quick takes

Quick Takes: Summertime Drama

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It’s been a strangely quiet summer for theatrical moviegoing so far, thanks largely to last year’s Hollywood labor strikes.  All of the usual corporate slop that clogs up American movie marquees has been arriving in a slow trickle instead of a constant flood, which has many box office pundits panicking about the collapse of theatrical exhibition as a viable industry.  I understand that theaters need weekly hits to sell enough popcorn to keep the projectors running, but I have to admit I’ve mostly been enjoying the lull.  This year’s short supply of substantial superhero sequels & IP extenders has left a lot of room for smaller, gentler films to breathe in local cinemas – from digital restorations of already venerated classics like Le Samouraï  & It’s Such a Beautiful Day to future classics in D.I.Y. outsider art like Hundreds of Beavers & The People’s Joker.  It’s actually been a great summer for movies so far if all you care about is easy access to high-quality cinema, which pretty much fully accounts for my selfish POV.

Last year, when I wrote about the state of summertime moviegoing in early June, I reported that I had retreated from theaters to watch smaller, quieter movies than what they were offering at home instead.  This year, I don’t have to stream those quiet dramas from my couch; they’re actually playing in New Orleans cinemas right now.  Theaters may be struggling, but attentive cinephiles are thriving.  So, here are a few short-form reviews of the smaller-scale, smaller-budget dramas currently playing across the city (among other titles I haven’t had time to catch up with yet, like The Bikeriders, Tuesday, and I Used to Be Funny).

Ghostlight

The most consistent, predictable supplier of the small-scale indie drama is, of course, The Sundance Film Festival, which typically opens the year with a handful of buzzy, awardsy titles that inevitably get drowned out by louder, flashier titles from later festivals like Cannes.  Somehow, Ghostlight plays directly into the tropes & expectations of a typical Sundance selection but earns sharp laughs and emotional pangs though that familiar template.  A family drama about a macho, emotionally closed-off construction worker who gets in touch with his feelings by signing up to play Romeo Montague in a community-theatre Shakespeare production, it’s got the general shape of a standard post-Little Miss Sunshine festival breakout.  However, it ends up being an inversion of hokey indie drama tropes instead of playing them straight.  There are plenty dramas that are shot like documentaries, and there are plenty documentaries that are shot like dramas; Ghostlight is a drama shot like a documentary that’s shot like a drama (a turdocen, if you will).  There are also plenty dramas wherein an actor’s real life starts to mirror a role they’re playing in their art, but Ghostlight is about an already famous play that starts to mirror the actor’s life instead, taking the teen-suicide themes of Romeo & Juliet more seriously than most modern adaptations and interpretations. It’s shockingly successful in that inversion too. If nothing else, it made me cry earlier & more often than any other new release I’ve seen so far this year.

I don’t often cry when something sad happens in a movie, like when the farm burns down in Minari.  I tend to cry at mawkish acts of kindness, like when Mrs. Harris is gifted the dress she desperately wanted after her trip to Paris.  In Ghostlight, all of the saddest events in our tough-exterior construction worker’s life happen before the audience meets the big softie.  All we really know about him at first is that he’s explosively angry when pressed to talk about his feelings, and that he’s currently rehearsing for two auditions: one for a legal deposition in a civil lawsuit and one for his first theatrical role as Romeo.  The audience is able to deduce the details of the lawsuit long before our grieving hero has the strength to voice them, based on his discomfort with the plot of the Shakespearean tragedy he was roped into performing.  The biggest tearjerking moments are all in the way his small social circle gently pushes him to heal without scaring him off: Dolly de Leon as a failed pro actor who takes him in like a wounded puppy, Katherine Mallen Kupferer as his theatre-nerd daughter who finally has a mechanism for bonding with her walled-off father, Tara Mallen as his put-upon wife who supports his surprising new hobby even though it threatens the couple’s domestic intimacy.  It’s a lovely, loving communal dynamic that only gets more emotionally effective once you learn that the central family unit is played by a real-life family of Chicago-area actors, led by Keith Kupferer as the hard-hatted thespian.  So much of Ghostlight‘s premise and presentation sounds phony in the abstract, but in practice there’s a raw, healing truth to it that’s cathartic to anyone willing to be vulnerable.

Janet Planet

Not everyone wants to spend the hot summer months having a public ugly-cry about small acts of kindness.  Maybe you just want to space out in your neighborhood theater’s AC and observe small acts of being.  The 1990s period piece Janet Planet is a warmly familiar coming-of-age story slowwwed down to the tempo of summer bugs ambiently chirping in the woods.  It’s like a less traumatic Aftersun, chronicling the summer months spent by a young girl named Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) quietly observing her mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson).  The film’s chapter breaks are named after various temporary boarders & lovers who drift through the small family’s home, mostly without incident.  Lacy is a bookworm introvert who observes the adult behavior around her with searing intensity, which redirects the dramatic scrutiny of the movie towards Janet’s relationships.  Occasionally, she’ll match her mother’s impulsive, depressed disposition with unprompted one-liners like “Do you know what’s funny? Every moment of my life is hell.”  Mostly, though, this is a drama of recognition, dragging the audience back to childhood experiences of being lonely, bored, and disregarded – filling your empty schedule with personal rituals, like compulsively plastering your loose hairs on the shower wall.  Lacy is realistically awkward, selfish, and nosy for a child her age.  We’ve all been there, but not all of us were so still and so quiet about it.

I would have never guessed that Janet Planet is the debut film of a well-known playwright (Annie Baker), given the general sparseness of its spoken dialogue.  There’s a detailed specificity to Lacy’s environment at the edge of 1990s Massachusetts hippie communes that feels like the work of a novelist, especially by the time she’s attending midsummer puppet festivals and watching her mother run an at-home acupuncture clinic (the titular Janet Planet).  At the same time, it belongs to a broad lineage of observational coming-of-age stories broadcasting the inner lives of young girls: Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, My Girl, Mermaids, Now & Then, Eighth Grade, Peppermint Soda, the aforementioned Aftersun, etc.  Its major distinction within that canon is in its slow-cinema distancing, in which a fixed camera silently observes the figures shrinking in its frame as they wander at the edges of American wilderness, their thoughts drowned out by the roaring static of birds & bugs.  I suppose it’s also distinct in that it’s the only film in this canon with a Laurie Anderson needle drop, which alone says a lot about the idiosyncrasies of Lacy & Janet’s particular, peculiar home environment.

Evil Does Not Exist

Falling further down the slow-cinema rabbit hole, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest drama Evil Does Not Exist is even more quietly observant of its characters’ bodies shrinking against the enormity of nature, often staring into a fixed place in the wooded distance for minutes on end.  Unlike Janet Planet, though, it’s set in the snowy mountains of a small village outside Tokyo, which is a visually appealing reprieve from the Climate Change heat waves outside the cinema walls.  That village will not be small for long.  After distantly observing the daily lives & labor of the rural locals, we’re led to a fluorescent-lit townhall meeting wherein greedy real estate developers announce a plan to establish a large-scale “glamping” site for tourists that will transform the village forever, despite protests.  The rest of the film is a tense battle of wills between skeptical locals who want to maintain an authentic relationship with their environment (represented by Hitoshi Okima) and big-city phonies who want to commodify that authenticity as an amusement-park experience (represented by Tyuji Kosaka).  This philosophical clash inevitably culminates in a shocking act of violence in the final seconds, but most of the “evil” depicted in the film is quietly bureaucratic and told through the grimaces of the locals being steamrolled for short-term profits.

I had an unexpectedly conflicted reaction to Evil Does Not Exist, especially to its cheap digi-video image quality.  Its amateur-grade digital video felt appropriately soulless when mocking the sinister mundanity of City Brain but felt flat & ugly when gazing at the idyllic mundanity of Country Life.  Dramatically, it packs neither the emotional wallop of Ghostlight nor the melancholic beauty of Janet Planet, even if its political & philosophical themes are more sharply defined.  It ended up being a mixed bag for me, which was a surprise after being enthusiastic about the other Hamaguchis I’ve seen (Drive My Car and Asako I & II).  Still, its quiet mood and overly patient pacing make for excellent summertime counterprogramming just as much as Ghostlight or Janet Planet.  These are the kinds of movies that theaters usually only have space for in the last-minute awards campaigns of winter, so excuse me if I’m a little perversely grateful for mainstream Hollywood’s current supply-chain struggles.

-Brandon Ledet

Quick Takes: Rebel Girls

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Sometime during my bus trip from watching the 4-hour French culinary documentary Menus-Plaisirs at The Prytania to immediately follow it with the 3-hour Polish sci-fi epic On the Silver Globe at The Broad, it hit me.  If I lived in a bigger city with a full, robust repertory scene, I would have a weekly meltdown.  Thankfully, New Orleans is relatively laidback in its repertory programming, with most of the heavy lifting done by The Prytania’s Sunday-morning Classic Movies series and now Wildwood‘s Wednesday-night screenings at The Broad.  There’s usually only one or two now-or-never selections in any given month here, which is much more manageable than the nonstop deluge of rare 35mm prints that flood cities like Chicago & NYC.  Having a large portion of those screenings recently relocate to The Broad has made it even more manageable for me personally, since it’s the theater closest to my home.  So, I’ve been spending a lot of time watching older releases at my neighborhood cinema, but not too much time.  Except for the rare occasions when I have to choose between two once-in-a-lifetime screenings on opposite sides of town, I’m mostly unbothered, moisturized, happy, in my lane, focused, flourishing.

As a result, I’ve racked up a few short-form reviews of older movies I happened to catch at The Broad in recent weeks.  All three movies happen to be about rebellious young women’s lives as social outcasts, which likely says less about the kinds of films being programmed around town than it says about the kinds of films that motivate me to leave the couch.  Here they are in all their grimy, leather-jacketed glory (listed in the order that I watched them).

Vagabond (1985)

Second only to Alfred Hitchcock’s routine appearances in Prytania’s Classic Movies program, Agnès Varda has got to be the most frequently programmed director in town (or at least has been for as long as I’ve been paying attention to such things).  Since 2018, I’ve seen Le Bonheur, Faces Places, The Gleaners & I, and Cléo from 5 to 7 at local specialty screenings, and I even missed one of Jane B.  It’s an incredible string of luck that’s made me reluctant to catch up with Varda’s most iconic titles at home, with the assumption that they’ll eventually play in a proper theater if I’m patient enough to wait.  That spoiled brat entitlement recently paid off when Wildwood screened the 1985 drama Vagabond, one of Varda’s most celebrated post-Cléo triumphs. I immediately understood its reputation as one of her best, since it works equally well as a prequel to her dumpster-diving documentary The Gleaners & I (my personal favorite Varda) and as a crust-punk take on Citizen Kane (many serious critics’ personal favorite by anyone). 

Sandrine Bonnaire stars as a transient young woman named Mona, hitchhiking her way across France with no particular purpose or destination.  Mona loves smoking weed, listening to generic pop radio, and not being hassled to do much else.  We’re introduced to her as a corpse, frozen in a ditch without anyone looking for her or even really knowing who she is.  We get to know her through the posthumous testimonials of people whose lives she drifted through, her aimless story playing out in fractured flashback.  Everyone projects their own dreams, regrets, uses, and prejudices onto her but she was never vulnerable enough with any stranger ever to fully reveal herself, making her just as impossible to pin down in testimonial as Charles Foster Kane.  Only, Kane was defined by the crushing weight of his own ambition, while Mona is defined by her total lack of it.  As she camps on isolated roadsides and squats in abandoned estates, the people around her attempt to parse out the romance of her wandering vs the self-destructive impulse of her “withering.”  It’s essentially unacceptable for her to merely exist, and the world inevitably punishes her for it by abandoning her body in a ditch.

One of the reasons I put off watching this particular Varda film for so long is that its premise sounds so unrelentingly grim.  In truth, Vagabond strikes the same real-life balance between joy & misery that most of Varda’s films achieve; it just starts with tragedy instead of saving it for a last-minute shock.  Even Mona’s death has an absurdist humor to it in the end, as it results from the joyous carnival celebrations of a local community who isn’t aware how vulnerable she is to their drunken shenanigans.  As doomed as she is from the start and as unknowable as she remains to everyone she meets, Mona is a loveable, recognizable kind of rebel.  Varda might mock the people who project their own psychological hangups onto the character’s blank canvas, but she includes herself and her audience in that indictment.  By the end you really feel like you know Mona, especially if you’ve ever smelled the particular sweet-yeast/old-mold stench crusties tend to cultivate in their unwashed denim.  You don’t know her, though.  No one possibly could.

Rebel Dykes (2021)

I don’t know that Patois Film Fest‘s screening of the 2021 documentary Rebel Dykes technically counts as repertory, since it might very well have been the film’s local premiere.  I’ve been waiting to see this low-budget, D.I.Y. punk doc for years, but it seemingly never landed official distribution outside its initial festival run.  It was a perfect fit for Patois programmers’ focus on political activism, though, since it’s specifically about the anti-assimilationist queer politics of post-punk lesbian leather bars in 1980s London.  Ostracized both by internal debates over whether S&M & pornography were acceptable feminist practices and by external governmental oppression in Thatcher’s UK, the heavy-leather lesbians of the era formed a tight community initially mobilized by lust but eventually galvanized into political fury – mostly by necessity.  A lot of them are still around to tell the tale, too (a rare luxury for 1980s urban queer communities), including producer Siobhan Fahey, who’s interviewed among her friends as a first-hand witness to the scene.

Rebel Dykes has all the hallmarks of a self-indulgent documentary in which talking heads wax nostalgic about the “You had to be there” glory days, but it’s thankfully working with a deep archive of vintage material from the era that helps illustrate the scene’s historical importance.  That archive is especially helped by its subjects recalling a time when home video camcorders were first becoming affordable, giving a lot of the vintage footage the feel of grimy video art and, more practically, homemade pornography.  The animated interstitials that stitch those clips together are a lot less visually impressive, but there is a kind of homemade charm to them as well, as if a bored teenage punk made their own Flash Animation versions of Love & Rockets comic book covers.  Mostly, though, Rebel Dykes‘s nostalgia is sidestepped through its usefulness as a modern political motivator.  It was a perfect selection for the activism angle of the Patois program, as it got a rowdy crowd amped up to either throw some bricks through some government windows or to throw some BDSM sex parties with their friends – whichever is more politically expedient.

Out of the Blue (1980)

Appropriately enough, Wildwood also recently screened Dennis Hopper’s teen-punk precursor to Vagabond—1980’s Out of the Blue—which likewise features an aimless, denim & leather-clad rebel whose most prized possession is her portable radio.  Linda Manz stars as an Elvis & punk obsessed brat who rebels against her eternal car-crash homelife by running away from home and mimicking the destructive, hedonistic behaviors of the drug-addict grownups around her.  Meanwhile, Hopper rebels with equal gusto against every studio exec who ever gave him a chance, combining the ecstatic antisocial freedoms of Easy Rider with the ecstatic career-torching incoherence of The Last Movie to deliver the least commercial project of his notoriously chaotic stint as a New Hollywood auteur.  Belligerent, sloppy, brilliant – Out of the Blue had me laughing and holding back tears throughout, often simultaneously.

Almost all of the credit for the movie’s power belongs to Manz, of course, whose lead performance anchors Hopper’s messy narrative style in the exact way her voiceover narration anchored Malick’s in Days of Heaven.  Her thick New Yawka felt out of place in that Americana period piece, but it’s perfectly suited to her character here, since she’s essentially auditioning to become the fifth Ramone.  Manz’s dialogue mostly consists of provocative catchphrases like “Elvis!”, “Punk rock!”, “Kill hippies!”, “Subvert normality!” and “I hate men!”, all of which she either delivers in confrontational shouts at the dysfunctional adults around her or in mumbled private reassurances to herself.  She’s a teenage thumbsucker who loves her teddy bear, but she’s eager to break out of her addiction-rotted home to live the full Fabulous Stains punk rock fantasy on the road, a volatile combo of innocence & bravado.  The result of that combination is inevitably bleak, but she’s explosively entertaining & surprisingly funny on her journey to self-destruction.

Out of the Blue is the total Rebel Girl package.  It’s got the oddly joyful nihilism of Vagabond, the take-no-shit toughness of Rebel Dykes, and a special one-of-a-kind teen rebel quality that’s only ever been credibly brought to the screen by Linda Manz (give or take a Natasha Lyonne, who is partially credited for fostering the film’s recent digital restoration).  It’s also got one of hell of a theme song in that titular Neil Young track, which helps add instant emotional impact to Hopper’s aggressively abject, abrasive imagery.

-Brandon Ledet

Quick Takes: Summer Flings

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It’s summertime, which means every movie marquee in America is clogged with corporate slop, and even the more artistic counterprogramming offered at your local multiplex is going to be a frantic superhero IP refresher like Shin Kamen Rider or Across the Spider-Verse.  There’s no refuge for weirdo cineastes in these conditions, which means that I won’t be leaving my couch much until Halloween & Oscars schlock reclaim their rightful screen space in October.  Naturally, I’m still watching movies, but I’m trying to keep everything light & low-key instead of getting my brain hammered smooth by the fast & furious transformer machinery of the summer’s new release schedule. 

As a result, I’ve been watching a lot of quiet indie films about love & romance in recent weeks, none of which will be lighting up my personal Best of the Year list at the end of 2023 but all of which have been a pleasant distraction while soaking up AC at my home box office.  So, here are a few short-form reviews of the smaller-scale, smaller-budget romances I’ve been watching this summer.

Rye Lane

When I try to name the most romantic movies of all time, the walk-and-talk European meet cute Before Sunrise is high on the hypothetical list.  Its 2023 equivalent, Rye Lane, continues the Before brand tradition of casual first-date swooning but shakes up the usual Beformula by transporting the action to the mostly Black neighborhoods of South London.  Meeting by chance at a mutual friend’s hilariously hacky art show, two South Londoners endlessly chat on what spirals into an accidental all-day first date, despite their recent, respective heartbreaks over failed relationships.  Their getting-to-know-you banter is decidedly low-key, but their walking tour of hip city neighborhoods provides a vibrant, near-psychedelic backdrop of food, art, fashion, sex, and music.  One sequence involving a petty heist temporarily raises the stakes (as our giddy couple breaks into an ex’s flat to liberate a vinyl copy of The Low End Theory), but for the most part the will-they-won’t-they tension of their tryst has an obvious, inevitable and, most importantly, adorable conclusion.

Rye Lane offers all of the usual chaotic, inexplicable behavior of a bubbly romcom, except now matched with chaotic, inexplicable camera work.  The whole thing is shot with a Soderberghian fisheye lens, bending a familiar modern comedy template around the constantly surprising visual flourishes of music videos & vintage animation.  Its central hook-up story of a meek man shaken out of his comfort zone by a manic pixie dream hedonist isn’t ever mind-blowing, but its warped visual presentation often can be.  In short, it’s a feel-good Before Sunrise for the Instagram era, and it’s a shame that its direct-to-Hulu distro means it has a much smaller chance of making a splash as that 90s indie-scene charmer.

Emily

Wuthering Heights may be the greatest romance ever written, but its story of life-long ferocious obsession & betrayal isn’t likely to be described as “small” or “low-key” by anyone who’s actually read it.  However, this factually loose biopic of its author imagines a brief, intimate affair that might have inspired its tale of feral, soul-destroying love, dragging it down to the level of a more recognizable, real-world romance.  Emma “Maeve from Sex Education” Mackey stars as a teenage Emily Brontë doing field research (i.e., getting her heart broken) before writing the novel that made her infamous.  According to the movie’s made-up version of events, her source inspiration behind Cathy’s wild, untamed desire for Heathcliff is split between the only two young men in her life: her libertine brother and their isolated village’s local curate. Thankfully, the story never tips into full-on incest (although that wouldn’t be too out of place in a Wuthering Heights context).  Instead, the young Brontë shares a fiery, oft-consummated passion with the clergyman – which is just sinful & blasphemous enough to justify its supposed connection to the novel, especially once the curate breaks her spirit by abruptly breaking things off.

Emily may not be useful as a historical text, but its deviations from the facts of Brontë’s sheltered bookworm life help make it an entertaining tribute to the greatest romance ever penned.  There’s something especially endearing about the way her handwritten prose & poetry are too powerful for the small-minded prudes around her to gaze at directly (including her sister & fellow author Charlotte, whom the film slanders as a proto-Karen scold).  Once a grief-stricken Emily sits down to scribble the entirety of Wuthering Heights in a single, furious tantrum, the fictionalized power of her writing can come across a little goofy, but it helps that the novel in question has stood the test of time as an incendiary work that either enraptures or enrages its readers to this day.  More importantly, the film itself is a gloomy love letter to all angsty goth girls everywhere, often making Brontë’s imagined loves & literary triumphs secondary to her iconoclastic status as a teenage “free thinker” who dabbles in opium, dirty poems, and the occult.  It’s romantic in its portrayal of a doomed fling that can only last a single season, but it’s also romantic in its aspirational posturing as a ghost story about the original shy-girl goth kid who became infamous for her dark-sided art and her intense brooding on the moors.

Sanctuary

It’s not exactly true that there’s no artsy counterprogramming in theaters right now.  In some ways, I’ve just been trained over the pandemic to treat this kind of low-budget, low-stakes movie as a small-screen experience that I’ll eventually catch whenever it hits streaming.  So, I have admittedly shot myself in the foot several times over the past month, skipping out on local showings of Past Lives, Monica, You Hurt My Feelings, and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.  I guess I’ll be cramming in those titles in the mad scramble to bulk up my Best of the Year list in December.  In the meantime, though, I did recently venture out of the house to see the single-room two hander Sanctuary, despite it being no bigger nor flashier than those competitors.  I suppose after already being suckered into watching Piercing, any movie where Christopher Abbott is tortured by a high-class dominatrix is something of an Event Film for me, although I can’t say either example so far has been especially exceptional.  In Sanctuary, Abbott’s pro-domme tormentor is played by Margaret Qualley, who refuses to take “No” for an answer when her millionaire hotel-heir client (Abbott) decides to break off their professional relationship just as he takes over his dad’s business and the real money starts flowing in.  Feeling like he owes his success to her sexual “training” and like their sessions have transcended a purely transactional nature to something more sweetly romantic, she holds him hostage in his luxury hotel suite until he caves and gives her everything her volatile whims demand.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of Sanctuary.  It’s either a disappointingly flat erotic thriller or a charmingly daffy romcom.  Maybe it’s both.  It needed to feel like a finely constructed stage play to fully work, but its ditzy internal logic is written more in the spirit of online erotica.  The result is something like an off-Broadway adaptation of Succession fan fiction (a Roman Roy fantasy, specifically), which can be adorably goofy in the moment but quickly falls apart under any prolonged scrutiny.  I did laugh at the camera movements that simulated the power dynamic flipping between characters by literally flipping the frame upside down (a move that’s coincidentally mirrored in Emily, which enters the twisted mind of Emily Brontë by literally twisting the camera’s zoom-in on her dark goth-girl eyes).  I also chuckled at the baffling, seemingly arbitrary decisions those characters make every few minutes, either to convey the frustration & desperation of someone who’s wildly horny or to convey the frustration & desperation of a screenwriter who doesn’t know how to keep the story going.  I appreciated that Qualley kept the mood light by playing her domme persona bratty instead of severe, but I can’t say that her performance wouldn’t have been better suited for, say, a Rachel Sennott or a Mia Goth or a Mia Wasikowska – one of whom has already proven her worth in this exact Abbott-teasing scenario.  I don’t know.  I’m the exact target audience for this kind of perversely playful filth, and yet I walked away from the theater only mildly satisfied, so I can’t imagine most people will work up much enthusiasm for it.  At least there are no green screen backdrops, and Christopher Abbott isn’t playing a superhero?  Arthouse victories can feel so minor this time of year, but I’m still thankful that they’re out there.

-Brandon Ledet

Quick Takes: New Orleans Rep Scene Report

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I’ve hit a dry spell with new releases lately.  Now that last year’s Awards Season holdovers and January’s Dumping Season genre trash have fallen off local marquees, there just isn’t that much out there for me.  I’d be in much better shape if I kept up with the annual sequels to ongoing franchises like Shazam, Creed, and John Wick, but I resent the idea that I need to do prerequisite homework before going to the movies, so I’m okay just letting them pass me by.  During this ritualistic dry spell that crops up before “Summer Blockbuster” season gets rolling mid-Spring, I find myself thinking a lot about cities like Los Angeles, New York, Austin, Chicago, and Toronto that aren’t nearly as reliant on the new release calendar for their moviegoing options.  These are cities with robust, flourishing repertory scenes where audiences seemingly get to see an older “new-to-you” title projected on the big screen every day of the week.  The New Orleans rep scene is much smaller & more scattered, to the point where it isn’t actually an organized scene at all.  You have to scrounge local listings on a weekly basis to find a couple disparate repertory titles worth getting excited about, something I become sharply aware of every time the new release calendar gets this consistently dull.  New Orleans rep screenings are out there, though, and they are easily accessible if you know where to look.

So, here are a few quick short-form reviews of the repertory screenings I happened to catch around the city over the past month, along with notes on where I found them.

Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

You can find the usual suspects of broad-appeal crowdpleaser rep screenings on a near-monthly basis—namely, Rocky Horror & The Room—but for the really good stuff you have to wait for annual festivals.  For instance, the upcoming Overlook Film Festival is about to bring legacy screenings of titles like Joe Dante’s Matinee, William Castle’s The Tingler, and David Cronenberg’s Dead Zone to both locations of The Prytania for one killer rep-friendly weekend we won’t see again until next Overlook.  This is happening less than a month after the most recent New Orleans French Film Festival (also staged at The Prytania) included Agnès Varda’s French New Wave classic Cléo from 5 to 7 in collaboration with the host venue’s weekly Classic Movie series.  That was also no fluke.  In the past, I’ve gotten to see French classics like Breathless, Children of the Paradise, Beauty and the Beast, Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Mr. Klein, and The Nun for the first time on the big screen thanks to French Film Fest, when I’d usually have to seek that kind of artsy-fartsy fare on the Criterion Channel at home.  I’ve particularly become spoiled when it comes to Varda’s work, of which I’ve seen most of her titles that I’m familiar with (including personal favorites The Gleaners & I and Le Bonheur) for the first time at that exact venue.  In all honesty, I should have sought out Cléo from 5 to 7 a lot sooner, as it’s arguably her most iconic work, but I was convinced it would eventually play at the festival if I was patient enough . . . and the gamble paid off.

The titular Cleopatra is a young chanteuse enjoying mild notoriety for her yé-yé pop tunes in early-60s Paris.  She’s also a superstitious, narcissistic hypochondriac who’s awaiting potentially devastating news from a doctor who recently screened her for cancer.  The movie follows Cléo’s attempts to distract herself for the final two hours before those test results arrive, explaining through an observational character study how, in her mind, the anticipation is far worse than any news her doctor could deliver.  Incidentally, the film also doubles as a real-time tour of 1960s Paris, as Varda’s handheld, ground-level camera commits brazen acts of people-watching while Cléo cabs & busses from cafe to art studio to couturier.  As Cléo muses about how modeling new clothes is intoxicating and her free-spirit bestie muses the same about nude modeling for art students, that cinematic voyeurism becomes the main thematic thrust of the picture.  The camera casually observes the people of Paris.  The people of Paris intensely observe the fashionable Cléo, who in turn even more intensely observes her own reflection.  Even though not much actually happens in the film, I was thrilled by how much of its screen space was overwhelmed by reflections in mirrors & windowpanes.  Not only did those reflections underline its themes of self-obsession & strange gazes, but it also just looked cool, affording Varda even more room to chop up & alter her images from infinite angles. And just as I was putting that thought together, the movie “overhears” a café discussion of Cubism as an artform.  As always with these Varda screenings at French Film Fest, Cléo was an immensely rewarding trip to the theater, one that made me fondly remember its newfound superiority over Breathless in the most recent Sight & Sound rankings.

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

Besides sporadic festival offerings, the most obvious, consistent venues for rep screenings are the only venues where you can watch any movies in New Orleans proper: The Broad and The Prytania, which among them account for the only three full-time cinemas within city limits.  Luckily, they’re both well balanced & adventurous in their programming, squeezing in as a many freak-show arthouse screenings as they can between the Top Gun & Avatar behemoths that pay the bills.  Since they recently acquired the Canal Place venue, The Prytania has had more screens to play with than The Broad, so they have more room for regular repertory programming like their aforementioned Classic Movie series and their weirder, wilder Wildwood series on Thursday nights.  I check both theatres’ listings every Tuesday afternoon to survey the next week of showtimes, though, and they’ve both come through with plenty of great repertory screenings in recent months – from new-to-me genre relics like Ghost in the Shell & Calvaire to very strange, one-of-a-kind presentations of The Mothman Prophecies and Antonioni’s Blow-Up.  Even though their rep offerings are less frequent, The Broad accounts for about half of the screenings I actually make it to (not least of all because they’re a much shorter bus ride away from my house), and I very much appreciate that they make room for older titles on the few screens they have to play with.  In particular, they’ve been on a John Carpenter kick lately, screening 4K restorations of his genre-defining classics that happened to get past me in my video store youth, which is how I recently got to see both The Fog and Assault on Precinct 13 for the first time on the big screen.

I would never place a Western-inspired prison siege movie above Carpenter’s supernatural horror classics as the director’s absolute best, but Assault on Precinct 13 does have a strong case as Carpenter’s absolute coolest.  Set in the vaguely defined war zone of “a Los Angeles ghetto”, this punk-era cops vs. gangsters shootout recalls much later, grimier genre pictures like Tenement, The Warriors, and Streets of Fire than it does the gruff, traditionalist John Wayne heroics that inspired it.  That said, Darwin Joston is doing a straight-up John Wayne impersonation as the laidback Death Row inmate Napoleon Wilson, who’s temporarily set free by his jailers to fire back at the ghoulish gangsters who relentlessly invade the titular police station where he is held captive.  His uneasy, sardonic friendship & romance with the officers he fights beside make Precinct a kind of unlikely hangout film in the tradition of the similarly violent-but-laidback Rio Bravo.  It’s Carpenter’s overbearing directorial style that makes it a classic in its own right, though, especially in the way he portrays the invading gangsters as no less mysterious & otherworldly than the ghosts that emerge from The Fog.  His halfway-closed police station setting is an eerie liminal space, and the morality of who’s in “the right” in the plot’s pigs vs. civilians warfare is just as unsettled.  I’ve gotten to see a lot of John Carpenter classics for the first time theatrically (including his actual career-best, The Thing, at The Prytania), and two things are always consistent among those screenings: his signature synth scores are electrifying in that full surround-sound environment, and no matter how great the movies are I always struggle to stay awake for their entirety.  In a perfect world, I’d love for the city’s somewhat regular John Carpenter rep screenings to play as matinees instead of cult-classic Midnighters, but as is I’ve gotten used to seeing them in my own liminal halfway dream state, re-running key scenes on Tubi as soon as I get home to make sure I didn’t actually sleep through something vital.  Given its real-world setting & premise, I didn’t expect Assault on Precinct 13 to fit so well into that eerie supernatural mold, but that’s apparently the John Carpenter touch.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

When things get really desperate, you can always leave the city for the suburbs, where there are multiple AMC Theaters waiting to dazzle you with “$5 Fan Favorite” rep screenings of crowd-pleasers like E.T., Jurassic Park, The Goonies and, presumably, even a few movies not produced by Steven Spielberg.  I happened to catch AMC at an opportune moment in recent weeks, when the Awards Season afterglow of the Oscars allowed for more variety on their schedule than usual.  In particular, AMC Elmwood included Ang Lee’s international wuxia hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on its recent Fan Favorites schedule, presumably inspired by Michele Yeoh’s Oscars Moment as the lead of the Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once.  Movies like Crouching Tiger returning to the big screen for their victory laps (or, often enough, getting funded in the first place) are the major reason I consider the exhausting Oscars ritual an overall net good. They’re more of a useful marketing tool than they are a signifier of artistic quality, but they are useful.  Until now, I’ve only ever experienced Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as an on-the-couch Blockbuster VHS rental, and it was wonderful to see its fantastic fight choreography play out on a larger canvas for the first time.

To my taste, the classy, buttoned-up version of martial arts cinema in Crouching Tiger is not nearly as exciting as the more playful, over-the-top actioners Michele Yeoh was making in her Hong Kong heyday.  Since The Heroic Trio is unlikely to ever make its way back to the suburban multiplex, however (despite a recent co-sign from The Criterion Collection, an actual signifier of good taste), I was ecstatic to watch Yeoh clang swords & hop rooftops in this Oscars-certified historical drama.  I can’t say that the will-they-won’t-they love story Yeoh shares with Chow Yun-Fat ever landed much emotional impact with me in the few times I’ve seen this film, nor do I pay much attention to the quiet nobility of their mission to find a rightful home for a 400-year-old sword.  I’m the kind of dipshit who prefers Pearl Chang’s low-rent, goofball version of wuxia acrobatics to the headier, classier oeuvre of King Hu, though, so it’s probably best that my personal taste is not dictating what gets screened around the city.  At its best, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a visual spectacle about the beauty of tactile fight choreography and wire work, and no matter how restrained the drama is between those fights (nor how mundane a theatrical venue the AMC can be), it’s impossible to deny the power of seeing those images big & loud for the first time.

-Brandon Ledet

Quick Takes: 2022 FYC Leftovers

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For the past couple months, my inboxes (both physical and virtual) have been overflowing with FYC Awards Screeners.  Within the two-hour span of pressing play on a movie and checking my phone during its end credits, two or three more titles would appear, fighting their way into my eyeballs.  It was an unrelenting flood of #prestigecontent presented in low-res, watermarked glory, and I crammed in as many titles I could before voting on the SEFCA’s Best of the Year list and publishing my own personal favs.  Now that the ritual is over and my backlog of screeners is cleared, I’m feeling a lot less pressure to properly review everything I watched during my FYC marathon.  For the past month, I’ve been regularly #prestigeposting about the movies I watched during that busy stretch, but I’m ready to move on to the much more exciting moviewatching ritual of January Dumping Season.  I’ve got to get these 2022 FYC leftovers out of the way before I review the most important cinematic release of 2023: the killer-doll gimmick horror M3GAN.

So, here are a few quick mini-reviews of the 2022 awards contenders I watched for Best of the Year consideration, but never found the time to write about before those lists were carved in stone.

Corsage (2022)

The playfully anachronistic costume drama Corsage was the biggest no-brainer selection from my screener pile, since I’m generally a huge fan of subversive works that shake up the genre with modern flippancy & vulgarity: Marie Antoinette, Emma., The Favourite, The Great, etc.  Only, I’m not sure that director Marie Kreutzer shares my love for those defiantly lewd period pieces.  Corsage modernizes Empress Elisabeth of Austria’s final years by framing her as a feminist icon, wagging her tongue & middle finger in mockery of The Patriarchy while orchestral arrangements of pop songs like “A Tears Go By” lilt on the soundtrack.  However, Kreutzer pursues a much more restrained, melancholy approach to the pop-music costume drama than you’ll find in Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, aiming more for deep exhaustion with the world than transgressive, bratty sass. Corsage evokes the awkward, sad, oppressive atmosphere of films like Spencer or Jackie instead, with even the modern pop soundtrack from French chanteuse Camile striking a haunted, spooky tone instead of an out-of-time party atmosphere.

That muted, somber tone limits how surprising & transgressive Corsage feels from scene to scene, so it’s most commendable as a Vicky Krieps acting showcase, the scale of which hasn’t been seen since Phantom Thread.  Elisabeth died in her forties, obsessed with maintaining her youthful beauty as a source of political power but frustrated to be living a royal life where “your only duty is having your hair braided.”  The movie skips over the more dramatic Wikipedia bullet points of her biography—including her assassination—and instead makes a meal out of watching Krieps squeeze into increasingly tight corsets, smoke countless cigarettes, and seethe on windowsills.  Its boldest risks are taken in her costuming, outfitting her with striking black veils, sea captain tattoos, costume shop mustaches, and other novelty adornments that would’ve been a shock to 19th Century onlookers.  In a lot of ways, it feels stuck between flippancy & solemnity, never finding a satisfying balance between those two impulses, but it’s still worth a look for Krieps’s costumes & performance.

The Whale (2022)

I can at least get behind Best Acting nominations for Krieps in Corsage more than I can support them for Brendan Fraser in The Whale.  His casting is just about the only thing that works in Darren Aronofsky’s latest allegorical feel-badder, in which Fraser plays a 600-pound gay man on a culinary suicide mission.  Fraser has kind, sympathetic eyes, which beam blinding, unearned pathos from under his cumbersome prosthetic fat suit.  The only problem is that every choice outside that casting is cruel, miserable, disposable nonsense.  Everything about this stilted stage play adaptation rings hollow & artificial, directly in opposition to the real-world authenticity of the last time Aronofsky told its father-seeking-redemption-before-suicide story in The Wrestler.  Worse, it gawks at Fraser’s synthetic fat body as an alien grotesquerie, cranking up the sounds of his eating, gasping, and wheezing on the soundtrack so you never forget to be disgusted by what he’s done to himself.  You’re supposed to feel immense sympathy when bullies enter the dying man’s apartment to hurl insults at the poor, obese creature, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the movie itself shares their villainous disgust.

I love a volatile auteur who consistently swings for the fences, but sometimes that means they follow up one of their career-best films with their absolutely worst.  mother! felt like an exciting direction for Aronofsky’s absurdly literal allegories, lashing out in broad, expressionist strokes instead of tethering himself to the grim restrictions of reality.  In that context, The Whale is a regressive act, confining all of its allegorical value in conversational references to Moby Dick & The Book of Jonah while Fraser’s pathetic junk-food suicide plays out onscreen in grounded, morbidly realistic terms (until its idiotic concluding seconds, at least).  For some reason, Sarah Polley’s emotionally devastating Women Talking is getting a lot of pushback this awards season for being stagebound & visually ugly, while this phony misery piece is shot in even duller greys, browns, and yellows in a cheap-o digi 4:3 Zoom window frame.  It’s incredible that it was adapted from a stage play and not written in a rush to produce something COVID-filmable, since most of its faux-philosophical dialogue reads as [insert something profound here] placeholders.

We’re all happy to see Fraser back onscreen, and he really does have effectively pathetic puppy dog eyes, but his presence is totally wasted here, not to mention physically obscured.

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)

In contrast, I despised Martin McDonagh’s last film—Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri—but adored his latest darkly comic awards seeker.  The Banshees of Inisherin is similar to The Whale in its stage-play approach to dialogue, its pronounced adherence to allegory, and its morbid fascination with destruction of the human body. It’s just more successful by every metric.  I was even heartened that the SEFCA poll for the Best Movies of 2022—the reason I received these screeners in the first place—honored Colin Farrell’s performance in Banshees over Fraser’s in The Whale, demoting that Oscar front-runner to Farrell’s runner-up.  Fraser may have sympathetic eyes, but Farrell has the world’s most flexible, expressive eyebrows, and they’re put to incredible use in his latest collaboration with McDonagh.

The Banshees of Inisherin isn’t an especially impressive looking movie; its relatively low-stakes story about an adult friendship on the rocks is rarely emotionally devastating; its metaphorical echoes of the Irish Civil War are spelled out as plainly & flatly as anything in The Whale.  Truth be told, it’s my favorite movie on this list simply because it is very, very funny.  Colin Farrell’s performance as a nice, milquetoast man who is devastated to discover that his lifelong bestie (Brendan Gleeson) finds him to be a bore and wants nothing more to do with him is consistently hilarious & endearing.  As Gleason holds himself hostage, mutilating his fiddle-playing hand every time Farrell crosses the treaty line to bore him with more small talk, Farrell’s sweetheart himbo confusion with why they’re spatting in the first place reaches some sublimely funny character work.  I’m going to assume it’s a distinctly Irish sense of humor, too, since McDonagh’s dialogue hits the exact same joke-telling cadence as the recently concluded sitcom Derry Girls, just now with more allegorey. 

Banshees did not register among my favorite movies of the year, but it consistently made me laugh, while Corsage occasionally had me checking my watch and The Whale made me roll my eyes so hard they’re still stuck at the top of my skull.

-Brandon Ledet

Quick Takes: Halloween Hangover

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Every October, I sit on the sidelines while more dedicated movie nerds cram in 31 new-to-them horror films, one for every day of the month. I’m usually too busy with New Orleans Film Fest screenings, podcast homework, NOCAZ prep, and other personal movie-watching rituals to keep up with that schedule.  A lot of those priorities have shifted in recent years, though. NOCAZ, for instance, doesn’t even exist anymore.  So, in the past couple years I’ve gotten the closest I ever have to properly celebrating Spooktober alongside my buddies, watching 32 horror films in October 2021 and 30 in October 2022.  These numbers are puny when you realize they’re boosted by rewatches. They’re even punier when you compare them to the triple-digit anomalies more voracious viewers like the hosts of We Love to Watch are racking up, but it’s at least a stride in the right direction.  When I grow up, I want to be a proper Spooktoberer.  One day, one day.

This Spooktober, my pen could not keep up with my eyes, and I didn’t find time to write or podcast about all of the horror movies I watched before Halloween Night.  I’m willing to write proper reviews of this year’s new horror releases that I watched last month, but I’m a less eager to let the older titles clog up my Drafts box.  So, here are a few quick mini-reviews of new-to-me, old-to-the-world horror movies I watched in the lead up to Halloween.

Evilspeak (1981)

After watching Clint Howard slum it in the all-around lazy kindertrauma slasher Ice Cream Man earlier this month, it was wonderful to see him shine as the lead in a Great horror movie for a change – although one with an equally goofy premise.  In Evilspeak, a young, baby-faced Howard stars as a military academy misfit who summons Satan to smite his bullies using the Latin translation software on the school computer.  It’s a dual-novelty horror that cashes in on the personal desktop computer & Satanic Panic trends of its era, combining badass practical gore spectacles with proto-Lawnmower Man computer graphics.  It isn’t long before the prematurely-bald Baby Clint graduates from translating Latin phrases from a Satanic priest’s diary to asking the computer dangerous questions like “What elements do I need for a Black Mass?” and “What are the keys to Satan’s magic?”, stoking parents’ technological and religious fears with full aggression.  And the third-act gore spectacle he unleashes with those questions is gorgeously disgusting.

There are two notable endorsements of Evilspeak‘s quality from infamously disreputable sources: Anton LaVey publicly praised the film’s Satanic powers, and British censors listed it among the initial Video Nasties list of banned home video titles.  Evilspeak starts off goofy & unassuming enough for audiences to expect a safe & subdued resolution to Clint’s schoolday woes.  Once he gets his cathartic Carrie payback scene in the school chapel, though, it quickly devolves into a gruesome gore fest, with Clint soaring above his tormenters while wielding a gigantic sword and an army of feral, flesh-starved hogs.  The only thing you can really fault the movie for is casting someone who was already bald to play a picked-on high school student (hiding under a thin, combed-over toupee), but hey, I had a very good friend at that age who started balding before we graduated, and it’s a pretty convincing reason why he was such a target for bullying.

Santo and Blue Demon vs. Dracula and the Wolf Man (1973)

The title pretty much says it all.  Santo and Blue Demon vs. Dracula and the Wolf Man is one of the 53 lucha libre films starring masked pro wrestler El Santo, nine of which featured him teaming up with his in-ring rival Demonio Azul.  From what I can tell, a significant portion of that filmography is horror-related too.  At least, the only other Santo movie I’ve seen to date, Santo vs. The Vampire Women, is essentially a Hammer horror film that happens to include some wrestling.  There’s no reason to be intimidated by the seemingly daunting number of Santo films that are out there, though.  Watching these two out of order—released a decade apart—I can confirm that they work a lot like real-life pro wrestling in that you can jump in at any time and still get into the drama of the match at hand pretty quickly: Santo good, Dracula bad, etc.

What really took me aback about this particular Santo horror was its pristine presentation on the free-with-ads streamer Tubi, which I’m forever struggling to wrap my mind around.  Tubi has this tag-team lucha horror presented in the pristine HD condition you’d expect from a Powell & Pressburger restoration on The Criterion Channel . . . give or take a few Geico ads and a goofball English dub.  The Eastman Color palette is shockingly vivid, to the point where watching Santo & The Blue Demon blow off steam with a friendly game of chess is just as gorgeous to behold as the film’s haunted-house bats, gargoyles, and cobwebbed torture dungeons.  The simplicity of Dracula’s plan to “turn the world into vampires & werewolves” makes this a relatively predictable novelty, but some truly wonderful Dracula & luchador imagery results from that set-up (as long as you can push past the embarrassingly lazy vocal dub).

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)

It’s a shame Bela Lugosi didn’t live long enough to play Dr. Acula in Ed Wood’s Night of the Ghouls, but at least his first mad scientist role was as Dr. Mirakle in the Universal picture Murders in the Rue Morgue.  Dr. Mirakle is a carnival sideshow murderer who experiments mixing women’s blood with his pet ape Eric’s in a disastrous attempt to prove the theory of Evolution.  When he’s frustrated with the results of “experimenting on” (i.e., murdering) prostitutes, he moves onto the women of Proper Society, so Parisians take notice and drive him to his doom.  The movie was heavily edited before release to downplay its shocks of violence, sexuality, and Evolutionary theory, leaving behind a short, chopped-to-pieces mess.  Lugosi looks great in his unibrow & tuxedo combo, though, and it’s easy to tell why they expanded his role as the central villain to the point where the story held very little—if any—resemblance to its Edgar Allen Poe source material.

Lugosi’s Dracula film has been slipping out of public favor in recent years for being “boring” (something I think a musical score easily fixes), while the Poverty Row slapstick comedy Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla has gradually been building a cult – to the point where it was screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival as a horror “classic.”  Murders in the Rue Morgue is far from Lugosi’s best, but it’s amusing as unlikely middle ground between the Universal Horror prestige and ape-on-the-loose goofballery of those two pictures.  His performance is fully committed, there are some shocking moments of pre-Code violence, and the gorgeous Expressionist photography smooths over a lot of the scatterbrained plotting.  You can find all of those elements put to much, much better use in other Poe-adjacent Lugosi pictures of the era like The Black Cat & The Raven, but they’re still charming here.

House (1986)

House II: The Second Story (1987)

It’s a shame that the 80s haunted house horror comedy House has to share its title with the 70s Nobuhiko Obayashi masterpiece of the same name & sub-genre, since being compared against one of the greatest films of all time doesn’t do it any favors.  This isn’t a Cronenberg vs 2006-Best-Picture-Winner Crash situation, though.  The 80s House is too endearing to be an embarrassment, even if it struggles to stand out on its own.  Not only does it share its title with a far superior haunted house horror comedy with similar war-atrocity themes; it also lands as a goofy midpoint between the better-funded special effects showcase of Poltergeist and the eerie Vietnam PTSD horror of Jacob’s Ladder.  House has no chance to match the euphoric highs of either comparison point, but it’s still a fun dark-ride attraction of its own merit.  Its story of a Vietnam veteran facing his inner demons while writing a memoir in a haunted house is restrictively straightforward & contained, but its rubber-mask monsters are adorably grotesque, and they pop out of the most surprising places – which is sometimes all you need from a Halloween-season spookfest.

Despite its all-timer of a title, House II: The Second Story is an embarrassment.  I enjoyed the goofball humor that underlines the carnival-ride scares & Vietnam flashbacks of the first House, but The Second Story tips a little too far into Porky’s era frat boy comedy and the whole thing kinda unravels.  The monsters are deliberately cute instead of scary, which means that the most frightening moment is when Bill Maher shows up as a Reaganite record exec.  And since the jokes aren’t funny, there really isn’t much to do except appreciate the occasional bursts stop-motion animation and rubber-suited monsters – things that were much more plentiful & satisfying in the original.  The best I can say about The Second Story is that its title is great, and that I appreciated it as my last new-to-me watch of the month, since it’s the only title in this batch that features a Halloween dance party.

Party Line (1988)

If you’re only going to watch one 1988 sleazoid slasher about the phone sex hotline craze, you might as well watch the one where Divine appears out of drag as a police detective alongside Lust in the Dust co-stars Tab Hunter, Lainie Kazan, and Paul Bartel – Out of the Dark.  If you’re going to watch two, I guess there’s also Party Line, ya freak. 

In Party Line, a pair of wealthy, mutually obsessed siblings use a phone-sex party line as a recruitment tool for vulnerably horny victims.  Leif Garret stars as the requisite Norman Bates crossdresser killer in this watered-down De Palma knockoff, joined by Miss Universe beauty queen Shawn Weatherly as his honeytrap partner and Richard “Shaft” Roundtree as the police chief who busts their (barely covert) schemes.  Without question, the movie is a hotbed for terrible politics, especially in its overt suggestion that rape victims & crossdressers are predisposed to become homicidal maniacs.  It’s an amusing relic of its era, though, especially in its exploitation of the party line dirty talk fad and its stylistic combination of MTV & Skinemax aesthetics.  As long as you’re prepared to feel queasy about the story it’s telling, the only major drawback, really, is that its novelty is undercut by Out of the Dark doing a slightly better job with the same fad the very same year.

-Brandon Ledet

Quick Takes: Film Festival Runoff

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It’s Film Festival Season right now.  If you’re on the level of industry press who get flown around the world, that means you’re dragging your corpse from screening to screening at high-profile fests like Venice, Tribeca, and TIFF, then pretending in your late-night hotel room tweets & podcasts that you’re fully awake and spring-loaded with the hottest takes as you drift into a brief nap before the cycle starts again.  And if you’re an amateur movie nerd like me, you’re taking those delirious dispatches from Film Industry Hell as holy gospel, making notes on what movies to look out for much, much further down the distribution path.  The problem is a lot of the smaller, weirder titles highlighted in those reports from the ground can take years to reach local screens, if they ever arrive at all.  After years of attentive podcast listening, I have serial killer conspiracy theorist notebooks full of scribbled-down titles of movies that functionally do not exist, hoping that something as wonderfully bizarre as an Aline, a Double Lover, or a Diamantino might eventually make it my way.  It often pays off!  But it’s a madman’s hobby.

I was thinking about this private film fest ritual in recent weeks, listening to festival recaps on podcasts like Film Comment & The Last Thing I Saw while still searching for titles they covered years ago on my weekly trips to JustWatch.  And I happened to catch a few of those festival runoff titles in recent weeks: low-budget movies that were briefly highlighted in their festival runs while higher-profile awards seekers premiered in much brighter spotlights at the same venues.  I’ve covered local fests like NOFF & Overlook for Swampflix before, but I can’t afford to be the first online with the freshest takes on titles out of Sundance & Telluride that will be widely available in the nation’s multiplexes just a few weeks later.  Instead, here are a few quick reviews of smaller-profile indies that premiered at festivals long ago, but just recently got wide distribution.

The Silent Twins

The newest film from The Lure‘s Agnieszka Smoczyńska has enjoyed the quickest turnaround of the festival titles highlighted here, premiering at Cannes just this Spring.  That kind of rushed-to-market release usually means a film is vying for Awards Season prestige, but The Silent Twins is too thorny & too fanciful to be mistaken for a crowd-pleaser.  Its titular Welsh sisters, June & Jennifer Gibbons, were mutually obsessed to the point of total reclusiveness in real life, refusing to communicate to anyone but each other in their own hushed, made-up language.  Smoczyńska uses their personal diaries & surviving scraps of creative writing as inspiration to imagine what their inner world might have been like, since there isn’t much to depict in their near-catatonic external life as the only Black family in their Welsh neighborhood.  From the outside looking in, this is a grim, by-the-numbers historical drama.  On the inside, it’s a rich fantasyscape that often takes the shape of a grotesque stop-motion music video.

There’s a bizarre mismatch between auteur & genre here, like watching Lynne Ramsay direct Oscar Bait.  Smoczyńska is unlikely to ever make another killer-mermaid disco musical, though, so it’s at least cool to see her directing high-profile work with a hint of commercial appeal.  The (mostly British) audience who know the Gibbons sisters as a from-the-headlines human interest story have been frustrated with the film’s self-indulgent style and historical inaccuracies, while fans of The Lure will be frustrated that it doesn’t break from reality more frequently & more harshly.  Neither side of that divide can walk away 100% happy, but there’s some great tension between its Wikipedia Biopic genre template and its insular, high-style dream logic. And who knows, maybe it’ll make waves at the BAFTAs before it otherwise fades away forever.

Tahara

The road to wide distribution has been much longer for the microbudget coming-of-age drama Tahara, which first premiered at Slamdance, TIFF, and Outfest way back in 2020.  This is, of course, the 77min, darkly humorous queer meltdown drama in which Rachel Sennott makes bagels and makes out as an agent of chaos at a Jewish funeral.  No, not that one, the other one.  Tahara was shot in the moment between when Shiva Baby was just a proof-of-concept short film and when its feature-length version became a critical darling at SXSW & TIFF, earning a spot on many publication’s Best of 2021 lists.  Tahara can only suffer by comparison, then, since it’s not as searingly intense nor as robustly funded as Shiva Baby, which puts Sennott’s electric screen presence to much more attention-grabbing use.  By the time Bodies Bodies Bodies hit theaters this summer, though, she proved herself to be a legitimate, once-in-a-generation star, which makes the first feature she shot worth a look no matter how redundant its surface details seem.

Oddly enough, Tahara shares more in common with The Silent Twins, stylistically, than it does with Shiva Baby.  Sennott stars alongside Madeline Grey DeFreece as a pair of high school BFFs who are so mutually obsessed that they can almost communicate telepathically, chatting in a private body language that director Olivia Pearce helpfully translates into on-screen subtitles.  When Sennott’s bratty partygirl hedonist pressures her more bookish bestie into making out for LOLs at a classmate’s funeral, her friend catches feelings and the film slips into Silent Twins-style stop-motion fantasy.  However, their interpersonal drama is extremely low stakes in comparison to Smoczyńska’s film, or even Shiva Baby, really.  Mostly, this is a charming indie comedy that scores a lot of nervous laughter off the social tension of Sennott causing self-involved havoc in a buttoned-up funeral setting.  It’s the exact kind of movie you’d expect to see at a local film fest and hold onto as an “I knew them when” badge of honor as the breakout performer moved onto bigger & better things.  Only, Sennott’s rise to fame was much quicker than the movie’s roll-out.

Mother Schmuckers

It’s shameful to admit, but the film from this batch I was most looking forward to was the one most devoid of best-of-the-year potential, awards season prestige, or even basic artistic merit.  The Belgian buddy comedy Mother Schmuckers premiered at Sundance in 2021 to total critical indifference, despite its most juvenile efforts to provoke.  The 70min novelty gross-out revisits the tipping point when the Farrelley Brothers converted the John Waters gross-out comedy into mainstream crowd pleasers, choosing instead to upset & offend.  It’s Dumb & Dumber for the Pink Flamingos crowd, both a revolting abomination and a revolting delight.  I can’t recommend it in good conscience, but I also won’t pretend I didn’t enjoy it.

Real-life brothers Harpo and Lenny Guit star as fictional idiot brothers who torment anyone & everyone unfortunate enough to know them, as if they were performing hype house YouTube pranks that no one is around to film.  Mother Schmuckers opens with the titular schmucks cooking feces in the family frying pan, then offering it to their incensed mother until she pukes onto the camera lens, providing a slimy green backdrop for the title card.  Kicked out of the house and left in charge of the most valued member of the family—their mother’s dog—they get into endless bad-taste shenanigans, ranging from murder to bestiality to necrophiliac prostitution . . . all while searching for an easy meal.  The film indulges in a little visual flair to lighten up the severity of these stunts, dabbling in color blind dog-cam POV, vintage picture-in-picture inserts, and Jackass-style found footage camcorder textures.  This is not another fantasy-prone-siblings-shunned-by-a-cruel-world heartbreaker like The Silent Twins, though.  It’s trash; it knows it’s trash; and any festival programming it would’ve been smart to bury it in the midnight slot where only the most delirious trash scavengers would stumble across it.  All that said, I laughed a lot while watching it, which I believe qualifies it as a success.  I’m also in total amazement that it scored American distribution, given how many higher-minded films never make it past the festival circuit.

-Brandon Ledet

Quick Takes: TV at the Movies

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Sometime around the prestige TV era of shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Wire, there was a lot of inane, hyperbolic discourse about how the boundary between television & cinema had become irreversibly blurred. I never bought the argument that modern Event Television had somehow surpassed the artistry of traditional filmmaking, nor do I believe that should even be its goal. My favorite TV shows tend to be the kind of disposable, episodic entertainment that can only exist in that medium: reality competition shows like Project Runway, animated sitcoms like Tuca & Bertie, clips-of-the-week roundups like The Soup (R.I.P.), etc. I will concede that the modern straight-to-streaming movie distribution model has blurred the distinction between television & cinema, though, if only by making it so the old made-for-TV, movie-of-the-week format now outnumbers how many traditional films get theatrical distribution on a weekly basis. It’s the non-stop need for fresh streaming #content that’s making movies more like television, not some new Golden Age of high-quality TV shows that take 30 hours to tell a decent, self-contained story that could be wrapped up in 100 minutes or less.

If there’s any clear sign that the boundary between television & cinema has become blurred, it’s in the mundanity of modern “The Movie” versions of TV shows. When I was a kid, it felt like a major event when popular TV shows like Pokémon, The Simpsons, and Jackass graduated from the small screen to grander, theatrical “The Movie” versions of their formats. In 2022, the distinction feels arbitrary. In the past month, I’ve seen three “The Movie” versions of TV shows that I love, and none felt especially ceremonious, or even worthy of a standalone review. I did enjoy all three, but they all felt more like good television than great cinema. Here’s a quick review of each, with some thoughts on how they blur the line between the two mediums.

The Bob’s Burgers Movie

Unquestionably, The Bob’s Burgers Movie is the most convincing, traditional “The Movie” version of a TV show I’ve seen this year. Not only was it exclusive to theaters for months before popping up on HBO Max & Hulu (where it has since transformed from TV at the movies to regular TV), but the Loren Borchard-led creative team behind it put in great effort to make it feel like an Event. Throughout the latest season of the show, background characters have been tripping over a dislodged chunk of sidewalk in front of the titular burger restaurant, teasing the giant sinkhole that opens the main conflict of the film. A lot of money was also poured into ensuring there was more depth & detail in the actual animation of the movie to distinguish it from the show, even if most of that effort was just adding shadows to its usual look.

I expected The Bob’s Burgers Movie would escalate the show’s occasional song & dance numbers to a full-blown movie musical, but instead it stays true to their usual rhythms. Structurally, it feels just like a 100min episode of the animated sitcom, stretching the special-occasion ceremony of a season finale to a night-long Event. Everything I love about the Bob’s Burgers show is sharply pronounced in the film; it delivers rapid-fire puns & punchlines, its sprawling cast of oddball characters are universally loveable, and it can be surprisingly emotional to watch them fail & grow (especially Louise’s arc in this super-sized episode). A lot of what justifies its graduation to movie-scale pomp & circumstance is just its length and that added layer of shadows, but both really do go a long way.

Downton Abbey: A New Era

If there’s any film that challenges my snobbish distinctions between film & television, it’s Downton Abbey: A New Era, the sequel to 2019’s Downton Abbey: The Movie. While The Bob’s Burgers Movie justifies its medium jump from television to the big screen in the quality of its animation, there is absolutely nothing that visually distinguishes the Downton Abbey movies from their seven seasons of televised build-up. The main draw of these films is that you get to revisit all of the Upstairs/Downstairs characters you love for another couple episodes of wealth-porn soap opera, except now with a theater full of likeminded costume drama nerds who laugh & sniffle in unison instead of watching it under a cozy blanket (assuming, again, that you caught the latest installment in theaters instead of waiting for it to pop up on the Peacock app, where it has been downgraded to TV again).

As much as the Downton Abbey movies feel like more-of-the-same episodic television, I still have to admit that A New Era was one of my most emotionally satisfying trips to the movie theater all year. I was either laughing or crying for the entire runtime, so there’s no reason why this shouldn’t land near the top of my “Top Films of 2022” list, except that I consider it more TV than cinema, which makes me a bit of a snob. I would be fine with the series ending with A New Era, since it’s come full circle to just being Gosford Park without the murder mystery again, but I’ll keep tuning in forever if it keeps going (if not only to see the continued adventures of John Molesey, the unlikeliest of late-series MVPs). It’s good TV.

Beavis and Butthead Do the Universe

The new Beavis and Butthead movie knows exactly where it falls on television/cinema divide. It pretends to scale up its usual airheaded slacker premise with some sci-fi gimmickry at its bookends (joining the multiverse craze headlined by Everything Everywhere and the new Doctor Strange), but everything in-between those brief scenes is just more-of-the-same retreading of the original show. When it’s not a sci-fi action comedy starring the galaxy’s two unlikeliest heroes, Beavis and Butthead Do the Universe mostly plays like a less funny version of the (excellent, underrated) 2011 reboot season of the show, where our favorite knuckleheads adapt to a world of smartphones & “woke” politics. It’s still very funny, though, and its disinterest in growth or change is obviously a large part of the joke.

Beavis and Butthead already had a proper “The Movie” escalation of its premise in 1996’s Beavis & Butthead Do America, so there’s really nothing a straight-to-Paramount+ follow-up to the show needs to accomplish except to be funny. It was the least rewarding film out of this trio for me, but it’s also the one that best understands the function of movie addendums to television shows in the modern streaming era. “The Movie” versions of TV shows don’t need to elevate their medium to the holy mountain of cinematic prestige; they just need to give their fans a little more time with the characters they love, and to deliver a few solid laughs.

-Brandon Ledet

Quick Takes: Spring Cleaning 2022

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Between a long Easter weekend off work and being knocked off my feet by a painful gout flare-up (damn those tasty crawfish!), I have seen a lot of movies in the past few days.  Too many, even.  My normal process for this blog is to give each film a full, individualized review, but it would take me way too long to clear out this backlog before I could move onto new material. And since that sounds like more work than fun, it’s time for some spring cleaning.  So, here are a few brief, to-the-point reviews of new releases I’ve seen over the past week, ranked from best-to-least-best.

You Won’t Be Alone

Between Border, November, Tale of Tales, Field Guide to Evil, Lamb, The Other Lamb, and Hagazussa, there has been an entire industry of traditionalist folktale cinema that has emerged in the wake of The VVitch – not to mention the folk horror documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched that collects them all like Pokémon.  It’s easy to take You Won’t Be Alone for granted in such a crowded field of similar titles (which vary wildly both in quality and in creativity), but it still manages to be uniquely unnerving.  I’m not sure how many coming-of-age folktales about shapeshifting, bodyhopping witches (i.e., Wolf-Eateresses) you’ve seen in your lifetime, but this was my first.  I’m also willing to bet it was the first ever to be set in 19th Century Macedonia.

Over the course of the film we watch Old Maid Maria, the most feared Wolf-Eateress of all, train a child in the art of stealing life & likeness from human & animal victims alike.  Raised in a cave without much direct human contact (in a futile attempt to avoid this apprenticeship), the child learns how to relate to other people by unconvincingly pretending to be a Normal Human in variously shaped, gendered bodies.  Meanwhile, Old Maid Maria chides her for not rejecting humanity entirely and just snacking on human flesh for sustenance.  If You Won’t Be Alone is meant to be dealt with as a horror film, it is Imposter Syndrome Horror, where you never feel like you fit in with any community while everyone else seems to excel at it effortlessly.  Or maybe it’s just a nightmare scenario where Freddy Krueger is your adoptive mother.  If it is not a horror film, then it’s a confounding supernatural drama about all the various ways life can be miserable unless you luck into a well-nurtured youth.  I greatly enjoyed being perturbed by it, even its brand of eerie, back-to-basics folktale has become a matter of routine in recent years.

Dual

The clever dual-purpose title Dual refers both to human cloning and to duels to the death.  Karen Gillan stars as a woman who has herself cloned so her memory can live on past a terminal illness, then is forced to duel that clone when she unexpectedly recovers.  It is a comedy of passive aggression, wherein Original Sarah finds herself annoyed with how much shinier Clone Sarah’s hair is, or how she weighs slightly less, or how much more accommodating she is to friends & family – all great motivation for killing her.  It’s also a comedy of isolation, taking a macro view of all the commodified ways we’re supposed to maintain our bodies & our relationships in an increasingly passionless, distanced world.

Director Riley Stearns hammers away at the same flat, matter-of-fact line deliveries and overall comedic bitterness he played with in The Art of Self-Defense.  Characters speak in clipped, emotionless stabs; they text with abrupt punctuation.  Instead of satirizing the absurdity of traditional masculinity this time, though, he chisels at the absurdity of the self-care industry, from gym training to support groups to talk therapy.  Call it The Art of Self-Improvement.  Dual is a squirmy little black comedy about all the little ways you hate yourself and your life, with no chance for genuine change no matter how hard you try.  It’s funnier than it sounds.

The Pink Cloud

The Brazilian sci-fi chiller The Pink Cloud is also a dark film about isolation & passive aggression, but you need to get past the cosmic coincidence of its premise to contend with that.  Without reason or explanation, pink clouds rapidly appear across the globe, killing anyone who breathes them within seconds and tinting everything a pale Millennial Pink.  It’s a purely supernatural event, as the poisoned air does not pass through gaps in windows and cannot be safely filtered through masks. The clouds exist simply to force everyone inside, communicating only through social media and purchasing necessities through a system of drones & tubes.  Stuck at home for years, we watch one couple fall in and out of love after hunkering down together when the clouds interrupt what was supposed to be a one-time hookup.

I’ve seen plenty of accidentally pandemic-relevant sci-fi & horror films over the past couple years (Palm Springs, She Dies Tomorrow, Little Fish, Spontaneous, etc.), but this is the first one I’ve seen outright apologize for the coincidence.  I understand the impulse to include a title card that emphasizes the film was written & produced pre-COVID, since it includes many dead-on parallels to our last couple years of isolation & rot – from major cultural shifts like the new class system of work-from-home jobs vs. “essential” service work to the emergence of boredom-inspired fads like adult roller-skating.  The filmmakers had a lot on their minds about climate change, depression, and the general isolation of modern living, so it must be frustrating to see their work reduced to a pure-COVID metaphor.  Still, there have been enough of these accidentally-relevant genre pictures over the past couple years that it’s impossible to not be a little reductive about their collective emotional impact.  File this particular accidental-pandemic-chiller under the same anti-romantic subcategory as Vivarium, although it’s more melancholic than abrasive.

Ambulance

Michael Bay returns to basics with a retro, regressive thriller about two tough-guy criminals who steal an ambulance during a botched bank heist (one out of medical desperation, one out of greed), and enter into a wild police chase around Los Angeles in the clunky vehicle.  Ambulance is a typical 90s Bay thriller in all of the exact visual, visceral, and political ways you’d expect, except with two major updates: flamboyant exploitation of drone-camera tech and a wild-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal performance.  The cameras are piloted by young, professional drone racers, adding a nauseating velocity to even the pre-car-chase establishing shots, often for no discernible reason.  Gyllenhaal matches their gonzo energy as the ambulance heist’s main villain, playing the role as part criminal mastermind, part Nic Cagian freak show.

Gyllenhaal and the drones are enough to make Ambulance feel novel & exciting, but maybe not enough to fully justify the feeling of being bashed in the skull for 135 relentless minutes.  I was more obliterated by it than I was “entertained”, but I suppose that’s exactly what Bay’s paid to do.  He’s good at his job, the bastard.

Aline

If you are somehow unaware, Aline is an unauthorized Celine Dion biopic in which 57-year-old French comedian Valérie Lemercier plays the Québecian chanteuse from ages 12 to 54, with the aid of shoddy CGI.  I’ve been greatly anticipating Aline since professional smartasses Kyle Buchannan & Rachel Handler sang its uncanny praises at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, so it was bizarre to watch the Event Film in an otherwise empty suburban megaplex.  I cannot imagine what it would be like to stumble into it totally unprepared for Lemercier’s de-aged “transformations”, but it turns out that’s not really a valid concern, since most people don’t even know this curio exists.  Even the posters & trailers emphasize the gobsmacked blurbs from Handler & Buchannan at Cannes as its only selling point, making it clear who is likely to show up at the theater – freaks like me.

Aline is an odd mix of surrealist geek show & genuine biopic cliché.  Most movie nerds will compare it to the unconvincing early-years play acting of Walk Hard, but it reminded me more of the absurdist artificiality of Annette, sometimes slipping into the broad crowd-pleasing appeal of a My Big Fat Québecian Wedding. Questions of its sincerity & intent will linger with me for a while, but it does nail the only two things I know about Dion: she makes goofy faces, and the age she met her late manager-husband is alarming.  The movie constantly references “Aline Dieu’s” age, so we know exactly how old she is within the drama (helpful, since her face remains a static 57-years-old throughout), which only makes you dwell on the discomfort of her romance with her middle-aged divorcee manager.  When she is 12, she huffs his cologne as a private kink.  When she is 17, she lusts over a picture of him that she keeps tucked under her pillow.  When she is 20, she initiates their first, fully consensual consummation.  It was already a deeply strange, unsettling dynamic in real life, so it’s oddly appropriate that this “work of fiction freely inspired by” it is also deeply strange & unsettling.

Catwoman: Hunted

I don’t pay much attention to DC Comics’ straight-to-video animated features, but I was impressed enough with the visual imagination & propulsive energy of Batman Ninja to keep my eye out for similar releases.  Unfortunately, Catwoman: Hunted is not nearly as ambitious of an anime take on the DC brand as Batman Ninja.  It features one of the coolest comic book characters of all time doing her usual thing (jewel heists, cat puns, bisexual seductions, etc.), and it throws everything from demons to ninja assassins to mech-suit warriors in her way.  And yet the result feels tame in comparison to the last time the company dipped their toe into anime waters, which is a shame.

Thankfully, Catwoman: Hunted avoids total stylistic tedium by borrowing some jazzy cool from Cowboy Bebop.  There’s a jazz infused retro-futurism to it that makes for a fun novelty (who wouldn’t be curious to see Catwoman in a Cowboy Bebop crossover?), even if the whole thing feels pleasantly slight & forgettable.  While not exactly the cat’s pajamas, it is purrrfect viewing for a lazy afternoon (followed, of course, by a cat nap).

-Brandon Ledet

The Alien Movies Rated and Ranked

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Alien (1979)

An exquisitely fucked up mutation of the Roger Corman creature feature.  So many dirt-cheap horrors in its wake have aimed for its exact quietly eerie mood and inspired only frustrated boredom in the attempt.  Here, every scare is a sharp knife to the brain no matter how familiar you are with what’s coming.  I still can’t look directly at Giger’s goopy sex monster without shivering in pure disgust all these sequels & knockoffs later.  Like the original Terminator, it’s got a reputation of having been surpassed by its louder, better-funded spawn, but I don’t believe that’s true for a second.

Alien: Resurrection (1997)

Far from the scariest entry in the franchise, but easily the most fun.  The whole thing plays like a live-action cartoon, and its blasphemous disinterest in series lore is a refreshing blast of fresh air after watching Fincher take everything so relentlessly serious in its predecessor.  Great creature gags, some endearingly goofy character work, and a wonderfully imaginative eye from Jeunet, as always.  Big fan.

Prometheus (2012)

Fantastic mix of ludicrous retro sci-fi pulp & elegant visual artistry.  I am forever in love with the idea of humans asking Big, Important philosophical questions about our origins & purpose to literal gods and receiving only brutal, wordless violence in response.  Still kicking myself for allowing the negative word-of-mouth to talk me out of seeing it in 3D on the big screen when I had the chance.

Aliens (1986)

I’ll always have some philosophical hang-ups with the way Cameron simplifies & normalizes the subliminal nightmare fuel of the first Alien movie for much more familiar blockbuster entertainment.  It’s still great as a standalone action movie though!  Stan Winston’s wizardly creature effects are especially praiseworthy, affording the xenomorphs an exciting feeling of agility that matches the increased momentum of the shoot-em-up action sequences.  I’ll never buy into the myth that this & T2 are somehow superior to their predecessors just because of their slicker production values, and the Director’s Cut’s sprawling 154min runtime is a crime against all reason & good taste.  And yet pushing back against its hyperbolic reputation comes across as contrarian blasphemy, when the truth is it’s just a solidly entertaining popcorn movie and that’s a pleasure in itself.

AvP: Requiem (2007)

This is widely understood to be the worst Alien film, but I thoroughly enjoy it as dumb-fun teen horror. If nothing else, it’s impressively efficient and Mean. The gore gags are plentiful & cruel, maintaining a consistently entertaining rhythm of nasty, amoral kills. It’s like a modern throwback to the Roger Corman creature feature, with a suburban-invasion angle that brings some much-needed novelty to two once-great franchises that were running out of steam. I honestly believe that if it featured warring alien creatures that weren’t associated with pre-existing series, it wouldn’t be nearly as reviled. It probably wouldn’t be remembered at all, though, so maybe it’s for the best that it ruffled horror-nerd feathers.

Alien Covenant (2017)

Instead of aiming for the arty pulp of Prometheus, Covenant drags the Alien series’ newfound philosophical themes back down to the level of a body-count slasher.  This prequel/sequel is much more of a paint-by-numbers space horror genre picture than its predecessor, but that’s not necessarily a quality that ruins its premise.  Through horrific cruelty, striking production design, and the strangest villainous performance to hit a mainstream movie in years (it really should be retitled Michael Fassbender: Sex Robot), this easily gets by as a memorably entertaining entry in its series. If it could be considered middling, it’s only because the Alien franchise has maintained a better hit-to-miss ratio than seemingly any other decades-old horror brand has eight films into its catalog.

Alien³ (1992)

Really pushes the limits of the dictum “There’s no such thing as a bad Alien movie.”  Even the revised Assembly Cut is an excessively dour bore, and the only thing that breathes any life into the damned thing is the continued instinctive terror of Giger’s creature designs (though the green sheen of the early-90s CGI isn’t doing that aesthetic any favors).  Its only illuminating accomplishment is helping make sense why Jeunet was hired for the next entry in the series, as it often looks & feels like one of his steampunk grotesqueries with all of the Fun & Whimsy surgically removed. Otherwise, it just coasts on the series’ former glories.

AvP: Alien vs Predator (2004)

Maybe the most frustrating movie in the Alienverse for being deliriously stupid fun for its final 20 minutes or so, but not worth the effort it takes to get there.  The restorative praise for it in Horror Noire had me hoping for a different reaction than I had in the theater, but this viewing was mostly a repeat: bored out of my skull for the first hour and then cheering on its climactic team-up sequence as if I were watching the creature-feature Super Bowl.  Appropriately, that’s also a pretty accurate summation of Paul WS Anderson’s entire career; there’s just enough unhinged, goofball fun to keep your rooting for him even though he fumbles the ball every single game.

-Brandon Ledet