brandon ledet

The Eternal Children

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One of the most common themes among established big-name directors this awards season is the memoir film, with directors like James Gray (Armageddon Time), Sam Mendes (Empire of Light), and Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Bardo) aiming to make career-defining magnum opuses out of dramatic reenactments & distortions of personal memories.  Only Steven Spielberg appears to have emerged from that 2022 memoir scrum victorious.  The Fabelmans makes a fable out of Spielberg’s youth, tracking his fascination with The Power of Cinema from his first trip to the theater (to see the circus-themed studio epic The Greatest Show on Earth) to his teenage use of filmmaking as a therapy tool throughout his parents’ divorce.  It’s being heralded as one of the best movies of the year, if not the best of Spielberg’s career . . . and I don’t understand that praise in the slightest.  If anything, I’m terrified to contract whatever subvariant of Film Twitter Brain Rot makes critics believe The Fabelmans is “late-style” Movie Magic but Cinema Paradiso is cornball schmaltz.  To his credit, Spielberg ensures that his memoir movie isn’t entirely comprised of shots of projectors flickering behind awed audiences modeling period costumes (although there is plenty of that ready-made imagery to go around); the movie is densely packed with detailed personal memories and messy interpersonal conflicts that are supposed to distinguish it from the more unembarrassed schmaltz of Paradiso.  And yet, the whole thing rings generic & phony, barely a step above the “aww shucks” Boomer nostalgia of A Christmas Story – if you’re not as reverent of Spielberg’s prominence in the cinema canon as the director is himself.  And it turns out plenty of people are, as evidenced by the film’s success over its fellow movie memoirs.

The most frustrating thing about The Fabelmans is there is a genuinely compelling, emotionally thorny drama at its core.  Through his geeky onscreen avatar Sammy Fabelman, Spielberg time travels back to a pivotal moment in his relationship with his mother (played by Michelle Williams in Judy Garland meltdown mode, sporting a lime cat haircut).  Beyond the broad caricatures of his mother as a right-brained free spirit—explaining the magic & poetry of movies to him after that fateful Greatest Show on Earth screening—and his father as a practical left-brained engineer—explaining the mechanics of movies as a technological illusion—the movie pinpoints their separation as a painful, epiphanic moment when Spielberg first saw his parents as real, flawed people, not just faceless pillars of authority & love.  It’s too bad that brain-breaking, cinema-rattling epiphany is buried under so much self-mythology about Spielberg’s early stirrings as an amateur filmmaker.  Instead of digging into the discomfort & detail of his changing relationship with his parents, the movie runs itself ragged trying to collect as many origin stories for the greatest hits of Spielberg Tropes as it can in 151 minutes.  We see the kids-on-bikes nostalgia of his early career-defining genre films foretold by his afternoon rides with his childhood boy scout troupe; we see a D.I.Y. trial run for his prestigious war epic Saving Private Ryan met with rapturous applause as the greatest backyard movie of all time; and, in the godawful concluding scene, we see him take direct inspiration from his boyhood hero John Ford, for no reason in particular.  The emotional core that supposedly separates The Fabelmans from sentimental schmaltz like Cinema Paradiso (a film I far prefer, at least for its clarity in intent) is buried under so much phony self-mythology that it has no room to resonate with any heft.

I was much more impressed with the smaller, more intimate memoir distortions of The Eternal Daughter that joined this year’s “autofiction” pile-up, if not only for being more direct & streamlined in its mother-child drama of discomforts.  Joanna Hogg’s latest is much less ostentatious than Spielberg’s by default, filmed on an independent budget under COVID-19 lockdowns instead of working with the kind of extravagant studio funds that are afforded to the world’s most famous director.  Hogg finds plenty of room for layered artifice in her small-cast drama, though, even while never losing sight of the mother-daughter tension at its core.  The Eternal Daughter is a slippery little supernatural mystery film that defies the tidiest boxes you want to file it away in.  It’s a ghost story about memory, not ghosts.  It’s directly connected to Hogg’s autobiographical Souvenir saga, but it works perfectly fine on its own, like a long-running series’ standalone, spooky Christmas special.  Tilda Swinton plays a mother-daughter duo in a dual role, but neither of performance is overly affected, and the back-and-forth bickering between them is more subtly devastating than cute.  In The Souvenir Parts I & II, Swinton’s real-life daughter (and Hogg’s real-life goddaughter) Honor Swinton Byrne played Hogg’s Sammy Fabelman avatar, while Swinton played her fictional mother onscreen.  In The Eternal Daughter, Swinton plays both roles, aged decades into the future, as they share an especially dour vacation in an empty hotel on the ghostly moors of Wales.  None of that Russian nesting-doll artifice really matters, though.  Neither does the ghost story framing of its drama.  All that matters is the way Hogg wrestles with the passive aggressive tensions of her mostly healthy relationship with her mother, and how a child seeing their parent’s personality & behavior reflected in themselves can be both wonderful & horrific, often simultaneously.

In the emotional climax of The Eternal Daughter, both versions of Swinton bicker about what time they should eat a celebratory birthday dinner.  That sounds like a minor frustration, but it’s far more hilarious and heartbreaking than any of the life-altering divorce drama from Spielberg’s actual relived childhood in The Fabelmans.  Listening to a mother-daughter duo volley “What do you think?” & “I’m not going to eat if you don’t” back and forth in an endless shot, reverse-shot nightmare feels painfully, relatably true to how passive aggressive, self-conflicted parental relationships play out in real life – even though you’re watching two Tilda Swintons bicker in a haunted hotel.  Somehow, Spielberg is staging dramatic reenactments of complex parental & marital betrayals that actually did happen in real life, and it all feels thuddingly false, inauthentic.  As a pair, both The Fabelmans and The Eternal Daughter find their filmmakers looking back on personal, familial memories and struggling with how the good feelings of the past are jumbled with the bad.  From there, your appreciation of either is almost a question of genre.  Are you more interested in the Raised By The Movies nostalgia trips of mainstream directors mythologizing their own childhoods as historical turning points in the artform, or are you more interested in the atmospheric tensions of a haunted-hotel ghost story that plays out under the eerie mood lighting of green & blue gels?  I found Hogg’s film more thematically direct & concise than Spielberg’s, which feels like a simultaneous one-for-them-one-for-me compromise that dilutes what he’s trying to work out onscreen.  My assumption is that his is the best of the recent crop of movie memoirs from Hollywood filmmaking giants, since the people who are more interested in that kind of thing have been singling it out as something special, a cut above.  I’ll likely never find out for myself, since there’s no promise of ghosts nor Tilda Swinton casting stunts to lure me in.

-Brandon Ledet

Motion Stopocalypse

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One of the bigger trends of the 2022 movie calendar was the prominence of stop-motion animation as a medium.  Netflix’s cheeky horror anthology The House was the first Great film of the year, and that early stop-motion triumph rolled into the wide, acclaimed release of so much direct competition that it now feels distant & puny in retrospect.  Rolling into awards season, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio are formidable contenders for best animated film of the year against the more typical Disney-funded CG mediocrities that have earned that prize by default since Toy Story put Pixar on the map.  And then there was Phil Tippet’s magnum opus horror show Mad God, which pushed the stop-motion medium to the outer limits of what animated cinema can achieve.  Usually, I’m on top of all stop-motion feature films as soon as they’re released, but this year offered so many varied, prominent titles in that category that I let a couple slip through my fingers until now.  Neither The Old Man Movie nor Wendell & Wild completely blew my mind as I caught up with them for Best of the Year listmaking season, but that was mostly a result of them joining such an already crowded field.  In a more typical year, these would have been the only two stop-motion releases of note, and I likely would have been much more ravenous for what they have to offer.

The more disappointing title of this late-entry pair is Wendell & Wild, since it’s the one with the highest pedigree behind its production.  Not only does it reunite the iconic comedy duo Key & Peele as a pair of wisecracking demons, but it’s also the comeback film of legendary stop-motion animator Henry Selick, who has not directed a film since 2009’s Coraline.  As a recently converted Monkeybone apologist, it brings me no pleasure to report that Wendell & Wild is, by far, Henry Selick’s worst film to date.  The good news is that it’s still pretty great, as long as you only pay attention to its mall goth art design & vintage Black punk soundtrack.  Story wise, the film is a sprawling, unresolved mess in a way a lot of blank-check Netflix productions have been for directors like Scorsese, Baumbach, Fincher, and The Coens, who have been putting in some of their career-weakest work on the platform with no one to push back on or hone their ideas.  Out of the pair, Netflix was smart to give del Toro’s Pinocchio the bigger Oscars Campaign—it is the better film—but it’s also far from del Toro’s best work either.  If anything, the two films could have borrowed and swapped a lot of their shakier qualities: Wendell & Wild should have been a punk rock musical, since its charms rely entirely on its soundtrack & visual spectacle, and Pinocchio should not have been a musical at all, since its entire songbook is limp & forgettable.  They’re both decently entertaining movies about rebellious youth, though, with Wendell & Wild falling somewhere at the Hot Topic end of that spectrum.

If the story of a high school punk rocker teaming with a pair of wisecracking demons to resurrect her dead parents with magical hair cream (and to avenge the wrongful deaths of the family’s condemned root beer factory while they’re at it) is a little overly complicated, maybe The Old Man Movie has a leg up on Wendell & Wild.  In The Old Man Movie, three siblings have to recapture & milk their grandfather’s escaped cow before its udder explodes, nuking their entire village in a milky “lactocalypse”.  Those are pretty clear, cut-and-dry stakes even if they are ridiculous ones, and the movie even provides a helpful 24-hour deadline before that udder catastrophe strikes.  The Old Man Movie also enjoys the benefit of nonexistent expectations. Henry Selick’s previous films Coraline, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and James and the Giant Peach rank highly among the most beloved stop-motion films of all time.  By contrast, The Old Man Movie is the most profitable animated film ever exported from Estonia, but it’s likely most audiences outside that country have never heard of it.  That might hint at its comparatively limited appeal, since Selick makes mildly spooky movies that are still friendly enough for children, while The Old Man Movie looks like it was made for children but would likely psychologically scar any who wander into the room.  It performs the shrill gross-out humor of Ren & Stimpy in the once-wholesome visual language of Wallace & Grommet.  It’s teeming with grotesque milk monsters, mile-high piles of pig shit, and unstoppable killer kratts – pushing it more into Phil Tippet nightmare territory than Henry Selick’s goth kid starter packs.

Some of The Old Man Movie‘s one-off gags offend, especially when it singles out hippies & women as targets for mockery.  Other gags deliver enormous laughs that make the eyerolls worthwhile, especially in its visible disgust for the gnarlier details of daily farm work.  While Wendell & Wild pushes the boundaries of stop-motion as an artform into the technological marvel territory of a Laika film, The Old Man Movie scales it back down to a handmade claymation style that feels a little like serial killer bedroom art.  It was refreshing to see a film so volatile in its moods & humor after the more cumbersome, plot-fixated machinations of Wendell & Wild felt so weighed down by its own enormity.  That’s not to say Wendell & Wild isn’t shocking or over-the-top in its own ways; it’s especially bold to see a children’s film about a rebellious youth’s team-up with demons get a major-platform release in a year when online Evangelicals are obsessed with the ways Satan is “grooming” children into cannibalism & debauchery through “hidden” messages in popular media.  What’s most incredible, though, is that neither The Old Man Movie nor Wendell & Wild qualify as the wildest, most outrageous stop-motion release of the year – a title that has a shocking amount of competition (and still belongs to Mad God).  There has been enough of a wealth of anarchic, ambitious stop-motion feature films that I can be a little bratty and brush both of these movies off into the “Pretty Good” pile instead of the “Saviors of Modem Animation Pile.”  I want to live in a world where I’m this spoiled every year.

-Brandon Ledet

Gender Repeal Party

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In the back of my mind, I’ve been saving a couple slots on my personal Best of 2022 list for two titles that never screened theatrically in New Orleans: Amanda Kramer’s Please Baby Please and Bertrand Mandico’s After Blue (Dirty Paradise).  Having now rented both films for an especially lurid double feature, it turns out those reserved parking spots were totally justified. Both films hammered the exact personal pleasure centers I’m always looking to hit when seeking out new releases, exactly as expected.  What I didn’t expect was that they would be so sympatico in their dreamlike deconstructions of gender, nor that they would be thematic mirror opposites of their respective directors’ previous works.  I was introduced to Kramer through her apocalyptic meditation on the vicious, combative impulses of femininity in Ladyworld; I was introduced to Mandico through his wet nightmare vision of the vicious, combative impulses of masculinity in The Wild Boys.  With their latest features, they’ve swapped topics (i.e., swapped genders), which makes After Blue & Please Baby Please a rewarding, fascinating double feature beyond their momentary value as last-minute best-of-the-year contenders.

In Ladyworld, Amanda Kramer immerses her audience in a never-ending Buñuelian house party where a group of young women eternally, ritualistically tear each other apart in the darkest corners of feminine bloodlust.  In Please Baby Please, she reflects on the performative brutality of masculinity instead, abstracting & eroticizing the violence of traditional machismo.  After a seemingly cis-hetero 1950s couple falls in lust with a gang of leather-clad ruffians (the wife out of gender envy, the husband out of closeted homosexuality), they separately explore their own relationships with masculinity as a social power & as a fetish aesthetic.  As the couple unravels & retangles, Kramer ponders the question “What is a man, anyway?” through lofty academic discussions of how masculinity is socially engineered and through kinky fetishization of 1950s kitsch. Andrea Riseborough gives the performance of the year as the beatnik housewife turned Tom of Finland brute, approximating what it would be like if an especially rabid Jerri Blank had a Marlon Brando drag-king impersonation act.  Harry Meulling’s crisis of masculinity is much more internal & philosophical, interrupting every friend group conversation with off-topic questions about why he must perform a gender at all, much less one arbitrarily assigned at birth. The film is overflowing with queer menace, artifice, and excellence, all achieved on a community theatre budget. 

Bertrand Mandico’s The Wild Boys is my favorite film released in my lifetime, a complete gender meltdown that erodes all of the traditional characteristics & boundaries of masculinity in its titular group of nihilist ruffians but does not reform their vicious misbehavior when they emerge as women on the other end.  Mandico’s second feature is just as gorgeous, grotesque, and wonderfully genderfucked as that debut, but goddamn that’s a tough act to follow.  After Blue (Dirty Paradise) starts with feminine violence as its thematic anchor, dreaming of a far-out lesbian orgy planet that cowers in fear of a demonic, almighty serial killer named Kate Bush.  As a disgraced hairdresser and her horndog daughter hunt down the elusive Kate Bush in the alien wilderness and fall in lust with other bizarre women they meet along the way, After Blue proves to be just as visually & thematically daring as The Wild Boys, just on the opposite end of the gender spectrum.  The hallmarks of its sci-fi acid Western subgenre weighs heavily on its momentum & pacing, but it also constantly fills the frame with the most exciting, glitter-slathered nightmare imagery you’re likely to see this year.  It plays like someone fed “James Bidgood’s Dune movie” into one of those AI art generators, and the results are intoxicating, even if a little exhausting.

Anyone who has already tasted “the rotten fruit of [Mandico’s] imagination” knows what to expect from After Blue, but that’s more of a sign of his out-the-gate fervor as a fully formed auteur than a sign that he’s repeating himself.  By contrast, Kramer’s ideas & imagery appear to vary more from film to film, aiming for a fluorescent-trash version of John Waters’s aesthetic in Please Baby Please that I don’t believe was present in her previous work.  As a pair, they’re among the most exciting artists currently working in the medium of queer filmmaking, not least of all because of their respective indulgences in over-the-top visual style and their shared philosophical hostility towards rigid gender boundaries.  I have no idea where their careers are going (especially Kramer’s), but I’m confident in saying they’re already making some of the best movies out there on the new release calendar, and it’s a shame these two titles aren’t being published on more critics’ Best of the Year lists.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Everything Everywhere All at Once & The 2022 SEFCA Winners

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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 2022 awarded films, starting with the top-prize winner Everything Everywhere All at Once.

00:00 Moviegoing with Bill
06:20 SEFCA
24:44 EEAAO
59:56 Other winners

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

All Jacked Up and Full of Worms (2022)

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Does sincerity have no place in low-budget genre trash these days?  Must all of our D.I.Y. practical-gore freakouts be buried under mile-high layers of ironic detachment and nostalgia for decades of horrors past?  I was really hoping the low-budget, psychedelic gore fest All Jacked Up and Full of Worms would live up to the gruesome glory of its title, and in some ways I guess it does.  It’s impressively revolting filth in fits & jabs, at least when it’s leaning into the visceral disgust of its wriggling worm imagery – which ranges from real-life worms squirming in cigarette ashtrays to gigantic, intestine-length latex monstrosities stretching across warehouse-scale movie studio voids.  It’s too bad all of that effort is undercut by its juvenile edgelord humor, though, as shock value topics like needle drugs, Satanic worship, and pedophilia are frequently mined for cheap, empty punchlines.  When you see a “Special Worm Effects By” credit in the opening scroll, you’re prepared for a Screaming Mad George-style descent into Hellish, surrealistic gore.  Instead, you get a movie custom made for middle schoolers to prank each other with as a sleepover dare.

Like this year’s much more sincere gross-out horror Swallowed, All Jacked Up is set in a fictional world where consuming worms—either orally or nasally in this case—creates a powerful psychedelic trip akin to an acid overdose.  These are just regular, everyday worms, as far as the audience can tell – a conceit that’s underlined by the repetition of the word “worms” in every single line of dialogue.  As it’s explained by a worms enthusiast, “There’s only one wrong way to do worms, man […] Not do worms!”  This is a pure drug-trip movie, with several loosely connected characters becoming increasingly manic under the worms’ influence.  I’d recount their exploits here if they were worth repeating, but they’re mostly just an improv comedy assemblage of self-amused bits that don’t translate outside the troupe.  The worm imagery is frequent & remarkably grotesque, but so are the purposeless, off-topic jokes about sexually assaulting babies.  Maybe it’s a matter of personal taste (or tastelessness), but I just wonder how much further this movie could push its discomforts if it were a sincere low-budget horror instead of an irony-poisoned horror comedy.

Anyway, if you really want to watch a retro, VHS-warped gross-out that’s overflowing with worms, you might as well watch the 1976 Tubi mainstay Squirm instead.  It’s not an especially great film either, but it’s at least a genuine one.  All Jacked Up and Full of Worms is a distinctly modern echo of that era’s pure-schlock filmmaking, mimicking long-outdated surface aesthetics instead of seeking genuine, of-the-moment terror.  It’s likely unfair of me to pin it under the full weight of modern horror’s weakness for ironic detachment & retro aesthetic worship, but it was also unfair of the movie to make me sit through so many schoolyard jokes about baby rape, so let’s call it even.

-Brandon Ledet

Blowing Up vs Shutting Down

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I recently took a long bus ride uptown to see my very first Antonioni film, projected on the big screen at the Prytania Theatre.  I enjoyed Blow-Up well enough but did not love it.  However, I do love some more genre-minded pictures that were directly inspired by it—namely Blow Out, Perversion Story, and The Eyes of Laura Mars—all titles I previously understood purely as giallo-era Hitchcock derivatives.  In contrast to those later, flashier works, Antonioni’s own perversion of a Hitchcockian murder mystery is a stubbornly arthouse-minded affair.  On paper, its story of a horndog fashion photographer in Swinging 60s London who uncovers evidence of a murder (and a larger political conspiracy to cover it up) in his photos reads like a stylish crime thriller.  In practice, Blow-Up deliberately withholds all the traditional payoffs of a murder mystery story & a political conspiracy thriller, instead dwelling in frustration & ambiguity.  If it’s a straight-up horror film, it’s about the existential horror of asking all your friends & acquaintances “Hey, you guys wanna see a dead body?” and no one taking you up on the offer, leaving you to sit with your own morbid fascination and no outlet for the tension.  As a result, it’s the kind of movie that earns measured “That was interesting!” compliments instead of more genuine, swooning enthusiasm.

To be honest, the most rewarding part of the screening was not Blow-Up itself, but its presentation.  The film was preceded by a lengthy slideshow lecture about The Beatles’ albums Rubber Soul & Revolver, which had nothing to do with the movie except that it happened to be set in London in the 1960s.  It was clear most of the audience was not aware of this deeply nerdy opening act, which pushed the start time a full precious hour later into the weeknight.  Every new slide about how well 45″ singles like “Paperback Writer” or “Yellow Submarine” were reviewed in the papers had people audibly groaning in frustration, with a small crowd of younger moviegoers cowering in the lobby, desperate for the rant to end.  It was an incredible bonding experience, like surviving a group hostage situation.  I don’t know that the lecture sold many Beatles-themed history books as potential Christmas gifts in the lobby, as intended, but it did a lot to restore my personal faith in humanity on both ends; it was good to know that the kids out there are still indignant brats and that the nerds are still oblivious to their audiences’ attention span for rapid-fire niche interest stats.  I often go to the theater alone, talk to no one except the box office worker, and leave without even making so much as eye contact with my fellow moviegoers, much less conversation.  By contrast, that Blow-Up screening felt like a substantial Community Event.

Somewhere in the lengthy preamble to the feature presentation, I found myself chatting with an employee at the theatre and expressed gratitude that they were adding more repertory classics to their weekly schedule. It turns out the single-screener only had room for this extra rep screening because the Oscar Bait Movie of the Week, She Said, was doing poorly.  And while the audience for Blow-Up might have been groaning at the nonstop onslaught of mid-60s #BeatlesFacts before the show, I was encouraged to see them show up & stick it out.  There were a few dozen people in attendance, when I’ve gotten used to sharing the room with much smaller crowds on my artsy-fartsy weeknight excursions.  After reading so many doomsaying national headlines about the box office disappointments of Awards Season hopefuls like She Said, The Fabelmans, Triangle of Sadness, and Tár, I was starting to worry that my local independent movie theatres might not be able to survive between superhero epics & Top Gun sequels if audiences are just going to wait for everything else on the marquee to hit streaming services.  Seeing that crowd show up for Blow-Up (and struggle to stay up for The Beatles) gave me hope that the business might not be dying, just changing.  If art-friendly spaces like The Prytania, The Broad, and Zeitgeist have to survive on community events & repertory screenings instead of Avatar-scale CG monstrosities the world may be all the better for it.

Even that night, I had to choose between seeing Blow-Up for the first time uptown at The Prytania or Hitchcock’s North by Northwest for the first time down the street at The Broad.  And The Prytania’s new downtown location has been running more regular repertory screenings than either of those locations combined, something I don’t know that I’ve ever seen with any regularity in this city.  I may not have fallen totally in love with Blow-Up on this first viewing, but it did feel like I was placing an essential puzzle piece in my larger understanding of genre film history, the same way that I felt seeing big-screen presentations of Ghost in the Shell & The Fog for the first time in recent months.  I do want to see the trend of every non-superhero movie struggling to make money continue in this post-COVID, rushed-to-streaming world, because I fear that theatres will not be able to sell enough booze & popcorn to stay afloat.  That momentum may be unstoppable at this point, though, and that surprisingly well-attended Blow-Up screening gave me hope that there might be another way to combat audiences’ exponential disinterest in trying new, uncanonized art.  I can’t speak for the rest of that crowd, but I’ll sit through a hundred more Beatles lectures if it means I get to keep watching weird, divisive movies projected big & loud.  If nothing else, I’m too old & too tired to find a new hobby at this point in my life.

-Brandon Ledet

Solomon King (1974)

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I recently went on a delightful vacation to San Francisco, where I was free to explore the city on my own throughout the day while my travel partners were busy at an academic conference.  Of course, I used that unstructured free time to bus around the city in search of movie nerd indulgences – including a City Guides walking tour of Hitchcock filming locations (as suggested by and enjoyed with my internet friend Sunil), an Oscar-qualifying screening of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, and a raid of local book & record stores for locally flavored physical media (where I scooped up copies of Kamikaze Hearts, Luminous Procuress, and San Francisco Noir).  By far, though, my most rewarding indulgence in Bay Area movie tourism was my trip to the Roxie Theatre, a century-old, Prytania style single-screener in the Mission District.  I was lucky to be in town for their only listed showing of Deaf Crocodile’s new digital restoration of the locally shot, locally proud blacksploitation relic Solomon King.  The screening was a riot, a one-of-a-kind communal celebration that felt more like being invited to a family reunion than paying to see vintage schlock.

Local entrepreneur Sal Watts shot Solomon King on-location in Oakland, relying on his own businesses & employees to help buoy the budget as ready-made sets & cast.  Self-credited as writer, director, producer, editor, and star, the film is undeniably a vanity project for Watts, who of course props himself up to be the most badass action hero who’s ever graced the screen.  The titular Solomon King is positioned as a Black folk hero and wish-fulfilment fantasy, recalling other action heroes of the time like Shaft, Coffy, and Black Samson.  Watts was working with a self-funded, sub-Dolemite budget, though.  His kung-fu choreography is even less convincing than Rudy Ray Moore’s, with the editing room cuts doing most of the work to convey the film’s “action” sequences.  Most of the dialogue is ADR’d onto the soundtrack as characters are walking & driving a long distance from the camera.  Every shot holds a few seconds too long; the boom mic’s shadow often sways on background walls; the climax teases a sequel Watts couldn’t afford to produce.  Still, Watts makes sure that he’s always the coolest, toughest brute in the room.  He beds every hottie he meets within minutes of locking eyes; he single-handedly takes down an army of terrorists the racist higher-ups at the CIA are too cowardly to touch.  The entire movie is about how awesome Solomon King—and by extension Sal Watts—is as a lone-wolf badass, and no budgetary limitations could hold back that kind of self-aggrandizing exuberance.

If anything, it’s Watts’s charming self-determination as a D.I.Y. filmmaker that makes Solomon King so delightful.  The film’s story of an ex-CIA renegade (and current smooth-talking nightclub owner) who takes down the corrupt kingdom of an ambiguous Middle Eastern country all by his lonesome is pretty loosely defined, an afterthought secondary to celebrating Watt’s badassery.  Mostly, Solomon King delights as a document of community theatre, as most of its cast consists of non-professional Oakland locals (give or take a small role for celebrity baseball player Tito Fuentes).  That’s why it was such a treat to attend that screening at the Roxie, where I got to watch that community theatre with the community in question.  During a post-screening Q&A with Watt’s widow Belinda Burton-Watts (who is set up as the star of the never-made sequel), it became increasingly apparent that about half the audience was connected to the production of the film in some way.  It was the most heartwarming version of a “This is more of a comment than a question” Q&A session, since people were piping up to point out that they were in the movie as children or related to the cast or crew.  I was also seated in front of Watts’s children, who provided live commentary throughout the screening (unprompted, free of charge), with adoring quips about how cheesy it was to see their dad act tough and how “Nobody wants to see their dad in a lovemaking scene.”  It was quite literally a family affair, both in production and in presentation.

A representative from Deaf Crocodile was also on-hand at the Roxie to explain how lucky we were to be watching Solomon King on the big screen, as even the audience members with direct ties to its production likely hadn’t seen it since the 1970s, if at all.  He apologized for the scratches and unintentional jump cuts in the digital scan, which was cleaned-up from a battered, pink-faded print borrowed from UCLA’s archives.  Those flaws were occasionally noticeable but never severe, the kind of thing that would only drive you mad if you spent years restoring the film frame by frame.  Their new scan of Solomon King is likely sharper & more vibrant than its local celluloid projections even would have been in its initial, limited release.  More importantly, they were able to work with a copy of the original soundtrack negative from Belinda Burton-Watts’s personal archive, so that the dialogue was clearly legible in a way these regional action relics rarely are.  That pristine soundtrack was also a boon for the original funk score & genre-obligatory nightclub acts that accompany Solomon King’s exploits.  This upcoming Blu-ray release from Deaf Crocodile isn’t so much a restoration as it is a life-saving rescue mission.

Solomon King totally earns that treatment too.  It’s easy to get hung up on (and delighted by) the film’s limitations as a truly independent, outsider-artist production, but it’s a consistently surprising, entertaining entry in its genre.  Occasional shots of a criminal biker’s blood spurting onto cocktail glasses or Solomon King firing a pistol through a perfectly arranged stack of warehouse shipping palettes prove Watts had genuine artistic ambitions as a filmmaker, no matter how short-lived that side career might’ve been.  The film isn’t as artistically substantial as similar Black, independent works of the era like Sweet Sweetback or Ganja & Hess, but it is substantial as a novelty action curio and an authentic slice of Oakland history.  The closest I’ve ever gotten to experiencing a New Orleans version of that afternoon at the Roxie was an NOFF screening of the similarly rescued & restored Cane River in 2018.  Even though I grew up in closer proximity to the community art project documented in Cane River, that regional romance melodrama cannot compete with the pure, skull-cracking entertainment value of Solomon King as a low-budget action picture, though.  And there was just something magical about walking into the Roxie without knowing how intimate of a communal, familial experience that screening was going to be.  Nothing but love for Oakland and San Francisco; and all hail Solomon King.

-Brandon Ledet

Bottom of the Gun Barrel

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There are a lot of handwringing articles making the rounds right now about why Awards Season movies like She Said, Triangle of Sadness, and Tár aren’t luring audiences to theaters.  Of course, this annual ritual is always followed by complaints from “The Fans” that the Oscars and other highfalutin institutions don’t nominate movies that people have actually seen.  Personally, I’m glad they don’t.  Given that most casual audiences only show up for a few scattered Disney acquisitions, talking CG-animal comedies, and disposable opening-weekend horrors throughout the year, Awards Season would be an absolute bore if it were driven by box office sales.  This is the one time of year where smaller, stranger, quieter films get a little room to breathe in the public discourse outside the otherwise constant cacophony of jump scares, superhero battles, and Lyle, Lyle Crocodile’s bathtub croonings. Taking that away to boost an awards ceremony’s TV ratings would be anti-Art, if not outright evil.  Case in point: the top-grossing film of the year to date—and the only Actual Movie of the year in wider audience’s minds—is the decades-late nostalgia stoker Top Gun: Maverick, a movie that it is, to put it as generously as possible, an absurdly expensive pile of ice-cold dogshit.

A lot of people will tell you that the only way to truly soak in the majesty of Top Gun: Maverick was to experience it in its large-screen format at your local multiplex’s imitation IMAX.  Personally, I feel like I watched it the way it was meant to be seen: scaled down to the back of a plane-seat headrest on a late-night flight.  While Maverick‘s biggest fans ooh’d & ahh’d at the Navy’s high-speed fighter jets roaring in perfectly calibrated digital clarity, I got the full 4D experience, with a real-life airplane engine providing aural background texture and the dull fear of a tragic mid-flight crash pumping up my adrenaline levels.  Even in my personal one-man rumble seat theatre in the sky, I despised the film, increasingly growing angry at audiences’ lack of appetite for the much tastier delicacies that were left to rot in empty theaters this year.  Top Gun: Maverick is a rusty carnival ride through a cobwebbed Hall of Memories – an algorithmic simulation of cinema.  Making Maverick after it was already pre-parodied in MacGruber is exactly as embarrassing as making a by-the-numbers musician biopic after Walk Hard.  It might even be a worse offense, considering how much more money was wasted on its $170mil production than smaller projects like Bohemian Rhapsody or Stardust (and for a much more insidious political purpose).  Either way, it was already perfectly, ruthlessly mocked years before release.  It’s nothing; it’s a joke; it’s the most popular movie of 2022 (at least until the next bloated-budget blockbuster sequel down the line, Avatar: The Way of Water, is given time to catch up).

Martin Scorsese has become a Gen-Z punching bag for an off-hand comment he made comparing modern superhero blockbusters to amusement park rides, and I think he’s only been proven right in the years since.  In this dual Navy recruitment tool and elaborate vanity project, Tom Cruise’s renegade fighter pilot is a real-world superhero, with every other character marveling that “He’s the fastest man alive” in slack-jawed awe as he Supermans his way through the sky.  He looks ghoulish in close-up as the force of his supernatural speed yanks his skin to the back of his skull, but we’re meant to fawn over his eternal good looks & boyish charm.  Since he has no grey hair and total control over the flattering angles he’s filmed from, we see no signs of his decades of aging since the original Top Gun, other than that he texts with full punctuation.  It’s like revisiting a Disney park attraction every few decades; the animatronic hosts behind the red ropes look mostly the same as they did your last visit, except a little haggard from years of repeating the same few robotic maneuvers.  And the wonders he’s there to guide you through only appear smaller & sadder as you grow older: a simulated ride in an airfighter’s cockpit; a technical showcase of your local multiplex’s outdated sound system; a soullessly reenacted clip from a movie you used to like, scored with just as many notes of Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire” to stoke the memory before moving on to the next empty, sad display.  Maverick is the abandoned wing of the amusement park that the owners didn’t bother to update, just a few months away from being replaced by something new & worse.

I could understand skepticism that watching Maverick on an uncomfortable airplane flight—eyes occasionally drawn to the private screening of That Thing You Do! on the headrest next to mine—is sufficient enough of an attempt at genuine appreciation.  As a counterargument, I’d like to report that I watched the original 1986 Top Gun on my connection flight that same night, and I loved it.  I remember being bored by Top Gun‘s rah-rah militarism on my first watch decades ago, so maybe it only clicked with me this go-round in comparison to its algorithmic snoozer of a sequel.  Either way, it’s undeniable that it looks better than its 2022 counterpart.  Tony Scott’s high-style approach to the material makes for gorgeous, horned-up pop art that only could have been produced in the MTV era.  In Maverick, Tom Cruise frequently repeats the mantra “Don’t think, just do” as an overt suggestion to the audience that we shut off our brains and enjoy the ride.  In contrast, Tony Scott shuts our brains off for us, packing the screen with so many wordless, sweaty music video montages that the film somehow plays more like a wet dream than a military recruitment ad.  Both films have visible hard-ons for the tools of US imperialist warfare, but only the original conveys the sexiness of the machinery and the meatheads who operate it in a genuinely swoonworthy way.  All of the color, flavor, and texture of that MTV reverie are drained from the sequel to the point where all that’s left is the machinery itself – none more important than the T-800 hyperalloy endoskeleton just under the surface of Cruise’s synthetic skin.

It’s okay that Top Gun: Maverick exists.  Something has to sell enough popcorn & sodas to keep movie theaters afloat.  What’s chafing me is the argument that it needs to be formally recognized as one of the best movies of the year in order to keep the Oscars’ TV ratings viable.  This movie belongs on the showroom floor of a Best Buy, advertising overpriced 4K TVs, not parading across an awards stage or printed on a critical publication’s Best of the Year list.  It’s not even a movie, really.  It’s an echo of a movie, an expensive version of Fathom Events re-running choppy digital streams of E.T. & The Goonies to make up for the industrial slow-down of pandemic-era #content.  The next time you hear someone complain that “They don’t make good movies anymore,” keep in mind that the only movies they’ve watched this year were a couple Spider-Man crossover sequels and this piece of shit.  Otherwise, they just halfway listened to a few Netflix Originals in the background while thumbing around on their phones.  There’s no need for critical institutions to cater to that audience; they’ve already spent all the money they’re going to spend at the carnival.

-Brandon Ledet

Holy Spider (2022)

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Holy Spider lands at the exact intersection of two genres I’m not especially interested in: the true crime serial killer thriller and the shoe-leather journalism drama.  Its semi-fictional story of real-life confessed, convicted killer Saeed Hanaei’s street-level rivalry with a composite-character journalist determined to bring him to justice is something I was prepared to ignore entirely . . . until I saw who directed it.  Iranian-born, Copenhagen-based filmmaker Ali Abbasi made such choppy waves with his previous film, Border, that I could not ignore whatever he made next, regardless of genre.  Although no less morbid nor extreme, Border is in my genre wheelhouse, since its dark fairy tale setting lands it firmly in the supernatural.  The ripped-from-the-headlines story behind Holy Spider can’t pretend to be as singular as that doomed trolls-in-love horror drama, but it does continue the disturbing brutality of Abbasi’s previous triumph, and likely puts it to more politically ethical use.  No matter how little interest I may have in Holy Spider as a genre piece, it’s so fiercely unflinching & matter of fact in its observations of misogynist violence that I couldn’t help but be chilled by it.  Abbasi is a fiercely effective purveyor of movie violence, often to a deliberately sickening degree.

Time-stamped with 9/11 footage looping on a background television, Holy Spider recounts the serial murders of sex workers in the “holy city” of Mashhad in the early 2000s.  The women are choked to death—often in real-time on camera—with their headscarves by a serial killer posing as a potential john, using a religious symbol as a form of self-righteous punishment.  Maintenance man Saeed Hanaei’s guilt in these crimes is not hidden from the audience.  It’s barely hidden from the fictional journalist who takes him down, as her bare-minimum efforts to sniff him out expose the cruelty of local police’s indifference to the murder spree.  Once caught, Hanaei proudly confesses his guilt, claiming the murders were a “jihad on vice”, calling for a “fatwa on immoral women”.  Public response to his declarations is mostly positive, recalling the NIMBY cruelty towards real-life sex workers’ murders in the avant-garde musical London Road.  It’s a pretty cut and dry story about the free-flowing bleedover of sexual repression into misogynist violence, one that only differs from its Hollywood true-crime equivalents in its cold, matter-of-fact depictions of sex & violence.  Abbasi could be accused of edgelord pranksterism for some of the more shocking moments in Border, but these real-life murders are taken deadly seriously, without a hint of humor or sensational romance.

If Abbasi does anything especially unique with the genre traditions of the serial killer thriller, it’s in the way he continues Hanaei’s story beyond capture & punishment.  Once caught, his rivalry with the feminist journalist determined to take him down continues in full stride, as he tries to weaponize the court of public opinion to justify his murders.  After execution, his misogynist philosophies live on, particularly in the mind & actions of his teenage son, who idolizes his father as a morally righteous superhero.  The typical Hollywood version of this story is pure copaganda, wherein putting Hanaei behind bars is enough to neutralize the threat.  Instead, Abbasi finds deep terror & sadness in the continuation of Hanaei’s misogynist vision on a culture-wide level, continuing his work well after he’s physically neutralized.  It’s a chilling picture, one that has more political & philosophical purpose than most true crime recaps of famous headlines or sensationalized hagiographies of journalists doing their jobs.  As much as I would personally prefer that Abbasi return to the supernatural world in future projects, I still respect what he was able to accomplish while tethered to reality here.  Both Border and Holy Spider feel like grueling ordeals rather than passive entertainment, and attaching that hurt to real-life victims doesn’t make them any easier to endure.

-Brandon Ledet

Decision to Broker

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There are two new high-profile, Korean-set detective dramas currently making the rounds, directed by Park Chan-wook and Hirokazu Kore-Eda.  Anyone familiar with the beloved auteurs’ past work would expect their latest films to be incomparable outside some light genre overlap and a shared national setting. They’d be right. Broker and Decision to Leave are tonally & narratively distinct enough that I’m likely doing them a disservice by lumping them together here, but as a pair I do think they indicate an interesting, mirrored career shift for their respective auteurs.  I know Park Chan-wook as an over-the-top sensationalist, one who pushes the boundaries of good taste & genre tropes within the confines of finely tuned, exquisitely staged chamber dramas.  By contrast, I know Hirokazu Kore-Eda as a restrained, observational dramatist who finds grand emotion & political importance in small, subtle gestures.  What makes their dual 2022 detective stories interesting as a pair is the way the two directors are both reaching towards a middle ground between those extremes.  Decision to Leave finds the usually more prankish Park working on his best behavior, while Broker finds Kore-Eda shaking up his typically underplayed docu-dramas with some more traditional, genre-minded payoffs.

That’s not to say that either director has compromised their personal stylistic touches or thematic obsessions.  In its broadest strokes, Broker is a very similar movie to Kore-Eda’s previous film, Shoplifters, which in turn was a more accessible version of his earlier triumph Nobody Knows.  A story about an illegal, D.I.Y. adoption agency who broker the sale of babies to families outside the foster system, Broker clearly continues Kore-Eda’s auteurist fascination with how unconventional parentage takes shape below the poverty line.  It just perks up that story with more entertainment-minded genre tropes and a more pronounced, devious sense of humor than I remember seeing in his previous work.  This is basically Shoplifters as a road trip movie where detectives are on the makeshift family’s tail, staking them out so they can be busted at the point of sale.  It’s a subtle introduction of accessible genre entertainment into Kore-Eda’s usual low-key dramas, a shift was seemingly influenced by the international success of Parasite – given it’s the Japanese director’s first film set in Korea, he anchors it to the charisma of Bong muse Song Kang-ho (as the lead broker), and he borrows its opening image from Parasite‘s iconic flood sequence.  Whatever the inspiration, Broker manages to feel much livelier that Kore-eda’s past work without sacrificing any of his usual emotional or political heft.

Unlike with Kore-Eda, I’m not sure that “measured restraint” is the first quality I look for in a Park Chan-wook film, but it does make Decision to Leave an interesting addition to his oeuvre.  You would expect his throwback crime story about an insomniac detective who falls disastrously in love with a femme fatale he suspects to be a murderer would land closer to Basic Instinct than to Hitchcock, but it seems he already got those erotic thriller indulgences out of his system with The Handmaiden.  It’s not any less thrilling than the lewder, more explosive payoffs of The Handmaiden, though.  There’s an exciting tension in watching Park push his more perverse impulses just below the surface of this traditionalist noir . . . for about an hour; then he starts more openly playing around with the detective-suspect eroticism of the genre.  Park holds himself together just long enough to tell the full classic Hollywood version of this detective story, then he stretches it a half-hour past its breaking point to search for the kinkier aspects of the detective-murderess dynamic.  It’s a relatively tame movie by his standards, but there are scenes where he lingers on the femme fatale displaying her domestic abuse wounds as an act of flirtation or becoming visibly aroused by her assigned-detective using brutal force against other perps.  It’s almost like watching Hitchcock make the subversively kinky Vertigo after he made the more explicitly perverse Frenzy, pulling back instead of leaning into his darkest impulses.

Maybe there’s an indication that these two distinct, disparate directors are gradually meeting in the middle – one softening their perversion stories’ sharpest edges and the other spicing up their intimate family dramas with some crime-world thrills.  More likely, they just happen to be pushing themselves to try new things instead of remaking the same picture over and over again, something that should be an auteur’s biggest fear.  Even if they both fully committed to these new directions in their work, it would take dozens of films for them to meet on common ground.  I just find it interesting that these deviations from their respective personal norms both happened to take the shape of detective stories set in the same country, released at the same time of year.

-Brandon Ledet