reviews

Closely Watched Trains (1966)

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At the time of posting, the social media platform TikTok is back online after briefly being banned in the United States over some vague Red Scare surveillance paranoia involving the app’s ownership by a Chinese company. Despite having called for this ban during his first presidency, Trump has found an executive-order workaround for the Supreme Court’s decision against TikTok’s fate in the US, retroactively pinning the unpopular decision to the recently concluded Biden administration. The brief banning of the app inspired US TikTok users to flock to an alternative platform to alleviate their #content addiction (including the Chinese-owned app RedNote, which spiked in American usership), and it also had me reflecting on what TikTok has contributed to Online Film Discourse. Like with all platforms, there are both good & bad data points that color TikTok’s character, from the shameless shilling for corporate media that the app’s Influencer class indulge for red carpet access to the stray surges of interest one out-of-nowhere video could draw to obscure works like Żuławski’s On the Silver Globe. Overall, though, when I think of what “MovieTok” (which I would happily rename “FlikTok” if I had the power) brings to Film Discourse, my mind goes to the trend of slagging art films as purposefully inscrutable puzzles that cinephiles only pretend to appreciate in order to appear smart. Anytime a celebrity lists a European art film during their “Letterboxd Top 4” interviews on the platform, a TikToker mocks their supposed pretention in a parodic video listing fictional titles.  Instead of expressing curiosity in any film outside the bounds of the MCU (or their more recent Major Studio equivalents), they make up a “4-hour black and white film about the Serbian government through the eyes of a pigeon.” It’s a stubbornly ignorant way to approach unfamiliarity with art, and I personally hope it dies with the app.

For any younger audiences doubtful that black & white European art films can be accessible & entertaining, I’d recommend checking out the 1966 Czech New Wave classic Closely Watched Trains, which was accessible enough to American audiences in its initial release that it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Closely Watched Trains is a shockingly light entertainment for a black & white Czechoslovakian art film about making sure the trains run on time under Nazi occupation. Its historical circumstances and its final scene are tragic, but structurally it’s a 90-minute boner comedy packed with prurient goofball schtick. While the MovieTok commentariat would have you to expect a Czech New Wave art film about Nazis to be a non-stop misery parade, Closely Watch Trains mostly plays out like one of those coming-of-age comedies about a teen’s sexual misadventures while working their first summer job … except it’s set at the edge of a frosty, war-torn Prague. There’s even a little “Welcome to my life” narration track at the start, as if you’re watching the original foreign-language version of Ferris Bueller instead of a project that was passed over by Věra Chytilová for seeming too difficult to adapt from page to screen. Sure, its final beat is deadly serious about the violent circumstances of Nazi rule, but its scene-to-scene concerns are refreshingly honest about what a teen working their first job outside the house would be paying most attention to: getting laid. It’s a shame that the MovieTok platform isn’t used to introduce younger viewers to a wilder world of cinema through accessible gateway films like this and instead tends to dismiss the entire concept of European Art Films outright for an easy punchline. Or, more likely, the more dismissive responses are the ones that reach a wider audience thanks to the algorithm’s bottomless love for Rage Bait, which is exactly how it works on my own evil #content app of choice, Twitter.

As a coming-of-age story, Closely Watched Trains keeps things simple. A scrawny sweetheart named Miloš attempts to follow in his father & grandfather’s footsteps by apprenticing as a railroad dispatcher. The circumstances of the job might have become a little more strained now that the trains are under Nazi command, but he’s told that if he sticks it out long enough he’ll get to retire with a pension. At the start of the job, he’s offered a crossroads of three different priorities: work, politics, or women. Unsure of which direction he wants his life to go, he tries his hand at each – flirting with rigid professionalism, flirting with a plot to bomb a Nazi supply train, and flirting with a cute train conductor who’s his age and eager to become his girlfriend. His physical urges overpower his higher mind for most of the runtime, leading to a series of proto-Porky’s sexual escapades that include train car orgies, ink-stamped butt cheeks, and a lot of vulnerable discussion of premature ejaculation. As silly as some of these sexual encounters can be in the moment, Miloš has Big Teenage Feelings about them that occasionally raise the stakes of the story into more traditional War Drama territory, sometimes under Nazi threat, sometimes under threat of self-harm. It would be reductive to present the film purely as a comedy, given its political & historical context, but for the majority of its runtime it’s more adorable than grim. Even its more overt indulgences in the art of the moving image are less challenging that they are cute. Wide-shot frames arrange the actors & trains with dollhouse meticulousness, which combined with the dark irony of the sex & romance recalls the work of Wes Anderson – maybe art cinema’s most widely accessible auteur.

I do not have much at stake in the ultimate fate of TikTok, but I do have something to say to the art-phobic influencers of MovieTok. There is no reason to be intimidated by the Great Works of European Cinema just because they’re initially unfamiliar. No matter how artsy, The Movies are ultimately just as much of a populist medium as TikTok #content; you can handle it.

-Brandon Ledet

Barfly (1987)

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I have a friend whose resolution for the new year was to ensure that he try a new restaurant every week, after having spent nearly a decade in Austin without properly branching out into the cuisine scene. When discussing where to dine this past weekend, I asked if he had tried Golden Horn yet, a newish eatery on the ground floor under Barfly’s, a bar that our friend group frequents. “Oh, he said! Like in Barfly!” Off of my puzzled look, he said “You know! ‘Your mother’s cunt smells like carpet cleaner’!” I had no idea what he was quoting until, after dinner (which ended up not being at Golden Horn after all), he showed a group of us this film, in which Mickey Rourke says this line to Frank Stallone in an alleyway while goading him into a fight. And wouldn’t you know it, this takes place right behind the Golden Horn, and damned if they didn’t copy the sign from the movie down to the last neon stroke: 

The Golden Horn in Barfly (1987)

The Golden Horn below Barfly’s, from their Instagram. 

I love the food at this place, but I can’t say that I loved this movie very much, unfortunately. Produced by Francis Ford Coppola and directed by Barbet Schroeder from a script by Charles Bukowski, Barfly is one in a line of pieces of fiction about Bukowski’s literary alter ego Henry Chinaski (Rourke). Chinaski is a nearly permanent fixture at The Golden Horn, a corner dive bar directly beneath the slummy long-term hotel that he occupies. Although he has a close relationship with one of the bartenders, Jim (J.C. Quinn), he’s constantly in conflict with the muscular Eddie (Stallone), hence his frequent goading of the latter into fistfights in the alley. Other fixtures include elderly prostitute Grandma Moses (Gloria LeRoy) and Janice (Sandy Martin, a.k.a. Mac’s mom from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia). When Chinaski manages to best Eddie one night, he’s convinced on the following evening to drink elsewhere, and initially declines any more than a few dollars from Jim, just enough to get a drink or two. He finds himself in a different bar, where he meets Wanda Wilcox (Faye Dunaway), another unrepentant drunk whose standards are so far underground that she finds him sufficiently charming. After Wanda acquires more liquor and beer for them for the evening on credit from her sugar daddy, the two spend a night together, and she gives him a key the next morning and tells him to move in. She warns him, however, that she’ll go home with any man who has a fifth of whiskey, and she does so that very night, with Eddie. Meanwhile, a sneaky man (Jack Nance) is lurking around Chinaski’s old place and The Golden Horn, and he reports back to the beautiful Tully Sorenson (Alice Krige) that Chinaski is the man that they’ve been looking for. Tully eventually catches up with him and reveals that she works for one of the countless publishers to whom Chinaski has been unsuccessfully submitting his work. An upper-class woman, she finds herself completely taken by Chinaski’s bohemian lifestyle and wants to be his patron, publisher, and lover. 

The morning after I saw this movie, I texted a friend who was absent the previous night that we had watched a terrible movie, and when he asked what it was, I responded “It was called Barfly, from 1987, written by Charles Bukowski and boy did it show.” He was unfamiliar, so I elaborated, “Bukowski was a poet/novelist/screenwriter who was widely beloved in his day and still is by a certain kind of youngish, roguish, predominantly white, edgelord type who thinks they’re the first person to mistake their amateur collegiate alcoholism for literary significance. If you were to know someone with a Fight Club poster and they had a favorite poet, their favorite poet would be Bukowski.” And I stand by that! Which is not to say that the Buke’s alcoholism was amateur; if one could drink at a professional level, the man did so. What I tried to articulate to my viewing companions that night was that this was a movie about drinking that was at once both portraying alcoholism as harrowing but also, you know, kinda fun. Make no mistake, the people in this film who suffer from alcoholism do the sorts of things that addicts (functional and dysfunctional) might do, and when viewed objectively, are horrible to witness. In a euphoric drunken state, Wanda steals some corn from where someone is growing it on the street near her apartment despite Chinaski warning her that it’s not ready to be eaten. Later, she grouses that nothing in her life works as she spits partially masticated, unripe green corn into a napkin. Grandma Moses is forced to haggle with her johns over the price of a blow job, and Chinaski himself ends up stabbing a man in a neighboring apartment in an altercation that arose from overhearing violent sexual roleplay (if he ever faces consequences for it, we don’t learn about it). 

This isn’t Trainspotting or some other film that commits to treating the haunting experiences of its characters as traumas, however. As one would expect from the screenwriter, Barfly treats drunkenness as next to godliness, with the quotidian given meaning via dual-wielding a pen in one hand and a handle of bourbon in the other. When Chinaski seeks out employment so that he can help pay the rent at Wanda’s hovel, his overt drunkenness means that he was never going to get past the interview that he attends, but attention is drawn to his rejection of norms in all forms. He instinctually bristles against the nature of completing applications and rejects the meanings of the questions he’s asked in favor of answering them with flamboyance; he’s too cool to get bogged down in all that stuff, man. He’s insufferable, and the film supports Chinaski’s masturbatory self-congratulation: he’s the author’s self-insert character! The most obvious example of this comes in the form of his two “love” interests. Wanda is a mostly functional alcoholic who manages to put on the appearance of a responsible citizen when she goes out in public (at least when she isn’t thieving corn) but whose drunkenness rivals Chinaski’s, and we get the sense that she’s his “true equal.” Tully, on the other hand, is like the walking embodiment of the girlfriend in Pulp’s “Common People,” a professional woman who finds the slovenly, slurring Chinaski’s work deeply moving and profound and, confusing the art with the artist, finds herself drawn to Chinaski sexually. Everywhere Tully goes, she’s perpetually clad in billowing white outfits, floating above it all, untouched by the filth of Chinaski’s life. 

The authorial fantasy of this, being pursued by two beautiful women, is unmistakable, and it boggles the mind. Recently, I’ve been watching Deadwood, and there are many scenes of Ian McShane as Ed Swearengen getting out of bed in his unwashed union suit and pissing in a bucket in the corner, and you have to be really disgusting for that to compare favorably, and Chinaski obliges. We never see him bathe or change clothes, and his undergarments are fascinatingly nauseating. There’s no visible soiling of his boxers, but they’re so boxy and greasy looking that one can only imagine how filthy he is. Despite this, Wanda falls for him overnight, and Tully even tracks him down to The Golden Horn after he leaves her place and gets into a bar fight with Wanda over him. Bukowski, via his proxy in Chinaski, gets the sleep with two gorgeous women who—despite their own disparate classes—are still both far, far too good for him, and he even gets to reject one and her “gilded cage” and then watch her be humiliated socially. Wanda even rips out a chuck of her hair! Alcoholism has never been more romanticized.

Where there is something to be praised here, it’s in the cinematography. All of these smoky, hazy bars are gorgeously photographed. There’s a magic to making a dingy dive, with its vinyl bumpers held together with duct tape and hideous clientele, into a tableaux of beauty. The lighting is also worth noting, and there are so many perfect compositions of neon signs and the glow that they cast that it’s a shame that this movie is largely unwatchable. This is a pre-boxing Rourke, and there are attempts to ugly up his pretty mug to make him seem more bedraggled, and they’re intermittently successful. Dunaway steals the spotlight from him in every scene that she’s in, however, and it’s a quietly understated performance from her. This was a decade after her Oscar win for Network, and there was a feeling I got when she gets into a tub at one point in the film and shows off her chest that she decided that the time was right to immortalize her breasts on screen. I was surprised to learn later from the film’s Wikipedia page that a glamor shot of her legs had been filmed at her insistence, which I think lends some credence to my theory. If I looked as good as she does here, I would do the same. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Furious (1984)

