comedy

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

Lagniappe Podcast: Heathers (1989)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the influential high school mean-girl comedy Heathers (1989).

00:00 The Big Texan Steak Ranch

09:00 Lured (1947)
11:10 Eraserhead (1977)
16:19 The House on Telegraph Hill (1951)
20:50 Drive-Away Dolls (2024)
24:18 Sasquatch Sunset (2024)
28:06 The Beast (2024)

34:57 Heathers (1989)

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

The People’s Joker (2024)

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The People’s Joker made me cry. 

A festival darling a couple of years ago, this DIY transfemme autofiction bildungsroman took an usually long time to reach general audiences, seeing as it was stuck in legal limbo for a while. You see, Vera Drew chose to tell the story of her life—from her earliest realizations that her body didn’t match her concept of herself, to her first real romance and how that other person’s journey of self-discovery helped her understand herself even further, into a happy, fantasy future—all through the lens of living in a comic book world. After an opening that parodies the framing device of Joker, we see a flashback to our essentially unnamed protagonist as a child (when her deadname is spoken aloud, by her mother for instance, it’s bleeped, except in one scene later where it’s uncensored to great effect). In this world, the little AMAB’s greatest dream is to one day be a cast member on UCB (that is, the United Clown Bureau, rather than the Upright Citizen’s Brigade) Live, a parody of SNL in which men in the cast are credited individually as Jokers or Jokemen, while all of the women are consigned to being credited en masse as “The Harlequins.” 

Notably, in this imagining, that Bruce Wayne is Batman is a well-known fact, and he all but rules Gotham with an iron glove. His drones scour the streets for crime, all comedy other than that of UCB Live has been outlawed, and there are films about him in-universe, one of which is clearly a take on Batman Forever, with one of the lines spoken by Nicole Kidman cracking our protagonist’s egg. When she asks her mother about it on the car ride home after the movie, and whether one could be born into “the wrong body,” her mother takes her straight to Arkham, where the sinister Dr. Crane prescribes a semi-antidepressant called Smylex, which is taken via inhaler and instantly distorts the patient’s face into a rictus grin. After a troubled childhood in which an eternally offscreen father leaves all child-rearing to his wife, and with whom our protagonist has an understandably strained relationship, our protagonist (now played by Vera Drew as an adult) moves to Gotham and attempts to get involved on UCB Live and is accepted into the incubator program only to discover that it’s a for-profit scam. This does enable our protagonist to meet their new best friend, Oswald Cobblepot, at the UCB center, and the two of them decide to set up their own illegal anti-establishment “anti-comedy” club. A whole rogues gallery becomes the (lampshaded) found family of the protagonist, including Poison Ivy, Catwoman, Bane, and the Riddler (who gets in early as riddles are, in fact, the antithesis of jokes, making him perfect for their anti-comedy). Our protagonist finds that none of their jokes land, until one day, they see a performance by a Joker named Jason Todd, who’s modeled after the Jared Leto “interpretation” of the character, down to the “damaged” tattoo on his forehead. 

The audience notices before our protagonist does that Jason’s open coat reveals his top surgery scars, so it comes as little surprise to us when he comes out as transgender to our protagonist, although it’s a mild shock to them. Our protagonist asks to be introduced on stage as Joker the Harlequin, and we see Joker and Jason, whom she calls “Mistah J,” play out, and it’s a perfect encapsulation of the complexity of relationships with people who are, whether they tell you at the start with a tattoo on their face or not, damaged. People who are toxic can also be the first people to see us for who we really are, and while that doesn’t cover for the ways in which their behavior is harmful, it does add shades of gray to the fact that these are people who may ultimately teach us something about ourselves. This culminates in our protagonist’s decision to proceed with gender affirming care, presented here as her plummet into a vat of estrogen, Harley Quinn style, only for her and Mr. J to come face to face with the Batman, who has his own abusive backstory with Jason. This is all stuff that is better discovered than recapped, so I won’t summarize further, but this sort of gives you the idea of what this narrative is. Kinda. 

What’s really fun here is just how many different ideas and styles are combined. The segments about J-the-H’s childhood are largely live action, sometimes in locations or sets but sometimes backgrounded only by collages or drawings of her hometown of Smallville. The film-within-a-film mentioned above uses action figures and 3D models to bring not-Batman Forever to life, while some sequences are fully comprised of what appears to be hand-drawn animation. One character exists solely as a puppet, while Poison Ivy is a purely a computer model that looks like she was rendered for a Windows 2000 ROM-based semi-animated point-and-clicker, and characters with more immediate impact on the plot appear in whatever the reimagined memory demands. Some of the film is some combination of several of these, and it’s often so poorly composited that it looks like it’s been cobbled together with excerpts from The Amazing Bulk, but that adds charm rather than taking away from it. I should warn that making the film “busy” in this way might not work for everyone; my viewing companion in particular said that the film’s constant jumps between styles did not mesh with his particular strain of ADHD, and this seems to have made the narrative less legible to him than to me. If you’re able to handle pastiche movies like the kinds put out by Everything is Terrible, you’ll be able to follow this. 

There’s a lot of heart here, especially when it’s clear that Vera is speaking through Joker, like when she admits that when she first arrived in the city she would sometimes call suicide hotlines that would automatically connect her to Kansas because of her area code, and she would use that experience to ground herself by asking how the weather was back home, even if that place had never really been “home.” It’s not all positive, however, as we also feel the biting sting of betrayal when Mr. J calls her by her deadname, the only time that it’s said clearly, in an argument; as she recalls, he had never even known her by that name, so it wasn’t an accident or a slip of the tongue but an intentional use to hurt her. It’s visceral and real, which feels like an odd thing to say about a movie that so provocatively calls attention to its artifice. 

One thing that this one has over the film that it’s parodying/satirizing/reimagining is that it’s actually funny. I’ll admit that I didn’t see the entirety of Todd Phillips’s Joker, but I can promise you that I saw enough. It’s not funny. And hey, not every joke in this one lands, but they come so fast and so furiously across a variety of spectrums that there’s going to be something for everyone here, except for the people who refuse to give the film a chance based purely on their ideologies. The anti-comedy stylings of several of the jokers are funny in their anti-humor with no real knowledge of comics, but there are obviously in-jokes and references, like the omnipresence of the TV-topping mind control device that Jim Carrey’s Riddler’s plan in Forever hinged upon and Catwoman’s complaint that Frank Miller always writes her as a sex worker (not that sex work is bad, she clarifies, but because it’s sexist of him to think that women can’t just be burglars). Most of these are funny even without the context, and some of the jokes that landed most with my theater crowd were oblique jokes about pop culture in general; the biggest laugh of the night came when the yet-unhatched Joker asks to be introduced on stage as Joker the Harlequin for the first time and their Penguiny friend commenting on their femme attire and pointing out that drag, like comedy, had been outlawed, but only because of the fallout from the explosion at RuPaul’s fracking ranch. 

This is an unusual experience of a film, and I expect that whatever impact it might have been able to have on larger culture has been largely blunted by Warner Bros’ intensive scrutiny and attempts to prevent its release with (unsustainable) claims that it falls outside of fair use, and the overall silence about it (so far at least) from the dipshit side of the cultural divide means that it may not get the popularity bump that everything the right wing pundits complain about does, for better and for worse. I didn’t really know what to expect, and I got something that was unique in its presentation but universal in its examination of the way that (sigh) sometimes, it’s society that’s sick, or it’s our parents who make us sick by their reaction to curiosity and parts of the human experience that are repressed due to societal pressures. It’s an Adult Swim fever dream, and, in its final moments and with its final line, it brought tears to my eyes. You know if this is for you, and if it is, seek it out.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Problemista (2024)

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I’ve been a fan of Julio Torres’s for years, ever since a friend introduced me to the joys of Patti Harrison and I got into that whole crew. Los Espookys was a lot of fun, and I was excited to hear about his directorial debut when it originally premiered at SXSW last year, in 2023. It took some time for it to make it to my local theater, but I was excited to see that not only did it hit the mainstream multiplex nearest me, but that there was a surprisingly dense group of people in attendance at my Tuesday night screening, and it got a response from everyone there. 

Alejandro (Torres) is the son of a Salvadoran artist, and many of her designs for public art features came from his imagination, made manifest by her. As an adult, he’s living in a nightmare NY apartment situation and attempting to break into his dream job, as a toy designer for Hasbro. Unfortunately, despite his application to their “talent incubator program,” which included such designs as Cabbage Patch Dolls that have smartphones and the attendant anxiety that comes with such devices, slinkies that simply refuse to go down stairs, and a Barbie with her fingers crossed behind her back (instant drama in the dream house), he has not been selected. Instead, he makes a meager living at a cryogenic facility, where he is assigned to a particular corpse, Bobby (RZA), a painter who was focused on one particular subject: eggs. Bobby’s been frozen for over twenty years, and his art critic wife Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton) is fed up with the ever-increasing cost of his “care.” When Alejandro is fired for a workplace accident—one with zero consequences—at roughly the same time that Bobby is to be moved to a smaller, less expensive part of the facility that does not accommodate his paintings, he latches onto the idea of helping her put together a show of Bobby’s work, as she needs the help and he needs an employee sponsorship in order to remain in the U.S. She agrees, but Ale quickly realizes that he’s bitten off more than he bargained for. Elizabeth is, it turns out, an erratic, defensive, bitter, verbally abusive narcissist, perhaps the exact evil monster his mother foresaw him encountering in a dream. 

Swinton’s performance here is utterly phenomenal, and Torres’s directorial and narrative choices that make her alternatively demonic, sympathetic, and delusional are pitch perfect. There are countless tiny details about Elizabeth that build a portrait of a very particular kind of person, one whom all of us have encountered at some point. When she’s sold on something, she’s devoted to it to the point of nearly psychotic loyalty, as evidenced by her obsession with using FileMaker Pro, a three decade old computer program, in order to maintain continuity across all of her databases. She’s hit a point of technological arrested development, and her frustration is made the problem of everyone else around her: Apple phone service agents for whom explaining how to find her photos on her phone is a daily occurrence, Ale for having to learn software that might be older than he is, and everyone who crosses her path and is blinded by her smartphone’s flashlight, which is always at full blast. She’s a classic evader, as she deflects any and all attempts to rationalize with her by changing the subject to one of her other countless complaints, and she has no appreciation for how her apathy toward signing his sponsorship documentation keeps him in a perpetual state not just of anxiety but of danger as well. 

Alejandro is her perfect foil in addition to being her assistant and, in some ways, both her student and her teacher. The details are best left discovered through a viewing rather than recited here, but the plan to be saved from deportation via Elizabeth’s sponsorship fails … but not before she empowers him to achieve not just his short-term goal of staying in the country, but his larger goals of sharing his ideas with the world through his toy creation. When he was a boy, Alejandro’s mother never limited his dreams in the slightest, and instead of that making him a selfish, demanding adult, it’s made him a soft-spoken sweetheart, and through learning to stand up to Elizabeth and break through the barrier she’s built between her reality and the world at large, he grows. And, having witnessed (and received) countless rants and diatribes from Elizabeth, he learns that this is rarely the best way to resolve a situation; there are instances in which it’s the only way to resolve it, though, and he uses this new wisdom to not only make sure that he receives credit for his ideas, but to secure a future for himself. The film has already provided an alternative happy ending by creating a path for him to stay in the U.S., and in a more realistic movie, we would likely have seen Ale accepting the job as a translator from his immigration lawyer and we would end the film with his next year’s submission to the Hasbro incubator program. Instead, Alejandro goes for broke and so does Problemista, to my delight. 

If you haven’t seen the movie or any of its advertising, then this probably sounds like a fairly straightforward plot description, since I’ve mentioned absolutely nothing about the film’s touches of magical realism, other than a brief mention of Ale’s mother’s dreams about his future. In the dream, she sees her son approaching a darkened cave, the depths of which are completely occluded other than two glowing red eyes. Elizabeth becomes that monster, dragon-like, but when Alejandro breaks through her self-deception forcefield and gets her to take an opportunity to show Bobby’s paintings despite it being “beneath” her, he appears in that imagined cave wearing a child’s toylike idea of a chivalric knight’s armor, besting her. Alejandro imagines the thirty day grace period he has to find sponsorship for his employment visa as an upturned hourglass, set amongst hundreds of other such devices, and he sees a woman fade from existence in front of him at the lawyer’s office when her time runs out. And, when he is forced into a series of degrading, quick, for-cash Craigslist jobs, the website is personified as a living being (Larry Owens) that presents him with opportunities for food delivery, handing out hair care product advertisements, and, ever present as a last resort, “Cleaning Boy (kink).” 

There are a myriad of effusively captured smaller roles here as well. Torres’s partner James Scully, of You and Fire Island fame, is ironically cast as Ale’s nemesis. The perfectly named Bingham is a white, New England landed gentry layabout whom Elizabeth is asked by a friend to take on as a secondary assistant, and whose effortless WASPy sycophantism charms her. There are hints throughout that Elizabeth may owe what meager success she had in her critical career to her aggressiveness and self-delusion more than to her eye for art, and although I don’t know that this makes her “shallow” necessarily, she’s positively wooed by Bingham’s surface level blaséness and taken in by him, to the degradation of her working relationship with Ale. One couldn’t ask for a more perfect narrator for all of this than Isabella Rosselini, whose soft enunciation of Torres’s script creates just as much magic as the visuals, and as a fan of Killjoys, it’s always exciting to see Kelly McCormack out and about in the world, even if her appearance is brief (but memorable!). My favorite appearance, however, was from Greta Lee, who appears briefly as Dalia, a former protegee (and more) of Bobby, who is in possession of Blue Egg on Yellow Satin, the final painting needed to complete his posthumous(?) show. She’s an utter delight to see here, and she makes a big impression despite her relatively short screen time. 

This is my favorite movie that I’ve seen so far this year, and I couldn’t have been happier that I ended up in a less-than-ideal seat at the theater because there were so many other people already there. There was a constant undercurrent of pure joy that rippled throughout, and it proved that it had something for everyone as groups of various ages released giggles, laughs, and even the occasional chuckle, all over different bits and jokes. (One thing that we could all agree on: Torres’s eccentric running style never got old.) I loved this one, and if you have enough joy in your heart, I think you’ll love it too. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Riddle of Fire (2024)

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It’s going to sound like an insult to immediately focus on its background details, but the low-budget kids’ adventure Riddle of Fire has some of the best set decoration artistry I’ve seen in any modern picture not directed by Wes Anderson.  A large portion of the film is set in the woods, which comes with its own ready-made production value, but the interiors of characters’ living spaces are intensely, wonderfully over-curated.  Whether cataloging a curio cabinet of one witchy mother’s taxidermy projects & Pagan relics or scanning over another, normier mother’s sickbed full of used tissues & plastic medicine bottles, the adult world at the outskirts of Riddle of Fire is crammed with tactile visual information.  It’s a fascinating collection of weird little talismans and the weird little dirtbags who cherish them, conjuring up childhood memories of a time when mundane objects held immense power.  It’s the feeling of bringing home a vintage t-shirt, a futuristic video game, a cool-looking rock; it’s magic practiced through obsessive, personal collection.

This practical magic of collecting just the right assemblage of seemingly mundane objects is central to the text.  The story is set in modern, suburban Wyoming, but it’s structured as a fairy tale quest to acquire a specific list of impossible-to-secure items, achieving legendary hero status once complete.  A small gang of children shoot paintballs & ride dirt bikes around their unimpressive suburb without much outside attention.  Their petty crime spree escalates when they steal a futuristic video game counsel from a poorly guarded warehouse, and they plan to waste away what’s left of their summer eating snacks and smashing controller buttons on the couch.  Only, their mother figure has locked the TV with a parental control to ensure they’ll spend some quality time outside.  They convince her to hand over the password if they bring home a blueberry pie to ease her flu symptoms, which leads them to doing a similar favor for the local baker, then seeking out a speckled egg to bake the pie recipe themselves, and so on.  The list of items gradually leads them astray to the point where they go to war with a Cottage Core death cult in the woods outside town, shooting paintballs at violent felons who pack real guns with real bullets – all in a fairy tale video game quest to bake an epic blueberry pie.

There’s an understated but over-verbalized magic to this film, which is mined for low-key absurdist humor.  The central trio of neighborhood brats announce themselves as The Three Immortal Reptiles, distinguished by the taxidermized reptile feet they wear on novelty necklaces as gang insignia.  When they make unlikely friends with the adult gang’s young daughter figure, she’s announced as Petal Hollyhock, The Princess of the Enchanted Blade, not simply as Petal.  The forest outside town is located at the edge of Faery Castle Mountain, described in-dialogue as “a wolf land of magic & dreams.”  Everything in the script is overly verbose in this way, so that when the kids collect a creepy babydoll to aid in their quest it is consistently described as “a rather chilling, ghastly doll” with no variation.  It’s like watching the rascals from The Florida Project get dropped off on the shores of Roan Inish, with their dialogue getting stuck somewhere between those two worlds.  Between its artful collection of strange objects and the shot-on-film textures of its visual aesthetic, there’s something familiarly magical in every frame of Riddle of Fire, and the dialogue underlines that magic every chance it gets.  Whether the humor of its dissonance between old-world magic and mundane modernity hits you in the right way is all personal bias, but you can’t deny that the magic is right there on the screen; the movie never lets you forget it.

-Brandon Ledet