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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Surviving Desire 1992
The first time that I felt completely emotionally remote from a Hartley film, as if the script were as guilty as the characters of over-intellectualizing all its ideas. The dialogue is as rigidly stylized, and sometimes as funny, as ever, occasionally hitting that perfect balance of comedy and offhand profundity (“The trouble with Americans is that they always want a tragedy with a happy ending”). But what’s missing is the grounding undercurrent of vulnerability that made the director’s first two…
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Let My Puppets Come 1976
Inherently less tedious than more typical, hardcore-sex-focused Golden Age of Porn films like Gerard Damiano’s own The Devil in Miss Jones, if only Damiano had any real way with comedy. Let My Puppets Come may not be very funny, but it’s at least light and playful in a way that’s less dreary than other adult films and less mean-spirited than fellow puppet provocation Meet the Feebles; if you don’t laugh at a singing felt “Prick” and dancing vagina, or a…
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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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Trust 1990
It’s ironic (and sad) how obscure Hal Hartley has become relative to other 90’s indie auteurs— partly due to how ill-served he’s been by both physical media and streaming— because films like Trust are such clear touchstones for the 2000’s indie crossover boom: the light absurdism, the quirky verbal wit, the underlying emotional directness. It may not be the most flattering comparison, considering how many insufferable quirk-fests came through Sundance over the years, but that only points to how potent…
