documentary

New City (2015)

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three star

2015 saw the ten year anniversary of the broken levees that flooded New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. The decade that’s followed this man-made disaster has brought various anxieties & concerns to the city, not least of all about the flood of transplants that have moved here during our long road to recovery. It’s easy to get bitter about the speed in which the city is changing. People move to New Orleans because they love its culture, but often try to change the city from within once they arrive. The fear is that along with positive changes like economic growth & much needed educational reform the city might be trading in its more unique cultural traditions, transforming into a modern, homogenized city no different than Anywhere Else, America.

The documentary New City bucks local negativity about the rapid changes we’ve seen post-Katrina, positing the last decade as “a renaissance” for New Orleans, playing almost like an advertisement for the direction the city is heading in. The film is relentlessly positive, countering the exhaustion & PTSD New Orleans has been struggling with in the years since the levee breach with unbridled enthusiasm about the hope that young  transplants bring to our economic landscape. There are a few voices of dissent among the film’s interviewees, but they mostly belong to barflies trapping themselves in negative thought loops. Local business owners, Mayor Mitch Landrieu, and other sober voices are selling a purely positive spin, declaring that the city is (in Landrieu’s words) “stronger & better than before”. No one is claiming that the storm’s death, destruction, and diaspora were a good thing for the city (at least I hope not), but when the loudest negative voices about post-Katrina transplants are coming from drunken rants that cover distaste for everything from President Obama to “job stealing” Hondurans, Landrieu & company’s optimism plays like a much more attractive way of thinking.

Form-wise, New City is about what you’d expect from a talking heads documentary about the current state of the city. It feels ready-made to be put in rotation on WYES (which is not at all a bad thing). The film does some interesting things with the format, though. Its aerial shots, most likely drone-operated, are very striking, inviting the audience to pull back & look at the city from a detached, distant angle. I also appreciated the way local cuisine is woven into its narrative. Narrator (and first time documentarian) Max Cusimano often exclaims things like “Let’s take a food break!” or “And now for some food porn” & values interviews from local chefs & food critics like Tom Fitzmorris & Out to Lunch‘s Peter Ricchiuti just as much as he values input from folks like the mayor. In a lot of ways, New City‘s bartstool interviews, drooling food photography, and stray footage of live music & Mardi Gras parades often work like a wordless reassurance that the city’s culture is here to stay indefinitely no matter how much or how quickly the population changes.

I’ll admit that I found certain aspects of New City‘s relentless optimism frustrating. There are entire lines of thought that the film avoids as long as possible in order to keep things posi. It takes almost 40 minutes for the doc to address people being priced out of their neighborhoods in this so-called “renaissance”. Words like “gentrification”, “Airbnb”, and “hipsters” are held off for even longer despite the severe weight they hold for locals. I also bristled at the way some interviewees valued “new, educated, business-oriented people” over undermined & underserved local talent. Even more uncomfortable was watching a Los Angeles couple gush over mix drinks with names like “levee breach” & “flood water” at a restaurant in the 9th Ward. Still, I found the film’s overall positivity to be downright infectious. My own tendencies to get defensive about who’s moving here & how they should behave once they arrive is unproductively negative & ultimately futile. New Orleans is a port city. As protective as we can be about maintaining local traditions, it’s good to keep in mind that our entire history, our very fabric is dependent upon constant influx of new faces & new ideas. This is far from our first “renaissance”.

I found myself agreeing with New City‘s the-future’s-looking-bright attitude most when it was tempered with a little caution for balance. As much as Landrieu lauds all of the new money & young talent coming through town, even he punctuates that opinion with the old adage that once you move to this city you don’t change it; it changes you. I also found myself encouraged by a bar owner’s levelheaded reminder that it’s great to have money flowing through the city that wasn’t here before the storm, but that “Money isn’t everything.” Even though I wish more of New City‘s sentiment was thoughtfully balanced in that way, it was still pleasant to see the city through the film’s hopeful eyes. At the very least, it put a lot of my own personal negativity about where the city might be headed & who’s moving here in check. I genuinely appreciated that. And when it wasn’t working for me, there was always food porn waiting to put my mind at ease.

Side note: When I watched this film on Amazon Prime there were a few sound quality issues in some of the interview footage that occasionally obscured what was being said. So, you know, that might not be the best platform to watch the film on even if it is currently the most convenient.

-Brandon Ledet

Always for Pleasure (1978)

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fourhalfstar

Mardi Gras in New Orleans is a near-impossible phenomenon to capture in art. There’s a magical, revelrous spirit to it that defies a strict, all-encompassing definition. As one interviewee explains in the documentary Always for Pleasure, Mardi Gras is not a spectator sport. It’s something you have to engage with & participate in to truly grasp, which might be a significant reason why capturing its spirit on film or in words is like trying to catch lightning in a bottle.

Filmed in 1977, the Criterion-approved Les Blank documentary Always for Pleasure truly is the best introduction to New Orleans culture that I could possibly imagine. Where else are you going to find soul legend Irma Thomas sharing her red beans & rice recipe and Allen Toussaint explaining the significance of jazz funerals & second lines? There’s also glimpses of crawfish boils, Mardi Gras Indians, Jazz Fest, above-ground cemeteries, St. Patty’s Day celebrations in the Irish Channel, brass bands, street cars, Dixie beer, Congo Square, and what essentially amounts to music videos for Wild Tchopitoulas & Professor Longhair. At just less than an hour in length, the film is an easily digestible crash course in local charm & hedonism. An interviewee in Always for Pleasure describes New Orleans as “The City that Care Forgot” & “The last city in American where you can feel free to live,” and the supporting images that surround those claims make it feel like he might be onto something.

What’s most remarkable about Always for Pleasure, though, is how close it comes to the near-impossible task of capturing the totality Mardi Gras in a single work. There’s a little bit of historical context provided about how the holiday developed as “a lustful time before a time without” both within & without religious connotation. For the most part, though, the film is smart not to over-explain. It mostly just documents. With the shoulder-mounted shakiness of a local news camera investigating a crime scene, Blank’s movie takes you into the nooks & crannies of the Carnival season. If Mardi Gras is not a spectator sport, the reason Always for Pleasure succeeds is because it feels authentically participatory. It grabs you by the hand & leads you through the parades & celebrations in a playful, drunken “sea cruise” of excess & time-honored tradition.

There pretty much is no substitution for the all-encompassing sampling of New Orleans culture in Always for Pleasure. The only significant aspect of local flavor I can think of that’s missing from the film would maybe be some culinary delights: gumbo, king cakes, beignets, etc. . . . and, of course, the rampant political corruption. And because the city is so hellbent on preserving & passing down its traditions from one generation to the next, the documentary still feels eerily fresh today. Honestly, not much has changed in the past three or four decades except for the fashions. This is the New Orleans I know & love. This is the meandering magic of Mardi Gras preserved for posterity in a work of art. That’s no small feat, I assure you, so this ends up being the film I return to on an annual basis to get into the spirit of the season.

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 1: Life Itself (2014)

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After viewing & reviewing every feature film in Russ Meyer’s catalog over the last few months, I’ve found myself in need of a new film-watching project to break up the monotony of chasing down every newer release that hits the theaters. I’m getting some fulfillment on that end with the Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. MCU retrospective I’m tackling with Boomer, but I’m in the need of something more ambitious & longerm. Recently, reading the excellent Russ Meyer biography Big Bosoms & Square Jaws a second time finally lead me to tackling Roger Ebert’s autobiography Life Itself, an endeavor that’s been intimidating me for years due to the potential emotional toll. Something I noticed while reading Life Itself was how eclectic & intimidating the list of movies Ebert references in the book is. Among titles I have already seen one hundred times (The Wizard of Oz, Reservoir Dogs, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, etc.), there were a ton of Important Movies I’ve been meaning to watch for years (Citizen Kane, Casa Blanca, Lawrence of Arabia, etc.) & even more films I’ve never heard of (Bwana Devil, French Peep Show, Breakheart Pass and so on).

So, as a means of self education, I plan on visiting all 200+ films referenced in Life Itself, both the book & the documentary of the same name. Unlike the Russ Meyer project, which took just a few months to complete, I expect putting myself (and whoever’s reading) through Roger Ebert Film School will take at least two years to complete. I do believe it is a worthwhile effort, though. Since Ebert naturally referenced these films in his writing instead of assembling a definitive list (like his Great Movies feature), they should be a very interesting overview of cinema’s highest highs & lowest lows. I’m looking forward to both ends. That being said, let’s get started. The class bell has effectively rung.

Where Life Itself (2014) is referenced in Life Itself: On the cover, naturally.

What Ebert had to say in his review: Unfortunately, he died before it completed filming, so he didn’t get a chance to see the final product.

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As I said, I had been avoiding reading Ebert’s autobiography, Life Itself, for years by the time it was adapted into a feature length documentary by Steve James in 2014. James’ movie gave me an excuse to delay the inevitable even longer. I’d be able to digest Ebert’s life story & indulge in some healthy sobbing all within two hours’ time, then walk away from the ordeal. I even made a sort of party out of it, dragging a group of friends to Chalmette Movies to watch it on the week of my 28th birthday. Having since read the book, I can happily report that James’ film is an excellent adaptation, considering the length of its runtime. It touches on nearly all of the topics covered in the print version of Life Itself, but with understandably less depth than the way they’re explored by Roger’s pen (except, of course, the more up to date health problems & eventual death that occurred during filming). James could’ve easily expanded Life Itself to match the massive runtime of his seminal work Hoop Dreams, if not longer, but as is the film is a touching, concise overview of Roger’s life & career from start to end.

Besides expediting the process of reviewing Ebert’s life story, the film version of Life Itself offers something inarguably valuable for the life story of a man who spent so much of his time in cinemas: imagery. Photographs, movie scenes, interview footage, and clips from Ebert’s fellow Chicagoan critic Gene Siskel add a whole layer of depth to Life Itself that the autobiography couldn’t afford due to the limits of its medium. The book version of Life Itself is 100% Roger’s voice, which at times can be overly humble or self-deprecating (especially when discussing his alcoholism) in a matter of fact sort of way. The film, on the other hand, is more concerned with his legacy. Talking head interviews with his loving wife Chaz & filmmaker heavyweights like Scorsese & Herzog make Ebert out to be a perfect angel in a way that would’ve made him blush had he been alive to see the final product. It’s very telling that the film also only lightly skims his relationship with perv auteur Russ Meyer, an area where Roger’s life most likely saw its most salacious lows. What’s most invaluable here, though, is the contentious outtakes of Roger going at it with Siskel. In the book he tends to sugarcoat the nastier side of their rivalry, which is entirely understandable given that his friend & colleague was deceased when he wrote it. The movie paints a much more complicated picture & it’s fascinating to watch the extremes of their brotherly (in a thoroughly competitive way) dynamic play out for the camera.

As a documentary divorced from the instant-likability  of its subject, I’m not sure that Life Itself is necessarily a grand feat in modern filmmaking. James’ camera is fearless in capturing Ebert’s hard-to-stomach bouts with cancer, as was Roger himself for putting those struggles on public display. There’s also the strange detail that passages from the book are read by an eerily accurate Ebert impersonator, so it feels as though you’re being spoken to from beyond the grave (not unlike the digitized Marlon Brando in Listen to Me Marlon). For the most part, though, Life Itself is firmly a Wikipedia-in-motion type of documentary. It adds some new information not included in its source material, especially when discussing how Roger championed small voices in filmmaking & opened doors for names like Martin Scorsese, Ava DuVernay, Werner Herzog, and Steve James himself. Life Itself mostly works as a companion piece, though. Ebert’s autobiography is loaded with priceless ponderings on the nature of cinema and, well, life itself. James’ film matches imagery to those ideas & boils them down to an easily digestible morsel.

A filmmaking feat or not, Life Itself is a very moving portrait of one of America’s all time great writers in any medium. It’s a film that has moved me to tears on all four of my viewings (this time it was DuVernay’s story about meeting Roger as a child that choked me up). It may not be a mold-breaking or technically ambitious film, but is an undeniably indispensable one. Highly recommended for those who’ve yet to have the pleasure.

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Roger’s Rating: N/A

Brandon’s Rating: (4/5, 80%)

fourstar

Next Lesson: Persona (1966)

-Brandon Ledet

Listen to Me Marlon (2015)

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fourstar

Documentaries aren’t a medium that necessarily require constant innovation to remain relevant, but it’s still exciting when they reach for unexplored methods of information delivery. 2013 saw the unskeptical oral history of The Shining‘s conspiracy theorists in Room 237. 2014 allowed the perpetrators of a horrific genocide to tell their own story through a cinematic lens in The Act of Killing. It’s arguable that 2015’s biggest contribution to the documentary as a medium might have been Listen to Me Marlon. As a biography-in-motion type of doc, its approach to storytelling is fascinating on both a visual & an aural plane. With a wealth of lengthy rants culled from hundreds of hours of home audio recordings from infamous actor Marlon Brando’s recollections & attempts at self-hypnosis, Listen to Me Marlon matches the disconnected nature of its subject’s self-interviews with an equally blurry montage of his image both alive & undead. Yes, Brando appears posthumously in the film as a digitized ghost à la Robyn Wright in the criminally under-appreciated The Congress. It’s an eerie effect, but an entirely appropriate one give the oddness of its subject.

Marlon Brando was inarguably a fascinating man. He may even have been, for a time, America’s greatest actor. A straight-forward documentary about him would have easily been worthwhile. Instead of adopting a traditional approach, though, Listen to Me Marlon lulls its audience into a hypnotic state through the actor’s infamous mumble. As Marlon reminisces on the production of The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, On The Waterfront, The Wild One, etc., you get the distinct feeling that you’re listening to & watching a ghost. In his life, Brando had already transformed from an impossibly beautiful young specimen of a man into an angry beast of an old crank. Listen to Me Marlon stages another transformation for the actor into a third, ethereal, intangible form. It’s a compelling effect, although a thoroughly subdued one.

People looking for a recap of a storied existence shouldn’t be too disappointed by what’s delivered here. Brando was a bit of a womanizer (helpfully explaining that “A lot of your decisions are made by your penis & not your brain”) and the film makes a big to-do about the parade of beauties that passed through his arms. He also discusses the very nature of his craft, recounting how he became an actor by accident, how cinema is different from stage acting because “your face becomes the stage” in close-ups, how his drama instructor Stella Adler essentially invented method acting & modern cinema and, of course, his ever-growing hatred for the parasitic nature of celebrity culture & tabloidism. Speaking of tabloids, Brando’s personal life & familial affairs also have a juicy quality to them (in the fact that they’re horrifically tragic & nobody’s business, really), as did his strong political affiliations – which included unlikely partnerships with The Black Panthers & radical Native American Civil Rights organizations.

Like I said, though, Listen to Me Marlon is anything but straight-forward, so anyone looking for that kind of recap is a lot more likely to be satisfied by a read-through of Brando’s Wikipedia page. For all of his discussion of craft in the film, his self-reflection still tends to get philosophical & abstract. He explains that acting is “lying for a living” & ponders why people would spend hard earned cash to sit in the dark & stare at a screen. His explanations delve into the idea that people want to be alone with their fantasies & their struggle with The Nightmare of the Want of Things. Brando also has a lot of abstract, frustrated things to say about the value (or lack thereof) in cinema & the exploitative nature of celebrity culture. The film has a great wealth of interview footage, photographs, and home audio to back up his abstract ponderings, but the ponderings themselves are less of a straight line & more of a swirly mess. I’ve never seen a documentary adapt dream logic or the shape of memories as closely as Listen to Me Marlon does & that aspect of its narrative is almost just as interesting as the story of Brando’s life itself, which is really saying something.

-Brandon Ledet

Required Viewing for Fans of The Independent (2000): Corman’s World (2011)

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In our Swampchat discussion of December’s Movie of the Month, the 2000 Jerry Stiller comedy The Independent, we praised the film for feeling remarkably ahead of its time in terms of the modern comedy landscape. Long stretches of the film wouldn’t feel out of place in a modern HBO anti-hero comedy or post-The Office docucomedy, which is true even if both genres are pulling influence from the same souce as The Independent – Christopher Guest mockumentaries. That’s not the only way in which The Independent was ahead of its time, though. Most mockumentaries & spoof comedies wait until the material they’re mocking is actually released. The ever-prescient The Independent, on the other hand, was released more than a decade before the documentary it most resembles – 2011’s Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel.

Roger Corman not only appears in brief “interviews” for The Independent, but Jerry Stiller’s schlockmeister protagonist Morty Fineman mostly serves as a Roger Corman archetype (with maybe a little David Friedman or Russ Meyer sleaze thrown in for good measure). Fineman’s 427 B-movies oeuvre may seem comically oversized & impossible for a filmmaker to achieve, but the timeless Roger Corman (who began making film in the 50s & continues to work to this day) has a whopping 409 production credits (and 56 directoral credits) according to IMDb. For every infamous Roger Corman trashterpiece (Rock & Roll High Schol, A Bucket of Blood, Death Race 2000, Piranha, etc.) there’s dozens of titles lurking in the archives that no one remembers at all, a sentiment reflected in the way that a dozen or so Fineman features are represented throughout The Independent, but hundreds are listed in his filmography that runs in tandem with the end credits.

There’s so much Corman in Fineman that the connection is undeniable, especially if you consider the way that unlikely former Corman collaborators pop up in both The Independent & Corman’s World – particularly Ron Howard & Peter Bogdanovich. There’s also  the two directors’ love for Ingmar Bergman – reflected in Fineman’s herpes-themed The Simplex Complex & in the odd, real-life detail that Corman used to provide distribution for the Swedish auteur’s films at American drive-ins because he thought people needed to see them. The truest connection of all, though, is in the clips of the two directors’ films – Fineman’s fake & Corman’s real. Corman talks at length about the value of text vs. subtext in sneaking in political messages in trashy B-movies features, but watching clips of his work in Corman’s World suggests that the director might be more in line with Fineman’s confession that he was mostly interested in the “tits, ass, and bombs” than he was putting on.

Corman’s World is an invaluable documentary, one that should be required viewing for all movie lovers whether or not they’ve indulged in The Independent‘s delights. Corman himself is just so full of insight from decades of hands-on experience. I particularly enjoyed his rigid, formulaic approach to genre films, like the way he describes that creature features need their monsters to kill someone fairly gruesome easily in the film, then kill at regular, less-shocking intervals until the blood-all-over-the-screen finale. It’s also a delight to see such twisted imagery & violent, sex-depraved themes originate from such a calm, professorial source, a dichotomy he describes as the outer image vs. the unconscious mind. This detail is missing in Fineman’s character, who is just as explosive in his art as he is in his personalty. There’s also a Russ Meyer-esque sleaziness in Fineman that’s entirely absent in the oddly-refined Corman.

What’s most interesting, though, is the ways in which Corman’s career phases serve as a blueprint for the history of cult cinema. Corman started by making creature features & teen rebellion dramas in the 1950s. He then moved on to the much classier “Poe cycle” of his career, a string of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations that married art house aesthetic with B-movie camp (including February’s Movie of the Month, The Masque of the Red Death). This lead him to indulging in arty hippie movies & giving a shot to young Hollywood voices that positioned him as the paterfamilias of the golden era of New Hollywood. Once his collaborators outgrew him & left him behind (names like Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Coppola, and Fonda), Corman survived on a second wave of trashy exploitation cinema until big budget films he heavily influenced (like Star Wars & Jaws) effectively disassembled the drive-in movie market & drove him to home video cheapness & SyFy Channel mockbusters. The story of Roger Corman’s career is the story of modern cinema at large, something that could also be said about the fictional Morty Fineman.

A lot of Corman’s more artistic impulses are missing in the eternal businessman Fineman, but there really is something to say about Corman & his ilk’s ability to make interesting, profitable pictures on shoestring budgets. Fineman doesn’t have fictional credits that match up with Corman’s racial segregation protest film The Intruder or the soaring artistry of the Poe Cycle, but the two directors do hare an eye for finance. As (frequently Corman collaborator) Jack Nicholson puts it in Corman’s World, “A filmmaker who doesn’t understand money is like an artist who doesn’t understand paint.” The Independent is all about Morty Fineman securing funding for yet another B-picture & even though themselves don’t look especially promising, it really is awe-inspiring to see Corman still at work, stealing shots & cutting expenses for SyFy Channel originals (which are essentially Roger Corman knockoffs), Fineman & Corman are survivors, unlikely successes navigating inhospitable waters for decades on end.

Thankfully, Corman’s success story at the conclusion of Corman’s World is much more impressive than Fineman’s at the end of The Independent. Fineman secures funding for his next picture, surviving to see another day & attending a small-town film festival held in his honor. Corman, on the other hand, receives a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, a much-deserved distinction for a director who could film movies as memorable as Little Shop of Horrors in a weekend or provide an environment in which Peter Bogdanovich’s first directorial credit is something called The Gill Women of Venus (aka Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women). I’m glad to see Corman receive the recognition he deserves from The Academy, but it’s almost an even greater achievement that he earned a loosely-based mockumentary homage  in (the albeit little-loved, little remembered) The Independent. The Independent & Corman’s World are inescapably linked in my mind as celebrations of one of cinemas most criminally under-celebrated heroes. Even though one is fictional & the other is a documentary, they’re both indispensable in their reverence for a wonderful artist.

For more on December’s Movie of the Month, 2000’s The Independent, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film & this transcription of Morty Fineman’s fictional filmography.

-Brandon Ledet

Pandora Peaks (2001)

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In the two decades between Russ Meyer’s last proper theatrical release, Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, and his straight-to-video swan song, Pandora Peaks, the once-on-top-of-the-world pervert auteur suffered a long line of never-completed projects. He mostly attempted to continue his thread of warped, post-Beyond the Valley of the Dolls retreads of his former glory days that started with Supervixens. This included the never-realized The Jaws of Lorna; The Jaws of Vixen; Blixen, Vixen, and Harry; Mondo Topless, Too; Up the Valley of the Beyond; and Kill, Kill, Pussycat! Faster!. Even more intriguing were the announced anthology projects Hotsa, Hotsa & the reportedly 17 hour in length The Breast of Russ Meyer. Worse yet was the nearly-realized Sex Pistols film Who Killed Bambi?, with a Roger Ebert screenplay ready to go. Dejected by the endless assault of false starts, Meyer had pretty much resigned himself to retiring from filmmaking altogether & focusing on his 1000+ page autobiography A Clean Breast (which actually did see the light of day). It wasn’t until a friend introduced him to the money-making possibilities of the home video market that he decided to return to his home behind the camera.

Pandora Peaks is a home video advertisement for its eponymous stripper/porn star. A supposed “documentary on Pandora at the peak of her popularity, the film plays like an episode of HBO’s Real Sex or a Playboy TV exclusive. Narrated by Meyer himself, Pandora Peaks resurrects the rapid-fire montage & non sequitur background chatter of the feverish go-go dancing nightmare Mondo Topless, but distinctly lacks that film’s white hot passion. You can also find traces of his home movie tourism in Europe in the Raw in sequences featuring a Hungarian stripper named Tundi (whose “interview” dialogue is provided by Meyer vet Uschi Digard), but again the film lacks any of the paranoid jingoism that made that “documentary” special. Perhaps the saddest part of the whole going-through-the-motions affair is that he director continuously references the glory days of past works in the film, particularly the successes of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! & Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. As clips from better Meyer times & shots of Pandora doing her thing at old shoot locations roll in, it’s apparent that the director is in an exhausted, retrospective mood, clearly disinterested in making earnest art out of what ultimately feels like a DVD extra.

There are some residual Meyer charms lurking in Pandora Peaks, mostly in the way the innocuous narration mixes harshly with the supposedly titilating imagery to crate a disorienting effect. As Pandora herself tells fond childhood stories about her enormous breasts & her over-active libido, Meyer blandly intones passages from his 1000+ page autobiography A Clean Breast. His anecdotes about how his boob fetish saved him from a dull life toiling away in a battery factor & why he loves to go fishing with his old war buddies are oddly sober & level-headed, far from the unfocused ramblings of the madman vision in his previous two pictures: Up! & Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. The best effect the film has is in its way of lulling the viewer in to a dulled, hypnotic state, one occasionally interrupted by slide whistle & sqeaking toy sound effects. In its worst moments, though, it’s an entirely dismissable home video of a nightmarish Dallas strip club on a field trip. Even excusing his diminished enthusiasm, Meyer’s aesthetic didn’t translate well to the modern, plastic era. The plastic Walkmans & modern street signs of Pandora Peaks have nothing on the old world radios & hand-painted advertisements of Mondo Topless, Similarly, the director’s love of gigantic breasts had reached its crescendo in its final picture, with Pandora trying to pass off her HHH-sized busom as a natural phenomenon, fooling no one.

If Meyer hadn’t already entered the arena of self-parody critics had been accusing him of since Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Pandora Peaks pretty much solidified the transition. It’s a little disappointing that his career ended with such an empty exercise instead of a more ambitious project like Who Killed Bambi? or The Breast of Russ Meyer, but there are honestly worse possible fates. At least Pandora Peaks is far from the morally reprehensible depths of Blacksnake or Motorpsycho!, except maybe in a couple isolated moments of casual homophobia. The saddest aspect of the film is the way in which the auteur & eternal perv is yearning in some way to make sense of his own career, reaching back to past glory & repeatedly cutting to a mosaic representation of his own face as if frustratingly gazing into a mirror & asking what will become of his legacy. 15 years after Pandora Peaks & 11 years after Meyer’s death the answer to that question is still ambiguously hanging in the air. He’s a tough artist to pigeonhole, a complicated brute of a man that defies you to defend everything he’s said & done in its entirety. And yet he’s made some of the most vibrant, idiosyncratic films the world has ever seen. The question is what are we to do with the mess he’s left behind? It’s been fun picking through the pieces of the wreckage, but I doubt I have any significant answer to that conundrum now that I’ve made it through to the other side. I doubt I ever will.

-Brandon Ledet

The Wolfpack (2015)

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three star

I’ve watched a lot of recent media about false imprisonment, from Unbreakable to Kimmy Schmidt to Everly to Room, but The Wolfpack may have a thematic upper hand on the rest, given that it’s presented as a documentary. The low budget doc tells the story of six young, long-haired brothers explore external spaces by watching movies & re-creating their favorites in home-made cover versions similar to what you’ find in Be Kind Rewind or (*shudder*) Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Except that these are real recreations with a real life purpose . . . supposedly. Part of what makes The Wolfpack an interesting, but frustrating experience is that the story is just beyond the reach of believability, but it’s difficult to tell what, if anything, has been embellished for dramatic effect.

What is undeniable is that the story is fascinating. The six Angulo brothers & their shielded-from-the-camera sister are said to have been raised in insular, tribe-like environment by their parents, with their father serving as a tyrannical cult-leader type that keeps them under lock & key. Homeschooled & taught to avoid contact with strangers, they report that they’d sometimes go outside their apartment “nine times a year, sometimes once . . .” It’s no wonder, then, that they found cinema to be such a welcome escape. As the eldest, most defiant Angulo brother puts it, “If I didn’t have movies,life would be pretty boring and there would be no point to go on.” It’s slightly less clear why their father would pressure them to pursue creative expression through film & music, although vague answers are directly provided. I get a general sense from the film that even he isn’t quite sure of why he oppresses his family, outside of an oversized sense of hubris that borders on mental illness.

The vagueness & just-short-of-authenticity narrative of The Wolfpack rests more on the shoulders of first-time documentarian Crystal Moselle than it does on her subjects.  For starters, Moselle doesn’t provide nearly enough insight into the mechanics of the brothers’ creative process. There’s a couple details provided, like the way they use closed captions to transcribe their scripts or how they use cereal boxes & yoga mats to create homemade Batman costumes. The film does not provide, however, a sense of scope. For instance, are the Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, The Dark Knight, and The Nightmare Before Christmas remakes shown in the film a majority of their catalog or are their other home movies not shown to the audience? I felt that a lot of the circumstances of their confinement were also a little thin as presented, with a lot of the tone established through home movies paired with dramatic music.

I’m not exactly saying that The Wolfpack is poorly made, just that it doesn’t feel fully fleshed out considering the very distinct nature of its subject. It almost would’ve been more worthwhile to have the boys tell their own story through a dramatic reenactment, à la The Act of Killing, as that would’ve incorporated the film’s more striking imagery for the full length of the feature without wearing the limited details of its story thin. Either way, the story is oddly fascinating as presented & it’ll be interesting to see how the brother’s lives will develop now that they’ve been exposed to the world outside their father’s apartment. They certainly have a a well-developed cinematic eye, something that’s put to extraordinary use in the film’s final minutes when they’re working on a wholly original project. I’m not sure that they need the limelight quite as much as they need therapy, but I’m excited to see what art they bring the world now that they’re free from whatever exact trauma they no doubt suffered.

-Brandon Ledet

Missing People (2015)

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fourstar

I first heard of the visual artist Roy Ferdinand when I attended his one-man show In Your Fucking Face at Barrister’s Art Gallery (when it was still on Oretha Castle Haley) sometime in 2004, As the title of that show suggests, Ferdinand’s work is aggressively crude & transgressive, assembling a unique document of New Orleans at the height of the city’s fever pitch crime rates in the 90s & 00s. An self-taught, outsider artist along the lines of a Henry Darger or a Daniel Johnson, Ferdinand drew portraits of the city & its inhabitants at their most cruel & vulnerable moments. His art is somehow both immediately digestible & impossible to ever shake once seen. The imagery sticks with you in a deeply affecting way, both in its violence’s absurdity & honesty, despite a lack of honed technical skills you’d expect from a more traditionally trained artist.

Roy Ferdinand may have been a somewhat financially successful artist, but he’s far from a household name & information on his personal life is scarce at best. That’s why I was stoked to discover that a documentary about Ferdinand was screening at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art as a part of the 2015 New Orleans Film Fest. Super stoked. Indeed, Missing People was a rare chance to see interview footage of Roy Ferdinand talking about himself, his city, and his art. However, it was far from the film that I was I expecting. Instead of being a documentary about Ferdinand outright, Missing People follows the story of Martina Batan, an art collector & curator who obsessively amassed hundreds of Ferdinand’s pieces for reasons that even she had difficulty understanding. It would be incredible to see a documentary strictly about Ferdinand & his work, but Missing People is not that film. Instead, it serves as a document about the way his art can deeply affect someone in a personal way. And after seeing the film it’d be difficult to argue that it’s ever affected anyone nearly as much as it has Martina Batan.

Described by a close friend & comic book artist Dave Carino as “a cross between Wednesday Adams & Holly Golightly”, Martina Batan was once a young art student with a Joey Ramone haircut in NYC’s highly influential late 70s punk era. The polaroids depicting her energetic youth are a stark contrast with her current life as a middle age divorcee & professional art curator. Living alone with two elderly dogs in Brooklyn, NY, Baton is a deeply depressed, anxious soul, one that rarely sleeps or, ostensibly, enjoys herself. One thing that haunts Batan in an ever-increasing intensity is the decades-old violent stabbing death of her teenage brother, a tragedy that tore her family to shreds. One of the ways Batan processes her grief over the loss of her brother, of course, is through collecting Roy Ferdinand’s artwork.

Batan first discovered Ferdinand while volunteering in New Orleans’ post-Katrina recovery shortly after the artist’s premature death in 2005. She soon became possessed with the task of collecting what she describes as “a greatest hits” of the artist’s work. Although Missing People is by no means a straight-forward documentary on Ferdinand & his art, it does feature hundreds of his pieces, by far the most I’ve ever seen, thanks to Batan’s tireless obsession as a collector. Besides the drawings, Batan also collected various ephemera from Ferdinand’s life, including a cowboy hat, boots, and unwashed socks Ferdinand’s two living sisters had entrusted to the owner of Barrister’s Gallery (a detail spookily echoed in Batan’s collection of her slain brother’s similar ephemera). Speaking of Ferdinand’s sisters, as a pair they offer one of the few points of insight into the deceased artists’ life & personality, outside stray interview footage of Roy in 1997, a few anecdotes from Barrister’s Gallery owner and, of course, the work itself. Roy’s sisters are particularly endearing in their dismissive laughter after hearing their brother describe himself as “an OG retired”. Whether or not roy was a certifiable “original gangster”, his self-declared role as a “journalist” & a “documentarian” that lead him to record “simple portraits of neighborhood characters” suggests that he at least had some kind of first hand experience with New Orleans’ crime element. As Roy himself puts it, he felt compelled to depict “guns, drugs, violence, and church” in his work because that’s what happens in a city where you constantly see “cops shooting at drug dealers, drug dealers shooting at cops, drug dealers shooting at each other.” Leave the scenic streams & meadows to the artists who live where that’s the reality. Although Roy’s sisters couldn’t corroborate his self-image of a “retired” hard criminal, they did admit that he often sold his paintings as a means to support his crack cocaine habit, saying “When he did his most eye-popping pieces, he was high as a kite.”

Not enough is really known about the “true” Roy Ferdinand to support a full-length documentary in the traditional sense (not that I wouldn’t love to see someone try). As one interviewee puts it, Roy was somewhat of a “performance artist”, adapting to many personas over the course of his lifetime: cowboy, voodoo practitioner, crack addict, fine artist, limo driver, French Quarter eccentric Chicken Man’s “official bodyguard”, etc. Although Missing People makes little to no attempt to offer a full portrait of the artist as a man, it does wonders to establish his role as a docuementarian. Roy explains the reasons he depicts the victims of horrible acts of violence is to preserve their likeness beyond being a mere headline in a news story. He says, “If it wasn’t for me, nobody would remember that these people existed.” Perhaps that sentiment is the essence of Martina Batan’s personal connection with Ferdinand’s work, seeing as how her long-deceased brother suffered a similar fate to many of Roy’s subjects, just in New York instead of New Orleans. The movie offers little in the way of answers.

As Martina struggles with her brother’s mysterious death, with her own failing health, and with an uneasy relationship with Roy’s sisters (who are justifiably suspicious & jealous of her collection of their brother’s work), Missing People paints a bleak, complicated picture. Much like Roy Ferdinand’s artwork, the documentary is painfully honest in an absurdly open, vulnerable way, refusing to play by the rules. Missing People documents the life of a great, little known artist not by offering a traditional biography, but instead focusing its attention on a few people still actively engaged with his work a decade after his passing. It works in the same way that Room 237 revealed a lot about the power of ambiguity in Kubrick’s The Shining by exploring the crackpot theories the film inspired instead of documenting the production of the film itself. As I said, as a fan of his work I would love to watch a proper, full-length documentary about Ferdinand (if that’s even possible), but that’s not at all what Missing People is aiming for. Instead, Roy is just the connective tissue in a story about the people living in his wake. It’s a bold & often frustrating choice, but in a lot of ways the film is more fascinating & satisfying for it.

-Brandon Ledet

Mondo Topless (1966)

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fourstar

campstamp

With his first six films, Russ Meyer pioneered & eventually mastered what is now known as “the nudie cutie”, an antiquated genre that is exactly what it sounds like: a cutesy comedy featuring nude models. His first feature, The Immoral Mr. Teas, is cited as the very first example of the “nudie cutie” and, following a few Teas-imitating stinkers, his final film in the genre, Heavenly Bodies!, proved to be a finely-tuned, navel-gazing example of the limits of what the format could accomplish. The next phase of his career was a series of black & white “roughies”, a collection of crudely violent crime pictures that were about as far from the word “cutie” that the director could possibly get. Again, that phase saw some highs & lows for the director, including the irredeemably vile Motorpsycho! & the indisputable crown jewel of the “roughie” genre, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. For his followup to Faster, Pussycat!, Meyer deviously combined the “nudie cutie” & “roughie” aesthetics into a single, incomprehensible picture, Mondo Topless. Mondo Topless is the cinematic equivalent of a child being forced to smoke an entire pack after failing to sneak a single cigarette. Meyer effectively asks his audience, “You want breasts? Here’s more than you could possibly handle. Choke on them.” The resulting film is an overwhelming assault on the senses, featuring an ungodly chaotic jumble of topless go-go dancing & non sequitur narration. If it were any longer than an hour, it’d be unwatchable. As is, it’s a oddly engaging spectacle of pure madness, one that summarized the full extent of what Meyer had accomplished at that time in his career.

One consistent feature of Meyer’s nudie cutie work is the non sequitur ramblings of an offscreen narrator, often delivered with the blank expression of an industrial film. Like with everything else it delivers, Mondo Topless adds a barely digestible layer of aggression to this Meyer trope. The narrator, John Furlong (who worked on several Meyer features, including Mudhoney & Common Law Cabin), delivers his relentless monologues in a near shout, backing the audience into a corner as the screen is overloaded with go-go dancers doing their thing. He starts by describing an especially salacious view of San Francisco, a city that reportedly “thrusts itself into the bosom of the Pacific” with the “bulging peaks & deep canyons” of its landscape, its trollies “digesting & disgorging humanity at will”, and structures that “thrust their bulk majestically toward the sky.” The rapidfire montage of this opening segment features a nude woman maniacally driving through the Bay Area intercut with images of the skyscrapers, ads, automobiles, and dancing naked women that make up Russ Meyer’s America. In a fit of shameless self-promotion our aggressive narrator promises an expose on the artform of “the topless”, “the phrase & the craze that is changing the mood & the morays of people everywhere […] Here, go-go girls in & out of their environment will be revealed to you in scenes that can only be summarized as a swinging tribute to unrestrained female anatomy. Mondo Topless is believably real in Eastman color. But ‘unbelievable’ just barely describes all of Russ Meyer’s discotheque discoveries: fantastic women, fantastic dances, featuring the world’s loveliest buxotics. You only dreamed there were women like these until now. But they’re real! Unbelievably real!” It’s an onslaught that makes you so dizzy you could puke.

The rest of the film’s dialogue is provided by the dancers themselves. As they answer interview questions that were not included to provide context, performers with names like Donna X & Babette Bardot dance frenetically while making strangely disconnected statements like “I used to play cello in a symphony orchestra when I was 13,” & “All you’re doing is a dance, it has no meaning whatsoever.” The range of topics covered in these “interviews” are as disparate as women’s sexual autonomy to the freedom of not wearing a bra to bed. The narrator only occasionally interjects to literally dare you to focus on what the dancers have to say as they’re violently shaking their bodies for your visual pleasure/motion sickness. When he shouts at you to “sit back!”, “relax!”, or “enjoy!” what the women have to offer it takes immense emotional fortitude to not shout back “Okay! I’ll try! Stop yelling at me!” There’s a very small amount of variety to be found within the film, mainly in the different styles of the featured dancers & the locations where they’re filmed (a rocky beach, near a passing train, underwater, in a mud puddle, etc.), but otherwise Mondo Topless is aggressively one-note: gorgeous women dance topless to portable radios & tape players at a maddening pace that never once pumps the brakes so the audience can catch its breath.

There’s a little bit of cultural context that makes Mondo Topless significant as a historical document, but there’s no way that it can be mistaken for a documentary. It only makes the slightest differentiations between “the erotic” dances of the past & “the topless” dancing (aka go-go dancing) that reportedly started in San Francisco. Erotic dances are supposedly built on the tease of the reveal & use of obscuring objects like pasties, where as topless go-go dancing is an all-out “burst of inhibited frenzy.” Mondo Topless does its best to recreate this feeling of frenzy in its relentless pace, intentionally distancing itself from Meyer’s burlesque nudie cutie past despite re-purposing the exact footage of what seemed to be every single dance from Europe in the Raw in its short runtime. Meyer also takes multiple breaks to pat himself on the back for his own accomplishments, like in an interview with Lorna Maitland, star of his film (duh) Lorna. The narrator brags, “Without artistic surrender, without compromise, without question or apology, an important motion picture was produced: Lorna: A Woman Too Much for One Man.” Maitland then goes on to speculate about her boundless future as an actress, tellingly only describing & showing footage only from the exact two scenes of the film I found worthwhile in my initial review.

Otherwise, Mondo Topless makes no attempt to pretend to be anything more than it is: an overwhelmingly aggressive hour of frenzied go-go dancing, Meyer’s bizarre editing style (that would later reach its apex in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) and disorienting, besides the point dialogue that only added confusion & obscurity to the proceedings. But, why should I attempt to describe the overall effect of the Mondo Topless to you when the film was content to review itself in its final monologue? It concludes, “Well, Mondo Topless measures up. The unmistakable Russ Meyer touch makes this more than a gang of great gals. It makes it move. We sincerely hope you enjoyed the flick.” Indeed.

-Brandon Ledet

Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau (2015)

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threehalfstar

I don’t really remember much about John Frankenheimer’s 1996 Island of Dr. Moreau. My parents rented it the summer it came to VHS, and, presumably ignorant of how mature it was, allowed me to watch it with them (of course, my father was and is the kind of person who really only objected to profanity and sex, while violence was ignored most of the time; it’s telling that they allowed me to watch this movie, but Miss Congeniality was banned in our house years later due to Sandra Bullock’s “foul” mouth). Most of what I remember is that Fairuza Balk, who I knew from Return to Oz, was in it, as was some hideous wheezing monster named Marlon Brando, whom my mother tried unsuccessfully to convince me was once a handsome movie star. This was a movie that had hyena monsters and a horribly graphic scene of a beast person giving birth, but I don’t remember those elements at all while Brando’s white-painted face haunted me for years.

But we’re not here to talk about that movie; we’re here to talk about what that movie could have been, or, more accurately, about the documentary about the movie that could have been, had original director Richard Stanley not been fired from the project, and all the myriad ways that fate conspired to destroy his vision. In Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau, director David Gregory delves into Stanley’s fascination with H.G. Wells’s novel from early childhood and his lifelong pursuit of giving the book a film adaptation that lived up to the story’s potential. Following the successes of his cyberpunk post-apocalypse horror flick Hardware and his sophomore follow up Dust Devil, Stanley found himself in talks with New Line about directing a film for them. Due to his lifelong love of Dr. Moreau, he successfully pitched the adaptation; it was all downhill from there.

Lost Soul covers a lot of ground, with interviews from sources as varied as Balk, Stanley, New Line founder and president Robert Shaye, Moreau animal behavioral consultant Peter Elliott, and actors Marco Hofschneider, Temuera Morrison, Neil Young (no, not that one), Fiona Mahl, and Rob Morrow (who took over for Val Kilmer in the Prendick role when Kilmer’s insistence on fewer shooting days meant that Kilmer was shifted into the role of Montgomery, initially filled by James Woods; Morrow would also eventually bow out and be replaced by David Thewlis). Beginning with Stanley’s upbringing as the child of a single mother who was fascinated by occultism both academically and personally and following through to Stanley’s current career (spoiler alert: it’s not pretty), the documentary details how Stanley, a young indie director whose pet project suddenly became a multi-million dollar picture when Brando expressed interest in the title role, was eventually fired from the production when he found himself in over his head and beset by problems. The literal hurricanes that destroyed many sets were nothing compared to the setback caused by Brando’s daughter’s suicide during pre-production, making it impossible to film significant portions of the film for several weeks. Worse still were the mind games that Kilmer used to undermine and belittle Stanley; the actor was going through a nasty divorce at the time, but that doesn’t begin to cover a fraction of the horror stories of intimidation tactics and threats the cast and crew recall from their time working on the film.

Stanley was ultimately fired as the result of many things that were outside of his control, and this story is a tragic one. It’s not the most engaging documentary I’ve seen, and lacks the warmth and nostalgia of, say, Best Worst Movie, which also tackled the making of a notoriously bad feature. Still, it’s a fascinating look behind the curtain of one of the biggest box office and critical flops of the 1990s, and it serves as a reminder of how an artist can be destroyed by concerns, commercial or otherwise, that are outside of his or her hands. Stanley was propelled far beyond what he was suited and prepared for too early in his career and his talent and drive weren’t enough to save him or Dr. Moreau.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond