comedy

Monkeybone (2001)

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There are two immediately obvious reasons why the special effects horror comedy Monkeybone is worth revisiting in 2022: its director and its star.  Henry Selick’s upcoming Wendell and Wild is his first feature film since 2009’s cult favorite Coraline, and it appears to be perfectly in rhythm with the stop-motion nightmares for kids that have defined his career.  Not only is Monkeybone Selick’s only live-action film to date, but it also happens to feature another beloved 90s figure who’s making a comeback this year: Brendan Fraser, who’s soon to launch a Best Actor awards campaign for Aronofsky’s The Whale. Fraser is in his wacky, live-action Looney Tunes mode in Monkeybone, as opposed to the dramatic vulnerability mode he brings to films like Gods & Monsters and, presumably, The Whale.  Trapped in a literal nightmare-world induced by a coma, Fraser’s comic book artist protagonist goes to war with his own cartoonish creations in a physical version of the Hot Topic mall-goth fantasyscapes Selick made his name on in A Nightmare Before Christmas.  It’s like a dispatch from an alternate universe where Tim Burton directed Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, one made even more fascinating by the fact that it flopped hard on its initial release – investing $75mil on a $7mil payoff.

To my shame, I don’t want to spend much time praising what Selick nor Fraser achieve in Monkeybone.  No, I want to praise Chris Kattan.  I outright groaned when Kattan’s name showed up in the opening credits, expecting the SNL veteran to be voicing the titular, annoying cartoon monkey sidekick character as an extension of his Mr. Peepers sketches.  It turns out that Kattan is totally innocent on that front; Monkeybone is voiced by John Turturro, the scamp. He’s also supposed to grate on the audience’s nerves, as evidenced by Fraser’s constant efforts to get him to shut up & go away every time he opens his obnoxious little mouth.  For his part, Kattan doesn’t show up until about an hour into the runtime, playing the corpse of a gymnast who died in a horrific accident.  Through convoluted cosmic circumstances that involve a deal with Death herself (played by Whoopi Goldberg, naturally), Fraser’s comatose cartoonist takes over the gymnast’s body mid-organ donation and flees the hospital into an unsuspecting world.  Kattan’s physical acting as an animated corpse with a broken neck and organs plopping out of its open body cavity had me absolutely howling with laughter.  It was the quickest I’ve ever turned around on a famous actor’s presence in a film, encountering Kattan’s name with dread, then finding his performance so deliriously funny that I almost threw up from the physical exertion. I suppose it’s also worth pointing out that another 2022-relevant actor played a major part of that movie-stealing gag: Better Call Saul’s Bob Odenkirk as the perplexed surgeon who trails behind the undead gymnast, continuing to harvest his organs as they fall to the ground behind him.  It’s sublimely silly.

As screechingly funny as Monkeybone gets during Kattan’s third-act zombie run and as wildly imaginative as Selick’s coma-induced Land of Nightmares set designs can be, its legacy mostly resonates with a what-could’ve-been melancholy.  Selick might have become a household name if this film didn’t flop so spectacularly. Or at least we wouldn’t get his work confused with Tim Burton’s quite so often.  Grimmer yet, Fraser, Kattan, and Rose McGowan (playing a humanoid-cat cocktail waitress, of course) have all gone public with stories of behind-the-scenes sexual abuse from major Hollywood players in the #MeToo era, haunting the film with questions of where their careers might have gone in a better world.  In the aftermath of those revelations, Fraser’s getting his late-career comeback, McGowan’s become a self-appointed spokesperson for the movement, and Kattan has continued to live in relative, semi-retired anonymity (give or take an affectionate shoutout in this summer’s Nope).  I don’t know that Kattan deserves the same red-carpet career revival as his co-stars, or if the actor would even be interested in a proper Kattanissance if it were an option.  I do know this, though: his performance is absolutely the highlight of Monkeybone, somehow outshining all of the cheeky monkeys, cyclops babies, Guernica bulls, and Nazi Mickey Mouse prison guards that Selick packs into the frame.  It would have been an interesting relic even without Kattan, creating an amusement park dark ride version of the kinds of grotesque cartoons that only aired on late-night Comedy Central in the 1990s.  Still, Kattan’s late-in-the-game intrusion is what pushes it over the line from interesting to essential.

-Brandon Ledet

Funny Pages (2022)

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In Funny Pages, a teenage comic-book obsessive shrugs off the comforts & privileges of their suburban upbringing to seek an authentic outsider-artist lifestyle in the city, jumpstarting their adult independence in the most juvenile ways possible.  If that premise recalls Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World, it’s not by mistake.  Funny Pages proudly wears its 2000s indie nostalgia as a grimy badge of dishonor, questioning why Ghost World and The Safdies can’t share the same marquee.  Its alt-comics slackerdom initially feels out of step with the modern world, but it turns out aimless teenage rebellion doesn’t change much from decade to decade.  Being a total brat who worships at the altar of Subversive Art at the expense of developing meaningful politics & relationships is a timeless rite of passage, and every generation needs their own gut-punch movie to mock that shithead behavior.

If Funny Pages updates the Ghost World template for the 2020s in any discernable way, it’s only in its Safdies-style casting choices.  This is a version of Ghost World where every character is as interesting to look at as Steve Buscemi, from Our Flag Means Death‘s Matthew Maher to Orange is the New Black‘s Constance Shulman to The Andy Milonakis Show‘s Andy Milonakis to a long list of one-of-a-kind screen presences you’ll never see in television or film again.  Most artists are difficult people, so there’s something immensely satisfying about seeing Real People on the screen again in this working-class art world context.  I say that with both full sincerity and full awareness that it makes me sound like the exact kind of dipshit suburbanite poser Funny Pages brutally satirizes.  In a movie about the boundaries between authenticity & stolen valor, it’s important to be on the right side of that dividing line.

Funny Pages is very funny, but it’s funny in a way that has you laughing while feeling like your skin is on fire.  It’s funny in the way that vintage alt-comics are funny, testing the extremes of good taste and then pushing past them to offend your delicate sensibilities.  It’s funny in the way that Ghost World is funny; it’s funny in a way that makes you feel like total shit.  Its effectiveness depends on your own personal embarrassment over being an edgelord provocateur as a teen, but it’s unlikely that anyone who didn’t go through that phase would stumble across this movie anyway.  There’s an endless supply of former Subversive Art brats to fill out the audience.  More are born & reformed every year, to the point where this movie would’ve been just as effective as a Blockbuster rental in 2002 as it is an art theater marquee-filler in 2022, something I can confirm from memory.

-Brandon Ledet

Terminal USA (1993)

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Three cheers for the American Genre Film Archive, who are doing the heroic work of preserving & distributing vintage outsider art in an age when practically every movie over a decade old is being snuffed out of existence, no matter how mainstream.  AGFA platforms works as essential as the coming-of-age riot grrrl sex comedy Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore and as disposable as the home-movie porn parody Bat Pussy, always with respect. My latest discovery in their catalog was, as always, a real doozy.  Terminal USA is less of a feature film than it is a Cali punk’s cracked plastic ash tray that was kicked under a mildewed couch, then given a quick spit shine after decades of nihilistic neglect.  It’s shot in a sound-stage suburban home seemingly constructed out of cardboard.  Every pronunciation of letters “s” & “t” tops out its rickety mics.  The cast aren’t acting so much as they’re talk-shouting while modeling history’s cheapest wigs.  Its cheapness is its greatest asset, a juvenile middle finger shoved in the face of the American public, who were outraged that tax money paid for its production and broadcast on PBS.  Personally, I can’t think of anything worthier of public funding than weirdo D.I.Y. art projects like this.  It would almost make me patriotic, if the film weren’t specifically about the moral, cultural rot in this nation’s arrhythmic heart.  We likely won’t ever see public funding for abrasive outsider cinema like Tongues Untied, Dottie Gets Spanked, or Terminal USA ever again, thanks to Reagan-era efforts to gut the National Endowment for the Arts.  At least niche distributors like AGFA are around to preserve the truly American art we got when the getting was good, though.  That history is always under threat of being erased from the record.

It’s worth talking broadly about mainstream America here, because Terminal USA makes such a mockery of the nation’s cultural decline, as indicated by the title.  While most satirical takes on the wounds festering just below suburbia’s manicured surface tend to come from white filmmakers (think John Waters, David Lynch, Tim Burton, etc.), Jon Moritsugu offers their lesser seen, lesser discussed Asian-American counterbalance, a grainy broadcast from the immigrant communities of the West Coast.  Moritsugu “stars” in dual roles as a snotty Cali mall punk who spits in the face of his parents’ desire to assimilate and as their better-behaved son, who fits more cleanly in the Asian-American stereotype of a model student with no social life.  It quickly turns out, of course, that the bookworm brother is the more depraved of the two, jacking off to Nazi muscle mags in his bedroom when he’s pretending to be studying math.  Their sister is a bratty cheerleader who’s desperate to sleep with the family lawyer.  Their mother is addicted to their bedridden grandfather’s prescription morphine; and the most depraved of all is their stand-up citizen father figure who’s oblivious to all his family’s barely concealed sins, frequently slipping into deranged monologues about Faith, purity, and The American Dream.  Despite all its gunshots, space aliens, and leaked porno tapes, there isn’t much of a plot to Terminal USA.  It’s a moldy family portrait, where every bizarre resident of a bland suburban home de-evolve into their worst possible selves over the course of one wretched night.  Oh yeah, and a young Gregg Turkington shows up as a local skinhead.

This is the kind of microbudget, limited-location production where the background graffiti artists get their own production design credit (attributed to Twist & Reminisce, in case you’re wondering).  Moritsugu & crew spruce up their sparse, flimsy sets with neon lights and the kinds of plastic gems you’d expect to see glued to a middle-schooler’s make-up kit.  It’s all so beautifully ugly.  The performances are just as preposterous & cheap; my biggest laugh (of many) was when Moritsugu’s dirtbag mall punk is shot in the kneecap and complains “This sucks!”.  His fingerprints & personality are highly visible all over every inch of the production, making him a true trash auteur.  And he’s accomplished a lot since he first started making 16mm punk films in the late 80s, cranking out attention-grabbing titles like Mod Fuck Explosion, Hippy Porn, and My Degeneration to consistently muted acclaim.  Terminal USA is a great introduction to his catalog, both as a snapshot of how he feels his work & persona fit in American pop culture and as proof that he’s a genuine provocateur, pissing off a lot of uptight conservatives with a seething hatred for The Arts.  I have no clue how easily accessible the rest of his titles are, but I doubt many have been as lovingly restored & presented as this AGFA scan of that trashteur calling card – a pristine image of a hideous nation.

-Brandon Ledet

Gigli (2003)

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So far, the most wholesome, unexpected pop culture news of the year has been the out-of-nowhere reboot of Bennifer.  In this age of division & strife, isn’t it nice that we can all gather around to celebrate two smoking hot millionaires who love boning each other?  JLo beaming in her Vegas wedding gown; a scruffy Battfleck taking dad-naps on yachts with his hand resting gracefully on his bride’s world-famous ass . . . Everything just feels right again.  It’s worth remembering, though, that even something as beautiful & pure as Bennifer was born the darkest, dankest of pop culture dungeons – just as every rose has its thorn and every cowboy sings his sad, sad song.  Jennifer Lopez & Ben Affleck first fell for each other on the set of the 2003 crime “comedy” Gigli, which lost roughly $70mil at the box office and was instantly reviled as one of the worst motion pictures of all time.  Starting off on such a sour note would have tanked most couples, but Bennifer soldiered on to collaborate on such beloved art projects as Kevin Smith’s Jersey Girl, JLo’s “Jenny from the Block” music video and, of course, an endless procession of tabloid headlines.  May they never separate again.

In case you’re as morbidly curious as I am, and you also happen to find a used DVD copy of Gigli at your local thrift store, please know that it is a total “DEAD DOVE, DO NOT EAT” proposition.  There is no room for critical revisionism here.  Gigli is just as bad as originally reported.  It’s worse than bad, actually.  It’s deeply embarrassing.  It’s an early-aughts hangover from the post-Tarantino 90s, the kind of wryly overwritten gangster comedies like Get Shorty & Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag that were convinced saying “fuck” every three words was all you needed to seem funny & cool.  Affleck appears in greased hair & loose bowling shirts as the titular Gigli (a name he hates hearing pronounced “jiggly” or “giggly”, which means you should definitely go for it).   He’s a low-level gangster assigned by his higher-ups to kidnap the brother of a federal prosecutor as political leverage before a mob-busting trial.  Only, the hostage in question is an intellectually disabled horndog who acts like a toddler with the world’s biggest boner for Baywatch.  Queasy hijinks ensue as the uptight, macho Affleck butts heads with the loveable goof in his care.  Then things get even queasier when he’s forced to co-parent with a fellow low-level gangster played by Lopez – a lesbian that Gigli is determined to convert through the seductive power of unchecked machismo (positioning the film as Elmore Leonard’s Chasing Amy).

The frustrating thing about Gigli is that the sexual chemistry between Lopez & Affleck is genuinely explosive.  The basic premise of a macho gangster wooing his way into a lesbian’s bed is boneheaded, but it actually leads to some interesting sexual power dynamics between the two leads.  The meathead argues his case by expounding upon the natural marvel of dicks & dildos in faux-philosophical monologue, and his lesbian adversary shoots back that “The mouth is the twin sister of the vagina” with equally mighty inanity, giving him lots to chew on (“gobble gobble”).  She warms herself up to the idea of sleeping with the galoot by softly forcefemming him, making him question his own gender identity – a kinky undercurrent made even more arousing by how rottenly into each other Bennifer obviously are out-of-character.  It’s too bad, then, that every other aspect of the movie is so deeply unpleasant and determined to self-sabotage.  Every time their unlikely, problematic romance heats up, it’s quickly deflated by the film’s catastrophic choice of comic relief: the neurodivergent tics of its only disabled character.  Their hostage raps to old-school hip-hop tracks in a “funny” voice; he shouts random catchphrases as if he has Tourette’s; and he just won’t stop slobbering over the boobs on Baywatch.  It’s not just unfunny; it’s cruel.  And it ruins any enjoyment that could possibly be found elsewhere in the picture.

If we’re rebooting Bennifer in the 2020s, maybe it’s time we also reboot Gigli as a straight-up erotic thriller.  Drop the ableist punchlines and just stick to JLo breaking down her new husband’s gender barriers in a steamy power struggle at the outskirts of the crime world.  The only problem there is that the erotic thriller version would definitely stick to the film’s original, discarded ending, in which the lesbian character was shot dead for her moral transgressions (because of course she was).  You know what?  Scratch that.  Let’s never speak of Gigli again.  The return of Bennifer has given us all a culture-wide goofball smile, and there’s really no reason to spoil that vibe with a return to its sour beginnings.  Unless, of course, you really need to see JLo model the low-rise jeans, exposed midriffs, and gigantic belt buckles of early-aughts fashion.  It’s at least good for that.

-Brandon Ledet

Everything is Terrible! The Movie (2009)

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YouTube launched in 2005.  The found-footage meme site Everything is Terrible! launched in 2007, as if in direct response to the way YouTube mutated the internet into a new, hideous beast.  I’m sure there was some equivalent to Everything is Terrible! on 90s college campuses, where VHS compilation tapes of weirdo pop culture ephemera were passed around & red-dubbed into fuzzed-out oblivion for dorm room stoner watch parties.  There’s just something precisely post-YouTube about the Everything is Terrible! evolution of that format, where contextless clips of work-out tapes, self-help babble, Christian children’s propaganda, corporate training videos, soft-core pornography, and Z-grade Hollywood schlock all co-mingle as if they were part of the same cursed continuum.  The Everything is Terrible! project started as a way for a small collective of Los Angeles hipsters to highlight & mock the disposable media most people glance over in thrift store bins without giving it a second’s thought.  Through the timing of its launch and its incredible longevity, it’s evolved into a vivid record of American pop culture brain rot in the internet era, where everything is contextless, meaningless, cheap and, well, terrible.

Just two years into their historic run as a meme-culture institution, Everything is Terrible! branched out into making rapid-fire, feature-length compilations of their blog’s “greatest hits”, starting with Everything is Terrible! The Movie in 2009.  Their first movie is a primitive prototype for the much better mixtapes the collective has dispatched in the years since, with nine features to their name as of 2022.  Later EIT! titles like The Great Satan & Doggie Woggiez, Poochie Woochiez are much more thematically focused & purposeful than their first catch-all mixtape – the former being a frantic biopic of the titular Satan and the latter being a dog-video themed “remake” of Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain.  Even the 2010 “sequel” to the first EIT! movie, 2 Everything 2 Terrible 2: Tokyo Drift, smooths out a lot of the original film’s rough spots, including moments of edgelord hipster irony that evoke suicide imagery and the word “retarded” as punching-down punchlines.  Everything is Terrible! The Movie is very much a product of an aughts-era internet where cruel hellsites like eBaum’s World, 4chan, and People of Walmart were cornerstone content farms, an era the site has thankfully outlived.

As much as I struggled with the cruelty & aimlessness of the first Everything is Terrible! movie, it’s still impressive as an experiment in what an EIT! movie would even be, working with no previous blueprint to mimic or adjust.  Structurally (and sarcastically), it echoes the basic structure of a Real Movie by starting with direct-to-camera character intros (pulled mostly from celebrities like Bob Saget, Kathy Griffith, and Angela Lansbury introducing their self-help and workout tapes). It concludes with action set pieces from direct-to-video schlock for its climax, followed by flashback clips from earlier in the mix while a sentimental jingle drones on the soundtrack.  There’s also some early moodsetting that contextualize the medium the film is playing around with, including clips that explain how connections are made in a developing toddler’s brain and what, exactly, is a mixtape CD.  Everything in-between those guiding signposts is a chaotic mess, though, a broadcast from a post-YouTube world where images of Evangelical abstinence training, child abduction scaremongering, Angela Lansbury masturbating, toupee infomercials, magician flirting tips, and 80s comic Sinbad dressed up as a condom all mix together as if they’re fibers of the same ragged cloth.  It’s a little overwhelming, a little terrifying, and often very funny – the basic internet experience.

I watched Everything is Terrible! The Movie on a sun-faded laptop screen while loitering in a hotel lobby with a $3 Starbucks order and an hour to kill.  My other entertainment option was to absent-mindedly scroll through my Twitter feed, where a jarring, algorithmic mix of bad takes, solid jokes, celebrity gaffs, thirst traps, absurdist home videos, and protest footage would’ve given me roughly the same psychic experience as this ancient internet relic from 2009.  One of the smartest clips included in the film is a “What is the internet?” explainer where middle-aged women complain that they’re confused about “www.this” and “www.that”, framing the internet as a mystical nowhere space that cannot be fully understood.  They’re right.  Internet communication & culture is a menacing puzzle that cannot be fully understood, let alone explained.  The Everything is Terrible! project has done a great job of capturing that mystical menace over the years, ironically by dragging pre-internet video clips into a post-YouTube world.  Everything is Terrible! The Movie was an interesting early attempt to translate that project into proper cinema, and they’ve since only achieved greater & greater things in that new medium.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #164: The Great Dictator (1940) & Charlie Chaplin

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Welcome to Episode #164 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss four classic comedies directed by Charlie Chaplin, starting with the anti-fascist satire The Great Dictator (1940).

00:00 Welcome

00:57 Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
05:25 Last Night in Soho (2021)
09:45 Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
13:05 Studio 666 (2022)

18:50 The Great Dictator (1940)
38:30 City Lights (1931)
47:00 Modern Times (1936)
1:01:45 Monsieur Verdoux (1947)

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew

Flux Gourmet (2022)

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David Cronenberg isn’t the only auteur fetishist who’s recently revisited his early work to construct a new fantasy world overrun by grotesque performance art.  I didn’t have time to catch Crimes of the Future opening weekend because I spent those four days submerged in the lower-budget, lower-profile offerings of The Overlook Film Festival at Canal Place.  From the vantage point of that Overlook microcosm, the premise & circumstances of Peter Strickland’s Flux Gourmet appeared eerily in sync with what I’d been reading about the new Cronenberg.  Strickland obviously doesn’t have as deep nor as prestigious of a catalog as Cronenberg’s (yet!), but there’s still a clear, circular career arc to his latest bedchamber dispatch.  Flux Gourmet feels like Strickland revising the giallo-tinged Berberian Sound Studio to bring it up to speed with the more free-flowing, one-of-a-kind absurdism he’s achieved in the decade since.  The result is not quite as silly as In Fabric nor as sensual as The Duke of Burgundy, but it hits a nice sweet spot in-between, just as Crimes of the Future reportedly lands midway between the sublime body-horror provocations that made Cronenberg famous and his late-career philosophic cold showers.

Strickland’s preposterous performance art fantasy world is enclosed in an artists’ colony that patronizes “culinary collectives” & “sonic caterers.”  Its current artists in residence are an avant-garde noise band that mic & distort routine, mundane cooking processes for a rapturous audience of pretentious art snobs.  Their work recontextualizes the sounds of food prep as both a difficult-listening version of music and as a low-key form of witchcraft, recalling the fuzzy borders between foley work, madness, and divine transcendence in Berberian Sound Studio.  Despite their inscrutability as artists, they suffer every dipshit rockstar cliché you’d expect from broader, more accessible comedies like Airheads, This is Spinal Tap, and That Thing You Do. The film essentially gives the witchy performance art collective of Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria the VH1 Behind the Music treatment, with petty squabbles over what to name the band, how much creative input the frontwoman allows the rest of the “collective,” and what they’re going to eat on tour overpowering the more supernatural goings on at the art institute. 

If Strickland’s kinky, insular phantasmagoria has anything to say about the real world outside its walls, it’s in the way it satirizes the creative process of all commercial art, no matter how fringe or intellectual.  Every character at the culinary art colony has a direct equivalent in the production of music, movies, and fine art.  Gwendoline Christie funds the collective’s work, limiting their creative freedom with producer meddling & studio boardroom notes just to flex her authority.  Longtime Strickland muse Fatma Mohamed plays the hothead bandleader, enraged by every one of her collaborators’ minor creative suggestions, especially Christie’s.  The list goes on from there: Asa Butterfield as a go-with-the-flow bandmate who tiptoes around his hot-tempered bosses; In Fabric’s Richard Bremmer as an insufferable academic who intellectualizes everything the band accomplishes without contributing anything to the project; a faceless audience who shows their appreciation for the band’s performances in writhing backstage orgies; etc.   My personal favorite is, of course, Makis Papadimitriou as a quietly suffering journalist who attempts to remain objective & separate from the work but gets sucked into the absurd drama of the band’s creative process anyway.  Not only is Strickland more appreciative of the journalist’s significance in the artistic ecosystem than most art-world satires normally are, but he also uses the writer as a constant fart-joke delivery system in a way that tempers the film’s potential for pretension.

I don’t know that Flux Gourmet’s art-world parody has as much to say about the creative process as The Duke of Burgundy has to say about romantic power dynamics or In Fabric has to say about fetishistic obsession.  I’m also at the point with Strickland that I don’t need him to prove his greatness with profound statements or unique observations about the world outside his head.  The nail-salon talons & over-the-top Euro fashions of his visual aesthetic remain a constant delight, as does his naughty schoolboy sense of humor.  I wouldn’t recommend Flux Gourmet as Baby’s First Strickland, just as I imagine Crimes of the Future wouldn’t be as valuable of a Cronenberg gateway as bona fide classics like Videodrome, Dead Ringers, Crash, and eXistenZ.  I guess if there’s any way Strickland has the one-up in that comparison, it’s that there’s a lot less homework you’d have to catch up with to understand his whole deal, so Flux Gourmet is an easily digestible delicacy for those with only a slightly advanced palate.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #161: Fatal Instinct (1993) & Genre Spoofs

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Welcome to Episode #161 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of genre spoofs, starting with Carl Reiner’s erotic thriller send-up Fatal Instinct (1993).

00:00 Welcome

02:10 Inland Empire (2006)
06:50 The Northman (2022) & Men (2022)
18:45 Pleasure (2022)

24:30 Fatal Instinct (1993)
49:25 This is Spinal Tap (1984)
1:04:00 The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991)
1:19:05 Black Dynamite (2009)

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2022)

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One of the stranger stories out of this year’s Cannes Film Festival was the selection of its opener.  Opening Cannes isn’t necessarily a marker of prestige, since the honor has been bestowed upon such disposable titles as The Da Vinci Code, Cafe Society, The Dead Don’t Die, and Grace of Monaco in the past.  Still, I was amused to hear that this year’s opener was a robustly budgeted French remake of the low-fi Japanese crowd-pleaser One Cut of the Dead.  Final Cut was directed by Michel Hazanavicius, who’s been coasting for a full decade on the notoriety of winning a Best Director Oscar for The Artist.  Otherwise, it appears to be the exact kind of anonymous mainstream comedy that never gets exported outside France, so that Americans assume most of the country’s cinematic output is its small crop of high-brown art films.  Attempting to recapture the magic of One Cut of the Dead is a fool’s mission in any context, but there’s something especially absurd about an establishment filmmaker remaking it with real studio money and then getting the red-carpet treatment at the world’s most distinguished film festival.

One of the reasons it’s foolish for Hazanavicius to attempt replicating One Cut of the Dead‘s niche, low-budget magic is that One Cut‘s director Shinichiro Ueda has already championed his chosen successor.  Ueda has proudly boosted the profile of the low-budget sci-fi one-shotter Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes as One Cut of the Dead‘s adorable kid sister, lifting it out of the festival circuit into international distribution.  If it weren’t for that profile boost, the comparison wouldn’t do Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes many favors.  While One Cut of the Dead transcends its low-budget zombie comedy medium to become a film about the joys of all low-budget filmmaking, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes has a lot less to say about the world outside its single-location microcosm.  It’s an impressive feat in circular-logic thought exercises and microbudget filmmaking, though, and it’s easy to see why Ueda was won over by its surface-level charms as One Cut‘s spiritual successor.  Selling the rights for the Final Cut remake was smart, but it’s nice to see Ueda’s still siding with D.I.Y. art projects on the other side of that paycheck.

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes splits its 70min runtime between two rooms in the same cramped building: a ground-level cafe that’s closing for the evening and one of its baristas’ upstairs apartment.  In a self-creating paradox, the barista discovers that his computer monitor can see two minutes into the future through a lagging stream of the cafe’s security camera.  His future-self informs present-him of this two-minute loop, an anomaly that’s quickly discovered by a growing list of intervening friends who push past his fear & bafflement to test the limits of what the loop can do.  It turns out that two-minute future vision is essentially useless, and the more our bumbling time criminals stretch the boundaries of that frustratingly brief timeframe the more they trap themselves in a self-perpetuating loop of small-scale fate.  There’s some handwringing about the implications of contradicting the (very near) future they’ve already seen play out on the monitors, but for the most part the fun in the film is in watching them fail to expand the implications of this strange, isolated event into something bigger & more significant.

Of course, the only reason Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes has earned any comparisons to One Cut of the Dead is that both films are structured as one-long-takes, testing the limitations of that gimmick the same way Beyond‘s knuckleheads test the limitations of the two-minute time loop.  In One Cut, the one-shot gimmick is a wonderfully concise summation of all the various restrictions of low-budget film production.  Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is a lot less concerned about the authenticity of the gimmick, sloppily “hiding” its cuts in closeups on doors, clothes, and shadows.  It’s a smart way to draw attention as a D.I.Y. production filmed on smartphones, but I got the sense that maintaining the real-time progression of the time-loop experiments was more important than maintaining the illusion of a one-shot production.  In most one-shotters, the intended effect is to prompt the audience to ask, “How did they do that?” in stunned wonder.  By contrast, these two films make it blatantly clear how they accomplished the feat. One Cut proudly highlights its production mistakes as part of its inherent charm, and Beyond doesn’t waste much energy at all on hiding the creases between its shots.  Its time-loop conundrums are its main focus, so that its greatest strengths are in its writing instead of its framing.

In summation, One Cut of the Dead is a modern cult favorite, Beyond the Infinite Minutes is its adorable faint echo, and Final Cut is its flimsy plastic substitute.  It’s hilarious to see which one got the red-carpet rollout at Cannes, even if there is plenty precedent for that exact kind of cornball programming at the fest.

-Brandon Ledet

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Do you remember the great Bacon Craze of the early 2010s, when it was considered hilarious to burden your friends with bacon-scented candles and bacon-flavored chewing gum as novelty gifts?  Do you remember further back, in the mid-aughts, when you could buy “Vote for Pedro” t-shirts at practically any gas station?  How about “Mr. T in Your Pocket” talking keychains?  “Git-R-Done” trucker hats?  Big Mouth Billy Bass? 

Imagine someone handing you one of these ancient totems and expecting a full-bellied laugh in return, as if it were the darndest thing you’ve never seen.  The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a decade-old Nicolas Cage meme with nothing novel to say about his unique talents or celebrity.  It’s a faint but direct echo of the “Not the bees!” YouTube clip that kickstarted the massively talented actor’s meme era in the first place.  It offers nothing that Andy Samberg didn’t already accomplish with his “Get in the Cage” segments on SNL an entire decade ago, including bringing in Nicolas Cage as himself to emphasize that he’s in on the bit.  It might as well be an I Can Has Cheezburger? coffee table book or Chuck Norris Facts: The Movie; it is that outdated, that useless.

Nicolas Cage stars as two versions of himself: a has-been who can’t land a decent role & an imaginary-friend version of his younger, more successful self that occasionally swoops in for pep talks. Admittedly, it’s fun to watch these two Nic Cages make out in one of the only instant-classic Cagian stunts anyone will remember from this film after the next few months (thanks to its potential for “Not the bees!” style memeage).  The problem is that only one of those versions of Nic Cage ever existed in the real world: the imaginary one. He was a genuine Hollywood movie star in his youth; that is undeniable. It’s the positioning of the “real”, modern Nic Cage as a total loser who hasn’t been doing anything worthy of his talents since the action-blockbuster heyday of movies like Face/Off, The Rock, and Con Air that rings embarrassingly false.  While a lot of dismissive cynics consider Cage more meme than actor at this point, anyone who’s regularly engaging with his output knows he’s in his full-on auteur period, putting in consistently great, idiosyncratic work for smaller, more niche audiences that are always happy to see him. 

Pedro Pascal plays a true believer, a proud member of that niche audience who challenges Cage’s total-loser narrative.  His claim that “Mandy is a masterpiece” is the only acknowledgement that the Nicolas Cage brand is still going strong.  Most of the other references to his acting work are stuck in his 80s & 90s heyday, citing Guarding Tess & Captain Corelli’s Mandolin as Nic Cage deep cuts.  Pascal’s enthusiasm for Cage’s talents makes the film mildly affable, especially as Cage gradually bonds with his #1 fan as a genuine, cherished friend.  There’s a plot in which the real-life Nic Cage gets recruited by the CIA for a covert spy mission on Pascal’s remote island compound (again, covering territory already run into the ground by Samberg on Weekend Update), but the movie’s at its sweetest & most recommendable when it focuses on the two dudes just being good buds, talking about movies & enjoying each other’s company.  It’s too bad the premise is so outdated and the jokes are such a constant eyeroll.  When it’s not commenting on Cage’s memeability or lost celebrity, it’s halfway cute.

I will credit The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent with this: it got me thinking about Nic Cage’s Hollywood celebrity heyday in a way I haven’t engaged with much in recent years.  There was once a time when he could play Normal Guys in films like The Family Man & It Could Happen to You without raising an eyebrow.  That era has decisively come to an end and is likely worth revisiting, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been doing anything worthwhile in recent years.  Nicolas Cage is not a loser.  He is not a stale, stagnant meme.  He is our best working actor, and he gets more fascinating every year.  I likely should have looked to Keith Phipps’s new book Age of Cage for a more nuanced summation of where Cage is currently at (and where he’s already been) instead of expecting that kind of up-to-date critical analysis from a best-bros comedy about the CIA.  Still, it’s hard to laugh at a joke you’ve already heard a thousand times before, especially when the setup to the punchlines is no longer anchored to the modern world.

-Brandon Ledet