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I’m generally positive on the current state of film culture, at least on the audience end.  Thanks to organizational hubs like Letterboxd, Discord, and the podcast circuit, it’s easier to find a wider cultural discussion on the niche cinematic artifacts I care about now than ever before in my lifetime, which leaves a lot of room for sharing & discovery outside the traditional print-media forum.  Growing up, my familiarity with movie titles was determined by video store curation and magazine articles, but now there’s an infinite supply of Movie Discourse to delve into in all directions, if you care to look.  It’s a blessing in terms of expanding the public library of accessible titles, but it can also be a little exhausting when it comes to those films’ analysis.  Pinpointing what every movie is really “about” (i.e. Grief, Trauma, Depression, Isolation, etc.) gets to be a little tiresome over time, since it feels more like solving a literary puzzle than indulging in the art of the moving image on its own terms.  Every modern film discussion tends to boil down to deciphering metaphor or interpreting the career-span mission statement of an auteur.  As a civilian with a movie blog, I’m among the guiltiest participants in that constant ritual, and I genuinely don’t know how to stop compounding the problem with my own inane analysis of every movie I watch.  How else could I justify logging all this stuff on Letterboxd?

The shot-on-video martial arts cheapie Furious is a huge relief in that modern context.  A subprofessional, no-budget production from wannabe Hollywood stuntmen before they worked their way into the industry proper, it’s the exact kind of vintage cinematic artifact you never would have encountered in the wild unless it happened to be stocked at your specific neighborhood video store.  Now, it’s accessible for streaming on several free-without-subscription platforms, backed by thousands of glowing Letterboxd reviews highlighting it as an overlooked gem.  Better yet, it’s a film that sidesteps the need for any concrete analysis, since its story was obviously figured out in real time during its month-long shoot, purpose or meaning be damned.  It’s all supernatural martial-arts nonsense that’s so light on plot & dialogue and so heavy on for-their-own-sake magic tricks that it plays less like a metaphorical puzzle to solve than it is a meandering dream dubbed direct to VHS.  Sleight-of-hand card tricks and droning synths pull the audience into the opening credits with a chintzy sense of mystery, followed by 70 minutes of incoherent action adventure across the cliffs and rooftops of sunny California, with no particular destination in mind.   Furious is much more concerned with convincing you that its stuntmen are jumping to their deaths from great heights or that its evil sorcerers are casting actual magic spells than it is concerned with filmic abstraction or metaphor.  It’s illusion without allusion, the perfect salve for modern film discourse.

In the opening sequence, a nameless warrior fights off attackers through some very careful cliffside choreo while attempting to operate what appears to be a magic tusk, as it spins like a compass.  It’s unclear where that compass is meant to lead her, since she’s soon overcome by combatant goons, who then bring the magic tusk to a sorcerer who runs a karate dojo out of a nearby 80s office building.  The fallen warrior’s brother leaves his own mountainside dojo to investigate and avenge his sister’s death, which throws him into the middle of a wide conspiracy involving wizards and, possibly, aliens.  Really, he just punches & kicks his way through a series of fights until he works his way up to the Big Bad, occasionally stopping to gawk at screen-illusion magic tricks, like the Big Bad’s ability to levitate or the main henchman’s ability to shoot live chickens out of his hands like bullets.  Nothing about Furious makes much linear, narrative sense, but its curio collection of spinning tusks, severed heads, flaming skeletons, and so, so many chickens has its own distinct sense of magic to it.  Our hero’s loopy revenge mission recalls the SOV surrealism of Tina Krause’s Limbo – Lynchian in the sense that they’re better enjoyed at face value than they are as 1:1 metaphors that can be unlocked through critical interpretation.  Furious just happens to feature more punching, kicking, and stunt falls than Limbo, along with more bright California sunshine.

The “remastered” version of Furious currently available on most streaming platforms still looks like it was dubbed over an already-used VHS, which only adds to its charm as a vintage martial-arts novelty.  Its narrative incoherence is also echoed in its editing style, in which every shot is either one beat too short or one beat too long, constantly keeping its rhythm off-balance.  The fight choreography is just as precise as the editing is sloppy, however, with each punch & kick sharply delivered on-target.  If I were to put on my 2020s movie blogger thinking cap, I’d say that the film’s narrative and editing incoherence reflects the protagonist’s hazy, disjointed mind as he recovers from the grief of his sister’s sudden death.  Really, though, the movie just kicks ass because the fights look cool and there’s a wizard who shoots chickens out of his hands.  It’s not that complicated.

-Brandon Ledet

Mirage (1965)

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Much like its amnesiac protagonist, Mirage is lost in time.  A major studio noir directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Gregory Peck, it’s got the professional pedigree of a movie produced decades earlier, except when it comes to the grimier details of its era’s loosened morals.  Mirage walks like a stylish 1940s crime cheapie but talks like post-Code 1960s sleaze, with disorienting references to orgies & suicide and a score composed by Quincy Jones.  It echoes the political paranoia of its contemporaries like Dr. Strangelove and The Manchurian Candidate, and yet its official designation as a “neo-noir” feels like miscategorization.  It’s a legitimate, bona fide noir that lost track of where it belongs in time, so that the trippier psych thriller touches that color the corners of its black & white frame register as an out-of-bounds intrusion that the can’t be fully reconciled.  That dissonance makes for exciting tension as you constantly forget and are reminded of when it was made, and just how much more vulgarity Hollywood could get away with then.

Gregory Peck stars as an amnesiac who has to solve the mystery of his own identity before he’s shot dead.  He is literally in the dark at the start of the film, as his office building experiences a sudden blackout at the precise moment when the last two years of his life have leapt out of his memory.  It’s also at that exact moment when a fellow tenant of the building has leapt to their death on the concrete below, represented in gory detail by insert shots of a watermelon falling to New York City pavement.  Guided by candlelight, Peck navigates his way out of a handsy crowd of hot-to-go office girls and attempts to go about his day in the fresh air of Wall Street sidewalks.  Only, he can’t fully remember what shape his day usually takes, and he’s weirdly agitated by any questions that prompt him to think about his personal life or his past.  Scared, he seeks context clues about who he is from a skeptical psychiatrist, a former lover who’s scared to fill him in (Diane Baker, modeling jewels by Tiffany & Company according to the credits), and a doddering, in-over-his-head private detective (Walter Matthau, in the comic relief role).  The answer to the question of his basic identity is a last-minute twist with its own specific, detailed politics, but most of the movie is about the question itself, hinged on a declaration that “If you’re not committed to something, you’re just taking up space.”

Mirage is not only lost in time; it’s also somewhat lost to time.  With no current streaming distribution and no physical copies in the New Orleans Public Library system, the only reason I stumbled across the movie is that I found a second-hand DVD at the thrift store.  Its modern obscurity is partially due to its reputation as the B-picture leftovers of Stanley Donan’s Charade, which employed a significant portion of its creative team (Matthau included).  It’s much better recommended as either a late-to-the-game paranoid manhunt noir from a director & star who could’ve made a more stripped-down version of the same picture twenty years earlier, or as an early-to-the-game paranoid psych thriller akin to Fincher’s The Game from thirty years later.  Mirage‘s visual aesthetic is typical to 1940s noir, and its blasé relationship with sex & violence is typical to the 1960s cocktails set, but its cross-cutting head trip identity crisis is untethered to any specific era.  It’s a movie that purposefully dislodges the audience from linear-timeline logic to create a sense of displacement & unease, which is an effect that’s only intensified the further we’ve drifted from its own temporal context.

-Brandon Ledet

Pillow Talk (1959)

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Rock Hudson was an enormous presence in Old Hollywood, and I don’t just mean as the personification of movie star handsomeness or as an archetype of “open secret” closeted gay celebrity.  He was physically enormous, towering over his co-stars at 6’5″ with a burly lumberjack build to match his cartoonishly square jaw.  Somehow, that imposing figure never really stood out to me in the romantic dramas of Hudson’s prime, starring opposite Elizabeth Taylor in Giant or Jayne Wyman in All that Heaven Allows.  Where he becomes most glaringly imposing is in his career-pivot to comedy in 1959’s Pillow Talk, which features several gags about his gigantic build.  Pillow Talk gawks at Hudson’s enormous body as he struggles to squeeze it into bathtubs and sportscars that were designed to house mere mortals, then concludes on a gag where he carries co-star Doris Day’s pajama-clad body through New York City streets like a firefighter rescuing a small child while she kicks her feet in petulant protest.  Tony Randall looks even mousier in comparison with that towering wall of beef as his ill-equipped romantic rival, posing next to him like a civilian fan taking photos with their favorite professional wrestler – physically mismatched to great comedic effect.

Hudson plays a jolly fuckboy giant in Pillow Talk, a skyscraper cad.  His meet-cute with Day involves a shared partyline between the two mismatched lovers’ NYC apartments, which Day is never able to use because Hudson is constantly tying up the line wooing a bevy of short-term lovers.  That partyline etiquette premise is just as relatable to kids today as their absurd romcom-trope professions: Broadway songwriter & interior decorator, respectively.  Day is understandably annoyed by Hudson’s playboy antics, describing him as a “sex maniac” in her request to the phone company to break up their partyline.  Meanwhile, Hudson is frustrated by Day’s immunity to his fuckboy charms, diagnosing her with “bedroom problems” during one of their shared-line squabbles.  According to romcom law, the pair are obviously destined to couple up by the end credits, but it takes some Three’s Company-style sitcom hijinks on Hudson’s behalf to make that happen.  He invents a flimsy naïve-Texan-in-the-big-city persona so that he can date her in person, which mostly amounts to Hudson doing a half-assed John Wayne impersonation while “aw, shucks”ing his way through several low-stakes dates.  Meanwhile, Day experiments with being overtly sexy onscreen for the first time in her career while maintaining a sense of cocktail-hour class, which is mirrored in her character’s struggles to loosen up enough to finally solve her “bedroom problems” once & for all.  Tony Randall also hangs around as their ineffectual third wheel, landing none of the successful smooches but most of the successful punchlines.

Pillow Talk precariously teeters between a more buttoned-up, euphemistic era of Hollywood screenwriting where characters are described as “bothered” instead of “horny” and the looser-morals Hollywood to follow where characters brag about bedding & marrying “strippers” in free-wheeling locker room talk.  If it were directed by Frank Tashlin in the mode of Rock Hunter or The Girl Can’t Help It, it might’ve been a perfectly anarchic, amoral comedy, but workman director Michael Gordon keeps it all at an even keel (likely just happy to be working again after being blacklisted for Communist ties).  In our collective memory, it’s lingered as cutesier and tamer than what Gordon delivered in reality, as evidenced by its ironic, post-modern homage in Peyton Reed’s 90s send-up Down with Love.  Like most comedies, a lot of Pillow Talk‘s individual punchlines have not aged well politically, especially when punching down at date-rape victims, racist stereotypes, and fat-bodied uggos.  Still, its willingness to offend leads to one of its more metatextually interesting gags, when Rock Hudson briefly indicates that he is a closeted homosexual so that Doris Day will up the stakes of their sexual contact to test his orientation.  In that moment, he’s a known-to-be-closeted actor playing a hyper-straight himbo slut who’s only pretending to be closeted so he can bed even more women.  The open discussion of that perceived queerness feels wildly out of sync with the Hays Code-era Hollywood glamor of the film’s Cinemascope extravagance, which twinkles in every one of Doris Day’s gowns & jewels, as spotlighted in the opening credits.

The segmented comic book framing of Pillow Talk‘s 1st-act phone calls conveys a modern, chic playfulness, while every one of its punchlines are underscored by stale, goofball sound-effects.  During a dual bathtub scene, its two near-nude stars play footsy at the barrier between their respective frames, so that you get a full view of their muscular gams, and yet they’re not allowed to consummate that mutual desire until they agree to marry at the end.  It’s a 1960s sex comedy made within the bounds of a 1950s romcom that’s not allowed to openly joke about sex.  None of this truly matters, though, since the main selling point is the spectacle of its two main stars.  Doris Day’s uncomfortable transformation into a Hollywood sex symbol makes for great comedic tension against Hudson’s rock-hard leading man physique.  Meanwhile, Hudson’s massive body is a spectacle unto itself, one that every woman onscreen instantly swoons over . . . Except, of course, for the one he loves.  It’s a dynamic so charming that it led to two more romcom pairings of those stars in Send Me No Flowers and Lover Come Back, both of which brought Tony Randall along for the ride to ensure no chemistry was lost.

-Brandon Ledet

The Devil and Miss Jones (1941)

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There is something grotesque about the way cultural institutions are preemptively leaning further right-wing in anticipation of the second Trump administration. Trump’s second term has not started yet, but companies like Disney & Meta are already self-censoring in anticipation of a hard-right shift towards moral censorship, which likely makes business sense given Trump’s public alignment with “anti-woke” shitposter Elon Musk. Usually, being designated The Richest Man in the World encourages billionaires to hide from the public in shame while executing their political influence in private, but Musk has instead elected to purchase himself a prominent role in Executive Branch politics, demanding to be liked in addition to being feared. He’s openly rigging the system to be more favorable to his regressive worldview, which is something the wealthy are supposed to do behind closed doors. There’s nothing new to the cultural strong-arming through obscene wealth that Trump & Musk are indulging in right now, except in the extent of their shamelessness to do so in full public view. If nothing else, you can already see their personality & tactics viciously satirized as far back as the 1940s comedy The Devil and Miss Jones, which itself preemptively apologizes & kowtows to “The Richest Men in the World” . . .  before mocking them mercilessly.

As early as its opening credits, The Devil and Miss Jones is clear about the moral stance it’s going to take in the eternal Class War. Charles Coburn is introduced as The Richest Man in the World by a title card that dresses him in a devil costume, with the flames of Hell roaring behind him. His comedic foil—Jean Arthur as a humble department store clerk—is then introduced dressed as a heavenly angel, complete with wings & halo. Then, a written letter from the producers apologize to The Richest Men in the World for that satirization, begging to not be sued for defamation since it’s not meant to target any one Wealthy Ghoul in particular (a tactical move that Orson Welles would have been wise to borrow for his satirization of William Randolph Hearst in Citizen Kane that same year). Part of the reason they can get away with the transgression is that the ultra wealthy of the time mostly had the good sense to hide from the public. Or, that’s at least Coburn’s approach as a millionaire businessman who’s so obscenely rich he’s no longer sure what actual businesses he owns. In the opening scene, he’s horrified to discover that an effigy of his likeness was hung & burned outside a department store by its unhappy workers, which made the front page of the daily papers. Only, those workers have no idea what he actually looks like; they just know (and curse) his name.

Coburn weaponizes his anonymity by posing as a regular worker at the department store, so that he can single out the dissidents on his payroll for mass firing. His attempts to unionbust from the inside quickly go awry when he discovers that the ground-level workers are wonderful people, and that middle-management are the true social pariahs. Jean Arthur is especially adorable as the titular Miss Jones, who adopts the Undercover Boss out of pity because he is absolutely abysmal as a salesman. Coburn is dragged to an underground union-organizing meeting after his very first day, so that he can be paraded as an example of how pathetic elderly workers can become in old age once they outlive their usefulness to their corporate employers. Without all of his wealth strong-arming his Yes Men into doing his bidding, Coburn proves to be a low-skill, low-intelligence loser, which is a characterization the movie doesn’t back down from even as his fellow department store workers help him stay on his feet so he can make a living. When his true identity as the company’s owner is revealed to those kind souls, he’s met with the same reaction that greets Monstro Elisasue at the end of The Substance; they recoil in horror at his monstrosity, disgusted with themselves from socializing with someone as grotesquely inhuman as the 1%.

Directed by Marx Brothers collaborator Sam Wood, The Devil and Miss Jones is a hilarious class-differences comedy about how labor unions are pure good, the wealthy are pure evil, and everyone loves a day at the beach. It may indulge in a little “We’re not so different after all” apologia in depicting its cross-class culture clash, but its politics remain sharply observed throughout. Even Miss Jones’s romantic infatuation with the department store’s most ardent labor-union rabble-rouser has its nuances, as the movie criticizes the unchecked machismo of Leftist men by having him blab pigheaded phrases like, “A woman’s place in the world is to tend to the male” while she scoffs. The main target of its political satire is, of course, Coburn’s obliviousness as a wealthy ghoul, repeatedly humbling his sense of superiority among the unwashed “idiots” and “morons” in his employ. It feels especially pointed that even when those workers attempt to sweeten the fine wine he brings along to their Coney Island beach day with a splash of Coca-Cola, it’s not quite enough to overpower the bitterness. Its class & labor commentary has aged incredibly well, so it’s somewhat a shame that its cultural reputation as mostly persisted as a footnote to the porn-parody title The Devil in Miss Jones, directed decades later by Gerard Damiano.

-Brandon Ledet

Babygirl (2024)

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After hearing early reports that it was not included in the pre-show package, there was a perverse thrill in seeing Nicole Kidman’s infamous AMC ad precede my local screening of her new erotic melodrama Babygirl.  It felt like getting away with something, much like how her CEO character in the film gets a thrill out of sleeping with a much younger intern.  However, no matter how much “heartbreak feels good” in a place like the corporate multiplex, it’s never felt nearly as good as the mind-shattering orgasms Kidman simulates in the film’s corporate skyscraper offices. I say “simulate” with some uncertainty, given the actor’s pull-quote confessions that she occasionally had to pause production because she didn’t “want to orgasm anymore,” an intimate experience that left her feeling “ragged” by the time the shoot had reached completion. All of this extratextual Nicole Kidman press is clouding my mind as I try to write about this movie because it’s a movie that’s partially about the actor’s icy real-world persona. Her frustrated CEO character is constantly coached by a PR team about how to present herself to the public, like an actor prepping for a press junket. During one crucial sequence, she’s plucked, injected, and flash-frozen to sculpt her already-gorgeous body into fighting shape, so she can be the public face of an upcoming, all-important product launch. The movie would mean significantly less if Kidman had not been cast as its titular babygirl, since it constantly invites you to import details from her real-life public persona into her character’s fragile ferocity as a public figure. That’s what makes its steamy, taboo sex scenes feel like genuinely vulnerable exposure for the actor – not necessarily their vulgarity.

The source & authenticity of orgasms are very important in Babygirl. The movie opens with Kidman having traditional Movie Sex with her hot, age-appropriate husband (a salt-and-pepper Antonio Banderas), simulating orgasm in their luxury-apartment marital bed. When the husband rolls over, Kidman sneaks off to her private home office to achieve the real orgasm he warmed her up for but was otherwise unable to assist. Notably, she finishes herself off to BDSM pornography, making it clear at the start of the film that she already knows exactly what she wants in her sex life; she just doesn’t have the courage to voice it. This status quo is interrupted by the hiring of a young, tall, strapping intern played by Harris Dickinson, in whom Kidman immediately detects a Dominant Vibe. It’s immediately clear that the high-powered CEO and the bratty, fresh-out-of-college bro beneath her will be having a torrid office affair, but Kidman’s inability to voice exactly what she wants from him delays the consummation of their mutual lust. Babygirl is not the usual self-discovery kink story wherein a dormant submissive discovers a newfound sexual appetite, à la Secretary or Fifty Shades of Grey. It also goes out of its way to not pathologize Kidman’s interest in the kink-play power dynamic of simulating submissiveness when she’s truthfully a high-powered Business Bitch. It’s more of a kink coming-out story, wherein Kidman knows exactly wants but has to work up the courage to ask for it. Too bad she has to have dirty motel room sex with a confused, vulnerable employee to break out of her vanilla rut, since she’s already married to a hot Daddy type who directs stage plays for a living; the irony is that he’s extremely well suited for the job but remains an untapped resource.

All of this dramatic tension is released (and released and released) through a series of successfully thrilling sex scenes between Kidman & Dickinson, who establish a convincing sexual rapport as well-matched but poorly trained kinksters. Unfortunately, the impact of those scenes does not reverberate through Babygirl‘s attempts at corporate & familial drama elsewhere. When Kidman & Dickinson negotiate power dynamics in seedy nightclubs & motel rooms the vibes are electric; when attempting the same negotiations in empty offices & apartment hallways half of their lines feel coldly ADR’d, registering more as a ventriloquist act than a dramatic performance. I kept leaning towards the screen, straining to see if their mouths are actually moving. However, any time I found myself questioning the thematic choices to link Kidman’s kink journey to her religious-cult upbringing, her rebellious daughter’s queerness, her sympatico relation to a wild dog in need of training, to Girlboss cultural politics, or to the soundtrack’s absurdly on-the-nose needle drops, the movie would pause for another fantastic sex scene that felt alive, authentic, and rich with nonverbal power negotiations. It’s a wobbly balancing act that director Halina “Bodies Bodies Bodies” Reijn only gets away with because the actors she cast are extremely hot. Kidman & Dickinson’s undeniable hotness are just as important to the text of Babygirl as the alien impersonablility of Kidman’s AMC ad, the audience-teasing hints at her on-set orgasms, and the obscure, high-end cosmetic work that presumably goes into keeping her physically preserved and camera-ready. The movie works best when it vaguely gestures at these things—not when it makes declarative statements about sexual & corporate power—letting Kidman & Dickinson’s physical chemistry do the talking.

-Brandon Ledet

Pepe (2025)

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Sometimes, a movie works best as an educational tool.  The movie Pepe educated me about the existence and persistence of Pablo Escobar’s hippos.  Apparently, the infamous drug lord imported a small population of African hippopotamuses to his private Colombian zoo, where they’ve since bred into an out-of-control population that’s long outlasted his reign.  And because movies also have to function as art, I learned that factoid through the confused narration of one of the original hippos’ ghost – naturally.  Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias recounts Escobar’s hippo fiasco with an international cast of German tourists, Colombian fishermen and, of course, African hippopotamuses.  As a gesture of respect to the hippos who’ve become a violent nuisance to Colombian citizens through no fault of their own, de los Santos Arias attempts to tell this story through those hippos’ voice & perspective, but the task proves impossible.  The titular Pepe narrates his small family’s travels from their home waters to the inhospitable rivers of a new land in two competing voices, neither of which he’s certain are his own.  He starts the film only convinced of two facts: he belongs in Africa, and he is already dead.  How he’s communicating his story and who, exactly, is his audience confounds the poor beast’s ghost, almost as much as Colombian fishermen were confounded by the sudden presence of hippos in their daily water routes. 

The first half of Pepe is its most artistically abstract.  We attempt to understand the world through the eyes of the already-dead hippo, much like how Jerzy Skolimowski attempts to understand the world through a donkey’s eyes in his Au hazard Balthazar modernization EO.  As a living creature, Pepe would not have been able to explain his life or his thoughts to a human audience, as he lived more on intuition than interpretation.  His knowledge of the world was passed down through “the eyes of the elders” in his hippo community and embellished by “the scratches on their old bodies.”  As the disembodied voice of a hippo’s ghost, Pepe has to learn how to tell his story to us in real time, while de los Santos Arias illustrates his life in the early 1980s through hippo-themed nature footage.  In either case, Pepe is aware of his audience.  In the 80s, his community is gawked at by German tourists on safari, who point cameras at the small herd.  In the 2020s, de los Santos Arias’s camera repeats the offense among Pepe’s Colombian descendants, while his hippo-ghost narrator sounds vaguely annoyed by having been awakened from death to explain his transportation to and escape from Pablo Escobar’s vanity zoo.  Both the filmmaker and the hippo blame Escobar for Pepe’s displacement and resulting death, not the freaked-out fishermen who can’t safely share the waters with the beast.  The crime against Pepe and his family is committed long before we meet his ghost, and all that’s left is grim aftermath.

Pepe gradually becomes more conventional as a narrative feature in its second half, when the fallout of the hippos’ displacement is dramatized among The Two-Legged who resolve to hunt them for the sake of human safety.  Even so, de los Santos Arias maintains a playful sense of experimentation throughout, especially in how he incorporates Ed Woodian nature footage into the more traditional drama of the fishermen’s struggles to live among Escobar’s hippos.  It’s a necessary indulgence to prevent direct, dangerous contact between the film’s human actors and its wild animals, but it also goes a long way to contextualize the story as an on-going environmental crisis.  The amount of digital hippo footage de los Santos Arias works into the visual texture of the film’s otherwise vintage 80s aesthetic makes it apparent just how easy it is to encounter hippos in modern Colombia.  They’re seemingly just as easy to film as an alligator in a Louisiana swamp, which have been present here for millions of years instead of dozens.  That mixed-media approach to the live hippo footage extends to other intrusions on Pepe’s narrative elsewhere, including real-life news reportage of Pablo Escobar’s death and a seemingly fabricated children’s cartoon starring a talking hippo character also named Pepe.  The most fascinating stretches of the film are the ones that gawk at the violent majesty of hippos in the wild – napping, pissing, shitting, being pecked at by small birds.  De los Santos Arias’s most ambitious experiment within that gawking is his attempt to give that violent majesty a voice of its own, sincerely wrestling with how impossible it is to do right by the modern beasts who’ve been so historically wronged.

-Brandon Ledet

Carmen: A Hip Hopera (2001)

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After several false-starts in the build-up to this moment (most of them penned by backpack-rap dork Lin-Manuel Miranda), we have finally arrived at the official return of the mainstream movie musical.  The monkey’s paw irony to that triumph is, of course, that neither of the awards-nominated musicals marking that return are any good.  If anyone who isn’t already afflicted with a debilitating, life-long case of Oscar Fever is paying attention to this year’s Awards Race, it’s because they’re fans of the pop stars Selena Gomez or Ariana Grande, who are both competing for a Best Supporting Actress statue in their respective movie-musical projects.  Gomez struggles to speak-sing Spanish in the operatic French musical Emilia Pérez, which is a strong Oscar frontrunner despite wide critical disdain for its ludicrous misrepresentations of transgender identity & Mexican criminality.  For her part, Grande excels as the only successful element of the Wizard of Oz fanfic musical Wicked: Part One, which is a strong Oscar frontrunner despite playing like a color-desaturated Target commercial with exactly one redeemable performance.  It’s baffling that either film is in Awards Contention at all, considering their shared artistic anemia, but their dual success is still a healthy sign for the movie industry at large – proving a wide-appeal audience interest in the movie musical format and activating sleeper-cell agents from the pop-girlies Stan Wars to draw wider attention to this year’s Oscars race.

In this world where two of the biggest Awards Season frontrunners are embarrassingly clunky musicals starring pop singers with rabid online fanbases, 2001’s Carmen: A Hip Hopera is a foundational text.  Produced for broadcast on MTV, the hip-hop flavored reinterpretation of the classic opera Carmen was propelled entirely by the star power of a young Beyoncé Knowles.  Before she tested the limitations of her Movie Star presence in her official debut Austin Powers in Goldmember and the limitations of her rapping skills in the albums leading up to Lemonade, Beyoncé was given the titular role in a made-for-TV feature that asked her to be a rapping Movie Star, hoping that her charm & beauty would overpower her unpreparedness.  The gamble mostly worked, if not only because the MTV production team was able to surround her with a talented cast of actors (most significantly Mekhi Phifer) and rappers (most significantly Mos Def) for support.  Like Emilia Pérez & Wicked, it was a film younger viewers watched solely for the star presence of their favorite pop singer and supported on principle, so as not to cede ground in the fight to cement their fav on Pop Music Mt. Rushmore.  As a result, it’s aged into a fun novelty as an early-aughts time capsule, padded out with performances from names that would only mean something to children raised on daily broadcasts of TRL: Da Brat, Lil Bow Wow, Jermain Dupri, Rah Digga, etc.

Beyoncé enters Carmen wearing a sparkly red Jessica Rabbit gown, turning the head of every Philadelphia cop slamming brewskies in their department’s go-to dive bar (tended by blacksploitation legend Fred Williamson).  Even the straightlaced family-man cop played by Mekhi Phifer can’t help but drool over her classic beauty, much to the indignation of his loving fiancé.  Instead of seducing any of the already crooked cops on the force who’d sleep with her in a heartbeat, Carmen of course zeroes in on the above-board gentleman in the room as a kind of personal challenge.  Phifer resists her advances at first, explaining in Seussian rap verses, “You’re too hot for a guy like me.  You and me are unlikely.”  They immediately bone anyway, which gives Phifer’s corrupt superior (Mos Def, giving the only genuinely good performance in the film) an excuse to lock the goody-two-shoes up and eventually chase the mismatched lovers out of town.  A classic tragedy follows as Carmen gets bored with her new plaything and moves onto the next, as slowly spelled out in a prototype for R. Kelly’s “Tapped in the Closet” narrative style.  There’s plenty of humor in the effort to reconfigure Carmen‘s narrative into modern hip-hop rhymes, like in Beyoncé’s warning that “Everything that glitters don’t bling,” or Phifer’s romantic declaration, “Let me tell you how much I care. Man, when I was locked up I couldn’t smell the piss, only the scent of your hair.”  It’s all vintage early-aughts camp, as long as you don’t take the inevitable deaths in the final beat too seriously.

Carmen: A Hip Hopera is at its most enjoyable when it drops the pretense of respectability and fully leans into its MTV-flavored novelty.  After a brief opening-credits music video wherein Da Brat explains the basic elevator pitch, the movie naturally slips into a kind of low-rent melodrama that happens to be set to a rap beat.  Eventually, though, director Robert Townsend (B*A*P*S*, Eddie Murphy: Raw) loosens up and has fun with the premise, introducing green screen illustrations of the rap lyrics in pure music-video kitsch.  The MTV branding is noticeable throughout in the choppy Pimp My Ride editing style and in-film references to shows like MTV Cribs, but it isn’t until the second half of the runtime that the music-video aesthetic fully takes over and Carmen becomes something sublimely silly instead of disastrously silly.  I’m willing to admit that I am personally biased on this front, as it was produced in the exact era when I would have been glued to MTV myself, so that its vintage music-video touches trigger an easy nostalgia for me.  I am also biased since, of all the singers currently vying for positions on Pop Music Mt. Rushmore, Beyoncé is the only one that most appeals to me.  As a musician and a stage performer she’s consistently impeccable, so to see her try her hand at something in which she’s merely mediocre only makes her that much more adorable.  So, maybe my dismissive opinions on Emilia Pérez & Wicked will cool over the next couple decades as they become cultural artifacts instead of poor excuses for Prestige Cinema, but it’s more likely that I will never warm up to them, since I have unknowingly chosen my own combatant in the War of the Pop Girlies and just hate to see the competition win.

-Brandon Ledet

Ghost Ship (2002)

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A friend and I were recently in our local video store (boy, I sure do seem to be mentioning them a lot lately) this past Thursday night, having decided to have a nostalgic movie-and-pizza night. We checked out the director wall, and we had already pulled Dressed to Kill as a maybe before we sauntered over to the horror section, where we alighted almost immediately on Ghost Ship, which my buddy pulled out of the stacks while referencing the number of times that he had seen the film’s lenticular cover on the shelves at the Blockbusters (et al) of our youth. He assumed I had seen it and I admitted that I hadn’t, and the pact was sealed. 

The film opens on a 1960s transatlantic sea voyage aboard the Antonia Graza, U.S.-bound from Italy. It’s the night of the captain’s ball, and a lounge singer is performing. A young girl named Katie Harwood (Emily Browning) shares a dance with the captain before a metal cable snaps and tears through the entire dance floor, slicing people as it goes and sparing only Katie, owing to her short stature. Forty years later, we get a look into the lives of a ragtag team of salvagers, with Maureen Epps (Julianna Margulies) clearly taking center stage as the film’s protagonist as we see her perform a down-to-the-wire patch job on a sinking salvage job that manages to save their haul. Also part of the salvage crew are soon-to-be-married Greer (Isaiah Washington), religious mechanic Santos (Alex Dimitriades), and also Dodge and Munder (Ron Eldard and Karl Urban), who don’t even have a one-to-two-word character trait for me to cite. Their ship, the Arctic Warrior, is captained by Murphy (Gabriel Byrne), who has a parent-child relationship with Epps. While celebrating their latest haul, they are approached by a man named Ferriman (Desmond Harrington), a weather service pilot who offers them the location of an apparently derelict cruise liner, which could end up being a huge score, if they cut him in. He negotiates his way aboard for the expedition, and when they arrive at the vessel, they realize that it’s the notorious lost ship Antonia Graza, which is treated as a kind of sea legend like the Queen Mary. As the crew begins salvage preparations, Murphy insists that they not inform the Coast Guard despite maritime laws, and Epps is the first to witness something spooky aboard: the ghost of Katie Harwood. 

This is … not a very good movie, but there are things to praise about it. Never having really given the film much thought beyond picking it up at a video store twenty years ago, reading the back of the DVD, and then putting it back on the shelf, I was surprised that this had a more complex storyline than expected. One would assume that the people killed at the beginning of the film would be the ghosts haunting the ship, and that the rest of the plot would play out as yet another pale imitation of The Haunting, but on a ship. Surprisingly, this one goes the route of having more of a mystery; the resolution is very goofy, but at least it doesn’t play all of the cards in its hand by the end of the first half hour. The salvage crew finds evidence that there have been other people aboard since the ship was originally lost, as they discover a digital watch and encounter a few corpses that are too fresh to be the original crew. Not every member of the crew was at the ball, so shouldn’t someone have survived? Why is Katie’s ghost a child if she was spared from the horrible accident in the prologue? How long did she survive aboard? Other crew members beside Epps start to experience hauntings as well, with Greer finding himself being seduced by the specter of the lounge singer, but things only get further complicated when they discover crates full of gold bars in the cargo hold. 

Apparently, this began life as more of a psychological thriller, with Murphy as the lead instead of acting as (not very convincing) decoy protagonist to Epps. Instead, it became more of a supernatural slasher, with a twist that almost, but doesn’t quite work. Ferriman’s name ends up being a clue, as it turns out that he’s a kind of demonic soul reaper who specializes in damning maritime crews through appealing to their sinful instincts. The gold is cursed, so that vessels with it aboard are ultimately destroyed because of the intense greed it afflicts upon the crew(s), with it having been transferred aboard the Antonia Graza the same day that it first went missing. The accident in the prologue was intentional sabotage, and the ship has been pulling in new crews to find it, fight over it, and ultimately die while aboard so that Ferriman can add new ghosts to his hellbound coterie. This ends up becoming needlessly complicated by some half-baked additions to the lore, including that some of the souls are “marked” by Ferriman and as such are under his control, while other innocent souls are also trapped on the ship and thus able to act against him. The only ones we ever see are Katie and the ghostly captain, and his intentions are less clear, as he induces the long-sober Murphy to have a drink with him. You can see the underpinnings of a stronger narrative here in scenes like the one that the two captains—living and dead—share, which reduces a plot that was clearly meant to echo The Shining into a single sequence of resurgent alcoholism. The overly complicated haunting plot and the slapdash characterization end up making the film feel both overstuffed and incomplete, like there’s a cut of this film that’s 10 minutes longer and more coherent, but not necessarily better. 

Still, there are some campy laughs to be had here. I found myself thinking back to our podcast discussion of Wishmaster, and how the excessive, imaginative violence of that film’s opening scene overshadowed the rest of the film, as this one also put its best scene right at the beginning. The metal line cutting through the crowd at the ball isn’t a quick scene, as the film instead revels in exploring all the ways that this would be truly horrifying. A man cut completely in half at the navel first has all of the clothes from his midsection fall to a pile around his ankles, leaving him in only his underwear and formalwear from the midriff up; it would be surprisingly chic if it weren’t for his body falling apart seconds later. The captain is sliced open at the mouth, leaving him with a grisly Gaslow grin before the top half of his head slides off. It’s a remarkable bit of gore, and we watch it all happen through the eyes of Katie, which makes it all the worse. From here, however, none of the deaths are as creative, and none of the characters are sufficiently grounded for them to matter to us emotionally, either. Murphy is placed in an empty aquarium after he attacks one of the others, and Epps later finds him having drowned when the aquarium flooded. Santos is killed off early on in an engine room explosion, and Dodge is killed offscreen via methods unknown. The most comical death is Greer’s, as he justifies hooking up with the ghost of the lounge singer by saying that it’s not really cheating since she probably doesn’t really exist, right before she lures him into falling down an elevator shaft. Greer just falls right through her when attempting to cop a feel, and it’s terribly undignified. 

This is the only other film ever directed by Steve Beck following the release of his Thirteen Ghosts remake the previous year. That didn’t come as a surprise to me when looking up the production history. There are similarities between the two insofar as shallow characterization, inconsistently entertaining violence, and general preference for spectacle over insight. This is an artifact of a lost time, when a movie that could just as easily have premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel would sometimes get a theatrical release, when Dark Castle was barely putting out original content between pumping out remakes like the aforementioned Thirteen Ghosts, the 1999 House on Haunted Hill, and the Paris Hilton House of Wax in 2005. The DVD box even suggests you learn more about the movie using an AOL keyword search and half the film’s special features require you to put it in a DVD-ROM drive (good luck). Ghost Ship’s minimal swearing and nudity seem tailor-made to be chopped out so that this could air right in the middle of a Saturday afternoon block with Epoch and Bugs, the kind of movie that you can really take a nap to. Come for the holographic cover, enjoy the opening gore, and then drift off to sleep. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond