For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the 1943 suburban noir Shadow of a Doubt, which Alfred Hitchcock described as his personal favorite of his own films.
After a recent viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, I double checked to see if it had already been covered on the site (it had), since I had learned to do this recently after getting a couple of paragraphs into a review of the director’s Frenzy, which Brandon had also already covered. This made me wonder just how many of Hitch’s thriller features we had covered; these account for 40 of the roughly 45 films in his filmography (I say “roughly” since I’m not sure how we would count his earliest, lost films like Number 13 and The Mountain Eagle), and I texted Brandon that we had covered 13 so far, to which he noted that we had already hit 14 if one counts his discussion of Strangers on a Trainhere. I thought it would be fun to try and do all 40 sometime, and figured I would tackle the next one chronologically after The Lodger. Unfortunately, my local video store does not have a copy of Blackmail!, so I rented Murder!, only to find out that the LaserLight DVD they have in their possession is one of those quick and dirty late nineties/early 2000s releases of a very poor transfer (in fact, The Hitchcock Zone has a warning about this exact DVD). It was, in a word, unwatchable, and that’s coming from someone who buys every unlabelled estate sale VHS he sees just to see what’s on them. I was still in a Hitchcock mood, though, so I decided to see what he had available on the Criterion Collection and stumbled across Young and Innocent, one of his 1937 pictures. The description of the film gave fair warning that the movie did contain a sequence of Blackface, which made me a bit wary. The movie ended up being so much fun and so delightful (in fact, I started to wonder why it wasn’t more well known) that I had completely forgotten about this heads-up by the time that the last ten minutes rolled around, and boy did it negatively affect my perception of this feature overall.
The film opens on an argument between Christine Clay, a British actress returned home after having success in Hollywood, and her ex-husband Guy, who accuses her of “bringing home boys and men” and refusing to accept that the marriage is over. The following morning, young Robert Tisdall (Derrick De Marney) is walking along a cliffside when he sees a body on the beach and climbs down, discovers Christine dead, and sprints away to get help. His speed is witnessed by two girls who had come down to the water to swim, and despite the fact that he did come back with the police, said coppers immediately decide to believe the teenagers’ interpretation that he was fleeing the scene and arrest him; it certainly doesn’t help that his raincoat was recently stolen and Christine was strangled with a raincoat belt, or that he and Christine knew each other from their stateside film work, where Robert was a writer. Their suspicions deepen when they learn that she has left him a substantial amount of money in her will, and he’s prepared for immediate arraignment. While detained at the station, he faints when he learns of this, and is revived by Erica Burgoyne (Nova Pilbeam), the daughter of the police commissioner, and is totally adorable with her Sealyham terrier named Towser and her beat-up, hand-cranked jalopy. When he’s given a clearly incompetent public defender, he flees the overcrowded courthouse and escapes by hiding in Erica’s car. When she runs out of gas, he pushes the car to the nearest petrol station and uses his last few coins to pay for more fuel before hiding out in an abandoned barn. When Erica returns home, she overhears that he can’t get far since he only has thirty pence, and she comes to believe that he must be innocent, as he claimed. When she returns to the barn to leave behind some food and coins for him, the two barely escape discovery by a couple of her father’s policemen, and she ends up agreeing to take him to the boarding house where a drifting vagrant who supposedly has possession of his raincoat may be able to prove his innocence.
De Marney and Pilbeam are utterly charming in these roles. We know from the start that Robert is innocent, so even though Erica’s claims that he’s too sweet-looking to be a murderer are dubious at best, we also can’t help but agree when we see Robert’s boyishness, especially when we get to see the two together in all their on-screen chemistry. In a lot of these “innocent man pursued” pictures, Hitch’s leading men often get frustrated and agitated at their situation, and even though this is early in his career, it’s kind of refreshing to see a man who’s at least somewhat enjoying the ride that he’s on. That makes his flirtation with Erica and her eventual willingness to help him try and find the proof of his innocence a nice, charming romance, with two sweet leads who work quite well together. Once they do locate the homeless china-mender, Old Will (Edward Rigby) and enlist him in their mission, he adds even more charm to their little ensemble. Perhaps my favorite character, however, is Erica’s Aunt Margaret (Mary Clare), who appears when Erica and Robert are still heading to the boarding house where Old Will might be found, and she says that she’ll call her father so that he doesn’t get worried and start looking for her. Erica has forgotten that it’s her younger cousin’s birthday and she gets roped into attending her party. Aunt Margaret is a total busybody and a bit of a party bully, but she’s so arch and funny that she’s much more entertaining than she is frustrating. Her husband, Uncle Basil (Basil Radford, who would appear the following year in The Lady Vanishes), is less suspicious and can see that blossoming romance between Erica and Robert so clearly that he ends up helping them slip away.
The general light-heartedness of this one also makes for a very fun comedic outing, but it’s also not without its fascinating set pieces, either. Besides the aforementioned child’s birthday party scene, Erica’s home life with her father and several younger brothers is also quite charming. It’s clear that her relationship with her family is a loving one, and all of the boys get enough characterization that it’s a delight to watch them all play off of each other. There’s a studious and up-tight one with glasses, the more jocular and athletic middle boy, and the precocious youngest who ends up bringing a rat to the dinner table at one point. This makes the later more serious scene in which her father shows her the resignation letter that he intends to deliver that day (rather than arrest his own daughter, whom he knows has abetted an escaped inmate) all the more impactful. For comedic set pieces, there’s a very good one at the restaurant called Tom’s Hat where Robert’s raincoat first went missing, when a couple of vagrants get into a brawl with some truckers that they feel are giving away a little too much information about Old Will, with Robert forcing his way inside in order to try and save Erica from the kerfuffle, only for her to have already made her way out of the building without any of his help. On the more dramatic side, the abandoned barn makes for a beautiful location, and there’s also a great setpiece where Robert, Old Will, and Erica (and Towser!) drive into an abandoned mine shaft to evade pursuing police, only for the shaft to give way beneath them and swallow the car as they desperately try to climb out of it before it falls. There’s also a great dance sequence at the end where Old Will, having been given an offscreen makeover that he despises, goes to a fancy hotel with Erica to see if he can identify Christine’s killer there, and it’s a sight to behold.
Unfortunately, it’s this final scene in the hotel where the film gets a little too ugly to swallow. It wasn’t uncommon for live musical performances of the era to take advantage of the minstrel show aesthetic, and every single member of the ten-piece band performing at the hotel ballroom is in Blackface, and it’s quite awful. I know that I’m looking at this through a modern lens and the contemporary logic was that it would make sense for the killer to have a job where he’s in some kind of disguise, and being painted to look like a racist caricature made for an understandable method of hiding in plain sight during a time when that kind of entertainment was common. Still, I can’t help but be sickened by the final ten minutes, especially since this one was chugging along at such a nice pace up until that point. I was a little curious as to why the quality control on the subtitles for this film seemed to be barely up to snuff, as the caption “[inaudible]” appears more here than in any other film I’ve ever seen, over a dozen times. Sometimes it’s character names that perhaps the captioner didn’t feel confident in providing or slang of the time that a younger staffer at Criterion might simply be unfamiliar with (in the very opening scene, Guy tells Christine that he won’t accept her “Reno divorce,” which the subtitles render as “[inaudible] divorce”), but at other times it’s just fast child-speech that a trained ear should be able to hear or it’s totally clear dialogue. It made it feel like this was done haphazardly and lazily, and I was keeping track of what I heard in order to email Criterion to recommend an update, but by the end of the film, all of the wind in my sails had gone out after seeing the Blackface sequences, and I get the feeling that whoever was in charge of getting this up onto the Criterion Channel likely had the same deflation. I can’t say that I blame them.
I’ve been slowly but surely working my way through Martin Scorsese’s filmography; I gave a rundown of what I’ve been up to in my Cape Fear review here, and I’ve worked my way from having only previously seen Shutter Island, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and The Last Waltz as of last year to now also having seen Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Cape Fear (obviously), Casino, and now The Aviator. At about halfway into the film’s staggering 171-minute runtime, I turned to my friend and stated that, although I understand that this might be a heretical opinion, I thought it was so far Scorsese’s best work that I had seen. After viewing the film’s more meandering and slow-moving second half, I’m not so sure that’s the case, but it may still very well be my favorite. All cards on the table, however, almost all of that enjoyment comes in the form of an absolutely marvelous performance from Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn, which having just watched Suddenly Last Summer, it’s pitch-perfect and an utter joy to watch. That the film becomes less interesting when Hepburn moves on from being courted by the playboy Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) to starting her affair with the still-married Spencer Tracy, as she did in real life, is not a surprise.
The Aviator is the story of one Howard Hughes, whose Houston-based family business made a fortune in drill bits for oil wells, and the film opens on Hughes engaging in his two great passions: aviation (naturally) and movies. He hires Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly) to manage his business so that he can put all of his attention into the completion of his war picture Hell’s Angels, a cause which ultimately takes him over three years and costs $4M ($77.3M in 2025, adjusted for inflation), nearly bankrupting him, but catapulting him into the public consciousness as the archetypal 20th Century Renaissance Man: a brilliant engineer, a playboy with the most beautiful women in Hollywood, and an artist. He also completely seizes up under any kind of greater attention, represented by him having a “whiteout” as the frame fills with light. Hepburn is immediately drawn to him, and the couple’s romance is quite a lot of fun, as she’s an unconventional woman who’s drawn to him, dazzled but not blinded, and she helps to ground him. His ongoing filmmaking career leads him to dalliances with other actresses while his oversight of Hughes Aircraft demands more of his attention, and after a disastrous visit to the Hepburn family compound, the two split up. All of this is intercut with Hughes continuing to design and engineer various aircraft, with one such plane making him, at the time, the fastest man who had ever lived.
When we did our podcast episode about Boogie Nights, Brandon drew a connection between it and Goodfellas, specifically in both films’ bifurcation into a “fuck around” half and a “find out” half, with 1980 as the dividing line. Casino has that same symmetrical structure, and The Aviator does too, among some other Scorsese-isms that I’ve started to notice, like federal agents being used for petty retaliation and planes running out of fuel while flying over golf courses. Unlike in Casino and Goodfellas, however, the main character’s downfall in the “find out” back half are a result of Hughes’s mental illnesses, rather than a more traditional tragic flaw, like Sam Rothstein’s need to be envied or Henry Hill’s inability to break free from the allure of the power that organized crime gave him. The film essentially shouts at you through a bullhorn that Scorsese sees himself in Hughes and although he doesn’t shy away from portraying Hughes’s outlandish behavior like extremely precise eating habits, obsessive handwashing (to the point of causing himself to bleed), and paranoid wiretapping of his girlfriend Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale)’s phones, it’s not those things that bring Hughes down. Scorsese’s Hughes is a Randian achievement of infamy by merit, precision, and perfectionism, and his failures have to be that he’s too much of a perfectionist and he pushes himself past his limits — the kinds of things that you would disingenuously call weaknesses in a job interview. The appearance of an antagonizing force in the form of PanAm president Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin) and his senator patsy Ralph Owen Brewster (Alan Alda) moves the narrative along but it’s not really Trippe or Brewster that Hughes is ever really fighting; it’s himself and his increasingly severe compulsive acts. Once he overcomes the agoraphobia he develops following the latest of several experimental aircraft crashes and delivers a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style speech to Brewster’s subcommittee, the narrative thrust has hit its climax. Hughes was an ubermensch, albeit an eccentric one, and Scorsese is the Hughes of the film world.
I’ll admit that this is an easy leap to make when interacting with any text, but there’s a special focus on Hughes’s tenderness in his approach to the machines that he creates. Hughes doesn’t do “test pilots”; he gets out there and he flies the thing himself, and the fact that his cockpit and his director’s chair are the same seat is made very literal early on when he flies around amidst the pilots shooting Hell’s Angels. When something doesn’t work, he keeps trying, even when the need for it has passed. He first dreams up the “Hercules” air carrier as a means to help the troops in WWII, but despite taking government development money, he doesn’t get the thing completed until after the war is over because it has to be perfect, just like a film has to be perfected before it gets sent out to the general public, even if doing so means that it misses its cultural moment. I have to admit that none of that is all that interesting to me, just like I’m not really all that interested in any of the film’s various historical inaccuracies (the film presents Hughes as making his firebrand subcommittee speech after coming out of his reclusive “locked in a movie theater and pissing in jars” period, when in fact the committee hearings were 1947, a solid ten years prior to his 1957 isolation). What is interesting to me is that this is a film that I don’t think could be made today.
The Aviator was released during what was probably the last time the general public was willing to accept an epic narrative about a real life “hero” of public stature. Contemporary figures of equivalent wealth, status, and public identity are far too accessible to the general public, and the extent to which some of the most powerful people in the world have sacrificed their mystery and allure on the altar of social media (not to mention their morals and ethics) and flat-out embarrassed themselves on an international stage means that they’ve forsaken any awe or reverence that they might have otherwise had. The pursuit of being the most liked boy by a vocal minority of people who are overrepresented online has shattered any opportunity for a contemporary millionaire inventor to be respected, for better or worse, not to mention that it’s fundamentally broken many of our critical institutions. Retroactively, it makes this entire genre seem like propaganda, and it probably always was, intentionally or not. That’s just the way of the future. Finally, I found this one a fun experiment in seeing what Scorsese would do with a more family-oriented picture. Most of his films are R-rated and notoriously so, with Goodfellas setting the record for the most uses of the word “fuck” in a movie at 300, a record that was broken five years later with 422 uses in Casino, and when the upper records started getting a little crowded, The Wolf of Wall Street had 569 uses in 2013. I’m no moral guardian, but I will say that there’s something to be said for playing around with moderation as The Aviator, as a PG-13 film, got exactly one “fuck” and it hit a lot harder than any single or cumulative use in the other Scorsese pictures I’ve seen. Part of this is the nature of the setting, which allows for Blanchett’s Hepburn to gush out “Golly!” and many other early period accurate transatlanticisms (and it’s a hoot every time). Scorsese usually goes for broke by leaning into the extremes, and it was interesting to see him do something different. This wasn’t his first non-R film, of course, as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, New York, New York, and The King of Comedy were all rated PG (albeit they predate the PG-13 rating), as is The Age of Innocence, and his Dali Lama picture Kundun was PG-13, but this feels like his first movie that you could catch on cable on a Saturday afternoon during a family get together and reasonably expect most of the people present to enjoy it.
I had a very difficult time getting anyone interested enough in the new Naked Gun to go see it with me, so much so that Brandon beat me to the punch with his review of it. Suffice it to say, we are in agreement that it’s a delight. And man, Elon Musk sure is catching strays out there in theaters this year, isn’t he? Between very thinly veiled versions of him appearing as villains in The Naked Gun, M3GAN 2.0, Superman, Mountainhead, and LifeHack, and a stand-in for him realizing that his whole life has been wasted and he’s likely hellbound in The Phoenician Scheme, this really hasn’t been a good year for him, has it? I doubt we’re going to Hollywood Carol him into turning his life around, but it sure is nice to see him getting egg on his face. But let’s return to a simpler time, when a movie’s evil villain didn’t have to be the richest man in the world, and when simply being a high-level drug trafficker with designs on killing Queen Elizabeth II was enough.
Lt. Frank Derbin (Leslie Nielsen) of LAPD’s special unit called Police Squad has just returned from a vacation overseas, where he had a bit of a busman’s holiday in the form of busting up a conference of the United States’ then-greatest enemies, including Yasser Arafat, Ayatollah Khomeini, Idi Amin, and Mikhail Gorbachev (whose famous birthmark Derbin reveals to be a fake). Upon returning home, he learns that his girlfriend has left him and his partner, Officer Nordberg (O.J. Simpson), is in the hospital after attempting to bust a heroin operation aboard a ship in L.A. Harbor, where he was caught and shot by men who work for shipping magnate Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalban). Nordberg’s wife begs Drebin to find the men responsible, but heroin found on Nordberg’s jacket points to him having been on the take; Drebin is given only 24 hours by Captain Ed Hocken (George Kennedy) to clear Nordberg’s name, as Police Squad has been authorized by Mayor Barkley (Nancy Marchand, aka Livia Soprano) to take charge of security operations for the impending visit of Liz II. Meanwhile, Ludwig instructs his unsuspecting secretary, Jane (Priscilla Presley), to get close to Drebin and learn what he knows under the guise of wanting to purge his company of any potential illegal activities. Jane and Frank immediately fall in love, but can he stop Ludwig’s plan to assassinate the queen, clear Nordberg’s name, and butcher the national anthem in 85 minutes? I mean 24 hours?
I have pretty strong memories of watching The Naked Gun as a kid, but I think that I probably saw the film’s first sequel more often, given that it was likely cheaper to license for television. At the very least, very few of these gags were familiar to me (other than the scene in which Derbin accidentally drops Ludwig’s pen into a fish tank and ends up killing one of the prized tropical fish in the process of fishing it out). I think part of that might have been that child-me would have been a little bored by the film’s ending, as it spends a pretty long time at a baseball stadium, and as a reluctant little league player during the wave of Angels in the Outfield, Field of Dreams, Little Big League, and countless other family baseball movies, I would have tuned out. In fact, as much as I was enjoying this movie, the back half is largely eaten up by Frank attempting to stop an assassination attempt at Anaheim Stadium, and I started to feel my opinion of it waver. Luckily, the location allows for a lot of beats in which Nielsen gets to do something hilarious, which made up for the fact that the film parks itself there for so long. One of the best bits involves Frank faking his way onto the field by knocking out and taking the place of a famed international opera singer, which leads to him ending up on the mound, “singing” a half-remembered version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It’s a delight, as is all of the stadium nonsense during which the queen is subjected to the vagaries of a baseball game, like having to ask someone to get out of your seat or ingest “dugout dogs” (one of which Ludwig discovers, to his horror, contains the remains of one of his lackeys who fell into the vat while trying to kill Frank).
Humor is subjective, and one of the difficult things about reviewing it, as we’ve said before, is that the issue with a lot of discussions of comedy is that they can often simply devolve into recapping the jokes or reciting the dialogue. What I will say about the friend that I was finally able to convince to go see the new Liam Neeson Naked Gun was that he was glad I talked him into it, and that although he didn’t enjoy the sight gags as much as I did, he found the dialogue very funny, and I think that’s a testament to what works about Naked Gun conceptually. I love all of the visual puns and the playing around with the language of film (there’s a particularly funny bit where the camera pans from one room to another, with most of the characters going through the set door while Frank merely steps around the edge of the set wall), but even if that’s not something that you’re going to enjoy as much as I did, you’ll probably still get a kick out of the cleverness of the dialogue. I’d still say that this one ranks below my personal favorite spoof flick, Top Secret!, but that’s a high bar to clear, and I’ll admit that it’s not without its flaws—in particular, that it spends several minutes doing a direct parody of The Blue Lagoon rather than the genre tropes that it traffics in for most of the runtime is arguably worse than the baseball digression that happens in Naked Gun.
It’s also interesting to look back at this one and see how much the most recent film drew from it without needing an audience to be familiar with its specifics. There is, of course, the scene in which two characters’ innocent misadventures are mistaken for degeneracy by an observer, Frank’s horny clunkily inelegant internal monologue upon meeting his love interest, and the scenes in which Frank gets raked over the coals by his superior. More specifically, when John Huston was explaining his master plan to his cronies in this year’s sequel, I said aloud, to my companion, “Isn’t this the exact plot of Kingsman?” (It is.) But the “use technology to brainwash people into committing acts of violence” villain plan is actually taken directly from the original, albeit on a much larger scale. In this film, Ludwig is able to use a remote device to turn people into Manchurian assassins; it’s never explained in any detail, as we just get close-ups of the sleeper agents’ watches when he pushes the button, and that’s all that we need to know. Brevity is the soul of wit, after all.
If you’re feeling a little nostalgic for an old school Naked Gun experience after seeing the new one, or need something to tide you over until you get the chance to check it out yourself, you really can’t go wrong with this one. Unusually for a comedy of its age, very few of the jokes have aged poorly, especially in comparison to some of “racial” comedy in the Hot Shots! movies; it’s possible that the film’s opening could come across as offensive if one wasn’t aware that the characters at the conference are specific world leaders/figures of the time, but that can’t be helped. If anything, the only thing that really dates this is the presence of the late (“alleged”) killer O.J. Simpson, but he’s not given much to do in this one other than be injured over and over again. That’s got to be worth it to somebody, right?
A frequent lament you’ll hear from Millennial cineastes is that we, as a generation, deeply miss the Directors Label DVDs from the early 2000s. Collecting the music-video catalogs of then-young auteurs like Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, and Jonathan Glazer, the series wasn’t just fun background texture for dorm-room hangouts; it was also a crash course in surrealistic filmmaking techniques, finding some of that era’s most expressionistic directors taking their biggest creative swings in the only commercially viable medium that would support that kind of experimentation. Since the music-licensing deals that made those DVD collections possible have become too convoluted & expensive to justify a reissue, those long out-of-print DVDs now resell for exorbitant sums, effectively rendering them extinct (unless you were able to protect your personal copies from scratches and friendly-fire splashes of beer & bong water). However, there is an equally vital DVD collection of music videos from that early-aughts era that’s still affordable on resale: The Complete Truth About De-Evolution. A DVD reprint of a music video anthology originally published on Laserdisc in the 1990s, The Complete Truth About De-Evolution collects all of the music videos produced by the American rock band DEVO from their proto-punk days in 1970s Akron, Ohio to their commercial-product days in 1990s Los Angeles, California. It documents the gradual mutation of the music video format from art-film experimentation to the crass commercialism of MTV, positioning the band as a sarcastic Prometheus of the medium. I watched those videos obsessively in college, inferring the creative & professional trajectory of what became my favorite band by studying how their cinematic output evolves across the disc, never fully understanding how all the pieces fit.
The new Netflix documentary DEVO is a wonderful addendum to that music video collection, reinforcing the band’s legitimacy as an intrinsically cinematic project. Director Chris Smith (of American Movie notoriety) has a lot of fun playing around with the pop-art iconography DEVO satirized in their music videos and graphic art, charting the intellectual & cultural decline of post-WWII America through a constant montage of its most absurdly inane commercial imagery. He also invites the band to discuss the ideology behind their songs & videos at length in the kinds of talking-head interviews standard to the straight-to-streaming infotainment doc. The main project of DEVO the film is to explain the political messaging of DEVO the band to a worldwide audience of Netflix subscribers who only remember them as the one-hit-wonder dweebs responsible for “Whip It.” The interviews mostly reinforce the intellectual seriousness of the project, explaining the band’s early history as a response to the Kent State Massacre and its career-high sarcastic mockery of the pop music industry that paid their bills. As a result, it goes out of its way to downplay the more ribald sex jokes of tracks like “Jerkin’ Back ‘n’ Forth”, “Penetration in the Centerfold,” and “Don’t You Know” (the “rocket in my pocket” song) in order to convey the overall sense that they were a highbrow political act that was merely satirizing the ape-brain sexuality of fellow MTV-era pop groups. The narrowness of that argument doesn’t fully capture what makes the band so fun to listen to full-volume on repeat, but it allows Smith to deploy them as a soundtrack to America’s cultural decline in the 20th Century, which flashes in nonstop montage like a feature-length version of their video for “Beautiful World.”
There are plenty of vintage DEVO clips included here that I’ve never seen before, scattered among the more familiar lore of the band’s career highlights: their violent relationship with the factory workers of Ohio barrooms, their significance to the CBGB punk scene, their early brushes with David Bowie & SNL, their political-pamphlet arguments that humans evolved from “insane mutant apes”, etc. My biggest thrill, however, was seeing clips from the music videos on The Complete Truth About De-Evolution restored in HD for the first time, since I’ve been watching them on the same ancient DVD for the past two decades. Formally, there isn’t much variation on the typical straight-to-Netflix pop doc template that points to Smith as an especially significant filmmaker; it’s more in line with his recent, anonymous docs on Fyre Festival, Wham!, and Vince McMahon than his career-making doc on the production of the regional horror film Coven. If there’s any one choice that makes the film stand out among other infotainment docs of its ilk, it’s the narrowness of scope. Of DEVO’s nine studio albums, Smith only covers the first five — their most artistically significant (and each an all-timer). There’s no obligatory reunion & redemption footage in the third act after the band’s initial break-up, either, because the film is not about DEVO as a rock ‘n’ roll act; it’s about DEVO as a political act. It juxtaposes their most overtly political lyrics with the most overtly asinine cultural detritus of their era in order to convincingly argue that their music was more subversive than it was cynically mercenary. That’s something you can gather by directly engaging with the work yourself in The Complete Truth of De-Evolution, but it doesn’t hurt that the truth about DEVO is now even more complete.
I am not immune to nostalgia bait. In fact, I’ve fallen for it in the past. I watched the entire first season of Girl Meets World based solely on my fondness for its 1990s predecessor (it’s terrible). I gave the 2016 Ghostbusters a pretty high rating that I’ve come to regret greatly over the years, and I genuinely love the Walt Disney personality-laundering Emma Thompson/Tom Hanks picture Saving Mr. Banks. Additionally, having babysat for younger cousins while I was in college and having a goddaughter born in 2009, I continued to be familiar with the larger Disney Channel oeuvre long after I aged out of their target demographic. I’m not going to argue that their work was ever especially great, but the pre-That’s So Raven era had a wider variety of original programming, with action series like The Famous Jett Jackson, for-kids supernatural spookfests like So Weird, and laugh track-free coming-of-age dramedies like Flash Forward (I know I’m really dating myself with the last one). As the channel grew more widely available at the basic cable level rather than at the premier price point, the popularity of Lizzie Mcguire was surpassed even by Raven, which people are quite fond of, but it’s Raven (and, to a lesser extent, Even Stevens) that committed what I would consider the network’s original sin: costuming became hypercolorful and quirky, characters were constantly delivering pithy one-liners and mugging to the audience, the laugh track became omnipresent, and everything became very same-y. It’s a generational curse, and one that I saw play out in many episodes of the shows that I was subjected to (or, as was the case with Girl Meets World, those shows to which I subjected myself). I’m almost 40 years old; I should not be burdened with so much knowledge of Austin & Ally or Wizards of Waverly Place or Suite Lifes on land and sea, and yet I am. (Good Luck Charlie is actually pretty good, though.)
The waters that Freakier Friday is navigating are overcrowded. Legacy sequels to cash in on millennial nostalgia have flooded the market in the last decade, and while big budget genre franchise pictures like the Star Wars sequel trilogy and the ongoing Jurassic World debacle have been successful commercially with mixed critical reception, 90s/early-aughts family and romantic comedy follow-ups have generally been poorly received on both fronts. I think the biggest obstacle here is that the popularity of the Disney Channel School of Hyperactive Comedy Acting means that all sitcoms produced for children has to have all those hallmarks: aggressively cartoonish facial acting, forced quippiness, etc. I have a fondness for She’s All That despite it not being a very good movie, but then you graft the modern hyper style onto the recent He’s All That follow up and it just doesn’t work. People who grew up watching the Y2K Freaky Friday were going to turn out for Freakier Friday regardless, and the sequel could have easily and lazily taken the path of least resistance to churn out a low-effort, reference-heavy movie that mostly consisted of the teenage girls making goobery big-eyed faces over unimaginative puns and small cameos from returning stars Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis. I was particularly concerned when every trailer that appeared before my screening was for an animated kids movie, which didn’t bode well for how much the feature would care about the adult members of its audience, but I was pleasantly surprised.
It’s been 20 years since psychologist Tess Coleman (Curtis) and her musician daughter Anna (Lohan) body-swapped on the eve of Tess’s marriage to Ryan (Mark Harmon) so that they could walk a mile in each other’s shoes and gain a better understanding of one another. Anna has since “chosen to be a single mother,” has a career in musical management, and has her own issues with understanding her teenage daughter: tomboy surfer Harper (Julia Butters). Harper’s conflict with a recent transfer student to her school, British fashion-conscious Lily (Sophia Hammons), results in both of their parents being called to a conference with the principal, and it’s here that Anna meets Lily’s widowed father Eric (Manny Jacinto), and sparks fly immediately. Six months later, it’s now the eve of Anna’s wedding, and Harper and Lily are no closer to getting along, with Harper fearing that the family will move to London and leave her California life behind, while Lily worries that her father will choose to settle full time in LA, preventing her from attending the fashion school that she wants and severing the connection she feels to her late mother. When the two instigate a food fight, they’re punished by being forced to have a sleepover at Tess’s the night after Anna’s bachelorette party. It’s there that both the reluctant soon-to-be-sisters as well as Anna and Tess meet palm reader Madame Jen (Vanessa Bayer), who channels something that results in all four of the women swapping bodies. Harper exchanges places with her mother while Lily and Tess are swapped, and your typical body-swap antics ensue. While Tess-in-Lily and Anna-in-Harper are forced to go to school and attend the detention that the teens got themselves into, Lily-in-Tess and Harper-in-Anna set out to make sure that the wedding never happens, essentially making this a kind of spiritual sequel to Lohan’s other big Disney remake, The Parent Trap. This connection is made even more clear when Elaine Hendrix, who played the undesirable potential stepmother in Trap, appears here as a fashion designer who’s tasked with styling Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), Anna’s pop star client whose concert tour launch is the same weekend as the wedding.
This is a solidly made little comedy with a surprising amount of heart. If the audience is meant to be teenagers, it refuses to talk down to them, and the film is just as interested in the stakes of Anna’s wedding as it is in the teenagers’ plots, and there’s even some time spent developing Tess’s stakes as well. Perhaps the intended target audience will be more emotionally invested in the points of view of Lily and Harper. I’m not really sure how having to finish high school in Los Angeles is going to affect Lily’s ability to attend a London fashion institute or that Harper having to move to London is going to be the end of the world, but it’s the kind of thing that kids and teens think are very high stakes (or, I could say, those are very Disney Channel Original Movie stakes), so it makes sense. That this is a text one will have different feelings about depending upon what age you are is a testament to how much more thoroughly thought-out this narrative is in comparison to more half-hearted attempts to go to the intellectual property well again. The plot between Anna and Eric is genuinely sweet; Harper has only ever seen Eric through the narrow lens of adolescence, as the father of her nemesis and an interloper who might upend her whole life, but she gets to see him through her mother’s eyes and witness how much he genuinely loves not only Anna but Harper as well. Eric’s love for Anna is clear (it doesn’t hurt that Manny Jacinto is perhaps the most beautiful man in the world), and we also get to see how much Anna loves him, and that insight into the adult world makes both of the girls see how selfishly they’ve behaved and hurt the people around them and try to stop their parents from calling off the wedding that they’ve spent most of the film trying to prevent.
The film makes a very smart choice in passing off most of the heavy emotional lifting to its adult cast. Lily has a tear-filled breakdown near the end when she finally opens up about the fact that her homesickness for the UK is really just her missing her mother and that she knows she’s acted out very badly, and that her mother would be happy that her father found love again and would be disappointed in her for her actions, and the fact that Lily’s in Tess at the time means that Curtis gets to lean on decades of performing to sell the performance. Curtis is clearly having the time of her life in this movie, as she gets some great physical comedy work, crawling around on the floor, putting on a fashion show, and doing some good bits about what it’s like to suddenly inhabit an ailing, aging body. Mark Harmon barely appears in the film, but in one of the scenes he makes an impression in, he and Tess have to compete in their Pickleball tournament, and Curtis is having so much fun that I had fun, too. Lohan isn’t called upon to do quite as much, since Jacinto’s “perfect husband material” material does most of the work in the scenes where Harper-in-Anna learns to think about someone other than herself, but she’s giving it her all in other areas. Part of the girls’ plan involves trying to get Anna’s high school boyfriend Jake (Chad Michael Murray) to fall back in love with Anna, and the directions that Lily gives Harper-in-Anna are comedically misinterpreted, and it’s a fun scene, made all the better by the fact that the teens are naturally completely blind to the fact that all these years later it’s Tess that Jake’s still horny for. It’s good comedy, and not what I was expecting from a decades-late sequel to a Disney remake I saw once twenty years ago because I was babysitting. (It even comes back around at the end when Jake’s date to Anna’s wedding is wearing the exact same dress that Curtis wore in Freaky Friday, sporting a similar haircut.)
As for the actual teenage actresses, they both do good work with the material that they’re given, and most of their scenes are comedic. Butters merely has to play Anna-in-Harper as stressed out about making sure that Harper-in-Anna gets to her and Eric’s immigration interview and that Ella doesn’t psych herself out of her tour opening performance over her recent breakup. Hammons has a bit more meat to chew on, with one of her best scenes being Tess-in-Lily once again encountering Stephen Tobolowsky’s teacher character (he hasn’t been able to retire because the school put all of their retirement funds into cryptocurrency) and once again using her psychological skills to try and manipulate him. She also gets an emotional scene, too, and she pulls it off quite well. I hope that they had as much fun making this as Jamie Lee Curtis obviously did, and the end credits blooper reel lends itself to that conclusion. And hey, Rosalind Chao was there! I always love to see her. Perhaps the best sequence in the film is the aforementioned pickleball tournament, which sees an appearance from June Diane Raphael as an aggressive player named Veronica. That means, with her appearance in Weapons, she appeared in both of the movies that topped the box office last week (thanks to my buddy Zach for pointing this out). If it weren’t for the fact that shouting “It’s June August! It’s June August” from my porch would make sense to no one, I’d be doing it.
Freakier Friday is surprisingly heartfelt and earnest, and it’s also candy for your brain. Why on earth do two adult women get in on Ella’s Rolling Stone shoot? Who cares? If you’ve been burned by this particular brand of nostalgic entrapment before, this one might heal that wound.
Welcome to Episode #245 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of Roald Dahl adaptations, starting with the Wes Anderson anthology film The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More (2024).
0:00 Welcome 02:45 Beavis and Butthead Do America (1996) 07:12 Napoleon Dynamite (2004) 13:52 Peter Pan (1960) 16:55 The Legend of Ochi (2025)
24:04 The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More (2024) 49:09 The Witches (1990) 1:10:12 James and the Giant Peach (1996) 1:23:35 Matilda (1996)
For decades, whenever someone cited the “uncanny valley” effect of modern filmmaking, they were referring to the off-putting resemblance of CGI to real-life humanity. As computer technology inches nearer to photographic accuracy, the ways in which the images are still just slightly off become monstrously horrific, especially when rendering human faces. As a result, movie nerds tend to fetishize the practical effects of yesteryear, preferring the blatant artifice of movie-magic techniques like stop-motion, animatronics, and latex makeup transformations to the uncanny computer effects of our current corporate hellscape. Ironically, that fetishism has recently led to an entirely new uncanny valley forming between advanced practical effects and the CG graphics they’re meant to counteract. For instance, when the stop-motion Wallace & Gromit shorts were mostly made by Nick Park’s hands in the early 90s, you could see the lumpy imperfections of his fingerprints in the characters’ clay bodies, unmistakably marking them with evidence of human touch. Now that Wallace & Gromit features like Vengeance Most Fowl are being produced by hundreds of collaborators for major studios like Netflix, those fingerprints have to be artificially applied, intentionally warping the clay so the machine-printed faces can’t be mistaken for computer animation. Likewise, the new children’s fantasy-adventure The Legend of Ochi features an animatronic puppet so perfect in construction & operation that it uncannily resembles its CGI equivalents in movies from less discerning filmmakers. Music video director Isaiah Saxon has spent years perfecting the puppetry & matte paintings of his feature-film debut to revive an industry overrun by computer-generated tedium with some old-world movie magic and old-fashioned awe. He didn’t think to artificially muck up the final product like Aardman Animations, though, and the result is so uncannily similar to CGI that you have to wonder why he even bothered.
The titular Ochi are magical creatures brought to life via animatronic puppetry. The species largely resembles the golden snub-nosed monkeys of China, except that its bites are poisonous and its children are adorned with Mogwai ears for maximum cuteness. The Ochi are introduced to the audience in a scientific text titled Carpathian Beasts & Demons to help distinguish them from the real-life primates they resemble. Their presence on the fictional, Romania-adjacent island of Carpathia is treated as vampiric & monstrous, with a crazed patriarch played by Willem Dafoe training a new generation of boys to hunt & kill the supposedly demonic beasts on sight. His daughter is not so convinced of the nobility in this mission, and she quickly befriends a baby Ochi left behind by one of her father’s hunts. The rest of the movie is an E.T.-inspired children’s adventure, in which the sullen teenager runs away from home to safely return the Ochi to his fleeing family in a coming-of-age act of rebellion. If there’s any modern update to that familiar formula, it’s in Dafoe’s mockery of Jordan Peterson-style manosphere philosophy, which he preaches to impressionable young boys while driving around his monster-truck chariot in antique battlefield armor. He has no particular interest in his daughter beyond her value as “a father’s greatest treasure,” while she rejects her extremely gendered role in the house by donning costume vampire fangs and cranking heavy metal tunes from the fictional band Hell Throne. The goodbye note she leaves when she runs away proudly declares, “I am strong and cool and don’t believe anything you say,” speaking for all teenage rebels everywhere in their universal language of sass. As a result, the movie should spiritually speak to any depressed loner children who resent their bloviating fathers—of which there is always an infinite supply—regardless of whether they’ve already seen an E.T. riff or three.
The Legend of Ochi evokes all of the childlike wonder and sarcastic teen humor needed to make this genre formula work, but neither of those elements are entirely convincing. Its teenage characters (Helena Zengel as the Ochi’s bestie and Finn Wolfhard as a burgeoning fuckboy who’s “only nice when no one’s looking”) mumble their lines under mops of greasy hair to the point of near indecipherability. They aim for deadpan comedy but overshoot to land at dead-eyed monotony instead. There are also long stretches of the adventure to Ochi territory that have no dialogue at all, which would test audiences’ patience at any age and suggests that Saxon isn’t used to filling up a feature-length runtime with his writing. The real disappointment is that the psychedelic magic of his past music video work for artists like Björk & Panda Bear fall short of inspiring awe here. His puppetry & matte-painting visual tricks, while admirably old-fashioned, are too technically perfect to convey their construction by human hands. When the trailer for the film first dropped, social media C.H.U.D.s baselessly accused Saxon of boosting his budget with A.I.-generated imagery, which had to be heartbreaking for an artist who spent multiple years fighting to render this passion-project fantasy world through the most practical, tactile methods possible. Still, the final result is a little too machine-perfect to inspire genuine awe, and you can easily see what stoked those accusations. There’s an uncanny valley effect in how close its state-of-the-art puppets resemble computer-generated images, leaving them a little off-putting & soulless despite the passionate craft behind them. Saxon technically did everything right here. The aesthetic is distinct; the puppets are cute and smoothly operated; the gender politics are pointed and relevant to the moment; the kids are authentically mopey & rebellious. That’s what makes it so frustrating that the movie never fully sings, even if it can demonstrably hit all the right notes in perfect pitch.
In its most shameless hours, there isn’t much difference between Vice News journalism and the Mondo exploitation movies of the 1960s & 70s. Vice has well earned its reputation for bravely tackling subjects more traditional news media won’t touch, but that bravery often translates to a kind of in-your-face bravado that can cross over into shock-value exploitation. There’s a thin line between reporting on real-world violence and profiting from horrific images of that violence, and that line gets especially blurry when you package those images with youth-culture music & aesthetic signifiers. Of course, that pseudo-documentary/pseudo-exploitation hybrid journalism bothered me a lot more in the 2010s, when Vice News hit peak popularity and I’d be casually confronted with its graphic violence via friends’ TV & laptop screens while just going about my day. It all came back to me watching the 2007 documentary Manda Bala, though, which plays like a Citizen Kane-sized cornerstone in establishing the cinematic language of aggro hipster journalism in the Vice News era.
Self-billed as “a film that cannot be shown in Brazil”, Manda Bala is a high-style documentary about brazen crime & corruption in that country, the unlikely center of which is the world’s largest frog farm. At its core, it’s a film about extreme wealth disparity in mid-2000s São Paulo, transitioning between interview subjects via scale-busting helicopter shots of the sprawling city’s skyscrapers & slums. It documents crimes on the furthest ends of those economic extremes: flagrant political corruption that steals massive amounts of money from impoverished communities and those communities’ frequent kidnappings of the ultra-wealthy’s family members for quick ransom payouts. The frog farm is just one of many money-laundering schemes on the political corruption end, but it’s one that offers the film a point of visual interest as the overpopulated frog nests are rife woth amphibian cannibalism. Besides the unapologetically corrupt owner of that farm, other interviewees include former kidnapping victims, currently active kidnappers, anti-kidnapping detectives, bulletproof car salesmen, and a plastic surgeon who specializes in reconstructing kidnapping victims’ severed ears with their own rib cartilage. Hostage videos, surgery footage, and ballistics tests constantly escalate the violence of the film’s imagery while it alternates between shockingly candid interviews with the people who suffer that violence every day. Sometimes, the film’s eagerness to entertain feels callously flippant given the severity of its subject (especially in its upbeat Tropicália music cues), but its retro, shot-on-film aesthetic is gorgeous and its on-the-street reporting pulls no punches when detailing the violence on either side of the poverty line.
My used DVD copy of Manda Bala boasts that the film won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, among a second prize for Best Cinematography. Given the state of the infotainment documentary in the mid-2000s, I believe that prize was deserved. The tonal mix of hipster cool cred & violent bloodshed in Manda Bala may have made me a bit queasy, but there’s no question that it’s better crafted than the nonstop onslaught of rote, cheapo digi-docs about George Bush, Wal-Mart, climate change, and the meat industry that cluttered up Blockbuster Video shelves throughout that decade. As much as the film relishes the quirky frog-farm imagery and Mondo hyperviolence of its subject, it does consistently hit the right political targets — explaining that the kidnapping epidemic is a direct symptom of the poverty caused by corruption, then going on to explain how that corruption is just a modern extension of historical Portuguese colonization. The film likely has just as legitimate of a claim as being a precursor to recent high-style arthouse documentaries like The Act of Killing & Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat as it does being a precursor to Vice News web broadcasts, but something about the confrontational, Mondo-style imagery read pure Vice to me. Maybe I’m too squeamish to differentiate true, hard-hitting journalism from shock-value exploitation; or maybe it’s okay to do a little of the latter if it draws attention to the former.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1959 adaptation of the Tennessee Williams-penned Southern Gothic stage play Suddenly, Last Summer, starring Katherine Hepburn & Elizabeth Taylor.
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