There’s something charmingly retro about the hair salon ensemble comedy Deadly Cuts, both in its plotting and in the specific niche of the festival-circuit indie comedies it recalls. This is a slobs-vs-snobs story about eccentric workers of an Irish hair salon getting one over on the gangsters, politicians, and big-city competition that bully them for being fabulous. Not only do the hairstylists of the titular Deadly Cuts (derided for being a lowly “pun salon”) claim victory over their bullies by winning a televised competition, but they also use the prize money to save their small suburb of Piglinstown from financial ruin. It’s the standard “save the community center” plot from every classic underdog comedy, but with a Christopher Guest-style talent show climax. Deadly Cuts recalls the funniest bits in Sordid Lives, Strictly Ballroom, and Best in Show, wringing some huge, often crass laughs out of a TV sitcom budget. It feels like the kind of movie that would have gathered a large but quiet cult following over the years had it come out in the time of video store rentals & limited movie options on cable (like all three of those comparison points). I don’t know how much room there is for that kind of sleeper hit to gain traction in the modern pop culture landscape, but the movie itself is fun & charming enough that you wish it could time travel back to a more favorable era.
Maybe it’s that late-to-the-table, familiar appeal that convinced writer-director Rachel Carey she needed to zhuzh up her debut feature with a killer hook. The oddball characters that work the film’s warring hair salons are distinct & funny enough on their own that the movie doesn’t really need an extra gimmick to make it worthwhile, but it does need to get eyeballs on the screen somehow. Carey chose murder. While the Deadly Cuts stylists are already super busy preparing for the avant-garde hairstyle competition Ahh Hair (broadcast nationally on Fad TV), where they’re outgunned by the skilled but passionless snobs of competing big-city salons, they also have to fight off local gangsters who extort them for “protection” money and local politicians who’re eager to knock their business down for an easy gentrification cash-in. It would have been more than enough for our foul-mouthed heroines to smite their enemies with outrageous haircuts, but Carey goes the extra mile by having them literally smite their enemies with a series of slapstick murders. The main conflict of the film is still in watching them beat the odds as the underdog favorites in the Ahh Hair competition, but there’s an added layer of tension in hoping they’ve disposed of their enemies’ bodies efficiently enough to collect their trophy before arrest. The most wholesome thing about the movie is watching the Piglinstown community cheer them on from home (or, more accurately, from pub) despite it being an open secret that their scissors have been cutting more than hair.
I would love to live in a world where Deadly Cuts became a sleeper sleepover hit, inspiring a generation of young sassy weirdos to quote catchphrases like “Let’s do hair” and “As I live and weave” amongst each other as a long-running “inside” joke. I just don’t see a lot of potential for the next Drop Dead Gorgeous or the next Romy & Michele to emerge from this current, disorganized zeitgeist, which is partly why this particular low-budget comedy feels at least twenty years out of place on the timeline. It’s a major success in the two ways that count most, though: it’s funny & cute from start to end. The challenge is in convincing your friends to watch it so you have someone to bounce your favorite quotes off of while everyone else in earshot has no idea what you’re babbling about.
I was shocked—SHOCKED!—to see Jared Leto finally give the first entertaining performance of his career in House of Gucci. He was easily the best part of Ridley Scott’s crimes-of-fashion melodrama, despite working alongside dependably entertaining co-stars like Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, and Al Pacino. Out-overacting Pacino would be an impressive feat for any performer, but it’s especially staggering coming from Leto. And yet his oblivious goofball energy is the only sign of life to be found in the film. Otherwise, House of Gucci is too conceptually silly to be so well-behaved. It asks the audience to take its exaggerated Italian accents and vintage fashion stunts seriously for the sprawling length of a Godfather movie, when the best it has to offer is a few flashes of outrageous outfits & sitcom hijinks; so, less The Godfather and more an overlong episode of The Nanny. In that context, there is only one knucklehead in the cast who perfectly understands the assignment (or at least perfectly misunderstands it), and he happens to be one of the most annoying Hollywood personalities around.
There is no other context where engaging with a Jared Leto performance is a positive, charming experience. Because of his literal, boneheaded approach to “method acting”, Leto is more of a social terrorist than he is a professional entertainer. His main job as an actor is to derail everyone else’s work on-set by remaining “in-character” as villainous pests, making his co-workers’ jobs as difficult as possible for no practical, discernible reason. After months of tabloid stories about Leto blinding, starving, or gorging himself for a role, he’ll reliably put in a performance so bland & textureless that you forget he was even in the movie (i.e., Lonely Hearts, Blade Runner 2049). In his greatest act of “method acting” terrorism to date, Leto “gifted” his Suicide Squad co-stars animal corpses, anal beads, and used condoms while “working” in-character as The Joker. His scenes were then almost entirely cut out of the film, making it clear that the horror stories behind his performances hold a more substantial place in our cultural imagination than the actual footage of those performances. All anyone remembers is his personal misbehavior, not his professional product. He’s effectively being paid to be an obstacle, not an actor.
This is not true in House of Gucci. Lady Gaga’s award-season ambitions completely overpowered Leto’s method-acting shenanigans during that production. Gaga’s interviews about needing “a psychiatric nurse” on-set because of how far she pushed herself in her portrayal of Patrizia Gucci—or how the real-life Patrizia put a real-life curse on her as retribution for that portrayal—filled the exact role that reports of Leto’s method-acting pranks usually fill: they’re way more interesting & fun to talk about than anything she accomplishes onscreen. Meanwhile, every single time Leto appears in his fat suit & bald cap combo as Paolo Gucci is a pure delight. He looks ridiculous, and his personality matches, playing Paolo as an overgrown Pinocchio with a wonderfully tacky fashion sense. I’ve never been so excited to see Jared Leto appear onscreen, knowing that every single line-delivery was going to be an absolute howler. And yet there was no significant tabloid baggage that came with the performance besides an off-hand joke(?) about “snorting arrabbiata sauce” and having “olive oil for blood” while immersed in the role. Gaga hogged up all the method-acting spotlight this go-round, and Leto was—against all odds—simply fun to watch.
I do not want to get into the business of becoming a Jared Leto apologist, so thank The Dark Lord for Morbius. There was something weirdly comforting about seeing Leto return to his same old tedious self in his very next role after House of Gucci. He is completely anonymous as Doctor Michael Morbius, the vampire superhero, delivering a lead performance just as forgettable as his fleeting appearances in movies he’s barely in. His line-deliveries are so flat & inflectionless that you cannot distinguish when he’s telling a joke. His only detectable facial expressions are computer-generated, signaling the emergence of an entertaining monster that the self-conflicted Morbius fights to contain under his boring, placid surface. The only brief moment when it’s apparent what Leto brings to the role is a scene where he appears buff & shirtless, enjoying his new vampire-bat superstrength before quickly covering up, lest the audience actually gets excited about something. He looks phenomenal for a 50-year-old, but there’s nothing else about his screen presence that could possibly impress an audience – mostly because the audience is snoring in their seats by the second act.
It’s not enough for Leto to be a bore. For him to truly be back on his bullshit, he needs to be a bore and a nuisance, making it unnecessarily difficult for his collaborators to record his trademark tedium on film. That’s why it’s a blessing to see Morbius director Daniel Espinosa confirm reports that Leto frequently derailed production with 45-minute bathroom breaks, remaining in-character as a physically disabled man (pre-vampire powers) between takes. Interviewer Mike Ryan prompted Espinosa with the anecdote, “Someone told me that Jared Leto was so committed to playing Michael Morbius that even when he had to go to the bathroom, he would use his crutches and slowly limp to get to the bathroom. But it was taking so long between for pee breaks, that a deal was made with him to get him a wheelchair so someone could wheel him there quicker and he agreed to that.” Espinosa confirmed, “Yeah. Because I think what Jared thinks, what Jared believes, is that somehow the pain of those movements, even when he was playing normal Michael Morbius, he needed, because he’s been having this pain his whole life.” That is the exact level of off-screen bullshit we expect from Leto: going out of his way to inconvenience his coworkers so he can deliver a flavorless, textureless performance of no consequence. Everything is in its rightful place again; order has been restored.
Of course, not everyone is not going to agree that Leto’s affable performance in House of Gucci is superior to his dreary return-to-form in Morbius. In fact, The Hollywood Reporter headlined its Morbius review with the blurb, “After his bizarrely cartoonish turn in ‘House of Gucci’, it’s a relief to see Jared Leto channel his lust for transformative characters into a film that’s quite literally written into the role’s DNA,” a line that was apparently written to troll me, specifically. Some people are just determined to not have fun, and there is no hope for them. At least we can all agree that House of Gucci was a fluke, a one-of-a-kind miracle where a Jared Leto performance was worthier of discussion than the backstage circumstances of its production. And so Morbius was a much-needed cooldown & career re-set, so that we don’t get too excited about seeing another fun, “bizarrely cartoonish turn” from him. Leto giveth, and Leto taketh away.
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the post-Scream teen slasher Cherry Falls (2000), starring a very gothy Brittany Murphy.
The mini-DV backyard horror comedy Psycho Ape! proudly promises to be the “dumbest, cheapest” ape movie of all time, and then it delivers exactly that. In case the audience dare question the scope of that mission statement, the movie is careful to catalog as many dumb-and-cheap ape movies as it can for context. It treats retro ape-movie ephemera as sacred relics: an official Congo boardgame, a pristine Blu-ray restoration of Schlock, a store-bought gorilla suit you’d expect to see in a Bowery Boys comedy, etc. Single-scene characters debate their personal rankings of famous primate franchises like King Kong, Planet of the Apes, and Mighty Joe Young as background-noise hangout banter. When it devolves into a traditional bodycount slasher (with a gorilla-suit murderer instead of a kitchen-knife killer, naturally), the psych expert on the monster’s trail is Dr. Zoomis: a cheeky portmanteau of Dr. Zaius & Dr. Loomis. Psycho Ape! goes absurdly overboard proving its credentials in dumb-and-cheap ape cinema scholarship, so that when it claims to be the “dumbest, cheapest” ape movie of all time, you have no choice but to take its word for it. I’m probably supposed to be aging out of this kind of bad-on-purpose, Troma-tinged schlock at this point in my life, but it’s impossible not to be charmed by something so lovingly reverent of such a disreputable, outdated subgenre – especially since it cites my personal favorite title, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, as one of the all-time greats.
On a dark & eerie night “25 years ago” (so, say, 1995), a “teenage girl slumber party” is crashed by a violent gorilla with an unquenchable bloodlust. His weapon of choice is a standard-issue Chiquita banana, but it wreaks the same bloody havoc as kitchen knives & meat cleavers in traditional slashers. Although most of the slumber-party teens are bludgeoned, stabbed, and choked to death by the phallic fruit, the titular psychotic primate does leave behind one anointed final girl: the obsessive ape-movie cineaste Nancy Banana (played by Kansas Bowling, director of the similar retro-schlock throwback B.C. Butcher). In the following decades, the gorilla continues to kill at random, while Nancy Banana pines for the love that could’ve been, dedicating her life to becoming “the next Jane Goodall” (by which she means she really wants to fuck that ape). They inevitably re-unite, and the film takes wild detours from its initial slasher template into retro romcom & beach party tropes. If you’re at all familiar with the history of ape-falls-in-love-with-platinum-blonde cinema, you know that their cutesy romantic bond can only end in tragedy – complete with an obligatory spoof of the genre’s iconic “Twas beauty killed the beast” stinger. The main difference is that this example also starts with tragedy and is careful to intersperse as many bloody banana stabbings it can afford in-between its cutesy romcom gags.
I just put more effort into pulling a coherent plot out of Psycho Ape! than director Addison Binek intended his audience to bother with. Structurally, it’s more of a loose sketch comedy than it is a linear narrative. Binek raised $7,500 in production funds through Kickstarter, then spent it all on goofing off with a gorilla costume, a camera, and as many friends as he could gather (seemingly including a ton of Troma alumni). It’s basically a hangout movie for sickos, Motern for edgelords. As proudly dumb & cheap as Psycho Ape! is, though, it’s anything but lazy. Most hodgepodge horror comedies shot in this scatterbrained, tangential style are infuriatingly lazy (see: Da Hip Hop Witch), but Psycho Ape! establishes a distinctive internal logic that transcends any need for plot or scene-to-scene logic. It’s a temporal mash-up of schlock ephemera from the past half-century: 50s Benny Hill grabassery, 60s lava lamp psychedelia, 70s first-wave slashings, 80s splatstick gore, post-Kevin Williamson 90s meta horror, 2000s digi-cam backyard movies, 2010s YouTube pranks, sub-Sarah Squirm 2020s gross-outs, and timeless scat & murder gags to tie them all together. Some of the most sublime moments of the entire picture are just throwaway transition shots of Nancy Banana dancing with her gorilla beau in a vintage yellow bikini, with everyone involved openly laughing at how idiotic the project is on a conceptual level. The fun they’re having on-“set” is infectious. It’s a reckless party movie dressed up like a bodycount horror, but it’s oddly sincere in its dedication to having a good time and to honoring the ape-horror comedies that came before it. I had a blast.
As I’ve already stated in reviews for titles like Karnan, War, Saaho, Master, and 2.0, there is nothing Hollywood has to offer than can out-entertain mainstream Indian action cinema. While American action franchises like the MCU and the Fast & Furious “saga” have long outlasted their initial novelty, Indian movie industries like Kollywood & Tollywood routinely escalate the explosive absurdism of the genre to new, delirious heights audiences have never seen before. They recall Hong Kong’s heyday as the most exciting, inventive action scene in the world, when seemingly every new title—no matter how anonymous or cheap—instantly earned a place in the canon of all-time greats. And even with that miles-high industry standard looming over him, director S.S. Rajamouli might be establishing himself as the very best craftsman in modern Indian actioners – recently striking big with the two-part action epic Baahubali, and now following it up with the ferociously entertaining RRR. While most modern, bloated American action pics only offer a post-nap headache, a Rajamouli picture guarantees a skull-cracking good time.
RRR is an anti-colonialist epic about the power of friendship (and the power of bullets, and the power of wolves, and the power of grenades, and the power of tigers, and the power of dynamite, and the power of bears, oh my!). The two friends at the center are a fantastically unlikely pair, frequently compared to fire & water, or “a volcano & a wildfire” in the rock anthems that underscore their volatile bond. One is a militant supercop whose wuxia superheroics enable him to fight off an ocean of unruly protestors while armed with just a baton. The other is a rural tribal leader on a one-man, Schwarzenegger-style mission to avenge his people against a governmental wrong – culminating in releasing wild, blood-starved animals at a fancy garden party in a righteous act of terrorism. Separately, either one of these burly supermen could’ve been highlighted as the hero of their own over-the-top action adventure; likewise, either one could’ve played villain. Instead, the movie gives them equal time as dual protagonists, eventually pushing them to form Voltron (see also: Krang, Master Blaster) as one united force against a common, worthier enemy: white British colonizers. It’s a beautiful bromance between good, muscly buds, with plenty explosions, dance-offs, and feral animal attacks keeping up the energy as they fall further in bruv.
RRR never strays from its mission as a populist crowd-pleaser, but it’s also a fiercely political film. Every white British colonizer that rules over 1920s Delhi in the picture is a sneering, monstrous piece of shit, and the entire arc of the unlikely cop-dissident friendship that forms at that colony’s fringes is pushing for their violent overthrow. A pre-credits warning explains that the events of the film are fictional (a disclaimer that’s even less necessary than its companion warning that the wild “animals” are entirely CG), but both of the film’s dual heroes were real-life revolutionaries & populist heroes. Alluri Sitarama Raju & Komaram Bheem violently revolted against colonialist rule in the 1920s & 30s in separate rebellions. RRR functions as a kind of anti-imperialist fan fiction that turns those historical heroes of the people into modern heroes of the screen. At the very least, it’s a much more politically purposeful & satisfying superhero team-up than any comic book or street-racing equivalent I can name in its genre’s American competition. That probably goes without saying, but it is stunning to see populist cinema with sharpened fangs, since so much of what we’re fed at home is conspicuously toothless.
Anything else I could say in praise of RRR would just be a rambling list of exciting images. You don’t need to hear about a motorcycle being launched as an explosive projectile any more than you need to hear about a wolf & a tiger brawling for dominance or our two heroes locking arms for the first time against a full-flame backdrop. All you need to know is that friendship is beautiful, imperialism is evil, and S.S. Rajamouli knows how to entertain. See RRR big & loud while you can. Otherwise, you’ll regret missing the chance when it’s shrunken down to TV-scale on Netflix in a couple months.
Considered in isolation, X is okay. It can be a little phony & shallow in spurts, but it’s a decent enough slasher with novel themes & settings not usually explored in the genre. Considered in a larger scope, it’s frustratingly stagnant. It’s getting extremely tired watching so many modern horror movies borrow their authenticity from vintage grindhouse cinema instead of genuinely attempting something new & risky. Ti West directed his breakout calling-card movie House of the Devil thirteen long years ago, and he was already indulging this kind of 70s & 80s throwback aesthetic back then. Hell, Rob Zombie directed House of 1,000 Corpses two decades ago. There have certainly been better grindhouse throwbacks made since 2003, but I don’t know that there have been any transcendent triumphs that justify wallowing in that nostalgia swamp for this long instead of attempting something freshly upsetting. Even when X excels in its go-for-broke moments of icky discomfort, I find myself questioning why this filmmaking mode is always set in the 70s or 80s now and buried under so many retro style markers. It feels stuck, as if West and his contemporaries are outright afraid of modern settings & new tones, using disreputable vintage subgenres as a stylistic, contextual crutch.
Worse, X is outright condescending to one of the drive-in era subgenres it’s supposedly paying tribute to. This is a grimy slasher film about a small crew of subprofessional pornographers who are slaughtered by elderly Evangelicals in rural Texas, 1979. The film is most satisfying as a Texas Chainsaw-inspired creep-out, unleashing a long-isolated family of murderous weirdos onto the big-city “sex fiends” who invade their small town. It’s also admirable in the way it highlights the true independent filmmaking spirit shared between horror & pornography in that era – two low-budget/high-profitability genres that were closely paralleled in their production & reputation. It’s annoying, then, that X‘s view of late-70s pornography is so phony & patronizing. Its six-person film crew is supposedly committed to creating porn that can be enjoyed & appreciated as legitimate art instead of disposable smut, but they’re working on a goofy cliché titled The Farmer’s Daughters, which they intend to distribute on VHS (despite shooting on film, a more expensive format). There’s a bizarre dissonance there, as if they’re discussing the production of Equation to an Unknown but in practice filming scenes from Bat Pussy. The audience has no choice but to laugh at their artistic ambitions, since the conflict between their words and their work is played as a joke. I hate to be such a scold about this, but presenting the concept of artful pornography as inherently funny is pretty hack & outdated at this point, especially if your recreation of it is the same funk guitar & screeching orgasms as a 90s sketch parody. This goes doubly so if you’re borrowing the look & feel of vintage pornography—low-budget genre films made fully in earnest—to boost the entertainment value of your A24-distributed horror mainstreamer. It’s insulting.
It’s a testament to Mia Goth’s fearlessness & “X-factor” appeal that X amounts to anything remarkable at all. She stars in dual roles as a young porno actress and her elderly, sexually-repressed admirer: a lonely old woman whose Evangelical husband no longer desires her, so she violently seeks extramarital satisfaction with the unsuspecting youth they lure to their farm. There’s something special about the intergenerational dynamic Goth shares between the two versions of herself. She paws at her own flesh in lecherous hunger, willing to burn down the entire world just to get one last taste of youthful beauty before death. The closest The Farmer’s Daughters’ crew gets to announcing X‘s central theme is when they lament “One day we’re going to be too old to fuck.” It’s an epiphany that doubles as a blanket excuse for hedonism and as a genuinely horrific vision of their sexless, geriatric future. What I can’t figure out is why West felt the need to bury that vision under so much phony vintage-grindhouse cheese. His heart really isn’t in the throwback genre markers anyway. The porno recreations are treated as a joke, and the slasher scenes include cross-cutting transition techniques that have no discernible purpose besides feeling quaintly outdated. It’s not enough that West mocks his pornographer characters for wanting to make ambitious art out of smut; he can’t even match their “avant-garde cinema” ambitions in his own work. Only Goth comes through with anything worth championing here. At least she gets to do it twice.
As far as retro porno-horrors go, X is no Knife+Heart. I’m not even convinced it’s the better Texas Chainsaw throwback from this year. There is a great, discomforting slasher film lurking somewhere in the tension between those two genre divides, though. It’s just a shame it wasn’t allowed to be its own thing without paying homage to an already overmined past.
If you have any inclination to check out the new direct-to-Hulu erotic thriller Deep Water, it’s because you’re a fan of at least one of its main three collaborators: Adrian Lyne, Ben Affleck, or Ana de Armas. No offense meant to down-the-call-sheet performers like Tracy Letts & Lil Rel Howery—nor to Euphoria-famous screenwriter Sam Levinson—but Lyne, Affleck, and de Armas are the film’s only legitimate draws. Deep Water‘s allure is entirely dependent on extratextual details from those three Hollywood celebs’ careers and tabloid notoriety. Not only is it the first Adrian Lyne film in 20 years, it’s also a return to the genre that made him infamous in the first place: erotic thrillers like 9½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction, and Indecent Proposal. It’s also a film that’s only hype-building press coverage was of Ben Affleck & Ana de Armas’s post-production love affair, as detailed in months-long paparazzi photo shoots. Otherwise, Deep Water does not truly exist in any practical or meaningful way, having been unceremoniously dumped into a Disney streaming platform sub-dungeon after a couple years of COVID-related distribution delays. You need to care about at least one of its three central collaborators to know or care about Deep Water to begin with, and you need all three of them to be in top form for the movie to fully satisfy. Unfortunately, it only edges you 2/3rds of the way there.
Ben Affleck & Ana de Armas are blameless in the movie’s failure to perform. De Armas is electric as a frustrating housewife-gone-wild, whose extramarital affairs appear to be equally for their own drunken-hedonist sake and a kinky role-play game she shares with her cuckolded husband, Affleck. As amusingly erratic & irritating as her performance can be, Deep Water is Ben Affleck’s movie through & through. He’s in his Gone Girlmode here, scruffy & gloomy to the point of self-parody. He pretends to be troubled by his wife’s sexual flings with younger men, only putting up with it to avoid divorce while they’re raising a young daughter. De Armas knows exactly how much fun he’s having as the silently “suffering” husband at home, though, quipping “If you were married to anyone else, you’d be so fucking bored you’d kill yourself.” What’s unclear is whether he’s staving off boredom by killing her lovers, and whether his wife is aware that murder is part of their kink. Like clockwork, each of her boytoys either go missing or are found dead as a new affair heats up, then she immediately replaces them with the next victim-du-jour. In the meantime, Affleck dutifully attends to their daughter and to his own coterie of pet snails, occasionally bragging about murdering his wife’s lovers with a self-amused smirk, daring the audience to believe him. It’s a deeply strange performance, an even more convincing supervillain origin story than Joker. All it’s missing is a scene where Affleck gets dragged away to Arkham Asylum, exclaiming “I was poly under duress until I became The Snail, avenger of cuckolds, the Willard of adultery!”
It’s a shame, then, that the director fails to reciprocate his actors’ efforts. Adrian Lyne is limp & passionless in his framing, as if he knew from the beginning this was a straight-to-streaming affair. The novelty of the uptown New Orleans setting offers little in the way of personality, unless you were somehow unaware until now that the wealthy are depraved perverts with no sense of taste. There are some nods to tropes of the erotic thriller’s heyday, mostly in de Armas’s unhinged villainy as an over-sexed woman and in Affleck’s more covert villainy as a ruthless businessman (this time as a tech-bro contributor to drone warfare, an update to Michael Douglas’s finance-bro jobs in decades past). The sex scenes are brief and missing the gender-warfare combativeness that made the genre’s original run so thrilling to begin with. The most antagonistic the sex gets is when de Armas demands that Affleck kiss her ass, and Lyne follows his immediately buried face in uncomfortable close-up. You can feel the movie come alive in moments like that, like when she spitefully removes a single pube from her tongue after initiating a blowjob she had no intent to finish. The problem is those moments feel like foreplay for a literal war-of-the-sexes that never fully heats up. And then, cruelly, the movie abruptly ends without a proper payoff – again, no intent to finish. It feels as if Lyne wasn’t sure what he was making or why, leaving it to the editors to figure it out in post. Too bad Paul Verhoeven didn’t get the job instead, since he already improved Lyne’s Fatal Attraction through revision & parody in Basic Instinct: the very best specimen of the genre, and proof in itself that Lyne is kind of a hack.
Deep Water is fun in spurts, but it’s missing a few escalated sex scenes and a proper climax. There’s only one dead-weight participant in its central threesome, but it’s enough to spoil everyone else’s good time. Affleck at least seemed like he had fun playing with those snails, but the whole movie needed to be as off-putting & slimy as his hobby.
Welcome to Episode #156 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of genre films from this year’s Best Director Oscar nominees, starting with Jane Campion’s 2003 erotic thriller In the Cut. Enjoy!
00:00 Welcome
00:38 Oliver Twist (2005) 04:10 Radhe Shyam (2022) 07:00 Turning Red (2022) 10:45 Master (2022) 15:10 Deep Water (2022) 21:00 Parallel Mothers (2022)
28:25 In the Cut (2003) 46:25 Duel (1971) 1:02:30 Dead Again (1991) 1:14:45 Asako I & II (2018) 1:29:00 Hard Eight (1996)
For the second year in a row, I found myself wildly out of sync with 2022’s announced list of Oscar nominees. Even though I watched over a hundred feature films released in 2021, only three of them were nominated in any category – even the lowly technicals. It used to be that I’d seen at least a dozen without trying. And of the three films I had seen, only one registered as anything especially praiseworthy. I like the idea of Cruella as a superhero movie for gay children, but as Disney’s attempt at “a punk film” it’s embarrassing. Dune was pretty, lavish, and competently made, but it was also my least favorite kind of literary adaptation: the kind that’s pinned down by obligation to its source material, never managing to take off as its own unique thing. Surprisingly, Power of the Dog is the one Oscar nominated title I had already seen that I was impressed by, even though I don’t usually care much for Westerns. It was one of Swampflix’s Top 10 Films of 2021, after all. Looking at the 38 feature films nominated for statues this year, I felt totally out of sync with what titles the film industry has deemed Important. Or maybe it was just another sign of the pandemic scrambling everything up to the point where there is no clear zeitgeist right now. Hard to tell.
Knowing that I’ll end up watching the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony live on TV with or without having seen any of the films nominated, I again used the Oscars an excuse to catch up with some of last year’s high-profile releases that had slipped by me. And so, here’s a ranked list of movies I recently watched because they were nominated for Oscars – each with an accompanying blurb. I only watched movies that I had a genuine interest in seeing; I would have found no pleasure watching Belfast or Don’t Look Up just to shit on them, so I didn’t bother. It was partly an excuse to check out a few titles I meant to catch up with anyway, and partly an excuse to gawk at all the sparkling evening gowns at this week’s televised ceremony. Enjoy.
Parallel Mothers
Nominated for Best Actress (Penélope Cruz) and Best Original Score
I guess you could complain that this isn’t anything new from Almodóvar, but since he’s specifically returning to the exquisite melodrama flavors of Volver & All About My Mother, it’d be like complaining about eating strawberry ice cream for a third time in two decades. It’s still delicious and a rare treat! I especially love this as an acting showcase for Cruz and as a political parable that manages to feel elusive of a 1:1 metaphor but still furious over a very specific issue. A huge step up from the muted navel-gazing of Pain & Glory in my book.
Drive My Car
Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi), Best International Feature, and Best Adapted Screenplay
I’m always unclear on how critical consensus rallies so quickly around a single, seemingly arbitrary title, but it’s nice when the beneficiary turns out to be this damn good. A patient, complex drama for adults, routinely landing direct stabs to the heart without ever making a big show of it. I generally consider myself a low-brow audience, so it feels significant that the big moment that made me cry was someone performing Chekhov in sign-language.
The Worst Person in the World
Nominated for Best International Feature and Best Original Screenplay
I’m an easy sucker for a story about a woman who is an absolute mess, but even so this feels like one of the best entries in the “Girl, same” canon since Fleabag. Visually playful & morally tricky enough to avoid feeling pedestrian or overlong, even though it’s sometimes stuck halfway between a Sundancey romcom & a solid season of television.
Summer of Soul
Nominated for Best Documentary Feature
I was prepared to dismiss this for allowing contextual talking-head interviews to overpower the music festival it’s documenting, but the editing is so persistently sharp and exciting that it justifies the interruption. I’d still love a full-footage box set release, but the truth is I’d probably treat it like background noise for laundry days, and this overview is something much more pointed & emotional.
Nightmare Alley
Nominated for Best Picture, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, and Best Costume Design
The most a movie has felt like an unofficial entry in the Tim Burton Batman canon since the 2003 Willard remake, which I mean as a compliment. It’s easy to miss the extravagant carnival setting of the first hour once you leave it for the big city, but the pure noir pastiche that follows is grim & gorgeous enough to overcome that loss. A lot of people seem to have retracted their love for del Toro in recent years, but I’m still buying tickets for the dark ride every time it passes through town. This one isn’t his best; it’s still pretty great.
Licorice Pizza
Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Paul Thomas Anderson), and Best Original Screenplay
I’m surprisingly super conflicted about this movie depending on whose coming-of-age story it is. As a story about the adorability of teen-boy confidence I’m intensely icked out by it. As a story about a twenty-something’s self-destructive resistance to growing up, I find it oddly moving & dark. And since PTA is careful to balance everything evenly between those two POVs, I didn’t walk away with any easy answers or summations about that tonal conflict, which might’ve been the point. All I can really say with any certainty is that these images look nice but the 1970s look sad & gross.
The Lost Daughter
Nominated for Best Actress (Olivia Colman), Best Supporting Actress (Jessie Buckley), and Best Adapted Screenplay
Part of me wants to say that trimming this down a half-hour would help sharpen the tension, but you’d probably lose some of the eeriness of its beach vacation purgatory setting in the process. Either way, it works better as a thorny drama about Difficult Women than as a psychological thriller, which is totally fine (except that only one of dual genres builds to something). Great performances all around; it’s just missing a climax.
Flee
Nominated for Best Documentary Feature, Best Animated Feature, and Best International Feature
Probably uncool to say, but I couldn’t get over how ugly & lazy the actual animation looked in this. As an oral-history document, its content is obviously much more important than its form, and the narration is vital, heartbreaking stuff no matter how it’s illustrated. Still, I was way more personally, emotionally engaged in the moments of archival footage than I was looking at its Flash animation style (the expressive A-ha music video flourishes were effective, though).
House of Gucci
Nominated for Best Makeup and Hairstyling
I regret to report that Jared Leto is the best part of this movie. It’s too silly to be so well behaved otherwise, so the overly committed excess of his Italian caricature is the only performance that feels appropriate for the occasion. Fun fashion & ridiculous accents all around, but there’s only one goofball in the cast who truly understands the assignment (or at least perfectly misunderstands it).
Spencer
Nominated for Best Actress (Kristen Stewart)
I hate to say it, because I’m generally a fan, but Stewart’s performance is the only reason this did not work for me. The retro couture, ghostly imagery, and suffocating tension are all consistently effective, but she’s the anchor of every dramatic beat and it all just rings as phony. It feels like a Kate McKinnon parody instead of the genuine thing, which didn’t bother me so much when Natalie Portman channeled Jinkx Monsoon in Jackie but here feels like it’s running away from the laidback cool of Stewart at her best and the gamble just didn’t pay off.
I have a severe case of Oscars Brain this week, a condition that makes me think of every movie I’m watching in an Awards Season context that will cease to matter in just a few days. It’s an embarrassing affliction. Pray that it heals soon.
Intellectually, I know that the Oscars are a ridiculous pageant with no genuine implications for what pictures qualify as The Best Movies of the Year (except maybe in its winners having an easier time getting their Best-Movies-of-Next-Year projects funded). The ceremony is a great excuse to watch challenging dramas I’d usually put on the backburner of my sprawling watchlist. It’s also a great excuse to gawk at beautiful, sparkly gowns on television while eating junk food. Those are ultimately very superficial functions in the grand scheme of cinematic discourse, though. I don’t put much emotional energy into the wins & snubs of the awards race, but I do enjoy the ritual of tuning in with friends, pizza, and champagne on hand.
It’s just nice to have one month out of the year when everyone talks about movies that don’t star superheroes or talking cartoon animals. If you ask most audiences, there have only been three actual movies released in the past year, the ones that feature Spider-men, Batmen, and Ghostbusters. The Oscars are a nice respite from that constant IP-worship chatter among The Fans™, which dominates all online discussion of movies for the other eleven months of the calendar. Hilariously, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is trying their best to court The Fans as a potential TV audience, pushing for all the Spider-Men and other supertwunks out there to share the spotlight during the ceremony in semi-official “Fan Favorite” awards, as if the literal billions of dollars they earn crowding real movies out of the box office isn’t already enough of a reward. To be honest, it’s making me extremely petty. I can’t hear the word “Ghostbuster” without rolling my eyes, desperate for anyone to talk about a genuinely substantive movie for a goddamn change. For all of pageantry, inanity, and bribery that makes The Oscars a total sham, at least it does clear space for real movies like Drive My Car, Parallel Mothers, and The Power of the Dogto breathe in the daylight until Captain Morbius or whatever the fuck swoops into suck up all the oxygen again.
The new Ghostbusters film gives that petty reflex a lot of ammunition too. Afterlife is absolutely absurd as a nostalgia-bait IP booster. It somehow misremembers the original Ghostbusters franchise as an E.T.-era Spielberg heart-warmer instead of a frat-boy special effect comedy. Instead of using its ghost-infestation premise as an excuse for rapid-fire joke delivery (a tradition that was kept alive in the previous 2016 reboot), this lands closer to the Stranger Things version of 80s nostalgia, complete with a major role for breakout stranger thing Finn Wolfhard. There are constant Who You Gonna Callbacks to things that used to be jokes in the original Ghostbusters film—marshmallows, Twinkies, firemen poles, retro commercials for the titular ghostbusting service—but they’re treated with a reverent awe that makes absolutely no sense considering the series’ goofball origins. Afterlife is an earnest drama about a family who moves from the big city to a rural farm to confront the mess left behind by their absentee patriarch (Egon Spengler, for all you Bustheads out there), haunted both by his dusty belongings and by an upswell of actual ghosts. It’s also a throwback to 80s Amblin kids’ adventure films, to the point where a wisecracking side character named Podcast functions as all of the Goonies characters rolled into a single out-of-time archetype. What it’s not is a traditional Ghostbusters film, at least not beyond the familiarity of the logo and a few unnecessary cameos.
As intensely odd as Afterlife is as a nostalgia trigger for adults, I do think it’s passably adorable as a standalone children’s film. With the rare exception of titles like MirrorMask & City of Ember (which, appropriately enough, also features a small role for Bill Murray), I can’t think of many dark, live-action fantasy adventure films made for young audiences in recent decades. Even Stranger Things feels pitched to an older, nostalgic audience who remembers growing up with kids-on-bikes horror adventures in the 80s instead of their fresh-eyed children. In that way, I think Ghostbusters: Afterlife is most useful as an intergenerational bonding tool that kids can enjoy for its legitimate spooky-adventure charms while their knucklehead parents point and smile at the callbacks & Easter eggs, drooling onto their Target-brand Ghostbusters t-shirts between nostalgia pops. It’s frustrating that we can’t make children’s movies like this without tying them to pre-existing IP from 40 years ago, but hey, that’s the pop culture hellscape we’re rotting in, so you gotta celebrate the small victories where you can find them.
There are a lot of small touches to Ghostbusters: Afterlife that genuinely brought me joy – mostly the Creechification of Slimer in the nü-ghost Muncher (Josh Gad’s greatest performance to date) and Carrie Coon’s aggressive disinterest in absolutely everything happening around her as the non-plussed mom. I can’t claim that those minor, momentary joys justify how much cultural discourse the Ghostbusters brand has generated over the past few years. This movie is far too shallow & disposable to earn its vast pop culture real estate. If it weren’t for all the online chatter about how the Oscars and critical institutions ignore movies that people have actually heard of, though, I don’t think that shallowness would bother me. This is a perfectly cromulent kids’ movie with plenty of soothing nostalgia indulgences to lure in those kids’ parents, which is perfectly fine. I just really wish there were more space to occasionally discuss something else. I don’t know if that would require audiences or producers to be more adventurous in what creative voices they pay attention to, but it really is exhausting talking about fluff like this all year round when there’s not much to it. It’s sad how vital the Oscars are in breaking up that monotony, since that ceremony is itself equally shallow & silly, just in a different way.
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