quick takes

Quick Takes: New Orleans Rep Scene Update

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Excluding the AMC multiplexes out in the suburbs, the Zeitgeist outpost in Arabi, and the backroom microcinemas in-between, there are exactly two regularly operational cinema hubs in Orleans Parish: The Prytania and The Broad. Both of these cultural epicenters work hard to make full use of their relatively limited screen space, finding the right balance between the arthouse titles that keep their die-hard regulars hooked and the big-ticket Disney products that actually keep the lights on. The most noble service The Prytania and The Broad provide is making room for regular, weekly repertory programming in the schedule gaps between new releases. Not too long ago, the Sunday morning Classic Movies slot at The Prytania Uptown was the only reliable spot to catch older titles in a proper theater around here, but the New Orleans repertory scene has gradually bulked up in recent years. The Broad has a classic horror movie slot every Monday night through ScreamFest NOLA (who’ve recently screened classics like Ginger Snaps, Frankenhooker, and Day of the Dead), an arthouse repertory slot every Wednesday night via Gap Tooth Cinema (who’ve recently screened once-in-a-lifetime obscurities like The Idiots, Supervixens, and Adua and Her Friends), and frequent specialty screenings at their neighboring outdoor venue The Broadside. Meanwhile, Rene Brunet’s Classic Movie Series is still going strong at The Prytania (recent standout titles: The Conversation, Dial ‘M’ for Murder, and 13 Ghosts in Illusion-O), and they’ve recently collaborated with the folks at Overlook Film Fest to program classic horror titles as well (Frankenstein, The Exorcist, and Interview with the Vampire, among others, during this year’s in-house “Kill-O-Rama” festival). Between these two businesses’ four locations, you can also routinely find specialty one-off screenings & re-releases on the weekly schedules (recently, Battle Royale & Linda Linda Linda at The Prytania’s Canal Place theaters and Night of the Juggler & Leila and the Wolves at The Broad).

All in all, our local rep scene is still too small to compete with larger cities like Los Angeles, New York, Austin, Chicago, Toronto, and San Francisco, where audiences seemingly get to see an older “new-to-you” title projected on the big screen every day of the week. New Orleans rep screenings are out there, though, and they are easily accessible if you know where to look. As evidence that this scene exists, here are a few quick short-form reviews of the repertory screenings I happened to catch around the city over the past couple weeks, along with notes on where I found them. I’ve also recently started a Letterboxd list to track what classic titles we’ve been able to cover on Swampflix over the years thanks to this growing scene, which seems to have only gotten more robust since I last filed one of these reports in 2023.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

The original Uptown location of The Prytania is still the most consistent local venue for seeing repertory titles on the big screen, as it has been for as long as I can remember. The only catch is that their Classic Movies program is almost entirely restricted to Hollywood productions, the kinds of titles you expect to see on TCM’s weekly broadcast schedule. As limited in range as that may sound, it’s an excellent resource for catching up with the works of luminary greats like Kubrick, Welles, and Hitchcock that you might’ve missed (especially Hitchcock, their house-favorite auteur), big & loud in an environment where you’re unlikely to get distracted by your phone. To that end, I recently saw John Huston’s foundational diamond-heist thriller The Asphalt Jungle for the first time as part of that series, after having previously seen Huston’s foundational noir The Maltese Falcon there several years earlier. Within the heist-thriller genre, there’s nothing especially surprising about The Asphalt Jungle‘s scene-to-scene plot beats, as it is an immeasurably influential work that helped establish that genre’s basic story structure in the first place. Where it does manage to surprise is in the little details of the character quirks, as it gradually becomes a story about the unlikely friendship between the elderly mastermind and the young hooligan muscle at opposite ends of the criminal hierarchy, both of whom are equally doomed. The framing compositions are also top-notch; that John Huston kid is a name to watch, I tell you what.

It would be disingenuous to call The Asphalt Jungle a hangout film, as there is plenty of urgent thriller tension in its textbook bank heist plot. The four factions vying for victory are clearly defined: the heist crew hastily assembled by a recently-paroled criminal mastermind (Sam Jaffe), the crooked lawyer who intends to steal away that crew’s loot for himself (Louis Calhern), the corrupt cop who pretends to be on their case while taking bribes beneath the table (Barry Kelley), and the by-the-books police commissioner who still believes in the nobility of obeying the law (John McIntire). The cops’ involvement in the diamond-heist fallout is mostly present as a background inevitability, something that makes the crooked lawyer sweat as he schemes to rip off his own accomplices. The real heart of the story is in the way the bank robbers pass their time between the heist and getting caught, recalling the crime-thriller hangouts of Quentin Tarantino’s oeuvre. There’s something sweet in the simple, pleasure-seeking worldviews of the mastermind and the hothead muscle (Sterling Hayden) in particular — one of whom meets his end while taking the time to watch a teen girl dance to a roadside diner jukebox and the other meeting his own end while indulging in homesick nostalgia, feebly returning to his family farm while he slowly bleeds to death from a gunshot wound. A baby-faced Marilyn Monroe also makes a huge impression in the couple scenes afforded to her as the crooked lawyer’s age-gap mistress, exclaiming “Yipe!” whenever she gets excited, and referring to her much older lover by pet names like “Uncle” and “Banana Head.” The editing rhythms of The Asphalt Jungle are not especially hurried or thrilling, but Huston arranges his performers in the Academy-ratio frame with consistently adept blocking, and he constantly feeds them all-timer lines of dialogue like, “Experience has taught me never to trust a policeman. Just when you think one’s all right, he turns legit.” It’s a great mood to sit in, especially once its noir-archetype characters start making unlikely friends & foes in the hours after the plot-catalyst heist.

Black Narcissus (1947)

Curiously, my most recent dip into the Gap Tooth Cinema program at The Broad was also a classic title you could expect to catch in TCM’s broadcast line-up, whereas the series is generally more unique for its “Where else would you ever see this?” selections (On the Silver Globe, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Coonskin, etc.). 1947’s Black Narcissus is as core of a text to nuns-in-crisis cinema as The Asphalt Jungle is to bank heist thrillers. If it’s not the most often seen & referenced convent drama, that’s only because The Sound of Music has a more iconic sing-a-long soundtrack, whereas most of the sound design in Black Narcissus is overpowered by howling, ominous winds. It was hearing those winds in immersive theatrical surround sound that made this first-time watch so memorably intense for me, though, whereas Powell & Pressburger’s follow-up ballet industry melodrama The Red Shoes is more striking for its three-strip Technicolor fantasia. While there are flashes of Technicolor brilliance throughout Black Narcissus, the combination of its doomed nuns’ white habits & skin is so uniformly pale the film often registers as monochrome. It’s the constant roar of the cold winds that gradually break those nuns’ minds along with the audience’s, eventually triggering the passionate, color-saturated violence of the third act. I know it’s gauche to describe anything as “Lynchian” these days, but those howling winds are maddening in a distinctly Lynchian way, and it turns out the production was filmed the same year Lynch himself was born. Coincidence? I think not.

The sinful evil those winds summon is mostly the seduction of nostalgia & memory. Deborah Kerr stars as a remarkably young Mother Superior who’s assigned to start a new convent in a former cliffside harem in the Himalayas, offering medicine and education to the Indian locals who don’t need or want the nuns’ presence. The isolation of the newly repurposed “house of women” on that mountaintop weighs on the sisters who are assigned there, as the ominous winds and dizzying altitude invite their minds to drift to memories from before they took their holy vows. Since it’s a British studio picture made in the 1940s, the nuns never express the transgression directly, but they specifically start to doubt their commitment to Christ because they’ve become desperately horny & lonely, to the point of madness. The burly presence of a blowhard macho handyman onsite is especially tempting for the women, and their repressed desire for him explodes into expressionistically violent acts that can only lead to death, never actual sex. It’s in those climactic violent acts that Black Narcissus most directly recalls the dark fantasy gestures of The Red Shoes, especially in the sisters’ extreme, wild-eyed close-ups. The winds that push them towards the matte-painting cliffsides outside the convent are much more consistently surreal throughout, however, recalling much later, freer works like David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return or Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes.

Mr. Melvin (1989, 2025)

While The Prytania’s Classic Movies and The Broad’s Gap Tooth series are dependable workhorse repertory programs, you have to walk next door from The Broad to their outdoor sister venue The Broadside to catch the more extravagant specialty screenings. For instance, it’s where I caught Lamberto Bava’s classic Italo meta-horror Demons with a live score from Goblin’s Claudio Simonetti and, more recently, it’s where I caught the new remix of The Toxic Avenger Parts II & III (1989), now Frankensteined together and retitled as Mr. Melvin (2025). That Mr. Melvin screening was supposed to be accompanied with a Lloyd Kaufman meet & greet, but the recently injured Kaufman couldn’t travel so he appeared only via video message, sending Troma regular Lisa Gaye to act as his brand ambassador instead. The movie was also accompanied with an opening punk rock set from The Pallbearers, making for a much rowdier setting than is typical for movie-nerd rep screenings around the city. The general party atmosphere at The Broadside can be distracting if you’ve never seen the film they’re screening before (I remember being especially distracted by the circus-act antics of Gap Tooth’s showing of Carny there), but it’s perfect for celebrating a VHS-era classic that you’re used to watching alone at home. The timing of this Mr. Melvin cut was personally serendipitous for me, then, as I had just watched every Toxic Avenger film for a podcast episode the previous month.

Since I had already exorcised all my demonic opinions about Toxie’s big-screen journey so recently on the podcast, I don’t have much new to say about Mr. Melvin except in pinpointing where it ranks among other titles in the series. Objectively, the best Toxic Avenger film is likely either the bad-taste original from 1984 or Macon Blair’s punching-up revision that was also released this year, and yet I can’t help but admire Mr. Melvin as a completionist’s timesaver. It’s all the best parts of the official Toxie sequels (the Japanese travelogue from Toxic Avenger II, the Toxie-goes-yuppie satire of Toxic Avenger III, not a single frame from Toxic Avenger IV) with at least 70 minutes of time-wasting junk erased from the public record. Mathematically speaking, it’s the most efficiently entertaining Toxic Avenger film to date, which technically qualifies it as public service — something to be considered by Lloyd Kaufman’s parole board. And since the original, in-tact sequels were rotting so close to the forefront of my mind, I was able to step away during the screening to grab another beer without missing anything, which is essential to appreciating any Troma release. You go to The Prytania to watch Old Hollywood classics in a historic setting, sipping morning coffee to the vintage Looney Tunes shorts that precede the feature. You go to Gap Tooth screenings at The Broad to challenge yourself with some daringly curated arthouse obscurities, chatting with friends afterwards to parse through complex feelings & ideas. In contrast, the repertory programming next door at The Broadside is for pounding beers and whooping along to a personal fav you’ve already seen a couple dozen times with likeminded freaks. Plan your repertory outings accordingly.

-Brandon Ledet

Quick Takes: Ghosts of Yule

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This hazy dead space between Christmas and the New Year finds the boundaries between this world and the next at its thinnest, even thinner than on All Hallows’ Eve.  That’s why Yule season is the perfect time to read, watch, and share ghost stories.  It’s a tradition most faithfully observed in annual retellings of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and in annual British television broadcasts that never fully cross over to the US.  While most households are streaming Hallmark & Lifetime Christmas schlock in their pajamas, we Yuleheads light a few candles and invite ghosts into our home through short story collections and the television set.  It’s become my favorite Yuletide tradition in recent years, and it’s one more traditionally Christmasy than a lot of people realize.  So, in order to help spread the undead Yule spirit before the holiday passes, here are a few short-form reviews of the ghost stories I’ve been chilling myself with this week.

The Uninvited (1944)

1944’s The Uninvited is the least Christmas-related film of this batch, but it’s ghostly & cozy enough to justify a Yule-season viewing.  More of a cutesy radio play than a tale of the macabre, it tells the story of a weirdly chummy brother & sister who purchase a dilapidated seaside home that’s been left empty for years because it’s very obviously haunted.  One local woman (a sheltered twentysomething who acts like a pouty teen) is especially distraught by the purchase, since her mother died there under mysterious circumstances that her new adoptive family must uncover before the ghost tosses her off the backyard cliff.  The answer to that mystery mostly plays out like a dinner-theatre staging of Hitchcock’s Rebecca, but it’s worth sticking it out to see the film’s gorgeous, ethereal visualization of its cursed-real-estate ghost.  While its Criterion Collection packaging presents it as a kindred spirit of much chillier, statelier 1960s ghost stories like The Haunting or The Innocents, The Uninvited is much gentler & sillier than that.  It’s a mildly spooky amusement, which is perfect for this time of year.

Beyond Tomorrow (1940)

1940’s Beyond Tomorrow is even gentler & sillier than The Uninvited, with more overt ties to Christmastime besides its seasonal apparitions.  Often retitled as Beyond Christmas, this public domain B-movie is a cozy, zero-conflict ghost story about how there are still a few sweetie pies left in The Big City: some living, some dead but lingering.  It starts with a trio of Scrooges of varying grumpiness who are working late hours on Christmas Eve, when one decides to play a Christmas game.  They each toss a leather wallet onto the New York City sidewalk with their address and a $10 bill inside to see if there’s anyone left in the city honest enough to return them.  Two adorably naive youngsters return the wallets they find on the snowy pavement and the old-fogey roommates/business partners treat them to a Christmas meal as thanks.  Then they collectively play matchmaker for the young couple, mostly from beyond the grave.  The improbable trio of businessmen die in a plane crash at the end of the first act, then spend the rest of the movie acting as a ghostly Greek chorus.  They do everything together in life, in death, and beyond.

Nothing especially dramatic happens in Beyond Tomorrow until the last-minute appearance of a sultry Big City temptress who threatens to break the couple up with her hedonistic ways.  From there, it’s a minutes-long morality play that ends in gunshots and emergency surgery, but by then we’ve already seen three grumpy but kindly old men pass on to the next world without much of a fuss.  Dying is just not that big of a deal.  Mostly, the film is an excuse to hang around a Christmas-decorated luxury apartment with a small collection of ghosts in hopes that one of them might remind you of your own grandfather; or maybe one will remind you of a wealthy benefactor who baited you off the street with a prop wallet, whichever speaks closer to the life you’ve lived.

All of Us Strangers (2023)

2023’s All of Us Strangers is a much more dramatic Christmastime ghost story, although even its own sense of melancholy settles into an overall cozy mood.  Andrew “Hot Priest” Scott stars as a lonely Londoner who’s living in a brand-new apartment building that otherwise appears to be entirely empty . . . except for the tempting presence of Paul Mescal as his more outwardly social but equally depressive downstairs neighbor.  He staves off some of his loneliness by fucking that younger, livelier neighbor, but he mostly suppresses it by visiting his childhood home outside of the city, where he finds domestic comfort with the ghosts of his parents who died in a car crash when he was 12.  Being older than the ghostly couple who raised him is already a surreal enough experience, but things get even more complicated when he comes out to them as a gay man, having to explain that it’s not really such a big deal anymore to Conservative suburbanites who died at the height of the AIDS epidemic.  Then, the whole thing falls apart when he attempts to introduce them to his new situationship boyfriend, throwing his entire home/romantic afterlife balance into chaos.

Andrew Haigh’s low-key supernatural melodrama delicately touches on a lot of traditional ghost story beats in its grace notes, but it also loudly echoes how the isolation of modern urban living is a kind of ghost story that we’re all living every day.  Our protagonist is a quiet, reserved bloke with no chance of making meaningful human connection from the voluntary prison cell of his one-bedroom apartment.  All he can do is spin vintage New Romantics records and reminisce about the last few warm memories of his childhood, unable to fully enjoy the ways the world has gotten easier for gay men like him in the decades since.  As a prestige drama for adults, it’s a little too Subtle, Restrained, and Nuanced for my personal tastes, but I still felt swept up in its melancholy Yuletide mood.

The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

1996’s The Long Kiss Goodnight is much louder, flashier Christmas fare than All of Us Strangers or any other title on this list.  It’s also not strictly a ghost story, so its inclusion here is kind of a cheat.  Geena Davis stars as a small-town middle school teacher who suffers from amnesia, unable to recall her life before her cookie-cutter Norman Rockwell thirties in the suburbs.  Her past comes back to haunt her, literally, after she appears in local TV news coverage of her town’s Christmas parade, where she’s featured waving from a float in an adorable Mrs. Claus outfit.  A subsequent head injury in a boozy Christmas Eve car accident shakes her past self loose in her mind, prompting it to appear to her in a dream, cliffside, with her red curls cut & dyed into an icy Basic Instinct blonde bob.  That eerie green-screen dream is a confrontation with the ghost of her former life – a supernatural showdown reflected in a magic dressing mirror that allows the two versions of herself to negotiate for control of her body.  While they fight it out, snarling supercriminals from her violent past—having seen her on television—invade her suburban home, and she goes on an emergency road trip with a sleazy private detective (Samuel L. Jackson, in a Shaft-era blacksploitation wardrobe) to retake control of her life.

It turns out that the blonde-bob Geena Davis of the past was a lethally trained CIA agent whose murderous skills come back to the red-curls Geena Davis of the present one at a time, scaring her but also arming her to fight back against her attackers.  During her road trip with her private dick, her trained-assassin ghost fully takes possession of her body, reclaims her preferred hairstyle, and sets up a precarious either/or decision where the Geena Davis of the future will either emerge a tough badass or an adoring mom.  The Long Kiss Goodnight was written by Shane Black, who is very likely the pinnacle of Tarantino-era post-modern edgelords, which means it’s overflowing with sarcastic quips and emptied gun clips.  It’s also very likely the pinnacle of Black’s work as a screenwriter, right down to his “written by” credit appearing over a pile of Christmas ornaments, celebrating his tendency to set hyperviolent scripts during the holiday. 90s action-schlock director Renny Harlan doesn’t entirely know what to do with Black’s excess of overwritten, flippant dialogue, but he’s at least smart enough to fill the screen with enough explosions that you hardly have time to notice.  As a result, the movie is most recommendable to audiences who are frustrated that Die Hard isn’t as Christmasy of Christmastime action-movie programming as annually advertised, more so than it is recognizable to audiences looking for a Yuletide ghost story.  There is a ghost story lurking in its DNA, though, because a Christmas traditionalist like Shane Black can’t help but acknowledge that essential but overlooked aspect of the holiday.

-Brandon Ledet

Quick Takes: Second-Hand Kung Fu

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There are currently 8,867 films on my Letterboxd watchlist, and roughly 8,000 of them will remain unwatched for all eternity.  Every time a movie looks interesting to me, I toss it into the bottomless watchpit, with no concrete plans to dig it up at any particular time.  Either it’ll tumble out of the Shuffle button at the exact right moment or it will rot there forever, and I think that’s beautiful.  What I’m much more dutiful about it is my physical media watchpile, which fits neatly into one humble box besides my television that I’m not “allowed” to let overfill before bringing home more discs.  Having a physical Blu-ray or DVD in my home is a guarantee that a movie will be watched—soon!—if not only because it then enables me to buy more Blu-rays & DVDs.  The watchbox has been getting a little tight lately, though, so it’s time to clear out a few lingering titles with some short-form reviews. 

I’ve been having especially good luck finding used martial-arts DVDs at local thrift stores this year, so that feels like as good of a category to start this KonMari process with as any.  Listed & reviewed below are four kung fu action flicks I purchased on used DVDs at two local Goodwill stores in 2024 (the one on Tulane Ave in MidCity and the new outlet “bins” location in New Orleans East, in case you’re on the hunt).  They all roughly follow the same story template in which a young fighter is violently wronged, trains for violent revenge, and then takes that revenge against his oppressors in violent spectacle.  Their individual emphases on the wronging, the training, and the avenging vary from film to film, though, as does their entertainment value as vintage martial-arts relics. 

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978)

By far, the best of this batch is the Shaw Brothers classic The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, which mostly focuses on the training aspect of the kung-fu story template.  While most kung-fu revengers include a martial-arts training montage in which a young fighter is taught fighting skills & Buddhist philosophy in a temple of violence, The 36th Chamber expands that 2nd-act rebirth to stretch over the majority of its runtime.  Gordon Liu plays a young student whose schoolmates & teacher are slaughtered by a fascistic government who sees them as a rebellious threat.  He retreats to a Shaolin temple to learn how to fight back against those government brutes and is reluctantly trained by the monks who live there to be a world-class combatant.  Most of the film features Liu solving physically challenging puzzles while older monks nod in silent approval, and he grows frustrated to be learning discipline rather than vengeance.  His impatience eventually fades as he matures into becoming a deadly weapon of great wisdom, which is a gift he then vows to spread to the common man outside the temple so they can fight their oppressors in great numbers instead of as individual rebels.

I watched The 36th Chamber of Shaolin in its ideal format: a thrifted Dragon Dynasty-label DVD with a 10min RZA interview reminiscing about marathoning Golden Age martial-arts & porno schlock as a kid in late-70s NYC.  The film would be considered a classic of Hong Kong action cinema without RZA’s help, but his grindhouse cinephilia helped sew its name into the fabric of American culture, so that every time you hear the words “36th Chamber”, “Shaolin” or “Master Killer” (the film’s alternate American title), a Wu-Tang Clan beat automatically plays in your head.  It’s a little silly to include a 2min “Wu-Tang concert video” as an additional special feature, but there’s still some thematic overlap there in how the dozen people performing on stage at once have found strength in numbers that they wouldn’t wield as individual rappers.  In his interview, RZA attempts to contextualize why Hong Kong martial-arts films might have resonated so deeply with him as a young Black youth in America, citing “the underdog thing,” “the brotherhood thing,” and “the escapism” as resonant themes.  The truth is he more likely cited this classic so often in Wu-Tang lyrics simply because it looked & sounded cool.  Either way, he’s right.

The Iron Monkey (1977)

The title & thrills of the 1977 martial-arts revenger The Iron Monkey are so much more generic & forgettable than 36th Chamber‘s that it’s usually only brought up as a footnote to a much more popular 1993 film of the same name, to which it has no narrative relation.  Chen Kuan-tai directs and stars as a frivolous, drunken gambler with a rebel father who is—you guessed it—assassinated by a fascist government.  He cleans up his act at a Shaolin temple and trains for revenge, which he eventually gets hands-on against the General that killed his father at the movie’s climax.  Given the stark-white backdrop of its pop-art opening credits and its genre-dutiful training sequences you might suspect that it was a cheap knockoff of The 36th Chamber . . . until you realize that it was released an entire year earlier.

The Iron Monkey is a standard-issue kung-fu revenger with nothing especially noteworthy about it except that the violence occasionally goes way overboard, especially in the opening sequence where an actual monkey & eagle are forced to fight as symbols of the “Monkey Fist” vs. “Eagle Claw” combat choreography of its central hero & villain.  There’s also a scene where the bad guys show they mean business by choking a child to death, which makes for two pretty alarming choices on when to color outside the lines.  My used DVD copy was a digital scan of a dubbed & scratched film print, which feels indicative of its significance in the larger kung-fu landscape.  I couldn’t tell if the off-screen impact sounds of punches & kicks that are heard but not seen were added by an American distributor hoping to keep the audience’s pulse up or were included in the original mix as a cost-cutting ploy, but the choice was something I had never encountered in a movie before.  I’d rather indulge in that kind of novelty than watching a stressed-out monkey fight an eagle for my entertainment.

Return of the Tiger (1977)

Just because a martial arts film is cheap doesn’t mean it’s worthless.  I was much more enthused by the Brucesploitation novelty Return of Tiger, which starred “Bruce Li” as yet another wronged son avenging the murder of his father.  Supposedly a sequel to a film called Exit the Dragon, Enter the Tiger (which starred Li as an entirely different character), Return of the Tiger skips the hero’s training montage to instead detail the training of his enemies.  Bruce Li and “special guest star” Angela Mao show up ready to do battle, but their Enemy No. 1 (Paul L. Smith, Altman’s Bluto) is continuously training a kung-fu army of underlings to protect his empire.  As a result, the film has incredibly athletic martial arts sequences, but most of them are confined to the relatively drab setting of an Olympic training gym — including Li’s intro in the music video style opening credits.  Mao’s intro is also literally gymnastic, in that she initially fights off the gang leader’s nameless goons while jumping on a trampoline and launching herself off a balance beam.  As her special credit suggests, she steals the show.

While Return of the Tiger follows a familiar wronging-training-avenging story template, it does distinguish itself from the other films on this list in its contemporary setting.  The main Bad Guy in the film is not some empirical warlord of the 18th Century; he’s a heroin dealer who runs a shipyard.  My English-dub DVD copy (“digitally mastered” by the fine folks at Reel Entertainment in Digital, which cannot be a real company) not only overdubs the dialogue but also replaces the soundtrack with incredibly baffling song choices, including a nightclub scene set to Wild Cherry’s “Play that Funky Music” while a lounge singer mouths lyrics to an entirely different song.  It’s a nice change of setting for the genre, and the fights staged there are accomplished in their precision & brutality. 

The One-Armed Swordsman (1967)

The first-act wronging of The One-Armed Swordsman is two-fold, which doubles the amount of training sequences the film gets to indulge in.  First, a young child watches his father get slaughtered (go figure), then is raised by a kung-fu master to become the formidable Hong Kong action hero Jimmy Wang.  Only, the fellow students at his temple are jealous of his skills and spiteful of having to be equals with the son of a (dead) servant, so in an overboard schoolyard bullying incident they cut off his sword-carrying arm.  Wang survives, improbably, and then trains again to re-learn how to fight with just one arm before local bandits get out of hand and harm untrained villagers who need protection.  Despite this doubling down on its training-for-revenge sequences, much of the runtime involves debates between our titular hero and his wife about whether he should relearn his fighting skills at all, since it’s a like he’s inviting violence into the family home — like how gun owners are statistically more likely to be killed by guns.  The title & premise make it sound like a gimmicky wuxia novelty, but in practice it’s a surprisingly classy drama set inside of a series of illustrated postcards . . . with some occasional swordfight gore.

What I mostly learned from this loose group of titles is that the Dragon Dynasty-label DVDs of classic Shaw Brother titles are a sign of quality & class, and they’re worth picking up any time you stumble across one at a Goodwill.  The best special feature included on this particular disc was a short career-retrospective documentary on its director, Chang Cheh, which added at least a dozen titles to my ever-expanding Letterboxd watchlist.  I’ll likely never get to them all unless they fall into my lap as used media, where tangibility means accountability and quality varies wildly.

-Brandon Ledet

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