reviews

Without You I’m Nothing (1990)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

I’ve loved Sandra Bernhard my entire life, but I could never tell you exactly why.  I have never watched any of her stand-up specials, and it wasn’t until recent adulthood viewings of Scorsese’s King of Comedy and Madonna’s Truth or Dare that I ever saw her in anything.  Like with my lifelong admiration of fellow provocateuress Annie Sprinkle, I just appreciated Bernhard for being around.  She was easy to latch onto as a counterculture media presence without ever directly engaging with her work.  So, finally catching up with the 1990 movie adaptation of her “smash-hit” one-woman show Without You I’m Nothing was an education in all things Bernhard, completing the puzzle of what, exactly, she does and where her art fits into the larger puzzle of American pop culture.  If I was looking for a provocateur in Bernhard all these years, I certainly found one.  Consider me provoked.

My heart sank in the early minutes of Without You I’m Nothing, which starts with Bernhard performing a whitewashed caricature of Nina Simone’s “Four Women,” intoning lines like “My skin is brown” and “My hair is wooly” in a nightclub cabaret act.  The discomfort did not stop there.  Throughout the show, Bernhard impersonates iconoclastic Black performers like Sylvester, Prince, and Diana Ross in a way that tests the boundaries of where cultural appreciation ends and outright minstrelsy begins.  It’s an off-putting approach to comedy, especially if the film is your introduction to her work.  However, every time she crosses the line into full-on offensive, the edit cuts away to an audience member rolling their eyes or yawning through her set.  She’s performing these Black counterculture standards to a bored, Black audience who are perpetually on the verge of walking out the room in total disinterest.  The joke, when there is one, is always on her.

Once I fought past my initial discomfort with Bernhard’s ironic racial caricature, I started to greatly appreciate the film on its own shaky terms.  Without You I’m Nothing is absolutely fabulous as an Encyclopedia of American counterculture icons.  It sketches out a roadmap of the queer, Jewish, and Black artists who have shaped this nation’s counterculture identity through a series of sincere impersonations and highly exaggerated in-character monologues.  Bernard playfully mocks herself for carving out her own place in that lineage of legends, a hubris that’s constantly undercut by her audience’s aggressive disinterest.  In a way, it has to wrestle with a white woman taking so much influence from such an inherently Black pop culture history as America’s, so there’s something daring about the way she crosses the political lines of good taste to make herself a target for well-deserved criticism.  At the same time, I wouldn’t blame anyone who bails on the picture as early as that Nina Simone opener.  The film is incredible, essential, and highly questionable.

I can’t think of many points of comparison for Without You I’m Nothing – concert film, stand-up special, or otherwise.  The closest I can think of is Sara Silverman’s Jesus is Magic, which is likewise offensive-on-purpose, but never as sincere nor as politically purposeful.  Bernhard throws a lot of punches in this film, from mocking the ladies who lunch in Upper Manhattan for their name-dropping, art-hag frivolity to repeatedly reducing her highly publicized frenemy Madonna into a dive bar stripper.  Even when she’s lashing out, though, you get the sense that she loves all the American freaks & geeks she profiles here, especially herself.  She was incredibly audacious to think she could get away with this much button-pushing in a show entirely about her place among her pop culture obsessions and, I don’t know, maybe she didn’t.  It’s a complicated work about a complicated national history, so I’m not sure it matters whether it was entirely successful.

-Brandon Ledet

Vicious Lips (1986)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

I love Z-grade exploitation cinema as an artform.  The Roger Corman method of cranking out low-budget, high-concept features over a single weekend with a sleep-starved crew is the exact kind of behind-the-scenes underdog story that always wins my heart.  All you really need to make a successful genre picture is a good marketing hook, some pocket change, and enough film-geek enthusiasm to power through a hectic shoot.  At least, that’s the fantasy.  The reality is that making movies is almost impossibly hard no matter the scale of production, and it’s a miracle that any movie reaches completion.  While Corman can pen a memoir titled How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime with a straight face, there are plenty filmmakers who’ve adopted his same run-and-gun shooting style and fallen flat on theirs.  From what I’ve already seen, Albert Pyun is totally capable of completing quick-shoot pictures on the cheap, at one point whisking rappers like Silkk the Shocker & Ice-T off to Slovakia for one-week productions like the urban crime drama Corrupt.  His career is also littered with what-could’ve-been near misses, though, like the 80s new wave space opera Vicious Lips.

Vicious Lips is the exact kind of underdog story I love to champion.  Shot in seven days on an outstretched $100,000 budget, it fits snugly in the Roger Corman exploitation mold.  Except, Corman always finds a way to package his most chaotic productions (Blood Bath & The Raven most notorious among them) into something resembling coherence, reportedly never losing a dime. Pyun completely biffs it here.  Dream sequences, flashbacks, and an extensive second-act hangout all reek of financial & creative desperation in the editing booth, struggling to mold Vicious Lips into a complete feature.  It’s a shame, too, since the movie has a killer hook.  The titular Vicious Lips are a space-traveling New Wave band (performing the songs of real-life New Wavers Sue Saad and the Next) who go on an intergalactic road trip for the gig of a lifetime, with only a stowaway rubber-mask monster to get in their way.  It’s impossible to describe without making it sound more fun than it is.  Despite the band’s bubbly 80s mallrat aesthetics and the much-needed adrenaline injection from Milo the Venusian Manbeast, the movie barely drags itself across the finish line.  It’s barely a movie at all.

Vicious Lips starts with almost enough manic MTV editing to distract from its overall incoherence.  Unfortunately, on the band’s journey to their career-making gig at The Radioactive Dream, the film literally crash-lands on a desert planet and rots in the sun.  All of the drag makeup, glitter, pleather, and teased wigs of the music video opening are still on full display, but the band essentially just hangs around a cardboard spaceship set waiting for more production funds to come through.  Those funds never arrive.  Milo and a few thriller-video zombies chase the girls around the spaceship’s “hallways” for a bit to burn off some pent-up energy, but we’re stuck in that sunlit sandpit for a really long time without much to do except wait.  It’s a hack observation to say any Z-grade schlock resembles a sexless porno, but this particular low-budget novelty does have an exact porno corollary in New Wave Hookers – a film that, despite its own myriad of faults, at least maintains a sense of momentum & purpose from scene to scene.  Once The Vicious Lips finally get back on “the road”, the movie cruelly cuts back to earlier scenes of their impromptu desert vacation in wistful montage, dragging us back into total sunburnt stasis for a second near-eternity.  Vicious Lips should be an inspiring story of a renegade film shoot pushing beyond near-impossible conditions to make gorgeously transcendent schlock. Instead, it plays as a cautionary tale about not going into production if you don’t have all the time & funding you need to complete a picture.

There’s no reason to be too hard on Pyun here.  It’s not his fault he was working with scraps.  Besides, he’s already been punished harshly enough for his hubris.  Vicious Lips failed in theaters, was dumped direct-to-VHS outside the US, and was essentially considered “lost” until Shout Factory released it on Blu-Ray in 2017.  There’s a lot to be charmed by in its 80s MTV revision of 50s Space Age kitsch, from the main character’s birthname Judy Jetson to the half-baked futurism of its three-tittied bar wenches, “sonic bloomers” lingerie, zig-zag shaped cigars, and glowing guitars. It’s cute; it’s just also inert.  It’s probably less useful for me to drag this already little-known film’s name through the mud that it would be to recommend watching its more successful equivalent Voyage of the Rock Aliens instead.  Still, it does help illustrate the limitations of the one-week-shoot Corman model.  Those run-and-gun schlock productions are the stuff of legends when they’re pulled off well, but they are frustratingly dull when they fail to cohere.

-Brandon Ledet

Inu-Oh (2022)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

I’ve only seen two anime films in theaters so far this year, but it still feels significant that both were pop musicals.  Both also happen to feature whale-themed light shows in their stadium concert fantasy sequences, as if they were both anime adaptations of The Decemberists performing “The Mariner’s Revenge Song”.  However, whereas Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle was set in an online cotton candy future-world, Masaaki Yuasa’s Inu-Oh dials the clock back to an earthtones watercolor illustration of feudal Japan.  Despite the centuries’ distance between their settings, Belle explores the merits & limitations of seeking community online, while Inu-Oh does the same for rock n’ roll fame, which can only elevate the marginalized so high before the fascists at the top take notice & shut them down.  I greatly appreciate both films as psychedelic experiments with the outer limits of animation.  I’m surprised that Inu-Oh was my favorite of the pair, though, since my tastes lean more to the ultra-modern, ultra-femme cyber-realms of Belle.

Like all the best rock operas, Inu-Oh is specifically a glam rock opera, joining the likes of Rocky Horror, Velvet Goldmine, Hedwig, and Lisztomania at the pinnacle of the art form.  Despite anchoring itself to the historical specifics of “biwa priests” providing musical entertainment for the emperors of 14th Century Japan, its story is easily relatable to anyone who’s familiar with rise-to-fame rock n’ roll myths – especially ones that involve crossdressing, glitter, and platform boots.  The biwas are electric guitars; the emperors are record execs; the shadow-puppet lightshows are proto-pyrotechnics; it’s all accessible & familiar.  Inu-Oh details the friendship & artistic collaboration between a rebel biwa priest (lead guitarist) and a freakish mutant (rock n’ roll frontman) he meets in his travels.  The biwa player is blind and perpetually mourning the childhood loss of his father.  His singing, dancing partner is a bizarre collection of physical abnormalities, an “ugly monster” covered in scales, with eyes, mouth, and limbs drifting to unlikely locations.  Through rock n’ roll, they not only find fame & respect they’ve never been afforded as ordinary citizens, but they also find the freedom to be their true selves in public for the very first time – testing the boundaries of their gender identity, political convictions, and sexual desirability in full public display.  And then, as always, The Man gets in their way.

Comparing Inu-Oh against Belle is likely a cheap shot, since anime is more of a broad artistic medium than a niche, rigid subgenre.  If anything, it more closely resembles the other cyberpunk movie musical I saw in theaters this year: Neptune Frost.  Both Inu-Oh & Neptune Frost use the propulsive, euphoric power of music to echo the momentum & rhythms of political resistance.  They’re both celebratory of the political power the disenfranchised can find in communal solidary, while also appropriately grim in detailing how futile that power can feel in the face of systemic fascism.  In particular, Inu-Oh often plays like a love letter to provocative, gender-ambiguous rock legends like Alice Cooper, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Prince, threading them into a larger continuum of artists who challenge the political status quo.  At the same time, it reckons with the reality that a lot of similar artists on the fringe never achieve that level of fame or cultural respect; a lot of queer activists’ voices are violently snuffed out before they can be heard.  For their heart and their anger, Inu-Oh & Neptune Frost are the most politically energizing movies I’ve seen all year; they’re also the very best.

That’s not to say that Inu-Oh‘s medium isn’t a major part of its appeal.  Anime often feels like the last remaining refuge of traditional, complex animation in a world where that visual artistry is being lost to cutesy, over-simplified computer graphics.  Yuasa is highly respected in that field as one of the best of the best, thanks to psychedelic free-for-alls like Mind Game & Night is Short, Walk On Girl.  Inu-Oh matches the euphoric transcendence of its rock n’ roll music with the expressive imagination of its visual style.  When viewing the world though a blind character’s mind, we navigate a white void where sounds trigger impressions of color.  We travel backwards through the centuries in still-photo montages of devolving landscapes.  We don’t see swordfights; we see the slash of the weapon and the steam rising from the blood.  This is a gorgeous, invigorating, heartbreaking work about the bliss, power, and turmoil of rock n’ roll outsiders.  Speaking personally, it’s the best genderfucked feudal Japan glam rock opera anime I’ve ever seen, but your mileage may vary.

-Brandon Ledet

End of Days (1999)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Every year I watch an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie on my birthday as a gift to myself.  It’s a small, often private ritual that I hold sacred, and it’s one I plan months in advance.  Which version of Arnold am I going to celebrate with – the one who gets in gunfights with alligators?, the one who gives birth to a baby with his own adult face?, or maybe a double-trouble combo of Arnie clones?  The possibilities are endless.  This year, the decision was easy.  I happened to find a used DVD copy of the nü-metal Schwarzenegger relic End of Days on a thrift store shelf a few months before my birthday, making my selection obvious.  Then, just a couple days before this year’s Big Event, a tabloid new story came out about Schwarzenegger’s abhorrent behavior on the set of End of Days.  Specifically, he was accused of deliberately farting in the face of his co-star Miriam Margoles during their fight scene.  And did he apologize for this workplace transgression?  No, dear reader, he laughed.  Beyond confirming yet again that all millionaires are assholes, it was kind of a nothing news item, worthy only of a chuckle while scrolling though headlines on the old Twitter feed.  It was the easily most press End of Days has gotten in this century, though, and its timing meant that this year I was celebrating my birthday with The Fart Movie.

Anyway, the Nü-Metal Arnöld movie holds up fairly well.  There was once a time in my life where any vaguely gothy movie with a prominent KoRn single on its tie-in soundtrack was an instant 5-star classic in my eyes, so I can’t say I enjoyed it as much now as I did when it was a Blockbuster rental, but it’s still a hoot.  End of Days is a product that only could have been made in that exact spiked-collars-and-wallet-chains era, marketing itself specifically as Y2k horror.  Set “three nights before every computer fails,” the film dreads the approach of the year 2000 with the same dread Christian doomsayers approach the birth of antichrist.  In fact, it directly links the two strands of paranoia.  You see, the Mark of the Beast has been misinterpreted in modern translations of the Bible.  That “666” has been flipped by mistake, making 1999 the Year of the Beast, when Satan would return to Earth to choose his bride and the mother of his world-destroying son.  The oncoming worldwide computer crashes of Y2k appear to be coincidental, but they’re frequently cited by radio DJs in the background as a parallel end-of-the-world scenario.  In case you don’t remember, Y2k never happened the way its biggest doomsayers promised, but Gabriel Byrne sure does arrive on Earth as a father-to-be Satan in this film, and there’s only one Austrian-accented supercop in all of NYC who can stop him before it’s too late: Jericho Cane.

End of Days takes the genre mashup “action horror” about as literally as it possibly can.  Satan’s quest to become a father before the Times Square ball drops on Y2k positions the film as the 90s blockbuster version of Rosemary’s Baby, but it’s the 90s version of Rosemary’s Baby that would’ve been produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.  Sure, there are spooky Catholic ceremonies behind every locked door in every NYC church, as the city’s priests wage a secret Good vs Evil battle with the Prince of Darkness.  And there are plenty of CG demons, back-alley crucifixions, and Satanic orgies to keep the teenage edgelord KoRn fans in the audience drooling on their JNCOs.  None of it is supposed to be especially scary, though.  It’s all just badass, gothy set dressing for a standard-issue Arnie action flick, complete with helicopter chases and storefront explosions.  Schwarzenegger plays such a cliché version of an action-hero cop that he borders on parody, especially in an early scene when he’s introduced pouring coffee, pizza, Pepto, and Chinese leftovers into a blender as a makeshift hangover cure – like a noir goblin.  Luckily, that approach means he still gets to land some of his standard action hero one-liners despite the oppressive gloominess of the setting, like in a scene where he tells Satan, “I want you to go to Hell,” and Satan shoots back, “You see, the problem is sometimes Hell goes to you.”  That’s some beautiful late-90s cheese, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

End of Days has a lot of problems.  Its 2-hour runtime is super bloated for a movie with so few ideas.  Its female lead, Robin Tunney, doesn’t have much to do besides wait around as a damsel in Satanic distress (and to vaguely resemble Brittany Murphy).  Worst yet, Kevin Pollak was brought in as sarcastic comic relief, as if the producers weren’t convinced Arnie wasn’t funny enough on his own (despite being, hands down, the funniest action lead of all time) and somehow thought Kevin Frickin Pollak was the solution to that non-problem.  Still, it feels like an essential artifact in both nü-metal & Y2k genre cinema, bridging the gap between two really dumb things I cared way too much about when I was 12 years old, with my all-time favorite action star at the helm (and sometimes on the cross).  It has an interesting production history too.  Both Sam Raimi & Guillermo del Toro turned down the chance to direct before it fell in the lap of anonymous workman Peter Hyams.  It was also written with Tom Cruise in mind to star, which would’ve changed the entire tone & meaning of the project.  It’s the kind of what-could’ve-been scenario that really fires up your imagination . . . until the conversation is dominated by the fact that Schwarzenegger is a bully who farted in the face of Miriam Margoles.  Oh well, at least he didn’t fart into an open flame, since flames & explosives were such a prominent aspect of its Satanic set decoration.  A lot more people could’ve been hurt.

-Brandon Ledet

The Living Skeleton (1968)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

I once found half of a Criterion Collection boxset at a West Bank thrift store, and it felt like stumbling across gold on the sidewalk.  Two of the four titles in Criterion’s “When Horror Came to Shochiku” set were collecting dust on the shelves at Thrift City USA, where I’m used to finding Hangover sequels and Season 3 discs of The O.C.  Neither were the title I was most excited to watch from the Shochiku set, but it still felt like winning the schlock bin lottery. 

I had only heard of the “When Horror Came to Shochiku” collection thanks to an early episode of the We Love to Watch podcast, which covered the chaotic, “bug-nuts” sci-fi free-for-all Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell with the same adoration Sight & Sound contributors reserve for Vertigo & Citizen Kane.  Unfortunately, Goke was not on that thrift store shelf.  What I had in my hands were the two lesser-loved titles Genocide & The X from Outer Space, which proved to be just as wonderfully bizarre but not as well-regarded.  It wasn’t until I was invited as a guest on We Love To Watch’s current “Summer of Kaiju” series to discuss The X from Outer Space that I realized I had somehow stopped short of watching all four titles from “When Horror Came to Shochiku,” and I had missed the most prestigious of them all.

“When Horror Came to Shochiku” collects four horror films produced by the Japanese studio Shochiku in the late 1960s, when they were best known for producing melodramas by the likes of Kurosawa & Ozu.  The Living Skeleton is the only film of the batch that doesn’t feel like a market response to the supernatural disaster template established by Godzilla, so it’s the one that maybe hits closest to the studio’s usual tone.  It’s also the one that’s seemed to earn the most critical praise since the set was released a decade ago.  The Living Skeleton is a lot more subdued than the other three films on the set, telling an eerie, seaside ghost story in a literary whisper.  Personally, I was a lot more excited by the vivid, volatile pleasures of the rest of the set, but I’m generally a more enthusiastic audience for that wildly expressive end of genre filmmaking than the average online film nerd.  If you’re more likely to enjoy a respectful, traditional ghost story from a movie studio best suited for respectful, traditional melodramas, of course The Living Skeleton would be your favorite of the batch.

The X from Outer Space has the most adorably dorky monster in the kaiju canon.  Genocide & Goke have an unpredictable, chaotic approach to narrative that gets to the heart of the cultural heartbreak of post-War Japan.  The Living Skeleton is the only film in the set shot in black & white, which I think is an indicator of the more traditional, subdued version of horror it offers.  It’s a very typical ghost-revenge story, with violent rape & murder committed by pirates in the first scene avenged by the arrival of a ghost in the same seaside village years later.  Some of the black & white haunted house effects call back to the Poverty Row knockoffs of Universal’s “Famous Monsters” era, including toy bats bobbing on strings against a black background.  Others are morbidly gorgeous, including an underwater garden of skeletons anchored to the seafloor and a dreamworld burlesque show worthy of David Lynch.  It’s all well-crafted & effectively creepy, but none of it feels as memorably idiosyncratic as the other horror novelties made by Shochiku at the time – apparently to its benefit in the modern discourse.

If I’m only describing The Living Skeleton through its comparisons to the rest of the Shochiku boxset, it’s because I don’t have much to say about it any other context.  There’s an antique quality to its visual patina that puts the more recent seaside horror The Lighthouse to shame, but there’s not much about it that you can’t find elsewhere in traditionalist ghost stories of its kind.  Maybe I’m shallow for prioritizing novelty in this boxset of effects-heavy horror films, but novelty is exactly what makes the set so great as an overall group.  In a time when so many Japanese filmmakers were rushing to replicate the exact zeitgeist-torching formula that made Godzilla so immensely popular, Shochiku took that inspiration into some far-out, unpredictable directions.  With The Living Skeleton, they strayed the least far from their home turf, which makes its relative payoffs the most timid & contained.  It’s still a solidly eerie ghost story on its own terms, though, and there isn’t one stinker in the entire collection.

Ranking the Criterion “When Horror Came to Shochiku” box set, just for fun:

1. The X from Outer Space

2. Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell

3. Genocide

4. The Living Skeleton

-Brandon Ledet

Terminal USA (1993)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Three cheers for the American Genre Film Archive, who are doing the heroic work of preserving & distributing vintage outsider art in an age when practically every movie over a decade old is being snuffed out of existence, no matter how mainstream.  AGFA platforms works as essential as the coming-of-age riot grrrl sex comedy Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore and as disposable as the home-movie porn parody Bat Pussy, always with respect. My latest discovery in their catalog was, as always, a real doozy.  Terminal USA is less of a feature film than it is a Cali punk’s cracked plastic ash tray that was kicked under a mildewed couch, then given a quick spit shine after decades of nihilistic neglect.  It’s shot in a sound-stage suburban home seemingly constructed out of cardboard.  Every pronunciation of letters “s” & “t” tops out its rickety mics.  The cast aren’t acting so much as they’re talk-shouting while modeling history’s cheapest wigs.  Its cheapness is its greatest asset, a juvenile middle finger shoved in the face of the American public, who were outraged that tax money paid for its production and broadcast on PBS.  Personally, I can’t think of anything worthier of public funding than weirdo D.I.Y. art projects like this.  It would almost make me patriotic, if the film weren’t specifically about the moral, cultural rot in this nation’s arrhythmic heart.  We likely won’t ever see public funding for abrasive outsider cinema like Tongues Untied, Dottie Gets Spanked, or Terminal USA ever again, thanks to Reagan-era efforts to gut the National Endowment for the Arts.  At least niche distributors like AGFA are around to preserve the truly American art we got when the getting was good, though.  That history is always under threat of being erased from the record.

It’s worth talking broadly about mainstream America here, because Terminal USA makes such a mockery of the nation’s cultural decline, as indicated by the title.  While most satirical takes on the wounds festering just below suburbia’s manicured surface tend to come from white filmmakers (think John Waters, David Lynch, Tim Burton, etc.), Jon Moritsugu offers their lesser seen, lesser discussed Asian-American counterbalance, a grainy broadcast from the immigrant communities of the West Coast.  Moritsugu “stars” in dual roles as a snotty Cali mall punk who spits in the face of his parents’ desire to assimilate and as their better-behaved son, who fits more cleanly in the Asian-American stereotype of a model student with no social life.  It quickly turns out, of course, that the bookworm brother is the more depraved of the two, jacking off to Nazi muscle mags in his bedroom when he’s pretending to be studying math.  Their sister is a bratty cheerleader who’s desperate to sleep with the family lawyer.  Their mother is addicted to their bedridden grandfather’s prescription morphine; and the most depraved of all is their stand-up citizen father figure who’s oblivious to all his family’s barely concealed sins, frequently slipping into deranged monologues about Faith, purity, and The American Dream.  Despite all its gunshots, space aliens, and leaked porno tapes, there isn’t much of a plot to Terminal USA.  It’s a moldy family portrait, where every bizarre resident of a bland suburban home de-evolve into their worst possible selves over the course of one wretched night.  Oh yeah, and a young Gregg Turkington shows up as a local skinhead.

This is the kind of microbudget, limited-location production where the background graffiti artists get their own production design credit (attributed to Twist & Reminisce, in case you’re wondering).  Moritsugu & crew spruce up their sparse, flimsy sets with neon lights and the kinds of plastic gems you’d expect to see glued to a middle-schooler’s make-up kit.  It’s all so beautifully ugly.  The performances are just as preposterous & cheap; my biggest laugh (of many) was when Moritsugu’s dirtbag mall punk is shot in the kneecap and complains “This sucks!”.  His fingerprints & personality are highly visible all over every inch of the production, making him a true trash auteur.  And he’s accomplished a lot since he first started making 16mm punk films in the late 80s, cranking out attention-grabbing titles like Mod Fuck Explosion, Hippy Porn, and My Degeneration to consistently muted acclaim.  Terminal USA is a great introduction to his catalog, both as a snapshot of how he feels his work & persona fit in American pop culture and as proof that he’s a genuine provocateur, pissing off a lot of uptight conservatives with a seething hatred for The Arts.  I have no clue how easily accessible the rest of his titles are, but I doubt many have been as lovingly restored & presented as this AGFA scan of that trashteur calling card – a pristine image of a hideous nation.

-Brandon Ledet

Far from the Madding Crowd (2015)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

A few weeks ago, there was a lot of journalistic handwringing over the Twitter bots behind the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut “movement”, following reports that at least 13% of the accounts behind that online uproar were 100% fake.  I’m not sure what part of that revelation was supposed to be a shock, except that maybe 13% feels like a low-end estimate.  Anyone who’s ever been tortured by a Twitter-feed algorithm should be well used to seeing a nonstop flood of automated, incoherent “opinions” posted by fake accounts.  That’s especially true when it comes to superhero movie discourse, which I’m convinced alone accounts for at least 13% of all non-pornographic internet traffic.  It’s much more shocking when that kind of organized bot-posting swells up around something that doesn’t involve superheroes, like the out-of-nowhere outrage over 2020’s Cuties or the more recent, even more preposterous outrage over the Jane Austen adaptation Persuasion.  When the trailer for Netflix’s cheeky, modernized version of Persuasion was released, there were plenty of sincere (even if hyperbolic) complaints about how it bungled the tone of the source material, marketing one of Austen’s most heartbreaking dramas as a Clueless-style comedy for Zoomers.  That Austen Fan Club outrage must’ve “done some numbers,” because every third post on my Twitter feed for weeks was labeled “Trending: Dakota Johnson”, with hundreds of accounts named “AustenFreak347492947” complaining that Austen didn’t know what a playlist was, so she would not have written that screenplay.  I’m not going to weigh in on whether Johnson’s flippant zingers about playlists & exes are appropriately respectful to the source material, since I have neither seen the film nor read the novel.  I just think it’s bizarre that any Austen adaptation could generate the same kind of widespread, automated online outrage as a $300mil superhero epic, much less something as insubstantial as a Netflix Original.

If there’s anything to be learned from the Austen & Snyder debacles—both real & fake—it’s that creators do not need to listen to The Fans.  Maybe the hardcore Persuasionheads out there had a genuine point about how that specific work was inappropriate for a playfully modern, Fleabag-style update.  That sentiment quickly backslid into inane, astroturfed discourse about how any straying from the tone & text of any movie’s source material is somehow shameful.  It’s the same pedantic, close-minded thinking that sends comic book nerds into belligerent rages about “faithfulness”, except this time it’s dressed up in lacy bodices instead of spandex & capes.  Worse, it leads to boring, unimaginative movies.  I happened to watch the 2015 adaptation of the Thomas Hardy novel Far from the Madding Crowd around the time of the Austen Bot invasion, and it was heavily weighed down by faithfulness.  Determined to hit every plot point of the novel, Thomas Vinterberg plows through the events of the text like a video game speed run, cramming decades of love & loss into what appears to be two page turns of a calendar.  It’s a prolonged, episodic storytelling style that feels more at home in a BBC miniseries than a mid-budget Oscar contender. Bot outrage over movie adaptations taking creative liberties with their source texts feels just as juvenile as complaints about sex scenes that don’t “advance the plot”.  If that kind of indulgence bothers you, I promise you’d be much happier just watching TV instead of movies.  At its best, cinema is streamlined & poetically expressive; it also says just as much about the time when it’s made as it does about the time when it’s set.  Maybe the new Persuasion movie didn’t update & reinterpret Austen’s novel especially well, but the attempt to do so shouldn’t be an offense in itself.  At least, I found myself wishing Vinterberg had shaken up Hardy’s novel a little himself, instead of carefully coloring within the lines drawn out a century earlier.

All that said, the central conflict of Far from the Madding Crowd is compelling even without embellishment, and it’s obvious enough why it’s been adapted several times over the decades.  Usually, in these literary costume dramas our heroine has to choose between two potential beaus: one that looks good on paper and one that feels right in her heart.  Hardy explodes that template by throwing in a third wild card option that fucks everything up for everyone involved.  Carey Mulligan stars as an independently wealthy landowner who’s reluctant to become “some man’s property” through marriage.  Michael Sheen plays her potential mate who looks best on paper, proposing to merge their two adjacent estates into one enormous, profitable empire.  Matthias Schoenaerts is the beau who feels right in her heart – a once-independent farmer who falls on hard times and dedicates the rest of his life in service of her success instead of his own, patiently waiting for her to admit to herself that she loves him.  And then there’s Tom Sturridge as the toxic fuckboy military man who breaks up that classic love triangle with a sudden rush of sex & chaos, challenging Mulligan’s self-image as a strong, independent thinker by directly appealing to her libido.  It’s all very well performed and narratively engaging (especially if you aren’t already familiar with where it’s going), but it doesn’t offer much in the way of interpretation or personalization.  If anything, Vinterberg is outright stubborn in his refusal to modernize, shooting this traditionally lit & costumed drama through a modern digital grain that feels like a tug of war between form & content.  The 2015 version of Far from the Madding Crowd is perfectly serviceable if you’re looking for any old costume drama to fill up your Sunday afternoon, but there’s nothing especially urgent or unique about what it has to offer within that genre outside illustrating the scene-to-scene events of its source text.

Of course, the two most exciting elements of Vinterberg’s Far from the Madding Crowd are the ones where he does modernize the novel.  There’s something thrilling about Mulligan’s wardrobe in particular, which conveys her badass girlboss independence by toughening up her 19th Century fashions with leather, denim, and pants.  The hypegirl sidekick she adopts when she first starts running her own farm is also a distinctly modern thrill, played with flippant Gen-Z sass by The End of the Fucking World‘s Jessica Barden.  Hardy’s novel is already packed with enough sex, death, and cruelty to feel freshly modern in comparison to buttoned-up costume dramas of the past, but Mulligan’s heavy denim dress and Barden’s aggressive brattiness are really what brings the film up to date.  Personally, I’m a sucker for that kind of modern intrusion into historical settings.  When Sofia Coppola snuck some Chucks into Marie Antoinette’s shoe closet, I was cheering while the most boring nerds in the room were rolling their eyes.  The very best Austen adaptations of my lifetime have all been cheekily modern, like Autumn De Wild’s Emma., Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship and, of course, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless.  I’m sure there are plenty of very real people who had very legitimate reasons for balking at that Persuasion trailer, but I would also like to think, for my own sanity, that most of the ones complaining that Jane Austen didn’t know about playlists were the softer side of Snyder bots.  There has to be more to movies than just faithfully illustrating the literal events of their source texts as they were written.  Otherwise, we’ve completely lost the dividing line between art & content, a thought too grim to bear.

-Brandon Ledet

Gigli (2003)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

So far, the most wholesome, unexpected pop culture news of the year has been the out-of-nowhere reboot of Bennifer.  In this age of division & strife, isn’t it nice that we can all gather around to celebrate two smoking hot millionaires who love boning each other?  JLo beaming in her Vegas wedding gown; a scruffy Battfleck taking dad-naps on yachts with his hand resting gracefully on his bride’s world-famous ass . . . Everything just feels right again.  It’s worth remembering, though, that even something as beautiful & pure as Bennifer was born the darkest, dankest of pop culture dungeons – just as every rose has its thorn and every cowboy sings his sad, sad song.  Jennifer Lopez & Ben Affleck first fell for each other on the set of the 2003 crime “comedy” Gigli, which lost roughly $70mil at the box office and was instantly reviled as one of the worst motion pictures of all time.  Starting off on such a sour note would have tanked most couples, but Bennifer soldiered on to collaborate on such beloved art projects as Kevin Smith’s Jersey Girl, JLo’s “Jenny from the Block” music video and, of course, an endless procession of tabloid headlines.  May they never separate again.

In case you’re as morbidly curious as I am, and you also happen to find a used DVD copy of Gigli at your local thrift store, please know that it is a total “DEAD DOVE, DO NOT EAT” proposition.  There is no room for critical revisionism here.  Gigli is just as bad as originally reported.  It’s worse than bad, actually.  It’s deeply embarrassing.  It’s an early-aughts hangover from the post-Tarantino 90s, the kind of wryly overwritten gangster comedies like Get Shorty & Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag that were convinced saying “fuck” every three words was all you needed to seem funny & cool.  Affleck appears in greased hair & loose bowling shirts as the titular Gigli (a name he hates hearing pronounced “jiggly” or “giggly”, which means you should definitely go for it).   He’s a low-level gangster assigned by his higher-ups to kidnap the brother of a federal prosecutor as political leverage before a mob-busting trial.  Only, the hostage in question is an intellectually disabled horndog who acts like a toddler with the world’s biggest boner for Baywatch.  Queasy hijinks ensue as the uptight, macho Affleck butts heads with the loveable goof in his care.  Then things get even queasier when he’s forced to co-parent with a fellow low-level gangster played by Lopez – a lesbian that Gigli is determined to convert through the seductive power of unchecked machismo (positioning the film as Elmore Leonard’s Chasing Amy).

The frustrating thing about Gigli is that the sexual chemistry between Lopez & Affleck is genuinely explosive.  The basic premise of a macho gangster wooing his way into a lesbian’s bed is boneheaded, but it actually leads to some interesting sexual power dynamics between the two leads.  The meathead argues his case by expounding upon the natural marvel of dicks & dildos in faux-philosophical monologue, and his lesbian adversary shoots back that “The mouth is the twin sister of the vagina” with equally mighty inanity, giving him lots to chew on (“gobble gobble”).  She warms herself up to the idea of sleeping with the galoot by softly forcefemming him, making him question his own gender identity – a kinky undercurrent made even more arousing by how rottenly into each other Bennifer obviously are out-of-character.  It’s too bad, then, that every other aspect of the movie is so deeply unpleasant and determined to self-sabotage.  Every time their unlikely, problematic romance heats up, it’s quickly deflated by the film’s catastrophic choice of comic relief: the neurodivergent tics of its only disabled character.  Their hostage raps to old-school hip-hop tracks in a “funny” voice; he shouts random catchphrases as if he has Tourette’s; and he just won’t stop slobbering over the boobs on Baywatch.  It’s not just unfunny; it’s cruel.  And it ruins any enjoyment that could possibly be found elsewhere in the picture.

If we’re rebooting Bennifer in the 2020s, maybe it’s time we also reboot Gigli as a straight-up erotic thriller.  Drop the ableist punchlines and just stick to JLo breaking down her new husband’s gender barriers in a steamy power struggle at the outskirts of the crime world.  The only problem there is that the erotic thriller version would definitely stick to the film’s original, discarded ending, in which the lesbian character was shot dead for her moral transgressions (because of course she was).  You know what?  Scratch that.  Let’s never speak of Gigli again.  The return of Bennifer has given us all a culture-wide goofball smile, and there’s really no reason to spoil that vibe with a return to its sour beginnings.  Unless, of course, you really need to see JLo model the low-rise jeans, exposed midriffs, and gigantic belt buckles of early-aughts fashion.  It’s at least good for that.

-Brandon Ledet

Looop Lapeta (2022)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

The only time I’ve ever seen the high-style, high-energy time loop thriller Run Lola Run was at a free screening for LSU students back in the early aughts.  It was a great programming choice for entertaining a crowd of stoned, Adderall-addled freshmen with a collective attention span of mere seconds, but even then it felt like an ancient artifact from another time & place, just a few years after its initial release.  Run Lola Run is tweaked-out Euro trash pop art that only could have been made in the 1990s, a rave culture video game for the MTV era.  That’s why it seemed so absurd all these decades later that a straight-to-Netflix Bollywood remake of the film would attempt to recapture that time-specific magic.  I was already out of sync with the Hackers-on-ecstasy raver energy of the light-hearted German thriller back in the early 2000s, so I wasn’t sure what Looop Lapeta was expecting to mine from it in the 2020s.

That uncertainty was cleared up in the first scene, when our heroine starts her time loop staring in a bathroom mirror, contemplating her life choices (especially her casual drug use and unexpected pregnancy) on the occasion of her birthday.  As she keeps resetting her day to that bathroom-mirror birthday epiphany, it’s quickly apparent that Looop Lapeta doubles as both a decades-late Bollywood remake of Run Lola Run and a timely Bollywood remake of Russian Doll.  Neither comparison does it any favors, really, but at least the decision to revive Run Lola Run makes more sense when you consider it in the context of all the #timeloopcontent that has been flooding Netflix & other streaming platforms in the Russian Doll era.  This is a movie obsessed with and weighed down by context too, considering all the backstory it piles on the barebones Run Lola Run plot template – from why our heroine runs so much (she’s a former Olympic athlete) to why she’s so emotionally dependent on her dirtbag boyfriend (he saved her from killing herself when her Olympic dreams were crushed).  Even the time loop she’s stuck in while attempting to stop her favorite fuckboy from ruining their lives with a botched armed robbery is stretched out from Run Lola Run‘s original 20-minute cycle to 50 minutes, indicating just how weighed down it is by extraneous narrative clutter.  It updates Run Lola Run by halfway converting it into a TV show – often a broad sitcom where the jokes rarely land.

Besides the recent popularity of high-concept time loop stories, Looop Lapeta also appears attracted to the rebellious counterculture posturing of Run Lola Run.  It takes advantage of the amoral freedom of working with Netflix as much as it can, raising a middle finger directly at the camera in bratty defiance.  Whereas most mainstream Indian films I’ve seen in recent years are slapped with moralistic warnings about the dangers of cigarettes & alcohol, Looop Lapeta goes out of its way to highlight how cool swearing, pot-smoking, and premarital sex make its heroine look.  It’s about as dangerous as an anarchy symbol scribbled on a middle schooler’s notebook, but it makes the film stand out in the context of its industry.  That kind of hedonistic behavior is more akin to Russian Doll than Run Lola Run in terms of actual on-screen content (Lola, as you will remember, mostly just runs), but it’s a juvenile version of rebelliousness that is stilly fully visible in its 1998 source material.

I’m just not convinced Looop Lapeta ever matches Run Lola Run in terms of style.  Run Lola Run is all style, no substance (gloriously so), while Looop Lapeta is all substance in search of some sense of style.  It updates the camcorder footage from Run Lola Run to its contemporary equivalent in smartphone framing, and it has occasional fun with crosslighting & low music video angles, but for the most part its style feels limp & inert.  Inviting comparisons to such a propulsive, dizzying free-for-all only undercuts its own occasional attempts at high-style filmmaking, especially since everything in-between those touches plays like a shot-for-Netflix sitcom.  The most Looop Lapeta did for me is make me want to revisit Run Lola Run, a college campus classic, and to be more selective with my straight-to-Netflix genre viewings.  It’s harmless, but it’s also inessential – especially considering how many time loop movies we’ve seen in the past few years (Edge of Tomorrow, Happy Death Day, Palm Springs, The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, etc. etc. etc.).

-Brandon Ledet

Love and Leashes (2022)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

The two genres I’ve noticed thriving exclusively on Netflix in recent years have been cutesy romcoms and steamy erotica.  The erotic thriller heyday of the Verhoeven 80s and the romcom heyday of the Meg Ryan 90s have long been absent from theatrical marquees, so Netflix has stepped in to, um, fill those gaps, so to speak.  Somewhere between the quiet success of titles like 365 Days (erotic), To All the Boys I’ve Love Before (romantic), Deadly Illusions (erotic), and Always Be My Maybe (romantic), the streaming behemoth has gotten its algorithmic wires crossed and decided to split the difference with an erotic romcom set in the Korean kink scene, Love and Leashes.  Not since Gary Marshall’s Exit to Eden has kink play been treated with such a fluffy, mainstream, sexless touch (unless, of course, you include other recent Netflix properties like the kink-themed sitcom Bonding or the kink-themed home improvement show How to Build a Sex Room).  And since Netflix does not share verifiable data about their streaming numbers, we’ll never know how much demand there is for such an unlikely mix of theme & tone . . . unless they start commissioning more romcom erotica to fill out their splash page in the next couple years.  All I can say for now is that Love and Leashes is as adorable as its existence is absurd.

This is a cutesy, formulaic comedy about an unexpected BDSM office romance, essentially Secretary re-imagined as a femdom romcom.  When a new hire at a media marketing firm risks having his human dog collar shipped to work, his vanilla (but kink-curious) coworker accidentally receives the package instead. In their struggle for possession, the seedy Amazon order flies in the air as they both fall to the ground, flustered.  It’s a kinky re-imagining of the standard dog walking meet-cute of two destined-to-fuck strangers getting tangled up in leashes while trying not to spill their Starbucks orders.  Only, the rope bondage comes much later in the plot.  The man is sensitive and turned on by masochistic play; the woman is naturally bossy but uninitiated to the scene.  She finds a genuine thrill in transgressing the assumed submissiveness of her gender roles, though. She also uses the excuse of learning more about her new co-worker’s fetishes to attempt dating him in a more traditional, romantic dynamic.  Sometimes they play at work, charged by the thrill of potentially getting caught.  More often, they test the uneasy waters of their new mistress/sub dynamic in hotel rooms and in public, both pretending they’re only into the kink activities, not each other (for reasons that can only be explained as Romcom Brain).  It’s the kind of nothing conflict that could be solved by a single, honest conversation, but that’s true of most romcoms, with or without the leather gear.

Of course, there’s an inherent incompatibility in attempting a romcom/erotica genre mashup; most traditional romcoms are excessively chaste.  As a result, Love and Leashes is strangely sexless, considering all the butt plugs, harnesses, and ball gags that hang in the background as set decoration.  In terms of actual, onscreen sexual activity, the most we get is some flogging, hair-pulling, foot worship, rope bondage, and the same dripped-wax fantasy as the “Livin’ La Vida Loca” music video.  We can hear sex in the next hotel room over, but we’re in the room where a man is wearing a leash and yipping like a dog for comic effect – no insertions necessary.  This might have bothered me more if the pup’s mistress-in-training didn’t ask (in Sex and the City-style narration) “Is it weird to play this hard without having sex?”, noting the absurdity of their chaste dynamic.  She spends a lot of time online researching the standard dynamics of domme-sub relationships and chatting up anonymous kink veterans on message boards for newbie tips (setting up an obligatory, last-minute Gossip Girl reveal), totally unaware of how much sex she should be having with the sub under her “control.”  A lot of the central conflict is in the weirdly out-of-sync couple finding a way to enjoy transgressive kink play and start up a traditional, adorable romance on vanilla dates – the same conflict the movie has in its own dueling tones.

This is both my first K-drama and the first movie I’ve seen adapted from a “webtoon” (originally titled Moral Sense), so I can’t speak to how well Love and Leashes translates its source material to a new medium.  I’m an expert in scouring Netflix for low-level horny novelties, though, and it’s one of the better attempts at harmless erotica I’ve seen on the platform.  It’s a little sexually timid & cruelly overlong, but it’s a decent throwback romcom with just enough naughtiness to make the genre’s stalest tropes feel freshly amusing & cute.  The obvious next step for the platform is to get into the business of romcom softcore, but we’ll have to see how well this mashup does before they take that risk.

-Brandon Ledet