rock n roll

Moonage Daydream (2022)

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Some psychedelic, “psychotronic” cinema is great because it tests the boundaries of filmmaking as an ever-evolving artform, especially cinema’s unique ability to simulate the elusive, illogical imagery of dreams.  Most of it is just a cheap way to babysit stoners.  The new David Bowie “documentary” Moonage Daydream falls firmly in that latter category, earning a prize spot among the stoner-babysitter Classic Rock “classics”: Heavy Metal, The Song Remains the Same, lava lamps, Tommy, blacklight posters, the iTunes visualizer, The Wall, etc.  It’s more of a scrapbook in motion than a proper essay film or documentary.  Or maybe it’s just the Bowie version of your local planetarium’s Pink Floyd laser show.  I do think there’s some cinematic value to that kind of stoner-pacifying psychedelic filmmaking, but the rewards are pretty limited.  It paints a beautiful backdrop for your couch-potato bong rips, then gently puts you to sleep so you can’t get into too much trouble while you’re high.

Do not watch Moonage Daydream if you want to learn about the life, loves, and art of glam rock musician David Bowie.  Do watch Moonage Daydream if you want to hear Bowie intone Headspace app meditations about life, love, and art over a randomized slideshow medley of concert footage & movie clips.  Some of the sci-fi pulp ephemera used to illustrate his lyrical mumblings make sense as mood setting for Bowie’s “alien rockstar” period as his Ziggy Stardust persona.  However, as the never-before-seen concert footage is continually interrupted by selections as disparate as Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising and Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space long after Bowie’s moved on to more grounded, coked-out material, it’s clear those clips are only included to keep the otherwise repetitive imagery freshly varied.  Bowie’s reputation as a cineaste is cited as an excuse to roll vintage sci-fi footage that looks cool alongside his music; the use of William S. Burroughs’s “cut-ups” technique in his writing is cited as an excuse to randomly quote him at his most abstractly philosophical, with no discernible reasoning behind arrangement or progression.  The whole film is about as carefully planned out as the improvised “liquid light shows” projected behind Jefferson Airplane performances in the 1960s.  It’s a Bowie-themed novelty kaleidoscope, a psychedelic “action painting” with a glam rock soundtrack.

This is not the approach to Bowie’s life, art, and legacy that I expected from documentarian Brett Morgen.  His earlier film Montage of Heck deliberately de-mystified the ethereal rock star persona of Kurt Cobain, stripping away the self-destructive romance of his memory to show how sad & dysfunctional his drug addiction made his life on a practical, real-world level.  By contrast, this montage of glam is only interested in David Bowie as an otherworldly prophet with an uncanny ability to tap into the collective unconscious through his far-out music; it’s more interested in his stage personae than his life as a real-world human being.  That approach isn’t fundamentally wrong, but it leaves little room for tracking Bowie’s progress as an artist beyond noting his relocations from London to Los Angeles to Berlin to beyond.  Since Morgen was given full blessing and access by the Bowie estate, he finds some freshly striking imagery to mine for his psychedelic freak-out montage; I was particularly tickled to see Ziggy Stardust perform at length in a slutty little kimono, conscious of his newfound status as a sex symbol.  There’s just only so much Morgen can achieve by focusing on Bowie’s finely curated surface aesthetics, and it’s not quite enough to sustain 135 minutes of continuous abstraction . . . unless it’s used as background enhancement for other, more illicit hobbies.

-Brandon Ledet

Vicious Lips (1986)

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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)

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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

Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982)

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I first heard a cassette of Pink Floyd’s The Wall as a child in the 90s, long before I had developed any sense of personal taste in pop media.  In that pre-Wikipedia world, I’m not sure I knew the album was a soundtrack for a feature film, but I do remember picturing live-action movie scenes in my mind as it played, if not only because tracks like “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2” included snippets of spoken dialogue in the music.  It wasn’t until I got to college in the aughts that the movie version of The Wall entered my life, but even at that time I imagined a wildly inaccurate version of it in my head instead of actually watching it.  By then, I was full-blown music snob, drawn almost exclusively to the sharp, concise pop perversions of punk instead of the loose, noodly prog of bands like Pink Floyd.  That’s likely why I didn’t participate in dorm room watch parties of The Wall, where dozens of my stoner classmates would cram into & cloud up a campus apartment to group-watch the film as if it were the psychedelic Rocky Horror Picture Show.  I had a very specific assumption of what The Wall was like based on that dorm room ritual, which turned out to be even less accurate than my childhood imagination of the film.  And since it’s one of many titles that have fallen through the distribution cracks in the modern streaming era, it wasn’t until I found a thrift-store DVD copy of my own that I finally cleared up my misconceptions. 

I have a couple questions about those freshman-year burnouts: What were they smoking, and where can I get some?  The Wall is visually playful & surreal enough to pass as stoner background fodder, but goddamn it’s grim.  It’s hard to imagine a dozen teenage dirtbags sincerely grappling with the film’s post-WWII grief & resentments while passing around a plastic bong.  They probably would’ve found a lot more “Whoa dude, far out!” entertainment value in the “Dark Side of the Rainbow” fan-edit of The Wizard of Oz . . . or just staring at an iTunes visualizer for a couple hours.  Technically, The Wall does deliver enough sex, drugs, and rock n roll imagery to fire up the imaginations of college-age thrill seekers, but it’s all conveyed through the perspective of an emotionally hollowed, terminally jaded rock star who’s lost the will to live.  This is less a psychedelic hedonist free-for-all then it is a cry for help, an outlet for Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters to lament his post-War childhood woes and his professional disappointments as an adult who barely survived the druggy haze of the 1970s.  If it has a guiding thesis, it’s that the Brits are not okay.  That S.O.S. message is only an extension of Waters’s own dwindling interest in life, love, and art, though, as pantomimed by fellow rock star Bob Geldof (of The Boomtown Rats) as his on-screen surrogate.  Fun!

In modern pop media terms, The Wall is Pink Floyd’s “visual album,” predating recent experiments in that medium like Lemonade, Dirty Computer, or When I Get Home.  It’s a feature-length music video, with little plot or spoken dialogue to distract from Waters’s lyrics.  Frankly, the songs themselves are not especially great, an assessment even most Pink Floyd fans would agree with.  They mostly just clear space for director Alan Parker (Angel Heart, Bugsy Malone, Evita) to play with the iconography of post-WWII Europe, as guided by Waters’s lyrics.  The composite character “Pink” (Geldof) is a lifeless, strung-out rock star with no remaining passion for his art and no remaining lust for his groupies.  He blankly stares at football & war movies on the TV, while reminiscing about a life where his father didn’t come home from the war, his mother was swallowed up by religion, the English school system wrung the life out of him, and everything else has been flavorless gruel in the decades since.  All the emotional walls, sexual hang-ups, and cultural rot of modern British masculinity are on full, grotesque display, while Nazi fascism slowly creeps back in to regain lost ground in the country’s schools, politics, hearts, and minds.  It’s all very loose & free-associative, but it paints a clear, deeply ugly picture of where Waters’s mind was at in the bitter afterglow of the 1970s.

If there’s any way in which The Wall delivers on the far-out, trippy, dorm room stoner experience that my knucklehead classmates were looking for, it’s in its tangents of psychedelic animation.  Gerald Scarfe’s animated sequences play like an alternate version of Wizards designed by Ralph Steadman instead of Ralph Bakshi.  Scarfe tinkers with the same post-War iconography as Parker, particularly in an early battlefield sequence when speeding war planes transform into flying crucifixes while decimating the land below.  A lot of his imagery is much freer to follow its own momentary whimsies, though.  A pair of flowers will have raunchy pistil-stamen sex, then transform into heroin needles & specters of death, then rearrange again to strings on a rubbery guitar neck.  If the entire film were just Scarfe illustrations of the images evoked by Waters’s lyrics, The Wall would still be oppressively grim, but I’d at least better understand its reputation as the thinking man’s Yellow Submarine.  As is, I mostly see an illustrated & pantomimed therapy session from a depressed loner who’s tired of the spotlight and bitter about his (admittedly shitty) childhood.  It’s a solid film on those terms, but I’m not in a rush to gawk at its bleak splendor again over pizza & bong rips with my closest, goofiest friends.

-Brandon Ledet

Studio 666 (2022)

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I’m not much of a Foo Fighters fan, so I probably shouldn’t be reviewing something that could be described as Foo Fighters: The Movie.  And yet, the Foo Fighters vanity project that somehow got pushed into wide distribution this year was a tribute to something I am a huge fan of: 80s metalsploitation.  Studio 666 is a goofball throwback to metalsploitation classics like Trick or Treat, Shock Em Dead, and Rock n Roll Nightmare, complete with authentic plot tropes about backwards Satanic recordings & ancient incantations that open portals to Hell.  It’s telling that even the Foo Fighters know their usual Dad Rock riffage does not hit the genre metrics of that tradition, so they traded their signature stadium sound for a thrash metal soundtrack under the pseudonym Dream Widow.  They demonstrate a genuine, nerdy appreciation for vintage metalsploitation here, so even though I don’t care much about the band, I still think it’s cute they wasted everyone’s time & energy making a tribute to the genre, then distributing it as if it were a Real Movie. 

Even if it is cute on a big-picture conceptual level, in practice Studio 666 is a constant battle between predictably awful one-liners and shockingly decent gore gags.  There isn’t much plot to fill its expansive 106min runtime.  A demon possesses Dave Grohl while he’s pushing the band to record their 10th studio album on location at a haunted house, so he slaughters his seemingly infinite bandmates one by one in increasingly gruesome ways.  There’s a lot of dead air to fill between those kills, which is mostly gobbled up by Gen-X Dad Humor about how Dude Stuff like backyard grilling rocks and new age Chick Stuff like meditation sucks.  The band slacks, cusses, shrugs, and mugs away the runtime, coasting on assumptions that the audience finds them adorable.  Thankfully, their banter is occasionally interrupted by some spectacularly gnarly gore: hammers to the skull, decapitations via gardening shears, bifurcations of the chainsaw, etc.  There’s no real invention or momentum to the kills, which punctuate the band’s hangout slacker humor instead of overpowering it, but they’re at least grotesquely tactile in a way that feels true to the splastick & metalsploitation traditions of olde.

I’m sure that dedicated fans of the Foo Fighters as the last true Stadium Rock Gods (give or take the Red Hot Chili Peppers) would find a lot more to chew on here.  If nothing else, the recent passing of the band’s second-in-command musician Taylor Hawkins adds an extra layer of morbidity to the premise, especially considering the tabloid rumors concerning his exhausted relationship with the workaholic Grohl (shown here literally working his bandmates to death).  Coming to it as a horror fan, I can’t say there’s much to mine here beyond a few retro practical effects shots and an out-of-nowhere endorsement from genre legend John Carpenter.  Still, I’m amused that it exists – at least in the abstract.  It’s charming that the biggest Guitar Rock band in the world spent their cultural capital reviving a dead horror subgenre from the Satanic Panic era, especially considering how fiercely Evangelical our culture is becoming at large (again).  If it were 20min shorter & 200% funnier it might’ve even been Good.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #159 of The Swampflix Podcast: The Song Remains the Same (1976) & Concert Films

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Welcome to Episode #159 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of classic concert films, starting with Led Zeppelin’s stoner odyssey The Song Remains the Same (1976).

00:00 Welcome

03:23 The Northman (2022)
06:01 The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022)
08:34 Con Air (1997)
12:37 Bullshit
13:54 Smooth Talk (1985)

18:53 The Song Remains the Same (1976)
34:49 Sign O The Times (1987)
47:25 Depeche Mode 101 (1989)
1:06:17 T.A.M.I. Show (1964)

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew

The Frank Tashlin School of Jayne Mansfield Studies

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Until a couple weeks ago, there were exactly two things I “knew” about Jayne Mansfield: she was a cheap imitation of Marilyn Monroe, and she died in a horrific car accident.  It turns out both of those bullet points were hazier & more complicated than I understood them to be.  Yes, Mansfield died tragically young on a late-night drive to New Orleans but, no, she was not decapitated as the sensationalist urban-legend reports of her death would have you believe.  Yes, Mansfield was often cast and marketed as a Great Value™ Marilyn Monroe alternative, but she managed to push her screen persona beyond that rigid typecasting to become her own distinct, wonderful thing.  I always thought of Jayne Mansfield as someone who starred in a couple minor roles before her life & career were abruptly cut short, but she’s got a few dozen credits to her name on IMDb—ranging from dead-serious noirs to ribald slapstick comedies—most of which have nothing to do with her designated place in Marilyn’s shadow.  I have a daunting curriculum ahead of me in parsing out exactly who Jayne Mansfield was as an onscreen persona, a too-long-delayed education I hope will override my initial, ignorant assumptions about her.

Since I’m not going to watch all three dozen of her acting credits in a single go, the best crash-course education in Jayne Mansfield studies I could figure was checking out her two most iconic roles: her collaborations with Looney Tunes legend Frank Tashlin.  Their first film together, the 1956 rock-and-roll comedy The Girl Can’t Help It, was my most obvious entry point, since it’s something I’ve seen lovingly referenced in several John Waters pictures.  Not only do the rock-and-roll teens’ reaction shots in Hairspray pull direct influence from The Girl Can’t Help It‘s various concert performances, but Waters also lovingly parodied Mansfield’s title-song strut for one of the very best gags in Pink Flamingos.  In the Frank Tashlin version, Mansfield struts down a city block in a form-fitting dress, while every man she passes on the street instantly overheats at the sight of her – milk boiling out of bottles & popcorn popping out bags in their hands like premature ejaculate.  In the John Waters version, Divine recreates the exact same strut while bewildered Baltimoreans gawk at her in confusion & disgust, stunned in total awe of her filthy divinity.  In case the connection isn’t clear, both versions are set to the Little Richard tune “The Girl Can’t Help It,” which made the Tashlin movie a must-see movie on my watchlist for years.

Unfortunately, I can’t say that The Girl Can’t Help It is the ideal Mansfield talent showcase.  It’s fantastic as a rock-and-roll concert film, featuring a wealth of standalone performances from Little Richard, Fats Domino, The Platters, and the like.  It’s also the ultimate example of a movie studio pigeonholing Mansfield as a Marilyn stand-in instead of allowing her to be her own thing.  Monroe made her secretly-smart-ditz schtick look so easy that you can only tell how tricky it is when someone else bungles it.  Mansfield is adorable as the drag club caricature of that archetype, at least, and it’s amusing that her … questionable talents are essential to the plot of her starring-role debut.  She plays the reluctant girlfriend of a gangster who’s forcing her into a nightclub-singer career she does not want (or even have the talent) to pursue.  She looks fantastic in her snatched-waist wardrobe—an effect wonderfully compounded by the endless supply of horndog men who make cartoon wolf-eyes at her—and her breathy obliviousness is a delightfully absurd exaggeration of retro femininity.  It just sucks that the comparisons to Marilyn’s similar not-so-ditzy ditzes are so unavoidable, since her character and her performance are not allowed to have the same depth & nuance as Monroe’s most iconic roles.

It wasn’t until her next Tashlin collab, the 1957 ad industry satire Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, that Mansfield really came into her own as a screen persona.  Her drag-club Marilyn caricature is adorable enough in The Girl Can’t Help It, but she pushes the act to such a transcendent extreme in the next film that the comparison is obliterated entirely.  Mansfield is pure bimbo mayhem in Rock Hunter, turning every inhale of breath into an orgasmic squeal and every costume change into a mind-blowing reveal.  Instead of playing an exaggeration of Monroe, she’s playing an exaggeration of herself – complete with verbal, metatextual references to her Girl Can’t Help It stardom.  It’s like watching a pro wrestler get assigned a go-nowhere, mood-killing gimmick and then somehow win over the crowd by playing it as a cartoonish extreme.  Even the teen girls of Rock Hunter have a crush on Mansfield, not just the men passing by, and you feel that lasting Ultimate Bimbo impact influence future women who’ve played that same archetype (notably including Elvira, whose pet poodle in Mistress of the Dark was likely an homage to Mansfield’s here).  Tashlin matches Mansfield’s nuclear zaniness in his direction of Rock Hunter too, firing off rapid-fire sex jokes and TV commercial parodies as if he were consciously bridging the temporal gap between The Marx Brothers and ZAZ.  In retrospect, The Girl Can’t Help It feels like a trial run for the film where they really set out to let loose, which tracks with the knowledge that Rock Hunter started as a Broadway stage play (also starring Mansfield) before The Girl Can’t Help It was developed.

I understand, logically, why The Girl Can’t Help It is the Tashlin-Mansfield collaboration that’s getting a spiffy new Criterion restoration.  There’s a distinct pop-art iconography to it that is undeniably potent, as indicated by the homage of its titular strut in Pink Flamingos (which is also getting a Criterion polish this year).  The movie is very proud of its technical beauty, bragging about its indulgences in “the grandeur of Cinemascope” and “the gorgeous, lifelike color of DeLuxe” in its William Castle-style intro.  It’s clear to me, though, that Tashlin & Mansfield were at their absolute best in their latter collaboration, which exaggerates everything that’s great about The Girl Can’t Help It (except the music) to a beautifully ludicrous extreme.  Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? taught me how to appreciate Jayne Mansfield as her own unique persona, breaking her out of the Marilyn Monroe impersonator box I used to store her in (despite her Rock Hunter character being written as a spoof of Monroe’s performance in The Seven Year Itch).  Now all I have to do is catch up with the thirty other Mansfield movies I haven’t seen so I can fully understand her surprisingly extensive career as an actress.  So far, I’ve only read the syllabus and skimmed the highlights; it’s time to do the coursework.

-Brandon Ledet

Streets of Fire (1984)

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I’m sure there are plenty of real-life biker gangs that have been a terrifying menace in whatever communities they rumble through, but I feel like most of my exposure to that culture has been sanitized & defanged to the point where I don’t see them as a threat.  From Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones to Vanilla Ice in Cool as Ice, there’s a long history of retro biker gangs that look tough on the screen but never actually follow through on their threats.  Likewise, most bikers I see in the streets these days appear to be bored men in midlife crisis, trying to muster up some Leather Daddy fashionability instead of just plain Dad Vibes.  Apparently, that de-emphasized biker menace bothered notorious genre filmmaker Walter Hill as well, presumably after growing up in the Marlon Brando era of biker-with-a-heart-of-gold dramas as a teenager.  Hill seemingly made an entire feature film just to make bikers feel genuinely dangerous again, terrorizing a 1980s audience with revamped black-leather bullies from his 1950s youth.

Streets of Fire is a 50s teen-delinquent throwback sleazed up with 80s music video neons.  Self-described as “a rock & roll fable” set in “another time and another place,” it exists in a make-believe limbo that covers both decades at once – the same neon-noir aesthetic as Alan Rudolph’s Trouble in Mind.  It’s basically The Wild Ones sped up for MTV sensibilities, with music-video crosscutting and a constant, aggressive drumbeat keeping the audience’s blood pumping like mad while its rabid biker gangs raise Hell up & down the streets of the fictional city of “Richmond” (read: Chicago).  Bikers get away with stripping innocent citizens nude in the street and dragging them across the asphalt trailing behind their roaring bikes as they smash every storefront window in their vicious path, but they cross a line when they kidnap a famous rock ‘n roll singer in the middle of her sold-out concert.  The heist mission to rescue that singer from biker-gang territory nearly burns the entire city to the ground, and it’s legitimately terrifying in a way few—if any—1950s biker films were allowed to be.

The only thing that really slows Streets of Fire down is its dead-eyed lead, Michael Paré, which is bizarre since the rest of the cast is packed with exciting, charismatic people you always love to see.  Willem Dafoe is a gorgeous sex goblin as the main biker villain, recalling his leather-clad brute performance in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Loveless.  Likewise, Diane Lane’s performance as the kidnapped rock ‘n roll singer feels like an MTV-era update to her persona in The Fabulous Stains, right down to the red & black color story of her wardrobe.  Rick Moranis is maybe the only main player who’s cast against type as the tough-guy music manager who hires a vigilante to rescue his missing talent, playing the part of a macho bully that’s usually reserved for men three times his size.  Paré does not bring much to the table as the mercenary hero in contrast.  He’s generically handsome, but he’s got no personality to speak of.  Walter Hill directs every single character to deliver action hero one-liners in amphetamine-rattled noir speak, and Paré’s the only one who mumbles his way through them like a long-lost Stallone brother.

While Paré is a major liability as the narrative center of attention, Hill’s high-style visual theatrics more than compensate for his lack of screen presence.  Flaming motorcycles, S&M butcher outfits, neon crosslighting, and a music video performance of the soft-rock hit “I Can Dream About You” all violently combine to make a singular genre picture – one that revitalizes a long-subdued subculture that’s rarely as tough as it looks.  For the record, Cool as Ice is also a high-style delight; I just wouldn’t say that Vanilla Ice was exactly “scary” in it.  Meanwhile, Willem Dafoe is a goddamn nightmare.

-Brandon Ledet

Leto (2019)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov is known for criticizing Russian government with his work on stage and screen, putting him high on Putin’s radar. During the final week of wrapping up and editing his most recent film, Leto, Serebrennikov was arrested for “fraud” charges, forcing him to complete his work on the film under house arrest. Many (including myself) believe this arrest was politically motivated, so the fact that Serebrennikov pushed through and completed Leto regardless of his circumstances is so badass. He even did it without being connected to the internet (Russian government took it away as part of his sentence). Leto, a musical film about Russia’s revolutionary rock movement in the early 1980s, has rebellion running through its veins. That alone is enough reason to watch this movie.

Leto (loosely translated from the Russian word for “Summer”) takes place in repressive Leningrad in the early 1980s. Rock music is loved by the Soviet Union’s youth, but older folk view it as music of the enemy because of its Western roots (influenced by Bowie, T. Rex, Lou Reed). The Leningrad Rock Club has recently opened and serves as the heart of the Soviet Union’s rock scene. The problem is that it’s overseen by the KGB and all musicians’ lyrics must be approved prior to performances. During the film’s beginning, the band Zoopark is performing at the Leningrad Rock Club to a seated audience being monitored by police. If anyone does anything beyond light claps for applause, head bobbing, and toe tapping, the police are on their ass. Watching a venue full of people quietly sitting while high-energy music is blaring through the speakers was beyond strange. Zoopark’s front man, Mike Naumenko (Roman Bilyk), is a prominent figure in this new scene. He’s a cool guy who wears sunglasses indoors and keeps things as funky as possible while following the rules of the KGB. He eventually meets Viktor Tsoi (Te Yoo), the singer and songwriter from the band Kino. Viktor is a little more rebellious with his music than Mike, but not enough to get him in jail or kicked out of the rock club. The relationship between Mike and Viktor is an interesting one. It’s hard to tell if Mike views Viktor as competition or if he wants to take Viktor under his wing and guide him through this new, growing music scene. Their relationship becomes even more confusing when Natasha (Irina Starshenbaum), Mike’s wife and mother to his child, gets permission from Mike to hook up with Viktor.

Zoopark and Kino are actual bands and Mike and Viktor are real-life members of those bands. However, this film is not considered to be a biopic. It’s more like historical fiction loosely based on two bands considered to be founding fathers of Russian rock music. There are times throughout the film where characters break the fourth wall to say, “This really didn’t happen.” prior to a scene. It’s a quirky way to remind us all that we are not watching a biopic, even though it really feels like we are. I went into this film knowing nothing about Russian rock music, much less Russian rock music from the early 80s, and I didn’t feel like I was ever not in the know. The film sort of jumps into the plot without any background or history, but its in-the-moment style is done so well that there is no need for a newcomer like me to be brought up to speed.

What really made Leto memorable for me was the film’s unique style. The entire film is in black and white (with a few flashbacks in grainy color), and there are musical moments with hand-drawn scribbles floating all over the screen. My favorite musical number was a rendition of the Talking Heads hit “Psycho Killer” during a violent train altercation. I’ve watched it multiple times. Let it be known that there aren’t that many musical numbers, so don’t avoid seeing this movie if you’re not a fan of musicals.

-Britnee Lombas

Her Smell (2019)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

There are few narrative templates as a familiar to American audiences as the rockstar addiction story, in which booze & illicit chemicals tear down celebrity gods from powerful highs to pitiful rock-bottoms. Hell, in the last year alone we’ve already seen this exact story play out in Vox Lux, Rocketman, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Dirt, and yet another A Star is Born remake in a longstanding, haggard tradition. On a plot outline level, Her Smell makes no attempt to jazz up the melody of this narrative template. It’s well aware that this is a story we’ve seen too many times before, both in the tabloids and on the big screen. If anything, everyone in the film seems well past exasperated & fed up with watching the tired rock star addiction cliché play out spectacularly around them; they’re just helpless to stop it. As faithful to & disdainful of that cliché as the film appears to be, though, it still manages to feel like a fresh, unholy terror through the virtues of its execution, which does its best to rattle the audience to the point where we’re numb, drained, and begging for release.

A large part of what distinguishes Her Smell in this crowded field is the specificity of its setting. These tortured artist addiction narratives are typically reserved for machismo-driven cock rockers like Jim Morrison, Led Zeppelin, and whatever Americana archetype Bradley Coopers was aiming for in last year’s Oscar run. By contrast, this film is a pastiche of the rock ’n roll excess stories that seeped out of the femme 90s punk bands of the riot grrrl & grunge era. The most obvious 1:1 comparison for its fictional rock ‘n roller Becky Something would be Courtney Love on her worst behavior, but the film pulls from plenty other bands’ onstage personae & backstage drama for inspiration: The Breeders, Throwing Muses, L7 , Babes in Toyland, etc., etc., etc. We see the fictional band Something She at the height of their 90s heyday only in brief interstitials of backstage videocorder footage between much lengthier, more contemporary scenes of their post-fame bickering. It’s a hyper-specific yet undeniably iconic music scene that we rarely get to see depicted in feature films, which usually do little to challenge rock ‘n roll’s outdated reputation as a boys’ club. If we’re going to watch a familiar story of drugs wrecking a rock star’s life & career play out yet again, we might as well use it as an opportunity to see something that’s a much rarer treat in filmmaking of any era: women behaving badly.

Besides the specificity of the setting, Her Smell is also elevated above its potential genre tedium by the provocateur sensibilities of its director, Alex Ross Perry. Perry brings his usual thirst for pitch-black despair & total sensory overload to this Queen of Earth follow-up, content to violently shake his audience by the shoulders for as long as anyone could possible stand it. The major evolution to his usual mode here is a newfound sense of patience. Her Smell is well over two hours long. It’s structured like a stage play, with act-length scenes stretching on for torturous eternities as its addict antagonist torments everyone unfortunate enough to be lured into her orbit. Perry at least has the decency to release some steam from the pressure cooker for a rare moment of calm halfway through the runtime that effectively serves as an intermission, but for the most part he offers very little relief from the anxiety & hurt addiction wreaks on this once vibrant, now decaying music scene. His camera offers a dizzying, unflinching tour through the backstage labyrinth hellscapes behind the concerts that justify this vile behavior, with muffled far-off crowds screaming for more like the demons of Hell. That thunderous applause mixes with subtly unnerving synth flourishes to continually disorient viewers as we’re forced to endure nightmare drug parties long after the good vibes have soured. It’s exhausting, but impressively effective.

All this preamble is really just burying the lede of what truly makes Her Smell a must-see spectacle: Elizabeth Moss. Recalling the maddening whirlwind performances of legendary actors before her like Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence or Faye Dunaway in Puzzle of a Downfall Child, Moss plays the tragic rock ‘n roller Betty Something more as a rabid animal or a natural disaster than a human woman. Usually these madwoman breakdown dramas are sympathetic portraits of someone who’s cracked under the pressures of mental illness & impossible Patriarchal ideals. Here, Moss is simply allowed to be total, unforgivable nightmare – bursting into rooms backstage like a flood that wipes out all her friends, family, and colleagues along with her. She curses professional rivals with mysterious black-magic hexes, plays with her small child like a dog temporarily excited by a new chew toy, and feeds off the adoration of her audience as an enabling signifier that she can do no wrong. We never see Moss ingest drugs onscreen, but you can read each speck of the junk on her dazed, ghoulish face. It’s an intensely physical performance that expresses all the subtlety & nuance necessary to make this somewhat generic story specific to her character, so that all Perry has to do (besides write the damn thing) is stay out of her of way and allow it to play out in its full, rabid spectacle. It’s a mesmerizing feat of a performance from one of our greatest living actors.

The final achievement that makes Her Smell an exceptional specimen of its ilk is in the quiet release of its final moments, something I wouldn’t dare spell out here even if I thought it was possible. After two full hours of being terrorized by Elizabeth Moss’s feral showboating, everyone involved is exhausted on a molecular level, allowing for a rare moment of quiet grace I can’t recall ever seeing before in this Tragic Rock ‘n Roll Addict genre. I was genuinely, emotionally moved by the final lines of Her Smell, which was something I hadn’t expected given the familiarity of this thematic material. It shames me to admit that I had much stronger feelings overall for the superficially similar swing-for-the-fences mess of Vox Lux last year. Still, it’s undeniable that Moss & Perry broke through to something truly resonant & powerful by the time this film reaches it’s closing moments of denouement – whether through the specificity of character & setting, the willingness to dwell in intense discomfort, or the perversely cathartic pleasure of watching Women Behaving Badly.

-Brandon Ledet