fantasy

Riddle of Fire (2024)

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It’s going to sound like an insult to immediately focus on its background details, but the low-budget kids’ adventure Riddle of Fire has some of the best set decoration artistry I’ve seen in any modern picture not directed by Wes Anderson.  A large portion of the film is set in the woods, which comes with its own ready-made production value, but the interiors of characters’ living spaces are intensely, wonderfully over-curated.  Whether cataloging a curio cabinet of one witchy mother’s taxidermy projects & Pagan relics or scanning over another, normier mother’s sickbed full of used tissues & plastic medicine bottles, the adult world at the outskirts of Riddle of Fire is crammed with tactile visual information.  It’s a fascinating collection of weird little talismans and the weird little dirtbags who cherish them, conjuring up childhood memories of a time when mundane objects held immense power.  It’s the feeling of bringing home a vintage t-shirt, a futuristic video game, a cool-looking rock; it’s magic practiced through obsessive, personal collection.

This practical magic of collecting just the right assemblage of seemingly mundane objects is central to the text.  The story is set in modern, suburban Wyoming, but it’s structured as a fairy tale quest to acquire a specific list of impossible-to-secure items, achieving legendary hero status once complete.  A small gang of children shoot paintballs & ride dirt bikes around their unimpressive suburb without much outside attention.  Their petty crime spree escalates when they steal a futuristic video game counsel from a poorly guarded warehouse, and they plan to waste away what’s left of their summer eating snacks and smashing controller buttons on the couch.  Only, their mother figure has locked the TV with a parental control to ensure they’ll spend some quality time outside.  They convince her to hand over the password if they bring home a blueberry pie to ease her flu symptoms, which leads them to doing a similar favor for the local baker, then seeking out a speckled egg to bake the pie recipe themselves, and so on.  The list of items gradually leads them astray to the point where they go to war with a Cottage Core death cult in the woods outside town, shooting paintballs at violent felons who pack real guns with real bullets – all in a fairy tale video game quest to bake an epic blueberry pie.

There’s an understated but over-verbalized magic to this film, which is mined for low-key absurdist humor.  The central trio of neighborhood brats announce themselves as The Three Immortal Reptiles, distinguished by the taxidermized reptile feet they wear on novelty necklaces as gang insignia.  When they make unlikely friends with the adult gang’s young daughter figure, she’s announced as Petal Hollyhock, The Princess of the Enchanted Blade, not simply as Petal.  The forest outside town is located at the edge of Faery Castle Mountain, described in-dialogue as “a wolf land of magic & dreams.”  Everything in the script is overly verbose in this way, so that when the kids collect a creepy babydoll to aid in their quest it is consistently described as “a rather chilling, ghastly doll” with no variation.  It’s like watching the rascals from The Florida Project get dropped off on the shores of Roan Inish, with their dialogue getting stuck somewhere between those two worlds.  Between its artful collection of strange objects and the shot-on-film textures of its visual aesthetic, there’s something familiarly magical in every frame of Riddle of Fire, and the dialogue underlines that magic every chance it gets.  Whether the humor of its dissonance between old-world magic and mundane modernity hits you in the right way is all personal bias, but you can’t deny that the magic is right there on the screen; the movie never lets you forget it.

-Brandon Ledet

This is Me … Now: A Love Story (2024)

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Jennifer Lopez is an amazing dancer, a magnetic actress, and . . . a singer also.  Outside her soulful tribute to Selena and the freak-chance payoff of the dance hit “Waiting for Tonight”, JLo’s decades-long singing career hasn’t produced many highlights, which is what makes it so awkward that she’s insistent on commemorating her legacy among the two towering pop acts of the current moment: Beyoncé and Taylor Swift.  Instead of sitting it out while those two titans fight for the throne in their own competing, career-defining concert films, Lopez has naively entered the fray with a couple career-recappers of her own – first, through the grand spectacle of a Superbowl halftime show (greatly aided by collaboration with Shakira) and, now, through a self-funded “visual album” retracing the steps of Beyoncé’s culture-shifter Lemonade.  This is Me … Now: A Love Story is an hour-long collection of music video vignettes, titled as a follow-up to JLo’s 2000s era pop album This is Me … Then, which is only notable for puzzling the world the personal-brand PR anthem “Jenny from the Block”.  This is Me … Now is a massive vanity project that cost $20mil of Lopez’s own money, meant to celebrate her romantic reunion of the Benifer partnership and to solidify her status as one of the great artistic minds on the modern pop landscape.  Personally, I would’ve much preferred that she just work with talented, established filmmakers like Tarsem or Soderbergh again, but at least this latest project was an interesting failure, which is more than you can say for most of her recent streaming-era acting jobs (and most of her post-90s music video work as a pop star).

This is Me … Now starts with abstract, poetic ambitions, as JLo self-narrates storybook romance fantasies about her rocky path reuniting Benifer (illustrated as an uncanny CG motorcycle crash), about her years of suffering repeated heartbreak (illustrated as uncanny CG steampunk dystopia featuring a giant mechanical heart powered by rose petals), and about her lifelong idolization of true love (illustrated by an uncanny CG hummingbird searching for its floral soulmate).  In this early stretch, it’s seemingly competing with fellow post-Lemonade projects Dirty Computer & When I Get Home to challenge the boundaries of the music video as a cinematic artform.  Then, it quickly backslides into standard-issue romcom tropes, making for a weirdly talky & plotty “visual” album.  All of the fantasy elements of the narrative are contextualized as dream sequences, each to be analyzed in therapy sessions with a teddy bear psychologist played by Fat Joe.  Teams of celebrities, factory workers, and stock romcom characters join Joe to coach JLo through her crippling love addiction so she can find her way back to her beloved Ben, a destination she can only reach by learning to love & hug her inner child (again, in a dream).  It’s all very tidy and, frankly, unimaginative, which is a shame considering the free-for-all fantasy promised in its opening heart factory sequence.  By the time the closing credits pad out the runtime for a 12-minute eternity—just barely stretching the film over the one-hour feature length finishing line—it’s clear there isn’t enough artistic drive behind this project to justify the classic MGM title card announcing it as A Movie.  Meanwhile, Lemonade, Dirty Computer, and When I Get Home all ranked among the best movies released in their respective years, regardless of form.

I’m not sure that JLo has the ability to stage her own sprawling, Tarsem-style fantasy piece, but I do think she could manage Maid in Manhattan: The Musical if tasked.  The only times This is Me … Now pays off its “so bad it’s good” irony-watching potential is in generic romcom voiceover about how people call her crazy for wanting to commit to traditional monogamous partnerships, about how she still believes in “soulmates and signs and hummingbirds,” and about how when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she always answered “In love.”  It’s a thoroughly committed “me, me, me, I, I, I” tribute to her own hungry heart, combined with a genuine cinephilic soft spot for classic romances like Singin’ in the Rain and The Way We Were.  The problem is that her artistic ambitions reach far beyond those Blockbuster Video romcom boundaries, and they ultimately prove to be an Icarian downfall that exposes her limitations as both a pop singer and a visual artist.  Of course, none of these shortcomings really matter, because This is Me … Now has already accomplished everything it set out to do; it refreshed JLo’s name in the pop stardom conversation by promoting her new album and promoting her ongoing tabloid romance with Ben Affleck.  Whether or not it’s any good is beside the point, which is generally how her pop music career at large contributes to her overall celebrity.

-Brandon Ledet

The Lathe of Heaven (1980)

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The recent career-overview documentary The Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin is a decent enough introduction to the sci-fi author’s big-picture concepts & beliefs.  The posthumous doc unfortunately highlights Le Guin’s Earthsea series as a source of inspiration for Harry Potter, of all indignities, but it’s a faux pas I’m willing to forgive since it also indulges in some transcendent Loving Vincent-style animation that illustrates her ideas beautifully.  I’m also willing to forgive it because there is so little visual, extratextual material to pull from when marrying images to Le Guin’s words.  Goro Miyazaki’s condensed anime adaptation of the Earthsea series also felt like a lazy cash-in on the popularity of Harry Potter in the 2000s, mixed with generic Games of Thrones-style fantasy tropes.  Tales from Earthsea certainly didn’t engage with the meaning behind the story of its source text in any authentic or substantial way, so it makes sense that The Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin would have to re-illustrate its central concepts instead of licensing Miyazaki’s imagery from Studio Ghibli.  There wasn’t much else to pull from beyond the Goro Miyazaki movie either – a noticeable void of extratextual illustration that becomes exponentially unignorable the further the documentary digs into Le Guin’s legacy. 

It’s outright absurd that there are only four direct film adaptations of Le Guin’s work listed on her official website.  Half adapt stories from Earthsea – including the Ghibli movie and a Syfy Channel miniseries.  The other half are TV movie adaptations of The Lathe of Heaven – one for public access and one for A&E.  That’s a shockingly thin catalog for an incalculably influential author with dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories to her name.  Luckily, there’s at least one great work lurking among these meager titles, one that eases the bitterly bland aftertaste of the middling Earthsea anime.  The very first film adaptation of Le Guin’s writing was also credited as the first made-for-Public-Access-TV movie ever.  The 1980 Lathe of Heaven is something of a cult curio for New Yorkers who happened to catch it on WNET Channel 13 in its original broadcast, and its scarcity on home video has only intensified its status as a niche object of sci-fi nerd affection in the decades since.  Made by experimental video art weirdos from the NYC area (David Loxton & Fred Barzyk), the 1980 version of The Lathe of Heaven is much more stylish than the A&E version from the 2000s.  Le Guin also had so much direct involvement in the production that she earned an official “creative consultant” credit, which is something you won’t find in the other adaptations of her work. 

The Lathe of Heaven stars Bruce “Willard” Davison as a troubled citizen of near-future Portland (Le Guin’s home city), a suicide attempt survivor who’s assigned to a “voluntary therapy clinic” to assess the mysterious sleep disorder that’s tanking his mental health.  He’s isolated by his suffering, since he is being plagued by phenomenon he describes as “effective dreams”: dreams that alter the fabric of reality in waking life, unbeknownst to everyone but him.  Against all odds, the patient convinces his new sleep therapist that the “effective dream” phenomenon is real in just a few sessions, but instead of working towards a cure, the doctor immediately exploits his fantastical power.  Using suggestive hypnosis, the therapist influences the content of his patient’s dreams, attempting to improve society and the planet through the unwieldy power.  After a couple minor successes transforming the famously rainy city of Portland into “The Sunshine City” and dreaming his way into a bigger office, the therapist quickly starts dreaming bigger – to the entire world’s peril.  His patient effectively has a cursed Monkey’s Paw for a brain, leading to a series of Twilight Zone style ironies in dreams fulfilled.  Dreaming the planet’s relief from over-population leads to genocide.  Dreaming for world peace leads to global suffering under alien invaders.  Dreaming the end of racism leads to oppressive cultural homogenization; etc.

There’s an overt philosophical conundrum at the heart of Le Guin’s story, stemming specifically from her interest in Taoism.  Although the therapist is relatively well-intentioned in his efforts to improve the world by exploiting his patient’s effective dreams, he’s constantly violating the natural flow of life & the universe, suffering grand-scale consequences for the transgression.  The dreamer, by contrast, is much better suited to a proper Taoist lifestyle, gradually accepting that there is no grand purpose or meaning to Life, explaining to his doctor, “It just is.”  The philosophical clash between those opposing forces would only be enough material to cover an hour-long block of Outer Limits, though, so it’s for the best that Loxton & Barzyk bring some much-needed visual flair to the dream sequences & sleep study experiments to translate Le Guin’s written ideas into cinema.  The directors’ video art psychedelia shines through on the display screens of the retro-futurist lab equipment and in the film-negative illustrations of invading UFOs.  It’s an effect that’s only been amplified by the film’s degenerated imagery.  Since its original production materials were lost, its most current DVD prints were remastered from time-damaged video elements – leaving it with a “ghosting” effect that smears all rapid movement onscreen in a transparent trail.  That would be a frustrating limitation in most archival contexts, but it’s appropriate to the film’s deliberately dreamlike visual style in this particular instance.

Truth be told, The Lathe of Heaven is more “great for a TV movie” than it is great for a movie-movie.  There are a few flashes of brilliance in its planetarium laser shows, its stage-bound visualization of a global plague, its Ed Woodian stock footage of jellyfish & space rockets, and its stunning montage of Portland landscapes warped by their reflection in skyscraper windowpanes.  Otherwise, the production is glaringly limited by its Public Access TV production budget, and so it’s most commendable for the imaginative & philosophical strengths of Le Guin’s writing.  The most you could say of the 1980 Lathe of Heaven as an art object is that it lands as a more level-headed, made-for-TV version of Ken Russell’s much wilder Altered States, which happened to be released the same year.  Otherwise, it’s a scrappy, serviceable illustration of its much more substantial source text.  That service just can’t be overvalued in this case, since the text’s author is so greatly talented and so strangely underadapted, with only a few relatively puny competitors, all devoid of any discernible visual style.

-Brandon Ledet

The Boy and the Heron (2023)

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Full disclosure: I’ve been struggling with what to write about The Boy and the Heron for over a week now. It’s obviously a beautiful movie, made with loving care, attention to detail, and bizarre imagination that one has come to expect from Hayao Miyazaki, and has all of his hallmarks of adorable and anti-adorable creatures, but also has a narrative that feels more incomplete than normal. I should also disclose that, although I am a forever proponent of watching these films with subtitles rather than with dubbing, my viewing experience was of the dubbed version of the film, and I’m not certain if there are differences between the two versions that could explain some of what I’m missing. 

Mahito Maki is a twelve-year-old boy who awakens one night to learn that there is a fire raging through Tokyo, and that the hospital where his mother is located is in the center of the conflagration. He runs toward the fire’s destruction, but his mother is lost. Some time later, his father, a manufacturer of air munitions, evacuates his family to his wife’s ancestral estate, currently occupied by his late wife’s sister, whom he has married in the interim since the opening scene. Mahito has trouble bonding with Natsuko, whom everyone remarks upon as being nearly identical to his late mother, and he further isolates himself by intentionally gouging a nasty wound in his head that is then presumed to have been the result of violence from bullies, and he is allowed to remain at the estate rather than having to go to school. Exploring the area, he finds a run-down structure and enters it through a doorway that is not completely sealed; later, he learns from one of his stepmother’s seven attendants, Kiriko, that this was the library of his great-granduncle, who was obsessed with magic and who disappeared in his youth, prompting the tower to be sealed. Mahito also finds himself the subject of the attention of a large grey heron, which speaks to him in a language he understands and tempts the boy to follow him into the tower. Fashioning himself a bow and an accompanying arrow (fletched with a recovered feather from the heron), Mahito enters the tower with Kiriko when searching for Natsuko, who has disappeared; deep within a hall, they encounter the heron again, who tempts Mahito with an image of this mother. Mahito manages to injure the heron in its beak because of the transitive magical properties of the heron’s feather, turning him into a grotesque bird man, who is ordered by a wizard to assist Mahito in his journey, and the heron, Kiriko, and Mahito find themselves transported to another world.

This isn’t a new story, not really. Children going to fantasy worlds is one of the oldest tropes of children’s literature, whether that world be Narnia or Oz or Neverland or Wonderland or Fantasia or the Labyrinth (etc.), and, from what I can tell, the novel from which The Boy and the Heron takes most of its narrative inspiration, 2006’s The Book of Lost Things, is also one of these narratives. In that novel, the main character’s stepmother has already given birth to his half-sibling (rather than being pregnant still, as in the film), and so there are even more parallels to fantasy media of this kind; I haven’t read the book, but a review of several summaries implies that the presence of a new baby is part of the incitement of the protagonist’s journey, as in Labyrinth. The tropes here are from all over. Just like the Pevensies in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Mahito has been evacuated from a city center during WWII (although we’re not supposed to think too hard about the fact that Majito’s father is making military equipment for the Axis); the recent death of the boy’s mother is even more strongly felt here than in The NeverEnding Story; and this film manages to ride the line that divides the Oz books from their most famous adaptation with The Wizard of Oz, as Mahito’s journey is clearly real, as Dorothy (et al)’s travels into Oz were in L. Frank Baum’s novels, but said world contains images that are derived from things that he has seen in the real world, as in the 1939 picture. 

What is new here also seems to have come largely from Miyazaki. There’s nothing in any of the summaries of The Book of Lost Things that indicate recurring bird images and motifs as part of that novel’s narrative (the book seems to largely feature canines and lycanthropes), but we all know that this man loves flight; it’s all over his work. Here, this is seen in the “real” world via Mahito’s father’s work as an air munitions manufacturer but which translates into several different species of birds in the “fantasy” world, all of whom have different natures that present to Mahito as things which at first seem cruel or wicked to him but which ultimately prove that the apparent violence of nature exists not because of malice in the world, but simply because existence does not conform to us as individuals. There is the heron first, whose motivations are unclear and who exists more as a trickster, whose behavior is inscrutable. Second are the pelicans, who first attack Mahito and are later seen descending upon and devouring this film’s cutesy sprite creatures, the Warawara. Although they seem to be malicious in this attack at first, a dying gull tells Mahito that their people are starving as a result of having been brought to this place, where they have no other natural food source. Finally, we meet the parakeets, who are largely anthropomorphic and willing to eat human flesh. The last of these do have some malicious intent, just as Mahito’s emotional climax of the film requires that he recognize that he has malice within himself as well, which saves him from the same fate as his great-granduncle. It’s this same realization that he has come to an age where he has to force himself to grow and mature as a person by recognizing that he can feel negative emotions and not act upon them that leads him to finally accept Natsuko and go home. After he has a fun adventure with the time-traveling child version of his mother, of course. 

I’m not sure that this one is destined to become an indisputable classic like some of Miyazaki’s other work, but that’s what we always say about late additions to the canon of an auteur with a career that has already proven that it will have a lasting legacy. It’s clearly a deeply personal film, and when making something that is created with an intentionally idiosyncratic worldview (rather than aiming for something more like universal appeal), there’s always the danger of making it insular and inscrutable. I certainly expect this one to have a smaller audience of devotees than something like Princess Mononoke or even Howl’s Moving Castle (which was greeted with a similarly lukewarm/confused audience reception as The Boy and the Heron upon initial release, to my recollection), but if there’s one thing that I’ve learned over the years, it’s that there’s no Miyazaki film that isn’t someone’s favorite, and that will apply here, too. It could even happen to you. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Moon Garden (2023)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the dreamworld fantasy film Moon Garden (2023).

00:00 Welcome

01:22 Inu-Oh (2022)
05:11 It’s a Wonderful Knife (2023)
08:22 Thanksgiving (2023)
11:35 The Marvels (2023)
22:06 The Killer (2023)
28:00 A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
33:45 E.T. (1982)
39:40 Godzilla Minus One (2023)
42:50 FYC Screeners

1:06:20 Moon Garden (2023)
1:33:13 Best of 2023 Catchup

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Piaffe (2023)

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Piaffe is a post-adolescence coming of age story about a shy adult shut-in who musters up the courage to learn new things about her desires, her body, and her self outside her cloistered home.  In doing so, she grows a horse tail, has masochistic sex with a perverted botanist, and takes on a new trade as a commercial foley artist.  Most of the events that transform her life & body are a natural matter of course rather than a deliberate, personal choice.  The foley artist job falls in her lap when her nonbinary mystic sibling is unexpectedly institutionalized, leaving her to complete their work providing horse-riding sound effects for a TV commercial advertising a mood stabilizer called Equili.  She gets into character as the horses she soundtracks by clopping dress shoes onto wooden dresser drawers, which causes her very own horse tail to grow from the base of her spine. Her sexual relationship with the botanist is more of a personal choice than something that happens to her, but it’s a choice she can only make after truly getting to know herself as a literal horsegirl with increasingly specific sexual desires – mostly involving getting her tail hair brushed.  Falling somewhere between the stern kink dynamics of the dark 2000s office romance Secretary and the flippant, prurient surrealism of the 1970s dark fantasy piece The Beast, Piaffe is funny, sexy, cool, and inexplicable, but never in an especially showy way.

It isn’t the movie’s fault, but there was something grim about watching Piaffe the same week that England’s premiere auteur fetishist Peter Strickland was stress-tweeting about struggling to find funding for his next project.  One of our greatest working directors can’t get a new movie off the ground, and yet he’s formidable enough that younger artists are out there making (pretty great, possibly unaware) pastiches of his work.  Piaffe plays as just as much of a career-retrospective overview of Peter Strickland’s style as his recent music industry satire Flux Gourmet, which likewise combined his foley-art giallo throwback Berberian Sound Studio with his kink-dynamic relationship drama The Duke of Burgundy into a single, self-spoofing work.  The ASMR phone sex of Piaffe, wherein our equestrian protagonist brushes her tail hair over a telephone receiver to excite her lover, feels like a gag pulled directly from a Strickland film that doesn’t yet exist.  And given that Strickland is struggling to land funding for his next project, maybe it never will.  What Piaffe offers is a sturdy Strickland substitute that proves he’s not the only filmmaker who can reliably deliver weird-for-weird’s-sake fetish comedies for the midnight movie crowd; in that context, it’s maybe the best of its kind since The Berlin Bride.  I can still only take it as a consolation prize, though, as I’d unquestionably list Strickland among the most exciting artists working in cinema right now (alongside Amanda Kramer & Bertrand Mandico), so I’m bummed to hear he’s not currently working on anything at all.

For all I know, Piaffe director Ann Oren has never seen a Peter Strickland film, and their parallel sensibilities are entirely coincidental.  My only previous exposure to Oren is in her outsider-art Hatsune Miku cosplay documentary The World is Mine, which is specifically about the erosion and erasure of identity within a digital-age fandom “community.”  I will refrain from assuming anything about her based on this high-art horsegirl cosplay erotica follow-up, except maybe that experimentation with new, fabricated identities & personae is an artistic preoccupation of hers – something that can only be confirmed as she establishes a larger body of work.  I have hopes that, in time, Oren will prove to be just as formidable a prankster artist as Strickland.  It’s something I already felt in this film’s fetishistic fixation on the mechanical tools of filmmaking & horseback riding, grazing its fingertips over leather harnesses and the rusty metal gears of an ancient zoetrope.  I just need to see more of her work to know what to anticipate in the next picture.  Meanwhile, I already know what I want & get out of Strickland’s films, and I’m stuck looking for those qualities elsewhere while he’s twiddling his thumbs waiting for someone to sign the checks. 

-Brandon Ledet

The Cassandra Cat (1963) 

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One of the sharpest reminders that the Internet is not real life that I’ve gotten recently was the sparse attendance at a local screening of The Cassandra Cat.  Also distributed under the English titles When the Cat Comes and That Cat, The Cassandra Cat is best known (to me) as the subject of a viral tweet, recommended by a film student whose Czech professor bragged about making a movie about a cat who wore sunglasses called The Cat Who Wore Sunglasses.  I certainly didn’t expect that one tweet would exalt The Cassandra Cat up to the level of household Czech New Wave standards like Daisies or Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, but it is one of those tweets that rattle around in the back of my mind the same way serious film scholars can quote lines of criticism by Kael, Sarris, and Godard.  So, when there were fewer than ten people in attendance for The Prytania’s afternoon screening of its recent restoration, I was shocked.  I could not believe so few people showed up to see a half-century-old Czech film about a magical cat that I’ve only ever heard about via Viral Tweet.  So weird.

Y’all missed out.  The Cassandra Cat is a wonderfully imaginative children’s film about collective action, holding adults accountable for being liars & cheats, and about how cats are excellent judges of character.  The titular cat is a trained circus performer who arrives to a small Czech village with an army of talented coworkers: a ringleader magician, a gorgeous trapeze artist, and a legion of faceless, supernatural puppeteers.  Their act initially goes over well with the townspeople until the final routine, in which the trapezist takes off the cat’s sunglasses so he can stare his naked cat eyes into the audience.  It turns out that the cat’s direct gaze has the magical power to expose people’s true nature by making them glow like mood rings (an effect achieved through body paint & gel lights).  Adulterers glow yellow, revealing secret affairs hidden from their spouses.  Selfish careerists glow violet, exposing their greed to higher-minded comrades.  Lovers glow red, revealing their pure, earnest hearts as artists & true friends among their careerist counterparts.  This, of course, causes a riot among the adults, who spend the rest of the film attempting to banish & discredit the cat in front of the children who witnessed their secret selves.

There is some political allegory to The Cassandra Cat that might not entirely translate to modern audiences unfamiliar with the day-to-day complexities of the Czech Republic pre-Prague Spring.  Mostly, though, it’s fairly easy to follow as the Czech New Wave version of “The Harper Valley PTA”.  That’s what makes it such a great children’s film, especially once the magical cat is weaponized by the town’s schoolchildren, who stage a mass classroom walkout until he’s surrendered to their care & use.  It’s also a great children’s film because of its vintage sense of magic & whimsy, recalling other psychedelic children’s media of bygone eras like H.R. Pufnstuf, The Peanut Butter Solution, and The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.  There were no actual children present at that afternoon screening at The Prytania, just a few stray adult weirdos who had nothing better to do in the breezy sunshine outside.  At this point, The Cassandra Cat is a film exclusively for weirdo shut-ins, the kid who file away hit tweets in the back of their minds in case the forgotten Czech films referenced therein happen to pop up on the local repertory schedule.  Maybe that makes us losers, but if like to think that if a cat stared at us that day we’d at least glow red.

– Brandon Ledet

The Beast (1975)

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I’ve watched a few disparate adaptations & reinterpretations of Beauty and the Beast in recent years, each with their own unique window into the dark magic of the fairy tale: the intensely sensual surrealism of the French version from 1946, the tactile storybook atmospherics of the Czech version from 1979, the Internet Age psychedelia of the animated Japanese version from 2021.  All of these retellings of the “tale as old as time” have, of course, touched on the hesitant attraction of an innocent young woman to a wounded, mysterious brute, but they also all ultimately focus more on the brute’s troubled past & cursed homelife than the inner life of the vulnerable beauty who loves him.  That’s where Walerian Borowczyk’s take on Beauty and the Beast finds new, forbidden territory worthy to explore (as a French adaptation from a Polish director, as long as we’re tracking geography).  A profane masterpiece of erotic menace & goofball social satire, Borowczyk’s perversion of the Beauty of the Beast template delves deeper into the monstrous extremes of women’s desire & pleasure than any other retelling I can name, to the point where the titular beast is merely a prop, a piece of furniture.  And wait until you see what the women do to the furniture!  The Beast is also singular its smutty eagerness to roll around in its own filth, an instinct that eventually pushes past the absurd into the sublime.  It’s the only version of this story I’ve seen that reasonably compares to the 1940s Cocteau film that defines so many adaptations’ basic visual language, mostly because both works were clearly made for abject perverts.

Technically, The Beast is not an adaptation of the 18th century fairy tale at all, at least not in terms of plot.  Like the recent anime version in Belle, Borowczyk’s film assumes the audience’s overfamiliarity with the source material, using its basic iconography for shorthand to push & warp its broader themes to new extremes.  This is still a story where a young, naive woman is married off to a cursed, wretched beast as a desperate financial ploy, with the deep sadness of their newly shared castle’s faded glory haunting their tentative romance.  And just in case you don’t catch his allusions to the fairy tale, Borowczyk hands the beast’s would-be bride a single red rose as a symbol of their delicate union.  It’s just that this is the kind of film where the young beauty mashes that rose into her clitoris as an unconventional masturbation tool, destroying it in lustful mania while entertaining a zoological ravishment fantasy that would make even the most jaded cinephile blush.  You’d think there’s nothing left that a Beauty and the Beast tale could do to surprise an audience, considering how many times it’s been retold & reshaped over the past few centuries.  The Beast dropped my jaw in shock in its very first frame, which zooms in on the textbook veterinary details of equine genital arousal.  The movie opens with relentless, repetitive images of erect horse cocks, fairly warning the audience that if you stick around long enough you will watch beasts fuck in intense biological detail.  You won’t find that kind of novelty in either of Disney’s retellings of the tale, but Borowczyk’s version has a way of distilling it down to its most essential, throbbing parts.

The beastly beau in this picture is the poorly socialized nephew of a decrepit French baron, living in a Grey Gardens style faded estate in the rot of long-lost wealth.  Hoping that a traditional Christian marriage will bring the mysteriously disgraced family back into the royal fold, they arrange for the ancient nobleman’s brother, a highly reputable Cardinal, to ordain his weirdo nephew’s union with a spritely British heiress.  Only, the heir to the estate is a hopeless loser, spending every waking moment in the stables overseeing an intensive horse-breeding program with a fervor that pushes beyond the practical to the disturbed.  Luckily, his wife-to-be is just as much of a shameless pervert, immediately matching the unholy, decadent vibe of the chateau with her own morbid sexual curiosity.  Since her beau is too socially obtuse to understand or reciprocate her enthusiasm, he leaves her sexually frustrated in the absurdly long wait for the Cardinal’s arrival, dead time that she fills with wet dreams of the estate’s sordid history.  There are superstitious rumors that a former lady of the house had mated with a cryptid beast who cyclically haunts the grounds every couple centuries, which is supposedly how the family was excommunicated from the Church in the first place.  The beauty sweatily reimagines this human-bestial coupling in extensive, graphic detail while furiously masturbating in her bridal nightgown until the poor cloth is ripped to shreds.  The horny, mythical beast of the past and the shy, grotesque beast of the present are eventually linked in a last-minute twist, but their connection is far less important than the perverted pleasures of the women who desire their touch (and thrusts).

Before The Beast devolves into full-on cryptid erotica, its value as a unique work gets lost among its many literary parallels, which extend far beyond the fairy tale it most overtly alludes to.  The long, pointless wait for the Cardinal’s arrival at the castle plays out as an existential joke, recalling surrealist works like The Exterminating Angel & Waiting for Godot.  There are also overt Buñuel parallels in its blasphemous mockery of the wealthy & religious ruling class as degenerate brutes, pushing its satire to de Sadist extremes but never fully matching the heightened Buñuelian humor at hand.  The centerpiece of the work really is the pornographic depictions of bestial fucking, then – starting with the horses, working up to more traditional onscreen heterosexual couplings, and then climaxing with the historical ravishment fantasy that swallows up most of the third act.  “Climax” is the only word you could really use to describe that payoff, too, since the humanoid wolverine who couples with an actual human being spurts semen by the bucketload for minutes on end as their tryst pushes beyond taste & reason.  A faux-classy harpsichord soundtrack keeps the mood lightly comical throughout this absurd display, and it concludes with a punchline in which the Cardinal, finally arrived, performs a grand, fingerwagging speech about the evils of bestiality & women’s libidos as if he were reading from a pre-prepared pamphlet.  In the end, it’s the women’s arousal & search for pleasure that registers as the film’s most blasphemous acts, even more so than its extensive depictions of their monstrous ravishment fantasies.  They’re greatly enjoying themselves, much to everyone else’s disgust & confusion, which remains a global movie censorship taboo to this day.

Borowczyk finds his own fairy tale visual language here with images that have no obvious connection to the Beauty and the Beast tale: a snail sliming its way across a lady’s sky-blue shoe; lurid flashes of red paint through hallway doors that slyly recall aroused genitals: pornographic close-ups on actual aroused genitals; etc.  As soon as his equivalent of Belle arrives on the estate taking dozens of dirty Polaroids of every perverted detail she can collect, it’s clear that he’s taking the story to new, distinct places.  Most Belles cower in fear of the erotic menace lurking in their new home castles, gradually warming up to the beast who stalks the grounds.  In this version, she’s so immediately fired up by the ugly erotic charge of the central pairing that it freaks out everyone around her, including the audience.  A half-century later, it remains a bold, hilarious, intensely alienating take on a story that’s continued to be told countless times since, but rarely with such gleeful prurience. 

-Brandon Ledet

Invincible (2001)

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“Why do I watch WrestleMania?  My answer is that the poet must not avert his eyes from what’s going on in the world.  In order to understand, you have to face it.”

“Our sense of the real world today is massively challenged; I include here reality television, breast enhancement, and the carefully choreographed, fake drama of WrestleMania, populated by larger-than-life characters with muscles that nature doesn’t normally provide us with and who take pleasure in telling everyone how unbelievably evil they are.”

“What is fascinating about WrestleMania is the stories around it: the dramas between the owner of the whole show and his son, who are feuding, and his wife in the wheelchair who is blind, and he is then showing up in the ring with girls who have huge, fake boobs, and he is fondling them.  This is almost sort of an ancient Greek drama – evil uninterrupted by commercials.”

These are just a choice few Werner Herzog quotes about the cultural & literary virtues of professional wrestling, pulled from the 2019 GQ listicle “Werner Herzog Cannot Stop Talking About WrestleMania” – a masterpiece of modern clickbait publication that I return to often.  Herzog was promoting his work as an actor on the Star Wars television series The Mandalorian around the time those various press junket quotes were assembled, a time when his familiarity as a household name was bridging the gap between art cinema snobs and their sworn enemies, “Disney Adults.”  His public perception has since been bifurcated in recent years, split between his well-earned designation as a world-class auteur and his more recent evolution into a Nic Cagian human meme who pontificates about supposedly low-brow subjects like WrestleMania & Ana Nicole Smith in a severe German accent.  Unlike Nic Cage, though, Herzog has not allowed his YouTube Era reputation as a human meme affect the tone or content of his work as a serious filmmaker, give or take a few over-the-top scenes in his collaboration with Cage in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans.  As often as you hear Herzog explain the grotesque poetry of reality TV & pro wrestling in interviews, it’s difficult to detect their influence on his actual work.  That is, unless you happen to be one of the few people who remember his 2001 historical fantasy drama Invincible, which presents an academic-level understanding of the historic origins of wrasslin’, as well as its modern mutation into mass, crass populist entertainment.

Invincible stars real-life strongman Jouko Ahola as historical strongman Zishe Breitbart, a young Jewish blacksmith from a small Polish village who grew to fame as “The Strongest Man in the World” in 1920s Germany.  Herzog takes a pro wrestling-style truthiness approach to the material, moving Breitbart’s story to the early stirrings of Nazi Germany a decade later, playing up the significance of his Jewish heritage in a heightened, more satisfying kayfabe version of his life’s story.  In the film, Breitbart enters the entertainment industry through the strongman circus acts that sparked pro wrestling as an artform.  He challenges a traveling strongman for prize money in what is supposed to be a rigged wrestling bout and easily defeats the brute in a Goliath vs Goliath matchup.  Word of his incredible strength quickly spreads, and he’s summoned to work as a regular stage act in a Berlin cabaret, ringmastered by a Nazi-friendly psychic played by Tim Roth.  Roth’s conman mystic is quick to use Breitbart’s Jewish heritage as a race-baiting point of division between the Nazi officers and Jewish citizens in the cabaret audience, which is perfectly in tune with how hot-topic political divisions are exploited for cheap heat in modern pro wrestling programs.  Breitbart is the underdog hero for the Jewish people, who feel increasingly hopeless as the Nazis rise to political power.  The carnie mystic MC is a hero to the Nazis, pretending to summon supernatural strength from The Dark Arts to overpower the strongman’s brute force (a “skill” he can sell as a war-winning weapon for Hitler’s army).  In truth, they’re working together as a scripted act, putting on a show to stoke their divided audience’s Us vs Them bloodlust; it’s wrestling in a nutshell.

Aesthetically, Invincible is worlds away from the reality-TV crassness of what Herzog refers to as “WrestleMania”.  In its best moments, there’s an ancient cinematic quality to the director’s visual storytelling, effectively remaking Bob Fosse’s Cabaret as if he were Tod Browning adapting a fairy tale.  In its worst moments, it plays like standard-issue Oscar bait of its era, bolstered by a prestige-desperate Hans Zimmer score that tells the audience exactly how to feel at every second of runtime.  Its Oscar chances were self-sabotaged by Herzog’s choice to have his European actors speak phonetic English in post-production dubs instead of performing naturally in their various native languages.  That might have been a deliberate attempt to evoke a Bressonian style of performance, but it just comes across as bizarre & confused, and only the established professional actors Tim Roth & Udo Kier come across as capable performers.  The camerawork can come across as bizarre & confused as well, alternating between a handheld documentary style and a Hollywood-schmaltz fantasy & artifice that attempts to (in Ross’s showman wording) “[articulate the audience’s] collective dreams”.  Its moments of visual lyricism make sense to me as a historically set fairy tale about Nazi obsession with mysticism clashing against a Freaks vs. The Reich style superhero.  They’re especially effective when Herzog gazes at the sea-life bodies of jellyfish & crabs as if he were a space alien considering their otherworldly beauty for the very first time.  He’s really good at articulating the uncanniness of everyday life & pop media in that way, which is how he’s gotten famous as an interviewee outside of art cinema circles.  It’s amusing, then, that he can’t convincingly translate that wonder with the world into an Oscar-friendly movie for normies; he’s too much of a genuine weirdo.

Around the time of Invincible, Herzog was essentially directing one feature film a year at a consistent pace, and he’s only gotten more prolific in the two decades since.  While some of his 2000s titles like Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World, and the aforementioned Bad Lieutenant have endured with a certain cultural cachet, many like Invincible have fallen through the cultural cracks; they can’t all be stunners.  If you’re going to excavate this one Herzog title out of relative obscurity within that massive catalog, I do think it’s worth considering as a bizarre, failed attempt to reach for Awards Season prestige beyond the usual, routine boundaries of his critical accolades.  He has found wider public recognition in the years since, but mostly as a weirdo public persona (an extension of the first-person narration style he developed in his 2000s-era documentaries).  Invincible does recall one very specific aspect of that public persona, at least: his inability to stop talking about WrestleMania.  Whether that’s enough of a reason to dig this one particular discarded Herzog DVD out of the Goodwill pile is up to your completionist interest in his career, I guess, as well as your personal fascination with the Greek tragedy & grotesque poetry of wrasslin’ as an artform.

-Brandon Ledet

Apocalypse After: Films by Bertrand Mandico (1998 – 2018)

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Only two feature films into his career, I’m already comfortable thinking of Bertrand Mandico as my favorite working director, even though only his debut was a total stunner.  Mandico’s The Wild Boys is my favorite film released within my lifetime – a Bidgoodian wet nightmare about gender dysphoria and, ultimately, gender obliteration.  His follow-up, After Blue (Dirty Paradise), is more of a flippant prank, using the same sensory intoxication & erotic menace for a much sillier purpose: worshipping the almighty Kate Bush in the rubble of our fallen civilization.  Although it’s seemingly shot in a muted black & white that sidesteps the cosmic blues & purples that make his other features so vivid & vibrant, I’m dying to see his third feature, Conann, which appears to be a gender-subverted riff on the pulp fantasy character Conan the Barbarian. It’s going to take a while for that latest dispatch from Mandico’s id to reach American screens (it just premiered at Cannes this summer), so I decided to placate my curiosity as best as I could by digging into his back catalog of short films.  Altered Innocence has consistently been Mandico’s home distributor since the company’s inception; it’s even arguable that Mandico’s films have been a brand-defining cornerstone for the Vinegar Syndrome partner label, along with the similar dreamlike genre throwbacks of Knife+Heart director Yann Gonzalez.  Given that close affiliation, their publishing a collection of Mandico’s short films on a single Blu-ray disc, titled Apocalypse After, was a total no-brainer.  Given my own personal obsession with The Wild Boys, the only surprising thing is that I didn’t jump on this disc the second it was released last year.  I guess I needed to get worked up about a new feature from Mandico dangling just outside my reach to seek out his already-available shorts I hadn’t yet seen.  Well, that and if I immediately jumped on every new Altered Innocence release I wanted to see I’d struggle to pay my energy bill, and I wouldn’t be able to watch them anyway.

The titular short on this disc, “Apocalypse After (Ultra Pulpe)”, is a calling-card submersion in the subliminal perversions of cinema, consciously transforming “science fiction” into “science titillation” while shouting in frustration that the images still aren’t erotic enough for the director’s liking.  Longtime Mandico collaborator & muse Elina Löwensohn stars as the director’s avatar, an arthouse pornographer named Joy d’Amato (in cheeky reference to real-life pornographer Joe d’Amato).  Mandico’s films are full of sarcastic allusions to real-life artists he admires in this way: Kate Bush, Henry Darger, Jean Cocteau, Walerian Borowczyk, etc.  Curiously, he has yet to name-drop the three filmmakers he most reminds me of—Kenneth Anger, Guy Maddin, and James Bidgood—likely because their influence is already blatantly apparent in the text.  Joy d’Amato is more Bertrand Mandico than she is Joe d’Amato, though, shooting a live-action version of paperback sci-fi cover art with the same vintage porno sensibility you can find in all of Mandico’s recent work.  In a way, the film shoot setting positions “Apocalypse After” as Mandico’s Knife+Heart (a movie he acted in as a porno cinematographer), but it’s even less of a coherent, linear story and even more of an expression of its director’s fascinations & frustrations with his artform.  Dialogue that declares details of the film shoot “magnificently hideous” or complain, “It’s beautiful, but at the same time I don’t know what he means,” function as meta commentary on the achievements & shortcomings of Mandico’s art.  No dialogue feels more essential to the piece than an actor’s monologue recalling watching forbidden, adult films as a child – compelled & mesmerized by the images on the screen but too young to fully comprehend them.  Mandico has a way of turning pornographic indulgence into transcendent visual art, and even then he directs his avatar in Löwensohn to shout that the images are still not erotic enough.  Nothing ever could be.

The “Apocalypse After” short is a thematically cohesive but logically incoherent collection of all the stylistic flourishes & quirks sketched out in Mandico’s first two features: the plant life molestations of The Wild Boys, the hollow geode-face zombies of After Blue, and the practically achieved glamour that merges their aesthetics – gel lights, rear projections, body glitter, smoke, prosthetic nipples, etc.  The presentation of Mandico’s previous shorts on the Apocalypse After disc is strictly chronological, so you can watch the director arrive at that personal aesthetic over decades of obsessive tinkering.  Over three full hours of his two decades of short-form experiments, Mandico Heads get to watch the filth maestro develop his cosmic visual language in ten preceding works.  In that context, “After Apocalypse” is less of a jumbled collection of Mandico pet obsessions than it is a natural crescendo of a clear pattern in methodology.  His seemingly weird-for-weird’s sake indulgences become more recognizably thoughtful & designed in retrospect, the same way the “Magick Lantern Cycle” packaging of Kenneth Anger’s shorts makes “Lucifer Rising” feel like the most obvious place his art could lead him, not an out-of-nowhere novelty.  The Apocalypse After disc starts with Mandico imitating Jan Švankmajer’s stop-motion nightmares in antiqued sepia tone, then seeking the same ancient artifice in short-form magical realist dramas.  He hits a breakthrough mid-career with the mid-length film “Boro in the Box”, which playfully reimagines filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk’s life in the style of Au Hazard Balthazar (a prototype for the more recent Balthazar riff EO).  By the time Mandico returns to stop-motion in his post-“Boro” short “Living Still Life” (this time animating taxidermized animals), his style is distinctly of his own.  As a result, all of the essential Mandico bangers arrive late on the disc, after he finds his distinct voice as a filmmaker: the Cronenbergian colonoscopy sideshow act “Prehistoric Cabaret,” the fairy tale creature feature “Our Lady of Hormones,” the unlikely Enys Men sister film “Depressive Cop” and, of course, the aforementioned self-portrait in heat “Apocalypse After.”

There are certainly other current filmmakers whose every feature I anticipate with the same gusto as Mandico’s, namely Peter Strickland and Amanda Kramer. None in that unholy trio of perverts gets the critical respect they deserve as playful subverters of the artform.  The academic interest critics used to have in similarly perverse, cerebral genre filmmakers like Cronenberg, Lynch, and Jodorowsky has more recently shifted to formally muted & restrained works of slow cinema auteurs instead.  A lot of the leeway we used to give venerated genre freaks of the past hasn’t trickled down to the unvenerated genre freaks of today, at least not for anyone who hasn’t struck a distribution deal with A24.  Altered Innocence appears to be committed to the cause at least, offering a step-by-step study of Mandico’s work for anyone who cares to learn how he arrived at something as wildly baffling as The Wild Boys.  The only other comparable presentation of a current director’s shorts that I can name is the The Islands of Yann Gonzalez, which I will leave to your imagination what is covered and who handled the distro.

-Brandon Ledet