reviews

Ashik Kerib (1988)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Self-billed as “An Oriental fairy tale,” Ashik Kerib is the final feature film of visionary Russian auteur Sergei Parajanov, a friend & contemporary of Andrei Tarkovsky (to whom the film is dedicated). The parallels between the Soviet Era directors’ work are clear once you know to look for them. Much like how Andrei Rublev finds Tarkovsky defiantly rummaging through the art & philosophy of Russia’s deeply religions past from a Russian Orthodox perspective, Ashik Kerib finds Parajanov doing the same for the country’s more Eastern philosophical heritage, sans the Christianity. Parajanov also shares Tarkovsky’s prioritization of crafting a striking image above all else, often composing an interesting frame at the expense of establishing or expanding an narrative plot. And yet Ashik Kerib lives up to a standard no Tarkovsky work I’ve seen can claim: it’s punk as fuck.

Adapted from an Arabian Nights-style fairy tale penned by esteemed poet Mikhail Lermentov, Ashik Kerib tells the deliberately episodic story of a romantic traveling minstrel who embarks on a 1000-day journey to earn enough money to wed his beloved, against her greedy father’s wishes. At just 70 minutes in length (seemingly a third of the runtime of a typical Tarkovsky picture), the film is little more than a series of living tableaus anarchically arranged for the camera. This is a stubbornly D.I.Y. production, telegraphing the lush costuming & cinematography of modern works like The Fall & Tale of Tales, while also functioning as a minor work of avant-garde theatre. It presents Early (East) Russian art with the same religious reverence as Andrei Rublev, but maintains a flippantly D.I.Y. ethos throughout – as best evidenced by its cheap two-man tiger costume & its anachronistic inclusion of plastic toy machine guns. Ashik Kerib mirrors the visual fixations of a Tarkovsky-type art film, but presents them with so much streamlined energy & D.I.Y. flippancy that the parallels become more blurred & inscrutable the more you strain to compare them.

When considering the basic visual aesthetic of Ashik Kerib, it more closely recalls the Eastern psychedelia & avant-garde theatre of hippie culture than the sneering urban toughness of punk. Still, there’s something snottily defiant about its lack of concern with plot, historical accuracy, and textural consistency that makes the film feel punk in spirit. It feels more like a descendant of the No Wave scene, John Waters, or The Cockettes than anything to do with Tarkovsky, especially considering its restraint in indulgence as a 70-minute novelty. As a D.I.Y., Eastern-minded perversion of the Andrei Rublev tradition, this series of living tableaus masquerading as an anthology piece is too slight & too sloppy to be hailed as a masterpiece, but also too visually stunning to be ignored entirely. I’d more likely recommend it to diehard fans of The Fall than to anyone with a Stalker tattoo, but its point of contrast as a punk-as-fuck Tarkovsky deviation still offers it a fascinating context.

-Brandon Ledet

Origin Story (2019)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Kulap Vilaysack is my best and sweetest friend. At least, that’s how it feels after getting to know her over hundreds of Who Charted? episodes, thanks to the intimate, conversational nature of podcasting. If there was ever any darkness or protective privacy to the boisterous, big-hearted comedy writer on that show it was whenever she found herself talking about her family, especially her relationship with her mother. Vilaysack’s first feature film as a director grew out of that familial darkness – a documentary about her family tree that she’s been talking about completing for years and years, one that I feel like I have a person investment in as a loyal listener to her podcast. Now that Origin Story has finally landed legitimate distribution on Amazon Prime, I find myself struggling to divorce that emotional investment in Kulap’s story and her personal well-being from a nagging thought that what’s onscreen isn’t entirely well executed as a movie­. I don’t know that the filmmaking itself is especially strong in Origin Story, but the story it tells is still emotionally rattling throughout for me. It’s a little difficult to worry about how the film’s framing could be more interesting, or its editing could be tightened, when your foremost thought is “Why won’t my best and sweetest friend stop crying?”

Weirdly enough, I wouldn’t readily recommend this documentary to comedy nerds who only know Vilaysak through her tangential relationships with institutions like Comedy Bang Bang & Seeso. There are a few famous comedians who drop by as friends, only referenced by first names, but they’re mostly there to offer teary-eyed emotional support for what amounts to a bravely public act of self-therapy. Origin Story is much more likely to satisfy fans of twisty family-drama docs like Three Identical Strangers or Stories We Tell, folks for whom “a good story” means “a good movie.” Kulap Vilaysack’s search for the truth of her own birth’s circumstances is a good story, although a traumatic one. When she was 14-years-old she found herself caught between her parents during an argument and her mother asked “Why are you defending him? He’s not your real dad.” It’s a revelation that sat heavy on her heart for two decades before she decided to investigate who her biological father is (with a documentary crew in tow). The answers are easy to find, but not so easy to swallow, as Kulap travels across Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Laos (her parents’ home country) to try to make sense of the four adults who raised her and the one who didn’t. Themes of physical & emotional abuse, war refugee immigration, and the importance of self-mythology arise from her travels as the story she’s always all been told about her childhood unravels, resulting in a flood of tears from everyone who appears onscreen (and, presumably, everyone watching in the audience).

As interesting as the story is and as emotionally invested as I am in Kulap’s well-being, I can’t say with confidence that this is a great film on its own merits. It’s at least fifteen minutes overlong and its tone (understandably) slips into the maudlin piano flourishes & Hallmark sentimentality of something far below the talent of its creator. There’s also a distinct reality TV quality to its interview format & establishing shots that recall the exact clichés Vilaysak parodied in her comedy show Bajillion Dollar Propertie$. Origin Story follows a serviceable template to deliver a personal, heartfelt story, but it’s a shame to see someone so creative waste an opportunity to experiment with form, even if she is personally close to the content. In terms of craft, the best sequences of Origin Story are the animated flourishes that lean into the comic book aesthetic hinted by the title. Storybook illustrations & handdrawn-style ink animations bring to life childhood memories & stories of her parents’ political crises before her birth in fantastic detail. It took years to complete the documentary and get it before an audience, but it almost feels like Origin Story’s true, natural format would be as a graphic novel that hasn’t yet arrived. I’m happy that Kulap was able to complete the project the way she wanted to, but also curious what it would be like to see a graphic artist completely translate the documentary into a longform comic book format – especially since those animated sequences where it’s strongest.

A lot has changed since Origin Story wrapped production, most of which I’m only aware of because I follow these comedians’ professional lives too closely. Kulap no longer cohosts Who Charted?. Her dog Rocky, who is heavily featured in the film, has sadly passed away. She’s also directed, produced, and organized more projects than ever before (including a television show that has already come and gone in the span of this film being completed). As a standalone work divorced from Kulap’s professional persona, Origin Story is emotionally rattling but a little creatively stilted. As a public act of personal self-therapy, however, it seems to have lifted a weight off her heart that has freed her to do more & better work. Part of me wishes that final product were a little finer tuned, but mostly I’m just happy for my best and sweetest friend that the work is completed and in the past.

-Brandon Ledet

The Arrival (1980)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

Lately, I’ve been finding myself increasingly fascinated with self-published outsider art. Discovering the insular communities of Matt Farley, Doris Wishman, Justin Decloux, and Don Dohler – each with their own endless back catalogs & stables of recurring players – is a thrilling alternative to the franchise filmmaking behemoths of modern mainstream cinema, where months of publicity & advertising can often make a film feel overly familiar before it even arrives to theaters. Finding something new that hasn’t already been talked to death in your online social circle takes a little obsessive crate-digging but can be intensely rewarding when you unearth something far out & exceptional. I daresay The Unarius Academy of Science is the most niche filmmaking community I’ve tapped into so far in this pursuit, something that worries me that I may have wandered off the ledge of our Flat Earth and fallen into the deep end of cult cinema. That’s not to say that I’ve personally discovered anything previously unseen or unexplored in Unarius. The Californian UFO cult has been publicly broadcasting their films to the world at large for nearly four decades solid now, something I discovered myself through one of many online articles detailing the history of their self-published propagandist cinema. Even if it was well-charted territory, though, something many Californians discovered themselves through public access broadcasts, there was something truly perverse & transgressive about ordering a Blu-ray copy of the cult’s most popular title directly from them that made me question whether this crate-digging impulse of hunting down niche outsider art was ultimately a healthy one. I feel like I’ve finally crossed a line here, not least of all because I was genuinely pleased by the product that arrived at my doorstep (accompanied by propaganda literature attempting to recruit me into the cult, naturally).

The first and most widely discussed film in the Unarius canon, The Arrival, is a brief hour-long religious manifesto that feels as if it lasts for a thousand past lives. As the film operates more as a meditative religious indoctrination piece than a traditional narrative entertainment, its sense of pacing is cosmically glacial – to the point where it almost triggers a genuinely psychedelic response. According to the Blu-ray cover, “A true story of the first contact with another world is reenacted by individuals reliving their past lives on the continent of Lemuria, 162,000 years ago.” We get no introductory establishment of what life in the fabled Lemuria was like before space alien contact the way we would in a more traditional narrative feature; instead we meet our caveman protagonist in the exact moment he confronts the crew of a UFO that lands before him in 160,000 B.C. It’s like the space alien equivalent of a Christian Passion play in that way, assuming the backstory & context of the event is well-known mythology for anyone who would be watching. The Arrival also subverts typical alien invasion narratives we’re used to in science fiction by making the alien force a calm, consciousness-raising source of enlightenment for the Lumerian caveman rather than evil, Earth-conquering warmongers. Dressed in bald caps & colorful religious robes, they trigger a spiritual epiphany within the caveman that allows him to recall “the past lives recorded in his spiritual body” that he cannot normally access in his physical form. From there, he confronts humanity’s follies of “ego, lust, and materialism” in a backwards trip through his soul’s thousands of years’ journey in various past lives. A brief detour into a past life where the caveman was a militaristic combatant on a Star Wars-type spaceship feels like a glimpse at more narratively traditional sci-fi story, but for the most part The Arrival is a meditative search for philosophical “truths.” It places much more emphasis on its walk & talk conversations with cult-leader Archangel Uriel than the caveman’s deep space laser battles, for instance, and it’s all the more fascinating for it.

If you’re not a member of the Unarius Academy of Science (and perhaps even if you are), the most immediately rewarding aspect of The Arrival is going to be the visual splendor of its handmade costumes & sets. The 2D-animated patchwork of the UFO, the regal space alien garb of Archangel Uriel, and the psychedelic screensaver flashes of its visualized spiritual awakening are the exact kind of high-ambition D.I.Y. effects work you’d most want to see from a sci-fi oddity on this scale & budget. Just don’t go into the film expecting to laugh at its camp value or to recoil in horror at its cult indoctrination tactics. This is an overall calming, meditative piece from what appears to be a relatively harmless UFO cult who claim to have achieved a supernatural level of spiritual enlightenment and have accidentally stumbled into making primo outsider cinema as a result. The serene, enlightened tone of the piece is alarmingly convincing; I could easily see myself being lured into its extratextual philosophy if I were stoned & lonely enough in the early 80s and caught this picture on late-night public access. As is, I already feel like I’m allowing The Uranius Academy of Science too much space in my head & wallet, as I’m tempted to order more of their films from their online store to get a better sense of their far-out filmmaking niche. I doubt one of these propaganda films will trigger a genuine trip into a spiritually recorded past life for me, but I took enough pleasure in its D.I.Y. microbudget craft & meditative energy that I’d like to further explore their back catalog anyway. Rarely does being lured into a hidden corner of “cult cinema” feel so literal & potentially unhealthy. It’s an impulse that’s making me question past decisions & current gluttony in my pop culture consumption, which in a roundabout way was The Arrival’s exact stated intent, so I suppose it’s a total success.

-Brandon Ledet

Teddy Bomb (2014)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Earlier this year, I purchased two Blu-rays of backyard film productions from Toronto as a means of sending financial support to a podcaster I admire. Of Justin Decloux’s two directorial credits, I was much more enthusiastic about the more recent feature, Impossible Horror – an uncanny slapstick splatter comedy about loneliness & outsider art. It’s an incredibly dense, ambitious picture for a no-budget horror on its scale, one that adapts Sam Raimi-style exaggerated camerawork to tones & themes that aren’t typically tackled in its Regional Horror genre. Decloux’s earlier film, Teddy Bomb, is something much more typical to the backyard horror aesthetic: a practical gore splatter comedy that aims more for over-the-top camp & gross-out hyperviolence than anything nearly as sincere or ambitious as what the director would later accomplish in Impossible Horror. However, even as a relatively average backyard horror comedy (with a few moments of genre film splendor in isolated gags), I do think there is a very specific circumstance in which catching up with Teddy Bomb is practically mandatory: if you’re at all a fan of last year’s sci-fi body horror Upgrade.

I was a huge fan of Upgrade myself; it made my Top 10 films of the year list last year and became a favorite of mine to rewatch with friends who hadn’t yet seen it as the year went on. A major part of the film’s appeal was the way it reimagined the basic outline of RoboCop (possibly my favorite sci-fi film of all time) as a satire on modern fears of self-automated technology instead of a satire on the privatization of law enforcement that was already on the horizon in the 1980s. I was a little surprised, then, to see a microbudget filmmaker from Toronto claim that their own work was direct, unacknowledged inspiration for Upgrade, a film already so undeniably indebted to RoboCop. Having now seen Teddy Bomb for myself, I totally get it. In the film, a bumbling beer delivery boy is in over his head when he steals what appears to be a cute teddy bear but is actually a high-tech weapon of mass destruction. Like with the STEM tech in Upgrade, the teddy bear telepathically communicates with his unprepared user, instructing him on how to kill the terrorists who wish to repossess the cuddly weapon. He often closes his eyes while the “teddy bear” does the nasty work of disposing of baddies, which is the most consistently rewarding gag in Upgrade as well. It’s all uncannily familiar.

Since I’m talking about two films that follow well-worn genre templates, it’s difficult to parse out exactly what’s parallel thinking vs. what’s unacknowledged “inspiration.” Besides Upgrade’s obvious debt to RoboCop, it’s a film that also saw its own uncanny parallels in a bigger-budget descendent with last year’s Venom, just months after its own release. Teddy Bomb itself feels like it borrows elements from other horror properties wholesale: Sam Raimi’s live-action-cartoon camerawork, George Romero’s signiature zombie disembowelings, the 8-bit romance of Scott Pilgrim, etc. The difference is that Teddy Bomb is very upfront about where it pulls its ideas from, even setting several scenes in a video rental store where Decloux himself appears as a side-character store clerk who practically points to the titles that most influenced his work. If Upgrade pulled direct influence from Teddy Bomb (and there is some convincing evidence it did, despite this being a microbudget splatter cheapie), it’s a shame that it didn’t do the same in turn. The titular weapon is Teddy Bomb’s most distinctive, exciting invention – one that adds to the genre film conversation instead of merely echoing it – so it’s frustrating to see it “borrowed” for a better-funded work without proper credit. I still believe Upgrade’s satirical vision of a self-automated future is distinct & funny enough on its own terms to justify its praise among similarly-styled works like RoboCop, Venom and, apparently, Teddy Bomb; that’s what telling stories within a genre template is all about. Still, it’s only right to acknowledge your direct influences, especially if you’re appropriating inspiration from self-funded artists far below your weight class who could use the boost.

If you want a concise comparison of the two films side-by-side, this tweet from Decloux lays out a fairly convincing case in two minutes’ time. Fans of Upgrade should really check out Teddy Bomb in its entirety to make up their own minds on the parallels, though. If nothing else, the back-to-back viewing experience makes for an interesting look at what two genre films following the same story template look like on drastically different budgetary levels.

-Brandon Ledet

Pokémon: Detective Pikachu (2019)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

I’ll admit upfront that I was highly skeptical of the new “live-action” Pokémon movie when it was first announced. It’s not the Pokémon property itself that had me rolling my eyes. To the contrary, I was excited to see a CG Pikachu go on a seedy urban adventure in the real world, encountering a vast array of fellow pocket monsters along the way. It was the announcement of Ryan Reynolds’s casting as the voice of Pikachu that had me worried. Detective Pikachu is specifically adapted from a Pokémon videogame in which the electric-rodent yokai is voiced by a hard-boiled detective, finding humor in the contrast between his cutesy appearance and his tough-guy demeanor. Personally, I’d much rather see these same CG characters & world designs treated with a straight-forward, genuine sentient true to the series’ kawaii beginnings. Covering up those cutesy impulses with a joking, above-it-all snark from the most sarcastic wisecracker in the business seemed like preemptively apologizing for making a Pokémon movie in the first place, as if it were embarrassing that adults would want to see something so cute & nerdy without a smartass celebrity there to hold our hands and reassure us that it is Cool. Basically, I was afraid that Ryan Reynolds was going to transform Pikachu into Lil’ Deadpool.

I’m happy to report that Reynolds’s mood-ruining smartassery only distracted from Pikachu’s cuteness to a minimal degree. This is a movie where Pikachu makes sex jokes (including an alarming one about people nonconsensually sticking fingers inside of him), refers to strangers with pet names like “Sweetie” & “Doll,” and constantly pressures his human partner to flirt with women. I would have much rather had the electro-rat in question only say its own name in cutesy Pokémon tradition to the annoyance of a tough-guy human detective partner (as if its Who Framed Roger Rabbit? lineage couldn’t be any clearer), but you take what you can get. Pokémon: Detective Pikachu is a compromise for everyone who dares enter. No one who is disinterested in Pokémon’s inherent kawaii appeal is going to give the movie a short based on Ryan Reynold’s voice acting, nor based on the film’s Baby’s First Noir plot in which a young teen finds himself (and his missing father) in a futuristic Tokyo. Those inconveniences are just obligatory concessions to get a Pokémon movie greenlit by studio executives in the first place, so that the already-converted could all get a gander at our favorite pocket monsters on the big screen (and, in my case, in 3-D). I do think the concessions are worth the effort, though. No matter what you must put up with to get a look at them, the pokémon themselves remain very, very cute.

Detective Pikachu is pretty damn cute overall, but in every single frame where there weren’t any pokémon I was thinking “Where’s the pokémon?,” so I guess it could have been cuter. Squirtles, Psyducks, and Mr. Mimes (along with pokétypes I’ve forgotten the names of in the decades since I really enjoyed this stuff as a kid) all get their chance to shine alongside brand-ambassador Pikachu, but I greedily wanted more. The movie starts off in the deep end of pokélore with references to Mewtwo, the personality differences been fire & water types, and all kinds of other series-specific jargon that would confuse anyone outside A Certain Generation who grew up with this nonsense. It even eventually follows Pokémon movie tradition in claiming themes against the capture, subjugation, and battling of pokémon despite those morally bankrupt practices all being essential to series lore (to the point of referenced in its theme song). Still, it ultimately settles into a serviceable, but forgettable neon & synths noir that distracts from its higher purpose: parading as many cute-as-fuck pokémon across the screen as it can in under two hours. The absurdity of enlisting Ken Watanabe for its pokénoir proceedings was amusing, but I even would have traded that living legend for another few seconds of pokémon cuteness, preferably without Lil’ Deadpool’s incongruous horniness spoiling the mood.

-Brandon Ledet

Saboteur (1942)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

If there’s anything I’ve learned from regularly attending the Classic Movies series at the historic Prytania Theatre on Sundays, it’s that even the “lesser” Hitchcock titles are not to be missed. After falling in love with the Marlene Dietrich sultriness of Stage Fright & the gorgeous Technicolor sex humor of To Catch a Thief, any & all Hitchcock titles have become appointment viewing — whether or not they match the iconic prestige of films like Psycho, Rear Window, or Strangers on a Train. The Prytania’s latest Hitchcock selection, Saboteur, was no exception to the rule. At first glance, Saboteur appears to be a noir thriller B-picture that’s only distinguishing detail is a co-writing credit from Dorothy Parker (who did a punch-up treatment on its dialogue). Only Alfred Hitchcock’s name in the “directed by” credit vouches for the film being anything more than that, but his is a name that consistently delivers. Even as much credit as Hitchcock gets for elevating genre filmmaking to the level of fine art, I’m beginning to question whether I’ve still been taking him for granted as one of the greatest directors of all time. He’s starting to cross the line from widely-praised cinematic icon to beloved personal favorite; the only question is why it took me so many years & just a few screenings of his “lesser” titles for me to get there.

In Saboteur, a couple of Air Force do-gooders attempt to put out a fire started by a foreign subversive at their base, and are punished for their heroism. One soldier dies in the fire, while the other is framed for the act of terror that killed his best friend & put national security at risk. What follows is a twisty, suspenseful mystery of grimy noir aesthetics & deep political intrigue as the surviving soldier travels the country in an attempt to thwart the terrorist syndicate who framed him and to clear his own name. At least that’s what’s promised on the tin. Instead, Hitchcock mostly delivers a weirdly patriotic road trip comedy about a hitch-hiker on the lam and the various weirdos who shelter him until he’s free of police scrutiny. Saboteur operates with a peculiar, admirable form of patriotism that loves America, but hates cops (as is right & proper). As our hero in peril finds comrades in billboard advertisement models, the disabled, working class truck drivers, and circus freaks while traveling by thumb across the country, Saboteur establishes a beautifully, radically inclusive definition of who & what is America. The enemies of that vision, by contrast, are wealthy pontificators who would sell the country to literal Nazis just to make another buck and ineffectual, brutish police officers who can’t determine the rightful target when enforcing the law. The crime thriller element promised in Saboteur‘s advertising is mostly just an excuse for this off-kilter version of war-time patriotism, one that course-corrects patriotism’s usual nastiness with a sense of humor & empathy the audience is not at all primed to expect.

Of course, Saboteur‘s surprises in tonal & narrative trajectory can only carry the film so far; they would amount to very little if it weren’t for Hitchcock’s visual craft & prankish spirit, both of which are on full display here despite this film’s modest budget & bevy of screenwriters. When crafting a noir thriller in the earliest stretch, the director casts sharply defined shadows of dangerous figures against stark white walls. When the inciting fire breaks out it’s announced with a thick black smoke projected against the same stark background, creeping into the frame with menacing intent. Incredible stunts & sound stage set pieces give the illusion of men crumbling in fires, jumping from bridges into wild rivers, and hanging from the torch of the Statue of Liberty. Although the accused’s hitch-hiking trip across the country is broadly informed with cheeky humor & outlandish character work, Hitchcock builds genuine tension in the feeling that he is trapped and will be caught at any second. Saboteur starts in the contained, dingy menace of a Poverty Row noir, but expands to deliver everything you could want to see on the big screen: comedy, romance, adventure, visual spectacle, shocks of terror, etc. You can feel Hitchcock straining behind the camera to elevate the material to match his own meticulous standard. In that way, it’s almost easier to see his merits as a director in these “lesser” works than in his better-funded, better-respected masterworks where everything is arranged in its proper place & tone.

I’m not sure that I would call Saboteur “essential viewing” for everyone with a passing interest in Hitchcock. For all of its charmingly skewed patriotism & admirably crafted spectacle, the film is still somewhat hampered by a dull lead performer (Robert Cummings) and an unsatisfactorily abrupt ending that prevent it from being Great Cinema. However, the way the film gradually reveals itself to be a wild, playfully cruel road trip comedy & popcorn movie after initially coming across as just another cheap-o noir truly feels like watching Hitchocck getting away with something, like he’s pulling a fast one on his producers. The dangerous thing about Saboteur is that it suggests that all Hitchcock titles might be essential viewing, that even his least-respected, lowest-profile works are not to be missed – especially if you have convenient access to seeing them on the big screen.

-Brandon Ledet

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

/ swampflix / 9 Comments

The common wisdom about Bugs Bunny is that he was modeled after Old Hollywood hunk Clark Gable; the only reason we even have the misconception that real-life rabbits love to eat carrots is because Bugs Bunny parodied Gable doing so in It Happened One Night and the image stuck. However, Gable’s slick, fast-talking, devilish pranksterism is just as much of a reflection of Studio Era sensibilities as they are a personal quirk. His rapid-fire dialogue delivery screams “Turner Classic Movies” more so than seeming specific to him, as if he were speaking a language called “Old Movie” that just happens to sound a lot like sped-up English. I’m saying this mostly because Bugs Bunny was the only thing I could think about while recently watching The Maltese Falcon for the first time, even though that’s a film that stars Humphrey Bogart, not Gable. The Maltese Falcon is a film with an absurdly prestigious pedigree: it’s the directorial debut of Studio Era legend John Huston; it’s cited as the first “major” film noir (as opposed to the smaller, independently produced noir pictures that preceded it); it’s one of the most defining examples of the MacGuffin as a literary device; etc. Still, all I could think about for the entire duration of the film was how funny Humphrey Bogart was in the lead role, and how much he reminded me of Bugs. Bogart is fluent in the same Old Movie language Clark Gable speaks (Bugsy Bunny also parodied him in the Casablanca poof Carrotblanca), and I feel as if I already owe the film a re-watch, not being able to keep up with each joke as fast as they were flying at me in Old Movie dialect.

As the film’s reputation of typifying a MacGuffin may suggest, the plot of The Maltese Falcon does not matter all that much. Bogart stars as a hard-drinking detective who gets sucked into a thieves’ quarrel by a dangerous dame (Mary Astor). At the expense of his partner, his freedom, and potentially his life, he aids this sultry stranger in their quest to obtain a highly valuable ornament ([whispering to my date while watching The Maltese Falcon when The Maltese Falcon first appears on the screen] “That’s the Maltese Falcon”) while avoiding the bullets of a small ring of thieves who also desperately desire to possess it. Casablanca’s Sydney Greenstreet, The Killing’s Elisha Cook Jr, and everyone’s favorite pervert Peter Lorre round out the main cast as that trio of gun-toting thieves, each taking turns backing Bogart into a corner so he can promptly talk his way out of it. It’s Bogart lashing out in that fight-or-flight position that makes The Maltese Falcon such a consistently fun watch. Whether talking to the dame, the cops, or the crooks, Bogart’s hardboiled detective delivers long strings of uninterrupted sass at a machine gun’s pace. Bogart knows he’s being lied to & bullied from all directions, but he finds the danger & mystery of that set-up to be a gas, taking great delight in calling everyone out in their deceits as his hypersensitive bullshit detector goes haywire. When Sydney Greenstreet’s would-be criminal mastermind repeatedly tells Bogart, “You are a character,” out of a gamesman’s delight, it the most honest sentiment shared by any of the film’s various players. This is a film built entirely on Bogart being a comically oversized character, in the colloquial sense of the word.

I don’t want to oversell The Maltese Falcon as a laugh-a-second yuck ‘em up comedy. Based on a very serious crime novel, the second adaption after a 1930s original (Hollywood remake culture has gone too far!), the film’s surface-level details deliver everything you’d want to see in a classic noir. Our “hero” is a hard-drinking adulterer who inserts himself into deadly criminals’ schemes for amusement & personal profit. He dons the classic suits & fedoras combo that inspire those wretched “Men used to dress classy” MRA memes. He’s framed with the intense lighting & drastic angles of classic noir while simply rolling a cigarette or pouring himself a drink, a handsome personification of gruff masculinity. This is directly contrasted with the fey, sexually devious energy of Peter Lorre, playing a character explicitly described as homosexual in the source material. Bogart gets into some S&M play with Lorre (who is introduced practically fellating the handle of his cane), dominating him with some Kung Fu action and barking “When you’re slapped, you’ll take it and like it.” There’s a serious, even tragic romanticism to this Alpha Male masculinity, typified by his fawning secretary’s plea “You always think you know what you’re doing, but you’re too slick for your own good.” Unfortunately, that macho posturing was something that trickled down into the zeitgeist just as much as Bogart’s “Ain’t I a stinker?” pranksterism, influencing descendants as disparate as the wise-cracking meatheads of French New Wave staples like Breathless and 1980s action spectacles like Commando. There’s a danger in making your troubled antiheroes out to be such slick charmers; they end up being so lovable they’re practically children’s-entertainment cartoon bunnies.

At this point, you probably don’t need to hear from me or any amateur film blogger that The Maltese Falcon is well-made & worth seeing. Catching it for the first time on the big screen (thanks to The Prytania’s Classic Movies series) mostly just confirmed for me what I had already assumed from its name recognition & its heavy rotation in corners like TCM: it’s a handsome, well-crafted noir with a talented cast & a distinct Old Hollywood charm. The only thing I didn’t know to expect was that it would be so damn funny. Even its score often reinforces the humor of the dialogue, with chipper flights of orchestral whims incongruously accompanying a murderous plot about greedy, gun-toting thieves. It’s practically the same accompaniment you’d expect to hear in a Merrie Melodies cartoon while Bugs Bunny cracks wise in an Old Movie cadence to talk his way out of getting shot by Elmer Fudd.

-Brandon Ledet

Panic in the Streets (1950)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

Usually, when a Hollywood production is shot on-location in New Orleans, the expectation is that the audience will be doing some tourist sightseeing. 80s thrillers like The Big Easy & Hard Target where especially shameless about this, setting scenes in conspicuous tourist spots like Tipitina’s, Mardi Gras parade float warehouses, and Bourbon Street strip joints for easy, sleazy atmosphere as they drunkenly stumbled around the city. The 1950 health-epidemic noir Panic in the Streets aimed for an entirely different kind of local seasoning. Directed by respected dramatist Elia Kazan shortly before he fired off major hits like A Streetcar Named Desire & On the Waterfront, Panic in the Streets was something of an experiment & a gamble for the Studio Era way of doing things. The business of exporting productions to shoot entirely on-location in far-off cities wasn’t business as usual yet, which might explain why Kazan didn’t think to make use of the city in the now-traditional ways of visiting famous clubs, capturing Mardi Gras crowds, or just generally making a big deal about the environment where the action is staged. There are a few familiar shots of French Quarter exteriors that haven’t changed at all in the last 70 years and the film eventually concludes in a shipping dock warehouse setting that feels unique to its chosen location, but most of its drama is confined to the city’s interior spaces, which are familiar but not entirely unique. The novelty of shooting a Studio Era film entirely on-location did lead to a different, less frequently travelled path to local authenticity, though. Over 80% of the hired cast & crew for Panic in the Streets were local to New Orleans, which is still an unusual way of doing things by big-budget Hollywood standards, even with all the productions that film here for the tax credits. There may not be much documentation of what the city itself looked like in the 1950s here, but the film offers something a little more precious instead: documentation of and collaboration with the city’s people.

Outside its context as a New Orleans peoplewatching time capsule, Panic in the Streets is a fairly standard noir. Its central hook promises something novel beyond the standard antihero cops vs. wise guy criminals dynamic that usually defines the genre. NOPD detectives and representatives from the federal US Public Health Service reluctantly team up to track down a murderer who is now patient zero in a potential city-wide epidemic of the pneumonic plague, thanks to a comprised victim. This unusual medical angle to the crime thriller drama does allow for some distinctive detail unusual to the genre: scientific jargon about “anti-plague serums,” wry humor about tough-guy cops who are afraid of taking their inoculation shots, an excuse to burn all the evidence with the infected-and-murdered man’s body just to make the mystery killer’s identity tougher to crack, etc. Mostly, the plague angle is merely used to build tension by giving local cops & federal officials a tight 48-hour window to catch their killer before his contagions become a city-wide threat. There are some conflicts built around “college men” health officials and blue-collar detectives flaunting their authority in the investigation, but most confrontations mostly amount to angry macho men yelling about jurisdiction at top volume, which feels standard to most cop thrillers. The rest of Panic in the Streets is a faithful amalgamation of classic noir tropes: post-German Expressionist lighting, witty retorts muttered under hard-drinking cops’ breath, a villain who looks like he was plucked from a Dick Tracy lineup, more sewer-grate steam that New Orleans has ever seen, and so on. Anyone with a built-in appreciation for noir as a genre won’t need much more than the plague outbreak premise and the New Orleans locale for the film to be of interest, but it still doesn’t go very far out of its way to distinguish itself beyond those novelties – especially considering the prestige Elia Kazan represents behind the camera.

One noticeable auteurist touch Kazan brings to the table is an interest in this port city’s immigrant Greek population, which feels unique to him given that the director himself was born in Constantinople to Greek parents. Besides the expected police stations, race tracks, and shipping dock locations that naturally arise by setting a noir here, one of the few vintage local spots the film takes a documentarian interest in is a Greek-owned restaurant named Athena’s, presumably now long-gone. The rest of the local cast & crew are much less conspicuous, sporting neither the thick Y’at nor Cajun accents typical to Hollywood productions set here (or, at least they weren’t undetectable to this local’s ear). It’s nice to have a movie character pronounce “New Orleans” correctly on the big screen (a rarer occurrence than you might expect) and it’s a little funny how the plague victims’ dazed stumbling resembles the drunken zombie tourists of Bourbon Street, but most of Panic in the Streets’s local people-watching is just as subtly played as its minor deviations from the noir template. There’s a natural authenticity to the movie that arises from casting real-life characters in a majority of the roles, so that very few faces on the screen are the pristine, homogenous brand of Hollywood Beauty we’re used to seeing. For my taste, there are far too few women with substantial roles to paly in that dynamic (especially for the genre that effectively invented the femme fatale), but for the most part I was riveted just picking faces out of the crowd anyway. Shotgun Cinema projecting the film large & loud for a free screening at the Marigny Opera House was a major help in that regard. As a shot-on-location noir and an Elia Kazan procedural drama, Panic in the Streets is a solid genre entry, but not much more. As an act of local-history people-watching, however, it carries a lot of clout as something exceptional and I was glad to have the opportunity to share that experience with a live, local community.

-Brandon Ledet

Impossible Horror (2017)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

I purchased a Blu-ray copy of Impossible Horror mostly as a means of contributing financial support to a podcaster I admire. The film’s director, Justin Decloux, cohosts The Important Cinema Club out of Toronto, where he also programs repertory genre screenings under the Laser Blast Film Society brand. The film arrived with an endearing thank-you note from Decloux’s creative partner Emily Milling, who scored, co-produced, and contributed sound editing on the film (likely among other duties). I’m mentioning all of this to note that Impossible Horror is very much a microbudget backyard production, a modern entry in the Regional Horror canon with all the charms & limitations that descriptor implies. Decloux & Milling briefly appear in the film themselves as side characters among a local community of friends & collaborators (including Important Cinema Club’s other cohost, Will Sloan) as their film’s “backyard” setting expands into the late-night urban streets of Toronto. Taking a gamble on these kinds of no-budget horror cheapies is always a tough sell for anyone outside the local social circles who appear on the screen in that way, but Impossible Horror is overflowing with enough creative ideas & genuine genre fandom that it’s well worth the effort. A 76min, dialogue-light sampler of a wide range of well-staged scares (ghost possessions, cursed VHS tapes, evil dolls, suicide cults, etc.), the film is very careful to not test its audience’s patience. Decloux & Milling are clearly fans of this D.I.Y. end of genre filmmaking themselves. Along with co-writer Nate Wilson, they energetically flood the screen with the ideas & imagery they love to see in these kinds of movies, conscious of just how easily the exercise could slip into tedium if they eased off the gas pedal. The result is surprisingly effective considering the limitations of their means, even if there are instances where they have to prompt the audience to [imagine a bigger budget here].

All this talk of backyard D.I.Y. art productions would normally be extratextual, but Impossible Horror is largely a film about outsider art & for-its-own-sake creativity. Sinking into the emotional slump that follows a devastating romantic breakup, our protagonist finds herself unsure what to do with her sudden influx of alone time beside throwing herself back into long-abandoned creative projects – drawing comics & making films. She first picks up her old video camera out of spite for The Asshole who left it behind in the breakup, but soon finds herself supernaturally compelled to see her new filmmaking project through. Unable to sleep through her heartache & her resentment of The Asshole, she finds herself going on late-night walks in those eerie post-midnight hours when, as Whodini would say, The Freaks come out. Suddenly, the absence of dialogue that comes with living alone is supplanted by a torrent of mysterious, paranoid ramblings from a newfound friend discovered on those late-night walks. From there, our once-lonely protagonist spends the rest of the film sinking further into her new friend’s own creative project: investigating a phenomenon of ghostly screams that routinely echo in the night and are always accompanied by mysteriously materialized objects – typewriters, VHS cassettes, dildos, hammers, etc. Solving the origin, meaning, and answer to this paranormal puzzle can often feel like trying to work your way through the storyline of a video game after skipping all of the dialogue screens that explain everything. What’s more important is that our protagonist reacts to this confounding experience by obsessively documenting it for an amateur film at the risk of her own safety & sanity. It can be difficult to track what the story is logically doing from minute to minute, but it all ultimately adds up to a Lovecraftian splatter comedy about amateur artists being driven mad by their own creativity. That’s a fitting theme for a no-budget movie made among friends that’s so ambitious in how it doles out its synths, gore, and ghosts that even this long-winded paragraph is only scratching the surface of its full narrative.

It does feel like a little bit of a betrayal to reduce Impossible Horror to its value as a backyard horror production & a nightmare-logic splatter comedy. Usually, horror films on this scale apologize for their limited means by leaning into their camp value, intentionally playing up their “so-bad-it’s good” humor. The earnestness of Impossible Horror is something much braver; its scares, jokes, and practical effects are all genuine attempts to make the best movie possible under the circumstances, all with a surprising success rate. The most poignant scene in the film is a voiceover performance from the protagonist as she shows her new ghost-hunter friend an old short film she made, continually apologizing for its quality in cruel self-deprecation. Every theme explored in the film is on display in full potency in that moment: how we’re haunted by our own past, the never-ending ways we self-harm, the insuppressible urge to keep making outsider amateur art even though putting your own work out in the world is fucking embarrassing. As fans of the microbudget horror genre on its own terms, Decloux & Milling instinctively understand the need to deliver the goods elsewhere, filling the screen with plenty gross-out gore & slapstick gags to entertain fellow fans of the Regional Horror tradition. What sets Impossible Horror apart from most of those self-published films, however, is its earnest, ambitious reach for something greater than a winking-at-the-camera joke. It’s wiling to comment at length about its own limited means, but only in a genuine exploration of how making art on this scale walks a fine line between partying with friends & overworking yourself into a lethal mania. Not everything it hurls at the screen to entertain the audience (and the creators) works, especially not all in tandem, but it does all amount to a genuinely satisfying reflection on the nature of loneliness & self-published art in the 2010s. It’s the kind of D.I.Y. art project that’ll make you want to seek out & support more outsider films on its scale & budget, if not make some of your own – perhaps to your own peril.

-Brandon Ledet

The Breaker Upperers (2019)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

Over the last decade, its gradually become clear that Taika Waititi is one of the greatest comedic directors of all time, full stop. From the farcical bloodbath of What We Do in the Shadows to the action-comedy grandeur of Hunt for the Wilderpeople, to the deep emotional incisions of Boy, Waititi has established a wide range of hilarious, finely-crafted comedic works in just a few features. He even overcame the Hollywood filmmaking odds to disrupt the MCU with some much-needed personality in series-standout Thor: Ragnarök. What’s much more interesting to me personally than what Waititi can achieve in the Kevin Feige Marvel Machine, however, is what smaller projects he chooses to fund with that massive paycheck. The Breaker Upperers, recently added to US Netflix, is an encouraging implication that Waititi’s still passionate about bringing smaller, personable comedies to the screen in the wake of his newfound success – cashing in his evil Disney Dollars to enact a real-world good.

The most exciting aspect of The Breaker Upperers is that it finds Waititi funding new creative voices with his newfound industry power rather than merely amplifying his own. The film is written, directed by, and starring two comedians from within his New Zealand community: Madeleine Sami & Jackie van Beek, who are obviously less widely known to the outside world. Although they share a certain local sensibility with Waititi’s own creative voice, Sami & van Beek bring a meaner, raunchier, more femme point of view to this debut feature — something I’d be eager to see more of in future follow-ups. They appear onscreen here as best friends & business partners — mercenaries who own a breakup-delivery service. The two women fake affairs, deaths, and pregnancies to help expedite the breakup process for cowards who can’t muster the courage to admit the truth to their partners that it’s time to move on. Eventually, the moral toll of lying for a living catches up with them, but the movie has as much fun with its initial premise as possible before the business of telling an emotionally satisfying story gets in the way.

There’s something distinctly 90’s-specific about The Breaker Upperers’s premise, as if it were a Kiwi-flavored soft-remake of the Norm MacDonald classic Dirty Work. As vintage as its plot may appear, however, the film nimbly avoids feeling stale or uninspired in its presentation. This is partly because it wastes no time establishing a first-act reason or backstory for its breakup-for-hire business the way the Happy Madison equivalent of this premise would. We join the women at work mid-stream, as if this were a The Movie adaptation of a sitcom that has already been running for years. The character nuances & the mercenary cruelty of the breakup-for-hire business are immediately well-defined enough for the rapid-fire editing to squeeze in as many goofs, gags, and friendship-dynamic crises as it can in its wonderfully slim 90min runtime. In their most inspired storytelling maneuver, Sami & van Beek establish their characters’ entire backstory as friends & business partners over the course of a single Céline Dion karaoke performance. It’s an efficiency that’s not only refreshing in the post-Apatow era of improv looseness, but also leaves more time for the character quirks & moment-by-moment gags that matter more than the plot anyway.

If you’re at all familiar with the Waititi comedy catalog, you’ll recognize plenty of faces among the film’s cast – including van Beek herself, who was a significant player in Shadows. More importantly, the film expands the New Zealand comedy scene’s presence in the word at large by offering Sami & van Beek their own platform where than can make us laugh on their own terms. This is a raunchy, queer, femme, goofy-as-fuck comedy with a big, earnest heart. It’s nice to know that something that distinct could be made on the back of the Mickey Mouse machine. Once again, Waititi has found a way to stand out as one of our most vital comedic voices, this time by signal-boosting the voices of others with his newfound industry clout.

-Brandon Ledet