On today’s “Puppet Perversion” episode of Unwatchables, we’re joined by Bob McCully from the film podcast Split Your Head to discuss two of the first films to violently tear up the notion that puppets are just for kids. Back when puppetry was mostly the domain of children’s entertainment, these movies brought enough graphic sex, drugs, and violence to traumatize any child unlucky enough to stumble upon them: Peter Jackson’s 1989 ultra-dark comedy Meet the Feebles, and Gerard Damiano’s 1976 pornographic…
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Querelle 1982
On today’s Unwatchables we’re tackling two controversial landmarks in gay cinema with help from Guy Lodge, film columnist for The Observer and chief UK film critic for Variety. Both films were scandalous for the early 1980’s, pushing boundaries with their unflinching depictions of the lives of gay men just before the AIDS crisis. First up is 1982’s Querelle, the final and most provocative film from legendary German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder; followed by 1980’s even more daring (and graphic) cult…
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Ghost in the Shell 1995
Too often feels like a narratively overstuffed episode of TV, as if half the important action already happened offscreen and with dialogue almost exclusively loading us down with exposition. But at least that's not the case visually— I usually don’t get too excited about the actual look of anime (in my woefully limited experience), so it’s to Ghost in the Shell’s credit that I appreciated it almost entirely on the surface. The crumbling, rain-soaked streets and neon signs evoke Blade…
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The Doom Generation 1995
I still don’t fully click with early Araki’s anarchic-at-best, juvenile-at-worst sensibility, though The Doom Generation works best when it gets so out there that it could pass for a parody of a disaffected, Gen-X criminals-on-the-run flick. I was most tickled when it pushes into outright absurdism: the talking severed head, the recurring $6.66, the way most of the trouble comes from Amy continually, inexplicably being mistaken for someone else (or is she?) who inspires violent obsession. I also found James…
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Oppenheimer 2023
Even Nolan’s biggest fans would probably concede that he’s best appreciated for his high concepts and heady spectacle, rather than for the mounds of inelegant exposition that often connect them; in a Nolan film, the characters and dialogue tend to be chiefly vehicles for his ideas, functional at best and clumsy at worst (lest we forget Tenet’s infamous ”including my son” line). In that sense, Oppenheimer doesn’t exactly play to his strengths. It’s a biopic through and through— the kind…
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The Unbelievable Truth 1989
Pretty incredible to realize that Hal Hartley’s first film arrived the same year as Steven Soderbergh’s and Gus Van Sant’s, which, along with Do the Right Thing, makes 1989 a candidate for the most consequential year for American independent film (or two years, if you include 1990; imagine still recovering from those all-time auspicious debuts, and then getting Slacker and Metropolitan). The Unbelievable Truth may not be fully-formed masterpiece like those other films, but it’s just as distinctive an introduction…
