documentary

Megadoc (2025)

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There’s a moment early in Megadoc in which Francis Ford Coppola is giving a speech to his assembled Megalopolis actors on the first day of rehearsals, and it feels very much like the first day of a high school theatre course. He quotes Dante’s Inferno, specifically the quote “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” which is posted at Hell’s gates, but then says that he has his own version, which is “Abandon worry, all ye who enter here,” which he notes should be on a sign in there in the large rehearsal space. “I have a sign and you’ll see it,” he says; “It’s supposed to be up,” revealing that, even in these early moments, things are already off schedule despite all the decades spent preparing for the film. “In this space,” he adds, “during this time, nobody can be bad, nobody can get in trouble.” Here, filmmaker Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) zooms his camera in on Shia LaBeouf, and I don’t know if that was a live decision or one that came up in the edit, but it’s prescient nonetheless. 

Figgis was invited by Coppola to document the creation of Megalopolis, a movie that I ranted about at length starting about 29 minutes into our podcast episode about Destroy All Monsters. I won’t recount the whole thing, but I summed it up at the time thus: “Bloated, hollow, ugly, infantile, pompous, stupid, pretentious, hubristic, insipid, hideous, homophobic, talent-wasting, facile, nepotistic, provocative (derogatory), neoliberal, lifeless, inconsistently performed, self-fellating, tiresome, shallow garbage.” In its own way, Megadoc is a perfect metatext for the film around which it revolves, namely in that just as Coppola couldn’t help but write a flawless avatar for himself in the form of Cesar Catilinia, he of the riches of the Emersonian mind. Inserting himself into the narrative obtrusively, Figgis is also far too much a presence in this “documentary;” it is, at best, an elevated behind the scenes featurette, albeit quite a long one. Initially, all the subjects present seem put off by his camera’s presence, other than Aubrey Plaza, who was not only the only person in Megalopolis who knew what kind of movie she was in but also the only person in Megadoc who knew what kind of movie they were in. She moves in quickly and adopts Figgis’s viewpoint as if it were the omnipresent camera of her character Wow Platinum. She’s an early delight in the finished Megadoc as the first person to be willing to do candid interviews, although it’s unclear exactly where Plaza ends and Platinum begins here, all to the film’s enrichment. 

After that first day playing warm-up theatre games, things get more serious. Megalopolis takes on a conceptual art designer who is initially over the moon about getting to work with Coppola, and her office is adorned with concept images of the various applications of Megalon. By the midpoint of the film, Coppola gets into an argument with the on-set art director where it seems like the director just isn’t understanding that it would be a good idea to put a blue screen at the rear of a shot. He mocks the man, saying “This gets back into why I like live effects, because although, in your opinion, they’re not as extraordinary and wonderful as the other kinds, I don’t agree with you.” The way he puts a little edge in on the words “extraordinary” and “wonderful,” you can tell that he’s just trying to needle the guy to make a point, and after he’s fired the team and brought on the kind of lean art department to which he was more accustomed, he sneers while saying “The last film they did was Guardians of the Galaxy.” We cut back to that concept artist in her office, and all the images have been taken down from the wall behind her, and you can tell that she’s drawing on a lifetime of practicing speaking very deliberately and politically about the egos she’s encountered as she says, “I’ve wondered if we missed the signs earlier on that he wanted to approach the movie differently. I do wonder if he didn’t communicate it as clearly.” 

This firing of the art department and hiring of a new one is only one of many woes that contributes to Megalopolis’s budget problems. Although I didn’t care for Figgis’s insertion of some of his own on-set video diaries, one cannot say that he doesn’t have a good head for comedic timing, as he’ll often pair footage of Coppola making spur-of-the-moment creative changes and decisions that have major financial consequences with on-screen text revealing just how much money was spent on inconsequential fluff. There are several minutes of rehearsal and test footage from Coppola’s failed attempt at getting Megalopolis off the ground in 2001, and they’re some of the most interesting things on display here, as we get to see Virginia Madsen perform a scene as Wow Platinum and a sequence of Ryan Gosling as LaBeouf’s character Clodio, with (I think) Scott Bairstow as his flunkie Huey. There’s a table read attended by Uma Thurman at which Billy Crudup learns that he’s been cast as Cesar rather than as Clodio as he believed. This shows us that, at that point in his career, Coppola was actually doing screen tests and taking other necessary steps in the filmmaking process that seem to have been completely absent from the production of the Megalopolis that made it to screen. Coppola is old and grumpy by his own admission, sometimes directing from his trailer so as not to explode at cast and crew, but he’s also gathered a huge crew at his own great expense to stand about while he and his son Roman fart around with trying to make an in-camera effect happen, when that’s the kind of detail that should absolutely be figured out and locked down by the time you get actors into costumes and make-up. It’s the kind of colossal waste of capital that one would expect when spending a studio’s limitless funds, not one’s own money obtained by selling off vineyards. 

The film spends time on the conflict between Coppola and LaBeouf, and it is legitimately fascinating. Although I don’t think he’s a very good person and that his history doesn’t give him any excuses regarding his behavior, I also have sympathy for most former child stars who have a hard time maturing. It was once a VH1 reality show cottage industry to point and laugh at aged child actors of the seventies like Danny Bonduce and Peter Knight as they struggled with their demons (and frequently lost), which was gross then and remains so today. What we can learn from them is that although there are successes like the Fanning sisters and Scarlett Johansson, they are the exceptions to the rule that early life stardom is a machine that creates mental illnesses down the line. LaBeouf has a few moments of raw human vulnerability here about how this is his first chance to work with a director from the old guard rather than just taking a job because he was a “starving kid,” (I’m no Crystal Skull fan, but on behalf of Spielberg, ouch), but then he also spends a lot of his screen time arguing with Coppola, trying to perhaps stretch his acting muscles while the exasperated octogenarian is clearly just trying to get things done, either because he’s elderly and tired or because every second of this is hemorrhaging his wallet. Late in Megadoc, LaBeouf recounts the fact that Coppola told him he was the worst actor he had ever worked with; “He says, ‘You know, I have one regret on this show.’ I said, ‘Okay, what’s the one regret?’ He goes, ‘You. You have been the biggest pain in my fucking ass,’—the only time he cursed—‘You’ve been the biggest pain in my fucking ass of any actor I’ve ever worked with.’ I said, ‘Really? Really? Any actor? Did I show up fucking 700 pounds overweight in the jungle? Really, any actor? Did I quit ten days before we wrap? Really, any actor?” It’s relatively good stuff and the only thing that really elevates it above the kind of thing you would have seen in a DVD special features section fifteen years ago. 

In his review of Megalopolis, Brandon noted that one of the modern ills that Coppola attacked via his fictional proxy was “journalists framing great men for fabricated sex crimes,” which relates to why this film barely counts as a documentary, if at all. Figgis and Coppola are, if not friends, at least amicable colleagues, and Megadoc does not address the allegations against Coppola, which first came to public attention roughly around the time of the film’s release. Although there’s been no resolution to the legal ramifications at the time of this writing, it’s telling that Megadoc ends its insight into the film’s creation not with the wide release to the public in September 2024, but at the Cannes premiere in May of 2024, with no additional dialogue or insight over what amounts to little more than cable red carpet coverage. It’s perhaps because Megadoc revealed moments before that Coppola’s wife Eleanor died in April of that year, right after footage of their sixtieth anniversary party on the set of Megalopolis. It verges on the disrespectful in its pre-emptive use of Coppola’s grief to end on a poignant note instead of addressing what is ultimately the most controversial thing about Megalopolis’s production. Tsk. 

The most magnetic person on screen, however, remains Plaza. Even in her Zoom audition, she’s funny and fantastic, and it reminds you that she truly is one of the great comedic minds of her generation. There’s a quietly disturbing scene in which we get to see the result of her petitioning to improv a scene with Dustin Hoffman, which jumps immediately to the two of them arm wrestling and Hoffman is flirting with her, and although he might be doing it “in character,” it makes one’s skin crawl regardless. It’s the only thing that seems like it’s not completely tempered by a need to skirt around the edges of anyone’s ego, but it’s not enough to save it. As a documentary, it’s functionally informative but not very insightful, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t have decent entertainment value, which is more than I would say about Megalopolis. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Stigmata (1991)

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One of the easiest ways to evoke dread in a horror film is to fake a found-footage cassette tape, recoiling from the flat digital textures of modern cameras to instead seek shelter in the spooky analog media of old. Two of this year’s buzziest horror titles rely heavily on that aesthetic cheat-code to varying levels of success; both Together & Bring Her Back explain the practical step-by-step details of their respective supernatural rituals via vintage camcorder recordings made by the cults who practice them. It’s the kind of haunted-media aura that you’d assume was earned over time, the way that scratchy old records, faded celluloid, and dusty children’s toys become creepy as they degrade but were considered innocuous when fresh. Camcorder video is different, though. Like with Polaroids, homemade video tapes were immediately understood to have a creepy aura, since their production in private, unregulated spaces could document all kinds of unspeakable evils with relative impunity. You can especially feel it in the video-art experiments of No Wave filmmaker Beth B, whose early projects like “Belladonna,” “Hysteria,” and “Thanatopsis” layered eerie camcorder video footage over horrific text pulled from Sigmund Freud, Nazi scientists and, perhaps the most extreme of all, Lydia Lunch. The real shock among those video-art experiments is how much her mid-length 40min feature Stigmata uses the exact same editing tricks as recent horrors like Together & Bring Her Back, interrupting its central narrative with shocks of contextless camcorder footage, evoking evil without ever fully explaining it. That’s not a newly creepy aspect to camcorder footage that was earned over time, like the spooky toy telephone & Fleischer cartoon broadcasts of Skinamarink. It was integral to the medium from the very beginning.

The core of Stigmata is more PBS special than analog horror. Beth B interviews six recovering heroin addicts about their lifelong personal struggles in the same black-void studio space you’d expect to see on a talk show like Charlie Rose (or, more charitably, a Marlon Riggs video). “Brutal honesty” doesn’t begin to cover the candidness of these interviews, which detail the personal, familial, and medical circumstances that lure people into hard drug addiction. Subjects explain at length how shooting heroin can be an act of self-medication, an escape from the prison of everyday life, and a relatively healthy alternative to suicide. Their struggles with the drug are confrontationally foregrounded, so that the entire screen is filled with the pain on their faces as they each recall their respective rock bottoms. The only relief valve Beth B offers the audience is occasional cutaways to unexplained home video footage that I assume was shot on vacation in coastal Europe, most likely Italy. These interstitials’ relationship to the addict interviews might mean something personally significant to the director, but that connection is left open for the audience to ponder. The title “stigmata” evokes the near-religious ecstasy of heroin use, which Beth B emphasizes by superimposing the opening credits over what appears to be an Old-World basilican dome. The subsequent interviews drag that ecstasy down to the physical level of holes being punched into bodies, while other camcorder cutaways stir up more horror than transcendence or peace. Beth B is especially fixated on the image of a stone window leading out to a seaside village, accompanied by unexplained sirens in the distance. The more that image repeats, the more sinister it becomes, as if it were found footage recovered from a self-documented suicide. The camera and its unseen operator never leap from that window, but the tension of the image never relaxes, and its ambiguous juxtaposition with the interviews make the whole project feel like a cursed object.

Self-billed as “a film/tape by Beth B,” Stigmata is included on Kino Lorber’s collection of the director’s solo works, titled Sex, Power, and Money. Along with her early reality-TV experiment Visiting Desire and her sleazy dance-club music video for “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight,” it registers as the one of the most substantial titles on the set. Other shorts included there play with the same juxtaposition of confessional dialogue and video-art menace in more naked terms. “Belladonna” mixes found texts from Sigmund Freud case histories and war crime reports from the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele with triple-exposed images of urban transportation in modern NYC. “Hysteria” similarly clashes outdated case reports from patriarchal gynecologists throughout history with confessional interviews in which modern women critique their own naked bodies, presented as headless reflections in an unseen mirror. “Thanatopsis” illustrates a Lydia Lunch spoken-word piece about macho violence with domestic images of the punk-scene performance artist lounging in her apartment. Those are exceedingly strict formal experiments compared to Stigmata, which is less academically declarative in its own methods. The relationship between the intimate confessions of addiction and the anonymous found-footage B-roll is much trickier to define, leaving it open to more poetic interpretation. There is a sinister energy that hums underneath all of Beth B’s solo video work (except in “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight,” of course, which is purely a party), but Stigmata stands out as the one that fully understood the evil power of its medium. It interjects home-video camcorder footage into its main narrative in the exact way that modern horror films do, establishing the visual language of current mainstream genre cinema in art-gallery experimental spaces decades ago. Beth B may be better remembered for collaborations with fellow no-waver Scott B on narrative titles like Vortex, but her solo documentary work convincingly verges on something new & lasting in its own right.

-Brandon Ledet

DEVO (2025)

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A frequent lament you’ll hear from Millennial cineastes is that we, as a generation, deeply miss the Directors Label DVDs from the early 2000s. Collecting the music-video catalogs of then-young auteurs like Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, and Jonathan Glazer, the series wasn’t just fun background texture for dorm-room hangouts; it was also a crash course in surrealistic filmmaking techniques, finding some of that era’s most expressionistic directors taking their biggest creative swings in the only commercially viable medium that would support that kind of experimentation. Since the music-licensing deals that made those DVD collections possible have become too convoluted & expensive to justify a reissue, those long out-of-print DVDs now resell for exorbitant sums, effectively rendering them extinct (unless you were able to protect your personal copies from scratches and friendly-fire splashes of beer & bong water). However, there is an equally vital DVD collection of music videos from that early-aughts era that’s still affordable on resale: The Complete Truth About De-Evolution. A DVD reprint of a music video anthology originally published on Laserdisc in the 1990s, The Complete Truth About De-Evolution collects all of the music videos produced by the American rock band DEVO from their proto-punk days in 1970s Akron, Ohio to their commercial-product days in 1990s Los Angeles, California. It documents the gradual mutation of the music video format from art-film experimentation to the crass commercialism of MTV, positioning the band as a sarcastic Prometheus of the medium. I watched those videos obsessively in college, inferring the creative & professional trajectory of what became my favorite band by studying how their cinematic output evolves across the disc, never fully understanding how all the pieces fit.

The new Netflix documentary DEVO is a wonderful addendum to that music video collection, reinforcing the band’s legitimacy as an intrinsically cinematic project. Director Chris Smith (of American Movie notoriety) has a lot of fun playing around with the pop-art iconography DEVO satirized in their music videos and graphic art, charting the intellectual & cultural decline of post-WWII America through a constant montage of its most absurdly inane commercial imagery. He also invites the band to discuss the ideology behind their songs & videos at length in the kinds of talking-head interviews standard to the straight-to-streaming infotainment doc. The main project of DEVO the film is to explain the political messaging of DEVO the band to a worldwide audience of Netflix subscribers who only remember them as the one-hit-wonder dweebs responsible for “Whip It.” The interviews mostly reinforce the intellectual seriousness of the project, explaining the band’s early history as a response to the Kent State Massacre and its career-high sarcastic mockery of the pop music industry that paid their bills. As a result, it goes out of its way to downplay the more ribald sex jokes of tracks like “Jerkin’ Back ‘n’ Forth”, “Penetration in the Centerfold,” and “Don’t You Know” (the “rocket in my pocket” song) in order to convey the overall sense that they were a highbrow political act that was merely satirizing the ape-brain sexuality of fellow MTV-era pop groups. The narrowness of that argument doesn’t fully capture what makes the band so fun to listen to on full-volume repeat, but it allows Smith to deploy them as a soundtrack to America’s cultural decline in the 20th Century, which flashes in nonstop montage like a feature-length version of their video for “Beautiful World.”

There are plenty of vintage DEVO clips included here that I’ve never seen before, scattered among the more familiar lore of the band’s career highlights: their violent relationship with the factory workers of Ohio barrooms, their significance to the CBGB punk scene, their early brushes with David Bowie & SNL, their political-pamphlet arguments that humans evolved from “insane mutant apes”, etc. My biggest thrill, however, was seeing clips from the music videos on The Complete Truth About De-Evolution restored in HD for the first time, since I’ve been watching them on the same ancient DVD for the past two decades. Formally, there isn’t much variation on the typical straight-to-Netflix pop doc template that points to Smith as an especially significant filmmaker; it’s more in line with his recent, anonymous docs on Fyre Festival, Wham!, and Vince McMahon than his career-making doc on the production of the regional horror film Coven. If there’s any one choice that makes the film stand out among other infotainment docs of its ilk, it’s the narrowness of scope. Of DEVO’s nine studio albums, Smith only covers the first five — their most artistically significant (and each an all-timer). There’s no obligatory reunion & redemption footage in the third act after the band’s initial break-up, either, because the film is not about DEVO as a rock ‘n’ roll act; it’s about DEVO as a political act. It juxtaposes their most overtly political lyrics with the most overtly asinine cultural detritus of their era in order to convincingly argue that their music was more subversive than it was cynically mercenary. That’s something you can gather by directly engaging with the work yourself in The Complete Truth of De-Evolution, but it doesn’t hurt that the truth about DEVO is now even more complete.

-Brandon Ledet

Manda Bala (Send a Bullet, 2007)

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In its most shameless hours, there isn’t much difference between Vice News journalism and the Mondo exploitation movies of the 1960s & 70s. Vice has well earned its reputation for bravely tackling subjects more traditional news media won’t touch, but that bravery often translates to a kind of in-your-face bravado that can cross over into shock-value exploitation. There’s a thin line between reporting on real-world violence and profiting from horrific images of that violence, and that line gets especially blurry when you package those images with youth-culture music & aesthetic signifiers. Of course, that pseudo-documentary/pseudo-exploitation hybrid journalism bothered me a lot more in the 2010s, when Vice News hit peak popularity and I’d be casually confronted with its graphic violence via friends’ TV & laptop screens while just going about my day. It all came back to me watching the 2007 documentary Manda Bala, though, which plays like a Citizen Kane-sized cornerstone in establishing the cinematic language of aggro hipster journalism in the Vice News era.

Self-billed as “a film that cannot be shown in Brazil”, Manda Bala is a high-style documentary about brazen crime & corruption in that country, the unlikely center of which is the world’s largest frog farm. At its core, it’s a film about extreme wealth disparity in mid-2000s São Paulo, transitioning between interview subjects via scale-busting helicopter shots of the sprawling city’s skyscrapers & slums. It documents crimes on the furthest ends of those economic extremes: flagrant political corruption that steals massive amounts of money from impoverished communities and those communities’ frequent kidnappings of the ultra-wealthy’s family members for quick ransom payouts. The frog farm is just one of many money-laundering schemes on the political corruption end, but it’s one that offers the film a point of visual interest as the overpopulated frog nests are rife woth amphibian cannibalism. Besides the unapologetically corrupt owner of that farm, other interviewees include former kidnapping victims, currently active kidnappers, anti-kidnapping detectives, bulletproof car salesmen, and a plastic surgeon who specializes in reconstructing kidnapping victims’ severed ears with their own rib cartilage. Hostage videos, surgery footage, and ballistics tests constantly escalate the violence of the film’s imagery while it alternates between shockingly candid interviews with the people who suffer that violence every day. Sometimes, the film’s eagerness to entertain feels callously flippant given the severity of its subject (especially in its upbeat Tropicália music cues), but its retro, shot-on-film aesthetic is gorgeous and its on-the-street reporting pulls no punches when detailing the violence on either side of the poverty line.

My used DVD copy of Manda Bala boasts that the film won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, among a second prize for Best Cinematography. Given the state of the infotainment documentary in the mid-2000s, I believe that prize was deserved. The tonal mix of hipster cool cred & violent bloodshed in Manda Bala may have made me a bit queasy, but there’s no question that it’s better crafted than the nonstop onslaught of rote, cheapo digi-docs about George Bush, Wal-Mart, climate change, and the meat industry that cluttered up Blockbuster Video shelves throughout that decade. As much as the film relishes the quirky frog-farm imagery and Mondo hyperviolence of its subject, it does consistently hit the right political targets — explaining that the kidnapping epidemic is a direct symptom of the poverty caused by corruption, then going on to explain how that corruption is just a modern extension of historical Portuguese colonization. The film likely has just as legitimate of a claim as being a precursor to recent high-style arthouse documentaries like The Act of Killing & Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat as it does being a precursor to Vice News web broadcasts, but something about the confrontational, Mondo-style imagery read pure Vice to me. Maybe I’m too squeamish to differentiate true, hard-hitting journalism from shock-value exploitation; or maybe it’s okay to do a little of the latter if it draws attention to the former.

-Brandon Ledet

No Other Land (2025)

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I saw No Other Land about a week before its Oscar win for Best Documentary Feature. I’ve been sitting on it and digesting it in the time since, thinking about what (or even if) I should write about it. As a document, it speaks for itself. 

Basel Adra opens the film with a voiceover, narrating footage taken of him at the tender age of nine. It is the first (but certainly not the last) time that Basel and his family are captured on film being forced to leave their home in Palestine under invading colonial forces. He tells us about how his father’s activism inspired his own. Through no fault of his own, his entire existence has been one spent on the edge of the knife and in the intersection between two barrels: the gun that seeks to push him out and the camera lens which documents his and others’ lives under apartheid. Masafer Yatta is the place in question, a region in the occupied West Bank, which has been declared (by the Israeli high court) to be annexed for use as a military training ground. Throughout the footage, taken over years, people are forced out of their homes by men and women in uniform who have only one refrain: “It is the law,” they say. “It is the law; it is the law.” And with each time they repeat it one can’t help but hear what they are actually saying, in the present as it was said in the past: “We are only following orders.” It is no defense. 

In many ways, No Other Land documents much less outright violence than one would expect. We’ve all spent an unbelievable length of time bearing witness to much more depraved acts of violence against the people of Palestine than are recorded here, although this film is not without horror, of course. During one protest we see Israeli soldiers open fire on a group of civilians, paralyzing one of them. The same man later dies after his home (a tent) is destroyed and the inhabitants of Masafer Yatta are forced to scatter to a series of caves for refuge; he succumbs to infection there. It is this man’s mother who gives the film its title, speaking of the fact that there is nowhere else to go. We also see Basel’s father shot at another point later in the film, and Basel is forced to give up on his activism for a time so that he can operate the area’s only gasoline dispensary, his father’s business, as its operation is vital for the area, at least until further settler invasion forces the forfeiture of all vehicles as the vice grip of their organized terrorism continues to tighten around the peoples of Palestine. 

The other primary lens through which we see the activities other than Basel’s is that of Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who is able to come and go freely from the ravaged area, and although he develops a deep and abiding friendship with Basel, the privilege of movement that he enjoys remains a sharp dividing line between the men. Yuval also comes face to face with people who appreciate his mission but doubt his ability to make any real changes, and when Yuval’s missives fail to reach larger audiences, he loses hope quickly while Basel and his people understand that this is an effort that could (and likely will) consume their lives and their lifetimes. 

One thing that particularly struck me was how this documentary works in conversation with Ernest Cole: Lost and Found. In particular, when watching Basel’s friend be shot and become quadriplegic, I remembered the segment of Lost and Found wherein the voiceover explained the monetary compensation that the apartheid regime enforced on the native South Africans. A specific dollar amount was assigned for the loss of a limb, or for total loss of one’s ability to work in the mines. Even under what we now recognize unilaterally as a genocidal and evil colonial practice, there were more protections (measly and inhumane ones, to be sure) for the people who were crushed under the heel of colonization. Lost and Found also featured many photographs of Cole and his community’s homes being demolished as well as images of the cookie cutter housing put up on their former land to be occupied by settlers. No Other Land features almost the exact same imagery, except that instead of photographs, it’s video of tractors and bulldozers demolishing the homes of the disenfranchised. Together, the two films tell a story about generational evil, the methods of control that are enacted across decades through violence and intimidation, and the way that world leaders are largely indifferent to suffering. What that conversation between them does positively is give me hope. Ernest Cole, like Moses, was exiled and never allowed to see the Promised Land, as he died within weeks of Mandela’s release, but South African apartheid did end, even if he never got to enjoy the fruits of his activism. If South Africa could be freed, then so too can Palestine.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Grand Theft Hamlet (2025)

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Making art is hard work, even when you’re just goofing off with your friends. No matter how silly a collaborative art project is on a conceptual level—a novelty punk band, an amateur movie blog, a Mardi Gras costuming krewe (to name the few I have personal experience with)—the practicalities of seeing it through gets mired down in the general bullshit drudgery of modern life. Between everyone’s duties to work, to family, and to personal health and well-being, real-life circumstances are always stacked against your success, which can make you question why you’re working so hard for something so silly as, say, organizing a meet-up for a small group of friends to dress as Divine on Mardi Gras day. It does feel great when everything clicks in to place, though. There are few victories sweeter than defying the odds or our modern capitalist hellscape by making something sublimely stupid with your friends.

Even by my personal standards, the communal art project documented in Grand Theft Hamlet is exceedingly inane. “Filmed” entirely inside the video game Grand Theft Auto Online during the early lockdown years of COVID-19 (in the style of We Met in Virtual Reality), Grand Theft Hamlet documents the efforts of two goofball British blokes to organize a staging of Shakespeare’s Hamlet entirely within the gaming platform. It’s an absurdly specific novelty project that quickly leads to a broader story about how hard it is to complete any piece of collaborative art. All the usual roadblocks of squeezing in rehearsals around work schedules, balancing personal obsession with familial obligation, and navigating contributors’ differing excitement levels to distribute labor according to enthusiasm all apply to meeting online to recite Shakespeare while digitally represented as archetypal sex workers & thugs. Only, the video game platform literalizes those obstacles in the form of outside players firing bullets & rockets in your direction while you’re just trying to goof off with your friends.

The tradition of adapting Shakespeare in a novelty setting is long & storied. Even the modern specificity of Grand Theft Auto can’t make this staging a total anomaly, since a digital office-building setting will instantly recall Hamlet (2000) or a burst of neon-lit gunfire will recall Romeo+Juliet (1996). I’m sure there have also been unpermitted guerilla productions of Shakespeare plays periodically shut down by the cops, even if those cops are usually not algorithmically generated NPCs. It’s the effort that Sam Crane & Mark Oosterveen (along with central documentarian Pinny Grylls) put into working around the intended purpose of GTA Online that affords the project its true uniqueness. The triumphant perseverance of a player shouting their lines over machine gunfire during rehearsal while fellow collaborators play defense against disruptive trolls & “griefers” adds a new obstacle to the usual “Let’s put on a show!” artistic sprit. The defiance of carrying on in those chaotic circumstances is energizing, inspiring an actor to shout “You can’t stop art, motherfuckers!” into the digital void.

Hamlet proves to be an apt play to stage for this ludicrous project, not least of all because its tragic Shakespearean violence fits right in with the basic control functions of GTA. The actual themes of the play are genuinely felt in the final edit, especially in scenes where Crane & Oosterveen slip into suicidal ideation thanks to the isolation of COVID-19 lockdowns or when GTA‘s in-universe superhero franchise Impotent Rage is advertised in block letters on billboards & slot machines. The most critical Shakespeare quote repeated in this particular staging, however, isn’t from Hamlet at all. It’s the Macbeth line about how life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” That pretty much sums up the whole project, from the proudly idiotic premise to the meaningless displays of violence to the general, persistent emptiness of being alive. It’s also a succinct explanation of why it’s so important to make dumb art projects with your friends despite the effort required to pull it off. Nothing matters anyway; you might as well have a little fun while you’re here.

-Brandon Ledet

The Cruise (1998)

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Collecting over three years of footage, 1998 saw the release of Bennett Miller (Moneyball, Foxcatcher, Capote)’s hilarious documentary The Cruise, centering around oddball New Yorker Timothy “Speed” Levitch. Throughout the 90s, Levitch was a guide for various New York sightseeing tours; during the time in which the doc was filmed, he was working for Gray Line, with whom he has a contentious relationship, while he and a former co-worker fondly recall having worked for Apple Tours in the past. The film takes its title from Levitch’s life philosophy about “cruising” (no relation), an idiosyncratic ideology about how life “should” flow. This approach to life finds Levitch working twenty hours a week giving tours (no more, no less) and spending the rest of his time enjoying “the cruise.” In many ways, his belief system is more about what systems and concepts he defines as being “anti-cruise,” which range from the obvious examples like the institution of policing, to more personal examples like people who have personally wronged him and Gray Line for instituting the use of work uniform shirts, to more esoteric instances like the NYC grid pattern.

Levitch’s New York is a more complex presentation than we normally get, as most of the people who are interested in showing off “their” New York usually follow a virtually identical script where they fellate the city to the point of apotheosis. I don’t have any particular dislike for the city—I quite enjoy myself there—but in all cities there is a vocal chorus about how their city is the best city in the world, baby! (For those of you based in Swampflix’s home of New Orleans, you’ll recognize this hometown tendency from the number of shirts that say “Only New Orleans is real, everything else is smoke and mirrors,” etc.) Like most of the things that people consider to be unique about their city, this is not unique to New York, but because of the sheer amount of our shared media that is produced there, it is the one whose citizen propaganda is often spread farthest and widest. As such, I don’t blame anyone who’s sick of it, but this is a piece of filmic art that shows something a little different, a more thoughtful, critical, and nuanced portrait of a city that could only come from one particular point of view. 

Of course, that’s not to say that the New York of Levitch and Miller still exists. As a document of the end of the twentieth century, the film is in fascinating conversation with Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, a collection of essays about the New York that was and its counterpoint in the New York that is, mostly drawing attention to the way that the Giuliani administration transformed the city into a real estate investment and playground for the rich and helped to institutionalize and cement the strata of class difference. Levitch is a man who is homeless but never unhoused, gliding (or rather, cruising) through life as a series of couch surfing and house sitting adventures, sustaining his lifestyle through the delivery of screeds for and against the city to a captive audience. Levitch’s NYC is ephemeral and fleeting, and nowhere is this more present than in a notable sequence in which Levitch tells someone that one of his favorite activities is to go to the plaza between the World Trade Center towers and spin around until he makes himself dizzy, then lie down on the ground and look up at them so that he feels like they’re falling down on top of him. 

We get a great taste for what a tour from Levitch would be like, as he pontificates how many blocks apart certain writers and other artists lived from where they are passing, about the unity of those actors and playwrights in a singular city and in a singular past is less interesting than the difference and distance between those thinkers in space and time. Art and artistry are delineated through proximity but not bound together by it, except in the ways that Levitch weaves together disparate facts into a cohesive whole. He’s obviously well-versed in the city’s rich history, with him occasionally delivering off-the-cuff lessons in architecture to the documentarian following him on the street during his “off hours.” He calls attention to the undulation of the curves of ceramic building shells—better than stone because of its lighter weight and easier affixation to the steel that undergirds the construction—and then, in a kind of religious spasm, compares the curvature of the building to the shape of a woman and makes noises of rapture. He describes the “utter catharsis” of architecture as phallic enterprise in the body of the Empire State Building from within “its silhouette.” He’s exactly the kind of person that it’s wonderful to be able to observe from a distance, to get to know through the remove of the camera lens, because while he’s very funny and is a fantastic entertainer, he is exactly the kind of person one would imagine has an energy that it would be difficult to be in the presence of for longer than the length of a sightseeing tour.

Levitch is a person who’s too much of a character to be fictional, a man who, if he were generated from the mind of an author, would be too grating and strange for us to identify with, but because he is a real person in our real world, we must accept his existence as fact. A font of unconventional wisdom with a vast knowledge of history and literature, there are moments when I found myself identifying with him very much. There’s a particularly fun bit near the end in which Levitch goes on a tirade about all of the people who have wronged him in his life, from unrequited childhood crushes to teachers to members of his family, and it’s wonderful stuff. I’m sorry that I never got the chance to get a tour from Levitch, even if I can’t help but wonder if I’d ever fully recover from the experience. As the film is currently in re-release, the local arthouse where I attended a screening noted that they had reached out to the distributor to see if it would be possible to have Levitch do a Q&A or even just videoconference in for an introduction. Apparently, the distributor said that this was far from the first request of this kind that they had fielded, but that “[they]’re having trouble finding him.” What a legacy; in fact, I fear that having to comment on this might be too anti-cruise for him to want to participate, so there’s a part of me that hopes they never find him, and he’s still out there, unfettered.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (2024)

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It’s likely cliché to describe any movie’s editing style as being similar to jazz, but in the case of Soundtrack to a Coup d’État the descriptor is literal.  The anxious sounds & stylish block text of vintage jazz albums overlay news-report propaganda clips for 150 relentless minutes in this essay-style documentary film, which covers the CIA’s efforts to rebrand the Cold War as a “Cool War” by deploying popular jazz musicians to distract from its conspiratorial overthrow of the Congolese government.  While political figures of the era as formidable & dissonant as Nikita Khrushchev, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Malcolm X weigh in on the UN machinations that led to the CIA’s conspiracy to assassinate Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, the soundtrack to that coup is provided by formidable & dissonant jazz greats of the era: Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Charles Mingus, and, most improbably, Louis Armstrong.  That soundtrack is not a formalistic choice made by director Johan Grimonprez so much as it is the core of his subject.  He details how those musicians were manipulated into working as semi-official “jazz ambassadors” for Black American culture in African nations that recently joined the UN, and how those ambassadors of Cool were used to distract from and cover for the planned execution of a newly sovereign foreign leader. 

There’s a sharp specificity to this doc’s subject, walking the audience through how African nations newly inducted into the United Nations were seen as a threat to be squashed by paranoid US leadership.  Their power within the UN as a young, organized voting block was especially threatening to the US government’s interests, since it relied on those nations remaining colonized so they could be mined for uranium supplies in the ongoing nuclear Cold War against the Communist Bloc.  Each subversive maneuver to ensure Belgium’s continued rule over the Congo is thoroughly documented in the onscreen text that interrupts the archival clips, often with page numbers & footnotes to encourage further research on your own time.  What Khrushchev describes as the “cacophony” of jazz guides the everything-goes, free-association editing style of that archival footage, so that the film ends up snapshotting the greater context of late-50s & early-60s global culture outside its duty to detail the step-by-step progress of its titular coup.  By the time Khrushchev is making jokes about visiting Disney World in a press conference attended by Marilyn Monroe, it plays like an alternate version of Joe Dante’s The Movie Orgy made for lefty academics: an impressive feat of politically fueled editing-room mania that captures & compresses the moral & political rot of an entire era.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’État‘s focus on the CIA’s appropriation & manipulation of Black American artists recalls a few other recent documentaries about the politics of Black artistic life in the US, namely Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, and I Am Not Your Negro.  It distinguishes itself from that cluster of radical docs by slightly shifting focus away from Civil Rights clashes of the 1960s to a different form of racist US state violence, but it’s still racist US state violence all the same.  Grimonprez uses a key Malcolm X clip to link the two struggles, in which the activist encourages his audience to get angrier about the US’s violence abroad instead of just the Civil Rights struggle at home, emphasizing that foreign governments are dropping American bombs on Americans’ behalf.  All efforts to de-colonize are worth supporting, but it’s especially egregious to ignore the ones suppressed by bombs bearing your country’s name.  That line of thought has obvious current relevance in the continued bombing of Gaza by the Israeli military—backed by US weapons supplies—resonating just as loudly as the continued cultural racism of the US and the continued, aggressive unpredictability of jazz.  It’s a documentary about a very specific political moment in time, but the global fight for post-colonial freedom smashes through that temporal window.

-Brandon Ledet

Heavy Petting (1989)

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If you’re going to make a formulaic talking-heads documentary about a broad cultural topic, you might as well interview David Byrne: an actual Talking Head with a distinct cultural point of view.  There’s not much to the late-80s cultural commentary doc Heavy Petting that you can’t find in most current reality-TV confessionals, in which random, fame-desperate weirdos shamelessly divulge TMI insights into their personal lives in exchange for extended screentime.  The only difference, really, is that Heavy Petting interviews vintage hipster celebrities instead of contemporary nobodies, which gives it a sharp edge over its modern competition.  David Byrne is included among the likes of Laurie Anderson, Ann Magnuson, Sandra Bernhard, Alan Ginsburg, Abbie Hoffman, and William S. Burroughs as the talking heads interviewed – a real who’s who of art-school-weirdo idols who haunted the streets of 1980s New York City.  They’re all individually sat in front of a black-void Sears & Roebuck photoshoot backdrop and asked to recount their earliest childhood memories of and experiences with sex.  For the most part, they’re surprisingly open to the interrogation, give or take a visibly irritated Burroughs, who acts as if he’s impatiently waiting for a delayed bus ride home.  There might be decades of reality TV confessionals exposing the raw sexual psyches of everyday extroverts, but there’s only one place you can go to find David Byrne talk about the mechanics of open vs. closed-mouth kissing as if he were a middle school space alien who just crash-landed his UFO into the schoolyard, eager to smooch his first earthling.

One-and-done director Obie Benz juxtaposes these personal confessionals about childhood sexual discovery with vintage propaganda reels promoting sanitized, Leave It To Beaver era sexual “health”, as well as clips of the 1950s sex icons that subverted the morals of the era.  All of the interviewees were raised in an era when Elvis & Mansfield’s wiggle, Dean & Brando’s biker leather, and Monroe’s husky whisper commodified the horned-up rebellion of rock ‘n roll for teenage consumption (during the birth & definition of The Teenager as a concept), but they were not prepared for the physical mechanics & consequences of sex through any formal education.  Rock ‘n roll got them riled up, but the unscientific gender-performance propaganda of the era left them completely clueless about the basic facts of sex: the physiology of pregnancy, the existence of sperm, the existence of the female orgasm, etc.  It’s easy to dismiss the film’s subversive use of 1950s instructional reels as an aesthetic cliche, especially after decades of these same vintage, Father Knows Best-style images being mocked on ironic postcards & bumper stickers.  However, the personal vulnerability of the interviews and the low-key insidiousness of the stock footage prove to be shockingly affecting as the widespread failure of American sex “education” curdles the ironic laughter into political fury.  The initial novelty of hearing Abbie Hoffman reminisce about a totally-hetero circle jerk he had with his childhood schoolmates gradually gave way to my own resentful memories of being raised sex-ignorant as a small-town Catholic in the exact era this film was produced, leaving little room for nostalgic kitsch since the problem never went away.

I was initially annoyed by Benz’s choice to avoid labeling his interviewees in identifying chyrons.  You either know who Ann Magnuson is or you don’t; even the final montage jokingly credits her as a “TV spokesmodel”, not the fringe actress & Bongwater poet I know her as.  When that montage reveals that a couple reality-TV level nobodies (i.e., NYC businessmen) are mixed among the more recognizable talking heads, I came around on the decision.  The movie intends to diagnose a widespread cultural rot in the rift between America’s leather-jacket horniness and America’s prudish aversion to sex education, so it’s smart to demonstrate that it’s a psychological damage that affects everyone, not just artsy-fartsy perverts.  This closing-credits reveal also pairs the subjects with their actual high school photos, confronting the audience with the faces of children who were deliberately left unprepared for healthy sexual lives in the name of Family Values.  All of the marketing for Heavy Petting promises benign Gen-X irony and repurposed 1950s kitsch, but there’s something bravely vulnerable & culturally heinous about what it unearths in its interviews and its moldy stock footage.  I found it strangely powerful and unfairly undervalued.

-Brandon Ledet