Butt Boy (Tyler Cornack, 2019)

If I asked my eight-year-old nephew to come up with an idea for a movie, I wouldn't be shocked if he offered something butt-related, say, a story about a man who sucks up large objects and a baby into his butt but the baby grows up in the butt and survives by eating poop and the man also sucks up a little kid and an adult in his butt, etc. And yet this is the very premise of Butt Boy, a film written and directed by verifiable adult Tyler Cornack who also stars as the titular antihero. It's a juvenile film, to say the least, right down to its unrepresentative title (Ass Man is more appropriate but doesn't scan as well and carries unrelated connotations besides). Much of it plays like a lame inverse of a superhero/fantasy movie. It's just a ring of a different kind and there are plenty explosions.

What's so intriguing about Butt Boy is that it forces a meditation on the relationship between form and content. One might imagine that a story such as this would be conveyed in the irreverent style of John Waters who named Butt Boy his favorite film of 2020 in Artforum. But Cornack has created a rather muted film and he gives a dour, unshowy performance as the appropriately named Chip Gutchell, a thirtysomething schlub in the requisite loveless marriage and dead-end job. Shades of Office Space seep into the film, especially Austin Lewis' hilarious turn as Chip's cheer-forcing boss. But the overall feel is of a grimy Michael Mann drama or Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice as told by your eight-year-old nephew. Everything from William Morean's cinematography (capturing rainy alleys and unnatural lighting) to the performances (including Tyler Rice as the grizzled, alcoholic detective hot on Chip's tail and Shelby Dash as Chip's distracted wife) to the changing-same synth score (by Cornack and producer/co-writer Ryan Koch) bespeaks commitment and a high level of maturity. 

So in the end the film it resembles most is I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978), a trashy, exploitative rape-revenge flick done up in art-cinema longueurs. Or, more precisely, it reminds me of the dislocations of so many great pop songs (which I wrote about here) in which the sass of the lyrics contrasts with the mournfulness of the music. It's difficult to position oneself with respect to these works since the style is asking the audience to take the material more seriously than it may deserve. But getting stranded in an itchy place is far more compelling than having a film tightly packaged for one's smooth consumption.

Grade: A-minus

 

A Dirty Shame (John Waters, 2004)

John Waters is one of the chief Oedipal fathers I have to kill. And with A Dirty Shame, he's finally given me guilt-free motivation. You'd think such a voracious reader as Waters would have come across the first volume of The History of Sexuality to discover Foucault's theory of the "implantation of perversions," the notion that the obsessive cataloging of sexualities consolidates power over them. With his storytelling abilities at the lowest they'd been since Mondo Trasho 35 years prior, Waters transforms A Dirty Shame into a perversion implantation machine as he notes every kink and taboo exhibited by Sylvia Stickles' (Tracey Ullman) Baltimore neighbors. And this is no abstract threat. The implantation of perversions encompasses practices ranging from moral censure to punishment and death. You can certainly glean the former from the director's commentary in which Waters confesses that infantilism goes too far for him. And the gleeful cataloging doesn't even ensure the vanguard spirit that made Waters famous. How is it possible that our Filth Elder has never heard of feltching?  It all makes for an oppressive, profoundly conservative film. Even worse, it forces you to reassess the liberating power of his previous work, most immediately the Cavalcade of Perversions from Multiple Maniacs (1970).

Grade: D

Strawberries Need Rain (Larry Buchanan, 1970)

After churning out such Grade-Z efforts as Zontar: The Thing from Venus (1966) and Mars Needs Women (1967) for AIP's television syndication packages, Larry Buchanan tried to hoodwink the art-house crowd with a preposterous Ingmar Bergman copy called Strawberries Need Rain (1970). According to Buchanan (not that I believe exploitation film directors' claims about their product), the ploy worked. He convinced a theatre operator outside of Southern Methodist University to run it as the latest Bergman film and presumably, arty college kids fell for it. A 1986 Texas Monthly profile maintains that "[o]ne of the high points of Buchanan's life was hearing students dissect the symbolism of his thrown-together fake in hushed, reverent tones" (212). Oh yes - us arty types are such dopes.

Listen, listen - part of the reason we sit through obnoxious art films is for a peek at all manner of perverse subject matter. It's the thesis of one of my all-time favorite pieces of film criticism - John Waters' "Guilty Pleasures" (available in his collection Crackpot) in which he surfs the thin line between exploitation and art by hawking Marguerite Duras as a punk and pleading with Bergman to get started on Brink of Life II. Sarno lulls, Pasolini titillates, and there's no reason to feel stupid (or guilty) for loving the filmographies of either.

So when I deem Strawberries Need Rain preposterous, I mean to signal the immense pleasure I took in it. I was compelled to finally watch this thing from Texas due to its inclusion in the Early-70s Second-Tier Bummer Party, a home-viewing series curated my pal Whit Strub which he describes as "going for that post-1968, pre-Jaws 'we blew it' vibe, beneath the New Hollywood auteurs but above the SWV/Vinegar Syndrome grindhouse goldmine." Based on the novella In a Certain Village by Victor Brun (yeah, I don't believe that either), Strawberries Need Rain conveys the somnambulant, anything-but-Saturday-night feel of other films in Whit's series such as Z.P.G. (Michael Campus, 1972) and a little something called Some Call It Loving.

Trash-film stalwart Monica Gayle stars as Erika, a young gal from Texas Hill Country (which supposedly looks like Bergman's Sweden) who is confronted by Death in the form of Les Tremayne wielding a scythe. He gives her 24 hours to live and in classic exploitation form, she uses her remaining time to devirginize. It doesn't go well with childhood friend Franz (an incredible unseasoned performance by Terry Mace) or mean biker Bruno (Paul Bertoya). But the deed finally gets done by Erika's former teacher, the Quixote-quoting Gertie (Gene Otis Shane) before a twist ending. The film features many of the hallmarks of art cinema: time-wasting scenes of driving/walking, mood-ruining music cues, jarring temporal shifts, disembodied one-liners, frequent underreaction, etc. in addition to Buchanan's characteristic day-for-night shooting. I found its 85 minutes utterly hypnotic and long to see it at either 4pm or 4am in a theatre sometime soon (or at least on a Mill Creek Entertainment box set).

Grade: A

And check out the poster below! Dig that Oscar! And know that those "Top Hits in America" are two dippy folk tunes played throughout. I've transcribed the lyrics below.

"Strawberries Need Rain"

Bluebirds need wings
And a dream needs a dreamer
Cornfields need golden grain

And I need love
Like the dawn needs the sunlight
And strawberries need rain

Butterflies need to be free
Or they never will fly
And they'll die

Apples need autumn
Like April needs springtime
Summer a shady lane

I need to love
To be loved, to be living
Like strawberries, strawberries need rain

"Yellow Blue & Green"

Yellow and green and blue
Are they colors or are they feelings
Or could they be tomorrow's painted memories stealing through?
Yellow and green and blue

I'm jealous of the yellow daffodils
I'm jealous of the golden sun
I'm jealous for they all will still be here
But I'll be gone

I'm envious of every blade of grass
Of every leaf on every tree
I envy them for they will be with you
Instead of me

The sky above my head is smiling on
The sadness showing in my face
I'm sad because I wish I didn't have to be
Some other place

Brink of Life II (Ingmar Bergman, 2014)

Just kidding. This post concerns Bergman's 1958 film Brink of Life, obscured by the canonical films surrounding it (The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, both 1957 and The Virgin Spring from 1960) but adored in one of my all-time favorite pieces of film writing, John Waters' 1983 "Guilty Pleasures," first published in Film Comment and then in his Crackpot collection. "Guilty Pleasures" was an early acknowledgement of the thin line between art and exploitation and finds Waters pumping Bresson and Duras as de facto punks alongside appreciations of such still-unsung rage and/or boredom-inducers as Night Games (Mai Zetterling, 1966), A Cold Wind in August (Alexander Singer, 1961), and Mademoiselle (Tony Richardson, 1966). By including Brink of Life amongst such maudit company, Waters means to praise not the Bergman of existential hand-wringing but rather the Bergman of puke scenes and ridiculously gratuitous boob closeups.

These were precisely the selling points that exhibitors wanted to hype in order to attract restless, postwar audiences, e.g., filmgoers educated via the GI Bill and/or troops who saw European (and often art) cinema overseas. And so "Guilty Pleasures" reminds us of a filmscape that leveled the distinctions between Brink of Life and a sexploitation classic like Russ Meyer's 1959 The Immoral Mr. Teas across theaters free to show saucier fare in the wake of the Paramount and Miracle decisions.

But this Bergman, the de facto sexploitation film director, does not survive in legend. Today, he's either the ultimate middlebrow director or, less likely, perched at the highest point of cinematic art. As early as 1959, Hollis Alpert laid out the latter viewpoint in a Saturday Evening Review piece: "It’s already possible to determine whether someone is middlebrow or upperbrow, depending on whether the word 'Bergman' suggests Ingmar or Ingrid." But rather quickly, Bergman lost prestige with some influential critics (especially, Jonathan Rosenbaum) for a variety of reasons laid out by David Bordwell here so that now Ingrid Bergman undoubtedly inspires more reverence (at least when she's paired up with an auteurist-approved master). Both legacies make it difficult to view Brink of Life though Mr. Teas' naughty x-ray vision.

For sure, it contains most of the hallmarks of Bergman's cinema, chiefly, a suffocating milieu. Over the opening credits, we can hear city life outside the doors of a maternity ward, the film's sole location.

A nurse opens the doors and wheels us into the story world.

And at the very end of the film, the doors close on us, no end credits.

Nothing else exists, leaving Bergman open to the common charge of apolitical self-absorption.

Except, of course, the world outside very much exists in his cinema. It's constantly referenced in the extended harangues of his characters. In Brink of Life, it suffocates three women in various stages of pregnancy. But what value one can juice from this inside-outside tension depends largely on which Bergman dominates the viewing experience.

Critics who see Bergman as the quintessential director of middlebrow pseudo-profundity would seize on this tension to conclude that his characters reference the outside world only insofar as it relates to themselves. Rarely do they acknowledge that anyone else might be suffering or that anything besides suffering might ever happen. And so the audience must submit to the endless rants with plenty of mute witnesses as our surrogates. Here, a nurse rides out some Ingrid Thulin dialogue:

But those who find Bergman "a much nervier and riskier filmmaker than the oracular figure of legend" experience more nuance in his filmography. This Bergman is fully cognizant that he's limited his view to a little corner of the world. At times he even strives to let some of the hot air out of his stifling locales. This rare glimpse of the outside world in Brink of Life gives the film a momentary blast of fresh air (even though the window is pretty tightly shut):

Windows provide brief opportunities for the characters to recognize their feverish self-regard. Perhaps they even allow Bergman to roll his eyes at his characters such as in this shot from The Silence (1963), a much nervier and riskier film:

                                                            It is stuffy in here.

But what about Bergman the sexploitation maestro or Bergman the obnoxious button pusher? Could we not read his films back through the prism of rock 'n' roll if not punk rock? Instead of linking him to Strindberg backward and Woody Allen forward, why not use Chuck Berry and Pink Flamingos as reference points? In this register, the unnatural rants take on the petulance of Elvis demanding his due from the world in "Mystery Train." The reduced palette starts to give off the intensity of the circumscribed look and sound of punk. And if we submit to it all, the characters will take us down with them into the apocalypse just like classic punk rockers. In short, might we not guffaw at the audacity of Bergman's films rather than cower before their genius?