comedy

Podcast #215: Look Who’s Talking (1989) & Deciphering Heckerling

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Welcome to Episode #214 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss the arc of Amy Heckerling’s art & career as a Hollywood auteur, starting with her biggest commercial hit: the talking-baby comedy Look Who’s Talking (1989).

00:00 Welcome

02:28 Der Fan (1982)
05:36 Miller’s Girl (2024)
09:35 Blue Collar (1978)
11:20 Adam Resurrected (2008)
21:28 The Sweetest Thing (2002)

26:46 Look Who’s Talking (1989)
57:50 Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)
1:12:09 Clueless (1995)
1:20:47 I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007)

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

– The Podcast Crew

It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012)

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When I saw Don Hertzfeldt’s latest animated short at this year’s Overlook, there was an hour-long line of giddy nerds queued up to squeeze in for a specialty screening and Q&A.  A few months later, ME was paired with a victory-lap roadshow exhibition of Hertzfeldt’s 2012 feature It’s Such a Beautiful Day, which I attended with a smattering of fellow introverts avoiding eye contact and the afternoon sun in the complimentary AC.  Both experiences were immaculate.  The hustle & bustle of the film festival environment made ME feel like a burning-hot ticket, especially since fans could corner the animator in the flesh to force such intimate experiences as asking questions during a moderated panel, showing him the tattoos he inspired, asking for autographs and, in my case, catching a glimpse of him wolfing down Shake Shack between screenings like a regular Joe.  The theatrical rollout was obviously less intimate, but Hertzfeldt did his best to make it feel personal.  As an intermission between the short & feature, he FaceTimes the audience with a pre-recorded message to explain the ways in which It’s Such a Beautiful Day was a breakthrough formal experiment for his art and to also apologize for exhaustion of watching it so soon after ME.  It still felt like a one-of-a-kind presentation for a work that was once streaming without context or personalization on Netflix, even though this exact Cinematic Event is currently touring dozens of international cities.

I’ve never thought of Hertzfeldt as a public figure before this recent tour.  Since he largely works alone on self-taught animation techniques that take years to calibrate, I’ve always imagined him as a reclusive outsider artist, the exact kind of quiet introvert that his movies attract to the theater.  Early works like Billy’s Balloon, Rejected, and Beautiful Day all had a word-of-mouth quality to their cultural awareness, and if his widest critical breakout World of Tomorrow screened anywhere near where I live with this level of fanfare, I totally missed it.  Unsurprisingly, it turns out Hertzfeldt does carry himself with a quiet, shy, apologetic demeanor, seemingly surprised by the continued cult enthusiasm for his animated stick figure abstractions.  It also turns out that his public personality was a lot more integral to the tone & narrative of It’s Such a Beautiful Day than I remembered, since his gentle voice is a constant hum on its soundtrack as the film’s scene-by-scene narrator.  There’s an observational comic-strip humor to It’s Such a Beautiful Day that makes it feel a hand-drawn diary, especially considering the direct, intimate rapport the director establishes with his audience through narration.  That’s what makes it so horrifying when it develops into a diary of personal anxieties rather than a diary of personal experiences as its story escalates, given that if any of this happened to Hertzfeldt himself, he would be either institutionalized or, more likely, dead.

Hertzfeldt narrates the daily, mundane thoughts & experiences of a middle-aged stick figure named Bill.  Our milquetoast protagonist starts his journey suffering the same nagging indignities that plague us all: awkwardly waiting for buses, awkwardly chatting with strangers, awkwardly navigating urban hellscapes, etc.  Bill’s suffering takes on increasing specificity as his mental health declines, though, due largely to a brain tumor that distorts his ability to think clearly (and inevitably kills him).  Although told in third-person, the narration is filtered entirely through Bill’s increasingly warped perception of reality, and the imagery warps to match it.  The white copy-paper backdrop of Hertzfeldt’s early works give way to photographic mixed-media textures that Bill stumbles through in non-linear time loops, untethered from logic.  His observations occasionally become crass & offensive as his POV is compromised by his tumor, making this one of the great illustrations of intrusive thoughts, mental illness, and unreliable narration.  Like all of Hertzfeldt’s work, it’s also a great illustration of Millennial humor, from its grim death-wish nihilism to its LOL-so-random internet cringe.  There’s even a literal bacon joke that anchors the picture to the Epic Bacon humor of the 2010s, which only makes it more impressive that the film manages to sketch out an earnest, authentic big-picture demonstration of what it feels like to think & function with a brain distorted by anxiety, depression, and physical malady.  For a small, devoted audience, no film has ever felt truer.

When Hertzfeldt refers to It’s Such a Beautiful Day as experimental, he means it more in terms of process than in terms of genre.  He filmed the animation cells for the project using a bulky 1940s camera, experimenting with how to segment the frame through multiple exposures by blocking the lens, sometimes mixing traditional animation with stock footage.  Even so, there are some aesthetic touches to the film that do recall Experimental Cinema in the Stan Brakhage/Maya Deren sense, with flashes of pure color overtaking the screen to tell the story through emotion & mood rather than through figure & voice.  It was a drastic evolution for an animator who used to work exclusively in black & white line drawings, with only a few pops of color adding visual excitement to the frame – an evolution that’s since only gotten more extreme through multi-media layering in The World of Tomorrow & ME.  The one thing that hasn’t changed, really, is Hertzfeldt’s unique sense of comic timing, which mines dark humor out of the mundane absurdism of being alive.  His ability to perfectly time a punchline made him a cult figure long before he fully distinguished his craft as a visual artist, so it’s been wonderful to spend so much time hearing those jokes in his own voice this year, whether in his heavily-narrated cult classic or in his Q&A tour promoting his new, dialogue-free short.  It’s fitting, then, that the only way to access these films (if they aren’t physically traveling to your neighborhood theater) is to purchase them directly from the artist’s website.  I imagine he personally packages each shipment by hand and includes a scribbled note of apology for making your brain a little darker with his harsh approach to life & art.

-Brandon Ledet

The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (2024)

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Calling an actor’s performance “vulnerable” is often just a delicate way of saying they appear nude on screen in sub-glamorous circumstances.  Actor-writer-director-editor Joanna Arnow appears to be acutely aware of this critical cliche, which she goes out of her way to mock & undercut in her sophomore feature The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed.  After spending a third of her screentime lounging around nude in a lover’s cramped, poorly lit New York City apartment, she bends over to spread her buttcheeks for the older man’s pleasure, and he dryly declares “Now that’s vulnerable!”  It’s one funny punchline among many in a movie that’s more like a comic strip diary than an autofictional novel.  Joanna Arnow’s vulnerability is essential to the text, as she plays a fictionalized version of herself (named Ann, for short) opposite her real-life parents and a small cast of suitors who illustrate real-life anecdotes of misadventures in kink-scene dating.  Given the fictional Ann’s extensive experience with BDSM, it’s tempting to read Joanna‘s “vulnerability” as a public humiliation kink, but the truth is it’s not any more extreme than most semi-autobiographical comedies about an indie filmmaker’s NYC dating life (see also: Flames, Pvt Chat, Appropriate Behavior, etc.).  Arnow’s just willing to make a joke at her own expense after indulging in that narcissistic ritual.  Now that’s vulnerable!

Almost every scene of The Feeling has a set-up and punchline rhythm to it in that way.  It’s a film made entirely of short clips of low-stakes, emotionless interactions in which the joke is just how banal it feels to be alive.  We bounce around the three tidy corners of Ann’s limited existence—work, family, sex—where she’s constantly being told what to do by elder micromanagers.  At work, she’s ordered around by corporate-speak bureaucrats; at home, by adorably sour parents.  At her on-again-off-again dom’s apartment, she’s ordered around by a middle-aged man who’s just as indifferent to her presence as everyone else in her life, except with an added layer of opt-in roleplay.  The only relief from this universal indifference is the sanctuary of Ann’s undecorated apartment, where there are no pets or hanged pieces of art personalizing her space.  She is a character defined by absence of characteristics, which is darkly hilarious in scenes where doms command her to tell them what she desires and she can’t come up with anything specific, defaulting instead to stock-character roles like Fuck Pig or furniture.  In most BDSM relationship dynamics, it’s the sub’s job to tell the dom what to tell them to do, so the heroic journey of our protagonist is all in learning how to assert herself and define her own personality against a world that’s so deeply, oppressively bland.  It feels incredibly good when she gets there (and incredibly terrible when she backslides).

The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is the driest comedy you’ll find outside a Roy Andersson film, which is funny to say about a BDSM confessional where no single scene lasts longer than a minute.  Most of its filmic artistry is in Arnow’s tight control of the edit, which both trims completely static interactions down to concentrated bursts of social tension and tells a larger story of personal growth through selective sequencing.  The audience can always tell exactly how emotionally invested Ann is in her various romantic & sexual relationships by how long Arnow is willing to linger with them.  When she’s trying to branch out from her long-term dom/sub relationship, the movie takes on a speed-dating rhythm that cuts between the various doofus men of NYC in rapid-fire clips.  When she’s indulging in her very first genuine romantic partnership, it maintains its average short-burst scene length but shows fewer interactions outside that relationship, putting her workplace and homelife annoyances on the backburner for a stretch (much to the audience’s relief).  If you catch Ann squeezing a sad envelope of room-temperature beans into a microwaveable glass bowl to eat for dinner alone, you know that she’s not particularly invested in any of her current relationships. It’s all told in editorial curation, which is the only element of the film with a pronounced sense of style; everything else is contained in a purposefully flat, digital, Soderberghian void.

If Joanna Arnow is expressing anything about herself to the audience through the avatar of Ann, it’s a young person’s anxiety about not being especially good at anything.  Ann is bad at her job, bad at small talk, bad at roleplay, bad at folding laundry, bad at everything.  She’s super relatable in that way, especially for anyone who was socially suffocated by overbearing parents and then unleashed unto the world at 18 with the expectation that they’re a fully formed adult with their own defined personality & desires.  Those efforts to define herself might’ve lacked specificity without the BDSM angle of her love life, so it’s for the best that Arnow chose vulnerability instead of cowering from cliche.

-Brandon Ledet

Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1970)

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Picture it. You’re settling in for Movie Night, and you know exactly what you’re in the mood for: a film about a bisexual demon twink who moves into a family home to seduce & ruin everyone who lives there.  Teorema is sounding a little too challenging that evening, but you’re not quite in the mood for the empty calories of Saltburn either.  What can you do to scratch that specific itch?  Thankfully, there is a perfect middle ground in the 1970 stage-play adaptation Entertaining Mr. Sloane, which is a little more sophisticated than an Emerald Fennell music video but not, like, Pasolini sophisticated.  It’s got all of the bisexual lust & thrust you’re looking for but lightened up with a little vintage Benny Hill-era British humor to keep the mood light.  Everything is falling into place . . . except that Entertaining Mr. Sloane isn’t currently available for home video distribution in America.  All you can access from the couch is the trailer on YouTube (which at least helpfully includes the film’s plot-summarizing theme song so you can imagine the rest).

I was lucky to catch this horny, thorny farce at The Broad earlier this month, when it was presented by filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell for the weekly WW Cinema series, with particular attention paid to the original work’s playwright Joe Orton.  Mitchell specifically recommended the 1987 biopic Prick Up Your Ears as background context for Orton’s queer agitator sensibilities, but none of that place setting is really necessary for being entertained by Mr. Sloane.  The tricky part is just finding a copy.  This is a work of broad humor & caustic camp.  Its stage play origins and its early arrival on the queer-cinema timeline afford it a sophisticated air, but it’s played directly to the cheap seats so that everyone gets a laugh.  A precursor to similar broad-appeal outsider art from the likes of John Waters & Paul Bartel, it played well to a raucous crowd of hipster weirdos, but there’s nothing especially exclusionary or esoteric about it that would turn off a broad audience.  It’s like an old TV sitcom with a premise that’s in such bad taste that the network deliberately lost its archival tapes.

Peter McEnery stars as the murderous demon twink of the title: an unscrupulous drifter who’s invited into a middle-class family home after he’s caught sunbathing in a nearby cemetery.  He’s picked up by a lonely middle-aged biddy (Beryl Reid) as a thinly veiled act of charity that both parties winkingly acknowledge as transactional sex work.  It would be out of the question to offer him room & board in exchange for sexual favors, but while he’s there . . . Also, because she’s an upstanding lady, there’s no proper way to express her desire for the younger, eager man, but if he were so overcome with passion that he sexually ravished her . . . Unsurprisingly, the men around the house (a classist snob played by Harry Andrews and Alan Webb as his ancient, ornery father) are just as repressed in their attraction to the smooth-bodied scamp.  No one can state out loud that they want to sleep with Mr. Sloane, but everyone jealously conspires to keep him away from the young girls around town whom he’s actually attracted to, meanwhile finding excuses to touch his body.  No one can state out loud that he’s a wanted murderer either, but they all know it to be true.

As a cultural relic, this pitch-black comedy feels like a response to the moral rot of the Free Love era.  Mr. Sloane’s selfishness & violence might reflect the amorality of that era’s hedonistic youth culture, but he’s not the main target of the satire.  Really, the bulk of the movie’s satire is rooted in the older generation’s response to the moral looseness he represents.  Beryl Reid’s girlish view of sexuality is absurdly repressed for a woman of her age, which gets increasingly uncomfortable once she starts treating him as a baby she’s coddling mid-coitus, like a child playing Mommy to her dolly.  Her closeted brother is no better, framing all of his lust for the houseguest through the misogynist mindset of boarding school bunkmates playing rough house.  He also treats Mr. Sloane as a kind of doll, dressing him head to toe in a tailored, fetishistic leather get-up under the guise of hiring him as a uniformed chauffer.  No one can express what they want from Mr. Sloane or how they intend to compensate him for it, but there’s a constant power struggle for his physical time & attention between the siblings that makes for a vicious tug of war.  And then the doubly-repressed lust expressed by their father makes things even uglier.

There are a few production design and shot composition choices that elevate Entertaining Mr. Sloane above its TV sitcom trappings.  Reid’s frilly lingerie and stuffed-animal-decorated teen girl bedroom are especially gorgeous, along with the continually hilarious prop of Andrews’s gigantic pink Cadillac, which appears to be undulating without shocks to match his clownish persona.  Occasionally, director Douglas Hickox & cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky will also frame out an absurdly over-curated tableau, like disembodied lips wrapping around a phallic popsicle against the grey backdrop of gravestones, or like a makeshift wedding ceremony staged at the altar of a fresh corpse.  Mostly, though, it’s the comedic voice of Orton’s source material that shines through, just as John Cameron Mitchell’s introduction to the film suggested.  Orton’s version of “The Straights Are Not Okay” social commentary manages to feel ahead of its time but also ingratiating enough to not entirely lose his contemporary audience.  Instead, he lost the future audience that’s more accustomed to that line of combative queer humor simply through scarcity in distribution, thanks to the current, dire state of home distro for any film made before 1990.  Catch it when it inevitably hits one of the only two streaming services that matter: Criterion or Tubi, whoever gets there first.

-Brandon Ledet

The Sweet East (2024)

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I’m not really sure how to feel about The Sweet East. There’s a neat little Through the Looking Glass theme that’s threaded throughout that I really enjoy (even when it gets the occasional wire-crossed with Adventures in Wonderland, like most Alice-homaging media does), Talia Ryder gives a magnetic performance amongst a half dozen fully realized supporting roles, and it even manages to get a little surreal on occasion despite being shot with documentary-evoking post-production that effectively contributes to its sense of realism. But I’m not sure if I liked it, or if it was good. This is one that’s best discussed with a plot summary, so if you don’t want to get spoiled, skip ahead to the paragraph that begins “What I straightforwardly love . . .”

Lillian (Ryder) is on a high school field trip to Washington D.C. While out with the group, which includes a guy that she hooked up with and his girlfriend, she is in the bathroom when the very place she is in is attacked by a gun-wielding QAnon lunatic who’s pulling his own Pizzagate. A platinum-haired punk with greatly gauged ears (Earl Cave, bad seed of Nick Cave) pulls her back into the bathroom and, in attempting to get out through the ceiling, discovers that the bathroom’s mirror conceals a secret passage through which they escape through a series of tunnels, avoiding the occasional teddy bear and tricycle. She goes with the punk, named Caleb, and his friends back to their communal crust house, where he eventually shows her his dick under the pretense of showing off his piercings (of which there are too, too many, and some of which seem anatomically impossible). She smokes a bowl with a woman named Annabel who tells her about how she recently left a man because he hit her, then falls asleep. The next morning, she joins a group of a dozen or so of the punks on an expedition to a park in Trenton, where they intend to get into a physical altercation with right-wingers they have been told will be there. The place turns out to be more nature preserve than picnic ground, and the punks run their mouths so much amongst themselves that they pass by the group that they’re looking for without noticing, while Lillian (who stopped to pee) hears them nearby as soon as the punks are out of earshot. 

She wanders into what turns out to be a neo-Nazi cookout, where she immediately attracts the attention of the awkward Lawrence (Simon Rex), who makes his way over to her and introduces himself. Thinking quickly, she gives the name Annabel, and Lawrence, who turns out to be a Poe scholar, just about creams himself; she even takes Annabel’s story about fleeing an abuser, and Lawrence immediately buys her some clothes and food and gives her a place to stay in his family home, which he now occupies alone. Lawrence is a character that puzzles me, because it’s him that I’m least sure what to think of. He displays plenty of overt bigotries above and beyond his closeted Nazism, including wiping a glass of water delivered to him by a Black waitress with a napkin before touching it and using the slurs t****y and f****t conversationally and with his whole chest. He’s handsome because Simon Rex is handsome, and he’s erudite and doesn’t talk down to Lillian/Annabel, but his singular obsession with Poe and what one presumes is at least a decade of no social interaction other than delivering lectures means that he’s a one-track bore on top of being a Nazi piece of shit. Some of this is played for comedy, and some of it lands. When giving her the initial tour, he tells her that she won’t want for reading material as he gestures at shelves full of books like she’s the Belle to his Beast, but when we see any of these shelves up close, they’re full of material of the obsessive war history variety, and she ends up reading a book about the history of trains, if I recall correctly. Later, he shows Lillian the semi-biographical short Edgar Allen Poe from 1909, directed by (yes, that) D.W. Griffiths, and overexplains the way that the film abbreviates and combines various parts of Poe’s life as if this seven-minute short is his Zapruder or Godfather, which is a funny bit. Although Lillian attempts to seduce him are unsuccessful, she does convince him to let her go along with him on a trip to New York, a trip that involves him delivering a duffel bag provided by a skinhead to a rendezvous there. When left alone in their hotel, after convincing Lawrence to move them into a single hotel room so that she could have access to the duffle, finds that it’s filled with cash and absconds. 

Within minutes, Lillian is stopped on the street by two filmmakers, producer Matthew (Jeremy O. Harris) and director Molly (Ayo Edebiri), who immediately enlist her to read for a part in Molly’s film. The two of them talk more at her than to her about what the film is about than what it is, in a hyperactive sugar rush of academia/filmcrit brainworm buzzwords that, unfortunately I understood more of than I would care to admit, which is going to be really embarrassing if there turns out to have been no authorial intent involved. After a brief audition, she meets her onscreen love interest in international heartthrob Ian Reynolds (international heartthrob Jacob Elordi), and the two end up being photographed together by the tabloids. Unfortunately, this ultimately leads to the aforementioned skinhead tracking her down to the shooting location in a rural location, and when Ian’s fooling about with a prop pistol causes a shootout to occur, Lillian is rescued by Mohammad (Rish Shah), a crewmember on the film. He manages to whisk her away to a farmstead across the border in Vermont, where he hides her away in an attic room of a barn and warns her not to let her presence become known, as he has to hide her not just from the neo-Nazis but also his brother Ahmad (Mazin Akar), who is leading some kind of Islamic community, one that includes physical training, assault rifles, and—for all intents and purposes—sweatin’ to the oldies, as Lillian observes from her single window. 

Mohammad continues to keep her locked away by telling her that the killers from what has been dubbed the “Mohawk Valley Massacre” are still loose, but when she manages to get out one day when everyone is away in town, she finds a newspaper indicating that they have been in custody for some time. When the group of men living on the compound return, she manages to convince a charmed Ahmad that she is a local girl who got lost looking for her missing dog, and escapes, only to fall asleep in a snowstorm and be rescued by another long-winded man, this time a priest (Gibby Haynes) who tells her that the police are coming to take her home and then starts to lecture her about the Chapel of the Milk Grotto before she slips back into unconsciousness. She wakes up back home; all of the girls that were in her senior class are pregnant, and people have adjusted to her return, but then her entire family is shocked when the television shows that an apparent terrorist bombing has occurred at the football stadium that was hosting the game they were watching. Who did it isn’t important—the crust conclave, the Trenton neo-Nazis, Ahmad’s group, or even someone completely unrelated—at this point, Lillian has seen a great deal of the east, and the only unifying factor in all of the groups that she has met is that they are all frustrated with the status quo, and ready to do violence. She walks away from the family as they gather to watch in horror, passing in front of a flag with forty-eight stars as we head into the credits. 

What I straightforwardly love about this one is the fairy tale narrative of it. Caleb the white haired punk with the noteworthily droopy ears is our White Rabbit, leading Alice behind the looking glass (even though he is a Wonderland character, you rarely get Alice without him regardless of which work is being adapted); Molly and Matt are the film’s equivalents of Tweedledee and Tweedledum, whose language clearly shares the same words as Lillian/Alice’s but are nonetheless fitted together in ways that she is unable to follow. Some of the other elements are less obvious, as when Lillian is taken for a walk by Mohammad while the others are away and he impresses her by naming every tree that they pass, in an inversion of the scene in Looking Glass in which Alice crosses the “wood where things have no names.” One of the most subtle ones relates to rivers and streams, which in Looking Glass portray the boundaries between the rows of a chessboard in keeping with that book’s motif, and Lillian’s crossing of several rivers and other boundaries on her journey. First, we see the Potomac when she is in DC, and when Lawrence first tells her about his home, he says that it’s “right on the Delaware,” and we see the two of them boating there together. When she’s on location for the shooting of As It Churns, she’s seen sitting on a rocking chair on a dock beside a river, smoking. Later, the crossing of the state border into Vermont is important enough that this film’s segment, as displayed on the interstitial title card, is entitled “First Time in Vermont?” As a Looking Glass Easter Egg hunt, it’s a fair bit of fun. 

Lillian’s actions throughout the film are fun. In each new encounter, she uses something from the previous vignette to her advantage. First, it’s stealing Annabel’s name and backstory when she encounters Lawrence. Later, she cherry-picks an observation from one of Lawrence’s lectures about how Europe perceives America as a young nation that will eventually “evolve” into their “decadent socialism” when it matures, which she turns on the pompous Ian Reynolds when he’s giving the filmmaking group a hard time while out one night. From Molly, she learns that there’s a certain way that she purses her lips when she’s acting that reads as completely genuine, and she uses this exact face on Ahmad in order to come off as naive and dim in order to escape the compound. I’m less enthralled with Lillian as a character. This film has the misfortune of being released after the sustained success of Poor Things, a film with which it shares themes and narrative beats, which is to The Sweet East’s detriment in any comparison. Both feature a naive protagonist who goes on an odyssey of being guided by different people, mostly men, who desire her carnally, and whom she must constantly and continuously evaluate and negotiate with as they attempt to teach her something or institutionalize her into accepting their proffered marriages. 

Talia Ryder is more than up to the challenge, and she’s stunning here, but I don’t love that Lillian is so fond of the r-slur, which is a big hindrance. I don’t expect my protagonists to be perfect, but it sends mixed messages when placed alongside Lawrence’s own bigoted language, which I can only assume is there to remind us that no matter how eloquent he is, he’s an unrepentant racist whom we are supposed to disdain. (In fact, Lillian also uses the f-slur at one point, which I had almost forgotten about.) I’m also not enamored of the “both sidesing” of the various groups we see. The crust punks, who I might remind you we last see setting out to do the good work of bashing in some Nazi skulls, are presented as ineffectual, all while also being mocked for being unable to get organized properly and containing individuals, like Caleb, who are posers with rich parents who are raging to rage, not because they’re at all affected by the machine. Molly and Matt are a parody of what middle Americans think of coastal media elites and pretentious film folk, and we can only assume that Mohammad was planning to keep Lillian captive until she was fully Stockholmed (although there’s sufficient evidence to argue that his brother’s camp is actually a gay boot camp thing). Lawrence is a man whose ideas are objectively evil, but he’s treated with the softest gloves by the narrative, and I don’t like that. It’s possible that there’s something I’m missing here, and I could be completely wrong, but I don’t like this. 

Overall, this one is a mixed bag. There’s a lot that’s great going for it cinematically (director Sean Price Williams was D.P. on my beloved Queen of Earth), and there’s something interesting about the interplay between all of these individuals and communities that Lillian interacts with, but I’m just not sure that it nails down all of its theses as surely as it could and should. Worth seeing, but not internalizing. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Divine Madness (1980)

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The Bette Midler concert film Divine Madness is not the most extreme of its one-woman-show contemporaries; it’s neither as outrageous as Sandra Bernhard’s Without You I’m Nothing nor as esoteric as Laurie Anderson’s Home of the Brave.  It does predate both of those examples by years, though, and it’s an excellent time capsule of Midler in her artistic prime.  By the time I was a child, Midler was a kind face in mainstream comedies and a soft-rock radio mainstay, but before my time she was a much more risqué, confrontational performer who rose to unlikely fame by playing gay bathhouses.  I’ve only caught glimpses of her blue material by purchasing live-concert albums at thrift stores, in which her song tracks are buffered by her telling raunchy sex jokes in a vaudevillian Sophie Tucker voice.  It turns out Midler’s stage act was a little more involved than that, but not very.  Mid-film, she acknowledges to her live audience that Divine Madness is intended to be a complete omnibus of her early-career bits, which include firing off raunchy punchlines while playing with a rubber chicken, maneuvering her arm flabs in an act of auto-puppetry, and concluding the show in a handstand as if it’s all she has left to give.  It’s like witnessing the exact moment someone who grew up putting on backyard shows to half-bored parents as a little girl truly made it as the most popular drag act in the world (complete with glittery mermaid costume & tear-away bra).  Midler sings, dances, quips, and costume-changes her way through 95 relentless minutes of maniacally horny schtick while a raucous audience eats directly out of her hand.  I was immediately frustrated that I could not climb through the screen to join them, even though I had not yet fully seen what she was capable of.

There isn’t too much visual style or craft to Divine Madness that’s worth picking apart.  It’s shot in an extreme widescreen frame that suggests a scale of cinematic ambition that director Michael Ritchie never attempts to back up.  After a brief sketch comedy intro in which the theater staff pray for a clean, morally uplifting show in a pre-curtain pep talk, the movie quickly settles into plainly documenting the concert from a few rigidly stationary camera angles.  Whatever energy is missing behind the camera is overflowing from the stage, though, with Midler hardly taking a breath between telling fart jokes then launching into a Janis Joplin-style barnburner rock number.  Her personalized rearrangements of contemporary rock & pop standards are demonically manic, most notably in a rendition of “Leader of the Pack” that translates girl-group vocals into sweaty punk yipping.  It’s a genuinely psychotic act that could only have developed in the glory days of cocaine chic & pre-AIDS sexual abandon.  I don’t know that individual songs or jokes matter all that much to the overall quality of Midler’s show; it’s likely the punchline about discovering her backup dancers “selling their papayas on 42nd Street” killed in 1970s NYC bathhouses in a way that it never could outside those venues.  Her unrelenting chatterbox energy steamrolls any momentary doubt about the show’s quality, though, pummeling the audience with purposefully hacky bit after hacky bit after bit until you’re laughing at punchlines simply because they have the cadence of something you know is funny.  It is classic vaudeville in that way, just updated for an audience whose brain has been rattled by rock & roll, disco, and hardcore pornography.  You don’t have to do much with the camera to make that entertaining; it’s the kind of classic entertainment that predates movie cameras.

If Divine Madness has any connection to current cinema, it’s through Midler’s daughter Sophie von Haselberg.  Von Haselberg recently starred in Amanda Kramer’s psychotronic meltdown Give Me Pity!, which warps the one-woman-show format into a funhouse mirror reflection of the manic narcissism shared by all performing-arts types.  In retrospect, watching Give Me Pity! before Divine Madness was a little like seeing Warhol’s pop art screen-prints of Marilyn Monroe before ever seeing a true Marilyn Monroe picture (which I’m almost certain was another born-late experience of mine as well).  Even Give Me Pity! was artificially backdated to an early-80s aesthetic, though, which is another indication of this work being frozen in time.  I suppose all concert films are technically documentaries, but Divine Madness is especially true to that aspect of the medium.  Just a few years after the 1979 concert it documents, Midler’s public persona had transformed to the point where the movie was already a relic of a bygone era; by the time she recorded “Wind Beneath My Wings” for the Beaches soundtrack, she was unrecognizable.  If you’ve ever been curious what made Midler an exceptional screen & stage presence before she softened up & mellowed out, Divine Madness is essential viewing.  That goes doubly if you’ve ever wanted to know what it would sound like if The Shangri-Las could trigger a psychotic break.

-Brandon Ledet

Shampoo (1975)

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At this point, you can’t fault Quentin Tarantino for hiding or obscuring his influences.  Maybe around the time he first made a splash with Reservoir Dogs on the 1990s film festival circuit, he could’ve been accused of lifting images & ideas from the Hong Kong action cinema that directly preceded him without citing his sources, but by now we’re all used to his schtick.  Tarantino is more of a genre film DJ than a traditional director, remixing & recontextualizing pre-existing media in an act of creation through curation.   Still, there is something a little deflating about catching up with those sources of inspiration after seeing them regurgitated in one of Tarantino’s post-modern mashups.  I understood as a teenager that Kill Bill, vol. 1 visually referenced a long history of vintage Japanese cinema & manga, but it wasn’t until recently watching Lady Snowblood for the first time that it really became clear how much more potent & vivid those source texts can be compared to their photocopied American version.  I loved Jackie Brown when I first saw it in high school as well, but at this point in my life I’m way more likely to return to Pam Grier classics like Coffy & Foxy Brown than I am to their adoring echoes in Tarantino’s homage.  This exact phenomenon hit me again while watching the 1975 Hal Ashby comedy Shampoo for the first time last month, which in retrospect made Tarantino’s most recent film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood feel a little hollow in its redundancy.  There was already a perfectly executed post-mortem on the old-world Los Angeles of the 1960s, made just a few years after the fact, while the corpse was still fresh.  Only, Ashby’s film ties that world’s death and the sinister hedonism of the hippie-dippy takeover that followed to the presidential election of Richard Nixon in 1968, while Tarantino ties it to the Manson Family violence of 1969.  There are no murders in Ashby’s day-in-the-life story about a fuckboy hairdresser who sleeps his way across Beverly Hills, but you can still distinctly smell the stench of death bubbling up from the canyons below.

Warren Beatty is a producer & co-writer of this bad-vibes hangout comedy, in which he satirizes his own real-life reputation as a handsome playboy & sex addict.  He plays an extremely popular, promiscuous hairdresser who compulsively sleeps with all of his clients.  He’s proud of his actual, professional salon work and insistent that he is not a gigolo, since he sleeps with the women purely for the pleasure of the act, and they return for more because he’s genuinely talented with hair.  The hairdressing is 100% part of the foreplay, though, as he practically dry-humps his clients’ heads while blowing them dry, then thrusts his instruments into his waistband like a cowboy’s phallic pistol.  Haircuts are unavoidably intimate acts in all circumstances, but there’s something especially shameless about his technique.  Usually, he gets away with this slutty, unprofessional behavior because the men outside the salon assume he is gay, a stereotype he gladly exploits for cover.  Only, Beatty’s promiscuity gets the best of him when the insular small-town community of Beverly Hills offers no new conquests he hasn’t serviced, and he finds that he’s already screwed over a potential investor in his dream to open his own salon by screwing the man’s wife, mistress, and teenage daughter (a baby-faced Carrie Fisher) on separate occasions – all seedy, all within 24 hours.  Meanwhile, satisfying his monogamous girlfriend at home while satisfying every other woman in the county proves to be trickier by the minute.  The sitcom juggling of these conflicting, overlapping relationships can be funny in a Three’s Company kind of way, but a lot of the film feels like a bitter autopsy on the recently concluded Free Love era, dissecting it more as a covert extension of classic male entitlement than as some progressive far-out experiment.  It’s a damning self-indictment that set public relations for the himbo community back for decades, so there’s something bravely vulnerable about Beatty’s involvement in the project in particular (assuming that Hal Ashby was not quietly known around town as an insatiable fuck machine).

Shampoo has somehow maintained a lasting reputation as a zany screwball comedy, which is mostly only paid off in the two party sequences at its climax.  In its clearest culture clash between the old-world Los Angeles of the 1960s and the upcoming druggy sleaze of the 1970s, both of the opposing sides in the hippies vs Nixon voters divide cross into enemy territory during simultaneous parties.  An absurdly Conservative, buttoned-up Jack Warden plays the central figure in this sequence: the businessman investor who’s been triple-cucked by Beatty’s assumed-queer hairdresser.  There’s a lot of awkward tension wound up by Warden’s Nixon-election-night party, where he’s unknowingly invited a small cadre of counterculture types, including his mistress (Julie Christie) & Beatty’s girlfriend (Goldie Hawn, looking like a boardwalk caricature of Goldie Hawn), who both get into Real Housewives-style glaring matches with Warden’s wife (Lee Grant).  Where the movie really gets funny, though, is when Warden leaves his Nixon-voter safe space and follows his younger, druggier associates to a hippie party in the Hills, chaotically drunk.  Warden explores the hippie party like he’s walking through an alien planet, poking at the locals like extraterrestrial specimens before experimenting with the idea of joining them.  It’s a short-lived cultural exchange, but it is a memorably funny one, especially since it releases a lot of the social tension of the election-night party that precedes it.  That tension immediately returns in full force when Warden catches a direct glimpse of Beatty’s passionate heterosexuality, though, and an ambient threat of violent retribution hangs over the rest of the picture.  It’s the same low-key hangout turned sourly sinister vibe shift that Tarantino echoed in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and although neither film explicitly marks the end of the Old Hollywood era with the brutal murder of Sharon Tate, it’s a feeling & a memory that hangs over both pictures like a dark cloud (something rarely seen in sunny LA).

If Warren Beatty’s slutty hairdresser has any direct corollary in Tarantino’s film, it’s clearly Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth: a has-been movie star whose handsome face only covered up his rotten personality for so long before the good times came to an abrupt stop.  If we’re tracking the way that influence reached Tarantino’s pen, it starts with a real-life friend of Warren Beatty’s, Jay Sebring.  A famously talented hairstylist, Sebring was also a close friend & former lover of Sharon Tate’s and one of the five Manson Family victims murdered in Tate’s home.  Tarantino cast Emile Hirsch in a small role as Sebring in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but there’s a lengthier, indirect representation of him through Pitt’s part as the co-lead.  Cliff Booth partially plays as an homage to Beatty’s hairstylist protagonist in Shampoo, who was in turn partially written in homage to the real-life Sebring.  Everything in Taratino’s films works this way.  It’s all fragments of reflections of ephemera from decades past, rearranged in loving homage to the media he genuinely, passionately appreciates as a consumer.  His work can be incredibly rewarding & entertaining, but there’s something limiting about that practice when compared to the original movies that inspire it.  Somehow, Beatty was able to convey the same darkness & brutality that concluded the Free Love 1960s in his homage to Sebring (mixed with winking reference to his own reputation) without ever evoking the death-cult violence that ended his friend’s life.  It can be fun to pick apart the academic collage of art & history in Tarantino’s work, but there’s something much more direct & powerful about the original works they reference.  Maybe Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was partially made as a corrective to Shampoo‘s discordant reputation as a goofy sitcom, intended to accentuate the more tragic undercurrents of its real-world context that are muffled under the humor of its hippies vs Nixonites culture clash.  If so, it’s a shame that Taratino has reportedly abandoned his planned project that dramatizes the art of film criticism, since that what he’s mainly good at.

-Brandon Ledet

To Be or Not to Be (1942)

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WW Cinema (formerly Wildwood) is a Wednesday-night screening series at The Broad in which filmmakers and other artists introduce classic repertory titles to an eager film-nerd audience.  These introductions are usually pre-recorded via webcam, but occasionally a low-level celebrity sighting will shake up the weekly routine.  Simpsons & Spinal Tap vet Harry Shearer was the most recent in-person presenter for the series, providing some quick, concise insight about what he thinks makes Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 wartime comedy To Be or Not to Be a great work of art, then sticking around after the film to answer questions about his own comedic career.  Shearer mentioned that he had a personal, professional connection to the film’s star, Jack Benny, working with him briefly in his first role as a child actor.  He also argued that the film stands as proof that if you feel passionately about a topic—in this case the political & moral evils of Nazism—you should make a comedy about it instead of a drama (with Dr. Strangelove & Taking Off presented as examples of similarly effective satire).  WW Cinema’s programming has had a lot of influence on what gets reviewed on this blog since they moved their screenings down the street from my house, but I don’t always mention the pre-film intros because they’re not the reason I consistently go; I go because their film selections are consistently rewarding.  I’m only mentioning Shearer here because he put on a masterclass of how to present a movie to an audience who might not have seen it before.  He made the screening personal without distracting from the film.  He voiced his reverence for the artist behind it he found most essential to the piece (in his case Benny, not Lubitsch, the opposite of my connection to it).  He rooted the film in its historical context, both within the timeline of WWII and within the timeline of Benny’s career.  And, most importantly, he kept it brief.  I got the feeling that Shearer has suffered through so many poorly curated film intros and Q&As over the decades that he knows exactly how to not fuck it up, which I’m quickly learning at these WW Cinema screenings is a practiced skill; he’s a professional.

Of course, To Be or Not to Be should not need an intro at all, given that Lubitsch’s comedies are just as riotously funny now as they have ever been; just the gift of laughing along with a live audience instead of streaming it alone on The Criterion Channel is enough to make a modern screening of a Lubitsch classic feel like a cultural event.  Even so, I found myself confused as to why this film isn’t as ubiquitously referenced & recommended as The Great Dictator as the best contemporary Nazi satire.  Jack Benny may not be as enduringly popular as Charlie Chaplin, but To Be or Not to Be is just as daring as The Great Dictator – and twice as funny.  Benny first appears onscreen in full Hitler drag, roaming the streets of pre-occupation Poland and attracting a crowd as if he were a space alien who crashed a UFO.  That’s because Hitler had not yet arrived in the country, and Benny is instead playing a famous Warsaw actor who’s rehearsing to play the Nazi dictator on stage.  Even with the threat of Nazi invasion looming over their heads, most of the film’s scene-to-scene drama involves the lives & squabbles of Benny’s theatre troupe, mostly revolving around the love-triangle maneuvering of his even more famous wife (Carole Lombard) and her flirt-crush of the week (Robert Stack).  It’s just like any of Lubitsch’s classic adultery comedies, except that things get deadly serious at the top of the second act when the Nazi invasion of Warsaw starts in earnest.  Miraculously, Lubitsch gradually builds back to the playful humor of the first act as the theatre troupe schemes to survive & subvert occupation, eventually weaponizing their acting skills as dissident spies within the Gestapo.  The dramatic tension of the second act is shockingly brutal for a comedy, especially considering that it mirrored real-life atrocities happening in real time outside the theater walls during this film’s initial run.  The release of that tension when Lubitsch decides to get goofy again is much needed and incredibly effective, sometimes earning huge laughs just by repeating exact dialogue from earlier scenes.  It helps that most of the jokes are at the expense of artists’ narcissism instead of Nazi violence, which is handled with appropriate mourning & disgust.

If I were presenting what makes To Be or Not to Be great, I’d probably talk about the art of establishing an in-joke with your audience, so that callbacks to previous snippets of dialogue can become uproarious punchlines.  For instance, the title refers to a recurring bit in which Benny is interrupted while delivering the famous Hamlet soliloquy by an audience member who always leaves the room when he gets started.  It turns out that the line was used as a signal to his wife’s would-be lover to visit her dressing room while her husband is occupied.  Over time, we come to realize that she may have chosen that particular moment in his performance to drive him mad because they have a longstanding professional jealousy that fuels the fires of their marriage; we also come to realize that the husband cares more about the interrupted soliloquy than he cares about the adultery, even if just slightly.  It’s a hilarious bit that only gets funnier in repetition, to the point where the line “To be or not to be” earns instant laughs despite being one of Shakespeare’s most often repeated phrases.  It’s also a bit that would work in basically any theatrical setting, since it has nothing to do with the Nazi occupation.  In contrast, there’s another recurring bit in which a Jewish actor in the troupe (Felix Bressart) is constantly auditioning for bigger roles by delivering the “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” speech from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, which alternates between being incredibly funny as an example of theatre-world narcissism and incredibly poignant as a heartfelt plea against antisemitism.  Listening to these jokes build to increasingly louder laughs and starker silences in the room was like listening to a classical music piece build to an ecstatic crescendo after starting on softly bowed strings.  Lubitsch died nearly eight decades ago, but he can still command an audience like a master conductor leading an orchestra.  I’ve enjoyed each of his classic comedies that I’ve seen, but usually for the transgression of their playful view of sex & adultery.  I’ve never been so impressed with the joke-building structure of one in this way before, possibly because I’ve never seen one take such a harsh dramatic pause midway through and have to rebuild its humor on the rubble of real-life horror.

I did not present To Be or Not to Be, though, because I did not work with Jack Benny when I was a child. In fact, our time on this planet did not overlap at all.  Harry Shearer’s insistence on the film’s greatness as an argument that comedy can be as passionate & effective at addressing real-world political issues as drama was a convincing one.  His insights about his & Benny’s comedy careers did not interest me quite as much, but he did not hold command of the stage long enough for that disconnect to derail the screening.  He did a great job introducing a great film without distracting from it by making it all about himself, which To Be or Not to Be itself will tell you is extremely difficult for an actor to do.  Most actors would make a world war about themselves if they could get away with it.

-Brandon Ledet

Sasquatch Sunset (2024)

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There’s something endearingly primal about the dialogue-free cryptid drama Sasquatch Sunset, in which a small family of sasquatches traverse the North American wilderness, searching for more of their kind.  The hairy beasts have nothing on their minds beyond their immediate needs.  Occasionally, they’ll call into the wild a beacon to new potential mates nearby, but for the most part they just forage for food, digest that food on camera, and solicit each other for sex between naps.  Any impulse to improve themselves is played for humor, as with the sasquatch who spends the entire film struggling to learn how to count past three, to no avail.  Maybe there’s some implied commentary on how these simple creatures are the last of their kind, squeezed out of existence by an encroaching human civilization that’s evolved to instead waste our days working desk jobs and reducing environmental resources into abstract profit.  Really, though, you can apply any meaning you want to here, as the movie invites your mind to wander in long, quiet sequences in which its central sasquatch players aren’t doing anything at all.  They just exist.

Personally, my mind wandered to recall how quickly I regress during hurricane power outages, when all there is to do is sit and eat and shit and sweat and grunt about how hot it is. There’s always a guilty pleasure to that state of simply existing in my environment, since it takes mass infrastructural destruction to achieve it. Sasquatch Sunset is a guilty pleasure too, but more in a LOL-so-random, sex-and-poop jokes kind of way.  The progression of its story is guided by the natural rhythms of time – beginning with sunrise and then blocked out into four seasonal chapters.  1970s folk music and crash zooms underline that granola-core hippie idolization of Nature in a knowing, ironic way, but the movie is surprisingly sincere about observing the sasquatches in their woodland habitat.  The selflessness of breastfeeding, the indignity of exposed needle dicks, and the fragility of the body to the most embarrassing forms of accidental death are all initially played as sight gags, but they also sit onscreen just long enough for the audience to reflect on how similar these beasts’ undignified animality is to our own.  We just do a better job of covering it up, more out of shame than out of practicality.

There are a couple celebrities hiding under the prosthetic sasquatch makeup—including Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, and co-director Nathan Zellner—but you wouldn’t know that if you peaced out before the end credits.  This is the kind of vanity-free acting exercise that invites its performers to imagine an entirely different way of being & communicating, something they’re much more likely to be assigned as a warm-up exercise in drama school than as a starring role in a feature film.  Through them, the audience is also invited to imagine, to draw parallels to our own bestial behavior.  Certainly, we’re also invited to laugh, as the film is essentially an example of what it would be like if every throwaway alternate-universe gag in Everything Everywhere All At Once was given a greenlight as its own standalone feature.  What most impressed me about Sasquatch Sunset, though, was not that it could land a few comedy-sketch punchlines about the idiocy of the Missing Link; you could find that payoff in something as common as a Geico commercial.  I was impressed that it cleared so much quiet space between the jokes, inviting the audience to reflect & meditate among our mythical, idiotic ancestors – often in jealous awe.

-Brandon Ledet

The Telephone Book (1971)

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I don’t know that most people decide what podcasts to listen to based on which are most “useful” to them, but I still want to report that Justin LaLiberty’s guest episodes on Brian Saur’s Just the Discs Podcast are the most useful the medium has ever been to me.  Shortly before every Vinegar Syndrome flash sale, Saur will interview LaLiberty (longtime Letterboxd champion and current Director of Operations for VS partner label OCN Distribution) about what titles Blu-ray collectors should scoop up while prices are low.  These conversations are always overflowing with great recommendations for high-style, low-profile genre films I would have never heard of otherwise, and it’s the kind of podcast I listen to with a notepad on hand.  To that point, one title LaLiberty has repeatedly promoted on these Just the Discs eps is the 1971 sexploitation comedy The Telephone Book, to the point where purchasing it felt mandatory (especially since its softcore lewdness pretty much guarantees it’ll never land on a major streaming service).  In general, Vinegar Syndrome has been particularly proud of this discovery & release, using it as a touchstone representative of the distro’s brand: vintage schlock & porno that has more cultural & artistic value than its reputation would suggest.  Having now finally seen it, I totally get it.  It’s a masterpiece of messy, sweaty, independent filmmaking – the exact kind of forgotten curio movie nerds are always hoping to rescue out of the bargain bin.

The Telephone Book is a freewheeling, semi-pornographic arthouse comedy about the divine art of dirty phone calls.  It’s grimy, street-level New York City filmmaking at its most playfully absurd.  Sarah Kennedy stars as an impossibly bubbly 18-year-old nymphomaniac who wastes away horny afternoons sweating alone in her NYC apartment.  Her bedroom boredom routine is violently disrupted at the start of the film by an anonymous dirty phone call from a man in a nearby photobooth, who announces himself under the alias John Smith.  Shocked that the call is the most satisfying sexual experience of her young life, she’s determined to track down the mysterious John Smith in the phone book listings, which guides her through a series of decreasingly satisfying sexual escapades around the city.  The film quickly devolves into a sketch comedy format from there, with isolated performances from 1970s theatre powerhouses William Hickey & Jill Clayburgh standing out among the more generic perverts of NYC.  Then, the momentum of the search for the phonebooth John Smith comes to an abrupt stop when he physically shows up at the scene of the crime, entering our nympho heroine’s apartment disguised in a pig mask.  Most of the rest of the runtime is comprised of his explanation of how he got so good at making dirty phone calls, playing out like the killer’s confession at the end of a slasher.  Then, he repeats the act that drove his victim insanely horny in the first place, melting down what remains of reality with the filthy sound of his voice.

The climactic dirty phone call is so ecstatically perfect that it cannot be convincingly depicted onscreen.  Instead, scenes of the second phonebooth call are intercut with the pornographic images bouncing around in Kennedy’s head, illustrated as crude bathroom-graffiti sex cartoons and explosive warzone audio.  The entire movie plays like a filthy collage in this way, right down to the graphic decor of our heroine’s bedroom, which looks like if the cut-and-paste wallpaper of Daisies was made entirely of porno mags (matching the general vibe of watching Věra Chytilová adapt articles out of Screw magazine).  War photography stock footage illustrates John Smith’s confession of power & guilt as his demented madman ravings get lost in the weeds of fascist American militarism and simulated space madness.  Cutaway interviews asking men why they make dirty phone calls to strangers recall the candid street interviews of Funeral Parade of Roses in their frequent plot disruption.  I’ve seen a few American titles that share DNA with The Telephone Book‘s oversexed, anarchic satire (and I really mean just a few – particularly Bone, Putney Swope, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?), but it’s all played with a tone & visual style that would feel much more at home in an artsy European film fest environment.  I don’t know that anyone’s out there dying to see Al Goldstein’s cheesecake sexuality filtered through the collagey French New Wave sensibilities of Agnès Varda, but if you’re out there, there is exactly one movie that might hit the spot.

As a vintage sexploitation time capsule, The Telephone Book is most illustrative in how it turns phonebooths and phone books into fetish objects of its era, splashing them with the cold water of a dial-a-prayer 900 number service for counterbalance.  Sarah Kennedy’s performance as a Sexy Baby archetype with a girlish voice & body but a monstrously voracious sexual appetite is also a marker of its time.  At one point, she watches then participates in the filming of an orgy as if she were a child observing then entering a petting zoo, fascinated by but detached from the action.  It’s difficult to say whether that characteristic was intended as pure macho fantasy or a pointed satire thereof, but it is undercut by the inclusion of Clayburgh’s more mature, jaded performance as her sultry bestie.  Clayburgh exists only in phone calls with Kennedy, never bothering to take off her sleeping mask while receiving head or loading her revolver in bed, only removing it once the phone sex with John Smith heats her up to an unbearable degree.  John Smith himself (a masked Norman Rose) is where the political satire of the picture creeps in and dismantles the entire illusion of the cutesy nudie cutie it could’ve been without him.  His confession and repeated phone call in the back half are so brilliantly staged that they make you want to immediately start the movie over again to reexamine sillier elements you might have dismissed as smut & fluff in the opening stretch.  That’s partly what makes it such an ideal movie to own on disc, the same way its psychedelic porno breakdown makes it an ideal Vinegar Syndrome disc in particular.

-Brandon Ledet