reviews

The Voices (2015)

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Comedy is risky. If you fail to connect with your audience the time you spend together can be brutal. Just ask any stand-up who’s bombed a set. That disconnect between audience & performer can be even more punishing if the material is aggressive. To succeed, a horror comedy has to find humor in sadism & cruelty and it takes a well-balanced, lighthearted tone to pull that off properly. Curiously enough, The Voices fails even though it nails that balance. There’s a playful party vibe to the movie (complete with a conga line) that counteracts its homicidal maniac narrative very well, achieving the exact kind of tonal balance a horror comedy typically needs to succeed. That makes it all the more frustrating that I just didn’t find it funny and, by extension, didn’t enjoy the movie outside of an occasional chuckle.

The main problem for me personally might just be an over-saturation of Ryan Reynolds. There is just so much Reynolds in the movie. He not only plays the central serial killer protagonist, but also provides the voices that the killer hears in his head, voices he attributes to his cat & dog. The idea of a talking cat & dog inspiring the crimes of a crazed killer sound like it could be played laughs rather well, but it just fails to reach anything approaching humor in The Voices. It’s not that I have anything particular against Ryan Reynolds in general. He has a natural smarm to his charisma that makes him an effective cad in films like Adventureland & Waiting, but whenever he’s supposed to be a likeable protagonist I fail to connect. That connection is made even more difficult here by the hurdles of him playing both a murderer of women and house cat with a Scottish accent. There’s some backstory to his killer protagonist’s childhood, which was plagued by an abusive father & a mother who also heard voices (attributed to angels instead of pets in her case), but it does little to make him likeable or his murderous antics amusing. Much of the film plays as if in Tucker & Dale Vs Evil Tucker & Dale turned out to be coldblooded, homicidal bullies but you were supposed to root for them anyway.

The English-language debut of Persepolis-director Marjane Satrapi, The Voices has so much going for it. Saptari provides the film a delicious living-cartoon setting, a playful atmosphere, and Disney-esque hallucinations that made the tonally similar (but much more amusing & less “on the nose”) Miss Meadows enjoyable, but here it’s all for naught. Even the adorably dorky charisma of Anna Kendrick couldn’t save the film from its core problem of being a failed comedy with an unlikeable ham protagonist. When comedies don’t work there’s just no way for an audience to enjoy themselves. I wish I could’ve laughed at the dialogue coming from Reynolds’ talking pets; I wanted to find them hilarious. Instead I was blankly staring at their stupid, little CGI mouths and hoping for the run time to be over quickly. I’m sure there are plenty of people who will be laughing right along with The Voices’ admirable brand of goofy, black humor, but it’ll be a total chore for whoever finds themselves watching in silence, unamused. Trust me.

-Brandon Ledet

Miss Meadows (2014)

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threehalfstar

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In the opening scene of Miss Meadows, a primly dressed Katie Holmes (as the titular Miss Meadows) tap dances down a suburban sidewalk, whistling whimsically at the CGI squirrels, birds & deer that surround her as if she were a real-life Disney princess. This reverie is interrupted by all-too-familiar street harassment as a lecherous man attempts to lure her into his dirty pick-up truck with salacious commands. In response, she shoots him in the neck. Miss Meadows describes itself as a Pulp Fiction Mary Poppins, but it plays  more like a Cinderella Death Wish, its central character acting as a no-nonsense vigilante that stands as a dividing line between decency & bloodthirsty, frothing-at-the-mouth criminals. It could also be described as Serial Mom: The Early Years and Batman in Pretty Dresses.

Much like with Death Wish & Batman there is a moral grey area in Miss Meadows’ worldview. According to Miss Meadows herself, “There are bad people in the world and they shouldn’t be around the good people.” She means that people are either wholly “good” or wholly “bad” with little to no further nuance in their worth as human beings. Miss Meadows, of course, believes herself to be one of the good ones. She tap dances, reads poetry, dresses immaculately, calls her mother regularly, dates a cop, sings in the choir, plays hopscotch, giggles during sex, knits, gardens, brings her neighbors tea & crumpets, and teaches a 1st grade class about the virtues of courage & kindness. She also, you know, murders people she doesn’t deem worthy to be alive. At one point she even admits with acidic honesty that she would rather criminals die than cost taxpayers in the penal system. That’s pretty damn cruel for someone who’s supposed to be a model citizen. Even Batman had his limits.

It’s difficult to tell exactly where Miss Meadows falls on its protagonist’s genteel brand of vigilante justice. It has the inauthentic feeling of a fairy tale or a moralizing allegory, with only children & a dog named “Frank” being honored with first names and most characters being addressed solely by handles like “Miss Meadows” & “The Sherriff”. The exact nature of the central moral, however, is more than a little muddled. A supposedly reformed criminal seems to question Miss Meadow’s good person/bad person worldview, but eventually she’s more or less proven to be right and his reformation unravels. Then again, Miss Meadows’ own mental health is quite poor and she reveals a little too much of herself in an exchange with a criminal where she shouts “I’m not crazy! You’re crazy and I’m nothing like you.” Judging Miss Meadows on its merits as a moral tale is a tricky proposition, one that doesn’t flatter its likeability. However, as a detached-from-reality vigilante story with a campy mean streak (and an admittedly low body count, in case that’s what you’re looking for), it’s quite pleasant.

-Brandon Ledet

R100 (2015)

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threehalfstar

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Late in the run time of the surreally campy BDSM comedy R100, the film addresses the audience directly by suggesting that, “People won’t understand this film until they’re 100 years old.” Even that timeline may be a little too optimistic. Directed by Hitoshi Matsumoto, the juvenile prankster who brought the world the cartoonish excess of Big Man Japan & Symbol, R100 initially pretends to be something it most definitely is not: understated. The first forty minutes of the film are a visually muted, noir-like erotic thriller with a dully comic sadness to its protagonists’ depression & persecution. It’s around the halfway mark where the film goes entirely off the rails genre-wise, dabbling in tones that range from spy movies to mockumentaries to old-school ZAZ spoofs. It’s doubtful that even 100 years on Earth will give you enough information to make sense out of that mess.

Although the first half of R100 is more toned down than the second, it’s still off to a fairly bizarre start. The film’s protagonist, a mild-mannered mattress salesman grieving over his comatose wife, seeks solace in an unusual BDSM club. Instead of subbing for a dominatrix on the club’s parameters, he signs a contract that allows its stable of dominant women to appear in his personal life, beating him mercilessly in public without warning. He initially gets off on the tension of not knowing when a dominatrix will appear to beat him, but as they begin to surface at his job, his home, and (worst of all) his wife’s hospital room, he attempts to desperately cancel the contract. Of course, the club is not interested in cancellations. This is a world without safe words, a world where a dominatrix believes, “When perverts beg for mercy that means they’re begging for more.” In other words, it initially plays like an erotic novel, not far from the plot machinations of Gary Marshall’s BDSM comedy Exit to Eden. It’s far more akin to fantasy than real life and the incongruity of the public beatings with the mundanity of the modern world is played for a subtly comic effect (and, eventually, for an effect that is anything but subtle).

There’s plenty of bizarre visual touches to this first half that suggest the weirdness that comes later: a carousel of dominatrix women floating in a void, brain wave halos of pleasure, leather clad doms galloping like gazelles, etc. There’s also the more surreal ways the protagonist submits, like when a dominatrix violently, repetitively smashes his sushi flat with her palm while he eats or when another covers him in gallons of saliva (which has got to be one of the most disgusting scenes I’ve ever encountered, or at least since Wetlands). At one point a character astutely compares the over-the-top theatricality of pro wrestling to kink play and in the ways kink is portrayed in R100 it feels more truthful than ever. However, even those cartoonish play sessions are ill preparation to the unhinged silliness that follows.

In some ways, the first half of R100 is an objectively better film, as it reins in its more absurd tendencies for the narrative’s benefit. Its premise would most likely fall flat as a straightforward film, though, so it’s not particularly a problem that it abandons its tone & genre for more outlandish territory. As long as you’re prepared to roll with the sharp left turn the film takes halfway through (especially if you’ve seen a Hitoshi Matsumoto film before), you’re likely to have fun with R100. It’s an oddball film that refuses to behave in a traditionally oddball way, seemingly shifting gears at a whim with no concern for the audience. When you sign up to watch R100, it’s like signing a contract that for the next two hours you’ll be in its capable, dominant hands, ready to submit to every command & goofy impulse it can muster before the contract runs out. As long as you don’t mind handing that freedom over and don’t become too attached to the early tone, you might experience some pleasure halos of your own.

-Brandon Ledet

The Devil’s Rain (1975)

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three star
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I was lead to The Devil’s Rain by a peculiar image featured in the recent Scientology documentary Going Clear: John Travolta’s young, eyeless, melting, goop-hemorrhaging face. The film was cited there as an example of Travolta’s immediate success in landing roles as a young actor, his earliest minor part in a feature-length film. It turns out that Travolta is not actually in The Devil’s Rain for all that long. Bleeding green goop out of his eyeless skull is essentially the extent of Travolta’s role, but there were plenty of other names of interest attached to the project as well: William Shatner, Ernest Borgnine, Tom Skerritt, and the director of The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Robert Feust. Despite all these recognizable Hollywood personalities, however, the most notable contributor to the film was an occultist author & musician Anton LaVey.

Anton LaVey is credited in The Devil’s Rain as the Technical Advisor, a job he landed through his real life credentials as High Priest of the Church of Satan. As briefly mentioned in our Swampchat on former Movie of the Month The Masque of the Red Death, LaVey had achieved a sort of celebrity status by marketing Satanism (which more celebrates materialism & individualism than it does The Devil proper) to California hippies in the 1960s. He is credited as a “technical adviser” in The Devil’s Rain to give the film a sense of credibility, but the film’s Satanic rituals feel way more cartoonishly “Satanic” than what idealistic hippies were most likely up to in reality. The film features such clichéd (but totally rad looking) Satanic cultural markers as red hooded robes, voodoo dolls, stained glass pentagrams, and high priests with magically transformed goat heads. Its most ludicrous stab at credibility, however, is its insistence on saying “Satanus” instead of “Satan”, because I guess it sounds more authentic in Latin. I was lead to The Devil’s Rain by a documentary profiling one cult (of which to this day Travolta is still a member) and instead found the phony beginner’s version of another.

The Devil’s Rain’s most punishing flaw is in its glacially slow pacing. a fault mostly due to a downplayed score and a meandering plot. Although the Satanic imagery is fun to gawk at, the movie does get frustrating in its refusal to be in a rush to entertain you. However, if you yourself are not in a particular rush, it’s an interesting lazy afternoon viewing experience in which goat people worship Satanus and get their heads melted (a young Travolta included), their bubbling skin oozing a disgusting green. The Devil’s Rain is a memorable film through the campy virtue of its oddball cast and the legitimate strengths of its Satanic imagery alone. Anton LaVey may not have provided the film with a feel of Satanic authenticity or saved it from its own miserable pacing, but he did afford it enough memorable images to make it worthwhile for a casual cult film fan who isn’t in any particular rush to be wowed.

-Brandon Ledet

Alien Outpost (2015)

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onehalfstar

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There’s a pretty significant lie in the title of Alien Outpost. It’s the false promise that there might actually be some aliens in the film from time to time. If you wanted to attempt some truth in advertising a more appropriate title would be Dickhole Soldier Outpost or Operation: Naptime. Posed as a sub-Blomkamp “documentary” about the militaristic consequences of a near-future alien invasion, Alien Outpost has the feel of a warfare video game that features way too many thoroughly unlikeable soldier bullies idling their time and not nearly enough aliens brutally murdering them. It’s what I imagine Battlefield Earth would be like if you spent most of the runtime with the rat-brained man animals and Travolta only had a small cameo.

The aliens in question (known as “heavies” here), aren’t particularly interesting (especially in light of that Battlefield Earth Psychlo comparison), but they’re far and away the most entertaining element in a film where entertainment is in short supply. They’re tall, grey, humanoids who are running desperately low on laser “ammo” and are being hunted by American soldiers in a Middle Eastern outpost that I’m sure is supposed to call up metaphorical comparisons to the Iraqi occupation or something along those lines. Both that metaphor and the general nature of “the heavies” remain frustratingly undefined as the film focuses on the endangered, yet trivial lives of the soldiers stationed at Outpost 37. As the movie puts it, “This is the story of the men fighting a war the world has chosen to forget.” Unfortunately, the men mentioned there (and, by extension, the movie that surrounds them) is just as forgettable as the war. More of the grey, ill-defined “heavies” would be a blessing compared to what’s actually delivered.

The Blomkamp documentary format is a lot of what’s wrong with the film on a structural level, as it tends to tell instead of show (like showing more aliens for instance). However, its main fault is that none of its ideas are well-developed enough to be memorable. The only moment that suggests an intricate exploration of its world is when a soldier is temporarily paralyzed by a bite from a “numb bug”, an invasive species of insect that infested Earth after hitching a ride here with the “heavies”. More original ideas specific to this world like the numb bugs would be appreciated, but are few & far between. The film instead focuses on far-from-compelling soldier dicks when it should find more of a fascination with the alien beasts that are trying to kill them. There’s nothing particularly new about the soldiers or the heavies compared to other sci-fi action flicks, but at least a movie focusing on the heavies would have a much better chance of being entertaining.

-Brandon Ledet

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (2015)

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threehalfstar

The only reason the likes of the recent HBO documentary Going Clear have not been released before (or at least not with this large of a budget) is because it’s an endeavor that requires a certain amount of bravery. Its subject, the (secretive, abusive, and dare I say cult-like) “religious” organization The Church of Scientology, is infamous for its bullying tactics when counteracting its vocal critics, almost to the point where I’m nervous to praise a film that attacks it even on this site, the most inconsequential of all blogs. Almost. Going Clear took a lot of guts to make, just like it took a lot of guts to write the book it was based on and it took a lot of guts for former church members to speak out in its interviews. It has the feeling of a long time coming for a subject so flagrantly nefarious in the public eye, but it’s also completely understandable why it took so long for a major outlet to speak out against it in this way.

Directed by prolific documentarian Alex Gibney, Going Clear does an excellent job of gradually introducing the audience to the insane world of Scientology’s beliefs & practices the same way the organization is known to gradually accustom its own members. The film mimics the form of an “audit” (a combination of a therapy session & a taped confession), a practice that plays a major role in Scientology’s recruitment process. At first the ideas of discharging hurtful memories and basic meditation through audits sound like reasonable forms of therapy and personal improvement. Also, the organization’s basic goals of freeing the Earth from insanity & criminality seem fairly admirable on the surface. As the film digs deeper, however, it starts to reveal a much stranger set of promises: superpowers that allow members to “transcend all perameters” & “achieve godspeed”, scientific instruments that can weigh the mass of your thoughts, billion year contracts to “save the world” (through indentured servitude, of course), and the quest to “unhypnotize” man. That’s not even getting into the more out-there concepts of prison planets & galactic overlords. If Gibney had introduced these details in the opening minutes (much like if Scientology introduced them in their initial recruitment efforts) they’d feel somewhat unbelievable, but by the time you get to them in the film they feel both very real and very much terrifying.

One of the tactics Going Clear employs very well is allowing the founder of it subject, deceased sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard, to speak for himself. Hubbard spent a large part of his adult life avoiding charges of tax fraud, so it is rare that you actually get to hear him talk about the monster he created. Footage from at least two separate interviews are assembled here to allow him to speak directly on Scientology’s core beliefs (as well as less savory topics like “the primitive races, including the white race”). As portrayed here, Hubbard was an abusive husband, a former Satanic occultist, a paranoid dissenter of traditional modes of mental health, and a prolific writer of pulp fiction. Initially, he conceived Scientology as a means of making money, quoted here telling his wife “The only way to make any real money is to have a religion”. A religion, of course, would afford Hubbard a tax exempt status that would allow him to hoard his earnings. As his personal health deteriorated, however, he began to believe his own teachings (concepts mostly cobbled together from the plots of pulp sci-fi novels he had written before his religious pursuit). To Hubbard’s credit, the modern monster that Scientology has become does not seem exactly like a devious, well-thought-out exploitation scheme, but rather the musings of a very sick man that were twisted even further after his death by power-hungry members of the church, especially the current leader David Miscavige.

This history lesson in this first half of Going Clear was much more interesting than what I would describe as the celebrity gossip second half. While explaining the basic teachings of the church, the film employs a fascinating type of visual collage that feels transcendent of its basic documentary format. Once the film delves into the modern era, which is mostly contingent on the involvement of Hollywood celebrities Tom Cruise & John Travolta, it loses a little steam as an unique work, depending mostly upon the church’s Dianetics recruitment videos for much of its visual charms. That’s not to say Tavolta & Cruise’s involvement are not inherently fascinating. When they first appear on the screen Travolta is dressed in soldier’s fatigues (on a movie set) and Cruise is wearing an oversized medallion (the “Freedom Medal of Valor”, as it were), two costume choices with enough bizarre energy on their own to make the millionaire weirdos’ presence interesting. It’s just that the back half of the film feels less special than the first, like it is something that anyone curious enough to watch a Scientology profile on YouTube could’ve encountered before.

As a whole, however, Going Clear is a fascinating look into the lives of people who have left the church as they look back upon the thetans, e-meters, out of body experiences, and Xenus that populated their troubled pasts. It may lose a little visual flair as it narrows its focus on Travolta & Cruise, but their inclusion is necessary as it calls into question the idea that as long as you give the church all of your money they can make anything possible. Is there an element of blackmail that maintains their involvement in Scientology or is does that “Next stop: infinity” slogan hold more weight than you would expect? Given the abusive, conniving practices of the church laid out here (not to mention basic laws of science & physics), it feels a lot more likely that it’s the former rather than the latter, but Scientology is such a strange, insular, shrouded entity that anything feels possible . . . as long as you give them all of your money.

-Brandon Ledet

Lost River (2015)

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threehalfstar

Sometimes it’s gotta suck to be Ryan Gosling. Not often, but sometimes. Everything sucks sometimes, right? I’m sure being a talented actor & a beautiful human specimen is mostly all perks, but what if no one takes you seriously when you try to let loose the weirdo artist lurking under your perfect skin? Finalizing his gradual transition from pint-sized Mouseketeer to big boy artist, Gosling recently stepped behind the camera to write & direct his debut feature, Lost River. Critically-speaking, it didn’t go well. The film was panned on the festival circuit as “derivative” “poverty porn” and lost its wide distribution detail in the process, eventually being damned to direct-to-VOD status. Gosling’s first outing as a creator instead of a performer failed to secure accolades and the talented sex beast was left having an uncharacteristically bad day in the sun. The dirty secret is that Lost River is actually pretty damn good for a debut feature. It’s far from flawless, but there’s very little justification for the vicious critical beating it received on the festival circuit. If the film were directed by a fresh-out-of-film-school nobody it most likely would’ve had a better chance in the critical eye. For once it didn’t pay to be for Ryan Gosling to be a wealthy, well-known pretty boy.

Both the “derivative” & “poverty porn” complaints feel somewhat like they were aimed specifically at Gosling’s pretty boy swag instead of his final product. The claim that the film is “derivative” is technically true, but not really a problem considering the sources Gosling pulls from here. Names like Lynch, Bava, Korine, Mallick, and Refn are sure to be conjured by any discerning audience, but what film buff wouldn’t love pieces of those five aesthetics gathered in one neon-soaked, dilapidated package? Speaking of dilapidated, the film may also technically substantiate that “poverty porn” critique, as it pulls beautiful images out of economic despair, turning what remains of Detroit into a ludicrous dream world. I also see this complaint as more of an asset than a problem, especially considering how the images tie into the film’s thematic details (foreclosed houses, stealing copper from blighted properties, etc.). Also, it’s an aesthetic that’s worked wonders before in titles like George Washington, Gummo, and Beasts of the Southern Wild.

The one legitimate qualm I found with Lost River is that it is poorly paced. There’s a calm, unrushed progression to the movie that plays right into the stereotype that art films have to be boring to be taken seriously. At least while the run time is glacially gliding along, there are plenty of worthwhile images to chew on: flaming bicycles, pink neon lights, glistening Casio keyboards, underwater dinosaur statues, slow-motion house fires, and so on. That’s not even getting into horror legend Barbara Steele’s hermetic mourning or fellow-perfect-specimen Christina Hendricks’ Tree of Life cosplay & blood-soaked burlesque. These images appear slowly, but each with great individual impact, backed by the sleek nightmare sounds of Chromatics genius Johnny Jewel. They’re definitely a sight to behold and it’s a sight I expect to revisit often, even if they do work better as still images than as a feature film. Gosling most certainly has an eye and once he tightens aspects like pacing & narrative, he has untold potential to make something truly great. I just hope that he hasn’t been discouraged from making more films by the negative reception his debut garnered. Lost River may not be a perfect work, but it does demonstrate a wealth of promise and it’d be a shame if that promise were snuffed out in its infancy by sourpuss critics.

-Brandon Ledet

What We Do in the Shadows (2015)

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I had previously written on this site that the New Zealand vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows was looking to crowdfund an American theatrical release, a campaign that was ultimately a success. I wrote that the movie “promises to take the same ennui employed by Only Lovers Left Alive into the satiric comedy territory of Vamps. Posed as a Christopher Guest-style mockumentary, the film follows modern day vampires as they navigate mundane activities like nightlife, dealing with roommates, and searching for a bite to eat. They clash with the likes of witches, zombies, werewolves, and plain-old humans in a loosely-plotted slice of (undead) life comedy. From the looks of the trailer, it could be quite funny as well as a fresh take on a genre I once thought hopelessly stale.” Having now actually seen What We Do in the Shadows, I am happy to report that the film not only met those expectations, but even greatly exceeded them. The most essential success of the film, however, was not what it had to add to the vampire genre, but just that it was simply riotously funny from start to finish.

Most of my favorite mockumentaries, titles like Best in Show & Drop Dead Gorgeous, aren’t necessarily well-told stories about personal growth and lessons learned. Instead, they’re more or less glimpses into the lives of already well-established characters as they prepare for a major life event, for instance a dog show or a beauty pageant. Staying true to that format, What We Do in the Shadows follows the lives of a small group of vampire roommates in the months leading up to their biggest annual celebration: The Unholy Masquerade, a grand party for the local undead. The Unholy Masquerade mostly serves as a climactic device that brings the film’s slowly boiling conflicts to a head, but what’s much more important is the characters that the “documentary” crew (who wear crucifixes for protection) follow in the months leading up to the event.

The film’s central vampire coven is a small crew consisting of an 18th century dandy, a torture-obsessed pervert, a 183 year old “young bad boy”, and an 8000 year old Nosferatu type named “Petyr”, who terrifies even his own undead flatmates. The group is mostly a collection of goofs, very much delusional in their outsized egos (a common trope in these Guest-style comedies), but also a true, formidable treat who fly, hypnotize, transform into bats & other creatures, and frequently murder unsuspecting victims with their incredibly sharp fangs. It’s a brilliant subject for an awkward comedy mostly concerned with trivial conflicts like a flatmate who doesn’t pull his weight on the chore wheel, the struggles of an active nightlife when you have to be formally invited into bars, meekly asking Petyr to sweep up the skeletons in his room, and struggling to adapt to the addition of a boisterous 5th roommate who shouts “I’m a vampire!” in public even more liberally than Nic Cage in Vampire’s Kiss. There’s some strange, ambitious concepts allowed by the film’s subject, like the existence of Hitler’s secret vampire army or depressed vampires wistfully watching footage of the sunrise on YouTube. It’s the clash of these ideas with the mundanity of modern life that make the film something special, like when one flatmate angrily shouts, “Just leave me to do my dark bidding on the internet!”

Co-writers/directors Jemaine Clement & Taika Waititi (of Flight of the Conchords fame) have crafted a thoroughly funny film here that I expect to revisit often. They have added a few updates to the mockumentary format, like the inclusion of some reality show beats, but for the most part the film is a very straightforward genre execution. It just also happens to be a very funny one. What We Do in the Shadows is as great as a vampire mockumentary could possibly be. An exceptionally funny comedy overstuffed with loveable, but deeply flawed characters (they are bloodthirsty murderers after all) and endlessly quotable zingers, it’s hard to imagine a more perfect, more rewatchable execution of its basic concept. In other words, it’s an instant classic.

-Brandon Ledet

The Sheik (2014)

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three star

Much like with hip-hop or viral content, professional wrestling is all about self-promotion. In pro wrestling, you don’t necessarily have to be the best, you just have to convince your audience that you’re the best. Just ask Hulk Hogan. As the 80s era’s choice for the face of the company (that company being the WWE, of course), Hogan seemingly tore through every formidable opponent tossed his way, from Andre the Giant to “Macho Man” Randy Savage to Zeus. His rapid rise in popularity caused a version of mild cultural hysteria that was even afforded its own name. The Hulkster was smartly branded as not only a single wrestler, but an entire movement. Hulkamania was an 80s phenomenon that gave birth to both the annual cultural juggernaut WrestleMania and the lesser, round-the-year spectacle of WWE as a household sport. Hulk Hogan’s shameless self-promotion in the 1980s built that empire, supported with major backing from the multi-million dollar company pulling the strings, of course.

Last year’s profile documentary The Sheik’s most ambitious (and yet still believable) claim is that the success of Hulkamania (and, by extension, WrestleMania) was largely dependent on the appeal of Hogan’s main opponent, The Iron Sheik. Playing off of Americans’ Islamophobic prejudices during the Carter era Iranian hostage crisis, The Iron Sheik is credited here for being the ideal heel for Hogan, essentially single-handedly putting him over with the crowd. Born in Iran in the 1940s, Hossein Khosrow “The Sheik” Ali Vaziri was raised in a culture where traditional wrestling was a national obsession, where a healthy body meant a healthy state. Describing his teenage life in The Sheik, Ali Vaziri says “I was married to the wrestling mat. I didn’t care about girls; I cared about wrestling.” It was this dedication that landed him the position as bodyguard for the Iranian shah and, after emigration, an all-American coach for the Olympic wrestling team. The Iron Sheik was a mild-mannered American hero with an exceedingly sweet Midwestern wife & three adorable daughters before he found his true calling as a pro wrestling heel (a “bad guy”) that perfectly counteracted The Hulkster’s “I am a real American” persona simply by being a foreigner (nevermind that he has a depthless love for the country that he adopted).

The Sheik is not only credited in this flattering profile as contributing to the success of Hulkamania, but also for creating the priceless term “jabroni” (later popularized by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, of course) as well as the arguably-more-important public revelation that pro wrestling is, in fact, rigged. Once upon a time the ultra-macho ballet known as pro wrestling was assumed to be a true-to-life physical competition until (as this doc tells it) The Iron Sheik & supposed opponent “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan were arrested together on a beer & drug binge. It was the first time a face & a heel were ever proven to be hanging out as buds outside the squared circle. This “revelation” eventually lead to WWE magnate Vince McMahon seeking (and achieving) the tax breaks that come with being classified as a form of entertainment and not a professional sport.

If The Sheik is to be believed its subject would be credited as the sole launching pad for the very existence of modern pro wrestling itself and not just as the highly effective, very much timely heel that’s most likely closer to the truth. However, it isn’t until the film relaxes on the revisionist history lesson and profiles The Sheik’s more recent transition from drug addict with a broken body & a heart of gold to reformed family man that it loses a good deal of its credibility. It’s true that The Iron Sheik has a truly fascinating Twitter, YouTube and Howard Stern presence, but the movie conveniently sidesteps the racist & homophobic tendencies of his statements in those forums. As a journalistic, documentary endeavor, The Sheik fails to uncover answers that doesn’t support its central thesis that The Iron Sheik is 100% awesome, no faults. As a rose-colored profile of a very storied man who calls everyone “Bubba”, never says anything offensive about minorities, and most definitely quit mountains of crack cocaine, it’s much more effective. Supporting interviews with pro wrestling staples like Jim Ross, The Rock (who was apparently babysat by The Sheik’s wife as a child), Jake “The Snake” Roberts, Mick “Mankind” Foley, Brett “The Hitman” Hart, Jimmy Hart, and King Kong Bundy are sure to please any “sports entertainment” fan who are looking for a collection of anecdotes and not a controversial expose. The Sheik may be an exercise in shameless self-promotion, but that’s far from a new concept in the world of pro wrestling and (much like with the “sport” it covers) it’s a much more satisfactory proposition if you know what you’re in for before you arrive.

-Brandon Ledet

Swearnet: The Movie (2014)

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Sometimes artists are so great in their respective niches that it truly hurts to watch them branch out into areas where they’re far from experts. Think Michael Jordan playing baseball or Madonna trying to act or nearly any actor you can name’s blues rock band. It’s tough for an audience to admit that the entertainers they love are only good at one specific thing, but I imagine it’s even harder for the entertainer. Being labeled as a one-trick pony and getting begged to repeat the same act over & over again has got to wear on you after a few years and I’m sure after a decade or two it’s absolutely maddening. Still, that doesn’t mean that anyone should have to suffer through Shanghai Surprise just because they like jamming out to “Material Girl”. It’s a lose/lose situation.

That’s exactly what makes me feel so bad for the Canadian writer-comedians behind the cult television series Trailer Park Boys. First of all, I love them dearly. After nine seasons of television, four feature length films, and two extended specials I am still hungry for more content from Sunnyvale Trailer Park. I’ve really got these guys’ bellies. The cycle of the show works the same way in every iteration; “the boys” get released from jail at the beginning of a season/movie, they commit various harebrained, criminal schemes to get rich quick, and then they inevitably go back to jail. This pattern repeats itself continuously, which is a brilliant reflection of the cycles of depression, poverty, and alcoholism that the show finds dark, cartoonish humor in despite the severity of those themes. As an audience, it’s comforting to know that “the boys” are always up to fucking up, never leaving the vice grip Sunnyvale has on their souls. As performers, I’m sure it’s got to be exhausting to have done this same schtick for more than a decade now, no exit strategy working out, trapped within their own creation just as much as “the boys” they portray are trapped within the prison system. No matter how much fun they have making the show it’s still got to be a little bit of a chore at this point.

That premise is essentially what Swearnet: The Movie is about. Playing exaggerated versions of themselves, the three main actors from Trailer Park Boys (John Paul Tremblay, Robb Wells, and Mike Smith) branch out from their Sunnyvale past and create their own entertainment network called Swearnet (which is a real thing). As fictionalized in the film, Swearnet is an entire media conglomerate dedicated to the idea that excessive swearing is always funny. It’s not. In fact, as Ben Kingsley proved in Jonathan Glazer’s excellent heist film Sexy Beast, excessive swearing can actually be kind of pathetic. Now, the three comedians at the helm of this film are very funny people and they do pull some great material out of the limited premise, like the odd phrase “Cancer can go fuck itself” and the concept of “swearaoke” (which of course is when you drunkenly substitute words in karaoke songs with references to “cocks” & such). I also really enjoyed the concept for the self-explanatory Swearnet show Acid Cannibals and the idea that Tremblay keeps his deceased father’s ashes in a doll shaped like his dad, (which he of course refers to as “Dad”), but these are a few isolated ideas in a film that doesn’t give itself much to stand on. It’s a thin concept that feels progressively thinner as the run time drags on (with an extended drag race climax, no less).

Written & filmed sometime around 2012 (just following the also-disappointing The Drunk and On Drugs Happy Fun Time Hour), Swearnet: The Movie is a document of a time when “the boys” didn’t know what to do with themselves. Just a year later they would thankfully acquire the rights for the then-temporarily defunct Trailer Park Boys for their real-life Swearnet network (along with a killer deal with Netflix), but in the meantime they were lost. They wanted to move on to other projects, but it was a hard sell for anyone who was just hungry for more antics from Julian, Ricky, and Bubbles. The movie is very self-aware in that way and they do their best to distance themselves from their Sunnyvale past here, with Mike Smith’s cruel bully version of himself getting the most distance from his kitten-loving sweetheart Bubbles. The self-awareness extends itself even to the cameo casting, featuring fellow left-by-the-wayside niche comedians Tom Green & Carrot Top.

The sheer hubris “the boys” display in Swearnet: The Movie is impressive. In the film, they’re bigger than their Sunnyvale past, they “get the girls”, and they launch a new project that’s bigger & better than anything they’ve done before. Unfortunately, the film itself doesn’t live up to its own mythology and simply reinforces the idea that they are much more entertaining as Trailer Park Boys. I’m so happy that they were able to acquire their own show from their old network and the two seasons of television they’ve produced since their break and the birth of Swearnet have been as funny as anything they’ve ever done before. I just hope that the feeling is mutual, that these talented people are happy with what they’re doing and it’s not as if Tom Hanks had to return to crossdressing sitcoms to pay his bills or as if Mark Wahlberg was driven back to rapping in his underwear. I hope they’re still having fun making Trailer Park Boys, because I’m still having fun watching. Hell, I hope they had fun making Swearnet: The Movie, but that’s another story.

-Brandon Ledet