reviews

Wicked Little Letters (2024)

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They may not be respected as taste-arbiters or as models of good theater etiquette, but the elderly moviegoers of America are the core customer base that keep cinemas running.  While movie studios are flailing in their courtship of a teenage audience that would rather be playing videogames or watching influencer ads at home, the Senior Discount crowd is keeping the industry afloat with only minimal pandering.  Every local film fest, repertory series, and daytime matinee in the nation owes a significant chunk of its cashflow to geriatric retirees, who generally have a much more adventurous approach to art-film programming than younger audiences, who tend to save their trips to the cinema for major Event Films instead of taking a chance on whatever happens to be out from week to week.  It’s a shame, then, that most movies that are cynically marketed to the 65+ age demographic are so … safe, so toothless.  Senior Citizen Comedies like Book Club and 80 for Brady mostly function as feature-length advertisements (for 50 Shades of Gray and the NFL, respectively), relying on the excess charm of their all-star casts without actually giving those actors much to do.  There’s a hint towards sexual naughtiness in their playfully saucy humor, but the movies are afraid to follow through on anything genuinely risqué, in fear of offending or alienating the morals of its target audience.  They take their customers’ attendance & amusement for granted.

Within that context, Wicked Little Letters is essentially a John Waters comedy for the senior set.  A 1920s period piece about women’s changing roles in public life post-WWI, it looks & feels like a routine BBC Films production that packs cinemas for weeks without ever attracting a single attendee under 30.  It doesn’t sound like those movies, though, since its dialogue features long strings of profane, nonsensical insults referring to various characters as “mangy old titless turnips”, “bloody fucking old saggy sacks of chicken piss”, and “fucking old steaming bags of wet leaking shit.”  I know Mrs. Harris was met with an icy response when she went to Paris, but I don’t remember it being that extreme.  Wicked Little Letters is about a pre-Internet shitposting campaign in which a not-so-mysterious letter writer bombards her otherwise wholesome British community with handwritten outbursts of extreme profanity.  Set against the backdrop of women “losing their decorum” after taking on traditionally masculine roles in public life during the war, it’s a comedic overcorrection wherein one especially peculiar woman takes a little too much delight in being able to express herself through cuss for the first time in her pious life.  It played very funny at home, but I imagine its pottymouth punchlines got even bigger laughs in the theater among its target demographic, considering the uproarious response to Mr. Molesley laying out the wrong silverware or whatever in the Downtown Abbey movies.  Its biggest swing is that it does not baby its very much grown-up audience, which is a rarity in this style of comedy.

As a gumshoe mystery and subsequent courtroom drama, Wicked Little Letters is less of a whodunnit than it is a howcatchem.  Olivia Colman & Jessie Buckley star as next-door neighbors with unlikely mutual admiration.  Buckley is a loudmouth, hard-drinking Irish lass who says & does exactly what she wants at all times, unburdened by any filters of ladylike public behavior.  Colman is Buckley’s older, more socially restrained frenemy, mostly as a result of the strictly religious, emotionally abusive oppression of her father (Timothy Spall).  Colman is also the sole recipient of the first barrage of pottymouth hate mail, which is immediately blamed on Buckley, given her public disregard for decorum.  Unconvinced that a woman that brazen would hide behind the anonymity of a pen, a local policewoman (Ladyparts guitarist Anjana Vasan) launches an off-the-books investigation of who’s really behind the transgression, which quickly escalates beyond a neighborly spat to instead terrorize an entire community.  It’s immediately obvious who is guilty, and a lot of the early comedic tension is in watching her barely contained amusement with her own naughtiness give herself away.  The fun of the investigation is in watching a small group of women join the effort to expose the truth and vindicate their foul-mouth lush of a friend.  Like with John Waters’s classic suburban invasion comedies, the movie pits the hypocrisy of the upstanding Christian majority against the winning charm of “queers and drunkards” in the court of public opinion and declares a clear, populist victor.  It’s delightful.

Of course, you won’t find any singing buttholes, cannibalized cops, or drag queens eating dog shit in Wicked Little Letters.  All of its naughty profanity is purely verbal, but when contrasted against the typically safe, toothless comedies of manners in this milieu, it’s more than enough to earn its laughs.  I’m sure the real-life gossip column story that inspired the movie is much grimmer & more complicated than how it’s presented onscreen, but I don’t know that there’s any way to depict morally uptight Brits reading the words “You’re a sad stinky bitch” without inviting an audience to laugh.  This audience deserves that laugh, too.  They’ve been drawn to the theater with the promise of naughty, risqué comedies so many times that it’s nice one finally decided to deliver the goods. 

-Brandon Ledet

Pumping Iron II: The Women (1985)

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The 1977 competitive bodybuilding documentary Pumping Iron isn’t especially thoughtful or artful in presentation.  It’s presented as an observational, fly-on-the-wall document of a peculiar subculture in its natural state, but too much of its dramatic framing and direct-to-camera interviewing feels phony for that approach to land convincingly.  Still, the movie has endured as a cult classic for the past half-century thanks to the genius decision to center a pre-Hollywood Arnold Schwarzenegger as its main subject.  Pumping Iron is essential Schwarzenegger cinema for two reasons: it constantly finds new, novel angles to point the camera at Arnie’s extraordinary body, and it perfectly illustrates his uncanny ability to make being the most arrogant man alive charming & fun to be around.  If Pumping Iron documents anything substantial, it’s Schwarzenegger’s dominance as a world-class bodybuilder and a world-class blowhard, taking an unnecessary victory lap as Mr. Universe before moving on to Real Fame as the star of Real Movies.  He’s hilariously obnoxious as the biggest of fish in the smallest of ponds, openly negging his younger, hungrier competition (including a twenty-something Lou Ferrigno) and bragging that his life is so great that every waking moment feels like a continuous orgasm.  The movie itself might not be much of a wonder, but Arnold Schwarzenegger certainly is.  He singlehandedly rescues Pumping Iron from registering as a second-rate Maysles or Wiseman doc to instead excel as a hilarious precursor to Christopher Guest comedies.

The central star of its lesser-known sequel, Pumping Iron II: The Women, is much humbler than Schwarzenegger, both by design and by default.  Like Schwarzenegger in his time, Bev Francis was very clearly the best of her competitive bodybuilding field when she was profiled for a documentary feature. Unlike Schwarzenegger, she was not properly celebrated for her physical accomplishments.  Excuse me for spoiling this decades-old curio, but she doesn’t even win the competition she’s favored to crush.  As the movie illustrates, that’s because the rules & standards of women’s bodybuilding competitions are much more muddled & controversial than men’s, like all forums for judging & regulating the human body.  In Arnie’s movie, the man who can convincingly display the biggest, best defined muscles wins.  By those standards, Bev Francis is the clear dominator.  Only, in her movie, judges are looking for defined muscles to be displayed within the strict confines of a traditionally “feminine” physique, which Francis has deliberately trained beyond to build as much muscle as possible.  As a result, the movie becomes less about the peculiarities of her personality than the original Pumping Iron is about the peculiarities of Arnie’s.  Instead, it’s a movie about the general ways women’s bodies are overly regulated & critiqued in ways men’s bodies aren’t.  Its obvious, ludicrous unfairness only becomes stranger once you realize that the competition the film documents is a one-off promotion created specifically for the camera’s benefit. 

Overall, the Pumping Iron producers’ erotic dance competition movie Stripper is much more successful as The Feminine Version of Pumping Iron, as it relies on a similar subcultural interview structure in a mirrored, gendered setting.  What makes Pumping Iron II interesting is that it gets surprisingly political & academic by attempting to define what “feminine” means in the first place.  Bev Francis’s absurdly muscular body type would’ve fit right in with Schwarzenegger’s & Ferrigno’s absurdly muscular body types in the first film, but when compared against the intentionally slimmed-down dancer types of her own competitive class, she’s a disruption to the entire system of competitive bodybuilding as a rigidly gendered sport.  The judges don’t know what to do with her, since she’s clearly got the biggest muscles on display, but her physicality short-circuits their personal & cultural definitions of what a Woman is.  The obvious phoniness of the 1983 Caesars World Cup of Women’s Bodybuilding staged for the film matters less & less in a post-reality TV world, where audiences have been well trained to parse out what’s real and what’s staged.  It’s clear that Francis’s challenge to the gendered aesthetics of women’s bodybuilding genuinely rattles the sport’s seasoned judges, who have a hard time articulating their opposition to her sculpted physique without sounding like fascist, misogynist ghouls. 

Among this trio of films in the Pumping Iron canon, The Women is my least favorite as cinematic entertainment, but that’s only because Stripper and the Schwarzenegger pic delight me as artifacts of vintage cheese & sleaze.  The Women is clearly the contender with the most on its mind, the one with the most to say.  The fact that fascist, misogynist ghouls like Matt Walsh are still asking disingenuous questions like “What is a woman?” with their own rigid, limiting definitions in mind only reinforces its continued academic resonance.  It’s also required viewing for anyone who’s enamored with Rose Glass’s muscular erotic thriller Love Lies Bleeding, since it had obvious influence on that film’s period-specific costume & production design, especially when pumping iron in the women’s home-town gyms.  Meanwhile, the only thing the original Pumping Iron is currently relevant to is the timeless tradition of imitating Schwarzenegger’s Austrian accent for a goof among friends, since it’s second only to Commando for his scene-to-scene quotability.

-Brandon Ledet

The Rover (2014)

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It may seem like we’re not far enough past the 2010s for the decade’s distinguishing cultural markers to be fully clear in the rearview, but recently returning to pop media from that time has convinced me it’s been long enough.  They’re especially clear when watching episodes of reality TV shows from a decade ago, where the dated fashions & attitudes of the 2010s are already vividly distinct.  You don’t have to be a freak like me to find those cultural timestamps in old episodes of Top Chef or Total Divas, though.  Those shows are meant to be disposable fluff, not anthropological time capsules.  Look instead to the 2014 road-trip thriller The Rover, which was only released ten years ago and already feels like it was made on another planet.  A somber, stylish revenge mission set in Mad Max’s near-future Australia, The Rover should still feel like a relatively fresh take on a road-worn template, but it’s already coated with a thick layer of dust from the past decade of pop culture progress.  A lot’s changed since we first cracked open a new decade, which is surprising considering that most of us spent the first couple years of the 2020s in a state of domestic stasis, avoiding the outside world.

Following an intentionally vague global economic collapse, Guy Pearce solemnly spends his days in the Australian heat drinking hard liquor and neglecting to shave.  His lonely, self-destructive routine is disrupted when his car is stolen by a small gang of reprobates, giving him an excuse to be destructive towards someone else for a change.  The only lead on his stolen car is an injured member of the gang left to die in the road, played by Robert Pattinson.  The two men reluctantly bond on a road trip towards dual, parallel acts of revenge: one for stolen property, one for heartless abandonment.  The most readily apparent way the pop culture landscape has changed since The Rover‘s initial release is that this kind of relentless post-apocalyptic trudge is no longer as overly prevalent now as it was in the early 2010s, when it would have competed with titles like Take Shelter, Snowpiercer, These Final Hours, The Book of Eli, The Road, Mad Max: Fury Road, World War Z, The Walking Dead, and so on.  It had a hard time standing out in that crowded field even though it’s more committed than most to distinguish itself with bleak tones and off-kilter character quirks (including an extensive sequence of Pattinson mumbling “Pretty Girl Rock” to himself that felt custom-designed for a David Ehrlich countdown video).  That’s not the only thing that’s changed, though.

I assume The Rover was initially compared to the in-over-his-head antihero plot of Blue Ruin (since there’s a lot of crossover in the small group of movie obsessives who’d happen to catch both titles), given Pearce’s blatant lack of a Taken-style “set of skills” that would make him suitable to fight off a gang of thugs as a lone wolf.  He’s just an ordinary man who happens to be extraordinarily angry about the theft of his car.  At this point on the cultural timeline, though, no revenge mission movie can get by without being unfairly compared to John Wick, which was released just one year later.  It’s unlikely that The Rover & John Wick would’ve been directly compared at the time, but John Wick has since set a definitive template for modern revengers that The Rover happens to fit into: stories about ultra-violent heroes overcorrecting seemingly petty wrongs.  Usually that means slaughtered pets (the dog in John Wick, the pig in Pig, the bees in The Beekeeper, etc). In The Rover‘s case, it’s a stolen, unremarkable sedan that leads to a bloody body-count. Of course, there’s always a deeper well of Trauma hidden under those surface-level revenge missions, but the macho brutes at the center can only express themselves through Violence so it takes a while to gather the details.  When Pearce finally confesses what awful incident broke his moral compass halfway through the picture, it’s not so much a major dramatic reveal as it is one more grim detail passing by in an endless parade.

Something else that’s obviously changed in the past decade is A24’s brand identity as a film distributor. They were already making bold acquisitions like The Rover, Spring Breakers, and Under the Skin in their first year, but they didn’t really become a recognizable, dependable marketing machine until 2015’s The Witch.  It’s impossible to say whether The Rover might have been a hit if it had come out after A24 fully won over the hearts of the coveted Film Bro audience, but it is the exact kind of tough-exterior-soft-interior thriller that appeals to young men of that ilk, so it’s possible.  At the very least, it was better suited for a cult audience than the similarly somber post-apocalyptic tale It Comes At Night, which lucked into a higher level of name recognition by arriving later in the A24 film-bro ascendancy.  Releasing The Rover after Robert Pattinson’s recent turn as Batman couldn’t have hurt on that front either, considering that he was still mostly known as The Guy from Twilight in 2014.  By now, anyone paying attention knows that Pattinson is a talented actor with good taste for adventurous projects, but the combination of this & Cosmopolis were only the early signs that was the case (to the measly dozens of people who saw them in initial release).  The Rover is very much a film of its time, to its peril.  Its distinctive virtues are just as apparent to a 2020s set of eyes as the difference between the current Women’s Division of the WWE vs the Divas division of the 2010s, which you can now plainly see in any random episode of Total Divas but was a lot more difficult to parse in the thick of it.

-Brandon Ledet

Carny (1980)

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One venue in which enthusiastic moviegoing is still alive & well is the Outdoor Movie Night, especially the free, inflatable-screen showings of Family Friendly favorites like Coco or Moana.  Those screenings are more of a community event than your typical, isolating trip to the cinema.  Families spread out on picnic blankets, halfheartedly try to keep their kids in eyesight as they play around with new friends and, whenever bored enough, pay attention to the movie being projected.  It’s cute.  The Broadside offers that same kind of Outdoor Movie Night experience with a little more formal structure & focus, having built a Family Friend compound next to The Broad Theater for regular concerts & laid-back screenings.  The recent Wildwood showing of 1980’s Carny made great use of that communal atmosphere.  To play off the movie’s traveling-carnival setting, they invited face-painters, stilt-walkers, tarot readers, and cotton candy spinners as a pre-show warmup, concluding with local musician Brookiecita (of LSD Clownsystem) introducing the film over a slideshow of her own childhood photographs from growing up on the carnival circuit.  There were indeed kids running around the grounds too, this time eating cotton candy and enjoying the “VIP room” of inflatable pools.

That Outdoor Movie Night atmosphere is worth noting here because Carny is absolutely not a Family Friendly affair.  This is one of those teenage Jodie Foster roles that edge right up to the line of being too slimy to stomach without ever fully crossing it (see also: Taxi Driver, Foxes, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane).  Foster plays an underage waitress who’s bored with the tedium of small-town living, so she joins a traveling carnival on a whim after lusting after its most boisterous performer (Gary Busey in horrifying clown makeup).  Struggling to establish her place in the carnival beyond her function as The Dunk Tank Clown’s girlfriend, she briefly auditions as one of the striptease dancers in the “hoochie coochie” tent.  This decision lands the teenager in multiple compromising scenarios: modeling lingerie for hooting drunkards, getting body-slammed onto the stage by said drunkards, and eventually getting tied to a bed by a villainous goon who threatens to sexually assault her before her fellow carnies intervene.  The worst part is that her much older boyfriend knows exactly how old she is (while she lies to everyone else about already being 18), and the safer, more appropriate job he eventually finds for her is still as sexual bait in one of the carnival-game booths – this time working marks for pocket change, which we see play out in a lengthy sequence of lesbian cruising.

All of this dangerous flirtation with Jodie Foster’s early cinematic persona as Teenage Jailbait is eased by the film always implying its sex scenes instead of fully illustrating them and by its characterization of her as a consenting participant in her own seduction & indoctrination.  It’s also eased by the fact that Carny isn’t really about her seduction into the carny lifestyle at all.  It’s more of a love story about the two best bros she gets between: Busey as the clown and musician Robbie Robertson as his “midway” hustler trailer-mate.  Busey & Robertson love each other with furious devotion, often expressing their mutual affection in drunken acts of group sex with women they pick up on the road.  It throws off their dynamic when Busey catches real feelings for Foster, then, and that goes double for when Robertson inevitably has sex with her too.  Their seething jealousies & whispered bickering just outside of her earshot end up taking over the foreground of the movie while her own coming of age carny-life story fades into the background, so that it’s less of a love triangle than it is a tortured bromance.  That helps steal some attention away from the situational leering at Foster’s body, but Carny still made for an intensely uncomfortable watch at times, especially in an Outdoor Movie Night setting.

Of course, discomfort was the intent.  The movie opens with Busey smearing on his greasy clown paint before hopping into the dunk-tank cage, antagonizing every mark who strolls by like a screeching gorilla.  It concludes with a classic hall-of-mirrors horror sequence in which the carnies plot to scare off local thugs who are shaking them down for obscene payouts, essentially borrowing its climax from Tod Browning’s 1930s cult classic Freaks.  Despite those intentionally scary images and the amoral sexual politics of Foster’s seduction into the carny lifestyle, Brookiecita introduced the movie as a humanizing, empathetic portrayal of traveling carnival folk as a type of found family.  Likewise, Robertson co-wrote, produced, and partially scored the picture based on his own experiences as a teenage carnival worker, fondly remembering his time in the business.  Personally, I got my own “seedy underbelly of the carnival” crash course from Bikini Kill’s “Carnival,” not The Band’s “Life is a Carnival,” but I like to think I still got the message.  In Carny, Robertson seemed to be acknowledging both the warmth of the carnival community when dealing with their own and the grimy, violent hucksterism they could stoop to when dealing with outsiders.  In a way, that clash of familial warmth and carnival grime actually made it a perfect Outdoor Movie Night selection, the best one I’ve seen since The Broadside screened Demons with live prog-rock accompaniment.

-Brandon Ledet

The Movie Orgy (1968)

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When Joe Dante’s mashup epic The Movie Orgy first toured the hippie-infested college campuses of 1960s America, it was a mobile party sponsored by Schlitz Beer – more of a “happening” than a movie.  The vibe was much calmer during its recent screening at The Broad, where a half-dozen or so hopeless nerds politely avoided eye contact by scrolling on our phones until the trailers started, then dutifully watched the film in its entirety while stragglers quietly filtered in & out during its sprawling runtime.  Even the length of The Movie Orgy is more sensible than it used to be.  The AGFA scan that’s currently available for public exhibition is “only” 5 hours long, when earlier cuts have been reported to reach the 7-hour mark.  Maybe the world has become too well behaved & socially awkward to ever recreate the raucous atmosphere of The Movie Orgy‘s stoners-at-a-kegger origins from a half-century ago.  More likely, it’s just hard to get a good party going at 2pm on a weekday.

It’s important to note the circumstances of exhibition in this case, because the movie is technically illegal to distribute at any price point higher than Free.  Long before Everything is Terrible! excavated moldy junk media from garage-sale VHS tapes in their own digital-era mashups, Joe Dante (along with fellow Corman alumnus Jon Davison) did the same for discarded strips of 16mm film.  The Movie Orgy is the great American scrapbook: a maniacal clip show stitched together from scraps of cartoons, commercials, newsreels, monster-movie schlock, government propaganda, and other disposable ephemera.  In its boozy college campus run, that ironic collage of American pop culture runoff would’ve invited loud, boisterous mockery from the turned-on/tuned-in/dropped-out audience, like an MST3k prototype for acid freaks.  In its current form, it’s more like digging through a shoebox of decades-old ticket stubs from your grandparents’ teenage years, unearthing evidence of low-budget, low-brow genre trash that’s otherwise been forgotten to time.

In theory, The Movie Orgy is a purely cinematic archive, but in practice it feels more like flipping through TV channels or clicking around the internet.  America’s racism, bloodlust, misogyny, hucksterism, and cheap monster movies are all compounded into one grotesque gestalt.  King Kong’s iconic climb up the Empire State Building shares the same psychic space as an urban attack from the giant turkey-monster of The Giant Claw, a film of much lowlier pedigree.  Richard Nixon, The Beatles, and early, optimistic reports about The Vietnam War are given equal footing as toothpaste ads and a contextless gag featuring a chimpanzee who plays the drums.  The construction of this absurd montage is much cruder than what you’ll find in its modern mashup descendants like The Great Satan or Ask Any Buddy, since there are no digital means to smooth over the abrupt transitions between each individual clip.  You can feel Joe Dante’s presence in the editing room, going mad while physically cutting & pasting everything together as a D.I.Y. outsider art project that got out of hand.

Dante made The Movie Orgy as a cinema-obsessed art school student looking to party.  Years later, Roger Corman hired him to edit trailers for the exact kind of low-budget creature features that The Movie Orgy lovingly mocked, turning that party into a profession.  Like most Corman hires, the job eventually led to Dante directing cheap-o horror pictures himself, to great success within and beyond the Roger Corman Film School.  His comic sensibilities were already well-honed in this early effort, landing huge laughs with runner gags involving a 50-foot-tall woman’s petty romantic jealousies, a bad-boy greaser who doesn’t like to be “crowded”, and a headache medicine for “sensitive people” that each get exponentially funnier the more they repeat over the seemingly infinite runtime.  The Movie Orgy is designed to be amusing for anyone who drifts in & out of attention as they consume & piss out another round of Schlitz Beer, but it’s most comedically rewarding for the long-haul movie nerds who stick with every relentless minute from start to end like it’s an academic research project – likely because Dante is one of us.

-Brandon Ledet

Last Stop in Yuma County (2024)

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Heretofore a director of mostly short films and music videos, first-time feature director Francis Galluppi has burst onto the scene with something that’s both indebted to indie upstarts of the past and which feels like a breath of fresh air. Last Stop in Yuma County is a spare movie; it doesn’t look or feel cheap although you can definitely tell it was made on a marginal budget. It’s lean in just the right places to take this story to the next level. 

In the 1970s, an unnamed traveling knife salesman (Jim Cummings) stops for gas while en route to see his daughter, in the custody of his ex-wife, for her birthday. He arrives at a filling station only to learn from the attendant, Vernon (Faizon Love), that he’s waiting for the fuel truck to arrive, and that he’s welcome to wait in the attached diner. Since this is, as the title says, the last stop in Yuma, he has little choice. The diner’s waitress and possibly sole employee, Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue), is dropped off by her sheriff husband, Charlie, while the salesman hears on the radio about a bank robbery a few counties over. Once the diner opens, Charlotte and the salesman make pleasant chit-chat while trying to ignore the rising heat, as the diner’s air conditioner is no longer working. Before long, another car stops in for gas and gets the same bad news, and its occupants also choose to idle the time away in the diner. While Charlotte takes their order, the salesman notices that they are driving the same green Pinto described in the radio bulletin. The robbers, young hothead Travis (Nicholas Logan) and middle-aged, stone-cold Beau (Richard Brake), take note that the salesman and the waitress seem to be exchanging confidences, and cut the phone line when Charlotte tries to call Charlie, who takes too long to come to the phone. (Charlie’s assistant, Virginia, is played by the one and only Barbara Crampton.) Beau tells them to play nice and tasks Charlotte with grilling each customer who comes in about their fuel situation and, if any of them have gas, he’ll simply take that car and let everyone live. 

The diner starts to fill up as more and more people arrive at the fill-up station. An elderly couple from Texas (Robin Bartlett and Gene Jones, the latter of whom you may remember as the gas station attendant whose small talk infuriates Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men) takes up residence at one table, and Charlie’s deputy Gavin (Connor Paolo) comes in for coffee, which sets Beau and Travis on edge. Charlotte almost manages to get a warning out, but Gavin’s careless collision with Travis costs her the opportunity. Two drifters, Miles (Ryan Masson) and Sybil (Sierra McCormick), also find their way to the diner, and Miles, who already idolized the criminals he heard about on the radio since he and Sybil have a whole anti-social folie-a-deux, attempts to steal the bank loot from the Pinto’s trunk before he’s spotted and they have to head into the diner to avoid being caught. It’s when local rancher Pete (Jon Proudstar) arrives, solely to have lunch since he filled up the day before, that things finally get out of hand. The meek salesman writes a note to his daughter and sticks it in his pocket and prepares to make a stand, but a standoff occurs when Beau takes Charlotte hostage, with Pete, the Texans, and Miles all pulling their guns on each other. Miles tries to bargain for part of the loot for helping Beau and Travis, and then things take a real turn for the worse. 

There are a couple of minor elements that spotlight Yuma as a first-time outing for a feature director. Throughout the film, one of its strengths is a beautiful, constant, yellow desert light coming in from the outside; it’s very atmospheric in a way that contributes to the tension. But when the salesman shows up at the diner around dawn (it’s specifically said that it opens at six o’clock, and he watches Charlotte enter and turn the “open” sign around), the light is already that same pallid yellow of noon. It’s unchanging, and it’s a minor detail, but one that I couldn’t help but notice. The scene in which Beau explains—calmly, coolly, and dispassionately—exactly why the salesman and Charlotte are still alive, it’s delivered as a monologue. It’s a strong one, and one that’s done in a single long take, which works great with the tone. However, there’s a moment in the speech when Beau says, “Do you understand?” [beat] “Good,” and then continues with his directions. We can assume, yes, that Charlotte and/or the salesman nodded their assent, but it feels weird not to see that response in the text, without a cutaway. You can’t cut the question from the monologue without cutting the long take, and you can’t cut to the other characters reacting without doing the same, but it nonetheless feels a little awkward. 

That’s all that there is to quibble about, though. This is a great piece of work, moody and tense. From the opening credits on, we know that the fuel truck isn’t coming, as the opening credits play out over its crash site, so we know that things can only go tragically (and boy do they). Cummings’ transformation from timidity to reluctant courage is fun to watch, and when his character starts to make selfish choices, we go into full Coen Brothers mode as he succumbs to his own personal greed, up to and including a moment where it seems like he will be forced to bury the cash beside the road like Jerry Lundegaard. Beau and Travis even superficially resemble other pairs of criminals that the Coens often conceive in their films, with Braker’s Beau in particular a welcome presence as his casual cruelty means the stakes are as high as possible, and the performance of base, blood simple (ha) meanness that Braker brings to the role is a highlight. The placement of the dominoes that create the narrative flow is excellent, with some really elegant foreshadowing and rhyming imagery. It’s hard to say more about this one without giving too much away (in fact, I may already have), but if you’re yearning for something in the vein of a less sprawling No Country in a tight ninety minutes, this is a perfect choice. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Santo vs The Martian Invasion (1967)

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Most genre movie freaks may have moved on to shiny new boutique Blu-rays and moldy old VHS tapes, but I still collect most of my movies at the tried-and-true distribution hub of the thrift store DVD rack.  You don’t always find rare gems at the thrift store, but you often find movies cheaper than they cost to rent on streaming, with the added bonus of a Special Features menu that most streamers don’t bother to upload.  My recent pickup of the 1960s sci-fi lucha libre classic Santo vs. The Martian Invasion felt like a blessing by both metrics; it’s rare enough that it’s not currently available to stream at home with English subtitles, and the disc includes several Bonus Features, including full-length commentaries and a 30-minute interview with Santo’s heir, Son of Santo.  It felt like even more of a blessing when those subtitles turned out to be a variation of Comic Sans, which I’m not sure I’ve ever seen outside of an ironic lyrics-only music video on YouTube. I don’t know that reporting on these details is useful to anyone who didn’t happen to be shopping at the Thrift City USA on the West Bank last weekend, but I still want to advertise that the dream is still alive in the thrift store DVD racks of New Orleans in general. I suppose I also want to report that the home distribution label Kit Parker Films is surprisingly generous with their bargain-bin DVDs’ bonus content, so look out for those discs in particular while you’re digging through the stacks.

Billed on its title card as Santo the Silver Mask vs The Invasion of the Martians, this specific bargain-bin discovery is a fairly typical Atomic Age sci-fi cheapie about an alien invasion of planet Earth; its hero just happens to be the masked luchador Santo, protector of “the weak and the defenseless.”  The alien-invasion plot is a little confused, with the Martians announcing their presence to the citizens of Mexico via multiple television broadcasts and having their evil deeds widely reported in local newspapers, then later being treated as a conspiratorial government secret hidden from the public.  Instead of getting that story straight, the movie intensely focuses on the physical abilities & vulnerabilities of the Martians.  Much attention is paid to the fact that they frequently take “oxygen pills” to be able to withstand Earth’s atmosphere, among other needless explanations of their uncanny ability to speak Spanish.  There’s also an intense fixation on their cube-shaped helmets’ Astral Eye, a glowing eyeball that allows them to either hypnotize or disintegrate nearby Earthlings, depending on the demands of the day.  They can also wrestle fairly well, which makes them the perfect opponent for Santo, the greatest & bravest wrestler who ever lived.  Santo repeatedly grapples with the blonde-wigged beefcake models from planet Mars, eternally flustered by their ability to teleport back to the safety of their spaceship every time the impromptu matches don’t go their way.  He eventually wins by stealing one of their teleportation devices to infiltrate and explode that ship himself, like a wrestler claiming a championship belt (literally; the device is belt-shaped).

The Martian Invasion loses a little steam once these intergalactic lucha libre matches return to a proper wrestling ring instead of being staged in exterior locations on the streets of Mexico, but most of its vintage sci-fi hijinks remain adorable & fun.  Instead of brooding in the bootleg Gothic atmosphere of horror pictures like Santo vs The Vampire Women or Santo and the Blue Demon vs Dracula and the Wolf Man, a lot of the runtime is filled with insane, rapid-fire dialogue about the peculiarities of the Martian species.  There’s also some fun 60s kitsch to the cheesecake Martian women in particular, who hypnotize & seduce the major players of Mexican patriarchy with the laziest futuristic go-go dancing you’ve ever seen.  Between that half-hearted eroticism and the absurd over-reliance on stock footage to pad out the budget, I was often reminded of some of my favorite Atomic Age sci-fi novelties: Nude on the Moon, Cat-Women of the Moon, Queen of Blood, The Astounding She-Monster, etc.  None of those comparison points feature extensive wrestling matches, though, which gives this an extra layer of novelty the same way the Santo horror films feel novel compared to their classic Universal Horror equivalents. 

Something I don’t have context for is how much of an anomaly The Martian Invasion is within the larger Santo canon.  It felt a little zippier & goofier than the couple horror films I’ve seen starring the masked luchador, which rely heavily on classic haunted-house mood & dread.  I don’t have enough evidence to say how typical that is to Santo’s filmography, though, because I’ve only seen three of what Wikipedia lists as “at least 54” titles in his catalog.  Given the pace at which I’m finding notable Santo movies on used discs or streaming, it’s likely I’ll never get the complete picture of his big-screen work before I run out of time and die. Honestly, I still can’t even pin down the exact list of titles that make up that catalog.  Wikipedia, IMDb, and Letterboxd all have conflicting lists of what count as an official Santo film, and the “Filmografia” Special Feature on my Martian Invasion disc only includes 52 of his “at least 54” titles.  To help illustrate the immensity & inconsistency of that catalog, I have transcribed the entire “Filmografia” feature of the Kit Parker DVD below.  It’s the kind of list that has made me accept that I will only see whichever films I happen to pick up at local thrift stores, completionism be damned.  May they all be as fun & loaded with bonus features as Santo vs The Martian Invasion.

Filmografia

1958

SANTO CONTRA EL CEREBRO DEL MAL
aka El Cerebro del Mal
Santo vs The Evil Brain

SANTO CONTRA LOS HOMBRES INFERNALES
Santo vs The Infernal Men aka White Cargo

1961

SANTO CONTRA LOS ZOMBIES
Santo vs The Zombies
Released in the U.S. as Invasion of the Zombies

SANTO CONTRA EL RED DEL CRIMEN
Santo vs The King of Crime

SANTO EN EL HOTEL DE LA MUERTE
Santo in The Hotel of Death

SANTO CONTRA EL CEREBRO DIABOLICO
Santo vs The Diabolical Brain

1962

SANTO CONTRA LAS MUJERES VAMPIRAS
Santo vs The Vampire Women
Released in the U.S. as Samson vs The Vampire Women

1963

SANTO EN EL MUSEO DE CERA
Santo in The Wax Museum
Released in the U.S. as Samson in the Wax Museum

SANTO CONTRA EL ESTRANGULADOR
Santo vs The Strangler

SANTO CONTRA EL ESPECTRO DEL ESTRANGULADOR
Santo vs The Ghost of the Strangler

1964

SANTO EN ATACAN LAS BRUJAS
aka Santo En La Casa De Las Brujas
Santo in The Witches Attack

BLUE DEMON CONTRA EL PODER SATANICO
Blue Demon vs The Satanic Power
Cameo appearance

SANTO CONTRA EL HACHA DIABOLICA
Santo vs The Diabolical Ax

1965

SANTO EN LOS PROFANADORES DE TUMBAS
aka Los Traficantes De La Muerte
Santo in The Grave Robbers

SANTO EN EL BARON BRAKOLA
Santo in Baron Brakola

1966

SANTO CONTRA LA INVASION DE LOS MARCIANOS
Santo vs The Martian Invasion

SANTO CONTRA LOS VILLANOS DEL RING
Santo vs The Villains of The Ring

SANTO EN OPERACION 67
Santo in Operation 67

1967

SANTO EN EL TESORO DE MOCTEZUMA
Santo in The Treasure of Moctezuma

1968

SANTO EN EL TESORO DE DRACULA
Santo in Dracula’s Treasure
aka EL Vampiro y El Sexo

SANTO CONTRA CAPULINA
Santo vs Capulina

1969

SANTO CONTRA BLUE DEMON EN LA ATLANTIDA
Santo vs Blue Demon in Atlantis

SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA LOS MONSTRUOS
Santo & Blue Demon vs The Monsters

SANTO Y BLUE DEMON EN EL MUNDO DE LOS MUERTOS
Santo & Blue Demon in The World of the Dead

SANTO CONTRA LOS CAZADORES DE CABEZAS
Santo vs The Headhunters

SANTO FRENTE A LA MUERTE
Santo Faces Death
aka Santo vs The Mafia Killers

1970

SANTO CONTRA LOS JINETES DEL TERROR
Santo vs The Terror Riders
aka The Lepers and Sex

SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LAS MUJERES VAMPIRAS
Santo in The Revenge of the Vampire Women

SANTO CONTRA LA MAFIA DEL VICIO
Santo vs The Mafia of Vice
aka Mission Sabotage

SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LA MOMIA
Santo in The Revenge of the Mummy

LAS MOMIAS DE GUANAJUATO
The Mummies of Guanajuato
Co-starring Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras

1971

SANTO CONTRA LA HIJA DE FRANKENSTEIN
Santo vs Frankenstein’s Daughter

SANTO CONTRA LOS ASESINOS DE OTROS MUNDOS
Santo vs The Killers from Other Worlds
aka Santo vs The Living Atom

SANTO Y EL AGUILA REAL
Santo and The Royal Eagle
aka Santo and The Tigress in The Royal Eagle

SANTO EN MISION SUICIDA
Santo in Suicide Mission

SANTO EN EL MISTERIO DE LA PERLA NEGRA
Santo in The Mystery of The Black Pearl
aka Santo in The Caribbean Connection
Released in Spain in 1971 and in Mexico in 1974

1972

SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA DRACULA Y EL HOMBRE LOBO
Santo & Blue Demon vs Dracula & The Wolfman

SANTO CONTRA LOS SECUESTRADORES
Santo vs The Kidnappers

SANTO CONTRA LA MAGIA NEGRA
Santo vs Black Magic

SANTO & BLUE DEMON EN LAS BESTIAS DEL TERROR
Santo & Blue Demon in The Beasts of Terror

SANTO EN LAS LOBAS
Santo in The She-Wolves

SANTO EN ANONIMO MORTAL
Santo in Anonymous Death Threat

1973

SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA EL DR. FRANKENSTEIN
Santo & Blue Demon vs Dr. Frankenstein

SANTO CONTRA EL DR. MURERTE
Santo vs Dr. Death
aka Santo Strikes Again

1974

SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LA LLORONA
Santo in The Revenge of The Crying Woman

1975

SANTO EN ORO NEGRO
aka La Noche De San Juan
Santo in Black Gold

1977

MISTERIO EN LAS BERMUDAS
Mystery in Bermuda
Co-starring Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras

1979

SANTO EN LA FRONTERA DEL TERROR
Santo at the Border of Terror
aka Santo vs The White Shadow

1981

SANTO CONTRA EL ASESINO DE LA TELEVISION
Santo vs The Television Killer

CHANOC Y EL HIJO DEL SANTO VS LOS VAMPIROS ASESINOS
Chanoc & The Son of Santo vs The Killer Vampires
Cameo appearance

1982

SANTO EN EL PUNO DE LA MUERTE
Santo in The Fist of Death

SANTO EN LA FURIA DE LOS KARATECAS
Santo in The Fury of the Karate Experts

-Brandon Ledet

Kinds of Kindness (2024)

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Kinds of Kindness is a dense text. A triptych of stories from director Yorgos Lanthimos that are only loosely connected by the appearance of a single minor character (with each of the major billed actors appearing as different characters in each segment), they are nonetheless in conversation with one another, as they are all about the way that kindness can be many things — sincere as well as selfish, sacrificial as well as superficial. The segments, titled “The Death of R.M.F.,” “R.M.F. is Flying,” and “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” each relay a fable in which a character is “kind,” with consequences. 

In “The Death,” we first see a man with the initials “R.M.F.” (Yorgos Stefanakos) embroidered on his shirt pocket as he accepts an envelope of cash from a woman we later learn is named Vivian (Margaret Qualley), and watch as a man named Robert Fletcher (Jesse Plemmons) works up the nerve to run a red light and smash his Bronco into R.M.F.’s car, although neither man is seriously injured. The next morning, Robert tells his wife Sarah (Hong Chau) about the incident while she fawns over a piece of sports memorabilia—a broken John McEnroe racquet—that was received that morning from Robert’s employer, Raymond (Willem Dafoe), calling it Raymond’s best gift yet. Once he arrives at the office, we get a better picture of Robert and Raymond’s relationship; Robert is more of a pet or a toy for Raymond than an employee. Every aspect of Robert’s life is dictated by the older man: what clothes he wears, what drinks he orders at the bar, what he eats for every meal, when he sleeps and wakes and has sex with his wife. He even engineered Sarah and Robert’s marriage by having Robert fake an injury at a bar in order to gain her sympathy. But Robert can’t bring himself to kill a stranger in a car “accident,” which leads Raymond to ice him out, setting off a chain of events in which Sarah leaves him and a chance encounter—or is it?—with a woman named Rita Fanning (Emma Stone) make him more and more desperate to get back into Raymond’s good graces. 

In “Flying,” Denham Springs police officer Daniel (Plemmons) is dealing with the recent disappearance of his wife, Liz (Emma Stone), along with some other researchers on a ship that went missing, presumably in the gulf. While his partner Neil (Mamoudou Athie) and Neil’s wife Martha (Qualley) attempt to assuage his fears while also remaining realistic about the chances that Liz will be found, Daniel’s erratic behavior, which includes intimately and romantically brushing the hair of a suspect behind their ear, causes concern within the DSPD. When Liz and another survivor are found (flown back in a rescue copter piloted by R.M.F., giving the segment its title), she comes back … different. It was well established that Liz’s hatred of chocolate meant that it was banned from the house, but this newly returned woman devours chocolate cake with gusto. She smokes a cigarette for the first time, feels unconfident in her favorite outfit, and none of her shoes fit her anymore. Daniel becomes more and more suspicious that she is an impostor, but his attempts to explain to others that he thinks his wife is no longer his wife because she doesn’t remember his favorite song make him seem even more unstable than when she was missing. Liz, if this is Liz, seems to live only to please him, and after shooting a man in the hand during a routine traffic stop, he’s placed on suspension, where the two have nothing but time together, and he tests the limits of her emotional and physical generosity. 

In “Sandwich,” Andrew (Plemmons) and Emily (Stone) are two members of a cult, run by Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Chau), that is seeking a woman with the power to heal and even reanimate the dead. Their search is specific; the woman will be about five foot nine, weigh about 130 pounds, and will be the survivor of a pair of twins. Their search brings them close enough to her old home that Emily sneaks away one morning to the house where her husband and daughter are still living and leaves a gift for her, which Andrew notices but promises to keep a secret, although she admits nothing. After a trip back to the commune compound, in which we get to see the cult’s grounds, practices, and yacht (specially designed for the awaited messiah), Andrew and Emily are sent on another expedition to the same town, where a woman named Rebecca approaches them and tells them that her twin sister Ruth (both Qualley) is the woman that they are looking for, but Andrew brushes her off. When another visit to her old house results in Emily being caught by her husband and daughter, he convinces her to have a drink with him, surreptitiously drugging and then sexually assaulting her. When she awakes the next morning, Omi and Aka are waiting for her outside, and for her “contamination” is exiled from the cult, although she hopes that finding Ruth will be her ticket back in. 

The first segment is a lot of fun, and there’s a lot of playfulness going on to toy with the audience and their expectations. Although the man with the embroidered initials “R.M.F.” is the first person that we see, this could be a misdirect, as we never learn Raymond’s last name, nor the middle names of Robert Fletcher or Rita Fanning, so any one of them could turn out to be the character who has a date with destiny and death. It also introduces several of the film’s recurring motifs. When a desperate Robert is trying to sell all of the sports memorabilia that he has accumulated as a result of Raymond’s gifts over the years, he’s unable to get a fair deal for it. Even as he repeats what must be Raymond’s words (notably calling out that yellow represented youthfulness on the helmet of a driver who died tragically while wearing it, just before he exchanges his aubergine turtleneck for a mustard one and sets out to try and win back Raymond’s affection), it’s clear that every bit of the older man’s largesse, his “kindness,” was all about control, and that even the gifts thereof are ultimately cheaper than they seem. 

That discussion of color symbolism cuts directly to an extreme close up of the yolk of an egg being fried, although Robert finds himself unable to eat it and tosses it out. That ties into a larger motif of appetite that runs throughout all three films. In “Flying,” the first thing that Daniel offers to do for the returned Liz is make her an omelet, which she declines, and the cult in “Sandwich” is particularly averse to eating fish, while Aka and (presumably) Omi’s son’s food intake is monitored, and he’s given conflicting directions from each of his parents. It’s most present in “Flying,” however. Throughout all of the film’s constituent segments, flashbacks and dreams are represented in black-and-white footage, and “Flying” features one such sequence in which Liz is seen resorting to cannibalism while deserted and awaiting rescue. It’s unclear if this is a real memory, a delusion, or even a projection of Daniel’s fears, especially since he seems to be the one most consumed with a desire for flesh; the beef he serves to Neil and Martha wouldn’t even be considered “rare” by most standards, he impulsively licks the wound of the man he shoots on Tulane Ave, and when he starts to test what lengths this “Liz” will go to in order to ingratiate herself to him, he asks her to excise and cook first her thumb and then her liver for him, as a test of her “kindness.” 

There’s also an interesting throughline about foot injuries, which I interpret to mean something along the lines of “kindness can shoot you in the foot,” but which also seems to have an undercurrent of dishonesty. In “Death,” Robert first attempts to recreate his meet cute with Sarah by pretending to injure his hand again, but is unsuccessful. Instead, he deliberately injures his foot in the bar bathroom by kicking the wall and breaking a couple of bones, which leads him to meeting Rita, who shows him sympathy and, well, kindness (although an air of mystery is retained regarding how altruistic this is and if it’s yet another one of Raymond’s manipulations). In “Flying,” it’s mentioned that the only other survivor from Liz’s ship has a leg infection that will likely result in the need for amputation, and it happens twice in “Sandwich,” as Emily’s husband lures her back to their old house to drug and assault her by spinning a lie about their daughter having hurt her ankle at ballet class and Emily herself injures a dog’s leg in order to have an excuse to meet with the veterinarian she believes is the savior. Notably, all of these injuries are used manipulatively; whether it’s a self-inflicted wound to get attention, a lie about an injury to get an ex to come over, or a recitation of something bad that happened to someone, they are all used to elicit “kindness.” 

Speaking of dogs, they’re present, in one form or another, in every segment. In “Flying,” Liz tells Daniel about a dream that she had when she was on the island (or which was about the island, it’s unclear to her and to us), where she was in a world where people were pets and dogs were the dominant species, and we get to see that world in the credits sequence of that segment. There is the aforementioned dog in “Sandwich,” whom Emily finds on the street and uses as a ticket to see Ruth. There are no animals in “Death,” however, unless one considers that Robert is Raymond’s dog. He fetches, he rolls over, he begs, and he performs for Raymond. Robert is his pet, his doll, he dresses him up and he picks out his food and he controls Robert’s entire environment. At one point, he directs him to go to a specific bar and order a non-alcoholic drink; Robert attempts to order bourbon, but the bartender asks him if he’s sure, and when he orders a Virgin Mary, it’s handed to him in seconds, having been waiting for him, just as a demonstration of just how far and wide the net of power Raymond controls is. It’s even telling that one of the scenes from Liz’s dreamworld of dogs-as-humans involves a dog driving an SUV who swerves to avoid a piece of human roadkill, which ties back thematically to the end of “Death,” which I won’t spoil. There’s a narrative present in all of them about the power that people have over animals; we all love our pets and we all are kind to them, but that kindness doesn’t change the fact that power flows only one way in that relationship, and that this may be true of all relationships. 

Before closing out, I want to talk about one particular scene in “Death,” wherein Robert confronts Raymond at his home to tell him that he can’t go through with his vehicular manslaughter plan. Initially, he has Vivian show Robert in, but the “scene” doesn’t feel right, so he has him do it again after sitting down in a chair, then has him take it from the top again and enter to deliver his news standing. When watching a film like this, in which a person takes on the role of “director” in their personal life, one can’t help but assume that the film’s director is also telling us something about themselves, or about the nature of control. I’m not sure that I’ve cracked what that is yet, or what Lanthimos is saying here. I have a feeling that this is one of those texts that only really reveals itself on multiple viewings, and with time. Both of my viewing companions for this screening were much more mixed in their opinions, but I’m feeling positive, and looking forward to what the next screening will reveal.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Bubble (2005)

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Even more so than your Slow Cinema auteur of choice, Steven Soderbergh is the master of the mundane. He consistently makes tight, thrilling, wryly funny dispatches from the florescent-lit hell pits of American tedium.  A 70min experiment in early-2000s digi cinematography and purposefully deflated genre payoffs, Bubble is a perfect illustration of that skill.  Its vision of America is a complex labyrinth of small-town diners, factory breakrooms, and low-ceiling apartments.  The doomed souls who navigate those mundane spaces all work multiple jobs for the privilege of getting paid minimum wage, wondering in their spare time what it might have been like if they had stuck it out for a full high school diploma.  When jailed for a violent crime, they complain “It’s horrible in here,” but it’s so oppressively bland everywhere else that it’s questionable whether rotting in a concrete cell is any worse than being free to work their next shift.  Even the murder that lands them there is bleakly, purposefully uninteresting. 

I suppose there’s some novelty in what type of Midwest factory employs these small-town workers.  Bubble was shot in a real, operational doll parts factory in Ohio, which makes for some horrific digital-video footage in early scenes.  The mundanity of the world outside the assembly line quickly closes in, though.  Loneliness & petty jealousies shared among three of the factory workers leads to one of their murders, with only one clear suspect and no real need to investigate.  A deleted scene explains the psychology behind that act of violence like the Freudian denouement of Hitchcock’s Psycho, but Soderbergh removes even that morsel of narrative satisfaction from the final cut.  He also undercuts the potential for dramatic excitement or emotion by casting non-actor locals to play the central parts, mumbling their semi-improvised lines through obvious shyness.  Even the camera’s movements are pedestrian, often just swiveling on a stationary tri-pod like an oscillating security cam.  It’s all very matter of fact, and the facts of the matter are all grim, grey gruel.

Handling the editing & cinematography himself under pseudonyms, Soderbergh seemed to be having fun playing around with the unpretentious tools of the new digital filmmaking era.  He even got hands-on in Bubble‘s distribution strategy, striking a deal with the Mark Cuban-owned cable company HDNet to release the film simultaneously in theaters, on-demand, and on physical disc.  His pitch was that hopefully audiences would be drawn to see the movie in theaters and, if they liked it, would pick up a physical copy for repeat viewings on the way home.  Corporate theater chains were outraged at this disruption to the traditional theatrical window, but that day-and-date release strategy has obviously become more of a standard practice in recent years.  Bubble was supposed to be the first of six HDNet releases with the same improvised-drama filming methods and unconventional home distribution schedules, but instead it flopped and mostly fell out of circulation.  I had to find my DVD copy second-hand, and it only includes a Spanish-language subtitles track, so it likely traveled far to reach me.

Forever adaptable, Soderbergh has been doing just fine in the two decades since the Bubble debacle.  If anything, he’s since moved on to making straight-to-HBO cheapies instead of straight-to-HDNet cheapies, which feels like a minor step up in prestige.  He’s also had a few theatrical hits since then and has flirted with the idea of early retirement, only to discover that he’d rather be making movies no matter the scale in production or distribution.  Bubble is not his most exciting, imaginative dispatch from the great mediocre American void (that would be Schizopolis), but it might be the most indicative example of his stripped-down, unfussy style.  In most other cases where a career-shifting work from a major filmmaker had fallen out of distribution, it would be tempting to petition for a spiffy new digital restoration from a boutique Blu-ray label.  In Bubble‘s case, it feels totally appropriate for it to be stuck in time on thrift-store DVDs.  The only reason to reissue it, really, would be for a new director’s commentary track looking back on how the industry has changed in the past couple decades, since Soderbergh happens to be the master of those too.

-Brandon Ledet

Kalki 2898 AD (2024)

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Sometimes, a movie can be so aggressively derivative that it crosses a threshold into becoming thrillingly unique.  Recently, Vera Drew’s copyright-skirting The People’s Joker melted eight decades of Batman comics & movies into a shockingly personal, vulnerable self-portrait.  One of this year’s buzziest horror films, In a Violent Nature, is a novelty slasher that simulates the sensation of watching a Friday the 13th sequel on an overdose of cough syrup.  Further back, vintage Hong Kong action schlock like The Seventh Curse and The Dragon Lives Again “borrowed” familiar icons from better-funded American productions for their own absurd purposes, theorizing what it might be like if Indiana Jones had to fight off Xenomorphs or if “Bruce Lee” teamed up with “Popeye” to beat up “Dracula” in Hell.  Lucio Fulci might not have been doing his most personal, innovative work when making an unsanctioned sequel to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, but without Italian producers’ complete disregard for American copyright, we never would have gotten the underwater zombie-on-shark fight scene of Zombi 2.  Genuinely transcendent, imaginative art can result from filmmakers being shamelessly derivative, as long as they fully embrace the practice and push it to its extreme.  Just call it “post-modern” and all is forgiven.

That’s why I was pleased to discover that the big-budget South Indian sci-fi film Kalki 2828 AD is even more derivative than I initially expected.  All of the promotional materials for the film led me to believe it was a mockbuster version of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, distinguished only from a Syfy Channel knockoff of that series by the fact that it boasts the biggest budget of any Indian production to date.  It turns out that Kalki 2898 is less of an overly expensive Dune bootleg than it is a more general sampler of any & every big-budget sci-fi property you can name: Dune, Star Wars, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Fury Road, Guardians of the Galaxy, everything. As a result, the movie it ended up reminding me most of was The Fifth Element: a mostly goofy genre derivative with a few genuinely transcendent moments all of its own making.  By the time a flashback reveals that its wisecracking anti-hero was trained by his mentor using laser-swords, it’s clear that the movie is uninterested in hiding its artistic debts to pre-existing material.  When it climaxes with a giant wizard figure doing Gandalf’s “You shall not pass!” routine during a bridge-fight with said anti-hero in a Transformers-styled mech suit, it’s also clear that those obvious debts do not matter.  Kalki 2898 may be derivative, but it’s also deliriously, deliciously entertaining.

Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan stars as the Gandalf-like wizard of that bridge fight: a wizened but weary warrior who has been cursed with immortality for a past sin but eventually uses his extended centuries on earth for good.  Tollywood action star Prabhas (of Baahubali fame) pilots the smart-car mech suit in that fight as a Han Solo type: a mercenary bad-boy who only does good when it fits his selfish needs.  They’re fighting over possession of a pregnant damsel in distress (Deepika Padukone, of last year’s Pathaan), who’s believed to be carrying a reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu.  There’s, of course, a prophecy going around that her child could be The One: a warrior savior who will bring light to a desert hell planet that has been suffering in greed & darkness.  Throw in a fascistic Empire who exploits the labor of the many to pamper the lives of the privileged few, and you’ve got the basic building blocks of a standard Dune or Star Wars knockoff, except maybe one with a concerning amount of attention paid to the Empire’s search for “fertile females.”  Kalki 2898 constantly refers to major events of Hindu mythology in flashbacks that can be disorienting for uninformed Western viewers, but so much of its story is borrowed from a universal source of worship (corporate pop-culture IP) that the knowledge gap doesn’t matter all too much.

If there’s any way that Kalki 2898 closely adheres to its Dune inspiration in particular, it’s that it abruptly ends after three hours with only half a story told.  One of the final images is a title card promising that the adventure will continue in the “Kalki Cinematic Universe,” and it’s been a while since I was excited instead of annoyed by that serialized approach to cinematic storytelling.  That’s not the only hack move it pulls that would’ve annoyed me in most American blockbusters either.  It includes many for-their-own sake cameos that wink to an insider audience (including one for Baahubali director S.S. Rajamouli); it follows up its “until next time . . .” title card with a mid-credits post-script that promises an evolution for the big bad villain.  Worse, early flashbacks include horrendous de-aging CGI effects for Bachchan that betray the fact that the film was rushed to market before it was fully completed, with production having wrapped only a month before release.  None of those usual red flags bothered me here, though, no more than I was bothered by watching it play around with the pre-fabricated action figures of more famous sci-fi properties.  Kalki 2898 AD is playful & extreme enough in its scene-to-scene action that any questions of artistic integrity or originality feel beside the point.

-Brandon Ledet