Author: swampflix

The Lego Batman Movie (2017)

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I don’t know if I can fully justify enjoying The Lego Batman Movie‘s tongue in cheek meta-commentary on the grim & gritty world of DC comic book adaptations while calling the same referential style of humor lazy & unfunny in Deadpool. It might just be that the jokes in Lego Batman were better written. It might be that the film’s visual craft better carried its dull stretches where the jokes weren’t landing. It might even be that DC is a target that really needs to be parodied in an irreverent, aggressively silly way (considering the gloomy hell pit it’s been mired in since Nolan & Snyder have shaped its modern image), while Deadpool‘s Marvel digs felt more inconsequential. No matter the reason, I felt like somewhat of a hypocrite laughing throughout The Lego Batman Movie for the same exact reasons I shuddered throughout Deadpool. I could try to make an argument that this animated triviality was more sincere or emotionally genuine that that accursed Ryan Reynolds vehicle, but I’ll always be saddled with the feeling of being made a hypocrite by my own sense of taste in this scenario.

One thing I can be certain of in my enjoyment of The Lego Batman Movie is that Will Arnett is brilliantly cast as the titular character; he’s probably the most inspired Batman casting since I first imagined Nic Cage in the role in my own head. Arnett’s naturally gruff speaking voice & leftover Gob Bluth hubris are perfect for the Batman/Bruce Wayne dichotomy. The 2014 Lego Movie was an adorable, infectiously energized pop culture mashup that allowed for all kinds of recognizable characters to share a single screen: C-3PO, Abraham Lincoln, Wonder Woman, Shakespeare, etc. Only Arnett’s Batman stood out enough to suggest he could justify his own spin-off, though. As a delivery on that promise, this quasi-sequel does a great job of both delivering more of the same & deepening the self-obsessed gloomy rich boy assholery that defines Arnett’s Batman as a character. He still shares the screen with an impossible array of crossover characters & finds fresh ways to take the wind out of Batman’s egomaniacal sails. We get to see much more of the loneliness, hurt, and grief that makes him such a selfish prick to begin with, however. The movie even opens that world to us without having to indulge in yet another retelling of the origin story sparked by his parent’s death (a restraint Snyder didn’t show in Dawn of Justice, unfortunately). Arnett’s Lego form is such a pure embodiment of Batman that in these reflective scenes of brooding over the past in his mansion & cave, he’s still wearing the costume & cowl. The movie makes his Bruce Wayne persona the disguise & Batman the natural default, which is both amusing & oddly insightful.

To make room for these introspective, parodic dives into Batman’s character, The Lego Batman Movie does little in the way of plot innovation. Like an episode of the 1960s Batman television series or the general ethos or Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, the game plan in this lego-ized version of a Batman plot is to just flood the screen with villains for the Caped Crusader to thwart. The Joker, Two-Face, The Riddler, Catwoman, etc. are joined by non-Batman villains like Sauron, Gremlins, Kong, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Dracula to provide a long line of in-the-moment obstacles for Batman to clear on his path to the end credits. Outside a couple well-casted performances (Jenny Slate as Harley Quinn, Zach Galifianakis as The Joker, etc.) there really isn’t much to hold onto in these external conflicts. Rather, it’s the emotional conflicts of Batman’s interpersonal relationships with friends & family (Alfred, Robin, Batgirl, himself) that drive to story. The Lego Batman Movie boasts fairly simplistic messages about learning to not be selfish & the value of asking for help that contrast with Batman’s self-absorbed rich boy nature as a vigilante who “karate chops poor people in a Halloween costume,” but that’s more than enough of a narrative structure to support the film’s true concern: self-referential goofs & gags.

The beautiful thing about this movie’s Batman nerdery is that it mostly focuses on Batman’s onscreen adaptations, as opposed to his life in comic books. There’s an inclusiveness to that kind of reference-based humor that I found constantly rewarding. From the opening heist sequence involving an “unnecessarily complicated bomb” that recalls The Dark Knight to the off-handed callback line, “You wanna get nuts?,” every inch of the script is crawling with heartfelt appreciation for Batman’s life in movies. References to less widely-loved properties like the (criminally undervalued) 1960s Batman: The Movie and even the 1940s serials are just as plentiful & thoughtful as the nods to Batman & Nolan. Much like The Lego Movie, The Lego Batman Movie does its best to capture the feeling of kids playing with toys on the living room floor, despite its nature as a corporate-sanctioned, CG-animated product deliberately designed to sell merchandise. Since I grew up a huge mark for Batman media (mostly thanks to Burton & The Animated Series), this particular version of smashing toys together actually resonated with my own memories of childhood playtime. That shared nerdery over Batman‘s cinematic past is likely a significant factor is why this indulgence in referential, tangential meta-humor worked so well for me while the same tactics in Deadpool left me absolutely cold.

The Lego Batman Movie is overlong for its paper thin plot & exhausting, gag-a-second style of post-ZAZ parody humor. It’s impressive how much of it works before that exhaustion sets in, however. I’m usually not at all a sucker for CG animation, but this Lego style has a cool, tactile stop-motion flavor to it that I really appreciate. The film’s knowledgeable assessment of Batman as a character can be impressive too, from commentary on his fear of familial love & his longterm relationships with supervillians to more shallow single-moment parodies where he literally shoots children in the face with merchandise or fights forgotten villains like Egghead & The Condiment King. The inspired casting of Arnett as Batman (and the alternate, improved universe where Channing Tatum plays Superman) is enough to carry the movie on its own, but it’s still endearing to see so much care & attention to detail poured into a property that appears to be all blatant commercialism from the surface. Maybe that intense fandom & craft is what’s missing for me in the meta sleaze of Deadpool, but, again, I’m really just grasping at straws trying to figure out why one of these movies worked for me while the other one didn’t. It’s a personal inconsistency that’s going to drive me mad until I can put a finer point on it.

-Brandon Ledet

Slave of the Cannibal God (1978)

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I once made a promise to myself that I’d never watch the grotesque exploitation piece Cannibal Holocaust again, but between Slave of the Cannibal God and the much more recently-produced Bone Tomahawk, I feel as if I already have. Now, Bone Tomahawk is admittedly a much better film than either of the schlocky horrors I’m lumping it in with here, but it does traffic in some of the same “savage natives” fear-mongering in a way that’s at least worth discussing, if not admonishing. Unlike Cannibal Holocaust, however, Bone Tomahawk does not depict the same real-life-animal-torture-as-entertainment aesthetic that make that film such a memorably unpleasant (and perhaps genuinely evil) experience. Slave of the Cannibal God very nearly does. It’s not quite as cruel or as nihilistically empty as Cannibal Holocaust, but it does position itself comfortably within the same wheelhouse while clearly displaying a level of craft that indicates its producers should’ve known better.

Released as Prisoner of the Cannibal God in the UK (where it was briefly banned as a “video nasty”) and Mountain of the Cannibal God in its native Italy, this delightful romp stars Bond girl Ursula Anders as a woman searching for her lost husband in the jungles of New Guinea and a young Stacy Keach as her reluctant guide. The guide fears, correctly, that the husband may have been abducted & tortured by an especially brutal tribe of cannibals who live on a mountain many fear to climb. They embark on an Apocalypse Now/Heart of Darkness-style mission to recover the doomed man anyway, an expedition that drastically dwindles their numbers along the way and inevitably results in an elaborately staged cannibal ritual. If there’s anything interesting about the way Slave of the Cannibal God structures its jungle expedition, it’s in the way the film often functions as a by-the-books slasher. A masked serial killer who had broken off from the cannibal tribe the group seeks picks them off one by one in the style of a spear-wielding Jason Voorhees. The rest of the film, however, is all reveals of ulterior motives within the expedition and shocking displays of animal cruelty & casual racism/sexism. It’s not quite as grotesque as the same vibe achieved in Cannibal Holocaust, but it’s well-shot & well-acted enough to suggest that it never should have ever come close.

The animal deaths depicted for atmosphere in Slave of the Cannibal God are largely presented as if they were pure nature footage. There’s something oddly staged-feeling about its footage of snakes eating a monkey or an owl, though, whether or not those animals were already co-habitating in the Sri Lankan filming location. Worse yet, the film includes a religious ritual centered around the gutting of a live lizard that’s stomach-turning at best. It’s not nearly as grotesque as the animal deaths in Cannibal Holocaust and it at least appears as if the lizard were promptly eaten raw, but it’s still an entirely needless act of animal cruelty. Anytime the film pauses to depict animal violence it feels as if it’s borrowing a primal energy it can’t bother to muster on its own accord. This is doubly disheartening when things like the lizard-gutting are used to make New Ginea’s “primitive peoples” (in the characters’ words) seem like grotesque monsters. Gleeful violence against women, mocking fascination with little people, and just a generally sleazy vibe that typifies 70s grindhouse aesthetic do little to lighten the mood of these for-the-sake-of-entertainment atrocities. Very early in the film, around the time I watched a snake slowly scalp a monkey for what felt like minutes, I realized that I probably should’ve known better than to watch something titled Slave of the Cannibal God in the first place. Things did not improve from there.

I did get a couple quick glimpses of the movie I would’ve wanted Slave of the Cannibal God to be, though, the movie I hoped to see instead of the one I should have known to expect. There’s a brief moment in the expedition where a gigantic crocodile puppet yanks one of the native guides from the group’s raft and tears him to shreds in the water. In a later scene, the masked killer who terrorizes the expedition chops off another guide’s head with a machete. A focus on this kind of practical effects spectacle, preferably without xenophobic othering & the detriment of all women everywhere, could’ve saved this movie from achieving its lowly status as a slightly less gross Cannibal Holocaust. More of a dedication to its unexpected slasher tropes could’ve helped distinguish it as well, as it at least would cut down on grouping all New Guinea tribes together as personality-free hoards and help establish a basic sense of novelty. I’m not convinced this inherently imperialist exploitation genre is at all worth saving, however. I guess Bone Tomahawk finds a way to skirt its worst trappings and, from what I hear, Eli Roth’s Green Inferno supposedly finds a way to shame the explorers instead of the community they invade; I’m not sure either achievement is enough to justify keeping this monstrously ugly thing alive. Films like Slave of the Cannibal God & Cannibal Holocaust would likely better serve the world by not existing at all and I honestly feel a little complicit in their continued legacy by picking this one up second-hand at the thrift store, as if it had something worthwhile to offer.

-Brandon Ledet

The Last Horror Film (1982)

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One of the most exciting things about schlock cinema as an art form is the experimentation that comes with filmmakers working under financial pressure. I’m especially fascinated by old horror cheapies that attempt to incorporate footage or sets from other films produced by the same studio in order to pad out runtimes or increase production value. Sometimes, this can lead to interesting results, like with Peter Bogdanovich’s footage cannibalizing debut feature Targets. It can also lead to complete disaster, as with the set-repurposing Roger Corman production The Raven, which is, objectively speaking, an incomprehensible mess (and, oddly enough, one of the films pilfered for Targets). The Last Horror Film is a proud contribution to this frugal tradition of recycled cinema, an early 80s horror that goes above & beyond in its milking production value out of better-funded films that came before it. It even goes a step beyond the Roger Corman recycling model by including imagery from better-funded horror films’ advertising to boost its own allure. It may not be a formally slick or thematically ambitious horror pic, but the way it gets by using financial shortcuts is honestly nothing short of inspiring.

Narratively speaking, The Last Horror Film doesn’t amount to much more than Taxi Driver Goes Giallo. A Travis Bickle-type obsesses over an actress known to the world as the undisputed Queen of Horror Films. Aspiring to leave his service industry life behind & claim his true destiny as a celebrated filmmaker, the sweaty creep follows his beloved scream queen across the ocean to the Cannes Film Festival in France. He films her there in secret, both at public press junkets and in private, voyeuristic settings. Meanwhile, friends & colleagues of the actress are violently killed under extreme, giallo-type lights, with the killer’s face entirely obscured, but heavily indicated to be the weirdo taxi driver. What’s partly so great about The Last Horror Film is that it makes absolutely no attempt to hide its giallo/Scorsese genre mashup. The film namechecks both Taxi Driver & Jodie Foster in the script to clue the audience in on its sense of self-awareness. The giallo-inspired kills include multiple close-up shots of straight razors to drive that point home as well. The film has very little use for subtlety & nuance, but instead focuses on squeezing as much entertainment value as possible out of its extremely limited resources.

Besides the aforementioned inclusion of kills from other horror pictures screening in-film at the Cannes Festival, The Last Horror Film also boosts its production value significantly by playing tourist. Intercutting shots of movie advertisements that line the streets of the festival (with particular attention given to an ad for the masterful Possession) and nude women sunbathing on nearby beaches, the film often plays like a much, much sleazier version of Roger Ebert’s video essays of Cannes from the 90s (clips of which are featured in the documentary Life Itself). The film’s plot & murders are almost treated as unneeded interruptions of its cheap pop music montages, where the main attraction is not murder, but people-watching. It’s in those stretches where The Last Horror Film goes from surprisingly entertaining to nearly invaluable, especially when it takes notice of the film industry weirdos mixing it up with the locals at the discos surrounding the fest. The Last Horror Film set out to make a watchable horror picture armed only with an interesting location and clips from other, better funded works and it did a kind of amazing job of it, fully committing to its blatant acts of tourism and grimy modes of meta film commentary.

There’s an A Night to Dismember quality to this film, especially in its feeling of hastily edited collage, but The Last Horror Film deviates from that Doris WIshman classic in its unexpected success in building a cohesive narrative out of its loosely gathered scraps. Much like the Wishman picture, this giallo pastiche attempts to deliver the goods in terms of cheap gore-for-gore’s-sake thrills: electrocutions, decapitations, melted faces, etc. These blatant, bloody bread & circuses moments are held together by legitimately artful, almost Fellini-esque dream sequences in which our crazed cabbie desperately clutches his make-believe Oscar while his scream queen deity (Hammer horror vet Carolyn Munro) coos at him in encouragement. While it never really reaches the heights of meta-commentary in similarly-minded works like Demons, the film also makes attempts to put its film industry setting to thematic use. There’s especially noteworthy scenes in which the famed horror actress is being hunted down in public, but everyone at Cannes, including the police, brush off her terror as a tasteless publicity stunt.

While maybe not masterful filmmaking in an arthouse sense, The Last Horror Film is a triumph in schlocky alchemy. Its blatant tourism of 1981 Cannes somehow makes a film that would otherwise be a (literal) cut & paste knockoff without it into an invaluable historical document. It’s the kind of scrappy, make-do filmmaking that deserves to be celebrated for its minor successes, even if they’re only employed for cheap horror film shocks & chills. In some ways, it’s miraculous that the film is even watchable at all.

-Brandon Ledet

When Disney Got Cold Feet Over Getting Spooky: The Watcher in the Woods (1980) & Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)

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July’s Movie of the Month is a jarring entry in the Walt Disney canon, something much spookier, much more adult, and much less financially successful than what the company usually produces. 1983’s Something Wicked This Way Comes is a Ray Bradbury-penned horror film packed with enough ghostly carnival attractions, Pam Grier witchcraft, and children-in-danger stakes to distract you from the fact that it’s a Disney movie to begin with. Still, it’s easy to get the sense while watching Something Wicked that Disney wasn’t fully committed to the adult horror waters it was testing at the time. Casting debates, re-shoots, and studio notes softened director Jack Clayton’s nightmarish vision at every turn. Although the film still stands out from Disney’s usual saccharine tone, it could have gone much, much further. This kind of post-production backpedaling was a constant theme during Disney’s brief adult horror period too. Much like with Something Wicked, the studio’s tinkering revisions softened & distorted the original vision of its first outright horror picture, 1980’s The Watcher in the Woods. Both films survived their troubled production histories as cult classic favorites, not financial successes, but both also could have been much more memorably strange & terrifying than Disney ultimately allowed them to be.

Before The Watcher in the Woods, Disney toyed with an outright horror tone in films like Black Hole or the Witch Mountain series, but it kept those urges confined to the bounds of a science fiction aesthetic, focusing on topics like space travel & telekinesis. The advertising for The Watcher in the Woods promised an entirely new, fully committed shift in trajectory. The trailers boasted, “Walt Disney ushers in a new decade of motion picture entertainment with the following invitation to spend 90min on the edge of your seat.” The problem is that the company wasn’t sure it wanted to accept its own invitation to do so. Director John Hough was hired with the intention of producing Disney’s The Exorcist, but the constant barrage of studio notes that tempered its production consistently diminished the wind in its sails. This behind-the-camera tinkering came to a head when the studio insisted that Hough rush its ending to completion so it could screen coinciding with a commemoration of star Bette Davis’s 50 years in the acting profession. The original ending, which includes a monstrous alien puppet that does not appear in the theatrical cut, was left incomprehensible due to the time constraint. It then had to be re-shot into a much more easily digestible conclusion after hundreds of stop & start rewrites. If pulled off well, it could have been a mind-blowing, impressively dark ending to an otherwise mildly spooky picture. In its compromised form, it’s more of an all-too-easy release of futilely built tension.

As much as you can feel the studio notes shenanigans muddling its ending & ultimate severity, The Watcher in the Woods is still an impressively spooky Disney picture and an important precursor to what the studio would soon accomplish in Something Wicked This Way Comes. Strange lights flashing in the woods, blindfolded ghosts appearing in cracked mirrors, haunted English mansions & carnival attractions: The Watcher establishes early glimpses of the same children vs. immense Evil horror that makes Something Wicked such a classic. Bette Davis appears in the full evil old biddy capacity she was frequently typecast in following the success of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, except with a distinctly tragic vulnerability that had been missing since that role reinvigorated her career. Her instantly spooky presence is admittedly sparse, but it suggests much of the film’s horrific tone to come as the mystery of her daughter’s disappearance unfolds. Occultist rituals, alternate dimensions, and, of course, the eeriness of the woods set the stage for a grand supernatural finale that not only was supposed to settle its overarching mystery, but also give physical form to a literal “watcher” in the woods (who appears to be some kind of evil crawfish in the original ending). It’s a shame Disney didn’t afford Hough the patience to see the original conclusion through in all of its spooky glory, but it’s still kind of incredible that they ever toyed with the idea of making a genuine horror film at all, so I guess I should be content with what’s left to be enjoyed onscreen.

Neither The Watcher in the Woods nor Something Wicked This Way Comes are the scariest live-action Disney films of all time. For my money, I’d assume that honor goes to the deeply traumatizing Return to Oz, which was soon to follow. However, as a pair they do make clear that at one point Disney’s plan to revitalize its brand (which was struggling by the 80s, believe it or not) was to experiment with legitimate horror film aesthetics. You can feel that decision lurking in Something Wicked‘s haunted carnival nightmare and, honestly, I do believe it’s the better film of the two. The Watcher in the Woods is a much more naked, deliberate push in the horror direction, though. Besides Bette Davis’s evil old biddy presence, the film echoes plenty of already established horror tropes: The Exorcist’s seances, The Shining‘s backwards mirror writing, the camera’s POV chases through the woods that recall both Jaws & the era’s more typical slashers. It would have been fascinating to see if Disney might have been more committed to this dark path if the success of The Little Mermaid hadn’t ushered in their animated division’s 90s renaissance. Maybe they would have eventually loosened the reins on their hired guns’ dark visions and allowed their live action horrors to run free. It’s literally too good to be true, though, so all we can really do is marvel at the fact that they ever got as close as they did to the horror film deep end before they inevitably got cold feet.

For more on July’s Movie of the Month, the Ray Bradbury-penned Disney horror Something Wicked This Way Comes, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #34 of The Swampflix Podcast: #ReelTimeJaws & The Butcher’s Wife (1991)

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Welcome to Episode #34 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our thirty-fourth episode, Britnee makes Brandon watch the Demi Moore magical realism romcom The Butcher’s Wife (1991) for the first time. Also, Brandon & Britnee discuss #ReelTimeJaws, a Jaws-themed movie-watching project created by stand-up comedian & podcaster Howard Kremer. Enjoy!

-Britnee Lombas & Brandon Ledet

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

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Spider-Man: Homecoming is a delightful movie. Featuring baby-faced Brit Tom Holland reprising his role from Captain America: Civil War as the eponymous arachno-person, the film has already met with widespread approval from most critics and fans. It’s not difficult to see why; even when playing an exasperatingly ebullient modern teenager complete with inappropriately timed self-videoing, Holland has a magnetic screen presence and brings a lot of charm to the role, not to mention that he actually looks like a teenager and not just Tobey Maguire in his late twenties wearing a backpack. This newfound verisimilitude when it comes to casting young people as young characters is reflected in the rest of the cast who portray Parker’s classmates, including Laura Harrier (27 but looks younger) as Peter’s love interest Liz, Jacob Batalon as his best friend and confidante Ned, Grand Budapest Hotel‘s Tony Revolori as bully Flash Thompson, and Disney debutante Zendaya as Michelle alongside others.

While recently watching The 3% on Netflix with my roommate, he remarked that he found the show to be “effortlessly Tumblr friendly,” which is also true of this film. One thing you may notice about the cast list above is that, other than Holland, all of the actors listed are people of color. This is a great step forward as far as diversity goes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is something that I have written about here before, especially in regards to the largely white-washed and underwhelming Doctor Strange. More admirable than that, however, is the fact that the film has largely cast actors with strong comedic ability beyond any arguable (or marketable) “tokenism”  in what is probably the funniest film that the MCU has produced outside of the Guardians movies so far. Other notable comedians in the adult cast include comedic actors like Hannibal Buress as Coach Wilson (who has some of the film’s best lines), my beloved Donald Glover as two-scene wonder Aaron Davis, and Orange is the New Black‘s (admittedly underutilized) Selenis Levya, making her the second actress to break free from that program into a superhero film after Elizabeth Rodriguez’s appearance in Logan earlier this year.

Rounding out the adult cast are Marisa Tomei as Peter Parker’s Aunt May, Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man (yet again), and Michael Keaton as the Vulture. Downey is essentially the same in this appearance as he is in all of his appearances as this (and frankly every) character, the rich asshole who is less charismatic than he thinks he is. Those of you who were wondering if he would express any regret or mixed feelings about his role in drafting what is essentially a child soldier into his personal grievance with Captain America in last year’s Civil War are bound to be disappointed, although probably not surprised. It’s still a nice touch that the film acknowledges in its text, if not in its characters’ self-awareness, that (once again) the film’s villains are created by Tony Stark and his lack of foresight. Keaton’s Vulture, nee Adrian Toomes, is a blue-collar Salvage worker whose contract with the city is rendered null when Tony Stark creates a new government agency to deal with the cleanup of the Battle of New York, forcing Toomes and his associates to find a new line of work. As is so often the case in the real world, these working-class men have no choice but to turn to crime, in this situation the theft and customization of advanced technology into weapons, in order to support themselves and their families.

This creates the backdrop of the film, which tells a much more grounded story than more excessive, loftier films like The Avengers. The stakes are largely personal, especially in one particular story beat that is obvious in retrospect but I didn’t see coming and won’t spoil here. Of course, just because the fate of the world isn’t on the line, that does not mean that the stakes are small. One could be easily forgiven for assuming that this movie would be a cliche teenage film that just happens to be filtered through a superhero lens, especially given the film’s subtitle of “homecoming,” but everything feels like it is awarded the dramatic weight that is warranted and appropriate given the setting and the tone. I’m hesitant to say more in this review as I want to save some of my insights for our Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. review, but I can say that this is one of my favorite films of the year so far and definitely worth the price of admission. I may be any easy sell (especially anytime a film uses “Space Age Love Song,” aka the best thing Flock of Seagulls ever made), but I’ll admit there are a few jokes and nods to the source material that don’t quite land, and I can confess that I had a fairly unpleasant viewing experience due to the loudness and phone usage of the film’s target audience (which is probably what I deserve for going to a screening on opening weekend that was not at the Alamo Drafthouse). All in all, however, I can all but guarantee you’ll have a good time.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Big Sick (2017)

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The Big Sick might be the sole Judd Apatow production to date that would benefit from a longer runtime. Written by real-life married couple & longtime comedy world mainstays Kumail Nanjiani & Emily Gordon, the film attempts to cram the bizarre true story about their personal relationship into the structure of a traditional romcom. In that respect, it’s mostly successful. The film is touching, sweet, and darkly funny in its awkward, vulnerably human reactions to an impossible romantic scenario. However, by molding a real, nuanced story into the shape of a three act, trope-laden genre structure, the film tends to glaze over some of its most essential relationships in a way that distorts its focus & undercuts its own power. Over time, The Big Sick turns out not to be about romance at all, but about unlikely partnerships that form in its absence. When its romcom genre structure demands that it return to that romance, then, the overall result is a picture that somehow isn’t self-aware of the emotional hook that makes it feel truly special in its best, most distinctive moments. With a little more screentime & a little less adherence to genre that may not have been the case.

Kumail Nanjiani stars as a younger version of himself, an aimless college graduate trying to stay afloat in the Chicago stand-up comedy scene & to maintain a relationship with his devout Muslim parents despite his own secular, Scorsese-esque crisis of faith. A Pakistani immigrant family, Nanjiani’s parents & brother push him to both pursue a more lucrative career & to submit to a traditional arranged marriage romance. Instead, he pays rent as an Uber driver & falls in love with a white girl. It’s a move his brother disappointedly calls cliche & his parents disown him over. The most shocking aspect of this family-destroying relationship isn’t that it bucks against Islamic values, however. Nanjiani’s life is disrupted when his new, white girlfriend, furious that he’s kept their relationship a secret as long as possible, is bedridden with a medically-induced coma and is faced with the precipice of death. He meets her family for the first time while she’s unconscious in the ICU & they’re technically broken up, leaving the parents suspicious as to why he cares enough to wait by her side. The questions this situation raises are vast in range. Will the girlfriend’s family remain cold to Kumail’s concern for their near-dead, comatose daughter? Will Kumail’s own family invite him back to the fold despite his secularism & apparent disregard for tradition? Will the girlfriend accept him back in her life when she recovers? Will she recover at all? These questions have all been answered by the real life history of the couple who penned the screenplay, but their tension still makes for a great dramatic plot for a modern, heartfelt romcom.

Because Nanjiani stars as (a slightly fictionalized version of) himself, the story mostly follows his personal trajectory as he’s alienated by his cultural, professional, and romantic conflicts. This narrow focus works exceptionally well in the film’s second act, but allows the narrative to stray from its most interesting character dynamics in the bookends of that center: Emily’s coma. Before the coma, Kumail’s relationships with his girlfriend & the eligible Pakistani women his parents pressure into him auditioning are rushed, never given enough room to develop in a significant way. Zoe Kazan is endearing as (the fictionalized version of) Emily, but the screentime she’s allowed isn’t pronounced enough to make her relationship with Kumail feel worth the trouble & commitment it stirs. The Pakistani women are even less fortunate in that respect, essentially reduced to a pile of interchangable photographs in a cigar box. A slightly extended runtime could’ve fixed either deficiency, which is a truly strange thing to wish for in an Apatow production. Instead, the most significant relationship formed onscreen is between Kumail & Emily’s parents. Ray Romano (who is staggeringly impressive here) & Holly Hunter (who’s also great, but less surprisingly so) shape the heart of the film as they cautiously allow Kumail into their lives as Emily’s parents. They’re tense, emotionally vulnerable people suffering their loneliest, most terrifying hour and there’s genuine power in the way they recognize that same hurt in their daughter’s estranged boyfriend. That’s why it’s disappointing when the movie’s romcom genre trappings steer its third act back towards Kumail’s less-defined relationship with Emily (for wholly understandable reasons) instead of resolving or deepening the dynamic that made for its funniest & most devastating moments, his relationship with her parents.

Real life is obviously more complicated & unwieldy than any two hour romcom plot could contain. If The Big Sick were to capture the entirety of Kumail & Emily’s bizarre story, it’d be twice as long & half as funny than it is in its current, darkly hilarious, emotionally resonant state. I do think that time constraint limited the film’s potential to be its best self, however, since it downplayed a lot of the potential romantic partners in Kumail’s life to instead fully develop his relationship with Emily’s parents, only to double back to the romantic narrative as a convenient genre tool at the last minute. Obviously, if my main complaint about a film is that there could have been more of it, it’s probably a worthwhile & enjoyable picture as is. The jokes are funny. The romantic triumphs are rewarding. The cultural details of the stand-up comedy world setting & Pakistani familial dynamics make for a memorably specific, distinct experience. It’s just a little frustrating that the most significant, exciting relationships of the movie are sacrificed for a more traditional, Apatow style romcom plot instead of being freely explored in the darkly funny indie film melancholy territory they deserve. There are at least a handful of films that have already detail romantic relationships somewhat similar to Kumail & Emily’s story in The Big Sick, as odd & coma-specific as it is, but Kumail’s relationship with Emily’s parents is something much more unique & worth examining. A better, more self-aware film might have reconciled that, either by narrowing its focus or extending its runtime.

-Brandon Ledet

Our RoboCop Remake (2014)

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I don’t know what it says about my attention span lately that I’ve been watching so many anthology-structured comedies built out of isolated sketches instead of an overarching narrative. Out of all those recent selections, though, including the stoner culture comedy The Groove Tube & the Italian Fantasia parody Allegro non troppo, I don’t think any have been as fractured or as loosely defined as Our RoboCop Remake, which actually does follow a strict narrative throughline. Crowd-funded & practically crowd-directed, Our RoboCop Remake is a scene for scene “remake” of the Paul Verhoeven classic RoboCop. Just as Alex Murphy’s robo-body is violently disassembled in RoboCop 2, the editors behind this fan-made reimagining divided the 1987 RoboCop feature between 50 contributing filmmakers, who individually remade scenes of the film for varying comedic effects. The movie was curated as a tongue-in-cheek protest of the then-upcoming major studio remake of RoboCop released that same year. This is explained on the film’s website with the mission statement: “Because if anyone’s going to ruin RoboCop, it’s us.” Although uneven by nature and at times painfully unfunny, the film is a lot more vibrantly energized & aggressively strange than its major studio counterpart, which makes it a lot more in tune with Verhoeven’s original vision than that PG-13 bore.

It’s difficult to imagine watching Our RoboCop Remake without having seen its source material, which might be its one major flaw in comparison to 2014’s other robo-reboot. Every scene is such an isolated, comically absurd send-up of the Original Flavor RoboCop moment it’s parodying that the story would be impossible to follow (or care about) if it weren’t for the primary movie’s legacy. The scene to scene range of talent & production value in everything from writing to costuming is violently drastic, including both intricately-constructed ED-209 puppets & out of the box Party City RoboCop costumes. Still, the movie easily survives on the strength of individual moments & gags and is consistently charming in the juvenile audacity of its basic premise. In stand-out moments comedian Steve Agee delivers a Tim & Eric style infomercial for prosthetic hearts, RoboCop explodes dozens of would-be rapists’ genitals, and an MGM lawyer serves the audience with a “Cease & Desist” order to shut the entire operation down. The comedy can be disappointingly bro-minded in some stretches, with an overabundance of dick jokes guiding the way. Helpful text at the bottom of the screen indicates the contributors involved in each segment, though, (sometimes amusingly so, especially in the case of a brief Drive spoof attributed to Nicolas Winding Refn), so any eyeroll-worthy moments of failed humor are quarantined well enough to not ruin the mood entirely. By the time the whole movie ends on a credits sequence involving multiple breakdancing RoboCops, as if it were an episode of Strangers with Candy, its general party vibe is undeniably infectious.

As with the similarly-spirited “illegal movie” Girl Walk//All Day, Our RoboCop Remake demands respect merely by maintaining its outsized ambition against the odds of its budget & circumstance. The range of its various mediums, from live action comedy sketches to amateur puppetry to crude computer animation to interpretive dance & musical theater, overcomes any disappointments in its inconsistent tone. The film is also deliriously over-the-top in its nudity & violence and deliberately devolves into an Ultimate Reality style of post-modern deconstruction towards its climax in ways that pay homage to Verhoeven’s reputation as a subversive button pusher without producing anything resembling a carbon copy of his work. The film is similar to the mixed bag results of Gus Van Sant’s “shot for shot” remake of Psycho, except that it’s much easier to imagine yelling at it while downing a case of cheap beer with your most idiotic friends. That’s not too bad of a result for a crowd-funded parody of an 80s action film stretched across dozens of filmmakers with varying levels of raw talent.

-Brandon Ledet

The Groove Tube (1974)

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The sketch comedy movie is an often derided & dismissed genre with rare exceptions like Kentucky Fried Movie breaking through to land significant cultural impact. Loosely connected sketches strung together for a full-length feature have a minute-to-minute “hit or miss” reputation with general audiences, who seem happily willing to brush them off as empty frivolity. I probably should not have been surprised, then, that the 1974 sketch comedy The Grove Tube has been largely forgotten by mainstream culture and, according to indicators like its pitifully low score on Letterboxd, dismissed even by those who have a patience for low budget experiments in independent cinema. I was still a little taken aback, though, since the film is so much funnier & more substantial than its reputation suggests. According to Wikipedia, “The film was originally produced to be shown at the Channel One Theater on East 60th St. in New York, a venue that featured R-rated video recordings shown on three television sets, which was a novelty to audiences at the time.” You can feel that artsy, confrontationally low-fi aesthetic in the film’s comedic tone, which aims more to amuse the post-hippie counterculture types of NYC than to reach as wide of an audience as possible. Shades of future counterculture comedy outlets like Wonder Showzen, UCB, UHF, and early SNL are detectable throughout. Absurdism, non sequitors, chaos disguised as order: The Groove Tube is surprisingly experimental & forward-thinking for a sketch comedy feature. Better yet, its individual sketches pay off with a much higher success rate than they typically do in these sprawling, stoner-minded comedies. It’s consistently funny.

The film opens with a fairly straightforward parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where a small community of apes are confronted with the mystery of a television set instead of the Kubrick film’s monilith. When the television flips on, a druggy montage of nuclear families watching TV over inverted outer space imagery read the title credits: The Groove Tube. This is clearly a film where early 70s counterculture laughs in the face of mainstream consumerism & family values, poking holes in and making fun of the sanitized version of America that’s broadcast on television. An early sketch even parodies hitchhiking & free love nudism to establish that it’s trading in Laugh-In‘s hippie California sunshine for a much more authentic New York City grime. Period-specific Barbie commercials & “Let your fingers do the walking” phone ads are parodied, but for the most part its satirical targets are relatively timeless: corporate empires, sexual norms, hippies, news media, cops, etc. In the film’s most typifying sketch, a Bozo the Clown stand-in appears to be harmless children’s entertainment on the surface, but devolves into purient readings of erotic De Sade-type literature once parents are asked to leave the room. In another, a nonsensical cooking show recipe devolves into a kind of madness distinctly reminiscent of a modern YouTube gimmick. Originally released with an “X” rating, the film features just as much male nudity as it does female and somehow avoids ever being outright sexist despite the general grossness of its era, even as it obsesses over explicit sexuality. In a perfect world, The Groove Tube would have been exalted just as high as Kentucky Fried Movie for the way it managed to elevate the sketch comedy feature to something more than just comedians dicking around with no sense of purpose or direction.

There is one unfortunate blemish on the film that hasn’t aged well at all in the four decades since its release: a brief sketch in which a young Richard Belzer plays a black female prostitute. It’s an offensively dated, bone headed moment that certainly leaves a bad taste in its wake, but like most sketches doesn’t last long enough to make too big of an impact on the film’s otherwise impeccable runtime. The Groove Tube mimics the feeling of being up too late in a drugged out haze, flipping channels without aim, and trying to make sense out of modern culture through that window. Most sketches, then, last only for seconds at a time, with the one minutes-long exception falling down a strange rabbit hole that begins with drug trafficking & public heavy-petting and ends with psychedelic animation & sincere expressions of homosexual desire. The prostitution sketch is only a blip in the larger gestalt, with most of Belzer’s work holding up fairly well as New York City alt-comedy counterculture, a snapshot of the city’s proto-punk grit & sleaze. He’s joined in most sketches by director Ken Shapiro and a young Chevy Chase (making his first feature film appearance), who would later carry a lot of the film’s sardonic, druggy, nose-thumbing comedy to his breakout role on SNL. Besides boasting all this youthful rebellious energy and politically-minded absurdism, The Groove Tube is also bookended by the Curtis Mayfield classic “Move On Up,” which helps solidify its tone as a fun, funky slice of political anger & cultural discontent. I doubt the sketch comedy feature will ever get its due respect as a vibrant & viable film genre, but if it ever does, I’d love to see The Groove Tube included as one of its more surprisingly rewarding specimens.

-Brandon Ledet

5 Centimeters per Second (2007)

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One of the year’s best surprises so far was the animated Japanese romance epic Your Name., which felt like it came out of nowhere before jumping into shockingly wide American distribution. Audiences who closely follow Japanese popular media were probably a lot less surprised by the film’s stellar quality and critical word of mouth success, however. Not only was Your Name. the top-grossing film in Japan last year, anime or otherwise, but it’s director Makoto Shinkai had been praised as “the next Miyazaki” for at least a decade now, despite not having much name recognition abroad. What really should have telegraphed the arrival of Your Name., though, was Shinkai’s sophomore feature, 5 Centimeters per Second, which shared a lot of basic DNA with the director’s breakout hit despite being released a decade in the past. It’s not nearly as significant or as cohesive of a work, but it is certainly fascinating as a wind-up to the pitch.

Told in a series of three interconnected vignettes, 5 Centimeters per Second is a kind of romance anthology, adopting a format usually employed by the horror genre. A young boy named Takaki yearns for intimacy with a classmate who moves to the countryside, several gruelling trains transfers away. In the first segment Takaki journeys to meet her at the station. In the second, he’s slightly older and painfully unaware that his current highschool classmate has a crush on him. His mind is still wrapped up in his childhood crush. The third segment finds Takaki as an adult with a job as an office drone, still living in an unfulfilled life as he mentally searches for a childhood love that never saw its due. Much like Your Name., it’s a film about two romantics separated by time & distance who yearn for an impossible shared space where they can fully explore their feelings for each other. Unlike Your Name., this film feels like a series of loosely connected, lightly detailed sketches that never truly come together in a cohesive way.

The three segments that make up 5 Centimeters per Second are obviously differentiated by drastic shifts in time: Takaki’s life as a school age boy with a devastating crush, his year as a hunky but oblivious highschool senior, and his adult state as a depressed, unfulfilled office worker. What really differentiates between these periods, however, and what keeps them interesting, is their individual senses of pacing. The opening puppy love segment is shot rapid fire at the screen with the excited energy of a young child to whom everything means so much. The highschool episode slows things down significantly, making room for reflective stargazing, matching Takaki’s off-in-the-distance sense of mental wandering. The concluding segment oddly ties the whole thing together by starting with Takaki’s aimless descent into dull adulthood tedium, but then reigniting the excitement of the film’s romantic spark with a music video crescendo that incorporates imagery from Takaki’s entire life onscreen. Each individual part has a clear sense of how to match its story with a corresponding cinematic energy, even if Shinkai is much less deliberate in how he brings them all together.

You can feel so many of Shinkai’s pet obsessions just starting to take shape in 5 Centimeters per Second that it makes sense it would take a decade for them to fully form. The film not only plays with the same city boy & country girl sending messages long distance dynamic of Your Name., but anchors that romance to a lot of similar imagery: cityscapes glistening like natural formations, birds flying against outer space backdrops, travel by trains, teens staring into cellphones in anticipation, etc. However, Shinkai seems less confident in this earlier work how to incorporate supernatural sci-fi into its central romance and how to conclude a story that spans such a long distance in both space & time. 5 Centimeters Per Second does stand well enough on it own as “a chain of short stories,” but it often feels like the sketchbook plans of the much better feature to come. Fans enamored with Your Name. should be able to find a lot to connect with in that respect, even if the movie is a loosely defined experiment.

-Brandon Ledet