Lists & Articles

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 14: Cool Hand Luke (1967)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

EPSON MFP image

Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Cool Hand Luke (1967) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 93 of the first edition hardback, Ebert recalls eating 26 raw eggs in order to win a contest during his college fraternity’s Hell Week, likening it to the egg-eating binge in Cool Hand Luke. His prize was a night of sleep.

What Ebert had to say in his reviews: “The movie hero used to be an inspiration, but recently he has become a substitute. We no longer want to be heroes ourselves, but we want to know that heroes are on the job in case we ever need one. This has resulted in an interesting flip-flop of stereotypes. Used to be the anti-hero was a bad guy we secretly liked. Then, with Brando, we got a bad guy we didn’t like. An now, in ‘Cool Hand Luke,’ we get a good guy who becomes a bad guy because he doesn’t like us. Luke is the first Newman character to understand himself well enough to tell us to shove off. He’s through risking his neck to make us happy.” -from his 1967 review for the Chicago Sun-Times

“Luke calls out to God at the end: ‘It’s beginnin’ to look like you got things fixed so I can’t never win out. Inside, outside, all them rules and regulations and bosses. You made me like I am. Just where am I supposed to fit in? Ol’ Man, I gotta tell ya. I started out pretty strong and fast. But it’s beginnin’ to get to me. When does it end?’ He gets his answer quickly enough, but what other answer could he have expected? The problem between Luke and God is nothing more than a failure to communicate. Having seen this powerful, punishing movie again freshly, I reflect than in 1967 I didn’t approach it with the proper pessimism. Today, it seems to be God does a fairly good job of getting his message across.” -from his 2008 review for his Great Movies series

EPSON MFP image

There’s a stubborn, tough as nails brand of masculinity that drips from every frame in Cool Hand Luke (sometimes literally, in the form of sweat) that I have a tough time connecting with. Paul Newman’s performance as the titular Luke injects young Brando bravado into a grown man’s physique (instead of whatever bizarre monster Brando himself evolved to become). Luke’s life imprisoned on a chain gang knows little tenderness as he struggles to stay strong in the face of knee-buckling manual labor & abusive authority. Just about the only thing I can relate to in Luke’s life is the oppressive sweat & dehydration leveled on him by the hellish Southern heat. The cigar chomping, shower fighting, smack talking, backyard boxing, poker game bluffing world that contains Luke’s prison sentence (imposed on him for robbing parking meters while blind drunk) are about as foreign to me as a Martian landscape or the lost city of Atlantis. Still, there’s a few touches of religious epiphany, delirious absurdism, pitch black nihilism, and political rebellion that manage to break through this chiseled veneer of braggadocio to reveal the the film has a lot more on its mind than just being the toughest guy in the room.

It’s easy to point out the moments when Cool Hand Luke reveals its hand & lets down the hyper-masculine guard to reveal something vulnerable underneath. A scene where Luke beautifully plays “Plastic Jesus” on a banjo to mourn his mother’s death comes to mind, as does a sequence where the chain gang feverishly digs a ditch while ogling a woman in a sundress who makes a show out of washing her car. That latter moment in particular reaches some bizarre, Russ Meyer-esque territory that plays onscreen like a live action cartoon. What really stands out as the film’s centerpiece, though, is a sequence in which Luke settles a bet by eating 50 hard-boiled eggs in a single sitting (50!). So much time & care goes into the egg-eating sequence that it completely shifts the course of the prison-life drama that precedes it. It initially amuses, then disgusts, then reaches some kind of transcendent religious sanctity that’s difficult to describe in words. After settling his egg-eating bet, Luke is laid out shirtless, bloated, and mimicking the stretched-out pose of Christ’s crucifixion. He is near death in his egg-stuffed state, but he emerges as a makeshift messiah in the eyes of the other prisoners (including a baby faced Dennis Hopper & Harry Dean Stanton among them) once he resurrects. It’s amazing that the film can turn something so seemingly trivial into something so essentially pivotal.

So much changes after the egg feast that Cool Hand Luke starts to feel like an entirely different movie. Instead of sizing each other up & jockeying for dominance, the prisoners form a tight camaraderie centered around their new, egg-chomping christ. Luke’s biggest bully (played with gusto by old-timer George Kennedy) in particular falls deeply, madly in love with him, calling him things like “my baby” and a “wild, beautiful thing.” They also rally around Luke when he’s unfairly locked in solitary confinement & subsequently makes several failed attempts to escape chain gang imprisonment. The strange thing about Luke’s deification is that he is far from messiah material. There’s no real rhyme or reason to his crimes or his stubborn defiance. He was arrested for getting drunk & destroying property. He takes delight in being a “crazy handful of nothing”, declaring that during a poker game, “Sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand.” There’s an emptiness & a nihilism to Luke’s refusal to genuinely engage with life in any significant way & when his fellow prisoners find a religious epiphany & devotion in that idea it plays as remarkably sad. It’s all over something as meaningless as a few dozen eggs.

There’s enough religious imagery & visual symbolism (including focus on signs that read things like “STOP” & “VIOLATION”) in Cool Hand Luke that it’s really tempting to read into its overall metaphor. You can can see Ebert’s struggle to nail down its exact meaning himself over the course of his two reviews, flipflopping between how Luke’s attitude & the film’s overall brutality are meant to be read. I think Ebert got closest when he called the film an “anti-establishment” work of rebellion. I don’t think reading any specific metaphors into its stance on the Vietnam War or the Civil Rights movement of the time would reveal anything more than a general disgust for authority & abuse of power, though. It’s “anti-establishment” in the same way that its contemporary Bonnie & Clyde was, except with a crucial difference in philosophy. Bonnie & Clyde felt wildly, dangerously celebratory in its displays of open rebellion, but Cool Hand Luke is decidedly empty, meaningless, a monument to nothing. You can see its cold, nihilistic view of the world reflected in the aviators of “The Man With No Eyes,” an especially cruel prison guard who serves as the film’s de facto Grim Reaper. You can see it in the way Luke lets down the prisoners who gave him all of their love & religious devotion in exchange for a big fat nothing. Perhaps the reason I “had a failure to communicate” with Cool Hand Luke‘s hyper macho posturing in the early scenes is that I read it as a glorification, a tribute to something to believe in. Once I realized the film believes in nothing at all –religion, masculinity, or otherwise– I was fully on board. Fifty hard-boiled eggs & a frivolous bet was all it took me to get there.

EPSON MFP image

Roger’s Rating : (4/4, 100%)

fourstar

Brandon’s Rating (4/5, 80%)

fourstar

Next Lesson: Citizen Kane (1941)

-Brandon Ledet

Alligator (1980) and 5 Other Must-See, Sharkless Jaws (1975) Knockoffs

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

EPSON MFP image

June’s Movie of the Month, the 1980 natural horror Alligator, is fascinating for many reasons, not least of all for being s a sharkless Jaws ripoff that mostly takes place out of the water. The years after Spielberg’s runaway success with that game-changing big budget creature feature saw a slew of cheap knockoffs of many different flavors. Many post-Jaws natural horrors didn’t even bother hiding their mimicry by changing their central monster’s species (Mako: The Jaws of Death, Tintorera: Tiger Shark, Great White aka The Last Shark, Blood Beach, etc., but there were plenty of Jaws imitators that did reapply the film’s mythically-gigantic beast model to non-shark animalia. Alligator‘s ginormous, vengeful monster Ramón was clearly inspired by his Great White predecessor but he was far from alone. We already covered much of what makes Alligator special in our Swampchat discussion of the film, but what of the other sharkless Jaws knockoffs that terrorized the drive-ins & grindhouses of the late 70s & early 80s?

Here are the five best sharkless, non-Alligator Jaws knockoffs I could find lurking in schlock cinema’s murkiest waters.

 

1) Piranha (1978)

Piranha is a special case within the Jaws-knockoff continuum, because it forms a sort of schlock cinema ouroboros. A lot of what films like Jaws & Star Wars did in the late 1970s was elevate the b-movie genre film work folks like Roger Corman had been producing for years to a big budget Hollywood “event film” format. With Piranha, Roger Corman bit back, “borrowing” from (and in some ways openly mocking) a big budget film that had heavily “borrowed” from his own work. Piranha is not only special for creating a cycle of schlocky theft & for turning the water-bound threat of the Jaws format into thousands of tiny monsters instead of one gigantic one, though; it also introduced the world to the violent slapstick magic of director Joe Dante. Dante’s trademark touch of silly & violent parody is already very much alive & fully realized in Piranha, with every goofy murder & biting spoof revealing all-too-definitively that he loves the movies he’s making as well a the ones he’s blatantly ripping off. Bonus points: Perfect angel Paul Bartel stars as a short-shorts wearing camp counselor from Hell.

 

2) Grizzly (1976)

There are many ridiculous things to note about Grizzly, not least of all its Jaws-but-with-a-bear! premise (if there’s any doubt of its Jaws connection, just look to its sequel, which was brazenly titled Claws), but the one that strikes me the most is its PG rating. The film operates largely like a slasher flick, from its campsite setting to its wooden between-kills acting, which is not a genre that leads itself to a PG mentality. Many of the film’s kills are from the bear’s first person POV where you see a claw intruding from off-screen to rip an undeserving (and sometimes undressing) victim to shreds where you’d normally see a machete in Jason Voorhees’s gloved hand. Jaws & Friday the 13th are both properties children probably shouldn’t watch, but often grow up loving, so the idea of combining their two aesthetics and replacing their villains with a 2,000 pound grizzly bear is a PG-rated horror cheapie formula exactly calibrated to terrorize cult film nuts as children & amuse them greatly as adults.

 

3) Razorback (1984)

An Australian horror film about a supernaturally enormous wild boar, Razorback should not be worth much more than its value as an 80s creature feature Jaws knockoff, but there’s something oddly special about it, especially in its visual palette. This film is the most similar to Alligator‘s specimen on this list not only because it’s one of the only examples whose mayhem takes place on land, but also because of its darkly grotesque & vaguely magical tone.The wild boar of Razorback is far from the kind of cinematic swine you’ll find in titles like Babe or Gordy. It’s a disgusting, vile monster of a beast, tearing apart homes & vehicles and snatching up babies & women with wild abandon, his menacing tusks threatening to gore everything in sight. There’s a scene where the hideous bastard prevents a near-rape, almost shining as an unlikely hero like our vengeful gator Ramón, but that sentiment is severely undercut when he immediately devours the would-be victim. He’s allowed to be a natural, wild monster in a way that Ramón sidesteps in his more deliberately vengeful acts of violence (except for that one time the gator ate a child at a pool party for no apparent reason).

 

4) Orca: The Killer Whale (1977)

Instead of attempting to sidestep or obscure its Jaws, um, homage, Orca tackles the issue head-on. Early on in Orca a Great White shark not unlike the supernaturally gigantic one in Spielberg’s film is shown being utterly, effortlessly destroyed by a killer whale. There’s an air of superiority to this opening clash, an attitude of “You think sharks are scary? Ha! Get a load of whales!” It’s only fitting, then, that Orca spends the rest of its runtime openly mimicking some of Jaws‘s most iconic scenes, such as a climactic battle where the whale tips a block of ice to slide its victim towards its mouth, a moment that miraculously doesn’t end with the line “You’re gonna need a bigger iceberg.” There’s a lot that distinguishes Orca as its own achievement, not least of all its incredibly life-like orca models, one of which is spectacularly shown having a post-mortem miscarriage. Mostly, though, the film is notable for being incredibly faithful & blatant in its Jaws mimicry and also strange to watch in a modern context after our minds on orcas have been forever altered by titles like Blackfish & Free Willy.

 

5) Tentacles (1977)

There’s not much to see in the Italian mockbuster Tentacles that you won’t see done better in Jaws, but it’s done with an enraged octopus, which, you know, is its own kind of rare treat. The film is a fairly lifeless retread of the exact tourism-disrupted-by-gigantic-sea-creature plot of its obvious source of inspiration, but the novelty of watching an enraged octopus being air-dropped into Jaws‘s exact structure is amusing in its own way. I mostly included Tentacles on this list because it’s a fitting baseline to see just how blatant & uninspired the Jaws knockoff genre can be. It can also be amusing to see the mismatched stock footage attacks the film employs to save money on actual special effects. In its own charming way it’s a technique that feels lifted directly out of the 1950s creature features Jaws itself was paying homage to, not that it wasn’t outshined by the much more impressive physical models built by nearly every other title on this list.

 

For more on June’s Movie of the Month, the 1980 creature feature Alligator, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film & this look at artist Ramón Santiago’s unlikely influence on its titular monster.

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 13: 2001 – A Space Odyssey (1968)

/ swampflix / 18 Comments

EPSON MFP image

Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is referenced in Life Itself: On pages 88 & 395 of the first edition hardback, Ebert mentions that the film’s infamous, evil A.I. robot was built at his alma mater, writing “Chills ran down my spine when I first heard the voice of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey announce that it had been born in the computer lab at the University of Illinois in Urbana.” He also mentions on page 153 that 2001 was one of the biggest “event” films of his early, formative years as a professional film critic.

What Ebert had to say in his reviews: “Kubrick’s universe, and the space ships he constructed to explore it, are simply out of scale with human concerns. The ships are perfect, impersonal machines which venture from one planet to another, and if men are tucked away somewhere inside them, then they get there too. But the achievement belongs to the machine. And Kubrick’s actors seem to sense this; they are lifelike but without emotion, like figures in a wax museum. Yet the machines are necessary because man himself is so helpless in the face of the universe.” -from his 1968 review for the Chicago Sun Times

“The genius is not in how much Stanley Kubrick does in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ but in how little. This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn’t include a single shot simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction movies, ‘2001’ is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe.” -from his 1997 review for his “Great Movies” series

EPSON MFP image

“Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.” – Ancient proverb

The arthouse space opera 2001: A Space Odyssey is madman auteur Stanley Kubrick’s magnum opus. Or, wait, maybe that’s The Shining. Or maybe Dr. Strangelove. Kubrick boasts too many crowning achievements to definitively rank any particular one as king beast, but 2001 certainly inspires that kind of lofty thinking, just in mere acknowledgement of its grand scale ambition. It’s a film that attempts to encapsulate the totality of time– past, present, and future– and does a fairly successful job of it. Its iconic scenes of space epic obfuscation have in time become so seminal that they now almost feel cliché, considering the one million and ten times they’ve been referenced & parodied in later, lesser works. This film is an unimaginable technical achievement for 1968, however, and I’m still scratching my head over the practicality of how some of it was accomplished through practical effects. Because each scene in the film is so overly-familiar to the public lexicon at this point, it’s near impossible to tell if I’ve actually watched it from front to end before. I do distinctly remember falling asleep to it once or twice in high school at the very least. As majestic & awe-inspiring as any particular achievement in 2001 can be, the film is also a slow, plodding, dialogue-light downstream drift that dares you at nearly every turn to lose focus & nod off. This is more or less the definition of challenging cinema. It takes a determined effort to stay on board for the journey, but the destination’s rewards are bountiful.

The funny thing for me on this most recent watch was that the movie I always think of as being 2001: A Space Odyssey, the movie where a crew of astronauts are murdered by an evil A.I. named HAL 9000, is just one segment of many in the film’s cinematic patchwork. 2001 functions almost like a horror anthology, with each of its four separate segments providing only a small window into its larger narrative. Each section of the film is dominated by the throughline talisman of the monolith, but they each stand as rigidly divided works of art, just in the same way Kubrick allows nearly every shot of the film to hang in the air like an isolated, precious object worth examination. 2001 is an art gallery just as much as it is a narrative motion picture.

In the first segment the film takes poetic license with evolution & the Dawn of Man and depicts the all-important monolith teaching humanity’s primate ancestors how to use tools, a development that immediately leads to the world’s first coldblooded murder. In the second segment a second monolith is discovered by astronauts on the moon and its effect is largely shrouded in mystery, other than the signal it projects that points to Jupiter. As this film was released just one year before the real moonlanding (an event some eccentrics believe Kubrick himself had a part in “faking”), the mysterious terror of this piece points to modern anxiety about what comes next on the frontier of scientific discovery. The third segment answers that question loud & clear, proposing that our near future will be dominated by pompous A.I. robots with murderous intent. The closing segment, beautifully titled “Jupiter & Beyond the Infinite” is a somewhat-open-to-interpretation trip though religious transcendence, a gateway into the next step in our evolution. The lucky astronaut who endures that final chapter’s monolith as a test subject emerges on the other end as some sort of unknowable space fetus. The future of humanity is left open-ended here, but given that all previous monoliths in the film were directly followed by murder, the outlook is just as chilling as it is majestic.

Much like how the monoliths transformed the state of humanity at several points throughout the film, 2001 transformed the state of sci-fi adventure media. Long gone are the days of Flash Gordon & Buck Rogers, although they would later return with 2001-esque special effects in George Lucas’s Star Wars franchise. The HAL 9000 segment of 2001 functions somewhat like a genre film if you squint at it the right way, but the other 3/4s of the picture are so gloriously obscured & open-ended that Kubrick’s version of a space adventure is a much stranger, more artful beast than the examples that preceded it. There is a clear narrative progression here in the evolution of humanity, but the source, nature, and purpose of that evolution is so immense & mysterious that the “odyssey” of the title is more figurative than it is literal. I’m sure Arthur C. Clarke’s novelized version of this story (which he wrote for the film as a collaborator) is much clearer than what’s onscreen, but I feel like any concrete, extraterrestrial explanation of what transpires would cheapen the movie’s poetry. The aliens in this film may as well be an all-knowing god or The Will of the Universe, considering the immensity of what’s onscreen. I left the film with few solid answers and took delight in that ambiguity.

Not everyone feels that way. Ebert noted in his “Great Movies” review of the film that there were several walkouts during the 1968 Los Angeles premiere he attended. Most notably among the miffed was an especially exasperated Rock Hudson, who was visibly livid that the couldn’t pin down the film’s exact plot. Indeed, 2001 feels determined at every turn to spurn its audience, like an ornery mechanical bull in a dive bar (except one bucking in spectacular slow motion). This is a film that will either bore or terrorize you depending on how game you are for its journey. As much as I loved it as an immersive cinematic experience I’ll even admit that a couple dialogueless shots where the soundtrack was dominated by heavy breathing & mechanical whirs tested my patience a great deal. I’d even go as far as to say it got on my nerves. That’s not to say this is  humorless, highbrow work without a touch of pedestrian entertainment value, though. I think the shock of starting the film among the unevolved primates was something of a sly joke, maybe even serving as Kubrick’s way of poking fun at human folly & hubris. Hal 9000, however creepy, is subtly funny in its own cold, biting way, even downright bitchy in intonations of phrases like “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that, Frank.” There’s even an honest-to-God, outright gag in the film where a character perplexedly reads a long list of instructions for a zero gravity toilet.

Of course, humor & genre thrills are not likely to be anyone’s biggest takeaway from 2001. For those who can stay on board for its demanding runtime, glacial pace, and deliberate obfuscation, the film delivers a perfectly crafted, near-flawless glimpse into the unknown, which is a rare treat for any kind of art, much less a cinematic space adventure. The violence on display here ranges from blind rage to cold calculation, but never for a minute feels exploitative. The visual effects & smooth, spinning camerawork are dizzying achievements of technical prowess, but feel more purposeful than showy. An old-fashioned overture & intermission feel entirely earned given the scope of the film’s ambition. I’m not sure if 2001 is Kubrick delivering a passionate work of narrative art so much as a perfectly calibrated machine that begs to be gawked at as it functions with divine precision. Either way, it’s a real beaut.

EPSON MFP image

Roger’s Rating: (4/4, 100%)

fourstar

Brandon’s Rating: (4.5/5, 90%)

fourhalfstar

Next Lesson: Cool Hand Luke (1967)

-Brandon Ledet

 

 

Artist Ramón Santiago’s Unlikely Influence on the Creature Feature Alligator (1980)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

EPSON MFP image

June’s Movie of the Month, Alligator, is an early 80s creature feature about a baby alligator named Ramón who grows mythically gigantic after being flushed down the toilet & feeding on a cruel science experiment’s cast-off corpses of animal subjects he finds in the Chicago sewers. Ramón is a fascinating monster in many ways. He not only embodies the urban legend of alligators living out of place in the sewer systems of major American cities; he’s also the size of a dinosaur and has an uncanny ability to hunt down & exact revenge upon the heartless people who’ve wronged him & other discarded animals. Still yet, one of the strangest aspects of Alligator‘s titular monster is that he’s indicated to be named after the little known, late painter Ramón Santiago. How or why that association between the gator & the painter was made is a total mystery.

Britnee wrote in our Swampchat discussion on Alligator, “During the scenes in David’s apartment, there are prints on the wall by Ramón Santiago (obvious inspiration for the alligator’s name). I was unaware of Santiago’s work prior to noticing the prints in the film, and I have to say that this guy has some phenomenal art. […] According to Santiago’s website, he stated, ‘My paintings are what dreams are made of.’ I would say that’s a pretty accurate description of his work. Unfortunately, I haven’t stumbled across an Santiago gator paintings yet.” Indeed, Google search results for “Ramón Santiago alligator” don’t lead any Santiago depictions of gators or even any discussions of the 1980 horror film in question (except for our own). At what point, exactly, was Santiago brought in as inspiration for our reptilian antihero Ramón? The artist could theoretically have served as a point of inspiration for director Lewis Teague or screenwriter John Sayles, but he could just as easily have been brought in as a sly visual joke by the set designer. There’s not a lot of evidence or context to point this connection in any solid direction.

Although there are no Santiago paintings of gators we were able to hunt down & the artist’s unlikely inclusion in the film might’ve been a question of set design or clever prop, it’s easy to see how his work fits into the Alligator universe on a very basic aesthetic level. Santiago’s work is dark & brooding, the exact same muted & grimy color palette of the gator Ramón’s urban environment. There’s also a magician’s touch to the painter’s work that is simultaneously a little corny & vastly mysterious, a combo of sentiments I could also assign to the gator Ramón’s artistry: chomping people to bits for crimes against animalia. The two Ramóns, painter & gator, are artists who largely go unrecognized for their accomplishments (pretty pictures & spectacular violence, respectfully). At first glance their work can appear a little common or even silly, but there’s a dark, mysterious soul lurking underneath he surface in both cases that makes them oddly fascinating in an unexpected way.

Until the greater mystery of the two Ramón’s true connection (if any truly exists) is cracked, here are a few of their works juxtaposed for your own consideration.

479418874_tp

alligator1

santiago_halloween_1990_oil-on-canvas

alligator2b1

santiago-full_blue_moon

alligator4[1]

For more on June’s Movie of the Month, the 1980 creature feature Alligator, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.: Captain America 3 – Civil War (2016)

/ swampflix / 10 Comments

EPSON MFP image

Superhero Watching: Alternating Marvel Perspectives, Fresh and Longterm, Ignoring X-Men, or S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X., is a feature in which Boomer (who reads superhero comics & is well versed in the MCU) & Brandon (who reads alternative comics & had, at the start of this project, seen less than 25% of the MCU’s output) revisit the films that make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe from the perspective of someone who knows what they’re talking about & someone who doesn’t have the slightest clue.

Boomer: After the success of Winter Soldier, the Russo brothers were invited back to direct the next Captain America sequel, confirming their involvement in March of 2014. Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who had previously drafted the scripts for both First Avenger and Thor 2 in addition to Winter Soldier, presented the Russos with the script for Civil War around the same time. Early reports featured the production team stating that they saw the film as more of a direct follow up to Winter Soldier, and that the intent was to further pursue the Bucky/Steve relationship in this flick.

There were mixed reactions to the announcement that the film would adapt (however loosely) the basic plotline of the Marvel Civil War plot from the comics. I’ve mentioned how I feel about this particular storyline in a few of our earlier reviews, but it’s worth outlining here and seeing how it stacks up against the plot of the film. One thing to bear in mind is that the Marvel comics universe is full to the gills with super-powered people. Mutants, Inhumans, actual alien refugees and expatriates, mystics and magicians, survivors of experimentation, people who were involved in chemical/radiation accidents: there are a lot of them. A decade or so back, the company tried to cull its ranks by reducing the number of mutants– just mutants– to less than 200, and there were still too many to allow time for each to be sufficiently developed. It’s also important to bear in mind that the books had spent the past few decades showing bigoted human legislators attempting to pass a Congressional Act that would require all mutants to register with the government. Marvel took the correct stance on this issue, demonstrating that (a) such a thing would be utterly unconstitutional and (b) that the advocates of this act were unequivocally in the wrong from a moral and ethical standpoint.

The plot of the comic Civil War opens with a team of third-tier superheroes, called the New Warriors, filming an episode of the reality show in which they were participating in exchange for funding of their operations. The group finds themselves involved in an altercation with a few villains; though they realize that they are out of their depth they press on, and their interaction with the villain Nitro results in an explosion that incinerates 612 people, including 60 schoolchildren. In the film, the circumstances are different: it’s the new Avengers team (minus War Machine and Vision) taking on a mission in Lagos that is successful but not without collateral damage, mitigated by but blamed upon the heroes. In the comics, Tony Stark is confronted by the mother of one of the children who died in the “Stamford Incident” (here he is confronted by a woman whose adult son died in Sokovia, which was a separate incident from the Lagos mission that opened the film). As a result of this shaming, Comics!Tony works with the U.S. Government to draft the Superhuman Registration Act, which would require all Americans with enhanced abilities to report their nature to the government without complaint.

It’s immediately obvious how questionable this is, especially when readers had been taught to expect (and, it bears mentioning again, rightfully so) that proponents of these types of laws—laws that require vulnerable minorities to essentially surrender not only their right to privacy but also the expectation of protection from hate violence—are villains. Comics!Tony may have had a point in that there should be a system of accountability in place for superpowered people, but the methods by which this was introduced resulted in a fandom backlash that Marvel should really have expected but seemed to be utterly surprised by. The miniseries later further added that not only did the SRA require powered people to register, but it also made them part of a de facto superhuman draft; people who registered (and remember: not registering is not a choice) could be called upon to act as agents of the government at any time, even in conflict with their own political and moral ideals. For a miniseries that was very much born of the paranoia of the War on Terror and the global politick of the Bush Administration, Marvel seemed shockingly out of touch with how its readership felt about that administration and its policies.

Worse, Marvel doubled down on the idea that they wanted readers to be on Team Iron Man instead of Team Cap, who was the much more reasonable figure, voicing the logical issues that come from drafting unwilling innocents to participate in missions that could be in violation of their beliefs in the name of political agendas.

Film!Tony’s proposition, that the Avengers act only when called upon to do so by a U.N. Accord, is much more sensible as an act that isn’t in violation of anyone’s civil rights or political autonomy. It has its own problems, some of which Cap points out (like the potential for the Avengers to be called upon to act against the greater good or their own consciences in the name of someone’s agenda) and some of which he doesn’t (there’s no way that an emergency session of the U.N. could be called together quickly enough to confer and vote upon deploying the Avengers in time to save anyone if, for instance, Thanos’s fleet appears in the skies above earth with the intent of burning all living things to ash). Overall, however, it strikes enough of a compromise between freelance vigilantism and wholesale surrendering of one’s right to forced government employment that one can feel conflicted about which side to choose, instead of everyone being Team Cap by default.

Back on the production side of things, the Russos acknowledged the difficulty of referencing this much-contested miniseries in their films, but stated that they were confident that they had found the right balance. It was announced early in production that Chadwick Boseman had joined the cast of the film as Black Panther and that Daniel Brühl of Goodbye, Lenin and The Edukators had been cast in an undisclosed role, although early internet speculation that he would be playing a version of Baron Zemo turned out to be correct. Other speculations, such as the much-touted fan belief that Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk would appear in the film, turned out to be unfounded, although virtually every other superpowered person who had previously appeared in the MCU films was back (so no Thor and no TV-only characters like Jessica Jones or Quake). Other returning characters included Emily VanCamp’s Sharon “Agent 13” Carter, who ends up reciting a remixed version of one of Comics!Cap’s speeches in her eulogy for her Aunt Peggy, and William Hurt’s General-cum-SecDef “Thunderbolt” Ross, who was last scene in the Norton Incredible Hulk film.

Other new characters announced included Martin Freeman’s forgettable Everett Ross (no relation) and, the big news, Brit newcomer Tom Holland as Peter Parker. In a recent interview with ScreenJunkies, the Russos admitted that they always intended for Spider-Man to inhabit the role that he plays in the final film; it was their insistence that this story would not work without the character that eventually led to the Sony-Disney deal that allows for crossovers. The two never considered for a moment presenting Marvel with a script that included a different character in that role. As a result, we also get our youngest Aunt May to date, played by Marisa Tomei.

Brandon, what did you think of Civil War?

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

Brandon: In the current media landscape where the borders between cinema & television have become increasingly blurred, I’ve found myself becoming most attracted to films that buck the trend. Formally bizarre titles like Under the Skin, The Duke of Burgundy, Upstream Color, and Beyond the Black Rainbow are so magnetic to me because they remind audiences that there are still things film can achieve that television can’t. As a franchise, the MCU has gone in the exact opposite direction. After a dozen films’ (and a difficult to calculate amount of supplementary televised content’s) worth of worldbuilding, the MCU can’t help but function as the cinematic equivalent of televised fiction. Each individual movie in the series, sans maybe the origin stories, is starting to feel like a compact season of absurdly well-funded television. With Civil War, the MCU seems to be hitting its stride the same way the Fast & Furious franchise did around its fifth installment. I enjoyed the film thoroughly, but felt as if I were enjoying it more as one small piece to a much larger whole than as a standalone property. I can’t even say for sure if Captain America was the star of his own movie here, despite his name being slapped on the title, since the series has adapted the sprawling cast format of a long-running television show. As much as this film seems willing to break nearly every rule of avoiding superhero conventionality, however, I couldn’t help but to enjoy every loud, bloated minute of it.

My most hopeful expectation about Civil War going in was that Tony Stark would essentially do what pro wrestlers call a “heel turn” and finally reveal himself to be the villainous prick I’ve taken him for since movie one. I would still love to see that dynamic play out (and I vaguely understand that it works that way in the comics), but Civil War goes a whole other route that may be an even better take on what superhero movies can be. A dull take on this story would be to have Cap & Tony fight for a minute, realize they have a bigger enemy at hand, and eventually team up to fight the film’s true baddy. If this sounds especially familiar at this moment it might be that it sounds awfully parallel to the way Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice structured its d.o.a. conflict. Despite the two movies’ striking thematic similarities, however, Civil War makes a much bolder, stranger turn. The film threatens to back out of its central hook of having its franchise’s two most popular heroes feud, but instead doubles down & gets murderously vicious in its brutal, climactic battle. Sticking to its guns in this way is a brilliant move, as was keeping the film’s true villain, (expertly portrayed by the always-welcome Daniel Brühl) a small pawn in the larger chess game who can stealthily cause a lot of damage. This is a superhero movie where the bad guy wins, which is not something I can’t remember on this large of a scale since, what, The Dark Knight? Because Civil War is just one puzzle piece/stepping stone/drop in the bucket in regards to its massive franchise, that aspect can feel a little drowned out. You know for a fact that the discord will eventually be undone, but for now it feels refreshingly pessimistic considering the supposed sameness of the superhero movie as a medium.

The most impressive thing Civil War did for me was revive my giddiness in the novelty of seeing all of its various “superpeople” sharing the screen in its titular centerpiece action sequence. It’s been at least since the first Avengers film hitting the theaters that I got this excited watching superheroes battle each other. Ant-Man going kaiju, Falcon toying with drones, Spidey geeking out, and Black Widow kicking close range ass (Remind me again why she doesn’t have her own movie yet?) were all touches of pure joy for me, as was the premiere of the fierce feline Kitty Cat Man, er, Black Panther. You could point to so many similarities Civil War shares with Dawn of Justice, not least of all its fretting over superheroes’ dead mommies & the collateral damage incurred while saving the world from an Apocalyptic threat, but the DC films so far seem to entirely miss the point of what makes the MCU so enjoyable. Civil War may wring its hands over concepts like “Victory at the expense of the innocent is no victory at all” & the necessity of “doing what has to be done to stave off something worse”, but it’s nowhere near the dour mess delivered by Batman v Superman just a couple months ago. Even early glimpses of the as-yet-unreleased Suicide Squad movie look like the cinematic equivalent of a sad sack’s depressive trip through a Hot Topic lingerie section and that film’s actively trying to ape some of the MCU’s Joss Whedon jokeyness in a conscious effort to lighten the fuck up. It took a lot of work to get there, but the MCU can now have its heroes beat each other into near-death, paralytic submission and somehow have the audience walk away thinking, “That was fun.”

I don’t know exactly how to rank this movie. Did I enjoy it on its own merits or as yet another chapter in a much larger story? These divisions are getting much more difficult to define as I become something closer to an in-the-know fan with these characters’ particular trajectories. Realistically, Civil War is probably just as good as The Winter Soldier or the first Avengers film, both of which I ranked slightly lower, but my enthusiasm has been raised merely through longterm familiarity. I’ve become too entrenched in the Marvel mindset to really look at these films with that outsider perspective anymore. If I end up reading the comic book source material as the next step (and I’ve already broken the seal with the first run of Howard the Duck), I’m in danger of losing total perspective of where I fit in here, except maybe as a Johnny Come Lately. Either that or Civil War did a fantastic job of encapsulating the totality of what makes the MCU a continuously entertaining product, even if its structure is more television-adjacent than it is cinematic. All I know for sure is that I’m enjoying what I’m seeing.

EPSON MFP image

fourhalfstar

Boomer: I put my non-spoilery notes in the individual review of this film, so please note that here there be spoilers.

I’ll be honest right out of the gate and admit that I never really fully bought into the relationship between Bucky and Steve as something that would be so all-consuming for Cap. I know it’s a popular pairing in the fandom and that the film franchise spends a lot of time telling us about how important they are to each other, but it’s hampered by the fact that Chris Evans and Sebastian Stan share fairly limited screen time in The First Avenger. After Bucky goes off to war, he disappears from the narrative for the entirety of Steve’s training and transformation, only reappearing when Steve, now Captain America, shows up to rescue him from Hydra captivity.

Then they have a montage about all their victories against the Axis, and go on a mission where Bucky “dies.” Everything that happens after that is about the two trying to reunite, and the framing of this relationship as the most important in Steve’s life never really “read” for me in the way that his relationships with Peggy, Natasha, and even Howard Stark did. Winter Soldier is the best movie that this franchise has churned out to date as far as I am concerned, but my affection for it is completely independent of any particular affection for the Steve/Bucky bromance.

Of course, Howard Stark is dead, and we even get to see how in this film (confirming a long-held film-specific fan theory that’s been circulating for a while). Also dead is Tommy Lee Jones’s character from First Avenger, and everyone else that was a part of Steve’s life before he went into the ice, except for Peggy… until the end of Act I. Peggy Carter, the best character in the MCU, dies offscreen in Civil War, passing painlessly in her sleep. And, yeah, I cried. It was an ugly cry. Rest in peace, Agent Carter. May your televised adventures carry you on forever in our hearts (oh no). Regardless, the fact that Bucky is now the last anchor to the life that Steve had before the 21st century, and in fact the only connection that he has to a time before his life was a never-ending war, strengthens the connection between the two. For the first time, I buy the relationship and its importance as much as Marvel wants me to.

The movie does fail to wring sufficient pathos out of the relationship between Cap and Black Widow this time around. I’m much more invested in their friendship, which we got to see grow and change over the course of Winter Soldier, than the relationship between Steve and Tony, who are barely friends and really only tolerate each other because of Howard’s hero-worship of the former, which was a source of contention for the latter. That tension isn’t fully explored here, especially in comparison to how well Winter Soldier addressed the points of contention between Natasha’s espionage-oriented worldview and Steve’s point of view as a lifelong soldier. As Age of Ultron showed us, Cap fears the end of war (probably because he can’t imagine having a place in a world of peace), which would have been an interesting point to explore here but is ultimately left out.

I’ve been a big fan of Brühl’s work since I was in high school (where the German club hosted a screening of Goodbye, Lenin), and I’m glad that his appearance as a hero of the Nazi army in Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds has brought him more exposure in the U.S., but his presence on screen here doesn’t quite measure up. To be fair, a lot of that may have to do with the fact that Civil War has two major plotlines that aren’t happening concurrently so much as intermittently. The framing of Bucky for the bombing of the Sikovia Accord ratification conference sets the stage for conflict between Iron Man and Cap that then takes over the narrative, in a plot that is somehow more light-hearted than the more Winter Soldier-esque plotline involving Zemo and the Winter Soldier Squad. It’s tonally inconsistent, but this is one of those productions that shows having tonal changes in a film doesn’t necessarily mean failure, as the brightly-colored, quippy airport battle brings some much-needed levity to the film before we go back to Siberia (and a quick side trip to an undersea Guantanamo) for the finale. It doesn’t break the seriousness, it just keeps the film from being too dark. Winter Soldier excels because of the consistent grittiness that characterized that picture, but Civil War benefits from mixing it up a bit. Overall, however, any complaints that I have pale in comparison to how much I enjoyed the film.

EPSON MFP image

Lagniappe

Brandon: Something that’s difficult to pin down here is the film’s sense of humor This was one of the quieter trips to the theater I’ve had with an MCU picture in terms of audience laughter. A one-liner or two landed here or there, but for the most part that typical Joss Whedon-type yuck-em-up humor was more than a little muted. Ant-Man & Spidey felt like necessary injections of silliness into the two sides of level-headed pondering on the balance between ignoring terrorism & combating it with outsized, unchecked aggression. I had a ton of fun watching this film, but my giddiness was less “That’s hilarious!” and more “That’s so cool!” In the absence of the Whedon-esque humor I found myself reaching for jokes that might not have actually been there. Was the line “Help me, Wanda” a subtle Traci Rearden reference? Did I actually see the Bluth family stair car hiding in the background of that epic airport battle? Was Spidey shooting little web wads in his teen boy bedroom subversively spermy for anyone but me? I can’t tell how far I’m reaching for these.

It seems like Captain America as its own isolated series (as much as it’s allowed to be one) has become more of a political thriller than a joke-a-minute action comedy, despite the lighter tone that made The First Avenger a franchise favorite for me. The next Thor movie is being billed as a road trip buddy comedy helmed by the almighty Taika Waititi, so the MCU is obviously not done with humor altogether. It’s just becoming increasingly unlikely that we’ll ever get my dream title of Captain America: The 100 Year Old Virgin off the ground (especially if Cap’s uncomfortable relationship with the unceremoniously dispensed-with Peggy Carter’s niece continues on its current, inevitably, oddly slimy path; Yikes!).

Boomer: If you’re looking for a basic introduction to the Black Panther mythos, I found the Black Panther animated series created by BET a few years back to be pretty good. It features Djimon Honsou (who appeared in the MCU proper as one of the Kree in Guardians) as the voice of T-Chaka, and features cameos from Captain America, Nightcrawler, and the Juggernaut as well as a recurring role for Storm, as voiced by R&B artist Jill Scott. I never loved the Storm/Black Panther pairing in the comics (it always came off as Marvel curtailing their individual, separate story arcs in order to create a “tokenistic” pairing; admittedly, I might be a bit biased since I always preferred Ororo’s relationship with Forge and hated how their breakup was handled), but it works in that series.

As for how this film relates to the MCU at large, the impact of this film on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was not as immediate as the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. in Winter Soldier. Agents has been focusing on more Inhuman-related plotlines in the past season and a half, and there was much speculation that the MCU would be using the Inhumans in place of mutants in the franchise, featuring a mass-empowering that would require more government oversight and lead into Civil War. Although that ended up not being the case, the events of Civil War did lead up to an argument between Director Coulson and General Glenn Talbott over the merits of the Sokovia Accords vis-à- vis Inhumans, with Coulson obviously being Team Cap (surprisingly, Agent May was as well, perhaps because the showrunners already used up their May vs. Coulson chip last season with the “Real S.H.I.E.L.D.” arc and felt it would be too early to go back to that well). Talbott is eventually brought around to Team Cap, too, but it remains to be seen whether or not the show can recreate the strong endings that characterized the respective finales of Seasons 1 and 2.

And what of the man who can do whatever a spider can? The new Sony-produced flick starring Tom Holland will be titled Homecoming, which was one of the words that was used to activate the Winter Soldier’s sleeper programs. There’s also been news that the new film will include Tony Stark in a key role, possible revisiting the Iron Spider arc from the comics (which led up to Civil War on the page). It remains to be seen how these will become further connected. There are still many other connections that have yet to be followed up on even now (like the fact that the first season of Daredevil revealed that Matt Murdock grew up in the same orphanage as Skye/Daisy, which hasn’t been mentioned since), so it’s unclear what the future holds for the MCU.

In conclusion, this will be the last Agents review for a while. I’ve already written up a piece detailing why we won’t be performing a review of Doctor Strange while it is in theaters, so you can expect to see that review only once it becomes possible for me to watch the movie without contributing to it financially, maybe in early 2017. The next MCU flick that I’m excited for is the sequel to Guardians, which is set to premiere in about a year, so be on the lookout for us then!

EPSON MFP image

Combined S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. Rating for Captain America 3 – Civil War (2016)

fourhalfstar

-Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.

 

Movie of the Month: Alligator (1980)

/ swampflix / 12 Comments

EPSON MFP image

Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made Boomer & Brandon watch Alligator (1980).

Britnee: There’s a popular urban legend about alligator sightings in the streets of major U.S. cities.  It’s said that city dwellers would bring back baby alligators as souvenirs from trips to Louisiana and Florida, and once they grew tired of the baby gators, they would flush them down the toilet. The baby alligators would then grow up in city sewers and become giant mutant gators. Lewis Teague brings this myth to life in his 1980 sci-fi horror flick Alligator.

Campy creature features were a hot commodity around the time Alligator was released (Piranha, Humanoids from the Deep, C.H.U.D., etc.), and usually the film gets thrown into that group. Yes, there are many campy moments in Alligator, but it’s actually an excellent, well-rounded film. I would go as far as to say it’s close to being on the same level as Jaws.

Upon recently re-watching the film, I found myself to be really let down by the fact that our leading lady, Marisa (Robin Ryker), didn’t have even the smallest emotional connection with the star of the film, an alligator named Ramón. In the beginning of the film, a young Marisa has baby Ramón as a pet in a pretty lame reptile tank setup (crappy neon pebbles included). Her douchebag of a father flushes Ramón down the toilet, sending him to live a horrible life in the disgusting garbage-filled sewers of Chicago. The film then flashes forward to 20 years later, and Marisa is a reptile expert that assists a police officer, David (Robert Forester), in hunting down Ramón, who has become a giant, mutated alligator that is terrorizing the city. Marisa never realizes that the mutant gator is in fact her childhood pet Ramón, and that just didn’t sit well with me. I’m all about a good human-animal connection in film, and I think just a small moment where Marisa sees a spark in Ramón’s eye and realizes who he is would make this film so much better.

Brandon, were you also a little let down by the lack of a connection between Marisa and Ramón? What did you ultimately think of Ramón? Was he really the film’s villain?

Brandon: Okay, I am stoked that we’re getting into this question of Ramón‘s morality this early, because there’s a lot more to unpack there than you might expect. As a mythically gigantic, bloodthirsty reptile you might expect that Ramón was pure evil (or at the very least a chaotic neutral force of Nature). However, there’s a spirit of moralistic vigilantism to some of his kills that makes him more akin to the nuanced antiheroism of folks like your Bruce Waynes or your Don Drapers or your Walter Whites. We are unclear as to who Ramón‘s first victim is, as all the police discover is a severed limb in a Chicago sewer. His second victim is a wicked pet store owner who kidnaps neighborhood dogs, sells them to a crooked science lab, and disposes of their bodies in Ramón‘s underground home. Later, in one of the film’s most spectacular scenes of alligator mayhem, Ramón also hunts down & dismantles the science lab employees that cruelly abused these discarded animals in the first place at a stuffy wedding party. There’s also a tangent where Ramón gets payback on a sleazeball big game hunter meant to take him out.

If Ramón is the hero of Alligator the proof is in these moments, which position him as some sort of sewer-dwelling vigilante who punishes evil Chicagoans who flush their pets down the toilet. It’s only when police & news reporter investigations drive Ramón out of the sewers & disrupt his shit-stained habitat that he resorts to killing innocents, including cops & children. As these are the exact kinds of victims people tend not to forgive, this greatly complicates the question of Ramón‘s moral compass.

Another thing that complicates how we see Ramón as a misunderstood friend or a murderous foe is in the surprising high quality of Alligator‘s special effects. He’s just too spectacularly terrifying to take lightly. I think the effects also cloud the issue of whether or not Alligator qualifies as camp cinema, as Britnee was concerned with above. There are some larger-than-life caricatures in this film, not least of all the sentient sausage/cigar hybrid police chief & the nastily creepy pet store owner that make Alligator feel far short of Jaws (a movie it openly riffs on) in terms of quality, no doubt. However, on a technical note, the combination of real-life gators & gigantic gator puppets are near seamless. As many times as I was tempted to scoff at certain moments (the spinning toilet cam when baby Ramón is first flushed comes to mind), I was also just as impressed with some technical achievements in Ramón‘s gator attacks, especially once he emerges above ground. Watching the mutant gator smash through city streets, destroy cars with its massive tail, swallow victims whole, and completely raise hell at the aforementioned wedding party were all more visually impressive moments than I what I expected from this film, given its sillier flourishes. The movie wastes no time opening with a gator attack, so I expected it to be violent, but I didn’t expect the violence to be so well crafted on a technical (or budgetary) level.

There were also ways Alligator could’ve gone even further in a campier direction, such as a more formal, on-the-nose reunion with Ramón & the adult Marissa or more attention paid to the evil science lab that made Ramón so large in the first place. I would’ve loved to see Ramón & Marissa have their moment of recognition or the results some of the experiment’s other failed test subjects, but either detail would’ve undoubtedly played as a silly indulgence. The resulting tone, then, is somewhere in the middle. Alligator is at times very silly, and at times well-crafted & darkly grotesque.

I have a hard time imagining one of us reviewing this film & not slapping a “Camp Stamp” on it, but I’m also the mostly likely contributor around here to apply that label to any movie. What do you think, Boomer? Where does Alligator fall in or outside the spectrum of camp cinema?

Boomer: I don’t know that I would call this a camp film, actually. It has its fair share of campy ideas, but the general seriousness of the situation and the brutality of the onscreen deaths (particularly that of the child who is killed at some kind of costume party) make up for the sillier elements. There are certainly some deranged elements that threaten to push the film over the edge into full on camp, like Marisa’s excitable and possibly crazy mother and the archetypal irascible police chief’s Mentat-style eyebrows, but Alligator has something that a lot of genre satires don’t: respect for the source material that is being referenced. The Jaws parallels mentioned above are the most obvious, as the film is unabashedly aping that film’s style and plotline right down to mayoral corruption, here the result of the unnamed mayor’s relationship with the pharmaceutical chief whose company’s experiments indirectly led to the alligator’s mutation rather than an attempt to preserve the summer tourism economy boom. There’s a lot here that’s played for laughs, but the film manages to do so without irrevocably breaking the tension, which is a refreshing change of pace from other pastiche parodies. Even if we disregard contemporary rubbish parodies like Date Movie or Meet the Spartans and only consider genre classics, great movies like Airplane! and The Naked Gun don’t really work as legitimate examples of disaster film or cop drama when divested of their parodic elements; in contrast, even if you were to somehow never seen or heard of Jaws, Alligator would still hold up as a surprisingly decent example of the “giant animal” horror subgenre.

I also particularly liked that there was a reason given for why Ramón was so large, and that this reason tied this mutation back to human involvement. There’s nothing about Jaws that makes him a victim at all, but Ramón is surprisingly sympathetic for a swamp monster that’s literally a dinosaur. We see that the environment he was born into would have eventually led to him being wrestled by humans regardless of whether or not your Marisa had taken him as a pet; he was displaced from his natural habitat and transplanted to a city sewer, where the only food he was able to find consisted of castoff, hormone-injected puppy corpses. Everything that mankind reaps in this movie is, as Brandon points out, sown by them, even though a few innocent people get caught up in the midst of his vengeful rampage. Jaws, on the other hand, never explains how the titular shark managed to grow to such an absurd size (ten feet longer than the average male Great White) or why he has such an insatiable hunger for human flesh; this doesn’t make this a better film than Jaws at all, as that movie is at least partially about the terror of the unknown, but it does add a different element to Alligator that differentiates it from being a straightforward rip-off. It’s not clear how or why Ramón knows to go to the Slade mansion and devour guests (or why he knows to specifically target the lead scientist and Slade), but that doesn’t matter. At least the film didn’t take the same approach as the novelization of Jaws: The Revenge, which indirectly gave us the term “Voodoo Shark.”

One of the things that amused me most about this movie was the way that everyone, hero and villain alike, had nothing but disdain for the journalistic community, and the primary antagonistic reporter, Kemp, obliged them by being as weaselly as possible. What did you make of this element, Britnee? And, further, were you creeped out by the relationship between Robert Forster and Robin Riker, given that he is supposed to be roughly 40 and her character is at most 26?

Britnee: Before getting into the ridiculousness that is Kemp’s character, I just want to point out how insane his eyebrows are. Of course, Kemp wasn’t the only person in this movie with giant caterpillar eyebrows. As Boomer pointed out, Chief Clark had crazy eyebrows too! Maybe I’m overthinking this similarity, but there could be a possible good versus evil eyebrow battle occurring deep within the film. If so, it’s obvious that Chief Clark takes the cake.

Kemp’s character serves as the stereotypical reporter that would do anything to get a good story, even if it means exploiting someone’s personal tragedy. Of course, we know that not every journalist is as savage as Kemp, but I feel as though the film was attempting to convey some sort of message to the audience in regards to the authenticity of mass media. I can’t help but think of the title of one of my favorite Barbra Streisand songs, “Don’t Believe What You Read.” Not all media outlets are necessarily reliable, and Kemp is a representation of the deceitful side of the world of journalism.

As for the intimate relationship between Robert Forester and Robin Ryker’s characters, it did throw me a little off-guard at first. Mainly because Robert Forester gives off some really intense dad vibes. Marisa’s dad was a total jerk that flushed Ramón down the toilet, so she obviously had some underlying daddy issues. If David’s character was played by another actor, such as Harrison Ford, I think their love affair would have sat better with me. Honestly, I love a good age-gap relationship in movies. Harold and Maude and White Palace are two fantastic, unconventional romantic films that come to mind, and Alligator could’ve been on their level if Robert Forester wasn’t so dad-like.

Brandon, watching the film again recently got me to focus a little more on the terror that is Colonel Brock (Henry Silva). While he is definitely one of the film’s villains, he is probably one of the funniest characters in the movie. The scene in which he is awkwardly flirting with the television reporter was by far one of the funniest scenes in Alligator. Did you find Colonel Brock to be as comedic as I did? If so, did his unique brand of humor add value to the film? Would a more serious character have been a better choice?

Brandon: I love the cartoonish cad energy the dastardly hunter Colonel Brock brings to the film. He struck me as an odd combination of Jumanji‘s safari hunter Van Pelt & Empire Records‘s Neil Diamond surrogate Rex Manning, a sleazeball dandy plucked directly from either a children’s film or a 50s big studio epic. I also love the transparency of his presence within the film. Once Ramón dispenses with the crooked pet store owner & the evil science lab technicians, there aren’t many potential victims for his vengeful reptilian chomping. Colonel Brock is a perfectly calibrated last minute injection for the film because he gives the audience one more sleazebag to want to see dead. Ramón, of course, wastes no time obliging that bloodthirst and swallows the self-important goon whole in spectacular fashion. I could see how someone treating the film with a more serious tone could want more significant villainy that what Brock delivers, but I’m perfectly happy with his whole silly ass deal.

As much as I’m willing to view this movie through the trashy goofery of a camp cinema lens, there’s no denying that it’s a largely grotesque, hateful work. The alligator attacks start immediately from the outset & upon watching a man’s limbs ripped to shreds in the opening seconds a little girl wants to take one of the little beasts home. Once flushed down the toilet, Ramón‘s newfound home is a disgusting lair of trash & human filth somehow made worse by a greedy scientist lab willing to abuse & discard puppies in the most heartless way imaginable. At one point a mentally unstable suicide bomber is ridiculed & turned into a police station punchline. At some points it’s even difficult to rejoice in Ramón‘s revenge on the wicked because his means are so brutal (see: him devouring a child). I love the film’s more cartoonish, sillier moments (there’s a genuine star wipe transition between shots at one point, for God’s sake), but there’s so much ugliness mixed in that the clashing tones are downright jarring.

Boomer, is there an particular moment of shocking alligator mayhem or cruel human folly that sticks out to you as especially ugly that we haven’t covered here yet? There was so much nastiness going around that we surely haven’t touched on it all.

Boomer: We’ve already talked about the devoured child, which was the big violent moment that I didn’t expect. For the most part, Ramón was sticking to either enacting vengeance on his oppressors in a way that was, conceptually, more human than animal, or against people foolish enough to wander into his lair, which is a very animalistic and understandable reaction (RIP Officer Rookie, we hardly knew ye). And Brandon really has a point with his notation that the people in the film are cruel and hateful, like the police officers who mock the erstwhile suicide bomber; in fact, the general lack of empathy among the human characters in this film is what stood out to me more than Ramón‘s appetite and the things he did to sate it.

What stood out to me were the vendors who appear at the site of a mangling where police officers are tossing depth charges into a small body of water while trying to get the gator’s attention. It seems that, in universe, the peddlers of cheap wares have named Ramón “Alexander the Alligator” and arrive at the scene of a horrible tragedy in an attempt to capitalize on it with foam hats and plastic gator trinkets. It’s been a long time since I rewatched Jaws, so I’m not sure whether or not this particular element was included there or not, but this capitalistic opportunism in the face of human misery shocked me much more than the casual violence of Ramón, whose swathe of killings are motivated more or less by base instinct. It’s merely one more layer on this film, reminding us that people are the real monsters.

Lagniappe

EPSON MFP image

Boomer: I notice that we mentioned that this film takes place in Chicago, and the Wikipedia page for the film also states that this is the case. This is never mentioned in the film, however; I kept trying to figure out where the film was set, and even googled “Marquette Place” when a sign with that name showed up on screen. Apparently, we only know this because it is mentioned in the director’s commentary. Before seeing the movie, I always assumed it was set in New York, which is probably the result of having long ago seen the Growing Pains episode in which Ben makes a movie that is, essentially, Alligator.

Britnee: During the scenes in David’s apartment, there are prints on the wall by Ramón Santiago (obvious inspiration for the alligator’s name). I was unaware of Santiago’s work prior to noticing the prints in the film, and I have to say that this guy has some phenomenal art. Not only is his art featured in the background of Alligator, but his art can also be found in the insanity that is the 1981 film Tattoo. According to Santiago’s website, he stated, “my paintings are what dreams are made of.” I would say that’s a pretty accurate description of his work. Unfortunately, I haven’t stumbled across an Santiago gator paintings yet.

Brandon: Alligator is a near-perfect slice of nasty 70s schlock (despite its early 80s release date) that begs to be loved for its faults instead of in spite of them. However, I do think that Britnee was onto something when she was wishing for a rewrite where a more solid connection between the now-monstrously large Ramón & the adult Marissa was established. However, instead of them sharing a moment of recognition at the film’s climax, I would’ve somehow implied that the body parts first discovered in the sewer belonged to Marissa’s father. Instead of an unidentified victim kicking off the police investigation that drives Ramón out of the sewers, Ramón killing Marissa’s father would both help explain her mother’s deranged state & add another name to Ramón‘s revenge list. One of the most fascinating concepts at work in Alligator is the idea of its titular monster intentionally seeking revenge on those who’ve wronged him, so it would’ve been incredible to see him devour the wicked brute that flushed him down the toilet as a baby. I enjoy the movie’s misshapen, incomplete feeling in general, but I do think that detail alteration would’ve improved the significance of Ramón‘s first recorded kill, however on-the-nose it would’ve been.

Upcoming Movies of the Month:
July: Boomer presents Citizen Ruth (1996)
August: Alli presents Black Moon (1975)
September: Brandon presents The Box (2009)

-The Swampflix Crew

Five Albums I Would Love to See in the Style of Girl Walk // All Day (2011)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

EPSON MFP image

May’s Movie of the Month selection, Girl Walk // All Day, was such a unique experience. After initially viewing the film, I couldn’t help but think of albums that I would love to see done in the style of Girl Walk // All Day. These, of course, would need to be dance albums because anything else just wouldn’t be as energetic and fun.

Here’s a list of five albums that I would love to see come to life on the big screen:

 

1. Scissor Sisters – Scissor Sisters

How can you not “feel like dancing” when listening to this incredible debut album by the Scissor Sisters? The music is just as unique as their bizarre music videos, so a visual album would turn the world upside down. I’m picturing a few body painted dancers portraying a coming-of-age tale in a mystical forest.

 

2. The Chemical Brothers – Push the Button

As the iconic beginning to “Galvanize,” the first track on the duo’s fifth studio album, plays, the audience is introduced to post-apocalyptic New York City. Dancers would be decked out in shredded pants and leather studded jackets, you know, the regular post-apocalyptic couture. Oh, and dirty faces for everyone!

 

3. Fatboy Slim – You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby

Every song on this album would be perfect for interpretive dance, and I think that a short musical film for You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby would be much like Girl Walk // All Day. Energetic tunes in the background with a leading lady breaking all the rules is the image I get for this one.

 

4. Beastie Boys – Licensed to Ill

This album is just 100% fun, like just about all of the music from the Beastie Boys. The songs on this album are so humorous, and they definitely make for some great old-school hip-hop dancing.

 

5. LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver

Aliens dancing up a storm in outer space is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Sound of Silver. This is one of those albums that you just can’t help but smile while listening to. The futuristic beats are perfect for dancing in the goofiest way possible, and I think it would be a lot of fun to see this album as a film.

For more on May’s Movie of the Month, the 2001 narrative dance video Girl Walk // All Day, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, our look at five other classic visual albums, and this comparison of the movie with Miyazaki’s “lost” short On Your Mark.

-Britnee Lombas

Illegal Art: Miyazaki’s On Your Mark (1995) & Girl Walk // All Day (2011)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

EPSON MFP image

When Brandon first mentioned that there might be some difficulty finding Girl Walk // All Day in order to watch it as this month’s MotM feature due to its rights issues, the first thing I thought of was On Your Mark. A seven minute experiment that Hayao Miyazaki churned out while dealing with his writer’s block on Princess Mononoke, the short film is an animated music video created for Japanese rock group Chage & Aska. It was originally released in theatres with Studio Ghibli feature Whisper of the Heart (which Miyazaki wrote but did not direct or animate), but has never had a legal release in the U.S., and is often pretty hard to find, even online (I found a version with a quick Google search, but won’t provide the link for fear that it will be immediately discovered and pulled). It was set to be released as part of a stateside Studio Ghibli DVD set, but Aska’s arrest for alleged possession of MDMA and other paraphernalia in 2014 meant that the set was delayed while Disney Japan scrubbed the video. Earlier sets of the DVD released in Japan were even recalled and new discs returned that did not contain the short. A note to international travelers: don’t do drugs in Japan. You’ll see your body of work erased from existence like lost, unnamed pharaohs.

The video itself is utterly beautiful. There’s no dialogue, and I don’t really know if the song itself has anything to do with the images, but the story is relatively straightforward despite being non-linear. There is an outside world that is ostensibly irradiated, and an underground metropolis that is visually evocative of both Blade Runner and Akira. Within this city, a group of policemen crash an airship into a tower filled with armed cultists, and two of them stumble upon a young girl with beautiful angelic wings. The girl is immediately taken by E.T.-esque scientists, and the two policemen who first discovered her break into a laboratory to liberate her. The three fail to escape and plunge to their deaths, but then a Lola rennt style rewind-as- montage leads back to the point where they fell and they instead fly away; the two policemen take the girl out into the sun to release her back into the sky, where she floats away and out of sight.

There are a lot of Miyazaki’s recurring elements in play, most notably his love for the imagery of flight. Whether it’s a flying fortress in Castle in the Sky, Nausicaa zipping around on her flier in Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, porcine fighter pilots in Porco Rosso, or pretty much the entirety of The Wind Rises, Miyazaki loves to make the audience feel like they’re soaring. The three characters have little in the way of characterization, but the policemen show a lot of personality in just their faces and their selfless attempts to save the girl from experimentation. We don’t really need to know much about their world at all, but the narrative of the story is clear regardless. Just as Girl Walk tells a story with no words, so to does On Your Mark. And, as both are constantly facing potential deletion, so to should you take any opportunity that presents itself to catch either film.

For more on May’s Movie of the Month, the 2001 narrative dance video Girl Walk // All Day, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film & last week’s look at five other classic visual albums.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Do as Peggy Says: Saying Goodbye to the MCU’s Best Hero

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

EPSON MFP image

The greatest Marvel Cinematic Universe character passed away last week. Margaret “Peggy” Carter, a founder of S.H.I.E.L.D. and all-around onscreen delight, was shown to have gone to her rest with the release of Captain America: Civil War last week. The film’s release was followed up by the announcement that ABC would not be renewing Agent Carter for a third season, leaving the show on a cliffhanger and disappointing hundreds of fans. When Brandon asked me if I wanted to take a minute to talk about what Peggy meant to me, I jumped at the call. Please, allow me this moment to eulogize one of the greats.

Who was Peggy Carter? The character first appeared in the MCU in a supporting role in Captain America: The First Avenger. As revealed in the second season of Agent Carter, Peggy had grown up a tomboy before ultimately giving in to the expectations of femininity that were thrust upon her and enforced by her mother. She joined the war effort, initially as a code-breaker, and was ultimately recruited to join the Special Operations Executive organization, which led to her meeting with Steve “Captain America” Rogers. Following Cap’s disappearance, he was considered missing in action, and Peggy joined the Strategic Scientific Reserve, the precursor to S.H.I.E.L.D. In this position, Peggy helped thwart an attempted Hydra takeover and foiled the assassination attempts of a graduate of the Black Widow program. She later participated in overthrowing a corrupt cabal of powerful men on the East Coast. Forty years later, she was still an active part of S.H.I.E.L.D. and serving on its board, as shown in the opening scene of last summer’s Ant-Man. When Cap finally re-emerged in the modern world, Peggy was his last remaining connection to his old life, and we had the pleasure of seeing him visit her bedside in Winter Soldier.

All of that, is, however, just fact. Or, “fact,” rather, given that we’re talking about a fictional character. Who was Peggy Carter, really, though? 2015 saw the release of an astonishing three American television shows that revolved around women from the comics: Agent Carter, Supergirl, and Jessica Jones. Despite the more obvious familiarity with the Supergirl character and the surprise success of the Netflix interpretation of Jessica Jones, Peggy Carter’s stories stood out just as strongly as those of the other series. Although it was a network show and therefore would never be able to address the lie of a enviable past with the same depth as, say, Mad Men, Agent Carter still put a woman in an important role in a spy agency in the late forties and was as honest as it could be about how she and her sisters would be treated. In one of the first season’s greatest speeches, Peggy is confronted by her chief and two male co-workers, who are incredulous that she could have spent the whole season performing an independent in-depth exploration of evidence under their noses. “I conducted my own investigation because no one listens to me,” she says. “I got away with it because no one looks at me. Because, unless I have your reports, your coffee, or your lunch, I’m invisible.” And, unfortunately, it looks like Agent Carter itself wasn’t visible enough to warrant further investigation.

But that does not mean that we can’t adore the episodes that we were blessed with until the dark night consumes us all. We can always look back fondly at a program that featured women who loved to eat (and even secreted away gravy compartments in their handbags to allow for dining after hours), women who protected each other, and women who saw the opportunity for jealousy and instead took the road of affection. It’ll be a darker world without her, but we’ll make it through. As for me, in the meantime, I’ll keep on doing as Peggy says.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Girl Walk // All Day (2011) & 5 Other Must-See “Visual Albums”

/ swampflix / 16 Comments

EPSON MFP image

There has been so much crossover between pop music & film over the decades that it’s almost difficult to distinguish exactly what makes May’s Movie of the Month, the full-length Girl Talk dance video Girl Walk // All Day, such a unique work. From the Beatles movies to MTV to beyond, pop musicians have turned to cinema as an outlet in many varied ways, not least of all including the music video, the concert film, and the tour documentary. Often enough, this visual element can be treated as a mere means of promotion, a backseat accompaniment to the true product being sold: the music itself. There are certainly some major exceptions to that music-video-as-advertisement mentality, however.

The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, The Who’s Tommy, and Prince’s Purple Rain are all readily recognizable examples of major musicians trying to put their music to film by constructing a feature-length narrative work with songs from a single album interjected between the plot points as punctuation. The concert film is its own artform, one perfected by more experimental examples like The Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense & Björk’s Biophilia Live (I’m sure Kanye West’s Jodorowsky-inspired Yeezus film will be right up there if he ever releases the damn thing), but they don’t seem quite as solid of a music-meets-film artform as the narrative versions of the records mentioned above. The problem that even the narrative music movies (something we’ve previously referred to as Pop Music Cinema around here) feel somewhat stilted in their integration of music & cinema, not quite reaching a fully-formed, fully-committed ideal. Concert films are a type of documentary. Narrative pop music films are often a next-stage evolution of the Broadway musical where the songs punctuate the dialogue as a kind of emotional spike or act break. Neither are 100% the music video as feature-length cinema.

Girl Walk // All Day feels different from most of pop music cinema’s past because it is more of pure conversion of the music video into the feature-length film medium. The most apt term I’ve heard to describe what I’m getting at here was recently coined by Beyoncé as “the visual album” (more on that below). I like that term because it distinguishes the artform from the “music video album”, which is quite literally just a collection of music videos, as opposed to a feature-length, singular work that poses the music video as a narrative artform. Think of the difference between The Beatles’ album Please Please Me and their more thematically cohesive later works like Abbey Road and you’ll see the same difference between “the music video album” and “the visual album”. Just because Beach House released a music video for every track on Teen Dream doesn’t mean all the videos from that record function as a singularly-minded, narratively cohesive collection. Girl Walk // All Day is a (fan-made) visual representation of a Girl Talk mixtape in its entirety. It’s much more akin to a music video than a traditional musical, but it still functions as a feature-length, narrative work with a (loose plot) entirely driven by the shifting dynamics of its soundtrack. Nothing exists in a void, however. Just because Girl Walk // All Day is, in my mind at least, the most fully-realized convergence of the music video & the feature film into a singular work doesn’t mean it was the first, last, or most significant example of its kind.

There are many other “visual albums” out there in the world and I’ve collected a solid list of five examples below of some of the highlights of the genre, including, of course, the Beyoncé work I lifted the term from. I don’t think the “visual album” has yet reached hit its peak. There’s plenty of room for the artform to expand into an distinct medium worthy of respect & adoration. I could even argue that the “visual album” is the logical next step for the musical as cinema, a medium that has stagnated in a lot of ways over the past few decades. Here’s five boudnary-pushing examples of the visual album that offer a distinctive look on where the genre could presumably go in the future, each promising just as much innovation as Girl Walk // All Day, if not more.

 

EPSON MFP image

1. Lemonade (2016)

It’d be a shame to praise the “visual album” as an artform without mentioning the source of where I lifted the term. It also helps that the product itself is an exquisite work of art. Beyoncé has been going through a spiritual growth spurt in the last few years where she’s struggling to break away from her long-established persona of top-of-the-world pop idol to reveal a more creative, vulnerable persona underneath. Her recent “visual album” Lemonade feels like a culmination of this momentum, a grand personal statement that cuts through her usual “flawless” visage to expose a galaxy of emotional conflicts & spiritual second-guessings the world was previously not privy to. It’s at times a deeply uncomfortable experience, as if you’re reading someone’s diary entries or poetry as they stare you down. However, it can also be an empowering & triumphant one, particularly aimed at giving a voice to the underserved POV of being a young black woman in modern America.

Lemonade is significant to the visual album medium not only for giving it a name, but also pushing the boundaries of form & narrative. In some ways it resembles the traditional mode of a “music video album” in that it represents each track from the audio version of Lemonade with a distinctly separate music video. Those rigid divisions serve mostly as chapter breaks, however, as the spoken word pieces that bind them represent an overall, loose narrative tableau about romantic grief, revenge, vulnerability, and empowerment. It’s the same kind of cryptic dialogue vs powerful cinematography formula that’s been driving Terrence Malicks’ work for years. At the risk of incurring the wrath of the Beyhive, Ill confess that I don’t find every risk Lemonade takes pays off (the country song & the poetry can both be a bit much for me at times), but I respect its ambition in a general sense, especially when the more powerful, successful moments hit you like a ton of emotional bricks. Lemonade names, expands, and complicates the concept of the visual album as a medium and demands to be seen if you have an interest in the meeting place where the music video blurs with cinema.

 

EPSON MFP image

2. The Line, the Cross and the Curve (1993)

I’ve been a huge Kate Bush fan since I first heard The Hounds of Love & The Dreaming in high school, but it took me a good, long while to get into her work from the 90s & beyond.There’s a pop slickness to Kate Bush’s sound, as strange is it is, that can be a little off-putting to me depending on the production .It was the short film The Line, the Cross and the Curve that finally unlocked this world for me and in the years since I first watched it Bush’s 1993 album The Red Shoes has become one of my favorites from the brilliant singer/songwriter. Composed of six music video segments pulled from the twelve tracks on The Red Shoes, The Line, the Cross and the Curve is a short film directed by Bush herself that mimics the 1948 Powell-Pressburger masterpiece The Red Shoes as a basic framework before deviating into something idiosyncratically sensual & surreal. Girl Walk // All Day might be the most successive marriage of the music video & the narrative feature film and Lemonade deserves its own accolades for expanding & labeling the “visual album” as an artform, but The Line, the Cross and the Curve is still a personal pet favorite for me based on pure emotional impact alone.

Bush recorded The Red Shoes in the wake of her emotional devastation of losing two loved ones & suffering a romantic break-up in a single year. The film version & the album both hold a similar cryptic diary/therapy dynamic as Lemonade, but the range & depth of emotions on display in The Line, the Cross and the Curve sometimes reach a sensual, celebratory jubilee not touched by Beyoncé’s distant descendant. I’m thinking particularly of the lush fruitscape of the “Eat the Music” portion of the film, a visual representation of a song so strong that it turned a tune I was too cynical to appreciate into one of my favorite pop music diddies of all time. Bush’s film also can play it tender (“Moments of Pleasure”) or demonically wicked (“The Red Shoes”) depending on its mood and although the singer/songwriter/dancer/director herself has gone on record voicing her frustration with the finished product, I find it to be something of a masterpiece, an early pinnacle of the “visual album” medium. My only complaint is that it could’ve easily included the other six tracks from The Red Shoes & functioned as a feature film.

EPSON MFP image

3. Ultimate Reality (2007)

One of the strangest concert experiences of my life was one of the first (of many wonderful) times I saw Dan Deacon perform live. Instead of having a traditional opening act for this particular tour, Deacon’s set was preceded by a “live performance” of his “visual album” Ultimate Reality. Two drummers took the stage to simultaneously perform on top of Deacon’s trademark synth carnage as a live soundtrack to a film that was projected behind them (provided by visual artist & frequent Deacon collaborator Jimmy Joe Roche). Scrapping together clips from Arnold Schwarzenegger classic from various phases of the action movie god’s career, Ultimate Reality repurposes the Governator’s past work into a single, kaleidoscopic mess of confusingly plotted narrative & eye-burning psychedelia.

Ultimate Reality approaches the music video as cinema concept from the same jubilant, illegal mindframe as Girl Walk // All Day, except it blends all of its “borrowed” material into an endurance contest instead of a crowd-pleasing celebration of the art of dance. There’s a very loose narrative plot at work in the film that tells some kind of time-traveling story Arnold thwarting a doomsday scenario, but it’s an entirely superfluous to the work’s true bread & butter: mind-melting visual & aural assault. Ultimate Reality is simultaneously one of the most beautiful & the most difficult to watch visual albums you’re ever likely to see (it’s pretty much literally a technicolor kaleidoscope of Arnold Schwarzenegger clips & Dan Deacon synths, after all). It’s by far my favorite way way to clear my house at the end of a party. Just pop in the DVD & watch them scatter.

EPSON MFP image

4. Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem (2003)

I’m far, far, far from an electronica fan, which makes me a bit of a sourpuss when it comes to enjoying the immensely popular French pop duo Daft Punk. A few singles will catch my attention every now & then, but listening to one of their albums in its entirety is something I’m not likely to ever to do voluntarily. Every rule has its exceptions, however, and I have found myself blaring the band’s soundtrack for the underrated cheap thrill Tron: Legacy. There’s something integrally cinematic about Daft Punk’s music that lends it well to soundtrack work, especially sci-fi movies and I would gladly watch any film the band scores for their contributions alone. It’s a good thing, then, that the Daft Punk visual album Interstella 5555 is a sci-fi film mostly set in outer space.

A French-Japanese co-production constructed by Toei Animation, the production studio behind legendary works like Sailor Moon & Dragon Ball Z, Interstella 5555 illustrates Daft Punk’s hit album Discovery in its entirety. Much like with Girl Walk // All Day, the visual album features no dialogue outside the band’s lyrics (which are at one point sampled in the Girl Walk movie, coincidentally), but its narrative is much more solid & vividly clear. In the movie the space alien band The Crescentdolls is kidnapped by an American record studio/ancient cult and forced to perform a one hit wonder & sign autographs for adoring fans at a punishingly repetitive schedule. Their quest to escape this hopeless imprisonment rests in the hands of a mercenary hero who flies around in a guitar-shaped spaceship & spends a lot of his time rocking out to bonafide jams while floating around in a vacuum. The film is beautiful, funny, terrifying, and easily recognizable as one of the best examples of the visual album to date. I’ll admit that somewhere around the third act the repetition of the dance music started to exhaust me a bit, but if you’re a more committed Daft Punk fan you might not even have that problem. As far as accomplishing the goals it establishes for itself, the film is wholly successful & thoroughly delightful.

EPSON MFP image

5. Trapped in the Closet (2005-2012)

R. Kelly is, in all likelihood, a complete monster (unless you want to consider the shocking pile of evidence against his good name hearsay), but that doesn’t mean he’s not an entertaining monster. There are so many ridiculous phases & highlights to the R&B singer’s career that I’m not even going to attempt to touch on them, here, but I think it’s fairly clear that his de facto magnum opus, Trapped in the Closet, has earned its place among the most noteworthy examples of the visual album medium. Kelly took the idea of a narrative film music video hybrid literally to the point of outright hilarity. Described as a “rap opera”, the seemingly never-ending saga of Trapped in the Closet follows the second-by-second developments of a love triangle that spirals out of control into an absurdly complicated web of deceipt, revenge, murder, and romance.

Trapped in the Closet is a gloriously silly watch (even when it’s offensively close-minded) and at times feels way more akin to a daytime soap opera than music video cinema, but it’s inspired so much pop culture weirdness to follow (including a glorious Weird Al parody & what’s easily one of the best Wikipedia pages I’ve ever read) that it’s near impossible to discuss the visual album as a concept without including its name. Trapped in the Closet may aim for a more straight-forward narrative than Girl Walk, Lemonade, etc. (even hilariously so), but easily matches those projects in ambition & sheer audacity. R. Kelly combined the music video & the narrative feature into a single, punishing, over-the-top work of high camp. Even if you can’t stomach the idea of sitting through all 33 “chapters” of the monotonously bonkers story, you should at least consider getting a taste of the early episodes and skimming through the Wikipedia plot synopsis, including this flow chart of who’s bonked whom in its web of sex & lies.

Untitled

For more on May’s Movie of the Month, the 2011 narrative dance video Girl Walk // All Day, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet