-Brandon Ledet
52 Pick-Up (1986)
crime
Asphalt (1929)
I am by no means well studied in the broader history of German Expressionism, but I have seen a horror movie or two. When I think of the German Expressionist visual style, my mind immediately conjures up the fantastic, transportive images of titles like Nosferatu, M, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Man Who Laughs, The Hands of Orlac, Destiny, The Golem and, of course, Metropolis. Even the cultural impact of those films’ innovative directors & cinematographers emigrating to America has always been most immediately apparent in early Hollywood horrors like The Black Cat & Dracula, given their surrealistic production design and shadowy visual play. It was surprising, then, to find no supernatural dream logic in the once-lost German Expressionist drama Asphalt, which might account for the film’s relatively low name recognition in that field. In terms of narrative, Joe May’s tragic story of mismatched lovers feels more familiar to early Hollywood dramas about misbehaved women than it does to the nightmare-realm horrors more typically associated with German Expressionism. However, all of the ecstatic visual flourish associated with that film movement is in full swing, as the camera sways wildly in an attempt to capture the bustling urban chaos of Berlin, where its doomed love story is set. Its plot synopsis might sound like the German equivalent of early US films like A Fool There Was, The Red Kimona, Parisian Love, or A Woman of the World, but it’s way less restrained & stage-bound than any of those titles. It’s pure cinema, made by the people who established the language of that artform in its infancy.
Metropolis star Gustav Fröhlich plays a bumbling, naive cop who’s not quite streetwise enough to handle the streets of Berlin. Else Heller (doing her best Louise Brooks drag) plays the young man’s downfall: a cunning, compulsive thief he catches robbing a jewelry store when he should be directing traffic his first day on the job. The poor rube buys her sob story about needing to steal to survive, as she is perilously close to being evicted onto the harsh streets of Berlin. An unlikely romance blossoms between cop & criminal as his sympathy grows, until she can’t stand his naivety any longer and fully confesses her betrayal of trust. She does not, in fact, steal for survival. She steals because it’s thrilling to get away with taking home diamonds & furs. She steals for the fun of stealing. What ruins the fun is the way her flirty pickpocket lifestyle gets her new beau into steep trouble, both with the macho brutes of her past and with the strictly law-abiding members of his own family. The dramatic entertainment value of Asphalt is in watching a young, fashionable woman thieve, lie, and cheat in hedonistic excess, even if the morals of the era require it to eventually condemn her for crimes against morality. No matter how deplorable the femme fatale’s behavior is in the abstract, the movie takes obvious delight in watching her smoke cigarettes and smolder in a heated bathtub, treating herself to a life of luxury that she would be denied through any legal path. She might not steal to survive, exactly, but she does steal to make life worth surviving.
Asphalt intuitively takes for granted that crime is sexy & fun, so it gets to spend a lot of its time playing around with new, exciting ways to move the camera instead of complicating its central romantic dynamic. It opens with kaleidoscopic mirroring of Berlin street traffic and sweeping montages of the rain-slicked asphalt beneath those cars & feet. The camera is in constant motion, either evoking the mania of navigating a city’s cacophonous busyness in exterior scenes or taking inventory of individual objects & players on interior sets. It represents an end of an era for ecstatic, inventive German filmmaking, but there’s no solemn, settled maturity to its cinematography. It’s desperate to impress. Like Metropolis, a complete print of Asphalt was considered lost media for decades, until it pieced back together through archival discovery & recovery in the 1990s. Unlike Metropolis, it’s been largely forgotten to time a second time since that restoration. There just isn’t as much of a completionist streak among romance & crime film enjoyers the same way that horror & sci-fi freaks will seek out anything that falls into their genre of choice. I’m as guilty of that bias as anyone, having never heard of this film until a used DVD copy fell into my hands at the Minneapolis record store Electric Fetus. Meanwhile, I’ve actively sought out at least a dozen horror films from the German Expressionist era in my frantic search to guzzle down all things horror. It turns out they were making romantic dramas in that period too, just like in Hollywood (except way dreamier & prettier).
-Brandon Ledet
Le Samouraï (1967)
I have not felt motivated to watch Richard Linklater’s undercover cop comedy Hit Man since it hit Netflix, but I did happen to catch its opening half-hour in the holiest of cinematic venues: muted on the TV at my neighborhood bar. The one sequence that caught my eye while I was enjoying my banh mi and cocktail that evening was an early montage of classic film clips in which Glen Powell’s pretend-hit-man explains that the entire hired assassin concept is a movie trope, not a real-life occupation. I don’t know whether the 1967 neo-noir Le Samouraï was referenced in that quick montage because I wouldn’t see it screened at the theater down the street from that bar until a few days later, but it would have fit right in. Like Branded to Kill, In Bruges, John Wick, Barry, and all the other hired-assassin media that Hit Man gently mocks for its outlandishness, Le Samouraï imagines a complex crime-world hierarchy in which money is routinely exchanged for murder, no questions asked – a world with its own bureaucratic rules & procedures. Like those films, it’s also fully aware of its indulgence in outlandish fiction, striving to be as cool & entertaining as possible without worrying about being factual. If anything, the most outlandish aspect of Le Samouraï is its casting of the extraordinarily handsome Alain Delon as an anonymous assassin who goes unnoticed in public as he executes his orders, which is a logical misstep Hit Man repeats by casting the Hollywood handsome Glen Powell as a master of disguise who can credibly disappear undercover.
In its own way, Le Samouraï is also a commentary on classic crime movie tropes, or it’s at least in direct communication with them. A few years after Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless shook up the French filmmaking establishment by returning to the high-style chaos of classic American noir, Jean-Pierre Melville offered a much calmer, stranger refraction of the American gangster picture. Delon’s mostly silent hitman glides through the streets of Paris with an overly professional, emotionless affect, but he still vainly checks his image in every mirror he passes, making sure his trench coat & fedora match the classic noir archetype projected in his mind. He’s a film trope out of time, which leads to great pop-art juxtaposition when he passes advertisements for modern products like Orangina on city streets. A disorienting organ motif loops on the soundtrack as he wordlessly carries out his work, dodges cops, and kills professional rivals, giving his crime world setting the same dreamlike quality that the Goblin soundtrack gives the ballet school of Dario Argento’s Suspriria. If Godard brought the crime film back to the poverty-row roots of its infancy, Melville pushed it forward past the point of death to the world beyond, sending his audience to a hypnotically hip hitman heaven. Most of the storytelling is visual, with all of the loudmouth blathering left for the cops on Delon’s tail. In other words, it’s all style, to the point where the style is the substance.
Any further praise I could heap on Le Samouraï that would just be variations on labeling it Cool. The opening scroll that explains Delon’s antihero protagonist lives by an honorable samurai code? Cool. His anxious-bird home alarm system; his small collection of adoring Parisian babes who will likely be his undoing; his deep knowledge of the public transit system that allows him to avoid arrest? All very cool. What’s even cooler is that I got the chance to see the movie with a full, enthusiastic crowd, thanks to the popularity of The Broad’s regular $6 Tuesdays deal. Like the muted television hanging over the local watering hole, $6 Tuesdays has become a great cinematic equalizer that has made watching movies into a communal event again, rather than something I do alone in the dark while everyone else watches Hit Man on Netflix at home. If there were only a new digital restoration of a classic Euro genre film I’ve never seen before making the theatrical rounds every week, I’d be set.
-Brandon Ledet
Double Indemnity (1944)
When Fred MacMurray’s horndog insurance salesman meets Barbara Stanwyck’s femme fatale at the start of Double Indemnity, she’s dressed only in a beach towel, fresh from sunbathing. After changing into a knee-length dress, she entertains him in the parlor, pretending to be interested in purchasing car insurance from his company but really feeling out his potential to help with the murder of her husband. He immediately catches onto her scheme (a hunch confirmed by her conversational shift away from automobile insurance to “accident” insurance), but he sticks around to flirt anyway, mostly for the vague promise of adultery. When Stanwyck uncrosses her bare legs during this uneasy negotiation to draw MacMurray’s attention to her girly ankle bracelet, it hit me; I had seen this exact dynamic play out before in Basic Instinct. I was watching a horned-up dope flirt with an obvious murderess in her cliffside California home, mesmerized by strategic flashes of her lower-body flesh. After I had already retitled the film Double Instinctity in my head, I later retitled it The Insurance Man Always Files Twice, following the clever “accidental death” of Stanwyck’s husband (only to later learn that the novel Double Indemnity was written by the author of the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain). By the time the adulterous couple’s alibi for murder involving the anonymity of public train transportation had me retitling it Dangers on a Train, it became clear this was an immeasurably influential American crime picture that was directly imitated and alluded to throughout Hollywood long before Verhoeven arrived to sleaze up the scene.
Although it was released years before the term was coined by a French critic, Double Indemnity did not invent the film noir genre. Even if the genre hadn’t gotten its start in dime store paperback novels, Humphrey Bogart had already been led to his onscreen doom by Mary Astor’s femme fatale in Double Indemnity‘s suaver older cousin The Maltese Falcon a few years prior. Stanwyck’s own femme fatale archetype is also named Phyllis Dietrichson, a winking reference to earlier femmes fatale played by Marlene Dietrich in her pre-Code collaborations with Josef von Sternberg. Still, it’s early and iconic enough that modern audiences get to watch it establish the core tropes of film noir in real time, to the point where it plays like a pastiche of a genre that hadn’t even been named yet. Before MacMurray is hypnotized by Stanwyck’s anklet, he moseys around her dusty parlor and directly comments on the room’s shadowy lighting and Venetian blinds – two standard visual signifiers of classic noir. That narration track rattles on at bewildering speeds throughout the entire picture, referring to Stanwyck as “a dame” (when in 3rd person) and “Baby” (when in 2nd person) so many times that it verges on self-parody. That narration also frames the entire story as a flashback confession to the reasoning behind the central murder, a narrative structure echoed in classic noir melodramas like Mildred Pierce and director Billy Wilder’s own Sunset Boulevard. Double Indemnity is not the first of its kind, but it is the Platonic ideal of a major studio noir, the same way Detour exemplifies the ideal of the genre’s Poverty Row variety. And even Detour‘s femme fatale Ann Savage starred in her own shameless knockoff of the picture initially titled Single Indemnity, before it was sued by Paramount Pictures into changing its title to Apology for Murder.
Although Fred MacMurray easily racks up Double Indemnity‘s highest word count on the narration track, he’s not the cast’s MVP. If nothing else, veteran character actor Edward G. Robinson fast-talks circles around him as his nosy business partner who unravels the adulterous couple’s perfect insurance-scam murder simply by following the hunches in his stomach (which he refers to as his “little man”). The two insurance men have a great, intimate rapport that plays like genuine affection, whereas MacMurray’s carnal attraction to Barbara Stanwyck is purely violent hedonism. Stanwyck is the obvious choice for MVP, then, as being led around on an LA murder spree by the leash of her anklet is such an obviously bad idea, but she’s a convincing lure anyway. Like Michael Douglas’s dipshit cokehead detective in Basic Instinct, MacMurray knows this woman will lead to his doom, but he still gives into her schemes because the sex is that good – a business deal sealed when she appears at his apartment in a wet trench coat for their first act of consummation. She isn’t afforded nearly as much screentime as MacMurray, but her every appearance is a cinematic event, from her initial beach towel entrance to her unflinching witness of her husband’s murder, to her grocery store appearance in Leave Her to Heaven sunglasses and a Laura Palmer wig. Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson may owe thematic debt to the Marlene Dietrich femmes fatale before her—among other pre-Code influences—but she’s clearly striking and conniving enough to truly earn the term “iconic” that gets tossed around so liberally these days. MacMurray’s job is just to play the stooge who drools at her anklet-adorned feet, which he does with humorous naivete.
It’s difficult to imagine how shocking the seediness of Double Indemnity would have registered in the 1940s, when noir was still taking its first baby steps. It took Wilder years to get a version of the script approved for production, since unrepentant murder & adultery were still fictional taboos instead of standard soap opera fodder. Along with cowriter (and noir novelist in his own right) Raymond Chandler, Wilder drives the wickedness of his characters home in a climactic double-crossing argument where Stanwyck declares both she and her duped insurance man are “rotten,” and he coldly replies, “Only, you’re a little more rotten.” With barely suppressed pride, she spits back, “Rotten to the heart.” There is little in the way of whodunit mystery to the script; it’s working more in the howcatchem style of a Columbo or Poker Face. The real mystery is just how rotten these characters are at heart, a contest Phyllis Dietrichson wins in a walk. By the time major-studio noir had its revival in Hollywood’s erotic thriller era, Double Indemnity‘s shock value had to be ratcheted up by films like Basic Instinct and the Postman Always Rings Twice remake to catch up with a jaded, seen-it-all audience. The rotten-hearted cruelty of Stanwyck’s femme fatale remained deliciously evil as times changed, though, and even Sharon Stone’s bisexual murderess in Verhoeven’s version could only play as an homage rather than an escalation.
-Brandon Ledet
White Heat (1949)
I’m only a few episodes into my first-time watch of the HBO series The Sopranos, and I already see why it became a pet favorite among cinephiles. Not only is it one of the first watercooler shows that nudged the TV drama format towards the more cinematic anti-hero era of so-called “Peak Television” (I’m more of a sitcom guy personally, don’t shoot), but it also constantly references the exact kinds of Italo-American gangster dramas that turn pimply college freshmen into cinephiles in the first place. In just the first few episodes of the show, characters have already made multiple references to the Godfather trilogy and to Goodfellas; there’s even a brief appearance from a Scorsese lookalike, coked out and ducking into a trashy nightclub. It’s safe to assume, then, that the Sopranos writers’ room was well versed in the rich history of the American gangster picture, so I’m also going to assume it was no coincidence that I was thinking a lot about Tony Soprano while recently watching the 1949 James Cagney noir White Heat (also for the first time).
Like The Sopranos, White Heat is also specifically about the pathological neuroses of the American mobster archetype. James Cagney’s Cody Jarrett is an unhinged sadist of a mob boss with a “psychopathic devotion” to his mother and not much affection for any other living being. Despite ruling over his goons with an iron fist, Jarrett frequently suffers intense (possibly psychosomatic) migraines that require that his mother remain on standby to coddle him back to good health. At the start of The Sopranos, James Gandolfini’s New Jersey mafia don Tony suffers similar spells. Stressed to the brink by the various pressures of his job as the local head of “sanitation,” Tony Soprano starts experiencing panic attacks that cause him to faint, inspiring him to take up regular sessions with a psychiatrist (Lorraine Bracco) that provide the show with a convenient episodic narrative structure. Tony also has a remarkably evil mother whom he loves dearly, but that parallel appears unrelated. Most mafia media centered on a mob boss in crisis tracks the way these anti-hero archetypes must delicately balance the necessary brutality of their jobs with the vulnerability of becoming so brutal that it inspires mutiny (whether among members of their own crew or among the cops on their payroll). What makes White Heat & The Sopranos stand out in that genre is in their Freudian interest in those powerful brutes’ troubled psychology, an interest that places the 1940s Cagney picture decades ahead of the curve.
Cagney was enough of a studio star by the time he made White Heat that he had a sweetheart deal to develop his own projects as a creative voice. Already having set the high standard for the American gangster picture in 1931’s The Public Enemy, he wasn’t particularly interested in returning to the genre until he was inspired to push his character’s psychology to shocking extremes. One way you can tell Cagney gives an all-timer performance in White Heat is that he manages to make a character named “Cody” genuinely intimidating, scary even. He’s described as “inhuman” by the cops on his tail, shooting lead into their bellies with reckless abandon – sometimes to cover his tracks, sometimes just because. The film’s opening train heist is particularly brutal, with Cagney’s stunt double hopping onto a moving locomotive and shooting every cop, conductor, and railway worker who gets a good look at him dead, just in case. When one of his most trusted goons accidentally has his face melted off by the train’s furious steam, Cody cruelly leaves him for dead, writhing in pain under his bandages. Cody’s boyishly sweet to his mother but an absolute terror to everyone else. He grinds his teeth. He strangles his moll. He’s little more than an excuse for Cagney to run wild as a murderous psychopath, more Norman Bates than Vito Corleone.
White Heat is not as iconic of a Cagney mobster picture as The Public Enemy, which is more directly referenced in episodes of The Sopranos that I have not gotten to yet. This later work from Cagney is a little too tardy & bloated to register as the height of classic-period American noir. The opening train heist and subsequent fallout is shocking in its brutality, but that effect slowly dulls in the lull leading up to the second heist in the final act, which is delayed by a largely uninteresting plot involving a voluntary jail stint and an undercover cop. Cagney’s feverish performance keeps the energy up in the meantime, though, as you immediately get the sense that there’s no other way for a character so psychotically chaotic to meet his end than in a storm of bullets; all of the tension is just in waiting for that storm to approach and worrying about who he’ll hurt before it arrives. Cagney never takes his foot off the gas, delivering his final “Made it ma! Top of the world!” line readings as if he’s winning the lottery instead of being shot to death. I haven’t yet spoiled myself on how Tony Soprano’s going to go out six seasons of television from where I am now, but I assume it’s going to be just as tragic of an end, just likely without Cody Jarrett’s celebratory zeal for violence. Tony may be suffering a mental health crisis, but he’s not nearly as violently, manically crazed as Cody; few characters are.
-Brandon Ledet
Johnny Handsome (1989)
I just finished reading the deceptively dense travel guide San Francisco Noir by essayist Nathaniel Rich, which doubles as both a guided tour of San Francisco’s many character-defining landmarks and a critical history of “the city in film noir from 1940 to the present.” There are so many noirs set in San Francisco that Rich is able to map out all of the city’s disparate moods & neighborhoods by cataloging how they’ve been portrayed onscreen in that one specific genre, frequently stopping the tour for incisive, short-form reviews of the dozens of noirs set in and around The Bay. As a movie nerd, the book was a great way to familiarize myself with a city I love to visit but never get to stay long enough to feel submerged below its touristy surface. As a New Orleanian, it made me jealous. Besides the impracticality of its distance from Los Angeles, why is it that so few classic noirs were set in New Orleans compared to the seemingly infinite noirs of San Francisco? Reading through Rich’s illustrated history of his port city’s deep well of art, music, crime, sex, and scandal, I couldn’t shake the feeling that all of the hallmarks that made San Francisco such a perfect setting for noir are echoed in my own city’s alluringly sordid history. And yet I can only name a few classic noir titles I’ve seen set on New Orleans streets: New Orleans Uncensored, Swamp Women, and Panic in the Streets. That’s a relatively puny list when compared to such formidable San Francisco noir titles as The Maltese Falcon, The Lady from Shanghai, Out of the Past, and Vertigo.
It turns out I’m not the only person convinced of New Orleans’s hospitality to noir moods & tropes, as I found Roger Ebert entertaining the same thought in his 1989 review of the Walter Hill neo-noir Johnny Handsome. Ebert wrote, “Johnny Handsome comes out of the film noir atmosphere of the 1940s, out of movies with dark streets and bitter laughter, with characters who live in cold-water flats and treat saloons as their living rooms. It is set in New Orleans, a city with a film noir soul, and it stars Mickey Rourke as a weary loser who has just about given up on himself.” Struck by Ebert’s assessment of New Orleans’s “film noir soul,” I dug into his other contemporary reviews of New Orleans-set thrillers starring the leads of Johnny Handsome. The results were mostly silly, including a thumbs-down dismissal of Hard Target (featuring Johnny Handsome villain Lance Henriksen) as being “not very smart and not very original” and a positive review of Angel Heart (also starring Mickey Rourke) that describes the West Bank neighborhood of Algiers as a “town across from New Orleans that makes the fleshpots of Bourbon Street look like Disneyland.” Sure, Roger. I’m glad I kept digging, though, because his 1987 review of the neo-noir erotic thriller The Big Easy (which shares a star with Johnny Handsome‘s secondary villain, Ellen Barkin), captures the city’s “film noir soul” perfectly in the paragraph, “The movie takes place in New Orleans, that most mysterious of American cities, a city where you can have the feeling you never will really know what goes down on those shadowy passages into those green and humid courtyards so guarded from the street.” That’s some good poetry.
As you can likely tell by my stalling to discuss this film directly by recapping the works of more talented & prestigious film critics, Johnny Dangerously is not especially interesting, at least not when compared to the rest of its era’s New Orleans crime pictures. It’s not as scuzzy as Angel Heart, nor as steamy as The Big Easy, nor as deliriously over-the-top as Hard Target. Its one claim to novelty among the other 80s New Orleans crime thrillers starring its central trio of volatile performers is that it’s the most faithful to the genre’s classic noir roots. Johnny Handsome evokes the drunken, downtrodden storytelling logic of vintage crime story paperbacks, ones written decades before its actual 1970s source material. Walter Hill reportedly dragged his feet on adapting that novel for years despite multiple offers, but his eventual decision to move its setting from New Jersey to New Orleans and to frame it within a traditionalist noir sensibility makes perfect sense for the material. The results just aren’t particularly exciting. Johnny Handsome is bookended by two heists: an early one in which Rourke’s titular disfigured anti-hero is abandoned by his gangster cohorts (Barkin & Henriksen) while looting a French Quarter jewelry store, and a climactic one in which he pays them back by trapping them in a doomed robbery of a shipyard construction site. Both sequences are fantastic, but there’s a lot of dead air between, which Hill mostly fills with achingly sincere melodrama about a supposedly reformed criminal who can’t seem to get out of the game. It’s the same level of heightened pastiche he brought to his 50s greaser throwback Streets of Fire, but something about it feels weirdly subdued & unenthused this go-round.
There are actually two old-school genre tributes at play in Johnny Handsome, both of which are signaled to the audience in black & white flashback. While the film’s classic noir tropes are introduced in an early flashback washed in an aged sepia tone, its simultaneous echo of German Expressionist horror is presented in a starker Xerox contrast. We’re told that Johnny Handsome was born with a monstrous, mutated face, even though he honestly doesn’t look too out of place in the context of The French Quarter – a circus without tents. His disfigurement is important to the plot, though, so much so that Hill allowed Rourke to mumble his lines under heavy prosthetics to achieve the effect. After getting busted during the first botched heist and before plotting to launch the second, Rourke finds himself imprisoned in Angola, where a kind mad scientist (Forest Whitaker) offers to lessen his sentence if he agrees to experimental facial reconstruction surgery. The surgery goes so well that Rourke is able to insert himself into his old, leather-clad cohorts’ lives incognito, luring them into participating in their own demise with the second heist. That sci-fi aspect of the plot has a distinct Hands of Orlac feel to it, which was also echoed in contemporary thrillers like Scalpel & Body Parts to much greater effect. At least Johnny Handsome switches up the formula by combining its German Expressionist patina with classic noir tropes. It’s a unique genre hybrid, even if subtly played, and it all comes together beautifully by the time the semi-reformed Rourke’s new girlfriend is practically screeching at his old frenemies, “No! No, don’t cut up Johnny’s beautiful face!”
All of the classic New Orleans noirs I’ve seen are fairly mediocre pictures. Most of the San Francisco noirs covered in Nathaniel Rich’s book are mediocre too, which is true of most movie genres and of all art everywhere. By the erotic thriller boom of the 1980s (which was essentially just neo-noir with an emphasis on video store sleaze), the movie industry had caught up with New Orleans’s noir potential and set some pretty great crime thrillers here: The Big Easy, Angel Heart, Tightrope, Cat People, Down By Law, etc. Johnny Dangerously is far from the best example of that wave of locally set 80s thrillers, but it’s the one that best evokes the city’s classic-period noir past that never was. I enjoyed the movie less as a sincere, in-the-moment thriller than I appreciated it as a what-could’ve-been simulation of what New Orleans’s “film noir soul” might’ve looked like if given the same amount of screentime as San Francisco noir in the genre’s heyday.
-Brandon Ledet
Blowing Up vs Shutting Down
I recently took a long bus ride uptown to see my very first Antonioni film, projected on the big screen at the Prytania Theatre. I enjoyed Blow-Up well enough but did not love it. However, I do love some more genre-minded pictures that were directly inspired by it—namely Blow Out, Perversion Story, and The Eyes of Laura Mars—all titles I previously understood purely as giallo-era Hitchcock derivatives. In contrast to those later, flashier works, Antonioni’s own perversion of a Hitchcockian murder mystery is a stubbornly arthouse-minded affair. On paper, its story of a horndog fashion photographer in Swinging 60s London who uncovers evidence of a murder (and a larger political conspiracy to cover it up) in his photos reads like a stylish crime thriller. In practice, Blow-Up deliberately withholds all the traditional payoffs of a murder mystery story & a political conspiracy thriller, instead dwelling in frustration & ambiguity. If it’s a straight-up horror film, it’s about the existential horror of asking all your friends & acquaintances “Hey, you guys wanna see a dead body?” and no one taking you up on the offer, leaving you to sit with your own morbid fascination and no outlet for the tension. As a result, it’s the kind of movie that earns measured “That was interesting!” compliments instead of more genuine, swooning enthusiasm.
To be honest, the most rewarding part of the screening was not Blow-Up itself, but its presentation. The film was preceded by a lengthy slideshow lecture about The Beatles’ albums Rubber Soul & Revolver, which had nothing to do with the movie except that it happened to be set in London in the 1960s. It was clear most of the audience was not aware of this deeply nerdy opening act, which pushed the start time a full precious hour later into the weeknight. Every new slide about how well 45″ singles like “Paperback Writer” or “Yellow Submarine” were reviewed in the papers had people audibly groaning in frustration, with a small crowd of younger moviegoers cowering in the lobby, desperate for the rant to end. It was an incredible bonding experience, like surviving a group hostage situation. I don’t know that the lecture sold many Beatles-themed history books as potential Christmas gifts in the lobby, as intended, but it did a lot to restore my personal faith in humanity on both ends; it was good to know that the kids out there are still indignant brats and that the nerds are still oblivious to their audiences’ attention span for rapid-fire niche interest stats. I often go to the theater alone, talk to no one except the box office worker, and leave without even making so much as eye contact with my fellow moviegoers, much less conversation. By contrast, that Blow-Up screening felt like a substantial Community Event.
Somewhere in the lengthy preamble to the feature presentation, I found myself chatting with an employee at the theatre and expressed gratitude that they were adding more repertory classics to their weekly schedule. It turns out the single-screener only had room for this extra rep screening because the Oscar Bait Movie of the Week, She Said, was doing poorly. And while the audience for Blow-Up might have been groaning at the nonstop onslaught of mid-60s #BeatlesFacts before the show, I was encouraged to see them show up & stick it out. There were a few dozen people in attendance, when I’ve gotten used to sharing the room with much smaller crowds on my artsy-fartsy weeknight excursions. After reading so many doomsaying national headlines about the box office disappointments of Awards Season hopefuls like She Said, The Fabelmans, Triangle of Sadness, and Tár, I was starting to worry that my local independent movie theatres might not be able to survive between superhero epics & Top Gun sequels if audiences are just going to wait for everything else on the marquee to hit streaming services. Seeing that crowd show up for Blow-Up (and struggle to stay up for The Beatles) gave me hope that the business might not be dying, just changing. If art-friendly spaces like The Prytania, The Broad, and Zeitgeist have to survive on community events & repertory screenings instead of Avatar-scale CG monstrosities the world may be all the better for it.
Even that night, I had to choose between seeing Blow-Up for the first time uptown at The Prytania or Hitchcock’s North by Northwest for the first time down the street at The Broad. And The Prytania’s new downtown location has been running more regular repertory screenings than either of those locations combined, something I don’t know that I’ve ever seen with any regularity in this city. I may not have fallen totally in love with Blow-Up on this first viewing, but it did feel like I was placing an essential puzzle piece in my larger understanding of genre film history, the same way that I felt seeing big-screen presentations of Ghost in the Shell & The Fog for the first time in recent months. I do want to see the trend of every non-superhero movie struggling to make money continue in this post-COVID, rushed-to-streaming world, because I fear that theatres will not be able to sell enough booze & popcorn to stay afloat. That momentum may be unstoppable at this point, though, and that surprisingly well-attended Blow-Up screening gave me hope that there might be another way to combat audiences’ exponential disinterest in trying new, uncanonized art. I can’t speak for the rest of that crowd, but I’ll sit through a hundred more Beatles lectures if it means I get to keep watching weird, divisive movies projected big & loud. If nothing else, I’m too old & too tired to find a new hobby at this point in my life.
-Brandon Ledet
Decision to Broker
There are two new high-profile, Korean-set detective dramas currently making the rounds, directed by Park Chan-wook and Hirokazu Kore-Eda. Anyone familiar with the beloved auteurs’ past work would expect their latest films to be incomparable outside some light genre overlap and a shared national setting. They’d be right. Broker and Decision to Leave are tonally & narratively distinct enough that I’m likely doing them a disservice by lumping them together here, but as a pair I do think they indicate an interesting, mirrored career shift for their respective auteurs. I know Park Chan-wook as an over-the-top sensationalist, one who pushes the boundaries of good taste & genre tropes within the confines of finely tuned, exquisitely staged chamber dramas. By contrast, I know Hirokazu Kore-Eda as a restrained, observational dramatist who finds grand emotion & political importance in small, subtle gestures. What makes their dual 2022 detective stories interesting as a pair is the way the two directors are both reaching towards a middle ground between those extremes. Decision to Leave finds the usually more prankish Park working on his best behavior, while Broker finds Kore-Eda shaking up his typically underplayed docu-dramas with some more traditional, genre-minded payoffs.
That’s not to say that either director has compromised their personal stylistic touches or thematic obsessions. In its broadest strokes, Broker is a very similar movie to Kore-Eda’s previous film, Shoplifters, which in turn was a more accessible version of his earlier triumph Nobody Knows. A story about an illegal, D.I.Y. adoption agency who broker the sale of babies to families outside the foster system, Broker clearly continues Kore-Eda’s auteurist fascination with how unconventional parentage takes shape below the poverty line. It just perks up that story with more entertainment-minded genre tropes and a more pronounced, devious sense of humor than I remember seeing in his previous work. This is basically Shoplifters as a road trip movie where detectives are on the makeshift family’s tail, staking them out so they can be busted at the point of sale. It’s a subtle introduction of accessible genre entertainment into Kore-Eda’s usual low-key dramas, a shift was seemingly influenced by the international success of Parasite – given it’s the Japanese director’s first film set in Korea, he anchors it to the charisma of Bong muse Song Kang-ho (as the lead broker), and he borrows its opening image from Parasite‘s iconic flood sequence. Whatever the inspiration, Broker manages to feel much livelier that Kore-eda’s past work without sacrificing any of his usual emotional or political heft.
Unlike with Kore-Eda, I’m not sure that “measured restraint” is the first quality I look for in a Park Chan-wook film, but it does make Decision to Leave an interesting addition to his oeuvre. You would expect his throwback crime story about an insomniac detective who falls disastrously in love with a femme fatale he suspects to be a murderer would land closer to Basic Instinct than to Hitchcock, but it seems he already got those erotic thriller indulgences out of his system with The Handmaiden. It’s not any less thrilling than the lewder, more explosive payoffs of The Handmaiden, though. There’s an exciting tension in watching Park push his more perverse impulses just below the surface of this traditionalist noir . . . for about an hour; then he starts more openly playing around with the detective-suspect eroticism of the genre. Park holds himself together just long enough to tell the full classic Hollywood version of this detective story, then he stretches it a half-hour past its breaking point to search for the kinkier aspects of the detective-murderess dynamic. It’s a relatively tame movie by his standards, but there are scenes where he lingers on the femme fatale displaying her domestic abuse wounds as an act of flirtation or becoming visibly aroused by her assigned-detective using brutal force against other perps. It’s almost like watching Hitchcock make the subversively kinky Vertigo after he made the more explicitly perverse Frenzy, pulling back instead of leaning into his darkest impulses.
Maybe there’s an indication that these two distinct, disparate directors are gradually meeting in the middle – one softening their perversion stories’ sharpest edges and the other spicing up their intimate family dramas with some crime-world thrills. More likely, they just happen to be pushing themselves to try new things instead of remaking the same picture over and over again, something that should be an auteur’s biggest fear. Even if they both fully committed to these new directions in their work, it would take dozens of films for them to meet on common ground. I just find it interesting that these deviations from their respective personal norms both happened to take the shape of detective stories set in the same country, released at the same time of year.
-Brandon Ledet
Gigli (2003)
So far, the most wholesome, unexpected pop culture news of the year has been the out-of-nowhere reboot of Bennifer. In this age of division & strife, isn’t it nice that we can all gather around to celebrate two smoking hot millionaires who love boning each other? JLo beaming in her Vegas wedding gown; a scruffy Battfleck taking dad-naps on yachts with his hand resting gracefully on his bride’s world-famous ass . . . Everything just feels right again. It’s worth remembering, though, that even something as beautiful & pure as Bennifer was born the darkest, dankest of pop culture dungeons – just as every rose has its thorn and every cowboy sings his sad, sad song. Jennifer Lopez & Ben Affleck first fell for each other on the set of the 2003 crime “comedy” Gigli, which lost roughly $70mil at the box office and was instantly reviled as one of the worst motion pictures of all time. Starting off on such a sour note would have tanked most couples, but Bennifer soldiered on to collaborate on such beloved art projects as Kevin Smith’s Jersey Girl, JLo’s “Jenny from the Block” music video and, of course, an endless procession of tabloid headlines. May they never separate again.
In case you’re as morbidly curious as I am, and you also happen to find a used DVD copy of Gigli at your local thrift store, please know that it is a total “DEAD DOVE, DO NOT EAT” proposition. There is no room for critical revisionism here. Gigli is just as bad as originally reported. It’s worse than bad, actually. It’s deeply embarrassing. It’s an early-aughts hangover from the post-Tarantino 90s, the kind of wryly overwritten gangster comedies like Get Shorty & Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag that were convinced saying “fuck” every three words was all you needed to seem funny & cool. Affleck appears in greased hair & loose bowling shirts as the titular Gigli (a name he hates hearing pronounced “jiggly” or “giggly”, which means you should definitely go for it). He’s a low-level gangster assigned by his higher-ups to kidnap the brother of a federal prosecutor as political leverage before a mob-busting trial. Only, the hostage in question is an intellectually disabled horndog who acts like a toddler with the world’s biggest boner for Baywatch. Queasy hijinks ensue as the uptight, macho Affleck butts heads with the loveable goof in his care. Then things get even queasier when he’s forced to co-parent with a fellow low-level gangster played by Lopez – a lesbian that Gigli is determined to convert through the seductive power of unchecked machismo (positioning the film as Elmore Leonard’s Chasing Amy).
The frustrating thing about Gigli is that the sexual chemistry between Lopez & Affleck is genuinely explosive. The basic premise of a macho gangster wooing his way into a lesbian’s bed is boneheaded, but it actually leads to some interesting sexual power dynamics between the two leads. The meathead argues his case by expounding upon the natural marvel of dicks & dildos in faux-philosophical monologue, and his lesbian adversary shoots back that “The mouth is the twin sister of the vagina” with equally mighty inanity, giving him lots to chew on (“gobble gobble”). She warms herself up to the idea of sleeping with the galoot by softly forcefemming him, making him question his own gender identity – a kinky undercurrent made even more arousing by how rottenly into each other Bennifer obviously are out-of-character. It’s too bad, then, that every other aspect of the movie is so deeply unpleasant and determined to self-sabotage. Every time their unlikely, problematic romance heats up, it’s quickly deflated by the film’s catastrophic choice of comic relief: the neurodivergent tics of its only disabled character. Their hostage raps to old-school hip-hop tracks in a “funny” voice; he shouts random catchphrases as if he has Tourette’s; and he just won’t stop slobbering over the boobs on Baywatch. It’s not just unfunny; it’s cruel. And it ruins any enjoyment that could possibly be found elsewhere in the picture.
If we’re rebooting Bennifer in the 2020s, maybe it’s time we also reboot Gigli as a straight-up erotic thriller. Drop the ableist punchlines and just stick to JLo breaking down her new husband’s gender barriers in a steamy power struggle at the outskirts of the crime world. The only problem there is that the erotic thriller version would definitely stick to the film’s original, discarded ending, in which the lesbian character was shot dead for her moral transgressions (because of course she was). You know what? Scratch that. Let’s never speak of Gigli again. The return of Bennifer has given us all a culture-wide goofball smile, and there’s really no reason to spoil that vibe with a return to its sour beginnings. Unless, of course, you really need to see JLo model the low-rise jeans, exposed midriffs, and gigantic belt buckles of early-aughts fashion. It’s at least good for that.
-Brandon Ledet
The Man in the Hat (2021)
A few months ago, a friend recommended the low-key Euro comedy The Man in the Hat to me as “stress relief/anti-anxiety medication.” One waitlisted library DVD loan later, I totally get what he meant. The Man in the Hat is a fluffy, distinctly French comedy of whimsies (despite its British director). It follows a mostly wordless man’s casual escape from mild-mannered gangsters, both sides traveling in teensy tiny Euro cars across the French countryside. There’s a vague threat of violence in that chase, and a hint of sadness in the affable protagonist’s desperate grip on a black & white portrait of his wife. Those motions towards conflict are only an excuse for a provincial road trip, though, so we can eavesdrop on the quirky characters, feral kittens, and communal parties that decorate rural France. It all amounts to an unrushed, calming amusement, interrupted only by snack breaks and an occasional folk tune.
The most obvious comparison point for The Man in the Hat‘s gentle, largely silent storytelling style is the equally French (“and fucking proud of it”) comedy of Jacques Tati, particularly the Monsieur Hulot series. In practice, it reminded me a lot of the low-key dark humor of Aki Kaurismaki, especially in its clash of twee whimsy with crime-world brutality and old-fashioned rock n’ roll cool. As calming & endearing as The Man in the Hat feels for most of its runtime, its central drama is hinged on some truly bleak motivators: a dead spouse, a botched suicide attempt, an accidental witness to a body being dumped into a city canal. In the Kaurismaki version of this story (in the tradition of The Man Without a Past or The Other Side of Hope), there would be much sharper shocks of gang violence, character-quirk humor, and political commentary than what The Man in the Hat is interested in delivering. This French/British echo of the Finnish humorist’s work is too mild-mannered to attempt anything other than self-amused twee, but it does match Kaurismaki’s eye for low-key romance & communal joy in the harshest of circumstances – even ending at an outdoor concert that feels like a direct hat-tip to his work.
To underline its function as “anti-anxiety medication”, The Man in the Hat often looks like a TV commercial for anti-depressants (or maybe just antihistamines, depending on the set-piece). Most of the sun-dappled road trip through lightly breezy vistas is populated by cautiously optimistic archetypes learning to have fun again in open fields, European cafes, and spontaneous block parties. Occasionally, the mood will shift in a wistful music video interlude lit by red brake lights or sparsely placed candles, but we’re often back on the road seconds later, “walking on sunshine” on our road to recovery. This is by no means a flashy movie, nor a challenging one. It’s just nice. There are likely more effective “anti-anxiety medications” out there on the market, but none that would pair this safely with a glass of wine (much less any that you could access for free through your local public library).
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 