nuclear war

Nuclear Missed Connections

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Ross McElwee’s landmark 1985 documentary Sherman’s March is now back in circulation, pristinely restored and streaming VOD for anyone who’s already watched every episode of How To with John Wilson and is searching for their next softspoken doomsayer fix. At first glance, Sherman’s March appears to be wryly narcissistic, with McElwee spending nearly three hours overanalyzing his own trivial romantic foibles instead of directly tackling the historical topic he was granted money to document. It’s not so much the Civil War military campaign of Sherman March‘s title that has been lingering with me in the weeks since I first saw the film, though. I’ve instead found myself dwelling on the significance of its subtitle, A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Proliferation. Like everyone else raised during the existential uncertainty of the Cold War, McElwee can’t help but filter his personal decisions and worldview through the lens of imminent nuclear annihilation. What, ultimately, would be the point making a romantic connection in the end times of the 1980s, given that the push of a few buttons could end all human existence the entire planet over at any given minute? In practice, the potential for nuclear war doesn’t directly affect McElwee’s love life all that much in Sherman’s March, except during the stretch where he romantically pursues a nuclear disarmament activist. The threat of nuclear holocaust does quietly hum in the background throughout the picture, though, as intentionally provoked by its subtitle. It was, presumably, a constant hum in the background of everything in that era, as I’ve continued to hear it humming in the couple other late-80s, early-90s titles that I’ve happened to catch in the past couple weeks since writing about Sherman’s March.

I mostly threw on 1988’s Miracle Mile because it offered a rare opportunity to see Anthony Edwards in a lead role outside the television show I’m currently binge-watching: ER. Even better, Edwards’s love interest in the film is played by Mare Winningham, who had a brief run as Edwards’s maniacally obsessed stalker on ER and who also recently married him in real life after a long-simmering infatuation. That odd, bittersweet connection between the two actors is only amplified by Miracle Mile, which initially plays like a video store-era romcom before it blows up into a nuclear disaster epic. Edwards stars as a bitterly sarcastic Los Angeleno who finally finds a woman he vibes with in the desperately lonely, phony West Coast city — a devil-may-care free spirit played by Winningham. Unfortunately, they only go on one sweetheart date before Edwards receives the payphone call that ruins everything.  A stranger on the other end of the line tells him that the world is about to end and the bombs are already on their way, so Edwards scrambles to recruit a crew of fellow survivors from an all-night diner to escape the fallout, in a prototype for Gore Verbinki’s recent apocalyptic satire Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. Only, no one can manage to catch the first helicopter out of town because everyone has someone in their life they want to take with them to safety, delaying departure to disastrous results. For Edwards’s sadsack lead, that special someone is a girl he just met, which would be sweetly romantic if it weren’t for the fact that both of their faces will likely be melted off by a nuclear blast before they get a chance to properly smooch. If it weren’t for Miracle Miles‘s moody synth score from Tangerine Dream, you could mistake its opening half for an old-school Hollywood romcom. Once the bombs are on their way, though, things get increasingly bleak, and the “possibility of romantic love in […] an era of nuclear proliferation” only gets bleaker by the minute until the story abruptly ends at the bleakest moment imaginable.

In the broadest terms, Miracle Mile does function as a comedy, but it’s also a city-wide portrait of a Cold War community in distress. Tonally, it’s the Los Angeles version of Scorsese’s After Hours, just as funny as it is stressful. The geographic specificity of its setting and the maniacally episodic nature of Edwards’s interactions with his fellow freaked-out Los Angelenos also reminded me a lot of McElwee’s romantic missed connections in Sherman’s March in ways I didn’t expect, given the disparity in the two films’ chosen genres. Likewise, I didn’t expect to be dwelling on that same topic yet again while watching Richard Linklater’s 1990 debut Slacker, which recently screened at The Broad’s repertory Gap Tooth series. Linklater himself appears on camera in the opening scene of Slacker to lay out the film’s episodic structure. He plays an aimless Gen-X slacker who’s too overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities of life to make any significant choice about what to do with himself, since every path he could take is just as valid and justifiable as the other. This apparently extends to his indecision on what story to tell, as Slacker spends an entire day hopping from one conversation to another down the sun-damaged streets of Austin, Texas, eavesdropping on a nonstop parade of absurdly verbose underachievers as they ramble about whatever’s on their empty minds, one thought at a time. Like the regional South of Sherman’s March and the late-night Los Angeles of Miracle Mile, the Austin of Slacker is revealed to the audience through broad communal portraiture, with every chatty loser who crosses the screen just as worthy of their own day-in-the-life portrait as the next. Like in the other two movies, Slacker also finds its community psychologically fucked up by the constant threat of nuclear obliteration, as expressed in random characters’ paranoid political rants and in one specific weirdo’s video-art instillation that loops nuclear test footage across a haphazard collection of cathode-ray TVs. Only, Linklater’s proudly unambitious characters appear to be preemptively operating as if the world has already ended, without waiting for the bombs to actually go off. It’s long been over, and everyone who’s left hanging around after our undetected apocalypse has their own crackpot theories on how it happened and how humanity can best spend our time toiling in the rubble.

I was a lot more charmed by Slacker than I usually am by Linklater’s low-effort Gen-X posturings, if not only because its turned-on, tuned-in, dropped-out hipsterdom spoke to a larger political sentiment within its contemporary moment (something his later, bigger-budgeted works would repeatedly attempt to recreate with no discernible thematic point at all). As one Austinite slacker puts it, “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy.” Admittedly, I also enjoyed the movie simply because I enjoyed hanging around the late-80s Austin scene populated by its various losers & eccentrics. Sure, it’s overrun with twentysomething stoner philosophers who are way too confident that they understand How the World Works for kids who haven’t yet lived a real life, but there’s something undeniably charming about their zen-like collective naivete. I also found myself getting excited by minor details specific to that exact Austin moment, like the deranged conman rant from Butthole Surfers drummer Teresa Nervosa or the brief sound of Daniel Johnston’s chord organ playing in a passing car (or, even more particularly, the appearance of Johnston’s one-time girlfriend Kathy McCarty, who gives extensive interviews about his life & art in The Devil and Daniel Johnston). It’s impossible to love every crazed Austinite who spouts their own personal conspiracy theories about our post-apocalyptic planet in Slacker, but it’s easy to love the city that allows them blow around in the Texas breeze like human tumbleweeds, jobless and relatively carefree. The same goes for the late-night diner patrons of Miracle Mile and the genteel, Southern-accented women of Sherman’s March. As individuals, they can be grating or alarming, but as broader communities, they’re a joy to spend time with. That’s why it’s so tragic that time is running out for them, that the doomsday clock is tirelessly ticking away. Each of these Cold War communal portraits find their doomed citizens scrambling to make meaningful connections with each other while the threat of nuclear apocalypse looms outside the frame. They all make a point to portray a version of humanity that is worth saving while also acknowledging that it’s likely too late to stop the bombs from going off anyway. Thank your lucky stars that it’s not the 1980s anymore, and it no longer feels like we’re living pointless lives in the earliest hours of the apocalypse. It might be difficult to fully enjoy each other’s company knowing that we’ve already reached the beginning of the end.

-Brandon Ledet

Café Flesh (1982)

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The most infamous critical assessment of pornographic filmmaking was penned by a judge, not by a professional film critic. During a 1964 obscenity case, US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was forced to legally define the dividing line where sexually explicit art becomes hardcore pornography, and the best he could come up with was “I know it when I see it.” At the time, he was ruling on what kinds of material would be legally approved for public exhibition in the US, participating in a long tradition of governmental censorship of pornographic art, but it was such a rarely honest, human moment within that tradition that it’s continued to reverberate in the half-century since. That “I know it when I see it” ruling even continues to resonate in how modern film critics write about pornographic cinema, as the Porno Chic moment of the 1970s & 80s has once again become a fascination for film-nerd tastemakers. There’s an attraction among hip genre-film aesthetes to treat vintage hardcore pornography as the next taboo cult-cinema frontier to be conquered, now that every last slasher, giallo, erotic thriller, and noir pic of any interest has already been given the loving 4K Blu-Ray restoration treatment. How far does that renewed critical interest in hardcore porno go, though? If a vintage porno like Bijou or Blonde Ambition is worthy of critical re-appraisal through a modern lens, why aren’t more recent best-seller titles like Visiting My Anal In-Laws 2 or POV Juggfuckers 8 also afforded that same critical consideration? I’ve personally reviewed feature-length porno parodies of films as wide-ranging as Batman, West World, The Exorcist, and Repulsion on this very website, so why haven’t I also made the time for Pulp Friction, American Whore Story, or Back to the Cooter? Part of that decision making is that all movies become more interesting and culturally significant with time, so the better-funded, better plotted pornos made in the Golden Age of Porno Chic are going to be inherently more attractive for critical analysis than the straight-to-VOD porno of today. But where is the dividing line? Is there a definitive temporal or budgetary cutoff that cleanly divides the art from the schlock? The simple answer is no; I just know it when I see it.

Of course, this fussy self-analysis over what forms of hardcore pornography I consider worth covering on this sub-professional film blog doesn’t carry much big-picture significance. I’m no Supreme Court Justice. It was just on my mind after I looked up the 1982 dystopian sci-fi porno Café Flesh on the social media website Letterboxd: this generation’s online hub for cinematic discourse. I had just watched Café Flesh for the first time after purchasing a nice, newly restored scan of it on Blu-ray from the niche genre-cinema label Mondo Macabre. As if it wasn’t already embarrassing enough that I was curious what my fellow Letterboxd users had to say about the artistic merits of a 40-year-old porno, my search also dug up three titles in the Café Flesh series, not just the infamous one from director Stephen Sayadian. Apparently there was a Café Flesh 2 produced in 1997 and a Café Flesh 3 in 2003, long after the Porno Chic wave had crested. While the original film maintains a small, niche place in genre-filmmaking history (and on the boutique Blu-ray market), those two direct-to-video sequels are the kind of long-abandoned porno schlock you’ll only find on copyright-infringing streaming sites with names like SpankBang & TNAFlix. Based on their release dates, screengrabs, and slipcover art, I totally get it. They appear to be purely, crassly commercial products that conform to the respective industry standards of their times, produced entirely with the intent of arousing a few orgasms and, more importantly, selling a few video tapes. Meanwhile, Sayadian’s original Café Flesh is a bizarre cultural oddity: a hardcore porno that routinely, deliberately makes creative decisions that undermine its commercial, erotic potential. A post-apocalyptic sci-fi parable about a near-future dystopia where most nuclear-fallout survivors can’t stomach sexual contact without wanting to vomit, the film is stubbornly silly, depressing, and gross. Maybe that’s the dividing line between pornographic art and porno schlock: the willingness to undermine any possible titillation to be found in visual depictions of penetrative sex with so much extraneous bullshit that the audience can only walk away wondering, “Who was this for? Why was it made?”

Set in “a world destroyed, a mutant universe” left over after our impending nuclear holocaust, Café Flesh imagines a future society in which 99% of surviving humans become insurmountably nauseated when they attempt to have sexual intercourse. So, a fascistic government agency has been created to force the remaining 1% of sexually viable survivors to perform for the majority population’s entertainment, as a kind of addictive surrogate for sexual release. The titular “café” is a nightclub in which large groups of Sex Negatives gather to watch a small celebrity class of Sex Positives get it on in public, performing on a small stage as if they were singing karaoke. Think it of it as the de-evolution porno, a series of novelty sex acts staged through music video choreo in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where everyone’s horny but (almost) nobody fucks. Stephen Sayadian puts his personal stamp on the material as a name-brand reprobate auteur (under the porn-industry pseudonym Rinse Dream). Here, he develops a lot of the sound-stage surrealism imagery he would later push to ecstatic German Expressionist extremes in his career-high achievement Dr. Caligari, to much sillier results. In the opening sex number, a milkman in a humanoid rat mask fucks a bored housewife while her three overgrown man-babies watch from their high-chair perches in the background, dancing in place to the beat. Then, a giant sports-mascot pencil in a business suit fucks an office worker on his desk while his secretary types notes in rhythm, giving new meaning to the phrase “pencil dick.” Even when these cartoonish exhibitions are replaced with more traditional sex acts, Sayadian continues to undermine all potential for sincere arousal in his audience, such as in a lesbian orgy that is scored with maniacal male laughter and the droning bomb sirens of an oncoming air raid. These theatrical novelty acts are broken up by the recursive reaction shots and petty domestic squabbles of the Sex Negative audience watching from the floor, occasionally interrupted by a Steve Martin-impersonating MC who ads an air of state-sanctioned menace to the proceedings. The only genuine moments of eroticism are found in the taboo of crossing the threshold from observer to participant. When someone officially designated as Sex Negative is found out to be a Sex Positive in hiding and pressured into exhibitionism, the movie allows for genuine erotic tension to hang in the air; everything else is grotesque mockery of Reagan’s America and its inevitable toxic fallout.

While Dr. Caligari is Stephen Sayadian’s greater artistic achievement overall, Café Flesh holds its own cultural significance as the definitive 80s movie. It expresses all of the artistic & sexual neuroses of a generation rattled by Porno Chic, MTV, and nuclear bombing drills through a funhouse mirror reflection of the times. I’ve seen lowlier, crasser versions of this exact 80s-specific porno aesthetic in contemporary titles like New Wave Hookers, but I’ve yet to see it achieved with such an active disinterest in the erotic potential of the depicted sex. Even in making that distinction, I’m attempting to draw a line between the commercially minded pornographic filmmaking of Gregory Dark and the for-their-own-sake poetic indulgences of Stephen Sayadian, once again relying on a “I know it when I see it” system of assigning artistic merit to one version of pornography over another. Sometimes you just have to admit that there’s nothing new or novel left to say about film as a medium that wasn’t already better worded decades before you were born; it’s just that we’re more used to those short-hand critical wisdoms coming from a Roger Ebert or a Pauline Kael, not a judge on the Supreme Court.

-Brandon Ledet

Topaz (1969)

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Topaz is the answer to the question, “What if Alfred Hitchcock made a James Bond movie?” Admittedly, Hitchcock had already been making spy movies for literal decades at this point, with this one premiering nearly thirty years after Foreign Correspondent. One of Topaz’s detractors, Pauline Kael, went so far as to write that the film was “the same damned spy picture he’s been making since the thirties, and it’s getting longer, slower, and duller.” I don’t know that I agree with her about the first part, as this one feels quite different in approach to his other spy films that I’ve seen, but it certainly feels longer, moves more slowly, and doesn’t have the same panache. I watched it just a couple of days after seeing Foreign Correspondent at The Prytania, and although that film had a few moments where it started to slow down a little, it was also enlivened by the excellent mid-film car chase and windmill infiltration as well as ending on a high note with the spectacular climax in which a commercial airliner is shot down by German U-boats. In comparison, there’s nary a moment of spectacle in Topaz, with the suspense arising from the tension of international conflict and potential violence. On a more granular level, both films feature a scene in which someone is killed via being thrown out of a window and the audience is kept in suspense about the identity of the victim. In Correspondent, we watch the body being flung from a cathedral and it’s possible that our protagonist may be the one in danger, while in Topaz the body is merely found after the fact by the main character, and we’re initially led to believe it may be his son in law. It’s still excellently filmed and aesthetically pleasing, but it’s also not very special. 

The film is based on a novel by Leon Uris that was inspired by a real French-Soviet conspiracy that Uris’s friend had helped to foil, although the book took many liberties from reality and the film takes many from the novel. After an opening sequence in which a defecting KGB Colonel and his wife and daughter evade recapture by his countrymen in Amsterdam, he’s escorted to the U.S. in care of American secret agent Michael Nordstrom (John Forsythe). None of these people are our main character, however. That’s André Devereaux (Frederick Stafford), a French intelligence officer who operates under the guise of civilian business ventures. Before we even meet him, his colleagues confirm that they agree he is too close to the Americans, and he proves them right almost immediately by agreeing to help Nordstrom get pictures of a secret agreement between the Soviet Union and Cuba on behalf of the U.S., without looping in his own government. He hires a fellow French expat named Philippe (Rosco Lee Browne) to bribe the secretary of General Rico Parra (John Vernon) of Cuba to get this access, and he immediately sets out to Cuba himself following this, much to the chagrin of his long-suffering wife Nicole (Dany Robin). Nicole has heard gossip that Devereaux’s frequent trips to Cuba may have more to do with an affair he’s having with a woman named Juanita de Cordoba than with his duties to France and the free world, and although Devereaux denies it, we see that he goes straight to Juanita (Karin Dor)’s house the moment his plane lands. Some subterfuge happens on the island and Devereaux returns to the states to learn that his wife has left him and returned to Paris, that “Topaz” is the codename of a secret cabal of Soviet sympathizers within the French government, and that he’s being recalled to France to stand before a council regarding his extracurricular activities. With Nordstrom’s intelligence, he has to figure out who the leader of Topaz is before he’s called to stand trial. 

Does that seem like it should take nearly two and a half hours? I’m not sure. Just two years prior, 1967 saw the release of You Only Live Twice (my personal favorite Bond, albeit one of the more problematic ones), which clocked in at 106 minutes, and it certainly seems like a lot more happened in that film than in Topaz. And if that comparison seems like I’m leaping, bear in mind that one of the Bond girls in You Only Live Twice is Karin Dor, who’s one of the best parts of this film as Juanita. There’s a very clear attempt to ape the Bond house style here, with Devereaux having two love interests in the film, the focus on infiltration via impersonation, and most clearly in the prevalence of the gadgetry of spycraft, which the film spends a decent amount of time focusing on. When Devereaux arrives in Cuba, he brings along some cutting-edge photographic equipment along with long distance lenses and remote-control cameras with a range of half a mile. When he gets the information that he needs, information gets stored in a microdot disguised as a period on one of the keys of his typewriter, negatives are stored in the disposable razor blade cartridges, and film is hidden inside the spool of his typewriter ribbon. None of it is as outlandish as some of Q’s later gadgets, but it’s still neat to me, although I could imagine this kind of detail being tedious to others. Again, Kael wasn’t wrong when she said that Hitch’s spy flicks were getting slower. 

That’s not the real weak element here, however, as the major problem is just how uninteresting Devereaux is. One of the more exciting sequences in the whole film happens as he literally watches from across the street, as Philippe poses as a reporter for Ebony (he would prefer to pretend to be from Playboy, and when Devereaux refuses, Philippe teases him for his lack of imagination) and infiltrates the hotel where Rico Parra is staying in Harlem as a show of solidarity with the Black community in America. Philippe lures Parra out onto the balcony to take photos of him waving to the throng that has gathered below so that Parra’s secretary can slink away with the case containing the Cuba-Russia memo. There are several tense moments in which it seems like Parra is going to notice the missing briefcase, and he always seems just on the verge of discovery, until Philippe has just enough time to get the information and deliver it to Devereaux. It’s fantastically tense and the performance from Browne is terrific, and it’s made all the better as this may be the only time I’ve ever seen a Hitchcock film in which a Black actor has been given so much to do. Vernon’s Parra is also an incredibly sympathetic character, all things considered, as Vernon very effectively conveys the internal turmoil that Parra feels when he realizes that Juanita, whom he considers above reproach as she is a “widow of a hero of the revolution,” has been involved with Devereaux’s activities. There’s an entire world happening behind his eyes when he kills her upon discovery of her assistance in Devereaux’s espionage, ensuring that she will not be forced to undergo the same tortures that he has overseen enacted on others. In short, despite this being a cast of less well-known actors than the caliber usually on display in a Hitchcock film, everyone is doing excellent work except for the lead, who’s about as interesting as a block of wood.

If you can get past that protagonist-shaped void of charisma, there’s still a lot to enjoy here. The conspiracy itself is effectively convoluted, and there are a lot of individual moments that stand out. Juanita’s death scene, shot from above as her purple dress spreads around her like a flower or a pool of blood as she falls to the floor, is beautiful. There’s actual archival footage of both Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in a sequence in which Devereaux attends a rally in Cuba, and that’s a lot of fun. The opening sequence, featuring Colonel Kusenov’s flight from the KGB, is marvelously tense, and although it doesn’t live up to the spectacle that we may have come to expect from the master of suspense, it certainly measures up in the suspense department. It seems that the presence of Devereaux’s daughter Michele (Claude Jade) and her husband Francois (Michel Subor) early on is merely incidental, only for them to come back in a major way in the film’s finale, with Francois’s remarkable skill at sketching portraits playing a huge role in the revelation of the identity of Topaz’s ringleader, “Columbine.” As a spy thriller, it’s constructed well, it just lacks the overall oomph that one expects from the director.

(Note: this review is of the 143 minute version of the film widely available in the U.S. and the U.K., rather than the 127-minute theatrical edition which doesn’t seem to have seen home video release in English-speaking markets since the 1987 laserdisc.)

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Biosphere (2023)

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Mumblecore may be long gone as a moment in time, but the Duplass Brothers are still out there keeping its memory alive.  While mumblecore overachievers Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach made the highest-grossing film of the year—a feature-length toy commercial, no less—The Duplasses are still making low-key, low-profile indies, still putting together dependably entertaining pictures with limited resources.  Even so, their new sci-fi bromance Biosphere feels like a mumblecore throwback stunt in its limited scope, featuring only two actors on a single, sparse, Apple Store futurist set.  That scaled-down approach to movie production made more sense when they were making lockdown-era laptop dramas like Language Lessons, but at this point in on-set COVID safety protocols, it’s more of a flex than a necessity.  In cynical Gen-X 90s terms, the narrative would’ve been that Barbie was a sign that Gerwig & Baumbach “sold out” and that the Duplasses are somehow nobler artists for continuing to slack around on a condemned & abandoned mumblecore playground.  In these post-Poptimism times we’re living in now, though, there’s no such thing as selling out, and all that really matters is that Barbie is one of the best movies of the year, while Biosphere is just the latest example of what its producers have been consistently making for the past couple decades running.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lacking in ambition, though.  Biosphere takes admirably big swings on its tiny playground, and it scores major bonus points for taking those swings early, so that it actually has to fully deal with the social discomforts of its premise instead of saving it all for a last-minute twist. Mark Duplass stars opposite Sterling K Brown as childhood best friends . . . and the only two human beings left alive after a nuclear apocalypse.  Every detail outside the bond of their friendship gets phonier & phonier the further the story spirals out from there.  Duplass unconvincingly stars as the Republican president of the United States and the main instigator of the nuclear shoot-out that ended it all, despite having more of an under-achieving court jester vibe.  Brown is slightly more believable as the politically progressive scientist who built the self-contained biodome they’re riding out the Apocalypse in, but the circumstances of when & why he built it get less credible by the minute.  That doesn’t matter nearly as much as the question of how two cisgender men are supposed to rebuild society without any outside collaborators for procreation, a question made even more uncomfortable by how their dorm-room college bro relationship is tested by their newfound need to be Everything to each other in a world the size of a living room.  Since the movie is most effective when it’s about the specifics of their evolving friendships, it’s probably for the best that there is no world outside their biohome.

I can’t say much more about Biosphere‘s premise without completely spoiling it, which I guess means that you should watch it with your best bro, so you have someone to talk it out with.  It’s thematically provocative in its discussions of the physiology & power dynamics of gender, poking specifically at the most sensitively guarded area of the topic: straight male companionship.  What does it say about the Duplasses’ filmmaking ambitions that Mark already starred in a movie about those exact bromantic sensitivities way back in 2009?  I’m not sure, but I do know that Humpday was received as a substantial entry in the mumblecore canon, while Biosphere feels untethered from anything especially urgent or substantial at all.  Even within the subgenre of movies contained in biospheres, it’s nowhere near as provocative as the eco-terror bomb-thrower Silent Running nor as memorably goofy & inane as the stoner bro comedy Biodome.  It’s just a Duplass Brothers movie that happens to have a sci-fi theme – the kind of low-key, oddly phony drama that makes you wonder why they didn’t just stage an off-Broadway play instead of making a movie.  I appreciate its ambition to challenge its audience in its thematic ideas, while I also question when The Duplasses are going to start challenging themselves with cinematic ones.

-Brandon Ledet

Godzilla Minus One (2023)

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As I’m piecing together my personal Best Films of 2023 list in these last few weeks of the year, I’m becoming increasingly self-conscious of how many of my favorite new releases are shamelessly nostalgic for the toys & kitsch collectibles of my youth.  Even without a new Godzilla film juicing the numbers, it’s been a great year for films about Furbies, Barbie dolls, Ninja Turtles, and tokusatsu superheroes like Ultraman, Kamen Rider, and The Power Rangers.  My Best of the Year list is starting to look like a 1998 Toys”R”Us TV commercial, which is somewhat embarrassing for a man of my age.  I am approaching 40 years old, and I still don’t wanna grow up.  Thankfully, Godzilla Minus One‘s inclusion in this year’s throwback-toy-commercial canon is at least helping to class up the list a little, as it’s a much more sincere, severe drama than most movies that have excited me lately.  It’s just as openly nostalgic for vintage tokusatsu media as Shin Ultraman, Shin Kamen Rider, and Smoking Causes Coughing, announcing itself as an official 70th anniversary celebration of the original 1954 Godzilla film that started it all.  However, it’s the only film in this year’s crop to hit the same notes of deep communal hurt as the ’54 Godzilla, which is a much more ambitious aim than reviving the goofball slapstick antics of the child-friendly kaiju & superhero media that followed in its wake.  Godzilla Minus One‘s sincerity is incredibly rewarding in that contrast, to the point where it’s the only Godzilla movie I can remember making me cry.

To commemorate that 70th anniversary, Godzilla Minus One dials the clock back to the widescale destruction of post-WWII Japan, covering the first few years of national rebuilding after nuclear devastation.  The giant primordial lizard of the title is once again shaken awake by the human folly of the atomic bomb, a great sin against Nature echoed in the creature’s flamethrower-style “atomic breath.”  The film’s limited budget means that Godzilla gets limited screentime, but the monster is deployed wisely as an unstoppable, unfathomable horror whose atomic power is so great that it burns away the flesh of its own towering body.  Godzilla is scary again, more of a harrowing extension of war survivors’ PTSD than a rollicking hero to children everywhere.  The cleverest move the movie makes, then, is by limiting the scope of its drama to match the limited scope of its monster attacks.  We feel the fear Godzilla stirs in just a few cowering citizens’ lives, even though both the monster and its victims represent large-scale national grief in metaphor.  It’s a small-cast wartime melodrama that’s occasionally interrupted by kaiju-scale mayhem, the same way a soldier who survives war is supposed to go through the motions of normal life in peacetime despite frequent, violent reminders & memories of the atrocities they’ve witnessed or participated in.  The “Minus One” of the title refers to people struggling to rebuild their lives from Ground Zero, only to be reset even further back by the grand-scale cruelties of life & Nature, through the monster.  It’s tough to watch.

The drama gets even more intimate & insular from there.  Most Godzilla movies dwell on the city-wide chaos of the monster attacks, depicting thousands of victims scattering away from Godzilla’s path like helpless insects.  In contrast, Godzilla Minus One zooms in to assess the value of just one, individual life in that mayhem.  Its mournful protagonist (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is a kamikaze pilot who dodged his suicidal mission during the war and now suffers intense survivor’s guilt, convinced that he morally failed in his duty to serve his nation.  The sudden appearance of Godzilla offers the self-hating young man a second attempt at wartime valor, to the point where he’s disturbingly excited by the prospect of facing off against the monster instead of experiencing healthier responses like fear & grief.  In a more proudly nationalistic action thriller, this sentiment would go unchallenged, and his self-assigned self-sacrifice would be celebrated as traditional macho heroism.  Instead, Godzilla Minus One is about the community of people around the pilot—each having survived their own war atrocities & personal shortcomings—convincing him that his life is worth living, that he has value beyond the damage he can cause as a lone soldier in a war that’s officially over.  The honor of serving his country through death is no nobler than risking his life de-activating leftover explosive mines to put food on his family’s table; it’s sad & disgraceful, and it should be treated as a worst-case scenario.

The dramatic beats of Godzilla Minus One are just as predictable as the rhythm of its monster attacks, and just as devastatingly effective.  I cried with surprising frequency during the final twenty-minute stretch, even though I saw each dramatic reveal coming from a nautical mile away.  Maybe it’s because I vaguely related to the communal struggle to rebuild after multiple unfathomable catastrophes, having remained in New Orleans through a series of floods & hurricanes.  Maybe it’s because I more personally related to the pilot’s struggle to learn a foundational sense of self-worth, the toughest aspect of adult life.  Maybe it’s because composer Naoki Satō’s gargantuan score drummed those sentimental feelings out of me through intense physical vibration.  Who’s to say?  All I can confidently report is that the drama is just thunderously affecting as Godzilla’s roars, which is a rarity in the series.

-Brandon Ledet

Weapons of Mass Distraction

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Like most other bored, overheated Americans, I spent the third Friday of July hiding from the sun in my neighborhood movie theater, watching an all-day double feature.  I didn’t directly participate in the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, though, partly due to scheduling inconvenience and partly out of general bafflement with the incongruous pairing.  As a longtime movie obsessive, it was wonderful to see more casual audiences out in full force, dressed up to participate in a double feature program; or it was at least a more endearing moviegoing meme than its recent “Gentleminions” predecessor.  I still like to program my double features with a little more consideration to tone & theme, though, and I can’t imagine that either Nolan’s or Gerwig’s latest were served well by the pairing – which was essentially a joke about how ill-suited they were for back-to-back binging in the first place.  However, I’m not immune to pop culture FOMO, which is how I wound up watching Oppenheimer in the first place.  Nothing about the film’s subject, genre, or marketing screamed out to me as essential viewing, other than the assumption that it was going to be a frequent subject of movie nerd discourse until at least next year’s Oscars ceremony.  So, I dragged my old, tired body to the theater at 10am on a weekday to sit down with Christopher Nolan’s three-hour rumination on the placid evils of nuclear war, and then paired it with a movie I suspected I would like just to sweeten the deal – the ludicrously titled Mission: Impossible 7, Part 1 – Dead Reckoning.  It was essentially the same dessert-after-dinner double feature approach most participating audiences took with Barbenheimer (which, considering that sequence, likely should’ve just been called “Oppie”), except applied to two feature films on a single subject: the abstract weaponry of modern war.

As you surely already know, Oppenheimer stars Cillian Murphy as the titular nuclear physicist, credited for leading the development of the atom bomb at the end of WWII.  His story is told in two conflicting, alternating perspectives: his own version of events in full color (as told to a military security-clearance review board) and a black-and-white version recounted by a professional rival (as told years later in a Congressional hearing).  It’s an abrasively dry approach to such an explosive, emotional subject, even if Nolan does everything possible to win over Dad Movie heretics like me in the story’s framing & editing – breaking up the pedestrian men-talking-in-rooms rhythms of an Oliver Stone or Aaron Sorkin screenplay with his own flashier, in-house Nolanisms.  Oppenheimer strives to overcome its limitations as a legal testimony drama by drawing immense energy from a three-hour crosscutting montage and relentless repetition of its own title at a “Gabbo! Gabbo! Gabbo!” rhythm.  After so many years of tinkering with the cold, technical machinery of cinema, Nolan at least seems willing to allow a new sense of looseness & abstraction into the picture to disrupt his usual visual clockwork (starting most clearly in Tenet).  Young Oppenheimer’s visit to an art museum as a student suggests that this new, abstracted style is inspired by the Cubist art movement of the setting’s era, but the editing feels purely Malickian to me, especially when covering the scientist’s early years.  My favorite moments were his visions of cosmos—micro and macro—while puzzling through the paradoxes of nuclear science, as well as his wife’s intrusive visions of his sexual affair while defending himself to a military panel.  These are still small, momentary distractions from the real business at hand: illustrating the biggest moral fuck-up of human history in all its daily office-work drudgery.  Most of the movie is outright boring in its “What have we done?” contemplations of bureaucratic weaponry-development evil, no matter how much timeline jumping it does in its character-actor table reads of real-life historical documents.

In all honesty, the most I got out of Oppenheimer was an appreciation for it table-setting the mood for the much more entertaining Mission: Impossible 7.  To paraphrase Logan Roy, I am not a serious person.  The great tragedy of Nolan’s piece is watching a Jewish, Leftist man’s attempts to stop his people’s genocide get exploited by the American military’s bottomless hunger for bigger, deadlier bombs – ultimately resulting in a new, inconceivable weapon that will likely lead to the end of humanity’s life on planet Earth (if other forms of industrial pollution don’t kill us first).  Oppenheimer doesn’t realize until it’s too late that his team’s invention did not end WWII; it instead created a new, infinite war built on the looming international threat of mutual self-destruction.  The immediate consequences of the atom bomb were the devastation of two Japanese cities, leaving figurative blood on the haunted man’s hands, which he attempts to clean in the final hour of runtime by ineffectively maneuvering for world peace within the system he helped arm.  The long-term consequences are much more difficult to define, leaving a lingering atmospheric menace on the world outside the theater after the credits roll.  Instead of sweetening that menace with the pink-frosted confectionary of Barbie, I followed up Oppenheimer with a much vapider novelty: the latest Tom Cruise vanity project.  Speaking of history’s greatest monsters, I was also feeling a little uneasy about watching the latest Tom Cruise stunt fest (especially after suffering through last year’s insipid Top Gun rebootquel), but credit where it’s due: Dead Reckoning was a great time at the movies.  Unlike Oppenheimer, M:I 7 is built of full, robust scenes and complete exchanges of dialogue instead of the de-constructed Malickian snippets of a three-hour trailer.  It’s a three-hour frivolity in its own right, but it’s an intensely entertaining one, and it immediately restored my faith that I can still appreciate mainstream, big-budget cinema right after Nolan shook it.  Also, there was something perverse about it doing so by toying around on the exact Cold War playground Oppenheimer mistakenly created.

If there’s a modern equivalent to the abstract, unfathomable power of the atom bomb (besides, you know, the still-growing stockpiles of nuclear weapons in many countries’ arsenals), it’s likely in the arena of digital espionage and the development of A.I. technology.  The seventh Mission: Impossible film runs with the zeitgeisty relevance of killer-A.I. weaponry at full speed, creating an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-everything-everywhere A.I. villain that looks like a vintage iTunes visualizer.  It’s about as well defined as the young Oppenheimer’s intrusive visions of nuclear particles, but neither Cruise nor his in-house workman director Christopher McQuarrie are especially interested in figuring out the scientific logic behind it.  Dead Reckoning‘s A.I. villain—referred to simply (and frequently) as The Entity—is mostly just an excuse for the creepy millionaire auteur behind it to stage a series of increasingly outlandish stunts.  By some miracle, the new Mission: Impossible nearly matches the absurdly convoluted humanity-vs-A.I. combat of Mrs. Davis and the absurdly over-the-top espionage action spectacle of Pathaan, making it the most entertaining American action blockbuster of the year by default.  Unfortunately, like a lot of other American blockbusters this year, it’s also only half a movie, ending on a literal cliff-hanger that won’t be resolved until a three-hour Part 2 conclusion of the miniseries reaches theaters in a couple years.  Since that double feature isn’t currently screening in its entirety, I had to settle for pairing it with Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which at least helped give its over-the-top A.I. espionage theatrics a sense of real-world consequence.  The only recognizable threat behind The Entity’s abstract swirl of LED lights is that it’s smart enough to fool & manipulate nuclear-capable governments.  It could bring the world to an end with the weaponry we’ve already created ourselves, and it wouldn’t be too surprising if Dead Reckoning, Part 2 includes a gag where Cruise diffuses an actual, active nuclear warhead while riding it in the sky like Slim Pickens before him.

My disparate reactions to Oppenheimer and Dead Reckoning likely have more to do with personal taste & disposition than the movies’ objective qualities.  Whereas self-serious lines of dialogue like “How can this man, who saw so much, be so blind?” and “Is anyone ever going to tell the truth about what’s happening here?” had me rolling my eyes at Oppenheimer, I was delighted by Mission: Impossible’s equally phony line reading of “Ethan, you are playing 4D chess with an algorithm,” delivered by Ving Rhames with the same unearned gravitas.  Maybe it’s because I don’t expect much out of the big-budget end of mainstream filmmaking except for its value as in-the-moment entertainment.  I don’t think Oppenheimer‘s internal wrestling with its protagonist’s guilt over inventing The Bomb or our government’s mistreatment of his professional reputation in The McCarthy Era amounts to all that much, except maybe as a reminder that the threat of Nuclear Apocalypse is an ongoing Important Issue.  It obviously can’t solve that issue in any meaningful way, though, unless you put a lot of personal meaning into Hollywood’s ability to convert Important Issues into Awards Statues.  It’s a movie, not a systemic political policy.  I personally see more immediate value in Mission: Impossible‘s ability to delight & distract (both from the real-world horrors of nuclear war and, more maliciously, the real-world horrors of its star), since that’s using the tools of mainstream filmmaking for what they’re actually apt to accomplish.  Oppenheimer is a three-hour montage of Important Men played by “That guy!” character actors exchanging tight smirks & knowing glances in alternating boardroom readings of historical testimony.  Dead Reckoning, Part 1 is a three-hour Evil Knievel stuntman roadshow punctuated by abstract info-dumps about the immense, unfathomable power of A.I. technology.  The closest Nolan comes to matching Cruise in this head-to-head battle in terms of pure entertainment value is the visual gag of a doddering Albert Einstein repeatedly dropping his hat. 

-Brandon Ledet

Genocide (1968)

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It would be a reductive understatement to point out that the people of Japan were emotionally & spiritually fucked up by the events of World War II—particularly the US’s deployment of the atom bomb—but that was still my foremost thought while watching the 1968 eco horror Genocide (aka War of the Insects). Nature striking back against humanity’s nuclear ills had already been a cinematic fixation dating over a decade prior to films like Godzilla & Them!, but there was something exceptionally troubled about the tones & emotions of Genocide that taps into an even deeper well of ugly post-War fallout than even those superior works. Opening with images of a mushroom cloud and mixing discussions of Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and military men’s PTSD with real-life war footage throughout, Genocide feels more like a cold-sweat nightmare about nuclear fallout than it does a proper feature film. There’s nothing unique to it in a thematic sense (as it often plays like a Mothra film with increased sex & violence), but there is a soul-deep discomfort to it psychologically that breaks through that familiarity.

A military airplane transporting an H-Bomb is downed on a Japanese island when attacked from the outside by a swarm of insects and from the inside by a solder suffering PTSD flashbacks. Western military men & Eastern Block spies race each other to recover the bomb first while two simultaneous mysteries develop around its disappearance: a murder trial involving a local man’s affair with a white tourist & the scientific explanation for the actual murderers responsible – poisonous bugs. It appears that all the insects of the world have joined forces to end humanity as retribution for inventing the atomic bomb. Their mission is accelerated by a mad-scientist Holocaust survivor who is blinded by her hatred of mankind due the torture she & her family suffered. None of these storylines cohere into a satisfactory, purposeful statement on the evils of War, but they do reflect a general psychological hurt across Japanese culture in their own jumbled, disoriented way. Genocide is a panicked nightmare of an eco horror where the killer bugs themselves are almost an afterthought in the face of humanity’s own colossal fuckups.

I don’t know that this picture is fully satisfying as a horror film. It does its best to unnerve the audience with the small-scale scares it can muster on what had to be a limited budget: model airplanes catching fire, Phase IV-style closeups of insect pincers pulling at flesh, nasty makeup work on victims’ festering wounds, a solitary psychedelic sequence of someone tripping on bug venom, etc. The real menace here is more deeply rooted in the psychological fallout of the War than the threat posed by the bugs, however. The way the insects organize, swarm, and gnaw flesh is never quite as eerie as the moment when they sing the word “genocide, genocide, genocide,” to torment their human foes. Genocide saturates the air in post-War Japan, as it’s presented here, to the point where Nature whispers it back to us in a creepy sing-song nursery rhyme. No matter where else the film may stumble in establishing a horrific mood (most notably in its limited scale and its occasionally shortsighted race & gender politics), that direct vocalization of a nation’s subliminal hurt is genuinely, impressively chilling.

-Brandon Ledet

The Space Children (1958)

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There’s nothing more admirable in genre film production than basic efficiency. Cheaply made sci-fi and horror can often transcend its limited means by way of an over the top premise or an inspired knack for production design, but those virtues can be dulled so easily by a labored pace or runtime. At just under 70 minutes, the sci-fi cheapie The Space Children never had time to outlive the novelty of its basic premise. Although director Jack Arnold had previously made a fine example of artful prestige horror with The Creature from the Black Lagoon (which is stunning in its moments of underwater cinematography), The Space Children is nothing but a bare bones sci-fi yarn made to fill out a double bill with the similarly slight, but impressive The Colossus of New York. Those limiting factors of microscopic budget & necessity for a brief runtime only amplify & enhance its charms as a scrappy little horror oddity with a strange plot & an even stranger alien menace. Whenever catching up with these efficient examples of bizarre, but slight genre films from the drive-in era, it’s tempting to wish that our modern PG-13 horrors & superhero epics would stick to that exact kind of length & scale.

The Space Children is a message movie about the horrors of nuclear war, nakedly so. While its heavy-handed lesson about how it’s probably not super cool to get into a worldwide arms race that could very quickly destroy the planet isn’t exactly a revolutionary thought for a 1950s genre picture, it is handled in a way that somewhat subverts its genre expectations. This is an alien invasion picture where neither the Thing From Another World that challenges our military, nor the army of creepy children it hypnotizes are the villain. In a variation from the Children of the Damned standard, it’s the parents, adult humans, who are the enemy. Scientists & military families are contracted by the American military to live in an isolated community while developing The Thunderer, a hydrogen bomb that can be readily launched from an orbiting satellite instead of a fixed physical location. Concerned, a glowing, telepathic brain from outer space lands on a beach nearby the military base and hypnotizes the scientists’ children to do its evil bidding: preventing nuclear holocaust by dismantling The Thunderer. Short story shorter, its galactic mission is a success and the evil space brain (with a little help from its ragtag group if telepathic juvenile slaves) saves Earth from blowing itself apart.

The Space Children never had a chance to be as iconic or as memorable as other nuclear horrors of its time like Them! or The Day The Earth Stood Still, even though it concludes with the exact same kind of moralizing rant about the dangers of nuclear war (this time with a Bible verse printed over an outer space backdrop to drive the point home). It was too cheap & lean of a production to aspire to those genre film heights. The movie does a great job of working within the boundaries of its scale & budget, though, suggesting worldwide implications of its central crisis despite never leaving its artificial studio lot locations. Although not likely a conscious choice, the artificiality of those sets, which are supposed to feel like natural outdoors environments, only adds to the movie’s charming surreality. Seemingly, the entire budget of The Space Children was sunk into the look of its space alien brain, which was a smart choice. When the alien first arrives, it appears to be a glowing jellyfish that washed up on the beach. As it pulsates, expands, and glows brighter while psychically linking to its child mind-slaves that same brain gradually grows to be the size of a small, glowing hippo. The logistics of constructing such a thing seemingly zapped most of the production money, leaving only room for cheap-to-film horror movie touches like telepathy, teleportation, telekinesis, and (scariest of all) Disney Channel levels of goofy child acting. It’s an expense that pays off nicely, though, and the brain is just as memorable for its physical presence as it is for somehow not being the villain.

The Space Children is a cheap, goofy sci-fi horror with nothing especially novel to say about the perils of nuclear war, bit still manages to feel like a fairly rewarding entry in its genre. Its efficiency in delivering the goods of its space alien brain special effects & its anti-war morality play in just over an hour of drive-in era absurdist fun is an impressive feat in itself. Backing up that efficiency is another excellent score from Twilight Zone vet Van Cleave (who also scored The Colossus of New York). As soon as the opening credits, which superimposes children’s heads over telescopic photos of outer space, Van Cleave’s organ & theremin arrangement elevates the material considerably. That Twilight Zone connection feels true to this movie’s overall spirit too, as that show was excellent at delivering the goods in a similarly lean time & budget. Something you won’t see on many Twilight Zone episodes, though, is a hippo-sized brain that glows, pulsates, hypnotizes children, and forces them to rebel against their war hungry parents. The Space Children wasn’t even the best movie on its own double bill at the drive-in (The Colossus of New York is so good), but it knew exactly how to milk its few saving virtues for all they were worth and, in some cases, how to make them glow.

-Brandon Ledet