brandon ledet

We Found a Dozen Nice Things to Say About Left Behind (2014)

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EPSON MFP image

Watching the 2014 version of Left Behind was one of those epiphany moments where a movie is bad (not a fun bad, just bad) but why were we expecting anything different? A reboot of a humorless Christian franchise trying its little, judgmental heart out to save our doomed, sinful souls from the definitely-going-to-happen-any-day-now Biblical Rapture doesn’t exactly sound like a laugh riot. The inclusion of human enigma Nicolas Cage gave the series the promise of campy appeal, but he was in quick-paycheck mode and did little for the film’s lifeless, dour tone. Similarly, any weird potential in the idea of a worldwide, supernatural, people-erasing event is severely undercut by the film being the first in a planned series and the budgetary decision of bottling most of the action on a single airplane. Instead of the amused chuckling we naively expected, we met most of the film with irritated silence.

It’s a little unfair to beat up on a film based on our off-base expectations, though, so instead of giving Left Behind a negative review, we decided to catalog the things we actually liked about the movie. It took some careful deliberation but between the two of us we came up with an even dozen nice (or at least entertaining) things to say about Left Behind.

1. Although the movie doesn’t include any patented Nic Cage Freak-Outs™, it does feature Cage delivering the following line to his Atheist daughter: “If your mother was going to leave me for another man, it might as well have been Jesus.” A calm, collected Cage isn’t exactly the shot in the arm this movie needed, but we really liked that line.

2. Cage has exactly one more entertaining moment later in the film. As the passengers on the airplane he’s piloting are freaking out, confused about their Raptured loved ones, he utilizes his National Treasure puzzle-solving skills and gets to the bottom of what’s going on. The clues that lead him to discovering the phenomenon’s Biblical source: one missing passenger’s watch reads “John 3:16” and another’s datebook has a scheduled Bible study penciled in.

3. The Rapture itself was kind of interesting (even if by default), especially the image of disappeared children’s clothes falling to the floor while the balloons they were holding float toward the heavens.

4. We may have unfairly described the film as humorless above. It does attempt an embarrassing, mildly reprehensible line of comic relief involving an angry dwarf character. Most of the gags are misfires politically & morally, but there is one that is just genuine, wholesome fun. As the passengers are trying to figure out if the Raptured have actually disappeared or are just invisible, the dwarf tries to give one of the missing a wet willy. It’s pretty funny.

5. Speaking of morally reprehensible, the same dwarf character mentioned above is unceremoniously tossed out of the airplane once it lands by a Muslim man he’d been bickering with for most of the runtime. It’s a gag that’s transgressive in its complete disregard for decency, but it’s still entertaining in its own deplorable way.

6. Nic Cage’s daughter is just as frustrated with her mother’s newfound Christian faith as Cage is. When she discovers that her mother’s warnings of The Rapture have come true she angrily smashes the disappeared woman’s Bible through window glass. It’s a great image & one that would befit the most melodramatic Lifetime Movie blowup.

7. Speaking of Nic Cage’s daughter, she looks eerily similar to his mistress in some ways. It’s cool that he has a type.

8. Cage’s totally happy, not at all depressing family unit is only shown in one place in a single image: a hilariously awkward family portrait that makes two separate appearances in the film. The shoddy Photoshop on the picture is an embarrassment, Cage himself looking like he was airbrushed into the picture. It’s one of the film’s only interesting images because it’s so jarringly fabricated and it’s totally bizarre that they felt the need to feature it twice.

9. In yet another bizarrely fake image, there’s a CGI plane that’s crash-landing looks like it was borrowed from a PowerPoint presentation. It’s ridiculous.

10. Just in case you don’t know how to feel at any point during the movie’s consistently over-sentimental, maudlin proceedings there’s an oppressive, violin-heavy soundtrack there to remind you how to feel at every moment. It would be annoying if it weren’t so over-the-top in its persistence.

11. The same way the violins never let you forget exactly how to feel, there’s a character that contantly reminds everyone around him that he’s an “investigative journalist”, which would be a ludicrous, ill-advised thing for a real-life investigative journalist to do, but it is pretty funny in this context.

12. All joking & sarcastic derision aside, there are a couple decent shots in the film. Exactly a couple. One image of Cage’s daughter backing up a truck & one of her running across a bridge at night felt like glimpses into a drastically different, frankly much better film. Combined together, they amount to maybe 5 seconds of footage, but they do look fairly nice in comparison to the artistic void that surrounds them. As with every other item on this list, we were deeply grateful for the fleeting flashes of vitality in a movie that was severely lacking both in life and personality.

-James Cohn & Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

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masque
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 watch The Masque of the Red Death (1964).

Brandon:
The Masque of The Red Death is one of eight films in the Corman-Poe cycle: a series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations directed by B-movie legend Roger Corman for American International Pictures. The Masque is widely considered the best of the Poe cycle as well as one of Corman’s best films overall, a sentiment I wholeheartedly agree with. There’s so much about The Masque that’s firmly in my wheelhouse: over-the-top set design, an early glimpse of 60’s era Satanic psychedelia, Vincent Price taking effete delight in his own cruelty, a fatalistic ending that doesn’t stray from the pessimism of Poe’s story, Corman pushing the limits of what he can get away with visually on a shoestring budget. I love it all.

What struck me most on this recent viewing of The Masque is how well it’s suited for the Carnival season. With Fat Tuesday looming around the corner, it was impossible not to see aspects of Carnival in the masquerade ball hosted by Prince Prospero (Vincent Price). The cheap costumes & mockery of opulence is very much reminiscent of Mardi Gras parades. There’s even a scene where Prospero literally throws beads from a balcony shouting “Gifts! Gifts!” and scoffs at the greed of the people below. As the threat of The Red Death plague becomes increasingly severe, the masquerade takes on a “party while the ship is sinking” vibe New Orleans knows all too well. Horror films are usually tied to Halloween, but The Masque of the Red Death is distinctly akin to Mardi Gras in my mind.

James, do you also see Carnival in The Masque’s decadence, or does the Satan worship overpower that influence?

James:
Man, The Masque of the Red Death was awesome. The bold stylistic choices that Corman made on a limited budget and limited time (the final masquerade scene was filmed in a day) are astonishing. Some of the images in the film (The Red Death himself being the starkest) are mesmerizing. I think the film should also be noted for its pitch-perfect tone. Despite its macabre images, philosophical discussions of Satanism, and Prince Prospero’s nastiness, what could have been a dreary chore is instead a blast throughout.

In regards to the presence of Carnival in the film, I do think the masquerade ball scenes in particular have a very Mardi Gras feel to them. Masks with feathered beaks, gorilla suits, and a child masquerading as a little person don’t feel too far removed from the typical Carnival season debauchery. The Carnival feel also deepened a central theme of the film: lost souls celebrating a kind of momentary victory over Death. Ultimately, the film seems to have a nihilistic attitude towards Death, implying that the celebration is indeed a momentary victory and whether Christian, Satanist, or Atheist, we will all have to eventually confront an indifferent Death. But it also seems to find solace in our ability to shape our own existence while we are alive. This is echoed The Red Death’s climactic statement “Each man creates his own God for himself – his own Heaven, his own Hell.”

Britnee, what was your interpretation of the film’s philosophy on Death? Is it wholly negative?

Britnee:
This was my first time viewing The Masque of Red Death, and I have to say that I was blown away. Vincent Price as Prince Prospero was dynamite. I was so close to hiding under the covers during the close-ups of his signature evil stare, but seconds later, I was imagining what it would be like to have a conversation & afternoon tea with him in one of those seven colored rooms. Also, one of my favorite things about the film was the set and costumes. I know the look was supposed to have a Medieval vibe, but I really felt that I was at a Satanic drug dealer’s mansion party in the early 60s. All that was missing was the orange shag carpet.

As for my interpretation of the film’s philosophy on Death, I’m honestly not 100% sure. Death has always terrified/interested me, and I caught myself really falling into some deep thoughts about it while watching this film. The Christians and Satanists in Masque both experienced violent deaths, and neither of their higher powers swooped in to save them or give them a miraculous second chance. I guess the film is trying to show that Death cannot be avoided, regardless of power or faith. In the end when The Red Death states “Sic transit gloria mundi,” which literally means “Thus passes the glory of this world,” everything sort of hit me. Life can be very short & leave without warning, whether you’re a Christian villager living in poverty or a wealthy Satanic prince; it’s coming for us all!

Something else that stuck out was the interesting relationship between Prospero and Francesca. After sparing Francesca’s life, Prospero brings her to his castle to make her his consort and gives her a taste of his world. He becomes very intrigued with Francesca’s innocence and faith. As for Francesca, there are times where it seems as though she is giving in to temptation, but simultaneously she is in constant focus on her escape.

Brandon, what themes do the relationship between Prospero and Francesca bring to the film?

Brandon:
It’s reasonable to assume that Prospero wasn’t always the cruel tyrant we meet in the picture. He didn’t emerge from the womb executing peasants and cursing God. Prospero’s poisonous personality was likely the result of a gradual corruption of his soul, an evil born of his prosperous upbringing. Raised with untold wealth & influence, he came to rule over his fellow human beings like an unforgiving deity. Unsatisfied with the power his privilege as Earthly nobility affords him, he reaches even further beyond this realm and makes a deal with Satan in an attempt to overcome Death. Yet, there’s a little speck of good left in Prospero’s heart, which I think is what we see in his treatment of Francesca. At times he tries to prove that even her innocence can be corrupted because he wants to be assured that his own wickedness can be found in every person’s heart. He even asks her to join him in mocking the greed & decay in the guests at the masque, because he believes all people to be as amoral as he is. At other times, he goes out of his way to protect her and spare her life, an instinct that surprises even The Red Death. The only other glimpse of good we see in Prospero is when he asks his guards to spare a baby’s life at the gates. Although he is beyond redemption, (not that redemption matters in the eyes of Death,) Francesca affords Prospero his last chance to act like a true human being.

Then there’s the fact that the actress who plays Francesca, Jane Asher, was just achingly beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that she was in a relationship with & at one time engaged to Sir Paul McCartney in the 60s. She was attractive enough to snare a Beatle during the fever pitch of Beatlemania, so surely a demented prince who can’t even cheat Death wouldn’t stand a chance against her charms. Perhaps simple lust spares her life. I think Francesca stands out here as a hip youngster (maybe it’s all in those bangs?) and helps add to that 60s drug dealer mansion party vibe mentioned above. So much of the film feels rebellious in an anachronistic way. Prospero’s philandering is out of control. Lines like “Satan rules the universe!” and “Each man creates his own god for himself” are pretty edgy for 1964, even coming from the villains. Keep in mind this is still years before the New Hollywood, a movement Roger Corman cannot be praised enough for influencing.

James, how do you see the balance between the movie’s setting and the era in which it was filmed?

James:
The movie definitely has an edge that makes it still creepy and blasphemous over 40 years later. I wonder how much Corman was in tune with the counterculture of the time because, despite it being a British production, the film feels more like a deranged product of the 60’s San Fransisco hippie movement, like a horror version of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls; its macabre decadence fueled by lust and greed. It’s also most likely no coincidence that the epicenter of the hippie movement was the same place that the Anton Lavey established the Church of Satan in 1966. Themes like the destruction of social norms and an openness to sexual and spiritual experiences seem to be shared by The Masque of the Red Death, Satanists, and the hippies; “Each man creates his own god for himself” is THE basic philosophical statement of Satanism. I also think this is reflected in the dark, psychedelic imagery that The Masque of the Red Death and Satanist rituals share. (Photo for example)

satanist

Britnee, How strongly do you think the psychedelic aesthetic of the 60’s influenced The Masque of the Red Death? Any specific examples that stick out to you?

Britnee:
I think that The Masque of the Red Death was as psychedelic as it gets, at least for a horror film based in Medieval times. An example that really sticks out to me is the colors used throughout the film, most importantly, the use of red. Red usually represents blood, gore, and all the good stuff horror movies are made of, but when I also think of the term “psychedelic,” red is usually the color that comes to mind. After doing a little research, I found that the color red has a pretty long wavelength and very low vibration; this pretty much explains how the red tint that is present in multiple scenes really gives off this warm, draining feeling. Sounds a bit like the feeling you get after taking a hallucinogen or two, right? Also, all of those gaudy colors in the castle & clothing of Prospero and his pals can’t go without mention. While I’m not a Middle Ages expert or enthusiast, I’m almost positive that the colors of clothing and décor weren’t as bright and vibrant during that era as they are in the film. It’s obvious that the 60’s psychedelic aesthetic heavily influenced those hues.

Lagniappe

Brandon:
I’d just like to point out one last time just how early this film was released. A lot of what we think of as the hippie-dippie 60s came very late in the decade. The era-defining Summer of Love was in 1967, the same year Roger Corman dropped acid for the first time and fictionalized his experience in the film The Trip. The Masque‘s 1964 release positions the film as years ahead of its time. Corman was pulling off the Satanic psychedelia vibe the same year that Mary Poppins & My Fair Lady were huge cultural hits. I’m not saying Masque was particularly a major influence on the countercultural swell that was to come, but it at least was somewhat visually intuitive. And Corman himself did have direct influence on the later films that typified that counterculture, films like Easy Rider and Bonnie & Clyde. Even back then, when “don’t trust anyone over 30” was a motto to live by, he was the hippest geezer in the room and a filmmaking rebel.

Britnee:
After the discussion with The Swampflix Crew, so many ideas and thoughts about The Masque of the Red Death were brought to the surface. It gave me an excuse to watch the film a couple more times, and I fell in love with it more each viewing. The movie also got me hooked on the Corman-Poe films, so I’m currently trying to get my hands on all of them. The Masque of the Red Death was just a great balance of horror, suspense, and drama that gave me some really unsettling thoughts & a case of the willies. Great job, Corman!

James:
Really enjoyed the discussion of The Masque of the Red Death. Watching the film a second time and taking into account all the points you guys made deepened my appreciation and understanding of the film. Definitely want to see more Corman, especially the Poe films. As Brandon pointed out, Corman seemed to have his hand on the pulse of the counterculture and was always one step ahead of mainstream Hollywood. Truly a filmmaker ahead of his time.

-The Swampflix Crew

Upcoming Movie of the Months
March: James presents The Seventh Seal (1957)
April: Britnee presents Blood & Black Lace (1964)

How to Play the See No Evil (2006) Drinking Game

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see no evil

One of the earliest (and trashiest) trends we’re developing here in Swampflix’s infancy is a focus on pro wrestling movies. We’ve even designated a Wrestling Cinema page, where you can find all reviews & articles for movies somehow related to pro wrestlers or to “sports entertainment” in general. I expect that over time (if it hasn’t happened already) we’ll end up spending way too much time & energy poring over the details of even the most dire entries in Wrestling Cinema, whether or not they deserve the effort. Spoiler: they typically don’t.

Even this early in our run, we’ve already spilled entirely too much ink on one particular Wrestling Cinema franchise: the pro wrestler Kane’s slasher vehicle See No Evil. Between our reviews of See No Evil (2006) & See No Evil 2 (2014), we’ve written ~1,500 words about a very simple set of films. The “tl;dr” version: the first one is surprisingly fun & nasty; the second one is a waste of your time. Even though we’ve already covered too much ground with the franchise at this point, there is one detail I feel we shouldn’t have skipped over: the See No Evil drinking game.

We’ve previously mentioned the awful dialogue, terrible acting, and “vile, hateful” teenage characters that populate the first See No Evil, but not in great detail. Instead of providing the teens meaningful exchanges or character arcs, most of the film’s dialogue consists of long strings of insults. Characters call each other “sluts” & “assholes” with an alarming frequency. The script’s dependency on insults would be an annoyance if the insults weren’t both so over-the-top in their prevalence and also surprisingly appropriate for the film’s overall nasty look & tone. The insults are so constant, so overwhelming that it becomes difficult to notice anything else (besides, you know, the brutal murders).

Which brings me to the rules of the See No Evil drinking game:
1) Drink whenever a character insults someone.

That’s it. You should have plenty to drink with just this one prompt. There may be some questions to suss out before the game begins like “Does it count if they insult an inanimate object or a building?” and “Does murdering someone count as an insult?” My own thoughts on that second question: in regards to this particular group of degenerates, murder might be more of a favor or a blessing.

Note: We only suggest playing this game with the first See No Evil movie. This is not only because the characters in See No Evil 2 are much kinder to each other, but also because we don’t recommend you watch the sequel at all.

Play safe!

-Brandon Ledet

See No Evil 2 (2014)

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see no evil

onehalfstar

campstamp

A lot can change in 8 years. Technology & cultural tastes are especially vulnerable to the passage of time. Fashion, language, entertainment, and modes of communication & business can go through massive transformations in just 8 months, let alone 8 years. 2014’s See No Evil 2, the sequel to 2006’s See No Evil, makes the mistake of ignoring these transformations entirely. It sets the lackluster sequel on the same night as the gross-out slasher original, but makes no attempts at continuity in the characters’ appearances or electronics. In one movie, they’re texting on bejeweled flip phones and in the next they’re discussing what’s trending on Twitter. It’s jarring.

The continuity issues don’t stop there. The two films are vastly different in both the stories they tell & the tone they tell them in. At the end of See No Evil there are 3 survivors from the hotel massacre & the supernaturally strong serial killer, Jacob Goodnight (ugh), is ultimately defeated when his heart is impaled. See No Evil 2 is set in the morgue that accepts the bodies from the hotel & there are no survivors to speak of. The killer’s eye is still missing from an attack in the first film, but his not-impaled heart is still beating in an early ambulance scene. There’s also no mention of the fact that he literally has maggots for brains in the first film or that his favorite hobby is to collect eyeballs as trophies of his kills. The eyeball collecting is a curious detail to ignore, since the pun in the film’s title is almost entirely dependent upon it. Without the eyeballs there is very little connecting the two films besides the title and the Jacob Goodnight character. Even the actor/professional wrestler who plays Jacob Goodnight is billed differently in the two films. In See No Evil he is simply billed as his wrestling persona “Kane”. In See No Evil 2, he’s graduated to Glenn “Kane” Jacobs.

Of course, consistency is not necessary to making an enjoyable slasher film starring a professional wrestler. It’s conceivably possible that the two drastically different See No Evil movies could peacefully co-exist as entertaining, loosely connected gore fests. As James pointed out in his review, the first See No Evil is surprisingly fun. It boasts “a sick charm because it knows exactly the kind of film it is and doesn’t pretend to be anything more.” See No Evil 2 unfortunately loses sight of the original’s tried-and-true cheap thrills slasher format and mistakenly attempts a slow burn suspense that is frankly beyond its limited reach. The first See No Evil is a surprisingly nasty gore fest overstuffed with vile, hateful characters that viciously get their comeuppance one at a time. See No Evil 2, by comparison, is overstuffed with bland couples sussing out their even blander relationship dynamics until they’re uneventfully killed off-screen. By the time a throat is finally slit in plain view an hour into the film & Goodnight discovers the morgue’s stash of bone saws, I felt like a sick bastard for cheering. Without any other entertaining element in play, I had a terrible case of unsatisfied bloodlust during most of the run time.

There are a few lonely bright spots in See No Evil 2. Kane, excuse me, Glen “Kane” Jacobs is visually terrifying enough in real life to be an imposing figure in a slasher movie without much help, something the first See No Evil uses to its advantage. See No Evil 2 goes the extra mile and costumes him in a plastic burn victim mask & black rubber apron that does wonders for his appearance. When he pauses to inspect his new, “improved” visage in a bathroom mirror he has a fairly hilarious “What have I become?” moment that I got a kick out of. The film’s central idea of throwing a surprise birthday party in a morgue also has an amusing charm to it, as does Kane taking chair shots to the head, something he’s been well-trained to do in the wrestling ring. Like most things in this franchise, though, the chair shots gag is exploited much more effectively in the first film, which makes the moment a little hollow. Similarly, by the time See No Evil 2’s sole over-the-top gore arrives in the last ten minutes (the killer is pumped full of vibrantly blue embalming fluid) the film had already asked for too much patience & instead of the “Awesome!” reaction it was looking for, I found myself thinking “Finally!”, something I didn’t experience with the first film.

Of course, it’s a little unfair to constantly compare the entertainment value of See No Evil 2 to that of its predecessor, but it’s a comparison that the film itself encourages often. There are frequent flashbacks & recaps of the first film in its sequel, unwisely reminding me that the product was actually fun at one time. In these recaps it becomes overwhelmingly clear just how different the two movies are. In 2006 See No Evil was imitating the recent successes of ultraviolent (in an icky way) horror flicks like Hostel & Saw, which allowed it to supplant minor details like a decent script or a reason to exist with detached eyeballs and buckets of gore. In the 8 years since its release Hollywood horror had softened greatly, aiming its sights on a PG-13 crowd, playing down bloodshed in order to sell more tickets. Instead of ignoring this trend like it ignored the continuity in the films’ story, the See No Evil franchise also softened in those 8 years. You can see the difference in See No Evil 2’s flashbacks, the dank squalor of the first film clashing with the clinical cleanliness of the second.

Although the films are ostensibly set on the same night, the 8 years that separate them are impossible to ignore. Updating See No Evil 2 for the watered-down 2014 slasher aesthetic was a huge mistake. It was a franchise well-suited for 2006’s often disgusting brand of gross-out gore & torture. Remove its mean streak and there’s not much left besides a bald, one-eyed wrestler in a plastic mask gloomily gazing in a bathroom mirror, asking himself “What have I become?”

-Brandon Ledet

Arakimentari (2004)

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EPSON MFP image

three star

A short, brisk documentary about Japanese artist Nobuyoshi Araki, Arakimentari tiptoes the same line as its subject: the division between fine art & shameless erotica. Araki, a photographer, is an excitable pervert even in his old age, rapidly firing off lofty platitudes about the visual appeal of vaginas & what it means to be an artist. The movie itself begins with the questions “What is a photographer? What is photography?” before diving head first into Araki’s unique world of daily self-documentation & bondage model photo shoots. As a total weirdo and a sexual deviant, Araki comes across here as the (much cheerier) Robert Crumb of photography.

Araki reached his peak cultural popularity in the 1990s & Arakimentari is smart to mimic a 90s aesthetic in the telling of his work. There’s a truly hip 90s NYC vibe in the movie’s long stretches where aggressive electronic music (provided by DJ Krush) plays over blindingly fast slide shows of Araki’s photography. The movie works best in these montages, allowing the art to speak for itself. Portraits, flowers, everyday objects, and muted landscapes mix with Araki’s obscene erotica in surreal bursts. Several photographers are interviewed to help provide context for Araki’s significance, but musician Björk is also included as a kind of Ambassador of 90s Cool. She explains that she found his work when she lived in London during that decade, describing what a powerful discovery it was at the time. Björk also points to the significance of Araki’s book about his deceased wife in a moment that gets a deservedly calmer, tenderer type of slideshow than the rest of his work does here.

Arakimentari is not a prying, tell-all type of documentary. It offers its subject’s life & work for review in the best light possible. It tells the story of an energetic degenerate with a photographic eye & a constant smile, without asking him to reveal too much about either himself or his detractors. Its best moments occur when the art is offered for viewing free of context, but Araki himself is an amusing character & deft storyteller that makes the rest of the run time worthwhile as well.

-Brandon Ledet

Prêt-à-Porter (1994)

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EPSON MFP image

twohalfstar

Robert Altman’s follow-up to the surprisingly potent (and far superior) Short Cuts, Prêt-à-Porter (Ready to Wear), applies the director’s casual, large-ensemble aesthetic to the colorful backdrop of Paris Fashion Week. Altman’s typically nonjudgmental tone is somewhat absent here as characters frequently devolve into the kind of self-parody you’d expect in a Christopher Guest mockumentary, but they’re more or less charming all the same. Prêt-à-Porter is a loose, amused take on the fashion industry that tries to succeed less on having something to say and more on having someone interesting say it.

In true Altman form, the cast is stacked: Sophia Loren, Kim Basinger, Forrest Whitaker, Rupert Everett, Julia Roberts, Lauren Bacall, Tim Robbins, Lyle Lovett, Tracey Ullman, Cher, Naomi Campbell, Teri Garr, and Harry Belafonte all participate in some capacity. By filming during Paris Fashion Week, Altman achieves an even larger ensemble cast of familiar faces than usual, which unfortunately may be the film’s greatest accomplishment. I was drawn to Prêt-à-Porter when I read that even Björk had a brief cameo as a runway model. “Brief” is even a generous word for it, as she merely passes across the screen in her Mother Nature Incarnate mode, the (real life) fashion line she’s modeling having something to do with snow & wilderness. The themes of different fashion lines are a consistent source of amusement for the film as they each intensely focus on a singular, seemingly empty idea: boots, subway cars, Scotland, etc. An American news reporter with a Southern accent works as an audience surrogate as she politely navigates the vapidity of each runway show. One campaign simply marketing nudity, the complete absence of fashion, finally prompts her “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore” Network moment & she storms off.

Prêt-à-Porter occupies a strange space between light ribbing and outright mockery. Parts of it feel like Altman’s fashion world version of Guest’s Best in Show, but it never completely tips in that direction. Other parts feel like an undercooked version of the everything-is-connected story Altman had told many times before in much better films. A couple hours loafing along with this impressive assortment of celebrities is not a particularly bad way to spend your time, especially if you have severe 90s nostalgia or an intense interest in the fashion industry, but it could’ve been a much better film if it pushed itself a little harder in any specific direction.

Prêt-à-Porter is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Brandon Ledet

Anna and the Moods (2007)

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EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

It’s nearly impossible to be hard on Anna and the Moods, an animated short children’s film from 2007. It’s not perfect, but it is perfectly charming. Because the title character was voiced by the musician Björk I expected a story about a young girl singer in a rock band called The Moods. Instead I was treated to a quirky, compassionate take on puberty and what The Fresh Prince would call The “Parents Just Don’t Understand” Dilemma.

Anna and the Moods tells the story of a young girl who is expected to be consistently cheerful & obedient by her family, which she does willingly until she one day wakes up transformed. No longer a sentient beam of sunshine, Anna finds herself plagued by “moodicles” (hormone-induced moods). Her image shifts from that of a precious little girl to a moody goth teen and she decides to freak her parents out instead of playing to their expectations. She smokes cigars, commits petty crimes, listens to loud music, and develops a questionable taste in boys. Disturbed, Anna’s parents subject her to psychological evaluation, where a doctor, to their horror, diagnoses her as a “teenager”. Instead of prescribing her a solution to the newfound shifts in her mood, the doctor teaches Anna how to deal with flawed parenting. The movie takes a mischievous stance on the sudden changes that come with puberty, encouraging kids to misbehave, but also warning them that their parents are going to be jerks about it.

Directed by one of Björk’s former bandmates from the alt rock group The Sugarcubes, Anna and the Moods works with some hideously cheap CGI, but uses the handicap to its advantage. The characters look like snotty versions of Margaret Keane’s “big eyes” paintings and the whole picture has a bending, warped surreality to it that fits the puberty-altered mindset of its subject well. Monty Python veteran Terry Jones narrates with a perfectly measured children’s book tone that makes the movie’s less successful elements (like an unnecessary potshot at Michael Jackson) more than forgivable. It’s not a complicated or even a good-looking film, but as a short, fun trifle with an empathetic message & a sense of mischief, it’s sincerely entertaining.

-Brandon Ledet

Drawing Restraint 9 (2005)

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drawing rest 9

onestar

I recently watched & reviewed the two cinematic elements of Björk’s multimedia project Biophilia: Biophilia Live & When Björk Met Attenborough. Both films make outlandish claims about science, art, and nature that could have been pretentious drivel in the wrong context, but come across as both personal & fun in Björk’s capable hands. Biophilia is a vast, ambitious intellectual exercise, but one that never feels labored or pompous. Drawing Restrait 9, conversely, is a pompous multimedia project Björk participated in, the exact kind of pretentious drivel she avoided when her own hands were on the wheel.

The film Drawing Restraint 9 is one element of a project that includes sculptures, books, photographs and drawings. It’s a single entry in the much larger Drawing Restraint art project that’s been ongoing since 1987 and currently in the Drawing Restraint 19 phase of its evolution. It’s the work of visual artist Matthew Barney, whose now defunct personal relationship with Björk is the subject of her most recent release, a heart-wrenching breakup album titled Vulnicura. Björk plays a large role in the film Drawing Restraint 9, both composing the music & playing one of the main characters opposite Barney himself. As it is a mostly dialogue-free affair with a very loose narrative, her musical contributions are a vital aspect of the production and one of the only pleasant elements in play (until it too takes a savage dive at the film’s climax). Drawing Restraint 9 is a work of avant garde filmmaking, the kind of art that dares you to hate it. It’s a dare I accept often.

The film opens with an unidentified figure carefully wrapping organic material in beautifully delicate packages. There’s a care & precision to the ceremony that’s both suggestive of the portrayals of precise, careful ceremonies to come as well as the overall craft of the movie itself. Barney’s background in visual art is constantly on display in some truly impressive images of the dance teams, tea ceremonies, and working class fisherman that participate in the mysterious rituals of a Japanese whaling ship. Very little dialogue is provided for context of how this all fits together. At almost 80min into its massive 3 hour run time, a few, sparse lines provide a brief glimpse into the occasion & purpose of the elaborate tea ceremony that takes place aboard the whaling ship, but it’s not a story that wants to be understood completely. It instead wants to be effective visually.

The narrative-free images are not the problem. There is an entertainment value to ambiguity & obfuscation that Drawing Restraint 9 could have achieved, but it’s as if the film deliberately wanted to be devoid of entertainment as well. The climactic tea ceremony/mating ritual is a perfect encapsulation why the picture doesn’t work in this respect. As the characters played by Björk & Matthew Barney sensually gut each other with knives on a sinking ship in the film’s sole moment of action (as opposed to its endless portrayals of preparation), the music becomes aggressively horrendous. A lone male voice & an arrhythmic woodblock combine to create without question the single most unpleasant song I have ever heard in my life. The disgusting surgical gore in this scene is violent enough to get its point across without the somehow even more painful sound design. Minutes after the gore stops the song continues to soldier on, leaving an intensely bitter taste in its wake. It turns out Björk’s potent approach to music can be used for evil as well as good.

In addition to her distinctive musical contributions, it’s easy to see Björk’s fingerprints elsewhere in Drawing Restraint 9. There are themes about humanity’s inseparable connection to nature running throughout and the final line she sings is “Nature conspires to help you”, something you could reasonably expect to hear in Biophilia or The Juniper Tree. She appears on screen as the first sign of a natural image, perched on beachside rocks in furs. Aboard the whaling ship she is treated as royalty, as if she were Mother Nature incarnate. It’s a role and an image that fits her well, but like with the violent climax, any entertainment value is severely undercut by Matthew Barney’s pretentious, overwrought inclinations. The farfetched philosophy of Biophilia is tempered by a desire to entertain & include, while Drawing Restraint 9 is the result of an ego (or two) unchecked. The images Barney crafts are undeniably powerful, but utilized poorly in my opinion.

Of course, I’m admitting a bias here in this preference between the Drawing Restraint & Biophilia projects. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m typically a less artsy and more fartsy kind of an audience. The two albums Björk recorded during this phase of her career, Medúlla & Volta, are the only two she’s released in my entire lifetime that I honestly don’t enjoy, which may be part of the problem. But maybe the problem is bigger. Maybe the problem is that I hate Matthew Barney’s aesthetic (or at least think he should stick to sculptures & still images). Maybe I hate avant garde cinema. Maybe I hate all artists everywhere. I’m not sure. I do know I hate Drawing Restraint 9, though. I hate this movie.

-Brandon Ledet

Ready to Rumble (2000)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

wrasslin

three star

campstamp

The Royal Rumble is the last major pro wrestling pay-per-view before Wrestlemania. It’s a chaotic, cluttered mess of an event, and one of the highlights of the annual wrestling cycle. My friends & I partied hard for this year’s Rumble, filling a tiny apartment with chips, dips, liquors, “royal rum balls” and drunken shouting. It was a blast until the disappointing, telegraphed conclusion to the main event, an inevitability that had the crowd both in our living room and on the TV screen openly booing. Knowing what was coming before the Rumble even started, I psyched myself up with a ludicrous YouTube clip of an infamous wrestling incident in 2000 that was met with its own open ridicule: the time professional goofball/actor David Arquette became WCW’s World Heavyweight Champion.

A wrestling fan himself, David Arquette knew an actor becoming the WCW World Heavyweight Champion would not go over well with the crowd. He reportedly protested the angle, but WCW’s booking insisted it would be great promotion. The product they were pushing? Arquette’s pro wrestling comedy Ready to Rumble, a massive critical and financial flop. Although it failed in its time, Ready to Rumble has gradually proved itself (through its mere existence) as a time capsule of a bygone era. It’s a strange relic of wrestling’s unexpected late 90s, early 00s boost in popularity. The fact that WCW felt it could justify a $24mil production alone frames the film as culturally significant, even if they were ultimately proved wrong. Their preposterous plan to promote the film by making Arquette a real life heavyweight champion makes the movie a truly singular oddity. Usually, if a wrestling promotion is going to push a film career, like with Hulk Hogan or The Rock, they promote from within. Bringing a Hollywood outsider (a real life fan or not) into the ring is not without precedent, but handing them the belt is beyond ridiculous and not something fans will suffer quietly.

Another strange facet of the Arquette debacle was his relationship with actual pro wrestler Diamond Dallas Page. In Ready to Rumble DDP plays the heel, the villain to Arquette’s unlikely hero. In the real WCW ring they were tag team partners. The inconsistency is even more bizarre when you consider that Oliver Platt played the film’s fictional face, wrestler Jimmy King. If you were trying to logically promote the film in a WCW match, the natural choice would be for Platt (as Jimmy King) to wrestle DDP on television in a quick, one-off promotion. Platt, despite being a legitimately talented actor, seems to consistently be slumming it in his choices of roles, so a 5 minute promotional wrestling bit doesn’t seem all that out of the question. Instead, WCW opted for a long-form angle featuring David Arquette (as David Arquette) becoming their undisputed champion, a decision that suggests a lack of respect for the sport & its fans, including Arquette himself.

In isolation from its ridiculous real-life promotion, Ready to Rumble displays a humble reverence for pro wrestling as a sport, falling clearly on the mark side of the mark/smark divide. The movie opens with claims that pro wrestlers are “the greatest athletes of all time” and “heroes of history”. These “superior athletes, superior men” are given plenty of screen time with the kind of overstated cameos that take an audience’s adoration for granted. Appearing here alongside DDP are the likes of “Macho Man” Randy Savage, Sting, Goldberg, Booker T, “Mean” Gene Okerlund, and a few other big industry names, including a brief glimpse of a young John Cena. There are a few smarky admissions, like wrestlers discussing choreography during matches and an unusually violent Martin Landau playing a Stu Hart stand-in, but for the most part this is a world where wrestling is both real and real important.

The movie’s major misstep is in its long stretches outside of the wrestling ring. The road trip segments of the film are overloaded with gross-out, non sequitur, teenage boy shenanigans: porta-potties, horny old ladies, and toothless hicks all played for unfortunate humor. There are some transcendent moments to be found in this frat house amusement, like Rose McGowan’s hot to trot wrestling fan engaging in “bedroom matches” and a van full of flatulent nuns performing a cover of “Running with the Devil” that’s less Van Halen and more The Roches, but for the most part it’s flat & forgettable. It’s the exact brand of dumb fun that plays well in a wrestling ring, but fails to translate well to the big screen.

I’m not sure that the film’s comedic failure is necessarily a bad thing. Ready to Rumble is unashamed of being a mindless trifle, marketable only to an audience already receptive to pro wrestling & complete garbage, a rather large audience at the time of its production. There’s a working class veneer to the film, complete with a Kid Rock soundtrack and Insane Clown Posse t-shirts. Arquette’s protagonist is the son of a cop who works in sanitation, loiters in front of corner stores, and dreams of meeting his favorite pro wrestler. He & his buddy rough house at their menial jobs and fantasize about executing wrestling moves on their bullies. It’s a pandering approach to comedy, but at least it’s closely familiar with the audience it’s catering to.

In the film’s promotion, however, all of this goodwill for pro wrestling fans was destroyed by Arquette’s championship victory cheapening the (already cheap enough) WCW title. 15 years later, that heartfelt betrayal plays more like a bizarre historical footnote, one with a feature film attached. Arquette’s championship may have helped ruin Ready to Rumble & WCW as financial enterprises in the year 2000, but it also gave them a strange longevity in cultural significance. It’s an occasionally funny movie with a thoroughly ludicrous context & execution that’s still worth scratching your head over in 2015.

-Brandon Ledet

The Spirit of The Spirit of the Beehive (1973): Horror in Ambiguity & Obscuration

/ swampflix / 12 Comments

spiritbee

Watching The Spirit of the Beehive for the first time recently, I was struck by how contemporary & effective the film still felt 40 years after its release. Its refusal to tell a complete, lucid story was reminiscent of so many recent art films that I love. What was even more striking was the horror the film found in its obscuration. There was an overwhelming sense of dread that something terrible was sure to happen at every turn, a dread that’s more unsettling than the scariest movie monster or serial slasher, because it could not be seen or completely understood. It’s somehow worse when something catastrophic doesn’t happen in the film, because the dread lives on to the next scene. To help myself better understand the film’s horrific use of ambiguity, I looked back to the film it heavily references: James Whale’s classic Frankenstein, a film 40 years its senior. I also looked to a film 40 years its junior: last year’s Under the Skin, within which director Jonathan Glazer finds his own ambiguous horror, bringing the spirt of The Spirit of the Beehive into his own fresh, unnerving territory.

As an essential part of the classic Universal Monsters era, the 1931 film Frankenstein is a touchstone for horror in cinema. The image of Boris Karloff lumbering around as a pile of sentient dead flesh is beyond iconic. So many of horror’s sub-genres, (with their gross-out creature effects & slow-moving, super strong killers), owe their worlds to the bolted-neck lug. What’s most surprising to me is what influence the film has had on atmospheric horror, particularly The Spirit of the Beehive. Having grown up with the Frankenstein monster’s ugly visage on rubber masks, morning cartoons, a Mel Brooks comedy and Halloween candy, I find that familiarity with the abomination has softened his horrific effect. In fact, I think he’s kinda cute. The film that surrounds him, however, still finds other ways to terrify. The movie’s opening graveyard scene, for instance, is a work of otherworldly terror, mostly due to the effective set design. The sparse set, open sky, and thick, clinging fog feels more akin to Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires than it does to Earth. The fact that mysterious men are there to rob graves is only icing on the cake for an already terrifying image. Without familiarity with the source material the reasons why they’re digging up corpses makes the moment even more mysterious. There’s an alien atmosphere at work in images like this graveyard set & the doctor’s laboratory that make the film enduringly unsettling.

Of course, most of Frankenstein is far from the detached ambiguity of 1973’s The Spirit of the Beehive. The doctor’s father, Baron Frankenstein, is the antithesis of ambiguity, stating clearly & loudly what is going on in every moment and providing what I suppose was meant as comic relief & “good sense”. Beehive has no such ambitions of clarity. Instead of being a direct spiritual descendent of Frankenstein, Beehive stretches the uncertainty & terror of the opening graveyard scene across its entire run time. It communicates its unease through its imagery, some of which is borrowed directly from Frankenstein. The film opens with children watching the horror classic in awe & discussing fantasies about the monster’s “spirit” afterwards. There’s also a very similar search party scene shared between both films, both feature characters left mute by trauma, and Karloff’s monster himself makes a cameo during one of Beehive’s more bizarre moments. The most significant aspect Beehive borrows from Frankenstein, however, is the foreboding sense of children in danger. In Frankenstein, there’s a scene where the monster picks flowers with a little girl at the side of a lake, only to mistakenly drown her. The two young female protagonists of The Spirit of the Beehive obsess over this scene afterwards, and discuss the monster & his “spirit” at length. Mimicking this moment almost endlessly, it feels as if there’s a constant threat on the children’s lives (whether they’ll be hit by a train, murdered by a stranger, drowned in a well, etc.) that’s communicated solely through the film’s tense imagery. It turns out that something awful already had happened to the girls: they had been uprooted & displaced by a civil war that stresses & complicates their home life, but is never referred to directly. All of the film’s conflicts are conveyed silently and it’s a silence that tyrannizes the central family & distresses the audience.

Silence & ambiguity are also the channels through which Under the Skin terrifies. Obfuscating the narrative of its source material, Glazer’s sci-fi horror leaves the identity, intentions, and even species of its protagonist up for question as she flirts with Scottish men and lures them back to her apartment. Unlike with Beehive, the violence suggested in Under the Skin’s overwhelming dread is delivered on screen. The unnamed protagonist, played by Scarlett Johansson, is more like Frankenstein’s monster in this way, as opposed to the civil war & familial unrest that plagues The Spirit of the Beehive. Instead of drowning & strangling, however, she lures her victims into a mysterious black liquid that somehow dissolves their bodies in a frightening, confounding spectacle. Under the Skin’s inclination for on-screen horror, no matter how alien, distances the film from being a direct spiritual descendent of Beehive, the same way Beehive’s brand of horror is distanced from Frankenstein’s. It does, however, employ a similar mystique & cryptic atmosphere that makes the film all the more terrifying than if Glazer had made a more literal adaptation of the novel by the same name.

Both Under the Skin & The Spirit of the Beehive reach beyond the typical ways a movie can terrify, beyond the methods pioneered by classic monster movies like Frankenstein. They achieve a transcendental beauty in images like Beehive’s honeycomb lighting & endless doorways and Under The Skin’s liquid void & free-floating flesh. It’s a terrifying beauty, though, as it is a beauty of the unknown. Both films are transfixing, yet horrifying, because they cannot be truly, completely understood, like the graveyard landscape at the beginning of Frankenstein. For the more than 80 years since mysterious men were curiously robbing graves on that foggy, otherworldly set, ambiguity and obscuration have been used to terrify audiences in countless films. The three mentioned here are mere steppingstones in the evolution of cryptic, atmospheric horror, perhaps only loosely connected to one another in terms of genre, but connected all the same in a hauntingly vague, undead spirit.

-Brandon Ledet