Year: 2016

Pom Poko (1994)

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fourhalfstar

The Japanese animation empire Studio Ghibli (most closely associated with the brilliant work of Hayao Miyazaki) is an intimidating force from the outside looking in. I’m familiar with the bigger works like Spirited Away & My Neighbor Totoro that dominate the studio’s branding, but there’s dozens of Ghibli titles I’ve never taken the time to approach partly due to the intimidation factor of the studio’s staggering output, despite the fact that most of their work seems to be of impossibly high quality in the medium of hand-drawn animation. If there’s just one Studio Ghibli film I wish I had seen years & years sooner it’d be the raccoon eco-warrior mockumentary Pom Poko. The small-community-vs-the-empowered-hegemony political tone, harsh mix of tragedy & black comedy, and ungodly amount of raccoon testicles that shape the story of Pom Poko would’ve made it a perfect fit for a movie night favorite in my younger, punker years. It’s all too easy to see how young anarcho-punks could empathize with the raccoons fighting the impossible-to-topple enemy of an encroaching housing development & even if they couldn’t align with the creatures politically, they’d still be able to draw a great deal of humor from the creatures’ ever-present, comically oversized testicles. Because it was a film we all grew up with, the movie that filled this niche when I was actually young & angsty was Ferngully. Pom Poko offers a much more beautiful, well-crafted, crass, and ultimately pessimistic version of the Ferngully sentimentality, though, and would’ve made a much more appropriate choice for repeated drunken viewings in my salad days.

The plot of Pom Poko is a fairly straightforward one, though its kookier details gradually escalate to heightened degrees of insanity over the course of its runtime. As a massive housing project threatens to level the forested area where a large tribe of magical raccoons reside, the woodland creatures decide to fight back through their limited means. Think of the guerrilla Ewok resistance on Endor in Return of the Jedi & you pretty much get the picture. The major difference, of course, is that these woodland creatures are not only cute, they’re also magically transformative. They can shapeshift from their natural raccoon shapes to look like supercute cartoon raccoons or an average human being or everyday inanimate objects or anything, really. Some use this skill to scare humans from encroaching on their territory. Some use to live among the humans to escape persecution. Some use it to transform their testicles into gigantic weapons to punish/kill human intruders, a move that positions Pom Poko as the premiere children’s film that deals in testicular homicide. As a small crew of wisened elders join the raccoons’ ranks, the transformations get more complicated & mythical from there, leading to stunning recreations from Japanese folklore (the exact kind you’d find in Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare). The ethereal display is supposed to intimidate the humans from encroaching any further, but any & all actions taken to protest the impending housing development seems doomed to fail. Business as Usual sees no threat big enough to discourage a potential profit & stopping the housing development proves to be a Sisyphean task.

Much of Pom Poko feels as is it may have been lost in translation from Japanese culture & language to its Western, English-speaking version. Firstly, despite what the English dub labels them, the tanuki portrayed here aren’t truly raccoons at all, although the two species do look remarkably similar. Tanuki also have a long history in folklore that justifies the excessive presence of their magical testicles in a children’s movie. The English translation (which features voice work from J.K. Simmons, Brian Posehn, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, and at least three Futurama vets) does its damnedest to soften the oddity of its testicular content by translating “testicles” to “pouches” as if kids would mistake the creatures for being marsupials, having never seen themselves or anyone else naked. The yokai folklore on display in the film’s visually stunning third act might also fail to fully translate for Western audiences as well, even though it’s easy to tell from the outside looking in that there’s a rich history backing up its exquisite artistic craftsmanship. The film obviously didn’t have too hard of a time traveling to Western markets, though, since it was submitted for consideration for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1994 (not that it won any accolades or even an official nomination). That kind of pedigree is not too shabby for a children’s cartoon drowning in a sea of furry testicles.

What easily breaks through the language & cultural barriers in Pom Poko is the flm’s anarco-punk spirit. As a radical community uniting against a much larger, better-equipped enemy, the racoons of Pom Poko have many philosophical discussions about the acceptable levels of violence & the effectiveness of non-violent protest in their tactics to combat the housing development, which is a never-ending debate among young progressives, I assure you. Their youthful spirit is also a detriment to their cause, as they’re prone to celebrate small victories long before achieving any longterm goals. The little creatures just love to party. They’re all too easily distracted by beer, pizza, pro wrestling, sex, cheeseburgers, and all sorts of hedonistic temptations that also often distract human punks from organizing & enacting a significant socio-economic change. If you’re looking for proof that this metaphor holds any water, just look to the political chants the raccoons use to rouse their ranks in times of depression or distracted partying. With the right guitar & percussive backing track any one of their chants could easily pass as a song from the seminal anarcho-punk band Crass. The film even addresses the concerns of what happens when these kinds of communities grow up, give in, die off, or decide to join the enemy, which is pretty much the plot of every 00s mall punk’s cinematic handbook, SLC Punk.

Besides the incredible level of skill in the film’s hand-drawn craft, the aspect that makes all of this work in Pom Poko is in its matter-of-fact storytelling style. The film is presented as a documentary & a collection of oral histories, which saves it from delving into the broad, slapstick frivolity of its spiritual cousin, Ferngully. The film can be cartoonishly humorous, sure, but it also aims to break your heart with depictions of death & defeat that a lot of modern children’s films (unfortunately) avoid at all cost. It’s an all-the-more rewarding film because of this detached tone, too, since you not only accept that racoons for who they are & cheer for their victory, but you also fear the idea that it’s a fight they can never possibly win.

-Branodn Ledet

If Released in Another Time, Big Business (1988) Could’ve Easily Been a ZAZ-Style Spoof of Old Hollywood Farces

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Somehow during our lengthy conversation surrounding our February Movie of the Month, the Bette Midler/Lily Tomlin swapped-twins comedy Big Business, I had foolishly overlooked who had actually directed the damned thing. Big Business‘s director, Jim Abrahams, is the “A” in the infamous comedic filmmaking team ZAZ. Along with brothers David & Jerry Zucker, Abrahams was responsible for popularizing the concept of the spoof comedy. As a collaborative trio ZAZ penned & directed Airplane!, Top Secret!, Hot Shots, Hot Shots Part Deux, and the Naked Gun trilogy, which pretty much covers the pillars of the medium. Flying solo, Abrahams also has screenwriting credits for Scary Movie 4, Kentucky Fried Movie, an some horrific-looking monster titled Jane Austen’s Mafia!. In isolation the name Jim Abrahams failed to ring any bells, but the team of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker was a force to be reckoned with, one that changed the comedy cinema landscape if not for the better than at least for the sillier.

Although I feel foolish that I didn’t recognize Abrahams’ hand in Big Business sooner, it totally makes sense in retrospect. The most crucial aspect of the film that stuck out to me was its dedicated homage to Old Hollywood comedies. Viewing the film with Abrahams in mind now, I see a much different sort of half-formed homage lurking in Big Business. It’s basically just one gentle push away from an Old Hollywood spoof. The film’s swapped-twins contrivance, grand hotel setting, borrowed gag from Duck Soup, endless line of eligible bachelors waiting to marry its protagonists, narrow-minded depictions of the difference between wealth & poverty, and over-the-top lengths to keep its mismatched twins from ending the ruse all once played like a love letter to a bygone era in studio system filmmaking. Now they feel like seeds to what could’ve been a fullblown Old Hollywood spoof after a couple of joke-heavy rewrites. The framework for a ZAZ-style spoof is lurking just under the surface of Big Business, waiting, begging for a sea of juvenile gags to fill in the blanks.

I think the major reason why Big Business didn’t take that direction is a question of timing. The film was released during a time frame where Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker were still a functioning unit, but the timing was off for an Old Hollywood spoof in terms of box office potential. If you look at the trio’s M.O., they generally stuck to spoofing film genres that were active in the era in which they worked. Airplane! spoofed the large-cast disaster film genre (specifically parodying Airport 1975 most heavily) at the tail end of the decade when they were A Thing. Top Secret! spoofed spy movies, a genre that never dies. The Hot Shots! series spoofed 80s & 90s action cinema in a time when that would’ve still been a relevant target, focusing heavily on Top Gun & Rambo for inspiration. Seeing as how it would’ve been impossible for Abrahams to create an Old Hollywood spoof in the Old Hollywood era, given that he was a child in its heyday, he would have had to achieved that distinction sometime in the 2000s or 2010s, long after the dissolution of the ZAZ partnership & well into his old age. Why so recently? Nostalgia has been kind to homages & parodies to the genre, which made room for wonderful comedies like Forgotten Silver & Hail, Caesar! to exist (though not flourish financially, unfortunately). In the 1988 an Old Hollywood spoof might’ve been hard to pitch to financiers, but in 2016 it’d have a much easier time making it to the cinema.

As is, Big Business has no interest in being an Old Hollywood parody. It is instead a loving homage to a bygone era in filmmaking. What Abrahams does instead is update the era’s comedic farce conventions for a 1980s sensibility, which was much less of a commercial gamble. That’s not to say that his history in genre parody did not inform his work in Big Business, though. If nothing else, Abrahams’ films display a consistent, innate understanding of genre tropes & how they can be made effective, whether for a genuine or a sarcastic effect. And if there’s any question to whether or not Big Business‘s toying with the idea of Old Hollywood parody was intentional, just look to Abrahams’ directorial cameo in the film. He plays a homeless drunk who rubs his eyes & tosses his liquor bottle aside when he keeps seeing the two sets of twins separately, a gag that’s about as old as comedy cinema itself (if not older). At the very beat before the end credits the film reveals that a second, well-dressed, far-from-homeless character was also portrayed by Abrahams, a reveal that’s meant to play as a huge prank. That moment feels like it easily could’ve been at home in the theoretical spoof version of Big Business that sadly doesn’t exist, not only because it feels so hokily old-fashioned, but also because its “Gotcha!” sarcasm is such a classic ZAZ-style tactic.

For more on February’s Movie of the Month, 1988’s Big Business, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film & last week’s look at its borrowed gag from The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup.

-Brandon Ledet

The Witch (2016)

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fourhalfstar

A lot of times when you tell people that you really liked a horror movie the first question they ask is “Was it scary?” Now, that’s not a requirement for me to enjoy myself at a horror showing. Horror can be funny or gruesome or just eccentric or interesting enough to make questions about whether or not it was scary to even be relevant. With The Witch, however, I can actually answer that question bluntly & with enthusiasm. The Witch is a scary movie. It’s a haunting, beautifully shot, impossibly well-researched witchcraft horror with an authenticity that’s unmatched in its genre going at least as far back as 1922’s Häxan, so it has many virtues outside the simple question of whether or not it was a scary movie, but yes, The Witch succeeds there as well. At times it can be downright terrifying.

What makes The Witch scary, though, might also prevent it from becoming a commercial success. With the full title The Witch: A New England Folklore, this is a film much more concerned with upholding traditions in the mythology surrounding witchcraft than it is with entertaining its audience with a kill-a-minute sense of modern horror momentum. Far from the cinematic witchery you’d see in films like Hocus Pocus, Practical Magic, or The Withes of Eastwick, The Witch is scary because it feels real. It strays from the temptations of movie magic escapism by telling a small, grounded story about a slowly-escalating supernatural event in the most muted, straightforward methods possible. I can see a lot of audiences seeking a typical horror movie experience being turned off by The Witch‘s art house sense of hushed drama & pacing, but that’s exactly what makes it such an engaging, terrifying experience if you can get on its wavelength.

Depicting the unraveling of a small Puritan family at the edge of the New England wilderness in the 17th Century, The Witch makes it clear very early that its supernatural threat is not only real, but it’s also really fucked up. The titular witch is an ugly, uncaring, unapologetically Satanic force of Nature. Her devout, pious victims are a paranoid family of many superstitions, all of which seem to prove true one at a time as if the witch were systematically confirming every horrific thing ever said about her & her kind. The strange thing about this set up is that the witch checks into cause havoc in occasional spurts (stealing an infant, seducing the weak-willed, spreading sickness & ritually participating in genital mutilation, etc.), but for the most part her presence is felt, but not seen. The main source of terror in the film is the cruelty of Nature at large. The witch is just one weapon in Nature’s arsenal, which is revealed to be quite large & varied by the time the film reaches its stunning conclusion. The Puritan farm family suffers many blows at Nature’s uncaring, ungodly hand, especially as their religious faith is tested & strained by heartbreaking loss & physical pain.

The old-timey vibe aimed for in The Witch is not only a matter of aesthetic. It’s essential to the film’s entire existence. The Witch is set in a time when its tales of cursed goats, Satan’s attempts to recruit the youth, and minor sins like “prideful conceit” causing you to fall out of God’s protective favor would’ve been very real, tangible concerns. As the film’s central family fails to navigate these Old World dangers on New World turf while remaining intact as a single unit, a deeply unnerving effect swells from the nightmare sound of the string arrangements in the film’s gloriously-evil sounding musical score. The Witch doesn’t solely evoke its 17th Century time frame by peppering its dialogue with “thee”s & “thy”s and lighting its characters like an old Dutch painter. It transports the audience to the era, making you feel like fairy tales like Hansel & Gretel and folklore about wanton women dancing with the devil naked in the moonlight might actually be real threats, just waiting in the woods to pick your family apart & devour the pieces. It’s not the usual terror-based entertainment you’d pull from more typical works about haunted houses or crazed killers who can’t be stopped, but it is a significantly more rewarding film than strict genre fare can be when it too closely plays by modern rules. The Witch is a scary movie, but what’s impressive is that it scares you with an outdated threat of a tratidional folklore that’s no longer supposed to feel as real as it does here.

-Brandon Ledet

Zoolander 2 (2016)

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threehalfstar

It’s been fifteen years since the release of the original Zoolander, which seems like an awfully long stretch of time before deciding the world needs a sequel. A lot has happened since 2001, including (perhaps least importantly) a major turnaround on Ben Stiller’s fashion world comedy’s cultural cache. Zoolander suffered mixed-to-negative reviews upon its initial release, but has since grown a strong cult following that seems too large to even consider “cult” at this point. I even remember personally going into the theater prepared to hate Zoolander‘s guts as a grumpy teenager & being wholeheartedly won over as soon as the explosive Wham!-soundtracked gas station gag in the first act. The funny thing about Zoolander‘s fifteen-years-late sequel is that it’s on the exact same trajectory for long-term cultural success as the first film. The reviews are dire. The box office numbers are hardly any better. However, the dirty little secret is that Zoolander 2, while being nowhere near as perfectly inane as its predecessor, is actually a damn fun time at the movies. Nowhere near every joke lands in the film, but it’s smart to flood you with enough impossibly idiotic humor that you’re bound to laugh at something, maybe even more often than you’d expect.

In order to justify its own existence, Zoolander 2 has to undo a lot of the happy ending denouement of the original. Former male models/makeshift political intrigue heavies Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) & Hansel (Owen Wilson) must again start from the bottom. Hansel has been horrifically scarred & is experiencing growing pains with his in-effect wife, an orgy of weirdos. Derek’s own wife has passed away due to his own failures as a businessman & custody of his son has been revoked by the state due to his total lack of parenting skills in areas as basic as “how to make spaghetti soft”. In order to reclaim their estranged familial relationships & earn back their rightful place on top of the fashion world, Hansel & Derek have to repair their irrevocably broken friendship, putting aside the narcissism that plagues them both so deeply. Obviously, the plot doesn’t matter too much in a comedy as aggressively vapid as this, but I do think there’s something oddly sweet about Zoolander 2‘s central bromance that wasn’t nearly as fully realized in the first film. Derek & Hans really do need each other. They’re entirely codependent in their joint efforts to understand a world that doesn’t make sense to their tiny, uncomprehending minds. It’s a fascinating, even touching companionship even if it is an assertively brainless one.

Zoolander 2 does have an Achilles heel, but it’s not exactly the first place you’d expect. The film sidesteps most concerns about being late to the table in terms of following up its original iteration by making the outdated, past-their-prime cultural irrelevance of the its protagonists a major plot point. The redundancy of a second film following the same protagonists as they transition from male modeling to a life in political intrigue is also avoided by adding concerns about familial bonds and, absurdly enough, radical Biblical interpretations & quests for immortality into the mix. Where the film gets a little exasperating is in its never ending list of cameos & bit roles. Even in the film’s trailer swapping an appearance by David Bowie for the much lesser musical being/tabloid fixture Justin Beiber felt like a weak trade-off (although Bieber is actually far from the worst cameo on deck; his time is brief & fairly amusing). The film is overstuffed with both celebrity cameos & SNL vets dropping in for a dumb joke or two. Will Ferrell was a welcome return as the impossibly wicked megalomaniac Mugatu, Penélope Cruz was charming (not to mention breathtakingly gorgeous) as a secret agent for INTERPOL’s fashion division, and current SNL cast member Kyle Mooney proved himself to be a stealth MVP as a double-talking sleazebag hipster piece of shit who’s ironically stuck in the nu metal 00s (an archetype he always nails without fail). These are just a few faces in a sea of many, though, and the nonstop torrent of names like Kristen Wiig, Willie Nelson, Fred Armisen, Katy Perry, and whoever else felt like walking through the film’s perpetually open door did little for Zoolander 2 except to make it feel a little sloppy & out of control.

There were thing I loved about Zoolander 2 & things I easily could’ve done without. The film’s Looney Tunes physics & complete disinterest in stimulating the intellect felt entirely in tune with the original’s sensibility. The vaguely transphobic joke about Benedict Cumberbatch’s androgynous model All in the trailer is not at all improved by being expanded in the movie. Even though Hansel & Derek are close-minded imbeciles who believe things like fat = bad person, their treatment of All is an uncomfortable mixed bag at best & mostly just distracts from the film’s better realized gags. Many of the celebrity cameos & bit roles equally feel like a waste of time that could’ve been better step, but Zoolander 2 decisively aims for a quantity over quality M.O. & by the time the film finds its stride far more of its jokes land than fall flat. I spent most of Zoolander 2‘s runtime laughing heartily, which might as well be the sole requirement for a movie this militantly irreverent to succeed as a finished product. It’s not the best comedy in the theater right now (that would be Hail, Caesar!), but it’s also not the worst (*cough* Deadpool *cough*) & I could easily see myself watching/enjoying the film multiple times in the future. If nothing else, that’s a far better experience than I expected based on its early reviews, which is pretty much how this whole ordeal worked out the first time around in 2001.

-Brandon Ledet

Hail, Caesar! (2016)

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Paying too close of attention to reviews & hype surrounding a film can sometimes lead you to miss out. Besides its release date coinciding a little too closely to Mardi Gras, I had put catching up with the latest Coen Brothers comedy, Hail, Caesar!, on the backburner due to the film’s somewhat tepid response at the box office. Hail, Caesar! is flopping hard right now, failing to find a significantly sized audience despite the prominence of Big Name movie stars in its advertising & the Coens’ loyal (though not gigantic) fanbase. Many major publication critics are also seemingly lukewarm on the film, often citing it an overstuffed mixed bag. That lack of enthusiasm & no basic knowledge of the film’s plot lead me to the theater with essentially no expectations, but Hail, Caesar! floored me anyway. Honestly, if I don’t see a better movie in the cinema all year I’ll still be perfectly happy. It was that much of a delight. I should have gotten to the theater a hell of a lot sooner.

Hail, Caesar! is firmly in the highly respectable medium of art about the nature of art. More specifically, it’s a movie about the movies. Much like with Barton Fink, the Coens have looked back to the Old Hollywood studio system as a gateway into discussing the nature of what they do for living as well as the nature of Nature at large. Packed with theological & political debate/diatribes and a sprawling cast of both Big Name movie stars & That Guy character actors, the film sounds like a lot more effort than it actually is. The plot is, in essence, the day in the life of a “fixer” for a major Hollywood film studio in the 1950s. Imagine if Pulp Fiction was centered on Harvey Keitel’s “The Wolf” character instead of the organized crime ring he was keeping steady & his work was in major film production instead of the murder & drug trade (on top of being oddly sweet instead of quietly terrifying). Josh Brolin’s protagonist, Eddie Mannix, provides such an anchor for Hail, Caesar! as a whirlwind of film production snafus swirl around him. Rampant addiction, a kidnapped star, unwanted pregnancy, secret Communist societies, gossip column vultures, and all kinds of trouble on the studio lot’s various sets turn Mannix’s typical workday into a laughable, Kafkaesque nightmare. It’s a testament to the Coens’ screenwriting talents that the film feels so smooth & effortless while Mannix’s webs become increasingly tangled and the general tone is a mix of subtle humor & broad farce instead of plot fatigue.

A lot of movies are effortlessly funny, though. What’s special about Hail, Caesar! is the way it perfectly captures Old Hollywood’s ghost. It reminded me a lot of the feeling of seeing Georges Méliès’s work recreated so vividly in the theater during Scorcese’s Hugo, except that Hail, Caesar! covered a much wider range of genres & filmmakers from a completely different era. Every classic Old Hollywood genre I can think of makes an appearance here: noir, Westerns, musicals, synchronized swimming pictures, Roman & religious epics, tuxedo’d leading man dramas, etc. Audiences sometimes forget that these types of films weren’t always physically degraded so it’s somewhat shocking to see the beautiful costuming & set design achievements of the era recreated & blown up large in such striking clarity at a modern movie theater. Besides the breathtaking visual achievements, it’s impressive how many other aspects of Old Hollywood cinema the film manages to include, both in its “real” setting & in its fake film shoots: close attention to lighting, a briefcase MacGuffin, sets that look like backdrop paintings, the threat that television will destroy the movie business, reclusive editors who act like chain-smoking psychos, talent that’s owned by the studio in what essentially amounts to indentured servitude, a sea of white faces in a world where everyone else has been locked out, etc. Even the smallest turns of phrase like “motion picture teleplay” & character names like George Clooney’s leading man actor Baird Whitlock feel perfectly in tune with the vibe of the era whether or not they’re poking fun at its inherent quaintness.

Speaking of Clooney’s wonderful turn as Baird Whitlock, Hail, Caesar! is at heart an ensemble cast comedy. It’s difficult to pinpoint any exact MVPs among the film’s long list of cameos & supporting players (Brolin undeniably takes the honor overall). Channing Tatum continues his nonstop winning streak here, dressing like a sailor & leading one of the most wholesomely filthy song & dance numbers you’re ever likely to see. Scarlett Johansson looks peacefully at home as a classic Hollywood starlet in a mermaid costume & hilariously disrupts the illusion with a brassy performance that allows her to refer to her flipper as a “fish ass.” Following up his delicately winning performance in Grand Budapest Hotel, Ralph Fiennes continues to prove himself as a stealthily comic force to be reckoned with. Relative unknown Alden Ehrenreich threatens to steal the show with an “Aw, shucks” cowboy routine & the similarly obscure Emily Beecham is a near dead-ringer for The Red Shoes/Peeping Tom star Moira Shearer (and I mean that as the highest praise). And all that’s just scratching the surface of how attractive everyone looks in this film, how effective the smallest of roles come across, and the sheer number of recognizable faces on display here.

So what’s keeping a smart, star-studded, intricately-plotted, politically & theologically thoughtful, genuinely hilarious, and strikingly gorgeous film like Hail, Caesar! from pulling in ticket sales? Who’s to say? I was a good three or four decades younger than most members of the audience where I watched the film (although it should be noted that most young folks were probably watching Deadpool that weekend), so maybe it’s missing an appeal to key money-making demographics? Maybe the advertising didn’t sell the more gorgeous end of its visuals hard enough, so a lot of folks are calmly waiting for it to reach VOD? I have no answers, really. I will, however, defend the film against the accusation that it’s overstuffed or unfocused. Hail, Caesar! chronicles a day in the life of a world-weary man who operates in an overstuffed, unfocused industry, so the various plotlines could be perceived as overwhelming as you try to make sense of them in retrospect, but on the screen they play with the confident poise of an expert juggler.

Like I said, Hail, Caesar! is not performing well financially & the reviews are mixed so it’s obvious that not everyone’s going to be into it. However, it’s loaded with beautiful tributes to every Old Hollywood genre I can think of and it’s pretty damn hilarious in a subtle, quirky way that I think ranks up there with the very best of the Coens’ work, an accolade I wouldn’t use lightly. If you need a litmus test for whether or not you’ll enjoy the film yourself, Barton Fink might be a good place to start. If you hold Barton Fink in high regard, I encourage you to give Hail, Caesar! a chance. You might even end up falling in love with it just as much as I did & it’ll be well worth the effort to see its beautiful visual work projected on the silver screen either way.

-Brandon Ledet

Deadpool (2016)

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Every year or so there seems to be a Ryan Reynolds vehicle waiting to test my resolve to stop trying to fall in love with the dude’s work. Last year it was the horror comedy The Voices, which pulled me in with an amusing premise & a candy-coated color palette only to waste it all on Reynolds’ unlovable smugness. This year Deadpool fits the bill. I was once again fooled that this was the Ryan Reynolds vehicle for me, because this time there was a Ryan Reynolds vehicle for everyone. Hell, I could even repeat my opening screed from my review of The Voices to cover a lot of how I felt watching Deadpool in the theater: “Comedy is risky. If you fail to connect with your audience the time you spend together can be brutal. Just ask any stand-up who’s bombed a set. That disconnect between audience & performer can be even more punishing if the material is aggressive.” Deadpool is both aggressive & aggressively unfunny. It’s making tons of money & most of the people in the theater where I watched it were howling at every gag, so there’s certainly an audience for what it’s selling, but I was left stone cold. Reynolds can play a perfectly good cad when you’re not supposed to like him (as with his turns in Adventureland & Waiting), but I find his shtick much harder to stomach when you’re supposed to cheer for his assholery. I’m still having a difficult time buying him as a leading man and an anti-hero.

Deadpool is, more or less, the Family Guy of superhero media. It’s a crass, hopelessly juvenile comedy that believes “adult content” means decades-old pop culture references & an onslaught of abrasive language. The thing is that a lot of people really like Family Guy & I’m not one to begrudge anyone from enjoying themselves at the movies, so I’m honestly glad the film has found a satisfied audience. For me, though, the pop culture-referencing, Gen-X snark that that properties like Deadpool & Family Guy seem determined to keep alive feels hopelessly outdated, a relic of the 90s. Watching the MCU films for the first time with Boomer for our Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. recaps, I’ve noticed that the earnest side of the superhero spectrum is what plays much more fresh & endearing in a modern context. Properties like Thor & Captain America (especially Captain America) are much more readily enjoyable to me than the bloated ego snark of properties like Iron Man (speaking of films that made tons of money & did nothing for me). Deadpool is firmly on that snarky, self-satisfied Iron Man end of the spectrum, always willing to poke fun at itself or detract from its run-of-the-mill Origin Story Formula by tossing out a name like Bernadette Peters or Wham! as if its detached irreverence was more of a game-changer than it would be to actually try a new idea in earnest. At the very least it could’ve gone further in the irreverent direction & functioned as a full-blown ZAZ-style spoof of superhero conventions instead of trying to have it both ways all while appearing not to genuinely care about anything at all (à la Seth MacFarlane). Deadpool is willing to wholeheartedly participate in the most generic tropes of its genre, but it wants you to know the entire time that it’s totally above it all & doesn’t give a shit. It’s not an endearing attitude.

From what I gather from comic book aficionados (both friends & internet commenters who’ve been viciously picking at the small list of critics who’ve dared to give this film a negative review), it’s the exact qualities I loathed about this film that made Ryan Reynolds & Deadpool as a character such a perfect match. From the outside looking in I have no reason to disagree with that idea. Deadpool’s 4th wall-breaking, winking at the camera, “Ain’t I a stinker?” meta snark is custom made for a comedy style Ryan Reynolds has been perfecting since the late-90s. In effect, both Deadpool & Ryan Reynolds have been working in the realm of Gen-X sardonic humor since it was actually in its heyday two decades ago. The movie wastes no time in setting that tone either. The opening scroll forgoes telling you who actually worked on the film to include credits for “A Hot Chick”, “A CGI Character”, “A British Villain”, “A Gratuitous Cameo”, etc. One of Deadpool’s first memorable lines is “I know, right? Whose balls did I have to fondle to get my own movie?” It’s pretty much a steady course from there. There’s a nonstop onslaught of “witty” jokes about death, poop, genitals, sexual orientation, babes with bangin’ bods, and things going up dudes’ butts (including a pegging gag that threatened to be playfully progressive for a half-second before falling back in line with the film’s bro-pleasing sensibilities) that eats up the film’s runtime, just barely distracting you from the fact that you’re watching yet another by-the-numbers superhero origin story. Personally, the biggest laugh I got out of the film is when the “British Villain” asked Mr. Pool, “You’re so relentlessly annoying. Why don’t you do us all a favor & shut the fuck up?” but those more in tune with Deadpool & Reynolds as personalities are a lot more likely to find humor that lands. Jokes are certainly in no short supply, since the film has zero interest in taking anything seriously (except maybe in a couple ten minute stretches when it pretends to be a cancer drama or a romance of the ages).

As much as the humor failed to connect with me, I did appreciate the way Deadpool staged its action sequences. Deadpool himself has a cool look to him, especially the way he totes both guns and swords into battle & it’s nice to watch a superhero film where the protagonist actually keeps his mask on for most of the runtime (especially since it saved me from Reynold’s eternally smug grin in this case). While I found most of its “adult” humor about as charming as Ben Kingsley’s potty mouth brute in Sexy Beast, the film’s R-rating worked wonders for its gore. The decapitations & blood-soaked torture upped the stakes to grindhouse horror levels that I honestly wouldn’t mind seeing in a more worthy superhero property. The rating also made room for a lot of naked Ryan Reynolds footage, which I know is sure to please plenty of folks who like to treat him as what Liz Lemon would describe a “sex idiot.” It was also cool to see X-Men characters Colossus & Negasonic Teenage Warhead in action if not only because X-Men is one of the few superhero comics I’m actually familiar with. Even the bloody, well-choreographed action sequences can be botched in their own way, though. Particularly, the opening sequence involving a fight-to-the-death on a freeway is really fun to watch, but is broken into frustratingly small pieces by elongated flashbacks that create a dual timeline structure, making the film feel like an incoherent mess on top of being painfully unfunny. The main goal of Deadpool is sarcastic humor & the genuinely awesome action sequences are often swept aside to serve that purpose, probably because they feel too sincere to fit the character’s M.O.

Like I said, I was never the target audience for Deadpool. I gave it an honest shot, but it was just never meant to be. The film never really tries to win over an outside audience, either, which I’d count as a huge positive. I didn’t need to be included here for the film to be successful. There’s a specific brand of mainline Nerd Culture™ that I always fail to connect with and although the definitions of what falls under that umbrella are intangible, Deadpool is firmly Nerd Culture™-friendly in a way that feels authentic even when it’s not funny or enjoyable or especially well-made. It’d be difficult to boil the film’s Nerd™ aesthetic down to a specific image or two, but I can at least point to its insistence that the meme-ification of unicorns & Ugly Christmas Sweaters is still verifiable as comedy gold. The thing is that unicorns & Ugly Christmas Sweaters are the exact kind of quirk you’d find crawling all over Facebook timelines or Target store fashion racks, so they’re not nearly as “weird” or “subversive” as Nerds™ believe them to be. Deadpool is a film that broke all kinds of box-office records for an R-rated property’s opening weekend, so the Nerdy™ gatekeeping that usually accompanies products like this is more than a little silly considering how many people loved what the movie was selling. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing that this movie was a widely-loved Nerd Culture™ property that made tons of money (I just spent most of the last two months singing The Force Awakens’ praises after all). I just got the distinct feeling that I was on the outside looking in with this film, which is fine. There were a lot more people in on the joke than I expected and I’m glad they had a good time where I failed to.

Side note: One thing that struck me as odd about this film’s sense of humor is that it felt compelled to repeat minor jokes as if they were callbacks to gut-busting one-liners. Off the top of my head, there were references to unicorns, shit-stained pants, and Agent Smith from The Matrix that were repeated twice apiece with little to no effect or change in their second occurrence. If they had occurred more often they might’ve played like a running gag, but just hitting the same note twice felt awkward at best, hopelessly lazy at worst.

-Brandon Ledet

The Late Great Planet Mirth II – Revelation (1999)

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Welcome to The Late Great Planet Mirth, an ongoing series in which a reformed survivor of PreMillenialist Dispensationalism explores the often silly, occasionally absurd, and sometimes surprisingly compelling tropes, traits, and treasures of films about the Rapture. Get caught up in it with us!

Revelation, sometimes stylized as Apocalypse II: Revelation, is the first of three sequels to 1998 PPI release Apocalypse, and it is a massive improvement on the previous installment. Gone are the bargain basement community theatre actors who clogged up the works in the first flick, replaced by people you may have actually heard of before; gone is the soundtrack that consists almost entirely of Contemporary Christian Music artists, replaced by music that was actually scored for the film rather than haphazardly arranged behind it. Furthermore, the production value on Revelation is exponentially higher than that of Apocalypse, as this movie succeeds in actually looking like a movie and not a poorly produced television pilot shot on VHS. Although the proselytizing elements are still present in this film, they’re toned down significantly, and Revelation feels like it was conceived as a movie with the soapbox added as an afterthought, rather than the other way around.

The film opens on Thorold Stone, a counter-terrorism specialist whose wife and young daughter were among those who vanished three months prior; he spends his evenings reminiscing and watching old home films while flashing back to all the times his wife tried to convince him to join her in church. He is awoken from his reverie by news of a schoolbus bombing (which is a bit of a continuity problem, as all children were supposedly raptured, although this could have been a bus for teenagers), and he meets his partner at the scene of the crime. They trace the detonation signal to an underground church  meeting of “haters,” Christians who oppose the apparently benevolent Antichrist Franco Macalusso (recast and now played by Nick Mancuso, who would portray him for the rest of the quadrilogy). Although their orders are to kill all the Haters on sight, Stone and his partner arrest the group instead, allowing the Hater sect leader (Marium Carvell) to plant the seeds of doubt in Stone’s mind and pass him a CD-ROM that she says will show him the truth. Macalusso sends Len Parker (David Roddis, previously seen as the new head of WNN last time) to kill Stone and his partner, fearing they may have learned too much. Stone’s partner is killed, but Stone survives while the captured Haters are imprisoned and prepared for re-education.

The disc leads Stone to Willie Spino (Tony Nappo), a wheelchair-bound computer programmer who has been working on an incredibly advanced virtual reality program for Macalusso’s upcoming “Day of Wonders.” Spino is unable to access the disc despite it being part of his design, and his attempts to access the O.N.E. network reveal his location to the Antichrist’s forces; the two escape and make their way to the Christian underground, where Nappo reunites with his stepsister, who is revealed to be Apocalypse MVP Leigh Lewis, reprising her role as Helen Hannah. While the incarcerated Haters continue to persevere throughout their torture, blind cynic Cindy (supermodel Carol Alt), a member of Helen’s underground, voices her increasing frustration at having to live in hiding. When Willie manages to crack the final line of code, he learns what the Day of Wonders actually is: in the virtual world, everyone will face the choice of accepting the Mark of the Beast or death.

As noted above, Revelation is a departure from Apocalypse in quality across the board. Whereas Apocalypse featured a lot of montages in which the members of the audience are meant to meditate upon the ideas presented, this film finds its footing quickly and stays strong through the end. There’s a great sequence that follows Thorold’s introduction to Helen in which the two have a conversation about faith, which includes Thorold begging that God show him a sign as small as knocking over a water glass; Helen tells him that God doesn’t work that way, and even if he did make himself evident by causing the glass to tumble, Thorold’s mind would find another explanation for the event. After their discussion, Thorold stands and bumps the table on which the glass is standing, causing it to fall to the floor; still later, when their safehouse is raided by the Antichrist’s forces, the group is able to make their escape because Len Parker trips on the glass. It’s not the most elegantly composed chain of events, but it reflects an understanding of irony and foreshadowing that wasn’t present in Apocalypse, and the scene demonstrates a real understanding of how many people approach the question of the existence of a higher power. It’s surprisingly subtle and well-composed, and the film deserves credit for that.

On the other hand, there are problems with the script. Although the film’s intentional diversity is admirable in its inclusion not just of people of color but also the differently abled, the end of the film is arguably ableist in its approach to physical handicaps. Willie is the most fleshed-out character in the movie, and Nappo is obviously a talented actor, but his turn from reluctant ally to outright antagonist is abrupt. Further, the fact that only Willie and the blind Cindy are so quick to accept the Antichrist’s offer (which restores his ability to walk and her ability to see), and that they are the only two main characters to do so, is problematic in its implications; both are so desperate to be “whole” that they sacrifice their souls to do so, with the influence of the Antichrist turning them into cackling villains in the final act. It’s not a great message.

The film’s major issue, however, is also its greatest strength. Whereas Apocalypse was made with the intention of being an evangelical tool, Revelation has elements of that but is largely focused on telling a compelling story first, and it mostly succeeds. The problem with this is that the series has moved past the “world-building” stage and now expects the audience to be well-versed in the premillenialist dispensationalism that forms the narrative background. We learn in the opening moments that Thorold works for the O.N.E., which is never defined or explained. Readers of Left Behind and the works of Hal Lindsey will recognize that this is the “foretold” one-world government that the Antichrist will supposedly set up on the earth, and will likely assume that the O.N.E. is the One Nation Empire or One Nation Earth, but the casual viewer without a background in this particular eschatological concept is asked to accept a lot about this world that is not clearly explicated, which hurts the film overall. It may have been the intent of the filmmakers that non-specialized viewers then ask the PMD Christian friend who loaned the film to them to explain, but that’s asking a lot of a casual audience member. Still, this is a much more thoughtful approach to the subject matter than we got last time, and it manages to be genuinely compelling for most of its runtime.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Daisies (1966)

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I’ve been fascinated by isolated frames from the 1966 art house comedy Daisies for years, but never actually gave the film a chance until recently. Despite the intense, psychedelic cinematography that makes each scene so vivid in isolation, I was surprised to find that as a whole Daisies is for the most part an irreverent comedy. Adopting the same absurdist & humorous expressions of political unrest as the Dadaist movement during WWI, Daisies is a tonal protest against post-WWII Czech communism that combats the devastating emotional toll of war & totalitarian rule with sublime silliness. Director Vera Chytilová was years ahead of the curve on this absurdist comedy. Often cited as a cornerstone of the Czech New Wave and experimenting with visual trickery that still feels vivid & fresh five decades later (not to to mention predicting a lot of flower child hippie fashion), Daisies is an incredibly important work for something so wrapped up in absurdism & frivolity.

View Daisies in the wrong light & it might just play like a damning example of pretentious art cinema at its worst. Its disjointed, nonsensical dialogue about living as a “doll”, being “spoiled”, and “girls, girls, girls, girls” often feels like the more cringe-worthy aspects of performance art & slam poetry. The strange sound cues & alternating color filters often feel arbitrary at best, playing directly into the art-for-art’s-sake vibes of the film’s dialogue. Daisies is atonal & arhythmic in a way that’s sure to frustrate those who aren’t used to films that don’t aim to answer questions or satisfy genre requirements. Daisies is a provocation, a sort of a highbrow prank, and it’s too easy to see how that could be a turnoff for those who aren’t prepared for its obfuscation & deliberately nonsensical nature.

However, if you remove the intense cinematography, the ludicrous sound design, and the war imagery that opens & closes the film, you’d have what is at heart a remarkably silly comedy. Daisies follows two teenage pranksters (both ostensibly named Marie) as they leave behind a widespread trail of low-level mischief. Their worst crimes amount to leading along older men in order to eat lavish meals, disrupting night club acts, and some light pickpocketing. Daisies is just as girlish as it is disjointed & psychedelic. It’s hard to imagine exactly why the film got its director banned from working in her homeland for a decade for “depicting the wanton.” The film does depict its fair share of drunkeness & sexuality, but it mostly amounts to two teen girls (literally) swinging from the chandelier & cutting neckties like Harpo Marx. There certainly is a political tone to the film that suggests unrest & discontent, but just like everything else at play it’s mostly detectable as a prankish goof.

I think what I enjoyed most about watching Daisies was pinpointing where its influence has trickled down into modern media. Its absurdism & girlish pranks posit the film as an art house Broad City. The butterfly-heavy still image montages recall the hyperspecific beauty of (my favorite film from last year) The Duke of Burgundy. Its myriad of color filters & bizarre editing choices have been passed down through so many different films & television series over the decades that it would almost feel cliche if it weren’t for the date of its release. The giant scissors cutting up phallic symbols (sausages, bananas, pickles) in an intimate bedroom/art studio reminded me a great deal of Felt, a film I’ve been championing a lot lately. As much as these individual elements are recognizable in modern cinema in television, Daisies is still an idiosyncratic work. Its collage-covered bedrooms, classical surrealism (including a nod to Magritte’s green apple), still image montages, and maniacal giggling are all remarkably vivid & unique. Similarly, its Cubist approach to editing isn’t entirely impossible to find in other works (Hausu comes to mind), but it does still feel fresh & idiosyncratic.

Still, I find myself going back to the still frames of the two Maries’ bedroom/art space for what makes Daisies feel special as a singular work. It really is a remarkably beautiful space, like life-sized shadow box or an art instillation piece. I didn’t expect the film that accompanied that set to be as silly or as politically storied as Daisies ended up being, but that was mostly lagniappe for a film that could survive solely on the strength of its imagery. I’m getting wistful just browsing through those images right now.

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-Brandon Ledet

The History of Future Folk (2013)

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Once upon a time on a planet named Hondo a well-respected war general was asked to save his home planet from certain destruction via comet by finding a new, inhabitable world & destroying its current resident population with a flesh eating virus to make room for the Hondonian people. The general crash landed on Earth, but decided not to mass-murder the 7 billion people who inhabit it because it’s on this new world that he heard music for the first time. Now desperate to save Earth from the Hondonians, he attempted to alert his home world of the wonders of music via satellite transmissions, all while living a double life as a family man & a dive bar folk musician. The question is would he be able to get his message across before Hondonian assassins ended his traitorous life. This is, more or less, the history of Future Folk.

Future Folk is a duo of novelty musicians from Brooklyn, New York (Nils d’Aulaire & Jay Klaitz) who’ve been writing & performing songs around the above premise for more than a decade. If they hadn’t been toiling away at their shtick since the early 2000s it’d be pretty easy to accuse them of being derivative of similar, but more successful acts like Flight of the Conchords or Tenacious D, but the truth is they’re more contemporaries than copycats. And just like the two acts just mentioned, their transition from concert hall sketch comedy to television/film is an impressively smooth one. Their visual & narrative backstory feels well explored & intricately detailed, but more importantly their screen presence & dedication to the act feels entirely sincere. As a film The History of Future Folk is somewhere between a quirky indie comedy & a low-stakes sci-fi fantasy epic. As a contribution to the comedy landscape at large, the film is a priceless document of a finely-tuned two-person act that doesn’t have any other way to reach an audience outside the Brooklynites who’ve seen them perform it live.

The most amusing aspect of the Future Folk’s Hondonian backstory is the way it’s played with straight-faced deadpan. It’s first introduced as a bedtime story for a little girl who treats it like an awe-inspiring myth of the ages. The same exact story is later treated like comedy gold by the far less sincere hipster bar patrons who accept the threat of intergalactic war & flesh-eating viruses as an ironic joke. In both instances the misplaced Hondonian general speaks in total, unembellished honesty. What people do with the truth is largely dependent on the audience in question. This stripped down earnestness pairs nicely with the film’s complete absence of a budget. Many shots feel candid, as if they were stolen without a permit, but its cheapness never feels like a detriment. It only adds to the Future Folk’s brand of earnest charm.

I guess it takes a certain tolerance of twee preciousness to get on The History of Future Folk‘s wavelength, but like I said, its much more in line with the subdued humor of acts like Flight of the Conchords than it is with heart-on-the-sleeve indies like Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. The History of Future Folk works best as intricate, feature length sketch comedy. Its limited budget & dedicated-to-the-joke leads leave little room for vanity or pretension. There’s an endearing sense of heart & earnestness that adds to the film’s charm, but it’s most mostly remarkable for its ability to earn belly laughs through such unlikely sources as department store Muzak & red plastic buckets. The History of Future Folk is an easily-lovable, genuinely hilarious work of modern sketch comedy. It’s about as much of a crowd-pleaser as a quirky, low-budget indie comedy could possibly be, twee vibes be damned.

-Brandon Ledet

The Late Great Planet Mirth I – Introduction & Apocalypse (1998)

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Before we get started, let’s get this out of the way: the opinions contained herein are strictly those of the author and do not reflect upon Swampflix or its editors. These opinions are born out of a lifetime spent being reared in a particular theological worldview and its intersection with academic and scholarly studies of religious doctrine and eschatology. The introduction below is provided solely to present the ideologies that serve to make up the mindset from which the film(s) reviewed were created. No harm is intended, and this should not be interpreted as an invitation to discuss religion, positively or negatively.

I have a real fondness for media pertaining to that particular brand of Christian eschatology that centers around The Rapture. I was raised in a church that was highly obsessed with Christ’s ever-nearer return, and being born into and reared in that environment had an intense effect on me, as we were always preparing for the Second Coming and expecting it to happen any day now. From the outside, it’s impossible to understand just how deeply the conviction that the Glorious Return will play out exactly as depicted in the Left Behind series of books runs, but suffice it to say that the true believers of this worldview are true believers, and there’s not a lot of room for discussion or alternate opinions/interpretations on/of the subject.

Speaking of Left Behind, theologian Fred Clark over at Patheos has been working on dissecting that novel series for several years now, exploring all the ways in which they can be deemed “the worst books of all time” on both the literary and theological level (not to mention the revelations-no pun intended-he has uncovered about the personality defects of authors Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye). In his ongoing exploration of the series, he gets into all of the ways that the novels are poorly written and center around horribly unlikable protagonists who are terrifyingly self-absorbed as well as the ways that the theological underpinnings of the books revolve around a questionable-at-best reading of Biblical scripture. He’s been writing that blog for a long time, and it’s absolutely brilliant and beautiful, often offering spiritual and moral guidance that is more scripturally sound and moving than anything Jenkins and LaHaye have to offer. Of course, I only know this because young Mark was a huge fan of Left Behind; it combined Biblical “prophecy” (in a very loose sense, which I’ll get to more in a moment) with political intrigue, and I was uneducated and foolish enough to find the plot compelling and intriguing. Only with the benefit of Clark’s insight and my own hindsight is it clear just how bankrupt LB is as a piece of art or theological investigation, and I highly recommend reading his analysis for anyone who is curious, although I must warn you that it’s just as staggering in it’s length as it is in its scholarship and entertainment value.

Of course, LaHaye and Jenkins didn’t create The Rapture out of whole cloth. The concept that Christ’s return will be heralded by the physical disappearance of Christians all over the world is nearly as old as the American nation, if not older, and its popularity as one of the myriad eschatologies is cyclical. One of my favorite stories of awaited Rapture is that of preacher William Miller, who led a congregation of Millerites (naturally) in his belief that the Rapture was definitively going to happen in May of 1844 (google “The Great Disappointment” for more information). Still, the fervor that overtook America in the nineties was born out of a renewed interest in Rapture theology, which first began to rise within evangelical Christianity in the 1970s following the release of several apocalyptic books by Hal Lindsey, with The Late Great Planet Earth being the most noteworthy among them (The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon also holds a special place in my heart). The 1980s brought with it the rebranding of the Republican party, which helped cement Lindsey in the public consciousness and allowed Rapture fever to hit its zenith in the 1990s and early 2000s. Lindsey was a virulent believer in what has become the most commonly believed Rapture theory of modern times, more accurately called Premillennialist Dispensationalism.

The millennium referred to in the name of this approach has nothing to do with the divisions of the gregorian calendar and instead refer to a thousand-year period of earthly peace and prosperity. This period of piece will, they say, come after a period of Tribulation (usually seven years, but there is dissention about that). Premillenialists believe that the Second Coming will come at the beginning of this period and thus it will be ruled over by none other than Jesus himself, while postmillenialists are of the belief that Christ’s return will occur at the end of the millennium. Dispensationalism is the belief that Christ’s “flock” will disappear from the face of the earth in the Rapture before this period of Tribulation, rather than after, which is opposed by those who hold to the tenets of Raptural Historicism, which states that the Rapture will occur after the Tribulation. Still with me? I hope so, because it only gets more complicated from here; for the sake of brevity, I’ll be referring to adherents of this belief as PMDs.

Now, when I was a child, my paternal grandparents were very steeped in this paradigm of scriptural interpretation. They had only a small shelf of books in their home, and all of them were devotionals, hymnals, or books of the Lindsey mold: jeremiads about the rise of insidious cultural evil like tolerance, “Eastern Mysticism,” and (of course) homosexuality, and how these were signs and signifiers of the fact that the Rapture was so close that if Jesus wasn’t already on the threshhold, he was surely coming up the steps. As a voracious reader deprived of other material, I devoured these books when I would stay with my grandparents, and I would be lying if I said that didn’t warp me and my worldview for a very long time. It also put me in a unique position of being intimately familiar with the theological “scholarship” that underlines and supports the presuppositions of Jenkins, LaHaye, and their acolytes. I’ll try to summarize and synthesize as much as I can here, but it’s a big Gordian Knot that I’m trying to map for you, and having lived on the shore doesn’t always mean you’re going to be a great cartographer.

So here’s the deal: the thing that I liked about Left Behind when I was a kid was the way that it looked at lots of disparate pieces and put them together into one big prophecy puzzle, all the verses and chapters coming together into what seemed like an intuitive map of the near future. The problem, however, is that the methodology that led to the explosion of Rapture believers in the past few decades is that, to the layman, it looks like a brilliant decryption of arcane text. In reality, however, it’s more of an exercise in practiced self-deception and selective reading, itself colored by the political environs from which it was birthed. For instance, the Left Behind branch of Rapture belief is heavily influenced by Lindsey’s prophecies, which were in turn highly affected by the international political climate of the 1980s; Lindsey and his followers identified the nations of Gog and Magog in John’s Revelation as obvious references to the U.S.S.R., and used that assumption as a metaphorical weight-bearing cornerstone in their philosophy. With the dissolution of that federation, successive additions to this unusual canon have had to deal with the fact that no-longer-relevant nations, rulers, and ideologies played a pivotal role in the development of Lindsey’s eschatology, with each pulled thread threatening to destroy the entire tapestry.

And that’s just in the application of Biblical archetypes to the contemporary modern world; there’s a slew of other issues with the basis of this ideology. Lindsey, like William Miller before him, has a bit of an obsession with numerology and drawing lines between dots that probably weren’t meant to be connected on anything other than a thematic level. As such, Lindsey’s underlying conceits often rely upon an equation that involves several erratically chosen numerical references, divided by seven, or maybe twelve, and then assigning to the solution a number of years or days or other delineation of time. Then, once you factor in the year of an event of Biblical or historical relevance; 1948 is a favorite year of significance as adherents to this methodology are obsessed with the reestablishment of the nation of Israel and the way that it seems to echo the repeated diaspora and reunification of the Israelites in the Bible. And once you factor in that one such iteration of that cycle took place during the Babylonian Exile, and Babylon is mentioned in John’s Revelation, well, baby you got a stew goin’! Just ignore the fact that John was also writing in exile and drawing upon imagery with which his contemporary audience would have been familiar (“It’s a little thing called the Book of Daniel; you’ve probably never heard of it.” –Early Christian Hipsters, probably). Does this seem like an erratic train of thought? Are you picturing Lindsey standing in front of a corkboard full of Bible pages with red string tied between different pushpins next to highlighted passages, like the conspiracy theorist in every thriller you’ve ever seen? Then you’re starting to get the idea.

And let’s not forget that all of this is based on what the figureheads of the movement would call a “literal” reading of the text, even though this is pretty much the opposite of the meaning of the word. A reference to multi-headed dragons monsters with crowns? Surely, that literally means ten nation states that will make up the one world government that the United Nations will morph into under the advisement of the Antichrist. And, of course, there’s the small matter of nonsensical ideas that have made their way out of esoteric circles into the mainstream, like the very concept of the Antichrist himself; the word is only used in 1 John and 2 John, and an actual literal reading of those texts makes it obvious that the “antichrist” is a term to be used for corrupter or false teacher, not an infernally inspired world leader (for further reading on this topic, I suggest “The Antichrist Hoax,” by Dr. Joel McDurmon). Essentially, what I’m saying is that the genealogy of this branch of Biblical “scholarship” reveals a poisonous tree with its roots in half-understood historical contexts, willful ignorance about current events that do not coincide with their prescribed worldview, and numerology, which most Christians would recognize as an outright heresy were it not so thoroughly ingrained in the makeup of this eschatology.

I’ve given you the basics and the background, so here’s the Left Behind (et al) standard apocalypse gameplan: very soon, we will all be witness to The Rapture, in which the dead in Christ shall rise and living Christians will disappear in the blink of an eye (usually dramatized by showing piles of empty clothing). Included in the Rapture are also children who have not yet reached “The Age of Accountability,” an apocryphal, largely Southern Baptist theological concept that assumes children are inherently innocent and are deserving of Heaven by default.Thus, those who believed the Gospel Truth™ are spared the Tribulation, a seven year period that begins either with the Rapture or when the Antichrist signs a peace treaty with Israel, depending upon your interpretation. The Antichrist is himself a European politician who will assume power over the world by demonstrating great leadership (and perhaps even miracles) in the wake of the disappearances; he will install a global political system with himself at the head, and citizens will be forced to take his Mark or face persecution. The first three and a half years of this period will be marked by prosperity, while the last three and a half will be full of death, famine, war, plagues, toxic meteors, etc. The end of this period will see the glorious return of Jesus, to banish the Antichrist to the pit and rule for a thousand years, after which it’s all Heaven, all the time.

So that’s the basic premise, which brings us to the reason we’re here today: to discuss PPI Films’ 1998 DTV film Apocalypse. Apocalypse is not the first film about the Rapture. Actually, it’s not even the instigator of the first series of films about the Rapture; that honor belongs to 1973’s superior A Thief in the Night, which was followed by three sequels: A Distant Thunder (1978), The Image of the Beast (1981), and The Prodigal Planet (1983). The Thief series was so popular, in fact, that LaHaye and Jenkins have even admitted that it helped inspire them to draft Left Behind. Left Behind, in turn, influenced the Apocalypse series, so overtly that the first film’s protagonist has a great deal is essentially an even more bargain-basement version of Left Behind’s Cameron “Buck” Williams. Still, all of these films are part of an esoteric canon of movies that are long overdue for an investigation, and Apocalypse was the big one of the nineties.

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Let’s get this out of the way: Apocalypse is a terrible movie. This is a film in which millions of people disappear from the face of the earth, nuclear war nearly breaks out in the Middle East and is only averted by divine intervention, Christians are herded into camps for execution and/or reeducation, and the President of the European Union announces that he is the Messiah. Yet, somehow, all of these situations feel as if the stakes are no higher than they would be if the main characters’ arcs revolved entirely around dealing with poor customer service. Never before or since has the apocalypse been presented in such a blasé and uninvolved manner. A lot of that has to do with the visual presentation of the film; it looks like it was shot using a video camera borrowed from the set of Passions and no one bothered to clean the Vaseline caked onto the lens. It creates a rhetorical space with which the audience is mostly familiar as reminiscent of daytime television, which is hardly the effect one would want when presenting the literal rise of Satan on Earth.

The film quality isn’t the only place where the film feels cheap, either. Peter LaLonde (who, along with his brother, created film distribution company PPI, which would later become CloudTen, the name under which the rest of the films in this series were released) was once the host of a Christian television program called This Week in Bible Prophecy, which sought to draw a connection between contemporary events and the End Times as outlined by PMDs. Clips from this series, as well as others hosted by noted PMDs/televangelists like John Hagee and husband/wife duo Jack and Rexella Van Impe, are present throughout the film, filling out running time that would be better served by character or world building. Instead, we watch characters as they watch television screens in silence, which is exactly as exciting as it sounds.

Above and beyond that, this movie feels like it’s about 50% montage, with half of those montages consisting of 1990s Contemporary Christian Music playing over real footage of actual riots and disasters, which is horrifying and offensive. In a perfect encapsulation of many of the bad ideas in this film, there is a scene in which an unseen video journalist is providing voiceover for footage of a protester of some kind immolating himself and lunging at police. The dialogue is just atrocious (“This man who lost his wife and daughter literally went crazy […] here he is literally setting himself on fire…”), and the scene appropriates this real-world footage for its purpose, overtly divorcing this protest from its historical context and the desired impact of the person whose image was used for this presentation. Burning churches, police brutality, freedom fighters: all are just set dressing for the film’s message, which is nauseating.

The plot follows World News Network anchors Bronson Pearl (Richard Nester) and Helen Hannah (Leigh Lewis) and their work leading up to and immediately following The Rapture. Pearl is on-site in the Middle East at the historical site Armageddon, where the Israeli Air Force is assembling against their vaguely defined enemies, and this struggle leads up to a mutually assured nuclear strike. Just as the missiles are ready to fall, they disappear from the skies, along with a particular subset of the population worldwide: Christians and children. Hannah, whose grandmother was one such vanished person and who had previously warned her of the impending return of Christ, struggles to accept that the warnings were real. After watching some John Hagee and Van Impe videos, she returns to work, only to find that EU President Franco Macalusso (Sam Bornstein) has taken credit for the miraculous event and declared himself the new Messiah, stating that he removed all the “haters” (i.e., followers of the false Messiah, Jesus) from the world in order to usher in a new era of peace. Hannah tries desperately to convince Pearl of the truth before it’s too late.

As noted above, the film is mostly padding, but there are some good ideas here. Immediately after Macalusso’s declaration, WNN is taken over by Len Parker (David Roddis), a weaselly man who is to serve as the Antichrist’s mouthpiece, and Roddis is obviously having a lot of fun devouring every bit of scenery in sight. There’s also a nice moment of foreshadowing when one of Pearl and Hannah’s co-workers leans over and instructs a technician to record Pearl’s frontlines exclamation that Macalusso is the Antichrist, saying that the recording “might come in handy;” this same person later barricades himself in the WNN booth to broadcast that same speech as an interruption of Pearl’s televised execution. It’s not a great example of narrative subterfuge, but bears mentioning as one of the few touches of subtlety in the film. The real MVP here is Lewis, however, as she manages to imbue a paper-thin character with a lot of real, earnest emotion. Even though the end of the movie makes it seem as if she, too, is about to face death, I don’t mind that the next film shows her alive and well and leading the resistance, as she’s by far the strongest actor in this first outing and I’m glad she was chosen to be the de facto main character of the series. It’s a shame that her IMDb page is so sparse, as, of all the performers on screen, she was the only one to show actual talent.

Nester easily stands out as the worst actor of the bunch; in fairness, I don’t know that the role as written gave him enough to work with to warrant calling out his particular theatrical failings. Pearl is essentially a carbon copy of the Buck Williams character from the Left Behind series, portrayed by fallen teen heartthrobs Kirk Cameron and Chad Michael Murray in their respective franchises. Unlike Williams, Pearl doesn’t get the chance to be unsuccessfully courted by the Antichrist’s new regime, which is a missed opportunity. There’s a parallel to the aforementioned scene wherein the media comes under the Antichrist’s control in the LB canon: Williams bears witness to the Antichrist performing supernatural mind control over his new cabal but is protected from this misdirection by his newfound faith. It’s a poorly written scene (as is LB in its entirety), but it does effectively build the Antichrist as a threat and gives insight into how he could gain the power that he does. In Apocalypse, Len just shows up and tells everyone he’s the new boss, and virtually all of Macalusso’s appearances are on a TV screen, which really goes to show the extent to which this film is but a shadow of something that wasn’t all that substantial to begin with.

What really sets Apocalypse apart from the later films in the series, aside from poor production value and an obnoxiously meandering narrative and the lack of “name” actors, is how obvious it is that this film was meant as a preaching tool. At the time when this film was made, I remember many pastors making their own post-Rapture videotapes, to be placed prominently in churches so they could be found by those left behind and provide guidance for them in the coming Tribulation (in the Left Behind films, if I remember correctly, the characters watch such a video prepared by Bishop T.D. Jakes). While watching someone struggle to come to terms with the fact that their entire conception of the universe is flawed could make for compelling viewing in theory, in practice these scenes are long and unengaging, as this is obviously the point in the film where the Christian audience is supposed to turn to the unsaved friend they foisted this movie upon and offer to guide them in prayer. Regardless of one’s point of view on that kind of proselytization, it’s inarguably bad film-making. Luckily for viewers, it gets better (and worse) from here.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond