brandon ledet

Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000)

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I was a late joiner to the Bong Joon-ho fan club. I didn’t see any of his films prior to the US release of Snowpiercer (which ended up being Swampflix’s very first pick for Movie of the Year), and I shamefully still—all these years later—have not doubled back to catch up with his early catalog.  Now that the runaway success of Parasite has made him an Oscar-certified sweetheart of the industry, Bong’s early films are easier to access than ever, so I have few remaining excuses to cover those blind spots.  It took nine long years for his debut feature, Barking Dogs Never Bite, to land proper American distribution, but now it’s just sitting right there on Hulu waiting to make you laugh & squirm along with the director’s other darkly funny genre pranks.  It obviously doesn’t match the budgetary scale of the eye-popping spectacles Bong would later deliver in films like Okja, Snowpiercer, and The Host, but it’s just as worthy of a post-Oscars re-evaluation of his decades-long career.  If nothing else, it’s good to be reminded that the adorable man who became a meme by making his Oscars statues kiss also has a deeply fucked up, vicious sense of humor.

Barking Dogs Never Bite feels like Bong Joon-ho’s version of the post-Clerks slacker comedy, complete with a couple of listless corner store clerks among its cast of downtrodden losers.  Gen-X apathy & ennui weighs heavy on its central players, a loose collection of near-destitute tenants of a multi-tiered apartment complex, barely earning enough through their entry-level jobs to feed themselves.  The title refers to the violent hijinks of an out-of-work academic whose peaceful days lounging around the apartment (which his pregnant wife pays for) are interrupted by a neighbor’s small, yipping dog.  The absolute worm of a man takes his frustrations over his stalled career out on various small dogs throughout the building, murdering them in an effort to quiet his own mind.  These outbursts of animal cruelty catch the eye of an anonymous notary who lives nearby, daydreaming about earning celebrity through heroic acts of vigilantism.  As the would-be vigilante tracks down the pathetic dog killer, the small minds & embarrassments of their daily routines pile up in an increasingly absurd tangling of their lives, somehow amounting to a pitch-black hangout comedy instead of a low-budget crime thriller.  It’s the exact kind of ironic slice-of-life slacker tale you’d expect to see at a film festival in the 1990s, except with a much sharper eye for visual gags & splendor than what you’d typically expect from movies on its budget level.

Bong’s debut is hilarious but vicious, which feels consistent with everything he’s done since.  Even so, violence against dogs is one of the few remaining taboos that make audiences squeamish, so it still cuts deep. It’s the kind of movie that’s almost pointless to log on the content-warning database Does the Dog Die?, as its entire purpose is to mash that exact taboo button.  The dogs that are killed are cute & pathetic.  Their murderer waits maybe a scene & a half before deciding to violently shut them up, not even suffering the expected montage where they annoy him for days on end until he snaps.  Even as someone with a high tolerance for shocking art, I was thankful that the film opened with an obligatory “No animals were harmed” title card instead of saving it for the end credits.  Still, I don’t know that I ever fully believed it, as whatever puppetry, camera trickery, or hidden harness support they used to depict the pups in peril was impressively convincing.  I was in love with Bong’s playful camera set-ups, non sequitur ghost stories, sped-up Benny Hill chase sequences, and onslaughts of discordant jazz, but I can’t claim that the puppy violence didn’t upset me.  It’s supposed to be upsetting, because Bong Joon-ho is a sick fuck, which is easy to forget as he’s become something of a Film Twitter mascot.

I remember there being a lot of memes at the expense of Chris Evans delivering the teary line “Babies taste best” in Snowpiercer, as if it were funny by accident.  I always found that mockery to be odd, as that moment didn’t feel especially over-the-top to me, at least not relative to every other batshit crazy thing that happens in that movie.  Having now seen Bong Joon-ho’s debut feature—a feel-bad hangout comedy about a series of dog murders—I’m even more convinced that the Snowpiercer memesters (likely just hungry to dunk on the limitations of Captain America’s acting talents) got it wrong.  Given Bong’s larger body of work, I believe that line was both intentionally funny and sincere.  It’s both a discomforting moment where a man deals with the guilt of surviving on the nourishment of baby-meat and a darkly humorous punchline that underlines just how depraved the film’s trainbound universe has gotten.  I’ve now seen Bong apply that exact discomforting humor to the onscreen death of puppies, so why not the off-screen death of babies? Lots to think about there, lots to consider.

-Brandon Ledet

Doppelgänger (2003)

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There’s something bittersweet about the early-2000s boom of Japanese & Korean horror films that were imported to the United States through home video labels like Tartan Asia Extreme.  On the one hand, it’s wonderful that daring, genre-blurring films like Suicide Club & A Tale of Two Sisters were able to find an audience outside of their respective home countries.  On the other hand, those films’ American marketing often perpetuated a reductive, borderline-Orientalist perception of that era in East Asian genre filmmaking as the most “extreme, “fucked-up”, “incredibly strange” movies ever made – as if every film were a variation on the torturous Guinea Pig series.  It was a very profitable perception for Tartan, I bet, but I’m not convinced it was an entirely healthy one for the filmmakers they were platforming (not to mention other filmmakers from the region who were working in entirely different modes of cinematic storytelling at the time).  I don’t want to complain too much about the way those home video releases were marketed to Americans, though, since those vintage DVD scans are still the only commercially available copies of a lot of those films in the US two decades later.  At least they found a path to our eyeballs, imperfect as it was.

I wonder how much the commercial pressures of “extreme J-horror” marketability influenced the production of the 2003 sci-fi comedy Doppelgänger.  Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa earned international acclaim among genre fans making that exact kind of Ringu-era J-horror exports (Cure, Pulse, Seance, etc.), but with Doppelgänger you can feel him striving to branch out into other modes of storytelling.  He sets the film up as a J-horror update to Jekyll & Hyde in its first act (which landed it an American DVD release on the Tartan Asia Extreme label), but it’s a much sillier film than that early tone implies.  Doppelgänger delivers the vicious violence that contemporary American audiences had come to expect from “extreme” Japanese horror cinema, but the further it goes along the more it strays into broad slapstick comedy, gradually escalating to ZAZ-level buffoonery in its final act (including an Indiana Jones spoof involving a boulder-sized disco ball).  It’s a darkly funny film, where most of the punchlines are people’s skulls being cracked with the anticlimactic thud of a hammer.  Still, it feels like Kurosawa only establishes an eerie sci-fi mood in the opening stretch so he could get away with goofing off once all the usual J-horror boxes were checked.  

One reason it’s so tempting to speculate about Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s frustrations with market expectations is that the protagonist of Doppelgänger is also intensely frustrated by his corporate overlords.  Kōji Yakusho stars as a meek research scientist who’s developing a kind of mech-suit wheelchair for the physically disabled, providing mechanical arms for paralytics.  The profit-obsessed higher-ups at his lab’s parent company continually undermine his careful research, forcing him to conform to unrealistic deadlines that threaten to corrupt the project.  This immense corporate pressure coincides with the arrival of the scientist’s doppelgänger (also played by Kōji Yakusho), whose brash, macho confidence creates an exponentially violent competition with the kinder, original scientist.  This is the story of a creative genius driven insane by small-minded money men, eventually abandoning his scientific pursuits altogether to instead engage in a pointless war with his own psyche.  It concludes with a go-nowhere road trip into total delirium, chasing down a deliberately pointless flavor of comedic absurdism rarely seen outside a Quentin Dupieux film.  By the end, Kurosawa is basically just goofing off, whether or not horror-hungry audiences were still along for the ride.

Two decades after its initial release, the biggest hurdle to enjoying Doppelgänger isn’t so much its reluctance to deliver the “extreme” J-horror goods; it’s the film’s early-2000s digi cinematography, which makes it look like cheap TV instead of proper cinema.  Even when it’s playing with spooky sci-fi ideas in its early stretch, the film lacks any of the throat-hold atmospheric dread that makes Kurosawa’s actual horror films so intense.  That disinterest in establishing an eerie mood is only amplified by the outdated SD scans of the film that are available on DVD & streaming services, to the point where even its indulgences in De Palma-style split screens feel like music video fuckery instead of genuine experiments in form.  All that flatness in tone stops mattering once the film reveals its true nature as a farcical comedy, though, starting with the macho doppelgänger copying his source-human’s café order one table over just to fuck with him and quickly escalating to a series of deadpan murders with a hastily wielded hammer.  I could see a lot of Western audiences having the exact opposite experience in the aughts, though, popping in a Tartan Asia Extreme DVD and enjoying the early spooky goings-on, only to be baffled by the goofball pranks that followed. 

-Brandon Ledet

I’m Your Man (2021)

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I’m not convinced that Dan Stevens ever fully achieved the movie star dream career he abruptly left Downton Abbey to pursue.  Between his career-defining run on that glorified soap opera and the Disney Prince paycheck he cashed after the live-action Beauty and the Beast remake, he’s probably financially set for life.  I get the sense that he’s still not creatively fulfilled, though.  After a strong start in the weirdo action thrillers The Guest and Legion, he’s mostly been doing anonymous, supporting work that doesn’t draw much attention to his movie-star potential as a leading man.  The German sci-fi romcom I’m Your Man is a welcome corrective step in that treadmill career trajectory.  In the film, Stevens stars as a perfectly calibrated robot boyfriend, a role that emphasizes both his generic handsomeness and his eerie, inhuman coldness.  Instead of running away from his default perception as a dime-a-dozen Ken Doll hunk (the exact reason Stevens fled from Downton Abbey as soon as he could), I’m Your Man leans hard into that quality, pressing both on its charms and its limitations.  It’s a perfect encapsulation of what makes him unique as a screen presence, which is something he doesn’t always get to showcase.

In I’m Your Man, robo-Dan Stevens is beta-tested by a recently divorced research scientist (Maren Eggert), who is reluctant to treat him like a potential A.I. life partner instead of a household appliance.  She reluctantly agrees to the study in a bargain that will land her own academic research future funding opportunities but finds the implication that a robot boyfriend would fulfill an emotional need in her life insulting.  Initially annoyed by his machinelike perfection and his servantile attention to her every need, she gradually learns to love the walking, talking dildo despite herself.  Their dynamic feels like a broadcast from a slightly brighter world where heartfelt romcoms get to tackle heady subjects usually reserved for eerie sci-fi chillers like Ex Machina.  It’s a very familiar Turing Test story structure that’s not usually played with such a lightness in its doomed human-robot romance.  It balances its romcom cuteness with just enough melancholy & heartbreak to feel sophisticated, but not enough to match the dramatic despair of much drearier sci-fi romances like Her and Never Let Me Go.  Like robo-Dan Stevens, it’s perfectly calibrated for what it is, with all the charms & limitations implied.

If there’s some larger topical or philosophical statement I’m Your Man is trying to make about humanity’s evolving relationship with technology, I’m not able to fully pinpoint it.  It romanticizes the shortcomings & imperfections that distinguish humans from machinery (most starkly in a slow-motion montage of “Epic Fail” YouTube clips).  At the same time, it’s also honest about how comforting & safe it feels to interact with machines instead of our fellow fuck-ups (maybe as subtle commentary on the distinctly modern isolation of smartphone addiction).  I don’t know that it makes any grand, definitive statements about human nature or technological comforts, though.  It instead gently pokes at the boundaries between the natural & the artificial, finding odd moments of peace & romance in their overlap.  For me, the movie’s clearest purpose is in highlighting the eerie charms of Dan Stevens as a screen presence, finding his exact sweet spot as a potential leading man.  Otherwise, it’s just an above-average romcom with a fun sci-fi spin.

-Brandon Ledet

Language Lessons (2021)

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There was much attention paid to the dual achievements of Ridley Scott & Ryusuke Hamaguchi directing two films each in 2021, but I haven’t personally seen any of the four films they released last year (House of Gucci & The Last Duel and Drive My Car & Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, respectively).  However, I have seen the dual directorial debuts of actor-turned-auteur Natalie Morales, Plan B & Language Lessons – both released in 2021.  Plan B was the higher-profile release of the pair, boasting a larger budget and a substantial promotional push when it premiered on Hulu.  It’s a fun addition to the new wave of teen sex comedies that attempt to de-Porky’s the genre by giving girls’ libidos a spin at the wheel for a change (joining titles like Blockers, Booksmart, The To Do List, and Never Have I Ever). Language Lessons is a much smaller film in scope & cultural impact, both of which were restricted by circumstances of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.  Filmed on laptops with an onscreen cast of two, Language Lessons finds Morales toying with the screenlife genre the same way she played around with the tropes of the teen sex comedy in Plan B.  There’s nothing flashy about her directorial style in either film, but she demonstrates a sharply tuned ear for comedic banter in both, which is especially evident in the film that is pure dialogue with no visual distractions from the script.

Mark Duplass stars as a nouveau riche Oakland hipster whose semi-famous husband buys him 100 Spanish language lessons as a surprise birthday gift.  His teacher is played by Morales herself, who’s much more protective of her personal life and is unsure how chummy she wants to be with a stranger she’ll be speaking to on a weekly basis for two solid years.  There are many barriers obstructing the mismatched pair’s path to a genuine friendship: their California/Costa Rica locations, their wealth/working class social statuses, their gringo/Latina cultural heritages, etc.  Gradually, though, the professional & transactional boundaries of their relationship break down and they become genuine, real-life friends – often through abrupt, shocking events in their lives off-screen.  The story is told entirely through Skype calls & video messages but doesn’t do anything remarkably unexpected with the screenlife format.  It’s just well written & performed enough to get by as a compelling one-on-one dialogue exchange, no visual embellishments necessary.  In comparison to other 2021 releases on similar topics, it doesn’t have quite as much to say about the transactional nature of modern online social life as Pvt Chat, but it’s a better attempt to remold dusty romcom tropes into a sincere story about friendship than Together Together.  Plan B is likely the 2021 Morales film that will be remembered & respected over time, but Language Lessons helps reinforce that her excellent dialogue & character work in that better-publicized debut was no fluke.

Sweeping Morales to the side for a second, Language Lessons does feel like a no-brainer Duplass Brothers project for the COVID era.  Not only was there a huge uptick in Duolingo users learning new languages in their idle time early in the pandemic (myself included, until Hurricane Ida power outages interrupted my momentum), but the safety protocols of COVID-era productions make for the exact kind of intimate indie dramas that the Duplasses cut their teeth producing.  At their best, Duplass productions are exciting reminders that just a couple people & a camera are more than enough resources to slap a decent movie together (as long as the script is strong).  Casting Mark as one of those two people in this instance makes Language Lessons feel like a wholesome counterpoint to Creep, a natural evolution of the exact kinds of movies they produce in normal circumstances anyway.  Morales is credited as the sole director of this production, but she shares the writing credit with Duplass, marking it as a true collaboration between them.  I’m not sure what she plans to accomplish as a filmmaker in the long term, but she had a great start in 2021 with two solidly entertaining, surprisingly political indie comedies released in the same calendar year.  Neither one is going to earn the level of attention the decades-established filmmakers Scott & Hamaguchi are enjoying but, again, she’s just getting started.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #152 of The Swampflix Podcast: Annette & 2021’s Honorable Mentions

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Welcome to Episode #152 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna continue our discussion of the Top Films of 2021 with some honorable mentions, starting with the anti-romantic rock opera Annette. Enjoy!

00:00 Welcome

03:15 Jack and Jill (2011)
07:30 Jack (1996)
11:03 Secrets and Lies (1996)
14:40 I’m Your Man (2021)

17:07 Annette (2021)

36:20 False Positive (2021)
56:40 Shiva Baby (2021)
1:13:13 The Map of Tiny Perfect Things (2021)

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

– The Podcast Crew

Swampflix’s Top 10 Films of 2021

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1. Titane — Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to Raw is a greasy, Cronenbergian nightmare we didn’t want to wake up from: a darkly comic body horror about a serial killer who’s impregnated by a Cadillac and finds herself hiding out with an aging firefighter, disguising herself amongst his cartoonishly macho employees.  It’s a nuclear gender meltdown with no clear sense to be made in its burnt-to-the-ground wreckage, finding unlikely refuge in the violence of pure-masc camaraderie & social ritual.  At times overwhelmingly explicit and unflinchingly fixated on its own gory violence, but also a heartwarming tale of unconditional love.

2. Pig — Not at all what you’d expect from a Nic Cage revenge thriller about a disgruntled chef’s John Wick-style mission to recover his stolen truffle pig.  An understated execution of a preposterous premise, refusing to behave either as a sober return-to-form showcase for the often-mocked actor or as fodder for his infinite supply of so-bad-its-good YouTube highlight reels.  It’s its own uniquely beautiful, tenderly macho thing, with more to say about the beauty of a thoughtfully prepared meal than the peculiar flavors of Cage’s screen presence.  Its heart is big, genuine, and forgiving, which is why it’s so moving despite its funhouse mirror reflection of the Portland culinary scene.

3. Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar — A delightful throwback to a very specific type of airheaded buddy comedy that rarely gets made anymore (think Romy & Michelle, A Night at the Roxbury, Dude Where’s My Car?, etc.), especially not with this level of grandeur in expensive set pieces and show-stopping musical numbers.  And it’s even rarer to see that comedic spotlight shone on middle-aged women: a demographic who don’t often get to enjoy the spotlight in anything, even goofy comedies.  We’re already hoping for sequels.

4. Saint Maud — A horrific illustration of how traditional stories of sainthood & martyrdom would play out through a modern, critical lens.  An intensely strange character study of a woman of newfound, uninformed, fragmented faith: a personal belief system she obsessively devotes herself to, holding others to the strictures of her singular ideology even though no one on Earth could possibly know what’s going on inside her mind.  And what’s in there is fantastical: orgasmic visions of God and the Devil, Heaven and Hell, atheist souls in desperate need of saving, and an attempted act of self-canonization that’s almost too harrowing to look at directly.

5. The Green Knight — A gritty, modernized illustration of an Arthurian quest — one that’s willing to critique the myths of yore, but not so much that the magic is lost.  The modern atmospheric horror treatment does wonders for the fantasy genre, apparently; it really sells the tension & dark magic. The moments of onscreen sorcery are dreamlike & metal as fuck, making for an unlikely new Christmas classic.

6. Bo Burnham: Inside — As a “comedy special” this pandemic-era video diary can be hit-or-miss joke by joke.  The songs are great, though, and by the time it fully devolves into panicked video art about Internet Age despair it’s undeniably substantial.  It perfectly captures the feeling of reality itself crumbling around us as we remain in isolation, unable to tell what’s real and what’s not in our increasingly fake modern world.

7. The French Dispatch — Film nerds often complain about how visually lazy studio comedies are, so here’s a movie packed with Hollywood Celebrities where every scene is overloaded with gorgeous visuals and hilarious jokes.  The anthology format affords Wes Anderson carte blanche to cram even more visual details & gags into the frame than usual, making for a texturally rich text.  If his previous films are beautifully decorated cakes, this one is a full banquet.

8. The Power of the Dog — Jane Campion’s unnerving take on the Western genre conveys a masterful command of tone & form.  And even if Westerns aren’t usually your thing, it’s still a relatable story about that one dipshit bully in your family whose sudden death would instantly improve the lives of everyone you know. 

9. Lapsis — A high-concept, low-budget satire about our near-future gig economy dystopia.  It doesn’t aim for the laugh-a-minute absurdism of Sorry to Bother You, but it’s maybe even more successful in pinpointing exactly how dispiriting it feels to live & work right now.  It’s also incredibly smart in identifying what kind of radical labor movements we need to build to topple the power imbalances workers suffer under, offering a solution instead of just dwelling on the problem.

10. Mandibles — Quentin Dupieux’s absurdist comedy about bumbling criminals who adopt & corrupt a gigantic housefly so it can join them in acts of petty theft.  A laugh-out-loud gem that’s smarter and more imaginative than the Dumb & Dumber-era Farrelly Brothers movies it recalls.  And yet, it’s somehow just as hopelessly, delightfully stupid.

Read Alli’s picks here.
Read Boomer’s picks here.
Read Brandon’s picks here.
Read Britnee’s picks here.
Read CC’s picks here.
See Hanna’s picks here.
Hear James’s picks here.

-The Swampflix Crew

Belle (2022)

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I went to see Mamoru Hosoda’s interpretation of Beauty and the Beast on the big screen solely because I recently enjoyed catching up with his 2006 debut (as a sole directorial voice) The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.  That introduction to Hosoda’s work should have primed me for the sci-fi spin the Japanese animator would put on that classic fairy-tale romance, but Belle was not at all the film I expected it to be.  Belle is a lot less about Beauty and the Beast and a lot more about The Internet than I was prepared for, which is fine by me, since I’m generally a huge sucker for Internet Age cinema anyway.  In this instance, Hosoda debates the merits & limitations of replacing in-the-flesh community with online engagement with the world at large.  He also uses the dreamscape visualizations of a pure cyberworld and the digi-humanoid avatars who populate it as an excuse to fill the screen with fun, excessively cute imagery for its own sake.  The result is a lot more exciting than a straight anime adaptation of Beauty and the Beast likely would have been, so it’s probably for the best that its supposed source material only accounts for roughly 15% of its sprawling plot.

The titular Belle is the online avatar for an anonymous, unpopular high school student who instantly becomes famous as a pop star after logging into the metaverse world of “U”.  Futuristic “bodysharing” technology allows U’s billions of users to be fully immersed in the senses & sensations of life online.  People still go to work & school in the physical world, but most social interaction & international celebrity is experienced in the digital one – like in The Congress, or like on Twitter.  Within U, Belle is the pop icon du jour, but she finds that she receives just as much cruelty from comment section trolls as she does adoration from her fans.  It’s still preferable to interacting with peers or adults in her real life, though, where her social anxiety and the very public history of her familial loss weighs heavily on her heart.  And at least as Belle she gets to wield her social capital for real world good: attempting to heal the broken heart of whatever similarly lonely teen is raging through U as The Beast.  Belle is both optimistic about and critical of what online community can achieve, and all the plot’s near-infinite twists & turns feel like a struggle to find a balance between that digital community and the one in “real” life.

I’m generally skeptical of modern anime’s need to supplement its traditional hand-drawn animation with CG backdrops & effects.  Hosoda gets away with it here by setting his coming-of-age sci-fi plot within a digital cyberworld, leaning into the uncanniness of the corner-cutting CG instead of excusing it for budgetary reasons.  Seeing it contrasted against a never-ending parade of trailers for shitty American cartoons in the theater certainly helped it stand out as an aesthetic object as well.  At least it’s constantly trying to look beautiful in every frame, as opposed to just seeking untapped IP sources that could be voiced by unenthused celebrites like Chris Pratt.  If anything, Belle is beautiful to the point of being sappy, but I cried at its emotional climax because I’m a total sap.  I can’t recall the last time an animated American film stirred up that emotional of a response in me purely through its visual artistry.  Maybe 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse?  And even that example has a much more limited imagination in straying from its already popular source material.

It’s probably for the best that Belle isn’t a direct Beauty and the Beast adaptation.  That French fairy tale already has a masterpiece adaptation in Jean Cocteau’s 1946 version, a beautifully animated adaptation in Disney’s 1991 version, and a horrific imbalance between flesh & CGI in Disney’s 2017 version.  Hosoda borrows a few images & relationship dynamics from that frequently trodden tale, but he mostly uses Belle as an excuse to reflect on what community, celebrity, privacy, and bodily identity are going to mean in our near digi-future as most of our interpersonal interactions are ported online.  I’ll always champion movies that sincerely, creatively engage with internet culture as a valuable cinematic subject.  Even so, this one is more beautiful to gaze at than most, and I’m almost curious enough about what the English-language versions of its pop songs sound like to rewatch it dubbed while it’s still playing in theaters.

-Brandon Ledet

The House (2022)

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Netflix has a habit of quietly dropping substantial, worthwhile art onto its streaming platform without any promotion or fanfare, but I’m not sure I’ve ever been as surprised by one of its dead quiet in-house releases as I was by The House.  The only reason this stop-motion anthology caught my eye is that one of its three segments was directed by the animators of This Magnificent Cake! (Emma De Swaef & Marc James Roels), and I recognized the visual trademarks of their work on the thumbnail poster.  Otherwise, I haven’t seen much official promotion or social media hoopla signaling the film’s uneventful release this month, at least not without looking for it directly.  And when I search for reviews & press releases covering The House, different sites appear to be in conflict about what it even is.  Netflix lists it as a one-time “special”.  IMDb & Rotten Tomatoes list it as a three-episode season of a supposedly ongoing “series” (likely because its three segments are credited to three different sets of animators).  Meanwhile, review sites like AV Club & RogerEbert.com are treating it as a standalone feature film.  That’s the category that registers as correct to me, given that it’s contained in one 97min presentation with no rigid episode breaks.  Still, I do think the general confusion about its format is indicative of Netflix’s constant, apathetic flood of #content with no attention paid to the promotion or artistic value of anything that’s not going to earn the company Oscars or Emmys.

A large part of the reason The House holds together as a standalone feature film is that all three of its segments were penned by a single screenwriter, Enda Walsh.  As the tones & visual styles shift between each segment’s separate animation teams (De Swaef & Roels, Niki Lindroth von Bahr, Paloma Baeza), Walsh maintains a strong narrative core throughout as the central authorial voice.  The House is a darkly funny stop-motion anthology about a cursed house’s journey through different eras of doomed owners.  Divided between the past, the present, and the future of the ornate structure, each set of its owners are working class rubes who are mesmerized by its opulence & grandeur, convinced that it will bring wealth & social status into their lives with just a little hard work & determination.  Each segment ends with the lesson-learned punchline of a centuries-old ghost story or fairy tale, with the owners’ obsession with the house inevitably absorbing them into its walls & bones.  It all amounts to a pretty relatable horror story about how “owning” a house basically means a house owns you – something that debt-saddled Millennials should be able to recognize as a real-world truth, anyway. 

As with all horror anthologies, The House varies in quality from segment to segment.  De Swaef & Roels open the film on its strongest, eeriest footing, while the hopeful note Baeza concludes with feels like its weakest step.  Between those bookends, there’s a great wealth of gorgeous animation, dark humor, and melancholy.  De Swaef & Roels have the most distinct visual style of the batch (working with the same textured felts & beading that distinguished This Magnificent Cake!), while von Bahr & Baeza both play with the taxidermy-in-motion style of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox.  Overall, it’s Walsh’s consistency in theme & tone that holds the film’s structure together as a convincing, satisfying whole.  I found this film just as visually & narratively impressive as any animation project I’ve seen in the past couple years, and yet its release has been so barebones that professional media critics can’t even decide whether it’s a Film at all.  Maybe I’ll be embarrassed next year when a Season 2 of The House is released on Netflix and my miscategorization is confirmed, but in all likelihood I wouldn’t even be aware a follow-up exists at all.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: My Winnipeg (2007)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (2007), a “docu-fantasia” homage to the director’s Canadian home-city Winnipeg.

00:00 Welcome

07:44 Together Together (2021)
09:50 The Dry (2021)
11:10 Flashback (2021)
14:10 Rare Beasts (2021)
16:50 The Matrix Resurrections (2021)
21:08 The French Dispatch (2021)
24:40 Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)
25:30 Plan B (2021)
27:44 Cryptozoo (2021)
30:03 The House (2022)
32:42 Belle (2022)

36:36 My Winnipeg (2007)

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

Kung-Fu Master! (1988)

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As I’m writing this review of a movie that’s nearly as old as I am, there are currently two prestigey Awards Season dramas from well-respected auteurs in theaters that dabble in age-gap “romances” between adults & teenagers.  In Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, a 25-year-old-woman disastrously indulges a semi-romantic friendship with a 15-year-old boy.  In Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, a 40-something conman actively grooms a small-town high schooler for potential employment in the pornography industry.  Surprisingly, it’s the former film that’s taking a lot of online heat for its supposedly dangerous amorality, while the latter is enjoying a quiet, uneventful theatrical run.  Maybe the difference is that Licorice Pizza‘s friendly quasi-romance is played with a nostalgic sentimentality, while Red Rocket more aggressively interrogates the moral shortcomings of its skeezy conman protagonist.  Maybe it’s merely a symptom of Licorice Pizza reaching a wider audience, so more people are around to be offended by it.  I’m going to make no attempts to pinpoint the discrepancy, as I’ve been constantly baffled by what movies have been singled out by the sharpened knives of Age Gap Discourse™ in recent years.  Ever since Call Me By Your Name was treated like a Cuties-level provocation, I’ve struggled to figure out why we’ve completely lost our ability for nuanced discussion of morally ambiguous relationships, especially in discussion of fictional age-gap romances.  One thing I do know, though, is that if it were released in this current hyperbolic environment, Agnes Varda’s Kung-Fu Master! would make these morally righteous kids’ heads explode.

Agnès Varda’s cinematic persona has been over-simplified into a kind of wholesome meme in recent years, but she made provocative, fiercely political art in her time.  Even so, Kung-Fu Master! is one of the toughest watches I’ve seen from her, although it appears to have been made as a tossed-off afterthought mid-production on her documentary Jane B.  Made as a collaboration with that documentary’s titular subject—actor & singer Jane Birkin—Kung-Fu Master! is a sentimental romance drama about a middle-aged woman who inexplicably falls in love with a teenage boy.  The small cast includes Varda & Birkin’s own children, including Varda’s son Matthieu Demy as the snotty object of Birkin’s desire and Birkin’s daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg as his classmate & her romantic rival.  It doesn’t sexualize the scrawny, boyish Demy in any way – outside maybe lingering on a few closed-mouth kisses with the adult Birkin.  Still, it also doesn’t make any excuses for his adult fling’s transgressions.  She is attracted to him specifically because he is underage, visibly fascinated by his juvenile ramblings about boyish nonsense like Dungeons & Dragons and the titular arcade game Kung-Fu Master!.  Falling in love with him ruins her social life, isolating her from her own children & other adults.  The movie doesn’t make any grand gestures to demonize her for her bizarre infatuation, though.  It instead delicately interrogates the absurdism of an adult being so transfixed with a child she has nothing in common with.  It’s a premise that would not survive a minute of modern Age Gap Discourse, at least not in the morally ambiguous way it’s handled here.

Personally, I think Kung-Fu Master! more than justifies exploring this specific moral transgression.  It’s a movie that’s more about the why of its morally squicky events than it is about depicting the what; the most we ever see of Birkin & Demy consummating their onscreen fling are a few chaste little kisses and an implied sleeping bag sleepover.  Meanwhile, the film is anchored to a grim contemporary context that’s presented with much harsher tonal severity.  Kung-Fu Master! is not so much about its romance itself as it is about escaping from the grim circumstances of the AIDS epidemic by retreating into the innocence of schoolyard crushes.  Divorced & painfully lonely, Birkin’s fantasy-prone protagonist longs for the flattery & safety of flirting with a teen boy instead of a sexually mature adult.  She swoons for the smallest, scrawniest boy in her daughter’s class of brutes specifically because he is “curious & vulnerable”.  Meanwhile, the video game arcades she trails him to are crowded by AIDS pamphlets & condom dispensers, constantly reminding her of the much more dangerous, complicated logistics of adult romance.  It isn’t until the mismatched couple isolate themselves for an island vacation that they escape the havoc AIDS has wreaked on big-city living, and they enjoy a moment of interpersonal peace.  It would be very easy to dismiss this film outright for the hands-off way it approaches the immoral romantic pairing at its core, and I wouldn’t fault anyone for being too squicked out by that predatory dynamic to appreciate its larger themes.  I found it to be a tough but moving watch in more ways than I expected, though, especially the further it digs into the reasons for Birkin’s immoral predation.

Curiously, Kung-Fu Master! opens with a scene that’s perfectly tailored for today’s social media climate.  The teenage Demy, dressed in a karate uniform, mimics the stilted video-game motions of his favorite arcade game by treating his city sidewalk as a sight-scrolling button-masher.  It’s a visual gag that’s been repeated endlessly in TikToks & Vines, where teens will mimic the nonsensical body language of GTA maniacs or idle NPCs.  I don’t know that modern social media discourse would have much breathing room for discussing anything that happens after that adorable intro, though, since Varda is entirely disinterested in damning her wayward protagonist for her crimes.  I understand the inherent sensitivity of a film tackling statutory rape in its core narrative, but I still think there’s something lost when art is reductively discussed as real-life morality parables rather than a safe, fictional space to explore complicated ideas.  Despite the obvious personal connection to Varda & Birkin’s own families (including the eventual loss of Varda’s husband & Demy’s father to AIDS complications), these are fictional characters whose onscreen behavior are not being endorsed by their real-life creators.  However, the harsh circumstances of the world they occupy is very real, and their moral transgressions within it are a troubling psychological response to that circumstance.  It’s deeply fucked up, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth grappling with.

-Brandon Ledet