Movie of the Month: The Swimmer (1968)

August 12, 2024August 12, 2024 / swampflix / 5 Comments

Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and we discuss it afterwards. This month Brandon made Britnee & Boomer watch The Swimmer (1968).

Brandon: I first discovered the surreal 60s melodrama The Swimmer when we covered director Frank Perry’s late-career mainstream comedy Hello Again for a previous Movie of the Month. I watched a few great films from Perry that month, but the dream-state machismo of this one in particular has constantly been on my mind in the few years since. Even so, I can’t think of a better time to revisit The Swimmer than now. Not only was its film-nerd awareness boosted during its brief run on the Criterion Channel earlier this year, but it’s also been so brutally, unrelentingly hot outside that all I want to do is look at, dive into, and drown in swimming pools. Every day that I have to take the bus or walk home from work in the Caribbean hell heat of downtown New Orleans, I like to imagine how wonderful it would be if I could swim my way across the city in an endless line of swimming pools instead, just like in Perry’s film. It really put a different spin on those awful “Proud to swim home” bumper stickers that littered the city in the years after Hurricane Katrina.

On a less whimsical note, The Swimmer has also taken on some additional relevance for me this US presidential election season. There’s something about watching a delusional egotist refuse to face the reality of his age and his social responsibilities until he crashes into it like a brick wall that just “hits different” this year. A past-his-prime Burt Lancaster stars as that titular egotist: a functional alcoholic who relies a little too heavily on his outdated social status as the neighborhood partyboy for a family man of his middle age. He spends the entire movie downing cocktails poolside in his signature Speedo, shamelessly flirting with every woman who’s in butt-slapping distance no matter age or marital status. You can’t say he’s a man without ambition, though. On a whim, the suburban hedonist declares that he is going to “swim home” by visiting a string of friends’ backyard pools across his wealthy upstate Connecticut neighborhood. On the journey, we witness the exact moment his carefree hunk status sours among the local socialites, so that he has no friends or family left at the end of his selfish, Quixotic quest for permanent leisure.

The “swimming home” plot of The Swimmer sounds like an absurdly vapid premise for a movie, but Frank Perry (along with then-wife Eleanor Perry, who wrote most of his early screenplays) somehow molds it into a low-key mind-melter of 1960s moral rot. He mostly pulls that off by digging into the aquatic anti-hero’s psyche, charting the progress of the story more through character revelations than through the practical details of the borderline supernatural plot. Instead of only traveling by the “continuous” “river” of swimming pools he initially envisions over his morning cocktail, Lancaster spends a lot of runtime galloping alongside horses, casually strolling through forests, and crossing highway traffic barefoot. He does often emerge from one borrowed swimming pool to the next, though, and along the way we sink deeper into the ugliness of his himbo playboy lifestyle. He starts the film as a masterful charmer, seducing the world (or at least the world’s wives and mistresses) with an infectious swinging-60s bravado. By the time he swims his last pool, we recognize him as a miserable piece of shit who doesn’t deserve to kiss the feet of the infinite wonderful women from his past who we meet along the way. The overall result is sinisterly ludicrous beefcake melodrama, presented in lurid Technicolor.

I do think it’s strange that a movie with such a high-concept premise is so willing to brush aside its own internal logic. Perry could have easily edited the story together so that the pools all appeared connected, without worrying about real-world practicality. What did y’all make of the parts of The Swimmer where Lancaster travels by land instead of by water? Did they feel like a shortcut cheat on his “swimming home” project or were they just as strangely compelling as his dips in the pool?

Britnee: Ned is bonkers, and I absolutely loved watching him unravel among the country club elite. Particularly the hot dog cart scene where Ned fights with the homeowner of the party he crashes about ownership of a hot dog cart. This is Americana!

When thinking about Ned’s swimming pool challenge, having him truly not swim all the way home made watching his misery all the more delightful. He failed his own project where he made the rules; this guy sucks so much. I also really enjoyed all of the wild non-swimming barefoot activities, such as jumping horse hurdles and walking on the road while barefoot. I wasn’t expecting a gore element in this movie, but good God, those feet were torn up.

Boomer: Oh boy, but I did love this one. I have my own affection for the idea of swimming home. For years, my best friend has teased me whenever I look at a body of water and think “I wonder if I could swim in that,” and living where I live now, there are so many beautiful bodies of water that are tempting, especially when the pool in my building often gets too hot in the summer to be refreshing (last year, my neighbor temped it at 92 degrees one August day). Last year, we defused the summer heat by going to a local outdoor watering hole called Jessica Hollis Park, which was wonderful. We would load up the car, head out as a quartet, and spend five to six hours out there in the crisp, cool water from the Colorado River; one friend got a snorkel set for me and I would often spend a couple of those hours just snorkeling and swimming. On one of the last days of summer, while I looked back wistfully as our car climbed the hill, I said that sometimes I wished that I could just live down there, and my best friend said that, while the rest of the party watched me snorkeling, they had joked that “every summer, he gets closer and closer to becoming amphibious.” I never get tired of it. Luckily, unlike Ned, I never have to experience a series of increasingly hostile neighbors and former friends each time that I surface.

What I liked most about this was the tinge of surreal horror that goes on throughout. When we first meet Ned, he emerges from the woods, clad only in his bathing suit, and greets two neighbors who welcome him warmly and affectionately. Even they, however, are surprised by some of the things that he says, particularly when he mentions that he has a desire for his two daughters to have their weddings in the Merrill house one day; this takes them aback and is our first and earliest indication that Ned is, in some way, living in a state of delusion. For the rest of the film, no matter how much time passes, he is insistent on a few precepts, from which he cannot deviate: that he must “swim home” via the pool route, that his daughters are at that very moment playing tennis, and that his wife Lucinda is waiting for him. The first few people whom he encounters take this in stride with little exception, but as he approaches his destination, those he meets are less inclined to partake in the maintenance of his illusions, although they are never able to dissuade him or bring him back to reality. Of particular note is one man who seems to be Ned’s true friend, who tells him about a job that Ned might be right for that could help him get back on his feet, which Ned shrugs off as unnecessary, causing the man to be somewhat offended that Ned thinks he has to maintain his pride and insist that he needs no such thing; to watch him shout “There’s no need to pretend with me,” while Ned runs off with a girl less than half his age, rejecting what may well be his last chance at salvation, is heartbreaking.

I also really loved the way that we get a slow trickle of information about what a fraud and a failure Ned is that slowly turns into a torrent, before ending in a rainstorm so vast that it threatens to consume him. Although this information never shakes his faith in his destination, it does begin to deteriorate his image of himself, so that the sexy, still fit older man who, in the film’s opening scenes, is the envy of his fellow middle aged men and declares that he still feels as athletic and powerful as he did before he took his first drink or had his first smoke (he can even keep pace with a horse!), eventually becomes a limping, tired, cold man whose feet are (as Britnee noted) in bad shape. First, there is the couple that is happy to greet him, then the mother of a man he says was a friend of his, but whom she states he never came to see in the hospital; Ned doesn’t even know that the man, Eric Hammar, seems to have died from his injuries. He happens upon his daughters’ former babysitter, now twenty, and whisks her away, indicating that he’s moving into a place where only the sweetly naive have faith in him, and even the girl’s younger brother seems to find the whole idea of “swimming home” odd and perhaps even sinister. Here, we learn more about just how delusional he is, as he asks the girl, Julie, to come up to the house and babysit, but she knows that his daughters are too old to need that kind of minding. From here, we head to the party where Ned is presented with his last chance to get off of his self-destructive path, as he comes upon the only woman in the film who would be responsive to his advances and the aforementioned friend who tells him about a potential job, but he rejects them both in favor of running off with a woman thirty-five years younger than he is in order to lovebomb her following her confession of a childhood crush on him. He scares her off eventually, and the narrative takes a real turn here, as things become more sinister and we get to see Ned in his worst moment in the film.

There is a moment where Ned comes upon the home of a wealthy nudist couple, just as their chauffeur arrives at the gate. Ned calls out to him using the wrong name, which in part reiterates for us that Ned’s regression into fantasy is also a regression into his past, as if he has a kind of euphoria-induced amnesia of the last few years when everything went wrong. It’s textual that he “forgets” how old his daughters are and that his wife has left him, as well as “not remembering” that one of his “friends” had died, so it’s natural that he might also “not remember” that one of his neighbors had changed employees. Subtextually, however, I think that this is also meant to highlight that Ned is, well, kind of a racist—mistaking one Black employee for another, as he asks the new driver if he ever met his predecessor, and then talks up said predecessor for all of his fine qualities. The new driver (he’s credited as “Halloran’s Chauffeur;” my apologies for not being able to give a name) then asks if the old driver had “natural rhythm,” to which Ned too-quickly replies, which earns him a bit of a side eye and a harrumph. Ned couldn’t tell these two men apart and then tried to ingratiate himself through stereotypes, and although his mental state degrades further, this is the first time that we see him commit a real moral wrong (trespassing and grabassing notwithstanding).

Things just get worse from here, where he ends up at a party where the hostess calls him a gate crasher and insults him, implying a past when Ned was her social better and the Merrills snubbed her and her husband, but that the latter couple is now the one with more social cache and status. After embarrassing himself by throwing a fit over the hot dog wagon that Britnee mentioned, he ends up in the middle of the film’s show-stopping performance from Janice Rule, who reveals herself to be an actress and Ned’s former lover before he ditched her. This is where we learn the most about Ned, and it’s delivered terrifically: he was always a charmer, they had their affair, during which time he only ever took her out where they could blend in and be invisible, before dumping her in a very crowded and hoity-toity place via a bunch of tired old saws about “the duties of a father and a husband,” hoping that she wouldn’t make a scene (she did). It’s great stuff, and reveals to both us and—seemingly—Ned himself that he’s a real cad. Then, emerging from the largest pool yet (after having to degrade himself by begging for fifty cents as well as show an attendant that he had washed between his toes), he’s further humiliated by a grocer and a barshop owner. The barman initially shows sympathy and compassion for Ned while his wife and the grocer taunt him for his wife’s expensive and pretentious tastes, his lack of discipline with his children that has led them to running wild (there’s even a reference to their “wild driving” and an accident that was kept out of the papers, which I interpreted to possibly mean that one of his own children had been responsible for the collision that ultimately killed Eric Hammar), and his unpaid tabs at both establishments. The barman’s wife even degrades the memory of his daughters, saying that the two girls would come in and mock him constantly. First a trickle of information about Ned, then a river, and all of it very bleak and haunting.

One of the things that tickled me most about Ned was his constant referent to “tomorrow.” Every time someone talks about getting together: “Let’s grab lunch tomorrow,” “bring your money because we’re playing golf tomorrow,” “you’ll have to come out and babysit the girls tomorrow,” “come over tomorrow and play tennis with my daughters.” It tells us something interesting about his character, which is that Ned is a man who over-commits, just as he has to the physically demanding “swimming home” idea, just as he wanted to become Julie’s overly devoted lover/mentor/protector (ew) after spending a couple of hours together, just as he has bought too much into the idea that he can make something real if he believes it hard enough. It reminded me of the Popeye character Wimpy, and his classic quote (I guess?) “I’d gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today,” which only got funnier and sadder as he extorted a cup of lemonade from a child by buying it on credit, then later found himself groveling for the entry fee to a public pool. Ned’s problems are always tomorrow’s problems; today, he has to swim home.

Lagniappe

Britnee: I’ve heard wonderful things about The Swimmer for years, but I never had the appetite to watch it. Something about watching Burt Lancaster swim in suburbia for over an hour just didn’t put me in the movie watching mood. Back in my college years, I had to watch Lancaster’s Go Tell the Spartans movie for a history course, and ever since then, I can only see Lancaster as a very tired and very tan macho man in his late 60s/70s film era. In The Swimmer, he is indeed a very tired and very tan macho man, but with a much better flavor (and much worse hair).

Boomer: I would be remiss in my duties if I were not to note that Diana Muldaur appeared in both the original Star Trek series and Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the latter, she spent an entire season as the ship’s doctor while Gates McFadden took some time away from the show (coming back almost immediately after the firing of a producer whose had sexually harassed her). In the former, she played two separate guest characters. I looked them up again to be sure, but this film actually came out during the summer between her two appearances, as she appeared in “Return to Tomorrow” in February 1968, The Swimmer released in May of 1968, and her second ST episode “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” aired in October of 1968. Big year for Muldaur-heads! (It also feels remiss not to note that Joan Rivers is in this movie, as a woman who tells Ned that she doesn’t get the appeal of pools, as they’re “murder on [her] hair.”)

I borrowed the Blu-ray for this one from my local library, and it’s a fun disc. The FBI warning and the “opinions expressed” disclaimer both have this goofy cartoon “water” overlay to make it look like you’re viewing it underwater, which was a novelty that I was surprisingly charmed by. The main menu also has a slickly edited montage of out-of-context scenes and beachy music that set up the feeling that you’re in for a groovy, sexy romp, which this movie definitely isn’t. I can only imagine the reaction of someone who wasn’t already vaguely familiar with the film’s concept picking this off of the shelf or out of a streaming line-up because of the hunky Lancaster on the cover and thinking that’s what they were about to watch, which is also very funny to me. Of course, they probably didn’t want to use the original poster despite the tagline “When you talk about ‘The Swimmer’ will you talk about yourself?” which is an all-timer—legendary—piece of film marketing.

Brandon: Time moves quick, whether or not you move along with it, as our overaged playboy protagonist discovers here. When I revisited The Swimmer for this conversation, Joe Biden was still stubbornly running for President in spite of loud, constant uproar urging him to step aside for someone younger & sharper to lead the Democratic Party. Trained to expect that nothing good ever happens, I assumed he was going to hold onto his delusions of youth & vigor all the way until an easily lost election. A lot has changed since then, but not so much that the film’s themes of a geriatric egotist refusing to cede power despite their obvious mental & moral slippage no longer has resonance in American electoral politics. Hell, as of this posting, there’s still one running for the office of US President.

Next month: Boomer presents Inherit the Wind (1960)

-The Swampflix Crew

The Not-So-New 52: The Death of Superman (2018)

August 7, 2024August 7, 2024 / swampflix / 4 Comments

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

When I first heard that DC animated had released a film titled The Death of Superman, I wasn’t that surprised. I had, at the time, only recently attempted to watch Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay and had, as I noted in the review of that film, found the opening to be rather tasteless. As a result, when hearing that a new adaptation of Superman’s death was about to be released, I thought, “Didn’t they already do that?” and then thought, “Oh, I guess they’re really just out of ideas.” Now that I’ve watched all of these (so far) in order, I have to say that it was more that this was where an adaptation of that story best slotted into this sub-franchise of the DCAMU, the eleventh of these films overall. It’s a little thin, all things considered, but that’s really because it’s more about setting up the next film than it is about the actual narrative that this adaptation covers. A little comic history: back in the nineties, DC was getting ready to marry Lois and Clark/Superman. However, at the time, the ABC series Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, was currently airing, and they wanted to marry the two characters to one another, but not for at least another season. So, ABC called in a favor and DC came up with a plan to delay the comic marriage of Clark and Lois until it was time for it to happen in the show as well, for synergy. As a result, they came up with the idea to “kill” Superman temporarily and then have a yearlong series of stories in which various characters attempt to fill the void that his death created, before the real deal triumphantly returns to reassume his place. That one little decision on behalf of a mostly forgotten Superman-adjacent primetime TV show is why we’re here today.

Despite their previous appearances together showing them enjoying one another’s company on a few dates, Superman (Jerry O’Connell) and Wonder Woman (Rosario Dawson) are now merely good friends and colleagues, and Superman has taken up dating his beloved Lois Lane (Rebecca Romijn) in his civilian identity as Clark Kent, although he has not yet come out to her as being Superman. Wonder Woman encourages him to do so, and his need to make a decision sooner than later is exacerbated when a meeting of the Justice League reveals that The Flash (Christopher Gorham) is getting married soon, and when Kal-El asks Barry if Iris “knows,” Barry tells him that he revealed his identity to her “ages ago.” Shortly after Superman gives Lois a tour of S.T.A.R. Labs, which houses the spacepod that brought him to earth and which contains holographic records that include an image of his parents, his other family, the Kents, arrive in town and want to meet Lois. Over the course of their dinner, Lois comes to realize that she actually knows almost nothing about her beau, for the first time recognizing how guarded he is around her and wondering what the cause is. She leaves him for the night, and he has a heart to heart with his mother wherein she admits that, at her age, it doesn’t seem like keeping secrets is really all that important anymore.

On the less domestic, more superheroic side of things, we learn that Lex Luthor (Rainn Wilson) has found a way to circumvent his house arrest and is still up to nefarious doings, including attempting to create a clone version of Superman which he can control as well as merging earth and Apokoliptian technology to sell to criminals. Seemingly coincidentally, a “boom tube” wormhole opens not far from the earth, spitting out a misshapen asteroid that starts to fall toward the planet, crashing into the ocean. Several of Aquaman (Matt Lanter)’s guards converge on the undersea crash site at the same time as a Lexcorp submersible. All are slain by a monster that emerges from the wreckage, who then makes his way to land and toward Metropolis, killing every living thing in his path. In the meantime, Clark reveals his secret to Lois, only to be called away to deal with the monster after it takes out the entire rest of the Justice League, although Wonder Woman goes down last and hardest. Clark leaves a note for Lois with his last secret (“I love you”) and then heads out to defeat the monster, while also having to deal with interference from Luthor, who gets involved both because of his ego and because he believes that the monster’s genetics will help him to stabilize the unstable makeup of all the deformed clones he’s hiding in the basement of Lexcorp.

While 2007’s Superman: Doomsday served to condense both the “Death of Superman” and the “Reign of the Supermen” comic arcs into a single movie, this one covers only the former and gives that original narrative some breathing room. I’m torn about the ongoing expansion of the Justice League as it seems to continue to happen largely offscreen and/or in the background. Justice League: Dark showed Hawkman and Martian Manhunter hanging around the League’s headquarters in non-speaking roles, and while Manhunter gets a line this film (voiced by Nyambi Nyambi), it’s strange that we don’t get a sense of camaraderie between the characters in the way that the earliest of these movies did. The relationship between Clark and Diana is strong, but the fact that Superman didn’t even know that the Flash was getting married makes it seem like, although this team is growing in number between movies when we’re not getting to see it, they’re not growing in friendship, and that’s the only reason that anyone would have to remain emotionally invested in this series as it advances. At least this one, since Batman is really and truly powerless against an unstoppable killing machine with no weak points, he gets out of the way and lets Superman take center stage here, although Wonder Woman is no slouch either. That inclusion of the whole League, however, allows for a consistent heightening of the stakes that appropriately ratchets the tension, even if we already know Superman is headed for his death because, you know, the title is at the beginning.

Of course, there are the seeds of the Supermen to come in this one. We see a young super clone being grown in a vat like a Venture brother; we meet Dr. John Henry Irons, who will eventually become Steel; we even get to see a hopeful astronaut named Hank Henshaw remain optimistic that Superman will save his crew even as their ship is pelted by debris from the asteroid’s incursion, killing his wife and their other companions, and even if you don’t know where that’s going, it’s successful as foreshadowing. Those are fun little seeds being planted. As for other things I really like, having O’Connell’s real life spouse voice Lois is a cute little treat, and their great natural chemistry comes through in the performance. Romijn is an underappreciated star, in my opinion, but she’s not given the same potency of material here that Anne Heche had on her plate in Doomsday. The best parts of that movie come after the fight with Doomsday that take up only Act I of that film (and which serves as the final climax of this one), wherein Lois grieves in secret because while the whole world mourns Superman she’s mourning Clark, struggles with her conflicting feelings about seeking comfort with the Kents, who are (as in this one) strangers to her, is initially delighted that Superman seems to have been resurrected only to be devastated by his reserved treatment of her. Romijn’s Lois isn’t given as much to do; the story focuses more on Clark’s internal struggle with whether to tell her his secret than it does on her learning the truth and puzzling out all the implications. When she thinks Clark is going to break up with her, she tells him that she’s absolutely not going to stop coming into the office, as if this eighties-ass Kate & Allie punchline is supposed to be empowering, when instead it besmirches the entire script. Hepburn and Tracy it ain’t.
This one is fine. It’s not predictable that some fringe film critic is going to sit down and watch all of these movies week after week; it’s logical to assume that the decade plus between the release of Doomsday and this movie would mean that you probably forgot most of the story beats for this even before they changed up other plot elements, or that Doomsday came out when you were too young to notice these things and now you’re a sophomore or a junior and thus the primary audience for this. (We should never really be under any illusion about that, and recognize that these movies rise above mediocrity at any point is kind of a miracle, to be honest.) This one is above the average for this overall franchise, but it’s missing something special that would push it into a more memorable state. It’s a necessary step in this film series, and thus can’t really be skipped, but it’s one that there’s no real reason to recommend other than for that reason, so take from that what you will.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Suicide Squad – Hell to Pay (2018)

July 31, 2024 / swampflix / 2 Comments

A few years back, [Erstwhile Roommate of Boomer] and I were browsing through the then-current version of the HBO app and stumbled upon the then-latest DC animated movie. We managed to barely get through the opening, which we found kind of distasteful and crass. That movie was Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay, and I wasn’t really looking forward to this one on this watch-through, since my previous experience was negative. Upon watching the film in its entirety, however, I can report it’s actually pretty fun. Whereas the humor in Batman and Harley Quinn mostly missed the mark, this one manages to weave together an interesting narrative that plays to the strengths of the characters chosen for this outing, while also tapping into an irreverence that previous darker attempts at comedy failed to achieve.

After a cold open in which an ill-conceived attempt by a couple of hotheads to get out of Suicide Squad duty leaves everyone but Deadshot (Christian Slater) dead, Amanda Waller (a perfectly cast Vanessa Williams) sends him into the field alongside the moralistic martial artist Bronze Tiger (Billy Brown), gimmicky sharpshooter Captain Boomerang, literal and figurative ice queen Killer Frost (Kristin Bauer van Straten), cybernetically enhanced Copperhead, and, of course, Harley Quinn (Tara Strong). Their mission: to retrieve a magical object, a literal “Get Out of Hell Free” card, which Waller secretly seeks for herself as she has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and now that the truth is out that hell is quite real, she knows she’s got a better shot at cheating her way out of it than seeking redemption. Two other parties are after the object, however, as immortal (but as he points out, not invulnerable) mutant caveman Vandal Savage is after is in pursuit of the card, as is the Reverse Flash. This film ties itself back to Flashpoint Paradox by having C. Thomas Howell reprise this role, and his whole deal is that when he was shot in the head at the end of that film, he “froze” himself in the moments before death with his superspeed, but each time he uses it, he gets that much closer to dying from the wound. (You just kind of have to go with it.)

The end of this one is a bit of a foregone conclusion. You don’t really introduce a member of this team whose imprisonment is the result of revenge killing the men who murdered his family, and who remains tortured by the loss of them despite being a vigilante who is willing to kill, and then also have a get out of hell free card, without the audience putting those two puzzle pieces together long before the finale. There are a lot of fun twists and turns along the way, though, and the comedy pretty much lands. Waller has to make this mission “off the books” (since it’s really her personal play to avoid damnation rather than a government sanctioned action), so the Squad heads out to the card’s last known location in a decrepit RV. This means that, of course we’re going to have a scene where Copperhead flashes his fangs at a child in the next car while they’re on their road trip to scare them, and of course we’re going to have a bus full of nuns show up at some point as a visual gag. A lot of it is pretty rote, but there’s some playfulness that makes this one a little more memorable. Of particular note is that the person that the group is initially sent to find, Steel Maxum, turns out to be both an exotic dancer and the unlikely former host of DC cosmic org chart bigwig Doctor Fate. Greg Grunberg has some fun with the role, playing up the guy’s himbo nature, which is so at odds with extreme stoicism of Doctor Fate that it makes for some good gags. Used to less comedic and more dramatic effect is the way that Vandal Savage’s plans are ultimately undone by his own inhuman morality; his daughter turns on him after Vandal allows her girlfriend to be killed in some crossfire, citing that she is “expendable.” He later says that he has had more children than he could ever count, and yet they always fail him because they think too small, when it seems like the real lesson he keeps failing over and over again is not to underestimate the power of love.

With one that functions as well as this one does, there’s not much more to say without simply recapping more of the film’s comedic moments, and I think that this one is better enjoyed than it is retold. It’s pretty funny, so I say: go forth and enjoy.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Horror’s Summer Blockbuster Era

July 25, 2024 / swampflix / 7 Comments

The tongue-in-cheek superhero team-up Deadpool & Wolverine releases wide this week, and its box office performance is sure to attract a lot of scrutiny from online pundits who specialize in that kind of thing. That’s because the once-dependable genre of live-action superhero blockbusters has largely retreated from suburban multiplexes to instead play it safe on streaming platforms like Disney+, leaving a massive void on movie theater marquees the past couple summers. I’m sure much will be written about what the Deadpool sequel’s box office receipts indicate about the future of live-action superhero media in particular, as well as the future of theatrical exhibition for big-budget movies in general, but that’s not the story that’s got my attention right now. What’s fascinated me in this summer’s superhero drought is the genre that’s swooped in to replace those traditional blockbusters with an entirely different kind of corporate IP: the horror franchise. Instead of saving anticipated horror sequels for the Halloween pre-gaming of Fall, studios have found open space in the summer release calendar to position them as the big-ticket Movie of the Week, to easy financial success. It helps that horror movies typically cost 1/100th of a superhero blockbuster budget, making them better suited to turn a profit with the current, shrunken moviegoing public, but it’s still an interesting shift.

There are two original, non-franchise horror movies of note in theaters right now that are easily the scariest I’ve seen all year: the Irish ghost story Oddity and the Satanic serial killer thriller Longlegs. Those standalone creep-outs are not the kind of horror blockbuster I’m describing here. When I recently had a couple days off work to spend at The Movies, most of what was accessible to me were IP-extenders for already-established horrors & thrillers, all released this summer. I felt the same way watching that triple feature of MaXXXine (a sequel), A Quiet Place: Day One (a prequel), and Twisters (a rebootquel) that I usually feel watching sequels, prequels, and reboots to big-budget action movies this time of year: mild, momentary amusement that quickly faded from my memory the further away I got from the theater. Longlegs & Oddity are designed to unnerve the audience by dragging us through previously unseen corners of Hell, guided by the Twisted Minds of their respective auteurs (Oz Perkins & Damian Mc Carthy). The horror sequels & prequels they’re up against are too warmly familiar to unnerve anyone. They were designed to remind us of movies we already like, providing a pleasantly violent atmosphere where we can purchase & consume popcorn. They’re essentially the MCU for nerds in black t-shirts who already have definite Halloween plans months in advance.

In that context, this trio of movies were adequately entertaining. Like X, MaXXXine is mostly a work of pastiche, updating the 70s Texas Porn Star Massacre grime of the original to the New Wave Hookers grime of the warped-VHS 1980s. That 80s aesthetic may not be as novel for a modern slasher as the Old Hollywood melodrama of the X prequel Pearl, but it at least panders enough to my personal tastes to give the movie a pass. For all of MaXXXine‘s vintage horror & porno references, though, the thing it reminded me of most was Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Red Riding Hood arc on the third season of The Deuce, which only places it about 5 years deep into the archives instead of the 40 it aimed for. It’s fun, but it’s fluff. Mia Goth is notably subdued as the porn-star-victim on the run after she got to play unhinged villain in the franchise’s last outing, which is something I could also say about director Michael Sarnoski’s presence in Day One, his prequel to A Quiet Place. Sarnoski’s debut feature Pig was an emotionally devastating riff on the John Wick revenge pic, sending a wounded Nicolas Cage on a culinary warpath that established the director as a name to watch. It’s a shame, then, that Sarnoski’s follow-up is just . . . another Quiet Place. There’s a little novelty in the franchise’s move to an urban setting at the exact moment of alien invasion, but otherwise Day One is just more of the same – similar to MaXXXine‘s shift to an 80s horror-porno aesthetic only slightly shaking up the X status quo.

The most successful film of this trio is the decades-later rebootquel Twisters, which updates the storm-chasing hijinks of the 90s Jan De Bont blockbuster Twister with small touches of dramatic restraint from Minari director Lee Isaac Chung (joining Sarnoski in the one-for-them check cashing line at the bank). Some might balk at the idea of labeling either Twister movie as Horror, but they’re both essentially monster-attack movies wherein the the monster happens to be bad weather. Both films climax at small-town horror screenings (The Shining in Twister and Frankenstein in Twisters) where the tornado rips through the screen as a direct, literal replacement for horror icons being projected from the past. The reason I’m pushing to include Twisters here is that it exemplifies what the future of horror blockbuster filmmaking might become. I’m shocked to report that I enjoyed the tornado movie more than the apocalyptic monster movie or the retro porno-horror, likely because it’s the one that’s most honest about the familiar, unchallenging entertainment it aims to deliver. Twisters is an emotionally satisfying pick-up truck commercial—complete with country-rock soundtrack—that occasionally takes breaks from promoting Dodge Ram products to indulge in thunderous kaiju horror action. Chung asserts his tastefulness as a serious artist by cutting out two traditional summer blockbuster payoffs that would’ve mapped it directly to a 90s template: the movie’s Big Bad being sucked into a tornado and a Big Kiss being shared between the leads. Otherwise, he’s making an anonymous, IP-driven action movie, and that shamelessness mostly works in his favor. It’s the kind of summertime fun you want to eat mozzarella sticks to.

Maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here. It was cute & relatable for Lupita Nyong’o’s doomed hero in A Quiet Place: Day One to seek one last comfort before death at a neighborhood pizzeria, but the success of Twisters suggests a better way. Maybe Sarnoski & company should have capitalized on the Blooming Onion facial design on the Quiet Place monsters and scored a tie-in promotional deal with Outback Steakhouse, sending Nyong’o to seek comfort there instead. A24 certainly understands the value of that kind of old-school hucksterism, and you can currently purchase a commemorative MaXXXine thong from their online giftshop, among other X-branded wares. All they need is some Universal Pictures-scale monetary backing to reach their full horror blockbuster potential. Or maybe this is all just a fluke. It’s possible that the lucrative return of Deadpool or The Joker or The Avengers will convince Hollywood to exclusively get back into the superhero movie business, putting this summer’s horror blockbuster era to a swift end. Personally, I hope not. I didn’t necessarily appreciate these horror sequels & prequels on any deeper level than I appreciate a Marvel or Star Wars or Fast & Furious picture, but I do prefer to spend my time in their stylistic milieu. Any excuse to hide from the New Orleans heat in the darkened, air-conditioned rooms of my neighborhood theater is welcome, but the more monsters we can cram into those rooms the better.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – Gotham by Gaslight (2018)

July 24, 2024September 13, 2025 / swampflix / 2 Comments

It had to happen eventually that one of these animated movies would emerge as an object lesson in adaptation that’s faithful in some ways and divergent in others, to ill effect in both realms. Batman: Gotham by Gaslight was a critically and commonly well-received 1989 Elseworlds comic that asked, What if Batman, but steampunk? and What if Batman fought Jack the Ripper?, which was the style at the time. This film adapts both of those questions directly, although it chooses a different culprit for who the Ripper turns out to be (it’s still an effective mystery, but who’s behind the Ripper’s blade in the comic is that story’s equivalent of The Joker, that comparison is absent here and the killer is someone else. Gotham by Gaslight transports the (apparently) eternally fertile narrative ground of a serial killer in the London Fog has been transported to the nearly identical (but explicitly American, even in this setting) city of Gotham, where the city streets are stalked by two different disguised men. The first, of course, is the Ripper, whose true identity forms the core mystery of the story. The other is a Victorian Batman, who is in fact the city’s recently returned prodigal son, the orphaned billionaire Bruce Wayne (Bruce Greenwood).

As with a lot of What if [Character] but [Specific Era/Location]? stories, this one transports all of the accoutrement of the character to the time and place that the author (or, more commonly, fanfiction writer) has a fascination with. So, while “Catwoman” isn’t here, Selina Kyle (Jennifer Carpenter) is, as an actress and singer who grew up as the daughter of a lion tamer, hence a handiness with a whip and an affection for cats. Leslie Thompkins, the kindly child psychologist who helped mend the young Bruce’s psyche in the comics, is here Sister Leslie (Grey Griffin), who ran the orphanage in which Bruce was raised. There’s a district attorney Harvey Dent, a showgirl (and, lest we forget because this is a Ripper story, sex worker) Pamela Isley, a police Commissioner named Gordon, a Doctor Hugo Strange, and so on and so forth. It’s a conceit that I think can be fun and rewarding, but can also be kind of tired. In fact, the thing that I felt most weighed down that recent Matt Reeves Batman movie was the fact that it was a Batman movie, and thus in the middle of this high budget, grimy neo-noir featuring some interesting creative choices, decent editing, and occasionally great visuals, you also had to have Colin Farrell as the Penguin for some reason. This kind of “Batman skin on a Victorian period piece” integration of the whole rogues gallery usually works best when the narrative finds something interesting to do with it or a way to twist expectations, and it does do that here in one small way, as there is both a Two-Face and a Harvey Dent, but they are not the same person here.

Visually, the most frustrating thing about this one is that it uses the general design aesthetics of the source material (simplified for animation) but none of the grain or grit that made that one’s overall look so memorable. In fact, although there have been other releases in this overall franchise that looked worse, the discrepancy between the mood and atmosphere of the original comic and this adaptation make this one feel cheaper than those others. For instance, take a look at this page of the original comic, which evokes both the yellowing of a newspaper and the sickly yellow light of the oil lamps in the district in which the scene takes place. It sets a tone that is lacking from this movie. That’s an overall issue with a lot, but not all, of these movies. When adapting from a well-liked source material, one can choose to try and imitate the original art as closely as possible while also “sanding off” some of the detail work that would be too difficult to animate (like New Frontier or All-Star Superman), or make something that looks completely different (like Doomsday’s use of a more Bruce Timm style, or Superman vs. The Elite’s Tartakovsky-esque crescent moon head shapes). This chooses to do some detail sanding in order to ape the art style of the original, but in doing so genericizes the overall feel of Mike Mignola’s pre-Hellboy artwork and the moodiness that made the graphic novel memorable enough to attempt to adapt nearly thirty years later in the first place. Paradoxically, this one is well-drawn but ultimately flat-looking, and not dynamic enough or visually arresting enough to really capture your attention.

That said, if you’re going to watch this one, it’s going to be because you’re interested in seeing who the Ripper is, and I won’t spoil that for you here. It’s a novel (and welcome) choice to forego any Jokery completely, and the twist is satisfactorily executed, with the fact that the Ripper was driven mad by the inhumanity he witnessed during the Civil War being an interesting touch. Performance-wise, the return of Greenwood to the Batman role after previously voicing him in Under the Red Hood is a good one, and his performance helps inflate some of the limper elements of the story. When it comes to the casting, however, the standout here is Anthony “Giles from Buffy” Head as Alfred, although he is underutilized. Perhaps you, dear reader, have not seen so many of these that you need them to be visually dynamic in order to be appreciated, and a middle of the road Jack the Ripper story dressed up in cape and cowl will be more fun for you. At the same time, if that’s what you’re looking for, what you really want to get your hands on is the 1989 comic. Your library system probably has a copy! Why don’t you go look that up right now, actually?

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Bonus Features: Baby Cakes (1989)

July 18, 2024 / swampflix / 1 Comment

Our current Movie of the Month, 1989’s Baby Cakes, is a made-for-TV romcom starring Ricki Lake as the world’s most adorable stalker. It follows the exact narrative beats of the original 1985 German film it adapts, Sugarbaby, but it handles them with a much lighter, gentler touch. In Sugarbaby, our lonely mortician protagonist has no friends or hobbies outside her obsessive scheming to sleep with the married man who catches her lustful eye. It’s a much darker film than Baby Cakes tonally, but it’s also much more colorful, as it’s lit with enough candy-color gels to halfway convince you that it was directed by Dario Argento under a German pseudonym. Baby Cakes sands off all the stranger, off-putting details of the original to instead deliver a familiar, cutesy romcom about a woman struggling with self-image issues as the world constantly taunts her for being overweight; Ricki Lake’s bubbly personality lifts the general mood of that story, as does the decision to make her object of desire an engaged man instead of a married one. Even her stalking is played as an adorable quirk in 80s-romcom montage, as she tries on different disguises while tracking down her supposed soulmate.

One essential romcom element of Baby Cakes is the quirky circumstances of its star-couple’s professions. Ricki Lake not only plays a mortician in this case; she’s the morgue’s designated beautician, livening up dead bodies with cheery glam makeup. The hunk she stalks in the NYC subway system is not traveling to a boring desk job in some office cubicle somewhere; he’s the subway train conductor who drives her to work everyday, a much less common occupation. Naturally, then, the NYC subway setting where she first lays eyes on him becomes a defining component of the film, affording it some novelty as a Public Transit Romcom instead of just a generic one. It’s in the subways where she forces a meet-cute, where she flirts by buying him Sugar Babies at a vending machine, where she dresses like a mustachioed janitor to sneak a peek at his work schedule, etc. That setting had me thinking a lot about public-transit romances as a result, so here are a few more titles in that subgenre to check out in addition to our Movie of the Month.

While You Were Sleeping (1995)

The most adorable public-transit romcom I could find also involves some unethical scheming and lusting from afar by its female star, in this case Sandra Bullock instead of Ricki Lake. Like in The Net, Bullock stars as an unloved schlub with no social life outside her relationship with her cat. Her only romantic prospect is making cartoon-wolf eyes at a handsome businessman stranger (Peter Gallagher), whom she watches board the train for his morning commute with ritualistic devotion. You see, her quirky romcom occupation is working the token booth for the Chicago L-Train system, which the movie specifies early in an opening credits sequence that features hotdog stands, Wrigley Field, and a Michael Jordan statue to establish locality. It also ends on an image of Bullock riding the L-Train herself as a passenger instead of a booth worker, modeling a classic white wedding dress and a “JUST MARRIED” sign as if she had hired a limousine in the suburbs.

While You Were Sleeping doesn’t spend too much time on that train platform, though. In an early scene, her mysterious would-be beau is mugged and falls unconscious onto the tracks, when she suddenly springs to action for the first time in her go-nowhere life and pulls his limp body to safety. Much of the rest of the film is spent in hospital rooms and the newly comatose man’s family home as she hides her non-relationship with him by pretending to be his fiancée. It’s a convoluted sitcom set-up that would lead to one doozy of a “Grandma, how did you meet Grandpa?” conversation by the time she makes a genuine romantic connection, but in terms of romcom logic it’s all relatively reasonable & adorable. Notably, she is eventually proposed to through the plexiglass barrier of the train-platform tollbooth, with an engagement ring passed along as if it were token fare. Cute!

On the Line (2002)

If you wish While You Were Sleeping had more emphasis on the novelty of its Chicago L-Train setting and are willing to give up little things like the movie being good or watchable, On the Line is the perfect public-transit romcom alternative. In fact, that is the only case in which it is recommendable. *NSYNC backup singers Lance Bass & Joey Fatone play boneheaded bros in the worst college-campus cover band you’ve ever heard. While Fatone refuses to grow up after college (continuing to live out his rockstar fantasy by playing dive bars and wearing t-shirts that helpfully say “ROCK” on them), Bass gets a boring desk job at an ad agency, which means a lot of morning commutes on the L. It’s on one of those trips to work when he strikes up a genuine connection with a fellow rider, chickens out when it’s time to ask for her number, and then spends the rest of the movie trying to complete the missed connection. When they inevitably find each other a second time, it’s on the same train platform, where they once again flirtatiously bond by reciting Al Green song titles and the lineage of American presidents. I am not kidding.

Do not ask me what happens between those two fateful meetings on the L, because I am not sure there is an answer. In lieu of minor details like plot, themes, or jokes, On the Line is a collection of occurrences that pass time between train stops. Besides a heroic third-act nut shot in which one of Bass’s idiot friends catches a baseball with his crotch at the aforementioned Wrigley Field, most of the “humor” of the film consists of characters reacting to non-events with softly sarcastic retorts like “Okayyyy,” “Well excuuuuuse me,” and “Ooooohhh that’s gotta hurt.” Otherwise, it’s all just background noise meant to promote a tie-in CD soundtrack that features acts like Britney Spears, Mandy Moore, Vitamin C and, of course, *NSYNC (the rest of whom show up for a “hilarious” post-credits gag where they play flamboyantly gay hairdressers, to the movie’s shame). Other on-screen corporate sponsorships include Reebok, Total Request Live, McDonalds, Chyna, and Al Green, the poor bastard. And because Bass works at an ad agency, the movie even dares to include a conversation with his boss (Dave Foley, embarrassing himself alongside coworker Jerry Stiller) that cynically attempts to define the term “tween females” as a marketing demographic. The main product being marketed to those tween females was, of course, Lance Bass himself, who comes across here as a not especially talented singer who’s terrified of women. Hopefully they vicariously learned to love public transit in the process too, which I suppose is also advertised among all those corporate brands. If nothing else, the romance is directly tied to the wonders of the L-Train by the time a character declares “Love might not make the world go round, but it’s what makes the ride worthwhile” to a car full of semi-annoyed passengers.

Paterson (2016)

If you’re looking for a movie that’s both good and heavily public transit-themed, I’d recommend stepping slightly outside the romcom genre to take a ride with Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s zen slice-of-life drama starring Adam Driver. Paterson may not technically be a romcom, but it is both romantic & comedic. Driver leans into his surname by driving a city bus around his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, earning just enough of a decent living to pay for his eccentric wife’s art supplies. His character’s first name also happens to be Paterson, which is one of many amusing coincidences that become quietly surreal as they recur: seeing twins around town, hearing repeated lines of dialogue, and striking up conversations with strangers who happen to be practicing poets. You see, Paterson is not only a bus driver, no more than Sandra Bullock’s lovelorn protagonist was only a tollbooth worker or Lance Bass was only a mediocre singer. He’s also an amateur poet who spends his alone time between bus rides writing work he never intends to publish, poems that are only read by his adoring wife. It’s all very aimless & low-stakes, but it’s also very lovely.

I generally find Jarmusch’s “I may be a millionaire but I’m still an aimless slacker at heart” schtick to be super irritating. However, as a former poetry major who rides the bus to work every day and whose biggest ambition in life is to write on the clock, I can’t be too too annoyed in this case. If nothing else, Paterson gets the act of writing poetry correct in a way that few movies do. It’s all about revising the same few lines over & over again until they’re exactly correct; it’s also all about the language of imagery. Paterson gets the humble appeal of riding the city bus right too, even if it is a little idealistic about how pleasant & clean the bus itself and the conversations eavesdropped on it tend to be (speaking as a person of NORTA experience). While You Were Sleeping & Baby Cakes have the most adorable use of their public-transit settings on this list; On the Line has the most absurd. For its part, Paterson just has the most. There are a lot of quiet, contemplative bus rides as the movie peacefully rolls along, which is the exact kind of energy I try to bring to my morning commute every day.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Batman and Harley Quinn (2017)

July 17, 2024September 13, 2025 / swampflix / 2 Comments

I think that I would have had a better impression of Batman and Harley Quinn if I had seen it when it was released, instead of in 2024, when we’ve already had a few seasons of the excellent animated adult Harley Quinn TV show. I’m sure this raucous, foul-mouthed representation of the character—which now seems like a tamer, less funny version of the TV series version—was probably more fun and exciting seven years ago, but it doesn’t hold up anymore. That’s only partially the film’s fault, however; it can’t be held accountable for the fact that what I think of as the best version of Harley Quinn was right around the corner, ready to overshadow it. I can blame it for being, well, not very good.

In a (contentious and challenged) continuation of the beloved Batman: The Animated Series, Batman (Kevin Conroy) and Nightwing (Loren Lester, reprising) must turn to the recently paroled/released Harley Quinn (Melissa Rauch, taking over for Arleen Sorkin, who originated the role and the character in the 90s) to try and find out where her BFF Poison Ivy (an utterly wasted Paget Brewster) is hiding. Ivy has recently teamed with poor man’s Swamp Thing “Floronic Man” (Kevin Michael Richardson) to steal some actual Swamp Thing matter from STAR Labs, with the goal of doing some “One man’s eco-terrorism is another man’s most ethical way to save the planet” shenanigans. Noting that Harley hasn’t reported to her parole officer in months, Nightwing finds her working at a kind of Super-Hooters where women dress in skimpy(er) versions of superheroine/villainess costumes. Tailing her, the two end up fighting one another; he asks why she’s resorted to this line of work instead of using her psychology doctorate, and she gets real with him about what the job market is like for ex-cons. She knocks him out, he wakes up tied to the bed, and they eventually hook up (although one can read the consensuality of the situation as dubious). She agrees to help the Dynamic Duo, they go on a couple of fest quests, and eventually they find Ivy and her new co-conspirator and save the day.

Due to time constraints as a result of work, travel, and my social life, I ended up accidentally watching this one as if it were a three-part episode of the series, as the film’s 74-minute runtime breaks down into three neat segments that are roughly the length of an episode of The Animated Series. I don’t think it suffered from that. In fact, I don’t mention it often, but I’ve probably watched about a third of these so far in more than one sitting, a practice I don’t normally condone (a movie is like a spell or most poems, to be consumed all at once or the magic could be dispelled), but which hasn’t really impacted my reading of these as texts. If anything, it’s made me engage with them more. The ones that really capture my interest are straightforward, one sitting, beginning to end viewing experiences, while the ones that fail to really grab me are the ones that I realize I have to rewind and rewatch parts of because my mind was starting to wander. And some, like Gotham Knight and Emerald Knights, are episodic by design, while others are episodic as a result of the fact that they are adapting stories that originated in a serialized, month-to-month medium, like All Star Superman (although that one gets a full viewing every time). Viewed through that lens, this is a three-parter with a first episode that I found mostly boring, a second part that was a big improvement, and a finale that was fine, I guess.

First, the good. The “Superbabes” restaurant is a fun sight gag, but that’s all there really is to write home about in the first act. The middle is better, as the unlikely trio’s research brings them to a shack in the woods where assorted colorful hoodlums and hooligans gather, with visual references to the Adam West Batman series aplenty, and even includes two musical numbers, one of which is endearing and funny (we’ll get to the second in “the bad”). There’s even a toilet humor gag that managed to cross the line into getting an actual laugh from me; Harley has some greasy food, she begs for the Batmobile to be pulled over so that she can use the facilities, Batman assumes it’s a ruse to escape and refuses, Harley passes a great volume of gas, Nightwing begs to roll the window down, and Batman again refuses, saying that it “Smells like discipline.” It’s a good gag, as there’s an abundance of writers who adore Batman to the point of biblical idolatry, and to tweak their over-the-top stoicism is funny both with and without that context. The final act also includes a pretty funny bit, where it seems like the day will be saved by the appearance of Swamp Thing, here a nearly omniscient/omnipotent vegetation deity, but he really just shows up to wag his finger at the villain and affects the plot not at all. It’s like the seed of an idea for the kind of gags and bits that the Harley Quinn animated series pulls off, and although it’s in its infancy here, it’s a good joke.

When it comes to the bad, I have to say, I don’t like Rauch as Harley. It’s funny, because I know she got her big break on Big Bang Theory, a series I have seen approximately 57 minutes of and all of them under duress, the same place that TV Harley Kaley Cuoco gathered much of her attention. (To me, I will always remember her from the endless promotion of 8 Simple Rules that aired constantly during reruns of Grounded for Life when I was in high school, as well as for her role as Billie, the Cousin Oliver of original recipe Charmed’s final season, because my brain is broken in so, so many ways.) Cuoco seems born to voice this role, while Rauch is doing … I don’t know, I’m sure it’s her best. It’s not quite as iconic as Sorkin’s original Harley, or as perfectly suited as Tara Strong’s chameleon-like version, or as unhinged as Cuoco’s ascension to animated Harley supreme. Sometimes, when watching the show, I can almost see Cuoco in the sound booth when she lets out one of Harley’s frustrated cries, really getting into the body language and everything. In this, Harley sounds so canned and rehearsed that you imagine that there was almost no motion during the entire recording session. It’s a very frustrating experience. This gets pushed past my tolerance limits when we have an entire musical performance of Rauch-as-Harley singing the seminal, perfect The Nerves (although obviously best known as a Blondie single) track “Hanging on the Telephone.” I’m not one to get upset when a filmmaker gets a little self-indulgent, but this is a real speedbump in this one, especially as it comes on the heels of the aforementioned fun music number.

I wish that I could watch this with completely fresh eyes when it was a new release, without the baggage of a much better, funnier, more exciting, and better performed adaptation of the character. But we’re all trapped within the horizon of our experiences, so here I am, trying and failing to like this release.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Coens Countdown

July 15, 2024July 15, 2024 / swampflix / 4 Comments

Over the past couple of years, I’ve sought to plug some holes in my watching of certain directorial canons. Starting in the summer of 2022, I began the process of watching every Coen Brothers movie in chronological order. This worked pretty well until I got to The Big Lebowski, a movie that I, like many others, made a core part of their teenage personalities in their youth, and as such I skipped over in order to return at a later date. Now, having finally given No Country for Old Men a rewatch, I’m ready to put them in a non-definitive, completely personal ranking of my favorites.

Honorable Mention: Crimewave, the 1985 Sam Raimi flop that Joel and Ethan co-wrote, is quite a bit of fun. Looney Tunes-esque in a similar vein to this year’s Hundreds of Beavers, the film follows a hapless nerd who stumbles upon one of his employers’ plot to kill the other, but gets distracted from doing anything about it by a quest to find his dream girl. It’s not great, but it’s worth the effort if you’re into it. Some of its narrative elements would be echoed in The Hudsucker Proxy, but I would say that, other than a stellar performance from Jennifer Jason Leigh and Proxy’s fun ending, rewatching this one would be my preference in most regards.

Dishonorable Mention: When we talked about Heathers recently, Brandon mentioned that he had finally seen Drive-Away Dolls, and he felt that my review of the film had been far too kind to it. I concurred at the time and must further agree now, as my opinion of the film has only declined in the intervening months. In fact, the only new release I’ve disliked more this whole year so far is that NYT propaganda “documentary” that wholeheartedly and unabashedly committed to validating the Zionist entity. A little lesbian love story set at the turn of the millennium but with the trappings of seventies film sounds like a good time, and at times it does manage to be, but it’s incredibly uneven and while Geraldine Viswanathan is charming, Margaret Qualley is delivering a community theater caliber performance that you’ll either get used to or learn to live with before the end of the film. Do you still think police violence against citizens can be funny? Then this is the movie for you, and I mean that in the most derogatory way possible.

18. The Ladykillers (2004) – This is, without a shadow of a doubt, the worst of the Coen Brothers’ filmography. This one isn’t even a subjective ranking; I would say that this is a widely agreed upon fact, and I’m not here to champion it as an underrated classic. There’s a distinct leap in quality between this and the next entry on this list; that one is second from the bottom but only because it is “merely” good, while this one is actually quite bad. This film, a remake of an earlier British Alec Guinness vehicle in which a group of thieves take up residency in an unsuspecting landlady’s home in order to gain access to a vault through her house, sucks. It’s racist, mean-spirited, and not funny. If every copy of this movie on earth were destroyed, the world would be a better place.

17. I’m not going to win over many people with this placement, but I just didn’t love The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). It’s not a bad movie, not by a long shot, and I almost want to put it higher on the list purely by virtue of its sheer madcap energy and that bonkers It’s a Wonderful Life-inspired ending, complete with angels and all. I think about the joke wherein one of the characters is barely saved from falling to his death by the strength of his stitching all the time; there’s a brief flashback of his tailor offering him the extra-strength stitching option and him declining, then the tailor using the heavy-duty stuff anyway just out of appreciation for his client, then the film cuts back to him being saved. It’s the kind of joke that you used to get from The Simpsons, where there are actually four or five jokes packed into one tiny story beat. Don’t let this one’s placement on this list make you think it’s a bad movie; it’s quite good, and there’s an ocean of quality between The Ladykillers and this. Jennifer Jason Leigh is a delight here, doing a truly wonderful transatlantic accent and delivering her dialogue like she’s in His Girl Friday, where every syllable is a bullet, and her mouth is a machine gun.

16. Generally considered to be one of the duo’s lesser outings, I still think that there’s a lot of fun to be had with Intolerable Cruelty (2003). It’s an imitation of the kind of madcap comedies that the duo were already affectionately ribbing in Proxy, but deliberately playing around with the fact that those films, which largely predate no-fault divorce options and had to skirt around the Hays Code. Instead of innocent trysts, the escalation of hostilities (and flirtation) between divorce law superstar George Clooney and predatory marry-and-dump gold-digger Catherine Zeta-Jones is a battle of wits and will while also being sweet and romantic to watch, as one never knows who’s pulling the wool over whose eyes at any given moment and who’s genuinely fallen for whom from minute to minute. It’s not stellar, but it’s still fun, and the most likely to come on TNT some afternoon when you’re visiting your parents, so be on the lookout.

15. There’s something truly arresting about The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). A noir shot in black and white, the film stars Billy Bob Thornton as Ed Crane, a barber working in his brother-in-law’s shop. He suspects his wife (Frances McDormand) is having an affair with her boss (James Gandolfini), so when he gets the opportunity to invest money with a man named Tolliver (Jon Polite), he blackmails Gandolfini’s character and gets the money, only for the man to find and kill Toliver. When Gandolfini confronts Thornton, the two struggle and Gandolfini is killed, and McDormand is blamed, both for the death and the apparent embezzlement. And then things just keep getting worse. It’s a tragedy in slow motion, the kind of story that the Coens tell over and over again, in which some amount of money is stolen or embezzled, and the everyman characters that we have met, plagued by problems as small and simple as mere ennui or as vast and deadly as owed money to organized crime, make bad choices that just make things worse and worse. It’s in their work going back as far as their first film, Blood Simple, and has carried over into works directly (like the FX series Fargo) and indirectly (like this year’s Last Stop in Yuma County) inspired by them. It’s fun to see it played out here in simple period piece monochrome, a great throwback that’s better than it has any right to be.

14. Speaking of Blood Simple (1984), in this first feature outing, the brothers knocked it out of the park. Featuring the debut of Frances McDormand, who would become a longtime collaborator of the pair (and Joel’s wife), the film follows the tragic affair between Abby (McDormand) and Ray (John Getz), who works for her husband Marty (Dan Hedaya). When Marty finds out, he hires a P.I. named Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) to kill the two of them. Visser double-crosses them all, but in doing so, he leaves behind evidence that could implicate him in Marty’s death, but Ray believes Abby was the one behind the killing. There’s nothing but blood and trauma from that point on, and the bros hit the ground running with their iconic aesthetics and favorite narrative devices — killing over an amount of money ($10K) that’s pretty low considering the stakes of the violence involved, rear brake lights at night, and deathly dark fields lit solely by the moon, where a silhouette of a man digs a grave. It’s only so low because they would go on to do this many more times, perfecting it with each incarnation; while this one rises to greatness, it doesn’t surpass it.

13. There was a time in my life when The Big Lebowski (1998) was my favorite movie. I had the poster in my dorm room, I almost wore out the DVD, I even recognized that the title of Phoebe Bridgers’ seminal album Stranger in the Alps was a reference to the edited-for-TV dialogue of the movie when it used to air on Comedy Central. (When John Goodman’s character is smashing a car with a golf club, he screams “This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass,” which made it to cable as “This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps,” perhaps the funniest dialogue replacement ever, right up there with TV Die Hard’s “Yippe-ki-yay, melon farmer.”) It’s probably the duo’s most famous movie, certainly the most quoted and the one that most people remember. Hell, while writing this, I needed to go to the store and get some rice for curry, and in the rice and beans aisle, not even an hour ago, I saw an elderly man wearing a “Lebowski 2024” shirt that read “This aggression will not stand, man.” It was a huge part of the cultural zeitgeist, and perhaps I simply watched it too many times in my youth, but I find very little about it to be as engaging as I once did. Julianne Moore is astonishing here, and I love her, and Jeff Bridges delivers a knockout performance as The Dude, but I just don’t have the strong feelings about this one that I used to. Maybe it was watching it go completely mainstream for too long, but it no longer has the place in my heart that it used to. It’s still wonderful, though, it just gets an outsized portion of critical attention within the brothers’ oeuvre.

12. I love an anthology film, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) fires on all cylinders (or in every chamber, as the western-themed shorts may require) for me. The tales within range from the jaunty title segment, which features frequent Coen collaborator Tim Blake Nelson as the fastest draw in the west, a singing cowboy whose preternatural luck is bound to run out sometime since “you can’t be top dog forever,” to a thoughtful character study (“All Gold Canyon”) about a prospector who refuses to give up, to a couple of beautifully dreary stories about a group of people in a stagecoach that may be bound for eternity and a traveling entertainer who is willing to shortsightedly “trade” his longtime companion and friend for the next most interesting thing in order to suit the public’s changing tastes (“The Mortal Remains” and “Meal Ticket,” respectively). My favorite segment, however, is “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” a perfectly depressing story about a woman who loses her brother on a wagon train and has no choice but to continue on, finding love with a rustler who offers to marry her and start a farm out west when their destination is reached. Everything seems like it’ll turn out all right for her in the end, until she, well, gets rattled. I usually find westerns to be incredibly boring, something that Brandon and I share in common, so much so that I’ve never even gone back and watched all of the “cowboy” episodes of my favorite TV show, The Twilight Zone, but this one really worked for me, especially as some of these segments are “spooky” or mysterious in the vein of Zone while also featuring that trademark Coen wit.

11. It’s reductivist, but I sometimes think that there are two kinds of Coen Brothers movies: No Country for Old Men movies and Burn After Reading (2008) movies. The former includes things like Miller’s Crossing and the aforementioned Blood Simple—engrossing variations on/experiments in noir filmmaking that are (mostly) non-comedic outings about the pervasiveness of evil, greed, and violence. The latter includes movies that are straightforward comedies, although admittedly zany, madcap ones, like Lebowski and Hail, Caesar!. Burn After Reading is such a fun little exercise in making a “small” movie after the epic scope of No Country, which premiered only the year before. No expensive night shooting in the desert, no costly period piece-accommodating locations and vehicles, and a full half hour shorter, this is a short, swiftly moving story of falling dominoes with—explicitly—no point. Dim-witted personal trainer Chad (Brad Pitt) and his colleague, the down-on-herself Linda (Frances McDormand) come into possession of the banal memoirs of an alcoholic former CIA analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovitch), as a result of his wife Katie (Tilda Swinton)’s copying of his files in preparation for divorce. Linda and Chad first try to blackmail Cox, thinking that they have happened upon state secrets, then attempt to sell the memoirs to the Russians when this fails, which brings them tangentially into contact with hound dog U.S. Marshal Harry (George Clooney). There’s still some (hilarious) violence, and some grue that’s probably not as funny to everyone as it is to me. When it’s over, you won’t have to question the nature of man or whether greed is the downfall of all mankind, you’ll just remember that George Clooney engineers and builds a sex machine that’s the size of a stationary bike; what more could you possibly ask for?

10. One of the recurring motifs in a lot of the brothers’ body of work is that of the missing money, the ransom or loot that becomes the central motivating factor in every character’s choices. It’s in both their comedies (Hail, Caesar!, Ladykillers, Lebowski) and their noirs (No Country, Blood Simple, The Man Who Wasn’t There). Most often, we see our central characters taken down by their greed, and their willingness to commit acts of savagery as they grow more and more desperate. In Miller’s Crossing (1990), this isn’t the tragic flaw of our lead, but of a supporting character, Bernie (John Turturro). See, Bernie’s the brother of Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), the moll of local crime boss Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney) who’s also carrying on an affair with O’Bannon’s prime enforcer, Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne). Tom is our main character here, but it’s Bernie’s greed that has a far-reaching effect on everyone else around him. Despite the fact that Bernie is his lady’s brother, Leo orders Tom to kill him. When Bernie pleads for mercy, however, Tom shoots his gun into the ground and lets the other man go, like the huntsman sparing Snow White. Bernie can’t stay away for long, however, and when he comes back around and starts to stir up trouble, including trying to blackmail his would-be killer, it comes back to bite him. There are some moments of comic levity here (Leo O’Bannon’s shooting spree following an ill-advised attack on his home stands out, as does the scene where Jon Polito’s Caspar takes over the police and starts clearing house), but overall, this one stands out as one of the best Coen dramas, with a downer ending that rivals Inside Llewyn Davis’s, even if it can’t touch the darkness of No Country.

9. I mentioned before when talking about Buster Scruggs that I am not a fan of westerns. Even the great spaghetti westerns of the past have a lot of bias to overcome in order for me to like them. But I was immediately won over by True Grit (2010), a remake of the 1969 John Wayne vehicle, this time with a grizzled, mush-mouthed Jeff Bridges in the Rooster Cogburn role. As in the original, a young girl hires Cogburn, a deputy U.S. Marshall, to help her track down her father’s killer, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). At the same time, Chaney is being pursued by Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), for the murder of a state senator. If we’re following the noir/madcap dichotomy outlined above, then Buster Scruggs is their western variant on the latter and Grit is their western variant on the former, and it works. Brolin’s Chaney is a truly disturbing monster; he’s no Anton Chigurh, but he has no qualms about murdering a child for no reason other than spite. As the girl with true grit, Mattie Ross, Hailee Steinfeld gives a star-making performance, and it’s a treat to see. Bridges and Damon have great chemistry, as do Steinfeld and Bridges (look, it’s Jeff Bridges; everyone has chemistry with him), and there are powerhouse performances all around. A western for people who hate westerns.

8. If there’s anything I usually hate more than I hate westerns, it’s a musical without Muppets (I love everything with Muppets in it, even and perhaps especially musicals). I’ve come around over the years from being a pure hater of the genre to having a few nontraditional ones that I really like (like London Road, Top Secret!, and Baahubali), and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) also has a place on that list (in fact, I love both Coen musicals, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves). Forsaking most of their normal collaborators, this one features a cast of mostly younger performers, some of whom were only a few years away from major star vehicles, and focuses on a kind of person that I think all of us have known at some point in our lives. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaacs) is a musician, a truly talented once-in-a-generation voice (literally and narratively), but one whose Shakespearian character flaw is his shortsightedness. Just like the people around him, the audience sympathizes with him because of the tragic loss of his musical partner, without whom he seems lost, while also bearing silent, frustrated witness as he throws away every opportunity that comes his way. He impulsively sleeps with his friend’s wife, who ends up pregnant (although it’s unclear if the child is his), he turns down a position as a member of a trio when offered the chance at a real, longterm, lucrative option, and he takes a quick payout of $200 for a session performance that, had he accepted royalties instead, would have set him up for life. He can’t even go back to the merchant marines since his license was in a box of his things that his sister kept, which he impulsively told her to toss out. The fact that the film both begins and ends with the same scene, in which Llewyn is beaten in an alley by a man with a grudge, means that if you started the movie again the moment that it ended, you’d be right back where you left off, in an endless loop of Llewyn Davis getting the shit kicked out of him, literally and figuratively. And it’s all set to a phenomenal folksy score, which includes a hauntingly beautiful cover of the “500 Miles” as sung by Isaacs, Carey Mulligan, and Justin Timberlake. Truly one of the greats.

7. One of the duo’s most underrated films, Hail, Caesar! (2016) is a riot. I don’t know why people don’t love this one more, or why it doesn’t get more love. Was the country just not in a place where they wanted this in 2016? Did everyone think it was uncool to love a movie in which Channing Tatum dances with his clothes on? Did the “would that it were” scene not work for most people? This is a movie in which Tilda Swinton plays twin gossip columnists who work for rival newspapers. I’d watch a movie that was just that, and here it’s only one of a million hilarious gags. The film centers on a fictional version of real-life studio “fixer” Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), who covers up the various scandals that Capitol Pictures’ retained stars get into, like figuring out how an unmarried actress can arrange to adopt her own child via a series of legal loopholes, thereby keeping the child and her image. Hollywood leading man Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) is kidnapped from the set of a Ben-Hur-esque epic by communists, and Mannix gets the ransom note. Elsewhere on the lot, young singing cowboy Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), whose specialties as an actor include lasso and guitar but do not include acting, has been cast in a comedy of manners (think Lady Windermere’s Fan), in which he is unable to deliver the arch, aristocratic lines required because of his drawl. In the midst of all this, Scarlett Johanson does a full synchronized swim routine, Channing Tatum does a full cheeky, kinda horny, Gene Kelly-style musical number, Ralph Fiennes tries to teach an ingénue hick to enunciate, and in case you forgot, identical gossip columnists who are both suspicious of Whitlock’s sudden disappearance. This movie is so much fun, and I really wish it had gotten the attention and love it deserved and the time, and still does.

6. The film company that Mannix works for in Hail is, as noted above, Capitol Pictures, a fake studio created originally for Barton Fink (1991), another Hollywood-set period piece, albeit one that takes place ten years prior to Hail, in 1941. Experiencing some writer’s block while crafting Miller’s Crossing, the brothers wrote that into a side project, about screenwriter Barton Fink (John Turturro), who takes a job at Capitol, and the neighbor with whom he shares a wall at the rundown Hotel Earle, insurance salesman Charlie Meadows (John Goodman). It’s a very confessional movie, as Fink, despite declaring his affinity for and connection to the common man, seems to be only able to create heady works that most people find too pretentious to connect with. For years before seeing this one, I saw a clip in which it was discussed by some film folk and which featured a scene from near the end in which John Goodman stood, furious, in the middle of a hotel as it burned; the talking heads who were deliberating about the movie talked about its purgatorial feel, which I took to mean that there was a larger metaphysical narrative than there really is, although Fink is a man who cannot go home and who is trapped in a place that seems hellish to him, unable to get out of his contract until he completes his Faustian bargain, the terms of which he may never be able to satisfy. It’s all a great deal of anxious, tense fun, and this is one of my favorite performances from John Mahoney, who plays a Faulknerian archetype named Bill Mayhew, a former novelist who has been reduced to writing movies (derogatory), a perfect foil for Fink, who has been elevated from playwright to screenwriter (complimentary).

5. Among all of the películas de hermanos (I’m sick of typing “brothers,” sue me), there’s one that stands directly in the middle of their dichotomy with a solid foot in both. Fargo (1996) is a dark, mean movie about little people with meaningless lives doing harm to one another over petty, trivial things. A movie in which being able to commit cold blooded murder doesn’t mean you can’t also be sniveling or pathetic. But Fargo is also about gentleness, comfort, and quiet dignity. A car salesman (William H. Macy) who’s racked up a significant amount of debt meets with two small-time criminals (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to have them fake-kidnap his wife without her knowledge, so that his wealthy father-in-law will pay a ransom that they will divvy up amongst themselves. When an unsuspecting state trooper is killed by the more psychotic of the two kidnappers, rural police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) begins an investigation into his slaying. Gunderson, who had heretofore never dealt with a crime of this severity, is a sweet woman who one at first assumes will not be up to the challenge of dealing with a criminal element of such monstrous evil. Instead, her charming, folksy naivete and belief in fundamental and foundational good remains unshaken despite staring into the abyss even as her ideas about human nature and the ways that people can hurt one another over something so low and crass as money are expanded. Buscemi and Macy are amazing as two sides of the same coin: desperate, nebbish, powerless rodents who constantly bite off more than they can chew; Stormare’s performance is palpably evil, like you’re staring into a man possessed by nothing more than pure, primordial hatred. But McDormand is the star here, and it’s no wonder that this was the performance that made her both an Oscar winner and a household name. It’s the perfect synergy of the two different Janus heads of the Coen brand: both deeply nihilistic in its examination of man’s inhumanity while also terrifically funny in its occasional slapstick and madcap energy. You’ll never laugh harder at a woman experiencing a terrifying home invasion.

4. There are parables inside of parables in A Serious Man (2009). Michael Stuhlbarg plays physics professor Larry Gopnik, whose life is in the process of falling apart. His son hasn’t even had his bar mitzvah yet, but he’s already smoking pot, and worse, buying it on credit. His daughter, from whom his son is stealing the money to support his habit, has a life full of hair washing and sock hops, and she’s not exercising a single brain cell more than is needed for those two activities. His brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), is homeless and staying with the family, while also working on a kabbalistic, “mathematical” map of the universe and all the probability thereof. One of his students refuses to accept his grade on the basis that it will cost him his scholarship, and when said student attempts to bribe him and Larry tries to return the money to the boy’s father, he’s told that the latter will sue the former for libel if he speaks out about the bribery attempt, or if he keeps the money without changing the grade, forcing him into an impossible situation. Perhaps worst of all, his wife demands that he provide her with a ghet, which will allow her to marry her lover, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). It’s the Book of Job, for modern (or mid-century modern, as the case may be) times. Despite having done nothing wrong (he doesn’t even covet his neighbor’s wife until much later in the film), Larry is subject to a plague of issues that disrupt his life and threaten to take away everything. Over the course of the film, he visits three different rabbis of increasing uselessness (the first merely tells him to work on changing his perspective on things while the last is clearly senile and quoting the lyrics to “Somebody to Love”); the second tells him a story about a dentist who discovers Hebrew inscription on the inside of a patient’s teeth, a parable that neither the character nor the film elucidates, and with which both we and Larry must now grapple. The film manages to keep Larry sympathetic without being pathetic, and when we laugh, we’re never laughing at him, even when he starts to make bad decisions further down the line. An overlooked classic in their canon, in my opinion.

3. The summer that I was fourteen, I must have watched O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000) thirty times. It was everywhere in my community; everybody’s mom had the soundtrack in the CD slot of her Ford Explorer, everybody’s dad was doing their impressions of George Clooney as Ulysses Everitt McGill, the Soggy Bottom Boys were all over the radio, and I had the movie on VHS, which I would start from the beginning again whenever it ended, sometimes twice a day. I know it backwards and forwards; I know it by heart. In grad school, I spit out a paper on its Odysseyan themes while drunk and in three hours, and my professor read from it to the class. I cannot see a can of pomade without thinking of “I’m a Dapper Dan man, dammit!”, and I think about the scene in which blind record producer Stephen Root is hoodwinked every time I hear the word “accompaniment.” This movie lives and breathes inside of me. I use the phrase “in the highways and in the hedges” in my own writing enough that I should pay royalties for it, and there are instructions in my final wishes to ensure that Alison Krauss is played at my funeral. “We thought you was a toad” is one of the finest lines in American cinema history to me. I don’t think I could love it more than I already do. McGill, along with Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) escape from a chain gang so that they can retrieve a treasure that McGill squirreled away on his family farm, on land that is set to be flooded to make a lake. McGill’s ultimate goal, however, is to reunite with his wife Penny (Holly Hunter)—get it?—and win her back. Along the way they run afoul of a one-eyed highwaymen (the cyclops), a group of Baptists (lotus eaters), a trio of mournfully singing women who drink them under the table and rob them (sirens), and also the KKK (your guess is as good as mine). And it’s a bluegrass/folk musical! One of the most beautiful movies in their oeuvre, O Brother is a top tier film in anyone’s canon.

2. What is there that’s left to say about No Country for Old Men (2007) that hasn’t already been said? It achieved a level of critical success that none of the Coens’ other movies could hope to accomplish, winning half of the eight Oscar nominations it received, three of the nine BAFTA categories in which it was nominated, three of five nominated Critics’ Choice awards, was nominated for the Palme d’Or, got an outstanding achievement award from the DGA, and was nominated for 110 film awards all in all, with a 63.6% success rate. And it is an outstanding achievement, as a novel adaptation, as a film in its own right, and as a star-making vehicle for Javier Bardem, whose portrayal of Anton Chigurh has catapulted the character to a level of household recognition as one of cinema’s ultimate, infamous villains alongside Darth Vader, Dracula, Hannibal Lector, Jack Torrance, and the Wicked Witch of the West. It’s eerie, and quiet, and is the ultimate distillation of the Coen abstract that evil is an unstoppable force, that nostalgia for a less brutal and dark time is a fallacy because humankind and its darkness are inextricable from one another and have been since we crawled up out of the murk, but although we are fallible, warmth and light are still within reach. Tommy Lee Jones was born to play this role, grizzled sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who, like Marge Gunderson before him, gets caught up in a crime that’s outside of his frame of reference. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) comes upon the remains of a massacre while out hunting, stumbling across the scene of a drug deal gone wrong, wherein everyone is dead but one suffering man. Nearby, he finds a briefcase full of money, which he takes with him; hours later, in the night, his conscience gets the better of him, and he returns with water for the survivor, only to discover that not only is he too late, but he’s now been seen at the scene by dangerous men. Chigurh, and unrepentant sociopath, is tasked with tracking down the money, while Moss does everything in his power to stay one step ahead, with Bell on the trail of both of them. Moss is clever enough that there’s genuine suspense over whether he’ll manage to get the better of Chigurh, while Bell puzzles out the latter’s M.O. It’s tense, it’s beautiful, it’s truly one of the greats.

1. There’s only one movie left that it could be, right? Fun fact: when I was a senior in high school, a DVD of Raising Arizona (1987) was a raffle prize for a fundraiser that one of the student organizations was holding. I bought a ticket solely for this reason, and I won that DVD because we were meant to be together. In only their second feature, Joel and Ethan crafted one of the greatest comedies of all time. Even if they never did anything after Arizona, there’s an Evil Dead-esque steadicam P.O.V. oner in this movie that comes up a driveway, across a yard, climbs a ladder, enters a window, and almost goes down a screaming woman’s throat that would solidify and cement them as filmmaking greats for all time. The story of eternally recidivist convenience store robber H.I. (Nicolas Cage) and his unlikely but perfect romantic match in police officer “Ed” (Holly Hunter), Raising Arizona follows their attempts to start a family despite Ed’s sterility preventing them from having a baby and H.I.’s criminal record preventing them from adopting. When wealthy unfinished furniture magnate Nathan Arizona idly jokes to the news media that his wife’s recent birthing of five quintuplets means that they almost have more kids than they can handle, the two end up kidnapping one of the babies to raise as their own. Assorted troubles arise in the form of H.I. losing his job after taking offense to his boss’s suggestion that the two of them “swing” with him and his wife, the breakout of H.I.’s friends (John Goodman and William Forsythe) from a nearby penitentiary and their subsequent extended stay at H.I. and Ed’s place, and the appearance of a seemingly demonic bounty hunter (even Chigurh doesn’t grenade bunny rabbits or cause flowers to burst into flames with his mere presence) who’s tracking the baby for the Arizonas. I won’t argue that No Country is a “better” movie, whatever that might mean to you, dear reader, but I could never rank it above Raising Arizona in my heart. It wouldn’t be honest; it wouldn’t be true. Cage, Hunter, and Goodman are a perfect trifecta of magic here, real lightning in a bottle stuff. I’m going to be thinking of this movie until my dying breath.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Last Stop in Yuma County (2024)

July 14, 2024 / swampflix / 4 Comments

Heretofore a director of mostly short films and music videos, first-time feature director Francis Galluppi has burst onto the scene with something that’s both indebted to indie upstarts of the past and which feels like a breath of fresh air. Last Stop in Yuma County is a spare movie; it doesn’t look or feel cheap although you can definitely tell it was made on a marginal budget. It’s lean in just the right places to take this story to the next level.

In the 1970s, an unnamed traveling knife salesman (Jim Cummings) stops for gas while en route to see his daughter, in the custody of his ex-wife, for her birthday. He arrives at a filling station only to learn from the attendant, Vernon (Faizon Love), that he’s waiting for the fuel truck to arrive, and that he’s welcome to wait in the attached diner. Since this is, as the title says, the last stop in Yuma, he has little choice. The diner’s waitress and possibly sole employee, Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue), is dropped off by her sheriff husband, Charlie, while the salesman hears on the radio about a bank robbery a few counties over. Once the diner opens, Charlotte and the salesman make pleasant chit-chat while trying to ignore the rising heat, as the diner’s air conditioner is no longer working. Before long, another car stops in for gas and gets the same bad news, and its occupants also choose to idle the time away in the diner. While Charlotte takes their order, the salesman notices that they are driving the same green Pinto described in the radio bulletin. The robbers, young hothead Travis (Nicholas Logan) and middle-aged, stone-cold Beau (Richard Brake), take note that the salesman and the waitress seem to be exchanging confidences, and cut the phone line when Charlotte tries to call Charlie, who takes too long to come to the phone. (Charlie’s assistant, Virginia, is played by the one and only Barbara Crampton.) Beau tells them to play nice and tasks Charlotte with grilling each customer who comes in about their fuel situation and, if any of them have gas, he’ll simply take that car and let everyone live.

The diner starts to fill up as more and more people arrive at the fill-up station. An elderly couple from Texas (Robin Bartlett and Gene Jones, the latter of whom you may remember as the gas station attendant whose small talk infuriates Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men) takes up residence at one table, and Charlie’s deputy Gavin (Connor Paolo) comes in for coffee, which sets Beau and Travis on edge. Charlotte almost manages to get a warning out, but Gavin’s careless collision with Travis costs her the opportunity. Two drifters, Miles (Ryan Masson) and Sybil (Sierra McCormick), also find their way to the diner, and Miles, who already idolized the criminals he heard about on the radio since he and Sybil have a whole anti-social folie-a-deux, attempts to steal the bank loot from the Pinto’s trunk before he’s spotted and they have to head into the diner to avoid being caught. It’s when local rancher Pete (Jon Proudstar) arrives, solely to have lunch since he filled up the day before, that things finally get out of hand. The meek salesman writes a note to his daughter and sticks it in his pocket and prepares to make a stand, but a standoff occurs when Beau takes Charlotte hostage, with Pete, the Texans, and Miles all pulling their guns on each other. Miles tries to bargain for part of the loot for helping Beau and Travis, and then things take a real turn for the worse.

There are a couple of minor elements that spotlight Yuma as a first-time outing for a feature director. Throughout the film, one of its strengths is a beautiful, constant, yellow desert light coming in from the outside; it’s very atmospheric in a way that contributes to the tension. But when the salesman shows up at the diner around dawn (it’s specifically said that it opens at six o’clock, and he watches Charlotte enter and turn the “open” sign around), the light is already that same pallid yellow of noon. It’s unchanging, and it’s a minor detail, but one that I couldn’t help but notice. The scene in which Beau explains—calmly, coolly, and dispassionately—exactly why the salesman and Charlotte are still alive, it’s delivered as a monologue. It’s a strong one, and one that’s done in a single long take, which works great with the tone. However, there’s a moment in the speech when Beau says, “Do you understand?” [beat] “Good,” and then continues with his directions. We can assume, yes, that Charlotte and/or the salesman nodded their assent, but it feels weird not to see that response in the text, without a cutaway. You can’t cut the question from the monologue without cutting the long take, and you can’t cut to the other characters reacting without doing the same, but it nonetheless feels a little awkward.

That’s all that there is to quibble about, though. This is a great piece of work, moody and tense. From the opening credits on, we know that the fuel truck isn’t coming, as the opening credits play out over its crash site, so we know that things can only go tragically (and boy do they). Cummings’ transformation from timidity to reluctant courage is fun to watch, and when his character starts to make selfish choices, we go into full Coen Brothers mode as he succumbs to his own personal greed, up to and including a moment where it seems like he will be forced to bury the cash beside the road like Jerry Lundegaard. Beau and Travis even superficially resemble other pairs of criminals that the Coens often conceive in their films, with Braker’s Beau in particular a welcome presence as his casual cruelty means the stakes are as high as possible, and the performance of base, blood simple (ha) meanness that Braker brings to the role is a highlight. The placement of the dominoes that create the narrative flow is excellent, with some really elegant foreshadowing and rhyming imagery. It’s hard to say more about this one without giving too much away (in fact, I may already have), but if you’re yearning for something in the vein of a less sprawling No Country in a tight ninety minutes, this is a perfect choice.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Angrier Young Men

July 12, 2024 / swampflix / 1 Comment

I had two conflicting thoughts about Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan’s role in the recent sci-fi blockbuster Kalki 2898 AD. My first thought was that it was interesting to see an actor known for embodying the “Angry Young Man” archetype in 1970s Bollywood productions play a wizened, centuries-old warrior opposite a rebellious young man played by Tollywood star Prabhas, like a ceremonial passing of the torch. My second thought was that I have no idea what I’m talking about. I am aware enough of the Angry Young Man trope that Bachchan’s name rattles around in my head while watching his echoes in films as old as the 1982 Saturday Night Fever riff Disco Dancer and as recent as Dev Patel’s 2024 John Wick riff Monkey Man. And yet, it is very likely that Kalki 2898 was the first time I had ever actually seen Bachchan act onscreen. A lot of this is a circumstance of access. I enjoy the ritual of driving out to Elmwood on the weekends to watch 3-hour Indian action films, but those are all new-release titles. I’m missing a century’s worth of cinematic context when I watch these modern mutations of the masala genre. It was fun to see Shah Rukh Khan play two dueling roles in last year’s over-the-top actioner Jawan, for instance, but there are several other examples of him indulging in that one-man special effect from past decades that I’ve entirely missed. Likewise, any glimpse I’ll get of Bachchan this way will be as an older, gentler man than the roles that made him famous.

Thankfully, I did happen to find a quintessential Angry Young Man title from Bachchan’s back catalog on a used DVD at a local Goodwill. 1975’s Deewaar was an early star-making vehicle for Bachchan, the same year he made Sholay. He plays a petty criminal who spends his entire life sinning & hustling so that his younger, gentler brother can be properly educated and afford the opportunities he missed. This dynamic eventually sours when the younger brother (Shashi Kapoor) grows up to become a squeaky-clean cop, assigned by higher-ups to take Bachchan down. The two boys play tug-of-war with their mother’s affections – the cop living a noble life and the criminal bringing shame on the family, just like their absent father. The sly moral trick that Deewaar plays is in praising the cop while glorifying the criminal. Sure, Kapoor gets equal screentime against Bachchan, and all of the film’s songs are cutesy romantic trysts hyping him up as a handsome leading man. It’s Bachchan’s brooding anger as a scrappy fighter who has to work outside the system to thrive that really sells the film’s commercial appeal, though. He smokes. He drinks. He has premarital sex. He enters his first big fight scene reclined in chair, feet kicked up, and ripping cigs while a gang of nameless goons are foolishly looking for him, about to get all their asses kicked by a single opponent. Simply put, he’s cool – a true hero of the people.

Because I don’t often have enough context to understand the bigger picture of Indian action cinema as a standalone industry, I’m often left to compare these movies against their closest Hollywood equivalents. To my uneducated eyes, Kalki 2898 is Prabhas’s Dune; Saaho is Prabhas’s Fast & Furious; Radhe Shyam is Prabhas’s Titanic; etc. My best understanding of Deewaar, then, was as the Indian equivalent of Blacksploitation pictures of the 1970s. Bachchan’s stylish, furious rebellion on the impoverished streets of Mumbai recalled American independent pictures of the time like Coffy, SuperFly, and The Mack. They appear to take inspiration from the same martial arts schlock, if nothing else, and their populist revenge against corrupt elites affords them similar political messaging. In that context, Bachchan’s anger against an unjust world is totally justified, even if Deewaar still feels the need to wag a finger at the immorality of his crimes. When Dev Patel can barely suppress his anger with the corrupt policemen who slaughtered his mother and burned his village to the ground long enough to exact his revenge in Monkey Man, he’s brooding in Bachchan’s shadow. That anger is doubled in S.S. Rajamouli’s recent international hit RRR, in which the unlikely pair of Ram Charan and N.T. Rama Rao Jr. lock biceps to exact revenge on British colonizers, both players struggling to not blow their cover in separate, intertwined Angry Young Men plots. In Gully Boy, Ranveer Singh raps his way through it. When I first saw it in theaters, all I could think about was Eminem’s hero arc in 8 Mile; now I’m imagining what it would be like if Bachchan had to battle-rap his way to glory instead of solving problems with his fists.

One interesting variation on the Angry Young Man is in the recent single-location actioner Kill, in which one lone hero fights off an army of murderous thieves on a moving commuter train. A generic mashup of Snowpiercer & The Raid, Kill‘s entertainment value relies more on the relentless brutality of its violence than on the complexity of its themes. Since Bachchan was already on my mind, though, I couldn’t help but think about how its Indian army commando hero (Lakshya) both falls in line with and defies the basic tropes of the Angry Young Man archetype. On the one hand, you would think that because he’s an army brute who beats up petty criminals the entire runtime, he’d be too entrenched in the ruling-class establishment to qualify as a proper Angry Young Man anti-hero. If anything, the most vicious of the villainous thieves (Raghav Juyal) would’ve filled that role in a better-rounded narrative where he wasn’t such a sadistic psychopath. And yet, because Lakshya is fighting specifically to protect and avenge a fiancée whose wealthy father wouldn’t allow him to marry because he isn’t of the right caste, I’d say that he at least partially qualifies. He’s a character defined entirely by his anger, lashing out at the thieves who’ve taken the train hostage with a ferocity that goes from heroic to monstrous as the violence escalates. At one point, Juyal remarks in wonder that “the commando’s love has dropped on us like a bomb.” It’s like watching Bachchan’s big one-on-many warehouse fight from Deewaar stretched out to a continuous 100-min action sequence, just with less coherent political messaging behind its thousands of bare-knuckle punches.

Frankly, I also saw a lot of the cheapness of Deewaar reflected in the independent production values of Kill. By now, Bachchan is internationally famous and starring in the most expensive Indian film productions of all time, like Kalki 2898. In the 70s, he was still scrappy and hungry, which might mean that the furious brutality of Lakshya’s performance in Kill will lead to bigger roles down the line. In the meantime, I’ll be busying myself trying to pick up the scraps of Bachchan’s back catalog that I can access at home. The only reason I got to see Deewaar with English subtitles is because I happened to pick it up at a West Bank thrift store that has since closed down. Luckily, the more widely remembered Sholay is currently available to stream on Tubi, free with ads. Not having actually seen an early Bachchan film before now has never stopped me from referencing his Angry Young Man persona in the past, though. His impact on the go-to narrative tropes of Indian action cinema are evident to even the greenest newcomers.

-Brandon Ledet

Swampflix

New Orleans film blog & podcast

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Angrier Young Men