wwii

To Be or Not to Be (1942)

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WW Cinema (formerly Wildwood) is a Wednesday-night screening series at The Broad in which filmmakers and other artists introduce classic repertory titles to an eager film-nerd audience.  These introductions are usually pre-recorded via webcam, but occasionally a low-level celebrity sighting will shake up the weekly routine.  Simpsons & Spinal Tap vet Harry Shearer was the most recent in-person presenter for the series, providing some quick, concise insight about what he thinks makes Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 wartime comedy To Be or Not to Be a great work of art, then sticking around after the film to answer questions about his own comedic career.  Shearer mentioned that he had a personal, professional connection to the film’s star, Jack Benny, working with him briefly in his first role as a child actor.  He also argued that the film stands as proof that if you feel passionately about a topic—in this case the political & moral evils of Nazism—you should make a comedy about it instead of a drama (with Dr. Strangelove & Taking Off presented as examples of similarly effective satire).  WW Cinema’s programming has had a lot of influence on what gets reviewed on this blog since they moved their screenings down the street from my house, but I don’t always mention the pre-film intros because they’re not the reason I consistently go; I go because their film selections are consistently rewarding.  I’m only mentioning Shearer here because he put on a masterclass of how to present a movie to an audience who might not have seen it before.  He made the screening personal without distracting from the film.  He voiced his reverence for the artist behind it he found most essential to the piece (in his case Benny, not Lubitsch, the opposite of my connection to it).  He rooted the film in its historical context, both within the timeline of WWII and within the timeline of Benny’s career.  And, most importantly, he kept it brief.  I got the feeling that Shearer has suffered through so many poorly curated film intros and Q&As over the decades that he knows exactly how to not fuck it up, which I’m quickly learning at these WW Cinema screenings is a practiced skill; he’s a professional.

Of course, To Be or Not to Be should not need an intro at all, given that Lubitsch’s comedies are just as riotously funny now as they have ever been; just the gift of laughing along with a live audience instead of streaming it alone on The Criterion Channel is enough to make a modern screening of a Lubitsch classic feel like a cultural event.  Even so, I found myself confused as to why this film isn’t as ubiquitously referenced & recommended as The Great Dictator as the best contemporary Nazi satire.  Jack Benny may not be as enduringly popular as Charlie Chaplin, but To Be or Not to Be is just as daring as The Great Dictator – and twice as funny.  Benny first appears onscreen in full Hitler drag, roaming the streets of pre-occupation Poland and attracting a crowd as if he were a space alien who crashed a UFO.  That’s because Hitler had not yet arrived in the country, and Benny is instead playing a famous Warsaw actor who’s rehearsing to play the Nazi dictator on stage.  Even with the threat of Nazi invasion looming over their heads, most of the film’s scene-to-scene drama involves the lives & squabbles of Benny’s theatre troupe, mostly revolving around the love-triangle maneuvering of his even more famous wife (Carole Lombard) and her flirt-crush of the week (Robert Stack).  It’s just like any of Lubitsch’s classic adultery comedies, except that things get deadly serious at the top of the second act when the Nazi invasion of Warsaw starts in earnest.  Miraculously, Lubitsch gradually builds back to the playful humor of the first act as the theatre troupe schemes to survive & subvert occupation, eventually weaponizing their acting skills as dissident spies within the Gestapo.  The dramatic tension of the second act is shockingly brutal for a comedy, especially considering that it mirrored real-life atrocities happening in real time outside the theater walls during this film’s initial run.  The release of that tension when Lubitsch decides to get goofy again is much needed and incredibly effective, sometimes earning huge laughs just by repeating exact dialogue from earlier scenes.  It helps that most of the jokes are at the expense of artists’ narcissism instead of Nazi violence, which is handled with appropriate mourning & disgust.

If I were presenting what makes To Be or Not to Be great, I’d probably talk about the art of establishing an in-joke with your audience, so that callbacks to previous snippets of dialogue can become uproarious punchlines.  For instance, the title refers to a recurring bit in which Benny is interrupted while delivering the famous Hamlet soliloquy by an audience member who always leaves the room when he gets started.  It turns out that the line was used as a signal to his wife’s would-be lover to visit her dressing room while her husband is occupied.  Over time, we come to realize that she may have chosen that particular moment in his performance to drive him mad because they have a longstanding professional jealousy that fuels the fires of their marriage; we also come to realize that the husband cares more about the interrupted soliloquy than he cares about the adultery, even if just slightly.  It’s a hilarious bit that only gets funnier in repetition, to the point where the line “To be or not to be” earns instant laughs despite being one of Shakespeare’s most often repeated phrases.  It’s also a bit that would work in basically any theatrical setting, since it has nothing to do with the Nazi occupation.  In contrast, there’s another recurring bit in which a Jewish actor in the troupe (Felix Bressart) is constantly auditioning for bigger roles by delivering the “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” speech from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, which alternates between being incredibly funny as an example of theatre-world narcissism and incredibly poignant as a heartfelt plea against antisemitism.  Listening to these jokes build to increasingly louder laughs and starker silences in the room was like listening to a classical music piece build to an ecstatic crescendo after starting on softly bowed strings.  Lubitsch died nearly eight decades ago, but he can still command an audience like a master conductor leading an orchestra.  I’ve enjoyed each of his classic comedies that I’ve seen, but usually for the transgression of their playful view of sex & adultery.  I’ve never been so impressed with the joke-building structure of one in this way before, possibly because I’ve never seen one take such a harsh dramatic pause midway through and have to rebuild its humor on the rubble of real-life horror.

I did not present To Be or Not to Be, though, because I did not work with Jack Benny when I was a child. In fact, our time on this planet did not overlap at all.  Harry Shearer’s insistence on the film’s greatness as an argument that comedy can be as passionate & effective at addressing real-world political issues as drama was a convincing one.  His insights about his & Benny’s comedy careers did not interest me quite as much, but he did not hold command of the stage long enough for that disconnect to derail the screening.  He did a great job introducing a great film without distracting from it by making it all about himself, which To Be or Not to Be itself will tell you is extremely difficult for an actor to do.  Most actors would make a world war about themselves if they could get away with it.

-Brandon Ledet

The Zone of Interest (2023)

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If you’re a particular kind of self-serious cinephile, every new Jonathan Glazer movie is a Cultural Event, largely because of scarcity.  The director only has four features to his name, stretched across two decades, with half of that time passing since his previous film Under the Skin arrived in 2013.  Glazer has been “a name to watch” since his early 2000s stunners Birth & Sexy Beast (if not since his iconic 1990s music videos like “Virtual Insanity” & “Karma Police”).  Every project is so carefully planned & crafted that there’s always intense anticipation of what shape his career is going to take overall. He makes too few films for anyone to predict the big-picture trajectory of his art; there just isn’t enough data.  So, I have to admit that I was a little disappointed by the announcement of his latest project, The Zone of Interest, because it doesn’t fit the shape I personally wanted for his career.  I would’ve much preferred that Glazer dove deeper into the uncanny surrealism of films like Birth & Under the Skin than where he chose to go: sinking further into ice-cold Hanekean cruelty instead.  Still, The Zone of Interest is a title of interest by default, regardless of subject or approach, and Glazer at least makes the misery meaningful & worthwhile. 

The Zone of Interest is the rare war atrocity drama that doesn’t let its audience off the hook for not being as bad as literal Nazis, but instead prompts us to dwell on the ways all modern life & labor echoes that specific moment in normalized Evil.  Sandra Hüller (Toni Erdmann, Anatomy of a Fall) stars as the doting housewife of the Nazi officer who runs Auschwitz (Rudolf Höss, played by Christian Friedel).  The couple’s idyllic home shares an external wall with the concentration camp, which soundtracks their daily domestic routines with the excruciating sounds of torture & genocide. The wife raises children, hosts parties, and tends to the garden.  The husband works tirelessly to invent more efficient ways to gas & incinerate Jews.  Both are separated from the tactile details of the violence that makes their lovely home possible, except in stark reminders when the busy work of the day is over and all that is left is the quiet of their conscience: lounging in a calm river polluted with the ashes of their victims, struggling to sleep in a house lit by the orange glow of the crematoriums, etc.  It’s a slowly escalating, dehumanizing horror that they’ve deliberately numbed themselves enough to not even notice, but it deeply sickens outsiders who briefly visit their home to smell the flowers or play with the kids.

If Glazer were a lesser artist, he would have firmly anchored his WWII drama to the tools & tones of the past, comforting his audience with the emotional distance of time.  Instead, he shoots The Zone of Interest in the style of a modern reality show, documenting the domestic busyness of his central couple on continuously running security cameras like an especially horrific episode of Big Brother.  There are even night-vision sequences that catch small acts of subversion the cameras aren’t supposed to see – good deeds that eventually go brutally punished.  Later, he interrupts the 1940s timeline with images of concentration camps’ current function as history museums, again finding a way to frame them as sites of heinous banality.  The automated-home modernization of this historical drama might initially register as a formalistic novelty, but the constant reminder that the movie is being made now with today’s technology gradually has a clear thematic purpose.  Anyone with a smartphone should be familiar with the feeling of becoming numb to grand-scale injustice & genocide as background noise while we busy ourselves with the meaningless tasks of the day.  Anyone who’s ever been lucratively employed should recognize the feeling that our jobs & lifestyles are causing active harm to people we cannot see.  We’ve all seen too many Holocaust dramas to truly feel the emotional sting of another one as if it were out first; Glazer does his best to shake us out of that numbness by making one specifically rooted in the doomscroller era.

Everything is tastefully, technically on-point here.  I was initially distracted by the automated security camera editing style, which had me looking for visible cameras in every frame, but the approach eventually proved itself thematically justified.  Mica Levi’s thunderous, minimalist score is maybe their sparsest work to date, but it’s effective in its restraint.  A24 has been well-behaved in their marketing & distribution of the film, refraining from selling boutique Nazi merch or leaning into trite FYC awards campaigning.  Glazer has again taken his time to deliver something thoughtfully crafted but not overfussed, proving himself to be one of our most patient auteurs.  I likely would not have watched The Zone of Interest if his name were not attached, since I’m generally skeptical of what yet another wartime genocide drama could possibly illuminate about history that audiences don’t already know (and have learned to ignore).  Glazer sidesteps that tedium by stating the historical facts of the narrative in plain terms – illuminating the dull, background evils of modern living instead of safely retreating to the past.  It’s not the project I would’ve greenlit if I were signing his checks, but it’s a worthy entry in his small canon of thorny, alienating features.  All I can do now is sit in the tension of what he’ll make next, likely until sometime in the 2030s.

-Brandon Ledet

Godzilla Minus One (2023)

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As I’m piecing together my personal Best Films of 2023 list in these last few weeks of the year, I’m becoming increasingly self-conscious of how many of my favorite new releases are shamelessly nostalgic for the toys & kitsch collectibles of my youth.  Even without a new Godzilla film juicing the numbers, it’s been a great year for films about Furbies, Barbie dolls, Ninja Turtles, and tokusatsu superheroes like Ultraman, Kamen Rider, and The Power Rangers.  My Best of the Year list is starting to look like a 1998 Toys”R”Us TV commercial, which is somewhat embarrassing for a man of my age.  I am approaching 40 years old, and I still don’t wanna grow up.  Thankfully, Godzilla Minus One‘s inclusion in this year’s throwback-toy-commercial canon is at least helping to class up the list a little, as it’s a much more sincere, severe drama than most movies that have excited me lately.  It’s just as openly nostalgic for vintage tokusatsu media as Shin Ultraman, Shin Kamen Rider, and Smoking Causes Coughing, announcing itself as an official 70th anniversary celebration of the original 1954 Godzilla film that started it all.  However, it’s the only film in this year’s crop to hit the same notes of deep communal hurt as the ’54 Godzilla, which is a much more ambitious aim than reviving the goofball slapstick antics of the child-friendly kaiju & superhero media that followed in its wake.  Godzilla Minus One‘s sincerity is incredibly rewarding in that contrast, to the point where it’s the only Godzilla movie I can remember making me cry.

To commemorate that 70th anniversary, Godzilla Minus One dials the clock back to the widescale destruction of post-WWII Japan, covering the first few years of national rebuilding after nuclear devastation.  The giant primordial lizard of the title is once again shaken awake by the human folly of the atomic bomb, a great sin against Nature echoed in the creature’s flamethrower-style “atomic breath.”  The film’s limited budget means that Godzilla gets limited screentime, but the monster is deployed wisely as an unstoppable, unfathomable horror whose atomic power is so great that it burns away the flesh of its own towering body.  Godzilla is scary again, more of a harrowing extension of war survivors’ PTSD than a rollicking hero to children everywhere.  The cleverest move the movie makes, then, is by limiting the scope of its drama to match the limited scope of its monster attacks.  We feel the fear Godzilla stirs in just a few cowering citizens’ lives, even though both the monster and its victims represent large-scale national grief in metaphor.  It’s a small-cast wartime melodrama that’s occasionally interrupted by kaiju-scale mayhem, the same way a soldier who survives war is supposed to go through the motions of normal life in peacetime despite frequent, violent reminders & memories of the atrocities they’ve witnessed or participated in.  The “Minus One” of the title refers to people struggling to rebuild their lives from Ground Zero, only to be reset even further back by the grand-scale cruelties of life & Nature, through the monster.  It’s tough to watch.

The drama gets even more intimate & insular from there.  Most Godzilla movies dwell on the city-wide chaos of the monster attacks, depicting thousands of victims scattering away from Godzilla’s path like helpless insects.  In contrast, Godzilla Minus One zooms in to assess the value of just one, individual life in that mayhem.  Its mournful protagonist (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is a kamikaze pilot who dodged his suicidal mission during the war and now suffers intense survivor’s guilt, convinced that he morally failed in his duty to serve his nation.  The sudden appearance of Godzilla offers the self-hating young man a second attempt at wartime valor, to the point where he’s disturbingly excited by the prospect of facing off against the monster instead of experiencing healthier responses like fear & grief.  In a more proudly nationalistic action thriller, this sentiment would go unchallenged, and his self-assigned self-sacrifice would be celebrated as traditional macho heroism.  Instead, Godzilla Minus One is about the community of people around the pilot—each having survived their own war atrocities & personal shortcomings—convincing him that his life is worth living, that he has value beyond the damage he can cause as a lone soldier in a war that’s officially over.  The honor of serving his country through death is no nobler than risking his life de-activating leftover explosive mines to put food on his family’s table; it’s sad & disgraceful, and it should be treated as a worst-case scenario.

The dramatic beats of Godzilla Minus One are just as predictable as the rhythm of its monster attacks, and just as devastatingly effective.  I cried with surprising frequency during the final twenty-minute stretch, even though I saw each dramatic reveal coming from a nautical mile away.  Maybe it’s because I vaguely related to the communal struggle to rebuild after multiple unfathomable catastrophes, having remained in New Orleans through a series of floods & hurricanes.  Maybe it’s because I more personally related to the pilot’s struggle to learn a foundational sense of self-worth, the toughest aspect of adult life.  Maybe it’s because composer Naoki Satō’s gargantuan score drummed those sentimental feelings out of me through intense physical vibration.  Who’s to say?  All I can confidently report is that the drama is just thunderously affecting as Godzilla’s roars, which is a rarity in the series.

-Brandon Ledet

Invincible (2001)

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“Why do I watch WrestleMania?  My answer is that the poet must not avert his eyes from what’s going on in the world.  In order to understand, you have to face it.”

“Our sense of the real world today is massively challenged; I include here reality television, breast enhancement, and the carefully choreographed, fake drama of WrestleMania, populated by larger-than-life characters with muscles that nature doesn’t normally provide us with and who take pleasure in telling everyone how unbelievably evil they are.”

“What is fascinating about WrestleMania is the stories around it: the dramas between the owner of the whole show and his son, who are feuding, and his wife in the wheelchair who is blind, and he is then showing up in the ring with girls who have huge, fake boobs, and he is fondling them.  This is almost sort of an ancient Greek drama – evil uninterrupted by commercials.”

These are just a choice few Werner Herzog quotes about the cultural & literary virtues of professional wrestling, pulled from the 2019 GQ listicle “Werner Herzog Cannot Stop Talking About WrestleMania” – a masterpiece of modern clickbait publication that I return to often.  Herzog was promoting his work as an actor on the Star Wars television series The Mandalorian around the time those various press junket quotes were assembled, a time when his familiarity as a household name was bridging the gap between art cinema snobs and their sworn enemies, “Disney Adults.”  His public perception has since been bifurcated in recent years, split between his well-earned designation as a world-class auteur and his more recent evolution into a Nic Cagian human meme who pontificates about supposedly low-brow subjects like WrestleMania & Ana Nicole Smith in a severe German accent.  Unlike Nic Cage, though, Herzog has not allowed his YouTube Era reputation as a human meme affect the tone or content of his work as a serious filmmaker, give or take a few over-the-top scenes in his collaboration with Cage in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans.  As often as you hear Herzog explain the grotesque poetry of reality TV & pro wrestling in interviews, it’s difficult to detect their influence on his actual work.  That is, unless you happen to be one of the few people who remember his 2001 historical fantasy drama Invincible, which presents an academic-level understanding of the historic origins of wrasslin’, as well as its modern mutation into mass, crass populist entertainment.

Invincible stars real-life strongman Jouko Ahola as historical strongman Zishe Breitbart, a young Jewish blacksmith from a small Polish village who grew to fame as “The Strongest Man in the World” in 1920s Germany.  Herzog takes a pro wrestling-style truthiness approach to the material, moving Breitbart’s story to the early stirrings of Nazi Germany a decade later, playing up the significance of his Jewish heritage in a heightened, more satisfying kayfabe version of his life’s story.  In the film, Breitbart enters the entertainment industry through the strongman circus acts that sparked pro wrestling as an artform.  He challenges a traveling strongman for prize money in what is supposed to be a rigged wrestling bout and easily defeats the brute in a Goliath vs Goliath matchup.  Word of his incredible strength quickly spreads, and he’s summoned to work as a regular stage act in a Berlin cabaret, ringmastered by a Nazi-friendly psychic played by Tim Roth.  Roth’s conman mystic is quick to use Breitbart’s Jewish heritage as a race-baiting point of division between the Nazi officers and Jewish citizens in the cabaret audience, which is perfectly in tune with how hot-topic political divisions are exploited for cheap heat in modern pro wrestling programs.  Breitbart is the underdog hero for the Jewish people, who feel increasingly hopeless as the Nazis rise to political power.  The carnie mystic MC is a hero to the Nazis, pretending to summon supernatural strength from The Dark Arts to overpower the strongman’s brute force (a “skill” he can sell as a war-winning weapon for Hitler’s army).  In truth, they’re working together as a scripted act, putting on a show to stoke their divided audience’s Us vs Them bloodlust; it’s wrestling in a nutshell.

Aesthetically, Invincible is worlds away from the reality-TV crassness of what Herzog refers to as “WrestleMania”.  In its best moments, there’s an ancient cinematic quality to the director’s visual storytelling, effectively remaking Bob Fosse’s Cabaret as if he were Tod Browning adapting a fairy tale.  In its worst moments, it plays like standard-issue Oscar bait of its era, bolstered by a prestige-desperate Hans Zimmer score that tells the audience exactly how to feel at every second of runtime.  Its Oscar chances were self-sabotaged by Herzog’s choice to have his European actors speak phonetic English in post-production dubs instead of performing naturally in their various native languages.  That might have been a deliberate attempt to evoke a Bressonian style of performance, but it just comes across as bizarre & confused, and only the established professional actors Tim Roth & Udo Kier come across as capable performers.  The camerawork can come across as bizarre & confused as well, alternating between a handheld documentary style and a Hollywood-schmaltz fantasy & artifice that attempts to (in Ross’s showman wording) “[articulate the audience’s] collective dreams”.  Its moments of visual lyricism make sense to me as a historically set fairy tale about Nazi obsession with mysticism clashing against a Freaks vs. The Reich style superhero.  They’re especially effective when Herzog gazes at the sea-life bodies of jellyfish & crabs as if he were a space alien considering their otherworldly beauty for the very first time.  He’s really good at articulating the uncanniness of everyday life & pop media in that way, which is how he’s gotten famous as an interviewee outside of art cinema circles.  It’s amusing, then, that he can’t convincingly translate that wonder with the world into an Oscar-friendly movie for normies; he’s too much of a genuine weirdo.

Around the time of Invincible, Herzog was essentially directing one feature film a year at a consistent pace, and he’s only gotten more prolific in the two decades since.  While some of his 2000s titles like Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World, and the aforementioned Bad Lieutenant have endured with a certain cultural cachet, many like Invincible have fallen through the cultural cracks; they can’t all be stunners.  If you’re going to excavate this one Herzog title out of relative obscurity within that massive catalog, I do think it’s worth considering as a bizarre, failed attempt to reach for Awards Season prestige beyond the usual, routine boundaries of his critical accolades.  He has found wider public recognition in the years since, but mostly as a weirdo public persona (an extension of the first-person narration style he developed in his 2000s-era documentaries).  Invincible does recall one very specific aspect of that public persona, at least: his inability to stop talking about WrestleMania.  Whether that’s enough of a reason to dig this one particular discarded Herzog DVD out of the Goodwill pile is up to your completionist interest in his career, I guess, as well as your personal fascination with the Greek tragedy & grotesque poetry of wrasslin’ as an artform.

-Brandon Ledet

Sisu (2023)

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I got a huge kick out of Finnish director Jalmari Helander’s Yuletide creature feature Rare Exports when we watched it for a Movie of the Month discussion a few years back.  It has a morbid sense of humor and a willingness to go there when tormenting wayward children that’s missing in most modern echoes of traditional fairy tales.  However, I did get hung up on how overtly macho the film felt for a folk tale, writing “This is a weirdly masculine movie.  The central relationships between a boy and his single father, a boy and his bully/bestie, and a boy and his Christmas demon are all variances of masculine bonding or masculine conflict.  In fact, I don’t recall there being a single female character represented onscreen.”  I had somehow forgotten that aspect of Helander’s debut by the time I borrowed his English-language breakout from the library last month, but it came roaring back in an instant as soon as I pressed play.  It turns out Helander’s just as much of a consistently meatheaded director as David Ayer, S. Craig Zahler, or Michael Bay – a perspective that felt like a weird fit for the material when he was making a modern-day fairy tale about a Christmas demon but is perfectly suited for a shoot-em-up action cheapie about a one-man army.  In Rare Exports, Helander’s ultra-masc roid rage sensibilities were a total surprise; in Sisu, they’re par for the course.

The term “sisu” is helpfully translated in an opening title card as a Finnish word for “a white-knuckle form of courage and unimaginable determination.”  That cultural concept is personified by a defected Finnish commando (Jorma Tommila), described by his enemies as an “immortal” “one-man death squad.”  Fed up with the international politics and personal tragedies of WWII, he’s reinvented himself as an independent gold prospector.  His new solemn, solitary life is interrupted by a small band of Nazis enacting a “scorched Earth policy” on the land where he discovers his first goldmine.  When the Nazis attempt to steal that gold directly out of his pockets, he fights back with unimaginable fury, systematically destroying each of their blood-sack bodies and, as lagniappe, setting their sex-slave prisoners free in the process.  He goes about his work of killing the offending Nazis with the stoic silence of classic, rugged masculinity, acting as if he owes Brad Pitt one hundred Nazi scalps the same way a steel mill worker owes the punch-clock eight hours of repetitive labor.  The movie sticks to a consistent, predictable rhythm as a result, even if that rhythm is frequently punctuated by stabs, gunshots, and explosions.  I’d call it the old-man version of John Wick if it weren’t for the fact that Liam Neeson was already making old-man John Wicks before there was a John Wick around to riff on.

There are more women onscreen in Sisu than there are in Rare Exports, but they’re mostly props.  They start the film as captive rape victims for the Nazi scum, then are eventually set free to transform into an entirely different macho trope: chicks with guns.  In Sisu, women are victims, dogs are target practice, and men are wordless murder machines with an equal deficit of interior life.  The results are reasonably entertaining for a grotesque slapstick actioner that’s just out to crush 90 Nazi skulls in 90 minutes or less or your pizza’s free.  As soon as its English narration track and faux-vintage chapter titles hit in the opening seconds, my standards for it to succeed plummeted to DTV action levels, and the movie seemed complacent to meet me there.  If Helander’s going to stick around in the cultural zeitgeist, I do think his macho sensibilities and delight in over-the-top action choreography would be perfectly suited for direct-to-streaming action novelties.  In an interview extra on my library’s DVD, he openly admits to the limitations of his aesthetic, explaining, “I’m pretty certain you will never see me doing a film which happens in a kitchen where husband and wife are arguing about some stupid shit.  To me, you have to have big adventure.”  In other words, he’s fully committed to the cause of meathead cinema and, thus, restricted to the payoffs & shortcomings therein.

-Brandon Ledet

Freaks vs. The Reich (2023)

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I’ve been struggling to find much to get excited about in theaters lately, now that “Summer” Blockbuster Season has encroached well into Spring, and multiplex marquees are once again all superheroes all of the time.  The general vibe among moviegoing audiences is that the superhero era is winding down post-Endgame, but it’s going to take a long time for Hollywood studios to adjust to that dwindling enthusiasm, since these billion-dollar behemoths take years to produce & market.  Personally, I’m so deeply, incurably bored by American superhero media that I’m avoiding all four-quadrant crowd-pleasers out there, not just the usual suspects like the new Guardians, the new Ant-Man, and the new Shazam.  If I stare at the poster or trailer for any tentpole blockbuster above a 6-figure production budget for long enough, they all appear to follow the same MCU superhero action template.  Super Mario Bros, Dungeons & Dragons, and Fast X are all essentially superhero movies to me, each with their own invincible, quippy gods among men who save the day by extending their IP.  I can’t hide from the new release calendar forever, though, so I need to re-learn how to enjoy a superhero movie or two until Hollywood fully moves onto the next money-printing fad.  Given that there are already dozens of Marvel & DC movies slated for release over the next few summers, it’s likely going to take a long time for this lumbering industry to correct course.  So, it’s somewhat fortuitous that the Italian supernatural action epic Freaks vs. The Reich finally landed a US release in this dire time of need, after years of stumbling over international distribution hurdles.  It’s the most convincing evidence I’ve seen in a while that there is still some juice left in the superhero genre, despite Hollywood’s determination to squeeze it dry and pummel the rind.

If there’s anything more frustratingly slow than Hollywood’s response to public appetite, it’s the distribution of international art films, which often fall into a years-long limbo between their initial festival runs and their wide US premieres.  I’ve been waiting to see Freaks vs. The Reich for so long that its earliest roadblocks were COVID related, and its original title has since been changed to give it a fresher, more recognizable appeal.  I suppose rebranding the film from Freaks Out to its new, more descriptive title is a useful warning for the shocking amount of Nazi imagery you’ll find in this supernatural circus sideshow fantasy.  It also helps explain why it’s so easy to cheer on the titular, superpowered freaks who take those Nazis down.  I wonder if some of its distribution delays had to do with clearing song rights, since the main Nazi supervillain in question abuses ether to mentally time-travel into the future, returning to the battlefields of WWII with visions of smartphones, video game controllers, and old-timey renditions of Radiohead’s “Creep” & Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine.”  The inclusion of “Creep” is important to note there, since the song also happens to be featured in the more traditional, straightforward superhero epic Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, which is currently eating up a grotesque amount of American screen space.  Whether you think it’s more interesting to hear that song played on a Spotify algorithm mixtape to evoke easy nostalgia points or performed by a drugged-out, time-traveling Nazi supervillain is a question of taste, but I can at least personally attest to appreciating a sense of variety within this oppressively omnipresent genre template.

Freaks vs. The Reich opens with a full circus sideshow act, introducing our Italian superhero freaks one at a time as they show off their individual talents – a magnetic dwarf, an electric ballerina, a real-life wolf-man, etc.  Before they can bow for audience applause, however, their tent is blown to shreds by Nazi warplanes, and they spend the rest of the movie rebuilding the team so they can end the war themselves.  Caught up in concentration camp processing, Italian militia resistance, and general wartime disorientation, they are all eventually reunited by the ether-huffing, time-travelling Nazi who’s convinced he can win the war for Hitler if he assembles the freaks to fight for Deutschland.  This all culminates in a grand superpowers battle in an open field (the way most superhero epics do), and I will admit that the journey to get to that predetermined conclusion can be a little overlong & draining (the way most superhero epics are).  There’s at least some novelty in the film’s antique circus sideshow aesthetic and WWII historical contexts, though, and novelty is a precious commodity for a genre that’s been so prevalent over the past decade.  It’s like watching the cast of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children act out the plot of Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion Pinocchio on the leftover sets of Matteo Garrone’s live-action Pinocchio – an antique Italo horror show.  You won’t find that kind of aesthetic deviance in the upcoming Flash or Captain Marvel sequels, which you can pretty much already picture start to end in your head sight-unseen.  These superhero freaks are flawed, messy, and they fuck, including the wolfman archetype in what has to be the hairiest sex scene since The Howling Part II: Your Sister is a Werewolf.  Meanwhile, Marvel & DC are still stubbornly stuck in a chaste, sanitized universe where “everyone is beautiful and no one is horny.”  They also murder Nazis, a universally agreeable target that hasn’t been attacked with such sincere patriotism since Marvel peaked in 2011 with Captain America: The First Avenger.

I’m probably doing this movie no favors by comparing it against American superhero media, since everyone’s starting to feel the same way about the genre as we felt about zombie media 17 seasons into The Walking Dead: numbly apathetic.  Within that context, though, it’s a breath of fresh ether – one of the strangest, most upsetting superhero stories since James Gunn made Super, at least five James Gunn superhero movies ago.  Maybe Freaks vs. The Reich would have fared better before our culture-wide superhero fatigue fully settled (it was initially set to be released less than a year after Endgame), but I personally needed it now more than ever, just so something in this genre didn’t look like a total snooze.

-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

Shadow in the Cloud (2021)

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One of my favorite films of all time is Richard Kelly’s The Box, a much-mocked sci-fi thriller that starts as a faithful adaptation of a Twilight Zone plot (Richard Matheson’s short story “Button, Button” to be specific), then spirals out to become its own over-the-top art object once that story runs its course.  I was delighted to see that template repeated in Shadow in the Cloud, then, which starts as a copyright-infringing adaptation of the Twilight Zone classic “Nightmare at 20,0000 Feet”, then mutates into its own monstrous beast separate from its obvious source of inspiration.  The difference is that The Box expands on its core Twilight Zone story with a flood of increasingly outlandish, convoluted Ideas that explode the initial premise into scattered, irretrievable shrapnel.  By contrast, Shadow in the Cloud reduces the initially bizarre outline of “Terror at 20,000 Feet” to the most basic, straightforward hand-to-hand combat action fluff imaginable.  It just does so with a full-on Richard Kelly level commitment to the bit, creating something truly spectacular purely out of brute force.

When Shadow in the Cloud is still limited to its “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” beginnings, it does a decent enough job at finding new sources of tension & purpose in that dusty genre template.  Chloë Grace Moretz stars as a WWII fighter pilot who’s at the mercy of an overly suspicious, grotesquely macho cargo-run crew who don’t trust her presence on their plane.  To neutralize her potential threat to their mission, the men confine her to a gun turret below the plane’s belly, where she’s isolated—and lethally armed—in a free-floating bubble.  The combination of that confined space, the radio chatter from the misogynist assholes above (who keep referring to her as a “dame” and a “broad” instead of a fellow soldier), and the eventual emergence of the Twilight Zone version of a gremlin on the plane’s wings is a wonderful tension-builder that makes full, glorious use of its seemingly limited, familiar premise.  It’s the lengthy, over-the-top release of that tension in the film’s third act that really achieves something special, though.

After listening to the men on the plane delegitimize and sexualize her for the entire ride—while also ignoring her warnings of the gremlin on the wings and enemy fighters in the clouds—Moretz explodes into action.  Once she emerges from her gun-turret prison cell, her deathmatch with the gremlin is nonstop carnage and catharsis, indulging in a Looney Tunes sense of physics & decorum that’s wildly divergent from the film’s confined-space beginnings. The 1940s setting is harshly contrasted with an 80s-synth John Carpenter score as Moretz proves herself to be the toughest solider on-board, effectively tearing the gremlin to shreds with her own bare hands as her fellow soldiers fall to their peril.  It’s the same grounded-war-narrative-to-outrageous-horror-schlock trajectory played with in 2018’s Overlord, except in this case the grotesquely monstrous enemy is American misogynists rather than Nazi combatants.

It may not be as gloriously inane as The Box (few films are), but Shadow in the Cloud is a total blast.  It’s 80 minutes of delicious, delirious pulp, settling halfway between a dumb-fun creature feature and a sincerely performed radio play.  Not for nothing, it’s also the first time I’ve ever enthusiastically enjoyed a Chloë Grace Moretz performance, as I spent the final half hour of the film cheering her on as if she were a pro wrestler taking down the ultimate heel.  I would love to live in a world where every classic Twilight Zone episode were exploited as a jumping-off point for an over-the-top sci-fi thriller that reaches beyond the outer limits of a 20min premise – especially if they all could manage to be this wonderfully absurd.

-Brandon Ledet

Mr Klein (1976)

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It sometimes feels as if the canon of Cinematic Classics has already been set in stone, as if there’s no major discoveries left to be found that haven’t already been exulted by cultural institutions like The Criterion Collection or The Sight & Sound Top 100 list. That’s why restorations of forgotten, discarded gems like Mr. Klein are so vital to modern cinephilia, keeping the hope alive for decades-delayed discoveries. Directed by HUAC-backlisted American ex-pat Joseph Losey in the grim, grimy days of the 1970s, Mr. Klein has been shoddily distributed in the decades since, to the point where it’s been effectively backlisted itself. Maybe some of its initial critical reluctance in France was due to its American filmmaker going exceptionally hard on targeting French authorities for cooperating with Nazis while under German occupation (still a fresh wound at the time of its initial release). Maybe the film was simply just considered not particularly great, just another vanity project for its tabloid-friendly leading man Alain Delon in the titular role; maybe its exceptional qualities only became apparent with time & distance away from Delon’s peak star wattage. Whatever the case, it’s a great work that deserves great respect, the exact kind of discarded gem that self-serious film nerds cream their jeans over when it’s rescued for the digital restoration treatment. Rialto Films isn’t only keeping Mr. Klein alive with this restoration; they’re also keeping alive the thrill of the hunt.

Delon stars as an unscrupulous art dealer who makes a fortune off the Holocaust’s slow intrusion into German-occupied France. As doomed Jewish citizens seek the road money necessary to escape Nazi rule, Mr. Klein lowballs them on the worth of their precious art collections, profiting off their terror. This unseemly business is disrupted when Klein is mistaken by French authorities to be Jewish himself, as he shares a name with a much less wealthy French citizen who’s on the path to be exported to a German concentration camp. Arrogantly convinced that his wealth & public stature will protect him, Klein decides to address this mix-up through official, administrative channels instead of fleeing France himself. His delusions that he can remain uninvolved in the plight of French Jews makes him more involved than ever. As he falls down a Kafkaesque bureaucracy rabbit hole in an attempt to clear his name, he effectively become both a Nazi and a Jew himself: hunting down the “real” Robert Klein to bring them to “justice” and being treated like a lousy criminal by the Nazi-complying French authorities because of an arbitrary criterion beyond his control. It’s clear from the start where the story is headed, as the movie largely functions as a Twilight Zone-style morality tale, but the point is less in the surprise of the plot than it is in the ugly depths of Klein’s authoritarian, self-serving character. This is a damn angry film about the evils of Political Apathy, and a damn great one.

Where Mr. Klein might frustrate some plot-obsessed viewers is in its predictability, it more than makes up for it in eerie mood. Its Kafkaesque bureaucracy nightmare and fits of uncanny horror almost suggest that Klein’s plight will tip into supernatural fantasy at any moment, as if he has a genuine doppelgänger roaming the streets of Paris in wait of a violent showdown. Mostly, though, the film operates like a grimy 1970s throwback to the heyday of noir. Klein’s late-night investigations of shadowy figures, dangerous dames, and widespread political corruption recall a wide range of classic noir tropes, right down the trench coat & fedora of his costuming. By the very first scene, he already tips the archetype of the noir anti-hero into full-fledged villainy, as he’s introduced fleecing a devastated Jewish man while dressed in an obnoxious silk bathrobe in his luxurious apartment. His villainy only worsens as he pursues the “real” Robert Klein instead of fleeing France himself, something he’s easily equipped to do. What’s his ideal success story here? That he clears his own name by condemning a Jewish man to death in a concentration camp? Klein is convinced the French authorities will clear his name through proper channels in time, yet he only becomes guiltier in the eyes of the audience and in the eyes of the Nazis the more he fights his designation as a Jewish citizen. Like all great Twilight Zone plots, it’s the story of a morally defunct man getting his cosmically just deserts, with plenty of uncanny chills along the way. It just happens to be dressed up more like a spooky noir film than an outright horror.

I hope that this restoration of Mr. Klein rescues it from its relative obscurity to present it as one of the era’s great works. If nothing else, there are isolated images from the film that continue to haunt me the way all Great Cinema does: a Nazi phrenology exam, a mansion left empty by pilfered artwork, the world’s most horrific drag brunch, etc. Whether that critical reappraisal is imminent or not, just the chance to see it projected on the big screen with a totally unprepared audience at this year’s New Orleans French Film Festival was enough of a wonder to justify Rialto Films’s restoration of this forgotten gem. Our modern-day audience was thrilled, chilled, and traumatized by the experience, which is just as validating as a proper entry in the Great Cinema canon.

-Brandon Ledet

Jojo Rabbit (2019)

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Is it okay to admit that I genuinely don’t know what to make of this movie? After Taika Waititi’s hot streak of instant 5-star classics—Hunt for the Wilderpeople, What We Do in the Shadows, Boy—it’s tempting to give the writer-director the benefit of the doubt in my unease with Jojo Rabbit’s tone & aesthetic. I especially wish I could celebrate Waititi’s willingness to immediately torch all the money & goodwill he earned making a crowd-pleasing Marvel movie by starring as Adolf Hitler in a pitch-black comedy with wild, deliberately alienating tonal shifts. Still, Jojo Rabbit’s mashup of Cute & Vile sentiments left me more confounded than either frustrated or moved. I suppose that discomfort & unease was largely the point, but it ultimately just didn’t feel as confident or personal as Waititi’s previous experiments in light-and-dark tonal clashes. It’s the first time I can assume one of his films didn’t fully achieve whatever it set out to accomplish.

The titular Jojo Rabbit is a 1940s German boy, Johannes, who is foolheartedly committed to his enrollment in The Hitler Youth. Already a victim to Nazi propaganda before the film starts, Jojo treats The Hitler Youth as a Weekend Fun precursor to The Boy Scouts (which it kinda was). He fully buys into the program’s antisemitic brainwashing that portrays Jewish people as magical, greedy demons with horns, scales, and forked tongues. This naïve, fanatical devotion to Nazi ideology is challenged when Jojo discovers that his own mother is secretly hiding a teenage Jewish girl from the Gestapo in the walls of their house, trapping him between the White Nationalist lies he’s been immersed in and the quiet demonstrations of kindness & charity towards Jews his mother exhibits at home. Naturally, he talks himself through this internal conflict with the help of his imaginary friend – a goofball, superheroic version of The Fuhrer himself, played by Waititi with the same vaudevillian broadness Charlie Chaplin brought to The Great Dictator.

Between the film’s Wes Andersonian visual fussiness, cutesy childhood humor, and ice-cold stares into the depths of wartime cruelty, Jojo Rabbit tosses a lot of clashing flavors into one overflowing gumbo. The not-for-everyone ingredient in that recipe (the okra, if you will) is the film’s peculiar sense of humor, which is broad enough to feel like it was intended for an audience of children despite the thematic severity it’s supposed to undercut. This film is consistently gorgeous as a meticulously tailored art object and seemingly heartfelt in its pangs of familial & genocidal drama, but it’s never quite funny enough to full earn its self-proclaimed status as “an anti-hate satire.” Making Hitler out to be a goofball lunatic who “can’t grow a full mustache” and teasing him with schoolyard names like “Shitler” registers only faintly on the satire scale, a whisper of righteous dissent. To be fair, it’s the kind of humor a school-age young’n might find darkly subversive, which fits the POV character’s mentality just fine. For an adult audience, though, the jokes rarely land with anything more than a droll chuckle of recognition, which to me means this outrageous Hitler comedy is paradoxically playing it safe.

Thankfully, it works much better as a political & familial drama, especially in Jojo’s relationships with the women in his house. Spending time with an actual, in-the-flesh Jewish girl reorients Jojo’s dehumanization of her people as horned demons in the exact ways you’d expect. His relationship with his mother (played by Scarlett Johansson with an SNL-tier “German” accent) is much more complex & capable of surprise, as she grieves for the loss of her sweet, kindhearted son to Nazi propaganda as if he had died in battle. The women’s disappointment in Jojo’s indoctrination into antisemitism and their dismissal of his burgeoning Nazi ideology as “a scared child playing dress-up” registers as the most clear-eyed satirical target in the film – one with undeniable parallels to the resurgence of Nazism among young white men online in the 2010s. The imaginary Hitler device doesn’t lead to anything nearly as poignant as that dramatic anchor (although it is satisfying to see the racist icon portrayed by a self-described “Polynesian Jew”).

If I’m unsure how successful Jojo Rabbit is overall, that unease is mostly due to its middling successes as a comedy. A few jokes land here or there with a light chuckle, but the humor peaks early with an opening credits sequence that reframes Leni Riefenstahl’s propoganda footage of Nazi crowds to play like a precursor to Beatlemania. Overall, the film’s “anti-hate satire” wasn’t nearly as pointed or as ambitious as the 2016 German comedy Look Who’s Back, which amplified tonal clashing in its parody of modern Nazism to the scale of a cosmic farce. For me, Jojo Rabbit worked best as a maternal parallel to the paternal drama of Waititi’s Boy. The difference is that I left Boy marveling at how he pulled off such a delicate tonal balance with such confident poise, whereas I left Jojo Rabbit wondering if I had just seen him lose his balance entirely and tumble to the floor for the first time. The answer remains unclear to me.

-Brandon Ledet