brandon ledet

Björk: Biophilia Live (2014)

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bjork
fourhalfstar
“I do believe motion pictures are the significant art form of our time. And I think the main reason is, they’re an art form of movement, as opposed to static art forms of previous times. But another reason that they’re the preeminent art form is they’re part art and part business. They are a compromised art form, and we live in a somewhat compromised time. And I believe to be successful over the long run, unless you’re a Federico Fellini or an Ingmar Bergman or a true genius in filmmaking, you have to understand that you’re working in both an art and a business.” – Roger Corman

The concert movie is a disadvantaged art form, as it has a lot to prove out the gate to justify its place among other films. While documentaries & fictional films can pretend not to be what Roger Corman would call a “compromised” artistic commodity, the concert film is always conspicuously selling a product: the band or artist that’s performing. The blurred line between short film & advertisement is acceptable in a music video, because they’re generally free to access and easy to consume. A full-length concert film on the other hand, especially one with a theatrical release, has a much steeper hill to climb. It’s asking you to pay admittance to a long-form promotion, spectacle or not. This is an especially hard sell for someone that’s not already a dedicated fan of the product on display.

Although some concert films make no attempt to hide their commercial aspirations or reach an audience outside of their fan base (last year’s One Direction: Where We Are is a recent high-profile example), others bend over backwards to prove themselves worthy to be discussed among their less-scrutinized film peers. Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense proves itself a genre benchmark through its careful consideration of how the band’s literal stage presence affects its cinematic image.  Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars uses the silver screen to breathe life into the fictional character of the film’s title. The Band’s The Last Waltz uses some of that good old Scorsese grit to give the account of its “farewell concert” the feeling of an intimate late-night jam session shared between a few dozen (exceptionally talented) friends. I don’t mean to pick on the One Direction concert movie. The group has a wide enough fan-base that the demand for a no frills concert movie is loud enough on its own to justify Where We Are’s existence. I’m just trying to distinguish why Bjork’s Biophilia Live, a movie in the same distinctly commercial-minded genre, deserves to be considered among the best films of 2014.

Biophilia Live begins with the voice of famed naturalist David Attenborough making wild, unrealistic declarations over breathtaking nature footage befitting the TV series Planet Earth. Attenborough urges the audience to “forget the size of the human body. Remember that you are a gateway between the universal and the microscopic, the unseen forces that stir the depths of your innermost being and Nature, who embraces you and all there is.” He goes on to claim that “we are on the brink of a revolution that will reunite humans with nature through new technological innovation.” Holy shit. That’s quite an ambitious opener. The film itself nearly delivers on this majestic promise, finding a unique visual language that combines “nature, music, and technology” into one cohesive whole.

This union of “nature, music and technology” is accomplished through a layered visual collage that matches the on-stage aspects of the concert being filmed to the beautiful nature footage & pixelated CGI that swirls around and above it. During the opening song “Thunderbolt” Björk appears in the Earth’s stormy atmosphere, her backing band’s synths (and a specially rigged Tesla coil) seemingly controlling the lightning that illuminates the air around her. The imagery then shifts from the earthly to the celestial, the rhythm of the music correlating to the phases of the moon and the glacially shifting lights of stars and galaxies. The focus then shrinks from the heavenly to the microscopic: Fantastic Voyage-style close-ups of blood moving through veins fade to pixelated bacteria attaching to strands of DNA before the images finally devolve into distorted television color bars & computer monitor static. My favorite use of the nature footage arrives during this microcosmic section when crystals form over the image of Björk performing the song “Crystalline”, only to disappear in a blink to match the song’s violent rhythms. “Crystalline”‘s “internal nebula” & “crystalizing galaxies” lyrical phrasing also feels like the film’s tone in a nutshell. It’s in the stranger moments like this and like when vibrant mushrooms slowly expand in the foreground, leaving the stage antics out of focus that Biophilia Live shines brightest.

These phases of the imagery are cleverly allowed to bleed into one another instead of remaining isolated, which leads to some transcendent juxtaposition: a lightning storm in outer space, the moon perched on a spinal column, crystal formations melting into prism light. Even Björk herself looks like a combination of two ostensibly separate natural phenomenons, her gigantic wig like a colorful galaxy & her asymmetrical dress like an underwater growth. Attenborough’s opening monologue defines “biophilia” as “the love for Nature in all her manifestations” and Biophilia Live tries desperately to capture all of those manifestations in one definitive catalog. Conceived as a single facet of a multi-media project alongside a studio album, music-composition computer apps, and a filmed conversation between Björk & Attenborough, the film itself is more than just a document of a single concert. It’s also an attempt to tie years of far-reaching ideas spread across various art forms into a single product, the same way it tries to tie all of Nature into a single entity. What’s most impressive is that the film succeeds.

Although Björk exhibited creative control through all aspects of the production, part of the film’s success is surely due to the involvement of British director Peter Strickland. Strickland had already established his skills in visually displaying reverence for sound in his 2013 film Berberian Sound Studio, a bizarre thriller that’s just as much homage to foley artists & sound engineers as it is to old school giallo movies. There’s a lot of maddening, horrific energy in Berberian’s dissociative conflict between its imagery & its sounds. Here he & co-director Nick Fenton instead synchronize sounds to their visual equals in the style of Björk’s previous music video collaborations with Michel Gondry. The dissociation occurs instead in how the images relate to each other: how the screens interact with the stage, how distant stars relate to plankton, etc.  Through various camera movement & editing techniques Biophilia Live creates a world that’s simultaneously intimate and expansive.

The live concert format is occasionally at odds with the film’s intimacy. The crowd sometimes intrudes mid-song, breaking the reverie with premature applause. Björk is appreciative of their presence at least, punctuating the end of each song with a polite “thank you”. Of course, the film’s very existence depends on Björk’s relationship with her audience, the same way the existence of One Direction’s Where We Are depends on theirs. Without a basic appreciation for Björk’s music, it’s unlikely that that someone would enjoy a feature-length document of one of her concerts.

What makes Biophilia Live remarkable is the ambition to reach beyond pleasing fans musically. It also asks its audience to contemplate the totality of Nature and how its individual parts interact and unite into a cohesive whole. It’s a zealous, far-reaching work that deserves to be included in the conversation of the best films released in 2014 as well as the best concert films of all time.

-Brandon Ledet

The Exterminating Angel (1962) and the “Party Out of Bounds” Story

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exterminatingangel

One of my favorite types of stories, especially when told on stage or on the screen, is what The B-52s would call the “party gone out of bounds”. I love it when guests at a fictional party stop celebrating and start having a truly shitty, life-changing catastrophe of a time, but decide to stick around and see it through instead of taking the logical step out of the door. It’s a familiar feeling, that late hour biterness that arises when alcohol’s social lubrication takes a toxic turn and the vile, dangerous aspects of human nature start bubbling to the surface. Civility dissolves and our feral natures emerge. The “Party Out of Bounds” story is one I’ve lived many times before, mostly in the drunken hours of early morning when I should’ve gone to bed, but instead felt compelled to stay up and argue “important”, hurtful things I didn’t always mean. I take strange pleasure in seeing these repellent impulses reflected back at me in my entertainment media, particularly in movies & plays.

Part of the allure of “Party Out of Bounds” story is the motivation for sticking around. What compels someone to remain at a party when “situations degenerate, disgusting things you’d never anticipate”? In the genre’s most easily recognizable example, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, it’s clear that the central couple George & Martha loathe their marriage and the make-believe required to keep it afloat, so their motivations for destroying each other’s delusions are fairly straightforward. But why do the younger couple, Nick & Honey, stick around once the tone gets sour and focused on destroying them as well? In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, it’s understandable why Maggie wants Brick to snap out of his sullen state and actively engage with life, but why does Brick allow the evening to go on endlessly, Maggie & his father digging deeper into his painful past? In The Boys In The Band, Michael allows his own self-loathing & alcoholism to tank the birthday party he throws for his friend Harold, but why do the other guests allow themselves to get sucked into his emotional black hole? The instinct to tough it out and see the awful thing through is fascinating to me.

Some “Party Out of Bounds” stories side-step the issue of motivation by confining their characters with literal barriers, some physical and some metaphysical. It’s A Disaster & Coherence are both great recent examples of this tactic, using chemical warfare & a supernatural occurrence to bottle their partygoers at a disastrous brunch & dinner party, respectively. This approach to the genre is more metaphorical than the one detailed above, but belongs all the same. Although an external force is trapping the characters, it’s their internal failings that drive the parties out of bounds. Both situations would have soured with or without the outside help.

Surrealist master Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film The Exterminating Angel plays both sides of this coin beautifully. There is an external force that keeps the film’s aristocratic partygoers trapped in a single cramped room of an expansive mansion, but it is a force than cannot be explained. The characters are compelled to remain in the mansion’s music room as if there were a force field blocking them at the door. At first the guests seem to remain at the dinner party out of nervousness & etiquette, like little kids waiting anxiously for someone to take the first dive at a pool party. Each time someone makes a motion to leave, they find a flimsy excuse to stick around: a forgotten purse, a cup of coffee. As with Coherence & It’s A Disaster there’s an external authority confining the partygoers to the music room, but the fact that this authority cannot be seen or even understood links the movie to the compulsion detailed in the classic examples listed above. The Exterminating Angel is the ultimate “Party Out of Bounds” story: the instinct that coerces its partygoers to see the awful thing through is given tangible power. It is an ugly compulsion materialized, a masochistic urge physically manifested.

As the ultimate “Party Out of Bounds” story, The Exterminating Angel starts with the wealthiest, most civilized party guests and ends with them reaching a feral state, fighting for food & water like wild animals. More than any other film listed above, the party starts at the greatest height of good manners before plummeting into murkiest depths of depravity. Civility more than dissolves here. It’s erased so completely that you begin to question whether it was present in the first place. As the days stretch on in the music room and the guests turn on each other one by one, the opulence & etiquette on display in the early scenes take the shape of a thin veneer, just barely covering the seething vulgarity under the surface. At the film’s beginning, the guests were already full of hatred, already committing adultery, already prone to frivolous cruelty, but were much better at covering up their indiscretions. Getting trapped in the music room merely forces them to display their true natures openly & honestly.

The debasement is gradual. At first guests become fatigued and take cat naps on various chairs & couches, but it’s fatigue that can be attributed to food, alcohol and the late hour of the party. Then they begin to undress from their tuxedos & gowns and clear places to sleep on the floor. As they wake from their makeshift slumber party, they start looking disheveled, unkempt. The reality of their inability to leave slowly dawns on them and they lose their self-control one by one. Those who initially remain calm consider themselves superior to the other guests, but that leverage doesn’t last long. Over time they come to blame each other for getting them in the bizarre predicament, pace at the doorway’s invisible barrier, cry, slip into comas, fight, fuck, commit suicide, hallucinate, insult each other’s hygiene and break into fits of hysterical laughter. When the story begins the characters are embarrassed to be caught acting like human beings. By its end they’re killing sheep with their bare hands and breaking apart furniture & musical instruments for firewood.

Yes, there are sheep roaming the house. There’s also a bear than begins to scale the mansion’s columns as if climbing a tree in plain view of the music room, seemingly mocking the party’s return to nature. The bear and the sheep were acquired for after-dinner entertainment that never arrived. There’s some symbolism to be made of the sheep’s presence (phrases like “mindless sheep” & “like lambs to the slaughter” come to mind), but what are we to make of the bear? And then there’s other details that beg to be picked apart: the vases the guests use as toilets are portals to an open-air outside world, there’s a severed hand that crawls across the floor like The Addams Family’s Thing, the rules of who can and who cannot cross the music room’s barrier becomes increasingly convoluted, the mansion itself is located on Providence Street, etc. It’s all, for a lack of a better word, perfectly surreal. Applying logical analysis to these images is a fool’s errand in my opinion, like the doctor at the party who tries to understand the music room phenomenon through reasoning and ultimately gets nowhere, just like his fellow partygoers.

It’s tempting to read into each of these images separately, but they’re better served when left at face value. Any of the larger ideas that need to get across are fairly plain without too much analysis. The aristocracy is like a gang of helpless infants without its serving staff. The barrier that keeps the affluent trapped in their mansion’s most frivolous room mirrors the way wealth can isolate a person from the “real” world outside and the common people who occupy it. Most importantly, though, civility is really a façade for the snarling beasts lurking within us. As characters begin to violate “the most basic concepts of good etiquette” and fail to “remember their upbringing”, one character calls it “the very end of human dignity.” I say good riddance to that dignity.

Getting back to the B-52s song in question, I’d like to answer the line “Who’s to blame when parties really get out of hand?” Only ourselves, buddy. Just us. Well, maybe us and alcohol. There’s a lot of great “Party Out of Bounds” stories out there and their conflict is always the same: a drunken, joyous celebration is derailed by repressed impulses & inherent, hideous aspects of human nature once civility is no longer there to keep them at bay. Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel pushes this conflict to unmatched extremes that are somehow just as amusing as they are terrifying. It’s an incredible feat of filmmaking and the crown jewel of a genre I love.

-Brandon Ledet

The Juniper Tree (1990)

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EPSON MFP image

three star

Discovering Björk’s acting debut in The Juniper Tree was some divine happenstance. I had lost track of her music career sometime after 2001’s Vespertine, so it was delightful to recently give her latest album Biophilia a (four years late) first listen and discover its fantastic weirdness, obsessively looping it through my headphones all last week. A recommendation that same week alerted me that I was 25 years behind on the release of another Björk project, a small budget, black & white indie film about witchcraft.

The Juniper Tree was filmed in 1986 in the months following the dissolution of Björk’s post-punk band KUKL and the birth of her first child. By the time the film cleared its financial hurdles and saw a 1990 release in Iceland and on film festival circuits, she had already earned much greater success with the alt rock group The Sugarcubes. By the time it saw a wide, international release in 1993, she had achieved major success as a solo artist with the album Debut. In comparison to the huge “Bad Taste” art collective behind The Sugarcubes and the big-name record labels behind Debut, The Juniper Tree’s cast and budget are microscopic, but the film does a lot with a little, pulling a weird little story and some bizarre images from a few locations and even fewer moving pieces. At least from a funding standpoint, it was a time capsule of a primitive state of Björk’s growth as an artist, but one that demonstrates how little material she needs to work with to produce something great.

Loosely based on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale of the same name, The Juniper Tree is the story of two grieving families struggling to blend into one cohesive unit. Think of it as an Icelandic Brady Bunch, but with witches & cannibalism instead of puppy love & nose-breaking footballs. Björk plays Margit, a young woman whose mother was recently stoned & burned for practicing witchcraft. In the escape from their home her sister Katla marries a young widower who lives alone with his son. The boy befriends Margit, but is vehemently against his father’s marriage to Katla, who he knows to be a witch. Although Katla does cast spells (cruelly & often), it is Margit who possesses truly magical abilities, most importantly the ability to communicate with ghosts.

The film’s heart lies with the relationship between Margit and her young brother-in-law and the mourning that bonds them, but it’s the fleeting, hallucinatory imagery that makes it noteworthy. Despite its budget, The Juniper Tree manages to produce an impressive range of images: a hand thrust into a black hole, a ghost perched on Icelandic cliffs, fish picking at an underwater corpse, Northern Lights, birds in flight. It’s a somber, self-serious affair, but one that earns its odder moments in a very short run time. If nothing else, the heavenly tones of Björk’s singing voice elevate the material into otherworldly territory. She’s perfectly suited for this world of witchcraft & mourning and it shows in the final product.

Of course, The Juniper Tree will always be known as the other Björk movie. Lars von Trier’s powerful Dancer in the Dark gave her a much larger stage to prove herself not only as an incredible composer, but also as an actress, a talent she doesn’t utilize nearly enough. The Juniper Tree gets drowned out in the comparison, but when considered in isolation it’s an interesting little art movie. It’s very much Super Serious 80s/90s Film School Fodder, but if a young, feral Björk practicing witchcraft goes as far with you as it does with me, you’ll find it kinda perfect in its small-scale intimacy.

The Juniper Tree is currently streaming on Hulu.

-Brandon Ledet

Electrick Children (2012)

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electrickchildren

fourhalfstar

Tape Jacket
The first & last sounds you hear in the dreamlike Electrick Children are ocean waves & a cassette player. If you played the film on loop, these sounds would parallel the experience of listening to the clicks & hisses of an audio tape switching from Side A to Side B and back again. This reverence for sound is a vital part of the film’s allure and essential to its plot. When the protagonist, a 15 year old girl simply named Rachel, listens to her very first rock & roll song she becomes inexplicably pregnant. As she navigates the consequences of this “miracle” in two irreconcilable worlds, her life takes the same Side A & Side B anatomy of the cassette tape that changed it forever.

Side A
Rachel’s home life is an isolated, fundamentalist Mormon community in Utah. It’s a loving environment, but one that strangles her personal desires & freedoms. Rachel has a sense of humor that’s generally discouraged in her piously pensive household. Her father (played by a terrifying thing that calls itself Billy Zane) is the community’s patriarch & spiritual leader, exuding a level of control that’s never purely healthy. He’s suspicious of Rachel’s prayers thanking God for modern inventions like tape recorders. Rachel’s mother is suspicious of her daughter’s intense interest in a bedtime story about a red Mustang. The story is meant for the kids to interpret as the tale of a mythical horse, but is in fact the story of the mother’s seduction in the passenger seat of a sports car. Her parents were right to be worried, as this fascination with the outside world literally impregnates their daughter through the conduit of a cassette tape recording of a new wave band covering Blondie’s “Hanging on the Telephone”. The only modern world objects in their house are hidden in the basement like a dirty secret: an electric light with a picture of the ocean, the audio cassette player & tapes. It’s in that basement where Rachel becomes pregnant. She confesses her transgression to her parents, reasoning “Maybe I listened to something I wasn’t supposed to and then I’m pregnant.” They don’t believe her and plan to conceal her “sin” by marrying her to a near stranger.

Side B
To avoid the unwanted marriage, Rachel runs away to Las Vegas in search of the voice on the cassette tape, a voice she believes belongs to her baby’s father. She approaches guitar-playing street performers and boys wearing images of cassettes in her desperate search. Vegas is a blown up version of the electric music & lights in her parents’ basement. Typical pillars of teenage rebellion swirl around her: cursing, drugs, kissing, punk shows & skate parks. Her mother’s mythical red Mustang appears to her throughout the journey: first on the drive into Vegas, then during her first kiss, and a final time after her first legitimate crime. Each time the car passes through her life it’s blasting “Hanging on the Telephone.” The car & the musicians she befriends don’t lead her to the father of her miraculous child, but along the way she falls in love, discovers autonomy, and hits every other typical beat you’d expect in a cinematic coming-of-age story. Rachel’s parents warned her of the sinful, destructive nature of the modern world, but it proves not to be true. She treats the modern world with a humble, humorous kindness and it returns the favor. Her only conflicts, including the pregnancy, result from her own transgressions.

Liner Notes
Some reviews for Electrick Children unfairly take points off for it being too cute or fanciful. There’s a preciousness to the story that could be a turn-off for some viewers, but is entirely appropriate for what the movie is: a modern fairy tale, an exercise in magic realism. The film’s Big Hollywood Ending brings its two worlds together in a moment that feels unreal, but no more unreal than the central Immaculate Conception. The characters come across somewhat as indie movie archetypes, but that artificiality is exploited to its full advantage. They’re only assigned first names and limited motivations, but that plays into their allegorical usefulness. The actors playing Rachel and her love interest Clyde (Julia Garner & Rory Culkin) get great mileage with the shorthand, bringing depthless empathy to characters that are mostly limited to one mode: wide-eyed hope and Bill & Ted style sloth, respectively. The skill with which first time director Rebecca Thomas handles her limited budget is remarkable. She pulls a fantastic dream world out of a few locations and a small-scale cast, finding an impressive wealth of significance in a few minor details like an electric light, a cassette tape, a Mustang, and Clyde’s Hawaiian shirt. She even seemingly taunts potential detractors with lines like “You guys playing Garden State or are you coming?” Most importantly, Thomas establishes fantasy in her attention to sound: the clicks of a cassette player, “Hanging on the Telephone”, Rachel’s recorded prayers & their accompanying somber piano notes, the sounds of ocean waves. When the waves return at the film’s end and Rachel says “Let’s go back to the beginning”, it’s tempting to take the suggestion and let the tape play over again, automatically switching back to Side A.

Secret Bonus Track
Rebecca Thomas cites Pasolini’s film The Gospel According To St Matthew (1964) as a stylistic influence on Electrick Children. She said “He takes a fairly neutral and nonjudgmental approach to the New Testament […] It was also important for me to keep my version of the Virgin Mary story as grounded as I could, even though I was dealing with the supernatural: I like to ground things that are fantastical to understand them more.” As the debauchery-benchmark Salò was the only Pasolini film I had seen before, I found that influence pretty surprising. As Thomas says, the film itself is a fairly literal, unsentimental telling of (an unusually angry) Jesus’ life, but one with some striking imagery and occasional brutality, even if it does feel like eating your vegetables. It’s not required viewing to enjoy or understand Electrick Children, but it does help provide context for Thomas’ ambitions. Also, it features an Odetta song, which is always nice.

Electrick Children is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Brandon Ledet

Bird People (2014)

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birdpeople

twostar

Last year’s Bird People is the exact kind of French indie movie I used to rent from Blockbuster as a kid to drive my parents crazy. It’s a deliberately bizarre work that deals mostly in somber, humorless tones in its first half before taking an inexplicable left turn into some really goofy, exuberant territory in the second. I really wanted to like this movie, but the two pieces never came together for me. As mirrors of each other the film’s two halves don’t have much to say about their reflections. They remain separate, isolated, which may have been the intended to match the narrative, but makes for a frustrating viewing experience. Besides, the second segment is vastly more interesting than the first, so the whole thing feels off-balance.

What Works: Audrey
Let’s get the main hook/spoiler/ridiculousness out of the way: about halfway into the movie one of the two main characters turns into a bird. I can’t explain it. She can’t explain it. It’s just a thing that happens. Audrey, the bird person in question, is a meek hotel maid who lives her life vicariously through the guests that pass through the rooms she cleans. She’s a nonsexual voyeur, a fly on the wall, an observer. When she unexpectedly turns into a sparrow she’s suddenly able to indulge in her observations up close. Her small size and ability to fly enables her to intrude & eavesdrop unnoticed and she even feels brave enough to interact with the people she’s watching, something she wouldn’t dare in human form. For lack of a better phrase she’s free as a bird. It’s an unusual, interesting idea that could’ve been stretched out & explored enough to justify its own movie. The problem is it comes too late in this one; the damage had already been done by Gary’s segment.

What Doesn’t Work: Gary
The film’s opening segment feels like a completely different movie, a much more sullen movie than the fanciful bird transformation story of the back half. It follows Gary, a guest at the hotel that employs Audrey, as he suffers a personal crisis/panic attack on a business trip that prompts him to sever all ties to his work & his family. Through a series of telephone & Skype conversations, Gary frees himself of all personal responsibilities to the shock & disgust of his wife & coworkers. It’s an isolating performance that puts a lot of weight on actor Josh Charles’ shoulders and, unfortunately, I don’t think it’s a weight he can carry. After watching Tom Hardy master this type of one-man-against-the-world-and-himself story in last year’s Locke, Charles’ performance can’t help but look weak by comparison. Gary’s Skype conversation with his wife should be an absolute soul-crusher, but instead comes off as more of a shrug.

What’s Missing: Who knows?
There are some connections to be made between Gary’s refusal to remain a casual observer in his own life and severing personal ties to obtain freedom & Audrey’s transformation into a sparrow that allows her leave behind the pretense of her maid duties and look into people’s lives more openly. These connections don’t feel fully fleshed out, though. It’s as if this feature-length film were truly meant to be a short or there was a missing third missing segment that would’ve helped tie both parts together or balance them out. As is, I think Bird People is half of a great movie. That half just comes too late to win me back over from its lackluster partner.

Superficial Side Note
I found it very distracting that Gary’s full name was Gary Newman. It’d be like if a character’s name were Mark Mothersbrow, Thomas Colby or Deborah Farry. While watching most of Gary’s segment I periodically wished I was listening to The Pleasure Principle with my eyes closed instead. Actually, I think I’m going to do that right now.

Bird People is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Brandon Ledet

The Meta Experience of Prytania Screening Cinema Paradiso (1989)

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paradiso

I was washing dishes this Thursday afternoon when I was unexpectedly alerted that Prytania Theatre was going to screen Cinema Paradiso for free in a half-hour’s time. I dried my hands, crated the dog and sped Uptown just in time to take my seat among the little old biddies and stray college students just before the movie began. With no time for Google or IMDb before I ran out the door, I went into the movie completely blind. All I knew was that it’s one of those foreign titles synonymous with phrases like “Oh man that’s a classic” and “How have you not seen that yet?” Oh man. It was a classic. How had I not seen that yet?

Cinema Paradiso is a movie about movies, cinema about a cinema, art about art. It’s one of those rare films that attempts to provoke every possible response in its viewers (laughter, tears, heartbreak, frustration, unbridled joy) and succeeds consistently. As the audience watches the story young boy grow into an old man, they also watch a history of how audiences have engaged with film over the course of decades. When we watch Cinema Paradiso, we watch the way people watch movies. At the beginning of the film the Cinema Paradiso’s audiences basically riot throughout the pictures. Towards the end they sit in rapt silence.

The audience at Prytania that day was anything but silent. They weren’t the masturbating, shit slinging, drunken near-rioters of Cinema Paradiso, but there was some audible chatter throughout the movie in the seats behind me and a full-on celebration in the lobby that could easily be heard through the dividing curtains. The Prytania was screening free movies that day and was gearing up for an afternoon block party to commemorate its 100th anniversary. As the oldest operating cinema in New Orleans and the only one in its neighborhood, it’s way too easy to draw connections between the Prytania Theatre and the titular Cinema Paradiso. Just as the Cinema Paradiso grows with & serves its Sicilian village, Prytania is a cultural mainstay of Uptown New Orleans. They planned on screening the film a second time later that night at the block party, the same kind of outdoor community screening Alfredo stages in the film.

Before the afternoon screening I attended began, Prytania’s 93 year old operator Rene Brunet told the following anecdote: When the one-screen theatre first ran Cinema Paradiso in 1989 it played for over six weeks, upsetting the locals (presumably the college kids) enough to picket the theatre to finally move on & play another movie. It’s the exact kind of episode that would’ve happened in the film itself, although presumably more tame.

The meta experience doesn’t stop there. When Cinema Paradiso was first released to an American audience, the undisputed king of cinematic self-sabotage Harvey Weinstein cut a full 51 minutes of footage from the Italian original (a tactic he almost repeated with last year’s Snowpiercer). The streamlined cut is the one that played at Prytania this Thursday, but it’s also the one that played in its original extended run at that cinema, as well as the one that earned the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Oddly enough, Roger Ebert himself contended that the Weinstein cut is “a better film than the longer.” Whether or not that is true, it’s still hilarious to me that drastic edits were made to a film that depicts a priest making drastic edits to other films as one of its thematic lynchpins.

The programming choice to celebrate Prytania’s century long history with Cinema Paradiso was wholly perfect. It was the story of New Orleans’ most significant one-screen cinema examining itself by revisiting the most significant story of a one-screen cinema around. They could’ve played a more tragic (but just as potent) work of cinematic navel-gazing like 1971’s The Last Picture Show or last year’s Life Itself, but that would’ve undermined the reason we were all there: a celebration. Commemorating Prytania’s first 100 years with Paradiso left me with the hope that it will last at least 100 more. There was no  better way possible to celebrate the movies than to watch people watch movies.

-Brandon Ledet

The Brainiac (1962)

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thebraniac

fourstar

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Like with all art forms, it’s difficult to find a great “bad movie”. For every transcendently awful Plan 9 or Troll 2 you have to sift through a hundred mind-numbingly dull Hobgoblins. A lot of old school schlock was made with the intention of getting butts in seats. As long as a trailer hoodwinked audiences into buying tickets the job was considered done and no effort had to be made on delivering the goods. Every now and then, though, everything clicks. When a B movie is firing on all cylinders, enthusiastically exploring every weird idea it has to their full potential, there’s really nothing like it. A lot of the sarcastic mockery associated with people who binge on bad movies is really just a front. Shlock fans put up with a lot of abuse from the movies they watch. A lot of times they abuse the movies back, but the truth is that they love the trash, even when verbally protesting. The dedication it takes to find the gems among the garbage has to come from a place of patient love, but it’s a love that can really pay off from time to time.

That being said, I loved The Braniac (or, as it was known in its native Mexico, The Baron of Terror). It’s such a bizarre little horror cheapie that didn’t need to try nearly as hard as it did. Check out this plot: It opens with hooded executioners of the Spanish Inquisition expressing their frustration that a specific victim, a philandering Mexican baron, was surviving all of their torture methods by bending the laws of physics like an omnipotent god. When they sentence the baron to a death-by-burning execution, he escapes by hitching a ride on a passing comet and promises to return in 300 years to murder the descendants of the Inquisitors. He delivers on this promise in the form of a forked-tongued space alien beast. All of this transpires in the opening 20 minutes.

After that incredible beginning, the film levels out a bit and hits all the usual beats you’d expect from a black & white creature feature on MST3K or late night basic cable. The baron alternates between human & beastly forms, cordially schmoozing his intended victims before exacting his revenge on them one at a time. His preferred murder tactic? He sucks their brains directly out of their skulls with the aforementioned demon tongue and then stores them for casual snacking. Although it opened with its most outlandish segment, The Braniac maintains a consistent cruelty that’s pretty remarkable for its schlocky parameters. The baron strangles, drowns, commits acts of cannibalism and seduces women before their fathers & husbands. He’s a monster. A lot of B pictures in this genre would drag the monster out for a couple killings now & then and try to limit its effect on the budget, but The Braniac consistently delivers.

I’m not saying the movie’s not cheap; it’s cheap. The baron’s space monster form is essentially an unsettlingly hairy, pulsating rubber mask paired with the baron’s business suit and some gloves. The sets & special effects are also laughably artificial, the pacing can be clunky, and despite a couple lines like “My hate is much stronger than my love, like a master no one can control,” the dialogue is mostly featureless. All of this is forgivable to me, considering the movie’s scope & budget. It’s the kind of ragtag production that feels like ordinary people trying to put on a good show. Like the best of bad movies, you can see the sticky fingerprints of the people who made it all over the picture. Instead of losing yourself in the film, you’re constantly aware that you’re watching something another human being tried their best to make entertaining. The Braniac’s been mocked before by the likes of Rifftrax and (according to a Dangerous Minds article that clued me in on its existence) Frank Zappa & Captain Beefheart, but it doesn’t really deserve the abuse. If you approach the movie with a little love & patience, it’s a pretty badass horror cheapie. If you’re a sucker for small budget creature features & outer space mysticism, it’s a genuine treat.

-Brandon Ledet

The Comedy (2012)

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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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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