Author: swampflix

How to Build a Truth Engine (2024)

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How to Build a Truth Engine is a documentary about disinformation and how we can try to combat it. Bookended by footage of the terrorist insurrection on January 6th, 2021, the film features journalists, software engineers, anthropologists, neuroscientists, and other talking heads as they tackle the topic of information warfare. The bitter irony, as one of those interviewed says, is that we live in an era in which people have access to more information than ever before, but that same mechanism which has enabled that access has also provided such a fertile breeding ground for misinformation that people have been algorithmically partitioned off into different realities. As we move from expert to expert, an idea of consciousness is constructed for the uninitiated: that among the strengths of the human mind are its abilities to recognize patterns and then complete those patterns. They don’t get into the nitty gritty about it overmuch, but if you’ve ever taken an anthropological literature course, it’s familiar, and it isn’t overcomplicated to the point where the viewer is going to have a syllabus’s worth of Michelle Sugiyama articles to read or need to learn the word “pareidolia.” 

The film rests on several pillars that all of us living in reality understand to be fundamentally true. Neurologically speaking, humans find patterns in everything, even when there isn’t one (in the same way that we see a cloud and superimpose “bunny” or “whale”), and it’s become clear that information warfare is the new frontier of mankind’s conflicts. Journalism is a dying industry despite the fact that we need the fifth estate now more than ever, and the root cause of this has been the dissolution of legacy and local newspapers as advertising revenue dried up (the connection between this and capitalism, however, is not made by this film). There was a time when there was a (mostly) functional journalistic body wherein the Woodwards and Bernsteins of the world were capable of bringing down men who abused their power – sometimes, anyway. Now that most people get their news from social media, there is no longer any official entity or body that can be held legally liable for spreading and disseminating information that is not only not fact-checked, but which is often patently false upon its face. People’s algorithmically driven social media feeds exist solely to drive engagement on the platform, not deliver factual or truthful content, and we are all living in a bit of a hellscape because of it. 

The people to whom we are introduced as experts in their field have very impressive credentials. There’s Susan Benesch, the current faculty associate of Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. She’s also the founder of the Dangerous Speech Project, an initiative that attempts to balance concerns about inflammatory, inciting rhetoric and the necessity of protecting free speech through the tactic of “counterspeech,” a form of providing alternative narratives in an empathetic way as a means to counter hate speech and misinformation. Zahra M. Aghajan, a clinical neuroscience researcher, is interviewed several times. There’s also Vwani Roychowdhury, a professor who has been with UCLA’s electrical engineering department since 1996, and who is also Director of The Roychowdhury Group in Computational Science, which specializes in machine learning and application; along for the ride is Behnam Shahbazi, a student for whom Roychowdhury was the advisor for Shahbazi’s paper a”StoryMiner: An Automated and Scalable Framework for Story Analysis and Detection from Social Media.” There’s also Itzhak Fried, MD, PhD, a neurosurgeon and Professor In Residence and Director of the Epilepsy Surgery Program at UCLA Health, who has been recognized several times for his advancement of the science. 

Rounding things out are a host of New York Times employees, some of whom operate across multiple departments but all of whom are involved with the “Visual Investigations” team, which they themselves describe as “combin[ing] traditional reporting with digital sleuthing and the forensic analysis of visual evidence to find truth, hold the powerful to account and deconstruct important news events.” There’s Malachy Browne, who’s the “enterprise director” of this team, who has won the Pulitzer twice, first in 2020 for exposing Russian culpability in Syrian hospital bombings, and again in 2023 for the team’s involvement in exposing which Russian unit was responsible for the murder of over two dozen civilians in Bucha, and the name of the commander of the unit. We’re walked through a lot of the reconstruction of this particular investigation, which establishes the credibility of the team, which also includes Haley Willis, who mostly covers human rights topics with the V.I., and Muyi Xiao, whose beat includes covering the news out of China. Her credentials are established through her coverage of COVID-19 as early as mid-January 2020, initially through reconstructing forensic digital data of communication between medical professionals but which was quickly silenced by the Chinese government. 

Several years back, I made a new friend who told me that he never watched documentaries, citing that he had taken a specific rhetoric of film class that made him too savvy to all of the ways that documentaries are manipulative, so he simply couldn’t trust any of them any more. I thought about him a lot while watching this doc, one that I was genuinely excited to see. As someone who has lost family members down the rabbit hole of bizarre, impossible conspiracy theories in the past ten years as they have approached mainstream metastasis, I was hoping for something new, something fresh, perhaps some new idea about how to break through to the brainwashed masses. And I was still mostly appreciative of the film, even as it repeated tired old canards that all of us who have watched as logic and reason were beaten back into the darkness in the past decade already know. I was a little surprised by the sloppiness of the proofreading for the subtitles (my screening featured them for the entire run time, not simply when translation was needed). I raised an eyebrow at the idea that A.I. (in the form of StoryMiner, a potential contender for the “truth engine” of the title) could somehow be harnessed for good to help seek and map out online conspiracy theories so that counterspeech could be developed to fight back against misinformation (it’s telling that I saw this just two days after another SXSW event featuring a sizzle reel of A.I. salespitching was booed). And, in the wake of the way that the Overton Window on trans liberation has been moved further and further into right-wing conservatism because the NYT is a chickenshit rag that has started acting as a mouthpiece for the exact kind of vile rhetoric that this documentary is (correctly) identifying as evil, I was skeptical of how much this documentary was dick-riding the erstwhile newspaper of record. 

All these things, in combination with very style-over-substance editing (the visuals in this documentary are, at my estimation, 85% semi-related drone footage with voice over), were matters of concern. I was still willing to go along with the presentation, all while wondering if there would be a mention of Palestine’s apartheid and the way that even people who consider themselves “liberal” have been silent about the issue for years and have revealed themselves as genocide apologists in the past six months; as the film went on, I thought “well, perhaps that’s a topic that’s outside of the scope of this particular documentary.” After all, it was difficult to tell when this was produced, or when the footage was shot. Muyi Xiao appears in some footage with braces, and some without (and, simply to clarify and not to belittle, when I saw “without” I mean “before”). When she is walking around Times Square, advertising can be seen for the final season of Insecure—which aired its finale the day after Christmas in 2021—but then again, I’m 98% percent positive that some of the drone footage included an advertisement of the 2011 film Real Steel (it could be an advertisement for something else entirely that simply has the same name and a similar typeface, but I couldn’t find evidence of anything like that while researching in prep for this review). And then. And then. 

As I mentioned before, this film milks the NYT Visual Investigations team’s coverage of the Bucha massacre for all the credibility that they can, and there’s no argument that they did damn fine journalism there. Their coverage of a Syrian bombing is likewise impressive, including their demonstration of how satellite imagery is combined with cell phone footage to triangulate where the videos are taken and establish their veracity. Before we get to see a recap of the Bucha investigation, we hear a phone call, translated from Russian to English via on-screen subtitles, in which a soldier (presumably one of the paratroopers from 234th Air Assault Regiment) calls his mother. He asks her what the news at home is saying, what she is hearing from people around her, tells her that they keep being told of victory after victory, but that he and his companions have no idea how much of what they are told is true, if anything. Although we then go on to learn just how depraved the activities that this caller et al went on to perform in Bucha were, I can’t help but interpret that there’s an attempt at an invocation of empathy for him; you don’t play the audio of a confused, possibly scared soldier calling his mommy without an agenda. An hour or so later, after dozens of interviews and countless minutes of footage of jungles, oceans, and city skylines, another voicemail is played, one which is identified as being a call from a “Hamas terrorist” in October of 2023, and which is translated on-screen with a speech I won’t transcribe, but one which aligns with the narrative that Israel has attempted to put forth to justify their ongoing genocide of the people of Palestine. It’s horrific to hear, so brief that you wouldn’t even have to take a bathroom break to miss it, just have a thirty second coughing fit. It’s so out of place that it feels like it was inserted at the last minute, a quick little virtue signal to the bloodthirsty neoliberals who think (or pretend to think) that it’s antisemitic to criticize starving millions to death in their homes or cutting them to pieces with death from the sky. 

I was shocked at this. I kept expecting that the film would loop back around on it, bring it up, maybe even use this as a demonstration piece to say, “Look how easy it is to use media to persuade; we told you that this audio recording was from Hamas and provided a translation that makes the blood boil, when in fact this is a recipe from a podcast.” In fact, it is one of the never-verified messages provided to the West by the Israeli military, and is treated not as a potential piece of propaganda to be analyzed, dissected, and verified. At best, in a text that is taking a moral stance on the literally society-sustaining importance of journalistic rigor, it feels like a half-baked and careless attempt at relevance that compromises the film’s integrity. A less charitable reading would be to say that this segment shatters any pretense that Engine could otherwise make that it maintains a clear set of ethics, and is therefore useless as a document of fact. The latter is my personal reading, and it renders what is otherwise a strong (if atypically slick) “documentary” which makes strong points about disinformation … as disinformation itself. I’m not going to pile on the contributors to the documentary for this; from what I can tell from additional research, Haley Willis spoke out against the firing of Emily Wilder from the Associated Press in 2021 when conservatives fought for her to be ousted because of her collegiate involvement with a pro-Palestinian justice organization. Further, although I was initially annoyed that there appears to be zero commentary about queer rights from Benesch’s Dangerous Speech Project (despite the overt hate speech that the community, especially trans people, have been subject to in recent years), they did issue a statement that they concurred with the ICJ’s denunciation of Israel’s genocidal rhetoric. As for searching for the names of the other participants in conjunction with this topic, most of the results keep leading back to the same Variety article, in which Siddhant Adlakha comes to the same conclusion that I do. 

As I sat in the auditorium before my screening, I overheard an older group of people behind me talking about another documentary that they had seen during SXSW, which I assume was The Truth vs. Alex Jones. They were discussing how they hoped that the film would open some people’s eyes about the man, and about how broken the system is when the justice system can find a man guilty of defamation on a scale that boggles the mind and that same person can get right back to grinding, telling more lies and spreading more misinformation and warping more minds, with no real consequences. They hoped that they could get others to watch it and that it would open some minds about just how much damage Jones has done to democracy. I couldn’t help but think about that Vonnegut quote about how artistic resistance to governmental malfeasance and war is as effectual as a custard pie, and I never really lost the feeling that reminder brought on throughout the rest of Engine, even when I was attuned to it. The ability that this documentary had to change hearts and minds was infinitesimal to begin with, and its lack of conviction in its ethics eradicates that potential.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Last Things (2024)

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When I first read a blurb in the paper advertising a screening of Deborah Stratman’s Last Things, the description called to mind Enys Men: a “documentary exploring the geo-biosphere throughout evolution and extinction” featuring “stunning visuals ranging from the microscopic to unending landscapes” that “defies the boundaries of what a documentary can be.” There was the promise that the film blended science fiction with science fact but which continued to express itself as truth. In the end, it wasn’t like Enys Men at all. In fact, I’m not entirely sure what a good point of comparison would be, other than to say, with an awe and respect that this description wouldn’t normally imply, that it’s one of the most student film-y pictures I’ve ever seen. I loved it. 

Insofar as Last Things has a narrative at all, it tells the story of the geology of our planet as an epic poem about the emergence of life in a form we wouldn’t recognize as life. Through the anthropomorphization of molecules and minerals, an origin myth emerges – one that’s not untrue in the way that a lot of origin myths are not untrue. For instance, did you ever consider that rocks could go extinct? I certainly hadn’t, but as it turns out, there was a time when iron floated freely in the planet’s oceans, suspended in it much like salt is at present. With the emergence of the first organisms that performed photosynthesis (cyanobacteria), oxygen became a component of the atmosphere for the first time, causing the iron in the ocean to oxidize and fall to the ocean floor, where they formed into banded rock of magnetite, silica, and other minerals. Formations like this one are extinct rocks, in the sense that they can never form again (at least not on this planet). 

It’s fascinating stuff, but it’s also not for the easily bored. At only fifty minutes, it falls shy of the length we would normally classify as a feature film, but there will be moments when you wonder how that amount of time has not already elapsed. It’s comprised almost entirely of open-source footage: NASA’s conceptual animation lab footage of the planetary nebula cloud, electron microscope imagery of chloroplasts, images of ice forming in water blown up to the highest magnification. Whether its ambition exceeds its grasp is in the eye of the beholder, but I thoroughly enjoyed the way that a story emerges from the cutting and pasting of bits of philosophy, poetry, vintage science fiction, and more against the visuals of rocks, minerals, and protozoa. As we are told by a scientist talking about chondrites—meteors that fall to earth without interacting with another body outside of the asteroid belt, meaning that they have been unchanged since the moment the furnace of the sun spat them out, before our planet was formed—“All matter does have a history, but it doesn’t remember it.” 

On the more fantastical end of the spectrum that Last Things slides up and down, our own bodies are stated to have a “genetic memory” connected to the rock, as the emergence of eukaryotic cells (and therefore life as we know it) required that the prokaryotic cells which banded together to symbiotically evolve into eukaryotic life required that taking in of minerals in order to form mitochondria. The film does this, ping-ponging back and forth between scientific fact and what we might call speculative geology, and it does it all with pulsing, hypnotic electronic music. It called to mind a movie that I saw at the New Orleans IMAX on a fifth grade field trip entitled The Hidden Dimension, which included a lot of microphotography, but to a much more psychedelic effect. 

There came a moment in Last Things in which the camera lingers for a long time on a rock formation in a park. It made me think of the Kuleshov effect, the theory and effect that Lev Kuleshov was able to demonstrate through the editing together of disparate images intercut with the face of Russian silent film actor Ivan Mosjoukine. Although the image of Mosjoukine was unchanging, the audience interpreted different meanings from his (identical) facial expressions based upon what footage appeared in between. Between the music and the fantasy, it does almost start to feel as if the rock is experiencing something, even thought that clearly can’t be the case. Can it? 

What’s the relationship between eukaryotic life, Petra, and glistening space concrete? Is there one? Director Stratman has stated that the film was born out of her existential panic about living through the planet’s sixth mass extinction event, and although I can’t speak for her, it seems to partially be about finding peace with the finity of human existence by viewing our transience, brevity, and diminutiveness by holding us up against mineral formations that meaningfully predate our solar system. If our concept of prehistory does not extend beyond the formation of the earth, it’s barely scratching the surface. And hey, the life that became us changed the planet; our ancestors caused rocks to go extinct, and those rocks became part of us, and although there’s no meaning in that, there is beauty, and we should appreciate it. 

I’d recommend reading this interview with Stratman; it’s insightful, and it says more about Last Things than I can. And if you get the chance to see this one, don’t miss it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Dune: Part Two (2024)

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Hey hey hey it’s throat-singing o’clock! I remember, lo several years ago now, when someone was online complaining about multiplex soundtrack overlap and how, in the moment that Beth died in Little Women, they could hear Babu Frik laughing in the next screening over. I had a similar experience last week when I could hear the chanting of the Sardaukar armies during a quiet moment in Drive-Away Dolls; I just sat there thinking how much I couldn’t wait to check out Dune 2, and that day has finally come. 

We open shortly after we left off in the last one, with Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), the concubine of the late Duke Leto Atreides, have been taken in by Stilgar (Javier Bardem), the leader of a local division of scavengers known as Fremen. Paul has recently slain one of the Fremen in ritual combat, which makes most of them leery of him, but a young woman named Chani (Zendaya) sees something in the outworlder that she respects. The desert world of Arrakis, the only place in the universe where the space travel-enabling spice melange can be found, has been returned to the governance of House Harkonnen, headed by the Baron (Stellan Skarsgård), who is currently training his nephew Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler) in the ways of wanton cruelty and planetary management. The Bene Gesserit, as headed by Reverend Mother Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling) sets her sights on using Feyd as the fulfillment of her sect’s centuries-long eugenics/missionary work following the presumed end of the Atreides bloodline, but reports coming from Arrakis that there is a new leader among the Fremen raise the curiosity of Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), whose allegiance is torn between her allegiance to the Bene Gesserit and her loyalty to her father, the emperor (Christopher Walken). Meanwhile, on Arrakis, Paul becomes embedded with the Fremen. When his mother first attempts to use her powers and the apparent fulfillment of prophecy in Paul as proof that he is the long-awaited Fremen messiah, Paul’s public rejection of this endears him both to the non-believers, who appreciate his honesty, and the true believers, who believe that this is merely messianic humility. When his mother, now pregnant, drinks of the mysterious “water of life,” she becomes the new Reverend Mother of the Fremen, a position she’s more than happy to leverage to further spread the glad tidings of her son’s ascendancy. 

This is a huge movie, just big and bold and broad and beautiful. It’s so captivating that even a week later, I still feel more like it was something that I experienced more than it was something that I saw; talking about it as a film almost feels like the wrong way to discuss it. There’s a sequence in the movie in which the Fremen enact a guerilla attack on one of the Harkonnen spice-harvesting machines, which is dozens of stories high and takes up the same amount of space as a quarter of a city block. They come from multiple fronts—bursting forth from under the sand, storming out from behind caves, and sharpshooting one of those dragonfly helicopters. It’s so perfectly captured and rendered on screen that I could almost feel the desert sun on my skin, the heat coming off of the sand. The tremendous, hideous machine has these pillar-like feet/ground hammerers that move every few minutes, and Paul and Chani take cover behind one while working out how to take down the copterfly. There’s an almost ineffable, indescribable reality of the starkness of the shadow, the perfect sound mix, the pacing of the cuts, all of them in perfect harmony that is just pure movie magic, and I was there. Desert environments are inherently otherworldly, but they do exist in reality, such that in the rare instances that we do see other environs like the world where the Harkonnens’ seat of power is, these are even more removed from what we consider reality but appear so complete and real that it’s truly something to behold on the big screen. The sequence in which we visit the Harkonnen arena and the sunlight is so intense that everything is monochrome except in the shade is a particular standout, just phenomenal, and the inky, strange fireworks that fill the air only make it that much cooler. Everything that you’ve heard about this movie’s mastery of every facet of the art of filmcraft is true, and more. 

Narratively, this one does a great job of establishing all the lore that you would need to know through dialogue and imagery, and adds some things which give the text a slightly different depth or interpretation. While Stilgar is every bit the perfect disciple, who sees the wisdom of the prophesied “Lisan al-Gaib” even in Paul’s dismissal of the title (it shows the messiah’s humility) and is willing to give his own life just to give Paul a chance to speak to a quorum of tribal leaders, Chani is here (unlike in the text) unwilling to ascribe any kind of spiritual meaning to Paul’s accomplishments. The film chalks this up to a cultural difference, which helps make the Fremen seem less monolithic; the northerners (like Chani) are of a more agnostic bent than their neighbors in the south (like Stilgar), who are more religious in general and have among them a strong lean toward fundamentalism. Their opposing views of Paul make his tragic turn more meaningful, as he moves from the moral certitude that he must reject all attempts to elevate him to power, as he believes the Fremen can only be meaningfully and permanently liberated if they are led to victory by one of their own, to taking on the mantle of their deliverer and leading them against the Harkonnens. Although there was a kind of filigree that the David Lynch adaptation had that is mostly absent here, there are still moments of bizarre psychedelia as well; after all, it wouldn’t quite be Dune without it. Psychic dreams abound, and when Jessica drinks the Water of Life while pregnant with her daughter, the fetus becomes psychically capable of communication with her mother while possessing the knowledge and experience of a hundred generations, so there are some shots of her in utero as she and her mother “talk,” and that’s the kind of seriously-treated wackiness that makes this whole thing so much more than the sum of its parts. 

I wouldn’t normally make this specific recommendation, but I really think that you ought to see this one in theaters if you can. Every person that I talked to who saw the first Dune at the movies thought it was a staggering masterpiece, while reactions among those who saw it at home were more mixed. To paraphrase Nicole Kidman, we go to the movies to go somewhere we’ve never been before, not just to be entertained, but to be reborn. You should see this one as big as you can. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman — Year One (2011)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

Right here on the cusp of the twelfth film of this project, I hit the first snag; Batman: Year One is not available on HBO Max, or whatever it’s called these days. Heretofore, every single one of these movies was on the service, and from what I can tell, all of the remaining ones are as well. With the high number of premium subscription service material that has started to migrate over to free services (Lovecraft Country is on Tubi, the people’s streaming service) or more widely accessed ones (Six Feet Under is on Netflix) while David Zaslav plunders and pillages HBO and Warner Brothers, I checked to see if it was on one of those, and it was not. In fact, it’s only available as a rental. So, while I wait to acquire it through the library, I figured I’d talk a little bit about the recent history of these movies as they relate to streaming and the Warner Bros. conglomeration. It hasn’t come up here before, but Warner got into it pretty heavy with Netflix some years back, and it was because of these movies. 

Well, it was technically mostly because of Warner Premiere, but considering that Warner Premiere consisted almost entirely of these films, cheapy cash-ins on legacy animated properties (Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown; Tom and Jerry Meet Sherlock Holmes; A Miser Brothers’ Christmas), even cheaper long-distant sequels to Warner properties (Return to House on Haunted Hill, The Dukes of Hazzard: The Beginning, The Lost Boys: The Tribe), eleven separate Scooby-Doo movies, and—inexplicably—Trick ‘r Treat, let’s be honest, these DC flicks were the real reason this happened. In 2010, Netflix and Warner agreed that the former, which was still largely a DVD-by-mail service and had not pivoted to streaming as their primary market, would allow for a 28-day gap between the retail release of a DVD and the date that it would be allowed to be sent out to subscribers. This was under pressure from Warner, who cited at the time that they make approximately 75% of their retail sales for all physical media within that time frame. By 2012, this window had increased to 56 days; to put that time frame into perspective, the first film to be affected by the 28-day window would have been Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, and the last to be mailed out within the first month would be this film, before the next one (Justice League: Doom) would be delayed to two months. 

All of this is, of course, moot now, as Netflix ended its DVD service as of September of last year. A half decade ago, however, DC had the idea to create their own streaming service. It would not only host every DC-related series and movie ever produced, but it would also provide unfettered access to the company’s digital comic vault that contained every story ever published, and would produce a few original series, notably the previously mentioned Titans, the Doom Patrol adaptation, and (most excitingly for me and the reason that I signed up for it) the third season of the prematurely canceled Young Justice series, which was originally supposed to be a Netflix production. DC Universe, as the service was called, didn’t last long, launching in September of 2018 and being discontinued in less than three years in January of 2021, when its programming was folded into the then-new HBO Max service, which had replaced HBO Go in September of 2020, and even as HBO Max was rebranded Max in May of 2023. This didn’t include everything that DC Universe had hosted (obscure TV series like the 1980s Superboy didn’t migrate over), but it has, to my knowledge, always included these animated movies, and the fact that Batman: Year One seems to be missing is another indicator, perhaps, that the overall quality of the service has declined. 

Batman: Year One is a fairly faithful adaptation of its source material, perhaps the most true-to-the-text one we have seen so far. Said comic is also the oldest one that has been tackled in this franchise as well. The Year One comic was released in 1986, following on the heels of the previously discussed crossover event Crisis on Infinite Earths, and was intended to cement what would now be the character’s new origin canon, although the Dark Knight’s was one of the least changed backstories under the new reboot. An adaptation of the comic languished in development for decades. In fact, the legends tell us that it was even considered for adaptation as the third film in the Burton Batman franchise, before the reins were turned over to Joel Schumacher in order to move in a more “kid-friendly” direction and away from the gritty reality of this narrative. Years later, when Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins was first announced, I seem to remember early trade publications citing that it would be a direct adaptation of Year One, but I don’t feel like fighting with the pathetic shell of a useful search engine that Google has become in order to confirm that one way or another. Even without that confirmation, the 2005 film does bear many similarities to the comic, with two major direct lifts from it; the first is the scene in which Batman summons a huge flock of bats that darken the sky using a supersonic device, and the second a sequence in which Jim Gordon tells Batman, his new ally, about the impending appearance of a clown-like villain who calls himself “Joker,” which is the final scene in both movies. 

This is a short one, but it’s got meat on its bones. On the same January day, Gotham City’s “prodigal son” Bruce Wayne (The OC’s Benjamin McKenzie) returns home, musing from his high vantage point as he flies into the city that it almost looks calm from the air, despite being a seedy place of misery at ground level, while Internal Affairs Lieutenant James Gordon (Bryan Cranston) arrives in the city by train, fretting about the place’s high crime rates and his concerns about bringing his pregnant wife to such a place. Bruce plans to rid Gotham of crime from the ground up, demonstrating that he has spent his eight year absence training physically to do so. Elsewhere, Gordon is “welcomed” to the GCPD by corrupt Commissioner Loeb (frequent Cohen Brothers collaborator Jon Polito), reckless and bloodthirsty SWAT lieutenant Brendon (Stephen Root), and Gordon’s new partner, the violent and hair-triggered Flass (Fred Tatasciore). Loeb hints at some dark part of Gordon’s past that makes him think that he’ll be easy to extort, but Gordon’s plan is the same as Bruce’s: making Gotham a place worth living in. Bruce’s first night out as an attempted crime fighter goes very poorly, as he attempts to rescue an underage sex worker from her pimp, only to be stabbed by the girl herself and being severely beaten by the crowd that gathers. The person who deals him the most damage is a prostitute named Selena Kyle (Eliza Dushku, in a pretty thankless role overall considering what she’s capable of). Although he manages to evade police and drag his way into his home, Bruce sits facing a bust of his father and planning to let himself bleed out if he doesn’t receive a sign that he should go on, which arrives in the form of a bat that crashes through the window. We don’t get to hear the line about “criminals [being] a cowardly and superstitious lot” in his internal monologue, but this is a very straightforward reenactment of the same scene in the comics, which emulates the first appearance of the character all the way back in 1939. 

Inspired, Bruce takes on the costumed alter ego of “Batman,” and although he starts out hassling a trio of teenagers boosting a television set, he eventually works his way up to threatening Loeb and his associate, the mobster Carmine Falcone (Alex Rocco), during a dinner at one of their homes. Gordon is the mythological one good apple in the GCPD, but Loeb’s fury about Batman’s threats leads him to assign Gordon to finding the Batman, all while Jim faces off against his own department — up to and including his fellow detectives beating him with a baseball bat in a parking garage while wearing masks because he refuses to get dirty and join the grift like they did. Inspired by the Bat, Selena Kyle decides to become a masked denizen of the night herself, but in pursuit of theft instead of justice, and models her costume on a cat motif. 

At barely more than an hour, this one just barely qualifies as a feature, but it’s a pretty good one. It’s economically paced, even if the parts with Selena feel like dead weight. In contrast, the original comic had a bit more plot having to do with Harvey Dent (the future Two-Face) as the third face of the fight for justice in Gotham, from within the DA’s office, with the added wrinkle that his overt derring-do made him one of Gordon’s suspects for the true identity of Batman. The Selena stuff is also everything that has aged most poorly about the source material, as it was one of those things where Frank Miller just couldn’t help himself but make Catwoman a sex worker (this was retconned almost immediately and is, for all intents and purposes, the only thing considered non-canonical in the comic to this day). The film’s biggest weakness, however, is that everything great about it has already been adapted in some form. Batman: The Animated Series depicted the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne almost exactly as it was retold in Year One, down to angle and perspectives from the comic. An uninformed viewer would likely see this one and think that it was ripping off Batman Begins by centering the narrative around the antics of Carmine Falcone or having Batman be saved by the appearance of hundreds of bats, but both that character and that sequence originated in this film’s source material. As a whole, I can’t see it having much reason to exist other than for its own sake and for the interest of people who are already familiar with and fans of the comic, which doesn’t seem to add up to much. Cranston is great as Gordon, and it’s great that what feels like the entire second half of the film is just Batman vs. cops, but I’m not sure it’s enough, especially given the number of hoops you have to jump through to find this one. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it does feel … vestigial.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Theodore Rex (1995)

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There can be something reassuring about watching a truly Bad movie.  Comforting, even.  The term “Bad Movies” has been applied to a growing canon of “so-bad-they’re-good” oddities with such wild abandon that a lot of so-good-they’re-great titles like Showgirls, Glen or Glenda, and Freddy Got Fingered have gotten swept up in the momentum, either because their intent is misunderstood or because they fail to meet arbitrary standards of objective, professional quality.  The further I’ve immersed myself in the deep end of iconoclastic, outsider-art filmmaking the more difficult it is to find any value in a Good vs Bad dichotomy.  If I had to come up with my own binary, I’d say movies are usually either Interesting or Boring.  So, it’s helpful to have a reality check like the 1995 buddy-cop comedy Theodore Rex to remind me that, yes, movies can be objectively Bad.  Everything about Whoopi Goldberg playing a future-cop who’s reluctantly partnered with a talking animatronic dinosaur sounds like the kind of nonsense novelty that gets me to overlook objective quality markers to instead find joy in the inane and the absurd.  And yet, there is no joy to be found in Theodore Rex.  It’s bad; it’s boring.  It’s more chore than art.

I mean “chore” in the literal sense.  Whoopi Goldberg was contracted to star in this 90s Dino Craze kids’ film though an oral agreement that she tried back out of once she smelled the stink on the project, then was forced to follow through on her promise via lawsuit.  As a result, most of the blame for its dead-eyed energy has defaulted to criticism of her performance, which is indeed a legally obligated sleepwalk.  The real shame, though, is that her T-Rex screen partner has no personality to speak of either.  His human-scale dino suit is cute enough to appeal to kids, but George Newbern’s vocal work as Teddy Rex is embarrassingly whiny & unenthused.  He spends the entire film mumbling to himself like a socially awkward nerd who just got dropped off for his first day at a party college (speaking from personal experience), draining all of the ferocious cool out of the T-Rex’s street cred and replacing it with generalized, unmedicated anxiety.  Worse yet, these two lifeless drips are investigating the conspiratorial murder of another T-Rex, so kids not only have to hang out with the least exciting dinosaur alive, but they’re also confronted with the limp corpse of their favorite dino in multiple scenes.  The whole thing plays like a cult deprogramming tape meant to convince children that dinosaurs are in no way interesting or cool.

If there are any signs of life in this dino-themed court summons, it’s in the production design.  Theodore Rex was one of the most expensive direct-to-video productions of its time, as it was initially budgeted for theatrical release.  That bloated scale mostly translates to big explosions, a thoughtful mix of animatronic puppetry & 90s computer graphics, and surprisingly engaged performances from recognizable names like Bud Cort, Carol Kane, and Richard “Shaft” Roundtree.  The money also shows in its intensely artificial sets, which take the “Once upon a time in the future …” framing of its sci-fi noir premise to a cartoon extreme where all the world is a DZ Discovery Zone.  However, you could just revisit the live-action Super Mario Bros movie or the TV-sitcom Dinosaurs for that exact effect without having to spend time with these dipshit dino cops.  They suck all of the fun out of every room they enter, and as a result the movie just kinda sucks.  There’s something especially painful about how every failed, flat punchline is punctuated with goofball sound effects to remind the audience that we’re supposed to be having fun! fun! fun!, so that our participation in this bullshit feels just as mandatory as Whoopi’s.  When it ends on a sequel-teasing title card that reads “See Ya!”, it reads like a threat.  Leave me out of it.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #208: Lenny Cooke (2013) & Basketball Docs

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Welcome to Episode #208 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna celebrate March Madness by discussing a handful of basketball documentaries, starting with the Safdie Brothers’ 2013 profile of Lenny Cooke.

00:00 Welcome

07:23 How to Have Sex (2024)
13:52 The Double Life of Véronique (1991)
19:11 The Marsh King’s Daughter (2023)
24:11 Out of the Blue (1980)

30:23 Lenny Cooke (2013)
55:30 Hoop Dreams (1994)
1:19:46 AND1 Ball Access – The Mixtape Tour (2002)
1:40:01 Dennis Rodman’s Big Bang in Pyongyang (2015)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Blood of the Virgins (1967)

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There’s been a lot of recent online conjecture & debate about the future of Tubi. Following the streamer’s rebrand with a uglier, bubblier logo, rumors spread that Tubi has been requesting that distributors upload censored versions of their films, with all graphic depictions of sex & violence obscured from public view.  It’s unclear whether this is true for the entirety of Tubi’s streaming library—which is miles deeper than any of its fellow competitors’—or if it’s just true for the movies that play on its “Live TV” channels that simulate pre-streaming movie broadcasts.  Or maybe it isn’t true at all.  There’s more speculation than evidence out there so far, so the only thing that’s really resulted from this scrutiny over Tubi’s supposed swerve into puritanism has been the constant reminder of who owns the company: the same Murdoch family who owns Fox News.  It’s not out of the question, then, that Tubi might go squeaky clean in the near future, which makes it my solemn duty as a film journalist to watch the most degenerate smut I can find on the platform just to keep an eye on the evolving facts of the situation.

You have to search for 1967’s Blood of the Virgins by its original Spanish-language title “Sangre de Virgenes” for it to populate on Tubi, but I can confirm that it has not yet been censored or removed.  The dream is still alive; tits & gore are still welcome on The People’s Streaming Service.  This apparently includes movies where tits & gore are the only thing on the filmmakers’ minds, as is the case with this sub-Jesús Franco vampire smut – a genre the poster specifies as “Erotomania”.  Blood of the Virgins is an oddball novelty even within the context of dirt-cheap, horned-up vampire schlock.  If nothing else, I’ve never seen a vampire movie try to pass off stock footage of seagulls as if they were its vampires’ bat form, aided only by a red color filter and some unconvincing squeaks on the soundtrack.  I’ve also never seen a vampire movie produced in Argentina, an unusual cultural perspective that shows in the film’s vintage telenovela blocking & scoring and in its central location of a vampire-infested log cabin instead of a vampire-infested Gothic castle.  Of course, these cultural & aesthetic details are all secondary to the film’s main goal: dousing beautiful naked bodies in artificial stage blood.

If you cannot tell from its listed 72-minute runtime, Blood of the Virgins was designed to pad out a double feature for drive-in make-out sessions, not to scare.  It’s closer to softcore pornography than it is to horror, especially in its best, earliest stretch where it chronicles a Swinging 60s ski cabin trip taken by its doomed hippie victims, who eventually break into the wrong cabin to their own peril.  After a period-piece vignette establishes the existence of vampires in centuries past, the audience is bombarded with an energetic Russ Meyer-style nudie cutie montage in which hippie freaks indulge in dive-bar go-go dancing between bouts of road trip heavy petting and wholesome downhill skiing.  It’s an invigorating, titillating start to what’s ultimately a low-energy Hammer Horror knockoff.  Once the vampires isolate & drain those hippies (who, I must note, are very much not virgins), the movie slows way down and loses both its momentum and its overall sense of purpose.  By then, it has outlived its function as background noise for drive-in canoodling, and it’s really your fault if you’re still paying attention to see how the story plays out.

There are a lot of fun little touches to this Argentinian oddity for anyone familiar with this genre.  Its hand-drawn credits, its soap opera zoom-ins, its seagull shaped “bats”, and its main vampire’s predilections as more of a titty sucker than a neck biter all make it an amusing novelty for anyone who can stay awake long enough to gawk at those details.  Blood of the Virgins is just slightly off in its bargain-bin approximation of Jesús Franco vampire erotica, making it a fascinating outlier for anyone who knows how these things are supposed to play out.  For instance, it’s weirdly sheepish about depicting lesbian acts between the hippies & vampires, but eager to gesture at male-hippie-on-female-vampire cunnilingus, which is a much rarer treat.  The Russ Meyer-style hippie montage at the beginning is also remarkably energetic for a genre that’s usually so sluggish & unrushed, and this might have been a bonafide cult classic if had sustained that rhythm throughout.  As is, it’s still great fun and great confirmation that you can still find boobies on Tubi despite recent reports otherwise.

-Brandon Ledet

Quick Takes: Rebel Girls

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Sometime during my bus trip from watching the 4-hour French culinary documentary Menus-Plaisirs at The Prytania to immediately follow it with the 3-hour Polish sci-fi epic On the Silver Globe at The Broad, it hit me.  If I lived in a bigger city with a full, robust repertory scene, I would have a weekly meltdown.  Thankfully, New Orleans is relatively laidback in its repertory programming, with most of the heavy lifting done by The Prytania’s Sunday-morning Classic Movies series and now Wildwood‘s Wednesday-night screenings at The Broad.  There’s usually only one or two now-or-never selections in any given month here, which is much more manageable than the nonstop deluge of rare 35mm prints that flood cities like Chicago & NYC.  Having a large portion of those screenings recently relocate to The Broad has made it even more manageable for me personally, since it’s the theater closest to my home.  So, I’ve been spending a lot of time watching older releases at my neighborhood cinema, but not too much time.  Except for the rare occasions when I have to choose between two once-in-a-lifetime screenings on opposite sides of town, I’m mostly unbothered, moisturized, happy, in my lane, focused, flourishing.

As a result, I’ve racked up a few short-form reviews of older movies I happened to catch at The Broad in recent weeks.  All three movies happen to be about rebellious young women’s lives as social outcasts, which likely says less about the kinds of films being programmed around town than it says about the kinds of films that motivate me to leave the couch.  Here they are in all their grimy, leather-jacketed glory (listed in the order that I watched them).

Vagabond (1985)

Second only to Alfred Hitchcock’s routine appearances in Prytania’s Classic Movies program, Agnès Varda has got to be the most frequently programmed director in town (or at least has been for as long as I’ve been paying attention to such things).  Since 2018, I’ve seen Le Bonheur, Faces Places, The Gleaners & I, and Cléo from 5 to 7 at local specialty screenings, and I even missed one of Jane B.  It’s an incredible string of luck that’s made me reluctant to catch up with Varda’s most iconic titles at home, with the assumption that they’ll eventually play in a proper theater if I’m patient enough to wait.  That spoiled brat entitlement recently paid off when Wildwood screened the 1985 drama Vagabond, one of Varda’s most celebrated post-Cléo triumphs. I immediately understood its reputation as one of her best, since it works equally well as a prequel to her dumpster-diving documentary The Gleaners & I (my personal favorite Varda) and as a crust-punk take on Citizen Kane (many serious critics’ personal favorite by anyone). 

Sandrine Bonnaire stars as a transient young woman named Mona, hitchhiking her way across France with no particular purpose or destination.  Mona loves smoking weed, listening to generic pop radio, and not being hassled to do much else.  We’re introduced to her as a corpse, frozen in a ditch without anyone looking for her or even really knowing who she is.  We get to know her through the posthumous testimonials of people whose lives she drifted through, her aimless story playing out in fractured flashback.  Everyone projects their own dreams, regrets, uses, and prejudices onto her but she was never vulnerable enough with any stranger ever to fully reveal herself, making her just as impossible to pin down in testimonial as Charles Foster Kane.  Only, Kane was defined by the crushing weight of his own ambition, while Mona is defined by her total lack of it.  As she camps on isolated roadsides and squats in abandoned estates, the people around her attempt to parse out the romance of her wandering vs the self-destructive impulse of her “withering.”  It’s essentially unacceptable for her to merely exist, and the world inevitably punishes her for it by abandoning her body in a ditch.

One of the reasons I put off watching this particular Varda film for so long is that its premise sounds so unrelentingly grim.  In truth, Vagabond strikes the same real-life balance between joy & misery that most of Varda’s films achieve; it just starts with tragedy instead of saving it for a last-minute shock.  Even Mona’s death has an absurdist humor to it in the end, as it results from the joyous carnival celebrations of a local community who isn’t aware how vulnerable she is to their drunken shenanigans.  As doomed as she is from the start and as unknowable as she remains to everyone she meets, Mona is a loveable, recognizable kind of rebel.  Varda might mock the people who project their own psychological hangups onto the character’s blank canvas, but she includes herself and her audience in that indictment.  By the end you really feel like you know Mona, especially if you’ve ever smelled the particular sweet-yeast/old-mold stench crusties tend to cultivate in their unwashed denim.  You don’t know her, though.  No one possibly could.

Rebel Dykes (2021)

I don’t know that Patois Film Fest‘s screening of the 2021 documentary Rebel Dykes technically counts as repertory, since it might very well have been the film’s local premiere.  I’ve been waiting to see this low-budget, D.I.Y. punk doc for years, but it seemingly never landed official distribution outside its initial festival run.  It was a perfect fit for Patois programmers’ focus on political activism, though, since it’s specifically about the anti-assimilationist queer politics of post-punk lesbian leather bars in 1980s London.  Ostracized both by internal debates over whether S&M & pornography were acceptable feminist practices and by external governmental oppression in Thatcher’s UK, the heavy-leather lesbians of the era formed a tight community initially mobilized by lust but eventually galvanized into political fury – mostly by necessity.  A lot of them are still around to tell the tale, too (a rare luxury for 1980s urban queer communities), including producer Siobhan Fahey, who’s interviewed among her friends as a first-hand witness to the scene.

Rebel Dykes has all the hallmarks of a self-indulgent documentary in which talking heads wax nostalgic about the “You had to be there” glory days, but it’s thankfully working with a deep archive of vintage material from the era that helps illustrate the scene’s historical importance.  That archive is especially helped by its subjects recalling a time when home video camcorders were first becoming affordable, giving a lot of the vintage footage the feel of grimy video art and, more practically, homemade pornography.  The animated interstitials that stitch those clips together are a lot less visually impressive, but there is a kind of homemade charm to them as well, as if a bored teenage punk made their own Flash Animation versions of Love & Rockets comic book covers.  Mostly, though, Rebel Dykes‘s nostalgia is sidestepped through its usefulness as a modern political motivator.  It was a perfect selection for the activism angle of the Patois program, as it got a rowdy crowd amped up to either throw some bricks through some government windows or to throw some BDSM sex parties with their friends – whichever is more politically expedient.

Out of the Blue (1980)

Appropriately enough, Wildwood also recently screened Dennis Hopper’s teen-punk precursor to Vagabond—1980’s Out of the Blue—which likewise features an aimless, denim & leather-clad rebel whose most prized possession is her portable radio.  Linda Manz stars as an Elvis & punk obsessed brat who rebels against her eternal car-crash homelife by running away from home and mimicking the destructive, hedonistic behaviors of the drug-addict grownups around her.  Meanwhile, Hopper rebels with equal gusto against every studio exec who ever gave him a chance, combining the ecstatic antisocial freedoms of Easy Rider with the ecstatic career-torching incoherence of The Last Movie to deliver the least commercial project of his notoriously chaotic stint as a New Hollywood auteur.  Belligerent, sloppy, brilliant – Out of the Blue had me laughing and holding back tears throughout, often simultaneously.

Almost all of the credit for the movie’s power belongs to Manz, of course, whose lead performance anchors Hopper’s messy narrative style in the exact way her voiceover narration anchored Malick’s in Days of Heaven.  Her thick New Yawka felt out of place in that Americana period piece, but it’s perfectly suited to her character here, since she’s essentially auditioning to become the fifth Ramone.  Manz’s dialogue mostly consists of provocative catchphrases like “Elvis!”, “Punk rock!”, “Kill hippies!”, “Subvert normality!” and “I hate men!”, all of which she either delivers in confrontational shouts at the dysfunctional adults around her or in mumbled private reassurances to herself.  She’s a teenage thumbsucker who loves her teddy bear, but she’s eager to break out of her addiction-rotted home to live the full Fabulous Stains punk rock fantasy on the road, a volatile combo of innocence & bravado.  The result of that combination is inevitably bleak, but she’s explosively entertaining & surprisingly funny on her journey to self-destruction.

Out of the Blue is the total Rebel Girl package.  It’s got the oddly joyful nihilism of Vagabond, the take-no-shit toughness of Rebel Dykes, and a special one-of-a-kind teen rebel quality that’s only ever been credibly brought to the screen by Linda Manz (give or take a Natasha Lyonne, who is partially credited for fostering the film’s recent digital restoration).  It’s also got one of hell of a theme song in that titular Neil Young track, which helps add instant emotional impact to Hopper’s aggressively abject, abrasive imagery.

-Brandon Ledet

Gasoline Rainbow (2024)

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It’s not something that comes up here a lot, but I go to a lot of live music shows. Although I’m reaching a point in my life where I’m often a decade or so older than the mode, I’ve never really found myself feeling like I had impostor syndrome until a couple of months ago, when I was at a show where a young woman was singing, accompanied solely by a male guitarist. This isn’t a statement about either’s talent—both were great—but there came a moment of intense realization on my part that I had heard all of the sentiments that were being laid before me before, and that I had in fact heard them many, many times. There’s nothing wrong with that; there’s room enough in the world for an infinite number of songs that feel like vulnerable diary entries and which rhyme “make-up” with “break up” with “wake up,” as long as there’s at least one person on the receiving end with whom the song connects, sonically and/or lyrically, and/or any other way that people connect with the art that they love. But I did realize that, perhaps, the time when that sung journal could connect with an older man like me had passed, no matter how much I was enjoying the show, when I was capable of wondering “Am I too old to be here?” 

I was a bit worried about this, heading into Gasoline Rainbow. The film’s blurb read “With high school in the rearview, five teenagers from small-town Oregon decide to embark on one last adventure. Piling into a van with a busted taillight, their mission is to make it to a place they’ve never been—the Pacific coast.” I was intrigued, not least of all because the film is the first fully narrative feature directed by the Ross brothers, Bill (IV) and Turner, who had previously helmed Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, but was worried that I might be too old to connect with the characters of Rainbow. Those fears were only further agitated when I saw the (at time of writing) only review on IMDb, which called the film “pretentious” and stated the “entire movies [sic] dialog [sic] between characters consists only of drunk teenagers talking.” Luckily, I needn’t have been concerned. 

The above-cited synopsis is pretty clear. Five teenagers, recently graduated from high school in fictional Wiley, Oregon, set out to have one last big adventure together before adult life pulls them in different directions. Stealing the family’s dilapidated van in the middle of the night, Nichole Dukes picks up the rest of the crew: Tony Abuerto, Micah Bunch, Nathaly Garcia, and Makai Garza. After a tense moment when the van’s engine dies beneath the slow-blinking yellow light of an isolated intersection and it seems unlikely to restart, they are on their way. Unlike a lot of movies of this type, they have a destination: the coast. From there, the film falls neatly into a series of vignettes characterized by the people that they meet. The first is a woman working at a gas station; the quintet asks her if she knows of anywhere cool nearby that they can visit, and she hops into the van with them and directs them to an otherworldly place in the Alvord Desert, an eighty-four square mile barren in southeast Oregon. Afterward, when returning their guide back to where she lives now, they ask if she’s interested in joining them for the rest of the way. She talks about the traveling that she used to do when she was younger, though she doesn’t look much older than they do, and although she’s clearly tempted, she begs off and wishes them well on their way. The next person that they encounter is a guy walking a dark road at night, who emerges from the darkness into the lamp of their headlights like a ghost from the mist; he invites them to join him and some friends for some good old-fashioned countryside drinking by a fire, and they accept. 

This turns into a fun time, and Makai in particular hits it off with a girl named Dallas, who ends up giving him a bracelet and telling him to meet her in a few days at “The End of the World,” a party happening near the coast so that he can return it to her there. After a night of drinking, smoking, and partying, the group wakes up in the field to find all other participants long gone, and when they climb back up to the road, they discover that the van has been stripped. They spend the next day on foot before arriving in another small town, where they are able to get some food and befriend a few locals and shoot some pool. They also meet two crust punks who teach them how to freight hop, and they make it all the way into Portland this way. While there, they meet and connect with a skateboarder, Micah’s cousin, and a couple of middle-aged fantasy-loving metalheads, all of whom function to allow the kids to reveal something of themselves, and to possibly reflect the kind of people that they could become. 

This is a beautifully photographed movie of deep feeling that avoids the traps of treacly sentiment. It’s rare to see a movie that so accurately reflects that cold, bright, fried lung morning after feeling, and this one certainly does. It’s also one with that particular verisimilitude that runs bone-deep in fiction film that’s made by filmmakers who cut their teeth in documentary work. A lot of how much you’ll enjoy this film will depend on what your tolerance level is for hearing teenagers talk about themselves amongst themselves, and although I understand that can be a barrier for others, I feel that the unscripted, adlibbed feeling of the dialogue covers a lot of irritation. That negative review I quoted earlier isn’t wrong, per se, in the sense that I’ve met plenty of people who, when presented with this text, would interpret it the same way. I don’t think that the film wants us in the audience to think that these kids are having life-changing realizations about themselves that are supposed to blow the minds of viewers; this is a character study of five kids who have never seen what’s over the horizon. Even if their revelations about what’s outside of their bubble may seem shallow to us, it’s so that we can reevaluate what we take for granted through their eyes, not so that we are moved by their philosophical insight. And, for what it’s worth, they also learn that the world over the horizon isn’t always what it cracks up to be either; one of my favorite jokes in the movie is that the kids learn why everything smells like shit in Portland—because that’s just how cities smell. 

The characters sell this one, honestly. That this is a story about misfits is an obvious statement; the gang even learns to trust their first friend on the road because she shows them her tattoo of the Misfits skull, which is almost too on the nose. One of the film’s major strengths is the way that it parses out little pieces of character that are revealed through dialogue. In a film that foregoes narrative devices like flashbacks in favor of a feeling of documentary realism, there’s no other way to get backstory, but it’s very well done here. Nathaly confides in another local girl that they meet in the town about her father’s recent deportation and not being sure what will happen to her now. Micah is caretaker to both of his younger siblings since his parents are both in rehab. Tony is directionless and feels that he has no other choice but to pursue a career in armed forces, which is the plight of a lot of Americans. As Makai tells the skateboarder (I want to say his name is Bernard, but I can’t find a single press kit that names anyone other than the kids), he was the only Black kid in the entire town. The film is also smart to let us know that there is conflict in the group, but to underplay it so that we don’t devote too much screen time to it and to underline the familial connection between them; for instance, the two girls are at one point pissed at Tony about something that he says offscreen, and the other two boys are hands-off. We never learn what it was that Tony said, and the only narrative contribution is that we see him looking over his shoulder at the girls as they shoot pool in the next scene, and by the next day, no one cares to bring it up again. It makes the road trip nature of the narrative have room to breathe. 

Gasoline Rainbow is a picaresque, and we get a lot of pictures of life along the way, treated respectfully at all levels, which is also a nice touch. Each of the people that we meet along the way are people that you’ve probably met. My personal favorite is the Portlandian man living on the river with whom the group stays on the last night before The End of the World. He and every one of the friends that we meet wears a black metal band tee; he used to have hair down to his waist but keeps his head shaved after an accident with a piece of industrial machinery; his walls are adorned with Game of Thrones house banners; he makes breakfast to “The Shire” from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack; and he’s nothing but joyful that he gets to, in his own words, be their Tom Bombadil. I’ve known so many different variations on this guy that I couldn’t fully shake the feeling that I had met him before, too. I liked all of the people that we met along the way, in truth, even the crust punks, and appreciated the balance between them providing some genuinely good advice while encouraging the kids to just keep going without ever making them feel like they should turn back. 

Taken on its own terms, this is a beauty, and a rare high-quality treat in its genre of contemporary coming-of-agers. There are a couple of moments where it gets a little hammy; the invocation of the word “family” in one of the kids’ voiceovers feels a bit heavy-handed, and I’m still conflicted about the film ending on seconds-long staring-to-camera close-ups of each character (its film-schooliness is apparent but it’s also very effective). If you get the chance to see this one in your market, I recommend it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond