reviews

Gasoline Rainbow (2024)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

It’s not something that comes up here a lot, but I go to a lot of live music shows. Although I’m reaching a point in my life where I’m often a decade or so older than the mode, I’ve never really found myself feeling like I had impostor syndrome until a couple of months ago, when I was at a show where a young woman was singing, accompanied solely by a male guitarist. This isn’t a statement about either’s talent—both were great—but there came a moment of intense realization on my part that I had heard all of the sentiments that were being laid before me before, and that I had in fact heard them many, many times. There’s nothing wrong with that; there’s room enough in the world for an infinite number of songs that feel like vulnerable diary entries and which rhyme “make-up” with “break up” with “wake up,” as long as there’s at least one person on the receiving end with whom the song connects, sonically and/or lyrically, and/or any other way that people connect with the art that they love. But I did realize that, perhaps, the time when that sung journal could connect with an older man like me had passed, no matter how much I was enjoying the show, when I was capable of wondering “Am I too old to be here?” 

I was a bit worried about this, heading into Gasoline Rainbow. The film’s blurb read “With high school in the rearview, five teenagers from small-town Oregon decide to embark on one last adventure. Piling into a van with a busted taillight, their mission is to make it to a place they’ve never been—the Pacific coast.” I was intrigued, not least of all because the film is the first fully narrative feature directed by the Ross brothers, Bill (IV) and Turner, who had previously helmed Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, but was worried that I might be too old to connect with the characters of Rainbow. Those fears were only further agitated when I saw the (at time of writing) only review on IMDb, which called the film “pretentious” and stated the “entire movies [sic] dialog [sic] between characters consists only of drunk teenagers talking.” Luckily, I needn’t have been concerned. 

The above-cited synopsis is pretty clear. Five teenagers, recently graduated from high school in fictional Wiley, Oregon, set out to have one last big adventure together before adult life pulls them in different directions. Stealing the family’s dilapidated van in the middle of the night, Nichole Dukes picks up the rest of the crew: Tony Abuerto, Micah Bunch, Nathaly Garcia, and Makai Garza. After a tense moment when the van’s engine dies beneath the slow-blinking yellow light of an isolated intersection and it seems unlikely to restart, they are on their way. Unlike a lot of movies of this type, they have a destination: the coast. From there, the film falls neatly into a series of vignettes characterized by the people that they meet. The first is a woman working at a gas station; the quintet asks her if she knows of anywhere cool nearby that they can visit, and she hops into the van with them and directs them to an otherworldly place in the Alvord Desert, an eighty-four square mile barren in southeast Oregon. Afterward, when returning their guide back to where she lives now, they ask if she’s interested in joining them for the rest of the way. She talks about the traveling that she used to do when she was younger, though she doesn’t look much older than they do, and although she’s clearly tempted, she begs off and wishes them well on their way. The next person that they encounter is a guy walking a dark road at night, who emerges from the darkness into the lamp of their headlights like a ghost from the mist; he invites them to join him and some friends for some good old-fashioned countryside drinking by a fire, and they accept. 

This turns into a fun time, and Makai in particular hits it off with a girl named Dallas, who ends up giving him a bracelet and telling him to meet her in a few days at “The End of the World,” a party happening near the coast so that he can return it to her there. After a night of drinking, smoking, and partying, the group wakes up in the field to find all other participants long gone, and when they climb back up to the road, they discover that the van has been stripped. They spend the next day on foot before arriving in another small town, where they are able to get some food and befriend a few locals and shoot some pool. They also meet two crust punks who teach them how to freight hop, and they make it all the way into Portland this way. While there, they meet and connect with a skateboarder, Micah’s cousin, and a couple of middle-aged fantasy-loving metalheads, all of whom function to allow the kids to reveal something of themselves, and to possibly reflect the kind of people that they could become. 

This is a beautifully photographed movie of deep feeling that avoids the traps of treacly sentiment. It’s rare to see a movie that so accurately reflects that cold, bright, fried lung morning after feeling, and this one certainly does. It’s also one with that particular verisimilitude that runs bone-deep in fiction film that’s made by filmmakers who cut their teeth in documentary work. A lot of how much you’ll enjoy this film will depend on what your tolerance level is for hearing teenagers talk about themselves amongst themselves, and although I understand that can be a barrier for others, I feel that the unscripted, adlibbed feeling of the dialogue covers a lot of irritation. That negative review I quoted earlier isn’t wrong, per se, in the sense that I’ve met plenty of people who, when presented with this text, would interpret it the same way. I don’t think that the film wants us in the audience to think that these kids are having life-changing realizations about themselves that are supposed to blow the minds of viewers; this is a character study of five kids who have never seen what’s over the horizon. Even if their revelations about what’s outside of their bubble may seem shallow to us, it’s so that we can reevaluate what we take for granted through their eyes, not so that we are moved by their philosophical insight. And, for what it’s worth, they also learn that the world over the horizon isn’t always what it cracks up to be either; one of my favorite jokes in the movie is that the kids learn why everything smells like shit in Portland—because that’s just how cities smell. 

The characters sell this one, honestly. That this is a story about misfits is an obvious statement; the gang even learns to trust their first friend on the road because she shows them her tattoo of the Misfits skull, which is almost too on the nose. One of the film’s major strengths is the way that it parses out little pieces of character that are revealed through dialogue. In a film that foregoes narrative devices like flashbacks in favor of a feeling of documentary realism, there’s no other way to get backstory, but it’s very well done here. Nathaly confides in another local girl that they meet in the town about her father’s recent deportation and not being sure what will happen to her now. Micah is caretaker to both of his younger siblings since his parents are both in rehab. Tony is directionless and feels that he has no other choice but to pursue a career in armed forces, which is the plight of a lot of Americans. As Makai tells the skateboarder (I want to say his name is Bernard, but I can’t find a single press kit that names anyone other than the kids), he was the only Black kid in the entire town. The film is also smart to let us know that there is conflict in the group, but to underplay it so that we don’t devote too much screen time to it and to underline the familial connection between them; for instance, the two girls are at one point pissed at Tony about something that he says offscreen, and the other two boys are hands-off. We never learn what it was that Tony said, and the only narrative contribution is that we see him looking over his shoulder at the girls as they shoot pool in the next scene, and by the next day, no one cares to bring it up again. It makes the road trip nature of the narrative have room to breathe. 

Gasoline Rainbow is a picaresque, and we get a lot of pictures of life along the way, treated respectfully at all levels, which is also a nice touch. Each of the people that we meet along the way are people that you’ve probably met. My personal favorite is the Portlandian man living on the river with whom the group stays on the last night before The End of the World. He and every one of the friends that we meet wears a black metal band tee; he used to have hair down to his waist but keeps his head shaved after an accident with a piece of industrial machinery; his walls are adorned with Game of Thrones house banners; he makes breakfast to “The Shire” from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack; and he’s nothing but joyful that he gets to, in his own words, be their Tom Bombadil. I’ve known so many different variations on this guy that I couldn’t fully shake the feeling that I had met him before, too. I liked all of the people that we met along the way, in truth, even the crust punks, and appreciated the balance between them providing some genuinely good advice while encouraging the kids to just keep going without ever making them feel like they should turn back. 

Taken on its own terms, this is a beauty, and a rare high-quality treat in its genre of contemporary coming-of-agers. There are a couple of moments where it gets a little hammy; the invocation of the word “family” in one of the kids’ voiceovers feels a bit heavy-handed, and I’m still conflicted about the film ending on seconds-long staring-to-camera close-ups of each character (its film-schooliness is apparent but it’s also very effective). If you get the chance to see this one in your market, I recommend it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

How to Have Sex (2024)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

In the somber Brits-on-holiday drama How to Have Sex, a trio of teen besties spend a week getting wasted drunk at a Greek resort built to house teens getting wasted drunk.  If they were teen boys in the early aughts, this would be a boneheaded boner comedy about virginal losers’ bumbling attempts to get laid for the first time among the Girls Gone Wild college crowd.  Since they’re teen girls in a modern drama, that same mission to ditch their virginal status before the return flight home plays like a horror film.  How to Have Sex dredged up some deeply unpleasant memories of my first couple years on my own at a binge-drinking “party college”, as well as more recent memories of being dragged out of the house by friends for a nightmarish stroll down Bourbon Street.  It’s just as terrifying onscreen as it is in person, especially the longer you sit with how realistic it is to a lot of people’s first sexual experiences inside those neon-lit Hell pits.  This is not just a film about the way alcohol violently fuels the flames of social pressure; it’s also a film about rape, even though everyone shows up eager to get each other in bed.

Mia McKenna-Bruce stars as our POV character, Taz, who travels to a MTV Spring Break-style hedonist resort with the sole intention of getting drunk and shedding her virginity.  The resort comes with its own pre-planned parties & mating rituals designed to make that dream come true, mostly by getting the already horny hordes of kids so blotto on grain alcohol that they can’t remember whether or not they’ve actually, finally done it.  There’s no room for authentic connection or intimate interaction within the cacophony of that DJ dance party dystopia, in which all the world’s a 24-hour nightclub.  It would be easy, then, to script a physically violent rape between strangers there, but first time writer-director Molly Manning Walker instead scripts a more common, less sensational kind of sexual trauma.  This is a story about the gradual erosion of consent by someone Taz knows.  She vulnerably puts herself out there for consensual sex but is rejected; then she is isolated, pressured to consent to acts she’s uncomfortable with, and then physically overpowered by her abuser once her will is fully worn down.  It’s tough to watch, mostly because it’s true to life.

In terms of recent erosion-of-consent stories about the gender politics of sexual assault, How to Have Sex is not nearly as feverishly overcharged as the service-industry thriller The Royal Hotel, nor as politically didactic as the porno-industry exposé Pleasure.  It deliberately avoids glamorizing the allure of the nonstop nightclub atmosphere, sticking to the grating, real-world details of teens sloppily gobbling cheese fries & screeching karaoke instead of depicting the fantasy of the fabulous night they’re having in their heads.  It might reframe the debaucherous mise-en-scène of a vintage Skins episode through clear-eyed sobriety of docu-fiction, but what it lacks in ecstatic cinematic style it more than makes up for in depth of character.  Taz is a real person to us, not just a symbolic victim or a political mechanism.  After her assault, she continues to think, feel, act, and react in ways that are authentic to real-life human behavior, which only amplifies the sinister inauthenticity of the world around her.  McKenna-Bruce plays the part with heartbreaking sweetness & insecurity, while Walker surrounds her with just enough sense-memory detail to put the audience right back in her ankle-breaking heels. It’s a scarily vulnerable feeling.

-Brandon Ledet

Drive-Away Dolls (2024)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

We’re coming up on nearly two years since I first started my “Summer of the Coen Brothers” marathon, where I intended to watch every one of the familial pair’s films over the course of Summer 2022. And to be fair, I almost made it! Starting with Blood Simple in May and going in mostly chronological order until I skipped over The Big Lebowski (on account of having seen it at least a hundred times already – although I circled back, don’t worry), I was moving at a pretty good clip. Then we skipped over a rewatch of No Country for Old Men to accommodate one of my friends’ schedules, and other than that one, we finished up in December of 2022, with the only outstanding unseen film in their oeuvre being 2021’s Tragedy of Macbeth. “But wait!” I hear you say. “That was a solo project for Joel! That doesn’t count!” And you might be right, but with my screening of that one still pending, I can’t speak for how much of the Coens-ness of the duo is present in it. I can say that it’s present in Ethan’s new project Drive-Away Dolls, although there is an air of … incompleteness about it. 

It’s 1999, almost 2000, and you can tell by the fact that lesbian bars still exist. Our two leads are Texas gal Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and her friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), both of whom are of the sapphic persuasion. Like most classic Coen-penned duos, they are a study in reflections and symmetries; Jamie is the drawling, energetic, oversexed libertine to Marian’s frumpily-dressed, hasn’t-been-laid-in-years bookworm. When Jamie gets kicked out for cheating by her girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), Marian puts her up, but only briefly, as she herself is traveling to Florida to visit an elderly relative and do some birding. Jamie convinces Marian to let her come along, noting that they can get a free car via a “drive away” service. I’ve never heard of this, but it apparently involves delivering an assigned vehicle to an assigned destination. I’m not sure if this service still exists or if it ever did; it’s hard to believe it would, but I imagine people who only know AirBnB learning about Couchsurfing would be similarly incredulous, so I’ll keep an open mind. Unbeknownst to them, as a result of a mix-up at the office of a surly man named Curlie (Bill Camp), the car that they are selected to transport was supposed to deliver certain extralegal goods. And, since duos are a Coen specialty, we get another one whose role is to pursue the other: two “heavies,” one a brutish, monosyllabic goon named Flint (C.J. Wilson) and the other a self-assured wannabe smooth-talker called Arliss (Joey Slotnick). They report up to a man known only as “The Chief” (Colman Domingo), who finds himself in deep trouble with a disembodied voice demanding better from the other end of the phone. 

I didn’t love this one, I’m afraid. I liked it; I liked it plenty, in fact. But there is something that’s just not quite whole about it. There are a lot of images and concepts that line up in an unexpected way at the end, which I always enjoy in a Coen production, the way the puzzle falls into place perfectly. For instance, there are several faux-80mm “groovy” psychedelic sequences that initially seem to serve as out-of-place scene transitions, but which ultimately relate to the overall plot since (spoilers), the Macguffin that the women are carrying turns out to be a case full of dildos molded by a hippie woman named Tiffany Plastercaster (Miley Cyrus) from her lovers, several of which have risen to positions of prominence and power in the intervening time. My favorite of these moments, however, comes in the form of a few dreams Marian has about her childhood, in which she had a crush on the woman next door who sunbathed in the nude, and the focus that her memories have on the neighbor’s footwear: cowboy boots, like Jamie’s. This folding back upon itself that the film does, which creates a new interpretation of what we’ve already seen and functionally bookends the plot, is complete in itself as a sum of its parts, but is still somehow lacking in transcending that arithmetic. 

I enjoyed the many references to Henry James. Throughout, Marian is seen reading The Europeans, which leads into a discussion between her and Jamie about The Portrait of a Lady, which Jamie cites as the English class assignment that turned her off of reading forever. Still later, The Chief is also reading a James novel (although I missed which one it was), and the film reveals its true title, Henry James’s Drive-Away Dykes, right before the end credits. In truth, however, the author that I couldn’t stop thinking about was Tom Robbins. There’s a real kinetic energy to Dolls at certain points, verging on the positively zany. A similar zaniness is a recurring element in Robbins’s work, and there’s just something about lesbian cowboys in the 1970s that makes it almost entirely impossible to put up a barrier in your mind between this work and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. 

“But wait!” I hear you say—how do you keep doing that?—“But wait, did you say ‘1970s?’ I thought you said it was 1999.” And you’re right! I did say that! But the overall aesthetic of Dolls is very aligned with the 70s, and it’s apparent that the film would be set in that decade were it not for the need for our very out, very lesbian leads to be able to walk around with almost no overt bigotry (they deal with less than they would have in the real world in 1999, or now, for that matter), and because the film wants to take a few namby-pamby, weak-fisted potshots at “traditionalist” reactionaries. Jamie looks like she stepped out of the past, while Marian’s work outfit features the kind of ribbon tie you see in office photos of yesteryear. When the two of them go to a “basement party” with a team of lesbian college athletes, their group rotating makeout session is not only timed out based on the A- and B-sides of a vinyl record, but the album in question is Linda Ronstadt’s Hasten Down the Wind, released in 1976. I think this movie would be more fun if it ripped off the band-aid and went full 1970s period piece. Although that wouldn’t line up with the timeline of the film’s villain having his dick duplicated during the lava lamp days, I don’t think that’s what really stopped them. 

It’s mostly a set-up so that the film can end with a newspaper headline that reveals that a Republican senator was shot outside of a lesbian bar carrying a suitcase full of dildos—haw haw—more than it is any kind of insightful or thoughtful satire. The scene in the trailer in which Marian and Jamie are asked what kind of people they are and proudly respond “We’re Democrats!” is just as awkward in the film proper. That neoliberal wishy-washiness is what makes Dolls feel like an artifact of the past, more than the near-Y2K setting, the 1970s aesthetic, or anything else. There are moments when the cartooniness works, like when Jamie and Marian start screaming when Flint and Arliss finally catch up to them, complete with zooms around the room that call to mind Raising Arizona and Crimewave, but then there are nearly as many others where that tone feels awkward and out of date. For instance, the scene where Sukie is tearfully struggling with an electric screwdriver while attempting to unmount a wall-mounted dildo, so sloppily that it’s stripping the screws, flip-flopping between rage and regret? Funny. Her punching Jamie in the face in front of a bar full of people the first time that she sees her after finding out she cheated? Not funny, and it’s made even less so by the fact that Sukie is a cop, one we’re supposed to find funny for abusing her power (a scene in which she “comedically” refuses to let an inmate see his lawyer is particularly unamusing), and whose trigger-happiness saves the day at the end. Some of it is as funny as it possibly can be, with her easy handling of Arliss and Flint when they come to her place looking for Jamie being a real standout of physical comedy, but that’s on Feldstein and her performance, and not the character as written on the page. In contrast, the character of Curlie is perfectly funny all the way through, from his insistence that Jamie not call him by his name because it’s “too familiar” to the scene where he is unable to call for help and muses aloud, “Who will save Curlie?” He’s used just enough to not become tiresome, and is a real example of the kind of richly funny “regular fellers” that permeate the landscape of the Coen tapestry, and is one of the characters that the movie is doing just right. 
The others, however, often feel flat, and there’s a real “Democrats-kneeling-in-kente-cloth / Ruthkanda forever” energy to it that undercuts what could otherwise be a more radical piece of queer art. Like Desert Hearts, it’s unusually satisfying to see WLW sexual activity as both (a) fun and (b) not for the straight male gaze. However, I’m torn about the treatment of the “Black church lady in a big hat” archetype at the end, as we finally meet Mairan’s aunt and Jamie gloats to her that the two of them are going to Massachusetts because women can get married there. On the one hand, in part, liberation means not having to pussyfoot (sorry) around one’s sexuality and identity to appease another person’s bigotry; on the other, that the filmmakers chose to end the movie on this scene specifically so we can all (presumably) laugh at a white lesbian woman making an older Black church lady uncomfortable is a choice that calls to mind the poor handling of race in The Ladykillers. I’m less torn about the scene in which the soccer team sends Flint and Arliss on a wild goose chase that ends with them in an Alabama juke joint, where the joke of the scene is that the two goons are unable to interpret the supposedly unintelligible dialogue of an older Black man. It’s got a real Trump-era SNL liberalism to it, is what I’m saying, and it clearly wants to be more radical than it is but is hampered by—to put it frankly—an older generation’s idea of liberation, and that seventeen-year idea-to-release window certainly isn’t doing it any favors. There’s a lot to enjoy and enough laughs to make it worthwhile, but it won’t be anybody’s favorite Coen project, as it feels primed to age like mayo in the sun.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Stopmotion (2024)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

A lot of the best stop-motion animation in recent years has been pure nightmare fuel.  Hellish visions like Mad God, The Wolf House, and the sickly puppetry of Violence Voyager have spoiled stop-motion freaks whose most cherished memories of the medium align more with vintage Švankmajer and Tool videos than with Wallace & Gromit or Rudolph & Hermey.  This new crop of stop-motion nightmares doesn’t bother much with plot or character; they’re more of a pure-cinema ice bath in the most grotesque, upsetting imagery their animators can mold together.  Until recently, British director Robert Morgan has ridden that wave of animated hellfire in his stop-motion horror shorts, but now that he’s graduated to his first feature, he’s proving to be a little more accommodating to audiences than Phil Tippet was in his own decades-in-the-making magnum opus.  Morgan’s film is intensely grotesque in both its imagery and its sound design the same way Mad God and The Wolf House were, but it’s much more familiar in its narrative structure and adherence to genre conventions.  It presents a small taste of pure-Hell animation for audiences who don’t have the patience for the medium’s more abstract, immersive titles, offering them frequent refuge in the relative safety of live-action drama.

Stopmotion is an artist-goes-mad horror about—shocker—a stop motion animator.  Aisling Franciosi stars as the assistant animator to her much more famous mother: an elderly, hands-on filmmaker who is losing the facilities of those aging hands, so she uses her daughter’s to complete her projects.  The daughter channels her frustration with her own stifled creativity as her mother’s “puppet” (both figuratively and by pet name) into her private, increasingly disturbing filmmaking.  She tries to find her own voice by tapping into her childhood imagination, which has stagnantly rotted into something bitter & violent.  Blacking out for hours in her isolated studio, she begins animating a cursed fairy tale about a lost girl in the woods who is hunted & tormented by a mysterious figure known as The Ash Man. She crafts both figures out of rotting meat & animal parts, making it viscerally unpleasant for anyone to visit & break her spells.  Meanwhile, she begins to expand her practice of “bringing dead things back to life” through animation by playing with her mother’s failing body . . . and by dispensing with anyone who dares interrupt her creative flow.  It’s a fairly conventional, predictable horror plot, except that it’s punctuated by scenes from the cursed fairy tale short that bubbles from the hellpits of the animator’s subconscious – its puppet players eventually escaping the screen to attack their creator in the flesh.

Despite all of the ways that Stopmotion contains & normalizes its most horrific images, it’s still a convincing testament to the dark power of creative drive.  There are few artforms as isolating as stop-motion animation, which requires long, patient hours of small movements with small results.  While our artist-in-peril’s colleagues are seeking paid, collaborative gigs for commercial work, she sinks exponentially further into the isolation of her craft.  The sounds of her concentrated breaths overloading the microphones or of her rotten meat puppets squishing under her careful manipulations are both truly unnerving and true to the nature of her chosen medium.  All that really matters here, though, is the putrid atmosphere of the Ash Man short that’s gradually doled out in a traditional, three-act fairy tale structure.  It’s upsetting in the same way Mad God & The Wolf House are; there just happens to be a lot less of it, and it’s somewhat diluted by narrative handholding that anchors it in the real world.  It’s a distinction that makes Stopmotion a good “genre” movie instead of a good “arthouse” movie, but whatever.  It’s good.

-Brandon Ledet

Heavy Petting (1989)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

If you’re going to make a formulaic talking-heads documentary about a broad cultural topic, you might as well interview David Byrne: an actual Talking Head with a distinct cultural point of view.  There’s not much to the late-80s cultural commentary doc Heavy Petting that you can’t find in most current reality-TV confessionals, in which random, fame-desperate weirdos shamelessly divulge TMI insights into their personal lives in exchange for extended screentime.  The only difference, really, is that Heavy Petting interviews vintage hipster celebrities instead of contemporary nobodies, which gives it a sharp edge over its modern competition.  David Byrne is included among the likes of Laurie Anderson, Ann Magnuson, Sandra Bernhard, Alan Ginsburg, Abbie Hoffman, and William S. Burroughs as the talking heads interviewed – a real who’s who of art-school-weirdo idols who haunted the streets of 1980s New York City.  They’re all individually sat in front of a black-void Sears & Roebuck photoshoot backdrop and asked to recount their earliest childhood memories of and experiences with sex.  For the most part, they’re surprisingly open to the interrogation, give or take a visibly irritated Burroughs, who acts as if he’s impatiently waiting for a delayed bus ride home.  There might be decades of reality TV confessionals exposing the raw sexual psyches of everyday extroverts, but there’s only one place you can go to find David Byrne talk about the mechanics of open vs. closed-mouth kissing as if he were a middle school space alien who just crash-landed his UFO into the schoolyard, eager to smooch his first earthling.

One-and-done director Obie Benz juxtaposes these personal confessionals about childhood sexual discovery with vintage propaganda reels promoting sanitized, Leave It To Beaver era sexual “health”, as well as clips of the 1950s sex icons that subverted the morals of the era.  All of the interviewees were raised in an era when Elvis & Mansfield’s wiggle, Dean & Brando’s biker leather, and Monroe’s husky whisper commodified the horned-up rebellion of rock ‘n roll for teenage consumption (during the birth & definition of The Teenager as a concept), but they were not prepared for the physical mechanics & consequences of sex through any formal education.  Rock ‘n roll got them riled up, but the unscientific gender-performance propaganda of the era left them completely clueless about the basic facts of sex: the physiology of pregnancy, the existence of sperm, the existence of the female orgasm, etc.  It’s easy to dismiss the film’s subversive use of 1950s instructional reels as an aesthetic cliche, especially after decades of these same vintage, Father Knows Best-style images being mocked on ironic postcards & bumper stickers.  However, the personal vulnerability of the interviews and the low-key insidiousness of the stock footage prove to be shockingly affecting as the widespread failure of American sex “education” curdles the ironic laughter into political fury.  The initial novelty of hearing Abbie Hoffman reminisce about a totally-hetero circle jerk he had with his childhood schoolmates gradually gave way to my own resentful memories of being raised sex-ignorant as a small-town Catholic in the exact era this film was produced, leaving little room for nostalgic kitsch since the problem never went away.

I was initially annoyed by Benz’s choice to avoid labeling his interviewees in identifying chyrons.  You either know who Ann Magnuson is or you don’t; even the final montage jokingly credits her as a “TV spokesmodel”, not the fringe actress & Bongwater poet I know her as.  When that montage reveals that a couple reality-TV level nobodies (i.e., NYC businessmen) are mixed among the more recognizable talking heads, I came around on the decision.  The movie intends to diagnose a widespread cultural rot in the rift between America’s leather-jacket horniness and America’s prudish aversion to sex education, so it’s smart to demonstrate that it’s a psychological damage that affects everyone, not just artsy-fartsy perverts.  This closing-credits reveal also pairs the subjects with their actual high school photos, confronting the audience with the faces of children who were deliberately left unprepared for healthy sexual lives in the name of Family Values.  All of the marketing for Heavy Petting promises benign Gen-X irony and repurposed 1950s kitsch, but there’s something bravely vulnerable & culturally heinous about what it unearths in its interviews and its moldy stock footage.  I found it strangely powerful and unfairly undervalued.

-Brandon Ledet

Madame Web (2024)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

There’s something very important about movies that are “so bad it’s good” (henceforth SBIG) that a lot of people don’t understand. If you look up a list of these movies, you’ll find some titles that are indisputable: Troll 2, The Room, Battlefield: Earth. But you’ll also see people citing things like Sharknado and Birdemic, and although I think those could be argued to fall under this category, what those films are lacking is a sense of honesty, of earnestness. In the last fifteen years, I can’t think of a single film that was SBIG that disqualified itself from that qualifier by virtue of being too self-aware (not counting Neil Breen, who is the exception that proves the rule). A true SBIG can’t wink at the audience, can’t show its cards, can’t let you know that it’s in on the joke, because then it’s not true. Madame Web is perhaps the first mainstream, studio-released movie in nearly two decades that’s earned this distinction. Like fellow SBIG flick Showgirls, it succeeds by having a main character whose responses to their situation are so bizarre that they’re mesmerizing, and like 1998’s Lost in Space, it’s absolutely filled to the brim with endless ideas, almost all of which are terrible. I went into this movie thinking that it might have all been a ploy by Dakota Johnson to make people forget about her involvement with the Fifty Shades movies by making sure that Madame Web was the film they thought of when they thought of her name (because, admit it, you kinda had until I just mentioned it, hadn’t you?). But by the time that the credits rolled (to The Cranberries’ “Dreams,” inexplicably), I couldn’t wait to own this movie, and I may have to go and see it in theaters again. 

You probably already know what this one is about. Johnson portrays Cassie Webb, a paramedic whose precognitive powers are awakened by a near death experience. She begins to have visions of a man named Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim) killing three young women, Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Mattie (Celeste O’Connor), and Anya (Isabela Merced), and sets out to protect them from him. She begins to connect the dots—because her web connects them all—and realizes that she has a past, um, connection to Ezekiel via her mother as, say it with me now, “he was in the Amazon with [her] mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.” As she comes to realize, the mother that she has resented for her whole life (Kerry Bishé) for choosing to be deep in the Peruvian jungle—well, not that deep, since she doesn’t work up a sweat hiking to the same spot from a bus stop later in the film, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves—despite being in her last trimester was actually there doing said spider research to prevent Cassie from developing a life-threatening muscular disorder. Also, did I mention that it’s 2003? And did we also mention that Cassie’s partner in the FDNY is Ben Parker (Adam Scott), and that his sister-in-law Mary (Emma Roberts) is heavily pregnant? 

I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun in a theater. And here’s the thing: despite the incredible negative backlash that the movie has received, it’s actually not that bad. In fact, if this had come out in 1998, it would be one of the best blockbusters of that year. Venom didn’t hit for me, but what people seemed to like about that one was the absolute batshit performance from charm machine Tom Hardy, and this movie is similar insofar as the fact that Dakota Johnson is giving a really fun performance here. Cassie is a bizarre, antisocial weirdo, and I love that for her. Before she falls from a bridge into the water and has to be rescued, the child of someone that she helped save tries to give her a drawing that he made as a way of saying thanks, she behaves as if she’s never encountered a child before and that she thinks this one is trying to give her a manila envelope full of anthrax. Ben has to tell her to take it and just throw it away somewhere else later (Cassie: “I can’t even fold it, it’s like it’s cardboard.”). When one of the other tenants in her building calls her out for leaving her junk mail in the entryway for other people to deal with, Cassie says that there should be a recycling bin for it, but it’s clearly a defensive deflection rather than a passion for the environment. When she boards a train to attend a funeral in Poughkeepsie, a man next to her asks if he is aboard the train headed to Mount Vernon, and she replies “I hope not;” later, when she is fleeing from the ceiling-crawling Ezekiel, she ends up on another train where the same man is seated, who asks again if he’s on the wrong train, and she’s just like “Man, I don’t know,” and her tone is so disdainful that I couldn’t help but fall in love with this character. 

At Mary’s baby shower, Cassie is handed a Pepsi, and Johnson does some of the most bizarre business with a canned soda that you’ve ever seen. She already handled a Mountain Dew Code Red like it was poisoned earlier in the film, but she carries around this unopened Pepsi for almost an entire scene, holding it in one hand while making a claw shape with her other hand that sort of hovers over the top, but she never opens it. I mean this in the most loving way possible, but it honestly looks like Dakota Johnson may have never opened a coke before. I wouldn’t have it any other way. There’s even a scene where Cassie is sent home by a doctor after trying to get herself tested for her “weird deja vu,” and the doctor tells her to go home and lie on the couch and watch old movies until she feels better; in the next scene, she’s watching Alistair Sim’s A Christmas Carol. This movie is not set at Christmas; in fact, everyone dresses like it’s August or September. There’s a narrative reason for this, that they want to have Cassie talk back to the TV when Scrooge asks the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come “Are these the shadows of things that must be, or are they the shadows of things that might be?”, but the fact that she’s watching a Christmas movie in the middle of the year is psychotic. And that’s not even getting into the fact that, after rescuing the three girls, she promises them that she’s not abducting them, only to drive them straight to the woods (hilarious) and then tell them that she’ll be back in three hours because she has to go home and dig through her mother’s old journals for more info about “Las Arañas,” the secret Peruvian tribe of Spider People who get powers from spider bites. 

“Flawless” movies are rare, if they exist, but this one is flawful, and although that makes it delightful in many ways, I’m not going to pretend that there aren’t some things here that are actually bad. For whatever reason, Rahim is dubbed over in every single scene, and the performance in the ADR is so flat a marble wouldn’t roll off of it. In one of his first scenes, he seduces a woman at the opera and, after they show each other a good time, he awakes next to her from his nightly nightmare, in which a slightly more grey-haired version of himself is killed by the young women that he later pursues. The nightmare sequence is fun, even if it does make it seem like the girls are not going to grow up to be heroes despite the costumes they wear and powers they display, as they do straight up murder him in his vision, but what’s even better is that he relates all of this to the woman in bed with him, babbling, talking about having foreseen his death every time he sleeps for decades. It is revealed that he targeted her specifically, as she has access to NSA tech that he can get his hacker employee (Zosia Mamet) to use to find his victims, but even before he reveals this, she should have been on her way out of the door based purely on his nonsense conspiracy talk, but she was clearly putting up with his conspiracy gobbledygook because she wanted to go a second round, and I respect that. 

The exposition is as inorganic as it could possibly be, the contemporary technology does things that are hilariously impossible, the dubbing is bad, and there are a dozen other things that you can find to complain about if that’s what movies are to you — things to complain about. That’s a way, but it isn’t my way. Maybe I just have big dumb baby brain and every time a scene opened with a shot through some kind of web-like obstruction (breezeblocks, lacy curtains, chain-link fencing, actual cobwebs on chain link fencing) or spiderwebs were evoked in broken glass or the structure of a window was the equivalent of having keys jangled in front of my face, because I was thoroughly entertained. Her web really does connect us all, and in the years to come when the immediate backlash dies down, I expect that this one will get a critical re-evaluation in the same vein as Showgirls. At long last, its hour come round again, another truly great bad movie has entered the chat. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lisa Frankenstein (2024)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Tim Burton was the very first director I recognized as an auteur, long before I knew the word.  Growing up with Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and Pee-wee’s Big Adventure in constant rotation made Burton’s ghoulish subversion of suburban utopias as easily brand-recognizable as Disney’s white-puff VHS cases.  Or so I thought.  My developing baby brain would often confuse off-brand titles like Casper, Coneheads, and Addams Family Values for genuine Burton films, something I wouldn’t clear up until I matured enough to pay attention to the credits.  Had the new Cole Sprouse zomcom Lisa Frankenstein been released 30 years ago, I’m sure I would’ve confused it for a Burton film as well.  The title indicates a mashup of classic creature-feature horror with cutesy late-80s Lisa Frank kitsch, but in practice it mashes up the cutesy-ghoulish sensibilities of opposing suburban auteurs Tim Burton & John Hughes.  There’s nothing especially new to be mined from that heavily nostalgic genre blending—especially not in a world where Heathers was around to do that work in real time—but there’s always a fresh batch of developing-baby-brain audiences out there who need their own intro to this stuff, and they could do a lot worse (mainly by watching modern era Burton).

Kathryn Newton steps in to replace Winona Ryder as the starter-pack goth girl inspo protagonist, the titular Lisa.  Adjusting to life at a new school with a new family, following the violent death of her mother, Lisa has become a quiet loner with a chip on her shoulder and an aesthetic addiction to black lace.  Armed to the fangs with Diablo Cody dialogue, she refers to her peers as “skeezers” & “beer sluts”, while thinking of herself as belonging to a special class of “people with feelings” who listen to college radio.  The only person she’ll open herself up to is a Victorian corpse played by Cole Sprouse, whom she initially meets by chatting with his gravestone and eventually resurrects from that grave through a freak, supernatural rainstorm.  The walking, grunting corpse becomes a kind of safe boytoy figurine she can confide in and play dress-up with . . . until her self-assigned outsider status gets out of control and the unlikely pair go on a killing spree.  They justify the violence by collecting functional body parts for the rotting Creature, but it’s really just an excuse to dispose of the poor souls at the top of Lisa’s personal shit list: her icy stepmother, her handsy would-be date rapist, the bad-boy crush who turns down her own advances, etc.  In short, it’s wish-fulfillment fantasy for the angstiest people alive: gothy suburban teens.

I’m no longer a gothy suburban teen myself, but I like to think I’m still young enough to remember the appeal a movie like this can hold.  One of the smartest touches of Cody’s script is the way it allows Lisa to be morally in the wrong, but in a relatable way that recalls the audience’s own lingering teen angst (while also, again, recalling Veronica Sawyer’s).  First-time director and promising young nepo-baby Zelda Williams also appeals to an older crowd in her aesthetic nods to Suburban Outsider ephemera from the past, including Burtonized dress-up montages, Smashing Pumpkins-style homages to Georges Méliès, 80s-goth needle drops, and a soul-deep fear of the tanning bed.  Unfortunately, though, the movie’s not quite zippy enough to compete with the decades of suburban horror comedies that precede it, from cultural juggernauts like Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands to VHS-era curios like Bob “The Madman” Balaban’s My Boyfriend’s Back.  Lisa Frankenstein is thankfully playful enough to avoid becoming the next victim of Age Gap Discourse despite the century’s difference between its romantic leads, which is good news for the teens who haven’t yet seen its dozens of obvious predecessors.  It’s just not funny enough to overcome its lax editing & scoring, which allow too many of its zinger punchlines to rot in dead air. 

This movie’s undeniably cute, but there’s something missing in it that pushes greatness just out of its reach.  Maybe it needed a tighter, zippier edit.  Maybe it needed the Danny Elfman touch that made Burton’s early triumphs sing.  Or maybe I just needed to be 13 again to fully love it.  With my 40s swiftly approaching on the horizon, decades after I’ve needed gateway-horror Burton titles to introduce me to the basic concepts of cinematic style, I’m okay with just liking it.

-Brandon Ledet

This is Me … Now: A Love Story (2024)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Jennifer Lopez is an amazing dancer, a magnetic actress, and . . . a singer also.  Outside her soulful tribute to Selena and the freak-chance payoff of the dance hit “Waiting for Tonight”, JLo’s decades-long singing career hasn’t produced many highlights, which is what makes it so awkward that she’s insistent on commemorating her legacy among the two towering pop acts of the current moment: Beyoncé and Taylor Swift.  Instead of sitting it out while those two titans fight for the throne in their own competing, career-defining concert films, Lopez has naively entered the fray with a couple career-recappers of her own – first, through the grand spectacle of a Superbowl halftime show (greatly aided by collaboration with Shakira) and, now, through a self-funded “visual album” retracing the steps of Beyoncé’s culture-shifter Lemonade.  This is Me … Now: A Love Story is an hour-long collection of music video vignettes, titled as a follow-up to JLo’s 2000s era pop album This is Me … Then, which is only notable for puzzling the world the personal-brand PR anthem “Jenny from the Block”.  This is Me … Now is a massive vanity project that cost $20mil of Lopez’s own money, meant to celebrate her romantic reunion of the Benifer partnership and to solidify her status as one of the great artistic minds on the modern pop landscape.  Personally, I would’ve much preferred that she just work with talented, established filmmakers like Tarsem or Soderbergh again, but at least this latest project was an interesting failure, which is more than you can say for most of her recent streaming-era acting jobs (and most of her post-90s music video work as a pop star).

This is Me … Now starts with abstract, poetic ambitions, as JLo self-narrates storybook romance fantasies about her rocky path reuniting Benifer (illustrated as an uncanny CG motorcycle crash), about her years of suffering repeated heartbreak (illustrated as uncanny CG steampunk dystopia featuring a giant mechanical heart powered by rose petals), and about her lifelong idolization of true love (illustrated by an uncanny CG hummingbird searching for its floral soulmate).  In this early stretch, it’s seemingly competing with fellow post-Lemonade projects Dirty Computer & When I Get Home to challenge the boundaries of the music video as a cinematic artform.  Then, it quickly backslides into standard-issue romcom tropes, making for a weirdly talky & plotty “visual” album.  All of the fantasy elements of the narrative are contextualized as dream sequences, each to be analyzed in therapy sessions with a teddy bear psychologist played by Fat Joe.  Teams of celebrities, factory workers, and stock romcom characters join Joe to coach JLo through her crippling love addiction so she can find her way back to her beloved Ben, a destination she can only reach by learning to love & hug her inner child (again, in a dream).  It’s all very tidy and, frankly, unimaginative, which is a shame considering the free-for-all fantasy promised in its opening heart factory sequence.  By the time the closing credits pad out the runtime for a 12-minute eternity—just barely stretching the film over the one-hour feature length finishing line—it’s clear there isn’t enough artistic drive behind this project to justify the classic MGM title card announcing it as A Movie.  Meanwhile, Lemonade, Dirty Computer, and When I Get Home all ranked among the best movies released in their respective years, regardless of form.

I’m not sure that JLo has the ability to stage her own sprawling, Tarsem-style fantasy piece, but I do think she could manage Maid in Manhattan: The Musical if tasked.  The only times This is Me … Now pays off its “so bad it’s good” irony-watching potential is in generic romcom voiceover about how people call her crazy for wanting to commit to traditional monogamous partnerships, about how she still believes in “soulmates and signs and hummingbirds,” and about how when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she always answered “In love.”  It’s a thoroughly committed “me, me, me, I, I, I” tribute to her own hungry heart, combined with a genuine cinephilic soft spot for classic romances like Singin’ in the Rain and The Way We Were.  The problem is that her artistic ambitions reach far beyond those Blockbuster Video romcom boundaries, and they ultimately prove to be an Icarian downfall that exposes her limitations as both a pop singer and a visual artist.  Of course, none of these shortcomings really matter, because This is Me … Now has already accomplished everything it set out to do; it refreshed JLo’s name in the pop stardom conversation by promoting her new album and promoting her ongoing tabloid romance with Ben Affleck.  Whether or not it’s any good is beside the point, which is generally how her pop music career at large contributes to her overall celebrity.

-Brandon Ledet

Peppermint Soda (1977)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

The 1977 French coming-of-age drama Peppermint Soda is a lovely, densely detailed memoir of school age sisters’ adolescence in 1960s Paris.  There’s nothing especially flashy or dramatic about its visual style or narrative except maybe in its choice of subject, since its matter-of-fact approach to the daily drama of young girls’ lives does feel ahead of its time.  Rather, its frankness feels cutting edge for its time, when the world was still shocked by the confessional honesty of Judy Blume, to the point where it was just a couple character names away from being retitled Dieu, tu es là? C’est moi, Marguerite.  Director Diane Kurys had never operated a camera before making Peppermint Soda but felt compelled to illustrate her childhood memories onscreen because there weren’t enough movies about teen girl adolescence being made in that era, when even the snobbier end of French cinema only made room for young boys’ coming-of-age stories like 400 Blows.  That’s a difficult context to imagine when watching the film now, since stories of its kind are so prevalent that Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret recently got an official mainstream Hollywood adaptation just last year.  While I was growing up, great girlhood nostalgia stories like Mermaids, My Girl and Now & Then, were holding more than their own against their male equivalents like The Sandlot & Stand By Me, so it seems Kurys won that particular battle in the culture war long before I saw caught up with her debut film. 

Where Peppermint Soda excels, then, is in the specificity of Kurys’s childhood details; it’s a personal touch felt as soon as her opening title card dedicating the film, “For my sister, who still hasn’t returned my orange sweater.”  Her and her sister’s avatars are a teenager & preteen in the film, just a few years but also a world apart due to the volatility of their ages.  We watch them attend school and attempt to define themselves within various interpersonal relationships for one calendar year – navigating their parents’ divorce, their teachers’ abuses of power, and their friends’ erratic teenage behavior.  Sometimes, the details of a scene are so specific to Kurys’s recollection of girlhood that they have to be pulled from personal memory, like when the younger girl awkwardly watches her older sister make out with a boy at a garage dance party.  Sometimes, the details are broadly cultural, referencing 1960s political touchstones like the Kennedy assassination to mark the otherwise timeless story’s temporal locale.  Whether the audience shares Kurys’s specific memory of growing up a girl in 1960s Paris is irrelevant, since there are universal aspects to childhood that translate to all cultural settings.  When a classroom nerd absentmindedly chews the end of her ink pen until she stains her mouth with its erupting contents, I could immediately taste the blue metallic sludge from my own childhood memories.  I was that exact kid once.  We all were, or we all at least knew one.

Kurys was smart in making the most of her modest budget and D.I.Y. filmmaking skills, whether in selecting just the right vibrant-pattern 60s curtains or in supplementing the production budget by suggesting unfilmed scenes in still, staged vacation photos.  Her eye for color & design is especially apparent in the gorgeous 2k digital scan of the film from a couple years back, wherein the saturation is cranked up in crisp detail.  In that new presentation, her visual style feels like a precursor to modern production design obsessives like Wes Anderson, as most vintage French cinema does.  In particular, there’s a teenage camping excursion that feels directly influential to the runaway romance of Moonrise Kingdom and its halfway-flippant dramatization of 1960s student protests was recently echoed in The French Dispatch.  Around the time Anderson was promoting The French Dispatch, he even programmed Peppermint Soda as part of a screening series for the French Institute Alliance Francaise devoted to his “favorite French features.”  That recommendation likely trumps anything I could say in the film’s favor in this format, so it’s safe to say that Peppermint Soda‘s poignancy & purpose has long outlasted whatever cultural fixation on teen-boy adolescence Kurys was initially attempting to counterbalance.  It’s a casually wonderful film with plenty of authentic, lived-in detail, and in a way recent American titles like Are You There God?, and Diary of a Teenage Girl feel like they’re still catching up to it.

-Brandon Ledet