brandon ledet

The Comedy (2012)

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fourstar

Throwing down the gauntlet in its opening shots, The Comedy begins with a sexlessly homoerotic dance party. Naked schlubs grind against each other to a sensual R&B soundtrack, pouring cheap beer down their pale, soft bodies, tucking their genitals between their legs. The last image before the title card is a flash of Tim Heidecker’s scrotum. The scene is devoid of sex appeal because the characters aren’t into what they’re doing. The ritual is a joke inspired by alcohol-fueled late night weirdness. The characters are governed by their sense of irony and the joke isn’t nearly as funny as they think it is.

Even The Comedy’s title is ironic. The same behavior Tim Heidecker usually employs for absurdist humor is weaponized here for a scathing indictment of a generation of scumbags whose entire personalities are affectations. Heidecker’s protagonist makes a sport out of saying things he presumably doesn’t mean. He drunkenly defends Hitler as a flirtation tactic, muses about his terminally ill father’s prolapsed anus, and loudly insults a Catholic church as his degenerate friends blow out prayer candles and roughhouse on the pews. Playing an overgrown, affluent child, Heidecker drifts through menial jobs that would suit a teenager on summer break out of boredom rather than necessity. He manipulates people with his wealth in almost Cheap Thrills levels of cruelty. He pinches a sleeping woman’s eyelids when he’s ready for her to wake. He is more toddler than man and it’s genuinely tragic when he admits that he’s 35 years old. The film doesn’t allow much room for sympathy, though, as it’s gradually revealed that he’s less of a lost, listless soul and more of a spoiled brat & racist prick.

Through a few minor signifiers, like the protagonist’s affinity for the Williamsburg neighborhood and cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, the movie specifies its exact target: the aging American hipster. This is not the broad definition of “hipster” that applies to almost anyone relatively young & discerning. It’s a very specific subsect of rich kids who speak & act exclusively through ironic detachment. It was brave of Heidecker to lend his Tim & Eric brand of humor (including longtime cronies Eric Wareheim & Gregg Turkington) to such a brutal impeachment of a group that likely overlaps with his established audience. Injecting Tim & Eric’s anti-humor into real human interactions leaves their characters looking like pampered shitheads as others blankly stare at them with disgust and exhaustion. The Comedy is a melancholy, unforgiving portrait of ironic toddler men. It’s not the kind of movie where a lesson is learned. The privileged don’t get their comeuppance. No one is punched in the mouth, even when they truly deserve it. Instead, they float on unchallenged, intoxicated, and refusing to engage with a sincere existence. Just like in real life.

The Comedy is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Brandon Ledet

Wetlands (2014)

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2014 was a weird year for the romcom. It’s not often that a modern romcom earns the kind of critical praise that lands it on Best of the Year lists or empathetically addresses a subject as sensitive as abortion, but last year’s Obvious Child accomplished both. The genre also found its first ZAZ-style spoof in They Came Together and some common ground with supernatural horror in The One I Love. These were all exciting developments in a genre long thought stagnant, but by far the strangest new territory under the romcom umbrella was explored by the German film Wetlands.

Most likely the cutest movie about an anal fissure you’ll ever see, Wetlands is by and large an exercise in depravity. It’s as if de Sade or Bataille had written a Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan comedy. If there’s a particular bodily fluid, sexual act, or unsanitary pizza topping that you absolutely cannot handle this may not be the movie for you. However, those who can endure a heap of gross-out humor are well rewarded for their fortitude. Like its 18 year old protagonist Helen (expertly played by Carla Juri) the film’s hard, shock value exterior is really a front for a big old softie lurking under the surface. For all of Helen’s filthy sex pranks and hygiene “experiments”, she’s really just an overgrown child who desperately wants her parents to get back together and for her hunky crush to notice her advances. There’s also some real pain behind her troubled relationships with her mother, her brother & her best friend, as well some surreally lyrical tangents involving dirty panties, microscopic closeups of bacteria, drug binges, and newly sprouted avocado trees. The film may be memorable for the depths of its depravity, but more importantly it manages a remarkable balance that allows it to stick to the romcom format while navigating those depths.

After its minuscule domestic release last year, I’m stoked that Wetlands is finally accessible for easy consumption on streaming platforms & physical media. As far as I know the only time it played locally was at Chalmette Movies during last year’s New Orleans Film Festival. The film was difficult to watch in more ways than one and, as it was my favorite comedy of 2014 (and in my top 5 movies overall), I’ve been sitting on my hands waiting for an opportunity to spread its name. If you’re worried that Wetlands is too grotesque for your taste, this (absurdly NSFW) trailer is a good litmus test. Otherwise, check it out on streaming or home video ASAP. It’s somehow just as cute as it is gross. It’s very, very gross.

-Brandon Ledet

Marks & Smarks: No Holds Barred (1989) & The Wrestler (2008)

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wrasslin

Definitions pulled from Wikipedia’s glossary of professional wrestling terms:
-“Mark”: a wrestling fan who enthusiastically believes that professional wrestling is not staged.
-“Smark”: a fan who is aware of and interested in the backstage and non-scripted aspects of wrestling; a portmanteau of “smart” and “mark.”

Last night I attended my first live pro wrestling event, a months-long goal fulfilled. Despite the distinctly tame vibe of the crowd, I decided to misbehave. Couldn’t help myself. I got drunk, cheered for heels like a jerk, and shouted things that disturbed the 10 year old boy sitting in the row ahead of me. A few rows behind me, another ten year old was also yelling ridiculous taunts, but his were much funnier & more insightful than mine. I was thoroughly upstaged. Around a third my age, this kid had a preternatural comprehension of the sport that he thankfully shared with the neighboring crowd in short, high-pitched bursts. The kid ahead of me would be genuinely upset if he were in earshot. I know I upset him myself. I was sandwiched between a young mark and a smark, two different wrestling worlds clashing on either side of me.

I think it helps to appreciate both sides of the coin to experience the full potential of pro wrestling. Losing yourself in the characters & the soap opera drama is just as important as the in-the-ring athleticism. The violence wouldn’t mean as much without the camp. On the other hand, the context of the practical, behind-the-scenes operations of the sport gives deeper meaning to the in-the-ring storylines. It’s a scripted sport, but scripted in the style of reality television: the reality & the fiction are inseparable. One feeds off the other. A well-rounded fan needs a solid admiration of both.

Searching for this balance in pro wrestling cinema leads me to the bookends of the modern wrestling movie. 1989’s Hulk Hogan vehicle No Holds Barred perfectly captures the nature of mark mentality in the infancy of the current Vince McMahon era. 2008’s The Wrestler, by comparison, is a smark’s dream: an authentic look at the brutal truths of pro wrestling as a career. Together, help paint a complete picture, the fiction & the reality, one feeding off the other.

No Holds Barred (1989)
Although No Holds Barred was far from the world’s first pro wrestling picture, it was the first film produced by the World Wrestling Federation (now WWE). It would take over a decade after its release for Vince McMahon’s juggernaut wrestling promotion to form its own movie studio, so in this way No Holds Barred was ahead of its time. This was the only way it was ahead of its time. Miming the late-80s Schwarzenegger action movie format as much as the budget would allow, No Holds Barred was a blatant attempt to launch the movie career of Hulk Hogan, who had already dominated the “sports entertainment” world and was looking for his next conquest. The first sounds you hear in the film are the voices of Jesse “The Body” Ventura & “Mean” Gene Okerlund, who had come to define the era’s ringside announcing. The film’s head villain is character actor Kurt Fuller testing an almost exact prototype of his career-defining role as a television network scumbag in Wayne’s World. No Holds Barred is in every way a product of its time.

Keeping in line with the 1989 perspective of pro wrestling, before the internet’s obsessive nitpicking of the sport, No Holds Barred is firmly on the mark side of the mark/smark divide. Hulk Hogan’s character Rip Thomas is a superhuman beast in the ring and out. He leaps to incredible heights, destroys cars with his bare hands, and dismantles “bad guys” to an 80s “rock music” soundtrack, all while wearing a costume befitting of a superhero biker. In a world devoid of subtext he is a hero without flaw, an incredibly smart brute who’s dedicated to his charity work, the kind of guy who inspires lines like “Rip’s word is his bond” even when he’s not in the room. The entire movie exists to make Hulk Hogan look impossibly good. He’s a saint, a “good guy”.

Objectively, the movie is not very good. In fact, it’s awful. There’s some guilty pleasure to be found in its campy action movie spectacle, like when Rip force-feeds a rejected bribe to Kurt Fuller’s television executive and quips “I won’t be around when this check clears.” It’s also funny to think that Vince McMahon produced a film that indicts the evil nature of megalomaniac network executives, because, well, he’s a megalomaniac network executive. For the most part, though, the movie is shoddily made of generic kids’ stuff: jokes about “dookie” and slobbering hillbillies, world-class mean-mugging from immense muscle men, “good guys” beating up “bad guys”. It’s a movie you have to love for its savage idiocy, not in spite of it.

More importantly, it’s a document of a different time, a swan song for the era of the mark.

The Wrestler (2008)
A drastically different approach, Daren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler is an objectively good movie. I’d even go as far as to call it a masterpiece. Applying the modern online smark mentality to pro wrestling, Aronofsky turns the backstage repercussions of sports entertainment into a Greek tragedy. Unlike Hogan’s Rip Thomas, Mickey Rourke’s Randy “The Ram” Robinson is a real human being outside the ring. Well past his glory days, Randy struggles with health, finances, and personal relationships badly damaged from years spent on the road. In-the-ring injuries have increasingly severe real life consequences. In one particularly gruesome scene medics remove staples, glass, etc. from Randy’s skin as the camera cuts back to show how they got buried there in a horrific hardcore match, a bloodthirsty crowd chanting “You sick fuck!” in the background. As the pain periodically hits him throughout the film, the intense sound design cues you in with high-pitched noises to match his wincing. Referring to himself, Randy “The Ram” says “I’m a broken down piece of meat. And I’m alone. And I deserve to be alone.” Time proves him right. This is far from the marked-out world of Rip Thomas.

Aronofsky’s attention to authenticity is a remarkable achievement here. As I said before in my list of top pro wrestling documentaries, Randy “The Ram” feels like wrestlers we know, wrestlers like Scott Hall & Jake “The Snake” Roberts. Smarks would take particular interest in the way the movie depicts wrestlers planning spots before matches, laying out a basic framework within which they can improvise. The movie also addresses blading/juicing, steroid abuse, boozy bouts of self-medication after matches, shady promoters and minuscule pay. Randy directly refutes claims that wrestling is “fake” and shows off his scars as proof. Part of why it hurts to watch him despair over the old action figures, Nintendo games, and 80s monster ballads that serve as relics of his former fame is that it feels all too real. There are people who live like this.

Of course, an accurate portrayal of pro wrestling is seated somewhere between these two extremes, just as I was seated between two wildly different children last night. Without the glam showmanship, juvenile humor or outrageous superheroics of Rip Thomas, Aronofsky’s version of wrestling is a grim, lethal ordeal. The wrestling of No Holds Barred is an idealistic child’s macho fantasy. From The Wrestler’s viewpoint, it’s more like assisted suicide. To take in the full scope of the bizarre, idiosyncratic, self-contradicting superhero spectacle of the brutal sport, you have to appreciate both perspectives. You have to look through the eyes of the mark and the smark. Drunken yelling also helps.

-Brandon Ledet

I, Frankenstein (2014)

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onehalfstar

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Reading over Wikipedia’s plot synopsis of I, Frankenstien makes me feel like a cinematic amnesiac. All the talk of “Gargoyle Order” weapons wielded to “ascend” and “descend” demons & gargoyles sounds vaguely familiar, but the particulars of what Bill Nighy, Dr. Frankenstein’s book or the supermodel scientist were up to are fuzzy at best. Mostly I remember Aaron Eckhart testing out his gruff Batman voice as if his former role as Harvey Dent was a consolation prize. There was some fun to be had in the climactic good versus evil fight scene (especially in the detail of costuming the evil demons in business suits) but for the most part the whole affair felt grim & indistinct.

I, Frankenstein is definitive proof that this post-Dark Knight era of sad sack superhero movies is reaching its nadir. Reinventing the monster movie by fusing it with the superhero genre is an idea loaded with fun potential, so (to quote a popular, hideous dorm room poster & t-shirt) why so serious? After all of I, Frankenstein’s ridiculous trailers & nominations for Worst Film of 2014, it at least gave the impression that it could’ve been amusing. Outside of minor details like the business suit demons, I get the sense that I was promised more goofy antics than were delivered.

I haven’t seen a single entry in the Underworld series, which shares writers & producers with I, Frankenstein, but from what I understand they’re just as bleak. To an outsider, the most bewildering aspect of the vampires/werewolves “action horror” series is that there are four of the damn things. Despite the lackluster critical response and general sense of drudgery, Underworld found enough of an audience to justify 7 hours of celluloid. Building off that hubris, I, Frankenstein all but offers an “Until Next Time” promise after the credits in its conspicuous aspirations of launching a new franchise. The problem (besides its uninspiring box office performance)? It’s not the only self-serious “action horror” Frankenstein product in the works.

2014 also saw the release of Universal Studios’ first entry in the planned Shared Universe® for its classic monsters characters: Dracula Untold. For the most part the movie was Dracula Unremarkable, but there were some (underutilized) bright spots: the vampire deaths were surprisingly gruesome considering the PG-13 rating (a heap of melted flesh instead of I, Frankenstein’s more symbolic “descending”) and Charles “The Man” Dance made the most out of his limited role as the head vampire. Just as I, Frankenstein felt like little more than dull goth superhero franchise kindling, Dracula Untold was mostly a “this is just the beginning” letdown of a story. One of the other goth superheroes on the Universal docket, waiting to join Dracula’s ranks: Frankenstein’s monster.

Given the unlikely longevity of the Underworld series it’s possible that Lionsgate will ignore the Universal Studios famous monsters universe and we’ll live in a world with two dueling Gritty Reboot® Super Frankenstein franchises nobody asked for. Hopefully an I, Frankenstein, II would ditch the self-serious tone and work in more business-suit-demons humor, but I wouldn’t hold your undead, crime-fighting breath. Seriously, don’t hold it. It’s criminal for movies this ridiculous in premise to be so severe, but they’re unlikely to change their ways as long as they’re making money. Or in I, Frankenstein‘s case, at least breaking even.

I, Frankenstein is currently streaming on Netflix & Amazon Prime.

-Brandon Ledet

It’s A Disaster (2013)

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disaster

fourstar

Although its sense of humor is decidedly more uncomfortable than either, It’s A Disaster is the same vein of realistic, self-absorbed approaches to widespread disasters as comedies like Shaun of the Dead & Life After Beth. Instead of a zombie attack, this small group of friends is trying to survive couples’ brunch . . . and the fallout from a series of dirty bombs set off in downtown Los Angeles.

Chemical warfare is the mechanism that keeps the characters cooped up inside the house, unable to escape brunch, but their toxic personal relationships are the real threat. Important news broadcasts are disregarded in favor of confessions of betrayal. Planning for survival takes a backseat to pointless power plays, cruel insults, and sexual advances. This isn’t quite the sadistic, drunken argument gallows humor of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? & The Boys in the Band, but it’s not far off.

It’s the kind of movie that has its cake and eats it too. With mimosas to drink. The personal relationships are vicious, but also sweet. The letdown of an ending is so well handled that it’s a send-up of letdown endings. Everyone’s having the worst day of their life, but also a pretty great time. There’s a very delicate balance between jovial & soul-crushing that It’s A Disaster handles expertly. It obviously helps that the entire film is hilarious.

It’s partly the casual nature of the performances that keeps the mood light despite the grim premise. Julia Stiles & America Ferrera are particularly great here, but the one performance that really struck me is David Cross’. Cross usually goes big in his comedic roles and is rarely afforded time to slowly ramp up the crazy the way he is here. Usually he plays a ridiculous caricature suited for his sketch comedy roots, his entire personality established early & often. Even in last year’s Obvious Child, Cross played the one character in a grounded cast that felt unbelievable as a real person. In It’s A Disaster, Cross is introduced as an audience surrogate, a doorway into an established world of ludicrous, lethal friendships before the pressure of the situation gets to him and he joins their ranks. I’ve always enjoyed Cross’ work, but this is up there among his best. It’s a great performance in a great film about an awful, awful brunch.

It’s A Disaster is currently streaming on Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon Prime.

-Brandon Ledet

“Unedited Footage of a Bear” & The Year of the Doppelgänger

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bear

After posting a too-long article trying to make sense out of last year’s surge of doppelgänger movies earlier this week, someone pointed out to me that I missed a major one: “Unedited Footage of a Bear”. “Unedited Footage” is a horror/comedy short from the same Adult Swim Infomercials program that produced the 2014-defining “Too Many Cooks”. (Did I get that song stuck in your head again? I am so sorry.) Where “Cooks” deconstructed an impressive range of television formats and worked them into a singular slasher film, “Unedited Footage” did the same with a much narrower genre: allergy medicine commercials. Using the fine print listed side effects of medication commercials & the intense artificiality of advertising in general to its disturbing advantage, “Unedited Footage” tells a tight, effective horror story in its fleeting ten minutes. A horror story that hinges on 2014’s biggest pet obsession: doppelgängers.

Although it plays on the popular doppelgänger obsession of last year’s features, “Unedited Footage of a Bear” isn’t a feature film itself. It isn’t even unedited footage of a bear. The entire doppelgänger/slasher storyline is framed as a tangent that distracts from the titular bear, but since it eats up all but 30sec of the runtime & the film never returns to the bear, the doppelgänger plot is the bulk of the film in every sense. Although it acts as the initial framing device, the bear is the tangent. The doppelgänger is the heart.

Despite the arrival of “Unedited Footage” at the December finish line & its depiction of a doppelgänger murder story, it’s hard for me to justify an addendum including it on that 2014 list. My intention with the “2014’s Doppelgänger Movies & Their Unlikely Doubles” article was to make sense of last year’s varied approaches to that genre by finding those film’s own doppelgängers in other seemingly unrelated movies. Besides the fact that I honestly forgot about “Unedited Footage” at the time, the problem with including it there is that I can’t think of its own double. I can’t think of another film that allows a single tangent to dominate the narrative in that way. (The only one that really comes to mind is that extended dream sequence towards the end of Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion where Lisa Kudrow’s Michele is sleeping in the passenger seat of a convertible, but believes she has gone into the reunion, expertly schmoozed her old classmates by convincing them that she invented the glue on the back of Post-it notes, fails to drag Mira Sorvino’s Romy away from a make-out session, gets hit by a limo, starts her own make-out session in that limo, loses her blouse, accepts an award in her bra, and grows old & wealthy still disconnected from her best friend before she finally wakes to discover it was all just a dream and she hasn’t even left the car. But that doesn’t even come close, really, because that dream only dominates a few minutes of the movie, which soldiers on after it concludes, the same way this article will soldier on after this tangent concludes. Also, I just saw Romy & Michele for the first time a couple nights ago so that’s totally why it’s fresh in my mind.)

2014 saw an unusual excess of new entries for the doppelgänger genre. The idiosyncratic “Unedited Footage of a Bear” deserves to be remembered among them, if not only because any film featuring an original score & brief cameo by Dan Deacon deserves to be remembered. It’s just unclear to me what the movie’s own doppelgänger in this world is, but I’m sure it’s out there, waiting to murder it. (Unless it actually is Romy & Michele, in which case it’ll most likely take it shopping or force-feed it junk food or make it watch Pretty Woman, like, 36 times, which is its own form of death.) Oh, it’s out there.

-Brandon Ledet

Jack Reacher (2012)

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jack reacher

three star

campstamp

Imagine a world without Scientology, a world without Katie Holmes, a world without Oprah’s couch. In this alternate universe Tom Cruise’s decade-old public meltdown never happened. Cruise is still top gun in all of our hearts. Every film he stars in is a major success. Beautiful women throw themselves at his feet. He merely needs to show up & wink at the camera to win us all over and collect his giant paycheck.

This isn’t a world we get to live in all the time, but we are allowed to visit. For instance, last year’s surprisingly entertaining Edge of Tomorrow saw Tom Cruise in full movie star mode, smooching ladies & killing space aliens in a violent version of Groundhog Day. Even Edge of Tomorrow is a little too eccentric to recall vintage Tom Cruise, though. If you’re looking for purely smug, top-of-the-world, Days of Thunder Cruise you have to go back to 2012’s Jack Reacher.

Jack Reacher is a straight-forward Tom Cruise vehicle. It’s not stylish. It’s not cool. It doesn’t pretend to be anything more than it is: a loud & dumb action movie. Think less The Guest and more Face/Off or Road House. Cruise, who of course plays the titular Jack Reacher, is so deliciously full of his smugly sexy self here. He drives maniacally, flirts with co-star Rosamund Pike like she owes him something, has the problem solving skills & inherent knowledge of an omnipotent god, and delivers smartass one-liners before every inevitable kill (those one-liners take a nastily sexist left turn in a particularly anachronistic bar fight scene). If you have any affection or nostalgia for Cruise before Oprah’s couch outed him as a total weirdo, Jack Reacher is a sight for sore eyes.

Bonus Points: All of this Tom Cruise talk is truly burying the lede. The real Jack Reacher story is that auteur director Werner Herzog plays the movie’s villain. Herzog’s role is minimized in the film the same way it’s minimized in this review. He doesn’t appear onscreen until nearly an hour in and delivers maybe one or two speeches, but the potency even a couple lines from Evil Herzog is something to be cherished. If you have no affection for vintage Cruise (or loud, dumb action movies in general) you owe it to yourself to at least watch Evil Werner Herzog perform here in the film’s best two minutes.

–Brandon Ledet

Jack Reacher is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

2014’s Doppelgänger Movies & Their Unlikely Doubles

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doppelganger

2014 saw the wide release of an unusual bounty of films about doppelgängers. Besides comic book superheroes it had to be the most common cinematic topic of the year. As early as Spring there was a heap of press citing similarities between Enemy & The Double, two doppelgänger movies based on doppelgänger novels both titled The Double (one by José Saramago & one by Fyodor Dostoyevsky). I joked that if they shared a distributor (they don’t) they should be released on home video as a combo pack. It turns out that besides one (admittedly major) detail in premise the two films actually have very little in common. As the year went on I found the true spiritual doppelgängers of Enemy & The Double in highly unlikely places, as well as a few more doppelgänger movies & their own unlikely partners.

Of course there are possible spoilers for all titles listed in bold below.

The Double (2014) & Joe Versus The Volcano (1990)
Although Richard Ayoade’s The Double didn’t deliver the similarities to Enemy that I expected, it wore other, stranger influences on its sleeve. It not only boasted visual cues picked up from David Lynch’s oeuvre, but also intentionally mirrored Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. The Double’s similarities with Brazil are so purposeful Ayoade’s film could be considered a long-form homage. What’s infinitely more surprising to me is the similarities it shares with the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan comedy Joe Versus The Volcano.

There’s a good deal of humor lurking under the surface of the Lynch & Gilliam influences Ayoade pulls from, but The Double is more of an unambiguous black comedy, its own dark humor resting in plain view. Its sinister amusement with depression & the grim life of an office drone positions it as more of a modern descendent of Joe in terms of genre. The Double’s Jesse Eisenberg’s work life is so surreally awful the only character in cinema I can compare it to is Tom Hanks’ Joe. The set design in both characters’ offices are achievements in over-the-top blandness. They both ache with yearning for coworkers who don’t know they exist. They even both serve clueless megalomaniac bosses portrayed by gifted character actors (Wallace Shawn & Dan Hedeya, respectively).

Admittedly, the resemblance fades after the first half of Joe. When the plot catalyst hits Joe (a life-threatening “brain cloud”) the protagonist gets to escape his oppressive life as a faceless worker & embark on a grand adventure in search of the titular volcano. The Double doesn’t allow its catalyst (a second Jesse Eisenberg, one less akin to George Michael Bluth) to shake things up in the same way. Ayoade instead forces his protagonist to see his grim, thankless life through to a bitter end.

Enemy (2014) & Stranger By The Lake (2014)
James & I once got in a particularly nerdy argument in a dive bar about the merits of Enemy. He was a huge fan of the film (it made his Top Ten list for the year after all), while I found it interesting, but far more self-serious than it needed to be (or maybe than I wanted it to be). Trying to discern what aspect of our personalities split us on the film (probably his love of & my aversion to philosophy), I brought up another recent release we were split on: Stranger By The Lake. In my attempts to defend Stranger in that conversation I noticed a common theme between it & Enemy. Both films feel like cryptic allegories for the dangers of carnal desire.

In an unfairly linear (& likely false) synopsis of Enemy, the protagonist’s libido tempts him to stray from intimacy with his pregnant wife to the point where his personality is split into two dueling halves. This split (again, in a deliberately simple analysis) leads the doppelgänger Jake Gyllenhaals into a deadly world of adultery & spiders. The protagonist in Stranger By The Lake, a man who regularly cruises for sexual activity on a gay nudist beach, feels a similar carnal pull. His two closest relationships, an unlikely friendship with a schlub he finds physically uninteresting but personally magnetic & a sexual affair with a very attractive man he knows to be a murderer, split his time in the same libido-driven downfall that corrupts the Gyllenhaals.

When viewed in a certain context, Enemy & Stranger can be interpreted as spiritual doubles in the parables they tell. Whether you value one over the other or not is, of course, a manner of personal preference.

Coherence (2014) & The One I Love (2014)
Two of 2014’s biggest surprises were the read-too-much-about-them-and-you’ll-ruin-them Coherence & The One I Love. Of the pair, Coherence was more of the critical darling, while The One I Love was more-or-less thought to be an interesting picture that couldn’t stick the landing. Personally, I believe The One I Love to be just as great (if not better) than Coherence. Both films push their supernatural left-turn premises to outlandish places while remaining grounded & emotionally potent. Together they help carve out a modern Romantic Horror genre (within which they’re the tiny indie equivalents to the major studio RomHorror Gone Girl).

Common assumption would suggest that Coherence’s rightful doppelgänger would be a Twilight Zone episode (particularly the classic “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street”) but it’s inseparable from The One I Love in my mind. This may not be the most surprising pairing on this list, as The One I Love also owes a hefty debt to The Twilight Zone. Enjoyment of both movies is ideally enhanced by an ignorance of their basic plots, something so delicate I fear I’m wrecking it by including them here. They both do a lot with a little, squeezing impressive mileage out of small budgets & a few great actors.

Again, my preferences & James’ were at odds over these titles, as Coherence appeared on his best of the year list & The One I Love appeared on mine. In this case we both liked both movies a good deal, though. There was no nerdy dive bar discussion necessary.

Honeymoon (2014) & Slither (2006)
Speaking of Romantic Horror, the under-the-radar Honeymoon works like Invasion of the Body Snatchers by way of Safety Not Guaranteed. Its calm, pragmatic approach to its supernatural my-wife-is-not-my-wife plot recalls the vibe of Coherence & The One I Love more than any other doppelgänger pairing on this list. All three films make the most extraordinary plots feel like conceivable relationship troubles that every couple goes through from time to time. Honeymoon is not alone in this world & the comparisons to Body Snatchers are especially well deserved, but I found other surprising similarities in the central relationship of James Gunn’s 2006 slapstick horror Slither.

Besides its own debt to Body Snatchers, Slither is wildly different from Honeymoon in tone & intent. Where the escalation in Honeymoon is calm & measured, Slither throws everything (including buckets of viscera) against the wall to see what sticks. However, the gradual escalation of unignorable changes in a spouse’s behavior binds them together. In Slither, the antagonist Grant Grant (played by world-class creep Michael Rooker) initially seems a bit out of it to his wife following an incident in the woods. The changes in his behavior spiral out of control in the most horrifying (and shockingly funny) ways imaginable. Honeymoon’s horror hinges on its own in-the-woods behavior altering event, but the results are decidedly a quieter form of terror, as opposed to Slither’s fever-pitched absurdity.

These movies aren’t broadly linked in their approaches to horror, but instead in the detail of their threats’ gradual revelations to the ones they love.

The Face of Love (2014) & Birth (2004)
The least successful film on this list artistically, The Face of Love attempts the grounded approach to the paranormal Coherence & The One I Love achieve, but ultimately falls short. Despite an interesting premise & some great performances from familiar faces Annette Benning, Ed Harris, and Robin Williams, the film never breaks through the trappings of an undistinguished trifle. Part of the problem is that an eerily similar plot has been executed so well before in Jonathan Glazer’s Birth.

The Face of Love mirrors Birth’s story of a woman who improbably meets her husband after his death, but takes it to less ambiguous, less visually striking territory. It’s not a bad movie exactly, but instead a mediocre version of its superior double. Both movies tackle the grieving process in an unusual manner, but Birth does it better. There are images & moments from Birth that will stick with me my entire life. I expect I’ll forget most of The Face of Love within the month.

It’s a bit unfair to include a movie here only to suggest that there’s a better version of it out there, but in the end it’s the doppelgänger’s job to kill its weaker double. It’s only natural.

-Brandon Ledet

Wrestling for Jesus: The Tale of T-Money (2011)

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The very last pro wrestling documentary I watched when assembling my Top Ten list for the genre was GLOW, the story of an over-the-top 80s glam wrestling promotion that saw brief success on television. Wrestling for Jesus was a jarring, smelling salts follow-up to GLOW. It pulled me out of GLOW’s glitter-covered reverie only to wake me on the small-town poverty side of wrestling. This is the wrestling of backyards & gymnasiums, where audience members were likely to have attended high school or at least church with the performers. Where the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling bragged about how they were the greatest show on Earth, the men of WFJ thought themselves to be, you know, pretty good and some of them would even like to maybe get paid a small sum of money for risking life-altering injuries in the Lord’s name.

The wrestlers who express interest in making a modest amount of money for their time and compromised health are secular defectors of the Wrestling For Jesus promotion. WFJ, as a non-profit organization, accepts donations for their live events, but those donations are directly given to the church. The events themselves are an extension of church in a way. Performers’ promos boast about their ability to spread the gospel & sermons are delivered from the ring after matches. These men are wrestling solely for Jesus, to bring new followers into their faith through sports entertainment, not to make money. As far as recruitment tactics go, it’s a fairly convincing one.

However, participation in WFJ isn’t entirely selfless. At the very least the WFJ community helped the titular T-Money overcome the grief surrounding his father’s suicide. T-Money’s triumph over his grief may have been short-lived, but he basically thanks WFJ (an organization he runs with his wife) for saving his life. As the film progresses, his WFJ-aided recovery gradually reveals itself to be one step on a long road that would see rougher patches (like his own suicide attempt & a domestic violence arrest). T-Money sounds conflicted at times about whether he believes WFJ is a positive or negative long-term influence in his life, confessing that sometimes he hides his true personality in the community’s presence. It’s likely he’s also hiding his true self in the camera’s presence. The refusal to follow this thread of thought to a satisfying conclusion is the documentary’s fatal flaw.

There’s a sense that T-Money is on the brink of a personal epiphany that the movie doesn’t stick around to discover with him. When one of his fellow WFJ performers breaks his neck in the ring, T-Money is moved to tears in his proclamation that he wishes it was his own neck that had broken instead. The injured wrestler appears to be pleased with his time in WFJ, believing he had sacrificed his body to a noble cause. T-Money appears less convinced, but the movie doesn’t follow him long enough (or push him to speak honestly enough) to find out what that means.

Unresolved ending aside, the filmmakers do a fine job of remaining objective when they could easily have made their subject look foolish or evil. That objectivity doesn’t exactly shield the Christian wrestlers from the incongruity of infusing religion into a sport built on camp & violence, but it does allow them to be sympathetic even as the phenomenon feels increasingly bizarre. Wrestling for Jesus was far from the most essential wrestling doc I’ve seen in recent months, but also far from the worst. WFJ‘s Achilles heel is that its fascinating subject could have made for a much better movie if only the filmmakers had allowed it more time to develop & pushed for more honesty. If director Nathan Clarke couldn’t afford to dig deeper, his film could have at least benefited from some of GLOW’s outlandish hubris. There’s nothing like some old-fashioned self-aggrandizing to cover up a lackluster wrestling program.

Wrestling For Jesus is currently streaming on Netflix and Amazon Prime.

-Brandon Ledet

Swampflix’s Top Films of 2014

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1. Snowpiercer – A high-concept dystopian sci-fi parable, our choice for Movie of the Year is likely to leave you with more questions than answers. However, if you avoid getting wrapped up in the literal mechanics of how its world functions or in its generic political philosophy, there’s an excess of violence, absurdity, and genuine heart bending over backwards to entertain you. It’s a wildly exciting ride for those who stop questioning its methods and instead submit to its charms.

2. The Babadook – The best horror film of 2014 is flooded with genuine scares essential to the genre, but its true threat is more intimate & psychological than what you’d find in a traditional monster movie. The Babadook will linger in your mind for days, months. Maybe forever.

3. Gone Girl – The Lifetime movie this film pretends to be in its first half is merely a cover-up of the excessive, sociopathic spectacle lurking under the surface. Fincher proves again that he can do no wrong.

4. Interstellar – Grand, epic, visually striking. The volume & variety of complaints surrounding this wonderful film has got to be the most hilarious joke of 2014.

5. Blue Ruin – A grim, realistic, edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller that hits familiar beats carved out by directors like Jeff Nichols & The Coen brothers without ever feeling redundant.

6. We Are the Best! – A heartwarming story about three adolescents discovering their inner punks. These kids are the best.

7. Under The Skin – Haunting. Sparse yet loaded with unforgettable images & sounds. Glazer is a genius.

8. The Grand Budapest Hotel – Wes Anderson seems to be testing just how much Wes Anderson people can take with his last couple of features. When he’s working with images this strong & performances as hilarious as Ralph Fiennes’ is here, we can take a lot.

9 The One I Love – A romantic trip into The Twilight Zone that’s both hilarious & thought-provoking. We’re not sure if Romantic Horror is a genre, but this film might qualify if it were.

10. Venus in Fur – Disregarding Polanski’s personal life, you have to give him credit here for turning a delicate premise into such a humorous, sensual, and metatextual success. Venus is brilliantly acted, masterfully escalated, and wonderfully critical of both sex politics & theater as an art form.

HM. Obvious Child – Approaching a sensitive subject from a sincere & deeply empathetic place, this film deserves to be recognized as one of the all-time great romantic comedies. Or at least one of the best in recent memory.

-The Swampflix Crew

Read Britnee’s picks here.
Read James’ picks here.
Read Brandon’s picks here.