comedy

The Seven Year Itch (1955)

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I’m not convinced the effect was intentional from anyone involved, but the Big Studio comedy classic The Seven Year Itch might be one of the few rare examples of a movie that was saved by the Hays Code, rather than stifled by it. Adapted for the screen by comedy legend Billy Wilder from a mildly raunchy stage play, The Seven Year Itch suffered many negotiations & revisions at the behest of the overly moralistic Hays Code & the overly protective playwright of its source material. As is usual with risqué comedies of its era, this revision process dulled much of its sex humor, or at least obscured it behind a veil of winking insinuations. It also, unintentionally, made for a much more fascinating picture in the process by abstracting its POV. The original version of The Seven Year Itch features the inner monologues of a pair of upstairs & downstairs neighbors in an apartment complex – offering the POV of a young single woman & older married man in the middle of an adulterous sexual tryst. Hays Code censorship & other production restrictions removed the woman’s POV from that dynamic, as well as the extramarital sex the pair indulged in. You would think that these changes would enhance the film’s sexist, male chauvinist POV, but it curiously has the exact opposite effect. Through censorship & writing process bickering, The Seven Year Itch transformed into something strangely compelling, if not outright surreal.

The male chauvinist protagonist in question is played by Tom Ewell, perhaps the most milquetoast screen presence of all time. Experiencing a midlife crisis at the exact seven-year mark when married couples supposedly tend to cheat in boredom, he finds himself alone in NYC for the summer. While their wives & children escape to cool off on lakeside vacations, businessmen husbands stay behind in the hot city ostensibly to continue their work, but actually use the opportunity to drink, cheat, and let loose. As explained in a constant torrent of soliloquies to the audience, our protagonist Richard believes himself to be above that boorish, animalistic behavior. It’s only that his macho virility is too irresistible to women, so it’s the young seductresses’ fault that he gets into trouble as a wayward husband, not his own. Just looking at the mild-mannered, middle-aged dolt, we know these delusions of macho grandeur to be far beyond the realm of reality. However, there’s an initial unease in not knowing whether we’re meant to be sympathetic to his complaints that marriage & the modern world are what’s holding back his dominant alpha male energy, rather than him just being an unremarkable specimen of a middle-aged sap. As his delusions & paranoid fantasies escalate, though, it becomes crystal clear that we’re not watching the justified political rants of the Modern American Male stifled by his environment, but rather the ravings of a total lunatic who has entirely detached from reality. He might as well be bloviating into a bullhorn from a street corner in a tinfoil hat rather than working in a brick & mortar office building.

There are no bounds to Richard’s paranoid fantasies. Any vague recollection he has of being alone with a woman other than his wife is distorted into their being violent temptresses who cannot resist his “tremendous personal magnetism.” When his wife misses a phone call while on vacation, he becomes panicked that she’s necking with another married man on a romantic hayride. When seen talking to another woman while his wife is away, he imagines the exact gossip trail that would lead the intel back to her, convinced that she instantaneously knows of his planed infidelity. These fantasies are increasingly ludicrous & far-fetched, making Richard the most blatantly unreliable narrator that you can imagine, one who compulsively feels the need to narrate every thought that comes to his delusional mind. How are we to trust his version of events, then, when he begins an inevitable romantic affair with his upstairs neighbor, who has only moved in when he was left to his own devices by his family & whom has been seen by no other reliable source in the film? Marilyn Monroe’s portrayal of the ditzy, naive blonde upstairs who is entirely clueless to the sexual desires of every man around her (or so she pretends) is such an exaggerated, draggy version of femininity it can only be the physical manifestation of a man’s fantasy-bimbo. And, since Richard is the most fantasy-prone man on the planet, he’s the exact kind who could imagine an entire person into existence if left alone for too long with too many bottles of Scotch. Yes, by the time Richard says the name “Marilyn Monroe” aloud in the script it becomes clear that his upstairs neighbor isn’t real at all, only a Fight Club-style figment of a milquetoast man’s delusional imagination.

This reading of The Seven Year Itch, the one where Marilyn Monroe’s upstairs temptress is nothing but a male fantasy, would not be possible without Hays Code intervention. The Hays Code’s regulations drop the neighbor’s own inner monologues and the suggestion that the affair is consummated with actual sex, leaving only a nameless blonde knockout who has no inner life & no clue what effect her high-femme vava-voom presence has on the men who drool over her. Monroe, of course, is iconic casting for this role; the scene where she wrestles with the skirt of her white dress over a gusty subway grate is as iconic of a Studio Era image as any dorm room poster of Breakfast at Tiffany’s or The Wizard of Oz or whatever image you can conjure. Before it becomes clear that Richard is a raving lunatic, her breathy temptress presence is the film’s only saving grace. All the swanky music, lush De Luxe color, Saul Bass animation, and cheeky sex humor are in service of a nastily chauvinist view of the world where wives are disciplinarian shrews and all other women are gateways to sin, so that The Seven Year Itch’s surface pleasures only sour & rot in the context of the overall tone. Monroe is a (moaning) breath of fresh air in that idiotic macho worldview, lightening up the mood with an exaggerated femme-drag screen presence in a deliciously subversive way. The movie eventually catches up with her, dropping its initial sympathy with its pathetic protagonist’s “Woe is the modern man” POV to become a character study for a total loser & a complete psychopath. The Seven Year Itch is less a swanky sex comedy than it is the ravings of man driven mad by the social pressures of toxic masculinity, as well as a testament to the unintended virtues of Hay’s Code censorship.

-Brandon Ledet

Support the Girls (2018)

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There aren’t many moments of tranquil beauty to be found in Support the Girls, because there isn’t much peace or beauty to be found in the service industry environment it depicts. The film is mostly relegated to the greyed-out concrete of Texan strip malls & interstate highways. When Regina Hall’s stressed-out restaurant manager finds a rare moment of Zen in the back alley behind her workplace, it manifests as a single migrant bird & a few scraggly bushes, a small glimpse of Nature that’s mostly drowned out by an endless sea of concrete & the constant background hum of passing cars. Mostly detailing a single disastrous day in the service industry, the stakes of the film are relatively small, but director Andrew Bujalski paints an impressively bleak picture anyway just by emphasizing the ugly blandness of the environment. There’s no need to push for more. The punishing, unnatural dullness of restaurant work in suburban Texas is enough dramatic tension to make Support the Girls a devastating watch, and to offer vital counterbalance to the film’s anguished sense of forced merriment.

It’s through that dwelling on punishing mediocrity that Support the Girls offers a damning vision of corporate world capitalism in a Texas-sized microcosm. The mundane details of its cookie-cutter service industry environment gave me vivid, unwanted flashbacks to working low-level back-of-the-house jobs at corporate restaurants I’d never personally patron, mostly to put myself through college. There’s an added layer of indignity here as the business in question is a “breastaurant,” which transforms waiting tables into a light form of sex work. Support the Girls isn’t quite the prostitution-as-microcosm-capitalism political screed that Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls is, but it’s not far off either. The wait staff of the fictional Double Whammies sports bar (a low-level Hooters knockoff) not only live in the grimmest version of concrete Texas mundanity; they also have to sexually stroke the egos of their macho, cheap beer-swilling customers. They’re part waitress, part stripper – which often blurs the boundaries of acceptable behavior from their patrons. Like all restaurant work, the only thing that gets them through is a sense of community as a crew, but capitalism has a way of souring & weaponizing even that consolation against them.

Regina Hall’s physically & emotionally overworked breastaurant manager is our window into this grim world. She’s both a leader & a healer for the girls on her staff and, against her best intentions, a tool of the enemy. Hall often finds herself emphasizing that “We are a family” to her employees, then using that sense of camaraderie & familial obligation to subtly apply pressure for them to do things beyond their normal expected workload, just to survive the day. As much as the team can come together for a shared hatred of the breastaurant’s racist, childish owner, Hall often becomes an extension of his awful will, to no one else’s gain. It’s the greatest tragedy of the film, as she means to do well by her girls, but the hierarchy is set up to make that impossible. The harshly bright lighting & sardonic humor of Support the Girls sets expectations for a Waiting-style broad comedy about the archetypal caricatures of the service industry, but Bujalski delivers something more subtly political & inherently tragic: a character study of a well-meaning capitalist victim who unwittingly becomes a tool for their own exploitation, with no alternative path.

There are plenty of broad service industry caricatures swarming around Regina Hall in this picture to distract from its true, grim nature. Haley Lu Richardson’s flighty firecracker with bottomless Employee of the Month energy particularly feels like she stumbled in from the set of an entirely different kind of comedy. The tragedy of Regina Hall’s goodwill being perverted as a tool for exploitation is much more difficult to detect than those flashes of broad humor. You can easily see it in the oppressive blandness of her environment, though. Wide shots frequently expand the frame just to capture the soul-crushing ugliness of her world: electrical outlets, stained drywall, interstate loops—an endless, monochromatic concrete Hell. There are plenty of momentary laughs to be found inside this bleak Texan prison, but being sentenced to a life within these confines ultimately feels joyless & without hope—an honest depiction of life-long restaurant work.

-Brandon Ledet

The Square (2017)

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Last year when I was putting together my list for the Best of 2017, I lamented that my roommate’s phone dying prevented us from seeing The Square during its all-too-brief run in Austin. While searching for something to watch this past weekend, we discovered that it’s finally found its way to Hulu, and we were overjoyed! Although there was some hemming and hawing about its 151 minute run time (especially as we had watched the 141 minute Bad Times at the El Royale earlier that same day), this was definitely worth the wait.

Christian (Claes Bang) is the divorced curator of the X-Royal modern art museum in Stockholm, which hosts such exhibits as a room full of identical piles of gravel, stacks of commonplace objects, an exhibit in which people must declare through the push of a button whether they trust other people or not (we do not see what happens if you admit you don’t, but entrants who go through the “I trust others” door must leave their phones and wallets in an open area), and the newest exhibit, Lola Arias’s titular “The Square.” Arias’s piece consists of a lighted square, four meters on each side, that is “a sanctuary of trust and caring” and within which “we all share equal rights and obligations.” After he is pickpocketed and loses his phone and wallet (and perhaps his cufflinks) as part of a con by a few people in a public space, Christian’s barely-together life falls apart completely. He sleeps with Anne (Elisabeth Moss), a slightly deranged American art journalist who he previously met professionally and runs into again later at a party, and their next interaction goes . . . poorly. His plan to retrieve his stolen belongings, encouraged by his assistant Michael (Christopher Læssø), involves tracking his GPS to an apartment building and stuffing all of the mailboxes in the complex with a threatening note. He succeeds, but not without affecting an innocent boy (Elijandro Edouard) whose parents assume the letter is about their son and punish him severely; the boy then demands Christian apologize and clarify the situation, or he will “make chaos” for the curator. His inattentiveness to the work of two young PR men (Daniel Hallberg and Martin Sööder) to increase the public’s interest in “The Square” results in their creation of a viral marketing attempt that manages to upset just about every person in Sweden; his daughters are constantly fighting; and to top it all off, one of the cleaners manages to vacuum up part of the gravel pile exhibit, meaning that the piles are no longer identical.

There’s a lot going on in this film, which functions more as a series of vignettes than as a complete whole, but it manages to be stronger than merely the sum of its parts, and even with two and a half hours of screen time, there are still answers left unexplored – for instance, if you’re hoping for an explanation of the bonobo that appears in the trailer, you’re still going to be unclear by the time that the credits roll (per the IMDb trivia page, director Ruben Östlund said in Cannes, “Anything can happen in a movie when suddenly a monkey appears in an apartment. Everything should have a monkey in it.”). In the U.S., when a film or TV show mocks the world of modern art, it’s usually mean-spirited and lacking in humor or depth, focusing on the apparent ridiculousness of the artistic sphere and their arch removal from the earthy, grounded nature of “normal” folk (see: any episode of King of the Hill in which Bobby becomes temporarily obsessed with anything other than clowning). In The Square, the mockery is still present, but less abrasively, as epitomized in the early, tone-setting scene in which Christian asks Anne if putting her purse in the museum would make it art. She waits for him to continue from what appears to be a rhetorical question, until the silence between them grows deafening.

Instead, The Square mocks not the artifice of haute culture and instead revels in needling the shallowness of artistic expression when self-important artists attempt to make broad social commentary while lacking any real depth of insight. In the introduction of the concept of “The Square” to the museum’s wealthy patrons, Christian’s assistant thanks two donors for their contribution of fifty million kroner (about 5.85 million USD); following this, Christian launches into a practiced speech before a minor interruption offers him the opportunity to make an “impromptu” request to go off-script and begin again, a specific strategy to appear more personable and relatable, and which we have already seen him rehearse in the previous scene. “Lola Arias compares ‘The Square’ to a pedestrian crossing,” he says. “In a pedestrian crossing, drivers are to look out for pedestrians. In a similar way, there is a contract implied by ‘The Square,’ to look out for each other. We help each other. If you enter this space and ask for help, anyone passing by is obligated to help you. ‘I’m hungry. Can you help me with a meal?'” This comes after several scenes in which Christian himself expresses reticence to leave his Tesla while visiting a poor neighborhood (you can tell because the building he enters has flickering lights in the hallway on every single floor), and in which requests from those experiencing homelessness are ignored by the characters we have been following. Immediately after this monologue, Christian yields the floor to the museum’s chef, who attempts to describe the meal that has been prepared for the patrons in attendance but has to shout at them in order to finish describing the menu as the horde ignores his description as they herd themselves to the dining room; this contrasts with Christian’s interaction with a homeless woman who asks specifically that he buy her a sandwich with no onions. The rich, despite being financially able to meet all of their needs until the end of their lives, are oblivious to the food they plan to shovel into their mouths; the poor, for whom every meal could be the last one for a while, have sincere desires that they may find difficult to explicate, and any desires that are specific are met with derision. Christian buys the sandwich, but throws it at the woman and says that she can pick out the onions herself, treating her with socially and economically enforced disdain, despite his pretensions toward equality that he espouses in the art that he curates. This motif repeats itself throughout the film: Christian the curator embraces the importance of charitable humanity and the need to support the poor and the weak; Christian the person ignores the plight of people around him, writes a threatening letter to an entire apartment complex with reckless abandon, refuses to apologize to a child for the havoc in the boy’s personal life for which he is directly responsible, and when he does try to make things right, it’s both too little and too late.

European art films also tend to highlight the beauty of centuries-old architecture and frame their outdoor sequences in such a way that captures their beauty, both that which is pristine and that which is distressed in an attractively antique way. The Square is instead comprised of harsh, gray, buildings that seem born out of the era of architectural brutalism. The museum itself consists of the former palace of the Swedish monarchy, but more often than not we see 711 convenience stores tucked away under concrete blocks or the aforementioned apartment building with its endlessly flickering lights. We see the sumptuous world of the rich more rarely, like in the dinner scene featuring Oleg’s performance (which gets out of hand) or in Christian’s apartment, which is haunted by the shouting of the boy he has wronged and his own screaming following a tantrum at his daughters. It’s no surprise that, near the film’s climax, Christian finds himself digging through the trash for something that he desperately needs, and that this is the moment where he finally realizes that he has responsibilities to make reparations to the people he has harmed.

This all makes the film appear more somber than it really is. It is at turns deeply discomfiting, hilarious, and charming. And now that it’s on Hulu, you can check it out. Please do.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

L’Age d’Or (1930)

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The short-form collaboration between surrealist masters Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou, is standard Film Class 101 material by now. I’m saying this as someone who’s never actually taken a proper film course, but has been shown the film in creative writing lectures, heard it referenced in Pixies lyrics, and (most recently) seen Agnes Varda mull over its legacy in her recent art instillation documentary Faces Places. The juxtaposed images of clouds intersecting the moon and a cow’s eyeball being cut-open with a straight razor are an especially gory slice of early cinema just as fundamental to the medium as Méliès’s trip to the moon, Charlie Chaplin’s sliding through machine gears, and a steam engine train rapidly approaching the screen. It feels ignorant, then, that I was not aware of the 17min short’s feature length follow-up, L’Age d’Or. His second collaboration (and final, due to a social falling-out) with Salvador Dali, L’Age d’Or was Buñuel’s first feature-length film. It maintains the surreal juxtaposition of highly political, violently non-sequitur imagery from Un Chien Andalou, but this time hung off a more recognizable narrative and sustained for a full hour. As that story is remarkably thin & self-subverting, however, L’Age d’Or often plays like a loose anthology of comically surreal vignettes; it’s essentially a sketch comedy revue with a fine art pedigree. That kind of highfalutin pranksterism is very much on-brand for both Dali & Buñuel (who would later reuse a lot of images & political tactics from this feature debut in works like The Exterminating Angel) so it’s bizarre to me that this work isn’t cited more often along with Un Chien Adalou as a significant text.

In addition to being a loose collection of silly non-sequiturs, L’Age d’Or might also be undervalued because it’s such a cheaply horny work. The thin narrative that binds its anthology of vignettes concerns a romantic couple among social elites who really want to fuck, but keep getting cockblocked by the wealth class & The Church. The pair lustily make eyes across the room at various social get-togethers until they passionately go at it, right there in public, only to be pulled apart mid-coitus. Even considering the flagrant sexuality of Pre-Code Hollywood films like Baby Face, this animalistic lust feels absolutely scandalous in a 1930s context—something Buñuel gleefully juxtaposes with the rigid social propriety of wealthy social events & religious ceremony. The sexual activity depicted onscreen is far from pornographic, but it is scandalous all the same: fantasies about a woman’s stockinged legs, muddy bouts of public exhibitionism, the fellating of fingers & toes, a minutes-long tribute to de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, etc. These acts themselves doesn’t matter as much as the elite’s response to them. High society types ignore incongruous, troubling events like the murder of a child, the intrusion of a comically oversized chariot helmed by drunks, and the posthumous decay of Catholic higher-ups who rot on beaches in their finest robes. However, any display of sexual impropriety sends them into a riotous uproar, and they continually tear the two lovers away any chance they find to go at it. It’s all the same hypocritical tension between proper manners & animal desires that would continue throughout Buñuel’s career. Yet, its arrival at such an early stage of cinema combines with the ramshackle DIY energy of a creator at the beginning of their career to make for something distinctly fascinating.

It’s said Buñuel was a new adapter of cinema as a medium around the time of Un Chien Andalou & L’Age d’Or, so it’s difficult to pinpoint which aspects of his work were intentional rule-breaking pranks and which were novice mistakes. Buñuel shot L’Age d’Or entirely in-sequence and without cutting any footage in the editing room; all exposed filmstock is included in the final product. One of the earliest French films to use sound, the film features both spoken dialogue & silent film intertitles as if it weren’t sure what to do with the technology. Often, the only auditory elements included beyond the music are of sound effects like gun shots & slaps. Sometimes this feels like an uneasy filmmaker not properly using all the tools in their arsenal. Often, however, it plays like just as much of a prank as the film’s horned-up plot, especially in the case of a toilet flush sound effect accompanying the image of bubbling water. Buñuel opens L’Age d’Or with a short documentary about scorpions that seemingly has nothing to do with “plot” in any direct, discernible way, but its inclusion feels like an artist who knows exactly what reaction they’re intending to evoke. Later, he documents modern Rome with the wildly uneven cinematography of someone who’s never held a camera before in their life. In either case, it’s a young, defiant personality thumbing their nose at the already-established rules of a still-developing artform, while weaponizing that new artform against the hypocrisy & wealth disparity of an amoral, grotesque society. That throwing-punches-before-figuring-out-the-rules attitude affords L’Age d’Or an infectious DIY punk spirit, even if Buñuel would later better hone his skills in more put-together ruminations on the same topic.

As a lover of both pretentious smut & silly hijinks, I couldn’t help but be enamored by L’Age d’Or. The ancient cinematic depictions of gore & fornication fully satisfy my instant-gratification need for pure entertainment value, while the inclusion of Surrealist heavy-hitters like Dali & Max Ernst (who appears in a minor role) as collaborators allows me to pretend I’m watching Important Art. I understand how the prurient subject matter & the extended runtime might keep it from being as standard of a classroom tool as Un Chien Andalou, but you can easily detect its influence on important, artsy-fartsy filmmakers as wide-ranging as David Lynch, Ken Russell, Roy Andersson, Guy Maddin, and Monty Python throughout. That’s wonderful to able to say about a series of sketches detailing a romantic couple’s thwarted attempts to fuck in public.

-Brandon Ledet

The Misandrists (2018)

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Queer punk prankster Bruce LaBruce’s latest work is a little too cheeky & misshapen to stand out as my favorite movie of the year but it is the most John Watersiest film I’ve seen all year, which, close enough. Although he has been making films long enough to have been lumped in with the New Queer Cinema movement of the early 90s (a descriptor he rejects in favor of association with the “queercore” punk scene), LaBruce still traffics in transgressive, microbudget outsider art that recalls John Waters’s trashy protopunk beginnings in the early 1970s. The Misandrists has clear thematic & aesthetic vision and a distinct political voice, but its commanding ethos is still aggressively amateur & D.I.Y. Its burn-it-all-down gender & sexual politics are sincerely revolutionary but are also filtered through a thick layer of over-the-top-camp. You might be justified in assuming The Misandrists was a film school debut from a young, angry upstart with a still-fresh appetite for shock humor & pornography, but it’s got the clear vision & tonal control of an artist who’s been honing their craft for decades – like John Waters at his best.

Set “somewhere in Ger(wo)many” in an alternate timeline 1999 (near the release of Waters’s similarly militant Cecil B. Demented) The Misandrists establishes a femmetopia comprised of man-hating revolutionaries who train to violently overthrow the Patriarchy. The women’s testosterone-free environment is disrupted by three types of intruders before their pornography-funded political revolution is fully launched: a male anti-capitalist revolutionary harbored under the noses of their leadership, pig cops searching for that persona non grata, and the trans & non-binary comrades already in their midst despite their cis-femmes-only recruitment policy. There are abundant red flags early in the film that suggest it subscribes to grotesque TERF ideology, but that outdated lack of intersectionality & inclusivity becomes its exact political target if you allow it time to get there. It affords characters air time to voice repugnant trans-exclusionary ideals, but when one of its most disruptive outsiders declares “It’s time to reconcile your revolutionary beliefs with your sexual politics,” the sentiment rings genuine in a way few of its radical extremist bon mots do.

For the stretch of The Misandrists that does voice rad-fem, TERFy ideology, it does so only to indulge in over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek exaggerations of what feminism looks like in an exploitation cinema context. The femme “comrades” of the film form a “separatist commune” disguised as a convent of nuns-in-training. They’re actually training as “an army of lovers” looking to establish a self-sustaining lesbian society free of men, whom they consider “repulsive,” “despicable,” “contaminating,” and “the cops of the world.” Their political ideology playfully crosses the line into religious dogma, as they form a new femme version of Christianity around “The Mother, The Daughter, and The Holy Cunt.” Terms like “(wo)manual,” “herstory,” and “womansplain” roll off the tongue as if they were commonly spoken phrases instead of humorous perversions of idioms. As the title suggests, The Misandrists presents an exaggerated version of what shithead men imagine when they hear the word “feminism”: militant man-haters & lesbians gearing up to steal power from all men everywhere in a violent overthrow. When depicted so crassly & without nuance, that imaginary version of feminism is a hilarious, over-the-top cartoon. It’s also, unsurprisingly, badass.

What’s most distinctive about The Misandrists is how LaBruce finds ways to express his true, genuine ideology through pornography while still allowing rad-fem caricatures to voice the politics he’s openly mocking. Two femme comrades watch masc gay porn for “research,” voicing violent disgust for the very sexual acts LaBruce is infamous for including in his art. The film itself often crosses the line from militant feminism-spoofing exploitation cinema into full-on lesbian porno, leering at girls making out while a tender pop song dryly intones “Down, down, down with the Patriarchy.” A transgressive, queer filmmaker, LaBruce goes out of his way to make sure this display is not straight-guy masturbation fodder. He not only plays extensive clips of hardcore gay pornography in an early scene, he also includes graphic footage of a real-life gender reassignment surgery and disrupts the straight eroticism of the lesbian sex scenes with perverse kinky defilements of food (including the filthiest use of eggs that I’ve ever seen in any film, including Tampopo). When a character proclaims, “Pornography is an act of insurrection against the dominating order,” it feels like one of the few moments when LaBruce is expressing a genuine political thought, as opposed to an over-the-top cartoon caricature of feminism. Of course he believes pornography could be a useful tool for funding a queer revolution – he’s already been using it that way for decades.

If you’re looking for a shocking, over-the-top slice of campy schlock, 2018 isn’t likely to offer a much more perfect specimen than The Misandrists. That might be the only way in which the film is “perfect,” as it deliberately traffics in imperfections & insincerities to prove a larger political point and to stay true to LaBruce’s D.I.Y. queercore sensibilities. Every year I ask myself which calendar release I would most want to watch with John Waters, The Pope of Filth, and I imagine this sarcastic, pornographic, politically angry act of feminist camp would tickle him like no other 2018 release I’ve seen.

-Brandon Ledet

An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn (2018)

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The 2016 gross-out comedy The Greasy Strangler is aggressively, unapologetically Not for Everyone. Devolving the awkward-on-purpose low-fi aesthetic of Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! into an even more subhuman headspace, The Greasy Strangler deliberately traffics in abrasive fits of mindless repetition & indulgences in sexual discomfort that amount to a truly singular, off-putting experience. For me, that skin-crawling, mind-zapping discomfort was a delightful novelty. As it was divisive-by-design, however, it left many others cold & unamused, dismissing the film’s juvenile self-indulgences as a total waste of time. I had a hard time understanding that reaction then, but director Jim Hosking’s follow-up to The Greasy Strangler, An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn, has offered me plenty of insight into what it must have felt like. Stripping Hosking’s schtick of its punishing repetition & grotesque sexual menace, An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn offers Greasy Strangler defenders a taste of how detractors see the director’s work. Without all that subhuman antagonism driving his films’ peculiar rhythms, all that’s left is some sub-Jared Hess quirk humor and an incongruously kickass synth core—neither of which can carry the weight of an 108min runtime on their own.

In an alternate timeline 1988 decorated by a time-traveling Wes Anderson, Aubrey Plaza stars as Lulu – a down-on-her-luck diner waitress fired by her husband/boss and, seemingly, the only attractive human being on the planet. Frustrated by her new role as a dutiful housewife to a lowlife diner manager (Emile Hirsch, who really shouldn’t be getting work, but is at least playing a scumbag abuser here), Lulu makes a break for it by running away to a nearby hotel with money stolen from her family in a heist too pointlessly stupid to explain. Her partner in crime is a useless, virginal thug played by Jemaine Clement, who feels perfectly in tune with Hosking’s peculiar tone. At their hotel hideaway, Lulu finds herself torn between three suitors: the thwarted husband, the tragically uncool thief, and her mysterious former lover Beverly Luff Lin (Craig Robinson), who was hired by the hotel to sing Scottish-themed novelty songs as entertainment. All the sex & abrasive repetition from The Greasy Stranger are missing in this static set-up; the movie also doesn’t take its romantic conflict or farcical heist plot either seriously or goofily enough to make an impression. Mostly, An Evening of Beverly Luff Linn is a series of go-nowhere evenings waiting in a hotel lobby for something, anything to happen – funny or otherwise. Occasionally someone in the central cast of comedic heavies obliges, but not often enough to make the exercise wholly worthwhile.

There’s a scene in Wet Hot American Summer where a “teenage” Paul Rudd is asked to properly clear his cafeteria tray into the trash and he makes a big, bratty show out of being put out by the request. It’s a bit that I think perfectly encapsulates the awkward, ineffectual, low-energy antagonism of Hosking’s works, but it’s also one that’s difficult to maintain with any intensity or nuance for a full feature. The Greasy Strangler manages that miracle with a slimy, ugly-horny ease. An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn struggles to repeat the trick. When it does attempt the earlier film’s repetitious antagonism, whether in having Craig Robinson communicate entirely in Frankenstein groans or in Emile Hirsch’s angry shouts of lines like “Ow, my fucking ear you fat fuck!,” it comes up short in earning laughs, nervous or genuine. As its romantic tensions & heist genre instincts are too aggressively lazy to take seriously, the film also feels at times like a failed attempt to boost Hosking’s Greasy Strangler aesthetic with unearned earnestness. The warped synth score & the highly-specific dead-past imagery feel as sharp here as anything to be found in The Greasy Strangler, but the core joke they’re in service of falls far short of feeling worth the effort. Perhaps An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn is a sign of growing pains as Hosking leaves behind the subhuman sexual grotesqueries of his debut for something more freshly, earnestly bizarre. I look forward to seeing where that career growth goes, but I can’t pretend I was especially entertained waiting in a hotel lobby for the next phase to arrive.

-Brandon Ledet

Never Goin’ Back (2018)

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Although you’re very unlikely to find one with actual queer content, there’s always at least a hint of homosexual desire simmering in the background of most dude-bro buddy comedies. Pairings like Bill & Ted, Harold & Kumar, and the Dude & Dude duo from Dude, Where’s My Car? are always so hopelessly made for each other that their mutual boy-crushes can never be fully covered up by a “no-homo” balking at the indication. The A24-distributed stoner comedy Never Goin’ Back’s greatest achievement is in making that same-sex desire buddy comedy subtext an explicit part of the text, then shrugging it off like it’s no big deal (because it isn’t). The mutual sexual attraction between stoner-buddy protagonists that is usually covered up with frantic jabs of gay panic humor is presented so casually in Never Goin’ Back that is never confirmed whether the duo in question are a romantic couple or just good buds who sometimes kiss for fun. It’s a fresh take on material that could very easily feel stale, but it’s also kind of a shame that the way we had to get there was by making both protagonists female.

Two young high school dropouts turned waitresses hatch a seemingly low-stakes plan to spend their rent money on a beach trip, then earn the money back by working ten straight days of double-shifts. With the gorgeous utopia of Galveston, TX just one week away, they hatch a series of ill-advised schemes to keep their heads above water—schemes that land them jobless, arrested, impossibly stoned, and more broke than ever. It’s kind of an anti-heist picture in that way, with the clockwork efficiency of a well-executed plan replaced by the whims of two wildly irresponsible young women attempting to wing it on the fly and failing miserably at every turn. The central beach trip is a kind of MacGuffin, of course, with flashbacks to the girls’ past hijinks frequently interrupting the flow of the narrative for the sake of a gag—like a TV show highlight reel. Being desperate & stoned does have its inherent, escalating conflicts, though, especially since the girls are blunderously locked into a series of get-rich-quick schemes that all immediately implode.

The desperate need for money that drives Never Goin’ Back’s story beats makes for great comedic tension, but the film’s greatest strength is in contrasting raunchy shock humor with the tender earnestness of a friendship so close it’s indistinguishable from romance. The two girls at the center (Maia Mitchell & Camila Morrone) share drugs & kisses indiscriminately, draw dicks on each other’s sleeping faces as if life were a nonstop slumber party, and refer to each other as “Dude” as if it were the sweetest pet name imaginable. The small-town ghouls that get in the way of their beach trip (including SNL’s Kyle Mooney as an awkward-pervert roommate) all feel like stock characters we’ve seen countless times before in dude-bro comedies, but the total infatuation & blasé sexual ambiguity shared between the leads plays as one-of-a-kind. I’d love to see this same dynamic spread into the boy-boy relationship dynamics of the typical stoner buddy comedy, but what’s on screen here for now is so endearingly sweet (especially in contrast to the crass world that engulfs it) that I have to respect the film tremendously for the way it’s already pushing the thematic boundaries of its genre.

-Brandon Ledet

Chained for Life (2018)

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For a long time, I considered myself a huge fan of Tod Browning’s 1930s cult-horror curio Freaks, but a recent revisit complicated my feelings on its ethics as entertainment media in a way I never really stopped to consider as a jaded youngster. A circus-performer-turned-director in the pre-Code Hollywood Era, Browning asks his audience to think twice about treating the disabled & disfigured sideshow performers in his cast as inhuman monstrosities, but then parades them through horror genre conventions that require them to be exactly that. Most of Freaks functions like an empathetic hangout comedy where the titular “circus freaks” are afforded screentime outside the exploitative context that usually presents them as monsters. However, Browning’s choice of horror genre convention to tell that story eventually sinks them back down to that exploitative, dehumanizing lens. That exact self-contradiction of phony empathy for disabled & disfigured performers justifying Hollywood’s continued exploitation of those very same people for cheap entertainment is largely the subject of the new melancholy meta-comedy Chained for Life (which borrows its title from a drama starring Freaks vets The Hilton Sisters). An acerbic, behind-the-scenes satire on the set of a European auteur’s first English-language film (after building mystique around himself as a former circus performer runaway), Chained for Life starts by darkly poking fun at Freaks’s legacy in particular, but then expands its critiques to encompass all of Hollywood filmmaking, horror and beyond, from the Studio System past to present day.

Although set in modern day and guided by a post-modern narrative structure, Chained for Life still carries the tone of Old Hollywood pastiche. The supposedly artsy-fartsy indie film with “European sensibilities” its fictional crew is filming feels like an especially sleazy, colorized artifact from Universal’s Famous Monsters cycle. Among a cast of genuinely disabled & disfigured performers with abnormalities like gigantism, conjoined twinning, and disfiguring tumors, a “slumming-it” famous actress (Teeth’s Jess Weixler) gets attention & adoration from the press for “bravely” playing a blind woman. Chained for Life asks, somewhat cheekily, what the difference is between an able-bodied actor playing disabled and an actor performing in blackface, offering real-life award-winning examples like Peter Sellers, Orson Welles, and Daniel Day Lewis as food for thought. The actress’s initial awkwardness around her disfigured cast members is complicated by her increasingly intimate relationship with her co-star (Under the Skin’s Adam Pearson) whose neurofibromatosis exaggerates his facial features with large, appearance-altering tumors. A hint of schmaltzy Old Hollywood romance bleeds over from the movie the co-leads are filming to their “real” backstage dynamic, but Chained for Life is less interested in developing that dynamic than it is in exploring the social divisions between its abled & disabled crew and indulging in the loopy, post-modern structure of its meta-Hollywood satire. As the divisions between the crew break down, so do the divisions between the movie and the movie-within-the-movie, so that any linear romance melodrama or personal-growth narratives are lost to more academic, intellectually detached pursuits.

For a small-budget indie drama shot on super-16mm filmstock, Chained for Life is ambitiously sprawling in its narrative. Its non-linear, loopily meta plot structure allows it to feature a considerably large cast of well-defined characters (although one largely anchored by Pearson & Weixler). Outside its Beware of a Holy Whore film industry satire, the movie also stages a background police investigation for a string of local violent attacks by a disfigured man, subverting the audience’s cravings for this tradition of exploitation by never showing his face as the mystery unfolds. At times eerie, howlingly funny, cruel, sweet, and disorienting, Chained for Life mines a lot of rich cinematic material out if its initial conceit of discussing Hollywood’s historic tradition of exploiting disabled & disfigured performers for gross-out scares & sideshow exploitation. Freaks isn’t the movie’s target so much as its jumping point, so that Browning’s self-contradictory act of empathetic exploitation is demonstrative of how disfigured people are represented onscreen at large. This is an ambitious work with broad political & cinematic ideas that far outweigh its scale & budget, which is the exact balance you’d generally want from indie releases on the film festival circuit (perhaps explaining its Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature at this year’s New Orleans Film Festival). That ambition is only amplified by its willingness to frankly discuss a socially award, taboo subject while admitting its own medium’s limitations in addressing it.

-Brandon Ledet

A Simple Favor (2018)

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Paul Feig is a strange animal. Freaks and Geeks is classic television, Bridesmaids is certainly popular even though I couldn’t quite get into it, and I’m probably one of the eight people in the world who saw Other Space, and I really, really enjoyed it (I’m still over here waiting for Karan Soni to really and truly break out). Never was Paul Feig’s eccentricity more clear to me than in the recent (all-too-brief) resurgence of The Soup under the Netflix banner as The Joel McHale Show with Joel McHale. Feig, who was a producer of TJMSWJM, appeared in every single episode. There was a lot that was . . . off about TJMSWJM. The Soup‘s recurring characters appeared organically as part of sketches and happened to reappear only if there was a reason or they struck a chord with the audience, while TJMSWJM seemed to be forcing new characters onto the show without any rhyme or reason and segments like “That Happened,” while occasionally funny, were completely tone deaf about who the show’s demographic was and who they wanted to appeal to. If there was one element of The Soup that I would have forsaken when rebooting, it would have been the once-per-episode celebrity appearances; TJMSWJM actually compounded this problem, as each time Feig appeared on screen, the show ground to a halt (although I did get a kick out of him using the money gun in the finale). I like him, I think that he has a great sense of humor, and you’d be hard pressed to find a white man in the business who is so consistently and effectively using his privilege to promote women in the industry, but I also feel that he has the problem that some comedians I know personally have, which is an inability to recognize when something doesn’t quite work. In short, I’m not sure that Feig knows how to kill his darlings.

A Simple Favor is one of his least uneven films. There are still some comedic moments in it that feel very out of place; the worst offender in the film comes at the conclusion, when a comic bit of action happens and a very minor character reappears to say a terrible line, which is then followed by several much-better lines from our main characters. It stands out because, for the most part, the comic timing in the film is pretty perfect, but when it clunks, it clunks hard, in a way that is more noticeable than in some of his other work since this one is much more intricately plotted.

Widowed single mother Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick) is a mommy vlogger whose son Miles befriends his classmate Nicky, which leads to Stephanie entering into an unequal friendship with Emily Nelson (Blake Lively, giving the best performance of her career). Emily is the PR manager for a fashion house that is run by your standard fashion mogul type, and her ultramodern home, huge income, hands-off parenting, hard drinking, and high fashion conflict with Stephanie’s tendency to commit to every school event, her recognition that her late husband’s insurance money will soon run out, and her felt-and-pompom arts and crafts aesthetic (although she does wear this cat study Anthropologie apron, which I recognized because don’t ask, so she’s more “Hollywood broke” than “real world poor”). Emily’s husband Sean (Crazy Rich Asians‘s Henry Golding) is a failed writer who teaches at a local institution, although Stephanie read his only novel as part of her book club years before. As their friendship grows (at least on Stephanie’s part), Emily elicits a dark secret from Stephanie under the guise of compassion and interest before asking her to pick up both boys one afternoon. Then Emily . . . disappears.

The police initially suspect Sean, but his alibi is solid. When evidence starts to point toward suicide, Stephanie refuses to believe it and launches into her own investigation, winding into and out of the lives of such disparate people as Sean’s T.A. (Melissa O’Neil, who I’ve been sorely missing since the unfortunate cancellation of Dark Matter), a painter who was once Emily’s lover (the ever-wonderful Linda Cardellini), and Emily’s dementia-afflicted mother (Jean Smart, always a pleasure). Her investigation leads her to the offices of fashion magnate Dennis Nylon, a Christian summer camp, a burned-out wing of a formerly glorious mansion, and even Emily’s gravesite. Emily–if that’s even her name–was not who she seemed to be. But then again, maybe Stephanie isn’t either . . .

Multiple reviews of A Simple Favor have drawn comparisons to the 2014 thriller Gone Girl, and with good reason, especially given that the film’s marketing seems to place it firmly in the largely humorless thriller genre (if there’s any way to describe Gone Girl, “humorless” is pretty high up there on the list). What appears to be taking audiences by surprise is A Simple Favor‘s comedic lightheartedness amidst all the sociopathy, implied and explicit violence, half-incest, debatable paternity, and arson. There’s a lot going on, but it’s never overwhelming, and if you’ve ever seen one of these movies before then there will be revelations that will lead you say, “Oh, I know where this is going,” and then the film promptly goes there. Regardless, there are still a few surprises buried in its bones, and the performances are strong enough to carry the film even when it seems to be simply following the outline of thrillers of this ilk. As noted above, this is probably the first film in which I’ve really been thrilled by a performance from Lively; I know that her shark movie was well received around these parts, but after Oliver Stone’s Savages I had no interest in another Lively vehicle. She’s really dynamic here, and it’s fantastic.

The only real problems in the film are the moments in which the comedy doesn’t land. Unfortunately, it’s the more ostentatious (and dare I say more Feigian) humor that thuds lifelessly on screen, and unfortunately those moments are more memorable than the praiseworthy subtle humor that’s woven throughout. Still, the actors and the French pop music lift the film when the plot starts to flail, and it would be a mistake to let this curiosity slip into obscurity without giving it a watch.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Crazy Rich Asians (2018)

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Crazy Rich Asians is just about the phoniest movie you’ll see all summer, but that’s by no means an unintentional effect. The movie opens with the giant hotel lobby setting, swanky music, and block lettering text of an Old Hollywood comedy – promising all the laughs, romance, and lavish imagery you’d expect from that traditionalist fare. The main update to the formalist Hollywood spectacle offered in Crazy Rich Asians is the one indicated by its title. This is a type of film usually populated by and targeted at white people reclaimed for a more historically underserved demographic. While the romantic comedy and wealth porn pleasures offered by the film are generic to the point of pastiche, its Asian & Asian-American cultural context anchor them to a specificity & a social politics POV that distinguish it from the phony Hollywood fare we’re most used to seeing on its scale. It’s damning to the reputation of mainstream filmmaking to consider that this well-behaved, phony romance spectacle is a subversive work merely for casting non-white leads, but that’s how representation-starved most POC audiences are on the pop culture landscape. Crazy Rich Asians is both a cookie-cutter Hollywood romance fantasy we’ve seen plenty times before, and paradoxically a political breakthrough for a cultural dinosaur that’s stubborn to change with the times.

The romcom A-plot pretty much writes itself. An NYU economics professor falls for a hunky bachelor who describes his family as “comfortable,” but is secretly one of the wealthiest lines of unofficial royalty on Earth. The “What if you accidentally married a prince?” fantasy offered in the film only takes on a specificity & a subversion when adapted to its cultural setting. Here, an Asian-American academic with a poor immigrant mother is dropped into a fish-out-of-water fantasy where she meets her secretly-wealthy beau’s absurdly monied family in the most extravagant corners of Singapore. Her culture clash of being an Asian-American woman in an alienating Asian environment is best exemplified in her icy relationship with her boyfriend’s mother, who subscribes to traditionalist divisions of class & culture that make her an unworthy candidate to marry into the family. The wedding preparation drama, makeover montages, and social power struggles that result from that conflict are all genre-faithful romcom material, but the specificity of their circumstances are consistently distinct & defiantly foreign. It’s no surprise, then, that Crazy Rich Asians’s best strengths lurk in the details outside its main romance plot.

Since Crazy Rich Asians is largely faithful to the familiar payoffs of Old Hollywood spectacle & the romcom genre, its more distinguishing details are hiding in the periphery. The wealth porn on display in Singapore’s more extravagant settings play almost like a travel ad, but that same luscious photography being applied to street food & homemade dumplings is a more rarified, gorgeous wonder. The central conflict established in the main romance is familiar to the genre, but the comedic sensibilities of weirdo side characters played by Awkwafina, Ken Jeong, Jimmy O. Yang, and Nico Santos are an anarchic presence that transform that genre formula into a new, exciting beast. You just have to be all-in on the typical payoffs of romcom & wealth porn indulgences to fully appreciate those deviances; this is a fun, beautiful film, but it’s one that’s aimed directly at wide, mainstream audiences. Culture-clash drama between Asian & Asian-American people can be found in select small-budget indie films like Better Luck Tomorrow, Saving Face, and Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle; what’s significant about Crazy Rich Asians is that it balloons that perspective to a massive, big budget, Old Hollywood scale. If you’re more likely to watch an escapist fairy tale that’s unashamed of reliving Old Hollywood phoniness than a small-scale indie drama aimed at artsy fartsy types, the cultural specificity of Crazy Rich Asians is a revelation. Old Hollywood romantic spectacle has been a traditionally all-white affair, so it’s wonderful to see that hegemony broken up by something so unashamedly fun & beautiful, even if narratively generic.

-Brandon Ledet