brandon ledet

Crazy Horse (2011)

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I would’ve watched my first Frederick Wiseman movie a lot sooner if someone told me he made a fly-on-the-wall nudie cutie.  By all accounts, Wiseman’s documentaries are the height of observational, humanist filmmaking, but I can never quite motivate myself to actually watch one.  A three-and-a-half-hour documentary about the current state of the New York Public Library system?  A four-hour doc about the daily operations of a Michelin Star restaurant?  A four-and-a-half-hour doc about the inner-workings of Boston’s municipal government?  I often hear that these are some of the very best documentaries ever made, but they always sound more like doing homework or serving jury duty than watching a movie.  There’s no valor in being incurious, though, so I did eventually find a Wiseman picture that met me halfway (by cutting his late-period runtimes in half) and spoke to one of my personal cinematic interests (sex).  The 2011 doc Crazy Horse finds Wiseman hanging out in the titular Parisian strip club, documenting the backstage & onstage mechanics of its decades-running cabaret act.  It’s a series of cutesy, old-fashioned stripteases occasionally interrupted by nitpicking arguments between dancers, choreographers, and producers about how the staging of the show should evolve.  It delivers all of the usual step-by-step procedural storytelling of the fly-on-the-wall documentary approach Wiseman helped pioneer, except mildly spiced up with a little early Russ Meyer nudie picture kitsch.  I can’t speak for everyone, but I would personally much rather hang around behind the stage of a Parisian burlesque than behind a desk at Boston City Hall, which made Crazy Horse the ideal entry point into Wiseman’s catalog.

I obviously can’t compare the stylistic approach of Crazy Horse to Wiseman’s more iconic works, but I will say it’s a lot less … dry than I expected.  Sure, he locks the camera onto a single, fixed horizontal plane for long, lingering shots, but in this case it’s to capture the fluid movements of a nude body under psychedelic gel lights.  There are also wordless montages of those gel lights switching on or off or switching colors, like the marquees lighting up at dusk sequence of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.  Wiseman might be a notoriously patient, restrained filmmaker, but even he can’t resist framing the stage performances of Crazy Horse with a touch of the razzle-dazzle pizazz with which Bob Fosse framed Cabaret; no one could.  Self-promoted as “the best chic nude show in town,” the Crazy Horse stage show provides plenty of psychedelic-kitsch eye candy to fill a feature-length documentary.  Wiseman being who he is, though, he also drags his cameras to the mundane meeting rooms, merch stands, and projection booths that make the magic happen – documenting long, circular debates about the future of the show.  You get the sense watching the performances that not much has changed about the Crazy Horse cabaret act since it was first staged in the 1950s (besides maybe some technological stagecraft, some musical novelties, and the occasional celebrity appearance from someone like Dita Von Teese, who appears on background posters through the film), and yet the choreographer endlessly argues with other staff about the evolving creative vision of the show.  It’s an empire built on cheap thrills, cheap champagne, and even cheaper pop music, but it’s treated like the staging of a high-art opera.  The great joy of Wiseman’s film is in how he’s willing to underline the irony of those passionate discussions, while also fully indulging in the visual beauty of what those artists are fighting for.

A lot of the backstage bickering about the creative direction of Le Crazy Horse Saloon is a classic art vs. commerce debate.  On one side, there’s the poetic visionary who draws inspiration for his choreography from his dreams; on the other, there are off-screen investors insisting on the most consistent, lucrative show possible to keep the money flowing.  The commerce side of that debate can be outright grotesque, particularly in a sequence where hopeful dancers are auditioned for the aesthetics of their bodies instead of their talents as performers.  The art speaks for itself, though, and as corny as some of the sub-Busby Berkeley stripteases can feel conceptually, there’s a genuine elegance to their artistry that goes far beyond mere sexual titillation.  I wonder how often Wiseman’s had to sit through similar debates about the commercial viability of his own work throughout the decades.  He’s a well-venerated auteur at this point, but even the most adventurous moviegoing audiences can be intimidated by the seemingly mundane stories he chooses to tell.  I hear that his new film Menus-Plaisirs is one of the best documentaries of the year, but I’ve spent far too much of my life working in commercial kitchens to want to return there for another four sweaty hours.  Even the two-hour stretch of Crazy Horse wore on me a little once I got the full scope of the movie’s subject, and this one features glittery titties & swinging tassels instead of lengthy meetings with a local city council.  I enjoyed my time with Wiseman and the girls, but I’ll also confess that it still felt like clocking in for a shift at work.  I felt like I was a Crazy Horse busboy for a night, a gig that only a teenage Parisians could fully love.

-Brandon Ledet

Brandon’s Top 20 Films of 2023

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1. Poor Things — Yorgos Lanthimos movies have always poked at assumed social norms as if they were a corpse he found in the woods.  That naive interrogation has never been as scientifically thorough nor as perversely fun as it is here, though, to the point where it feels like he’s articulated the entire human experience through repurposed dead flesh. It’s clearly the movie of the year and, so far, the movie of his career.

2. The Royal Hotel — I’m shocked by how much I loved this service industry thriller, even though I bought in early on director Kitty Green & star Julia Garner stock back when prices were low (Casting JonBenet & Electrick Children, respectively). It plays like a slightly more grounded version of Alex Garland’s Men, except the men in question swarm their victims like George Romero zombie hordes. A great film about misogyny, social pressure, and alcoholic stupor.

3. Enys Men — In a year where the buzziest horror titles were slow-cinema abstractions, I’m glad one stabbed me squarely in the brain stem after a couple near-misses (see: Skinamarink, The Outwaters).  A pure psychedelic meltdown of id at the bottom of a deep well of communal grief.  It restructures the seaside ghost story of Carpenter’s The Fog through the methodical unraveling of Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, dredging up something that’s at once eerily familiar & wholly unique.

4. Priscilla — Sofia Coppola’s downers & cocktails antidote to Baz Luhrmann’s brain-poison uppers.  Technically, both directors are just playing the hits in their respective Graceland biopics, but only one of them successfully recaptures the magic of their 1990s masterworks.  It’s one of Coppola’s best films about the boredom & isolation of feminine youth, by which I mean it’s one of her best overall.

5. Barbie — Combines the bubbly pop feminism of Legally Blonde with the menacing, high-artifice movie magic of The Wizard of Oz to craft the first truly great Hollywood studio film of the decade. It’s fantastic, an instant classic.

6. Shin Ultraman — A 60s-throwback kaiju comedy that looks like it was shot by Soderbergh in full show-off mode.  It more often recalls Big Man Japan than it does Shin Godzilla, but that’s at least a comparison that does it a lot of favors.  Come for the absurdist skyscraper action; stay for the adorable go-getter humanist spirit.

7. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem — Not only the best Ninja Turtles movie in thirty years, but also the best mutation of the Spider-Verse animation aesthetic to date and the most a Trent Reznor score has actually sounded like Trent Reznor’s band. I was particularly delighted that it leans into the “teen” portion of its title by making everything as gross as possible and by making the turtles’ ultimate goal Saving Prom.

8. Smoking Causes Coughing — An anthology horror comedy disguised as a Power Rangers parody.  Quentin Dupieux is apparently getting antsy about having to spend 70min on just one absurdist premise, so now he’s chopping them up into bite-sized, 7-minute morsels, which is great, since every impulse he has is hilariously idiotic. He’s in his goofball Roy Andersson era. 

9. Asteroid City — In The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson self-assessed how his fussy live-action New Yorker cartoons function as populist entertainment. In Asteroid City, the self-assessment peers inward, shifting to their function as emotional Trojan horses. I found the former funnier, the latter more affecting, and I suspect they’re both worthy of repeat viewings to fully sink into their dense detail.

10. Godzilla Minus One — It was a great year for nostalgic throwbacks to vintage tokusatsu (see also: Shin Ultraman, Shin Kamen Rider, Smoking Causes Coughing), but this is the only title in that crop to hit the notes of deep communal hurt from the original 1954 Godzilla film that started it all. That sincerity is incredibly rewarding, if not only because it’s the only Godzilla movie I can remember making me cry.

11. Infinity Pool — Among its many fellow recent “Eat the Rich” satires, this most reminded me of Triangle of Sadness, mostly for how far it pushes its onscreen depravity for darkly comedic, cathartic release – careful to put every possible substance the human body can discharge on full, loving display.  Plenty audiences are turned off by both works’ disregard for subtlety & restraint, but that’s exactly what makes them great.

12. Rimini — In which a has-been pop singer drinks and fucks away the remaining scraps of his life in off-season beachside hotel rooms.  It’s commendable both as a wryly grim character study and as the Euro counterpoint to recent American films only using geriatric sex for gross-out jump scares.  Sure, the racist, alcoholic protagonist is gross, but the sex he’s having is refreshingly matter of fact in its vulgarity.

13. The Taste of Things — An aggressively sensual romance about the joy of sharing thoughtfully prepared meals. It’s absurdly cozy & warm, likely the best movie about food since Pig.

14. The Five Devils — An intensely fucked up little time-travel family drama, punctuated by volatile jabs of style & emotion. Petite Maman for sickos.

15. Piaffe — Ann Oren’s follow-up to her outsider-art cosplay documentary The World is Mine is high-art pony play erotica.  It’s the closest thing we got to a new Peter Stickland movie this year, which automatically earns it a slot on this list.

16. Give Me Pity! — Amanda Kramer’s feature length spoof of disco era one-woman TV specials, one that pushes well past the initial layers of irony & artifice to dig at something deeply ugly about all artists’ outsized, fragile egos.  It’s a vicious takedown of fame-obsessed LA Brain from women who seem like they’ve suffered it first-hand.

17. Sick of Myself — A hilariously squirmy satire about art-world narcissism in which neither of the competing egos at the center actually make art; one is a designer furniture thief, and the other is an ambitionless barista who medically self-harms for attention.  In a way, their dual addiction to the spotlight makes them a perfect couple.  It would almost be romantic if they weren’t constantly, viciously fighting for flash-in-the-pan media coverage. Love is petty, love is benign.

18. M3GAN — What’s most important here is that the killer doll gives the best side-eye since Michelle Pfeiffer in French Exit.  Hell, maybe even the best side-eye since Michelle Pfeiffer in mother!.  No small feat.

19. Shin Kamen Rider — All of the retro kitsch of Shin Ultraman and the volatile brutality of Shin Godzilla streamlined into one unfathomably efficient superhero saga.  Zips through a half-century of TV episode storylines so quickly you have no time to care whether you have any idea what’s going on or not. Just do your best to tag along for the high-speed motorcycle rides & insectoid hyperviolence or you’ll miss a season’s worth of plot reveals in a single blink.

20. Suzume — I don’t know that Makoto Shinkai will ever match the soaring teen emotions of Your Name., but the visual artistry of his two lesser loved follow-ups still coasts miles above most modern animation.  His work remains impressively gorgeous & earnest in the moment even if it’s no longer surprising or novel in the larger context of his career, since he keeps repeating the same beats every picture. If anything, at this point the defiant tripling down on his schtick is starting to become endearing in a Wes Andersonian way.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Holdovers & SEFCA Awards 2023

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Brandon is joined by Moviegoing with Bill‘s Bill Arceneaux to discuss the Southeastern Film Critic Association’s awarded films of 2023, starting with the only prize-winner we haven’t previously covered, Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers.

00:00 Welcome

05:20 SEFCA’s Top 10 Films of 2023
26:06 The Holdovers (2023)
53:03 Other SEFCA Winners

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Kokomo City (2023)

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Kokomo City is one of the most visually stunning documentaries I’ve seen in a long while, composed entirely of black & white images so stark in contrast they recall old-world nitrate celluloid; it’s practically filmed in black & silver.  It’s also one of the most awkwardly edited docs I’ve seen in a long while, to the point where it’s difficult to believe it was shot & edited by the same person.  First-time filmmaker D. Smith started the project largely as a one-woman show, interviewing a small cast of transgender sex workers about their lives & labor while she was on the verge of choosing between the trade and homelessness herself.  Her total control over the project as a director, cinematographer, and editor speaks to its qualities as an intimate, personal work that makes space for its subjects to speak candidly about their lives without hesitation or filter.  It also speaks to Smith’s comedic sensibilities, often undercutting those confessional interviews’ darker turns with the boi-oi-oing sound effects & slide whistles of a vaudevillian cartoon.  Maybe that choice was necessary to prevent the film from becoming one-dimensional miserabilist poverty porn about Black trans women’s lives, but its flippant soundtrack choices and shot-to-shot rhythms still distract from how gorgeous its individual images are in isolation.  It’s continually frustrating that these same raw materials could easily be re-edited into something timelessly cool instead of something needlessly frantic. 

This is likely a silly complaint to make about a project that’s entire point is to just listen to four women tell their own stories in their own environments.  In conversation, the subjects redefine sex work as “survival work”, making it clear that even in the best circumstances their lives are in the hands of their (often closeted, often married) clients.  There’s a morbid humor to their interviews even without the Looney Tunes sound cues; the movie opens with a near-death experience involving a john with a handgun that’s recited as if it were a cocktail party anecdote instead of a traumatic memory.  Smith is determined to communicate that the women’s lives are not joyless, which comes through clearly enough in its fish-eye lens music video skits and stylistic callbacks to classic She’s Gotta Have It-era NYC indie filmmaking.  There’s just something about those anecdotes’ sequencing that feels over-fussed in the edit.  It’s jazzy in a 30 Rock kind of way instead of jazzy in a Tribe Called Quest kind of way, which distracts from the individual stories being recorded.  The four women interviewed—Daniella Carter, Koko Da Doll, Liyah Mitchell, Dominique Silver—get much-deserved “Starring …” title cards in the opening credits, which is a testament to how much the movie hangs off their every word.  It’s very much worth rolling your eyes at a couple corny needle drops and morning-radio shock jock sound effects to hear what they have to say, especially since they all look so incredible saying it.

I’m being a little overly critical here, especially for a movie made with so few resources.  Kokomo City is clearly a cut above the kinds of poverty-line trans life documentaries I’m used to seeing at film festivals – titles like Pier Kids, Kiki, and Check It!.  It’s only frustrating because a few small tweaks in the editing style could’ve elevated it to something much more substantial, landing it among all-time queer classics like Paris is Burning, The Queen, and Dressed in Blue.  I’m likely being shortsighted on this point; time will likely be kind to Kokomo City both as an aesthetic object and as a cultural time capsule.  Its Instagram-inspired art direction, rap skit comedic antics, and gaudy onscreen text might cheapen its more immediately satisfying choices to my old-man eyes & ears right now, but in time might make it indispensable as a document of a specific moment in outsider queer culture.  Maybe this was what watching the video-art experimentation of Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied felt like thirty years ago.  It certainly carries the same sense of communal grief, political fury, and defiant humor.  I might just need a little time & distance to fully appreciate how those impulses are warped by the tools of modern digital filmmaking.

-Brandon Ledet

Medusa Deluxe (2023)

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I’ve been slipping into my laziest writing tendencies lately, defaulting to an oddly optometrist approach to film criticism.  Because I’ve been catching up with too many 2023 releases all at once in this final month of the year, it’s been too difficult to write about them all in individual reviews.  So, I’ve been forcing them into false-binary competitions, like an eye doctor operating a phoropter.  Which is better, 1 or 2?  1: the melodrama about child abuse; or 2: the melodrama about gourmet food?  1: the class warfare thriller about homoerotic lust; or 2: the small-town thriller about lesbian lust?  1: the literary drama challenging current trends in mainstream publication; or 2: the literary documentary challenging a long-dead author’s seminal novel?  Setting up these arbitrary binaries is an easy go-to when the only other option is assessing a film on its own merits (blech), and it’s a habit I hope to break soon.  However, I won’t be breaking it today.

It would be impossible to discuss the British whodunnit Medusa Deluxe without comparing it against the recent Irish crime comedy Deadly Cuts.  That is, if you’re one of the few people who’ve happened to see both pictures, which feels statistically improbable for anyone living outside the UK.  Still, I’m not sure how many dark comedies there are about murders behind the scenes at hairstyling competitions; I’ve personally seen exactly two, and they were released just a year apart in the US.  Sticking to the phoropter binary device I’ve set up for myself here, I’ll say that Medusa Deluxe is a lot more stylish than Deadly Cuts, spending most of its 100 minutes on a single, seemingly unbroken shot that investigates an off-screen murder in real time.  On the other hand, it’s also a lot less funny than Deadly Cuts, so as a head-to-head contest it’s kind of a wash (and rise).  To continue my mixed metaphor, it’s like the fine-tuning portion of an optometrist visit where you’re no longer sure which image is sharper, and you’re mostly just impatient to get the trivial comparisons over with.

Medusa Deluxe sets up unfair expectations of greatness by opening with its best scene, in which actor Clare Perkins runs circles around her costars talking shit about a rival hairdresser who’s just been killed & scalped hours before their regional competition.  Perkins continues to steal every scene she’s in as a rawly genuine, scrappy artist who’s ready to throw punches at anyone who challenges or disrespects her work.  It’s almost a shame that the movie isn’t a Rye Lane style walk-and-talk about her character’s daily routine running a salon instead of a real-time investigation of her rival’s murder, since no one else ever lives up to her performance.  As someone who doesn’t know their “poofs” from their “fontages”, I can’t report exactly what’s going on with her colleagues’ outrageous hairstyles as they wait around backstage to be interviewed by the cops, but I do know they’re beautiful works of art.  I also admire the way that the hairdressers’ usual salon gossip adapts so well to speculation of who amongst them might be The Killer, just as a lot of recent real-world salon gossip has devolved to speculation over true-crime tabloid stories of abductions & murders.  Only Perkins stands out as a memorable player in the stage-play drama of their predicament, though; everyone else is just chattering in gorgeous weaves, wigs, and hair sculptures.

First-time director Thomas Hardiman is showy here in the way first-time directors often are, following his small cast of characters around a labyrinth of tiny dressing rooms with the same handheld virtuosity that Friedkin used to shoot his early stage play adaptations.  If it were released in the 90s, it would likely be lumped in with the wave of Tarantino knockoffs that flooded video stores, detailing the stylists’ lives outside of competition instead of focusing on the crime that holds them captive, the same way that Reservoir Dogs is about the events around a botched bank heist instead of the heist itself.  Only, the competitive hairstyling world it depicts is more of a recent Instagram-era phenomenon, so it couldn’t have been made at all back then, leaving the much sillier Deadly Cuts as its only useful comparison point.  Both films are smart for choosing this specific subcultural setting, because of the opportunity for eye candy & sight gags (at one point, Perkins is “maced” with Tresemmé by a competitor) and because it’s the kind of insular community that fosters years of long-simmering resentments, which can turn violent.  Both also choose to conclude on a Bollywood-inspired dance video, which only intensifies the urge to compare them.  Medusa Deluxe is the more ambitious film of the two, but that also means it’s the one that asks you to take it more seriously, which both dulls its humor and opens it to more critical scrutiny.  Deadly Cuts gets away being with being the low-key charmer that’s good to have around for a laugh, like a pair of novelty sunglasses you don’t actually need vs. the regular prescription glasses you wear every day.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #202: Elves (1989) & Santa’s Little Killers

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Welcome to Episode #202 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Pete Moran of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss Christmas horror films about miniature killers, starting with the Yuletide Nazisploitation novelty Elves (1989).

00:00 Welcome
06:53 Little Christmas killers

37:24 Elves (1989)

57:05 Gremlins (1984)
1:17:03 Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys (2004)
1:28:18 The Gingerdead Man (2005)
1:38:03 Krampus (2015)
1:53:23 Toys of Terror (2020)
2:00:06 Silent Night Deadly Night 5: The Toymaker (1991)
2:08:30 Feeders 2: Slay Bells (1998)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Podcast Crew

FYC 2023: Wrasslin’ Weepies

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Unsurprisingly, a lot of this year’s major Awards Frontrunners are solemn biopics of men who committed some of the worst sins in human history: the invention of the atom bomb, the daily operation of concentration camps, the genocide of an Indigenous nation.  As much as The Academy has attempted to reconfigure what qualifies as an Oscar-Worthy movie, it’s clear that the Oscar-friendly template of Important Men directing history lessons about Important Men is still an effective one; all that’s really changed is that those portraits of Important Men have become more critical than celebratory.  Further down the power rankings of this FYC season’s major players, there’s also a curious pair of historical biopics about Important Men who operated in a much smaller arena than the frontrunners’ global politics stomping grounds: the regional pro wrestling circuit of 1980s Texas.  The men depicted in these pro wrasslin’ biopics are of much smaller historical importance than a J. Robert Oppenheimer or a Rudolf Höss; the tearjerking melodrama of their lives is less about the moral sins of their own actions than it is about how cruelly unfair the world was to them, and whether they survived the trauma.  However, in a big picture sense, they echo the same criticism of the rigid machismo and the hypocrisy in Family Values conservatism that drove the Important Men of Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flowers Moon, and The Zone of Interest to commit humanity’s greatest.  They just work through that cultural tragedy within the walls of their small family homes and within the rubber-padded ropes of the wrestling ring.  It’s more contained.

If this season’s pro wrestling dramas are being contextualized as awards-hopefuls, they’re most overtly engineering FYC attention for their male stars.  In that way, pro wrestling is the perfect cinematic subject, since it offers such a familiar, convenient storytelling template to help get male performers over with the crowd.  Even when a wrasslin’ pictures’s in-movie drama feels minor in comparison to more historically important works, their in-ring drama carries the audience through, highlighting an actors’ talents with the emotional histrionics of a soap opera or a Greek tragedy.  Nobody benefits from that dramatic bolstering this year more than Gabriel García Bernal, who stars as the titular lead in the lucha libre history lesson Cassandro.  This by-the-numbers biopic isn’t half as stylistically daring as the Cassandro, el Exótico! documentary on the same subject, nor as fabulously glamorous as the luchador himself, but it’s an inherently cinematic story and García Bernal shines in the central role.  The real-life Cassandro is credited for changing the artform of lucha libre by subverting the homophobic trope of the “exótico.”  When he entered the business wrestling on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, exóticos were a purely homophobic stereotype: heels who would earn cheap heat by flirting with their more traditionally macho opponents, then get immediately crushed in the ring to the crowd’s enthusiastic cheers.  It was gaybashing as ceremonial pageantry.  Cassandro flipped the script by genuinely getting over with the crowd through the artistry of his wrestling, to the point where promoters saw potential profits in letting an exótico win for a change; or, that’s at least how the story goes, according to kayfabe.  The beyond-the-mat drama of his struggles with a loving but homophobic mother and with sex-partner colleagues who are willing to fuck him in private but renounce him in public can feel a little phony & cliche to anyone who’s seen their share of queer indie dramas in the past few decades.  The nonstop montage of Cassandro’s career in the ring is still emotionally compelling in a succinct, celebratory, wrasslin’-specific way that makes up for those broad cliches, though, and by the time the credits roll it’s hard to tell whether you’re rooting for Cassandro or rooting for García Bernal – an FYC publicist’s dream.

The Von Erich family drama The Iron Claw spreads the FYC wealth to many more potential nominees than Cassandro‘s fixed spotlight on Gabriel García Bernal.  The improbable true story of the supposedly “cursed” family of professional wrestlers has plenty of star-making tragedy to spread around its four central brothers: Zac Efron as Kevin Von Erich, Jeremy Allen White as Kerry Von Erich, Harris Dickinson as David Von Erich, and Stanley Simons as David Von Erich.  Efron is the most obvious awards play of the group, transforming himself into a human He-Man action figure for the role in a grotesque way that awards bodies love to celebrate.  Each of the Von Erich brothers get their moment to bring the audience to tears, though, as they’re each pushed to the brink of what their hearts and bodies can handle by their toxically macho father Fritz Von Erich, played with monstrous villainy by Holt McCallany.  The first half of the movie recalls the laidback nostalgic cool of Dazed and Confused as the four central brothers lean on each other for warmth & validation in the happiest times of their lives, working together as up & coming wrestlers who have yet to be fully poisoned by their father’s insistence they compete amongst themselves for his scraps of praise.  The second half disrupts that momentary bliss with the heightened violence of a Greek tragedy, with each brother meeting improbably horrific ends in a rapid, relentless procession.  The Iron Claw‘s reliance on the in-ring drama of pro wrestling is heaviest in the early stretch, as the Von Erichs’ prominence in pre-WWF regional wrasslin’ circuits is mapped out in montage & dramatic recreations of select, pivotal matches.  The back half is a much more straightforward drama that could have befallen any sports-family household, since cataloging the parade of traumas that crushed the Von Erichs leaves very little time to show them actually doing the work.  Besides, the movie isn’t really about their wrestling careers anyway; it’s more about the love they shared as brothers, and how important that bond was in a home run by a man incapable of expressing affection.  If it were any less successful as a sincere family drama, the men’s frequent repetition of the word “Brother” would play as a joke, the same way audiences now laugh every time Vin Diesel says “Family” in the Fast & Furious movies.

If this were a one-on-one, three-count fight, it would be a squash match.  Cassandro is dramatically and stylistically outperformed by The Iron Claw by practically every metric – except, maybe, in the vintage-glam detail of Cassandro’s gemstoned ring gear.  Neither film is an exceptional work of great artistic importance, though; they’re both just FYC acting showcases for their above-the-line talents, who utilize pro-wrestling’s played-to-the-cheap-seats pageantry to add some emotional heft to otherwise traditional sports dramas.  If they have any standing in discussion with the Oscar-hopefuls who’ve risen to the top of the Vegas-odds rankings over the course of this FYC season, it’s in their shared skepticism over the effects of stoic masculinity and conservative Family Values in recent generational history.  Cassandro finds a way to offer a triumphant rejection of those traditional values, while The Iron Claw drags our battered hearts through their most miserable consequences.  In either case, their performers are never more powerful nor more beautiful than they are on the wrestling mat, and both films are excellent examples of acting as full-body physical artistry.  If I have to watch straightforward, mediocre melodramas to keep up with the buzziest titles in the Oscars Cycle every year, I’d be more than happy if they’d continually return to the wrestling ring for easy crowd work and promotion.  It gives us something easy to root for, which is honestly something I’d rather put myself through than yet another war atrocity drama about the worst things that have ever happened in the history of the human species.

-Brandon Ledet

SEFCA’s Top 10 Films of 2023

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Swampflix’s official coverage of the best films of 2023 won’t start until January 2024, but listmaking 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 2023, 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 Lily Gladstone get recognition for her star-making work in Killers of the Flower Moon and to see Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall take the prize for Best Foreign-Language Film after winning the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes.

The biggest story of last year’s SEFCA list was the total dominance of the Daniels’ big-hearted sci-fi comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once, which went on to be named Swampflix’s Movie of the Year as well. This year, the list was dominated by Christopher Nolan’s nuclear science bio-epic Oppenheimer, which was awarded Best Picture, Best Actor (Cillian Murphy), Best Supporting Actor (Robert Downey, Jr.), Best Ensemble, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography and Best Score. To quote SEFCA President Scott Phillips in today’s press release, “This fall featured three big films from three grandmasters of cinema. Martin Scorsese released Killers of the Flower Moon. Ridley Scott brought Napoleon to the big screen and Michael Mann hits theaters next week with Ferrari. Despite this bumper crop from heavy-hitting auteurs, Christopher Nolan’s film from six months ago is walking away with eight SEFCA awards. Oppenheimer is a stunning cinematic achievement. Our members recognized that in July, and they are rewarding it in December.”

Check out the SEFCA’s Top 10 Films of 2023 list below, and the full list of this year’s awarded films on the organization’s website.

  1. Oppenheimer
  2. Killers of the Flower Moon
  3. The Holdovers
  4. Past Lives
  5. Barbie
  6. Poor Things
  7. American Fiction
  8. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
  9. Anatomy of a Fall
  10. The Zone of Interest

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Moon Garden (2023)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the dreamworld fantasy film Moon Garden (2023).

00:00 Welcome

01:22 Inu-Oh (2022)
05:11 It’s a Wonderful Knife (2023)
08:22 Thanksgiving (2023)
11:35 The Marvels (2023)
22:06 The Killer (2023)
28:00 A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
33:45 E.T. (1982)
39:40 Godzilla Minus One (2023)
42:50 FYC Screeners

1:06:20 Moon Garden (2023)
1:33:13 Best of 2023 Catchup

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew