Author: swampflix

Schizopolis (1996) Goes Hollywood: Full Frontal (2002)

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When Steven Soderbergh filmed the largely improvised, aggressively irreverent Schizopolis in the mid-90s, he seemed to be deliberately disrupting the flow of his career. After a few consecutive big budget duds failed in wide release, the director returned to the themes & means of his popular debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, with the intent of burning them to the ground & shaking himself out of a creative rut. Soderbergh’s one-for-me-one-for-them creative pattern never felt as drastic as when he filmed Schizopolis, which was seemingly made with an audience of one in mind: Steven Soderbergh. The trick worked. The next stretch of the director’s career brought on a string of mainstream successes that made him a formidable creative force within the Hollywood system, instead of a one hit wonder in the 90s indie cinema boom he helped spark. Even success has a kind of complacency to it that begs disruption, however, and early in the 00s Soderbergh returned to the cerebral irreverence of Schizopolis to shake himself out of the comfort of Hollywood System filmmaking.

Following on the heels of major financial successes Traffic & Erin Brockovich, the Hollywood-insider comedy Full Frontal returned to the low-fi absurdism & disjointed structure Soderbergh gleefully turned into a Looney Tunes farce in Schizopolis. Full Frontal is a little less aggressive in its sense of silliness than that 90s work, but is just as prone to jarring non sequiturs, unexplained shifts in form & reality, and playful experimentation with improv. Shot in less than a month on intentionally low quality digital video, the film was called out by contemporary critics for being confusing & visually amateurish, as if those effects weren’t deliberate. For at least the second time in his career, Soderbergh was consciously working in low-fi, anarchic modes of expression to break away from a creative comfort zone that threatened to dull his output. The only difference, really, was that Schizopolis featured mostly non-professional actors (including Soderbergh himself & his real-life ex-wife Betsy Brantley), running amok in the Baton Rouge suburbs, while Full Frontal heavily relies on a vapid Los Angeles movie industry playground for its own hijinks, including public persona-subverting turns from Major Movie Stars like Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, David Fincher, David Duchovny, etc.

Full Frontal vaguely tackes the shape of many 00s indies with large casts. A collection group of characters weave in & out of each other’s lives in a loose, everything-is-connected narrative over the course of a single day. Actors, producers, public relations drones, playwrights, and every other brand of LA industry type you can imagine entangle and drift apart in various combinations in the day leading up to a mutual friend’s birthday celebration. Occasionally, Julia Roberts poking fun at her America’s Sweetheart™ persona or Catherine Keener asking nonsensical, stream of conscious questions to her employees in layoff interviews will steal the show, but the movie is ultimately more concerned with form than it is with performance. Jarring shifts in visual quality & location of setting will intentionally disorient the audience, especially as (borrowing a page from Sex, Lies, and Videotape) the audio drifts out of sync from the image presented, to a dissociative effect. Sex is blurred & obscured from the camera. Movie within a movie layering & voice-over interviews deliberately confuse what’s “real” within the narrative. Character introductions are presented in headshots before the opening credits (which are actually credits for a non-existent movie Rendezvous) as if they were a playbill in motion. Much like Schizopolis, Full Frontal feels like a filmmaker playing with the basic tools of his craft to reach for freshly innovative effects he could not achieve in the more well-behaved works that preceded it.

There are plenty visual & thematic details connecting Full Frontal & Schizopolis if you intentionally keep an eye out for them. Catherine Keener’s slow-motion romantic breakup with David Hyde Pierce certainly echoes the domestic fallings out between Soderbergh & Bentley’s various doppelgängers in the earlier work. The reality-breaking interview tangents, the drab office place settings (including scenes set in workplace men’s rooms), and Soderbergh’s choice to appear in front of the camera (this time with a blurred-out face, as if he were an episode of Cops) are just a few blatant connectors that run as parallels between the two films. What’s more important is the way the films use an improv-style spontenaity to make the audience feel as if anything could happen. In Full Frontal, a nameless neighbor is shown performing simple domestic chores in a full Dracula costume; an unnamed man crawls across a hotel hallway on all fours in his underwear, unacknowledged; an actor with a Hitler mustache sings the theme song to Cops in a makeup mirror (there’s that show again). This spontenaity revitalizes Soderbergh as a filmmaker, a creator. Instead of shaking up the romantic ennuii of Baton Rouge suburbanites, it disrupts the business-as-usual mundanity of Hollywood’s sycophantic starfuckers & namedroppers, but the intent remains the same even in the transported setting. Unfortunately, these films also share the burden of being overlooked & undervalued for the deftly absurd ways they reshaped & untidied Soderbergh’s career as it evolved into Hollywood-insider status. They’re two of his best films, yet somehow two of his least loved.

For more on August’s Movie of the Month, the irreverently cerebral Steven Soderbergh comedy Schizopolis, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, this comparison of its romantic doppelgänger crisis to the similar themes of Anomalisa (2015), and last week’s look at how it violently subverted the director’s hit debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989).

-Brandon Ledet

Nobody Knows (2004)

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Authentic child actor performances are as difficult to capture on film as it is to build a feature around the uncooperative selfishness of animals. The 2004 Japanese drama Nobody Knows deserves just as much credit for wrangling its incredibly young & convincingly genuine cast of performers as this year’s Kedi does for somehow constructing a narrative around the daily lives of Turkish street cats. Much of that achievement is attributable to director Hirokazu Koreeda’s dedication to a documentary-style verisimilitude while filming his insular cast of young, nonprofessional performers. With a narrative modeled after real life child abandonment cases of the 1980s, Nobody Knows focuses almost entirely on juvenile characters left to fend for themselves with few resources & few interactions with adults. After fifteen years of planning & revision, the story of four young siblings was shot in sequence over the course of a year, mostly held to the confines of single, three room apartment. Most recent stories about this kind of juvenile confinement — Room, Brigsby Bear, The Wolfpack, etc. — adopt the lyricism of a child’s imagination, but Nobody Knows values honesty over style. With very little score and largely improvised performances captured through obscured cameras, the film mostly concerns itself with watching its four central characters grow one year older in an enclosed, unsupervised space without the structure or discipline of adult influence. While sometimes exhaustingly quiet & unrushed, it’s a fascinating achievement in form & authenticity.

A young, single mother smuggles her four children into a three room apartment, claiming to her new landlord that her oldest son is her only child. As the rest of her kids emerge from their transporting suitcases, which they then use like furniture, you get the sense that there’s a nomadic routine to this ritual. She reminds them of the ground rules: remain quiet & stay indoors. Only the oldest boy, Akira, is allowed to venture outside so that he can collect groceries & other supplies while she’s out at work (and at play). The oldest kids’ responsibilities of cooking, cleaning, clothing, and homeschooling their younger siblings to maintain this off-the-books home is a heavy, adult set of obligations. Selfishly, the mother drinks out on the town and acts like an irresponsible child while they shoulder this weight. While she leaves the apartment to pursue external pleasures, we’re left holding our breath for how long she’ll be gone and the kids will be solely responsible for maintaining order within the home & keeping the family intact, out of the destructive hands of child protective services. Her absences are erratic, sometimes lasting a workday, sometimes lasting months, with little thought given to the money & supplies she’s budgeted the children with in her wake. The majority of the narrative unfolds in what feels like a year-long stretch of the mother’s absence, with no sign of return. The kids’ hair grows longer; dishes & garbage pile up; the utilities are cut; home-cooked meals backside into instant ramen & chewed paper. We see the truth of what children are capable of accomplishing when left on their own without a caring adult, a reality that can be both beautiful & tragic as the circumstances become more drastically isolating.

At 140 minutes of solemn reflection on the resilience of abused & abandoned children, Nobody Knows can be a little trying in its commitment to verisimilitude. Watching the kids’ state gradually devolve into disorder as they visibly age in front of the camera is fascinating as an artistic experiment, but maybe a little too academically thorough & a little too subdued for its own good as a feature film. Some of the film’s best moments come when this natural atmosphere is broken up by the kids finding joy in the transgression of venturing outdoors or innocently debating whether pop culture creations like zombies, UFOs, and Totoro are “really, really real.” That joyful release may not have meant as much without the solemn isolation that engulfs it, but I still found myself wishing certain sequences were trimmed in the editing room for the sake of practicality. I can see how after nearly two decades of work on a film with reflections of real life parenting horrors in its DNA, Hirokazu Koreeda may have been reluctant to lose any more of his footage to edits than he already did. Even when its merits as fictional entertainment are sacrificed to the authenticity of documentation of real life trauma, Nobody Knows still shines as a technical achievement in cinematic honesty. You’re not likely to see onscreen performances from children this genuine and this consistent in quality in any other feature, which alone makes the film a significant work. Knowing that there’s a reality to their year-long trial in isolation only makes those performances more hauntingly effective. Hirokazu Koreeda was likely smart for sticking to that honesty over the traditional entertainment value I personally longed for.

-Brandon Ledet

Pokémon: The Movie 2000 (2000)

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As a film series, Pokémon does little to bring outsiders into the fold, assuming all of the clueless parents & professional critics dragged into seeing its individual movies in isolation are familiar with the full canon of its various television series, trading cards, Nintendo games, manga, and so on. There’s a huge time jump in adventures between the first Pokémon film, Mewtwo Strikes Back, and this follow-up, Pokémon: The Movie 2000, that’s even more confusing than the jumbled inconsistencies in their titles. In the Missing Adventures between these two titles, gaps presumably filled by the televised anime series, our hero Ash has acquired far more pokémon & travel partners we don’t have any time to meet before the new plot kicks in. His worried mother is apparently now in the picture as well and the animation style has evolved to include more aid from CGI. The series’ dedication to a Just Another Adventure ethos is entirely baffling to those on the outside looking in and is doing me no favors as I attempt to get acclimated to its pocket monster-infested universe, but I’m sure 90s Kids™ who regularly watched the television show were stoked to see an extended episode of something they loved dearly projected large & loud with the reverence of a summertime blockbuster.

The plot in this uninclusive sequel concerns a wealthy pokémon collector who disrupts the balance of Nature when he starts hunting rare, big game pokétypes. After overreaching narration explains that fire, ice, and lightning are the elements that control the ocean (huh?!) the villainous collector is shown catching the corresponding pokémon that command those elements from their posts in a very specific set of small islands (Lugia, Articuno, Zapdos, Moltres, all of which had significance in a recent rollout within the Pokémon Go game). Ash & his pokébuds happen to arrive on those same islands (the chances!), where they’re greeted by Princess Mononoke-style tribes who speak of a Chosen One (Ash, duh) who can restore order to their realm. With the help of a Team Rocket face turn and hoards of wild, free range pokémon who show up just to pitch in (due to being more in tune with the ebb & flow of Nature than humans, of course), Ash is able to fulfill his Destiny and free the captured pokémon to restore their balance of power over the islands and the oceans that house them. This isn’t as exciting of an obstacle as the mutated Mewtwo plot of the first film, but the evil collector & his sky ship poképrison do help establish an interesting pattern. In the first installment, a climactic fight between a stadium full of pokémon and their corresponding clones was met with a pacifist message about how violence is entirely senseless, despite “battling” being an essential aspect of pokémon culture. In Pokémon: The Movie 2000, the main evil is an act of selfish collecting of pokémon, despite “catching them all” being so essential to the series that it’s the hook of its theme song. My best guess is that the next film in the series will focus on the inherent evils of one of three possible topics: miniature monsters, naming kids Ash, or animated children’s media.

As with the first film, the pleasures & rewards of Pokémon: The Movie 2000 (or, in its more literal translation, Pocket Monsters The Movie: The Phantom Pokémon – Lugia’s Explosive Birth) are constant, but moderate. I was once again won over by the earnestness of the film’s music, especially in the opening banger “We All Live in a Pokémon World” (which includes a pokémon-themed rap breakdown) and the closing Donna Summer ballad “The Power of One,” which has since gained fame from being quoted at multiple Herman Cain political speeches (under the guise “A poet once said . . .”). Although both movies are mired in their mundane obsession over bad weather conditions disrupting travel, the sequel does make strides to develop some of its central relationships in a way that suggests narrative progress. The most prominent female character in particular, Misty, is constantly needled about her unspoken romantic feelings for Ash, much to her embarrassment. More importantly, Team Rocket is given plenty to do despite not being the central baddies. Not only do they have a role in saving the day, but Jesse & James are allowed throwaway lines about their not-so-secretly queer identities (referring to relationships with the opposite sex as “trouble”) and meta commentary about the ridiculousness of their even being a Pokémon movie: “Prepare for more trouble than you’ve ever seen. And make it double, we’re on the big screen!” The only thing this pokésequel can offer audiences is more of the same, but since “the same” is so (moderately) pleasant, that’s not so bad of a proposition.

