motorcycles

The Bikeriders (2024)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

The thing about shamelessly borrowing from Scorsese’s Goodfellas is that it works.  It worked for Paul Thomas Anderson when he applied the Goodfellas template to the Golden Age of porno in Boogie Nights.  It worked for Todd Haynes when he applied it to the classic glam rock scene in Velvet Goldmine (even if he had to mix in a healthy dose of Citizen Kane to throw critics off the scent).  And now it has worked just as well for Jeff Nichols in his new film The Bikeriders, which is essentially just Goodfellas on motorbikes.  All three of these Goodfellas derivatives follow a distinct pattern that starts in a Fuck Around era (in which they introduce the audience to the power outsiders feel when they find community in seemingly dangerous subcultures), followed by the requisite Find Out Era (in which those subcultures are unraveled by drugs & violence), distinctly marked by the turning of a decade.  They all heavily rely on vintage pop-music montage and period-specific costume design to evoke the cool-factor appeal of their subcultural settings, often underlined in wry voiceover.  I’m also of the lowbrow opinion that all three are the career-best feature films of their respective directors to date. It’s an overly familiar genre template, but that’s because it’s a consistently effective one.

If Nichols narrows in on any particular element of the Goodfellas formula that other imitators miss, it’s in the second-act narrator switch in which the protagonist-gangster’s wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), highjacks the story’s POV for a short stretch.  We get a great taste of how overwhelming it is to be plunged into the deep end of a foreign subculture during Karen’s wedding-sequence narration in particular, but more importantly we get a woman’s perspective on what makes that particular subculture sexy.  One of the most important line-readings of Scorsese’s script is Karen describing the first time she directly witnessed mobster violence first-hand, confessing “I know there are women, like my best friends, who would have gotten out of there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide. But I didn’t. I got to admit the truth. It turned me on.”  Jodie Comer’s wife-of-a-motorcycle rebel narrator Kathy keeps that horny engine running throughout the entire runtime of The Bikeriders, whereas Goodfellas only takes Karen’s POV for a few minutes.  It’s not enough that Jeff Nichols dresses up every young character-actor hunk of today in the fetishistic biker gear of yesteryear, mounted on the backs of roaring sex machines.  He also frames them from the perspective of a woman panting like a cartoon hound in disbelief of how ridiculous and how ridiculously sexy they are.  Comer gives the best lead performance of the year as a result, even if she is just a regional accent in high-waist jeans.

Otherwise, the movie rides within the painted lines of the road that Goodfellas paved.  The Shangri-Las check off the 60s-Girl-Group-Soundtrack requirement of the template, with “Out in the Streets” deployed as an overture that explains Comer’s lustful fascination with Austin Butler’s bad-boy rebel.  She has to compete for his attention with Tom Hardy’s gang leader, who is living out a fantasy in his head in which he is the Wild One Brando to Butler’s Causeless Rebel Dean.  Nichols positions Hardy as a weekend-warrior poser and Butler as the real-deal biker rebel that all of his fellow riders strive to emulate.  They form a motorcycle riding club in the Fuck Around 1960s, then cower in disgust as it spirals out of control in the Find Out 1970s, mostly due to Vietnam War PTSD from their younger recruits.  Comer maintains a “Can you believe these guys?” incredulity throughout that helps keep the mood light, recounting tales from the road to a photojournalist played by Mike Faist, who in real life published the anthropological portraits that Nichols adapted to the screen.  From there, the cast is rounded out by young That Guy character actors playing eccentric bikers with ludicrous nicknames: Norman Reedus as Funny Sonny, Karl Glusman as Corky, Michael Shannon as Zipco, Toby Wallace as The Kid, etc.  They all look just as great in their grimy leather jackets as the cast of Goodfellas looked in their shiny silk suits.

All of this posing & posturing in vintage biker gear makes total sense for a movie adapted from a series of portraits where motorcycle nerds & freaks posed for still images.  It’s also appropriate for a subculture that was so intrinsically image-obsessed, wherein men with regular jobs & families would play dress-up with their buddies to live out the rebel-biker fantasies they would otherwise only see at The Movies.  The Bikeriders is not a pure, prurient portrait of handsome men in leather & denim, though.  It’s much less of a capital-A Art Film than Katherine Bigelow’s The Loveless in that way, even though it shares its themes & interests.  The Goodfellas template allows it to indulge in as much sexy rebel-biker fantasy and subcultural anthropology as it wants without leaving a mainstream audience behind in its dust.  It might be an unimaginative way to hold a movie together, but dammit it works every time.

-Brandon Ledet

Shin Kamen Rider (2023)

/ swampflix / 10 Comments

As omnipresent as superhero media feels in pop culture right now, I honestly don’t think it’s much more prevalent than it was when I was a child in the 80s & 90s.  It may be more aggressively marketed to adults now, but it’s always been around. The major difference between post-MCU, post-Dark Knight comic book adaptations and the Saturday morning superhero schlock I grew up with is that adults are now expected to take them seriously as meaningful art, each with their own decades of backstory worthy of literary study.  As a child I was aware that characters like Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, and the X-Men had long-running, epic scale stories that stretched beyond the thirty-minute episodes of their respective animated series.  I would tune into those episodes sporadically, though, and I didn’t really need to know their larger stories to enjoy the simple pleasures of their violent Good Guys vs. Bad Guys morality tales.  In contrast, now you have to watch Batman learn ninja skills for an entire origin saga before he can start Batmanning in earnest.  You have to watch 30 feature films, several streaming series, and a non-denominational holiday special to fully appreciate a talking raccoon whooping ass in space.  Context & lore used to matter way less in our long-running superhero epics, or at least they used to be secondary to novelty & iconography.  That’s why it was so thrilling to return to that vintage style of Saturday morning superhero storytelling in Hideaki Anno’s Shin Kamen Rider, which hurls you directly into the continued adventures of its titular cyborg superhero without any expectation that you’ll have done your decades of televised homework before arriving at the theater.  Its approach to lore is confusing the same way the subtextual meanings of an abstract art film can be; you’re not expected to know the answer, and it’s freeing to admit you’re lost and just enjoy the ride.

Yes, Shin Kamen Rider is technically connected to a network of other Anno-revived tokusatsu franchises—Shin Godzilla, Shin Ultraman, and the latest Neon Genesis Evangelion reboot—all bundled under the banner of the “Shin Japan Heroes Universe.”  Unlike with the MCU, however, each title in the SJHU is designed to work as a standalone project, only crossing over in action figure toy commercials instead of Cultural Event double features like Infinity War & Endgame.  Shin Kamen Rider‘s connection to Anno’s other two “Shin” tokusatsu titles is more one of method than one of narrative.  It carries over all of the retro kitsch of Shin Ultraman and the volatile brutality of Shin Godzilla, now streamlined into one unfathomably efficient superhero saga.  All you really need to know is that our titular hero is a grasshopper-hybrid cyborg man who escapes the evil laboratory that augmented his body and vows to destroy it before they augment the rest of humanity.  Anno doesn’t bother with Kamen Rider’s origin story, nor even his escape from the lab.  He invites the audience to join in three or four episodes into a Kamen Rider TV series, then zips through the next half-century’s weekly storylines so quickly there’s no time to care whether you have any idea what’s going on. You just do your best to tag along for the high-speed motorcycle rides & insectoid hyperviolence or you miss a season’s worth of plot reveals in a single blink.  And if you blink, so what?  There’s still plenty for-its-own-sake pleasure in watching the heroic grasshopper cyborg man beat up the evil cyborg spider man, the evil cyborg bat man, the evil cyborg mantis man, and so on, regardless of why he’s doing it.  I didn’t grow up with the Kamen Rider TV series as a kid, but I did have a very similar experience watching the Americanized tokusatsu series Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, where I would enjoy whatever random, out-of-order episodes I happened to catch on a schedule I was too young to control, continuity be damned.

The paradox here is that while Anno is not taking the longform lore of superhero storytelling all that seriously, his SJHU movies are much more emotionally earnest than the jokey, sarcastic heroes of The MCU.  While all modern Marvel heroes have borrowed a touch of self-satirical Deadpool snark, Anno takes the emotional stakes of his outlandish superhero premises 100% seriously.  Shin Godzilla is a scathing political satire about the inefficiency of bureaucratic government in the face of genuine public crisis.  Shin Ultraman is a loving tribute to humanity’s go-getter resiliency despite that governmental failure to unite & protect.  Shin Kamen Rider is more of a brooding, Upgrade-style tale of a hero horrified by the violence he’s capable of, isolated & alienated by the biological weaponry of his augmented body.  Despite its jabs of soulful remorse between fight scenes, though, it still indulges in the retro kitsch of reviving a 1970s children’s TV show for its 50th anniversary – mimicking the cheap-o action cinema style of its source material for modern audiences’ semi-ironic amusement.  Anno frames every establishing shot and character movement with the attention to visual detail he brought to anime, so that a leather glove casually falling to the floor is afforded the same heft of a building crumbling or a world ending.  He carries over the extreme wide-angle camera work of Shin Ultraman but frees it from that film’s drab office spaces, so it feels less like Soderbergh doing anime and more like the first-person-POV of a bug.  There’s an inherent visual absurdity to following a cyborg grasshopper man on a motorcycle from one insectoid enemy to another that Anno never shies away from, but he also takes that heroic bug man’s self-conflicted emotions seriously as he stares at the blood dripping from his leather-gloved hands.  It’s a tricky tonal balance to achieve, no matter how easy Anno makes it look.

You do not have to be specifically nostalgic for the original Kamen Rider TV series to enjoy the Shin Kamen Rider film.  It does help to be generally nostalgic for the episodic superhero media of yesteryear, though, assuming you’re old enough to remember a time when you were only expected to vaguely know what Batman’s deal was to enjoy a Batman film.  Before the streaming era, it took a lot of effort, time, and money to be a nerd-culture completist, and it was okay to dip your toe into this kind of thing mid-adventure – encouraged, even.  All that really mattered was whether you were enticed to buy the action figures.

-Brandon Ledet

Streets of Fire (1984)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

I’m sure there are plenty of real-life biker gangs that have been a terrifying menace in whatever communities they rumble through, but I feel like most of my exposure to that culture has been sanitized & defanged to the point where I don’t see them as a threat.  From Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones to Vanilla Ice in Cool as Ice, there’s a long history of retro biker gangs that look tough on the screen but never actually follow through on their threats.  Likewise, most bikers I see in the streets these days appear to be bored men in midlife crisis, trying to muster up some Leather Daddy fashionability instead of just plain Dad Vibes.  Apparently, that de-emphasized biker menace bothered notorious genre filmmaker Walter Hill as well, presumably after growing up in the Marlon Brando era of biker-with-a-heart-of-gold dramas as a teenager.  Hill seemingly made an entire feature film just to make bikers feel genuinely dangerous again, terrorizing a 1980s audience with revamped black-leather bullies from his 1950s youth.

Streets of Fire is a 50s teen-delinquent throwback sleazed up with 80s music video neons.  Self-described as “a rock & roll fable” set in “another time and another place,” it exists in a make-believe limbo that covers both decades at once – the same neon-noir aesthetic as Alan Rudolph’s Trouble in Mind.  It’s basically The Wild Ones sped up for MTV sensibilities, with music-video crosscutting and a constant, aggressive drumbeat keeping the audience’s blood pumping like mad while its rabid biker gangs raise Hell up & down the streets of the fictional city of “Richmond” (read: Chicago).  Bikers get away with stripping innocent citizens nude in the street and dragging them across the asphalt trailing behind their roaring bikes as they smash every storefront window in their vicious path, but they cross a line when they kidnap a famous rock ‘n roll singer in the middle of her sold-out concert.  The heist mission to rescue that singer from biker-gang territory nearly burns the entire city to the ground, and it’s legitimately terrifying in a way few—if any—1950s biker films were allowed to be.

The only thing that really slows Streets of Fire down is its dead-eyed lead, Michael Paré, which is bizarre since the rest of the cast is packed with exciting, charismatic people you always love to see.  Willem Dafoe is a gorgeous sex goblin as the main biker villain, recalling his leather-clad brute performance in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Loveless.  Likewise, Diane Lane’s performance as the kidnapped rock ‘n roll singer feels like an MTV-era update to her persona in The Fabulous Stains, right down to the red & black color story of her wardrobe.  Rick Moranis is maybe the only main player who’s cast against type as the tough-guy music manager who hires a vigilante to rescue his missing talent, playing the part of a macho bully that’s usually reserved for men three times his size.  Paré does not bring much to the table as the mercenary hero in contrast.  He’s generically handsome, but he’s got no personality to speak of.  Walter Hill directs every single character to deliver action hero one-liners in amphetamine-rattled noir speak, and Paré’s the only one who mumbles his way through them like a long-lost Stallone brother.

While Paré is a major liability as the narrative center of attention, Hill’s high-style visual theatrics more than compensate for his lack of screen presence.  Flaming motorcycles, S&M butcher outfits, neon crosslighting, and a music video performance of the soft-rock hit “I Can Dream About You” all violently combine to make a singular genre picture – one that revitalizes a long-subdued subculture that’s rarely as tough as it looks.  For the record, Cool as Ice is also a high-style delight; I just wouldn’t say that Vanilla Ice was exactly “scary” in it.  Meanwhile, Willem Dafoe is a goddamn nightmare.

-Brandon Ledet

Motorpsycho! (1965)

/ swampflix / 13 Comments

EPSON MFP image

halfstar

campstamp

With his first two black & white “roughies”, Russ Meyer was palpably building towards something special that just quite wasn’t in reach. In what critic & friend Roger Ebert dubbed Meyer’s “Gothic period,” the tirelessly perverted director had established a very distinct atmosphere of violent, maniacal, sex-crazed dread in Lorna & Mudhoney that was pushing his career towards the cartoonish war of the sexes trashterpieces that would eventually make him a B-movie legend. Unfortunately, before Meyer would more or less perfect the roughie picture with Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, he would end up making one of the worst films of his career, Motorpsycho!. Halfway between Marlon Brando’s landmark motorcycle gang classic The Wild One & Roger Corman’s Easy Rider-precursor The Wild Angels, Motorpsycho! is a fairly straightforward proposition of Meyer’s usual bevy of buxom babes recontextualized in a world of instrumental psych rock & loud motorbikes. Too bad it’s a grotesquely misogynistic bore & one of the most vile films of the director’s entire oeuvre. I’m usually on board with Meyer’s peculiar brand of brutish horndoggery, because it reveals such a deeply strange character underneath his militaristic, all-American façade, but Motorpsycho! is honestly too repugnant to excuse on artistic grounds, campy or not.

There isn’t really much plot to speak of here. A biker gang that looks like The Evil Beatles terrorizes a small desert community, particularly preying on isolated women. True to Meyer fashion, tragedy befalls couples wherein a man is inattentive or just generally a bad lover, but in this case the victims are almost invariably female. Early in the film when a man complains that his wife’s noisy playfulness “ruined the fishing,” she cheekily retorts, “You’ve got the best there is on your line right now!” This kind of banter might be entertaining if it weren’t immediately followed by the woman being physically assaulted by a bunch of young male punks in leather jackets. There’s no particular sense of purpose for the film’s ultraviolence. It just sort of happens without rhyme or reason. By the time Meyer appears in the film himself, playing a cop (of course) & remarking upon the body of one of the gang’s victims (to her grieving husband!) “Nothing happened to her that a woman ain’t built for”, the whole affair feels unbearably sleazy, nothing conceivably being able to redeem it from its own pointless, misanthropic cruelty.

As much as I despised Motorpsycho!, I’m still glad it was made. The story goes that after making the movie, Russ was stricken with a brilliant idea: to retell the story, except featuring buxom hotrod women instead of brutish motorcycle men. Thus, the basic idea for the much superior Faster, Pussycat! was born. Motorpsycho! also saw the first appearance of Meyer superstar Haji, who would go on to star in Pussycat!, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Supervixens!, and so on. Haji only has exactly one memorable moment in Motorpsycho! (being shouted at by a male co-star to remove snake venom from a bite on his leg with hilarious, in bad taste shouts of “Suck it!” & “Spit it out!”), but it’s still a start. Besides its historical significance as a Faster, Pussycat! precursor, Motorpsycho! also partially inspired the White Zombie track “Thunderkiss ’65” & provided the name for a Norweigian indie rock band (much like Pussycat! & Mudhoney) as well as being credited as one of the first on-screen representations of Vietnam War-related PTSD (in the gang leader & last surviving member of The Evil Beatles). It also marks the beginning a period of time when Meyer significantly scaled back the nudity in his films (a godsend in this case), possibly due to the exhausting morality case coutroom battles instigated by Lorna & Mudhoney that later Hollywood productions would greatly benefit from. Otherwise, there’s not much else to see here. The best of Russ Meyer was still yet to come, one of his most repulsive works now thankfully behind him.

-Brandon Ledet