drama

Riding the Bus with My Sister (2005)

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onehalfstar

campstamp

“I’m not stupid, I’m just different.”

When I first learned that Riding the Bus with My Sister existed, I was both fascinated and frightened. Rosie O’Donnell playing a mentally challenged person whose main hobbies include riding the city bus and buying toilet seat covers held promise for sheer what-the-fuckness, but I knew that so-bad-it’s-good can end up being so-bad-it’s-really-bad real quick.

My worst fears were confirmed, unfortunately, in the opening credits as the words “Lifetime” and “Hallmark Hall of Fame” scrolled across the screen and were further solidified when Beth, waking from her disabled slumber, smiles into the mirror and in a loud, grating voice shouts, “Good Morning!” From that point forward, the WTF factor of seeing Rosie O’ Donnell play a mentally “retarded” woman with a heart of gold diminished every time she was on the screen.

Now I know it’s not politically correct to use the term “retarded” but it’s inexplicably used throughout Riding the Bus with My Sister, its negativity undermining many of the positive messages the film is trying to convey. One character even asks early on, “They still use that word?” It also doesn’t help that Beth is treated like crap the entire movie. In the first five minutes she is called a “hippo” by a downstairs neighbor, glared at with disgust by her fellow bus riders, and openly insulted for being lazy & living off the government. It would have been just as effective if director Anjelica Huston (Why?) flashed “People hate the handicapped” in bold red letters. For a simple woman who only wants to ride the bus, drink discount brand cola, and one day go to Disney World, she is treated as a drain on society.

The person who treats her the worst is her sister Rachel, a career woman living in New York who must leave behind her fashion photography business to take care of Beth after their father passes away. In a wholly unlikable performance, Andie MacDowell phones it in as the self-absorbed Rachel. MacDowell’s only job in the movie is to look nice & be annoyed by Beth’s antics. Rachel moves in with Beth to help her adapt to life on her own, but soon regrets it as Beth irritates her with conversation-starters like “Hey Rachael, I put seven red fishies inside of this can, do you think they can swim in cola? I sure hope so. I would hate to drown them.” Rachel’s characters arc (and the arc of the entire movie) amounts to the realization, “Hey, I’m kind of a piece of shit because I never really accepted my mentally challenged sister.” We learn this through a tedious parade of at least ten flashbacks of the sisters eating dirt, painting, even suffering seizures; all accompanied by sparse, acoustic guitar. This goes on for two hours.

The most frustrating thing about Riding the Bus With My Sister is that Beth is looked down on by Rachel but she seems to have life more figured out than her developmentally “superior” sister. She has her own place, lots of friends, and a routine she enjoys. She even has a similarly disabled boyfriend, Jessie, who treats her well, takes her out on dates, and has hobbies of his own like karate & riding his bike. Of course, in one of the many ways the movie manipulates viewers’ sentimentality, Jessie is beaten by a group of thugs towards the end of the film.

Kudos should be given to Rosie O’Donnell, though. While her performance mostly consists of rocking back and forth, shouting, and contorting her face, she does succeed in coming across as genuinely handicapped. In one of the film’s best scenes, Beth mourns the loss of her father by sobbing uncontrollably on a bench outside the hospital while eating a doughnut, drinking a cola, and wearing a kitty cat t-shirt. In another she talks about boning Will Smith. There are a few memorable moments like that in Riding the Bus with My Sister but with minimal plot development and a near-absence of likable characters the film falls apart. What could have been a heartfelt drama with camp value fails because the story doesn’t go anywhere. In the end, the viewer is left feeling as confused & unfairly abused as Beth is in the film.

-James Cohn

Cake (2014)

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fourstar

Over the weekend, I was able to make my way to the movie theater to see Cake. I didn’t know anything about the film until I came across the trailer last Friday. Where did this movie come from and why didn’t I hear anything about it? Maybe it’s because of a lack of advertising or the fact that I’m so behind with the times. I was so eager to watch it that I was first in line to see it Saturday morning. I was surrounded by tons of silver-haired old ladies, so I was pretty much in my element. The film brought out some inappropriate laughter, gasps, and lots of tears from just about everyone in the audience. Cake was a movie for real people about real people, and I absolutely loved it.

Jennifer Aniston really showed the world that she could be more than just a funny, flirty girl who stars in a rom-com every now and then. In this film, she plays the role of Claire Bennett, a pill-popper recovering from an unknown, tragic accident. Claire has such a horrible attitude that she drove just about all of her friends and family away. The only person in her life is her paid housekeeper, Silvana (Adriana Barazza). In her support group consisting of other women dealing with unhealthy addictions, one of the members, Nina (Anna Kendrick) commits suicide by jumping off a freeway. After having a few confrontations with Nina’s ghost, Claire develops an obsession with Nina’s family and suicide. This strange little obsession actually helps Claire come to terms with her personal tragedy and take initiative to get better.

Cake is simply a sweet story with a good bit of crude humor and lots of heart. After reading a couple of reviews about the movie, critics did not seem to enjoy the film’s slow pace, but I really enjoyed the way the movie dragged on with no straight-forward answers. It allowed me to develop a connection with Claire; she’s a nut job that I want to be best friends with. I personally know a few individuals that suffer from chronic pain and pill addiction, and I was shocked at how authentic Aniston’s performance was. It was so spot-on that it was scary. Eating her prescription meds like candy, grunting and complaining all the time, and acting like she has nothing to live for. Even if you have no interest in watching this type of film, it’s worth sitting through just to witness Aniston’s impeccable acting. Her performance really “takes the cake.”

-Britnee Lombas

Frank (2014)

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fourstar
“I’ve always wanted to work with someone who shares my dream of making extremely likable music.”

It seems easier now than ever to be a “musician”: gather a couple friends, write a few songs, release them on the Internet.  But just because your music is easier to get heard does not mean that it’s necessarily good. In the 2014 comic drama Frank we follow one such mediocre musician, Jon, played by Domhnall Gleeson, who finds himself dropping everything to join an avant-garde pop band led by the enigmatic and mysterious Frank. Frank is a musical savant with a history of mental illness who hides himself inside a large papier-mâché head.  Jon is enthralled with Frank’s outsider art but fails to see past his own ambitions and realize that there are dark secrets behind that fake, gigantic head.

Frank is grounded by a stunning performance from Michael Fassbender as the titular protagonist who channels Jim Morrison, Captain Beefheart, and Daniel Johnston; artists whose own troubled past and history of mental illness mirror Frank’s. Props should also be given Domnhall Gleeson, as it could have been easy to lose our sympathy for Jon as he latches on to Frank’s coattails. But in the end we realize he’s just trying to be something he’s not and for that he earns our sympathy instead of our scorn.

Some viewers might feel that the story loses steam in its melodramatic finale but the emotional third act brings home the larger theme of how different people react to mental illness when it is coupled with something like vast creativity: diner patrons call Frank a “freak” and laugh at him; Jon thinks he must have been ‘traumatized’; Frank’s parents love and support him, but are clueless about how to help him.

Ultimately, what sounds like a premise for a ridiculous indie comedy instead ends up being a deeply moving exploration of mental illness and blind artist worship. It is also wickedly funny. Director Lenny Abrahamson does a great job of juggling the seemingly contradictory tones in the film: whimsical and offbeat, sweet and punk-spirited, funny and melancholic. A definite must watch.

Frank is currently streaming on Netflix.

-James Cohn

The Juniper Tree (1990)

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three star

Discovering Björk’s acting debut in The Juniper Tree was some divine happenstance. I had lost track of her music career sometime after 2001’s Vespertine, so it was delightful to recently give her latest album Biophilia a (four years late) first listen and discover its fantastic weirdness, obsessively looping it through my headphones all last week. A recommendation that same week alerted me that I was 25 years behind on the release of another Björk project, a small budget, black & white indie film about witchcraft.

The Juniper Tree was filmed in 1986 in the months following the dissolution of Björk’s post-punk band KUKL and the birth of her first child. By the time the film cleared its financial hurdles and saw a 1990 release in Iceland and on film festival circuits, she had already earned much greater success with the alt rock group The Sugarcubes. By the time it saw a wide, international release in 1993, she had achieved major success as a solo artist with the album Debut. In comparison to the huge “Bad Taste” art collective behind The Sugarcubes and the big-name record labels behind Debut, The Juniper Tree’s cast and budget are microscopic, but the film does a lot with a little, pulling a weird little story and some bizarre images from a few locations and even fewer moving pieces. At least from a funding standpoint, it was a time capsule of a primitive state of Björk’s growth as an artist, but one that demonstrates how little material she needs to work with to produce something great.

Loosely based on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale of the same name, The Juniper Tree is the story of two grieving families struggling to blend into one cohesive unit. Think of it as an Icelandic Brady Bunch, but with witches & cannibalism instead of puppy love & nose-breaking footballs. Björk plays Margit, a young woman whose mother was recently stoned & burned for practicing witchcraft. In the escape from their home her sister Katla marries a young widower who lives alone with his son. The boy befriends Margit, but is vehemently against his father’s marriage to Katla, who he knows to be a witch. Although Katla does cast spells (cruelly & often), it is Margit who possesses truly magical abilities, most importantly the ability to communicate with ghosts.

The film’s heart lies with the relationship between Margit and her young brother-in-law and the mourning that bonds them, but it’s the fleeting, hallucinatory imagery that makes it noteworthy. Despite its budget, The Juniper Tree manages to produce an impressive range of images: a hand thrust into a black hole, a ghost perched on Icelandic cliffs, fish picking at an underwater corpse, Northern Lights, birds in flight. It’s a somber, self-serious affair, but one that earns its odder moments in a very short run time. If nothing else, the heavenly tones of Björk’s singing voice elevate the material into otherworldly territory. She’s perfectly suited for this world of witchcraft & mourning and it shows in the final product.

Of course, The Juniper Tree will always be known as the other Björk movie. Lars von Trier’s powerful Dancer in the Dark gave her a much larger stage to prove herself not only as an incredible composer, but also as an actress, a talent she doesn’t utilize nearly enough. The Juniper Tree gets drowned out in the comparison, but when considered in isolation it’s an interesting little art movie. It’s very much Super Serious 80s/90s Film School Fodder, but if a young, feral Björk practicing witchcraft goes as far with you as it does with me, you’ll find it kinda perfect in its small-scale intimacy.

The Juniper Tree is currently streaming on Hulu.

-Brandon Ledet

Electrick Children (2012)

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electrickchildren

fourhalfstar

Tape Jacket
The first & last sounds you hear in the dreamlike Electrick Children are ocean waves & a cassette player. If you played the film on loop, these sounds would parallel the experience of listening to the clicks & hisses of an audio tape switching from Side A to Side B and back again. This reverence for sound is a vital part of the film’s allure and essential to its plot. When the protagonist, a 15 year old girl simply named Rachel, listens to her very first rock & roll song she becomes inexplicably pregnant. As she navigates the consequences of this “miracle” in two irreconcilable worlds, her life takes the same Side A & Side B anatomy of the cassette tape that changed it forever.

Side A
Rachel’s home life is an isolated, fundamentalist Mormon community in Utah. It’s a loving environment, but one that strangles her personal desires & freedoms. Rachel has a sense of humor that’s generally discouraged in her piously pensive household. Her father (played by a terrifying thing that calls itself Billy Zane) is the community’s patriarch & spiritual leader, exuding a level of control that’s never purely healthy. He’s suspicious of Rachel’s prayers thanking God for modern inventions like tape recorders. Rachel’s mother is suspicious of her daughter’s intense interest in a bedtime story about a red Mustang. The story is meant for the kids to interpret as the tale of a mythical horse, but is in fact the story of the mother’s seduction in the passenger seat of a sports car. Her parents were right to be worried, as this fascination with the outside world literally impregnates their daughter through the conduit of a cassette tape recording of a new wave band covering Blondie’s “Hanging on the Telephone”. The only modern world objects in their house are hidden in the basement like a dirty secret: an electric light with a picture of the ocean, the audio cassette player & tapes. It’s in that basement where Rachel becomes pregnant. She confesses her transgression to her parents, reasoning “Maybe I listened to something I wasn’t supposed to and then I’m pregnant.” They don’t believe her and plan to conceal her “sin” by marrying her to a near stranger.

Side B
To avoid the unwanted marriage, Rachel runs away to Las Vegas in search of the voice on the cassette tape, a voice she believes belongs to her baby’s father. She approaches guitar-playing street performers and boys wearing images of cassettes in her desperate search. Vegas is a blown up version of the electric music & lights in her parents’ basement. Typical pillars of teenage rebellion swirl around her: cursing, drugs, kissing, punk shows & skate parks. Her mother’s mythical red Mustang appears to her throughout the journey: first on the drive into Vegas, then during her first kiss, and a final time after her first legitimate crime. Each time the car passes through her life it’s blasting “Hanging on the Telephone.” The car & the musicians she befriends don’t lead her to the father of her miraculous child, but along the way she falls in love, discovers autonomy, and hits every other typical beat you’d expect in a cinematic coming-of-age story. Rachel’s parents warned her of the sinful, destructive nature of the modern world, but it proves not to be true. She treats the modern world with a humble, humorous kindness and it returns the favor. Her only conflicts, including the pregnancy, result from her own transgressions.

Liner Notes
Some reviews for Electrick Children unfairly take points off for it being too cute or fanciful. There’s a preciousness to the story that could be a turn-off for some viewers, but is entirely appropriate for what the movie is: a modern fairy tale, an exercise in magic realism. The film’s Big Hollywood Ending brings its two worlds together in a moment that feels unreal, but no more unreal than the central Immaculate Conception. The characters come across somewhat as indie movie archetypes, but that artificiality is exploited to its full advantage. They’re only assigned first names and limited motivations, but that plays into their allegorical usefulness. The actors playing Rachel and her love interest Clyde (Julia Garner & Rory Culkin) get great mileage with the shorthand, bringing depthless empathy to characters that are mostly limited to one mode: wide-eyed hope and Bill & Ted style sloth, respectively. The skill with which first time director Rebecca Thomas handles her limited budget is remarkable. She pulls a fantastic dream world out of a few locations and a small-scale cast, finding an impressive wealth of significance in a few minor details like an electric light, a cassette tape, a Mustang, and Clyde’s Hawaiian shirt. She even seemingly taunts potential detractors with lines like “You guys playing Garden State or are you coming?” Most importantly, Thomas establishes fantasy in her attention to sound: the clicks of a cassette player, “Hanging on the Telephone”, Rachel’s recorded prayers & their accompanying somber piano notes, the sounds of ocean waves. When the waves return at the film’s end and Rachel says “Let’s go back to the beginning”, it’s tempting to take the suggestion and let the tape play over again, automatically switching back to Side A.

Secret Bonus Track
Rebecca Thomas cites Pasolini’s film The Gospel According To St Matthew (1964) as a stylistic influence on Electrick Children. She said “He takes a fairly neutral and nonjudgmental approach to the New Testament […] It was also important for me to keep my version of the Virgin Mary story as grounded as I could, even though I was dealing with the supernatural: I like to ground things that are fantastical to understand them more.” As the debauchery-benchmark Salò was the only Pasolini film I had seen before, I found that influence pretty surprising. As Thomas says, the film itself is a fairly literal, unsentimental telling of (an unusually angry) Jesus’ life, but one with some striking imagery and occasional brutality, even if it does feel like eating your vegetables. It’s not required viewing to enjoy or understand Electrick Children, but it does help provide context for Thomas’ ambitions. Also, it features an Odetta song, which is always nice.

Electrick Children is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Brandon Ledet

Bird People (2014)

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twostar

Last year’s Bird People is the exact kind of French indie movie I used to rent from Blockbuster as a kid to drive my parents crazy. It’s a deliberately bizarre work that deals mostly in somber, humorless tones in its first half before taking an inexplicable left turn into some really goofy, exuberant territory in the second. I really wanted to like this movie, but the two pieces never came together for me. As mirrors of each other the film’s two halves don’t have much to say about their reflections. They remain separate, isolated, which may have been the intended to match the narrative, but makes for a frustrating viewing experience. Besides, the second segment is vastly more interesting than the first, so the whole thing feels off-balance.

What Works: Audrey
Let’s get the main hook/spoiler/ridiculousness out of the way: about halfway into the movie one of the two main characters turns into a bird. I can’t explain it. She can’t explain it. It’s just a thing that happens. Audrey, the bird person in question, is a meek hotel maid who lives her life vicariously through the guests that pass through the rooms she cleans. She’s a nonsexual voyeur, a fly on the wall, an observer. When she unexpectedly turns into a sparrow she’s suddenly able to indulge in her observations up close. Her small size and ability to fly enables her to intrude & eavesdrop unnoticed and she even feels brave enough to interact with the people she’s watching, something she wouldn’t dare in human form. For lack of a better phrase she’s free as a bird. It’s an unusual, interesting idea that could’ve been stretched out & explored enough to justify its own movie. The problem is it comes too late in this one; the damage had already been done by Gary’s segment.

What Doesn’t Work: Gary
The film’s opening segment feels like a completely different movie, a much more sullen movie than the fanciful bird transformation story of the back half. It follows Gary, a guest at the hotel that employs Audrey, as he suffers a personal crisis/panic attack on a business trip that prompts him to sever all ties to his work & his family. Through a series of telephone & Skype conversations, Gary frees himself of all personal responsibilities to the shock & disgust of his wife & coworkers. It’s an isolating performance that puts a lot of weight on actor Josh Charles’ shoulders and, unfortunately, I don’t think it’s a weight he can carry. After watching Tom Hardy master this type of one-man-against-the-world-and-himself story in last year’s Locke, Charles’ performance can’t help but look weak by comparison. Gary’s Skype conversation with his wife should be an absolute soul-crusher, but instead comes off as more of a shrug.

What’s Missing: Who knows?
There are some connections to be made between Gary’s refusal to remain a casual observer in his own life and severing personal ties to obtain freedom & Audrey’s transformation into a sparrow that allows her leave behind the pretense of her maid duties and look into people’s lives more openly. These connections don’t feel fully fleshed out, though. It’s as if this feature-length film were truly meant to be a short or there was a missing third missing segment that would’ve helped tie both parts together or balance them out. As is, I think Bird People is half of a great movie. That half just comes too late to win me back over from its lackluster partner.

Superficial Side Note
I found it very distracting that Gary’s full name was Gary Newman. It’d be like if a character’s name were Mark Mothersbrow, Thomas Colby or Deborah Farry. While watching most of Gary’s segment I periodically wished I was listening to The Pleasure Principle with my eyes closed instead. Actually, I think I’m going to do that right now.

Bird People is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Brandon Ledet

The Meta Experience of Prytania Screening Cinema Paradiso (1989)

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I was washing dishes this Thursday afternoon when I was unexpectedly alerted that Prytania Theatre was going to screen Cinema Paradiso for free in a half-hour’s time. I dried my hands, crated the dog and sped Uptown just in time to take my seat among the little old biddies and stray college students just before the movie began. With no time for Google or IMDb before I ran out the door, I went into the movie completely blind. All I knew was that it’s one of those foreign titles synonymous with phrases like “Oh man that’s a classic” and “How have you not seen that yet?” Oh man. It was a classic. How had I not seen that yet?

Cinema Paradiso is a movie about movies, cinema about a cinema, art about art. It’s one of those rare films that attempts to provoke every possible response in its viewers (laughter, tears, heartbreak, frustration, unbridled joy) and succeeds consistently. As the audience watches the story young boy grow into an old man, they also watch a history of how audiences have engaged with film over the course of decades. When we watch Cinema Paradiso, we watch the way people watch movies. At the beginning of the film the Cinema Paradiso’s audiences basically riot throughout the pictures. Towards the end they sit in rapt silence.

The audience at Prytania that day was anything but silent. They weren’t the masturbating, shit slinging, drunken near-rioters of Cinema Paradiso, but there was some audible chatter throughout the movie in the seats behind me and a full-on celebration in the lobby that could easily be heard through the dividing curtains. The Prytania was screening free movies that day and was gearing up for an afternoon block party to commemorate its 100th anniversary. As the oldest operating cinema in New Orleans and the only one in its neighborhood, it’s way too easy to draw connections between the Prytania Theatre and the titular Cinema Paradiso. Just as the Cinema Paradiso grows with & serves its Sicilian village, Prytania is a cultural mainstay of Uptown New Orleans. They planned on screening the film a second time later that night at the block party, the same kind of outdoor community screening Alfredo stages in the film.

Before the afternoon screening I attended began, Prytania’s 93 year old operator Rene Brunet told the following anecdote: When the one-screen theatre first ran Cinema Paradiso in 1989 it played for over six weeks, upsetting the locals (presumably the college kids) enough to picket the theatre to finally move on & play another movie. It’s the exact kind of episode that would’ve happened in the film itself, although presumably more tame.

The meta experience doesn’t stop there. When Cinema Paradiso was first released to an American audience, the undisputed king of cinematic self-sabotage Harvey Weinstein cut a full 51 minutes of footage from the Italian original (a tactic he almost repeated with last year’s Snowpiercer). The streamlined cut is the one that played at Prytania this Thursday, but it’s also the one that played in its original extended run at that cinema, as well as the one that earned the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Oddly enough, Roger Ebert himself contended that the Weinstein cut is “a better film than the longer.” Whether or not that is true, it’s still hilarious to me that drastic edits were made to a film that depicts a priest making drastic edits to other films as one of its thematic lynchpins.

The programming choice to celebrate Prytania’s century long history with Cinema Paradiso was wholly perfect. It was the story of New Orleans’ most significant one-screen cinema examining itself by revisiting the most significant story of a one-screen cinema around. They could’ve played a more tragic (but just as potent) work of cinematic navel-gazing like 1971’s The Last Picture Show or last year’s Life Itself, but that would’ve undermined the reason we were all there: a celebration. Commemorating Prytania’s first 100 years with Paradiso left me with the hope that it will last at least 100 more. There was no  better way possible to celebrate the movies than to watch people watch movies.

-Brandon Ledet

The Comedy (2012)

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fourstar

Throwing down the gauntlet in its opening shots, The Comedy begins with a sexlessly homoerotic dance party. Naked schlubs grind against each other to a sensual R&B soundtrack, pouring cheap beer down their pale, soft bodies, tucking their genitals between their legs. The last image before the title card is a flash of Tim Heidecker’s scrotum. The scene is devoid of sex appeal because the characters aren’t into what they’re doing. The ritual is a joke inspired by alcohol-fueled late night weirdness. The characters are governed by their sense of irony and the joke isn’t nearly as funny as they think it is.

Even The Comedy’s title is ironic. The same behavior Tim Heidecker usually employs for absurdist humor is weaponized here for a scathing indictment of a generation of scumbags whose entire personalities are affectations. Heidecker’s protagonist makes a sport out of saying things he presumably doesn’t mean. He drunkenly defends Hitler as a flirtation tactic, muses about his terminally ill father’s prolapsed anus, and loudly insults a Catholic church as his degenerate friends blow out prayer candles and roughhouse on the pews. Playing an overgrown, affluent child, Heidecker drifts through menial jobs that would suit a teenager on summer break out of boredom rather than necessity. He manipulates people with his wealth in almost Cheap Thrills levels of cruelty. He pinches a sleeping woman’s eyelids when he’s ready for her to wake. He is more toddler than man and it’s genuinely tragic when he admits that he’s 35 years old. The film doesn’t allow much room for sympathy, though, as it’s gradually revealed that he’s less of a lost, listless soul and more of a spoiled brat & racist prick.

Through a few minor signifiers, like the protagonist’s affinity for the Williamsburg neighborhood and cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, the movie specifies its exact target: the aging American hipster. This is not the broad definition of “hipster” that applies to almost anyone relatively young & discerning. It’s a very specific subsect of rich kids who speak & act exclusively through ironic detachment. It was brave of Heidecker to lend his Tim & Eric brand of humor (including longtime cronies Eric Wareheim & Gregg Turkington) to such a brutal impeachment of a group that likely overlaps with his established audience. Injecting Tim & Eric’s anti-humor into real human interactions leaves their characters looking like pampered shitheads as others blankly stare at them with disgust and exhaustion. The Comedy is a melancholy, unforgiving portrait of ironic toddler men. It’s not the kind of movie where a lesson is learned. The privileged don’t get their comeuppance. No one is punched in the mouth, even when they truly deserve it. Instead, they float on unchallenged, intoxicated, and refusing to engage with a sincere existence. Just like in real life.

The Comedy is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Brandon Ledet

Marks & Smarks: No Holds Barred (1989) & The Wrestler (2008)

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wrasslin

Definitions pulled from Wikipedia’s glossary of professional wrestling terms:
-“Mark”: a wrestling fan who enthusiastically believes that professional wrestling is not staged.
-“Smark”: a fan who is aware of and interested in the backstage and non-scripted aspects of wrestling; a portmanteau of “smart” and “mark.”

Last night I attended my first live pro wrestling event, a months-long goal fulfilled. Despite the distinctly tame vibe of the crowd, I decided to misbehave. Couldn’t help myself. I got drunk, cheered for heels like a jerk, and shouted things that disturbed the 10 year old boy sitting in the row ahead of me. A few rows behind me, another ten year old was also yelling ridiculous taunts, but his were much funnier & more insightful than mine. I was thoroughly upstaged. Around a third my age, this kid had a preternatural comprehension of the sport that he thankfully shared with the neighboring crowd in short, high-pitched bursts. The kid ahead of me would be genuinely upset if he were in earshot. I know I upset him myself. I was sandwiched between a young mark and a smark, two different wrestling worlds clashing on either side of me.

I think it helps to appreciate both sides of the coin to experience the full potential of pro wrestling. Losing yourself in the characters & the soap opera drama is just as important as the in-the-ring athleticism. The violence wouldn’t mean as much without the camp. On the other hand, the context of the practical, behind-the-scenes operations of the sport gives deeper meaning to the in-the-ring storylines. It’s a scripted sport, but scripted in the style of reality television: the reality & the fiction are inseparable. One feeds off the other. A well-rounded fan needs a solid admiration of both.

Searching for this balance in pro wrestling cinema leads me to the bookends of the modern wrestling movie. 1989’s Hulk Hogan vehicle No Holds Barred perfectly captures the nature of mark mentality in the infancy of the current Vince McMahon era. 2008’s The Wrestler, by comparison, is a smark’s dream: an authentic look at the brutal truths of pro wrestling as a career. Together, help paint a complete picture, the fiction & the reality, one feeding off the other.

No Holds Barred (1989)
Although No Holds Barred was far from the world’s first pro wrestling picture, it was the first film produced by the World Wrestling Federation (now WWE). It would take over a decade after its release for Vince McMahon’s juggernaut wrestling promotion to form its own movie studio, so in this way No Holds Barred was ahead of its time. This was the only way it was ahead of its time. Miming the late-80s Schwarzenegger action movie format as much as the budget would allow, No Holds Barred was a blatant attempt to launch the movie career of Hulk Hogan, who had already dominated the “sports entertainment” world and was looking for his next conquest. The first sounds you hear in the film are the voices of Jesse “The Body” Ventura & “Mean” Gene Okerlund, who had come to define the era’s ringside announcing. The film’s head villain is character actor Kurt Fuller testing an almost exact prototype of his career-defining role as a television network scumbag in Wayne’s World. No Holds Barred is in every way a product of its time.

Keeping in line with the 1989 perspective of pro wrestling, before the internet’s obsessive nitpicking of the sport, No Holds Barred is firmly on the mark side of the mark/smark divide. Hulk Hogan’s character Rip Thomas is a superhuman beast in the ring and out. He leaps to incredible heights, destroys cars with his bare hands, and dismantles “bad guys” to an 80s “rock music” soundtrack, all while wearing a costume befitting of a superhero biker. In a world devoid of subtext he is a hero without flaw, an incredibly smart brute who’s dedicated to his charity work, the kind of guy who inspires lines like “Rip’s word is his bond” even when he’s not in the room. The entire movie exists to make Hulk Hogan look impossibly good. He’s a saint, a “good guy”.

Objectively, the movie is not very good. In fact, it’s awful. There’s some guilty pleasure to be found in its campy action movie spectacle, like when Rip force-feeds a rejected bribe to Kurt Fuller’s television executive and quips “I won’t be around when this check clears.” It’s also funny to think that Vince McMahon produced a film that indicts the evil nature of megalomaniac network executives, because, well, he’s a megalomaniac network executive. For the most part, though, the movie is shoddily made of generic kids’ stuff: jokes about “dookie” and slobbering hillbillies, world-class mean-mugging from immense muscle men, “good guys” beating up “bad guys”. It’s a movie you have to love for its savage idiocy, not in spite of it.

More importantly, it’s a document of a different time, a swan song for the era of the mark.

The Wrestler (2008)
A drastically different approach, Daren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler is an objectively good movie. I’d even go as far as to call it a masterpiece. Applying the modern online smark mentality to pro wrestling, Aronofsky turns the backstage repercussions of sports entertainment into a Greek tragedy. Unlike Hogan’s Rip Thomas, Mickey Rourke’s Randy “The Ram” Robinson is a real human being outside the ring. Well past his glory days, Randy struggles with health, finances, and personal relationships badly damaged from years spent on the road. In-the-ring injuries have increasingly severe real life consequences. In one particularly gruesome scene medics remove staples, glass, etc. from Randy’s skin as the camera cuts back to show how they got buried there in a horrific hardcore match, a bloodthirsty crowd chanting “You sick fuck!” in the background. As the pain periodically hits him throughout the film, the intense sound design cues you in with high-pitched noises to match his wincing. Referring to himself, Randy “The Ram” says “I’m a broken down piece of meat. And I’m alone. And I deserve to be alone.” Time proves him right. This is far from the marked-out world of Rip Thomas.

Aronofsky’s attention to authenticity is a remarkable achievement here. As I said before in my list of top pro wrestling documentaries, Randy “The Ram” feels like wrestlers we know, wrestlers like Scott Hall & Jake “The Snake” Roberts. Smarks would take particular interest in the way the movie depicts wrestlers planning spots before matches, laying out a basic framework within which they can improvise. The movie also addresses blading/juicing, steroid abuse, boozy bouts of self-medication after matches, shady promoters and minuscule pay. Randy directly refutes claims that wrestling is “fake” and shows off his scars as proof. Part of why it hurts to watch him despair over the old action figures, Nintendo games, and 80s monster ballads that serve as relics of his former fame is that it feels all too real. There are people who live like this.

Of course, an accurate portrayal of pro wrestling is seated somewhere between these two extremes, just as I was seated between two wildly different children last night. Without the glam showmanship, juvenile humor or outrageous superheroics of Rip Thomas, Aronofsky’s version of wrestling is a grim, lethal ordeal. The wrestling of No Holds Barred is an idealistic child’s macho fantasy. From The Wrestler’s viewpoint, it’s more like assisted suicide. To take in the full scope of the bizarre, idiosyncratic, self-contradicting superhero spectacle of the brutal sport, you have to appreciate both perspectives. You have to look through the eyes of the mark and the smark. Drunken yelling also helps.

-Brandon Ledet

Back Street (1961)

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backstreet

fourstar

Based on the 1931 novel by the late, great Fannie Hurst, Back Street is a tragic film about the relationship between a man and his mistress. There are two other versions of this film that I have yet to see, but it’s only a matter of time until I get to the 1932 and 1941 Back Streets. I doubt that they will be able to top the decadent set designs and costumes from renowned designer Jean Louis, but I’m sure each film has an interesting take on this legendary love story.

Rae Smith (Susan Hayward) and Paul Saxon (John Gavin) meet by chance as Saxon is passing through Nebraska on military business, and they fall in love almost instantly. The problem is that Saxon is a married man. Once Smith finds out that he is married, she cuts him off and moves from Nebraska to New York as a form of therapy. She ends up running into him in New York after she has established a career in the fashion design industry. She rejects him once again and shortly thereafter earns an opportunity to move to Rome in order to expand her business. She immediately accepts, mostly because she wants to dismiss all chances of running into Saxon again. Guess whom she runs into in Rome? I swear he’s got some sort of tracking device on her. Once she runs into him, along with his entire family in Rome, she decides to just give in to the affair of her dreams. Of course, this doesn’t last for long and everything starts to fall apart as expected.

What I love most about this film is its ability to keep such a raunchy situation so classy. Their love just feels so authentic, mostly thanks to Hayward. I’m a pretty big fan of John Gavin, but this definitely wasn’t his best performance. He was just this sort of strange statue hanging around the set majority of the time (a very handsome statue at that). However, Hayward was, as always, astounding. Thankfully, the film focused more on her character than Gavin’s. Back Street is a film I watched years ago that I’ve kept on the back burner, but after watching it again recently it’s slowly becoming one of my favorite classics.

-Britnee Lombas