dystopia

Battle Royale (2000)

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The J-horror classic Battle Royale is one those high-concept movies with such a clear, concise premise that it’s a convenient cultural reference point even if you’ve never seen the full picture yourself. Like Gaslight, Catfish, and The Bucket List, it’s the kind of clarifying text that defines a simple idea that’s since been extrapolated & mutated beyond the point of attribution. I had never seen Battle Royale before this year, but I’ve long-known its logline premise thanks to its lineage of dystopian YA descendants in major studio titles like The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner and, most recently, The Long Walk, each of which have been likened to it. Any movie wherein a group of teenagers in a fascistic near-future are pitted against each other in a lethal game of survival is going to be reflexively likened to Battle Royale, and it was starting to get embarrassing that I had not seen that film myself despite it being such a consistent reference point in that genre. Sometimes, though, procrastination pays off. This year’s 25th anniversary of the film inspired a theatrical re-release, where I got to see it for the first time big & loud, in all its gory, sadistic glory.

Having only known this film as a point of inspiration for the Hollywood YA thrillers to follow, I wasn’t especially shocked by its preference for melodrama over bloodshed – only spraying the screen with teen blood as dramatic punctuation between long scenes of heart-to-heart confessions & betrayals. As a species, teens tend to have Big Feelings about anything & everything, so it makes sense that they’d spend more time getting teary eyed about having to tear each other apart for survival than actually doing the tearing. Even the recent Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk reads more like the teen-boy melodrama Stand by Me that it does a bodycount horror flick, and it’s got a reputation for being the more brutal version of The Hunger Games series (with which it shares a director in Francis Lawrence). Where Battle Royale gets more vicious than its Hollywood derivatives is not so much in its escalated gore, but in its prologue’s establishment that these kids already know & love each other before they’re forced to kill. Like The Long Walk, it’s an unlikely story about the value of true friendship instead of the expected story about selfish teenage violence. However, the young men of The Long Walk become fast friends after they’ve already been locked into their own respective survival game, starting off as strangers. In Battle Royale, the friendships & alliances go back for years before the story starts, which makes each lethal betrayal all the more sickening.

A class of Japanese high schoolers are mysteriously gassed while riding a school bus, waking on a small island wearing identical metal collars. Disoriented, they receive a crash-course orientation from a former aggrieved teacher (genre cinema heavyweight Beat Takeshi) and a kawaii pop idol, who appears only on a rolling AV Cart. The ultimate goal of the game is simple; the high schoolers must kill each other within 72 hours until only one survivor is left. The rules of how to accomplish that goal get a little trickier, involving explosive collars to punish conscientious objectors, volunteer players who appear to be violent gangsters from outside the class, rotating areas of the map that are temporarily forbidden to discourage stationary hiding, etc. The singular weapon that each student is provided varies wildly in effectiveness, ranging from knife to gun to binoculars to pot lid. That arbitrarily assigned hierarchy and the rules of combat appear designed entirely to keep the game moving & entertaining, as if the film were being broadcast on national Japanese television instead of closed-circuit security monitors. Every kill is even punctuated with an onscreen rolling body count that feels as if it were made for a live-feed audience, not the dweebs in the theater. That one change in broadcast scope might be the only place that later works like The Hunger Games might’ve improved on the Battle Royale premise, even if they pulled that detail from Stephen King novels like The Long Walk & The Running Man. The most Battle Royale touches on the entertainment media of its time is during the AV-cart orientation scene, in which a cutesy pop idol directs her audience to log onto http://www.br.com.

As with all films in this genre, this is primarily a story about a younger generation suffering the violent fallout of mistakes made before they were born. Beat Takeshi’s failed, disgruntled teacher is a pitch-perfect villain, seething with resentment for his young, captive victims while also reaching out to them for his one chance at genuine human connection. His hard exterior crumbles in a spectacularly pathetic display when the kids storm his compound to find his amateur, Henry Darger-esque painting of his favorite student winning the games – a nauseating tribute to her childish innocence, to which he no longer relates. Meanwhile, most of the kids in the game do their best to get by sharing resources and scheming a way off the island. They pass around food, medicine, and hacking skills when they’re supposed to be passing around bullets & live grenades. The rules of the game are unfairly stacked against them, though, and all it takes is a few trigger-happy outliers to set the mass murder in motion. The kills in Battle Royale are frequent and comically graphic, setting a dizzying rhythm in its Grand Guignol grotesqueries that propels the scene-to-scene momentum well after the rules & players are fully established. A few off-island flashbacks distract from the gore & drama at hand, but the biggest break in format is saved for the finale, when the surviving teens escape to the streets of modern Tokyo and have to live in the larger world adults have made for them, which feels equally as bleak as the game it parallels. Given how frequently this same story template has been repeated in the 25 years since Battle Royale was first released, it’s likely fair to say the generation that followed didn’t leave the world much better off for their own children either. Take care of each other out there, while you still have a choice.

-Brandon Ledet

The Long Walk (2025)

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I’ve been hearing nothing but good things about The Long Walk, so it was a surprise to me that, among the five-person group with whom I attended the movie, it only got a 20% approval rate (and the one who liked it was me). Among the complaints that I collected in the post-screening debrief was that it felt like torture porn to one, was too violent for others, that the character development was underbaked, and the film was denounced as largely predictable. For the more personally subjective takes, I can say that the film is definitely one of the more gruesomely violent that I’ve seen this year (bar something like Final Destination: Bloodlines, where the violence is more fantastical and cartoonish). For the critiques of structure, I also can’t provide evidence that the film didn’t follow a fairly straightforward narrative throughline or that every character felt fully fleshed out. To the latter, I would argue that the confinement of the narrative to a dwindling band of fifty teenaged boys walking on a road necessitates that backstory and character be revealed through dialogue, which can run counter to what one expects from film as a medium. For the former, I would make a very similar argument; containment of the premise makes the eventuality of the stations of the plot inevitable, but that alone is not inherently a negative. 

Although this wasn’t the first of Stephen King’s novels to be published, it is the first that he wrote, only seeing publication several years after Carrie under King’s pen name Richard Bachman. He began writing it as a college student in the mid-sixties, and I think that these facts are obvious from the text itself — both that it’s highly influenced by the Vietnam War (a time during which widespread media allowed for Americans to see drafted boys get blown to bits on the nightly news for the first time) and that it’s the writing of a young, not-yet-fully-developed author. That’s not entirely a bad thing, however, as it allows for this update of the material (sort of; it’s set in a dystopian future but has all the trappings of this bad future having happened due to something awful in the 1970s, not Next Sunday, AD) to speak to a different social crisis, our contemporary one in which society relegates its youth to die horribly for the viewing pleasure of the masses. If anything, it was perhaps too early, as it feels like an answer to the dystopian YA literature adaptation glut of a decade ago, a commentary on The Hunger Games and its imitators while being a darker, meaner, grislier concept that plays out under a different regime. 

The main character of the film is Ray Garraway (Cooper Hoffman), who submitted himself to a lottery in which there is a 98% certainty that he will die, on the one chance that he will be the survivor of the fifty “Walkers” who wins a massive cash prize as well as the opportunity to make one “wish.” This is over the wishes of his mother (Judy Greer), who has already lost her husband, a victim of state violence after teaching outlawed ideas to his son post-societal collapse. The competition itself is annual and features one boy from every state, all of whom set out to travel down Route 1 on foot, with the caveat that they must maintain a speed greater than three miles per hour, with a system of warnings issued for falling below that threshold before the boy’s “ticket gets punched”—that is, shot in the face by the accompanying military guard, led by “The Major” (Mark Hammil). Other competitors that we spend some time with and get to know include: Richard Harkness (Jordan Gonzalez), the one with big glasses who’s hoping to write a book about what it’s like to participate in the Long Walk; Collie Parker (Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation actor Joshua Odjick), a tough jock; athlete and apparent ringer Billy Stebbins (Garrett Wareing); religious Arthur Baker (Tut Nyuot) of Baton Rouge (represent!); yapper Hank Olson (Ben Wang); and your garden variety Stephen King long-haired antisocial shit-stirrer Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer). The person that Ray grows closest to, however, is Peter McVries (David Jonsson), an orphaned young man with a striking scar on the side of his face. A few of these doomed boys dub themselves “the Musketeers,” but their boisterous false optimism is immediately challenged by the death of the first of their number, a kid named Curley who had clearly lied about his age in order to enter the Walk. Alliances are formed and fall apart, friendships are made and then tragically cut short at the hands of carbine-wielding death squads, and the mental and physical anguish and turmoil play out as the boys’ numbers dwindle. 

The movie I most thought of while watching this film was actually Darren Aronofsky’s 2017 opus mother!, in that I can’t remember any film other than that or The Long Walk that could accurately be described, as Lindsay Ellis did, as “Oops, All Metaphor.” There’s nothing subtle about The Long Walk, from the opening moments to the final seconds, and it’s perhaps that lack of subtlety that lends itself to an interpretation that this film was perhaps too predictable to be fully appreciated. I’d still argue that this is more a function of the premise and its constraints than it is an issue with the film itself, but as always, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There’s no attempt to parse any of the suffering that the boys are going through, and there’s no chance that they’re going to be able to have two winners at the end or really that the “winner” will survive very long after they reach the end of their Walk. Characters say to one another that entering the lottery pool for the Long Walk is technically a choice, but if literally everyone enters because it’s the only chance for any kind of economic movement out of poverty, then it’s not really a choice at all, is it? The movie can get away with wearing its message on its sleeve because all of the characters are teenage boys, so it’s not terribly out of place for them to have these not-that-staggering revelations and feel that they’ve stumbled upon some great wisdom, but I also understand if that feels preachy to certain audiences who are already aligned with the movie’s moral. I would venture that, given the state of media literacy (and actual literacy, for that matter) we’re currently grappling with out here in the real world, I’d warrant that this kind of declarative, undisguised thesis statement may be necessary to get it to stick, but that’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. 

There are some themes for which the film reaches but which fall outside of its grasp. When Ray reveals his true motivation for entering the Walk to Peter, Peter tries to caution him against vengeance, but it’s arguable that Ray’s desire to kill one of the heads of the evil government is actually an excellent way to try and right some of society’s wrongs, if he’s given the chance. We never get a clear idea of just what society’s current shape is, as the narrative simply isn’t as invested in world building as much as it is in exploring the miseries of a life in which you have no choice but to walk (or work) yourself to death; it’s one possible inference now that the entire U.S. is now under the control of the Major as a military despot like Gaddafi or Idi Amin, that slaying the head of that dragon if given the opportunity is a moral imperative. It reminds me a bit of the finale of King’s novel The Dead Zone, in which psychic protagonist Johnny Smith ultimately realizes that he has to end, by any means necessary, the rising political career of a man named Greg Stillson, who will end the world in a nuclear holocaust if he is allowed to ascend to the presidency. The protestations against revenge as a factor are where the film slips into a kind of navel-gazing that isn’t fully tonally consistent with the rest of the text, but when that’s the biggest complaint you can get from me, then you should know that this is a recommendation. 

I do think that it was an interesting choice on the part of the producers to choose Francis Lawrence to direct, considering that he helmed three of the four Hunger Games films as well as prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and the upcoming release Sunrise on the Reaping. He was also the man responsible for Constantine and I Am Legend, which is probably why the latter film seems to be on TV multiple times a week right now: for synergy purposes. The film’s writer is JT Mollner, who wrote and directed last year’s divisive nonchronological Kyle Gallner vehicle Strange Darling, and I’m hoping based on a text conversation with Brandon that his skill here is starting to win our dear editor back over. I wouldn’t have imagined this as a team that would be able to bring this source material to life so well, but it gets a recommendation from me.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Privilege (1967)

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I’m sure the millions of dollars help ease the tension a little, but being a popstar really does sound miserable.  Between recent reports of Ice Spice twerking with joyless dead-eyed monotony, Taylor Swift cancelling tours dates under credible terrorist threats, and Chappell Roan tearfully begging her own fans to back the fuck off and let her breathe a little, it appears that the all the Pop Girlies aren’t enjoying fame so much as they’re Going Through It.  This isn’t some recent phenomenon of the social media era either, which has encouraged obsessed fans to stand out in a global crowd by either viciously “defending” their Fav online or by hurling water bottles at that Fav in person, depending on which attracts the most momentary attention.  Being miserable has been a core fixture of modern pop stardom from the very beginning, which you can mostly clearly track over the course of The Beatles’ transformation in the 1960s from four goofball lads looking for a laugh to four miserable hippie chain-smokers who could no longer stand to be in a room with one another.  Culture scholars will point to earlier celebrities like Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby or Louis Armstrong as the first true popstars, but there’s something hyper-specific and extensively documented about the Beatles saga in particular that makes them feel like the Big Bang event of the modern pop landscape.  The scale & ferocity of Beatlemania will likely never be matched again in our post-monoculture era, but whenever I see how drained & defeated modern stars are by their own rabid fanbases, I always think about the Beatles cancelling all future live performances mid-career because the crowds simply did not know how to behave.

That symbolic, definitive role of The Beatles as the poster boys for popstar misery was already apparent when the band was still active.  At least, Peter Watkins saw great importance in the band’s dehumanizing level of international fame.  His 1967 film Privilege is a grim satire of Beatlemania, extrapolating a dystopian trajectory for “the youth of the future” based on how they treated the popstars of their day.  The film is set in the “near future” but only could have been made in the Swinging 60s UK, indulging in the far-out, psychedelic fashions & designs of its era while simultaneously diagnosing Beatlemania as a symptom of widespread cultural rot.  Real-life Manfred Mann singer Paul Jones stars as the fictional rock singer Steven Shorter (a lateral move in terms of flashy stage name recognition).  As the most beloved and most hassled pop singer of all time, Steven’s unremarkability as a name and as a presence is slyly mocked in the opening scenes where an endless sea of screaming teens hold up signs that simply read “STEVE!” in perfect banality.  Steve’s parade procession leads to a music video-style performance in a church, where he is handcuffed inside an onstage cage and physically rattled by his audience of orgasmic fans.  A narrator helpfully explains that the popstar’s violent stage act is designed by his handlers (more of a government propaganda agency than a mere record label) as a public service, a necessary release of tension for the attendees.  Basically, Steve is thrown to the wolves, who ravenously pick at his bones in staged concert footage that could easily double for a document of an early Beatles show if it weren’t for the jail-cell prop.  Despite being the most famous and most loved man in the world, he does not look happy to be there.

Not everything about Privilege‘s skepticism of pop music stardom still rings true.  The more we get to know Steve through the semi-romantic, semi-journalistic prying of an artist paid to paint his portrait (Swinging 60s supermodel Jean Shrimpton), the more we get to know the apparatus that puppets his cardboard-cutout personality.  The governmental project of Steven Shorter is revealed to be a long-term scheme to harness counterculture sensibilities and shepherd the youth into ultimately embracing a doctrine of Conformity.  He’s the propaganda mouthpiece for Church & State, a bread-and-circuses distraction for the masses who don’t realize they’re being manipulated by unseen councils & boardrooms.  It’s a pretty basic take on the music industry, all things considered, recalling more over-the-top productions of its era like The Apple or Lisztomania in its Free Love counterculture vs. fascistic conformity politics.  That cynicism feels increasingly reductive & dismissive in a post-Poptimism world, where disregard for mass-marketed art that appeals to teenage girls has been deemed largely misogynistic.  It’s Paul Jones’s dead-eyed, dutiful performance as Steve that adds a layer of nuance to that rote social commentary.  His abject joylessness as a non-person who’s been designated as the in-the-flesh embodiment of every living consumer’s desires & fantasies still rings true to how Top 40s pop stars interact with their public today.  The critical class may have found a way to appreciate & legitimize pop music as an artform, but pop fandoms & factions have yet to find a way to engage with their chosen Favs without draining all of the life & joy out of those popstars’ bodies.

While its intensely 60s fashions and intensely cynical thoughts on the music industry may feel extremely dated (in good ways and bad), Privilege was ahead of its time in terms of filmmaking aesthetics.  Watkins tells the tragic story of Steve the millionaire pop singer as if it were a documentary of a future event that had not yet arrived.  It’s narrated like a nature film, as if Steve’s alien characteristics are worthy of zoological study rather than human psychoanalysis.  Much of the camera work is handheld, following the fictional popstar through crowded parties and bumping into the drunken attendees, who in turn stare directly into the lens in awkward awareness of the audience on the other side.  It’s a psychedelic pop-music mockumentary version of The Truman Show, profiling a character who already knows he’s living in an artificial environment beyond his control and has grimly resigned himself to that fate without protest.  Bringing a documentarian feel into that intensely fake, plastic, semi-futuristic world makes for some great tension the movie might feel thin without, and it’s a choice that has only gotten more effective as it’s aged into a Swinging 60s time capsule in the half-century since initial release.  Steve’s visible misery as the Near-Future King of Pop has also helped preserve Privilege as something continually current & relevant, much more so than it would be if Steve actually enjoyed his job and his money as the world’s #1 idol.

Brandon Ledet

Don’t Worry Darling (2022)

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We’re all familiar with Dr. Manhattan and how he exists everywhere at once now, right? Like, it’s not just comic book nerds; the meme(s) mean(s) that everyone knows the whole deal, right? So if I were to describe to you those three panels, but in each one, I’m saying: 

  • It’s 1998 and my mom has rented The Stepford Wives for us to watch while my dad is out of town.
  • It’s 2004 and I’m sitting in a theater watching the modern version of The Stepford Wives.
  • It’s 2022 and I’m sitting in a theater watching the modern version of The Stepford Wives. 

…you get the effect I’m trying to achieve, right? 

Don’t Worry Darling is the sophomore picture of one Olivia Wilde, who delivered a stunner with her freshman flick Booksmart. I first saw the trailer before Men when I caught that in a May screening, and was captivated by it, and I’m glad to say that it delivered for me, even if it isn’t for others. Florence Pugh stars as Alice Chambers, who plays house all day in her gorgeous Midcentury modern bungalow located in a perfect little cul-de-sac. Each morning, she sees off her husband Jack (Harry Styles) as he and all of the other husbands in the neighborhood drive off to work in their pristine 1950s cars (I’m not a car guy and I guess there’s not a lot of overlap between car guys and this movie, since there would normally be a list of cars in the IMDb trivia by now, so your guess is as good as mine; I’m certain at least one was a Chevy and that’s all I’ve got). They’re all residents of a company town called Victory, and Jack and all of the men work for Frank (Chris Pine) on something called “progressive materials,” which is of course classified. The gals spend their days with housekeeping and idle leisure — shopping, spending long days creating perfect meals, drinking poolside, scrubbing bathtubs, keeping fit with ballet lessons from Frank’s wife Shelley (Gemma Chan), and making beds. Of course, it’s not the 1950s we know, and we’re tipped off by this from the film’s first moments, where we see the Chamberses hosting a party with an interracial couple (with the Loving V. decision still a decade away) and living in a desegregated neighborhood, as evidenced by the presence of Margaret (KiKi Layne) and Ted Watkins. 

All is not peachy keen for everyone in Pleasantville, however, as Margaret is going through a difficult time. Some time before the start of the narrative, she believed that she saw a biplane crash in the desert hills that surround the town and went into the Headquarters’ restricted zone with her son to find it; only she came back alive, and Alice’s best friend Bunny (Olivia Wilde) in particular is judgmental of the whole situation. For Alice, however, things are perfect: she has her handsome husband, her perfect life, and her gorgeous friends, and he’s getting a promotion! That is, until she sees a plane crash over the ridge as well and, going to inspect it, comes upon a reflective, man-made structure that gives her a surreal vision. She awakens back at home, but it’s as if the veil of her reality has been pierced, and as more traumatic events take place in Victory, she begins having nightmares and hallucinations that affect her sense of reality. And, as you would expect, nothing is as it seems. 

Almost five years ago, a new employee joined my company, and in his icebreaker, they were asked, If you could live in a fictional tv or movie world, what would it be? Their response? “Mad Men,” they said. “I really like the late 50’s and 60’s. I know the time is not fictional but the show is. I’m not a big fiction fan. That time period had the best designed cars, furniture, homes, fashion, etc.” I’ll leave aside that this person voluntarily said that they were not a “fan” of “fiction” (although woof), because I had my own collegiate phase in which I refused to read non-fiction and said of all non-fiction works, saying “They’re all the same, it’s all about white people having a spiritual experience at the expense of colonized peoples or some person thinking that they can’t climb a mountain only to realize that they can,” and then I would perform what is colloquially known as a “jerk off motion.” I get that I can be closed-minded too. But I was also completely agog that my new colleague sat down and watched Mad Men and the lesson that he absorbed from it was “Dan Draper is cool,” rather than “nostalgia without inspection is poisonous and insidious.” When I mentioned this to a friend, I was surprised to learn (as a person who ended up watching the show rather late into its run) that there was actually a fairly large misaimed fandom for the AMC show during its heyday. The lesson I took from that day is that some people are very easily won over by candy-coated Midcentury modernism, so much so that even when the text is blindingly obvious in its intent to convey the message that the past is always worse than you think. The show’s timeline overlapped with the lynching of Emmit Till and the assassination of MLK and intentionally so (it would often skip a year or two between seasons, so when a contemporary event fell within the scope of the narrative, you knew it did so with purpose), and that’s just the big picture stuff, not even getting into the social normalization of casual littering, child abuse, and just about every bigotry you can name. And yet some people only noticed the Noguchi coffee tables and the Coupes DeVille. 

Supposedly, Pine’s character, the enigmatic Frank, is based on self-titled “public intellectual” Jordan Peterson (not the one who’s a MEN.com exclusive), the Canadian social media personality who subsists on a diet of nothing but meat and who exercises by stre-e-e-etching to find something new each day in the media to take personal offense to, and then makes his indignation about black mermaids and She-Hulks the subject of his personality while calling other people “snowflakes.” If he is a stranger to you, bless you, summer child, and look no further into the existence of this man. If he sounds slightly familiar, it may be because he went on a recent multi-site frothing-at-the-mouth/crying tour because Sports Illustrated put a woman on the cover that didn’t make his dick hard. Some of that is lost when casting sends over Chris “Kirk but a Chad” Pine to stand in for a man who looks like a ghoul on a good day. I can see how that intent may have been clearer in the script, given that Frank has created an environment in which the strict 1950s gender roles of breadwinner/homemaker is enforced in more ways than simply socially, and it’s not just that he owns the whole company town like Hank Scorpio, but his endless pablum of radio-delivered doublespeak sounds exactly like the purposely dense nonsense talk of Peterson. Where it fails is in the fact that Pine, with his lantern jawline, piercing eyes, and taut abdominal muscles, doesn’t look like Jordan Peterson; he looks like a movie star. And while those who have seen the movie and know its twist could argue that Frank might not really look as good as he appears to us, given that another character is seen as their un-idealized self at a different point, but I’d also argue that the difference between the “normal” and the “idealized” versions of that character are minimal (Janey Briggs looked more different in her before-and-afters). 

I made two notes immediately after watching this movie. The first, “People want to live in Mad Men and it sucks,” I think we’ve already discussed in detail above. The other, “Trying to recapture ‘the glories of the past’ and all of the purported good thereof also sucks.” L.P. Hartley famously wrote as the opening line to The Go-Between that “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” It is perhaps the greatest malady of modern man that he is still so susceptible not only to lies about an imagined “better” (or worse, “great”) past, so trapped within the limited horizon of their self-awareness that they can’t seem to understand that there is no going back to “innocence” because “innocence” isn’t a time in the past, it’s a time in your past, that continuum of moments that all took place prior to the day you realized that something you didn’t realize you had was gone, and maybe had been gone for a long time. 

Within Don’t Worry Darling, the Victory Project is the modern incel’s fantasy about what they’ve been tricked into believing about the past. Narratively, it’s so similar to the Stepford chronicles from which it cribs heavily that it wouldn’t be something novel enough to comment upon if it weren’t for just how beautiful and expressive everything is. Cinematically, the movie is breathtaking, with shots of an impassable desert, an impossible community, and all of the furniture, architecture, and style that harkens back to a time that never really existed. There are a few pacing problems on occasion, but special style points must go to the crew for all the work of blurring the lines about how much of what we see we can actually trust. As Alice starts to experience hallucinations and surreal nightmares, the imagery is effective and fascinating. I can only hope that the 5-star “Harry is hawt” reviews from children can do enough to balance out the 1-star “hur hur feminists will like watching this movie with their cats” reviews from CHUDs to ensure that people decide to, uh, do their own research and make up their own minds. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lapsis (2021)

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The daily experience of working and living right now is exhausting on a cellular level.  I’m not even referring to the specific context of the ongoing global pandemic, which has only amplified problems that have been humming in the background of our lives & work over the past couple decades.  Everything is fake now.  Meaningful, tangible experiences have been distorted and “disrupted” beyond recognition by the most power-hungry dipshits among us – tech bro vampires who mistake their inherited wealth for personal genius.  Most jobs aren’t really jobs anymore; they’re one-off assigned tasks performed by “independent contractors” for mega-corporations with incredible talent for innovating new ways to avoid taking care of their own.  Most personal interactions have lost their intimacy; they’re abstracted and commodified for social media broadcast, creating a constant pressure to be “on” all the time that makes even our idle hobbies feel like a secondary mode of labor – paid out in likes.  The modern world is uniquely empty and cruel in a way that’s becoming increasingly difficult to satirize.  There’s no artistic parody that could truly match the exponential inanity of the real thing, at least not in a way that won’t be topped the very next week by some other cosmic Internet Age blunder.

Lapsis gets close.  A high-concept, low-budget satire about our near-future gig economy dystopia, it’s a bleak comedy but not a hopeless one.  The wonderfully-named Dean Imperial stars as an old-fashioned working class brute who struggles to adapt to the artificial gig work of the Internet Age.  Our befuddled, belly-scratching hero takes on a new job running cables in the woods as infrastructure for a new, so-called “Quantum” internet service.  His daily work is assigned through an app that gamifies grueling, daily hikes with a point system and a competitive social media component with fellow contract “employees”.  He struggles to comprehend the basic functions of the app, requiring constant assistance from younger hikers who find smartphone tech more familiar & intuitive.  Yet, he ignores their attempts to unionize, focusing instead on sending all his hard-earned digital money back to a younger brother suffering from a vaguely defined type of medical exhaustion with the world called “omnia”.  The app heavily regulates hikers’ rest, like Chaplin being chided for taking an extended bathroom break in Modern Times.  They compete for tasks with automated delivery robots that trek on in the hours when their human bodies need sleep.  Their wages are taxed into oblivion by small, daily expenses that should be funded by the mega-corporation that “employs” them.  It’s all eerily familiar to the inane, artificial world we occupy now, with just enough exaggeration to qualify as science fiction.

The only other modern labor-exploitation satire I can recall in the same league as Lapsis is 2018’s Sorry to Bother You.  Lapsis doesn’t aim for the laugh-a-minute absurdism of Boots Riley’s instant-cult comedy, but it’s maybe even more successful in pinpointing exactly how empty and draining it feels to live & work right now.  Visually, it makes the most out of its budget in its art instillation set pieces that juxtapose its hiking-in-the-woods nature setting with impossible tangles of internet cables and the imposing cube-shaped modems they link to.  Satirically, it’s most impressive for walking a tightrope between observational humor and moralistic allegory.  Despite all of the tangible, recognizable parodies of modern gig-work tech it lays out in its early stretch, the film is most commendable for its more abstract, big-picture metaphors about inherited wealth, capitalist exploitation, and soul-deep exhaustion with modern living – all of which play out within the absurdist specificity of its near-future premise.  I was especially delighted that it strives towards a hopeful solution for our fake-as-fuck hellscape instead of just dwelling on its compounding problems.  It dares to sketch out a hopeful vision for labor solidarity between young, very-online Leftists and more traditional working-class Joe Schmoes, where it could just as easily point out the specific ways things are fucked right now without bothering to offer an exit strategy.  We need that kind of hopeful vision right now, even while we acknowledge exactly what’s wrong with the world as-is.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: Playtime (1967)

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Our current Movie of the Month, Jacques Tati’s Playtime, is a dystopian farce that clashes futuristic sci-fi sterility with the slapstick chaos of Silent Era comedies. Playtime isn’t as screamingly funny from gag-to-gag as its Silent Era sources of inspiration; it’s more of an intellectual exercise that drolly pokes fun at the absurdity of Modern Living. In that respect, the film is undeniably genius. It’s a patient, nightmarish vision of the way that technology worship is slowly homogenizing all culture & art into one amorphous, spiritless Hell. The minor laughs along the way only soften our frustrations & despair over Capitalism’s momentum towards that inevitable global monoculture, in which new product is more valued than natural humanity.

My initial impulse for recommending further viewing to audiences who want to see more films on Playtime‘s wavelength was to dive deeper into the Monsieur Hulot catalog. Tati directed himself as Hulot in four feature films, most of which overlap thematically with Playtime‘s humanity vs. technology themes. Watching the entire Hulot saga in one go would likely be a bit draining, though, since most of Tati’s directorial work operates with the same low-key tone. Instead, here are a few suggested titles if you loved our Movie of the Month and want to experience more cinema that touches on its themes & charms without repeating them wholesale.

Jour de fête (1949)

Part of the reason I expected bigger laughs out of Playtime is because the only other Tati movie I had previously seen was his debut feature, Jour de fête. It’s a much, much funnier movie than Playtime in terms of staging laugh-a-minute gags. It’s also a much less distinguished movie, creatively speaking, as it merely feels like Tati emulating the Silent Era comedy stylings of Buster Keaton & Charlie Chaplin without adding much innovation of his own. Like Picasso learning to paint naturalistically before he devolved into Cubist mayhem, Jour de fête feels a lot like Tati earning the right to play with the purpose & structure of traditional, vaudevillian comedy by proving he knows how to effectively play it straight.

In terms of setting & atmosphere, Jour de fête is the total opposite of Playtime. Tati stars as a bicycle-equipped mailman in a tiny French village who’s overwhelmed by the sudden influx of work that accompanies a traveling carnival arriving on the scene. Eventually, though, the film adopts the same skeptical eye that Tati’s later work would have for modern innovation, as the mailman attempts to deliver mail in a rapid, new-fangled “American style” that causes exponential chaos on his delivery route. Modern techniques & innovations disrupting the simplicity of daily living was apparently something Tati was interested in exploring from the start of his career, and it’s refreshing to see him pull that off in such a stripped-down, deeply silly context (as opposed to the massive, Parisian-scale sets he built for Playtime).

If you want to see Tati in full, unrestrained goofball mode before his work got more intellectually heady, Jour de fête is a wonderfully funny film from start to end. It’s not as memorably grandiose or artistically mannered as Playtime—so it’s not nearly as essential—but comedies don’t need to be astounding achievements in craft to be worthwhile.

Modern Times (1936)

Chaplin’s Modern Times obviously shares a technophobic sensibility with Playtime in its basic themes, but it’s also stubbornly old-fashioned in a similar way in terms of its form. Made in the post-Depression 30s long after talkies had taken over filmmaking as the industry norm, Modern Times is just as nostalgic as Playtime for Silent Era artistry. There’s minimal spoken dialogue in the film, and it’s mostly sidestepped through the intertitles & pantomime that Chaplin was used to working with – a stubborn nostalgia for filmmaking tradition that Tati would pick back up decades down the line.

Like Playtime, Modern Times is highly skeptical of the convenience that modern tech is supposed to afford our daily lives. Instead of mocking the pointless, homogenizing consumerism that Tati’s film spoofs, however, Chaplin instead warns of the way technology will be used to further exploit working class labor. The film’s most iconic gags are anchored to its opening stretch, wherein factory workers on an assembly line are surveilled & tormented by their supervisors in a series of escalating indignities. This culminates in a few key images from a near-future automated dystopia: Chaplin being admonished via video screen for taking a breather in the company restroom, Chaplin being force-fed a meal via robot to cut down on lunch-break productivity dips, and Chaplin being consumed by the machinery wholesale – whimsically traveling through the assembly line cogs & gears as if it were an amusement park ride.

Overall, this is a much angrier picture than Playtime. Instead of bumbling through absurdly contrived machinery meant to streamline modern life, Chaplin’s tramp character is a chaotic agitator who breaks down the very machines that was were designed to exploit his labor. It’s also a much funnier picture than Playtime and, not for nothing, a masterpiece in its own right.

Sorry to Bother You (2018)

The dystopian warnings of Playtime & Modern Times were fairly accurate to the nightmare we live in now all these decades later, but it still wouldn’t hurt to pair them with a more modern update. The 2018 Boots Riley comedy Sorry to Bother You is a gleefully overstuffed sci-fi satire that taps into the Amazon Prime-sponsored hellscape we’re living in today like no other film I can name. Just as angry about class disparity & economic exploitation as Modern Times, Sorry to Bother You is bursting at the seams with things to say about race, labor, wealth, and the art of selling out in every over-the-top gag. Unlike the even-tempered, carefully curated confection that Tati achieved in Playtime, Riley’s film is never satisfied with exploring one idea at a time when it could just as easily flood the screen with thousands all at once, subtlety & restraint be damned. Where the films differ in tone, however, they greatly overlap in their fear of an inevitable, homogenized monoculture – a world without any recognizable sense of genuine humanity or localized community.

Overall, Sorry to Bother You‘s concerns are more aligned with the labor exploitation fears of Modern Times; this becomes especially evident in the film’s back half when its corporate villain, the fictional Amazon surrogate Worry Free, redesigns the human body itself for maximum labor efficiency. Worry Free’s insidious mission does overlap greatly with the monotonized, spiritless dystopia of Playtime for much of the film’s runtime, though. Their preference would be that the entire working-class population live on campus at their factory jobsites, six workers to each bunkbed slumber cubicle. Billboards with cheeky slogans like “If you lived here you’d be at work already” and desperately “chill” MTV Cribs episodes advertise these uniform live-at-work cubicles as a convenience that’s too tempting to pass up, but for the audience at home it’s easily recognizable as a nightmare vision of our not-too-distant future under the rule of Emperor Bezos.

While Riley’s film is much more tonally & politically chaotic than Playtime at large, it does have its own touches of carefully curated twee whimsy when it’s in the mood (including an out-of-left-field Michel Gondry gag). Both movies also share a bumbling protagonist who’s just trying to get through his day while a rapidly modernizing world around him makes every decision feel like a complex puzzle – whether one of morality (Sorry to Bother You) or one of practicality (Playtime). As you can likely tell by this group of recommendations, I tend to gravitate more towards Riley’s chaotic, messy sensibilities over the restrained subtlety of Playtime, but I still found a greater appreciation for both titles through the comparison.

-Brandon Ledet

Ready Player One (2018)

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As a pasty pro wrestling fan with a film blog, I’m comfortable with being identified as a nerd, but I’ve never quite felt like the right kind of nerd. Superhero comics, video games, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, anime – the staples of Nerd Culture have never been the pop media I personally obsess about. It’s not that my own nerdy obsessions are especially esoteric; I’ve just always felt like somewhat of an outsider when observing what typical nerds cosplay as or geek out over. When the pasty nerd hero of Ready Player One sneers at the business dick villain pretending to share his interests, “A fanboy knows a hater,” I had to think to myself that I likely qualify as neither. I also suspect director Steven Spielberg is an objective outsider to that distinction as well. Looking at the scruffy, near-sighted goon, it’s not too difficult to imagine that he’s seen the wrong end of a swirly or a locker-shove in his past, especially considering his life-long interest in science fiction. However, it is difficult to imagine him caring about the particular Nerd Shit on display in Ready Player One. Although there is plenty evidence to the contrary, I just can’t picture Spielberg wasting days behind the controller of a marathon session of Halo or repeatedly rewatching Akira in his Cheetos-stained pajamas. Roughly 75% of the Nerd Shit references that weren’t verbally acknowledged Ready Player One’s dialogue when over my head and I suspect a millionaire over twice my age wouldn’t have fared much better (many of the background details were reportedly included by special effects teams without his explicit request). As an outsider, I must admit I’m baffled by the consensus that Ready Player One is intended to be seen as a fun popcorn movie. To me, it’s a nightmare vision of a plausible near-future Hell that we’re helplessly barreling towards. Maybe that qualifies me as a hater. I wouldn’t know; you’d have to ask a fanboy. I do suspect, though, that the film’s director shares that same point of view somewhere beneath his King Nerd exterior.

Gatekeeping is perhaps the ultimate qualifier of true nerdom. Nerds tend to declare what pop culture is objectively Good or Bad as if their opinion is law and no interests outside their own have value. Like how 10 Cloverfield Lane exposes the creepiness of Doomsday preppers by depicting the dystopian world they secretly desire, Ready Player One envisions the logical, terrifying result of what this pop culture gatekeeping would look like if it were taken as seriously as every self-aggrandizing nerd wants it to be. A lonely trillionaire nerd (Mark Rylance) builds a virtual reality video game universe where his own pop culture obsessions (mostly white boy nerd shit from the 1980s) are canon as the greatest works of art of all time. Because of the universal popularity of his immersive gaming system, this über-Steve Jobs experiences the ultimate power fantasy all nerds crave: he’s celebrated for his superior tastes in esoteric pop culture. If he was into it, it’s fantastic & worthy of scholarly study. If he wasn’t, it essentially never existed. By the year 2045, long after his death, this celebration of one man’s pop culture tastes has driven the world into a digital Hell. Most people live impoverished in overpopulated slums (picture a game of Jenga where the building blocks are mobile homes). They escape their grim surroundings by immersing themselves in a dead trillionaire’s nerdy pop culture utopia through increasingly realistic virtual reality technology. No new art or creativity is necessary, since their preferred world’s creator isn’t around to approve it. This dystopian vision feels like a less classist version of Idiocracy in that way, where the world is driven to its lowest point by mindless 80s nostalgia instead of “bad breeding.” If a single, gatekeeping Nerd won the ultimate prize of being taken seriously as a tastemaker and had their own obsessions guide the establishment of a universal monoculture, this is exactly the world we would eventually live in. It’s a goddamn nightmare.

The catch about Ready Player One (and the internal tension that makes it interesting) is that it was written by one of those gatekeepers. Writer/stand-up comedian Ernest Cline penned both the film’s screenplay (along with several co-writers) and its source material novel. Cline takes gleeful pleasure in the material’s endless pop culture references, but that doesn’t feel at all reinforced on Spielberg’s end. Spielberg’s adventurism works in tandem with Cline’s geeked-out tone in an occasional chase sequence or flash of goofball humor, but as a whole their work feels more like a philosophical debate than a blissful collaboration. Cline constructs a story about a young nerd (Tye Sheridan) wooing another young nerd (Olivia Cooke) and saving the world by playing video games with incredible skill & displaying esoteric 80s pop trivia. It should be a joyous power fantasy for the like-minded video game obsessives in the world, but it instead looks & feels like a continuation of the grim, grimy futurism of Minority Report & A.I.: Artificial intelligence (two of the best films of Spielberg’s career, but also two of the most acidic). By all accounts, Cline’s writing style tends to dwell in long lists of nerdy pop culture ephemera, taking time to build its own gatekeeping canon of exactly what nerdy shit is worth preserving. By contrast, Spielberg’s film feels unconcerned with dwelling on its references at all, as plentiful as they are. Instead of relishing the joy of seeing disparate characters form across all of nerdom share the screen, Ready Player One essentially glosses over them in favor of fleshing out its grim dystopian future. There are plenty of extratextual characters referenced in the film, but they mostly appear so briefly in the background in moments of chaos that you hardly have time to notice them. It’s like Ernie Bushmiller’s “three rocks” principle: there are exactly just as many nostalgic references included as necessary to create the illusion that the film is overrun with them. In the few times when the film does dwell on them, their distant memory distorts the original intent of the artwork that’s supposedly being celebrated, like a copy of a copy. The Shining is now a jump-scare fest; the Iron Giant is now a ruthless killing machine; Chucky is all maniacal laughter instead of smart-ass quips; etc. Spielberg doesn’t take the same joy in referencing past works that Cline does; he practically mocks the way that thoughtless, performative celebration changes their fundamental nature. Spielberg’s not quite the same level of satirist as Paul Verhoeven, to put it lightly, but I haven’t seen a film this at odds with its own source material since Starship Troopers.

Maybe I’m giving Spielberg too much benefit of the doubt here. Maybe he does spend his lonely nerd nights creaming his Zelda pajamas while dreaming about how cool it would be if Gundam fought Mechagodzilla. Either way, Ready Player One plays much closer to the grim future-tech prophecies of his own early 2000s sci-fi than the pure-fun video game crossover indulgences of a Super Smash Bros or a Marvel vs. Capcom. Like the surveillance state speculation of Minority Report or the cruelty of artificial intelligence creation in A.I., Ready Player One taps into the potential, foreseeable darkness of a world that’s already nostalgia-obsessed, with escapist pleasures to be found in the anonymity of Internet avatars & in watching strangers make money playing video games on YouTube. If nerds win the culture war, this is a plausible vision of where we’re headed. If you look to Ready Player One as mindless popcorn fun, your enthusiasm for that vision might be determined by where you fall on the fanboy/hater divide. To me, the film is much more rewarding if you consider the ways it makes its own Nostalgia Bait fun appear grotesque & terrifying, regardless of what Spielberg’s intent may have been. Maybe the film works as a fanboy/hater Rorschach test in that way. Audiences who see a love letter to nerdy pop culture where Gremlins, Goro, and Batman can finally share the same universe can maintain their fanboy status. Others who see a deeply depressing glimpse into a near-future Hell, like I did, might just be haters after all (at least in Ernest Cline’s nomenclature). However, haters can take solace in the likelihood that Spielberg’s secretly a hater was well, considering how similar this grim vision is to his past dystopian world-building. Paradoxically, you’d have to be generous to classify Spielberg or myself as anything but nerds, even if we are the wrong kind of nerds. Let’s hope we’re aren’t found out as imposters in the virtual reality Hell that apparently awaits us.

-Brandon Ledet

Deathrow Gameshow (1987)

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I’m a huge sucker for dystopian gameshow cinema, so my appreciation for Deathrow Gameshow might very well be entirely dependent on genre. There’s nothing particularly special about this mid-80s sci-fi cheapie that you couldn’t find in titles like The Running Man, Death Race 2000, The Hunger Games, or Nerve in terms of dystopian world-building or slick production design. Deathrow Gameshow even sidesteps the genre’s usual adherence to liberal, anti-authoritarian politics to sympathize & laugh along with the abusers in power, which seems like the exact wrong way to go about making one of these things. Still, I couldn’t help but take delight of some of the Killer Gameshow from the Future surface pleasures of the film’s premise because the genre territory it occupies is so instantly appealing to me. As the film went along, I even started to appreciate the way its disgusting Reagan era politics & sadistic black humor helped distinguish the work from its genre peers, even if by being spiritually repugnant.

In the not too-distant future of1991, a game show titled Live or Die executes prisoners for captivated audiences’ afternoon television entertainment. Deathrow inmates sign waivers to appear on the show, where they answer trivia questions or complete simple (but rigged) tasks in the hopes of winning prizes. The cost of an incorrect answer or a job half done is a televised execution – by guillotine, by electrocution, by explosion, by whatever keeps eyes glued to the television. The show is wildly popular, with citizens committing crimes for the opportunity to appear as contestants & family members of the executed cheering on their death for brief fame or small prizes. Live or Die does have its critics, though. Protestors gather in the streets holding signs saying the host “should be aborted.” There’s also, of course, people out to kill the host themselves to avenge lives he’s ended on air for personal profit. What’s weird is that we’re asked to sympathize with the sick, oppressive fuck instead of his portrayed-as-whiny detractors. Instead of watching him suffer under the weight of his own societal sins like, say, James Woods’s similar sleaze bag in Videodrome, we’re supposed to be invested in his spiritual growth as he’s threatened punishment, but ultimately gets out on top. That might be a result of the film’s dedication to comedy instead of horror or dystopian sci-fi, but it is a striking deviation from how these things usually go nonetheless.

Besides aligning audience sympathies with its selfish sleaze bag gameshow host, Deathrow Gameshow also disgusts in the targets of its misanthropic humor. This film takes jabs at “militant” feminism, makes casual references to prison rape & domestic violence for easy “humor,” and is convinced that the mere mention for homosexual desire is the height of hilarity. It’s also worth mentioning that although there’s diversity in its deathrow prisoner population, the only black characters represented onscreen are violent criminals. The film wholly & cruelly commits to a Reagan-era sense of Fuck You, I Got Mine selfishness, but in a way that almost works to its advantage. Even if its goal was to make me laugh with its cruel sense of punching down humor, the way those gleeful stabs at political incorrectness land make me recoil in horror, which in a way heightens the effect of its premise. This is a crass film with a complete absence of a moral center, but that kind of Money > Empathy sentiment fits its killer gameshow premise surprisingly well. I’m not sure the effect was entirely intentional, but the discomfort certainly makes for a memorable, authentically horrific viewing experience.

That’s not to say all of Deathrow Gameshow’s humor amounted to empty cruelty, though. I got a chuckle when one of the Live or Die contestants wins death by hanging as a gameshow prize, only for a The Price is Right-type announcer to declare, “Every man dreams of being well hung.” It’s not a particularly smart or inventive joke, but it’s well told, much like other gags where a secretary is caught masturbating or a rolled-up car window reads the message, “Blow it out your ass.” Everything in Deathrow Gameshow fits in one of two categories: sex or violence. Sometimes that 80s-era lizard brain idiocy can be amusing, like when an assassin, portrayed by an actor known simply as Beano, chows down on a whole mess of spaghetti while casually discussing murder. Sometimes it can be deflating, like when a character calling a woman coded to be a Feminist “a stupid bitch” is supposed to be a knee-slapper of a punchline.

There are some stranger, non-comedic touches to Deathrow Gameshow too: prisoners only being referred to as numbers, television advertisements for sex work, a nightmare sequence being rigidly blocked off like a movie trailer, a character justifying the show’s murder for entertainment ethos by explaining, “Life is a transitional state and Death is God’s way of saying ‘Take a Break.’” The movie’s just a little too compromised in its spiritually corrupt humor & underwhelming in its world-building ambition to award a hearty recommendation. I don’t mean to besmirch the good name of filmmaker Mark Pirro, whose other titles include Nudist Colony of the Dead, A Polish Vampire in Burbank, and Curse of the Queerwolf, but I’m not sure he was the best person to tackle the material. While Pirro’s grimy, off-putting sense of humor did provide the film a memorably sleazy, discomforting vibe, it’s a property that could’ve been an all-time classic in the more ambitious hands of The Canon Group or maybe Roger Corman’s crew. As is, Deathrow Gameshow is entertaining enough in its lighthearted approach to cruel, meat-headed exploitation cinema. It’s just difficult to shake the feeling that it could’ve been something more worthwhile.

-Brandon Ledet

Hell Comes to Frogtown (1988)

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As hardwired as my brain is to only focus on pro wrestling whenever given the opportunity, the name “Rowdy” Roddy Piper doesn’t automatically take me to the ring. Piper’s kilt-wearing, Goldust-kissing, race-stereotyping gimmickry as a wrestling heel is beyond infamy, but it’s his leading role in the John Carpenter sci-fi horror They Live! that defines his career for me. From the meaningless street brawl over a pair of sunglasses to the classic line “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass . . . and I’m all out of bubblegum,” Piper’s foray into Kurt Russell-esque genre film machismo was perfectly suited for his skills as a world class shit talker & in-ring performer. What I didn’t know until recently is that Piper actually headlined two outlandish sci-fi pictures in 1988. They Live! has rightfully earned its place as the one deserving cultural longevity, even seeing a recent resurgence in meme form after last year’s disastrous presidential election. Somehow, though, that film’s paranoia about space aliens brainwashing the American masses was the most grounded & plausible of Piper’s 1988 sci-fi pics. The other title was the real weirdo shit.

In the absurdly-titled Hell Comes to Frogtown, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper stars as the titular antihero Sam Hell, a gruff loudmouth who roams a post-nuclear fallout sci-fi dystopia as the most virile man on Earth. Although he prides himself as the ultimate alpha male, Hell has to learn how to navigate what is now a decidedly matriarchal society. World War III has drastically diminished the male population of the planet and left only a few survivors with a viable sperm count, putting the human race’s longterm survival at risk. And thus, even in the rare 80s genre film where the world is run by women, the citizens of Earth still need a man to save them. Hell is essentially enslaved as a sperm donor by the government agency Med Tech and given militaristic marching orders to impregnate as many as women possible in attempt to save the human race. The only thing standing in his way of fulfilling his literal stud duties is the other lingering side effect of the nuclear fallout disaster: humanoid frogs. Described in-film as “mutant greeners,” the villains of this dystopian wasteland are frog-like scavengers who are holed up in the titular Frogtown and lead by Commander Toadie, presumably in power because he has three dicks (one of the advantages of mutation, I guess). To simplify the plot & budget, Hell Comes to Frogtown boils down this worldwide crisis into a simplistic heist scenario. Lead Commander Toadie is holding fertile women hostage at his palace/harem for ransom (and pleasure). Med Tech commands Sam Hell to free these prisoners so that he can spread his seed, explaining “We’re gonna get them out and you’re gonna get them pregnant.” All in all, it’s a fairly solid contender for silliest Road Warrior knockoff ever.

It should go without saying that there’s a deeply strange sexual energy running throughout Hell Comes to Frogtown. I’m not convinced film didn’t start as an ill-advised exercised in erotic fiction that just got way out of hand and snowballed into a screenplay. The pervasiveness of this strange sexuality extends far beyond just the weirdo details of the plot and obviously charged imagery like rhythmic rifle-polishing and the hose of a gas can being carefully inserted into a tank.  In this dystopian hell hole, condoms are effectively outlawed. The Bible verse, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the Earth, and conquer it” is treated like a national slogan. A slow pan up a stripper’s body reveals a frog’s face, the first of the mutant greeners we actually see instead of just listening to their ribbits. Then there’s the BDSM undertone of Sam Hell’s relationship with his matriarchal captors. Outfitted with a high-tech, government-issued chastity belt, Hell is kept on a very short leash. His dick is now considered government equipment and any attempts to run away with it are punished by directly-applied electric shock. His captors tease him to keep him sexually excited, though, using military-sanctioned “seduction techniques” to keep him in the mood. This intense pressure to perform (and for an audience, no less) sometimes leads Hell to embarrassing moments of erection-killing anxiety. He barks at the female scientists in control of his sexual impulses, “Maybe you oughta try making love to a complete stranger in the middle of a hostile mutant territory and see how you like it!” It also seems a little odd that every woman in the world would be begging, desperate to sleep with and be impregnated by Hell at first sight, but at least that choice keeps the mood light; I wouldn’t want to watch a version of this picture where a matriarchal government was forcing Hell to impregnate women against their will.

Of course, the bizarre nature of this film’s sexuality is at least somewhat matched by its humanoid amphibian threat. The frogs that attempt to stop Sam Hell from saving the world through his progeny are weird looking boogers, resembling a cross between the classy masquerade scene from The Abominable Dr. Phibes and the Goombas from the Super Mario Bros. movie. They have the expressionless and flapping jaws of a cheap Planet of the Apes sequel, but a kind of incredible throat-swelling effect with every ribbit that distracts from their mobile limitations. Even when the villainous frogs’ general look isn’t exactly impressive, though, there’s always an underlying absurdity to their general presence, especially when they’re doing ridiculous things like wielding a chainsaw or insulting Hell by calling him “flat lips.” Combine that visual absurdity with the film’s weirdo sexuality and the campy cult classic potential just oozes from the screen like so much nuclear waste.

I can’t say that Hell Comes to Frogtown is entirely successful in living up to its full cult classic potential. As far as “Rowdy” Roddy Piper vehicles go, it’s certainly no They Live! and it’s difficult not to compare that film’s heights like the bubblegum one-liner to this one’s much lesser, “Eat lead, froggies.” Overall, Hell Comes to Frogtown’s comedic antics gleefully command a ten year old’s sense of humor, the same maturity range that seemingly dictates its Indiana Jones-style swashbuckling & slack-jawed fascination with naked breasts. Still, it’s overloaded with enough strange energy & discomforting sexual undertone to distinguish itself as a midnight movie novelty. Every scene in the movie looks like it was lit by car headlights. Piper brings distinct pro wrestling flavor to scenes where glass bottles are smashed over his head or where his loin cloth resembles a tattered version of his signature ring gear kilt. Camo bikinis with doily-style lace trim and phone chords tethering Piper’s crotch to mysterious electronic devices sear the brain with their kinky idiocy. This is an exceedingly inane movie that dares you to ask “What in the Sam Hell?” on a scene to scene basis, but somehow abstains from vocalizing that particular line itself against all odds. Hell Comes to Frogtown may not be the outlandish 1988 sci-fi picture that defined Piper’s career as a screen presence, but it has enough bizarre energy – sexual, amphibian, and otherwise – to stand on its own as a memorable, ramshackle novelty.

-Brandon Ledet

Logan (2017)

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I don’t like Wolverine.

This has been a topic of much contention with my fellow comic book nerds for a long time, but there are a host of reasons why he doesn’t appeal to me as a character. First, it’s never made much sense to me that Professor X has a spot on his peace-oriented team for a man whose powers and enhancements make him a perfect assassin or soldier. I’ve also never seen myself reflected in Wolverine the way that I see aspects of myself in Kitty Pryde, Emma Frost (under Joss Whedon’s pen), and (especially) Beast; nor do I see something I could aspire to be in Wolverine the way that I did and do in Storm’s serenity or Nightcrawler’s happiness in spite of a lifetime of abuse. I certainly understand the allure of a character without a past and the desire for redemption (although the importance of this desire was intermittent), but Wolverine never worked for me as a character.

I think that this is mostly because, despite his meager origins, the character of Wolverine evolved into a straight white male power fantasy, especially among the more self-pitying members of the nerd subculture of the eighties and nineties. Macho Wolverine gets the girl, takes no shit, and leaves his enemies shredded to ribbons: he’s the ultimate enviable hero of the platonic nineties nerd before Hollywood came along and turned comic books and superheroes into the hottest trends on Earth. Following this popularity explosion, the character was inescapable, which is probably my foremost issue with him. Don’t like Angel, or Jean Grey, or Psylocke? No problem: there are plenty of Marvel comics without them, including long periods of time in many X-books. Don’t like Wolverine? You’re out of luck, bub: try to find an X-Men comic from 1985 to 2014 where he’s not a presence (give or take an Excalibur here or there), and if you turn to another Marvel book for a Wolverine-free reading experience, you better not want to check out Avengers, or New Avengers, or even Power Pack. It’s essentially the same reason that, despite my long and storied love of Star Trek, I don’t like Data (a crucifiable offense in many circles): both he and Wolverine are such pets of vocal fans and some creators that they become the entire focus of what is supposedly an ensemble, to the detriment and derision of other characters*. You can even see this in the way that he was not only the de facto star of the X-Men films in which he appeared, but also got his own film franchise.

That franchise reaches what claims to be its final film in the recently released Logan, a gritty neo-western masquerading as a superhero film. The plot finds the titular Logan (Hugh Jackman) caring for an aging and increasingly senile Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) with the help of Caliban (Stephen Merchant) in the Mexican desert in 2029. The combination of a cataclysmic event and genetic suppression has rendered them among the last mutants on Earth, until Logan is drawn back into the world of heroism by Gabriella (Orange is the New Black‘s Elizabeth Rodriguez), a woman who begs him to help save a child named Laura (Dafne Keen) from Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook), a cybernetically enhanced mercenary. Their redemptive road trip also features appearances from Eriq La Salle and Elise Neal as world-weary farmers who provide shelter for the group.

My apathy and weariness about Wolverine aside, this is a good movie. Sure, it makes no logical sense within the confines of the different timelines that the other films in this franchise have provided without a conspiracy theory board of newspaper clippings, post-it notes, and red string, but 20th Century Fox doesn’t care anymore, so why should you? The one problem I’ve never had with the film version of Wolverine is Hugh Jackman’s consistently strong performance regardless of the variable quality of the material available, and this is his best work as the character to date. This is despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that, for once, we’re not reflecting back on his mysterious past as we have in literally every movie in which he appeared in this franchise and are instead seeing a man at the end of his career and, perhaps, his life. Logan deals with the more mundane aspects of growing old, like obsolescence in a changing world, the dementia of an elderly father (figure), and the betrayal of his own aging body and the disease thereof, despite his much-touted healing factor. This is not a character who is obsessed with learning about (or altering) his past, but one for whom the past is prologue to a slow, painful existence in an all-too-real dystopian future.

This is not the Sentinel-ruled technicolor hell of Days of Future Past, nor is it the candy-coated “corrected” timeline in which Jean, Scott, and Hank are alive: this is a dusty, economically depressed future in which life is cheap, crossing the border into Mexico is an ordeal, and Canada provides asylum to those on the run from an authoritarian government that hates them because they are different, all while said government not only condones but supports the imprisonment of and experimentation on children of color and treats Mexico like its dumping ground. This film has been in development for a while and takes a great deal of inspiration from graphic novel Old Man Logan, but it is particularly fascinating that the first X-film released following the election paints such a realistic picture of a dark future in comparison to the optimistic ending of Days of Future Past, which was released solidly in the middle of Obama’s second term, when the tide of freedom and progress seemed to flow ever-forward.

Logan never becomes explicitly political, however, instead allowing this interpretation to emerge from its subtext. This is, first and foremost, a story about a retired, past-his- prime gunbladeslinger who has long since lost what little place he had in the world before being brought back in for one last stand. You’ve seen this movie before, but dressing it up in these clothes puts a spin on the material that is fresher than I expected, in the same way that Winter Soldier was reinvigorating as both a government conspiracy thriller and a superhero flick. I’d love to see more movies like this, to be honest: James T. Kirk and Company as the Magnificent Seven/Seven Samurai, Black Widow having to Die Hard her way out of a building, or, hell, even Steve Rogers trying to save the old community center from being torn down to make way for those awful condominium/shopping center hybrid abominations.

Where the film doesn’t work for me is in its insistence on defining Logan’s little group as a family. The discovery of the genetic connection between Logan and Laura and the latter’s decision to help her does not necessarily an intimate connection make, and Xavier’s “This is what life looks like” moment rings falsely sentimental for the character, given all that we’ve seen him do and accomplish over the course of these films. For such a bloody and violent flick (which, make no mistake, Logan is), a fair amount of the emotional resonance that the film seeks to create works, but the occasional references to Laura and Xavier as Logan’s family work better when they’re subtle (like when he passes them off as his father and daughter) than they do when characters explicitly state that they are family. That aside, however, this serves as a fitting swan song for Hugh Jackman’s contribution to the franchise, especially if you’re  willing to forgive stilted dialogue and the occasionally unearned moments of pathos.

*Here’s the part where I admit that I love the Wolverine and the X-Men animated series, despite my general apathy towards the character; although Wolverine is the title character, WatX was much more of an ensemble piece that gave every character plenty of development and attention. He’s also cast in an unusual role as the reluctant leader with the atypically angsty Cyclops serving as the team’s loner. The show also has one of the darkest storylines ever constructed for what is ostensibly a show for children; it’s definitely worth checking out.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond