romance

The Puffy Chair (2005)

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I’m not fully sure where the current film culture consensus is on the Duplass Brothers. They’ve been quietly making low-budget indie dramedies for two decades now, and the larger cultural response to their work has remained at the same low, continual hum. Back when they started in the mumblecore days of the early 2000s, however, their performatively unpretentious filmmaking style made a relatively big splash in the industry, enough to convince established heavy hitters like Jonathan Demme to try their own hand at aggressively casual digicam dramas like Rachel Getting Married. I suppose I feel some personal affection for the Duplasses as Metairie-boys-made-good locals who’ve survived in an industry that’s since moved on after mumblecore’s brief moment in the Sundance sunshine, but I only occasionally dip into their work when it touches on genres I frequent, like the camcorder horror Creep or the sci-fi whatsit Biosphere. Given the wider cultural apathy for their indie cinema contributions (alongside an even harsher indifference to fellow mumblecore pioneer Joe Swanberg), I was surprised, then, that their breakout debut The Puffy Chair was given a 20th anniversary victory-lap release this month, celebrating two decades of quiet, low-budget crowd displeasers from our old pals Mark & Jay.

Mark Duplass stars in this go-nowhere road trip drama, co-written and co-directed with his brother Jay. It’s partially a movie about brothers, contrasting the frustratingly rigid, stubborn personality of Mark’s protagonist with the free-spirit openness of his fictional brother, a habitually jobless artist (Rhett Wilkins). More so, it’s a movie about bros, examining the quirks & kinks of the modern hetero male ego and finding the entire gender lacking in morality & merit. Our two brothers in crisis embark on a road trip to purchase the titular La-Z-Boy recliner as surprise gift for their father’s birthday, hoping to stage a family reunion with a familiar relic from their familial past in tow. They butt heads on the trip, as brothers do, but most of their personal issues arise from their relationships with women. The free spirit in the van falls in love just as quickly as he falls out of it, while our egotistical anti-hero drags out a doomed romance with a long-term girlfriend (Katie Aselton) whom he’d rather bicker with than commit to. The entire trip is shot on handheld, commercial grade digicams as if it were a documentary, and the only major splurge in the budget is the puffy La-Z-Boy, which goes through as much anguished hell as the characters who drag it down the highway. It’s all low-stakes, mildly funny malaise until late-night alcohol binges make the romantic arguments too vicious to bare, and the characters take their frustrations out on the chair instead of parting ways like they should.

The broey sensibilities of The Puffy Chair aren’t an accident; they’re deliberately evoked as a kind of self-skewering. Every detail about Mark Duplass’s self-assured asshole protagonist is seemingly designed to parody an early-aughts indie-scene bro archetype: his floppy hair cut, his American Apparel hoodie, his tighty-whities, his entrepreneurial pursuits as a failed musician turned band manager, his name being Josh. This very clearly a “depiction ≠ endorsement” situation, with the film’s main mission being a character study of the minute ways that Josh is a self-centered prick. Still, there is a kind of default-macho POV emanating from behind the camera that doesn’t feel entirely pointed or intentional, and that broey sensibility might help illuminate why the Duplasses have quietly drifted from the center of the indie filmmaking scene over the past couple decades. The same day that I watched The Puffy Chair in theaters, I had streamed Shudder’s feminist talking-heads documentary 1000 Women in Horror at home, in which women filmmakers are interviewed about their participation in & appreciate of the genre. In it, actor-turned-director Brea Grant relays an anecdote about her early days as a performer where she frequently had to ask male screenwriters what her character does for a living, since she could get no sense of who they were as a person outside their relationships to the male leads. That question echoed in my mind hours later watching The Puffy Chair. Does Josh’s girlfriend have a job? Does she have a life outside the world of Josh? It’s impossible to say.

It’s funny that this movie’s quiet re-release has coincided with a wider cultural celebration of the TV series Nirvanna the Band, which got its own theatrical victory lap earlier this year with Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Both movies parodically skewer the same early-aughts indie scene bro archetype; Nirvanna the Band just has an easier time winning an audience over with overt humor while The Puffy Chair feels sadistically eager to dwell in discomfort. Between them, I feel like I’ve accidentally stumbled into a cursed time machine that only goes back to my worst college years. Their respective soundtracks are a major part of that temporal displacement, with Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie kicking off on a vintage Ben Folds track, while The Puffy Chair includes college-radio hits from Death Cab for Cutie, Spoon, and Of Montreal – all bands that have been collecting cultural dust since the dingiest days of the flip-phone aughts. While last year’s Secret Mall Apartment attempted to revive the new-sincerity hopefulness of the 2000s indie scene, The Puffy Chair & Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie brought me back to that decade as I actually remember it: grotesquely broey, depressed, poorly dressed, in standard definition. To their credit, The Duplasses appear to have been hyper aware of the era’s faults & foibles as they were happening, ready to be captured on MiniDV tapes for Sundance festival audiences’ squirmy mortification.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: High Art (1998)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Brandon & Britnee discuss the drugged-out indie romance High Art (1998), directly following its recent Gap Tooth screening at The Broad.

00:00 Vinegar Syndrome Denver
10:16 Fackham Hall (2025)
14:05 Thank God It’s Friday (1978)

22:50 High Art (1998)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

“Wuthering Heights” (2026)

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Brandon has already written about Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” and although I was forewarned, my own love for the source material meant that, sooner or later, I was going to have to check this hot mess out for myself. And what a mess it is! Not as hot as one would expect, though, given that the director’s stated intention with this adaptation has been to recreate the horniness that she presumes is the universal experience of all first time readers. The thing about ”Wuthering Heights” is that the text I found myself thinking about most often while watching it wasn’t the novel itself or any of the prior adaptations, but Wicked: For Good. In writing about that film, I posited that its greatest flaw is also its greatest weakness: it only exists as a commercial product because of its connection to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its offshoots, sequels, and adaptations as a brand. The first half of the play (and the earlier film that adapted only that opening half) is allowed to find all sorts of fun things to explore within the “canon” of Oz, since the only thing it carries over is the necessity that, at some point, the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch must eventually become enemies, in the public eye if not in reality. Everything else is fair game. In the second half of the play, which became For Good, every action exists in service of putting the characters from Wizard of Oz into the positions that they will be when Dorothy meets them upon her arrival in the fairy land, so characters march lock-step toward their places in the canon regardless of whether that works on a narrative, character, or even emotionally meaningful level. “Wuthering Heights” has the same problem. I’m not going to say it’s a bad movie because it’s a bad adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which it most certainly is, but it’s a bad movie because it’s an attempt at adapting Emily Brontë’s novel at all. 

Widower Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), the tenant of farmhouse Wuthering Heights, returns home from the city with a young boy in tow, whom he “rescued” from a life of being abused by a drunken father so that he can come to the Heights and be abused by a drunken stranger instead. He gives the boy to his daughter, Cathy, who names the child “Heathcliff, after my dead brother,” and the two form a fast friendship. Also present in the household is Nelly, who as the bastard daughter of a lord is not entitled to recognition or shelter, but is welcome to act as the formal companion to Cathy; this relationship is challenged by Cathy’s burgeoning devotion to Heathcliff, who absorbs some of Earnshaw’s parental abuse. Some years later, Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) watch as a procession of carriages deliver their new neighbors, The Lintons, to the manor of Thrushcross Grange. Cathy, who has been raised with no mother and is thus somewhat as wild and unmannered as her lowborn foster brother, sneaks up to spy on Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) and his “ward” Isabella (Alison Oliver) and ends up injuring her ankle and being hosted at Thrushcross Grange for several weeks to recuperate. She returns to Wuthering Heights “quite the lady” and admits to Nelly (Hong Chau) that she has fallen in love with Linton and will marry him; she says aloud that she cannot marry Heathcliff because of their vast social class gap, and Nelly, knowing that Heathcliff has overheard this, keeps this information to herself. Linton and Catherine marry, Heathcliff leaves, Catherine becomes pregnant, and Heathcliff returns, at which point Catherine learns that Nelly allowed him to believe that Catherine didn’t love him. Heathcliff marries Isabella, but he and Catherine begin a brief, torrid affair that ends in tragedy. 

If you’re familiar with the novel (or any of its more faithful adaptations, although there are surprisingly few), then that synopsis undoubtedly feels strange to you. It’s like Brontë’s in some ways; the character names are the same and some of the larger events from the novel are present. The exclusion of Hindley, Cathy’s brother and Heathcliff’s primary tormentor (and thus also his wife and child), is very jarring, as is the complete absence of Mrs. Earnshaw. Earnshaw family employee Joseph has also been aged down and cast with a handsome actor (Ewan Mitchell), eschewing the novel Joseph’s characterization as a religious zealot and instead giving him the chance to engage in kinky, largely unseen BDSM with one of the housemaids so that Heathcliff and Cathy can observe them surreptitiously in a way that sets both characters’ sexual imaginations ablaze. Most adaptations focus solely on the Cathy/Heathcliff story and leave out the entire plot about the second generation that constitutes the entire second half of Wuthering Heights, so its excision here isn’t surprising, but knowing that it doesn’t need to take that into consideration, “Wuthering Heights” decides to instead have Cathy not only die, but miscarry her child with Linton, since there’s no reason to have a living child if the story isn’t going to continue. I also can’t fault the film for choosing to narratively manifest the “Nelly is the villain” theory. Although I have personally never accepted that in my reading of the text, it has become the prevailing literary lens for the novel’s academic criticism since James Hafley first posited this thesis in 1958. (If you have JSTOR access, his essay can be found here; it’s a good read even if you, like I, remain unconvinced.) 

If you’re not familiar with the novel, none of this may seem like it changes that much about the text, but I can assure you: it does. My distaste for the film could be said to be either (a) entirely predicated on, or (b) have nothing to do with my love of Wuthering Heights, by which I mean that I don’t particularly care that this is a bad adaptation of Wuthering Heights—in fact, the number of faithful adaptations is rare, and I prefer some of the less faithful adaptations over the more detail-oriented ones—I just don’t think this needed to be an adaptation of Wuthering Heights specifically. It almost feels as if Fennell responded to critics’ dismissal of Saltburn as a lesser Talented Mr. Ripley by deciding to take her Wuthering Heights-inspired erotic fiction and—in an inverse of E.L. James filing the serial numbers off of her Twilight fanfiction and publishing it as Fifty Shades of Grey—direct an adaptation of that and call it “Wuthering Heights.” I’m not frustrated with this movie as a fan of Brontë’s; I’m frustrated with it as a movie lover, the part of me that just wants to go to the movies and have a good time. Where this ties into Wicked: For Good is that like that film, “Wuthering Heights” goes awry in having to fall in line with the text that it is branded, meaning that the film is inexorably tied to the text from which it takes its name, when liberating it from that title would have allowed this to go in more interesting directions.

Robbie is very good as Cathy (Elordi is fine), but our two lead characters are so boring. In the film’s second act, we get to see some of the home life of Heathcliff and Isabella, and it’s the best stuff in the movie. Instead of being a victim of Heathcliff’s abuse, Isabella is all-in on his weird degradation play; she gets off on sending letters to Cathy and Nelly lying about how horrid Heathcliff is to her while also clearly enjoying being chained up and treated like a dog. We’ve already gotten a clear look into her bizarre psyche earlier in the film, in which we learn that she has an entire room devoted solely to her hair ribbons, and we get to see her create a fun murder scene in miniature by venting her frustrations at Cathy herself on the doll she made of the woman instead, with a dollhouse tableau that’s as funny as it is disturbing. While sitting in the theater, I couldn’t help but think about how much better a movie “Wuthering Heights” would be if it realized that its most interesting character was Isabella, and the movie had been made about her instead. I fantasized about the film taking a sudden turn into being about Heathcliff realizing that Isabella truly could match his freak and the two of them falling for each other. “Wuthering Heights” could never go in that direction because it’s called “Wuthering Heights,” rather than “[Untitled Emerald Fennell Sexy Gothic Romance starring Jacob Elordi].” The first time that we meet Isabella, she’s sitting in the garden and delivering an excruciatingly detailed recap of Romeo & Juliet to Linton. For a moment, I really was naive enough to think that Fennell was going to do something truly audacious, and that the mention of the play would draw attention to something crucial that Shakespeare’s play and Brontë’s novel share: they are decidedly tragic, non-romantic stories that the general public perceives as romantic. Alas, this was not to be the case, and the director’s much-vaunted “audacity” was once again constrained to the erotic consumption of another person’s bodily fluids (and occasionally egg yolks). Ho-hum.

Where Emerald Fennell does allow herself to get really freaky with things that she adds from outside the text are the moments where the film does actually shine. When she first arrives to live at Thrushcross Grange, Cathy is ushered into a room that Linton has prepared for her by having the place painted “the most beautiful color in the world, the color of [Cathy’s] flesh.” As we enter the room, it looks tasteful enough, but as the camera moves closer we get to see that Linton has had the decorators recreate not only her freckles but the light, almost imperceptible blue veins beneath. It’s delightfully grotesque. The film also occasionally goes for utter camp in a few fine moments, with the standout being the scene in which Mr. Earnshaw dies, surrounded by a physically impossible stack of empty wine and liquor bottles. The film also features very beautiful tableaux; there are several nearly-still chiaroscuro images of characters lit solely by the natural light streaming through a window, calling to mind Rembrandt’s Anna and the Blind Tobit or the Rembrandtian A Man seated reading at a Table in a Lofty Room. Evoking the imagery of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is an easy go-to for Heathcliff’s return, but it’s also an effective choice. Visually, the film’s depiction of Thrushcross Grange having strong juxtapositions of white and blood-red are striking, even if the choice doesn’t seem to have a deeper meaning other than the most superficial symbolism. Any one of those things would have been a delight to see in [Untitled Emerald Fennell Sexy Gothic Romance starring Jacob Elordi], in which Fennell wouldn’t have felt the need to remain bound to “adapting” Wuthering Heights and instead been able to go full bore into the story she really wanted to tell. Instead, we have this disappointment.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Pillion (2026)

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There’s a new entry in the small canon of high-style comedies in which Harry Melling plays a new-to-the-game BDSM sub who discovers a latent desire to serve leather daddies, following several years’ wait after Amanda Kramer’s Please Baby Please. Die-hard fans of that two-film genre haven’t been waiting as long as devotees of the equally small canon of British melodramas about homosexual bikers with turbulent home lives, who’ve been waiting several decades for a follow-up to 1965’s The Leather Boys. Pillion is a worthy addition to both of those micro-genres, both wryly amusing in its depiction of post-Tom of Finland kink play and sincerely dramatic in teasing out the romantic tensions within that scene. Harry Melling’s sheltered protagonist is adorably in-over-his-head as the newest addition to a gang of leather-clad biker brutes, playing against Alexander Skarsgård as the disconcertingly handsome dom who takes him on as a pet. The power dynamics of their sexual play is clear from the start, but the dynamics of their romantic life are much fuzzier & unstable, given that Skarsgård’s smirking hunk mug is impossible to read, leaving Melling’s mewling underling with lots to think about while awaiting commands. It doesn’t help that onlookers universally treat their pairing as a sight gag, baffled by how a little imp who looks like Melling could score such a chiseled Adonis (with obvious emotional baggage and a pathological aversion to even the smallest peck of a kiss).

At the movies, most BDSM romances are told from the POV of a newly initiated sub who’s excited by the thrill of being bossed around but unsure of their personal boundaries or desires within that new role, until the dom overexerts their power and breaks the spell. In real life, it’s the sub who wields all the power, having pre-planned and negotiated all the things they want done to them during playtime while pretending it was all the dom’s idea all along once the games begin. Pillion starts as the movie version of a BDSM romance, then ends on the reality. Harry Melling plays an uncloseted but embarrassingly inexperienced gay man who still lives at home with his parents well into his 30s, until he lucks into the exact thing he wants: a big, exciting biker hunk who bosses him around and adopts him as a pet. He’s beamingly proud of his “aptitude for devotion” within this new relationship, but he’s also unsure about much of himself he should commit to it, because he cannot decide which master’s expectations to meet: his dom’s or his parents’. His terminally ill mother (Lesley Sharp) is especially concerned that what her sons sees as a game might cross over into emotional abuse, and he’s desperate to ease her mind without disappointing his new owner. The struggle within the relationship is that by the time he learns to assert himself to his mother’s liking, it becomes clear that he’s hitched his wagon to a damaged top, and the whole dynamic falls apart.

The attraction to telling these kinds of kink-dynamic stories on the screen is that they make the small power negotiations within all romances vivid & explicit. Not for nothing, they’re also hot. Before he realizes that he’s owed power that his top refuses to allow him (like a bad dog owner who neglects to take their pup on walks), Pillion finds a lot of awkward humor in the excessive gratitude its protagonist shows to his new hunky lover for even stooping to notice him, much less fuck him. It also finds a lot of on-screen steam in the actual fucking, dwelling on the minor physical gestures of its wrestling matches, blowjobs, and exhibitionist picnic-table sodomy. There’s also some intoxicating poetry in its nocturnal bike rides, when our POV sub finally finds a way to get out of his own head and live in the excitement of the moment — a subliminal headspace that carries over into the bedroom. The only thing he needs to learn is that he has a lot of say in how that mental subspace is reached, whether or not the first dom he meets agrees. So, for a gay leather-kink indie drama, Pillion really does have something for everyone: funny jokes, hot sex, and personal growth to be enjoyed by all. The film is even bookended with Christmas scenes, so you can gather the entire family around the TV to watch it next holiday season, joining other beloved Yuletide British rom-drams like Love Actually and About a Boy.

-Brandon Ledet

Singles (1992)

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There’s a fun storytelling device in Susan Seidelman’s Sex and the City pilot that greatly added to the casual, Gen-X appeal of the show’s early seasons, before being dropped from its format entirely: the direct-to-camera confessionals. In early episodes of Sex and the City, main characters and single-scene players alike were introduced to the audience via street-interview soliloquies, adding to the show’s simulated confessional candor about modern New Yorkers’ sex lives. I used to assume that Seidelman staged those documentary-style interviews as a way to mimic the blind-item anecdotes of Candace Bushnell’s original “Sex and the City” newspaper column, maybe borrowing some visual language from reality TV in the process. In retrospect, that device may have been borrowed from an entirely different early-90s Gen-X relic, separate from the MTV Real World confessionals that they coincidentally recall. Structurally, Cameron Crowe’s 1992 grunge-scene dramedy Singles is a major stylistic precursor for the initial Sex and the City aesthetic, profiling the sexual & romantic lives of lovelorn slackers in the same confessionals-and-vignettes rhythms that Seidelman helped establish for the show. The differences between them are matters of perspective & tone. Singles is set in Seattle instead of New York, it’s cuter than it is raunchy, and its characters are idealistic twentysomethings looking for love instead of jaded thirtysomethings looking to settle.

The core friend group profiled in Singles are connected through the exact kinds of cultural hubs you’d expect to find in early-90s Seattle: warehouse concert venues, hipster coffee shops, and the single-bedroom apartment complexes that give the film its title. All of its characters teeter between remaining single forever and halfway committing to serious relationships, unsure whether they can trust each other or if their hearts are being played with in pursuit of sex. The women are universally adorable: Bridget Fonda as the plucky optimist, Kyra Sedgwick as the cynical pessimist, Sheila Kelley as the A-type stress magnet. The men are varying levels of dopey: Campbell Scott as the careerist yuppie, Jim True-Frost as the dorky wannabe, Matt Dillon as the true-believer grunge scene burnout. They clumsily mix & match as best as they can while struggling to maintain that classic Gen-X air of apathetic cool that shields all raw emotion behind untold pounds of oversized sweaters, flannels, denim, and leather. The story’s scatterbrained vignette structure sets it up to function as a kind of backdoor sitcom pilot à la Sex and the City or Melrose Place, appealing specifically to teens just a few years younger than its characters, itching to move out of the suburbs and live adult lives in The Big City. Instead, it had to settle for reaching those kids through its tie-in CD soundtrack, which was such a successful cash-in on The Grunge Moment that it’s much better remembered than the film it was commissioned to promote.

Singles is so performatively laidback & low-key that it’s easy to underestimate its accomplishments as a Gen-X rom-dram. Consider it in comparison with 1994’s Reality Bites, for instance, which is so overly concerned with signaling its rebellion against Corporate Phonies and the sin of Selling Out that it becomes a kind of phony corporate sell-out product in its own right. Crowe’s handle on the era is much more humanist, recognizing that no matter how much Gen-X pretended to not give a shit about anything, they were still just lonely kids like every other generation before them. Where Reality Bites cast Ethan Hawke as a hunky poster-boy for disaffected slackerdom, Singles cast Matt Dillon as a goofball parody of the same burnout musician archetype, inviting the audience to lean in and search for the lovable lug below his jaded surface instead of shoving his charms in our faces. Crowe’s background as a music journalist doesn’t hurt Singles‘s credibility either, as it allowed him to include progenitors of “The Seattle Sound” like Pearl Jam & Soundgarden onscreen to vouch for the movie’s authenticity. Having his characters awkwardly flirt at an Alice in Chains concert gives the movie just as much cultural & temporal specificity as having Carrie Bradshaw order a Cosmopolitan at a swanky NYC nightclub. Their desires & behavior are universally relatable, though, even if you weren’t around for grunge’s first wave; anyone who’s ever suffered through an uneasy situationship in their 20s is likely to see themselves in it, no matter where or when.

-Brandon Ledet

Unfaithful Mutations

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Wuthering Heights is one of my all-time favorite works of art. Emily Brontë’s 19th Century novel is a shockingly horrific read for anyone who’s ever been assigned it in a high school or college-level literature course, expecting it to be a melodramatic romance (matched only in its homework-assignment shock value by her sister’s novel Jane Eyre). Wuthering Heights is not a traditionally tragic love affair; it imagines romantic attraction as a form of life-destroying doom that compels all involved to viciously tear each other apart out of the insatiable hunger of yearning, never to be satisfied through physical touch. It should be no surprise, then, that the latest, loudest adaptation of that novel would receive equally loud criticism for the ways it reduces its source text to a more familiar, better-behaved romance, as if it were a dime store paperback instead of a great work of Gothic lit. Personally, I can’t conjure the energy to care. To my knowledge, no movie version of Wuthering Heights to date has approached anything near faithful adaptation. They tend to leave the business of adapting the novel’s second half—in which a second generation of interfamilial combatants continue the first half’s vicious games of yearning & revenge—to be retold only via BBC miniseries, which are too tonally genteel to convey the full, feral nature of the source text. So far, what we’ve seen is a story dutifully half-told, with no real personal imposition on the text by the filmmakers behind the camera (besides maybe Andrea Arnold’s race-conscious adaptation from the 2010s, which gets specific in conveying the novel’s themes of “otherness,” usually left more vaguely defined). They tend to be more transcriptive than interpretive. So, I find myself in the embarrassing position of being impressed by the crassly unfaithful adaptation of one my favorite novels for at least engaging with the material in a transformative way, even if it’s more deimagined than reimagined. “Death of the author” means allowing our sacred texts to become entirely new beasts in afterlife.

Despite all the prepackaged backlash, “Wuthering Heights” proved to be another erratically entertaining piece of lurid pop art from Emerald Fennell, whose previous works Saltburn & Promising Young Woman were also loudly scrutinized in their own time for their thematic carelessness. Fennell appears eager to get ahead of the criticism in this case, adding the titular scare quotes in an effort to defuse any expectations that she might be sincerely adapting Brontë’s novel. Every image is prefaced with a wink, signaling to the audience that it’s okay to have fun this time instead of getting too hung up on Heathcliff & Cathy’s recursively lethal, semi-incestuous attraction to each other. It’s not so much an adaptation of Wuthering Heights as it is an adaptation of the horned-up dreams a teenager might have while reading Wuthering Heights — often illustrated in fancam-style montages that insert bodice-ripping sex scenes into a story that used to be about the destructive nature of unconsummated lust. Jacob Elordi & Margot Robbie are cast more for their paperback-romance cover art appeal than their appropriateness for the source material. Charli XCX is employed to soundtrack the music video rhythms of the edit to rush the story along before the discomfort of any one cruel moment has time to fully sink in. Even when destroying other women’s lives in order to get Cathy’s attention, Heathcliff seeks enthusiastic consent, turning what used to be domestic abuse into a kind of elaborate BDSM game. It’s all in good fun (give or take the obligatory tragic ending), staged entirely for the purpose of hiring movie stars to play dress-up and dry hump, supplementing the wet sounds of actual sex with bizarrely chosen surrogates like fish heads, snail slime, egg yolks, and raw dough. As goofy & half-considered as it is, it’s also Emerald Fennell’s best work to date. She continues to improve as a populist entertainer with every picture, but she has also suffered the great misfortune of being immediately successful, so everything she does is met with obnoxiously loud scrutiny. Hopefully all of her generational wealth serves as a small comfort in this difficult time.

The same week that Wuthering Heights topped the US box office (proving yet again that online backlash has no tangible effect outside your Twitter feed), I saw another domestic release of an unfaithful literary mutation. The new anime film Scarlet restages Hamlet as a sword-and-sorcery fantasy epic in a Hell-adjacent afterlife, seemingly combining the characters of Hamlet & Ophelia into one newly imagined, feminist action hero. I’m no Shakespeare scholar but, like Wuthering Heights, Hamlet does fall into the category of great literary works I was assigned to read multiple times throughout high school & college, and I don’t remember the bard describing the young Dane being groped by countless hands of the undead under a sky of black ocean waves in his stage directions. By the time Scarlet interjects a title card that drags the story back to 16th Century Denmark, I couldn’t help but treat it as a visual gag. I laughed, but I was the only one laughing in that theater, because I was the only one in the theater at all. Director Mamoru Hosoda is relatively well known among anime nerds for earlier works like Summer Wars, Wolf Children, and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, but recently he’s been on a kick where he reinterprets literary classics as high-fantasy adventure films featuring heroic warrior princesses. With Belle, he relocated characters from Beauty and the Beast to a Virtual Reality other-realm where violence & power is wielded through pop songstress supremacy and it online follower counts. With Scarlet, he reinterprets Hamlet as a warrior princess saga about the value of forgiving yourself instead of seeking revenge, set in a timeless afterlife where the souls of 16th Century nobility can fall in love with 21st Century hunks who have working-class jobs but angelically noble hearts. Unlike with “Wuthering Heights”, no one appears to be especially angry about these far-out reinterpretations of their source texts, likely for two very obvious reasons: 1. Hamlet & La Belle et La Bête have already enjoyed multiple faithful movie adaptations while Brontë’s novel hasn’t and, more importantly, 2. Way fewer people are watching them.

As of this posting, roughly 9,000 people have logged Hosoda’s unfaithful Hamlet mutation on Letterboxd, compared to the 570,000 who have logged Fennell’s unfaithful mutation of Wuthering Heights. That’s an imperfect metric when measuring these two films’ audience reach (not least of all because “Wuthering Heights” has been review-bombed by angry social media addicts who haven’t yet seen the film themselves), but those two numbers are extremely disparate enough to mean something. Some people are mad at Emerald Fennell for not adhering to one specific interpretation of Brontë’s book as if it is the only objectively correct one (i.e., the Arnold-friendly interpretation in which Heathcliff’s otherness is based more in race than class). Others are mad at her for having no interpretation at all, using a half-remembered impression of what the book is kinda-sorta like as an excuse to stage a series of images that make her horny. I find both criticisms to be misguided. No movie owes fealty to it literary source text; all that matters is the distinctness of the vision that literature inspired. For all of her consistently reckless flippancy, Fennell’s vision gets increasingly distinct every picture. We’re also getting a clearer picture of what she personally finds erotic, which I’d argue is one of the best uses of the cinematic artform any director can pursue. Forget using the art of moviemaking as a machine that generates empathy; it’s much more useful as a window into the unresolved psychosexual issues of artists who don’t know how to effectively express themselves through any other medium. In Fennell’s case, that window appears to be attached to a candy-coated dollhouse with an immature brat trapped inside, which she expresses here by re-working Catherine Earnshaw into an indecisive woman-child who suffers through attempts to have her cake and eat it too. She even employed the official mascot of Brat culture to sing on the soundtrack, continuously underlining the point. While prettier to look at and grander in scale, I don’t know that Hosoda’s films are useful as a window into anything especially personal about his hang-ups or worldview. The images are more pleasant and the ideas are more carefully thought out, but to what end? Maybe the other obvious reason that fewer people are talking about them is because there’s just not as much to say.

-Brandon Ledet

Tromeo & Juliet (1996)

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There are two minor miracles to be found in the 1996 Shakespeare schlockification Tromeo & Juliet. The first is that it’s an unusually sweet, tender romance for the Troma brand (in the moments between its company-mandated fart & boner jokes). The second is that it helped launch a successful filmmaking career outside the Troma trenches, despite being just as obnoxious & grotesque as the worst offenders in the company’s catalog. These miracles are directly related to each other, of course, as Tromeo & Juliet‘s out-of-character sentimentality is the work of young screenwriter James Gunn, who has found an exponentially successful career grossing audiences out with goopy grotesqueries while remaining a soft-hearted cornball. The only difference is that Gunn used to write those cornball grossouts for the home video market under Lloyd Kauffman’s sleazy supervision, and now he directs $200mil superhero movies for major Hollywood studios. You can take the troll out of Tromaville, but you can you really take the Troma out of the troll?

Forgive me for my lack of interest in recapping the interfamilial beef between the Montegues & Capulets here; I really do try my best not to treat this blog like a high school book report. Tromeo & Juliet is relatively faithful to its literary source text, as signaled by hiring a half-drunk Lemmy (of Motörhead) to narrate the opening prologue in mumbled iambic pentameter. The central joke of the project is to transport the play’s action to the modern, grimy streets of New York City, making the source of its familial feud a dispute over ownership of an NYC porno studio. Every event from the play is “reinterpreted” (i.e., mucked up) in that way, shoehorning monster puppets, lesbian make-outs, and ADR’d fart noises into the tragic romance we all know & love. The tagline on the poster says it all, promising to deliver “all the body-piercing, kinky sex, and car crashes that Shakespeare wanted but never had!” The final image it leaves you on is the populist playwright chuckling in delighted approval, reassuring the audience that Shakespeare would love Troma-brand juvenilia if he were alive to see it.

James Gunn’s auteurism shows in the screenplay’s unexpected touches of romantic sincerity. When Juliet has steamy lesbian sex with her handmaiden, there’s surprising romantic chemistry there, playing like a genuine bodice-ripper instead of a half-hearted Playboy shoot. When Tromeo jerks off to interactive CD-ROM pornography, his go-to kink category is revealed to be “true love,” with an onscreen nude model professing her devotion to him in bridal gear. The biggest deviation from the Shakespeare play is that Tromeo & Juliet is ultimately not a tragedy at all. Instead of committing a double suicide at the climax, our young teens in love procure a potion that temporarily makes Juliet so monstrous to the eye that only Tromeo could continue to love her, scaring off her family’s chosen suitor. In true Troma fashion, it’s then revealed that Tromeo & Juliet are long lost siblings—a secret long guarded by their feuding parents—and their romantic union would be an unholy act of incest. They decide to marry & procreate anyway; their love is just that strong, and the screenwriter is just that much of a softie, despite his alarming edgelord tendencies.

I don’t mean to undermine director Lloyd Kaufman’s own auteurism in this project. Considering that the Yale graduate & Troma kingpin’s most recent feature is a Troma’d up version of The Tempest titled Shakespeare Shitstorm, I have to assume that much of the creative direction behind the camera originated with him. The young Gunn was hired to overhaul an early version of the screenplay that Kauffman was unsatisfied with, and it seems that the final product was a true collaboration between them. You can hear them mind-melding as two mutually respected sleazebags on the Blu-ray’s commentary track, indulging in some boys-will-be-boys locker room talk about all the hot chicks they got to see naked while working together. It’s gross, but their rapport is also oddly sweet, which carries over to the final product on the screen. In the scene where Tromeo flips through his stash of interactive porno CD-ROMs, we get a taste of all the other reparatory Troma stagings of Shakespeare works we could’ve been treated to over the decades, in titles like Et Tu Blowjob, The Merchant of Penis, As You Lick It, and Much Ado about Humping. It’s unlikely that James Gunn wishes he were still writing those shock-value frivolities instead of directing Superman spinoffs in the big leagues, but I dare say he was making more honest, personal work in his early Troma days — equally, extremely sappy & revolting.

-Brandon Ledet

Two Sleepy People (2026)

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Someone alert Ned Flanders; they’ve finally found a way for you to watch Woody Allen movies without Woody Allen in them. Last year, there were two prestige dramas that borrowed The Woody Allen Font to billboard their discussions of sexual assault within the university system: Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby and Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt. Those allusions to Allen’s past reign as the neurotic king of overly talky indie cinema were presumably semi-ironic—given Allen’s more recent association with sexual abuse outside of the cinema—but they’re at least honest about Allen’s continued influence on the Sundance drama as a medium. There are tons of recent options to check out if, like Ned Flanders, you like Woodsy Allen movies but don’t like that nervous fella that’s always in ’em: Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, James Sweeney’s Straight Up, Matt Farley’s Local Legends, and now Baron Ryan’s Two Sleepy People. There’s a whole new crop nervous fellas to choose from if you don’t care for the last one.

First-time writer/director Baron Ryan stars as a scrawny, neurotic office worker who’s trapped in an endless loop of pointless couple’s therapy with a wife he doesn’t love. His co-writer Caroline Grossman co-stars as a new coworker who catches his eye during awkward pitch meetings for a marketing campaign to sell melatonin pills. They both quickly latch onto melatonin’s natural occurrence in breast milk, inappropriately blurting out ad pitches focusing on “mommy milkers” during team meetings. Whatever Mommy Issues inspire those outbursts then echo in their melatonin-fueled dreams, which they start to inexplicably share as a married couple in a psychic common-space, vaguely remembering their nightly otherworld trysts the next day at work. It’s a clever way to literalize a workplace emotional affair by staging it in a psychic space separate from everyday reality, and it allows the two lonely souls to safely pair up & confront childhood traumas they’ve suppressed in artificial stage play environments. It’s also a clever way to interrogate big-picture concepts through limited cast & locations, revealing more about the writers’ hang-ups with the way they were raised as children than their fictional avatars’ phony struggles with intimacy.

Two Sleepy People starts with a consciously equal balance between the two leads’ leftover Mommy Issues and subsequent young-adult neuroses. We get to know them in their respective real-world living spaces where they’ve trapped themselves in prisons of their own design, with jailcell bars made of unpacked moving boxes or compulsively purchased houseplants depending on the apartment. Things are much more pleasant in their emotional-cheating dreamscape apartment, give or take the Lynchian theatre stage just outside the front door that forces them to relive memories of the mommies who failed them. While those memories also start off equally balanced between the two characters, Baron Ryan’s Woodsy Alleny protagonist eventually takes the literal spotlight, and the back half of the film largely becomes about his impending, unavoidable divorce. The film is most enjoyable in its first half, while it’s unsure how to define the rules of its Sleep Life/Real Life divide and the audience is still learning to love the characters and their worlds. Once their in-the-moment romantic issues have to actually mean something to move the plot along, it loses a lot of steam, and the nervous fella at the center of it all unfortunately outlives his welcome by at least a few overly chatty minutes of runtime.

The miracle of this microbudget indie project is that it’s ever funny or charming at all. Clicking around online, I gather that Baron Ryan is usually billed as a “creator” instead of a filmmaker, which means he already has a small following from making short-form videos on platforms like Instagram & TikTok. For the most part, his Very Online sense of humor translates relatively well to a feature film format, landing punchlines that work just fine out of context (such as a short story pitch about a fetus who is issued an eviction notice from its mother’s womb) and jokes that only make sense in this high-concept scenario (such as the double meaning of a coworker’s accusation that “Everyone knows you’re sleeping together”). There’s a timidity in just how emotionally or psychologically vulnerable he & Grossman are willing to get in their script, though, which especially shows in their fear of broaching the subject of sex. Their characters never physically cheat in their shared psychic space; when the subject of sexual needs or kinks comes up in conversation, they brush it aside to instead embarrass themselves with reenacted childhood memories and read-aloud diary entries. Compare that guardedness with the open-book neuroses of Joanna Arnow’s similarly themed & budgeted The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, and you get a sense of just how careful Ryan & Grossman are to not fully Go There. To their credit, though, Woody Allen revealed way too much about himself in his own pioneering versions of this neurotic romcom subgenre, and we all now wish we knew way less. They may be sparing us in the long run.

-Brandon Ledet

Mississippi Masala (1991)

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The 1991 romantic dramedy Mississippi Masala is, to put it simply, a story about two incredibly hot people falling in love despite increasingly thorny circumstances. What Hollywood studios don’t want you to know is that every movie used to be like that, that life was once great. It turns out that all you need to make a lastingly beloved motion picture is to cast a couple nuclear-hot actors with nuclear-meltdown chemistry and then throw a few puny obstacles in the way of their union. It sounds like a simple formula, looking back, but from what I gather studio executives forgot to write it down, and it’s since been lost to time.

Sarita Choudhury & Denzel Washington star as the incredibly hot people in question: the daughter of motel workers in small-town Mississippi and a self-employed carpet cleaner who also does business at local motels, just outside of her periphery. The Indian immigrant & Black American communities they belong to are remarkably similar when compared in parallel, as the young couple angles for alone time between constant obligations to their aging parents. They’re also rigidly separate communities, to the point where it’s just as much of a transgression for them to date as it would be for a Montague to date a Capulet. Only, their worlds are separated by racial & xenophobic bigotry instead of interfamilial beef, which makes it even easier for the audience to root for their success.

The thorny circumstances that keep our incredibly hot would-be couple apart are given more political thought & attention than most by-the-numbers romances of the period. The story starts twenty years earlier in the Indian immigrant communities of 1970s Uganda, just as those communities are being forcibly ejected from the country by dictator Idi Amin. Roshan Seth plays a Ugandan-patriotic lawyer who’s heartbroken by his home country’s sudden rejection of his presence for not being “a real African,” which of course colors his opinions on mixed-race relationships twenty years later when his daughter dares to date a Mississippi local. Interracial bigotry is obviously not an uncommon source of conflict in romance dramas, but it is rare for a mainstream picture to dwell so thoughtfully on the historical, intersectional context of that conflict, let alone to tell a story with no white characters of consequence.

Director Mina Nair was very clear-headed in her mission to Trojan Horse political text into her traditionalist romance, doing on-the-ground research in Uganda while preparing the project. Nowadays, if you want to make a mainstream picture about geopolitical conflict, you have to sneak it into a $100mil superhero action spectacle; if you want to tell a story about small-town racial bigotry, you have to shroud it behind “elevated horror” metaphor. That is, if you want an audience to actually see your movie, as opposed to scrolling past its thumbnail on Netflix. In the 90s, the formula was much simpler. Side-by-side shots of Choudhury & Washington sharing a steamy phone call in their respective bedrooms was more than enough to justify the political substance of the larger text. I didn’t cry when that couple finally beats the odds, signing their romantic contract with a kiss at a highway gas station. I did, however, cry when Rashaan Seth finally returns to Uganda, fully reckoning with his lost home and his lost solidarity with fellow Africans. No one would finance a movie about the latter without indulging a little of the former, though, and Nair played the system perfectly to tell the story she wanted to tell to as many people as possible.

-Brandon Ledet

Sleeping Beauty (1959)

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Once upon a dream, Disney was in the business of producing world-class visual art. Now they’re just in the business of business — corporate acquisitions and such. The dream is over. So it goes.

That corporate culture shift didn’t happen overnight. At minimum, it happened over a decade. The 1950s saw Disney’s earliest, mightiest strides to diversify its portfolio, expanding into television and amusement parks after spending its first couple decades focused on its core mission: overworking & union-busting animators. Still alive, engaged, and at the helm, Walt Disney himself was conscious of the ways his company’s corporate expansion could dilute the quality of its feature films, so he made a point to reaffirm dominance in the field through technically accomplished pictures like Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan. Fittingly, the studio closed out the decade with the most back-to-basics title of the batch, 1959’s fairy tale romance Sleeping Beauty.

This feature-length adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s thinly plotted ballet is, above all else, a formal flex. Narratively speaking, Sleeping Beauty doesn’t accomplish anything that wasn’t already covered by Snow White or Cinderella. It’s yet another princess-in-distress fairy tale of a fair maiden being rescued from a jealous hag’s curse by a macho hero’s kiss. Only, it’s stripped of any defining characteristics that would make its doomed lovers lastingly memorable. Nothing about Princess Aurora is especially iconic, to the point where she’s more often referred to nowadays by the film’s title than by her proper name. All memorable character quirks are instead reserved for the women in charge of her fate: the three goofball fairies who protect her from Evil (Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather) and the villainous Mistress of All Evil (Maleficent, the only character here deemed worthy of her own spinoff franchise).

Without any of the usual pesky plotting or character concerns getting in their way, Disney’s team of technicians could focus entirely on the animation’s visual majesty. Afforded an extreme “Technirama” aspect ratio to paint his elaborate backdrops within, artist Eymind Earle crafts an extravagantly detailed tableau in every frame. Walt Disney tasked his crew with evoking Medieval tapestries in the film’s design, and Earle goes so overboard in his traditionalist craftsmanship that he upstages the characters that populate his backdrops.  In turn, his collaborators create an incredible depth of field through cell animation techniques, especially in early sequences where the wicked witch Maleficent and her fairy foes bless & curse the newborn baby Aurora through a series of magic spells. Roses, specters, lightning, and other abstract premonitions swirl in psychedelic montage as Aurora’s fate is decided at the foot of her royal crib. It’s a divine intersection of the fairy tale traditionalism of Snow White and the pure orchestral illustration of Fantasia — two mighty Disney triumphs from decades past, the best animation money can buy.

I have no interest in recounting Aurora’s troubled path to womanhood here. She’s cursed to die on her 16th birthday but is saved by a good nap and a classic case of puppy love. The rest is all arranged royal marriages, goofy sidekick antics, and sitcom-level mistaken identity hijinks. Even the mighty Maleficent is more memorable for her visual design than for her words or actions. We love the drag queen pageantry of her devil-horned headpiece. We love the green-on-black color scheme of her magic spells. We love her climactic transformation into a purple, fire-breathing dragon — another grand achievement in classic, hand-drawn animation. When the evil witch is defeated and Aurora is saved by the kiss of her sweetheart prince, the picture ends with the young couple dancing in the clouds. That’s also where the audience’s heads are supposed to be, not sweating the details of the storytelling on the ground.

When was the last time Disney was more focused on the visual majesty of it’s animation than on the marketability of its characters? Every in-house Disney production is now shrewdly designed to stock some toy shelf, amusement park attraction, or T-shirt screen press with fresh, sellable IP. It’s difficult to imagine an instance where they’d set aside character quirks & catchphrases to wow an audience with a return to classic, elegant animation. At this point, the company’s animation wing is a product delivery mechanism, like an assembly line conveyor belt. It used to be their entire raison d’être.

-Brandon Ledet