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Naked Ambition (2025)

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One of cinema’s greatest virtues is how it functions as a populist access point to art. Not only is the medium itself a collaboration between artists of many talents—photographers, writers, actors, costumers, sculptors, set designers, musicians, make-up artists, etc.—but its documentary branch can also document and distribute fine-art images to the widest audience possible, making fine art objects readily accessible to virtually everyone. While it could be prohibitively expensive to travel the world seeing the great works in person or to collect high-end art books that present them in the best 2D renderings available, it doesn’t cost all that much to watch a movie. With enough patience & a library card, you can even access most documentaries about fine artists for free. There’s obviously something lost in not seeing a large-scale oil painting in person or hearing a world-class musician perform from across the room, but fine-art photography is especially apt for the documentary treatment, since montages of still photographs largely function the same way as catching a photographer’s career-retrospective slideshow in a physical art gallery. Thanks to the movies, I’ve seen hundreds of photographs from the likes of Nan Goldin, Lauren Greenfield, Ernest Cole, and George Dureau that would have cost exorbitant sums of money & time to track down in other venues. Formally, documentaries about photographers don’t need to try very hard to be worthwhile. A feature-length slideshow narrated by talking heads who know the artist personally is already well worth any art-enthusiast’s time, especially if you don’t live the kind of life that allows you to travel to Paris, London, and New York City between shifts at your soul-crushing 9 to 5.

It might seem a little flippant to praise a documentary for providing wide public access to vintage nudie pics as if they were the cultural equal to Guernica or the Mona Lisa, but vintage cheesecake photographer Bunny Yeager has well earned that art-realm prestige. The new documentary Naked Ambition argues that Yeager should be recognized for her artistic & political merit as a skilled portraitist, pushing back against her superficial reputation as the pornographer who made Bettie Page the world’s most famous pin-up model. However, that work has already been done by fine art curators in recent years, who have staged retrospectives of Yeager’s work in legitimizing gallery spaces instead of the nudie mags where her photos were more traditionally exhibited. Even if Bunny Yeager were “just” a pornographer, her contributions to the visual lexicon of American pop art would still be worthy of a career-retrospective gallery show or documentary. Her iconic collaborations with Page and her aesthetic-defining contributions to Playboy‘s early, semi-literary days helped define an entire genre of vintage American smut that has been gradually disseminated & recontextualized enough that her artistic influence is now immeasurable. She also has a great print-the-legend story as “the world’s prettiest photographer,” having started as a pin-up model herself before learning how to operate a camera. As profiled here, Bunny Yeager was just as highly fashionable as she was highly ambitious. Her career as a public spectacle affords the movie more than enough vintage talk show clips, nudie cutie excerpts, and celebrity name-dropping anecdotes to fill its 73-minute runtime, but the real treasure is the access it gives the public to high-quality scans of her photographs. Like Bunny herself, they consistently look fantastic and convey a timeless cool.

If there’s any value to Naked Ambition outside of its function as a Bunny Yeager slideshow, it’s in its peripheral portrait of Miami, Florida sleaze from the 1950s through the 1970s. Alongside young feminist talking heads who link Yeager’s work to modern phenomena like burlesque revues, Insta selfies, and OnlyFans modeling, the doc also drags out a few surviving old-timers from Yeager’s heyday to attest to the grease & sleaze of vintage Miami living. The late, erratic news anchor Larry King is a surprise MVP in that respect, telling wild stories about how easy it was to get laid in his radio broadcast days that have no direct relevance to Yeager’s work except to establish the mise-en-scène in which it was created. There are also brief glimpses into the private lives of Sammy Davis, Jr. and the surprisingly gravel-voiced Bettie Page that happen to appear in anecdotes, but for the most part Yeager’s social life appeared to be more domestic than glamorous. As much as Yeager’s skill & fashionability elevated her work to fine-art quality, it was still produced as commercial material meant to financially provide for her family. Her surviving daughters are in an ongoing dispute about whether to treat the work she’s left behind as archive-worthy art or disposable smut, but they at least appear to agree that they were raised in a loving home with emotionally present parents. If you read between the lines during their opposing interviews, there is some juicy drama to be found here in how Bunny Yeager is being remembered by the people who loved her most, but that domestic conflict isn’t really any of Naked Ambition‘s business. The movie cares most about the work itself, which is presented in constant art-gallery slideshow. Assuming the public display of nude breasts can no longer shock a modern audience, there is nothing especially surprising or daring about that cinematic presentation, but there is something greatly virtuous about its ease of access.

-Brandon Ledet

Boys Go to Jupiter (2025)

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It’s been three decades since Toy Story diverted the animation industry towards computer animation instead of traditional hand-drawn & stop-motion techniques, and the world is mostly worse off for it. The CG animation era has largely been dispiriting, typified more by soulless corporate dreck like Bee Movie, Shrek, and The Secret Lives of Pets than more relatively artful corporate products like Across the Spider-Verse. It feels like the entire battlefield has been surrendered to lazy IP cash-ins so celebrities like Chris Pratt can collect easy voice-acting paychecks. I haven’t seen much genuine, personal art in the medium outside a few short films in festival showcases. The new debut feature from outsider 3D animator Julian Glander is a welcome glimpse of how that might change as the tools of the trade become more widely accessible outside the corporate offices of Disney & Pixar. Admittedly, Boys Go to Jupiter indulges in the same lazy celebrity voice-acting traditions of lesser, more expensive CG animated films, but this time the voice cast happens to be overpopulated with hip, talented people: Jeaneane Garofalo, Julio Torres, Cole Escola, Elsie Fisher, Joe Pera, Chris Fleming, Demi Adejuyigbe, Sarah Squirm, and the list goes on. It’s also got a distinct visual style, an understated tone, righteous politics, and an authentic sense of genuine humanity — all things that are difficult to find in the average computer-animated feature. It’s a vision of a better world, even if it’s one that satirizes the corporate hell world we currently live in.

In essence, Boys Go to Jupiter is cozy slacker art. It follows the daily toils of food-delivery-app worker Billy 5000 as he spends every waking minute scheming to earn the $5,000 fortune of his namesake. He scoots around his bumhole Florida town on a Segway, cramming in as many deliveries a day as he can to exploit a financial loophole in his delivery app before the bigwigs at Grubster catch onto the grift. Most of his interactions with fellow disaffected Floridians are exceedingly low-key, as he casually bumps into acquaintances like his dirtbag friends, his religious nut neighbor, an overly dedicated hotdog salesman, and his fellow Grubster drones while scooting from doorstep to doorstep. His coming-of-age Bummer Summer lifestyle is only effectively interrupted by the intrusion of two supernatural forces: an E.T.-type alien creature invading from beneath the Earth’s surface and a potential love interest who works at her mother’s science lab developing impossible varieties of semi-magical fruits. It turns out that even these fantastical players are weighed down by the daily mundanities of labor, however, as the older girl he crushes on struggles to accept her fate as her mother’s successor and the underground E.T. creature is revealed to belong to a family of social media food bloggers who have to transmit Grubster take-out reviews to their followers back home to justify their vacation on the surface. Many pointless hangouts and improvised junk food jingles ensue, with all of Billy 5000’s many trivialities revolving around one simple truth: having a job sucks.

The rounded edges, overemphasized light-sources, and blown-out haze of Glander’s visual style belong to the kind of 3D art renderings you’d only expect to see in indie comics and homemade videogames. Specifically, it plays like a D.I.Y. videogame set in Steven Universe‘s Beach City, so much so that I’m amazed it’s screening in neighborhood arthouses like Zeitgeist and not personal Steam Deck consoles. Whether Glander effectively applies that softly psychedelic visual aesthetic to anything especially unique or useful is up for debate. I didn’t find it had anything new to observe about gig-economy exploitation that wasn’t more successfully satirized in fellow low-budget sci-fi whatsit Lapsis, but it’s relatable & satisfying enough as a slacker comedy that its political effectiveness is a moot point. All I know is that I liked the way it looked, its laidback novelty songs soothed my addled brain, and I laughed every time Billy 5000 concluded a Grubster delivery with the fictional company’s signature slogan, “Have a Grubby day!” I know a lot of people had their faith in computer-animated outsider art restored by last year’s feline adventure flick Flow, but I couldn’t feel that future promise of the medium myself until I “went to Jupiter” (i.e. ate some junk food and sang silly songs on the beach) with the boys.

-Brandon Ledet

Some Kind of Heaven (2021)

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I’ve been watching a lot of reality competition shows over the past year, as that format is about the upper limit of what my brain can handle right now.  I particularly enjoy competition shows where contestants collaborate on art projects (especially fashion competitions), as opposed to the much more plentiful variety of shows where they compete for romantic connections.  After 15 months of burnt-out pandemic brain, I feel like I’ve completely depleted the backlog of worthwhile, currently-streaming shows that hit that exact dopamine sweet spot.  Since March of last year, I’ve watched Project Runway, Next in Fashion, Making the Cut, Legendary, Glow Up, Blown Away, America’s Next Top Model, Great British Bake-Off, Great Pottery Throwdown, Interior Design Masters, Big Flower Fight, Full Bloom, Nailed It, Making It, Haute Dog, Dragula and more spin-off series of RuPaul’s Drag Race than I care to recount.  I couldn’t tell that I was scraping the bottom of the competition show barrel until recently, though, when I found myself watching the Hulu show Exposure.  Exposure is essentially a 6-hour commercial for Samsung Galaxy smartphones, presented as a competition show for aspiring “smartphone photographers” – i.e., L.A. area Instagram hipsters.  It’s trash, and I watched the entire thing in a single weekend between hammering away at my own home renovation projects and hiding from in-the-flesh social interactions.

As vapid as Exposure is on a conceptual level, it did get me thinking a lot about the art of smartphone photography and Instagram curation.  Yes, the show was cynically designed to sell one specific brand of smartphone, but it’s also one of the few instances of popular, legitimized media I’ve seen acknowledge the labor & artistry that goes into smartphone photography.  Most of us take pictures with our phones, and most of us are atrocious at it.  Despite the democratization of the tech, there’s a highly developed skill level and shared aesthetic among the masters of the artform that most of us will never put in the time to match.  Exposure could’ve been a show entirely about the art of the selfie alone and still had plenty of formalistic challenges to cover over the course of a season.  If most of the professional photography we engage with on a daily basis is now relegated to the confines of smartphone tech and social media curation, it’s outright odd that Exposure is one of the few instances of that artistry spilling out into other, more legitimized media.  It seems inevitable that the look & feel of Instagram photography in particular would start to influence the formalist approach of proper cinema, if not only because most young cinematographers in the industry likely got their start taking photos on a commercial-grade smartphone.

Enter Some Kind of Heaven, a highly stylized documentary that owes a lot of its visual appeal to the visual language of Instagram.  A sweet, lightly surreal portrait of the largest “retirement community” in America, Some Kind of Heaven is relatively reserved in its subject & themes.  The people & setting are interesting enough to hold your attention, but it’s really the cinematography that makes it sing.  The film’s boxed-in, 4:3 aspect ratio should probably recall the studio-lot artificiality of the Old Hollywood era when the similarly squared-off Academy Ratio was basically an industry standard.  Instead, its fetishistic obsession with symmetry and its formalist, posed portraiture can’t help but feel driven by the visual language of Instagram.  As a documentary, it’s a fairly standard exercise human-interest journalism.  As an art object, it feels like an Internet Age update on Lauren Greenfield’s oeuvre, modernizing the art of formalist portraiture with an Instagram-driven sense of framing against a bizarrely artificial backdrop.  Of course, those two aspects of the film cannot be detangled from each other.  First-time director Lance Oppenheim credits editor Daniel Garber as the film’s “co-author”, and I assume he’d include cinematographer David Bolen in that sentiment as well, considering how much of its eerie, otherworldly appeal is due to its Insta-era visual slang.

There’s an obvious, blatant clash between form & content here.  While there’s a youthful modernism to the film’s post-Instagram aesthetic, the subjects being profiled live in a world populated only by the elderly.  Some Kind of Heaven is entirely contained to the sprawling “retirement community” of The Villages, FL.  The conflicts suffered by its four main interview subjects are largely specific to geriatric life: drug dependency, homelessness, loneliness, declining mental cognizance and physical health, etc.  Those conflicts just happen to play out in the surreally artificial world of The Villages, self-described as “Disney World for retirees.”  The people are recognizably real, but their playground is an extravagant illusion, which is where the film’s form & content work together in harmony.  When we look at a slickly curated Instagram feed, we know we’re seeing an authentic person abstracted & distorted by a shamelessly inauthentic artform.  That exact clash is echoed in this film’s fascination with how its subjects’ messy lives contrast against the fabricated surrealism of their intensely Floridian backdrop.  Some Kind of Heaven makes for stiff competition with Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar for the most Floridian film of the year, and it didn’t have to build sets to achieve that status.  It merely stumbles into a pre-existing alternate reality to gawk at the set dressing already in place.

As far as I can tell, Some Kind of Heaven was filmed on professional-grade digital movie cameras, not smartphones.  It’s a little reductive for me to tie its meticulous visual artistry so closely to Instagram formalism, then, but I can’t help making the connection.  If bottom-of-the-barrel competition shows like Exposure are going to be the only legitimized media outlets that recognize the artistry of cell phone photography, we’re going to lose sight of what makes this specific era of photography visually distinct from better-respected modes of the past.  It’s only a matter of time before the chaotic irreverence and rapid-fire edits of TikTok overtake the Insta generation’s cinematic moment, so it’s worthwhile to consider which films are actually preserving & engaging with the aesthetic while it lasts.  Of the few Insta-driven movies I can think of—Ingrid Goes West, Assassination Nation, Woodshock, etc.—this might be the most visually striking of the batch.  There’s something wonderfully bizarre about that achievement being tied to such an explicitly geriatric subject, since Instagram celebrity has been so closely tied to youthful beauty since its inception & popularization.  And, hey, if anyone out there wants to borrow my idea for a reality competition show about the art of the selfie you can have it for free.  I need more mind-numbing bullshit to watch on the weekends anyway.

-Brandon Ledet

Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar (2021)

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I wonder if anyone’s ever put together a definitive list of The Most Floridian Films of All Time.  If so, I’d like to nominate Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar for inclusion in that canon.  While other recent Florida-as-Fuck movies like Magic Mike, The Beach Bum, and The Florida Project have understandably centered their stories on the beach state’s burnout locals, Barb and Star dares to explore its function as the nation’s largest tourist trap.  The hotel tiki bars, by-the-hour boat rentals, boardwalk souvenir shops, and Lisa Frank color palettes that overwhelm the screen are all hyperspecific to Floridian tourism.  The authenticity of that setting includes the characterization of the titular tourists as well: two clueless but sweet rubes from the Midwest with absurdly superficial notions of what a getaway vacation adventure should look like.  You could remake this entire film on a cruise ship without having to change many of its gags or locations, which is how you know it perfectly captures the tacky surrealism of the modern tourist industry.  This is the fantasy version of Florida presented in all-inclusive vacation package pamphlets, and it’s wonderfully bizarre to see actual human beings navigate those flamingo pink waters.

Of course, the main concern of this absurdist buddy comedy is neither to capture the spirit of Floridian tourism nor to drum up tension in its superfluous sci-fi espionage plot.  It’s simply trying to make you laugh, and it ably succeeds.  Kristen Wiig and frequent collaborator Annie Mumolo co-lead as Barb & Star, a pair of middle-age, Midwest besties whose co-dependent life together has hit a spiritual rut.  In search of a “soul douche” meant to rediscover their inner “shimmer”, the gals head off to the gift shop-lined beaches of Florida.  There, they learn to have fun without hanging onto each other 24/7, thanks to the help of a sexy himbo staying in the same hotel (Fifty Shades of Grey‘s Jamie Dornan) and an exponentially out-of-place terrorist plot orchestrated by a James Bond villain (also played by Wiig).  It’s a delightful throwback to a very specific type of absurdist buddy comedy that rarely gets made anymore, where a pair of Good Buds bounce inane in-jokes off each other, unaware of the deadly-serious crisis that orbits around them.  I’m thinking of titles like Zoolander, A Night at the Roxbury, Dude Where’s My Car?, and Romy & Michelle’s High School Re-Union.  Like all those previous examples of its ilk, it’s destined to gradually build a cult audience, one that will likely outlast the cultural impact of Wiig & Mumolo’s previous, more commercially successful screenplay collaboration, Bridesmaids.

If I have one complaint about Barb and Star, it’s that it’s one song performance short of being a full-blown musical.  Why stop at two break-from-reality musical numbers?  A third one would have really rounded out the show, especially a grand musical blowout finale.  And no, Richard Cheese’s cameo as a boobies-obsessed lounge singer does not count.  Otherwise, it’s a perfect, traditional buddy comedy – one bolstered by its excessively Floridian set design, which strives to outdo The Birdcage‘s commitment to that pleasure realm aesthetic in every new locale.  This might even be the best vehicle yet for the normcore-parody comedic sensibilities Wiig honed on SNL, considering that most of her film work since that show has been focused on darkly funny indie dramas (give or take a MacGruber).  Any minor complaints about where it falls short in its musicality or narrative structure are entirely besides the point.  It’s simply fun.  Or, in the movie’s own words, it’s “a real tit-flapper”.

-Brandon Ledet