zac efron

FYC 2023: Wrasslin’ Weepies

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

Unsurprisingly, a lot of this year’s major Awards Frontrunners are solemn biopics of men who committed some of the worst sins in human history: the invention of the atom bomb, the daily operation of concentration camps, the genocide of an Indigenous nation.  As much as The Academy has attempted to reconfigure what qualifies as an Oscar-Worthy movie, it’s clear that the Oscar-friendly template of Important Men directing history lessons about Important Men is still an effective one; all that’s really changed is that those portraits of Important Men have become more critical than celebratory.  Further down the power rankings of this FYC season’s major players, there’s also a curious pair of historical biopics about Important Men who operated in a much smaller arena than the frontrunners’ global politics stomping grounds: the regional pro wrestling circuit of 1980s Texas.  The men depicted in these pro wrasslin’ biopics are of much smaller historical importance than a J. Robert Oppenheimer or a Rudolf Höss; the tearjerking melodrama of their lives is less about the moral sins of their own actions than it is about how cruelly unfair the world was to them, and whether they survived the trauma.  However, in a big picture sense, they echo the same criticism of the rigid machismo and the hypocrisy in Family Values conservatism that drove the Important Men of Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flowers Moon, and The Zone of Interest to commit humanity’s greatest.  They just work through that cultural tragedy within the walls of their small family homes and within the rubber-padded ropes of the wrestling ring.  It’s more contained.

If this season’s pro wrestling dramas are being contextualized as awards-hopefuls, they’re most overtly engineering FYC attention for their male stars.  In that way, pro wrestling is the perfect cinematic subject, since it offers such a familiar, convenient storytelling template to help get male performers over with the crowd.  Even when a wrasslin’ pictures’s in-movie drama feels minor in comparison to more historically important works, their in-ring drama carries the audience through, highlighting an actors’ talents with the emotional histrionics of a soap opera or a Greek tragedy.  Nobody benefits from that dramatic bolstering this year more than Gabriel García Bernal, who stars as the titular lead in the lucha libre history lesson Cassandro.  This by-the-numbers biopic isn’t half as stylistically daring as the Cassandro, el Exótico! documentary on the same subject, nor as fabulously glamorous as the luchador himself, but it’s an inherently cinematic story and García Bernal shines in the central role.  The real-life Cassandro is credited for changing the artform of lucha libre by subverting the homophobic trope of the “exótico.”  When he entered the business wrestling on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, exóticos were a purely homophobic stereotype: heels who would earn cheap heat by flirting with their more traditionally macho opponents, then get immediately crushed in the ring to the crowd’s enthusiastic cheers.  It was gaybashing as ceremonial pageantry.  Cassandro flipped the script by genuinely getting over with the crowd through the artistry of his wrestling, to the point where promoters saw potential profits in letting an exótico win for a change; or, that’s at least how the story goes, according to kayfabe.  The beyond-the-mat drama of his struggles with a loving but homophobic mother and with sex-partner colleagues who are willing to fuck him in private but renounce him in public can feel a little phony & cliche to anyone who’s seen their share of queer indie dramas in the past few decades.  The nonstop montage of Cassandro’s career in the ring is still emotionally compelling in a succinct, celebratory, wrasslin’-specific way that makes up for those broad cliches, though, and by the time the credits roll it’s hard to tell whether you’re rooting for Cassandro or rooting for García Bernal – an FYC publicist’s dream.

The Von Erich family drama The Iron Claw spreads the FYC wealth to many more potential nominees than Cassandro‘s fixed spotlight on Gabriel García Bernal.  The improbable true story of the supposedly “cursed” family of professional wrestlers has plenty of star-making tragedy to spread around its four central brothers: Zac Efron as Kevin Von Erich, Jeremy Allen White as Kerry Von Erich, Harris Dickinson as David Von Erich, and Stanley Simons as David Von Erich.  Efron is the most obvious awards play of the group, transforming himself into a human He-Man action figure for the role in a grotesque way that awards bodies love to celebrate.  Each of the Von Erich brothers get their moment to bring the audience to tears, though, as they’re each pushed to the brink of what their hearts and bodies can handle by their toxically macho father Fritz Von Erich, played with monstrous villainy by Holt McCallany.  The first half of the movie recalls the laidback nostalgic cool of Dazed and Confused as the four central brothers lean on each other for warmth & validation in the happiest times of their lives, working together as up & coming wrestlers who have yet to be fully poisoned by their father’s insistence they compete amongst themselves for his scraps of praise.  The second half disrupts that momentary bliss with the heightened violence of a Greek tragedy, with each brother meeting improbably horrific ends in a rapid, relentless procession.  The Iron Claw‘s reliance on the in-ring drama of pro wrestling is heaviest in the early stretch, as the Von Erichs’ prominence in pre-WWF regional wrasslin’ circuits is mapped out in montage & dramatic recreations of select, pivotal matches.  The back half is a much more straightforward drama that could have befallen any sports-family household, since cataloging the parade of traumas that crushed the Von Erichs leaves very little time to show them actually doing the work.  Besides, the movie isn’t really about their wrestling careers anyway; it’s more about the love they shared as brothers, and how important that bond was in a home run by a man incapable of expressing affection.  If it were any less successful as a sincere family drama, the men’s frequent repetition of the word “Brother” would play as a joke, the same way audiences now laugh every time Vin Diesel says “Family” in the Fast & Furious movies.

If this were a one-on-one, three-count fight, it would be a squash match.  Cassandro is dramatically and stylistically outperformed by The Iron Claw by practically every metric – except, maybe, in the vintage-glam detail of Cassandro’s gemstoned ring gear.  Neither film is an exceptional work of great artistic importance, though; they’re both just FYC acting showcases for their above-the-line talents, who utilize pro-wrestling’s played-to-the-cheap-seats pageantry to add some emotional heft to otherwise traditional sports dramas.  If they have any standing in discussion with the Oscar-hopefuls who’ve risen to the top of the Vegas-odds rankings over the course of this FYC season, it’s in their shared skepticism over the effects of stoic masculinity and conservative Family Values in recent generational history.  Cassandro finds a way to offer a triumphant rejection of those traditional values, while The Iron Claw drags our battered hearts through their most miserable consequences.  In either case, their performers are never more powerful nor more beautiful than they are on the wrestling mat, and both films are excellent examples of acting as full-body physical artistry.  If I have to watch straightforward, mediocre melodramas to keep up with the buzziest titles in the Oscars Cycle every year, I’d be more than happy if they’d continually return to the wrestling ring for easy crowd work and promotion.  It gives us something easy to root for, which is honestly something I’d rather put myself through than yet another war atrocity drama about the worst things that have ever happened in the history of the human species.

-Brandon Ledet

The Beach Bum (2019)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

I best appreciate Harmony Korine when he reins in his aimless, nonsensical character studies with the semblance of a guiding structure. Deliberately off-putting, nihilistically empty provocations like Trash Humpers & Mister Lonely are immediately fascinating for their surface eccentricities but exhausting at full-length. By contrast, the reason Gummo & Spring Breakers stand out as clear highlights in the director’s scummy arthouse catalog is that they afford the audience a recognizable genre framework with built-in dramatic payoffs, whether post-Apocalyptic sci-fi or a neon-lit heist thriller, without sacrificing the eccentricities that distinguish Korine as a phlegmy creative voice. The Beach Bum joins those ranks of Korine’s best-behaved works by meeting the audience hallway with a recognizable tone & structure while its minute to minute rhythms still recall the off-putting, amoral deviance of provocations like Trash Humpers. The guiding structure in this sunshiny Floridian nightmare is the most unlikely genre the director has barnacled his schtick to yet: the 1990s major studio comedy. The Beach Bum is essentially Harmony Korine’s Billy Madison. I mean that as a compliment.

Matthew McConaughey stars as the titular preposterous beach bum, a Florida-famous stoner-poet named Moondog. As you might expect from a Korine protagonist, Moondog is The Worst. “The most prolific poet in Key West, Florida,” he lives in a haze of cheap beer, pot smoke, and dehydrating sunshine, relying on his local fame to pave over his schoolyard bully brutality. He ruins every life he touches, but everyone around him continually excuses his behavior with shrugged-off phrases like “That’s just Moondog,” and “He’s from another dimension.” Meanwhile, Moondog laughs maniacally at his own villainy, barking “I write poetry, you little bitch” at anyone who doesn’t immediately respect his literary pedigree. He announces in a poem, “One day I will swallow up the world and when I do I hope you all suffer violently” to his adoring audience, briefly dropping his worry-free beach-frat exterior to reveal his true nature: a hedonist monster who’s wiling to destroy lives if it means he can get laid, get high, and have a laugh. The film builds itself around exploring the intricacies & eccentricities of a character who is too stoned & too spiritually empty to be genuinely interesting on his own merits. It’s pure Korine in that way, even if its surface details resemble a much more conventional comedy.

As off-putting & nihilistically empty as The Beach Bum is as a character study, the marketing company that cut its misleading trailer had plenty to work with in making it look like a 90s stoner comedy. A plot contrivance that pressures Moondog to finish his next poetry collection in order to inherit a fortune that was willed to him with that stipulation feels like it was ripped directly from an unpublished Adam Sandler screenplay. To reinforce that association, Jonah Hill plays Moondog’s literary agent as a full-on impersonation of The Waterboy’s Bobby Boucher. Moondog’s own persona seems to have derived from a fantasy where Billy Madison grew up to be an even grosser, less effective version of The Dude from The Big Lebowski, which is the kind of fan-fiction you write as a teenage idiot only to rediscover it in horror as a sober adult. All the plot really amounts to, though, is an excuse to send Moondog on a go-nowhere, circular road trip with his trusty typewriter slung over his shoulder in a trash bag. Like all road-trip comedies, The Beach Bum is mostly a series of episodic run-ins with over-the-top caricatures: Snoop Dogg & Jimmy Buffett essentially playing themselves in extended cameos; Martin Lawrence as a dolphin-obsessed sea captain (who would almost certainly have been played by Chris Farley in a genuine comedy of this ilk); Zac Efron as a JNCOs-wearing Christian-rocker who apparently time traveled directly from a late-90s Creed concert. They’re all recognizable archetypes from mainstream 90s comedies but distorted into horrific grotesqueries. And none are half as nightmarish as Moondog himself.

The Beach Bum bills itself as “The new Comedy from Harmony Korine,” but I was the only person at my first-weekend 4:20 screening howling in laughter or gasping in horror. A certain familiarity with the director’s schtick is likely required at the door to get on this film’s wavelength. It wears the clothes of a laugh-a-minute yuck ‘em up from the Happy Madison brand, but beneath those vestments it’s the same aimless, puke-stained nightmare Korine has always delivered. As a hot-and-cold admirer of his work, I found plenty to be impressed by here – particularly in the way he mimics Moondog’s semi-conscious, lifelong-blackout engagement with the world in an editing style that works in half-remembered, repetitious circles. Moondog is a destructive menace with nothing novel or insightful to say about the world but somehow continually gets away with passing off his villainy as gonzo poetry. Living inside his burnout, bottom-feeder mind for 95 minutes is a frustrating, fruitless experience, but also fascinating as a character-specific nightmare. It’s less a satirical attack on the juvenile manbabies of mainstream comedies past than it is an acknowledgment of a kindred spirit between them and Korine’s own catalog of useless, preposterous lunatics. Whatever critiques or subversions of the mainstream comedy you may pick up along the way are just a result of the director doing his usual thing to an unusual level of success.

-Brandon Ledet.

The Greatest Showman (2017)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

“Does it bother you that everything you’re selling is fake?”
“Do these smiles look fake?”

One of my favorite recurring SNL characters in recent years was Andy Samberg’s portrayal of Hugh Jackman: The Man with Two Sides. The joke was essentially that Jackman’s public persona was bizarrely bifurcated between his gruff performances as a muscled-out action star and his more delicate, fanciful performances as a man of the stage. 2017 might have been the year when the Two Sides of Hugh Jackman both reached their most absurd extremes. Early in the year, Jackman’s long-running lone wolf/tough guy act as Wolverine in the X-Men franchise got so somber & manly in Logan that the film could easily pass as an adaptation of a late-career Johnny Cash ballad. Jackman then followed that grizzled performance up in December with the silliest, most frothy performance in his entire musical theatre career. Jackman stars in the movie musical biopic The Greatest Showman as an eternally chipper P.T. Barnum, whom the movie posits as the inventor of modern showbusiness. The Greatest Showman is less remarkable for contrasting Logan as an exercise in pure, unembarrassed musical theatre than it is for contrasting it as a disingenuous, 100-minute-long commercial where the product being sold is joy. Just as I cried a solitary, manly tear as Logan toyed with political exploitation & deep-seated daddy issues, I also totally bought into the joyful, bullshit product Jackman peddles in The Greatest Showman. He’s a very talented salesman, no matter which one of his Two Sides is doing the talking.

Calling The Greatest Showman a biopic is a little misleading. I’m not sure Jackman’s portrayal of P.T. Barnum shares much in common with the real-life showman outside a name and an affiliation with the popularization of the traveling circus. The revisionist narrative the film peddles is just as surreally artificial as its nonstop barrage of green-screened backdrops. Barnum begins the film as a working-class upstart whose belief in the American dream (and skills at lying to bank lenders) catapults his family from rags to riches as he unknowingly “invents” modern show business (think Vegas variety show). His “aha!” moment that transforms a failing wax museum packed with dusty curios to a lucrative enterprise of populist entertainment is a decision to exploit the local outcasts & physically disabled as tourist attractions, essentially inventing the profession of “circus freak.” The Greatest Showman often attempts to posit Barnum’s relationship with his disenfranchised employees as tenderly familial, but it’s much more convincing in the stretches where he profits off their labor, yet locks them out of the visibility of the high-society circles they afford him access to. The film’s moral lies somewhere in celebrating your inner (and outer) weirdness instead of desperately wanting to be accepted by the snobbish hegemony, a lesson Barnum supposedly learns several times throughout (by way of gaudy, pop-minded showtunes, of course).

There are dual romance storylines that distract from The Greatest Showman’s Let Your Freak Flag Fly messaging and overall value as a crassly populist spectacle. One involves Barnum repeatedly ignoring his wife (Michelle Williams) and children in his blind pursuit of high society respectability, something that falls a little flat if not only because his wife’s inner desires are left vague & unclear. Early on, Barnum sings passionately about his dream of creating the ultimate form of entertainment, while his wife’s only expressed desire is that he share that dream with her and allow her to tag along. A second, interracial romance among Barnum’s employees (Disney Channel vets Zack Effron & Zendaya) is a little clearer in its place in the story, though it’s ultimately just as inconsequential. Neither romance is nearly as satisfying as the time spent with Barnum’s stable of “freaks,” whose determination to be visible & respected while being themselves is the most convincing thread in the film’s overall sentimentality. I’ll admit that even as crass & silly as this movie is in every single frame, I got a little teary-eyed at the circus performers (especially the bearded lady) singing about how they’re “Not scared to be seen” in the Oscar-nominated tune “This is Me.” The characterizations of the circus performers can be just as insultingly artificial as the romances and the revision of Barnum’s exploitative history and everything else in the film (the bizarre vocal dubbing of the cast’s sole little person is especially egregious), but that’s all part of The Greatest Showman’s tacky sense of proto-Vegas fun. It also does little to distract from the endearing, all-accepting, freaks-are-people-too messaging.

The debut film from director Michael Gracey, The Greatest Showman was likely a movie-by-committee proposition, very much in the tradition of blatantly commercial movie musicals like Moulin Rouge & Xanadu. It proudly wears that populism on its ruffled sleeve, though, directly calling out potential critics as “prigs & snobs” before they even have a chance to file a negative review. Barnum goes even further by calling the entire profession of entertainment criticism inherently hypocritical, as he becomes morbidly fixated on a “critic who can’t find joy in the theatre.” That insult stuck with me, not because it was especially insightful as a look into the practice of art criticism, but because it made clear exactly what product this obnoxious, crass, overlong, deeply silly advertisement was trying to sell me: joy. I greatly respect The Greatest Showman for the honesty of its populist spectacle & out-in-the-open commitment to artifice. I also believe that, besides maybe Barnum himself, there are few hucksters who could have sold its joy-product more convincingly than Jackman, even if he was outshined by the circus performers’ storyline and could only employ one of his distinct Two Sides in the task.

-Brandon Ledet

Dirty Grandpa (2016)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

It’s so rare for Robert De Niro to put in a watchable performance nowadays that it’s tempting to overpraise his smaller roles in movies where he’s not even the main attraction, just because he put forth a notable effort. Bit parts in films like Stardust & Silver Linings Playbook keep the He’s Still Got It dream alive while most top bill De Niro performances urge us to abandon all hope, to accept that whatever talent or drive the actor held onto as a young man is long dead. Dirty Grandpa might be a game-changer in that respect (and in that one aspect only). Dirty Grandpa is a broad, crass comedy about overgrown man-children that makes no real attempt to distinguish itself from every other broad, crass comedy about overgrown man-children that have filled out theater marquees since the rise of the Judd Apatow era. Robert De Niro’s performance within that framework as the titular grimy geezer is worthy of distinguishing praise, however. Once you get past the fact that his role is a series of grotesque sexual come-ons, irreverent gross-outs, expletive-filled karaoke performances, and feverish torrents of masturbation, it becomes apparent that it might be the actor’s bravest, most fully committed work in decades. It’s almost Freddy Got Fingered levels of audience-trolling absurdity that he decided to apply that latent sense of passionate craft to such an aggressively inane, grotesque line of humor.

Zac Efron is a buttoned up lawyer on the verge of marrying an uptight woman he very obviously has no feelings for. Robert De Niro is his ex-military grandfather and a recent widower. At first he comes off as a kind of racist, homophobic asshole, but really no better or worse than any other old white man his age. As the film develops, he reveals that his outward crassness is a deliberate ploy to shake his too-refined grandson out of making the romantic mistake of a lifetime in marrying a woman he doesn’t love. It’s a typical bro comedy plot, playing almost like a The Hangover spin-off (especially in its demonization of a shrewish fiancée whose only enjoyment in life is in ruining boys-will-be-boys type fun). Dirty Grandpa manages to make the effort worthwhile, though. Centering its conflicts around the grandpa’s immediate quest to fuck a young college student (that’s right; this grandpa fucks) the day after his wife’s funeral, the movie seems entirely self-aware about the frivolity of the story it’s telling. Its climactic heart to heart has nothing to do with teaching the grandson a life lesson, but instead includes the line, “The greatest gift a guy can give his grandpa is unprotected sex with a college girl before he dies.” The road trip mishaps on the journey to organize that gift at a Daytona Beach Spring Break celebration also cut down on the movie’s ultra-macho posturing, especially once the brocation is interrupted by the likes of a crazed drug dealer (Jason Mantzoukas), a sarcastic gay man (UnReal‘s Jeffery Bowyer-Chapman), and a no-fucks-given anarchic monster (Aubrey Plaza).

I was initially very weary of the bro humor Dirty Grandpa gleefully rolled around in like a pig in shit. Verbal references to “retards,” “buttfuckers,” and prison rape cool the comedy a great deal in the initial goings, but it’s easy to warm up to the film once you realize De Niro’s elderly gremlin is supposed to be an unlikable monster. I wound up admiring how gross Dirty Grandpa‘s gross-out humor dared to be and by the time the ancient bastard was rapping along to Ice Cube’s “Today Was a Good Day” at a karaoke club I was fully on board with the cheap thrills this movie and this actor were willing to debase themselves to provide. Maybe De Niro is on some level too much of a talent to be employed for a gag where his adult grandson walks in on him fully nude & furiously masturbating (or “doing a #3,” in the movie’s parlance), but that kind of decision-making is more up to the actor & his agent than it is to me as an audience. I’m just happy to see the old man dive head first into non-vanilla, memorable material. Watching him take on a monstrous role as a wrinkled hellraiser with an unrelenting boner in a comedy whose title I consistently confuse with the throwaway Johnny Knoxville trifle Bad Grandpa might not have been my first choice in where I’d want to see his late-career trajectory go, but I’d be a liar if I said it wasn’t a pleasure to behold. A dirty, shameful pleasure.

-Brandon Ledet