Lists & Articles

Boomer’s Top Films of 2018

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

Let’s get this out of the way: 2018 was a miserable year for yours truly. From March to June, I was locked in a constant battle with the manager of the property where I live with regards to a phantom leak that they “observed,” leading to them cutting a 4′ square section of my bathroom ceiling being cut, without being repaired or replaced, for three months. I picked up a staph infection while on vacation, arrived home after nearly a day-and-a-half of travel due to an overnight layover in Dublin, only to find that my luggage had been lost and that my refrigerator was abloom with monstrous polyps and fungi due to its motor failing while I was gone. And then in October, I was standing innocently at the corner of 7th and Colorado Streets in downtown Austin, waiting for my bus to take me home after a long Monday, when a man in a pickup truck ran the red light, was struck by another vehicle, spun out, and then ultimately hopped the curb and pinned my leg to the bus stop bench and dragging me the length of it before coming to rest in a position that trapped me and rendered me immobile. This broke my fibular neck and left me with extensive tissue damage, including an internal degloving event (don’t look it up unless you’ve got a strong stomach), and trapped me in my apartment for six weeks; I only got out to go to the doctor and to vote, because it’s going to take a lot more than being mangled and nearly killed to keep your boy from voting. As a result, anything that was released after October 15 pretty much flew under my radar. There was so much I wanted to see this year: I had tickets to Bad Times at the El Royale for the day after the collision that has (temporarily, fingers crossed) hobbled me, and a pass to Good Manners (As boas maneiras) for that weekend, both of which went unused. Perhaps the greatest crime is that I, the self-proclaimed foremost expert on Dario Argento’s body of work among all the people that you know (unless you know Maitland McDonagh, in which case, can you introduce me?), still have not seen the remake of Suspiria. Of course, this year also blessed me in some places: I took my first vacation since 2014 and got to go out of the country for the first time for it as well! Also, Black Panther came out and my cat outlived (and continues to outlive) the veterinarian’s projections, so here we are. Also, I’m not going to see Boy Erased. It’s just too triggering and personal.

All the movies that I wanted to see but did not in 2018, and thus should not be considered omissions from this list for lack of quality, but simply due to availability and my getting mangled: Bad Times at the El Royale, Foxtrot, Three Identical Strangers, Summer of ’84, Green Fog, Call Me By Your Name, Isle of Dogs, American Animals, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Blackkklansman, The Kindergarten Teacher, Let the Corpses Tan, Good Behavior, and If Beale Street Could Talk. Also, probably that one about the Spiders-men.

2017 Hangover
(Movies I Wish I Saw Last Year So They Could Have Been on My 2017 List)

The Babysitter: Every word of Brandon’s review of this one is correct: it is a sugar rush of gory absurdity, in the vein of Turbo Kid, one of my favorites of the past few years. I, too, could have done without some of the elements that were designed to pander to the lowest denominator of movie viewers, with their foundationally eradicated attention spans (more on that in a minute). The pop-up text on screen (especially anything to do with the pocketknife) was distracting and fundamentally lowered the level of discourse we can have about this movie, but I was still enthralled from minute to minute, even after walking shirtless scene Robbie Amell took his plunge. This one gets a strong recommendation from me.

I, Tonya: Although this fine crew found each other through the sheer force of will and love for cinematic Things That Should Not Be, we are not of one mind, and I, Tonya is a pretty clear example of that. Brandon was not impressed, but I was enraptured by every moment of it. I can’t remember the last time that I was so sucked into a movie that I watched it again almost immediately, and then a third time just a few days later. There’s violence aplenty, which I think was the main detraction for our Dear Leader, but while the omnipresent domestic abuse that permeated the film was so true-to-life that I wasn’t pushed out of the scene by it, but was only drawn further in, even in the moments that it got very close to home. It’s certainly a movie that needs a trigger warning, and I have my issues with a sympathetic portrait of a person whose political views are, um, bad, but I nonetheless found this utterly compelling.

It Comes at Night: Holy shit is this a great movie. From the disorienting refusal to clarify anything about the layout of the house in which all of the action takes place, to the twists and turns in plotting, this is another great A24 release, even if it comes so soon after the similarly plotted Into the Forest (2015, also distributed by A24), which found Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood as two sisters alone in a deteriorating cabin in another undisclosed location somewhere in otherwise idyllic wilderness. What I liked most about this one was the dread atmosphere that takes hold from the first moment, when an elder member of the clan meets his heartbreaking demise: it makes you side with the first family that you meet, although another film could just as easily follow the other family. What if their inconsistent information about their past is just the result of not wanting to give too much about themselves away in case their apparent saviors aren’t all that they appear to be (which . . . ends up being the case, essentially). This one is on Amazon Prime now and Into the Forest is on Netflix, so treat yourself to this double feature. Read Brandon’s review here.

Honorable Mentions

Sierra Burgess is a Loser: While certainly not the great follow up to the surprise Netflix hit To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before that Netflix was hoping it would be, given the reappearance of the internet’s newest celebrity boyfriend, Noah Centineo, and the presence of Shannon Purser (a.k.a. Barb from Stranger Things), Sierra Burgess is a Loser is a perfectly serviceable little teen romcom that retells the well-worn Cyrano de Bergerac story: a physically “imperfect” suitor woos a perfect specimen with the help of a more attractive counterpart. It’s not groundbreaking, even with the gender flip that lands Purser as loser Sierra Burgess trying to win the heart of Centineo’s Jamey through surrogate Veronica (Kristine Froseth), a mean girl with a rough home life whom Sierra ultimately befriends, albeit with some bumps along the way. Much of the negative reaction to this one, I’m assuming, stems from the desire for another pitch-perfect romantic comedy like TATBILB, not the movie’s actual quality. First time screen-writer Lindsey Beer does a pretty good job here, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of her work.

Bird Box: My roommate read Josh Malerman’s novel Bird Box a couple of years ago and was super excited when he learned that it was being adapted into a film, citing the book as one of the scariest things he had ever seen. From his description of the novel, I was sitting in a movie theater in November 2017 to see Lady Bird and saw the trailer for A Quiet Place and thought “wow, they got that into production faster than I would have expected,” before realizing that it was not a trailer for Bird Box that was playing out before me. Here it is, over a year later, and the comparisons to A Quiet Place and The Happening are still rolling around out there on the internet, largely in response to (and revolt against) Netflix’s bizarre (but effective) meme-heavy marketing strategy. Still, derivative though the film may seem now after the release of other similarly themed apocalyptic titles in the years since the book was first released, this is a pretty effective little thriller with a star-studded cast and a new dimension from lead Sandra Bullock, who has rarely had the opportunity to play a character who is both sentimental and hardened, at turns charming and unlikable. The biggest drawback here is that the film somehow manages to feel both overstuffed and somewhat overlong as well, with a lot of plot points that should have been given more time to be explored, but having too many of these to make a film with a pat running time. This one should have been a miniseries.

The Haunting of Hill House: Speaking of miniseries (or limited series), I’m giving a special mention to The Haunting of Hill House, a breakout ten-episode mini that Netflix released this year. Very loosely based on the Shirley Jackson novel of the same name, Hill House follows the story of the Crains, a large family headed by patriarch Hugh Crain (Henry Thomas in the past and Timothy Hutton in the present), a house flipper before that term really existed. He and architect wife Olivia (Carla Gugino), who looks forward to the day when the family can finally build their “forever house,” have moved their five children into the Hill House mansion, where a series of escalating supernatural events leaves the family broken and traumatized, with that trauma spilling over into their adult lives: Stephen (Michael Huisman) is a skeptic who writes books about other supposed hauntings; Shirley (Elizabeth Reaser) is a mortician who resents that Stephen’s books have dragged the family’s history into the public eye; Theodora (Kate Siegel) is a queer social worker unable to form relationships because of her psychic sensitivity; and twins Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and Nell (Victoria Pedretti), the former of whom is a drug addict who has burned his family more times than can be counted and the latter of whom was the most affected by the house in her youth and has never really recovered. I’m putting this on my list because it’s not a movie, in any technical or real way, but it does stretch the boundaries of what we can consider a movie, as it feels less like a series of episodes and more like a ten hour movie broken into manageable chunks. There’s also a one-shot in the sixth episode that blows away any competition from actual films on my list as far as technical mastery. As with Bird Box, I’ve seen the split on my Facebook feed between people who loved this and people who hated it, but unlike with BB there’s a notable difference: the only people I’ve seen consistently hating on Hill House are those who have terminally limited attention spans and who don’t have the patience to watch a whole movie, let alone a miniseries, without checking their phones every 5 minutes (sorry if you feel called out by this, but you know it’s true). If that’s you, stick to Vine compilations, but if you have the ability to, you know, watch things, give this a try.

Dishonorable Mentions

Solo: A Star Wars Story: I may have given a lukewarm defense of this one in my review of it last summer, but this movie really doesn’t work. Ehrenreich is charming in everything, and I got a kick out of L3-37, but further reflection on this film has really not been kind to my remembrance of it. It helps that so much of it was forgettable, and I’m hoping that we’ll see more of Ehrenreich and Donald Glover on the big screen in years to come, but I’m not holding my breath.

Deadpool 2: I fell asleep during this movie, in a theater. That disqualifies me from reviewing it unless I see it again, and through to the end, but honestly, I’m just not sure I’m up for it. I’ve always been a Domino fan, and her character is about the only thing that I remember from the film, but I just couldn’t bring myself to care (or keep my eyes open). Luckily, Brandon managed to stay awake through it.

Avengers: Infinity War: “What’s this?” you say. “He didn’t like Infinity War? But everyone liked Infinity War!” Well, sorry to break anyone’s hearts, but my opinion of this movie has only gone down following my review last summer. I even gave it a slightly higher star review at the time than I felt in my heart, because the people I had seen it with had enjoyed themselves so thoroughly and I wanted it to be better than it was. But while it was technically proficient, visually stimulating, and managed to weld together nearly two dozen characters into a plot that was serviceable and well-executed, it left me so cold. I didn’t feel anything in this movie, not even for a moment. I thought maybe I was just in a bad mood when I saw it the first time, so I gave it another watch a couple of months later and I was even less engaged the second time around. I should have loved this movie. I wanted to love this movie. And I just didn’t.

Ready Player One: Holy shit was this a pile of self congratulatory garbage. I’d diatribe here about the way that this reinforces toxic gatekeeper culture and also about how it’s still pretty vapid and shitty despite all of that (“You’d love me but not my birthmark!”), but this isn’t a movie worth investing that kind of emotional energy and labor into. Just read Brandon’s review or Vox‘s primer.

Open House: Britnee beat me to it with her review of this stinker a full year ago, but I stuck it in my Netflix queue last January, largely based on my fondness for Dylan Minnette, where I promptly forgot about it until I was housebound and working my way through those things I hadn’t watched yet. Having run out of Star Trek: Voyager, Haunting of Hill House, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and, god forgive me, Riverdale, I turned my sights on movies in my queue. I watched the Australian movie where Robin Wright and Naomi Watts bang each others’ sons; I watched a horrible coming of age movie called SPF-18 in which the most exciting thing that happens is that Noah Centineo breaks a disco ball; I even watched a boner comedy by way of Groundhog Day called Premature about a high school kid who is stuck in a repeating day that restarts every time he, well, ejaculates (prematurely). But by far the most disappointing one was Open House, a mediocre rehash of every “creepy things happen in a remote house to a family in crisis” movie that you’ve ever seen, but without the kind of twist or resolution that a film of this type needs to be memorable, or at the very least the catharsis that it needs to be passable. Forbes reviewer Paul Tassi wrote that Open House made him feel like someone was asleep at the switch in Netflix’s quality control, but if they managed to let this movie out into the world, the person in charge of QC must have died at the wheel.

And now . . . Boomer’s Top 15(ish) Movies of 2018

15. Mary and the Witch’s Flower: Make no mistake, this is a children’s movie. It’s also not a Hayao Miyazaki movie, or even a Studio Ghibli film, although you can be forgiven for assuming either given the film’s visual style. Director Hiromasa Yonebayashi, formerly of Ghibli (first working as a clean-up animator on Princess Mononoke before doing key animation on Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Tales from Earthsea, among others) and now well-known for his directorial debut The Secret World of Arrietty and, a few years later, his Oscar nomination for When Marnie was There, turns a fairly thin story about a young girl who encounters a world of magic and sorcery through the discovery of the titular “witch’s flower,” a kind of bud that, when burst, grants those whose juice it touches temporary access to magic. The film’s strong opening sequence, breathtaking flying scenes, and the exploration of the visually entrancing and dynamic magical college that Mary finds in the clouds elevate what would otherwise be just another The Worst Witch/Harry Potter knock-off (although one with a stronger pedigree: the source novel, The Little Broom, was published in 1971, a full three years before the first Worst Witch book). Read Brandon’s review here.

14. A Simple Favor: A bit of an uneven movie, this comedy thriller is held aloft by some decent twists and turns coupled with strong performances from Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively. Read more in my review here.

13. Love, Simon/To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before: I’m taking the coward’s way out on this one, since neither of these films is really “quality” enough to belong on this list under its own merits. Upon Love, Simon‘s release, I was largely against it, even in theory. “Why do we need stories like this one?” I asked myself. “Where are the radical queer stories?” And then I went and saw it, and I was completely enraptured by its earnestness and clarity of vision. I wanted to hate Love, Simon, but instead found myself feeling a kind of warmth and sincerity that I haven’t felt in a long time. (The one moment of sarcasm that I allowed myself was when I leaned over to my companion during the scene in which Simon waits for his online friend “Blue,” and said “If this were Degrassi, a pedophile would show up right about now.” I also had a moment where I was like “Oh, Josh Duhamel is in this, just like Broken Hearts Club, which I guess lends this some gay romcom credibility” before I remembered that it was Timothy Olyphant in that one; I also realized in that moment that I am old.)  Likewise, I slept on To All the Boys I Loved Before because I didn’t think that I could get much joy out of a movie that generates that many posts on BuzzFeed with shirtless .gifs and quizzes about which boy from TATBILB you, BuzzFeed reader, should be with. And yet, in my time of need, I gave this one a try, and was utterly charmed by it. It’s certainly better than other efforts with leading man Noah Centineo (I refer you back to the aforementioned SPF-18), and it wears its social media age Sixteen Candles lineage on its sleeve. Lana Condor’s Lara Jean is effortlessly charming. If you just need a little warmth in your heart, either one of these would make good medicine.

12. Ant-Man and the Wasp: A fun follow-up to 2015’s Ant-Man, read my thoughts on this one here.

11. Game Night: I was warmer to this one than Brandon was; he liked it, but I really, really got on board with this one. Directors John Francis Daley (didn’t think that I would be mentioning a Freaks and Geeks alum on the same list in 2018, but here we are) and Jonathan Goldstein have churned out a fun little heist comedy that utilizes the talent of all of its participants. Max (Jason Bateman) and Annie (Rachel McAdams) have great chemistry, and Billy Magnussen is doing great work making a truly stupid character likable enough that you don’t find yourself doubting why he’s even friends with the others. Sharon Horgan also turns in a command performance with her continuing exasperation at Magnussen’s character’s idiocy. If I had one qualm, it would be that Lamorne Morris and Kylie Bunbury are given little to do other than playing off of each other rather than the whole group, as Morris’s character’s obsession with the idea that his wife may have slept with one other person before they were married consistently puts the two of them in little joke cul-de-sacs rather than keeping them more central to the narrative.

10. Upgrade: Leigh Whannell’s latest is a sleek, fun, trashy romp through a futuristic Death Wish-style roaring rampage of revenge, with a cyberpunk twist. Blumhouse accidentally made a prestige picture in 2017 and has been riding that success for a while; a friend who will be doing some work on one of their upcoming TV projects told me that the first question that you would ask when you got tapped for a Blumhouse production was “Is it union?”, but now it’s a solid bet that you might end up working on something great. Upgrade may not be the greatest sci-fi, but it’s a super fun thrill ride with Logan Marshall-Green as a truly likable guy with a magnetic screen presence. While others might consider him a poor man’s Tom Hardy, he does great work here, especially when he’s in “conversation” with an AI that no one else can hear. It’s twisty, it’s turny: it’s Upgrade. Read Brandon’s glowing review here.

9. The Endless: I added this one to my Netflix queue some time ago based simply on the premise: two brothers who, years before, escaped from a UFO death cult return to the commune after receiving a strange video from one of its members. Younger brother Aaron (Aaron Moorhead) was apparently too young when they left to remember all of the truly creepy goings-on that older brother Justin (Justin Benson) has always told him they were lucky to escape, but Aaron is insistent that the video they received could mean that the UFO they were waiting for has finally arrived. Realizing that his younger brother will never be at peace until he sees the place for himself, Justin takes Aaron on a road trip, seeing a few portents of the irrational along the way. Once they arrive, things seem almost too perfect, although strange happenings and optical illusions (or are they?) begin to make the men wonder if they will be able to escape before something truly terrible happens. It’s a low budget indie sci-fi that occasionally shows it lack of money (there’s a scene in which a house is supposedly aflame but the fire itself is terribly unconvincing), but its heart is in the right place and the tension can’t be beaten. Read Brandon’s review of The Endless and its sister film Resolution here.

8. The Ritual: A kind of modern day Blair Witch Project (minus the found footage element) paired with a heaping dose of morbid survivor’s guilt and including a pretty original… let’s say “monster,” for lack of a better term, The Ritual follows four men who venture onto a Swedish nature hiking trail to honor a fallen friend. Luke (Rafe Spall) entered a liquor store with Rob (Paul Reid) after a boy’s night out with his university buds, only to discover that the place is in the middle of an armed robbery. Luke hides but Rob is seen by the thieves and, upon refusing to cooperate, is killed. As Rob’s wish was to take this hiking trip, Luke joins hardass Hutch (Robert James-Collier), gone-soft family man Dom (Sam Troughton), and nervous Phil (Arsher Ali). When Dom injures himself along the trail, the group opts to take a shortcut back to their last occupied way station through the deep, dark woods. Fair enough, until they take shelter in an abandoned shack during a heavy rain storm and emerge the next morning to find that the storm prevented them from noticing all the runes carved into nearby trees, and that’s not even getting into the bizarre effigy in a room upstairs, or the fact that they discover a dead elk pinned in a tree like an offering. At every turn, Luke is confronted by memories and hallucinations of Rob’s last fateful moments. Is he cracking up in another stressful situation, or is there something in the woods that’s forcing him to relive that night over and over again? Although not the most original story, it makes up for its flaws with a haunting ambiance and a reveal of a… being that is truly unique. Check it out, and read Brandon’s review here.

7. Sorry to Bother You: This is a movie that’s only gone up in my opinion since I first saw it. Read my review here.

6. Phantom Thread: I’ve previously mentioned my theory that if a film that comes out after December 20th, it really should only count on lists for the following year, so I’m including Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest (and supposedly Daniel Day Lewis’s last) film here. There’s so much to say about this movie, and so much of it has already been said, but I would say that this is a movie worth seeing, for all of the passive aggressive eating if nothing else. Read Brandon’s review here.

5. Black Panther: I’m not sure that there’s much more that I can (or am qualified to) contribute to the discourse on this movie that I haven’t already, so just read my review here.

4. You Were Never Really Here: Brandon said everything I could say about this movie better than I could here. This movie hypnotizes and mesmerizes, but not in an uplifting way, just a way that makes you feel alone.

3. Unsane: I can say without a moment’s hesitation or mental evasion that Unsane is hands-down the most unsettling and disturbing film that I have ever seen. I have never, in my entire life, been more uncomfortable than I was when watching this movie. I know that Unsane is trading on a lot of worn-out cliches and tired tropes of the Unspeakable Horrors of the American Mental Health System, or the general Scary Asylum genre. I don’t care: this movie knows exactly where every single one of my psychological pressure points are and just how much weight to apply to each one in sequence to make me physically ill. My reaction watching this film was like my friend’s reaction to seeing Raw for the first time and being unable to handle it at all: I almost had a panic attack. It’s not the most original movie in the world, or the most sympathetic or responsible, but it made me sick. Read Brandon’s review here.

2. Annihilation: Our bodies and our minds will be fragmented into their smallest parts until not one part remains. Read my review here. For those of us in parts of the world where this wasn’t released straight to Netflix, it’s now streaming on Hulu.

1. Hereditary: My favorite thing about Hereditary is that it actually effectively gaslights you, the audience member. Spoilers ahoy, so just skip this if you haven’t seen it: there’s some weirdness at the beginning with odd sigils appearing in places that make sense and which do not, strange mourners, and unearthly glowing and droning. But then after the event (you know the one), the film instead turns into a fairly down-to-earth exploration of mourning, rage, helplessness, and complete surrender to the abyss of grief, and you convince yourself that all of the signs of supernatural interference that you saw must have just been things you thought you saw. The movie teaches you to mistrust yourself, then turns another hairpin corner and says, nope, there were demonic shenanigans all along. Or, to put it another way: this movie was marketed as The Bad Seed and appears to be this at the beginning before turning into Ordinary People for an hour before morphing once again into Rosemary’s Baby. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Read my original review here.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Brandon’s Top Films of 2018

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1. The Wild Boys – As an art film oddity & a transgressive object, this gem lives up to the “wild” descriptor of its title in every conceivable way, delivering everything you could possibly want from a perplexing “What the fuck?” cinematic bazaar. More importantly, though, Wild Boys is thoroughly, defiantly genderfucked – a freshly radical act of nouveau sexual politics represented via the tones & tools of the ancient past. All of its psychedelic beauty & nightmarish sexual id is filtered through an early 20th Century adventurers’ lens, feeling simultaneously archaic & progressive in its subversions of gender & sexuality. It looks like Guy Maddin directing an ancient pervert’s wet dream, both beautifully & brutally old-fashioned in its newfangled deconstruction of gender.

2. Double Lover – Not your average, by-the-books erotic thriller, but rather a deranged masterpiece, a horned-up nightmare. Double Lover’s basic premise is a familiar template, but as it spirals out into total madness there’s no bounds to its erotic mania, which is communicated through an increasingly intense list of sexual indulgences: incest, body horror, gynecological close-ups, bisexual orgies, negging, pegging, “redwings,” erotic choking, and nightmarish lapses in logic that, frankly, make no goddamn sense outside their subliminal expressions of psychosexual anxiety. It’s a gorgeous work of fine art that disarms its audience with its nonstop onslaught of inelegant prurience as a means of crawling under our skin and rotting us from the inside.

3. Mandy – So sinisterly beautiful & deafening that its aesthetic indulgences become a grotesque, horrifying display. This is less of a revenge thriller than it is a Hellish nightmare, a dream logic horror-show that drifts further away from the rules & sensory palettes of reality the deeper it sinks into its characters’ trauma & grief. Nic Cage may slay biker demons & religious acid freaks with a self-forged axe in a neon-lit, alternate dimension 1980s, but Mandy is not headbanging party metal. It’s more stoned-and-alone, crying over past trauma to doom riffs metal, where the flashes of fun & cosmic absurdity are only reminders of how cruelly uncaring & meaningless it can feel to be alive.

4. Dirty Computer – A fifty-minute narrative film stringing together an anthology of music videos with a dystopian sci-fi wraparound, this “emotion picture” delivers on the genre film undertones promised in Janelle Monáe’s early pop music career while also advancing the visual album as a medium to a new modern high. There are seven different directors listed as having collaborated on individual segments of Dirty Computer, but Monáe clearly stands out as the auteur of the project. A large part of that auteuism is how the film works as an expression of her newly public identity as a queer black woman navigating an increasingly hostile world that targets Others in her position, to the point where a tyrannical government facility is literally draining the gay out of her in tubes of rainbow ooze before she rises against them in open bisexual rebellion.

5. Sorry to Bother You – Incredibly dense, gleefully overstuffed sci-fi satire about the Amazon Prime-sponsored hellscape we’re already living in today – just bursting with things to say about race, labor, wealth, and the art of selling out. I can see how this movie’s third-act rug-pull could make a lot of people wince at it for going too far over-the-top, but that’s exactly when it went from good to great for me. The fact that it’s never satisfied with exploring one idea at a time when it could just as easily flood the screen with thousands is what endears it to me as one of the year’s clear stand-outs; more films cold benefit from being this wild & unrestrained, subtlety be damned.

6. Paddington 2 – There has always been dissent against the wholesome tweeness of visual artists like Michel Gondry & Wes Anderson, but those naysayers typically don’t give full credit to the deeply devastating sadness that lurks just under their works’ meticulously manicured surfaces. Paddington 2 nails both sides of that divide – the visually precious and the emotionally fragile – while teaching kids an important lesson about applying simple concepts like politeness & manners to their interactions with social & cultural outsiders. We always say we wish more children’s films were ambitious in their craft & purposeful in their thematic messaging; Paddington 2 wholly satisfies both demands.

7. Annihilation – It’s a shame more people didn’t take a chance on this Alex Garland sci-fi stunner when it was on the big screen. On one level, it’s just a visually gorgeous, weirdo monster movie that reimagines Tarkovsky’s Stalker with a Tumblr-ready pastel color palette & more traditional genre thrills. On a deeper level, though, it’s a powerful reflection on how grief & trauma transform us into entirely different people, to the point where that change becomes physical & irreversible. Haunting stuff.

8. Upgrade – The very real, very macho anxiety of approaching obsoletion at the hands of automated future-tech is shown in gloriously over-the-top extreme, where a once-mighty macho man now needs a computer’s help to even move a single muscle, much less stage a gory revenge mission against an effete Elon Musk archetype. Upgrade has an entirely different plot & satirical target than RoboCop, but the way it buries that social commentary under a thick layer of popcorn movie Fun that can just as easily be read at face value is very much classic Verhoeven. It’s a subversive, playing-both-sides tone that’s exceedingly difficult to pull off without tipping your hand, which is what makes this sci-fi action gem so instantly recognizable as a modern genre classic.

9. Cam – Between its Unfriended-style user interface horror about the Evils of the Internet and its smutty Brian De Palma modes of building tension through eerie sexual menace, this movie is so extremely weighted to things I personally love to see in cinema that my adoration for it was practically predestined. A neon-lit, feminist cyberthriller about modern sex work, Cam was custom-built to be one of my favorite films of the year just on the strengths of its subject matter & visual aesthetics alone. It’s only lagniappe, then, that the film is excellently written, staged, and performed – offering a legitimacy in craft to support my default-mode appreciation of its chosen thematic territory.

10. You Were Never Really Here – Director Lynne Ramsay’s latest grime-coated vision of a real-world Hell obscures the emotional release of traditional macho revenge thrillers by focusing only on the violence’s anticipation & resulting aftermath, never the act itself. You Were Never Really Here’s artistic merits are found almost entirely in its editing room tinkering, searching for freshly upsetting ways to depict onscreen violence by both lingering on its brutality and removing all of its tangible payoff. In crime thriller terms, this resembles the skeletal structure of a Liam Neeson-starring Dadsploitation power fantasy, but its guts are all the emotional, gushy stuff most action films deliberately avoid. And because this is a Lynne Ramsay picture, those guts are laid out to rot & fester.

11. BlacKkKlansman – As its buddy cop & blacksploitation throwback narratives power through their natural conclusions, BlacKkKlansman pretends to be a straight-faced, well-behaved participation in old-fashioned genre tropes meant to leave audiences entertained & satisfied. Then all of that easy, comforting payoff is swept away with an epilogue that effectively punches the audience in the gut, reminding us that we’re not supposed to feel good about the way the past has shaken out, that the modern world remains messy & nauseating in a way that can’t be captured in a fully satisfied genre exercise. Spike Lee knows exactly how storytelling conventions have trained audiences to expect easy, comforting resolutions to even the most sickening thematic territory, and he’s found potent, purposeful ways to weaponize that against us.

12. Unsane – Filmed on an iPhone and shamelessly participating in every mental institution thriller cliché you can imagine, Unsane is a Soderberghian experiment in the lowest rung of genre filth. It uses that unlikely platform to explore themes ranging from capitalist greed in modern medical & prison systems to male-dominated institutions’ flagrant dismissal of the concerns of women to the power dynamics of money & gender in every conceivable tier of society. Unsane experiments with a teetering balance between microbudget exploitation cinema & power-skeptical radical politics. They’re two flavors that shouldn’t mix well together in a single container but do find a chemically explosive reaction in the clash.

13. Flames – A collaboration between two filmmakers & conceptual artists documenting the rise & fall of their own romance, Flames presents a scenario where not being able to tell what’s genuine & what’s performance art can have emotionally devastating effects on a real-life relationship. Instead of merely manipulating audience perception, the filmmakers manipulate their own understanding of what’s even happening in their own lives, turning the already volatile emotional powder keg of a passionate romance into a daily terror of bruised egos, questionable motives, and petty acts of self-serving cruelty. It’s deeply fascinating, but it’s also deeply fucked up.

14. Shirkers – This documentary figuratively hit close to home with me in its profile of a D.I.Y. art project tragedy, but it also literally, geographically hit close to home with me in the trajectory of its narrative. I was pleasantly surprised to personally connect with the film as a self-portrait of a socially tactless, self-sabotaging D.I.Y. artist; director Sandi Tan got through to me via the merits of her brutal self-honesty & her authentic zine culture aesthetic. More superficially, she also got through to me with her story’s exponentially rapid trajectory to my front doorstep. It’s shocking how much of this story about a conflict that begins in Singapore finds its way to Mid-City New Orleans.

15. Eighth Grade – With a piercingly astute eye for the way social media has reshaped & mutated adolescent anxiety into an entirely new beast, Eighth Grade excels both as a snapshot of what life online looks like in the 2010s and as a distinct, character-driven drama even when removed from its of-the-moment focus on social media. Reductively speaking, it also excels as an anxiety Litmus test. You can either read its plot as a relatively low-stakes depiction of an adorable teen girl’s final week of middle school or as a horrifyingly relatable depiction of an anxious mess puzzling her way through a world that no longer seems conquerable & a changing self-identity she has little control over. I was personally watching it through my fingers as if it were a jump scare-heavy slasher.

16. Vox Lux – Brutal and coldly funny like a Yorgos Lanthimos film, yet absurdly earnest like a Mommie Dearest melodrama. A distanced philosophical statement on the current shape of Western pop culture, but also a gleefully perverse, intimate portrait of a woman behaving monstrously. Like mother!, Vox Lux is a divisive, shamelessly unsubtle work that gets outright Biblical in its internal, philosophical conflicts. It dares you to hate it, then asks for forgiveness. It spits in your face, then blows you a kiss.

17. The Favourite – No matter how wild or devilishly cruel The Favourite may seem in a costume drama context, it’s also a rare glimpse of Yorgos Lanthimos on his best behavior. Part of this smoothing out of his most off-putting impulses is due to the setting; an 18th Century royal court is the exact right place for buttoned-up, emotionally distanced mockery of “civility,” whereas it often feels alien or robotic in his more modern settings. Still, the jokes fly faster & with a newfound, delicious bitchiness. The sex & violence veer more towards slapstick than inhuman cruelty. The Favourite is Lanthimos seeking moments of compromise & accessibility while still staying true to his distinctly cold auteurist voice – and it’s his best film to date for it.

18. Beast – Partly a murder mystery concerning missing young girls in an isolated community, but mostly a dark romance tale about two dangerous people who can’t help but be pulled into each other’s violent orbits. There’s a distinctly literary vibe to Beast, nearly bordering on a Gothic horror tradition, that almost makes its modern setting feel anachronistic. The intense, primal attraction at the film’s core and the seedy murder mystery that challenges that passion’s boundaries make it feel like Wuthering Heights by way of Top of the Lake, like a modern take on Beauty & the Beast (except with two beasts).

19. Good Manners – On a horror movie spectrum, this is more of a gradual, what-the-fuck mind melt than a haunted house carnival ride with gory payoffs & jump scares at every turn. Descriptors like “queer,” “coming of age,” “romantic,” “body horror,” and “creature feature” can only describe the movie in spurts as it loses itself in the genre wilderness chasing down the details of its own nature & narrative. It’s an unconventional story about unconventional families, one where romantic & parental anxieties are hard to put into words even if they’re painfully obvious onscreen. Anyone with a hunger for dark fairy tales and sincerely dramatic takes on centuries-old genre tropes are likely to find a peculiar fascination with the subtle, methodical ways it bares its soul for all to see. Just don’t expect the shock-a-minute payoffs of a typical monster movie here; those are entirely secondary, if they can be detected at all.

20. Hereditary– Requires a little patience in allowing it to establish its peculiar version of atmospheric dread, but once the nightmare imagery & themes of familial resentment start piling up it more than makes up for the unease of that early stretch. Where it overachieves is in anchoring all of its glorious 70s-throwback horror vibes & stage play familial viciousness to the best Toni Collette acting showcase since Muriel’s Wedding (give or take a season of United States of Tara). You can’t overvalue a novelty like that.

-Brandon Ledet

Movies Screening in New Orleans This Week 1/3/19 – 1/9/19

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Here’s a quick round-up of the movies we’re most excited about that are screening in New Orleans this week.  In case you can’t tell, we’re starting to get into that glorious time of the year where Oscar Hopefuls trickle down South from NY & LA while dirt-cheap genre films simultaneously get dumped into wide-release. It’s a very satisfying, weirdly incongruous overlap.

Movies We Haven’t Seen (Yet)

If Beale Street Could Talk – Barry Jenkins follows up his Best Picture winner Moonlight with an adaptation of a James Baldwin novel set in 1970s Harlem. From what I can tell without spoiling it for myself, it appears to be brimming with gorgeous costumes, sensual romance, and a seething indictment of America’s inherently racist system of “justice.” Looks heavy, but emotionally powerful.

Escape Room – Whether it’s “Truth or dare?,” Pokémon Go, or CandyCrush, it seems like there’s always an early-in-the-year horror release waiting to exploit a silly game or novelty fad for cheap, goofy scares. This year, the random topic generator landed on escape rooms, which should be as good for a dumb-fun time at the movies as anything.

Mortal Engines – A steam punk action-fantasy epic about warring cities on wheels. Appears to fall halfway between Howl’s Moving Castle & Mad Max: Fury Road.  I doubt it’s half as good as either of those comparison points, but it looks impressively silly and this is likely its last week on local big screens.

Movies We Already Enjoyed

All About Eve (1950) – A classic Big Studio melodrama starring Bette Davis as an aging Broadway star who must fight to maintain her profession & fame in the face of a power-hungry fan who intends to usurp her. It won an impressive six Academy Awards in its day (including Best Picture) and is as excellent of a Bette Davis acting showcase as any you’ll see. Playing Sunday 1/6 & Wednesday 1/9 as part of Prytania’s Classic Movies series.

The Favourite – Yorgos Lanthimos follows up the stubbornly obscure The Killing of a Sacred Deer with his most accessible feature yet: a queer, darkly funny costume drama about a three-way power struggle between increasingly volatile women (Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, and Rachel Weisz). It’s both a gorgeous laugh riot and a pitch-black howl of unending cruelty & despair. Fun!

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse – In the abstract, the concept of a 2010s CG animation Spider-Man origin story sounds dreadful. In practice, prankster screenwriter Phil Lord explodes the concept into a wild cosmic comedy by making a movie about the world’s over-abundance of Spider-Man origin stories (and about the art of CG animation at large). Spider-Verse is a shockingly imaginative, beautiful, and hilarious take on a story & a medium that should be a total drag, but instead is bursting with energetic life & psychedelic creativity.

-Brandon Ledet

Movies Screening in New Orleans This Week 12/27/18 – 1/2/19

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Here’s a quick round-up of the movies we’re most excited about that are screening in New Orleans this week, including one of the most grotesque films of the year and one of the greatest films of all time.

Movies We Haven’t Seen (Yet)

Border – A Swedish fantasy-horror about a twisted creature-on-creature romance. This is supposed to be one of the most divisive, what-the-fuck cinematic freak-outs of the year, a repulsive nightmare. So why not watch it in public with fellow squirming weirdos? Only playing at Zeitgeist.

Roma – Alfonso Cuarón’s black & white period-piece epic & personal memoir is all but guaranteed to be a major Oscar contender in the next few months, but most people will only have a chance to see it at home on Netflix. We’re one of the few cities where audiences can fully immerse themselves in its lush cinematography & meticulously detailed sound design on the big screen. Only playing at The Broad Theater.

Mary Queen of Scots – Saoirse Ronan & Margot Robbie square off in a not-quite-historically-accurate costume drama directed by a legitimate mainstay of the British stage.  The reviews are generally positive, and this seems like the exact kind of buttoned-up period piece that earns Oscars attention, but that’s not why I’m excited. I just like to watch actors play Queen Elizabeth I, because it’s a role that invites them to chew scenery while dressed like a maniac, and I’m sure Margot Robbie is up for the task.

Movies We Already Enjoyed

Citizen Kane (1941) – It’s near impossible to live up to the hype of being The Greatest Film of All Time, but Citizen Kane does a damn good job of it. Here’s a pull-quote from when I reviewed it for my Roger Ebert Film School series a couple years ago: “It’s tempting to label Citizen Kane as the first modern film, the birth of an auteurist fever that wouldn’t fully take hold of the industry until the New Hollywood movement got rolling three decades later. Citizen Kane’s punishing rhythm and hands-off-the-handlebars fragmentation feels strikingly modern even at today’s standards.” Playing Sunday 12/30 & Wednesday 1/2 as part of Prytania’s Classic Movies series.

The Favourite – Yorgos Lanthimos follows up the stubbornly obscure The Killing of a Sacred Deer with his most accessible feature yet: a queer, darkly funny costume drama about a three-way power struggle between increasingly volatile women (Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, and Rachel Weisz). It’s both a gorgeous laugh riot and a pitch-black howl of unending cruelty & despair. Fun!

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse – In the abstract, the concept of a 2010s CG animation Spider-Man origin story sounds dreadful. In practice, prankster screenwriter Phil Lord explodes the concept into a wild cosmic comedy by making a movie about the world’s over-abundance of Spider-Man origin stories (and about the art of CG animation at large). Spider-Verse is a shockingly imaginative, beautiful, and hilarious take on a story & a medium that should be a total drag, but instead is bursting with energetic life & psychedelic creativity.

-Brandon Ledet

Dabney Coleman vs. Video Games

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When praising our current Movie of the Month, the hyperviolent children’s adventure pic Cloak & Dagger, there’s plenty of flashy details that distract from the novelty of the casting. The film’s cultural relic function as a desperate attempt to rescue Atari from the video game crash of 1983, its incongruous clash of boys’ adventurism spirit & cruel depictions of 80s action-violence, and its whimsical flights of escapist fantasy all overwhelm minor concerns with the details of its casting. The cast is such an afterthought, in fact, that no one thought twice about featuring Henry Thomas in the lead role, despite his face being on every cartridge of the E.T. video game that helped nearly bankrupt the company the year before. Thomas’s association with “the worst video game of all time” isn’t even the strangest novelty in the film’s casting. That honor belongs to That Guy! character actor Dabney Coleman, who’s cast in dual roles (!!) as the boy’s father & imaginary friend. As Henry Thomas’s dad, Coleman is a straight-laced family man widower doing his best to keep his home in order. As his imaginary friend Jack Flack, he’s a James Bond-type world adventurer, prepared at a moment’s notice to take out an entire warring country using only his American fists. Both roles are used in the film to teach Thomas a lesson about the dangers of escapist fantasy – the dad in stern talks about what true heroism looks like in the real world and Jack Flack in placing the boy in danger through his reality-detached fearlessness. As if this dual-role lesson about the fantasy-life dangers of video games & RPGs weren’t enough of a novelty alone, Coleman’s casting feels like a bizarre choice because of its echoing of a role he played exactly one year earlier, in what’s likely the most beloved alarmist anti-video game screed of all time.

Dabney Coleman’s role in the 1983 Cold War thriller WarGames feels like a perfect synthesis of his two roles in Cloak & Dagger. With his hair dyed unnaturally black like Jack Flack’s, Coleman plays a no-nonsense military man who both has no time for the fantasies of teenage gaming culture and lives the unreal international espionage lifestyle that’s exaggerated for comic effect in Flack. Coleman’s performance in WarGames is such a perfect midpoint between his two characters in Cloak & Dagger that the film feels more like an audition reel than it does like inspirational source material. He’s even called on to give Matthew Broderick’s teen protagonist a stern fatherly talking to about the dangers of video game fantasy, despite not being the boy’s father. In Cloak & Dagger, he’s right to warn his son about losing touch with reality in his roleplay gaming fantasies, but misses the larger point of how RPG’s & video games could be useful as a bonding tool with the lonely, grieving boy. In WarGames he’s right to update military procedure with computer programming automation, but misses the larger point of how video gameplay & gamesmanship logic are useful in war strategy – particularly in stalemate conflicts like The Cold War. As often happens with character actors, all three roles between these two films feel like different variations on the same archetype, and it’s funny that both of these Beware the Video Game movies thought to cast Coleman as their browbeating fuddy-duddies. As Cloak & Dagger is the more eccentric, over-the-top work, it plays almost like a parody of his grounded (even if archetypal) performance in WarGames. Both films’ paralleled arrival (along with their accompanying Atari game tie-ins) at the exact time the video game industry crashed only make comparing the two films all the more appealing; Colema’s casting in both projects is the perfect excuse to oblige.

Objectively speaking, WarGames is likely a superior film to Cloak & Dagger, but I’m not sure that quality craftsmanship is what I’m looking for in an 80s relic about how video game fantasy can put real lives at risk. A pre-fame Matthew Broderick & Ally Sheedy star as teen brats who hope to hack into a video game company’s unreleased titles, but instead mistakingly access a military supercomputer that nearly instigates WWIII. It’s the same video game fantasy leading to life-threatening danger premise of Cloak & Dagger, except in this case the danger is global instead of purely personal. As the teens play with real-life nuclear weapons as if they were toys, the tension between harmless bedroom fun & dead-serious war room retaliation says a lot about the automation, abstraction, and depersonalization of war (which has only gotten more intense in the last 35 years). At the same time, that abstraction & depersonalization makes its actual stakes feel almost too distanced to fully hit home, as opposed to the more hands-on dangers of video game fantasy in Cloak & Dagger. The conflict of a hacked, haywire computer nearly triggering nuclear war is truer to life than a boy’s imaginary friend landing him in a deadly game of international espionage, but there’s still something more affecting about watching a grown man pull a knife on an E.T.-era Henry Thomas or threaten to shoot out the child’s kneecaps “just to watch him bleed.” WarGames’s video game alarmism is also cleverer than Cloak & Dagger’s in the way it makes the video game itself a deranged character threatening death & destruction; in Cloak & Dagger the cartridge everyone is after is more or less a MacGuffin. Clever or not, I still find myself more drawn to the over-the-top, cartoonish antics of Cloak & Dagger (especially when they clash with brutal child-threatening violence), and the difference between the two films’ aesthetics is perfectly summarized by Coleman’s cartoonish performance of Jack Flack therein.

You don’t have to squint too hard to see the similarities between WarGames and Cloak & Dagger: two alarmist thrillers about the dangers of video games that arrived just when their subject’s industry was crashing, but were developed as Atari games anyway. Dabney Coleman’s casting as three characters across these two movies only helps further illustrate both the already apparent parallels between them and the difference in their respective tones. WarGames, as the more tonally sober war thriller, won out in the long run in both respect & notoriety, but the much sillier Cloak & Dagger deserves even more respect for its willingness to go for the jugular in ways you might not expect – especially considering how silly Coleman is in the Jack Flack persona.

For more on December’s Movie of the Month, the hyperviolent children’s action-adventure Cloak & Dagger (1984), check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, our comparison to another alarmist 80s roleplay gaming thriller Mazes & Monsters, and last week’s look at the death of Atari.

-Brandon Ledet

The Time Henry Thomas Buried Atari, Then Dug It Back Out

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One of the more interesting aspects of our current Movie of the Month, the violent children’s action-adventure Cloak & Dagger, is that it was in part designed to rescue Atari from financial ruin. After the video game crash of 1983 that nearly put Atari out of business for good, the ailing company hoped a movie tie-in deal might help boost its popularity (and promote video game culture in general) by joining the ranks of popular films like Tron & WarGames. Hitching its wagon to the in-development Cloak & Dagger project, which was eventually named after a real-life Atari 2600 cartridge that never made it to market, was a strange choice for a couple of reasons. On a big-picture level, Cloak & Dagger functions as alarmist propaganda about the dangers of video games & fantasy roleplay, so its dual role as an advertisement for a specific Atari game seems a little self-defeating. On a smaller, more specific level, the film’s pint-sized lead Henry Thomas seemed like an odd choice for a video game poster boy, seeing as how he was already closely associated with the industry’s 1983 downfall. It was kind of a bold move both for Henry Thomas’s agent and for Atari to risk associating the young actor, best known for his role as Elliott in E.T., with video games again so soon after the E.T. video game disaster. The E.T. tie-in video game was such an embarrassing flop for Atari (due mostly to poor craftsmanship in its rush to market) that it’s cited as one of the major contributing factors for the 1983 industry crash – the very thing that made desperate last-ditch efforts like Cloak & Dagger necessary in the first place. The game was such a flop that it inspired an urban legend about its unsold stock being buried in a New Mexico landfill—hundreds of thousands of deadstock cartridges with Henry Thomas’s face on the cover discarded underground. That’s not necessarily the first face I would think to cast in my movie meant to rescue the industry.

The most fascinating thing about the E.T. video game legend is that’s it’s (at least partially) true. The 2014 documentary Atari: Game Over is especially illuminating on the subject, tracking the search for and excavation of the E.T. landfill meant to prove its existence. In a way, it’s a total success. Excavation crews uncover a landfill packed with thousands of unsold Atari games in Alamogordo NM, near where scientists first tested the nuclear bomb. An entirely different kind of bomb, E.T.: “the worst video game of all time,” was included among those buried titles, but it did not comprise as much of the loot as the urban legend may have suggested. Only 10% of the video game cartridges recovered in that New Mexico landfill featured Henry Thomas’s face; buried along with E.T.: The Video Game were much better-respected titles like Yars’ Revenge, Pac-Man, and Centipede. Blaming the massive cartridge burial and, by extension, the entire video game crash of ’83 on the E.T. game just makes for a better story, whether or not the infamous flop deserved the mockery. Much of Atari: Game Over functions like rehabilitative PR for the E.T. game in that way. It explains how the game was rushed to market in just five weeks’ time to capitalize on the Christmas season, so that its very existence is kind of a computer programming miracle for the game’s designer, Howard Scott Warshaw. Although its frustrating gameplay that it lands its avatar, an unrecognizably pixelated E.T., in holes from which he can’t escape is explained to be far from the worst gameplay to grace the Atari console; it only seemed that way it compares to the quality of the movie. Interviews with Spielberg also confirm that the director himself approved the game before it hit the market, so it seems unfair that was effectively driven out of the video game business after E.T.’s failure, despite having designed more beloved games like Yars’ Revenge and the Raiders of the Lost Ark tie-in. Most damningly (but perhaps least surprisingly), industry experts also explain how the video game crash of ’83 was far from E.T.’s fault; the game’s failure was just the convenient scapegoat for much larger financial issues. The whole film serves as a pretty convincing argument for why Henry Thomas shouldn’t be barred from video game adaptations after the E.T. game’s failure, even if the optics are initially questionable.

As useful as I found Atari: Game Over in illustrating exactly what happened with the E.T. video game landfill, I can’t exactly recommend it as a well-made documentary. The only feature film produced for X-Box’s video content wing X-Box Originals, this very slight 66min doc feels like it has a target audience of 14-year-old boys and not that much wider. Director Zak Penn brings a decent pedigree to the project, as a writer for many major Hollywood comic book adaptations & one-time collaboration with Werner Herzog on The Incident at Loch Ness, but he mostly crafts this documentary like the video game equivalent of Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. Since the actual excavation of the Atari landfill can’t comprise an entire feature’s runtime on its own, the film busies itself crosscutting between the dig & an oral history of the early days of Atari that led to the E.T. debacle. There’s a lot of useful insight to be pulled from these interviews, but they just as often feel like a boys’ club glory days nostalgia trip – boosting the programmers’ own nerdy legacy instead of maintaining properly distanced, documentarian honesty. Ready Player One novelist Ernest Cline is a perfect mascot for how this unexamined, nerdy pop-culture worship comes across in its worst moments. He injects himself into the narrative of the landscape excavation it the cringiest of ways, staging a road trip to witness the dig by driving in a replica Back to the Future DeLorean he picks up form Game of Thrones author George RR Martin, accompanied by a life-size E.T. replica in the passenger seat. The self-described “screenwriter, novelist, and gentlemen adventurer” provides some useful context about how E.T.’s gameplay helped inspired the video game “Easter Egg” trope that guided the plot of Ready Player One, but mostly he just serves as the Guy Fieri of the piece—representing both its TV special qualities & its unwillingness to engage with pop culture nerdery as anything but The Greatest Thing Ever.

Regardless of Game Over’s quality as documentary filmmaking, the movie is extremely useful in illustrating both how the unsold E.T. cartridges featuring Henry Thomas’s face aren’t entirely responsible for the 1983 video game crash and how the urban legend surrounding them was so strong that casting him in Cloak & Dagger was risky anyway. As supplementary material, the film is more an act of reputation rehabilitation for the E.T. game & its creator than it is a revelation of anything directly related to Cloak & Dagger. Still, it’s an illustrative history of the cultural climate Cloak & Dagger was released in, a time when the future of video games as a lucrative industry did not seem as set in stone as it does now. It has no trouble finding nerds who were on the ground floor for those troublesome early days to reminisce about the era as if they were Guy Fieri singing the praises of Donkey Sauce.

For more on December’s Movie of the Month, the hyperviolent children’s action-adventure Cloak & Dagger (1984), check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and last week’s look at another alarmist 80s roleplay gaming thriller, Mazes & Monsters.

-Brandon Ledet

R.P.G.: R.I.P.

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Our current Movie of the Month, the 1984 children’s action-thriller Cloak & Dagger, has a lot to say about the dangers of fantasy roleplay gaming, but it’s all very confused & self-conflicting. If nothing else, the film seems to be confused about what gaming culture even is, conflating tools like video game cartridges and 12-sided board game dice as if they belonged to the same activity. Additionally, it cannot decide whether it wants to scare parents about the dangers of fantasy roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons or if it wants to promote the purchase of Atari cartridges like the one that gets its young tyke protagonist into a heap of trouble. Besides the film’s horrific eagerness to put children in life-threatening danger, I’d point to that self-conflicted messaging as one of the film’s major draws. In a key exchange in the first act, a father & son (Dabney Coleman & Henry Thomas) argue about the value of fantasy roleplaying and, in what’s rare for a children’s film from the era, both sides of the divide have a point – the father in pleading with his son to consider the practical realities of the world around him and the son in asking the father to participate in his gaming interests as a way of bonding. That well-balanced approach to the topic of fantasy roleplaying may be smart & nuanced, but it does dampen the novelty of Cloak & Dagger’s larger tendency to function as an alarmist siren to all parents everywhere that roleplay fantasy is corrupting their children’s minds. Thankfully, another early 80s gaming drama picked up the slack with a much less nuanced, raving lunatic screed against the dangers of D&D. And it even starred one of America’s most beloved celebrities.

The 1982 made-for-CBS melodrama Mazes & Monsters is a vision of what Cloak & Dagger would be like without dramatic nuance or tact. Based on a “true crime” novel about a real-life disappearance case where a fanatic D&D player committed suicide, the film deliberately skews logical cause & effect patterns to make RPGs out to be child-endangering killers. Mazes & Monsters opens with a news report explaining what fantasy roleplay gaming is and how it can directly lead to “loss of distinction between reality & fantasy, and possibly the loss of life in the process.” We’re then introduced to four college-age friends, each with deep-seated personal issues, who regular meet to play a fictional RPG called Mazes & Monsters when they should be focusing on their school work. Tom Hanks, in his first leading role, plays the most troubled of the foursome – a likely schizophrenic outsider haunted by the disappearance of his older brother. While the other players in his gaming circle have no trouble using the escapism of Mazes & Monsters to forget their personal issues (romantic, parental, school-related, or otherwise), Hanks’s fraying protagonist struggles with coming back down from the fantasy to return to normal life. He refuses to break character, hallucinates demons from the game in his real-life environment, and eventually runs off to NYC on a suicide mission to jump off The Twin Towers. His friends eventually call for help when they can’t stop him from doing a 9/11 to himself, but in the process feel compelled to lie about their involvement in the game, endangering him even further in their cautious self-preservation. Everything that touches the Mazes & Monsters game only leads to malady & misery.

The amusing thing about Mazes & Monsters is that it contradicts its own message just as much as Cloak & Dagger; it just seems to be entirely unaware that it’s doing so. The film shoots itself in the foot by foolishly swapping around the cause & effect of its alarmist fearmongering. The way the movie frames it, roleplaying games cause a psychological break with reality that generates a series of personal problems in the impressionable, weak-minded youngsters who succumb to their temptations of escapist fantasy. However, it also frames the Mazes & Monsters gamers as already-troubled youths who use the RPG lifestyle as a means of forming comraderie with like-minded peers. Tom Hanks’s troubled youth is already predisposed to schizophrenia & suicidal urges when he arrives to college; the social activity of roleplay gaming merely provides him with a safety net community who can call for proper medical attention when he needs it. Of course, this glorified Afternoon Special about the dangers of gaming misinterprets this dynamic to the opposite extreme and practically characterizes the RPG community as occultist freaks. Late night Mazes & Monsters sessions are candlelit as if they were witchy seances. Dragon-like demons (or at least hallucinations thereof) are summoned in condemned, life-threatening caves. Worst yet, the game is warned to even inspire your kids to run off to New York City, the biggest temple of sin since Sodom & Gomorrah. The depictions of fantasy roleplay gaming start off harmless & true enough – with college age nerds putting off studying for a Physics exam so they can roll 12-sided dice in a cramped dorm room. By the end of the film, however, it’s played with the authenticity & occult-fearing alarmism of a live-action adaptation of a Chick Tract.

As amusing as Mazes & Monsters’s alarmist rants about the otherworldly danger of roleplay fantasy gaming can be, and as adorable as it is to see Tom Hanks find his humble beginnings in a project so embarrassing in its central conceit, the movie is unfortunately too muted & slow-moving to recommend as an over-the-top novelty. It’s interesting as a comparison point to Cloak & Dagger (and the two films’ titles could be swapped with hardly anyone noticing), as it demonstrates what that superior film could have devolved into if it had fully committed to its scolding about the dangers of gaming. Cloak & Dagger‘s dual purpose as an advertisement for the flailing Atari 2600 console added an interesting, self-challenging layer to its anti-gaming moralism missing from Mazes & Monsters. Without it, that made-for- CBS melodrama only challenges its own message by missing the point entirely – advertising for roleplaying games as a source of community & comraderie in a misguided attempt to condemn the harmless activity for its supposed reality-distorting sorcery.

For more on December’s Movie of the Month, the hyperviolent children’s action-adventure Cloak & Dagger (1984), check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Movies to See in New Orleans this Week 12/13/18 – 12/19/18

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Here’s a quick round-up of the films we’re most excited about that are screening in New Orleans this week. After nearly a month of there being little to recommend, the mysterious distribution gods are actively trying to drown us. There’s so much to see!

Movies We Haven’t Seen (Yet)

The Favourite – Yorgos Lanthimos follows up the stubbornly obscure The Killing of a Sacred Deer with what appears to be his most accessible feature yet: a queer, darkly funny costume drama about a three-way power struggle between increasingly volatile women (Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, and Rachel Weisz). This is the one film I feel like I must see before contributing to any Best of the Year lists; it looks like a gorgeous riot.

Roma – Alfonso Cuarón’s black & white period-piece epic & personal memoir is all but guaranteed to be a major Oscar contender in the next few months, but most people will only have a chance to see it at home on Netflix. We’re one of the few cities where audiences can fully immerse themselves in its lush cinematography & meticulously detailed sound design on the big screen. Only playing at The Broad Theater.

The Big Easy (1986) – A big-budget erotic thriller starring Dennis Quaid & Ellen Barkin, shot on location in 1980s New Orleans.  Come for the hot & steamy criminal-world intrigue; stay for the documentary glimpses of 80s New Orleans locales like Tipitina’s, Antoine’s, Mardi Gras parade float warehouses, and French Quarter strip clubs. Screening Thursday 12/13 at The Prytania Theatre.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse – Spider-Man & CG animation are two filmmaking arenas I usually don’t care about at all, but there’s a lot of promise in the screenwriting involvement of Phil Lord (Clone High, Last Man on Earth, The Lego Movie) and the movie’s Ben-Day dots visual design. Its high critical scores (99% on Rotten Tomatoes, 85 on Metacritic) also suggest that it’s something worthy of my time, despite my genre biases.

Movies We Already Enjoyed

Female Trouble (1974) – Divine might not have ever gotten those cha-cha heels she wanted from Santa and John Waters may never make the gay Christmas movie Fruitcake that he wrote, but you can still celebrate XXX-Mas with the Dreamlanders this weekend with a drag-themed screening of Female Trouble.  Drag performers Puddin’ Tain, Titibaby, Squirt Reynolds and Tarah Cards will host a rowdy midnight screening of the film (with the pre-show starting at 11) Saturday 10/15 at the AllWays Lounge (as an unofficial afterparty for the performance of A John Waters Christmas at the Civic).

Vox Lux – Natalie Portman stars as an off-the-rails pop star in the middle of a spectacular breakdown in the public spotlight. A lot of people are going to hate this, but I was really won over by it when we caught it at NOFF. It’s brutal and coldly funny like a Lanthimos film, but also absurdly earnest like a Mommie Dearest melodrama. It’s interesting as a philosophical indictment of modernity, but also just a perverse joy in watching a woman behave monstrously (and dance to Sia songs) without repercussion. Bold, alienating stuff – the mother! of 2018.

Widows – Academy Award-winning director Steve McQueen cashes in some of his prestige points to make a heist picture about a group of ordinary women who reluctantly transform into violent criminals, a collaboration with Gone Girl writer Gillian Flynn. I was surprised by how much of his one functions like an ensemble cast melodrama instead of the action-thriller that was advertised. Not disappointed, just surprised. It feels like a movie custom built for people whose all-time favorite TV show is still The Wire, which, who could blame ‘em?

Jim Henson’s Holiday Special (1977, 1984) – A Yuletide, Muppet-themed double feature of Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas and The Bells of Fraggle Rock, two beloved Jim Henson holiday classics. Screening Sunday 12/16 via Fathom Events.

-Brandon Ledet

Movies to See in New Orleans this Week 12/5/18 – 12/12/18

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Here’s a quick rundown of the movies we’re most excited about that are screening in New Orleans this week.

Movies We Haven’t Seen (Yet)

Mirai – A tender animated drama about a young child’s jealousy of his newly arrived baby sister that eventually transforms into a time & space defying fantasy adventure, boosted by Miyazaki-style anime artistry.  Screening Saturday 12/8 via Fathom Events.

Creed II – I’m not much of a sports movie fanatic, but Ryan Coogler’s 2015 boxing drama Creed was enough of a knockout to punch past my genre biases and knock me on my ass.  It’s one of a very select few sports movies I can think of that made me weep instead of lulling me to sleep. Coogler is not involved with this scrappier follow-up, but reviews have mostly been positive and supporting actor Tessa Thompson is already in three of my favorite releases of the year (Annihilation, Dirty Computer, and Sorry to Bother You), so it still seems to be worth a look.

Movies We Already Enjoyed

Widows – Academy Award-winning director Steve McQueen cashes in some of his prestige points to make a heist picture about a group of ordinary women who reluctantly transform into violent criminals, a collaboration with Gone Girl writer Gillian Flynn. I was surprised by how much of his one functions like an ensemble cast melodrama instead of the action-thriller that was advertised. Not disappointed, just surprised. It feels like a movie custom built for people whose all-time favorite TV show is still The Wire, which, who could blame ‘em?

Overlord– This is less the Nazi Zombie Movie tedium delivered in Dead Snow than it is an over-the-top descendant of Re-Animator, reinterpreted as a WWII video game. It’s cartoonish schlock with a big studio budget behind it – a deliriously fun, cathartic middle finger to the Nazi grotesqueries of the modern world. Only screening at Canal Place, likely its final week on local big screens.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Cloak & Dagger (1984)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before and we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made Boomer, Brandon, and CC watch Cloak & Dagger (1984).

Britnee: Even as a grown woman, I find that I still watch a lot of children’s films, which is obvious from some of my past Movie of the Month choices (e.g., Magic in the Mirror, Something Wicked This Way Comes). The reason I get so much joy from indulging in films created for kids is that watching them whisks me away from my boring life of being a lame adult. Children’s films are full of imagination, creativity, and nostalgia – all things that I love. And so my selection for December’s Movie of the Month is yet another imaginative, nostalgic children’s film: Richard Franklin’s 1984 children’s adventure classic, Cloak & Dagger.

Cloak & Dagger is different from the average children’s movie, though, because it is extremely violent, making it super fun to watch as an adult. The film is about a dorky kid named Davey (Henry Thomas of E.T. fame) that spends most of his time going on adventures with his imaginary friend, Jack Flack (Dabney Coleman). Jack is the main character of Cloak & Dagger, a spy-adventure Atari game that Davey is obsessed with. After Davey is handed a Cloak & Dagger cartridge by a dying man in a stairwell, his life becomes Cloak & Dagger for real instead of for pretend. The cartridge contains top-secret government plans, and he must protect it at all costs. Things get crazy when a mysterious group of men hunt Davey down, intent to get their hands on the game (and to murder Davey in cold blood).

Brandon, were you surprised by the amount of violent action in Cloak & Dagger? What kind of reception do you think this film would receive if it was released in theaters today?

Brandon: I was definitely taken aback by the violence of Cloak & Dagger. Shocked, even. The film’s Video Game: The Movie gimmickry and casting of Dabney Coleman (in a dual role as both father & imaginary friend) promises a fun, goofy knockoff of WarGames about a young boy’s spy-mission fantasy antics. Instead, Cloak & Dagger mostly plays like a terrifying thriller about an international network of ruthless child murderers, only wearing its PG kids’ adventure movie pedigree as a disguise. The gleeful brutality of the child-hunting terrorists in Cloak & Dagger extends far beyond the normal Bad Guy goons just doing their jobs that typically fill the villain roles in these kinds of movies; they’re really looking forward to destroying their pint-sized tagrets (E.T.‘s Henry Thomas is paired up with a precocious Drew Barrymore-type for a sidekick, go figure), even more so than recovering their top-secret video game cartridge. The children of Cloak & Dagger are throttled, shot at, nearly stabbed, delivered bombs and, most cruelly, locked in car trunks with the corpses of their dead friends. Burly men burst into their homes, growling threats of how they’re going to blow up the entire neighborhood or shoot out the kids’ kneecaps before actually killing them, just to watch them bleed. All of this violence is supposedly in service of teaching Davey a lesson about how the adventurism he craves is no match for the stability of the loving home his father provides, but it is pushed to a traumatic extreme that definitely feels distinct for the genre.

As extreme as the brutality of Cloak & Dagger feels in retrospect, the film is clearly a product of its time. Sneaking into theaters just before the advent of the PG-13 rating, it got away with a lot of its violence because of the amoral grey area of not-quite-children’s-media that arose & died in its era. Along with Spielberg productions like Gremlins & Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Cloak & Dagger presented a confounding trend for the uptight pearl-clutchers at the MPAA: films that weren’t sexually crass enough to earn an R-rating, but were far too violent to be rated PG, requiring the invention of an entirely new rating. If released even months later, Cloak & Dagger would have been saddled with a PG-13 rating, which likely would have preempted it from becoming a modest hit. Cutting out that much of its potential customer base (by making a children’s movie only teenagers could see without a guardian in tow) would likely mean that a modern release of Cloak & Dagger either wouldn’t be greenlit in the first place, or would be sanitized of the violence that makes it distinct. Modern audiences struggle with embracing violent children-in-danger narratives in general, and the few that sneak through (Midnight Special, Kubo and the Two Strings, and Tomorrowland, to name a recent few) are often commercially shrugged off until they effectively disappear. The PG-rated brutality of Cloak & Dagger is just as 1980s-specific as the kids in the film being given free reign to ride the city bus wherever they like without chaperones and waving around black plastic toy guns in office buildings; it simply wouldn’t be permissed in modern day.

Of course, Cloak & Dagger is also adorably dated to the 1980s in its treatment of video game culture as an opportunity for a cash-grab, a flash-in-the-pan fad. One of the first instances of corporate synergy in the cinematic video game tie-in market (via a real-life Cloak & Dagger game simultaneously released to arcades by Atari) this film could have just as easily been titled Video Game: The Movie. Yet, it doesn’t seem to understand video games at all, likening all types of gaming (role play, cards, board games, arcades) as if they were all of the same cloth and not separate forms of amusement. CC, what do you make of Cloak & Dagger‘s adorably antiquated understanding of video game culture and how that tone clashes with the severity of its children-in-danger brutality? Does that juxtaposition date the film in a delightfully entertaining way or is it prohibitively distracting?

CC: I wasn’t there to experience it, so I could be wrong, but I feel like leisure activities have dramatically evolved in the past 50 years. When Cloak & Dagger came out, I’m not 100% sure that video games were seen by the wider culture as any different from table-top RPGs, card games, board games, or the games of skill seen in arcade halls. The types of amusements depicted in Cloak & Dagger were once considered the amusements of children – and children only. The only adult who plays video games in the movie was portrayed as a socially awkward nerd who is coded as existing in a state of arrested development. Now that video games are mainstream and firmly established as their own multi-billion-dollar industry, separate from all other types of gaming, I feel like the distance between these types of amusement has expanded. Further, the desire of the children of the 1980s to continue playing video games as they got older pushed it into the mainstream and increased the age of the average player. Today, I feel like table-top RPGs and campaign board games are more of a late-teen to adult amusement. Or perhaps I’m overestimating the level of perceived difference in types of gaming among actual gamers and the jumbling of elements has more to do with the writers’ cluelessness?

I never really felt that the clash between the gaming sensibilities and the violence were what was jarring. It was simply the protagonist’s young age that made the level of violence seem discordant. Personally, I liked the level of violence in this because it drove home the point that the Cold War Era table-top RPGs our protagonist was obsessed with included a huge amount of senseless violence. It’s only when you see that gore portrayed onscreen that you understand the intensity of the violence in the fantasy world he was already immersed in. On the page it’s fun and games, but in real life it’s terrifying.

Boomer, during our October Movie of the Month discussion for The Pit we talked a little bit about the mental health of Jamie, the sociopathic (but previously written as autistic or at least on the spectrum) lead. I feel like this film also walks a fine line between portraying its protagonist, Davey, as an obsessed child who gets carried away with his games to the point of hallucinating his hero Jack Flack – and a normal, but imaginative child who is truly trapped in a dangerous situation. How do you think this film handled Davey’s mental state? Did you feel that the level of judgement towards Davey’s game-playing was warranted?

Boomer: There’s certainly a level of “the newest form of entertainment is evil” panic present in the film, at least as far as Davey’s father is concerned. Some of this could simply be a filmmaker’s panic about video games; after all, history is filled with (externally moralized) panic about television replacing film, phonographs replacing people’s desire to learn how to play a musical instrument, and the printing press being an invention of the devil. With the advent of home gaming in the early 80s, there were many attempts to demonize that there newfangled video console. (Given that the video game industry is making money hand over fist and pulling in more revenue than movies, perhaps their concerns were justified.) Within the context of the film itself, Davey’s father’s concerns are justified: while he’s at work, his son gets so into his fantasy world that he’s wandering around downtown San Antonio and flashing very realistic toy guns in front of office lobby security. The security guard who sees a kid with what could easily be a real gun and doesn’t do anything about it is really bad at his job. While it would have been pretty bad for the elderly spies to escape with the secret stealth bomber plans hidden on the cartridge, this plot should never have happened, because Davey should have been asked where his parents were and his dad should have been called at work as soon as he flashed his piece in a crowded building. I live in Texas and the open carry laws are pretty lenient, but even in the 80s this wouldn’t have flown. The film sets up Mr. Osborne to be, within the context of this narrative, rightfully concerned that Davey is experiencing some degree of difficulty separating reality from fantasy, and so the lesson for children does seem to be that video games (and by association tabletop RPGs, etc.) are not to be trusted. Alternatively, a reasonable kid could also take away the lesson that, should you happen to witness a murder or something else you can’t immediately prove, maybe you should explain it to your parents in a realistic way and not talk about your imaginary friend in the process; that ups your credibility. Further, as with most stories in which new media are denigrated, most kids will recognize that the people making it have no idea how any of it works, which is in full evidence here in the way that no one making the movie understands how video games work or how figurines could play into it.

Brandon noted that this is part of that 80s zeitgeist of movies in which kids are doing pretty spectacular things, and they either fool their parents (who are useless), or their parents don’t believe them (again, useless), until at the end of the film Mom or Dad (never both in the 80s: Dad’s either left the family or Mom’s dead) demonstrate that they really do love Child Protagonist in a way that could be dangerous to them, but it all works out in the end. One of the things that this film didn’t do was have the two single parents of the kids have that moment at the end when everyone’s safe and they look at each other with a “maybe romance?” twinkle in their respective eyes. In fact, given the overall level of violence (it hasn’t been mentioned yet, but our Child Protagonist kills a man) and a pretty winding plot, there are probably more “rules” of kids movies from this era that are being broken that I’m overlooking. Britnee, as the expert on this genre and the person who’s seen Cloak & Dagger more than once, what are some of the other subversions and broken rules at play here?

Britnee: Piggybacking off your statements about the role of parents in 1980s kids’ movies, often when the child has a deceased parent there’s at least one or two scenes where they have an “I wish Mom/Dad was here” moment, or something is done to honor their parent’s memory. A memorable example would be when Bastian from The NeverEnding Story calls the Childlike Empress “Moonchild,” which is believed to be the name of his late mother. This trope even persists in animated children films of the 1980s. In The Land Before Time (which I still truly cannot watch without crying like a baby until this day), the spirit of Littlefoot’s deceased mother guides him on his journey to The Great Valley. The only mention of Davey’s deceased mother in Cloak & Dagger is from his father. Davey never talks about her or references her, and she never shows up to give him any sort of spiritual guidance. Perhaps having the memory of his mother more present in his decision-making would have softened up the film a bit?

What really stood out to me after watching Cloak & Dagger recently is how Davey was so willing to go with the elderly couple who end up being total creeps. For some reason, in both film and in real life, the older a person is, the safer they seem to be. The sweetly helpful elderly couple is all too common of a trope in children’s movies, so the twist that they are villains here is shocking. Trusting the old couple was the biggest mistake that Davey made because they were just as evil as the pack of child-killers chasing him. The most important lesson that can be learned from Cloak & Dagger is that Stranger Danger has no age limit.

Cloak & Dagger also strays away from the average 1980s kids’ movie because there’s really nothing magical or whimsical in it. There are no buried treasures or mythical creatures. The villains are grown men with guns; it takes place in San Antonio, Texas; and all that’s at stake are some lame secret government plans. Even though Jack is an imaginary friend, he doesn’t have any superpowers or magical abilities, which are typical imaginary friend qualities. The only thing in the film that was a little outside-of-the-box is the giant multi-sided dice in the opening scene. The more that I think about it, Cloak & Dagger is essentially a kids’ movie made for old men.

Brandon, do you think the film would have been better if Jack had superpowers? Like making weapons appear out of thin air for Davey to use against the bad guys?

Brandon: I was delighted by the jarring, Top Secret!-style spy-movie spoof that opens Cloak & Dagger, but I’m also glad the fantasy stopped there. That run-in with the giant dice is a concise, disorienting taste of Davey’s inner-fantasy life before the film moves on to contrast that escapism with the harsh, violent realities of the real world. Giving Jack Flack real-world superpowers might have made for a different kind of fun kids’ movie, but it would have ruined the dynamic that makes this one so special: the disconnect between Davey’s swashbuckling boys’ adventurism and the real-life implications of the violence that often defines those adventures. That dynamic is not only fascinating because of the horrific levels of 80s action movie violence leveled on children in a PG context, but also because of how it affects Davey’s relationship with his overworked father.

As Boomer already touched on, Cloak & Dagger stands out as the rare children’s film where both the kid & the parent actually have a point in their central conflict. Yes, Daddy-Dabney Coleman faces the same resentments about valuing career over family that plague most single parents in kids’ media. However, his explanation to Davey that “real heroes do boring things” like provide stability & shelter for their loved ones (instead of saving the world in grand, bullet-riddled adventures) is more justification than most single-parent archetypes get in this context. At the same time, Davey’s insistence that his dad play along with his interest in gaming so that they can spend intimate, quality time together is also justified by the danger that envelops him when he’s left to his own devices (namely, an Atari & a bus pass). Giving Imaginary Dabney Coleman real-life superpowers might have tipped the scales of justification further in Davey’s direction, which would be a shame since it’s rare to see such an evenly weighted parental conflict in a kids’ movie.

Cloak & Dagger was originally adapted from a short story (presumably written solely to pitch the movie) titled “The Boy Who Cried Murder,” so there’s plenty of implication that the film was meant to serve as a cautionary tale about getting lost in the fantasy of gaming – the same alarmist territory covered in the Tom Hanks Dungeons & Dragons cautionary tale Mazes & Monsters. At the same time, the film really wants you to invest in the struggling Atari console, so much so that it’s directly marketing a tie-in Cloak & Dagger video game by incorporating its cartridge & gameplay as a central part of the plot. Daddy-Dabney Coleman is also taught a lesson that parents should not blindly dismiss their kids’ interest in gaming, encouraging them to play along so they can be involved in their kids’ inner lives. CC, what do you make of this self-contradictory moralizing about the dangers of gaming and encouragement for parents to play Atari with their kids? Does Cloak & Dagger attempt “to have its cake & eat it too” or does it make a clear, substantive statement about whether gaming is a danger or if it’s harmless fun?

CC: It’s difficult to parse out the filmmakers’ intent, but there is definitely an internal struggle between the idea that games are a dangerous mind-suck and the reaction that golly-gee, that new Atari game sure looks swell. Even when they’re trying to sell you a new video game, they make it very clear that, unless you’re a well-adjusted parent trying to forge a stronger bond with your child, the only adults that play games are socially awkward nerds. They certainly spend more of the film’s runtime emphasizing the dark sides of gaming (obsession, fantastic delusion, misplaced trust in the elderly) that any pro-gaming messages seem like an afterthought, or were perhaps shoehorned in after Atari’s team watched the rough cut.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what the intent was. Due to the video game crash of 1983, Atari halted production on the home console version of Cloak & Dagger (and the company went bankrupt shortly after). All of the screenshots in the film were pulled from the arcade version and the cartridges were fakes. Perhaps the conflicted tone of the movie gives us some insights into the turmoil of Atari’s marketing department. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Mark, imagine you were the right age when Cloak & Dagger came out (and Atari had released the home console version). Would you have wanted to purchase your own copy after seeing this movie?

Boomer: You know, I don’t think that I would have been that into it, but I’m not sure. I like video games and always have, but I’ve never really been much of a “gamer” (especially as, almost from its inception, online gaming has been a cesspool of homophobic and racist language used by children without oversight or parental guidance), and I’m old enough to remember when the gatekeepers of that fandom looked down on me for my unending love of Halo (then derogatorily referred to as a “Doom clone” before we came to call those games by the more appropriate term “first person shooter”). But as a kid growing up in economically depressed Southeastern Louisiana, we were always behind the times technologically, although I still clearly remember getting the original Game Boy for Christmas in 1995, six years after its release, and I’ve been lagging behind ever since; I bought my Xbox 360 in 2008, three years after it hit the shelves and even then only because my tax return that year was pretty good, and ten years later it’s still the most sophisticated thing that I own. That having been said, the depictions of video games in movies rarely piques my interest, and I don’t think that this would have been any different had I been the appropriate age for this film when it was released. It makes an interesting companion piece to The Wizard, which came out 5 years later and which I do remember from its television airings when I was younger; I remember being fond of that movie, but that might simply be the fact that even as a child I knew that I would follow Jenny Lewis to the ends of the earth. The first video game I can remember playing in the home (the local seafood po-boy place at the corner of Plank and Hwy 64 had both Pole Position and Ms. Pac-Man, both over ten years old by that point) was the bizarre Bouncing Babies, which came with our monochromatic MS-DOS HP that was inherited from a friend of the family in 1996 (again, 12 years after that game was originally released) and which I loved.

The actual gameplay of the Cloak & Dagger video game that we see doesn’t look like much fun, to be honest, and I don’t think even child-Boomer would have been impressed or interested. The graphics are bad, even for that time; compare the onscreen presentation to something like Frogger, Donkey Kong, and especially Dragon’s Lair, all of which predated or were contemporaries of C&D, and there’s really no contest. Cloak & Dagger looks muddied, clipped, and just plain ugly. Of course, that may just be the way that the refresh rate on the monitors that characters are using in the movie interacted with film, since actual screengrabs from the game look amazing in comparison. Still, as a kid, I don’t think that I would have been that interested, especially since even for a patient kid like me, this movie was long, and the gameplay was the least captivating thing about it. I would have been much more interested in the real-world make-believe play-acting that the kids in this movie did. In fact, if I remember correctly, I used to desperately want a pair of amazing walkie-talkies that I could use to talk to my best friend from a long way away more than I wanted anything else as a kid, a desire that was fanned by other movies with similarly unrealistic performance ranges (I’m looking at you, Three Ninjas).

The other thing that would have really stood out to me as a kid, even more than its video game subplot, were the villains. The elderly couple make for pretty memorable antagonists. I told a friend that I had watched this movie the day before, and he said that this was on the movies that his elementary school had on VHS to be pulled out on rainy days (which . . . yikes). When asking questions to make sure he was remembering the right movie, he didn’t mention any Atari cartridges or an imaginary friend: his strongest memory was of the evil elderly spies. Take from that what you will.

Lagniappe

Boomer: So this movie is pretty blatantly propaganda for San Antonio’s public transportation system, right? That and the River Walk.

Britnee: Dabney Coleman looks like he smells like a mix of chewing tobacco and fabric softener. This applies to his role as Davey’s father and as Jack Flack.

Brandon: It was kind of a bold move both for Henry Thomas’s agent and for Atari to risk associating the young actor with gaming so soon after the E.T. video game disaster. The E.T. tie-in video game was such an embarrassing flop for Atari (due mostly to poor craftsmanship in its rush to market) that it’s cited as one of the major contributing factors for the video game industry crash of 1983 – the very thing that made desperate last-ditch revitalization efforts like Cloak & Dagger necessary in the first place. As confirmed in the 2014 documentary Atari: Game Over, thousands of copies of the E.T. game were buried in a New Mexico landfill to clear the unsold stock, each with Henry Thomas’s face on the cartridge. That’s not necessarily the first face I would think to cast in my movie about a video game fantasy adventure.

CC: As much as I like kids in danger, I dunno, this one doesn’t do it for me. I think Britnee got it right when she said it was a kids film for old men. Plus the opening scene reminded me of Top Secret! & The Naked Gun and I hate ZAZ/Leslie Nielsen films.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
January: The Top Films of 2018

-The Swampflix Crew