I did walk away from Pokémon: The Movie 2000 with a new theory as to why these films were so hated by critics, however. I wasn’t previously aware that theatrical versions of these films were each proceeded by inane short films featuring fan favorite pokémon, the adorable electric rodent Pikachu. In these 20min shorts, Pikachu and other pokémon get into brightly colored hijinks with little human interference to break up their gibberish repetitions of their own names on loop (as is the pokéway). I can see how getting through one of these introductions, which play like an anime version of Teletubbies, would sour critics & parents on then following up the experience with an 80 minute adventure film that makes no effort to reach out to the uninformed. The Pikachu shorts that accompany the Pokémon movies are undeniably cute, but they likely didn’t help an already perplexed audience get in the proper, receptive mood.

-Brandon Ledet

Beach Rats (2017)

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When I was first saw trailers for the Best Picture Winner™ Moonlight last year, I was a little worried that the film was going to be yet another tragically queer coming of age story where a young, closeted protagonist struggles to be their true selves in an unforgiving world determined to propel them to an inevitably violent end. There’s certainly a real world validity to that narrative, but after decades of nearly every major instance of queer representation onscreen following that exact pattern, it’s becoming depressingly limiting to what queer cinema can accomplish as an artform. Thankfully, Moonlight sidestepped most of the Queer Tragedy pitfalls that dull many of its genre peers to deliver something much more transcendently tender & delicately beautiful. The film Beach Rats, which was developed simultaneously at an artist’s retreat with Moonlight by writer-director Eliza Hittman, was much less nimble. Beach Rats is a hyper-specific, wonderfully realized character study about a young queer man navigating the ultra macho beach bro culture that dominates his Brooklyn-based peer group. Its visual language, particularly in its focus on the movement & positioning of bodies, is impressively, subliminally effective. Unfortunately, the film is also stubbornly stuck in an Indie 90s mindset in its estimation of a queer cinema narrative, dimming its idiosyncratic delights in visually detailed culture-gazing to amount to something unnecessarily familiar.

British newcomer Harris Dickinson stars as the confused Brooklynite Frankie (much like how Australian actor Danielle Macdonald recently disappeared into a Jersey Girl persona in Patti Cake$). Pocketing the oxycotin prescribed to his cancer-ridden father, struggling to relate to his grieving mother & sister, and doing his best not to stand out among the Jersey Shore bros that populate his Brooklyn neighborhood, Frankie is unsure how to integrate his sexual interest in the (much) older men he flirts with online into his traditionally macho public persona. He attempts to maintain a romantic relationship with a girl he meets on the boardwalk and claims to the men he begins to hook up with, “I don’t really know what I like,” but his sexual intetests never seem to be in question. It’s clear to the audience (and likely to Frankie) what genuinely turns him on. Excuses why he can’t emotionally or sexually commit to the young woman who’s obviously into him range from having snorted too many pills, lack of condom access, and anxiety over his father’s health, but he seems to have no problem in getting revved up while cruising strange, older men in online chatrooms & on public beaches. As the pressure of maintaining his gym rat beach bro persona while pursuing these anonymous same sex hookups mounts, the movie barrels toward an inevitably dour conclusion that thankfully doesn’t reach for the horrifically violent tragedies typical to its ilk, but still feels overly familiar all the same.

As old hat as Beach Rats feels as a queer cinema narrative, the lived-in imagery of the world it captures feels both believably real & oddly beautiful. The amusement park & nightclub settings these beach bros invade when they’re not shirtlessly staring at the water are near-indistinguishable as neon-lit, electronica-soaked playgrounds, drawing an interesting thread in their continued adolescence even as they search for cheap, drug-fueled highs. The physical rituals of marijuana, handball, and masculine greetings are carefully detailed, especially in the fleeting moments when bodies are socially allowed to touch. While this is far from the explicit territory covered in Stranger by the Lake, Hittman’s eye for this physical communication is carried over to the mostly wordless hookups between queer men, with special attention paid to the strength in the subjects’ muscular hands & buttocks. In an erotic moment, the camera is drawn to the nearest crotch; when the tone turns violent, it lingers on the idle knuckles of potential abusers. This attention to physical detail is never as potent as when Frankie is posing for selfies while working out in his bedroom mirror, baseball cap carefully placed to obscure his face. The way the smartphone flash coldly reflects off greasy thumbprints on the glass is oddly beautiful as Frankie admires & advertises his own body. You can tell Hittman strived to capture a real world setting & culture in this imagery and her attention to its physical detail is what makes Beach Rats feel at all special or worthwhile.

Sometimes, devotion to real world detail is a detriment for the film’s purpose. The dedication to hiring non-professional actors to flesh out its cast feels authentic, but also a little flat. Beach Rats is entirely empathetic to the ultra macho gym bro culture it captures so well onscreen, without a trace of irony in its depiction, but it is a little difficult to suppress laughter while watching Frankie sad-vape or play sad-handball in the rain, as true to life as those images may be. However, that objective approach works well enough while keeping a knowing distance from acknowledging the correlation between Frankie’s thirst for older men & his father’s absence or the vulnerability of identifying as queer in a culture where, “When two girls make out it’s hot; when two guys make out it’s gay.” It’s monstrously unfair to compare Beach Rats & Moonlight solely due to the professional proximity of their creators & their respective depictions of beachside, same sex hookups, but Barry Jenkins’s successes really do exemplify where Hittman missteps. If Beach Rats shared Moonlight‘s narrative instinct in knowing where to pull away from real world tragedy to explore more rarely seen modes of queer representation, it could have been a modern masterwork. As is, it functions just fine as a culturally specific character study with an intense focus on the physicality of its subjects’ social rituals, from the blatantly erotic to the purely fraternal. It’s totally recommendable for those virtues alone, even if it falls short of the transcendent experience it could have been.

-Brandon Ledet

mother! (2017)

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In the words of the Grand Galactic Inquisitor: “That was a weird one!”

For years, I woke up every morning (and the occasional afternoon), rolled over, and put my feet firmly on the floor in front of a poster for Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain. The Fountain was not a movie that I liked when I first saw it, nor was Black Swan. Over time, however, I came to love The Fountain in spite (or perhaps because) of its bizarre but ultimately human melding of pretentious universalism and cloying sentimentality. Even in my first viewing in the theater, I still loved the visuals of the film, especially the depictions of space as a vast sea of colors and reactions, which were actually taken from microphotography. And I guess I’ve come around some on Black Swan as well, although I doubt I’ll ever come to love it. All of this is to say that opinions can and do change. Sometimes I look back and can’t believe I gave Tenebrae anything less than a perfect 5 Stars. And 4 Stars for last year’s Ghostbusters? What was I smoking? In order to be fair, despite the fact that I walked out of the theater after seeing mother! and immediately wanted to pen my review, I decided to ruminate on it for a few days to see if my feelings about the movie changed at all.

And, hey, they did! The more time that passes, the less I like it. I better get this down on paper while I still have some positivity. And maybe while I still have some negativity as well. Good or bad, this one’s going to be on my mind for a while to come, and I get the feeling it’s going to go up and down.

On my Fountain poster, there was a pull-quote from film critic Glenn Kenny: “As deeply felt as it is imagined.” This is essentially true of all of Aronofsky’s films that I’ve seen (of his recent work, I’ve only missed Noah and The Wrestler): they are all films with a great depth of imagination and arresting visuals, paired with emotional gravitas that varies wildly but usually works because of strong performances by powerhouses like Barbara Hershey, Ellen Burstyn, and, for all that people love to mock her, Natalie Portman. It doesn’t really apply in the case of mother!, however. This is a cast full of powerful performers, from Javier Bardem to Jennifer Lawrence to Ed Harris and (my ride or die) Michelle Pfeiffer, but even their presence makes for a film that lacks the emotional resonance that it’s shooting for; it aims for the moon and misses, but it doesn’t land among the stars, it plummets back to earth as a fiery wreck, breaking up in the atmosphere and never again reaching the grounding of earth.

Although I went into this film as blind as I possibly could, avoiding all pre-release interviews and clickbait, I don’t foresee being able to fully discuss this film without going into the major plot elements and my interpretation of the events of the narrative. This is going to be a spoiler-heavy review, so abandon ship now all ye who wish to view the film with fresh eyes and clear hearts. This plot summary may not vary far from others you may have already seen, but I intend to only note things I plan to discuss. Ok? Let’s go.

The film opens on Javier Bardem’s character “Him” placing a crystal with a fiery center in a podium, which causes a burned home to regenerate, including the appearance of Jennifer Lawrence’s character, “mother.” She is working on restoring a glorious octagonal Victorian house to its former glory after a fire: plastering walls, repainting, and generally doing all of the heavy lifting while Bardem’s writer character, whom we later learn is a poet, sits in his study (which contains the crystal from the opening scene) and struggles with his writer’s block. One day “the man” (Harris) appears, supposedly after having been told that their home was a bed and breakfast. The poet welcomes him into the house over Lawrence’s character’s protests, and the two men spend the night drinking and carousing. The next morning, mother awakens to find herself alone before stumbling upon her husband helping the man, now with a wound where his back ribs are, to vomit in a commode. This prompts the appearance of “the woman” (Pfeiffer), the man’s wife, who slinks about making innuendo and asking invasive questions about how often the (ostensibly) younger couple have sex, do they love each other, and, of course, when is Lawrence’s character just going to have a baby already?

They reveal that they are actually fans of the poet’s work, and Pfeffer’s character finally manages to find her way into his inner sanctum, accidentally breaking the crystal and driving the poet into a rage; he boards up his study. As the homeowners prepare to kick the interlopers out of their house, the latter’s two sons (Domnhall Gleeson as the elder and Brian Gleeson as the younger) arrive and bicker about their inheritance, leading to a physical altercation that results in the younger son’s death. This leads into an influx of a seemingly endless multitude of mourners into the house, who invade and act out, from childishly mocking Lawrence’s character for trying to preserve the sanctity of her bedroom to aggressively trying to sleep with her and using misogynistic slurs to ultimately breaking a sink and flooding the room. This finally prompts her to drive all of the uninvited guests out. Afterwards, she and the poet make love. She awakes the next morning and declares that she is pregnant. This delights her husband and breaks through the wall of his creative block, and he writes something new, something truly beautiful and transcendent (not that the audience gets to read it; we only see how people react). That’s when shit truly hits the fan.

Near the end of her pregnancy, the new work is published, to Lawrence’s character’s surprise, and their home is immediately descended upon by fans, who begin to besiege the house in the form of a mob. In a matter of minutes, they make their way into the house and begin to destroy it, repeating the poet’s declaration that all that lies within is to be shared. Violence erupts, as well as various rituals and rites that smack of religiosity and sectarianism, until their home becomes a war zone, complete with women being imprisoned, the poet’s publisher (Kristen Wiig) performing violent executions, refugees hiding in barracks, and explosions in every direction. The mother and her husband make their way to his boarded-up study, where she gives birth but refuses to let the poet take the baby out into the rest of the house; when she finally falls asleep, she awakes in a panic and rushes from the room to find that Bardem’s character is presenting their child to the assembled throng of his fans, who steal the baby.

Then they kill it. Then they eat it. (Then hundreds of people in dozens of cinemas in America stood up and left the theater. To address the elephant in the room, it was pretty gruesomely laid open, and I’m not shocked that middle America revolted at this… revolting display. I’m sure that they would say that I am too desensitized to this kind of thing based on my previous viewing habits–including La terza madre, which features a similar scene of infant cannibalism–but really it’s that I’m an adult who knows when a prop is just a prop. The disturbing shit is happening out there in the streets in the real world right now, and if you happen to be one of those people who found this beyond reprehensible but don’t have a thing to say in defense of the victim when children like Trayvon Martin are getting murdered in the real world, then you’re the one whose brain is fucked up. Get your priorities and your house in order. But I digress.)

This (baby eating) drives Lawrence’s character around the bend. She attacks some followers and is badly beaten by them in retaliation. She ultimately makes her way to the basement, where she succeeds in setting the house ablaze and killing everyone inside, save for the poet. He finds her burned body and asks her to make one last sacrifice on his behalf: she allows him to remove her heart, which he cracks like a nut or an egg to reveal another crystal identical to the one at the start of the film. He again places the crystal in its place, and the house begins to rejuvenate once more….

I’m embarrassed to say that the primary and most obvious metaphor of the film did not reveal itself to me during my first watch. As someone well versed with the Western Canon, the reinterpretation and revisitation of Biblical sources is as familiar to me as the smell of my childhood home or the shape of the tree outside my bedroom window. I was careful (and lucky) to avoid promotional materials, which meant that Aronofsky’s public declarations about the films allegorical intent were unknown to me until after the fact. Still, in retrospect it should have been obvious to me that the poet was meant to be God, that Harris and Pfeiffer’s characters were Adam and Eve, that their sons were Cain and Abel, that the broken sink was the great deluge, that Lawrence’s character’s child was Jesus, especially as the mass of fanatics ate of his flesh and experienced a kind of religious ecstasy. Aronofsky has also stated that the considered the title character to be representative of the earth, which is taken for granted by mankind, a group which in turn tears the world apart in the name of warring faiths and factionalism, until the earth turns on its guests and burns everything down. Also, I’m pretty sure Wiig is supposed to be the Catholic Church in this paradigm. But Roland Barthes and I are over here in the corner and we want you to know: the Author is dead, baby, dead, and you’re not beholden to what he has to say.

I read the film not as a mostly one-to-one allegorical fable about the rise and fall of mankind, but as being instead about the God Complex of the author, the artist who is so self-absorbed with their personal vision that they allow themselves to reach the point of total narcissism and personal deification, an apotheosis of the self. To me, this read true in the scenes in which we see Bardem’s character repeatedly surrender his privacy, the sanctity of his personal relationships, and even his own child to appease the reader and the audience. It made me think of the way that so many writers, myself included, stripmine their lives for story material, consciously and unconsciously. I wasn’t expecting Adam and Eve so I didn’t notice them when they arrived, and was more fascinated with wondering whether or not Aronofsky knew how unbearable the author (and thus he himself) seemed to be, based on the lens of my reading.

As chaos descends in the final act, I found myself looking for other ways to interpret the material, and thought that we were headed for a kind of H.P. Lovecraft’s Rosemary’s Baby scenario. There’s certainly enough textual evidence for the idea that the house is in reality an eldritch horror show under all the floorboards and the plaster, with the image of a beating, fleshy thing behind the walls and a Cronenbergian bladder/ulcer/boil/appendage (?) sticking out of the plumbing. There’s also a very Lovecraftian element to the way that the interior of the house descends into a Gilliamesque war zone that’s evocative of the indecipherable and incomprehensible chaos of films like Jacob’s Ladder and In the Mouth of Madness. I was rooting for this potential turn right up until the child was born and it was totally normal-looking (other than being ten months old like most movie “newborns”). My hopes that the film was going to transcend into something truly bizarre were dashed.

But if we instead take Aronofsky at his word, then everything is so obviously (and clumsily) literal that we’re left struggling to grasp the meaning of the more obtuse symbols that appear in the film? Take, for instance, the importance of Harris’s character’s lighter. This “Adam” smokes, much to “mother’s” chagrin; if she is Mother Earth, is she upset by the pollution of her perfect home, caused by self-destructiveness, and this is the reason for her ill temperament? If we accept this premise for the sake of argument, what are we to make of the fact that she deliberately loses the lighter–is this the earth hiding man’s self-destruction from him, and is the fact that Harris’s character later lights a cigarette on the stove despite having no lighter a metaphor for how mankind will continues to be self-destructive regardless of nature’s attempts to course correct? If we grant that these precepts are sine qua non of the thesis that man/Adam/mankind abuses the hospitality/household/habitability of mother/earth/Mother-Earth and that this is what ultimately leads to the destruction of the house/planet, we are still left with questions. Why does the lighter have a Nordic rune on it (it’s called a Wendehorn; you can also see it on the woman’s luggage clasps)? When the metaphorical first man arrives bearing fire, are we really supposed to draw no connection to the myth of Prometheus? Given that Promethean fire most often metaphorically stands for technology, is it mankind’s technical aptitude that mother despises, and if so, what does the fact that she uses this fire/technology/self-destruction to burn down the house mean? Is it that polluting the earth causes climate change and thus the ultimate death-by-heat of humanity?

Is it really just that one layer? Is it really so obvious and dumb? Or is it a matryoshka, with multiple obfuscated layers of meaning but also somehow just as dumb?

And what of “Cain” and “Abel”? Primogeniture, inheritance, and birthright are common narrative devices of the Judaic biblical canon, ranging from Jacob and Esau to Isaac and Ishmael to Joseph and his brothers, but those aren’t elements of the story of Adam and Eve’s eldest sons, whose altercation was the result of Cain making the wrong kind of pre-Messianic sacrifice in comparison to Abel’s proper profferation of his prettiest sheep (no, seriously, look it up). Fraternal jealousy is a hallmark of this tradition, but Cain and Abel competed for the affections of their creator, not their father. As such, one would think that there would be some interaction between either of the brothers and the poet before the slaying, but if there was it was too fast or subtle to be perceptible. Again, there’s so much (one could say too much) effort put into creating a one-to-one correlation between events in the film and Judaic myth that when that synchronization falls out of step, it highlights the shoddiness of the overall metaphor.

Which is to say: I think there may be a great movie in mother!, despite its flaws being as deeply felt as they are imagined. It just needed two or three more drafts before it could reach that potential. And if this film has taught us anything, it’s that writers who think they are gods, as well as gods who envision themselves as writers, don’t spend nearly enough time working out the kinks.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Schizopolis (1996) Brought Soderbergh Back to Home Base Only to Burn It to the Ground

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One of the most exciting aspects of September’s Movie of the Month, the irreverently cerebral Steven Soderbergh comedy Schizopolis, is in trying to figure out exactly who it’s for. As a filmmaker, Soderbergh has consistently maintained a one-for-me-one-for-them creative pattern, balancing out crowd-pleasers like the Oceans & Magic Mike series with head-scratchers like Solaris & The Girlfriend Experience. Few creative enterprises have ever felt as self-satisfying as the deliberately impenetrable Schizopolis, however, which was seemingly made for Steven Soderbergh and Steven Soderbergh alone, an audience of one. What’s interesting is that as insular & self-indulgent as Schizopolis can feel to anyone who isn’t Steven Soderbergh, it also closely resembles the debut crowd-pleaser that jumpstarted his career, a feature that made him a name before he had even fully found his voice. In a way, Schizopolis documents Soderbergh’s return to his creative home base, his professional launching pad, only so he could set fire to the good will it generated and move on with his life. Soderbergh may have built his career on a one-for-me-one-for-them ethos, but Schizopolis is a rare case of the director returning to one of his one-for-them successes with an anarchic intent to explode his own legacy.

Sex, Lies, and Videotape was a Big Deal in 1989. At 26 years old, Soderbergh was the then-youngest director to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes with this debut feature, which then went on to earn great financial success that made a name for the Sundance Film Fest and was a major player in kick-starting the 90s indie cinema boom. That success also weighed heavily on Soderbergh’s shoulders. A film famously written on a legal pad during a week’s worth of travel and filmed in just a month’s time in Soderbergh’s makeshift home city of Baton Rouge, Sex, Lies, and Videotape quickly built the young director up for a massive professional fall, a danger he immediately succumbed to. His three immediate follow-ups– Kafka, King of the Hill, and The Underneath— bombed critically & financially, leaving him dangerously close to becoming an indie cinema one hit wonder. To shake himself out of this professional slump, Soderbergh returned to Baton Rouge as a prodigal son to film another hastily-written, dirt cheap reflection on domesticity & suburban ennui. Where he had formerly crafted a poignant, darkly funny drama that struck a chord with everyone within earshot, he now seemed determined to cut loose with a nonsensical comedy designed to strike a chord with no one. Schizopolis was the inverse, anti-matter version of Sex, Lies, and Videotape, a kind of self-targeting professional blasphemy that set Soderbergh free from the expectations set by his initial success.

Much like Schizopolis, Sex, Lies, and Videotape is about a long-married Baton Rouge couple struggling to maintain intimacy & honest communication as their domestic life loses its initial spark of romance. Andie MacDowell stars as a bored suburban housewife who doesn’t believe women enjoy sex as much they report to while her eternally horny husband cheats on her with her equally oversexed sister. Although she’s never experienced an orgasm and is embarrassed to discuss masturbation even with her therapist, her sexual appetite is seemingly awakened by the arrival of her husband’s old college buddy, a drastically gloomy James Spader. Spader’s lovelorn drifter is an impotent fetishist who can only get off by interviewing women about their sexual past on the titular videotapes, which he watches in isolation. McDowell’s lack of a sexual appetite & Spader’s social impotency amounts to a kind of sexual miscommunication that builds nicely with the ambient tension of Sex, Lies, and Videotape‘s Cliff Martinez score. The film’s payoff is in watching two emotionally wounded animals eventually get on the same page to fulfill their obvious desire for one another, despite the communication breakdown of their sexual language. Paradoxically, Schizopolis would later make this exact kind of romantic miscommunication more literal and more abstract.

Schizopolis may return to the themes & settings of Sex, Lies, and Videotape, but it also feels hostile to the commercial elements that make Soderbergh’s debut a universal success. Themes of romantic miscommunication are made irreverently literal as a husband & wife’s dialogue are overdubbed in two incompatible languages or converted to generic, nonsensical placeholder phrases. Where Sex, Lies, and Videotape was hastily written, Schizopolis is almost wholly improvised, making its spontaneity even more abrasive. In his debut, Soderbergh made sure to keep his Baton Rouge setting mostly confined to interiors, where MacDowell’s thick Southern accent is the only identifying element at play that makes it feel unlike Anywhere, America. By contrast, Schizopolis makes a point to document as many Baton Rouge-specific exteriors as possible, to the point where half our initial conversation on the film was distracted by its tourism of a city where most of us had lived at one time or another in the 2000s. He made the film even less universal by casting himself & his ex-wife (Betsy Bentley) as the film’s romantic doppelgängers; not to mention the lack of commercial appeal inherent to an irreverent film about romantic doppelgängers in the first place. It’s a film that covers the same adulterous, dispirited, emotionally dysfunctional territory as Sex, Lies, and Videotape, but with none of the universal appeal that made that landmark erotic thriller a critical & financial hit, deliberately so. It even forsakes the immediate appeal of its predecessor’s instantly intriguing title.

As disparate as the approaches in Soderbergh’s Baton Rouge-set domestic dramas seem aesthetically, there’s actually a fair amount of Schizopolis’s DNA detectable in Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Besides the obvious overlap in themes & setting, one of the more striking aspects of Sex, Lies, and Videotape is the dissociative disconnect between the movie’s imagery & its soundtrack. From the opening sequence where Andie MacDowell rambles to her therapist about waste disposal while the audience watches James Spader travel to Baton Rouge as a prodigal son to later scenes where her confessions of sexual appetite deficiency overlap with images of her husband’s infidelity, Sex, Lies, and Videotape is playful with the ways the sights & sounds of cinema can manipulate audience perception when out of sync. Schizopolis pushes this dissociative effect to a comedic extreme, jarring its audience out of sync at every possible turn with the irreverence of a feature length Monty Python sketch gone rogue. By returning to his earliest success in filmmaking experimentation, Soderbergh rediscovered the tools & effects that initially excited him in the first place, then decided to push them as far as the medium (and perhaps past where his audience) would allow. He picked apart & set aflame the basic components of his first feature in an eccentrically personal work that seemed to violently shake him out of a five year sophomore slump and led directly to the most successful stretch of his career to date.

For more on August’s Movie of the Month, the irreverently cerebral Steven Soderbergh comedy Schizopolis, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and last week’s look at how its romantic doppelgänger crisis compares to the themes of Anomalisa (2015).

-Brandon Ledet

Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016)

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The opening gag of Bridget Jones’s Baby is the entire movie in a microcosm. Alone on her birthday, Rene Zellweger’s now middle aged romcom anti-hero opens this years-late sequel on the exact note where she started the first film in the series: blowing out a single candle on a cupcake & lip-syncing to Celine Dion’s “All By Myself” in an amusingly over-the-top moment of self-pity. She asks her series-sparking diary “How in the hell did I end up here again?” in voice-over and as an audience I can’t help but breathe a much-needed sigh of relief. Even with all of the uncomfortable weight-cataloging & desperation to land a husband, 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary holds up nicely as a smart, darkly funny romcom that modernizes & subverts the Jane Austen classic Pride & Prejudice for the hard-loving, hard-drinking thirty-somethings of its era. As a protagonist, Bridget Jones is a little dopey & off-kilter, but personifies for her audience the Inner Idiot we all feel like we come off as whenever we’re anxious in public. 2004’s follow-up, the inexplicably titled Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason, completely misinterprets the character’s appeal and makes her out to be an Actual Idiot in one of the most insultingly vapid romcoms I can ever remember seeing. That’s why it’s such a relief, over a decade later, to see Bridget Jones return to square one: drunk, alone, and once again personifying our collective Inner Idiot in a recognizably human way. It’s even more of a relief when this familiar beat is interrupted by Bridget switching the track to a modern pop song and deciding to celebrate her current middle age state instead of moping about her apartment, a welcome taste of what’s to come.

As necessary as Bridget Jones’s Baby was in undoing the damage wrought by Edge of Reason, it doesn’t find much else purpose for its existence besides transporting its protagonist to a modern context. The movie’s plot is centered on a simple “Who’s the father?” mystery as Bridget finds herself pregnant & caught between two potential lovers: Colin Firth’s eternally uptight Mr. Darcy from the first two films & the out of nowhere addition of an American billionaire played by 80s TV heartthrob Patrick Dempsey. I suppose as an audience we’re supposed to fret over which beau she (and her titular baby) will end the film with, but it’s difficult to care too much about that dilemma (especially since Mr. Darcy has been a kind of recurring inevitability since film one). The true conflict here is in watching Bridget navigate the 2010s, now a total outsider to the youth culture she drank her way through exiting in her original appearance. Surrounded by *shudder* millennials, Bridget weighs in on the cultural evils of music festivals, man buns, “ironic” beards, brand managers, “vegan condoms,” and (in an extended featured cameo) Ed Sheeran. I despised the trailer for this film for its regressive fretting over the fear of dying “alone” as a single mother, but the movie is much less concerned with the baby of its title than it is with ribbing a young, inauthentically hip culture it’s getting too old to understand. Bridget Jones is an awkward & as dopey as ever, but as a relic of the past she’s become a kind of Gen-X anti-hero tasked with cutting through the bullshit of modern culture in the name of middle aged women everywhere. That’s a huge step up from her blithering idiot persona who “hilariously” doesn’t know how to snow ski or navigate Thailand’s prison system in the miserable Edge of Reason.

There’s a comfort in familiarity to romcoms as a genre that Bridget Jones’s Baby delivers expertly. Rescuing its protagonist from the Idiot Plot screenwriting hell of Edge of Reason, this damage control sequel makes everything pleasantly familiar again. Bridget is back in her proper apartment, surrounded by her same cast of friends (including the always-welcome Shirley Henderson), and back to worrying about her same self-defeating anxieties over romance, her career, and her body. This return to normalcy is the cinematic equivalent of an electric blanket in a cold snap, to the point where any developments in Bridget’s romantic or professional life almost don’t matter at all. At its very last opportunity, Bridget Jones’s Baby introduces a plot twist that leaves the door open for a sequel that sounds pleasant, but unnecessary. Now that the damage from Edge of Reason has been undone there isn’t much a fourth Bridget Jones movie could possibly offer besides more comforting familiarity. At least that’s far from the worst thing a movie could accomplish. I’ll admit I was even tickled in this sequel by seeing Emma Thompson seemingly reprise her irreverent natal physician from Junior as Bridget’s smartass doctor. It didn’t really improve or even alter what I’d already seen her do before, but it was still a familiar, comforting reminder of a past pleasure. Bridget may despondently ask, “How in the hell did I end up here again?,” at the start of this movie, but her audience couldn’t possibly want to be anywhere else. Bridget Jones’s Baby doesn’t attempt to disrupt or subvert the romcom formula like recent bomb-throwers Wetlands, Obvious Child, Sleeping With Other People, Appropriate Behavior, etc., but it does feel essentially redemptive for restoring a beloved character who deserved so much better in her previous outing to a comfortably familiar place.

-Brandon Ledet

Laser Mission (1989)

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I discovered the late 80s action cheapie Laser Mission as a thrift store purchase of what appears to be a DVD bootleg transferred from a straight-to-VHS release. The absence of a legitimate production budget is apparent as soon as its opening diamond heist sequence. The “most precious and largest” diamond ever mined in Africa is stolen from a banquet hall while masked villains gear up & load ammo against a black background. The effect feels like cutting between amateur camcorder footage of a VFW hall wedding and a TV commercial for car alarms. An 80s rock ballad recorded by Dire Straits co-founder David Knopfler wails, “In the violence of the night, his heart beats like a hammer, like the backbeat of a song. And the fire burns in him. He knows he don’t belong. Mercenary man, mercenary man, mercenary man,” before reaching its inevitable crescendo of a saxophone solo. It’s the film’s sole soundtrack selection and will repeat endlessly until the end credits. Laser Mission is Everything Is Terrible action cinema, a genuine VHS era version of Neil Breen’s weirdo vanity projects or Tim Heidecker’s Decker series. It’s flatly acted, looks like it was filmed in a backyard, and does not at all earn the confidence needed to pull off its sub-Commando sense of bravado. There’s something infectious about its constantly apparent cheapness, though, and by the end credits I found myself singing “Mercenary man, mercenary man, mercenary man” along with its one-song soundtrack while reaching for more box wine. It’s a “bad” movie, but it wasn’t a bad time.

Years before he went goth (and tragically died) for The Crow, Brandon Lee stars in his first deviation from the early career martial arts schlock that relived the legacy of his father, Bruce Lee. He appears here as the smartass superspy action hero Michael Gold. Lee lacks any of the charisma that makes the Stallone & Schwarzenegger characters he’s aping work on the screen. He’s also not nearly as physically imposing as those towering meatheads, so any direct attempts to make him look like a super cool, tough-talking badass fall humorously flat. When he shows up for secret meetings at US embassies wearing only an undershirt, he looks like a joke. When he calls a woman he meets for the first time “bitch” for turning down his sexual advances, he sounds like a chauvinist monster. Attempts to disguise himself for acts of espionage range from pathetically applying a fake mustache in a makeup mirror to monstrously adorning brownface & the rags of a crippled beggar. It also doesn’t help that Lee’s sub-Schwarzenegger one-liners are embarrassingly weak. Exchanges include the awkward, “Are you acquainted with theoretical physics?” “No, I specialized in recess and girls,” “Ha, very funny,” and a disgruntled “You know? You guys really know how to win friends & influence people.” The only thing that prevents Laser Mission from being a total embarrassment is Lee’s undeniable skill with martial arts. Practically no money went into producing this disposable schlock, but what little was there was all poured into its gun violence, explosions, and endless supply of nameless baddies for Lee to mow down with ease. The action is the only semi-legitimate element at play in Laser Mission (besides maybe its phenomenal theme music), which honestly wasn’t the worst choice it could have made in terms of VHS era craft. There’s nothing wrong with playing to your strengths.

Laser Mission‘s surface pleasures are so slight that it doesn’t even treat the audience to its titular lasers. Michael Gold is tasked by US special forces to retrieve a Russian scientist (Ernest “What Am I Doing Here?” Bornigne) famed as “the world’s leading expert in laser technology” before the KGB can nab him first. The race against the clock is especially dangerous because of the KGB’s possession of the comically oversized diamond from the opening heist, which they supposedly want to use to create the world’s most powerful laser cannon or some such nonsense. We, of course, never get to see said laser cannon because the movie can’t afford to depict it. Instead, we watch Lee evade capture from two bumbling Scooby-Doo level goons as he works his way closer to Borgnine’s laser scientist, eventually teaming up with that target’s daughter to complete the mission. In between disposing of baddies with liberally fired bullets & casual karate chops, he openly gawks at his new partner for her ability to fire guns & drive a getaway truck in heels even though she’s a woman. They eventually fuck, the scientist & the laser diagmond are recovered, and a few go-nowhere twists are revealed in a dry fart of a finale that sets up Michael Gold’s next mission, obviously never to come. Besides not delivering on the lasers it brazenly promises, it’s not too bad of a cheap action plot; at least, it wouldn’t be if the jokes were actually funny and the bravado was actually earned.

Laser Mission is mildly enjoyable as a late 80s curio. It’s at least amusing to see what happens when the Stallone/Schwarzenegger formula falls flat in less capable hands, even if the embarrassment for Brandon Lee’s failings as a leading man are palpably awkward. I can’t recommend the film at face value as a legitimately well-made action flick, but as a real world example of the kinds of VHS schlock Decker & Neil Breen are calling back to, it’s both fascinating & adorably campy. The only thing it’s missing, really, is a few lasers.

-Brandon Ledet

Utopia (1951)

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I picked up a dirt cheap, used DVD copy of the Laurel & Hardy comedy Utopia (aka Atoll K, aka Robinson Crusoeland) thinking it’d likely be as good of an introduction to the comedy duo’s 23 film catalog as any. I’ve done my best to catch up with comedy staples like Charlie Chaplin and Abbott & Costello over the years,  but somehow the filmography of Laurel & Hardy has always escaped me. This was an ill-advised point of entry as an outsider, as it turns out that Utopia was the final film in Laurel & Hardy’s catalog, a misfire that put an end to their career. It’s difficult to even know which version of the film is the definitive one, since they’re are four separate cuts with four different runtimes, none of which were positively received. Filmed in Europe with a blacklisted American director years after the comedy duo’s heyday, Utopia was engineered to function entirely as last gasp cash grab. It was anything but. The shoot was supposed to take twelve weeks, but instead lasted an entire year, dragging out any chance to make a quick buck off the shriveling Laurel & Hardy legacy before it disappeared entirely, with no chance to financially succeed. You can feel that labor in every dull frame of the picture too; it plays more like a hostage video than a slapstick comedy.

The main problem with Utopia is that it works way too hard for way too long to establish what should be a simple premise. Laurel & Hardy inherit a rickety yacht & an uncharted island from a deceased uncle, where they intend to establish a paradisal version of Mortville to ease their economic troubles. It takes an absolute eternity for them to reach that goal, as the movie wastes tons of time in unnecessarily expensive sight gags suffered by their traveling ship for more than half the runtime. It takes a solid 40 minutes for the plot to fully set up Laurel & Hardy alone in the island with two other dirty men & one beautiful lady. It takes a full hour before that crew decides to establish their own country, Crusoeland. That only leaves 20 minutes for the film’s basic premise to play itself out, which really wouldn’t be a problem if the lead-up were shorter or less labored. I was simply too exhausted by Utopia’s narrative mechanics of setting up the political follies of a small island country to be amused by the inhabitants of that island treating a lobster like a pet dog or trying to pile into a single bed. Instead of achieving the knee-slapping energy of a light-hearted farce, Utopia presents a frustrating existential crisis where everyone from the (multiple!) directors to the actors to the audience has to work way too hard for laughs that never arrive or feel worth the effort.

As poor of a Laurel & Hardy introduction as Utopia turned out to be, it at least thematically clued me in on some of the duo’s charms. They way they function like a married couple (“Don’t I always take care of you? You’re the first one I think of.”) and turn their dire economic peril into (sometimes literal) gallows humor is endearing, at least. I can also get behind their central goal to establish a country with “no passports, no prisoners, no taxes, no laws, and no murder.” It’s a shame that those sentiments are buried under a film so visibly tired & directionless. Every potential is wasted, from Laurel & Hardy’s vaudevillian energy to the absence of a performance from French singer Suzy Declare, the only female performer of note onscreen. By the time previously absent narration intrudes halfway through the runtime to summarize the young country’s efforts to tame the island they inhabit the whole thing feels like a mess that should have been cancelled the first month it fell behind schedule. No one steering the ship wanted to be there and I didn’t want to be watching them go through the motions, especially not as a first time audience for an iconic comedy duo I’ve never witnessed in their prime.

-Brandon Ledet