Welcome to Episode #18 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our eighteenth episode, Brandon & CC discuss the cult classic horror film The Wicker Man (1973) and its less-than-prestigious Nic Cage remake from 2006. Also, CC makes Brandon watch the “ramen Western” Tampopo (1985) for the first time. Enjoy!
-CC Chapman & Brandon Ledet
Not every Studio Ghibli release is going to be an automatic home run & there’s no better reminder of the animation giant’s capability for mediocrity than its mid-00s adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tales from Earthsea. Everything about this animated fantasy epic is competent, but difficult to rouse excitement over. Tales from Earthsea plays like a midway point between Miyazaki & Game of Thrones without ever reaching the heights of majesty or brutality from either end of that formula. Here you get the dragons & cursed swords of the best of the fantasy genre mixed with the magical bloodbaths of Princess Mononoke, but without the entertainment value powder keg that combination implies. Even the film’s director is not Hayao Miyazaki himself, but rather his son Gorō Miyazaki making his very unassuming debut. The result is pleasant, but ultimate forgettable & vaguely defined. You’d have to be really into dragons for this film to truly register.
The film opens with a noble king being murdered in his own castle by his own loving son. Confused & ashamed of his own actions, our reluctant assassin bolts into the wild, a desertscape with sprawling seaside villages that’s vaguely reminiscent of North Africa. There he befriends a cloaked wizard named Sparrowhawk and a mysterious abuse survivor around his own age, all while drawing the attentions of a second, much creepier wizard with an evil, soft-spoken voice & a wicked cruelty streak. Besides the heightened sense of violence & brutality promised early in an opening fight between dragons and carried throughout in details like forced slavery, threats of sexual violence, and a fantasy world stand-in for heroin addiction. Tales form Earthsea also recalls the adult parable leanings of Princess Mononoke in details like an organized wolf attack & the assassin child’s cursed sword, the source of his occasional urge to kill. Unlike with Mononoke, though, no themes are explored to any particularly enlightening end and the film’s big ideas about the balance between lightness & darkness, life & death mostly boil down to a battle between two rival wizards and their stuck-in-the-middle hostages.
From what I understand there were many changes made in adapting & condensing Le Guin’s work for the screen here that left many fans of the book frustrated, including Le Guin herself. Not familiar with this particular work from the author, though, I can only see that there were obvious elements at play that likely made the material look worthwhile for an adaptation (the eerie dream logic of tar-filled nightmares & the idea of a weapon possessing an otherwise kind soul were especially exciting), but they aren’t given a lot of room to develop or evolve here. Like with a lot of Le Guin’s work, which is typically expansive yet intricately detailed, this material likely would’ve been served better as a miniseries instead of a two hour film. Its problems extend beyond its supposed shortcomings as an adaptation, however. You can see it in the blades of grass. You can hear it in the emotionless songs. You can feel it in the CG aided camera movement. Tales from Earthsea is pleasant to look at, but thoroughly indistinct.
-Brandon Ledet
Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.
Where Bonnie & Clyde (1967) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 153 of the first edition hardback, Ebert gushes about the wealth of great cinema that he was lucky to cover at the beginning of his career as a critic. He writes, “The big events of that period were movies like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The French New Wave had reached America. TIME magazine put ‘The Film Generation’ on its cover. A few months later they did a piece about me in their Press section, headlined ‘Populist at the Movies.’ Pauline Kael had started at the New Yorker, and movie critics were hot. It was a honey of a job to have at that age.”
What Ebert had to say in his review: “Bonnie and Clyde is a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance. It is also pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking, and astonishingly beautiful. If it does not seem that those words should be strung together, perhaps that is because movies do not very often reflect the full range of human life. […] Years from now it is quite possible that Bonnie and Clyde will be seen as the definitive film of the 1960s, showing with sadness, humor and unforgiving detail what one society had come to.” – from his 1967 review for The Chicago Sun-Times
A lot of people tend to think of critics, especially the higher profile examples, as self-important blowhards, but, just like with all generalizations, that’s often not the case. Roger Ebert, for example, made a point to be a populist at the cinema, a contrast to stuffy, self-important counterpoints like his colleague & good friend Gene Siskel. As much as Ebert loved to talk about himself in reporting his experiences at the cinema, he often took on an air of self-deprecation that would diffuse any claims that he was a pompous blowhard. One of his most often repeated claims to humility was his contention that his success as a writer was mostly due to the blind luck opportunity presented by becoming a film critic during one of cinema’s most exciting & creatively rewarding eras, a period known now as New Hollywood. I’d argue that Roger was an immensely talented writer who would’ve found a high-profile outlet for his work no matter when or where he was working, but it’s at least somewhat true that he benefited from happening to come into his own during the era of fresh names like Scorsese, Coppola, Friedkin, De Palma, and Bogdanovich. Ebert was on the ground floor with a lot of auteurs we still consider The Greats & the rise of New Hollywood was extremely fortuitous for his career. And it was an industry upheaval that many credit starting with 1967’s Bonnie & Clyde.
Looking back in a modern context, it might not be instantly recognizable why Bonnie & Clyde was such a big deal. After the oppressive censorship of the long-running Hays Code, however, the film’s unapologetic sex & violence was downright revolutionary, tapping into the youthful rebellion that would soon swell into a fever pitch in the form of race riots & hippie counterculture. An oddly loving account of the real-life bank robbers of its namesake, the film gleefully indulges in portraying beautiful people behaving badly, signaling the return of the antihero to American cinemas, something that had been largely missing since the heyday of noir. As with most New Hollywood fare, and keeping in line with its real-life source material, Bonnie & Clyde doesn’t provide a happy ending for its band of ramshackle misfits. However, it does seem to celebrate its Hollywood-beautiful characters played by in-their-prime Faye Dunaway & Warren Beatty as they goof off, shoot people in the face, go to the movies, and steal from The Man. There’s an undeniable sense of fun in the film’s violence & chaos that may be lost or dulled in this post-Tarantino world we’re living in, but was striking enough in 1967 to spark a filmmaking revolution.
One thing that certainly hasn’t faded with time is the triumphant feeling of getting one over on the evil of predatory banks. This summer’s surprise critical hit Hell or High Water alone proves that audiences are still hungry for this time of revenge-on-the-system thriller. Bonnie & Clyde is much lighter & narratively slighter than that film, however (and to its benefit, in my opinion), as the story of its characters’ demise is historically predetermined. There’s some grappled-with issues & consequences like Bonnie’s familial guilt & Clyde’s apparent asexuality, as well as a rising tension when The Barrow Gang expands its ranks (and, thus, dilutes its profits), but for the most part the story is remarkably straightforward & light on its feet. I imagine the reason the film resonated with young folks of its time was less to do with its dramatic deft & more tied to its depictions of beautiful people eating burgers, sharing Cokes, robbing banks, murdering comps, and making out in the getaway car to a frantic banjo soundtrack. You know, typical teen stuff. In retrospect, the film’s shenanigans might not play as especially radical, but in the context of its time it’s a total game-changer that shaped the course of cinema for the decades of anti-hero narratives that followed.
This most recent watch was my second viewing of Bonnie & Clyde. Not much changed for me in the revisitation, other than knowing where the story & tone were going freed me to focus a little more on the strength of its performances. Beatty & Dunaway are radiant in their lead roles and they find great counterparts in smaller roles filled by actors like Gene Hackman & Michael J. Pollard. It’s near impossible to discuss the film at this particular moment in time, however, without at least mentioning the debut performance of the recently departed, irreplaceable talent Gene Wilder. Even in his screen presence’s infancy Wilder has an incredibly intense nervousness & mania that’s just barely contained by its falsely calm surface. If you’re looking for a title to return to in mourning the one-of-a-kind actor and have already exhausted obvious titles like Willy Wonka & Young Frankenstein, there’s enough promise & energy in his bit role as a temporary hostage in Bonnie & Clyde to justify a look, however brief. Wilder’s youth is just one seed of rebellious cinema to come lurking in Bonnie & Clyde’s arsenal. The film is well deserving of its status as a New Hollywood instigator & an act of cinematic defiance. Roger Ebert was indeed lucky to start his career as a critic on such creatively fertile ground.
Roger’s Rating: (4/4, 100%)
Brandon’s Rating (4/5, 80%)
Next Lesson: The Graduate (1967)
-Brandon Ledet
I was very shaky on Arrival’s merits as high concept sci-fi until its third act revelations & narrative upendings completely turned me around on how I was thinking about the story it was telling. As such, it’s difficult to discuss the film’s successes without diving headfirst into spoilers, which is something I’d like to avoid in this review if possible. Arrival is a film about two species, human and alien, learning to communicate with one another by the gradual process of establishing common ground between their two disparate languages. Similarly, the film has to teach its audience how to understand what they’re watching and exactly what’s being communicated. It’s often said that movies are about the journey, not the destination, a (cliché) sentiment I’d typically tend to agree with, but so much of Arrival‘s value as a work of art hinges on its concluding half hour that its destination matters just as much, if not more than the effort it takes to get there. This is a story told through cyclical, circular, paradoxical logic, a structure that’s announced from scene one, but doesn’t become clear until minutes before the end credits and can’t be fully understood until at least a second viewing. Whether or not you’ll be interested in that proposition depends largely on your patience for that kind of non-traditional, non-linear payoff in your cinematic entertainment.
My initial complaints about Arrival‘s narrative shortcomings are fairly indicative of how I feel about high-concept sci-fi cinema as a whole. With a lot of hard sci-fi, Big Ideas are given prominence while smaller, more personal emotions take an unfortunate back seat. In an ideal sci-fi work, something like Ex Machina or Midnight Special, those two ends meet a well-balanced compromise. Arrival struggles to find that compromise, opening with a world-class linguist (played by a wonderfully measured & muted Amy Adams) as she recounts the loss of a child & the monotony of an academic life lived alone, but not taking the time to live in those moments & make their emotional impact count for something. The familial drama at the film’s center is conveyed through an impressionistic set of Tree of Life-type imagery & brief conversational snippets, a preview of the worst information dump stretches of the film’s eventual alien invasion plot that finds Adams’s protagonist at the center of a potentially world-ending interplanetary negotiation. The way narrative information is conveyed in Arrival is often cold & blatantly utilitarian, at one point even spelled out in a narrated monologue that completely disrupts the flow of its storytelling rhythm. The film is much more interested in the global implications of an alien invasion (within which it’s much less realistic than a Godzilla film from this year of all things, in how it depicts America’s involvement in such a crisis) and the tensions between military & academia in its problem-solving strategies than it is depicting the smaller scale personal impact that would make these tensions resonate with any significance. Any and all personal drama within Arrival, no matter how traumatic, exists only to serve the weirder turns the plot takes in its mind-bending second half. It’s a good thing that the ideas they serve in the film’s gloriously strange conclusion are so interesting that their emotionless delivery in the front end doesn’t matter in the slightest.
I’m typically a style over substance audience when it comes to movies, especially sci-fi, so a lot of Arrival wasn’t my usual mode of genre filmmaking. Until the film pushes its narrative into the loopy, paradoxical territory of its glorious third act, it mostly just reminded me of The Martian: a reasonably entertaining story of scientific problem-solving with more in-the-moment significance than ideas worth chewing over long-term. I was very much struck by the film’s design of the alien species and their vaguely egg-shaped ships, which had a kind of 2001 monolith vibe in their clean lines & oppressive grandeur. The film would have been perfectly admirable as a The Day the Earth Stood Still-style parable about humanity’s potentially aggressive response to alien contact had it remained a straightforward story, but it thankfully expands into something much stranger & much more unique. Arrival is above all else a story about the power of language, how it is the first weapon drawn in a conflict, how learning a new one can rewire your brain to think differently. Once you learn the film’s own language, you start to understand that it was never a straightforward story to begin with, that it was always just as strange as the places it eventually takes you in its final act. This rewiring of audience perception takes a little patience before it reaches a significant payoff and it’s one I expect is better appreciated when experienced rather than explained. Director Denis Villeneuve tried to do something similar with the surreal conclusion of his film Enemy, another work that plays with his audience’s linear perception of storytelling, but I think he’s much more successful in pulling off the trick in Arrival. For all of my early misgivings about the film’s emotionless information dumps & preferences for big ideas over small character moments (despite the best efforts of Adams & other capable actors like Michael Stuhlbarg, Forrest Whitaker, and Jeremy Renner), the weird dream logic surrealism and paradoxical reality-shifting of the final act makes all of those complaints entirely worthless. The truth is that the film & I just started off speaking different languages and it’s value as a work of high-concept sci-fi storytelling was lost in translation until we found common ground. I’m very much eager to give it a second look now that I know how to communicate with its more outlandish ideas in a less-linear, less literal fashion.
-Brandon Ledet
The lateness of some political milestones can be horrifying to realize once you put them in temporal context. There are people alive now who lived through a time before women earned the right to vote in American elections. In 1964 The Beatles gave birth to modern pop music the same year The Civil Rights Act (legally) ended racial segregation. The Supreme Court made gay marriage legally binding in 2015, less than 15 years after it officially decriminalized sodomy in 2003. I’m always bewildered (and more than a little horrified) by how late in the game these kinds of milestones arrive and my most recently discovered example on that note is the case of Daughters of the Dust. Daughters of the Dust was the first feature film directed by a black woman to earn a theatrical release in the United States. In 1991. That’s madness. The same year Silence of the Lambs swept the Oscars, the Internet was first made available for commercial use, Nirvana’s Nevermind made punk popular again, and Rodney King’s assault & arrest were caught on video tape, the first film directed by a black woman to be theatrically released in the US landed a political milestone that should have come decades, if not almost a century sooner. I can’t get over that.
One of the best things about Julie Dash’s history-making crown jewel is that it is fiercely, unapologetically black. Typifying pop culture Afrocentrism of the early 90s, the film depicts several generations of a Gullah family of slave descendants as they negotiate on what level they’d be participating in the modern world. Isolated on an island off the American coast near Georgia, the Gullah people thrived as free outsiders with their own unique culture, language, and customs. The threat of rape, exploitation, and enslavement looms over them, but is kept entirely off-camera as the film focuses on a very specific moment early in the 20th Century as younger generations long to leave behind old religions to join a modern world they’ve only seen in photographs while their elders cling to culture & tradition. Rhythmic African percussion, folk art, and meticulous food preparation (including what looks like a life-changing gumbo) drive the film’s apparent concern with preservation of culture in the face of a world that seems determined to colonize and homogenize. For all of Daughters of the Dust‘s fretting over staying still vs keeping in motion and reminders to “Respect your family. Respect your elders. Respect your ancestors,” it doesn’t at all play like an academic exercise in anthropology cinema. Besides being a vivid record of a highly specific black cultural experience, Daughters of the Dust also feels deeply personal and resoundingly poetic.
Written, directed, and produced by Dash herself, the film boasts the art film obfuscation that often gets called “dreamlike” or a “tone poem.” The negotiations (mostly between women) over who will and who will not be returning to mainland America after the film’s climactic feast provide a very basic structure for the story Daughters of the Dust wants to tell, but a lot of its narrative is expressed through the feelings evoked in its imagery. Floods of wild horses disrupt island calm. Purple steam rises from wooden cauldrons as women process indigo dye. Characters languidly drape themselves on immense trees like sentient moss. The whole story is narrated by a bodyless spirit billed as Unborn Child in the credits. Dash’s film is a sometimes impenetrable, but often beautiful evocation of a mood & a spirit. It may first appear from the outside to be a historical work about the Gullah people on the precipice of the modern world, but Daughters of the Dust strives to be something much grander & harder to pinpoint than that reductive description and it’s near-impossible not to admire the film’s ambitions even when its individual moments aren’t wholly successful.
I’ll admit that at times during this film I had found it to be more interesting as an artifact than as a moment to moment experience. Much like the films of similarly image-centric auteurs like Nicolas Winding Refn (who I love) and Terrence Malick (who I loathe), this is the kind of work where you have to find its rhythm early or else get left behind. Besides my personal lack of interest in narratively loose, intentionally obscured modes of filmmaking, an occasional choice in home video-era frame rate or embarrassingly dated soundtrack cues threw me off in specific moments where I lost the rhythm of what Daughters of the Dust was trying to accomplish (and, to be fair, those were likely editing choices, the one area of production Dash didn’t handle herself). I did, however, continuously find the film fascinating & wondrous to behold as it presented a culture and a set of images rarely evoked onscreen. Having watched the less than stellar Kino-released DVD of the film, I’m very much interested in seeing the restored version of Daughters of the Dust that’s currently making the rounds (having just played at New Orleans Film Fest last month). Not only was Dash’s film a far too late cultural milestone for black female directors, it hasn’t been well treated or remembered in the decades since its release. After being cited as a major influence on Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade, though, it seems that it’s finally getting the respect & recognition it deserves and I’d love to see how vivid the film’s powerful imagery is in its latest, most well-handled incarnation, so I can fall even further under its spell.
-Brandon Ledet
A lot of documentaries can survive on the inherent cool of an interesting subject, but Check It pushes the boundaries of just how much that dynamic can allow. In Check It’s better moments it functions as an oral history of the self-proclaimed Check It crew, reported in the film to be “the first gay gang documented in America.” Formed in the rougher areas of Washington DC, where there’s an absurdly high rate of reported hate crimes against LGBTQ youth, Check It exists as an aggressive resistance in which queer & trans kids stand up for themselves and participate in vicious acts of violence in order to survive daily life. In the documentary’s less interesting impulses it glorifies the gang counselors who intend to “reform” members of Check It and turn them into normalized, “productive” members of society. The counselors & the documentary have their heart in the right place, but often push to strip the kids of the identity & vibrancy that made them so strong & so fascinating the first place. The result is a really interesting story told from self-conflicting perspectives: the kids who live it & the outsider adults who want to change it for the greater good.
I don’t mean to make Check It gang members’ lifestyles sound at all glamorous. Their ranks are populated with underage trans sex workers, the abandoned children of the survivors of the 80s crack epidemic that destroyed DC, the frequent targets of sudden & deadly violence. Kicked out of school, left homeless, and barely surviving, it’s incredible the way these kids found immense strength in solidarity. Their confidence is infectious. That solidarity sometimes becomes too powerful & their violence extends into abuse instead of survival in its ugliest moments, but that’s the improbable way they found respect in a world that obviously wants them dead. Outsider gang counselors attempt to inspire change in Check It’s key members, nobly & nakedly trying to save their lives. Sometimes this reform takes a natural approach, hoping to inspire them to find professional careers in the fashion industry, given their creativity in personal style. Other times it robs them of their identity, like when influencing them to take more traditionally masculine interests in activities like boxing. Either alternative might be a better option than their usual hobies of “fighting, snatching purses, getting locked up,” but it often feels disingenuous & short term in a way that wouldn’t be true if the change were coming from within.
If I were rating this film solely on the young, exciting personalities it manages to document this would be a five star review. The way these kids managed to turn a Paris is Burning lifestyle into a militarized force of resistance is an undeniably incredible feat. There’s a real power in statements like “when we go out places we go out as one,” even if “going out” is detailed here in difficult-to-watch smartphone footage of vicious knife fights & wig-snatching. When outside forces try to influence the kids to move in a safer, more socially acceptable direction, the documentary loses some of that genuine impact. The intent may be to save lives & I hope that’s an approach that works, but the film’s much more interesting angle is in how Check It members were saving their own lives long before the counselors & the cameras arrived. Check It works best when it shows the kids chowing on fast food, discussing their Instagram aesthetics, and listening to artists like Cakes da Killa or Dominique Young Unique. It loses a little credibility in its celebratory air when it asks those kids to change themselves to survive, especially since they had managed to survive on their own despite the overwhelming odds for long enough to make a name for themselves and attract this attention in the first place. If they ever find a way to inspire internal inspiration for change & progress within their own ranks they’ll be unstoppable. It’ll also make for a much less compromised documentary.
-Brandon Ledet
When I heard that there were going to be two Herzog documentaries released this year, I was pumped. I knew one was going to be about the internet. You may remember my review about that and enthusiasm. Then I found out that the second one was about volcanoes, which, if you can think of the internet as very in our control and of our creation, volcanoes are a destructive force of nature, out of our hands, and very capable of shutting down mankind’s creations.
Lo and Behold was very theoretical, nebulous, and introspective for a movie about how the internet has connected us all and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Volcanoes, while not 100% predictable or understood, are still well studied and more predictable than the future of technology (look at any science fiction novel that tried to predict what the year 2000 was going to be like). The great irony is that Lo and Behold had an actual theatrical release, whereas Into the Inferno was distributed by Netflix, a service that is almost entirely streaming over the internet at this point.
For Into the Inferno, Herzog teamed up with vulcanologist Clive Oppenheimer, whom had he met on the set of Encounters at the End of the World. They made a good team. Oppenheimer is a lovable volcano nerd whose exuberance and enthusiasm make the technical descriptions engaging. Herzog is himself, which is to say that he’s very interested in the small, very human details. Every documentary he helms ends up being just as much an anthropological work as it is art. Together they vowed to explore aspects of how volcanoes effected human culture, no matter how weird it gets. The result is a portrait of how nature has helped build and destroy humanity from the very beginning. And it also gets very weird, as they explore volcano based cults, North Korean mythology, and sift for early hominid bones with paleo-anthropologists in the Awash Valley, Ethiopia.
This is also one of the most beautiful movies of this year. It is just full of astonishing shots of rolling mountains. There are amazing scenes of visible magma inside calderas, just popping and bubbling up. The only sounds are the dangerous grumbles and the splatters. It’s as inside the inferno as many of us will ever get, which is really, truly amazing. When the camera isn’t on the volcanoes, there’s incredible footage of unique cultural practices, dances, and villages.
Into the Inferno is vast and beautiful. We are blessed to live a year with two feature length Herzog documentaries. This is a nature documentary but more so a cultural one. It covers so many parts of the world in a way that many of us will never get to experience and we shouldn’t, lest we destroy them.
-Alli Hobbs
Ever since 2011’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 left theaters and was release on DVD, Potter fans all over the world were overcome with a deep sadness as the film signified the end of one of the most successful movie franchises of all time. Potter mastermind J.K. Rowling created an entire wizarding world through her best selling novels, which would eventually become blockbuster hits, and as each film was released, the universe she created kept growing and growing. When the news of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was released, all was good in the world. I wasn’t too surprised to find out that Rowling would choose to gift fans with more of the fantastic world she created by writing the Fantastic Beasts screenplay. I mean, how on earth could she just stop writing about the Potter universe and all of its glory?
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is one of the better-known books the students of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry use in their studies. The textbook was written by Newt Scamander, a famous Magizoologist (an individual who studies magical creatures). The textbook contains information that Scamander gathered from studying a vast amount of magical creatures from all over the world. The film follows Scamander on his journey to the United States in 1926, as he is performing research for what will soon become an invaluable vault of information for all witches and wizards. Scamander is perhaps the most compassionate individual in the wizarding world, as he has dedicated his life to trying to understand all magical creatures during a time when they were outlawed and unappreciated. Scamander arrives in the United States by way of New York City with a briefcase filled with magical creatures. His goal with visiting the US is to release a Thunderbird name Frank to his home in Arizona. Of course, a briefcase full of magical creatures would become quite difficult to maintain for Scamander and majority of them eventually escape and run the busy streets of NYC.
The first beast to slither its way out of the briefcase is a Niffler, a small platypus-like creature that is drawn to any and all things shiny. As Scamander is attempting to catch the escaped Niffler in a large city bank (full of shiny coins), he meets a “No-Maj” (non-magic folk, aka “Muggle”) named Jacob Kowalkski. Kowalski is at the bank attempting to get a loan to open up his dream bakery. It doesn’t take long for Kowalski to get mixed up in the wizarding world, which is pretty much unknown to all No-Majs. The two become a duo comparable to Batman and Robin, and it’s one of the best bromances in cinema history.
As Scamander attempts to locate all of his escaped beasts, he runs into trouble with The Magical Congress of the United States of America (MCUSA), and everything becomes a total shit show. The film’s female lead, Porpentina “Tina” Goldstein, works for the MCUSA. She comes off as a total pain in the ass at the film’s beginning because she rats out Scamander to the MCUSA, but she quickly becomes an extremely likeable character. Tina has achieved role model status with me. She’s a powerful, intelligent witch who is out to do the right thing. It just takes her a little bit to find out what the right thing really is. Tina’s sister, Queenie Goldstein, is quite the opposite of Tina. Queenie is full of giggles and smiles, has sunny blonde hair, and sports a bright pink coat for most of the movie, while Tina is more on the serious side. I remember cringing a little bit when Queenie first makes her appearance because I assumed she was going to be the ditzy-blonde-girl type of character, but that’s not the case at all. Queenie is simply sweet and optimistic, and she is responsible for saving the day just as much as the rest of the crew. All in all, the leading ladies in Fantastic Beasts are totally impressive, but of course, I would expect nothing less from the mind of Rowling.
There are a lot of things to pay attention to in Fantastic Beasts because everything is a piece of a giant puzzle that will reach completion once the 5th film in the series is released. That’s right, there will be five Fantastic Beast films! And I’m here for that. The cast of Fantastic Beasts reminds me a lot of the cast of the Harry Potter films. Their camaraderie really comes across in their acting, and there’s just good vibes all around. The film’s director, David Yates, also directed the last four Harry Potter films, and he’s known for being a pleasure to work with. This is cinema that’s made with so much passion and love, and I cannot wait to see the next four!
-Britnee Lombas
In our initial conversation about November’s Movie of the Month, the lucid dreaming fantasy drama Paperhouse, Boomer mentioned discovering the film when it used to play regularly on IFC in the early 2000s. This surprised me, because it felt exactly like the kind of thing that kids would’ve grown up remembering (in horror) through countless late night viewings on a home-taped VHS. Specifically, Paperhouse reminded me of a film I watched repeatedly on VHS as a child, Lady in White. Both works are from 1988 and occupy a strange space where they feel like they’re made for young children, but are much more traumatizing than traditional kids’ media tends to be (with Paperhouse earning a PG-13 rating and Lady in White landing a solid R). Despite both films scoring high with populist critics like Roger Ebert, they didn’t make much of a splash financially (in fact, Lady in White only made 1/3rd of its modest budget back at the box office), so their cult status notoriety had to be maintained by the children who happened to catch them at the right age, growing up with anxieties inspired by their nightmarish details. Speaking personally, I can say that I think about and reference Lady in White constantly as an adult even though I hadn’t watched it since the early 90s until this week (and despite the fact that, unlike Paperhouse, it’s actually not very good).
Set during Halloween in a 1962 suburbia, Lady in White is narrated by a Steven King-esque writerly archetype reminiscing about a childhood trauma, a time when his entire East Coast town was wrapped up in a serial child killer murder mystery and he found himself at the center of it. I remembered the beginning of this film vividly. As a young boy the protagonist (played by late 80s mainstay Lukas Haas) is locked in his school’s coatroom by racist bullies after hours, where he encounters two terrifying figures: the ghost of a young girl and the real life presence of a menacing man (later revealed to be the serial child murderer) who nearly chokes him to death. In my scared child’s mind most of the film was confined to that coatroom and that’s what reminded me of its contemporary, the kids’ horror Paperhouse. A young child makes friends with a not-quite-real member of the opposite gender in an attic-sparse space, coldly lit, haunted by a menacing adult figure with an obscured face who threatens their lives: this plot could potentially describe either Lady in White or Paperhouse. The problem is that my childhood memories distorted the details of the former and I had forgotten the murder mystery melodrama about the dangers of racism & mov mentality that eats up most of Lady in White’s runtime in favor of the Paperhouse-like moments of horror the film was able to construct only in fleeting moments & specific scenes. The truth is that although Lady in White manages to evoke Paperhouse’s effective late 80s horror tone in brief stretches, it can’t in any way compare to its full artistic effectiveness & magnitude.
I think a lot of the divide in terms of artistic success in both works derives from the strong guiding hand of director Bernard Rose. With Candyman, Rose proved that the menacing tone evoked in Paperhouse was no fluke and could be used for an even more distinct, horrifying effect at will. Lady in White has great moments & specific images that nearly match Rose’s eerie tone, but the film falls short when considered as a whole. When locked in the school coatroom, the film’s protagonist rocks a distinct, doll-like look in his plastic Dracula mask, suffers a psychedelic vision of his own death as his astral projection barrels towards the sun, and revisits the resonating horror of attending his mother’s funeral at an even younger age. He’s also, of course, visited by a ghost (one of two in the film) and nearly dies several times in a misty wooded area that recalls the strangely artificial set of the TV show Dinosaurs. Lady in White has a lot of the same spooky material to work with as Paperhouse, including both a near-death crisis at the edge of a cliff & a child suffering crippling anxieties over a parental absence, but it fails to sustain that film’s effectiveness for any significant stretch of time.
There are so many ways that Paperhouse trounces Lady in White in terms of quality, especially when you consider the way the latter film spreads itself so thin over so many narratives & the way it continuously plays Italian caricatures that would make Mario blush for comedic relief to undercut its own spooky mood. One of the most glaring ways Lady in White shoots itself in the foot is in the carefree, child-friendly tone of its score, which directly contrasts with the horrifying atmosphere Hans Zimmer sets in Paperhouse (a trick Bernard Rose would later repeat by hiring Phillip Glass to soundtrack Candyman). For all of these two film’s resounding differences, though, they represent to me a very specific time in VHS media where it was okay, if not openly encouraged, to scare the living shit out of children. 1988 was a scary year to be a child with a VCR. In films like Paperhouse & Lady in White, bone-chilling supernatural horror had a way of seeping into film genres where you wouldn’t expect them: familial drama, fantasy epics, crime story melodrama, tone-confused comedy about Italian stereotypes, etc. Paperhouse managed to turn that bleed-over into a wonderfully balanced work of deeply effective art. Lady in White could only hold onto that effectiveness in fleeting moments & isolated images, but together the two films paint a strange, horrifying picture, one that could haunt your imagination forever if you caught them at the right age & the right year with the right home entertainment gear.
For more on November’s Movie of the Month, the lucid dreaming fantasy drama Paperhouse, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and last week’s look at director Bernard Rose’s best known work, Candyman.
-Brandon Ledet
Like many kids who grew up without cable, PBS was my major television window into the weirdness abyss a milquetoast suburban life in St. Bernard sheltered me from. A lot of what I learned about the various subcultures of punks, painters, and poets as a kid started with hour-long documentaries on New Orleans’s local PBS affiliate WYES (in between daytime offerings of Old Hollywood standards), initial introductions I would later flesh out by hunting down something people used to call “books.” I have a lot less time for “books” now that I’m watching/reviewing so many goddamn movies every week (Seriously. I’ve been reading the same biography of pro wrestler Gorgeous George & the same Howard the Duck comics collection since early summer when I usually would have knocked them both out in a week), but I did recently bring home one of WYES’s made-for-TV documentaries about local New Orleans culture from a university library that brought me back to that Chalmette bedroom where I was forever rapt & eager to learn more. Maybe I’ll even pick up a “book” on the subject (though, more likely, I’ll click around on Wikipedia between theater showtimes like the increasingly uncultured heathen I’ve become).
The Nightlife that Was first aired on WYES in 2004, but it might as well have been 1994 given the fashions & sensibilities that drives its awe-struck history of local nightlife. The hour-long documentary is not only a glimpse into the legendary bars & clubs that made New Orleans one of the coolest cities on the planet in the 1950s & 60s; it’s also a glimpse at a much more recent time where pre-Katrina New Orleans was relaxed & content with falling behind on every current trend other major cities were chasing. It’s very difficult to believe this documentary was made as recently as the aughts, not because it’s corny or old fashioned, but because it reflects a very specific kind of untouched-by-time aspect the city’s lost in its modernization over the last decade. The Nightlife that Was is a really fun, informative look back at half a century old pop culture history in my favorite city, but it also made me miss The New Orleans that Was in much more recent memory in its own charming way.
As a history lesson, The Nightlife that Was plays like a slowed-down, actually-informative version of Mondo Topless set in New Orleans instead of San Francisco. In a wild, hedonistic time, before-they-were-famous musicians like Dr John & Clarence “Frogman” Henry played background tunes for barroom strippers & cops were very relaxed on enforcing age restrictions for patrons; New Orleans was the wildest party on the planet. As one interviewee puts it, “If you couldn’t find something to do, you were a hermit.” Names like Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and a babyfaced Bill Clinton traveled to the city in the search of “the naughty & the gawdy,” finding an endless wealth of jazz musicians, killer soul singers, drag queens, comedians, and larger than life personalities for their troubles. Local standards like “Bill Baley” & “Stacker Lee” blare through a barrage of rapidfire anecdotes about the city’s rich history of “colorful squalor”, eventually giving way to hippie dippy bullshit like The Grateful Dead & the more recent Fat City disco scene as the years roll on before your eyes. The film makes a couple larger statements about the importance of nightlife to the city’s culture like its (very much true) assertion that “The gay political scene came out of bars, much like how the black political movement came out of churches,” but mostly The Nightlife that Was plays like a best-of highlight reel of priceless vintage nightlife footage. It’s mostly a reminder that the music may have gotten shittier on Bourbon Street & the people may not dress up to go there like they used to, but the debauchery has remained largely unchanged.
As far as the objective quality & importance of The Nightlife that Was goes, it’s probably much more in line with the post-Katrina check-in of Max Cusimano’s recent New City doc than with the priceless documentation of works like Always for Pleasure or The Sons of Tennessee Williams. That is to say that it’s interesting & worthy of discussion, but maybe not a home run in terms of thoroughly covering every topic it unearths. For instance, I found myself wanting to know more, much more about the history of the infamous black nightlclub The Dew Drop Inn than what the film had time for, to the point where I’d sacrifice the rest of its runtime to just focus on that one club. Nostalgia-wise, though, there was something special about this WYES production that struck a very particular chord in my heart. Everything from host/narrator Peggy Scott Laborde’s shoulder padded blazer to local legend Irma Thomas’s mid-00s visage to the fact that the film’s official for-purchase print appears to be a DVD-R brought me back to a childhood place of warmth & fascinated curiosity. Even the fact that I wanted to learn more than what little the film provided on many of its subjects reminded me of the role WYES has filled for a long time in my life. It made me want to read “books.”
-Brandon Ledet
