comedy

Utopia (1951)

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I picked up a dirt cheap, used DVD copy of the Laurel & Hardy comedy Utopia (aka Atoll K, aka Robinson Crusoeland) thinking it’d likely be as good of an introduction to the comedy duo’s 23 film catalog as any. I’ve done my best to catch up with comedy staples like Charlie Chaplin and Abbott & Costello over the years,  but somehow the filmography of Laurel & Hardy has always escaped me. This was an ill-advised point of entry as an outsider, as it turns out that Utopia was the final film in Laurel & Hardy’s catalog, a misfire that put an end to their career. It’s difficult to even know which version of the film is the definitive one, since they’re are four separate cuts with four different runtimes, none of which were positively received. Filmed in Europe with a blacklisted American director years after the comedy duo’s heyday, Utopia was engineered to function entirely as last gasp cash grab. It was anything but. The shoot was supposed to take twelve weeks, but instead lasted an entire year, dragging out any chance to make a quick buck off the shriveling Laurel & Hardy legacy before it disappeared entirely, with no chance to financially succeed. You can feel that labor in every dull frame of the picture too; it plays more like a hostage video than a slapstick comedy.

The main problem with Utopia is that it works way too hard for way too long to establish what should be a simple premise. Laurel & Hardy inherit a rickety yacht & an uncharted island from a deceased uncle, where they intend to establish a paradisal version of Mortville to ease their economic troubles. It takes an absolute eternity for them to reach that goal, as the movie wastes tons of time in unnecessarily expensive sight gags suffered by their traveling ship for more than half the runtime. It takes a solid 40 minutes for the plot to fully set up Laurel & Hardy alone in the island with two other dirty men & one beautiful lady. It takes a full hour before that crew decides to establish their own country, Crusoeland. That only leaves 20 minutes for the film’s basic premise to play itself out, which really wouldn’t be a problem if the lead-up were shorter or less labored. I was simply too exhausted by Utopia’s narrative mechanics of setting up the political follies of a small island country to be amused by the inhabitants of that island treating a lobster like a pet dog or trying to pile into a single bed. Instead of achieving the knee-slapping energy of a light-hearted farce, Utopia presents a frustrating existential crisis where everyone from the (multiple!) directors to the actors to the audience has to work way too hard for laughs that never arrive or feel worth the effort.

As poor of a Laurel & Hardy introduction as Utopia turned out to be, it at least thematically clued me in on some of the duo’s charms. They way they function like a married couple (“Don’t I always take care of you? You’re the first one I think of.”) and turn their dire economic peril into (sometimes literal) gallows humor is endearing, at least. I can also get behind their central goal to establish a country with “no passports, no prisoners, no taxes, no laws, and no murder.” It’s a shame that those sentiments are buried under a film so visibly tired & directionless. Every potential is wasted, from Laurel & Hardy’s vaudevillian energy to the absence of a performance from French singer Suzy Declare, the only female performer of note onscreen. By the time previously absent narration intrudes halfway through the runtime to summarize the young country’s efforts to tame the island they inhabit the whole thing feels like a mess that should have been cancelled the first month it fell behind schedule. No one steering the ship wanted to be there and I didn’t want to be watching them go through the motions, especially not as a first time audience for an iconic comedy duo I’ve never witnessed in their prime.

-Brandon Ledet

Girls Trip (2017)

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In a summer when many comedies fell flat & promptly disappeared, Girls Trip excelled as a surprise runaway success lingering in theaters for months longer than its closest competition (Rough Night, Fun Mom Dinner, etc.). It’s not at all difficult to see why the film would carry a wide appeal & resulting financial success. As a star-studded broad comedy (featuring heavy hitters Regina Hall, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Queen Latifah among pop music celebrity cameos from performers like P. Diddy & Estelle) that caters directly to black audiences, Girls Trip taps directly into a criminally underserved market desperate to see its POV properly represented on the big screen. In a more idiosyncratic sense, it also cast an impossibly wide net in terms of tone. Girls Trip is an unashamedly maudlin comedy about adult sisterhood that drowns its audience in melodramatic cheese in its reflections on motherhood, religious Faith, adultery, betrayal, and falling out of touch with loved ones. It’s also one of the bawdiest, most aggressively horny comedies of the year, with a turn from breakout star Tiffany Haddish steering the ship out of its Hallmark Channel waters towards the prankish filth of Divine’s turn in Pink Flamingos every opportunity she’s allowed at the helm. These two warring halves– the raunchy & the sentimental– make for a wholly unpredictable, tonally chaotic summertime comedy that’s bound to grab the attention of anyone within earshot. Very rarely is something with commercial appeal this vast is so energetically strange & memorable for its grand scale acts of depravity.

The four leads of this corny/raunchy comedy feel as if they were grown in a lab to appeal to every quadrant of middle aged women in 2010s America. Queen Latifah is a skilled journalist whose talents are going to waste writing click bait hit pieces on celebrity gossip. Regina Hall is billed as the second coming of Oprah, a successful woman who seemingly Has It All in public, but struggles to keep her family together in private. Tiffany Haddish is a nuclear element of chaos, an overgrown childhood id in an adult woman’s body. Jada Pinkett-Smith is an uptight Party Mom, a “nurturer”, which is in direct contrast to her real life persona fronting a nu-metal band (!) & raising America’s most adorable space aliens. Self-described as The Flossy Posse, this meticulously crafted crew reunites after their post-college fall-out for an extravagant trip to New Orleans, where they attend Essence Fest & generally raise hell. Half the plot concerns mending emotional wounds between Latifah & Hall’s estranged besties as they try to save face in discussions of their personal lives. The other half is a group-wide mission to get Pinkett Smith’s hopelessly milquetoast Mother archetype laid. Haddish operates entirely outside either concern, ensuring the film’s immortality in her Freddy Got Fingered levels of depravity. Haddish’s lengthy tangents about ripping men’s hearts out & storing drugs in her “bootyhole” are paired with acts of mimed fellatio & a firehose of sprayed urine to completely pervert & subvert all of the film’s more heartfelt reflections on betrayal, reconciliation, and True Friendship. Haddish is not the only Flossy Posse member with blue material; every character gets their fair share of one-liners about giant dicks, camel toe, etc. Her performance just pushes the material into all-timer territory in its commitment to depravity & its freedom to exist outside concerns of realism or grounding melodrama.

New Orleans is the perfect backdrop for these sordid/maudlin shenanigans, but I have to admit I was often distracted by the way my city was depicted onscreen. The laws of movie magic dictate that I cannot nitpick the logic of the Hotel Monteleone’s carousel bar being near-empty on a festival weekend, the convenience of cabs & hotel rooms opening out of nowhere, the inhuman ability for the Flossy Posse to down consecutive Hand Grenades™ without exploding into piles of vomit, or the lunacy of a character having their morning coffee at the Topical Isle daiquiri chain. I can let these minuscule details go. The sanitized amusement park look of America’s infected bootyhole, Bourbon Street, was laughably unrealistic, however, and as a local it’s always sad to see one of the most vital, dynamic cultures on the planet reduced to off-season Mardi Gras beads & public flashing. From a tourist’s perspective, this view of the city might right true, though. There’s genuine admiration for the city in the film’s loving shots of the Superdome and local music touches like a twerking-flavored bounce show or a brass band rendition of a Bill Withers classic. Essence Fest also plays a huge role in Girls Trip‘s basic appeal. Not only does it allow for pop music acts to break up more labored stretches of emotional conflict; it also leads to weird novelties like this being the only film you’re likely to ever see where Ava DuVernay & DJ Mannie Fresh are both featured in prominent cameos. On some level, Girls Trip works as a dual commercial both for New Orleans as a lawless playground and for Essence as a concert experience. I just hope that anyone who takes the bait is aware that they won’t have as effortless of a time with it as The Flossy Posse, even with Regina Hall money to throw around.

There are plenty of reasons why Girls Trip shouldn’t work nearly as well as it does. Besides its depiction of a pristine, non-existent New Orleans, the film is overlong, dramatically labored, and embarrassingly cheesy. You get a whopping taste of that cheese in its introductory stretch, which heavily features a lazily Photoshopped group portrait of The Flossy Posse standing in front of a green screen Superdome and (I kid you not) opens with a record scratch sound effect. It’s somehow easy to even be charmed by that opener, however, thanks to how a look back to the crew’s college days allows for open 90s nostalgia (a hot commodity right now, another reason why Latifah’s casting was perfectly calibrated). If Girls Trip is indeed a movie-by-committee proposition engineered to appeal to as many people as possible, I’ll admit I was not at all immune to its scheme. The film’s gleeful participation in overt, oversexed filth plays directly to my raccoonish tastes. Even if the massive runtime or clueless sentimentality had entirely soured me, I still would have walked away a fan of Tiffany Haddish, whose Jerri Blank-esque presence elevates the material immeasurably. I wasn’t necessarily negative on the film’s emotionally manipulate half either, though. Not every story beat about motherhood anxiety or the struggle to maintain the integrity of Christian Faith & public brands did something for me, but the film’s overall celebration of female friendship is undeniably infectious. It may be a story that could have been told more honestly & more succinctly, but the way its genuine pathos is perverted by the chaos of bar fights, hallucination, and male frontal nudity made for a delightfully subversive summertime comedy. I just won’t shed a tear if Girls Trip 2 happens to be set in another city, so I can focus less on setting & more on whom the Flossy Posse is banging, pissing on, giving a sincere heart to heart to, etc.

-Brandon Ledet

The Well-Intentioned Letdown of When John Waters Targeted the Art World

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Starting with the mid-career course correction of Polyester, cult director John Waters had a kind of creative epiphany. In his earliest works of divine genius (Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, etc.), the trash-dwelling provocateur gave life to insular freakshows of over-the-top Baltimore personalities, outsiders who were naturally exuding a punk rock nastiness when hippie feel-goodery still ruled the counterculture. Polyester and its suburban-set follow-ups (Hairspray, Cry-Baby, Serial Mom) found an even more subversive platform for his cinematic freaks, contrasting their outlandish trashiness with the supposedly more well-behaved sect of Proper Society. Hairspray & Cry-Baby were especially adept at exposing suburbia for being a sea of hateful, racist, close-minded assholes in a way that wouldn’t be apparent in more insular settings like Desperate Living‘s Mortville, where the weirdos keep to themselves. After four consecutive films exposed this suburban evil, however, Waters was in need of a new target. Mainstream commercial success had entirely changed his outsider status as a renegade filmmaker & a provocateur by the mid-90s. Waters found himself the toast of both the suburban monsters he’d lampooned for the better part of a decade and the art world snobs who enjoyed his early works for their supposed dedication to irony. With suburbia thoroughly skewered, the director fired off two successive films that targeted the ironic hipsters & mainstream moviegoers who fundamentally misunderstood his passions & his appeal. The intent was admirably calculated, but the results were . . . mixed.

It pains me to write anything even remotely negative about a director I consider to be the greatest artist, if not greatest human being, of all times forever. The nu-metal vibes of the late 90s & early 00s were just poisonous for pop culture in general, though, so it would make sense that Waters would experience the worst creative slump of his career in that era. You can feel him introspectively reaching for something to say in his 1998 comedy Pecker, which continues his childhood period piece navel-gazing in Hairspray & Cry-Baby by centering on a weirdo teen artist who accidentally makes it big just by goofing around with his nobody loved-ones in Baltimore. I think the biggest misconception of Waters’s career, particularly in his early “trash” pictures, is that his portrayals of over-the-top Baltimore caricatures are entirely rooted in a sense of irony. Those pictures are actually coming from a place of feverishly obsessive love. There’s obviously a sense of camp that informs his humor, but Waters also deeply loves & admires early regulars like Divine, Mink Stole, and Edith Massey (as well as his home city of Baltimore) and seemingly only makes his films as a way to document & broadcast their art & their obsessions. Pecker is, above all else, a film about that clash between his intent & public perception of his work. Just as Waters obsessively made movies about his weirdo friends in 1970s Baltimore, he depicts a young photographer (Edward Furlong, the titular Pecker) who obsessively documents his loved ones & their surroundings on the same city streets. That’s why it’s such a betrayal when, in the film and in life, Big City hipsters latch onto those characters only with a sense of irony, laughing at them instead of with them.

Pecker is a film about obsession & authenticity. Even beyond the titular protagonist’s bottomless passion for photography, every character in his social circle has a sitcom-esque dedication to a singular interest: candy, laundromats, shoplifting, clothing the homeless, gay men, pubic hair, ventriloquism, teabagging, etc. These damned souls stay dutifully within their own lanes, only speaking on their one respective topic of interest whenever prompted for dialogue. Pecker finds their passions endearing & documents them within his own sole interest: photography. When his art takes off to an unlikely notoriety in New York City, he assumes everyone championing his photographs is similarly celebrating the beauty of his subjects. Instead, they’re ironically laughing at his “culturally challenged” family & friends for their perceived tackiness. Once this Big City hipster irony is revealed as a real world evil, the film eventually takes the form of a good-natured revenge tale. Pecker invites his new Art World “friends” to Baltimore for his latest show, where they’re given a taste of their own medicine as the derogatory subject of his photographs, a source of mockery. They’re briefly gawked at by Baltimore weirdos as the true freaks for once, until Pecker unites both sides for a climactic party where everyone shares indulgences in each other’s obsessions & collectively cheer, “To the end of irony!” The point being made in that celebration is admirable and I love that Waters took his audience to task for looking down on his weirdo friends as inhuman curiosities instead of genuinely joining in the celebration of their obsessions. The comedy just doesn’t feel as sharp or, frankly, as dirty as it should to match the laugh riot heights of earlier triumphs. Besides a few details involving strip clubs & gay bars (of which The Fudge Palace feels like an obvious ode to New Orleans staple The Corner Pocket), the film didn’t feel very much interested in its own subjects, at least not with the same obsessive intensity they were interested in things like candy & pubic hair. It seems in making a film about art & obsessions, Waters somewhat lost track of funneling his own passionate obsessions into his art.

Cecil B. Demented, the 2000 follow-up to Pecker, feels even more creatively exhausted. Waters shifts his focus slightly from the irony of Art World assholes to the slow death of modern cinema, which he sees as being completely drained of the obsessive artistic passions of his earlier work. Here, the director sides with the artsy types he previously lampooned in order to take aim at the corporate business end of film production. In an opening credits sequence that’s only become more relevant as the years roll on, movie theater marquees are overrun by sequels, franchise titles like Star Trek & Star Wars, comedies starring disposable knuckleheads like Pauly Shore, and art films dubbed from their original languages. As Pecker toasted, “To the end of irony!,” Cecil B. Demented cries, “Death to those who support mainstream cinema!” This is essentially a heist picture where a “teenage” gang (including early appearances from Michael Shannon, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Adrian Grenier) kidnaps a famed Hollywood starlet (Melanie Griffith, who has no trouble slipping into the role of Terrible Actress) and forces her into a guerilla film production that often borders on outright terrorism. Literally wearing their influences on their sleeves in the forms of tattooed names like William Castle, David Lynch, Herschell Gordon Lewis, and Kenneth Anger, they attempt to disrupt business-as-usual Hollywood filmmaking by bringing artistic obsession back to the forefront of the industry. There’s an unfortunate irony in this intense focus on authenticity, as the movie doesn’t feel nearly as dangerous or as personal as Waters’s own past in guerilla filmmaking. His murderous cinephiles are certainly silly, but you get the sense that he’s on their side, while still failing to live up to their impossible ideals. “Technique is nothing but failed style,” is a great line in isolation, but I’m not sure what it means in a work that’s Waters’s least funny, least stylish, and most obedient adherence to the mainstream technique of its time: the nu-metal Dark Ages.

By the mid-90s, John Waters’s outsider aesthetic had become an essential part of mainstream filmmaking thanks the gross-out comedy boom that followed the success of There’s Something About Mary. There’s an “Okay, what now?” quality to Pecker & Cecil B. Demented that might be a direct result of that assimilation. With a sensibility he was on the ground floor of establishing now the mainstream standard and his own personal obsessions already documented for infamy in previous works, Waters had to find new purpose for his art in a time mired in one of our worst modern pop culture slumps. I admire his ambition in tackling the commercial end of art production in Cecil B. Demented & the earnestness of the art consumer in Pecker, even if I believe those films to represent his worst creative period. Not only is it a half-assed put-down for me to call out a film or two for being the worst releases from my favorite director; this story also has a happy ending in John Waters eventually getting his groove back back in the excellent 2004 sex comedy A Dirty Shame, his most recent (and most underrated) film to date. Having proven himself in so many other titles that transcend these nu-metal era doldrums, Waters’s Art World potshots are worth having around if not only for giving voice to the director’s take on the art & commerce compromises of his industry. Characters describing Pecker’s photography persona as “a humane Diane Arbus” while Cindy Sherman (playing herself) walks around art galleries offering Valium to children or a dangerously horny Michael Shannon shouting “Tell me about Mel Gibson’s dick and balls!” are worthwhile indulgences for their own sake, even if they don’t match the obsessive passion of documenting Divine & Edith Massey’s exploits in the Dreamlanders era. I may wish that the final products were a little funnier & more artistically distinct, but I love that Waters took the time to dismantle art world pretension & empties commercialism once he was done vilifying suburban normies.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #38 of The Swampflix Podcast: NOMA’s John Waters Film Fest & Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype (1980)

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Welcome to Episode #38 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our thirty-eighth episode, we tackle the career of our favorite living artist/human being. Brandon and Britnee recap the New Orleans Museum of Art’s recent summertime John Waters Film Festival with fellow Krewe Divine co-founder Virginia Ruth. Also, Britnee makes Brandon watch the Golan-Globus horror comedy Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype (1980) for the first time. Enjoy!

-Britnee Lombas & Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Schizopolis (1996)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Alli made Britnee, Brandon, and Boomer watch Schizopolis (1996).

Alli: I spent my teenage years moping away in Baton Rouge. I lived in the thick of the suburban sprawl, I dealt with LSU Tigermania, and I struggled with the boredom of living in a place where the main source of entertainment was trying to learn to be into football or embracing the wacky nature of not really belonging. I didn’t watch Schizopolis until after I had moved to New Orleans, but it just stuck with me how the film doesn’t explicitly say it’s set in Baton Rouge anywhere, yet Baton Rouge is everywhere. All of the city’s most iconic landmarks are onscreen: Louie’s Cafe, the local new age emporium Coyote Moon, Highland Park (which I wonder if they even got permission for the obscene moments they filmed there), and the strip mall where Little Wars, the game store and nerd refuge, is located. Basically, Baton Rouge is integral to me as far as Schizopolis is concerned. Outside of the disjointed narrative and surrealist moments of invented language, it’s basically a movie about how the typical American suburban life with a cubicle office job drives you a little crazy.

The main character played by director Steven Soderbergh, Fletcher Munson, works a boring office job for a self help guru/cult leader reminiscent of L. Ron Hubbard, T. Asimuth Schwitters. (There’s a strong Scientology presence in Baton Rouge in real life.) He wastes his time at work throwing paper balls into a waste basket and literally jerking off. He has a regular wife with a regular daughter. A generic life full of “generic greetings.” His wife is bored and tired of his inattentiveness, so she starts cheating on him with his doppelgänger: Dr. Korchek, a dentist and philanderer. There are many other wild characters who jump in the narrative along the way: Elmo Oxygen, Nameless Numberhead Man, and Attractive Woman #2.  It’s a jumble of varying perspectives, nonlinear storytelling, and basically just nonsense.

Steven Soderbergh filmed Schizopolis in nine months, working whenever he felt like it. It’s a total self-indulgent vanity project. He starred, directed, wrote it (or rather mainly improvised it), was the cinematographer, and even worked in the sound department. But Schizopolis is a very aware kind of self-indulgent. Before the actual movie begins, there’s a prologue that really serves to set the mood, where Soderbergh is in front of a microphone in an empty theater introducing the film. It’s almost a Monty Python-esque sort of dry humor, right down to the intertitle that assures you that no fish were harmed.

In general, I think the writing is extremely funny, especially for having been improvised. The love letter written to Attractive Woman #2 is a really great example: “I may not know much, but I know that the wind sings your name endlessly, although with a slight lisp that makes it difficult to understand if I’m standing near an air conditioner.” Brandon, what did you think of the use of humor in a non linear narrative like this? Do you have any favorite lines?

Brandon: Monty Python is actually a perfect point of reference, since the disjointed nature of Schizopolis reminded me a lot of a genre I love that rarely goes over well with most audiences: the sketch comedy film. Gags in this comedic mosaic often feel like isolated vignettes before they connect to the larger themes Soderbergh is playing with, namely suburban boredom & romantic miscommunication. Because of the cheap, handheld 90s cinematography that feels so firmly nestled in the era’s indie cinema boom, I suppose sketch comedy troupes like The Kids in the Hall or Upright Citizens Brigade would better fit the vibe Schizopolis traffics in than Monty Python or (for a more esoteric example) The Groove Tube, especially since their televised series would often work individual sketches into a larger episodic narrative. There’s a Gen-X slacker quality to Schizopolis that I really appreciated as a contrast to its heady explorations of the flawed nature of language or the faux-spiritualism of its Scientology stand-in, Eventualism. It’s basically the movie equivalent of a late-period Picasso or a 90s low-fi indie rock act like Half Japanese or Daniel Johnston, getting across genuinely intellectual ideas through a formally sloppy mode of expression. Looking at the film from an intellectual distance, many might think that anyone could’ve made it, that there isn’t much craft to its prankish amateurism. I don’t believe that’s true. There are plenty of other low-fi experiments filmed on microbudgets in Nowhere, America that aren’t nearly as watchable or as cerebrally stimulating as this film. Just look to the documentary American Movie to get a taste of what I’m talking about.

For a film about language, however, there aren’t many individual lines of dialogue I can single out as favorites. A lot of Soderbergh’s technique in Schizopolis is dependent on generic placeholders substituting genuine dialogue. The scenes where Fletcher Munson & Mrs. Munson hold entire conversations with phrases like “Obligation” and “Location of offspring” or where the exterminator, Elmo Oxygen, hits on his female clientele with nonsensical gibberish are fascinating improv language exercises, especially when they’re turned back in on themselves from a different character’s POV in the third act. They’re not exactly quotable, though. A lot of my favorite gags were purely visual, like when an entire scene is substituted with a sign that reads “IDEA MISSING” or when the title card is presented as screenprinted text on a man’s t-shirt, only for the man to be revealed wearing only the t-shirt. The stand-out centerpiece of the film might even be the unbroken shot of Soderbergh (as Munson) making goofy Jim Carrey faces in the bathroom mirror immediately after masturbating at work, just because. As big as Schizopolis‘s ideas can be in a larger scope, its scene to scene rhythms function as a series of half-assed pranks, like a highbrow version of Jackass.

Like Alli, I was also thrown off by these highbrow pranks being staged in Baton Rouge, a severely mediocre city I regret living in for as long as I did in the mid 00s. Every now and then a K&B sign or an eerily familiar LSU auditorium would snap me back into awareness of setting in a dissociative way that was just as surreal as any of the film’s play with language or spiritualism. It’s so odd to me that after the massive success of Sex, Lies, and Videotape (which was also set in Baton Rouge) Soderbergh would stave off the major studio career he would later succumb to (in titles like Erin Brockovich, Magic Mike, and the Oceans series) by relying on his father’s resources as LSU’s Dean of Education to film the most bizarre, dirt cheap, and, in my opinion, best movie of his career in a place as drab as Baton Rouge. Boomer, you also have a personal connection to the city Alli & I are eager to throw under the bus here. Did Schizopolis’s Baton Rouge setting contribute to its surreality in your viewing? What effect do you think the city had on this picture’s overall vibe?

Boomer: Seeing the city that I knew so well (and have much fonder feelings for than my fellows here, although all their criticisms are 100% accurate) certainly added a layer of surreality to the film that I was not expecting. I know Soderbergh was a longtime BR resident–a friend of mine from college used to live in the Sex, Lies, and Videotape house on Bedford–but I was still taken aback when the intro sequence of Act 1 featured (the old location of) Louie’s, which was never more than a five minute walk from any apartment I occupied in the eight years I lived in Baton Rouge. For me, growing up in the beyond-rural reaches of the 5.5 square mile municipality of Slaughter (now a town as of 2002!), Baton Rouge wasn’t just a city, it was the city. To put this in perspective, my parents still can’t get cable where they live, and a recent AT&T service issue left them without phone or internet for three weeks. As such, even the tiny town of Natchitoches seemed like a thriving metropolis when I lived there for a couple of years for school. Looking back, there’s a certain kind of nostalgic energy that I’ve had difficulty articulating in the past: I have very specific remembrances of passing through parts of BR I had not seen before as a child and recognizing the business signs, like the one for Kelleher in the aforementioned Jefferson Highway shopping center that now contains Little Wars, and getting a thrill that something from TV appeared in my real life. Part of this may have been born out of being fortunate enough to see the travelling Sesame Street show at the old Bon Marché mall as a very young child. When you grow up in a trailer in the woods with no connection to the cultural world other than three TV networks (four and a half on a clear day) and the “local” public library two towns over, there’s no clear distinction between national and regional broadcasts, so seeing a business in the real world that had been advertised in a local commercial was just as magical to tiny Boomer as hypothetically seeing Big Bird wandering the streets or stumbling upon Murphy Brown in a cafe.

Years of living in Baton Rouge killed that magic, although I will readily admit that there were other mitigating factors that led to me disenchantment, most of them concerned with growing up and being forced to participate in the economy, which aren’t BR-specific. On the other hand, I was fortunate enough to live on or near East State for the better part of a decade during the time when it was one of the last bastions of artists and other weirdos left in the city’s culture war against gentrification (which it lost, in case you were wondering), and being a part of KLSU gave me insight into a different, more culturally relevant side of the city. That having been said, seeing The Baton Rouge That Was, the city of my childhood, brought back feelings in me that I wasn’t prepared for, and cast a veil of intimacy over Schizopolis that was both surreal and distracting. I kept thinking of being a kid, and making connections between the on-screen presentation that were probably never intended to mean anything to a larger audience (“The lady on Channel 9 with the big teeth–they’re talking about Donna Britt!”). The part of my brain that still retains its childhood awe of the Baton Rouge of yore was a bit overwhelmed by the input, and by the time that Mrs. Munson meets her French lover in a coffee shop where I used to work, I was close to short-circuiting.

When my brain was working, I kept thinking about Jacques Derrida and his work in Of Grammatology, wherein he espouses a theory of language that prioritizes a kind of Logocentrism that revolves around the conceit that writing is a removed (and thus less pure) form of speech, and that speech is a removed (and, again, less pure) form of thought. In the scene where Elmo Oxygen finally breaks down what he really wants (to have sex with a certain P.A.), he makes the statement that “Language does not always require speech,” which on the surface appears to be the opposite of his personal ideology. Elmo’s speech seems to instead require no language, communicating emphasis and meaning through a form of comically exaggerated aphasia in which words have no objective meaning. I have to ask, Britnee, do you think that this is an intentional inversion, or is there a meaning to his statement that I’m overlooking?

Britnee: Elmo is by far my favorite character in Schizopolis. The moment that funky beat of his theme music starts to play, you can be sure that Elmo and his bug-eye goggles are about to grace the screen. He’s the generic sexy neighborhood “pool boy,” except he’s a lanky, middle aged bug exterminator that doesn’t need to try too hard to seduce lonely housewives. Elmo’s character doesn’t make much sense, but I don’t think he’s supposed to. That’s what makes him so funny. While his bizarre manner of speaking seems to be another one of the film’s hilarious improvisations, the strange language eventually starts to make sense. Elmo’s nonsense words are repeated in multiple scenes (“nomenclature,” “jigsaw,” “beef diaper”), and they actually start to develop meaning. For example, when “jigsaw” is stated, it means something along the lines of a sexy “Alright.” When he does state, “Language does not always require speech,” I thought it was just another comical element to his character and nothing more. It’s interesting that Boomer mentioned this theory of language from Jacques Derrida. I have no idea who Derrida is and I am not familiar with his work. However, it made me look at Elmo’s statement in a different light. It’s quite possible that the statement was a nod towards the art of improvisation, but I’m leaning towards it just being a goofy line for his nonsensical character.

Other than Elmo, one of the more fascinating parts of the film was the relationship between Fletcher Munson and his wife. I love how we are able to see the same scenario repeated through the eyes of each character. When we see Fletcher’s version, everything is very matter-of-fact. When he comes home to his wife and child at the end of the work day, it becomes quite obvious that the two have a lack of communication. Fletcher greets his wife by saying, “Generic greeting,” and she responds with “Generic greeting returned.” It’s actually really sad to see the lack of connection and emotion between the two while they put on fake smiles and pretend to give a shit. Fletcher’s wife’s version of events is a little different. When she hears Fletcher and his doppelgänger, Dr. Korchek, speak, the two speak in Japanese and Italian, further representing the inability for Mrs. Munson and the men in her life to communicate with each other.

I felt so bad for Fletcher’s wife. She gets shut out by both versions of her husband, and she doesn’t even get a name! She’s simply known as Mrs. Munson. Alli, what are your thoughts on Mrs. Munson’s character? Is she supposed to represent the invisible suburban housewife?

Alli: Mrs. Munson does seem to represent the average bored and lonely housewife, jaded and treated horribly by a culture of men who are bored, neglectful spark-chasers. However, much like how Munson has his doppelgänger, she has her own in Attractive Woman #2; still a character without a name, but a character with much more agency. On one hand, we have this maternal and pragmatic woman fed up with her husband and his lack of attention, but then there’s also this woman who just wants a dang dentist and takes a man to court for being a creep. She’s a mother trying to figure out where her life is headed next and an unattainable love interest who has the upper hand, which is slightly more than the Soderbergh character gets, even if it involves less screen time and no first name.

It’s this duality that really creates the central conflict of the film. There’s a dichotomy between the settled American family life, represented by Mrs. Munson and her husband, and the single life, represented by Dr. Korchek and Attractive Woman #2. The question being posed and answered in that dynamic amounts to, “Is the grass greener on the other side?”  And of course, going a little deeper than shallow inspection (Munson peering into Korchek’s windows) and beyond infatuation, the answer is resoundingly “No.” If you’re a normie suburban type, you might as well just embrace it.

The female characters in general do seem to be given a level of inconsideration, however. Like we’ve already mentioned, none of them are given first names. None of them have any obvious occupations. They’re stuck in the stereotypical world of women, gossiping with friends and taking care of children. The men aren’t exactly portrayed favorably, but it doesn’t feel balanced given their female counterparts’ lack of screen time, lines, and story beats. It’s the same sort of attitude that I feel like the film is trying to lampoon, ironically enough, by making all the men boneheads. I don’t want to be too harsh though, because, unlike in real life, being creepy and sexist has noticeable consequences here. Dr. Korchek gets his words thrown back at him by three unamused lawyers, and even gets shot. Munson is unknowingly ignoring his wife into leaving him. All of the men get their due, even Nameless Numberhead Man, who’s constantly and disgustingly shaming his wife for being too thin. He’s made to look like a ridiculous ass, and much like Mrs. Munson with Dr. K, his wife is cheating on him with Elmo the exterminator, who is a weirdo but not a creep. Everything between Elmo and women is consensual.

Elmo is a somewhat main character who isn’t given a double; what you see is what you get with him, although he’s given an alternate life or two. He’s an exterminator, he’s a sexy neighborhood “pool boy” like Britnee mentioned, and eventually he’s sort of a reality TV star. “Meta” is an overused word, but between Elmo’s video life, the intro, and the interview with the guy in the park, there’s this sort of self-aware thread running through Schizopolis. Brandon, how do you feel about that kind of post-modern “This is a movie you’re watching” thing? And what do you think of Elmo’s involvement in it?

Brandon: While it’s true that Elmo Oxygen doesn’t have an exact doppelgänger (at least not in the form of a separate character also played by actor David Jensen), he does have a sort of counterbalance in the cult leader guru T. Azimuth Schwitters (Mike Malone), author of How To Control Your Own Mind & the engineer of Eventualism. The film contrasts Elmo’s aggressively informal demeanor & working class lifestyle distributing Elmo’s Bug Juice throughout Baton Rouge suburbia with Schwitters’s stuffier, self-agrandizing nature as an L. Ron Hubbard stand-in. The way they function within the plot as a unit suggests they might have originally been intended to be cast as a single actor, like Fletcher Munson & the dentist or Mrs. Munson & Attractive Woman #2. Schwitters’s Eventualism lectures have a decidedly more academic air to them than the hypnotic gibberish Elmo employs to seduce the bored housewives of Baton Rouge, but the philosophical sentiment of those monologues mean just about as much as Elmo’s “jigsaw nomenclature” ramblings; i.e. they mean nothing at all.

The dual function of these two characters also operates mostly outside the domestic drama of the doppelgängers, which is more of the film’s A-plot. Elmo & Scwitters are allowed to address the audience directly and reveal the barely hidden mechanics of Making a Movie in a way that points to the self-aware, “meta” nature of Schizopolis Alli was referring to. Elmo’s role in that dynamic seems to be to represent the film’s function as a sophomoric prank with Looney Tunes sound effects, while Schwitters represents its more heady, philosophical aspirations. Both are played for equal, self-effacing humor and anchor other meta elements like the interviews in the park, the diagetic chapter breaks, and Soderbergh’s introductory address to the audience to something more thematically substantial. Usually when movies are this self-aware they fall firmly in the Dumb Comedy genre, where breaking the fourth wall or directly pointing to the artificiality of their own existence is a more widely employed trope. Elmo managed to make a more significant impact than Schwitters in this way, as his prankish existence is much more in line with the cartoonish weirdos you’d likely see in a wacky comedy from the Farrelly Brothers, ZAZ, The Lonely Island, etc., but I found them both about equally fascinating as two sides of the same meta coin.

As fun as the film’s self-aware meta humor is on a scene to scene basis, Schizopolis‘s main concern seems to be the romantic affairs between the various doppelgängers played by Soderbergh & Betsy Brantley. This dynamic, in which spouses cheat on each other with characters who look exactly the same as the people they’re already with, opens the film up to many thematic provocations we’ve already covered: the breakdown of communication, the mundanity of suburban life, the dwindling passion inherent to romantic partnership & domesticity, etc. What I’d like to hear from Boomer is how he thinks that dynamic compares to the similar themes of Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa, in which attraction to a new acquaintance makes them appear different from the rest of the world only until time eventually renders them to be the exact same as everyone else: just another body within the dull hegemony. Does that more conspicuously bitter stop-motion drama traffic in the same waters as Schizopolis‘s “Love the One You’re With” domestic strife for you or are they doing entirely different things?

Boomer: What a great question! For me, I see the two as being complementary and compatible, but not really aligned with one another. Within Anomalisa, Michael’s issues appear to stem from a pretty severe mental illness which causes him to see all people as variations on the same archetype of a person; for him, the whole of humanity is a vast sea of individual bodies bearing identical faces and voices, “proving” to him that he is the only unique (and perhaps only real) person in the world. Michael is adrift in a sea of non-persons, circumscribed by his own existence and unable to find value in others, trapped. When he meets Lisa, he perceives that he is like him, an individual, and creates a facade of her with which he falls in love. When the real Lisa does not live up to this false expectation (because no one can), she begins to assume the same face and voice as the rest of the human horde, until Michael can no longer see what attracted him to her in the first place. My reading of the text of Anomalisa is different from my reading of Schizopolis; Anomalisa is very much a work about the failures of human interaction, yes, but I interpret its thesis to be a statement about men’s needs to create an artifice of a woman in place of a real person, as this is less complicated than recognizing a person’s individuality, and how that mental circumlocution is supported by predominant social narratives about the gender but is ultimately doomed to failure because it fails to accept that gender is socially created and performative, not a fact of biology. On another level, Anomalisa is about Michael’s particular and idiosyncratic sociopathy when it comes to his lack of recognition of the humanity of others.

My reading of Schizopolis, on the other hand, is more about the relationships between individuals. It is still a film about projection, but in a way that explores the various ways that multiple individuals categorize and compartmentalize their interactions between different people depending upon the intimacy (or lack thereof) of their relationship, the difference in their social classes and the power dynamic thereof, the emotional distance between them, libido, and other factors. Instead of Anomalisa‘s Michael facing the difficulty of seeing every person–strangers, his wife, his ex, his boss–as the same, Fletcher Munson’s interactions vary, demonstrating the dissonance between his words and his thoughts in his conversations with various people. As noted above, his conversation with his wife is like an exchange of placeholder dialogue despite their physical proximity to each other on screen and the intimacy which we would expect based on the fact that they are married; alternatively, his shouted comments to his neighbor, who is placed across the street to imply that the distance between them is personal as well as physical, are too familiar, talking about the man’s wife in intimate (and derogatory) terms.

The biggest difference between the two films, however, is in the fact that Anomalisa only gives us Michael’s point of view and insight into his particular problems with intimacy, communication, empathy, and humanity. We see Lisa’s true face at the end, but only briefly and out of Michael’s sight. Shizopolis gives us the points of view of several people, and highlights how each of them have their own problems with communication, which vary from person to person. I wouldn’t say that makes Soderbergh’s the richer film (it’s too tongue-in-cheek to have the same haunting effect as Charlie Kaufman’s unique brand of melancholy), but it does make it one with more rewatch value.

Britnee, what did you think of the role of (dis)organized religion in this film? Do you think that the director’s choice to mock Scientology over other, more popular and stable religions was designed to prevent offense? What does the film say about cult thinking?

Britnee: Eventualism is always looming in the background of Schizopolis. These sad, lifeless characters (minus Elmo) are products of Eventualism. Much like Scientology, Eventualism dangles the cheese in front of its members, giving them the promise of reaching their full potential, but in all actuality, destroying their lives. Part of me wonders if Fletcher and his wife’s doppelgängers are what they would actually be if they weren’t part of Eventualism. Lately, I’ve become fascinated with Scientology. No, I’m definitely not becoming a member, but the more I learn about the religion the more blown away I am that it exists. On a recent trip to Quebec City, I stumbled upon Eglise de Scientologie on accident (I thought it was a bookstore), and it was quite the experience. Lifeless, robotic individuals were walking up to me and my mother, offering us the “secret to happiness” by trying to lure us into taking personality tests. I couldn’t help but think of these folks when watching Schizopolis. Like Fletcher and his wife, they really aren’t horrible people; they’re just in a horrible situation. Like with many cults, if the members aren’t 100% brainwashed, they’re trapped. Their families are members and it’s become the only life they know, so it’s not easy to leave. Take Fletcher, for instance: he works for the leader Schwitters and his family belongs to the faith, but he’s absolutely miserable. He’s forever doomed and he knows it.

I don’t think that Soderbergh targeted Scientology over other popular religions to prevent offense, as he doesn’t strike me as the type to play it safe. It seems like he chose Scientology because it’s more interesting than boring old Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, etc. Scientology is a little more on the flashy side, as it’s practiced by many celebrities and even advertised on television!

Lagniappe

Alli: As boring and ill-fitting as suburban, domestic life is presented here, ultimately there’s some sort of resolution and acceptance. Fletcher meets with his wife in the end at coffee shop to patch things up. It seems like they’ve had a taste of the other, more adventurous side of life and it fits even less. Hopefully they resolve their communication issues, but overall it’s an ending that says maybe the average American life isn’t so bad. Some people are just born normies, and that’s okay.

Boomer: As for another artistic view on Baton Rouge that is more in line with Brandon and Alli’s feelings about the city, I recommend “Polio Addict” by BR band The Melters. As for other Baton Rouge-iana that permeates the film, I thought that perhaps Soderbergh’s mention of “foot long veggie on wheat” was a reference to Inga’s Subs and Salads, but wanted to make sure that this was possible, timeline-wise. As it turns out, yes! Inga retired a couple of years ago, but her shop is still in existence on West Chimes Street, and I recommend it.

Britnee: I can count the number of times I’ve been to Baton Rouge on one hand, so I didn’t have any nostalgic feelings like the rest of the crew. I will definitely check out some of the Schizopolis landmarks on future trips!

Brandon: Schizopolis was the most important motion picture I ever rented. It is my firm belief that the delicate fabric that holds all of us together will be ripped apart unless every man, woman, and child in this country sees this film and pays full streaming price, not some cut-rate deal. I found certain sequences & events confusing, but it was my fault, not filmmakers’. I will need to see the picture again and again until I understand everything.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
October: Brandon presents Unfriended (2015)
November: Britnee presents Hearts of Fire (1987)
December: Boomer presents Wings of Fame (1990)

-The Swampflix Crew

Logan Lucky (2017)

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I imagine a few outsiders are likely to be offended on The South’s behalf for the way the region is depicted in Steven Soderbergh’s latest heist picture. A self-described Oceans 7-11, Logan Lucky stages an elaborate robbery of a NASCAR racetrack with the same technical intricacy of Soderbergh’s more lavish crime pictures, except now with the Southern-fried flavor of a Masterminds or Talladega Nights. A Louisiana native himself, Soderbergh feels intimately familiar with the Down South culture of his North Carolina & West Virginia settings, even peppering in references to LSU football as a callback to his Baton Rouge roots (which are more immediately perceptible in titles like Schizopolis & Sex, Lies, and Video Tape). Speaking as a lifelong Louisiana resident who’s familiar with the camo sweatpants & Bob Seger t-shirts country where Logan Lucky is staged, I personally found the film to be far more loving than satirical. Characters may awkwardly reference “knowing all the Twitters” or “looking it up on the Google” in their comically thick Southern accents, but the movie is genuinely invested in their emotional & financial hardships even while having a laugh at colloquialisms. Soderbergh may be making fun of his characters to an extent, but it’s in the way of an older brother ragging on their younger sibling. It’s done out of love & an unavoidable compulsion.

I’ve personally never seen an Oceans movie so I can’t directly compare Soderbergh’s sleek money-makers to Logan Lucky in terms of how they function as elaborate heist plots. I will say that there’s a laid-back, distinctly Southern vibe in the way the film builds up to its NASCAR track heist centerpiece that I doubt was integral to when he was filming beautiful movie stars robbing casinos in tuxedos. That slow Southern drawl delivery leaves a lot of room in the first two acts for character-based humor, however. Channing Tatum & Adam Driver star as two blue collar brothers who mastermind the NASCAR heist with a limited set of technical skills, but an intimate knowledge of how the facility’s money is stored & accounted for. Although Logan Lucky is a notable departure from the Oceans movies’ sleekness, it does feel like a direct continuation of Soderbergh’s previous collaboration with Tatum, Magic Mike. Both films can be wickedly fun in spurts, but also dwell on the dismal economic landscape suffered by modern American Southerners. Instead of struggling as a male stripper trying to make it out of the business, Tatum is a construction worker who’s let go for not disclosing a pre-existing medical condition, but desperately needs money to be able to afford his right to visit with his young daughter. Along with his bartender brother (Driver) & his hairdresser sister (Riley Keough), he intends to shatter a local superstition about his “family curse” by stealing a large sum of cash from an insured corporation that can stand to lose the money. As an audience, we never get the detailed plan of the heist until it’s entirely over, but rather take the time to get to know the Logan family in the weeks before they pull the trigger on their NASCAR-robbing ambitions. It’s easy to equate that kind of lead-up to traditional Southern Hospitality, which I believe to be a genuine impulse here.

Although I was often the only lunatic laughing in the theater, I do believe one of Logan Lucky‘s greatest strengths is its muted, character & setting derived sense of humor. A stranger accusing Tatum’s protagonist of being “one of them Unabomber types” because he doesn’t carry a cellphone or a smash cut from cockroaches to frying bacon had me cackling so much in the film’s first act build that I was in no rush to get to the payoff of its NASCAR heist. Admittedly, some of the humor in that build-up was in hearing ludicrously thick Southern accents attempted by big shot movie stars: Tatum, Driver, Keough, Daniel Craig, Katherine Waterson, Katie Holmes, Hilary Swank (the last two of whom were tasked with similar caricatures in Sam Raimi’s The Gift), etc. Those accents are just one facet of Soderbergh’s larger scope portrait of Everywhere, America that rests at Logan Lucky‘s core, however. There are so many distinct touchstones of Americana informing the film’s aesthetic: child beauty pageants, Katie Holmes drinking white wine in the doorway of her McMansion, off-hand references to Dr. Phil and the Fast & Furious franchise, an impassioned inclusion of John Denver music (in a year where every movie from Okja to Free Fire seems bent on honoring the long gone folk musician), and so on. It’s perfectly fitting, then, that the film pauses dead in its tracks for the National Anthem at the top of its centerpiece NASCAR race and makes frequent references to Memorial Day & American veterans. Anyone who’s made uneasy by the idea of a wealthy British actor dressing up in the guise of a poor American Southerner or the image of a pig feet dunking contest at a local fair is missing the larger picture of Soderbergh’s love for these characters and their environment. He’s having fun with them for sure, but not necessarily at their expense. The great joy of the film is watching them get one over on a larger corporation with the limited means of a discounted underdog; the movie is on their side.

-Brandon Ledet

Brigsby Bear (2017)

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There was a time before DVRs, streaming, and even VCRs when watching television was a more communal activity. The idea of a “water cooler show” that everyone discusses in the days after it airs is still alive & well, but in the early days of broadcast viewing there was a more distinct cultural phenomenon of everyone watching the same show at once. When I was a kid my two religious appointment-viewing shows were The Simpsons & Saturday Night Live, two cultural behemoths that shaped my comedic brain while simultaneously doing the same for snarky kids & juvenile adults everywhere who I virtually shared a television set with, but never met. Brigsby Bear taps into that exact communal phenomenon and turns it into a horror show. What if there weren’t millions of other people watching The Simpsons at the exact same time as me? What if, in fact, I was the entirety of the show’s intended audience? What if instead of it being a show meant to entertain a massive amount of people it was instead produced as propaganda to warp my (and only my) developing mind? In Brigsby Bear, the answers to these questions are darkly funny & informed by awkward, whimsical quirk, but also lead to some fairly earnest, heartbreaking discoveries about abuse, therapy, community, and art.

SNL’s Kyle Mooney stars as the victim of such an elaborate betrayal, a thirty-something man-child who was raised as the sole superfan of the fictional television show The Brigsby Bear Adventures. The show, which chronicles the space-traveling adventures of its titular bear, was meant to raise him from when he was a small child until his current state as an emotionally stunted adult. As a result, it has the appearance of Teletubbies or Barney style kids’ television with the complex lore of a sci-fi series that has lasted hundreds of episodes over the course of decades. Along with enforcing propaganda about “only trusting your family unit” and how “curiosity is an unnatural emotion,” the show also teaches him increasingly complex math problems & provides a window of mental escape within his horrifically insular surroundings. Beginning where Room winds up in its third act, Mooney’s over-sheltered protagonist ends his lifelong confinement to a small space where television is his only contact with the outside world to explore a new world where “everything is really very big.” The problem is that in order to be integrated into a larger, more conventional society, he must leave behind his memorabilia altar to the almighty Brigsby and adjust to a new life where a show that only he’s ever seen is no longer being produced on a weekly basis; he’ll never know how The Brigsby Bear Adventures ends. His only choice, then, is to complete Brigsby’s character arc himself in a final, self-produced movie that will satisfactorily conclude the only story he (and only he) has ever cared about once & for all.

If Brigsby Bear were made in the snarkier days of the Gen-X 90s, it would be unbearably sarcastic & mean. Although it’s a darkly funny film that builds its narrative around a fictional television show that stars an animatronic bear & adheres to an Everything Is Terrible VHS aesthetic, it’s instead remarkably earnest, with genuine emotional stakes. Along with Mooney (who co-wrote the screenplay), Brigsby Bear features several sketch comedy performers (Matt Walsh, Andy Samberg, Beck Bennett) who somehow sidestep snark to hold their own dramatically with more traditionally earnest players like Greg Kinnear, Claire Danes, and Mark Hammill. Only Tim Heidecker is allowed to fully ham it up in his single scene cameo as an objectively shitty action star. Everyone else plays the material straight, allowing the absurdity of the scenario to speak for itself. Mooney anchors the film by adjusting the socially awkward, overgrown teens he usually plays in sketches to convey a hurt, scared man-child who is unsure how to adjust to the expanse of the modern world, so he buries himself in his work, recalling outsider art projects like Marwencol or Henry Darger’s Realms of the Unreal. By crudely learning the art of filmmaking so he can complete the fictional saga of a space alien bear wizard, he finds his own place in society, making friends & learning to cope with an unbelievably tough adjustment along the way. It’s just as touching as it is strange.

I never thought I’d see the best parts of Room & Gentlemen Broncos synthesized into a single picture, but what’s even more impressive is that Brigsby Bear manages to be both more emotionally devastating & substantially amusing than either individual work. 2017 was the year Kyle Mooney made me cry in a comedy about an animatronic bear, a time I never knew to expect. My only real complaint is in the frustration of knowing that I can’t be locked in a room to watch a few hundred episodes of The Brigsby Bear Adventures myself. Regardless of how it was created to manipulate a single viewer/victim, its existence could only do the world good. Like an inverse of the haunted VHS tapes of The Ring, everyone who watches The Brigsby Bear Adventures is emotionally brought to life and I sorely wish I could count myself among them.

-Brandon Ledet

Patti Cake$ (2017)

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I remember thinking last year’s indie darling Sing Street (which celebrates the joy of watching a young new wave band come into their own in 1980s Dublin) was cute & mostly enjoyable, but 2017 has already offered two cheaply-made features that improve on its basic formula. The darkly funny romantic dramedy Band Aid juxtaposes the joys of watching a garage band come together with the tragedy of a marriage falling apart, adding a sense of purpose to the songwriting missing in Sing Street’s dedication to nostalgic pastiche. Patti Cake$, by contrast, sticks much closer to Sing Street’s recipe, a rags to slightly-nicer-rags story where a young pop music act struggles to gain the confidence in their own voice they can only experience in their music video daydreams. The difference for me is that Patti Cake$ steers this narrative towards a much more satisfying emotional climax and happens to frame its setting in a world I can much more readily identify with. Its tale of misfit nerds trying to leave their mark on a behind the times, low stakes New Jersey rap scene feels specifically geared to remind me of Coming of Age in my own shitty industrial suburb (Chalmette is pretty much a New Orleans-scale Jersey) when nu metal and Ca$h Money were a huge deal. It even includes an out of nowhere Bikini Kill needle drop plucked directly from my personal high school soundtrack just to drive the last nail in the coffin. It’s a celebratory music scene fairy tale version of a life I’ve already lived, which makes Sing Street’s coming of age romance feel increasingly hollow in the rearview.

The titular Patti Cake$, aka Killer P, aka Patricia (breakout actor Danielle Macdonald), is an aspiring white girl rapper whose service industry jobs (bartending at a karaoke dive bar & picking up extra cash catering) are far from the pop star excess she longs for in her music video-inspired daydreams. She hopes to be signed one day by local rap legend Oz, who appears to be half A$AP Rocky/half wizard, but doesn’t have the confidence to even challenge the Vanilla Ice-flavored EDM idiots who stage concert at the local VFW halls. Her addict mother (Lady Dynamite‘s Bridget Everett) knocks her down for not having a talent for “real” music, unlike her own past of fronting a hair metal band in the 80s. Neighborhood bullies insult her from all sides for being overweight before even hearing what she has to say. Rap game rivals & idols, including the all-powerful Oz, tell her she has no business even trying to make it, that she should just stick to her service industry purgatory. Still, she hones her skills at writing bars around the clock, rapping while she’s brushing her teeth, pissing, and preparing the morning’s Pop Tarts. Eventually, she finds her own scarecrow & tin woodsman (a nerdy pharmacist hype man & a goth version of Nell with a shack full of expensive beat-making equipment) to follow the mixtape road to success with her, despite the constant flood of reasons to quit. The speed bumps along the way are undeniably cliché (including a subplot about her mother’s jealousy so old hat it was spoofed on a Strangers With Candy episode nearly two decades ago), but feed into the film’s charms as an old fashioned fairy tale. By the time the Hero’s Journey concludes with a climactic concert and an alternate path to (minor) success, the cumulative effect is awe-inspiringly great. We’re all rooting for Patti Cake$.

Director Geremy Jasper’s debut feature is impressive not only in its parallel-thinking improvements on the Sing Street formula, but also in its infectious sense of style. Patti Cake$‘s slightly heightened sense of reality feels like a Ca$h Money album cover adapted to a feature length fairy tale. It’s less of the ramshackle 8 Mile it’s been marketed as than it is a surreal comedy that clashes the green smoke & bubble bath fantasy of rap videos against the strip mall & cigarette butts reality of industrial suburbs for relatable, darkly humorous effect. It’s like a hip-hop version of Drop Dead Gorgeous in that way, especially in scenes where it undercuts its small scale triumphs with the visible awkwardness of details like fumbling, nerdy sex and celebratory mozzarella sticks. Everyone in the film, from the rebellious go-nowhere twentysomethings to their bitter went-nowhere authority figures, feels as if they’re permanently stuck in the summer after high school graduation, rotting in a stasis of indecision & dwindling opportunities. Some of the details of this world are very specific to New Jersey, including a real life Cookie Puss, but a lot of it applies to every small town industrial suburb in the US. If Patti Cake$ were set in the Midwest, it’d likely be a Juggalo story. If it were set in Chalmette, Louisiana, its nu metal moment in the VFW Hall (featuring an industrial metal song with the lyrics “You’re sheep! Wake up!”) would’ve commanded the entire feature. If it were set in Dublin, well, I feel like I’ve already seen that movie. Patti Cake$’s Jersey rap scene setting isn’t essential to its storytelling, as hinted at by the cycle started by the mother character’s hair metal past, but it does afford the film a striking sense of cheap-to-produce visual imagery that helps distinguish its supernatural fairy tale tone. What’s much more important is the way the film succeeds in making that fairy tale feel freshly funny & emotionally satisfying, despite its overriding sense of familiarity.

-Brandon Ledet

Junior (1994)

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There’s no question that in the very limited subgenre of Ivan Reitman comedies where Arnold Schwarzenegger is teamed with Danny DeVito in a mismatched comedy duo, Twins is the crown jewel. Where does that leave its only competition, though? Much like how Twins finds it endlessly hilarious that Schwarzenegger is large & DeVito is small, the follow-up to that pairing, Junior, is tickled by the idea of the smaller actor getting the larger one pregnant. That’s not an idea that necessarily generates brilliant comedy on a joke to joke basis, but it does lead to very pressing questions like How?, Why?, and Wait What? that could never be fully answered by a single motion picture. Reitman & company were so amused by the idea of a pregnant Arnold Schwarzenegger that they never stopped to consider the reasoning or the implications behind the unholy creation, leading to an oddly tame studio comedy with an absurdly bizarre basic premise that’s made all the more jarring by the fact that it’s not fully explored. Twins is the funnier, more successful Schwarzenegger/DeVito comedy in Reitman’s catalog, but Junior is clearly the strangest.

Schwarzenegger begins Junior as a caricature of a meat-head supernerd near-identical to the one he played in Twins. The only difference is that this nerd is uptight, a cynical academic who’s nervous around the children & social obligations he encounters through his career in fertility research. As his foil, DeVito is also similar to the chauvanistic snake oil salesman he plays in Twins, except this time he works in the field of gynecology. In the name of saving their collaborative research project from having its university funding pulled (or some other such contrivance), the two goofs make the rash decision to experiment on themselves to prove their very sciency science serum is effective in increasing fertility. This leads to Arnold being impregnated with an egg stolen from a fellow researcher’s (and eventual love interest’s) competing project, fertilized by his own sperm. Their experiment is never supposed to continue past the first trimester, but Schwarzenegger’s shifting hormones convince him to carry the child full-time, against all logic & good taste. We watch in amusement/horror as pregnancy slowly opens his cold, dead heart to life’s simple joys and he finds true love with the researcher (a befuddled, Nutty Professor-mode Emma Thompson) whose egg he hijacked without consent. It’s all very conventional in a textbook romcom sense, except for the obvious deviation from that model in having the film’s emotional work carried on the back of a male, pregnant bodybuilder.

The strangest aspect of Junior is not the presence of a visibly pregnant Arnold Schwarzenegger, but the general absence of traditional jokes. Besides the absurdity of its premise and a couple stray jabs of gay panic humor, the film does little to reach for moments of over the top comedy. What’s left, then, is the uneasy feeling of watching DeVito & Schwarzenegger gestate a baby, which feels subversively bizarre only in the way it’s mostly played straight. DeVito compliments Schwarzenegger’s sperm in a flat, matter of fact tone, remarking “Strong swimmers. Big load. Way to go.” He penetrates Schwarzenegger’s abdominal wall to impregnate him with a giant needle, with little attention paid to how he will carry a baby without the help of a womb or umbilical cord. Schwarzenegger’s struggles with morning sickness, nipple soreness, and hormone-induced horniness are only amusing because of the physical presence of the actor conveying them. Besides a third act drag routine at an expectant mothers’ retreat or his action movie one-liner delivery of “My body, my choice,” there aren’t many comedic touches to his presence in the film. In fact, in a nightmare sequence where his face is superimposed over a screaming baby’s, a brief moment of mid-90s CGI, he can even be outright terrifying.

Junior‘s one joke begins & ends with its basic premise: Danny DeVito gets Arnold Schwarzenegger pregnant. There’s something perverse about playing that premise straight instead of reaching for a laugh-a-minute giggle fest, but the fact of the matter is that the film’s main attraction is the absurdity of its own existence. If you want to see DeVito & Schwarzenegger bounce off one another as a top of their game comedy duo, watch Twins. Junior should be reserved for when you want something other than humor: unease, confusion, and (in the case of the CG Arnold baby) horror. The film feels like Reitman somehow got away with a longform prank on pop culture at large. I’m sure he was tickled with the results, but he rest of us can hope to muster stunned awe.

-Brandon Ledet

The Women (1939)

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The tagline for the 1939 comedy The Women is “It’s all about men!” This is a blatant lie. The Women was initially written as a stage play based on gossip overheard in a nightclub powder room. Including the playwright and the film’s two credited screenwriters (Clare Boothe Luce, Anita Loos, and Jane Murfin), that makes three women behind its script, which is a remarkable feat for a Studio Era feature. What makes The Women even more remarkable is its enormous all-female cast. Men are never seen nor heard in the picture, a casting choice that even applies to the women’s yipping lapdogs. The joke in that “It’s all about men!” tagline, then, is that when these (uniformly white, wealthy) women are alone together, all they discuss is the men in their lives. I suppose that’s technically true in a broad sense. It is odd that it could be questioned if this all woman-starring feature would pass the Bechdel Test. That doesn’t meant the film is about men at all, though. The off-screen men referenced constantly in The Women‘s dialogue as husbands, ex-husbands, and secret lovers aren’t functioning in their corresponding women’s lives as conquests of romance, but rather as bargaining chips. They’re pawns, foot soldiers, personality-free tokens that represent wealth & power, but not much more. The Women is better understood not as a romantic comedy, but as a social circle war film where its female cast of characters gun each other down with rapid-fire barbs & insults. Divorces & marriages are like battles temporarily won; the men are territories claimed. Nothing matters as much as the women calling the shots in the war room, though, which in this case happens to be an upscale health salon.

Norma Shearer stars as a wealthy mother whose husband is becoming increasingly absent as he spirals further into an extramarital affair. She had previously held illusions that their marriage was a modernist arrangement of equal partnership. Her mother suggests, coldly, that she remain married and keep her feelings about the affair to herself, suggesting an age old tradition in their social sect. It turns out many wives treat their husbands this way, allowing for secretive betrayal as long as they can publicly keep the wealth & social status. Others march through a long line of divorces & affairs to match their needs as they shift through time. Our protagonist has two enemies in her fight to retain her dignity in her decision to remain in a loveless, compromised marriage. The obvious enemy is the husband’s mistress, played by a devilishly callous Joan Crawford, who is nakedly exploiting the man’s lust to improve her drab life as a futureless counter girl at the social circle’s central meeting place: the salon. The less obvious enemy is one of her closest friends, played by the deliciously wicked Rosalind Russel, who deliberately stirs shit among her peers out of pure, idle boredom. She specifically sends Shearer’s character to the salon to hear the gossip of the affair from a chatty manicurist instead of telling her directly or letting her be. She herself also gossips behind her friend’s back for sport and, worse yet, joins forces with the mistress against her as soon as it’s personally beneficial. This picture is soaked to the bone in gossip, so it likely won’t win over anyone disinterested in overtly catty power plays, but watching Shearer’s dignified defiance openly clash with Crawford & Russell’s gleeful cruelty is intoxicating fun for those onboard. The film is frank & darkly humorous in its discussions of adultery & marriage, an impressive honesty for its 1930s cultural climate.

The pacing & dialogue saturation in this film is immediately overwhelming, opening with some of the most rapid-fire wordplay this side of a cattle auction. What’s truly impressive amidst that dialogue, though, is how much Rosalind Russel is able to outshine Joan Crawford as the film’s central heel, despite not playing the romantic rival. Drag queens looking for tips on how to construct #iconiclooks & #classicreads are advised to bring a notebook and keep their eyes locked on Russell, who eats up the screen no matter how many hundreds of women she’s asked to share it with. Crawford’s part is relatively small by comparison, especially given its impact on the plot. You could easily cut yourself on her eyebrows or put out an eye on her shoulder pads, but most of the damage laid in her warpath is dwarfed by Russell’s larger than life Gossip Queen persona. I will say, however, that Crawford is afforded the single best line in the film, when she complains to her coworkers at the salon, “Can you believe him? He almost stood me up for his wife!” Her coldly calculating efforts to gain power as a rich man’s mistress is an early sign of the shockingly modern-feeling territory the film eventually explores for laughs. There’s a 1950s musical remake of The Women titled The Opposite Sex that I gather isn’t nearly as daring or as subversive as the version that came before it. in the remake, men share the screen and generate in-the-moment romantic conflict with the women at the helm. In The Women, any argument held between a married couple isn’t heard directly by the audience, but rather filtered through gossip in later retellings & traded like currency. There’s a real subversion to that kind of one-sided perspective, especially for its time. As a great as Norma Shearer is as the film’s lead, it’s Russell & Crawford’s gleeful indulgence in that subversion as a deliberate tactic of social war that really makes it feel special. I imagine that’s all lost in the neutered-looking musical.

It’s worth noting that not all of The Women‘s strengths begin & end with its deviously witty dialogue. The film also impresses as a grand visual spectacle, an expensive-looking feat of Studio Era craft. The salon setting that stages most of the film’s social battles is a cavernous compound complete with mud baths, gyms, ballet studios, perfume counters, and a central foyer decked out with massive landscape murals & a modern art fountain in the shape of a woman’s hand. It’s staggering. The camerawork often matches the majesty of the production design. In one pivotal scene, Norma Shearer is confronted with a shocking detail of the gossip surrounding the affair in front of a mirror that reflects three images of Rosalind Russll (a dream, that); stunned, she walks away in a daze directly towards the audience in a momentum-heavy tracking shot while the world around her slips away. I’d also be foolish not to highlight the film’s The Red Shoes style centerpiece that breaks up its black & white cinematography for a single sequence filmed in Technicolor. Described in-film as “an adventurous voyage into Fashionland,” the Technicolor sequence is a narrative-free fashion show that pushes the film just over the edge from sharply-written comedy to aggressively feminine high art. There are plenty of other visual achievements to drool over. I’m especially in love with the set design of a scene where Joan Crawford smokes & chats on the phone in a see-through bathtub, complete with its own set of drapes. There’s just something about the Technicolor fashion show fantasy that elevates every scene around it by proxy. My only complaint about the entire movie, really, is that I had to leave the fantasy of that sequence. My reality felt comparatively drab after that.

The opening credits of The Women pairs each of its main players with their animal kingdom equivalent, suggesting a world of predators & prey: a deer, a lamb, a leopard, a fox, etc. I didn’t see the film’s conflicts as an extension of animalistic nature, however. Rather, the carefully planned, deceptively complex attacks of gossip & romantic maneuvering in The Women feel more like strategic war games & game theory to me. To say this film is “all about men!” was drastic misunderstanding of its basic rhythms by the film’s marketing. I’m honestly not sure I’ve seen many films less about men in my entire life (although Sofia Coppola’s recent The Beguiled remake does come to mind). I’d love to see any other film on that same intensely feminine wavelength, whether from the 1930s or just last month. There’s certainly enough immersive dives into masculinity out there to require a counterbalance.

-Brandon Ledet