Rick’s talents and voila! Smilac gives birth to “Rock ‘n’ Roll Wrestling”. The spectacle of a live rock band playing while sports entertainers perform is treated here like the discovery of the cure for cancer. Smilac is lauded as a genius.

In Body Slam’s logic, Smilac not only improves pro wrestling with this invention, but he also improves rock ‘n’ roll. These are two forms of art that don’t need improvement. Both rock and wrestling are perfectly appealing when reduced to their most basic parts; they don’t need 80s-tinged grandstanding to make them worthwhile. It’s fitting, then, that the band Smilac manages, KICKS, is an obvious stand-in for the band KISS, who are no strangers to using theatrics & merchandising to distract audiences from their okay-at-best brand of rock ‘n’ roll. In the movie’s logic, KICKS’ songs (as well as their deep love of pyrotechnics) are not only a draw for the crowd, but they also give the wrestlers (well, the faces at least) strength to overpower their opponents. They’re breathing life into a far-from-dead brand of entertainment that really didn’t need their help in the first place.

Of course, Body Slam is a silly trifle of a film that shouldn’t be judged too harshly about what it has to say about pro wrestling as a sport, because it doesn’t have too much to say about anything at all, much less wrestling. However, the film does have some charms as a campy delight. The 80s cheese is thick enough to choke you as early as the opening scene, which features Smilac hanging out of a convertible, hair slicked back, hitting on bikini babes by showing off his gigantic car phone. There’s also some corny humor in exchanges like when a friend asks Smilac, “What are you gonna do, Harry?” and he responds “What I always do: manage!” The campy appeal of the rock ‘n’ roll wrestling plot doesn’t really get going until the last third of the film, but the montages are so worth it, especially the one that’s accompanied by the Body Slam theme song. There’s also, of course, a wide range of 80s wresters to gawk at here. Besides the aforementioned Roddy Piper, the film includes “The Nature Boy” Ric Flair, “Captain” Lou Albano, “Classy” Freddie Blassie, “The Barbarian” Sione Vailahi, and several members of the Samoan Anoaʻi family (including Roman Reigns’ father Sika), among others. Besides the innate fun of seeing them all in a feature film, they’re also more or less abysmal at acting, which helps keep the mood light. With all of this 80s-specific cheese flying around, the inclusion of always-welcome Billy Barty & Charles Nelson Reilly is somehow just icing on the cake.

It’s not a great movie, but Body Slam is effective as a time capsule of the 80s as an era of corny comedies, show-off musicians, and the birth of bloated spectacle in wrestling. The time capsule aspect goes both ways, though, both funny in its quaintly out-of-date aesthetic and disturbing in its penchant for finding cheap humor in topics like misogyny, racial caricature, cross-dressing and pedophilia. Those offenses aside, there are moments late in the film when they finally get the basic appeal of pro wrestling down when during a rock ‘n’ roll wrestling performance the band KICKS is attacked by a group of heels and the whole show devolves into chaos. There’s also a particularly bloody street fight match involving chains that feels pretty close to what a lot of hardcore fans are looking for in the sport, despite an announcer’s exclamation that “This is setting wrestling back 1000 years!”

When considered from the perspective of an enterprising showman (like a Harry Smilac or an Eric Bischoff), Body Slam is an interesting case study of what outsiders often get wrong in their assumptions about what makes pro wrestling entertaining. I’m not saying that local promotions like Wildkat Sports are inherently better than their televised, large scale, rock ‘n’ roll wrestling competitors; I’ll still be eagerly watching all 4 bloated-spectacle hours of WrestleMania XXXI this coming Sunday. I’m just saying that the sport is entertaining enough on its own merit, even when stripped of the fireworks, the KISS-knockoffs, and the David Arquettes. There’s a basic appeal to its violence & pageantry that’s evident whether you’re in a middle school gym with 1,000 sweaty nerds or an outrageously packed stadium of 90,000 rabid fans. The bloated spectacle is delicious lagniappe at its best and unnecessarily excessive at its worst. In Body Slam, it’s mostly the latter, though the film argues otherwise.

-Brandon Ledet

Mother Night (1996)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

inaworld

threehalfstar

Mother Night is an outstanding novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., arguably his best work outside the holy trinity of his titles that get the most attention: Slaughter House Five, Cat’s Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions. Mother Night is surprisingly just as great (if not better) than any of those books, but what makes it even more surprising is that was remarkably adaptable for film. In addition to hitting my costume drama sweet spot (a low bar to clear, for sure) 1996’s Mother Night was also the best Vonnegut adaptation I’ve ever seen (another low bar, since I’ve only seen the not-very-good Breakfast of Champions). It obviously doesn’t touch anything near the greatness of Vonnegut’s novel (how could it?), but it was effective as a summary of the film’s best touchstones with some inspired casting choices helping bring his words to life.

Playing a role that would likely be filled by Bruce Dern if it were released in 2015 and not 1996, Nick Nolte is damn good in the film’s central role as Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an American playwright turned Nazi propagandist during World War II. In some ways Vonnegut does for the Nazi scumbag what Nabokov did for a pedophile in Lolita: he makes Campbell a complicated, richly human character that is at times sympathetic and at other times beyond contemptible, even to himself. Especially to himself. Campbell is a Nazi propagandist who says gut-wrenchingly evil things about Jews as a people in his radio broadcasts, but he’s also an American spy who transmits sensitive information about the war in those very same broadcasts. Nolte carries the gruff, broken spirit of Campbell well, selling the alternating self-hatred and self-aggrandizing of his inner conflict exactly as I imagined it while reading the novel.

Vonnegut’s plot allows a lot of room for consideration in the ways morality during war is a lot more questionable than the typical good vs. evil narrative that’s usually depicted. For Campbell that means that the coded spy language that’s infused into his hateful Nazi broadcasts makes his sin & his virtue inseparable. As his German father-in-law puts it, it does not matter whether he is a spy or not, because the hate in his propaganda is so effective that there is no way he could have served the enemy (America) as well as he served his adopted country (Germany). Campbell tries to remain impartial to the Nazi/American divide, saying that he only feels allegiance to his marriage (“a nation of two”) but the impossibility of that lie is a lesson he learns too late. It’s a moral he summarizes as “You must be careful what you pretend to be, because in the end you are what you pretend to be.”

Mother Night is not only commendable in its competence at capturing Vonnegut’s tricky sense of humor on film; it’s especially praiseworthy because the task in this particular case is made even trickier by the story’s habit of culling amusement out of the horrors of Nazism. It’s partly successful because of its willingness to let the hateful things Campbell says ruminate, like in a scene where a filmed version of one of his broadcasts is projected onto his horrified face as he truly listens to his own words for the first time. Although Campbell is occasionally sympathetic, the movie rarely lets him (or the audience) forget that he is a monster. Besides Nolte’s excellent turn as the central propagandist, there are plenty of other performances to praise here: Alan Arkin’s role as his best friend; Sheryl “Laura Palmer” Lee as his German wife; a perfectly cast John Goodman as the American agent that recruits him as a spy; and Kirsten Dunst as an adorable, pint-sized Nazi moppet, among others. There are some really dark touches to the film’s humor, like when Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” plays over images of a concentration camp or when Campbell makes sensual love to his wife while one of Hitler’s impassioned speeches blares on the bedside radio. These touches all feel oddly subversive, as the whole film has a decidedly old-fashioned feel to it, like black comedy version of The Rocketeer. As a film, it’s more than just a rushed, abridged version of a great novel; it’s also a handsome, well-acted historical drama that finds a peculiar line of humor in narcissism, self-hatred, and genocide.

-Brandon Ledet

The Fast and the Furious (1955)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

EPSON MFP image

twohalfstar

campstamp

When I said yesterday that I had yet to see a single Fast & Furious film in full, I wasn’t being 100% honest. I had previously seen the film the series derived its name from, a 1950’s car racing cheapie from Movie of the Month vet Roger Corman. 1955’s The Fast and the Furious is far from Corman’s most interesting film, but it is only the second title (out of hundreds) that he’s produced and the first title produced by American International Pictures, the film company that helped make him a b-movie powerhouse. The film has very little connection to the much-more-infamous Paul Walker series outside of the purchase of its title rights, but that purchase was most certainly worth every penny. It’s a damn good title. Good thing they decided not stick with the much less compelling original name for the film, Crashout.

When considered on its own, The Fast and the Furious doesn’t amount to much. It’s story of an (innocent) escaped convict who comes to hold a female race car driver hostage in hopes that she will drive him to freedom across the Mexican border. At first they bristle at each other’s hostility. In an early exchange, the race car driver, Connie, spits, “I hate you.” Frank, the convict, responds, “Just hate me all the way to Mexico.” There’s a lot of violent sexual energy between the couple that becomes less violent and more sexual as they stop struggling to outsmart each other and start working as a pair in their confrontations with police & other, less forgiving race car drivers. The racing culture of 1950s is portrayed as rich man’s hobby here, which leads to some occasionally interesting class politics in Frank’s interactions with Connie’s circle. This also plays into why Frank was convicted of a crime he didn’t commit in the first place, which is revealed in his line “It isn’t what you are that counts. It’s what you get taken for.”

Filmed in just ten days, The Fast and the Furious is one of many examples of Corman’s superhuman ability to make a surprisingly watchable picture on a tight budget, even if it isn’t a particularly memorable one. It does share some incidental similarities the Paul Walker franchise of the same name, like felons getting mixed up in car racing, racers inspecting/admiring each other’s gear, the featured inclusion of female racers, and (most incidentally of all) mentions of Coachella, California. Both Corman’s film and the 2000s franchise also have a tendency to mix corny comedy in with their criminal intrigue as well as an over-reliance on dated effects (whether they be CGI or driving scenes filmed in front of a projector). Corman’s The Fast and the Furious is by no means essential viewing, but it is an interesting footnote to the trashy cultural powerhouse that followed nearly 50 years later.

The Fast and the Furious (1955) is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Brandon Ledet

The Fast and the Furious (2001)

/ swampflix / 9 Comments

EPSON MFP image

three star

campstamp

Despite the 15 year run of the franchise’s cultural ubiquity, I’ve somehow managed to avoid ever seeing a Fast & Furious movie in full. Sure, I’ve seen them playing as background noise in various bars & living rooms over the years, but I’ve never bothered to watch a single picture from front to end. When the series first got started I was a gloomy teenage snob who wouldn’t be caught dead watching such mindless machismo, but something happened in the years since: I grew a sense of humor. And while I was working on that, something else happened: the series seemingly got exponentially ridiculous with each sequel. It’s rare these days for any genre film outside of slasher flicks to earn six sequels, but here we are in 2015 with a car racing movie reaching its seventh installment next month: Furious 7. It’s with the ads for that seventh installment that I’ve finally reached my tipping point. The trailer for Furious 7 is so deliciously over the top that when I first saw it in the theater I finally felt compelled to catch up with the entire series.

It turns out that the very first installment in the Fast & Furious franchise was a very effective baseline measurement for the series. It was exactly what I had expected: rap-rock era machismo way more concerned with cartoonishly fast cars, gigantic guns, and impressively elaborate action sequences than its superfluous plot about an undercover cop. The movie opens with a dangerous, in-motion highway robbery, then moves on directly to a fistfight, then a drag race, then a feud with a biker gang and so on. In addition to fistfights, armed robberies, motorcycles, and sports cars, The Fast and the Furious features such macho trademarks as rap metal, backyard grills, and lipstick lesbianism. The film also features Vin Diesel in his early 2000s prime (he had a prime, right?), Ja Rule (unmistakably in his prime) as an early sign of the series’ unique interest in rappers-turned-actors, and the strikingly sexy Jordana Brewster as the designated trophy girl for face-of-the-series Paul Walker to lust after. Above all of these macho hallmarks stands what I suppose is the film’s main attraction: fast cars. Cars so fast that light warps around them like spaceships in old-line sci-fi, their roaring engines overpowering the sound design & the inner workings of their nitrous oxide systems becoming a fetishistic focus for the CGI. The series, of course, is all about furiously fast cars, with plot & dialogue taking a very distant second.

The Fast and the Furious is entertaining enough as a mindless action flick & a trashy cultural relic, but it’s nowhere near the peak ridiculousness promised in the Furious 7 trailer. It does have its campy moments, though. The dialogue is often laughable. For example, early in the film when Paul Walker’s character suspiciously patrons a subpar sandwich shop, a hooligan asks, “What’s up with this fool? What is he, sandwich crazy?” In addition to the nonsensical vocal posturing, there’s the hideous detail of someone being force-fed engine oil as a torture tactic, the fact that somehow no one seems to think it’s fucked up that their drag race competition is called “Race Wars”, and a straight-out-of-a-girl-group-song moment when Paul Walker screams “Don’t do it, Jesse!” while trying to convince a reckless teen not to race. Also, as a lazy Louisiana nerd who barely leaves the house, I have no idea exactly how over the top the depictions of widescale California street races that result in thousands of people running from the cops are, but they felt pretty silly to an outsider. The campy charms never reach a fever pitch, however, and the film mostly serves as a baseline measurement for the sure-to-come shameless retreads inherent to sequels as well as the cartoonish absurdity promised in the ads for Furious 7 (and hopefully elsewhere in the five films in-between). It was a decent start to the series, but I doubt it’s the best or the worst that it has to offer. We’ll see.

-Brandon Ledet

Tammy (2014)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

Tammy is unmistakably a passion project for actress/comedian Melissa McCarthy. Ever since her career-making turn as a hot mess in Bridesmaids, McCarthy has been unfortunately typecasted as an obnoxious slob, so it seems peculiar that a film she personally developed with her first-time writer/director husband Ben Falcone would again have her fill that role. Instead of feeling like more of the same, however, Tammy feels like the culmination of what McCarthy has been building towards since her long line of hot mess characters began in 2011. Structurally, the film plays like a genre exercise in the vein of a standard road trip/buddy comedy that throws generic plot points at the audience as if they’re somehow still surprising despite their over-familiarity. However, Tammy’s strict genre adherence is a merely a front, a platform for the dark, irreverent working class comedy the film really is at heart.

The character Tammy (nearly every character is known by just their first name here: Pearl, Earl, Lenore, Bobby, etc.) is almost instantly familiar to the audience. As we follow her through an especially shitty day in which she loses a car, a job, and a husband, she not only builds on the personality McCarthy has developed since Bridesmaids, but she also establishes herself as a descendant of a long line of have-vs-have-nots comedic characters. Tammy is like a complicated black comedy cocktail with equal parts Strangers With Candy (sharing Jerri Blank’s near feral human-raccoon nature) , Roseanne (with her disinterest in feigning poise), Observe & Report (in her tendency to obscure her crippling depression with outsized bravado), Tommy Boy (in that she destroys everything she touches, but in an endearing way), and Freddy Got Fingered (in both her irreverence & her interaction with dead animals, though both of those factors are thankfully toned down). It’s a hilariously bitter formula that’s just as delightful as it is depressing. Tammy is an eternal fuckup with no discernible promise in her future, but she’s also refreshingly honest & super friendly. Her nature is best understood in a scene where she’s ineptly robbing a fast food restaurant while making friends & plans to hang out with the employees she holds at gunpoint. No one describes Tammy better than she does herself when she says “A little taste of Tammy and you’re going to come clammering back for more. I’m like a Cheeto; you can’t eat just one.” Her character (and in some ways the movie itself) is the personification of junk food; Tammy is cheap, cheesy, and most likely bad for you, but she’s also potently delectable.

In addition to Tammy’s penchant for finding somber humor in poverty, alcoholism, and depression, it’s also subversive in the way it swaps the traditional gender roles in the road trip & buddy comedies it emulates (the same way The To Do List subverted teen sex farces in 2013). Not only is the titular Tammy not the gender you’d expect in a crude, bumbling buffoon protagonist in this genre, she’s also surrounded by a large cast of hilarious women, with the film’s men taking largely a backseat role. The always-welcome Allison Janney & Kathy Bates both have great turns as Tammy’s uptight mother & boisterous lesbian aunt, respectively, but it’s Susan Sarandon that steals the show as Pearl, Tammy’s alcoholic, pill-addicted fuckup drunk of a grandmother. Even though it’s a story we’ve all seen told before, the film’s most heartfelt moments are when Tammy & Pearl drop the self-righteous posturing and bond as two vulnerable people, like in the scene where Pearl reveals that she was in a sexual relationship with “the wrong” Allman Brother and Tammy confesses that she got fingered by Boz Scaggs (but it’s okay, because “it turns out it wasn’t Boz Scaggs”). The film not only allows its women to misbehave in unconventional ways, it also limits the roles its male characters are allowed to fill. The only two male characters of note are played by Gary Cole, who essentially serves as a drunken bimbo for Pearl to conquer, and Mark Duplass, who plays the central character’s way too attractive & emotionally stable love interest, defined only by the depthless selflessness he offers the world. It’s an exact gender reversal of traditional slapstick farces.

Of course, Tammy is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea (or flavor of Cheeto). In fact, Deadspin named it the worst film of last summer, calling it “an ill-conceived nightmare from the beginning, starting with its star’s basic misunderstanding of what makes her an appealing actress in the first place. (It’s not the pratfalls; it’s the energy and warmth behind them).” I think there’s a lot of genuine warmth & some truly bizarre energy behind Tammy’s character that you can miss if you’re not on the movie’s wavelength (despite the character’s self-explanation that she’s like junk food & her love interest’s constant reassurance that she’s lovably honest & “real”). As with most comedies, your enjoyment is ultimately going to boil down to whether or not you find the film funny. Sure, it has its faults: the heart it tries to grow at its clichéd climax is less than compelling; there is an unfortunate featured inclusion of Macklemore on the soundtrack that will surely date the film; it’s relentlessly dumb & gross, etc. However, those faults are inherent to the genre-framework it operates within. For fans of this brand of subversively dark, lowbrow, working-class farces (from the titles mentioned above to other little-loved features like Brothers Solomon & Dirty Work) Tammy has plenty of charm to spare and a refreshing take on the gender roles established by its predecessors. McCarthy may not be playing to the height of her talents here (she’s an impressive dramatic actress when given the chance), but she has constructed a character and a film that are a welcome addition to a long tradition of surprisingly bitter junk food comedies.

-Brandon Ledet

Phase IV (1974)

/ swampflix / 19 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

When I’m prompted to imagine a film about murderous insects, I think back to the atomic creature features of the 1950s. I picture close-ups of actual insects scaling miniature models of suburban homes crudely combined with shots of victims screaming for their lives in the grasp of the invader’s oversized paper mache pincers. In my imagination, the insects become monsters through massive size alone, a tradition carried down all the way from 1957’s The Deadly Mantis to 2002’s Eight Legged Freaks. A refreshing deviation from this norm, 1974’s Phase IV surprisingly makes a threat of its murderous ants without blowing them out of proportion, but instead giving them a much more dangerous attribute: intelligence.

The killer ants in Phase IV are shrewd, organized, and scarily adaptable. They attack their predators preemptively, methodically killing spiders, praying mantises, and then humans as if they’re assassins taking orders. They turn automobiles into bombs, dismantle computers, and weaponize reflected sunlight in a vengeful reflection of a bored child with a magnifying glass. When sprayed with poisons, they purposefully evolve to include the toxins in their next mutation. The nature footage the film manages to cull is very impressive. It’s rare that this brand of sci-fi schlock would be perplexing on a technical level, but Phase IV kept me guessing. Sure, there were the inevitable close-up shots of ants eating cut with images of a collapsing set, but a lot of the film had me scratching my head as to just exactly how they got their footage. Did they dye the mutant ants? Was some of the action achieved though stop-motion animation? Did they write the movie around the kind of footage they could influence? I had a lot of questions about the production of Phase IV that I normally wouldn’t have in other films of its caliber.

Of course, Phase IV has its campy charms as well. The scientists that study/go to war with the ants bring a lot of good ole sci-fi nonsense like geodesic domes, futuristic hazmat suits, decontamination steam, and very sciency bleep bloop machines along with them. The opening narration is accompanied by outer space animation that recalls the ridiculousness of The Adventures of Hercules. The film also occasionally adopts the ants’ POV through a honeycomb-patterned kaleidoscope lens probably best described as “ant cam”. The cheap Western landscape setting (which resembles the remote communities where the atom bomb was developed) gives the film an automatic otherworldly look, which combines effectively with the ants’ naturally alien features in the nature footage close-ups. The queen ant is also provided some red/blue Creepshow lighting, which does wonders for her appeal as a villain and the film’s appeal as a silly diversion. It’s easy to see why Phase IV was given the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment, but I feel like that brand of mockery is selling its other merits a bit short.

Visually bizarre, technically impressive, tonally unnerving, and backed by a wickedly cool soundtrack of droning synths (recently made available 40 years late by Waxwork Records), Phase IV is a thoroughly strange film. Its loose, psychedelic ending was apparently cut short by butchers at Paramount Pictures (with some of the more bizarre surviving footage thankfully preserved in the trailer and elsewhere on YouTube), but the remaining effect is an open-ended conclusion that’s rare for this genre & era. The film isn’t exactly on an Under the Skin level of obfuscation & psychedelia, but it’s not far off. As far as sci-fi schlock about murderous insects goes, Phase IV is an impressive oddity with a killer soundtrack and some highly effective nature footage backing up its inherently campy appeal. It’s tempting to brush it off as a silly trifle based on premise alone, but there’s something much more peculiar going on here. It’s a shame that first-time director Saul Bass, known mostly as a graphic designer in his work on movie posters & title sequences, would never follow it up with a second feature. He had a great knack for striking visuals & eerie moods that could’ve translated into a long, interesting career if given the chance to flourish.

-Brandon Ledet

Bergman vs. Corman: Death vs. The Red Death

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

EPSON MFP image

In our Swampchat discussion of March’s Movie of the Month, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, I pointed out how great of a one-two punch the movie was in combination with February’s Movie of the Month, Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death. As a double feature, the two movies feed off each other well thematically, especially in their contemplation of an uncaring, inevitable Death. Even Roger Corman himself saw the similarities in the films’ subject matter, which lead to him delaying the production of Masque for years. According to Wikipedia, he was quoted as saying, “I kept moving The Masque of the Red Death back, because of the similarities, but it was really an artificial reason in my mind.” The films do have a similar doom & gloom aesthetic in their personifications of Death in the time of a plague, but the differences that ultimately make their connection “artificial” are very much fundamental in nature. The Seventh Seal and The Masque of the Red Death are connected by a plague and by Death’s portrayal as a living character, but both Death’s personality and the social effect of a plague on its suffering population are strikingly different in the two films.

Both The Seventh Seal & The Masque of the Red Death rightfully portray Death as an inevitability, but the personality traits they assign him are almost directly oppositional. In The Seventh Seal, Death allows himself to be amused. The movie’s iconic chess match, while a stay of execution for Antonius Black, is nothing more than a diversion, a light entertainment for Death. Death later continues his playful bemusement with Antonius by posing as a priest and taking his confession. Death has a sly sense of humor in this exchange, albeit one with a morbid result. In Corman’s Masque, The Red Death wouldn’t be caught alive participating in such tomfoolery. The Red Death is very much a professional in his duties, carrying the impartial poise of a courtroom judge in his interactions with Prince Prospero. The only time he allows himself to react to Prospero’s schemes is when the prince begs mercy for the captive Francesca and even then his reaction is only mild surprise.

The plagues that accompany Death & The Red Death are more or less interchangeable, but there’s an essential difference in Corman & Bergman’s interpretations of the victims’ reactions to the hardship. In both films the plagues are met (at least by some) with a form of naïve celebration, a kind of a party while the ship goes down. In The Masque of the Red Death, this party is a disgusting display, a vilification of opulence. Wealthy party guests assume they are above The Red Death’s inevitability merely by the merit of their breed & fortune. Considering themselves invincible, they shut the poor out of the gates of Prospero’s mansion and party their final hours away in excess. Their thirst for a good time while others suffer is a vile impulse that Corman represents disapprovingly and Vincent Price skillfully amplifies with gusto. As James first said in our Swampchat on The Seventh Seal (and which I later explored in my comparison of the film to Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey), the central couple “Jof and Mia who, while maybe naïve, fully embrace life, family, and art despite the dread and despair that surrounds them. As Jof, Mia, and Mikael are the only characters to survive the film, I think Bergman is trying to say that the only way to conquer the fear of death is to truly embrace life, which makes the film, in my eyes, an ultimately uplifting one.” In Bergman’s viewpoint, celebration in the time of Death is a human ideal. While the celebration in Masque is a hateful sin, the one in The Seventh Seal is a life-saving virtue. Bergman even pushes the idea further by having Jof receive visions from beyond this mortal realm. In some ways his naïve celebration of life is downright divine.

The surprising thing about the differences between Death & The Red Death is that they’re somewhat counterintuitive. As a superficial assumption I would think that The Seventh Seal, a black & white art house drama from Ingmar Bergman, would have been the film that portrayed Death as a somber executioner and the party that surrounds him a crime against man. I would also expect that The Masque of the Red Death, a Vincent Price horror film helmed by camp legend Roger Corman, would be the film that portrayed Death as a playful prankster and the celebration of life that surrounds him a moral asset. Instead, the two films find their respective art house pensiveness & over-the-top camp in other characters & plot devices, the trivial elements that bind them as a pair used for entirely different ends. Although their connection is primarily artificial, our back-to-back discussions of The Seventh Seal & The Masque of the Red Death will forever link them in my mind anyway, both for the ways they are superficially the same and in the considerable ways they differ on a fundamental level.

For more on March’s Movie of the Month, 1957’s The Seventh Seal, visit our Swampchat discussion of the film and last week’s exploration of its thematic similarities with Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.

-Brandon Ledet