Lists & Articles

Brandon’s Top 20 Films of 2022

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1. Neptune Frost – A post-gender Afrofuturist musical that triangulates unlikely holy ground between Black Orpheus, Bacurau, and Hackers.  At its best, cinema is honest artifice.  At its best, cinema is openly provocative & political; it’s a shared dream; it’s poetry.  This is cinema at its best.

2. Inu-Oh – An anime fable about the glories & follies of rock n’ roll fame, illustrating how it can only elevate the marginalized so high before fascists at the top take notice and shut them down.  Personally, it’s the best genderfucked feudal Japan glam rock opera I’ve ever seen, but I can’t speak for everyone.

3. Mad God – Both a for-its-own-sake immersion in scatological mayhem & an oddly touching reflection on the creative process, the indifference of time, and the cruelty of everything.  It’s meticulously designed to either delight or irritate, so count me among the awed freaks who never wanted this stop-motion nightmare to end.

4. Everything Everywhere All at Once – We have apparently slipped into an alternate timeline where Michel Gondry directed The Matrix.  It’s nice here (as long as you don’t engage with the fanatics).

5. RRR – An anti-colonialist action epic about the power of friendship (and the power of bullets, and the power of wolves, and the power of grenades, and the power of tigers, and the power of dynamite, and the power of bears, oh my).  A real skull-cracker of a good time.

6. Jackass Forever – Rewatching the first Jackass movie recently had me thinking about the series as a Reality TV update to Pink Flamingos, but I don’t know that Pink Flamingos ever reached this wide or otherwise unadventurous of an audience.  I also don’t know that I’ve ever found a John Waters film to be this heartfelt & sentimental.  For all of the Jackass series’ boneheaded commitment to gross-out gags, it’s also now a beautiful decades-long story about friendship (a friendship that just happens to be illustrated with feces & genital mutilation).

7. Deadstream – A found footage horror comedy about an obnoxious social media influencer getting his cosmic comeuppance while livestreaming his overnight tour of a haunted house.  It’s a constantly surprising delight, getting huge laughs out of supernaturally torturing a YouTuber smartass with a sub-Ryan Reynolds sense of humor.  It effectively does for The Blair Witch Project what Host did for Unfriended, borrowing its basic outline to stage a chaotic assemblage of over-the-top, technically impressive scare gags.

8. Please Baby Please – Ponders the question “What is a man, anyway?” through lofty academic discussions of how masculinity is socially engineered and through kinky 1950s kitsch.  Andrea Riseborough gives THE performance of the year, approximating what it would be like if an especially rabid Jerri Blank had a Marlon Brando drag-king impersonation act.  Queer menace, artifice, and excellence on a community theatre budget.

9. After Blue (Dirty Paradise) –  A sci-fi acid Western that languidly fills the frame with the most mesmerizing, glitter-slathered nightmare imagery I saw all year. Its lesbian orgy planet that cowers in fear of a demonic, almighty Kate Bush reads like someone fed “James Bidgood’s Dune movie” into one of those AI art generators, and the results are intoxicating.

10. Strawberry Mansion – Look, I grew up in a time when Michel Gondry was a golden god to artsy teens everywhere and not a aughts-era fad everyone seems embarrassed to admit they were super into.  So, of course I’m happy to see his arts & crafts aesthetic is back in vogue and prominently represented in this twee fantasy epic about dream-hopping lovers dodging pop-up ads in a near-future dystopia.  Maybe I should be rolling my eyes at its analog whimsy but I’m happy to swoon instead.

11. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On – Expected to enjoy this no matter what, since I’m in the exact Millennial target demographic that would be nostalgic for the titular stop-motion cutie’s original YouTube clips.  Even so, I was super impressed by it, both as a rapidfire joke delivery system (where every punchline is “so small!”) and as an emotional defibrillator, shocking me back into the great wide world of communal joy after a few years of intense isolation.

12. Funny Pages – Proudly wears its 2000s indie nostalgia as a grimy badge of dishonor, questioning why Ghost World and The Safdies can’t share the same marquee.  You might want to question where its alt-comics slackerdom fits in the modern world, but you also can’t deny that it’s nice to see Real People on the screen again.  I say that with full sincerity and full awareness that it makes me sound like the exact kind of dipshit suburbanite poser the movie is brutally satirizing.

13. Flux Gourmet – Cronenberg wasn’t the only fetishist director who reconfigured his early works into a new fantasy world overrun by grotesque performance art last year.  Crimes of the Future found an unlikely sister film in Peter Strickland’s latest, which brings the vague outline of Berberian Sound Studio up to speed with the more free-flowing absurdism the pervert auteur has achieved in the years since.  The result is not quite as silly as In Fabric nor as sensual as The Duke of Burgundy, but it hits a nice sweet spot in-between.

14. Lux Æterna – In which Gaspar Noé deploys the same disorienting split screen technique he plays with in the much more subdued Vortex to actively attempt to melt his audience’s minds.  The most authentically “psychotronic” movie I’ve seen in a while, one that balances out its seething hatred of backstage film set squabbling with a love for witchcraft, strobe lights, leather jackets, and wearing sunglasses indoors.  A truly stunning experience; consult your doctor before subjecting your brain.

15. Belle – Pretends to be a sci-fi anime update of Beauty and the Beast, but it’s more a virtual reality teen fantasy drama about the merits & limitations of seeking community online.  Weird coincidence that both this & Inu-oh happen to feature whale-themed light shows in their stadium concert fantasy sequences, as if they’re both anime illustrations of The Decemberists performing “The Mariner’s Revenge Song”. 

16. We Met in Virtual Reality – Billed as “the first feature-length documentary filmed entirely in VR,” this is basically Belle except for “real” and without all those pesky trips back to the physical world.  Most remarkable as a bizarre descent into the niche nerd-culture subdungeons that the internet was built for but rarely makes room for anymore.  Happy to see that documented before the Metaverse turns it all into a digital Target.

17. EO – Jerzy Skolimowski’s noble donkey tale only occasionally plays like a colorized TV edit of Au Hasard Balthasar.  More often, it takes wild detours into an energetic, dreamlike approximation of what it might look like if Gaspar Noé directed Homeward Bound.  It’s incredible that a film this vibrant & playful was made by a long-respected octogenarian, not a fresh-outta-film-school prankster with something to prove.

18. You Won’t Be Alone – A post-VVitch coming-of-age folktale about shapeshifting, bodyhopping witchcraft.  If it’s to be dealt with as a horror film, it’s Imposter Syndrome Horror (or maybe just a nightmare scenario where Freddy Krueger is your adoptive mother).  Mostly, though, it’s a supernatural drama about all the various ways life can be miserable unless you luck into a well-nurtured youth.

19. Hatching – A great entry in the Puberty as Monstrous Transformation canon, along with titles like Ginger Snaps, Jennifer’s Body, Teeth, and Carrie.  Stands out in that crowd by adding an extra layer about mothers living vicariously through their daughters in unhealthy ways.  Also achieves a lot on what appears to be a limited budget, leaning into its cheapness to create the kind of plastic world you’d expect to find in a music box.

20. Men – There’s been a lot of pushback against the idea that A24 has a house style, but I’m pretty sure I would’ve guessed the studio that produced this before I would’ve guessed the director.  Alex Garland is usually reliable for chilly sci-fi, not atmospheric folk horror with a blatant 1:1 metaphor driving all of its grotesque imagery.  Kind of a useless distinction, though, since I’m a fan of both.  If it weren’t for the tabloidification of Don’t Worry Darling, this would easily be the most over-complained about movie of 2022.

-Brandon Ledet

The Eternal Children

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One of the most common themes among established big-name directors this awards season is the memoir film, with directors like James Gray (Armageddon Time), Sam Mendes (Empire of Light), and Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Bardo) aiming to make career-defining magnum opuses out of dramatic reenactments & distortions of personal memories.  Only Steven Spielberg appears to have emerged from that 2022 memoir scrum victorious.  The Fabelmans makes a fable out of Spielberg’s youth, tracking his fascination with The Power of Cinema from his first trip to the theater (to see the circus-themed studio epic The Greatest Show on Earth) to his teenage use of filmmaking as a therapy tool throughout his parents’ divorce.  It’s being heralded as one of the best movies of the year, if not the best of Spielberg’s career . . . and I don’t understand that praise in the slightest.  If anything, I’m terrified to contract whatever subvariant of Film Twitter Brain Rot makes critics believe The Fabelmans is “late-style” Movie Magic but Cinema Paradiso is cornball schmaltz.  To his credit, Spielberg ensures that his memoir movie isn’t entirely comprised of shots of projectors flickering behind awed audiences modeling period costumes (although there is plenty of that ready-made imagery to go around); the movie is densely packed with detailed personal memories and messy interpersonal conflicts that are supposed to distinguish it from the more unembarrassed schmaltz of Paradiso.  And yet, the whole thing rings generic & phony, barely a step above the “aww shucks” Boomer nostalgia of A Christmas Story – if you’re not as reverent of Spielberg’s prominence in the cinema canon as the director is himself.  And it turns out plenty of people are, as evidenced by the film’s success over its fellow movie memoirs.

The most frustrating thing about The Fabelmans is there is a genuinely compelling, emotionally thorny drama at its core.  Through his geeky onscreen avatar Sammy Fabelman, Spielberg time travels back to a pivotal moment in his relationship with his mother (played by Michelle Williams in Judy Garland meltdown mode, sporting a lime cat haircut).  Beyond the broad caricatures of his mother as a right-brained free spirit—explaining the magic & poetry of movies to him after that fateful Greatest Show on Earth screening—and his father as a practical left-brained engineer—explaining the mechanics of movies as a technological illusion—the movie pinpoints their separation as a painful, epiphanic moment when Spielberg first saw his parents as real, flawed people, not just faceless pillars of authority & love.  It’s too bad that brain-breaking, cinema-rattling epiphany is buried under so much self-mythology about Spielberg’s early stirrings as an amateur filmmaker.  Instead of digging into the discomfort & detail of his changing relationship with his parents, the movie runs itself ragged trying to collect as many origin stories for the greatest hits of Spielberg Tropes as it can in 151 minutes.  We see the kids-on-bikes nostalgia of his early career-defining genre films foretold by his afternoon rides with his childhood boy scout troupe; we see a D.I.Y. trial run for his prestigious war epic Saving Private Ryan met with rapturous applause as the greatest backyard movie of all time; and, in the godawful concluding scene, we see him take direct inspiration from his boyhood hero John Ford, for no reason in particular.  The emotional core that supposedly separates The Fabelmans from sentimental schmaltz like Cinema Paradiso (a film I far prefer, at least for its clarity in intent) is buried under so much phony self-mythology that it has no room to resonate with any heft.

I was much more impressed with the smaller, more intimate memoir distortions of The Eternal Daughter that joined this year’s “autofiction” pile-up, if not only for being more direct & streamlined in its mother-child drama of discomforts.  Joanna Hogg’s latest is much less ostentatious than Spielberg’s by default, filmed on an independent budget under COVID-19 lockdowns instead of working with the kind of extravagant studio funds that are afforded to the world’s most famous director.  Hogg finds plenty of room for layered artifice in her small-cast drama, though, even while never losing sight of the mother-daughter tension at its core.  The Eternal Daughter is a slippery little supernatural mystery film that defies the tidiest boxes you want to file it away in.  It’s a ghost story about memory, not ghosts.  It’s directly connected to Hogg’s autobiographical Souvenir saga, but it works perfectly fine on its own, like a long-running series’ standalone, spooky Christmas special.  Tilda Swinton plays a mother-daughter duo in a dual role, but neither of performance is overly affected, and the back-and-forth bickering between them is more subtly devastating than cute.  In The Souvenir Parts I & II, Swinton’s real-life daughter (and Hogg’s real-life goddaughter) Honor Swinton Byrne played Hogg’s Sammy Fabelman avatar, while Swinton played her fictional mother onscreen.  In The Eternal Daughter, Swinton plays both roles, aged decades into the future, as they share an especially dour vacation in an empty hotel on the ghostly moors of Wales.  None of that Russian nesting-doll artifice really matters, though.  Neither does the ghost story framing of its drama.  All that matters is the way Hogg wrestles with the passive aggressive tensions of her mostly healthy relationship with her mother, and how a child seeing their parent’s personality & behavior reflected in themselves can be both wonderful & horrific, often simultaneously.

In the emotional climax of The Eternal Daughter, both versions of Swinton bicker about what time they should eat a celebratory birthday dinner.  That sounds like a minor frustration, but it’s far more hilarious and heartbreaking than any of the life-altering divorce drama from Spielberg’s actual relived childhood in The Fabelmans.  Listening to a mother-daughter duo volley “What do you think?” & “I’m not going to eat if you don’t” back and forth in an endless shot, reverse-shot nightmare feels painfully, relatably true to how passive aggressive, self-conflicted parental relationships play out in real life – even though you’re watching two Tilda Swintons bicker in a haunted hotel.  Somehow, Spielberg is staging dramatic reenactments of complex parental & marital betrayals that actually did happen in real life, and it all feels thuddingly false, inauthentic.  As a pair, both The Fabelmans and The Eternal Daughter find their filmmakers looking back on personal, familial memories and struggling with how the good feelings of the past are jumbled with the bad.  From there, your appreciation of either is almost a question of genre.  Are you more interested in the Raised By The Movies nostalgia trips of mainstream directors mythologizing their own childhoods as historical turning points in the artform, or are you more interested in the atmospheric tensions of a haunted-hotel ghost story that plays out under the eerie mood lighting of green & blue gels?  I found Hogg’s film more thematically direct & concise than Spielberg’s, which feels like a simultaneous one-for-them-one-for-me compromise that dilutes what he’s trying to work out onscreen.  My assumption is that his is the best of the recent crop of movie memoirs from Hollywood filmmaking giants, since the people who are more interested in that kind of thing have been singling it out as something special, a cut above.  I’ll likely never find out for myself, since there’s no promise of ghosts nor Tilda Swinton casting stunts to lure me in.

-Brandon Ledet

Gender Repeal Party

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In the back of my mind, I’ve been saving a couple slots on my personal Best of 2022 list for two titles that never screened theatrically in New Orleans: Amanda Kramer’s Please Baby Please and Bertrand Mandico’s After Blue (Dirty Paradise).  Having now rented both films for an especially lurid double feature, it turns out those reserved parking spots were totally justified. Both films hammered the exact personal pleasure centers I’m always looking to hit when seeking out new releases, exactly as expected.  What I didn’t expect was that they would be so sympatico in their dreamlike deconstructions of gender, nor that they would be thematic mirror opposites of their respective directors’ previous works.  I was introduced to Kramer through her apocalyptic meditation on the vicious, combative impulses of femininity in Ladyworld; I was introduced to Mandico through his wet nightmare vision of the vicious, combative impulses of masculinity in The Wild Boys.  With their latest features, they’ve swapped topics (i.e., swapped genders), which makes After Blue & Please Baby Please a rewarding, fascinating double feature beyond their momentary value as last-minute best-of-the-year contenders.

In Ladyworld, Amanda Kramer immerses her audience in a never-ending Buñuelian house party where a group of young women eternally, ritualistically tear each other apart in the darkest corners of feminine bloodlust.  In Please Baby Please, she reflects on the performative brutality of masculinity instead, abstracting & eroticizing the violence of traditional machismo.  After a seemingly cis-hetero 1950s couple falls in lust with a gang of leather-clad ruffians (the wife out of gender envy, the husband out of closeted homosexuality), they separately explore their own relationships with masculinity as a social power & as a fetish aesthetic.  As the couple unravels & retangles, Kramer ponders the question “What is a man, anyway?” through lofty academic discussions of how masculinity is socially engineered and through kinky fetishization of 1950s kitsch. Andrea Riseborough gives the performance of the year as the beatnik housewife turned Tom of Finland brute, approximating what it would be like if an especially rabid Jerri Blank had a Marlon Brando drag-king impersonation act.  Harry Meulling’s crisis of masculinity is much more internal & philosophical, interrupting every friend group conversation with off-topic questions about why he must perform a gender at all, much less one arbitrarily assigned at birth. The film is overflowing with queer menace, artifice, and excellence, all achieved on a community theatre budget. 

Bertrand Mandico’s The Wild Boys is my favorite film released in my lifetime, a complete gender meltdown that erodes all of the traditional characteristics & boundaries of masculinity in its titular group of nihilist ruffians but does not reform their vicious misbehavior when they emerge as women on the other end.  Mandico’s second feature is just as gorgeous, grotesque, and wonderfully genderfucked as that debut, but goddamn that’s a tough act to follow.  After Blue (Dirty Paradise) starts with feminine violence as its thematic anchor, dreaming of a far-out lesbian orgy planet that cowers in fear of a demonic, almighty serial killer named Kate Bush.  As a disgraced hairdresser and her horndog daughter hunt down the elusive Kate Bush in the alien wilderness and fall in lust with other bizarre women they meet along the way, After Blue proves to be just as visually & thematically daring as The Wild Boys, just on the opposite end of the gender spectrum.  The hallmarks of its sci-fi acid Western subgenre weighs heavily on its momentum & pacing, but it also constantly fills the frame with the most exciting, glitter-slathered nightmare imagery you’re likely to see this year.  It plays like someone fed “James Bidgood’s Dune movie” into one of those AI art generators, and the results are intoxicating, even if a little exhausting.

Anyone who has already tasted “the rotten fruit of [Mandico’s] imagination” knows what to expect from After Blue, but that’s more of a sign of his out-the-gate fervor as a fully formed auteur than a sign that he’s repeating himself.  By contrast, Kramer’s ideas & imagery appear to vary more from film to film, aiming for a fluorescent-trash version of John Waters’s aesthetic in Please Baby Please that I don’t believe was present in her previous work.  As a pair, they’re among the most exciting artists currently working in the medium of queer filmmaking, not least of all because of their respective indulgences in over-the-top visual style and their shared philosophical hostility towards rigid gender boundaries.  I have no idea where their careers are going (especially Kramer’s), but I’m confident in saying they’re already making some of the best movies out there on the new release calendar, and it’s a shame these two titles aren’t being published on more critics’ Best of the Year lists.

-Brandon Ledet

Blowing Up vs Shutting Down

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I recently took a long bus ride uptown to see my very first Antonioni film, projected on the big screen at the Prytania Theatre.  I enjoyed Blow-Up well enough but did not love it.  However, I do love some more genre-minded pictures that were directly inspired by it—namely Blow Out, Perversion Story, and The Eyes of Laura Mars—all titles I previously understood purely as giallo-era Hitchcock derivatives.  In contrast to those later, flashier works, Antonioni’s own perversion of a Hitchcockian murder mystery is a stubbornly arthouse-minded affair.  On paper, its story of a horndog fashion photographer in Swinging 60s London who uncovers evidence of a murder (and a larger political conspiracy to cover it up) in his photos reads like a stylish crime thriller.  In practice, Blow-Up deliberately withholds all the traditional payoffs of a murder mystery story & a political conspiracy thriller, instead dwelling in frustration & ambiguity.  If it’s a straight-up horror film, it’s about the existential horror of asking all your friends & acquaintances “Hey, you guys wanna see a dead body?” and no one taking you up on the offer, leaving you to sit with your own morbid fascination and no outlet for the tension.  As a result, it’s the kind of movie that earns measured “That was interesting!” compliments instead of more genuine, swooning enthusiasm.

To be honest, the most rewarding part of the screening was not Blow-Up itself, but its presentation.  The film was preceded by a lengthy slideshow lecture about The Beatles’ albums Rubber Soul & Revolver, which had nothing to do with the movie except that it happened to be set in London in the 1960s.  It was clear most of the audience was not aware of this deeply nerdy opening act, which pushed the start time a full precious hour later into the weeknight.  Every new slide about how well 45″ singles like “Paperback Writer” or “Yellow Submarine” were reviewed in the papers had people audibly groaning in frustration, with a small crowd of younger moviegoers cowering in the lobby, desperate for the rant to end.  It was an incredible bonding experience, like surviving a group hostage situation.  I don’t know that the lecture sold many Beatles-themed history books as potential Christmas gifts in the lobby, as intended, but it did a lot to restore my personal faith in humanity on both ends; it was good to know that the kids out there are still indignant brats and that the nerds are still oblivious to their audiences’ attention span for rapid-fire niche interest stats.  I often go to the theater alone, talk to no one except the box office worker, and leave without even making so much as eye contact with my fellow moviegoers, much less conversation.  By contrast, that Blow-Up screening felt like a substantial Community Event.

Somewhere in the lengthy preamble to the feature presentation, I found myself chatting with an employee at the theatre and expressed gratitude that they were adding more repertory classics to their weekly schedule. It turns out the single-screener only had room for this extra rep screening because the Oscar Bait Movie of the Week, She Said, was doing poorly.  And while the audience for Blow-Up might have been groaning at the nonstop onslaught of mid-60s #BeatlesFacts before the show, I was encouraged to see them show up & stick it out.  There were a few dozen people in attendance, when I’ve gotten used to sharing the room with much smaller crowds on my artsy-fartsy weeknight excursions.  After reading so many doomsaying national headlines about the box office disappointments of Awards Season hopefuls like She Said, The Fabelmans, Triangle of Sadness, and Tár, I was starting to worry that my local independent movie theatres might not be able to survive between superhero epics & Top Gun sequels if audiences are just going to wait for everything else on the marquee to hit streaming services.  Seeing that crowd show up for Blow-Up (and struggle to stay up for The Beatles) gave me hope that the business might not be dying, just changing.  If art-friendly spaces like The Prytania, The Broad, and Zeitgeist have to survive on community events & repertory screenings instead of Avatar-scale CG monstrosities the world may be all the better for it.

Even that night, I had to choose between seeing Blow-Up for the first time uptown at The Prytania or Hitchcock’s North by Northwest for the first time down the street at The Broad.  And The Prytania’s new downtown location has been running more regular repertory screenings than either of those locations combined, something I don’t know that I’ve ever seen with any regularity in this city.  I may not have fallen totally in love with Blow-Up on this first viewing, but it did feel like I was placing an essential puzzle piece in my larger understanding of genre film history, the same way that I felt seeing big-screen presentations of Ghost in the Shell & The Fog for the first time in recent months.  I do want to see the trend of every non-superhero movie struggling to make money continue in this post-COVID, rushed-to-streaming world, because I fear that theatres will not be able to sell enough booze & popcorn to stay afloat.  That momentum may be unstoppable at this point, though, and that surprisingly well-attended Blow-Up screening gave me hope that there might be another way to combat audiences’ exponential disinterest in trying new, uncanonized art.  I can’t speak for the rest of that crowd, but I’ll sit through a hundred more Beatles lectures if it means I get to keep watching weird, divisive movies projected big & loud.  If nothing else, I’m too old & too tired to find a new hobby at this point in my life.

-Brandon Ledet

Bottom of the Gun Barrel

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There are a lot of handwringing articles making the rounds right now about why Awards Season movies like She Said, Triangle of Sadness, and Tár aren’t luring audiences to theaters.  Of course, this annual ritual is always followed by complaints from “The Fans” that the Oscars and other highfalutin institutions don’t nominate movies that people have actually seen.  Personally, I’m glad they don’t.  Given that most casual audiences only show up for a few scattered Disney acquisitions, talking CG-animal comedies, and disposable opening-weekend horrors throughout the year, Awards Season would be an absolute bore if it were driven by box office sales.  This is the one time of year where smaller, stranger, quieter films get a little room to breathe in the public discourse outside the otherwise constant cacophony of jump scares, superhero battles, and Lyle, Lyle Crocodile’s bathtub croonings. Taking that away to boost an awards ceremony’s TV ratings would be anti-Art, if not outright evil.  Case in point: the top-grossing film of the year to date—and the only Actual Movie of the year in wider audience’s minds—is the decades-late nostalgia stoker Top Gun: Maverick, a movie that it is, to put it as generously as possible, an absurdly expensive pile of ice-cold dogshit.

A lot of people will tell you that the only way to truly soak in the majesty of Top Gun: Maverick was to experience it in its large-screen format at your local multiplex’s imitation IMAX.  Personally, I feel like I watched it the way it was meant to be seen: scaled down to the back of a plane-seat headrest on a late-night flight.  While Maverick‘s biggest fans ooh’d & ahh’d at the Navy’s high-speed fighter jets roaring in perfectly calibrated digital clarity, I got the full 4D experience, with a real-life airplane engine providing aural background texture and the dull fear of a tragic mid-flight crash pumping up my adrenaline levels.  Even in my personal one-man rumble seat theatre in the sky, I despised the film, increasingly growing angry at audiences’ lack of appetite for the much tastier delicacies that were left to rot in empty theaters this year.  Top Gun: Maverick is a rusty carnival ride through a cobwebbed Hall of Memories – an algorithmic simulation of cinema.  Making Maverick after it was already pre-parodied in MacGruber is exactly as embarrassing as making a by-the-numbers musician biopic after Walk Hard.  It might even be a worse offense, considering how much more money was wasted on its $170mil production than smaller projects like Bohemian Rhapsody or Stardust (and for a much more insidious political purpose).  Either way, it was already perfectly, ruthlessly mocked years before release.  It’s nothing; it’s a joke; it’s the most popular movie of 2022 (at least until the next bloated-budget blockbuster sequel down the line, Avatar: The Way of Water, is given time to catch up).

Martin Scorsese has become a Gen-Z punching bag for an off-hand comment he made comparing modern superhero blockbusters to amusement park rides, and I think he’s only been proven right in the years since.  In this dual Navy recruitment tool and elaborate vanity project, Tom Cruise’s renegade fighter pilot is a real-world superhero, with every other character marveling that “He’s the fastest man alive” in slack-jawed awe as he Supermans his way through the sky.  He looks ghoulish in close-up as the force of his supernatural speed yanks his skin to the back of his skull, but we’re meant to fawn over his eternal good looks & boyish charm.  Since he has no grey hair and total control over the flattering angles he’s filmed from, we see no signs of his decades of aging since the original Top Gun, other than that he texts with full punctuation.  It’s like revisiting a Disney park attraction every few decades; the animatronic hosts behind the red ropes look mostly the same as they did your last visit, except a little haggard from years of repeating the same few robotic maneuvers.  And the wonders he’s there to guide you through only appear smaller & sadder as you grow older: a simulated ride in an airfighter’s cockpit; a technical showcase of your local multiplex’s outdated sound system; a soullessly reenacted clip from a movie you used to like, scored with just as many notes of Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire” to stoke the memory before moving on to the next empty, sad display.  Maverick is the abandoned wing of the amusement park that the owners didn’t bother to update, just a few months away from being replaced by something new & worse.

I could understand skepticism that watching Maverick on an uncomfortable airplane flight—eyes occasionally drawn to the private screening of That Thing You Do! on the headrest next to mine—is sufficient enough of an attempt at genuine appreciation.  As a counterargument, I’d like to report that I watched the original 1986 Top Gun on my connection flight that same night, and I loved it.  I remember being bored by Top Gun‘s rah-rah militarism on my first watch decades ago, so maybe it only clicked with me this go-round in comparison to its algorithmic snoozer of a sequel.  Either way, it’s undeniable that it looks better than its 2022 counterpart.  Tony Scott’s high-style approach to the material makes for gorgeous, horned-up pop art that only could have been produced in the MTV era.  In Maverick, Tom Cruise frequently repeats the mantra “Don’t think, just do” as an overt suggestion to the audience that we shut off our brains and enjoy the ride.  In contrast, Tony Scott shuts our brains off for us, packing the screen with so many wordless, sweaty music video montages that the film somehow plays more like a wet dream than a military recruitment ad.  Both films have visible hard-ons for the tools of US imperialist warfare, but only the original conveys the sexiness of the machinery and the meatheads who operate it in a genuinely swoonworthy way.  All of the color, flavor, and texture of that MTV reverie are drained from the sequel to the point where all that’s left is the machinery itself – none more important than the T-800 hyperalloy endoskeleton just under the surface of Cruise’s synthetic skin.

It’s okay that Top Gun: Maverick exists.  Something has to sell enough popcorn & sodas to keep movie theaters afloat.  What’s chafing me is the argument that it needs to be formally recognized as one of the best movies of the year in order to keep the Oscars’ TV ratings viable.  This movie belongs on the showroom floor of a Best Buy, advertising overpriced 4K TVs, not parading across an awards stage or printed on a critical publication’s Best of the Year list.  It’s not even a movie, really.  It’s an echo of a movie, an expensive version of Fathom Events re-running choppy digital streams of E.T. & The Goonies to make up for the industrial slow-down of pandemic-era #content.  The next time you hear someone complain that “They don’t make good movies anymore,” keep in mind that the only movies they’ve watched this year were a couple Spider-Man crossover sequels and this piece of shit.  Otherwise, they just halfway listened to a few Netflix Originals in the background while thumbing around on their phones.  There’s no need for critical institutions to cater to that audience; they’ve already spent all the money they’re going to spend at the carnival.

-Brandon Ledet

Decision to Broker

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There are two new high-profile, Korean-set detective dramas currently making the rounds, directed by Park Chan-wook and Hirokazu Kore-Eda.  Anyone familiar with the beloved auteurs’ past work would expect their latest films to be incomparable outside some light genre overlap and a shared national setting. They’d be right. Broker and Decision to Leave are tonally & narratively distinct enough that I’m likely doing them a disservice by lumping them together here, but as a pair I do think they indicate an interesting, mirrored career shift for their respective auteurs.  I know Park Chan-wook as an over-the-top sensationalist, one who pushes the boundaries of good taste & genre tropes within the confines of finely tuned, exquisitely staged chamber dramas.  By contrast, I know Hirokazu Kore-Eda as a restrained, observational dramatist who finds grand emotion & political importance in small, subtle gestures.  What makes their dual 2022 detective stories interesting as a pair is the way the two directors are both reaching towards a middle ground between those extremes.  Decision to Leave finds the usually more prankish Park working on his best behavior, while Broker finds Kore-Eda shaking up his typically underplayed docu-dramas with some more traditional, genre-minded payoffs.

That’s not to say that either director has compromised their personal stylistic touches or thematic obsessions.  In its broadest strokes, Broker is a very similar movie to Kore-Eda’s previous film, Shoplifters, which in turn was a more accessible version of his earlier triumph Nobody Knows.  A story about an illegal, D.I.Y. adoption agency who broker the sale of babies to families outside the foster system, Broker clearly continues Kore-Eda’s auteurist fascination with how unconventional parentage takes shape below the poverty line.  It just perks up that story with more entertainment-minded genre tropes and a more pronounced, devious sense of humor than I remember seeing in his previous work.  This is basically Shoplifters as a road trip movie where detectives are on the makeshift family’s tail, staking them out so they can be busted at the point of sale.  It’s a subtle introduction of accessible genre entertainment into Kore-Eda’s usual low-key dramas, a shift was seemingly influenced by the international success of Parasite – given it’s the Japanese director’s first film set in Korea, he anchors it to the charisma of Bong muse Song Kang-ho (as the lead broker), and he borrows its opening image from Parasite‘s iconic flood sequence.  Whatever the inspiration, Broker manages to feel much livelier that Kore-eda’s past work without sacrificing any of his usual emotional or political heft.

Unlike with Kore-Eda, I’m not sure that “measured restraint” is the first quality I look for in a Park Chan-wook film, but it does make Decision to Leave an interesting addition to his oeuvre.  You would expect his throwback crime story about an insomniac detective who falls disastrously in love with a femme fatale he suspects to be a murderer would land closer to Basic Instinct than to Hitchcock, but it seems he already got those erotic thriller indulgences out of his system with The Handmaiden.  It’s not any less thrilling than the lewder, more explosive payoffs of The Handmaiden, though.  There’s an exciting tension in watching Park push his more perverse impulses just below the surface of this traditionalist noir . . . for about an hour; then he starts more openly playing around with the detective-suspect eroticism of the genre.  Park holds himself together just long enough to tell the full classic Hollywood version of this detective story, then he stretches it a half-hour past its breaking point to search for the kinkier aspects of the detective-murderess dynamic.  It’s a relatively tame movie by his standards, but there are scenes where he lingers on the femme fatale displaying her domestic abuse wounds as an act of flirtation or becoming visibly aroused by her assigned-detective using brutal force against other perps.  It’s almost like watching Hitchcock make the subversively kinky Vertigo after he made the more explicitly perverse Frenzy, pulling back instead of leaning into his darkest impulses.

Maybe there’s an indication that these two distinct, disparate directors are gradually meeting in the middle – one softening their perversion stories’ sharpest edges and the other spicing up their intimate family dramas with some crime-world thrills.  More likely, they just happen to be pushing themselves to try new things instead of remaking the same picture over and over again, something that should be an auteur’s biggest fear.  Even if they both fully committed to these new directions in their work, it would take dozens of films for them to meet on common ground.  I just find it interesting that these deviations from their respective personal norms both happened to take the shape of detective stories set in the same country, released at the same time of year.

-Brandon Ledet

SEFCA’s Top 10 Films of 2022

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Swampflix’s official coverage of the best films of 2022 won’t start until January 2023, but listmaking season is already in full swing elsewhere.  General consensus on the best films of the year is starting to take shape as regional film critic associations are publishing their collective Best of the Year lists, and I’m proud to say I was able to take a small part in that ritual this year.  I voted in the Southeastern Film Critics Association poll for the best films of 2022, representing a consensus opinion among 84 critics across nine states in the American South.  Winners were announced this morning, and it’s a pretty great list!  At the very least, it’s incredibly cool to see the skull-cracking action flick RRR rank so highly among the winners (including a win for Best Foreign Language Film) and to see something as bizarre as Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic recognized as “the film that best evokes the spirit of the South” (SEFCA’s Gene Wyatt Award).  At Swampflix, we’re always pushing for vibrant, over-the-top genre filmmaking to be recognized alongside more typically prestigious Awards Season fare, and this year’s SEFCA winners include a healthy balance of both.

Speaking of which, the biggest story of this year’s list is the total dominance of the Daniels’ big-hearted sci-fi comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once.  Not only was it honored as our #1 film of the year, but it also pretty much swept all major categories, including awards for Best Actress (Michelle Yeoh), Best Supporting Actor (Ke Huy Quan), Best Director(s) (Daniels), and Best Original Screenplay (Daniels).  Online discussion of Everything Everywhere‘s faults & merits has gotten shockingly hyperbolic since it hit theaters way back in March, but it’s undeniably cool that a movie that playful & adventurous is earning so much genuine grassroots praise as a serious contender for Movie of the Year.  To quote SEFCA President Matt Goldberg in today’s press release, “As film critics, one of the best things we can do is celebrate films that push the boundaries of narrative and genre. We hope that our voice can pull in viewers who may not normally check out a film where two women with hot dog fingers figure out their relationship. As strange as the film can be, its core message of embracing the richness of our relationships in the face of nihilistic apathy will endure far beyond this year’s award season.”  Right on.

Check out the SEFCA’s Top 10 Films of 2022 list below, and the full list of this year’s awarded films on the organization’s website.

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once
2. The Banshees of Inisherin
3. The Fabelmans
4. Tár
5. Top Gun: Maverick
6. RRR
7. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
8. Women Talking
9. Nope
10. The Batman

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Company of Wolves (1984)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli continue their celebration of Angela Lansbury by discussing the coming-of-age werewolf anthology horror The Company of Wolves (1984).

00:00 Welcome

00:55 Knife+Heart (2018)
03:52 The Menu (2022)
05:00 Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2022)
08:20 Andor
09:58 Weird (2022)
13:50 Fire of Love (2022)
16:10 Barbarian (2022)
17:25 Fifty Shades
20:07 Do Revenge (2022)
22:14 Don’t Worry Darling (2022)
25:25 Bones and All (2022)
29:10 The Eternal Daughter (2022)

32:48 The Company of Wolves (1984)

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

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Podcast #174: Girl Asleep (2015) & Classic Twee

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Welcome to Episode #174 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss the merits & miseries of twee, comparing the 2015 twee-revival comedy Girl Asleep against a grab bag of aughts-era twee classics.

00:00 Welcome

02:26 Imitation of Life (1959)
05:00 Don’t Worry Darling (2022)
08:13 Banshees of Inisherin (2022)
13:00 Triangle of Sadness (2022)
17:05 Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
21:17 Solomon King (1978)

25:18 Girl Asleep (2015)
39:02 The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
55:22 Amélie (2001)
1:12:02 Garden State (2004)

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew

Bonus Features: A New Leaf (1972)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1972’s A New Leaf, was the directorial debut of stage comedy legend Elaine May.  May reluctantly starred in the film herself opposite Walter Matthau, who plays a destitute, asexual playboy aristocrat who plans to marry her neurotic heiress character, kill her, and liquidate her fortune.  Only, his plans are thwarted when it gradually dawns on him that there is one thing in the world he enjoys more than money: his wife’s company.  A New Leaf is a darkly funny, bitterly anti-romantic romcom until, against all odds, it ends on the familiarly sweet notes of a traditional romcom.  Elaine May’s performance is a large part of its success, as the only reasonable response to watching her nervously unravel under her gigantic glasses is to immediately blurt out “Marry me,” regardless of whether you also want to kill her for her inheritance.  It’s a shame, then, that her frustrations behind the camera tripped up the film’s potential success.

Every movie Elaine May directed was delivered over-schedule & over-budget.  Even her relatively laidback, low-budget debut stretched 40 days past its shooting schedule, with an entire hour of extraneous bits & bobs the studio edited out of the final product despite May’s protests that it needed to be a three-hour romcom to work.  If she had delivered A New Leaf on-time, on-budget, and properly trimmed, it would’ve been considered a huge hit instead of just breaking even, and she might’ve had an easier time fighting for her cuts of similarly troubled productions down the line.  Instead, she toiled away in the background, writing screenplays for some of the most beloved Hollywood comedies of all time – poor thing.  She did manage to squeeze four feature films out of Hollywood producers before they took away her director’s chair, though, and luckily for audiences they’re all great movies, whether or not they lost money.  If you enjoyed A New Leaf, I recommend that you watch all three films May directed afterwards, detailed below.  And if you’re a Hollywood producer, I recommend that you spend even more money on whatever dream project the 90-year-old auteur wants to see made before she leaves this world.  Chances are high you’ve already wasted much more money on much worse films.

The Heartbreak Kid (1972)

I guess it’s inaccurate to claim that every Elaine May movie was a commercial flop.  Her follow-up to A New Leaf was her one hit comedy, enough of a financial success that it inspired a major studio remake starring Ben Stiller in the aughts.  Curiously, it’s also the only film in her catalog that’s not currently available to watch at home through official means. The Heartbreak Kid has been left to rot on YouTube and Archive.org as a long-forgotten 20th Century Fox acquisition that the art-indifferent overlords at Disney have no concern for. Which is a shame, since it might very well be May’s career best as a director.  At the very least, its anti-romcom humor is even darker & more vicious than A New Leaf’s, which is impressive since that debut was about marital murder.

Charles Grodin stars as a fresh-out-of-college shit-talker who immediately realizes on a honeymoon road trip that he despises his bride.  While vacationing in Miami, he ditches her for a younger, blonder co-ed who he has no business fooling with, inevitably finding himself still deeply unhappy after another successful romantic conquest.  The Heartbreak Kid is essentially a horror film about a nightmare world where everyone has to marry the first person who makes them horny before they get to have sex, regardless of compatibility or moral deficiency.  May’s psychedelic zoom-ins on the Miami resort sunshine, Groden’s complaints that his wife is “not really his type,” and the escalating tension of the plot’s sitcom hijinks are outright maddening, whereas the similar poisonous romance humor of A New Leaf plays oddly, subtly sweet.  Together, they make a great pair, and they’re the best argument for May’s genius as a comedic auteur.

Mikey & Nicky (1976)

May’s least typical work is her all-in-one-night gangster drama Mikey & Nicky, starring Peter Falk & John Cassavetes as a pair of uneasy, paranoid friends at the bottom rung of the crime-world ladder.  Falk appears to be the kinder, more calming presence of the two, but over the course of the film both characters expose themselves as low-level scumbag criminals without a decent bone between either of their bodies.  They’re not all that different from the self-absorbed, oblivious brutes of May’s comedies, except that working in a different genre means she no longer has to ingratiate them to the audience for the story to work.  Moving away from a character-based comedy structure also expands her scope to capture a portrait of a grimy, pre-Giuliana era NYC instead of just a couple losers who occupy it.  The film’s late-night setting, 70s funk soundtrack, guerilla-style camerawork, and authentic casting of dive-bar creeps as background extras all feel like they’d be much more at home in a Scorsese picture like Taxi Driver or Mean Streets than a typical film from Elaine May.  But she’s damn good at it.

Mikey & Nicky presents the best argument that May deserves as much time to tinker around in the editing room as she desires.  The dialogue has a tight, pointed feel to it, as if the screenplay were written for the stage. So, it’s mind-blowing to read about how its narrative flow was mostly constructed after-the-fact in the editing room, like a sprawling, improv-based Apatow comedy.  Her way of putting a story together might not have been financially sound at the time (considering that her over-schedule shoots were burning through celluloid while Apatow’s only clutter up digital servers), but you can’t argue with the results. She makes great movies.

Ishtar (1987)

The only time I can feel the overcooked, under-planned sweatiness of Elaine May’s directorial style is in her final picture, the one that effectively became a punchline synonym for box office disaster.  Ishtar is not nearly as bad as its contemporary reviews suggested.  In its earliest stretch, it’s an ahead-of-its-time, Tim & Eric style anti-comedy, starring Dustin Hoffman & Warren Beatty as a pair of sub-mediocre songwriters who abandon their shared dream of making it big in New York City to instead make some quick money as a nightclub act in Morocco.  The film also isn’t as great as its modern reclaimers suggest.  Once it arrives in Morocco, May loses the personable intimacy that makes her earlier comedies so great, as Beatty & Hoffman’s buffoons are gradually drafted against their will into a conflict between the CIA, leftist guerillas, and the dictator of the fictional country of Ishtar.  The movie loses a little of its post-Andy Kauffman, proto-Tim & Eric sheen as the whole battle comes to a head in its third act slump, which involves a blind camel, some unfortunate detours into brown face, and our bumbling leads getting lost in the desert.

Despite some of that exhausting, comedy-killing bloat in the third act, Ishtar does not deserve its reputation as One of the Worst Comedies of All Time. It’s doubtful it was even the worst comedy released in the spring of 1985. The film is often funny in a strikingly subversive, adventurously unconventional way. It even goes as far as to include harsh criticisms of US interference with political affairs in the Middle East instead of broadly stereotyping the people of the region the way lazier 80s comedies would (for the most part).  Still, it ended up being the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, as it finally sealed May’s reputation as box office poison after four consecutive debacles. Even the critics had turned on May at the arrival of her final feature, seemingly eager to tear it down before it was even released.  Even if her productions were overly extravagant for what she was supposed to be delivering, I’d say that was a mistake.  After all, she was only hurting the money men.  She consistently put out great art, even when it was bad for business.

-Brandon Ledet