For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Belgian-French animated fantasy adventure Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds (2024).
Keeping up with Quentin Dupieux is hard work, even as a fan. The prankster Frenchman’s filmography is as prolific as it is silly, as he’s only surpassed in his routine creative output by Matt “The Madman” Farley. Every time I review “the new Dupieux” for this site, he’s already released at least two more recent films on the Euro festival circuit, which will inevitably be followed by yet another new Dupieux before those achieve US distro. So, while I am here to write about the two “new” Quentin Dupieux movies that arrived in America this year, I also have to acknowledge that his actual-latest film, The Second Act, has already premiered at Cannes and is still pending US release. That’s three new features total since I reviewed Smoking Causes Coughing at last year’s Overlook Film Fest (and three more films than most aspiring directors will get to release in their lifetime). The man is a machine that produces silly comedies at an alarming rate, like that haywire conveyor belt of chocolate treats that tormented Lucille Ball. This must be how more serious critics feel about Hong Sang-soo.
The best of this year’s silly treats was the semi-biographical comedy Daaaaaalí!, in which Dupieux pays flippant homage to master surrealist Salvador Dalí. The absurdly elongated title is in reference to how the multiple actors who portray Daaaaaalí pronounce their own name, often while bragging in third-person. Dupieux is unafraid to poke fun at his artist-subject’s ludicrous ego and public misbehavior, likely because his own creative debt and reverence for Dalí is obvious to the point of not needing to be stated aloud. The matter-of-fact surrealism of Dupieux’s humor already amounts to a career-long tribute to Dalí in its own way, so much so that the director finds it difficult to complete a film about the much more famous artist without feeling like a failure. Daaaaaalí! is a loopy, prankish comedy about the impossibility of making a worthy, satisfying movie about Salvador Dalí. Dupieux’s onscreen avatar is a young journalist who repeatedly attempts to film a full-length interview with Dalí but can never quite pull the fluff-piece documentary together, mostly due to whimsical sabotage from her subject. Instead, Dupieux sends her down a labyrinth of circular-logic dreams, time-jumps, and actor swaps that make no linear narrative sense, attempting to match the audience-trolling humor of Dalí’s work at large while staging living-tableau recreations of specific Dalí paintings. That way, Dupieux can’t disappoint himself in his homage to a personal, professional hero, since he openly admits defeat before the project starts in earnest. With Daaaaaalí!, Dupieux combines the professional self-parody of Deerskin and the anything-goes-at-any-moment sketch comedy of Smoking Causes Coughing into a single, silly picture – finding a delightfully uneasy middle ground between his two career-best titles to date (assuming he hasn’t released an even better one since I started typing this paragraph).
Something I’ve noticed about Dupieux’s recent output is that his increasingly silly ideas for movies are outpacing his already hectic production schedule, so that recent works like Daaaaaalí! and Smoking Causes Coughing play more like sketch comedy revues than single-concept feature films. That’s not the case with his recent title Yannick, though, which is an unusually focused & abrasive effort from the goofball auteur. An all-in-one-night black comedy about a low-rent theatrical production that’s threatened at gunpoint by an audience member who doesn’t appreciate the show, Yannick finds Dupiuex holding his audience hostage and heckling us about our own grossest impulses in a single-location limbo. The most interesting angle on it is trying to figure out if Dupieux considers himself one of us or one of the suffering artists who find it impossible to please us, mocking dissenters in his audience for making their personal criticisms loudly, publicly known to the detriment of fellow theatregoers who are quietly enjoying themselves. There is some formal playfulness in how he shoots the players from the audience and the audience from the stage like two warring sides of a never-ending conflict, pontificating on how even a successful stage play is already a kind of hostage situation in reverse. It’s just unclear whether his portrayal of the play’s titular heckler as a braying jackass is an insult to the audience’s intelligence or if he’s supposed to be a common-denominator mouthpiece voicing populist derision against needlessly pretentious, fussy art, which is something Dupieux might identify with as a man who’s dedicated his life’s work to being as silly as possible at all times.
If you’ve gotten used to Dupieux’s rapid-fire delivery of absurdly silly ideas in movies like Daaaaaalí!, the feature-length, single-idea fixation of Yannick can be a little tiresome, even at a mere 67 minutes of runtime. It’s still interesting to decipher within the larger context of Dupieux’s career as a public figure, which is always what happens when you watch too many movies from a single director. Out of context, Daaaaaalí! is likely still entertaining as a remarkably silly movie about a remarkably silly art-world icon, but the larger project of Dupieux’s career leads us to wonder where the director sees himself in the onscreen relationship between portraitist and subject. That goes doubly for Yannick, where the most interesting piece of the puzzle is deciphering what our auteur du jour is attempting to communicate about the relationship between artist and audience. It’s the same way that fellow Quentin’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is about Tarantino’s relationship with his industry, or the same way that every Matt Farley movie is now about the greater Matt Farley project, most recently exemplified in the self-parodic Local Legends: Bloodbath. To be a Quentin Dupiuex fan is to be someone who routinely watches two or three of the silliest movies released all year in a single sitting and puzzling through what they’re saying about Art and The Artist. Dupieux used to make movies like the killer-car-tire horror comedy Rubber about how nothing in life has any meaning or reason behind it; now he makes movies about what believing & embodying that ethos has done to his art and to the artist behind it. I’m assuming he doesn’t have a solid answer to that personal quandary yet, since he he’s been making a lot of them.
Swampflix’s official coverage of the best films of 2024 won’t start until January 2025, but list-making season is already in full swing elsewhere. General consensus on the best films of the year is starting to take shape as regional film critic associations are publishing their collective Best of the Year lists, and I’m proud to say I was once again able to take a small part in that annual ritual. I voted in the Southeastern Film Critics Association poll for the best films of 2024, representing a consensus opinion among 89 critics across nine states in the American South. Winners were announced this morning, and it’s a pretty solid list. At the very least, it’s cool to see Sean Baker recognized for his latest in a long line of high-energy, high-empathy sex industry dramas, Anora, and to see the objectively best score of the year win its respective category: Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross’s music for Luca Guadagnino’s erotic tennis thriller Challengers. I’m also proud to have helped a movie as absurdly grotesque as Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance get rightfully highlighted as one of the year’s major works.
The biggest story of last year’s SEFCA list was the total dominance of Christopher Nolan’s historical drama Oppenheimer, which then went on to sweep The Oscars as well, with seven wins out of thirteen nominations. This year, there’s no clear dominant winner, as the majority of the prizes are evenly split among Anora, Conclave, and The Brutalist. That sounds like a robust crop of movies to me. To quote SEFCA President Scott Phillips in today’s press release, “Every year we hear from the naysaying sectors of the industry that it wasn’t a very good year for film. This slate of winners easily disproves that statement for 2024. Between theatrical distribution and streaming, releases can be a bit scattered and hard to find, but if you take the time to find the better films of 2024, they form a potent lineup. We hope that film fans out there can use our Top 10 list to catch up on some of the best that 2024 had to offer.”
It has been heartbreaking to watch Barry Jenkins succumb to the Disney filmmaking machine, pouring years of his life & art into the lifeless, artless product of the studio’s “live-action” CG prequel to The Lion King. Regardless of whether Jenkins’s Mufasa is any good, it’s undeniably a waste of the talented filmmaker’s time when compared to his previous critical hits Moonlight & If Beale Street Could Talk: two gorgeous, somber portraits of Black American life, as opposed to a pale, sickly sing-along starring computer-animated lions. Anyone who’s mourning that loss and feeling nostalgic for The Old Jenkins is likely to find refuge in RaMel Ross’s Awards Season sweetheart Nickel Boys, which offers a more formally extreme version of Jenkins’s earlier triumphs. As already evidenced in his own earlier, artsier documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Ross is a more challenging, experimental filmmaker than Jenkins, but the two directors share a fearless, formalist approach to Black portraiture and work well in tandem. Nickel Boys softens a little of Hale County‘s narrative looseness in its distraction with other tools of filmmaking language, but it’s still a potentially alienating work with uncompromising politics. Let’s just hope that its Oscars buzz doesn’t lead to Ross directing Moana 3 or Black Panther 4 over the next few years; the financial paycheck is never worth the artistic payoff.
The formal experiment in this case is in adapting a novel written from a 3rd-person POV into a 1st-person narrative film, putting the audience in the alternating minds & bodies of its two main characters. Instead of taking a straight historical look at the recent abusive, racist past of boys’ reformatory schools in the American South, Ross walks you through the first-hand experience of being imprisoned there as a young, innocent victim of the system. It’s like playing a 1st-person shooter video game except instead of committing acts of violence you walk into the wrong place at the wrong time, and your fate is locked into a one-way track you have no opportunity to break away from, which accounts for the experience of many young Black men in America. The result is a clear, direct argument that the institution of American slavery continued well after the Civil War; it’s just now carried out through schoolyard & prison labor under the guise of punitive justice. To his credit, Ross breaks away from the linear one-way-track structure of that political argument with intrusions of memory and glimpses of his protagonists’ future—which fully take over in the final, fragmentary montage that pulls the full scope of his story together—but the central conceit is having to suffer inside the two boys’ bodies & minds as if they were your own, fearful that you might not make it to the end credits without getting dumped into one of the school’s unmarked graves.
If you end up watching Nickel Boys at home instead of the theater, I recommend using headphones. A lot of attention has been paid to the 1st-person perspective of its imagery, but its sound design is just as intensely, complexly immersive. I wish I had more to say about what it’s doing dramatically rather than formally, but the technical achievement of that sensory immersion can’t be dismissed. If it has any narrative grace to it, it’s in the smaller, observational details that distract from his larger historical & political bullet points: focusing on the thread of a garment while news reports of a landmark Civil Rights event echo in the background, using the recurring image of a freshly picked orange to anchor the audience to the Floridian setting, throwing in a couple alligator jump scares to heighten the already tense experience of being a sensitive boy raised in a macho, militarized environment, etc. I can’t say the dramatic exchanges between actors ever overpowered the visual & aural devices that Ross spent so much of his energy tinkering with; it plays more like a VR experience than a traditional narrative film. Still, that’s more of an exciting, daring technical achievement than figuring out how to get a CG lion to mouth the words to a Lin Manuel-Miranda song or whatever Jenkins has been up to in his Disney Vault prison cell.
One of the more diabolical trends in recent film promotion & distribution has been the decrease in access to premiere screenings for professional critics in favor of inviting online influencers instead. The thought is that the younger, less journalistic influencer crowd is more likely review a new movie favorably than a traditional critic—especially when buttered up with parties, booze, and merch—so studios can effectively purchase cheap advertising by elbowing the old-world press out of the way to make room for the brats. Being neither a paid critic nor a young upstart with a substantial online following myself, I’ve never experienced that kind of blatant buttering-up first-hand, but I did get a small taste of it at last weekend’s local premiere of the microbudget documentary Holding Back the Tide at The Broadside. The ticket price for the screening included a Happy Hour icebreaker where local shuckers supplied unlimited raw oysters for the crowd to slurp down in excess, supposedly as a live demonstration of the shell-recycling program helmed by The Coalition to Restore Costal Louisiana, which has been repurposing shells from local bars & restaurants to rebuild the state’s eroding coastline. No matter how many helpful CRCL representatives were around to answer questions via personal interaction or post-film panel discussion about the recycling program, I could clearly see the truth; those oysters were a bribe – a bribe far more valuable than any Los Angeles red carpet meet-and-greet with the voice cast of Mufasa. They put the audience in a euphoric mood that was impossible to break.
In all seriousness, Holding Back the Tide does pair extraordinarily well with pre-screening oysters, since half of the movie’s credibility relies on a shared understanding that oysters are an exquisitely delicious treat. Once you agree to that premise, all the movie has to do is explain that they are also an admirable political tool & role model, as exemplified locally by CRCL’s Oyster Shell Recycling Program. This is not a talking-heads advocacy doc so much as it’s an invitation to mediate on the nature of the oyster as a divine organism for 77 breezy minutes, best enjoyed with the mollusks’ briny taste still lingering on your tongue. It walks a thin line between poetry and incoherence, but it also makes a convincing enough argument that oysters deserve that awestruck aspiration. By the time this seafood industry documentary ends on a heartfelt dedication “to The Queer Future,” it earns a hearty “Right on,” from its audience. At that point, we’ve touched on the oyster’s relationships with and answers to political subjects as wide-ranging as Climate Change, gender identity, communal solidarity, racial justice, and capitalistic overconsumption – each with seemingly enough contextual history worthy of their own standalone doc. Oyster farmers, vendors, shuckers, and scientists pontificate about their collective fav in fragmentary interviews, focusing mostly on the oyster’s significance to the life & history of New York City. This hands-on academia is counterbalanced by a more metaphorical appreciation of the oyster’s tendency to change genders mid-life to maintain social balance, as voiced & modeled by trans performers who personify the little wonders.
Holding Back the Tide is resistant to linear explanations of the oyster’s significance to NYC culture, choosing instead to mimic the circular, repetitive structure of human breath or crashing waves. Its imagery can be abstract to the point of counterproductivity, such as its gorgeous underwater photography of subway cars being used to restore coastal reefs along with humanmade, recycled oyster beds – which are seen but not verbally explained. When a seemingly cis-het couple orally exchange an oyster back & forth Tampopo-style, then emerge from the experience as a different pair of lesbian actors, their literalized transformation into The Queer Future is just as confused as it is corny. However, the living-tableau recreation of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in an oversized oyster shell, reworked as a portrait of modern transgender beauty, is one genius image among many, with clear thematic intent. It’s especially easy to get on board with the movie’s religious exaltation of the oyster as a Louisianian familiar with its pleasures as a seasonal delicacy and its uses in coastal hurricane protection, maybe even more so than for the average New Yorkers in the target audience. Love for the oyster is something you feel more than it is something you can articulate, like the stupefying awe for rocks expressed in Deborah Stratman’s recent film Last Things. Holding Back the Tide is less abrasive & challenging than Stratman’s film, calling back to the more playful 90s NYC indie filmmaking of a Fresh Kill than anything so academically experimental. Its love for the oyster is raw & heartfelt, and it wants to be shared to its audience so badly it sometimes comes with a real-life oyster bar to help supplement the experience.
I attended my first live ballet performance this October, when the New Orleans Ballet Company staged its modern-dance interpretation of Dracula. It was an easy entry point into the medium, not only because it fit in so well with all of the horror movies I was binge-watching at the time anyway, but also because the Dracula story in particular is something I’ve seen repeated onscreen dozens of times before. From the more faithful early adaptations of Bram Stoker’s novel by Browning & Murnau to its weirdo outlier mutations in titles like Shadow of the Vampire & Dracula 3D, the Dracula story is well familiar to anyone who’s seen a horror movie or two. It’s even been staged onscreen as a ballet before in Guy Madden’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary. So, when the New Orleans Ballet Company had to cut some narrative & financial corners in depicting Jonathan Harker’s cross-sea travels to score a real estate deal with Count Dracula in Transylvania or in depicting the infamous vampire’s subsequent travels back to Harker’s home turf to seduce & destroy everything he holds dear, I never felt lost in the progression of the story – no matter how abstractly represented. That trust in the audience’s familiarity with the source material plays no part in Dracula‘s most recent big-screen adaptation, since director Robert Eggers is more of a history-obsessed purist than a Guy Madden-style prankster of poetic license. Eggers is as faithful to the original story structure of Stoker’s novel as the F.W. Murnau film from which he borrows his title, which itself was faithful enough to nearly get sued out of existence for copyright infringement by the Stoker estate. Audiences can expect to see every progressive step of the Dracula story dramatized onscreen—including the all-important legal signing of real estate documents—with full reverence for the Murnau classic as a foundational cinematic text. What they might not have seen before, however, is the intensity of the violence & beauty in the Dracula story cranked up to their furthest extremes, which accounts for Eggers’s other directorial specialty besides his kink for historical research.
Ever since he jumped ship from A24 to the major studios, Eggers has softened the more alienating, unconventional touches of his first couple films so that he can stage his exquisite, traditionalist images on a larger studio-budget scale. As a result, his version of Nosferatu does not add much to the ongoing ritual of reinterpreting Dracula, except in its attention to the period details of its 19th Century Germany setting (and in accidentally making a contrast-and-compare argument that Coppola’s version is the best adaptation to date). He dutifully, earnestly goes through the motions of a traditional Dracula movie plot with what his Van Helsing stand-in (Willem Dafoe) would describe as a sense of “grotesque tediousness.” The film makes for a great Yuletide ghost-story moodsetter, offering a Christmas Carol alternative for bloodthirsty freaks, but you can clearly hear some thematic preoccupations with the source text screaming for him to break from that literary tradition to deliver something new. If there’s any new angle in Eggers’s version of this familiar story, it’s his interest in the internal struggles of his Mina figure (Lily-Rose Depp) as she finds herself undeniably drawn to the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård, the copyright-infringing Dracula) despite her recent marriage to a doomed dupe of a real estate agent (Nicolas Hoult). There’s a dark, soul-deep lust in her attraction to Orlok that affords the film a genuine sense of Evil at its core, with Depp pleading to anyone who’ll listen to answer the one question that haunts her, “Does evil come from within us or from beyond?” Since she starts the film as a young girl possessed, years before she meets Orlok or his dopey real estate agent in the flesh, the answer is clear from the outset, but her personal journey to accepting that answer gives the movie a fresh, personalized take on the material. So, it’s a little disappointing to spend so much time retracing the standard Dracula movie plot beats outside that central struggle. Following Hoult on his journey to sign the legal documents that seal his life-ruining real estate deal is a little like watching Bruce Wayne’s mother’s pearls hit the pavement in yet another Batman origin story. We’ve seen it before; you can stray your focus elsewhere without losing us.
No matter where Eggers’s Nosferatu may be a little straightlaced as a literary adaptation, it’s still a gorgeous, heinous nightmare in pure visual terms, which obviously goes a long way. Anyone who was frustrated with the director’s looser, atmospheric approach to horror in The Lighthouse & The Witch will find much more traditional genre pleasures here, delivered through a series of jump scares and horny gasps. If Eggers had fully drilled down into Depp’s acceptance of the darkness within herself and never left her sweaty bedside, the movie would lose Orlok’s absurd introduction of his What We Do in the Shadows voice & domesticity and Dafoe’s maniacal prancing among the vampire’s army of plague-carrying rats, which together account for most of its deviant levity. When Eggers fully settles into the supernatural cuckoldry of the central trio in the third act, things get thematically exciting in a way that makes you wonder why he bothered depicting anything else, but Skarsgård’s Orlok is a spooky enough image in itself to keep the tension up until that payoff arrives. Eggers’s longtime cinematographer Jarin Blashke puts in typically astounding work as a visual stylist, finding a terrible beauty in natural on-set lighting and the immense darkness it barely keeps at bay. It’s a ghoulish ghost story told over candlelight on a blistering winter night, which keeps it from feeling like the most daring onscreen interpretation of Dracula to date but still manages to scare & chill despite its narrative familiarity. I would’ve loved to have seen what the gonzo Robert Eggers who made The Lighthouse would’ve done with the erotic Mina-Dracula tensions of this film at feature length, but the more restrained, traditionalist Robert Eggers who made The Northman is almost just as good. If it sounds like I’m complaining more than praising here, it’s only because I’m holding the director to the impossibly high standard that he set for himself early on. It’s a very good, traditionally satisfying horror picture by any other metric.
It took a while to arrive, but 2024 was finally Sebastian Stan’s year. Ever since the strikingly hunky actor found early fame in the wide-appeal franchises Gossip Girl and The MCU, he’s been attempting to pull off the Robert Pattinson trick of convincing cinephilic snobs that he’s more than just a handsome face. Stan has been deliberately eroding his pretty-boy persona by taking on increasingly odd, unlikeable roles in titles like I, Tonya, Fresh, and The Bronze, but audiences have yet to take him seriously by any other name than Bucky Barnes. It’s clear to me that 2024 was the critical breakthrough in that effort, with Stan earning many impassioned accolades for his two most recent film roles in The Apprentice and A Different Man. Weirdly, that career boost may have been indirectly assisted by the recent re-election of Donald Trump, whom Stan portrays as a young man in The Apprentice. Or it was at least assisted by his fellow actors’ cowardice on the subject of Trump, since Stan vented that he was invited to participate in Variety‘s annual “Actors on Actors” interview series, but nothing ever came of it because no actor (or at least no actor’s publicist) dared to discuss Trump or the election on the record. This news item led to a fresh new wave of critics praising Stan’s fully committed portrayal of the president-elect as a young ghoul in training, reinvigorating discussion of a film that had for the most part faded into the Awards Season background since it premiered at Cannes. It’s not all just empty political posturing, either; he deserves the praise.
In The Apprentice, Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi (Border, Holy Spider) attempts to diagnose the illness at the heart of contemporary American politics by pinpointing the exact moment when Donald Trump transformed from human being to monstrous caricature. Trump is already a shit-heel capitalist at the start of the film, when Sebastian Stan is introduced as a racist landlord collecting rent payments & shutting out Black tenants in 1970s New York City. The punk, disco, and street noise of the era appear to rattle young Donny just as much as his legal troubles and his father’s withheld affections. Then, the figure of Roy Cohn appears from across a crowded barroom, played like a beckoning Count Dracula by Succession star Jeremy Strong. In the first third of the film, Strong’s verbal & physical mannerisms are more closely aligned with the SNL-parody version of Trump we’re all used to, and the acting challenge of the piece is for Stan to gradually grow into the role as he learns from his vampiric mentor. His transformation from status-obsessed dork to the most powerful carnival conman in America is physically manifested in peculiar contortions of the mouth and verbal jabs of one-upmanship against his own previous sentences while bragging to the press, and he learned it all from watching Cohn do the same. What Abbasi & Stan most clearly understand about Trump is how unfortunate it is that he’s a funny guy in addition to being an evil one, so that The Apprentice ends up becoming a kind of It’s Always Sunny-style dirtbag sitcom featuring talented actors playing despicable ghouls. It’s not especially insightful as a political text, but it is impressive as an acting showcase, which is exactly what Sebastian Stan needed to break through into critical legitimacy.
The only hindrance to The Apprentice announcing Sebastian Stan’s arrival as a formidable actor is that he only gives the second best performance in his own movie, as he’s often outshone by Jeremy Strong’s scenes-stealing performance as Roy Cohn. Funnily enough, that actor-vs-actor tension is the exact conflict that torments Stan’s lead character in his actual-best performance of the year. In A Different Man, director Aaron Schimberg ventures further into the ethical & psychological labyrinth of rethinking onscreen disfigurement & disability representation that he first stepped into with Chained for Life, this time with less third-act abstraction. Sebastian Stan does incredible work building complex layers in the lead role as a failed actor with neurofibromatosis, which hides his face under a mountainous mask of noncancerous tumors. After an experimental drug chemically removes those tumors in a miraculous transformation that reveals Stan’s Hollywood Handsome face, he remains a failed actor, finding that his lack of confidence & charisma had little to do with his disfiguring medical condition. Then enters Adam Pearson (Chained for Life, Under the Skin) as the world’s most affable guy, who charms every room he walks into despite the fact that his own neurofibromatosis remains untreated. Pearson is hilarious as the carefree bloke who completely wrecks Stan’s entire life simply by being pleasant company, but it’s Stan’s performance that affords the movie most of its emotional complexity. It’s impressive to watch him intentionally play someone who is disastrously bad at acting in a movie where we can all clearly tell he’s a great actor, maybe even with potential to become one of our best.
A Different Man is a great, darkly funny comedy about the tensions between internal & external identity, teased out through the pronounced artifice of stage theatre. By the time Stan is wearing a 3D rendering of his former disfigurement as a mask while playing a fictionalized version of himself on-stage, it’s clear that Schimberg has created something incredibly complex here, and he found an actor who was up for the task. A Different Man is a much smaller, quieter film than The Apprentice, which made enough of a stir to be publicly threatened with lawsuits by its subject’s legal team the week of its premiere. That threat certainly contributed to the good will behind critics’ defense of Stan’s right to discuss his craft in portraying Trump onscreen, but A Different Man is still the title of the pair that’s more likely to land on hipper publications’ Best of the Year lists. The Apprentice is, at heart, a kind of phony drama that excels solely as an acting showcase for its two leads, who make great use of the opportunity; it’s Awards Season fluff. By contrast, A Different Man is the real deal; it’s cinema. In combination, they suggest that Sebastian Stan has finally achieved the creative success he’s been seeking as an actor ever since he first achieved financial success as a handsome face. Let’s hope all these critical accolades only embolden him to get weirder & more off-putting, since he’s such a joy to watch in that mode.
This is not my time of year. While every multiplex in town is overbooked with screenings of four-quadrant crowd-pleasers like Wicked: Part 1, Moana 2, and Gladiator 2, my e-mail inbox is overflowing with FYC screeners for the critical favs that premiered at festivals months ago but distributors have held back for optimal last-minute Oscar buzz. Neither option is especially appealing to me, personally, as most of my favorite new releases tend to be the high-style, low-profile genre titles that quietly trickle into local arthouse cinemas during the first half of the year, playing to mostly empty rooms. Still, I make an effort to catch up with what hipper, higher-minded critics single out as The Best Movies of the Year, mostly as an effort to stay informed but also somewhat as an effort to not waste my time & money on the corporate IP currently clogging up American marquees. It’s during this holiday-season FYC ritual that I’m most often confronted with my most hated & feared cinematic enemies: Subtlety, Nuance, and Restraint. It’s also when I watch the most capital-A Acting, since these tend to be projects greenlit & distributed with the intent of stirring up awards buzz for a particular performer on the poster. If there’s any one theme to the trio of FYC screeners I happened to watch over Thanksgiving break, it’s that they were all easy-to-watch dramas about difficult-to-handle people, each highlighting the acting talents of their headlining performers by allowing them to get socially & emotionally messy onscreen without other cinematic distractions getting the way – petty details like dynamic, daring cinematography and editing, the art of the moving image.
If you’re ever in the mood to watch a movie that values acting over any other cinematic concern, you can always look to actors-turned-directors to scratch that itch. Jesse Eisenberg’s second directorial work, A Real Pain, is a two-hander acting showcase for himself and screen partner Kieran Culkin, who are both good enough in the movie that it’s been in The Awards Conversation for almost a full year since it first premiered at Sundance. Jesse Eisenberg stars as a Jesse Eisenberg type: a nervous New Yorker who can barely finish a conversational sentence without having a panic attack. Kieran Culkin is his socially volatile cousin: a bi-polar timebomb who breaks every unspoken social convention imaginable while still managing to charm every stranger he meets. Structurally, the film is a travel story about the cousins’ journey to Poland to reconnect with their Jewish heritage in the wake of their grandmother’s recent death, which leads to a lot of solemn sightseeing at major sites of The Holocaust. From scene to scene, however, it functions as a darkly, uncomfortably funny comedy about two men who love each other very much but have incompatible mental illnesses that make it impossible for them to share a room. No one wants to hear their Awards Season drama described as a breezy, 90min Sundance dramedy about The Holocaust, but that’s exactly the movie that Eisenberg made. A Real Pain‘s saving grace, then, is the strength of the performances the two central actors deliver as absurdly difficult people. Culkin’s social brashness and emotional volatility makes his difficulty more immediately apparent, but Eisenberg gives himself plenty of room to do his Nervous Fella schtick as much as possible. It’s an anxious archetype that Culkin’s character aptly describes as “an awesome guy stuck inside the body of someone who’s always running late.”
Marielle Heller is another actor-turned-director who has made empathy for difficult characters a core tenet of her artistry, most successfully in Can You Ever Forgive Me? and The Diary of a Teenage Girl. Her new adaptation of the Rachel Yoder novel Nightbitch doesn’t reach far beyond that search for empathetic cheerleading, though, and the movie is mostly a dud as a result. Amy Adams stars as a visual artist who has put her creative pursuits aside to raise a child while her husband travels for work. Spending weeks in isolation with only her young child for company, she loses her adult social skills and essentially goes feral, convincing herself that she is physically transforming into a dog. Suppressing her artist’s spirit to play housewife breaks her brain, causing her to hallucinate monstrous canine hair, tail, and nipple growth in the mirror and to act out wildly in public (barking, stealing food off strangers’ plates, dressing her son in a leash, etc.). Where her internal fantasy of motherhood bringing out her most animalistic traits ends and her external, real-life social misbehavior begins is intentionally kept vague, as Heller is more concerned with seeing the world through her protagonist’s color-blind eyes than with constructing genuine, heartfelt drama. Nightbitch is conceptually amusing as a body-horror metaphor for how motherhood physically & mentally transforms you, but it’s pretty lackluster in execution, especially as a page-to-screen adaptation. There are long stretches of narration in which Adams recites passages from Yoder’s book, as if Heller’s relationship with the material was more admiration than inspiration. She’s so concerned with landing its political jabs about gendered, invisible domestic labor that she forgot to make its characters feel like real people, so the whole thing ends up hollow & phony no matter how committed Adams’s performance is as the titular Nightbitch. It should’ve been an audiobook.
Mike Leigh did not start his career as an actor, but he does have a career-long history as a stage theatre director, which is a very actorly profession. That background heavily informs the sparse, minimalist approach to familial drama in his new film Hard Truths, which sits with its characters’ interpersonal conflicts rather than resolving them. As the most difficult person of all in this triple feature, Marianne Jean-Baptiste stars as a middle-aged grump who wages a one-woman war against the “smiling, cheerful people” of the world for 100 relentlessly sour minutes, including her own loving sister. Her performance is intensely funny and bitter, as she finds so much to complain about every second she is awake that she cannot even sit comfortably in her own home without obsessing over the activities of the pigeons, foxes, and bugs outside the window. There are multiple scenes that start with her gasping in horror at the sensation of waking up from a nap, and her nonstop tirades against the waking world’s many offenses leads to the highest incredulous-teeth-sucking-per-minute ratio I’ve ever seen in a movie as her audience is held hostage by her hostility. Meanwhile, a softly droning violin draws out the pathos of her pathological misery, especially in scenes where her much better adjusted sister gently attempts to diffuse her anger. Leigh pays careful attention to the social & economic circumstances of the sisters’ past that would’ve burdened one with awareness of the world’s wretchedness while leaving the other unscathed, but most of the thematic & emotional impact of the picture is achieved through the forcefulness of Jean-Baptiste’s performance, which is exactly how all of these movies work, even the lesser ones.
If any of these movies indulge in the Subtlety, Nuance, and Restraint that torment me during the Awards Season screener deluge every year, it’s Hard Truths, which is what makes it so unfortunate that it’s the best of this batch. If all of the cinematic value of a picture is going to be invested in the difficulty & thorniness of a central performance, that performance might as well reach for the extremity of Marianne Jeanne-Baptiste’s, which is a cinematic spectacle in and of itself. The problem with Amy Adams, Kieran Culkin, and Jesse Eisenberg’s performances—if there is one—is that you always get the sense that their respective directors need you to like their characters, so they’re careful not to push their difficult-person conflicts far enough to abandon the audience. Mike Leigh is fearless in that respect, even if he restrains himself elsewhere. Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s hopeless grump is somewhat lovable as a movie character, but you wouldn’t want to be in the same room as her for ten consecutive minutes, whereas you could easily imagine yourself splitting a bottle of wine with Adams, Culkin, or Eisenberg’s grumps to hear more of their side of things. If I’m going to watch a low-key movie about a high-maintenance individual, I’d prefer that character to be as high-maintenance as possible. Make them a real pain, a real bitch – a really, truly difficult person.
“Why must a movie be ‘good?’ Is it not enough to sit somewhere dark and see a beautiful face, huge?”
That 19-word tweet from Mike Ginn is one of the most concisely insightful pieces of critical writing on cinema in the past decade. It’s also never been so strenuously tested since it was first tweeted in 2018 as it is in Gia Coppola’s latest feature, The Last Showgirl, which relies heavily on the simple pleasure of seeing Pamela Anderson’s beautiful face, huge. The Last Showgirl is not a Good Movie in an artistic sense, or it’s at least too phony & hollow to pass as a well-constructed drama. It’s got a nice visual texture to it, though, which helps make it an effective advertisement for Anderson’s reinvented screen presence as an anxious, fragile Betty Boop. Anderson stars in the film as a traditional Las Vegas showgirl who’s aging out of her decades-long stage act, echoing her real-life career as The 90s Babe who was quietly forgotten after the end of her signature decade. She’s overly delicate & vulnerable here in a way we’ve never seen her in more youthful, forceful titles like Baywatch & Barb-Wire, which is a great benefit to the movie, since it otherwise only shows us things we’ve seen before. If you’ve seen Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler or any post-Starlet title from Sean Baker, you’ve already seen The Last Showgirl done better. You just haven’t seen it with Pamela Anderson’s beautiful face on the screen & poster.
Even so, The Last Showgirl doesn’t do entirely right by Anderson, since it allows her more forceful costars to steamroll her daintily sweet performance whenever they want the spotlight. Jamie Lee Curtis is the guiltiest of her scene partners in that respect, playing a too-old-for-this-shit cocktail waitress who still stubbornly carries the self-assured boldness that Anderson left behind in the 90s. Dave Bautista is innocent as the only male member of the central cast and the only costar who tones himself down to match her low-key volatility. Meanwhile, the three actresses that she takes under her wing as daughter figures, only one biological (Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song, Billie Lourd), each hungrily scrape for single-scene impact that will allow them to stand out in a movie built entirely around an already-famous actor’s persona. The result is a long procession of phony interactions that feel like out-of-context scenes from a longer movie where these personal relationships actually mean something to the audience beyond an acting showcase. The important thing, though, is that Pamela Anderson gets to model gorgeously tacky Vegas showgirl outfits while either whispering or screeching dialogue that no one would have dared to feed her when she was a 20something sexpot. It’s an audition for a better movie that can make full use of what she has to offer, now that we know it’s on the table.
There isn’t much of a story to speak of here, just fragments of one that gradually unravel and dissolve. At the start of the film, Anderson’s titular showgirl is given two-weeks’ notice that her decades-running show of employment, Le Razzle Dazzle, is being closed to make room for more exciting, novel acts. She’s distraught by this professional blow, not only because she’s unlikely to find new stage work but also because no one around her seems especially nostalgic for what’s being lost. Everyone from her fellow dancers (Shipka, Song), her estranged daughter (Lourd), her romantic-interest stage manager (Bautista), and her cocktail-waitress bestie (Curtis) all see Le Razzle Dazzle as just another tits-and-glitter show – a way to pay the bills. In her mind and, presumably, the audience’s, it’s more substantial than that. It’s a moving work of visual art and a relic of Old Vegas kitsch, which Anderson’s showgirl likens to Parisian traditions like shows at The Crazy Horse. That’s a great starting place for a film, but Coppola never finds the way to develop her premise into a plot. Individual scenes from those two depressing weeks in the showgirl’s life clash against each other in gentle, splashing waves, then the whole movie just recedes away from the audience in a low tide, leaving us dry. Of course, though, just because it isn’t any good doesn’t mean it isn’t worth seeing Pamela Anderson’s face in it, huge.
There are few genres cozier than the talking-heads documentary about a subject you already love. It’s like switching your brain off to reality TV, except you get the vague feeling that it’s somehow good for you. In my case, I love kicking back to talking-heads docs about vintage smut – the kinds of movies that exist solely for Boomers to wax nostalgic on-camera about how grimy New York City was before Mayor Giuliani ruined everything. This year has seen the wide-release of two notable documentaries in that specific cozy-viewing category: Queen of the Deuce and Carol Doda Topless at the Condor. Split between opposite ends of the US coast, they both cover the professional lives & exploits of women who became infamous sex-industry titans of the 1960s & 70s. One’s about a stripper, one’s about a porno distributor, and both were great low-effort watches to enjoy with a warm cup of tea on my couch.
Unsurprisingly, the more famous of the two women was profiled in the better documentary of the pair, as her talent for publicity left more archival material behind for her biographers to work with. Carol Doda Topless at the Condor is a glowing portrait of “The Queen of Topless,” America’s first topless dancer. A woman of many professional aliases, Carol Doda was first publicized as “The Girl on the Floating Piano,” since she was the only dancer brave enough to do her go-go routine on the Condor night club’s hydraulically lifted & lowered piano. She then transformed San Francisco’s striptease scene forever by being the first dancer brave enough to perform in the “monokini” (a topless swimsuit) and, thus, kickstarting “the topless craze” that made the city a global tourist destination for vice entertainment. Her first topless performance also happened to coincide with San Francisco hosting that year’s Republican National Convention, which allows the movie to argue that the city’s strip club scene was an epicenter of 1960s Civil Rights activism, while also shamelessly indulging in the vintage softcore of Russ Meyer’s America. Carol Doda Topless at the Condor is overflowing with smutty stock footage, interview clips, rock & roll performances, and mafia-connected murder conspiracies involving the infamous Floating Piano. It’s got everything a bored pervert could want; it just doesn’t break any cinematic conventions delivering it.
Queen of the Deuce is not so fortunate. Its subject, Chelly Wilson, was more of a behind-the-scenes player on the NYC porno theatre circuit, so you can only catch direct glimpses of her in home-video footage and a single tape-recorded interview. When you hit the 2D animation in the first few minutes of the documentary, you might panic that there’s not enough archival material to justify a feature, but it is worth sticking around to get to know the singular Wilson . . . in other people’s words. Queen of the Deuce is a real-life girlboss story about a Greek lesbian Holocaust survivor who became an unlikely porno magnate in 1970s NYC. She worked her way up from importing Greek romances & comedies that reminded fellow immigrants of home to producing & screening hardcore pornography in cinemas like the all-male venue The Adonis (immortalized in the Golden Age porno A Night at The Adonis). Her life is retold as a flip through her family photo album, with her grandchildren fondly reminiscing about the long climb up the porno-theatre stairs to grandma’s apartment and listening in on the “cabal of Greek witches” who would chain-smoke there – some of them lovers, all of them friends. It’s not an especially impressive movie and it can barely drag itself across the finish line of a feature-length runtime, but it’s a warmly pleasant watch, especially if you’re the kind of audience who perks up in your chair when an interviewee drops names like Jamie Gillis, Al Goldstein, and Gerard Damiano.
Although Carol Doda Topless at the Condor was the better, more energetic documentary of the pair, I still got great cozy feelings from the vintage smut of Queen of the Deuce. It may not have had the bottomless wealth of archival clips to work with as its West Coast counterpart, but it did have me reaching for my notebook more often to write down the titles of other vintage schlock to check out later, most notably a pantyhose-fetish roughie Wilson produced titled Scarf of Mist, Thigh of Satin and a vampire comedy her grandson filmed inside The Adonis titled Gargoyle and Goblin (which sadly appears to have only ever screened once at the NYU Student Film Fest). As cinema in their own right, neither film is especially daring or groundbreaking; they both fall into the rigid template of the standard talking-heads doc without many bells & tassels getting in the way. Their entire goal is to introduce you to badass women who briefly held power in small corners of the traditionally macho sex industry, so that they are not forgotten to time. It is indeed a pleasure getting to know them, even if a simple one.
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