Ash (2025)

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It is a truth non-universally acknowledged that all art is political, but Ash, from director Steven Ellison (better known under his musical moniker Flying Lotus), may be the first film I’ve ever seen that has no identifiable thesis and thus appears to be completely apolitical. This isn’t a criticism so much as an observation of the fact that this movie, despite how much I enjoyed it, seems to be all but completely theme-less. Riya (Eiza González) wakes up, amnesiac, inside of what appears to be crew quarters, surrounded by dead bodies, all of which demonstrate extreme violence done against them. She experiences horrifying flashes of such violence: a head bashed in by a rock, a face melting away as it decomposes, smiles turning from friendly and warm to malevolent and menacing. She walks outside and discovers that she was inside of some kind of station or base on an alien world, as something snowlike drifts down from a sky that is dominated by a radial design that resembles the iris of a great eye, pulsing and pulsating. She sees something vaguely humanoid at a distance, obscured by the harsh atmosphere, although it remains unclear if there is someone or something out there, or if it is perhaps a mirror image of herself (as it mimics her movements) or even a mirage or hallucination. She manages to make it back inside before the atmosphere suffocates her, only to hear a knock at the door. It’s Brion (Aaron Paul), the sixth member of their expedition team, who has left his post in orbit in response to a distress call from the surface, saying that Riya himself had told him that Clarke (Kate Elliott), the only person not accounted for between the two of them and the corpses, had undergone some kind of psychotic break and attacked the others. Riya attempts to recover her memories and advocates for finding and rescuing Clarke, but their time is limited; they have to return to the main spaceship the next time that it completes its orbit in just a few hours, as damage to the base means that they have insufficient atmosphere to wait for it to come around again. 

In writing about Lotus’s previous film, Kuso, Brandon noted that the gross out comedy (with heavy focus on the “gross out” part) was of a kind with Adult-Swim-to-feature pipeline films that “tend[ed] to push attention spans to the limit at full length.” I can confirm that this was an issue for one of my viewing companion, who admitted in the car ride on the way home that some of the gaps in his understanding of the film could be attributed to dozing off a couple of times, but this is also a film with an intentionally dense plot that lends itself to few easy answers. The amnesiac protagonist character is not necessarily a new one, but the film initially sets itself up as a bit of a science fiction mystery with an anachronic order: Who killed everyone? Can Brion be trusted? Can Riya, for that matter? As characterization and events are doled out in flashes of recovered memory as well as exploration footage that Riya manages to recover from a drone, we learn more about what happened, and it becomes apparent that this movie is little more than a remix of other films from this genre — an excellently photographed, perfectly soundtracked, and gorgeously colored, to be sure, but a remix nonetheless. That does not detract from the film, but that all of these elements come with a bit of a pacing issue does. 

In the opening minutes, as Riya makes her way outside of the base and sees a figure in the distance mimicking her movement, one thinks of the finale of Annihilation. The quick cross-cutting of horrific images in Riya’s mind—be they memories, hallucinations, nightmares, or some combination thereof—calls to mind Event Horizon, which famously tucked all of the visuals that pushed the film into the NC-17 rating into mere blips on screen in order to secure an R, so that the viewer isn’t sure what they’re seeing but are nonetheless disturbed. As Riya watches the video captured by one of the mission’s drones and we intercut between the footage itself and the memories that it awakens within her, one is reminded of the crew of the Nostromo as they approach the downed ship on LV-426 in Alien (that the planet “Ash,” from which the film takes its title, also has a very similar designation is but one of the smallest of many allusions to that franchise). Their discovery of an alien artifact of their own and the realization that this is the first domino that falls before the tragedy we entered in media res at the start of the film is likewise very Alien-like, and then the film pushes further and becomes a bit like Prometheus in the study of organic matter taken from it, which becomes an orifice-invading life form that is ultimately responsible for everything. There’s even a little The Thing in there, as this is an isolated place in a desolate environment where no one can be trusted, as well as a really great Rob Bottin/Stanley Winston style mutant human at the end. 

One Alien film it doesn’t borrow from is Alien3, but it does crib from another of director David Fincher’s films, but to say more on that would stray too far into spoiler territory, and I think this is a film that should be gone into with as little foreknowledge as possible. I certainly did; it just happened to be $5 Tuesday (well, $5.75 now) and a friend finally had some time off after having to work an extended stretch of days during and around SXSW. The arthouse was doing repertory screenings of things I had already seen, and Brandon had written about Black Bag and the new Looney Tunes picture, so with nothing more to go on than the tiny icon of the film’s poster in the MoviePass app, I went to the film with a couple of friends. As soon as the characteristic “heartbeat” sound and logo card that accompanies the opening of the Shudder app and precedes the films it distributes, I realized that I had accidentally duped myself into paying for a movie that I could watch at home. That having been said, when the film’s opening fifteen minutes or so felt very much like the beginning of a Syfy Channel original (albeit an extremely elevated and gory one), I was glad that I was watching this in a theater instead of at home, where the film’s pacing would have been a greater challenge on my attention span. This is a film that is introspective, but temporally, not tonally. There’s a lovely dream sequence in the middle that I rather liked, but the purposeful use of long scenes in which very little is happening and we are left to merely contemplate the tableau is something that I can see turning off certain audiences (my two viewing companions, for example, had polar opposite reactions).

Even if you, like me, are more tolerant of those contemplative moments, you may still find that what’s most critically missing here is a lack of theme. Alien is positively (and often literally) dripping with concepts of motherhood, gestation, and birth; The Thing captures a quiet paranoia and isolation that’s universally emotionally applicable; Event Horizon is a parable about madness through the consequences of what happens when science pierces the veil of reality. All of these are existential horrors in what are normally considered environments of speculative fiction, and all of them feature terrifying results of encounters with beings so unlike us that moral concepts of “good” and “evil” don’t really apply. So is Ash. But as to what Ash is about … I’m not really sure that I could tell you. The overall societal decline in attention span has resulted in a lot of discourse about whether a certain scene has a “purpose” or a “point,” meaning to what end does it serve the god of plot and the god of plot alone. Those people are not going to have a good time screening Ash. But the fact that I liked this one so much despite its real lack of theme or thesis tells me that this is a movie with no small amount of things to enjoy and even praise. Its “purpose” is to be an Alien movie unapologetically shot like Knife+Heart; its “point” is to synthesize all of those elements together and then create the best sci-fi synth soundtrack since Blade Runner. It won’t be for everyone, but if you have the inclination after this review to see it, I’d see it on the big screen if you can.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Scenes from a Screenwriter’s Marriage

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We try our best to cover both the highest and the lowest ends of cinema here, from the finest of fine art to the trashiest of genre trash. Occasionally, those two polar-opposite ends of the medium intersect in unexpected ways. Last week, I found myself watching two seemingly discordant movies that covered the exact same metatextual topic – one because it screened in The Prytania’s Classic Cinema series during New Orleans French Film Fest and one because the Blu-ray was heavily discounted during an online flash sale. Both 1963’s Contempt and 1989’s The Black Cat are movies about screenwriters who jeopardize their marriages by taking on doomed-from-the-start film projects that put their wives’ personal safety at risk. The former was directed by French New Wave innovator Jean-Luc Godard at the height of his professional career, while the latter was directed by Italo schlockteur Luigi Cozzi in a sly attempt to cash in on his tutelage under his much more famous mentor, Dario Argento. They also both happen to be literary adaptations, at least in theory. While Godard was relatively faithful to his source-material novel, Cozzi’s film is an adaptation in name only, daring to bill itself as “Edgar Allen Poe’s The Black Cat” in its opening-credits title card before immediately abandoning its source text to leech off Argento’s legacy instead of Poe’s. Godard does indulge in his own allusions to an earlier, foundational filmmaker’s work in Contempt, though, by casting Fritz Lang as himself and including discussions of Lang’s early artistic triumphs, like M. You’d never expect these two movies to have anything in common at first glance, but The Black Cat really is Contempt‘s trashy cousin, long estranged.

Typically, I don’t think of Jean-Luc Godard’s signature aesthetic to be all that distant from the low-budget, high-style genre filmmaking ethos that guided the Italo horror brats of the 70s & 80s. At the very least, both sides of that divide would have been passionately reverent of Alfred Hitchcock as a cinematic stylist. However, Contempt is so far removed from the handheld, D.I.Y. crime picture days of Breathless that it’s hardly Godardian at all, at least not visually. Shot on location at seaside Italian villas in Technicolor & Cinemascope, Contempt is often breathtaking in its visual grandeur, especially in its 2023 digital restoration that aggressively pops the intensity of its colors. Godard presents star Brigitte Bardot in several magazine glamour-shoot set-ups that accentuate the otherworldly beauty of her body, with particular attention paid to her buttcheeks. Of course, vacationing with a beautiful woman in an exotic locale doesn’t fundamentally change who you are, so the usual self-defeating macho bullshit that plagues Godard’s protagonists follow him there too. Michel Piccoli co-leads as a cash-strapped screenwriter who takes a well-paying job doing re-writes on an already-in-production Fritz Lang adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Lang is making a much more abstract, artsier picture than what his American producer had greenlit, so Piccoli ends up in a sickening position where he must undermine the work of a genius he respects to instead please a meathead cad from The States who values commerce over art (Jack Palance, playing a pitch-perfect dipshit). Worse yet, the American pig has the hots for Bardot, and Piccoli does nothing to get in his way or to protect his obviously uncomfortable wife. This leads to an endlessly vicious, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-style argument between the couple, so that they spend much of their time in an Italian paradise bickering about the purity of their love and the corruption of money. Meanwhile, Fritz Lang amusedly shakes his head, as if he’s seen this all before.

The marital crisis of The Black Cat is much more outlandish & abstract, but it also starts with a filmmaker taking on an ill-advised project. Our protagonist is a Luigi Cozzi-style horror director who decides to make good use of the Italian film industry’s loose copyright laws to make his own unsanctioned sequel to Suspiria. The project is in the early writing phase, where he is collaborating with a writing partner to sketch out the backstory of the Third Mother referenced in Argento’s Suspiria, believing there was room for another cash-grab witchcraft story in that lore (after the Second Mother was covered in Argento’s Inferno, and long before the Third Mother was covered in Argento’s Mother of Tears). They foolishly decide to pull inspiration from a “real”, powerful witch named Levana, who is awakened from her cosmic slumber by the project. Specifically, once the wart-faced Levana catches wind that she will be played onscreen by the director’s wife, she flips the fuck out and invades the real world through a mirror in the couple’s home, puking a chunky green goo in the actress’s face and then generally causing havoc. From there, The Black Cat is a supernatural horror free-for-all, following its scene-to-scene whims without any care or attention paid to the pre-existing work of Dario Argento, Edgar Allen Poe, or high school physics teachers. The movie is a jumbled mess of demonically possessed space fetuses, witchcraft-practicing house cats, 19th Century ghost children, telekinetic explosions, laser-shooting eyeballs, internal organ ruptures, creepy-crawly spiders, and whatever else amuses Levana as she tears apart this doomed marriage, all because she doesn’t want a movie made about her. What a diva.

You can assume a lot of what was on Godard’s mind while he was making Contempt just by watching the movie. Between the intensely bitter (and even more intensely gendered) marital argument that eats up most of the runtime and the art-vs-commerce argument that eats up the rest, you get a pretty clear picture of what was going on in his internal & professional life at the time. Even after watching the “Cat on the Brain” interview included on the Blu-ray disc, I cannot begin to tell you what Cozzi was attempting to communicate in The Black Cat. During the interview, he describes the picture as “science fiction,” likening it to his Star Wars knockoff Starcrash, with which it only shares a few extraneous insert shots of outer space. I’d say it’s much more spiritually in line with his supernatural slasher film Paganini Horror, which hooks the audience with the undead spirit of famous composer Niccolo Pagnini for a familiar starting point, then launches into a series of hair-metal music video vignettes where he just does whatever amuses him from scene to scene. Both of these vintage European relics might generally be about the artform of screenwriting, but only Contempt seems to put any sincere thought into that craft, while The Black Cat is much more about trying whatever looks cool in a scene, internal logic be damned. Something the two pictures do have in common, though, is the assertion that the basic labor & finance of filmmaking will ruin your marriage, whether through the intrusion of jackass Hollywood money men or the intrusion of evil mirror-dimension witches. If two movies so far apart in philosophy, tone, and intent happen to come to that same conclusion, I have to believe there’s some truth to it. Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be screenwriters.

-Brandon Ledet

Possible Films: Short Works by Hal Hartley 1994-2004

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I was unfortunately out of town or otherwise indisposed when my local arthouse theater recently hosted a showcase of Hal Hartley films. I’m not terribly familiar with the director’s work, but the promotional videos that were cut together for the screenings were very enticing. Unfortunately, the films that were shown have proven difficult to locate elsewhere, even despite the presence of my local, resurrected, independent video store. What they did have readily available was a collection of his shorts, a 2004 DVD release titled Possible Films: Short Works by Hal Hartley 1994-2004, which included eight titles that added up to be a bit of a mixed bag. 

First up is Opera No. 1, described by one online review as the most accessible of the shorts, which has born itself out to be relatively true. It’s a condensation of an operatic story about love and loss starring Parker Posey and James Urbaniak alongside the late Adrienne Shelly, who was a frequent collaborator with Hartley. Shelly and Posey play roller-skating angels among other characters within a narrative that Urbaniak is simultaneously both composing and living (I think). Twelfth Night is alluded to through an apparent gender swap for one of Shelly’s characters (again—I think), but the narrative isn’t really what’s important here so much as the image and, if you’ll forgive me, the vibe. Urbaniak’s placement on a precarious-looking scaffold as he writes out scenes then balls the paper in his fist evokes a sense of what it is to create: to endanger oneself through exposure of your innermost thoughts stage and the frustration that comes when one tries to contort the world into something more beautiful and manageable but failing to capture the same. Posey and Shelly are ethereal as angels, skating about in an empty theatre behind and between rows of empty seats, but the transcendent is also made human in that they also seem to love smoking. 

Opera No. 1 is followed immediately by The Other Also. Apparently, this second short began life as an art gallery installation, and I can neither improve upon nor dispute a contemporary A.V. Club review from Keith Phipps which stated this was “arguably the only place where a single out-of-focus shot of two actresses circling each other in slow motion to the accompaniment of an ambient score and a haltingly repeated Bible passage would be welcome.” It was at this point in my initial viewing that I stopped the DVD and decided to engage with the shorts individually, with some distance between them. 

The third short, the dialogue-free The New Math(s), is a return to something a little more “formful,” a film that is truly experimental in the sense that one feels Hartley trying out different techniques to see if they work. In an abandoned warehouse, two people sit at desks in a makeshift classroom. One, a man whose suspenders and short pants code him as youthful (David Neumann), contemplates an apple, while the other, a woman (Miho Nikaido, Hartley’s wife) works diligently on the math equation set before the two of them. A third character, their apparent teacher (D.J. Mendel) gets on and off of a freight elevator elsewhere in the building. When the woman appears to complete the equation, a non-violent kung-fu style battle seems to break out as each party pursues one another through the empty building, parts of which are likewise etched with other elaborate mathematical equations. The woman pulls a lever, machines elsewhere begin to move, and then their apparent activation seems to no longer be tied to the lever but to the woman herself, with the possible interpretation that the equation somehow delineates or even affects the passage of time. There’s something almost distinctly “public broadcasting” about it, from the grainy film quality to the overuse of the swoop and swoosh noises that come from parodying kung-fu sequences to the very Square One use of math(s) as a narrative device. I feel like I can see Hartley in the editing bay, working out how to convey the starting and stopping of time through the use of heavy machinery footage that may have been free to license, or him pushing the limits of his ability to capture fighting on screen and whether he had a knack for it. As with Opera No. 1, there’s little to say about the narrative or plot, but there is something interesting about the energy and the fun of getting to watch a filmmaker try out some new things. 

The fourth short, entitled NYC 3/94, follows four characters. The first is a man portrayed by Dwight Ewell (most recognizable to me from his long-ago Kevin Smith collaborations, most notably as Hooper the Black, gay comic book writer in Chasing Amy) who finds himself standing at the edge of a roof. The shot cuts away and we find him on the ground, apparently unharmed, where he meets a woman (Lianna Pai) who helps him to his feet. All around them, the sounds of war rage. Elsewhere, another man (Urbaniak again) reads out a jeremiad for the present day, narrating the inevitable collapse that we see taking place on the street. The final character, a man in a suit (Paul Schulze, whom I couldn’t place until I looked him up; he’s Father Intintola from The Sopranos), asks to be let into a place where Ewell and Pai’s characters have taken shelter and apparently dies in the street, but who is later seen escaping with the other two characters. Apparently, the audio was taken from “the war from the former Yugoslavia” (according to the aforementioned Phipps review), and the supposed mundanity of a civilization in collapse is effectively captured via the fact that the short is shot guerrilla style. As our three characters duck and cover from violence that only exists in the audio track and thus is only inferred through the magic of filmmaking in the images, people in the background mill about and go about their daily lives, “oblivious” to the “war” around them. It’s a neat little piece. 

The Sisters of Mercy is the fifth short and consists of seventeen minutes of outtakes between Posey and Sabrina Lloyd (from Sliders!) as they rehearse for Hartley’s short film Iris (not included on the disc), which is set to the song of the same name by The Breeders. It’s interesting from a technical point of view and mostly in conversation with the avante garde music video that for which it is, for all intents and purposes, supplementary material. Iris clocks in at under four minutes long, and Sisters of Mercy works to show how much work actually goes into a much shorter completed piece of art. As an individual piece, there’s little more to say about it, as it feels like an orphaned DVD extra. I did seek out and find Iris on the Criterion streaming collection, though, and it’s pretty good! 

I have to admit that I messed up a little here. Seeing Sisters of Mercy, Iris, and Regarding Soon on the Criterion Channel, I decided not to rush through the remainder of the shorts and instead return the DVD to my local video store, only to discover that the next short, Kimono, was not only not on Criterion, but all but impossible to find online. I would have to rent it all over again, I assumed, until I accidentally misspelled the director’s last name as “Hartly” in one of my Googlings, and discovered the 27-minute short in its entirety … on a porn site. I don’t know that I would call it pornographic, but there should be no mistaking the fact that this is an erotic film. A woman (Nikaido again) is a woman in a wedding dress who is ejected from a New Beetle (this was released in 1999, after all) in a deserted area. She wanders through woods and fields, slowly shedding parts of her wedding dress until she’s down to her lacy undergarments, all the time pursued by two woman that the IMDb page identifies as wood nymphs (Valerie Celis and Yun Shen). Once she’s shed every part of the bridal attire, she redresses herself in a kimono that she finds in a rundown house in the woods. She appears to fall asleep, whereupon a ghost whispers something to her while the observing nymphs cover their ears. Intermittently, poetic phrases float up on screen (ex.: “In this world / love has no color / and who knows how / my body is marked by yours”). They appear in broken lines, and it’s unfortunate that the effect is something like you would see in a contemporary film trailer for a suspense thriller (you know the effect I’m talking about, even if you can’t pinpoint the last time you saw it). It lends the whole experience the effect that it’s an advertisement for something else, and with a runtime of nearly thirty minutes, that’s a negative. On the other hand, this is a beautifully photographed piece, and one which shows that, even before the term “wife guy” was coined, Hartley was pioneering what that meant when it came to making a piece of art about how much he loves his hot wife.

Regarding Regarding Soon, this ten-minute film features Hartley talking about the creation of his stage play Soon, which was inspired by the Branch Davidian massacre and revolves around millennialist end-times Christianity in America. In his review of the DVD, Robert Spuhler noted that Sisters of Mercy was “probably [his] favorite as an actor” because of its insight into the creative process. Regarding Soon turned out to be one of my favorites probably because of my (well documented) interest in American eschatology. The play largely consists of arguments between seven characters about scriptural interpretation and interpolation, and the concept of “creative religiosity,” most notably the way that both religion and art are attempts we mere mortals make at attempting to understand the nature of existence. There doesn’t seem to be a performance of the play online in any format that I can find, but there must have been a publication of the script at some point since it has a presence on GoodReads, and we do get some images of the performance on this DVD, which is nice. I recently saw part of Hartley’s 1989 film The Unbelievable Truth and was struck by the pointedness and efficiency of its dream-like dialogue, how it presaged the kind of quick-witted linguistic playfulness and melodramatic delivery that would go on (sometimes for better, sometimes for worse) to be a characteristic of works like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gregg Araki’s Nowhere, and Gilmore Girls. It seems like this was the mode for Soon as well, and I hope I get to see a production of it or get the chance to read the script at some point in the future. For something that’s essentially a supplementary text for a larger work, this one held my attention quite well, and it was fascinating to hear Hartley talk about his creative process and confirm some of the things that I had already assumed about him from the previous entries in this anthology. He describes himself as minimalist by nature and how he enjoys working within a “restricted palette,” and I think that came through in all of these in one way or another. 

Ultimately, this collection wasn’t what I expected. Probably a must-view only for Hartley completionists, a few films feel like they are included here just because they had to be stored somewhere in order to be cited in his feature works, or feel like diary entries from production, which has a limited audience. I think that most others would get just as much out of watching the ones that sound interesting to them on the Criterion Channel (or whatever porn site you can find Kimono on).

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond 

Eephus (2025)

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I am not sure how, but my grandfather watched a baseball game for the entire span of my childhood. No matter when we stopped by his house, that one Atlanta Braves game was playing on the television, with no beginning or end. No one ever won or lost. Nothing especially interesting ever happened on the field. It was just plain, old baseball for all of eternity. I never understood the appeal until I attended a game in-person as an adult. With a couple beers and an Italian sausage in the stands, the endless stasis of plain, old baseball became pleasant instead of confounding. It was a calm background texture, an occasional distraction from the casual conversation & junk food consumption I would be indulging in anyway. Baseball is, essentially, the hangout movie of sports.

The new gloomy hangout comedy Eephus understands the spirit of that sport more deeply than any other baseball movie I can name. It’s a slow-paced, aimless picture that feels like watching a sub-professional baseball game played in real time. None of the players are especially athletic, much less talented. They’re playing a game so pointless that they can opt to get drunk & nap in the outfield with no direct effect on the final score. And yet, the dead-space background texture of the sport leaves a lot of room for what really matters in movies: detailed observations of human behavior, character quirks, and the poetic graces of life. Every single dialogue exchange & character detail of Eephus is deeply charming, riotously funny, or both, making for an exceptionally pleasant day at the park.

The occasion of this specific baseball game is the closing of Soldiers Field in Nowhere, Massachusetts. Before the site is demolished to make room for a school, two recreational-league teams of middle-aged men gather for one final game. They complain about the cruel absurdity of building a school on such hallowed ground, as if their field were being replaced with a strip mall or prison. The next-nearest field is only a 30-minute drive away, which they consider an insurmountable distance, deciding instead to retire from the sport forever. As the sun sets on their final game, the field lights never kick on, so they play in the dark, unable to see the ball or accurately call a play. They can barely haul their sagging dad-bods around the bases, joking “They should put me down” as if they’ve fully outlived their usefulness. There’s no real momentum or purpose to the game beyond going through the motions to give the field a proper send-off. When they celebrate with fireworks after the final play, we don’t even watch the display. There’s no sense of ceremony here, just lives being lived.

Eephus lingers somewhere in the vast liminal space between Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets & Field of Dreams, but its moment-to-moment charms are more kinetic than that description indicates. There are seemingly no repeated camera set-ups as cinematographer-turned-director Carson Lund (Ham on Rye, Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point) finds infinite angles from which to shoot a generally unimpressive recreational field. Standalone shots of an empty dugout, a good cloud, or the moon peeking out in daylight register with a quiet, warm beauty, but Lund never allows the tempo to drift from hangout movie to slow-cinema abstraction. He mostly finds the humor & humanity in the minor, unimportant behaviors of his small cast of minor, unimportant men. Meanwhile a series of local Halloween-themed radio commercials and an opening news broadcast voiced by Frederick Wiseman keep the energy up with loud, frantic background chatter. As an end-of-an-era movie about people who’ve outlived their purpose, it’s unavoidably melancholy, but it moves quick, looks great, and delivers constant laughs as it waits out the final hours of the day.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Nowhere (1997)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Gregg Araki’s Los Angeles teen brain-rot comedy Nowhere (1997).

00:00 Welcome

03:30 Urban Legend (1998)
15:00 Juliet of the Spirits (1965)
19:23 Contempt (1963)
22:45 The Black Cat (1989)
27:35 Video Violence (1987)
30:51 Fade to Black (1980)
34:34 Possible Films – Short Works by Hal Hartley (1994-2004)
42:13 Mickey 17 (2025)
50:04 Goodfellas (1990)

59:52 Nowhere (1997)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

That Gum You Like is Back in Style

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I had a classic theatrical experience at the downtown location of The Prytania this Wednesday, when I caught a double feature of the new Looney Tunes movie and the new Soderbergh. Since both films mercifully clock in around 90 minutes a piece, it was not an especially exhausting trip to the cinema, but more importantly they paired well as a charming throwback to theatrical programming of the distant past. The next morning, I read a series of confusing headlines about how “Moviegoers Want More Comedies, Thrillers and Action Titles,” so they haven’t been showing up to theaters for lack of interest in what’s currently out there. The survey generating those headlines is obviously flawed, since moviegoers simply don’t know what’s currently out there. Anyone claiming they don’t regularly go to the theater because “They don’t make ’em like they used to,” has lost sight of what’s actually on theatrical marquees, a problem that could be solved if they’d just glance up. The Day the Earth Blew Up & Black Bag are both exactly how they used to make ’em; it’s more that audiences “don’t watch ’em like they used to.” The habit of checking the newspaper for listings of what happens to be playing this afternoon or physically stopping by the nearest theater and catching whatever has the most convenient showtime is a lost cultural practice.

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie is about as classic as they come. Sure, its sexual & cultural references are a little more up to date than the anarchic sex & archaic pop culture parodies of Looney Tunes past (with innuendo about anonymous truck stop hookups and visual allusions to sci-fi horror classics like The Thing, Invasion of The Body Snatchers, Jurassic Park, and Night of the Living Dead). At its core, though, it’s just an extended Merrie Melodies short, following the goofball exploits of Daffy Duck & Porky Pig as they desperately attempt to hold onto their entry-level jobs at the local bubblegum factory while simultaneously fighting off a space alien who wants to poison that gum with a mind-controlling goo. Classic stuff. The humor ranges from vaudevillian slapstick to Ren & Stimpy gross-outs in a cacophonously loud celebration of all things loony, all rendered in glorious 2D animation. In a better world, every movie would open with a condensed version of this kind of goofball novelty as an appetizer for the Feature Presentation, maybe accompanied by a short news report about The War or what Lana Turner wore to her recent premiere. Instead, we live in a Hell dimension where its day-to-day box office uneasiness is a bargaining tool in backroom negotiations about whether the other recently completed Looney Tunes feature should be released to theaters or deleted from the Warner Brothers servers for a tax write-off. It’s grim out there.

For the adults in the room, Steven Soderberg has put a pause on his recent unsane genre experiments to instead re-establish his presence as one of Hollywood’s more classical entertainers. Black Bag finds the director returning to the suave professionalism of past commercial triumphs, this time casting Michael Fassbender & Cate Blanchett as a married couple of international cyber-spies who would literally kill for each other despite their shared need to constantly lie in order to do their jobs. The spy plot is a tangled mess of double-triple-crossings involving two “interlocked counterplans” to break this elite marriage part (and take over the world in the process), but none of that really matters. The project is more about signaling a return to the handsome, timeless world of tweed caps, stirred cocktails, and wholehearted monogamy. Soderbergh puts in a Herculean effort to make monogamous marital commitment sexy & cool. It’s a trick he finds much easier to pull off with Fassbender’s love of administering polygraph tests to fellow spies, since those come with their own bondage gear that signals sexiness from the jump. Setting all of this laidback, horny sophistication in the swankiest corners of downtown London and then going out of your way to cast a former James Bond actor in a prominent role (Pierce Brosnan, as the spy agency’s untrustworthy head honcho) all feels like a deliberate callback to the kind of classic thriller surveyed moviegoers claim to want, even if they’re not used to seeing it filtered through Soderbergh’s personal kink for commercial-grade digital textures.

In a word, Black Bag is cute. It’s a nice little treat for Soderbergh casuals who prefer the classic sophistication of Ocean’s 11 over the erratic playfulness of Ocean’s 12. I’m happy for that audience, even though I can’t relate. Similarly, The Day the Earth Blew Up is cute. It’s good for a few sensible chuckles and a few outright guffaws (the origin story for Porky Pig’s trademark stutter got an especially big, unexpected laugh out of me), but it’s in no way attempting to invent or innovate. It’s classic Looney Tunes buffoonery, a familiarly pleasant offering for anyone who’s looking to get out of the house and chomp some popcorn at The Movies. Watching it as a warm-up for a handsomely staged spy thriller about the timeless beauty of a traditional marriage felt like an experience that I could have had at the picture show at any time in the past century. People largely seem unaware that these traditionally entertaining movies are out in the world right now, though, since only the occasional Event Film (i.e., reboots, superhero flicks, live-action remakes of Disney cartoons) seems able to cut through the social media babble to grab their attention. It’s a problem I don’t really know how to fix, but thankfully I’m not in marketing, so it’s not really my job to fix. I just like going to the movies. Every week, I check my local listings and pop in to see what’s being offered to me. It’s a constantly rewarding hobby, one that requires minimal effort.

-Brandon Ledet

Mickey 17 (2025)

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When we recently did our podcast episode about The Big Sleep, Brandon mentioned that he had already seen Mickey 17 and briefly shared his thoughts about it. One of the things that he noted was that when Bong Joon Ho makes a movie that is primarily for a Western audience, he foregoes a lot of the subtlety that is maintained in the films that he makes with his homeland in mind. Which is to say that I think he thinks we’re all a little stupid over here (and he’s not wrong). Memories of Murder and Parasite are films with lots of subtext and subtlety (although the latter doesn’t hold back with its themes), while Snowpiercer and Okja are—and I mean this in the most affectionate and respectful way possible—a little obvious. When I think about Bong’s body of work, the scene that comes to my mind most often and the one that stands out most clearly is the sequence from Snowpiercer in which Tilda Swinton’s androgynous Minister Mason delivers a speech to disruptive back-of-train passengers. “A hat belongs on the head,” they say, “And the shoe belongs on the foot. I am a hat; you are a shoe.” Mason’s voice drips with disdain and hatred. Theirs is a demonstration of not just their slavish, religious devotion to class distinction, but just how furiously angry power can be when it reinforces itself, how the veil of civility (barely) conceals a snarling dog. 

So when you hear mixed things about Mickey 17, and people talking about how the film is obvious, well, they’re not lying to you. Mickey 17 is an obvious movie. It lacks subtlety, and I can see how people may feel that they’re being talked down to, or how the film’s lack of nuance in its themes could make it feel like a Disney Channel Original version of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, if you’re feeling extremely uncharitable. I would never go that far, but I will say that my expectations were not exceeded. 

Three decades from now, dimwitted Mickey (Robert Pattinson) has run into some trouble with a mafia-connected loan shark, alongside his friend Timo (Steven Yeun). The two decide the best solution to their problem would be to escape the dying planet aboard a corporate ship bound for worlds that humans seek to colonize. Timo is able to talk himself into a pilot position immediately, while Mickey signs up to be an “expendable,” a person whose primary role is to take on dangerous jobs during the long spaceflight. Sometime between the present and the not-too-distant future, scientists figured out how to 3-D print cloned human bodies and how to transfer memories between them, allowing for people to essentially create backup versions of themselves in case of death. When the technology was virtually immediately used for criminal (and homicidal) purposes, its use was banned on earth, but due to the dangerous nature of starfaring, one “expendable” is allowed per starship. Aboard, Mickey meets and falls into immediately reciprocated love with Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a security officer. The ship on which they are travelling is commanded not by a seasoned space veteran but by manchild former (read: failed) politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a character who exists to be an amalgamation of celebrities cum “leaders” but whose details make him a very (read: not at all) thinly veiled parody of the current U.S. president. Along for the ride is his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), whose rather thin characterization—she’s obsessed with sauce—goes largely unnoticed as Collette gives another fantastically over the top performance. 

Over the course of their journey, Mickey isn’t just given dangerous jobs to do, he becomes the subject of outright inhumane laboratory tests. His brain gets backed up onto a hard drive every week and then he gets printed out again when he dies. He’s put outside in a spacesuit in order to be exposed to cosmic radiation; he’s used to collect spores from the new planet’s atmosphere so that a vaccination to the diseases present on the planet can be created; he’s exposed to an ongoing series of nerve gas exposures in order to develop new biological weapons. One would also have to assume that, as his rations keep being halved over and over again, one of the Mickeys must have starved to death. It’s not a charmed life, but Mickey is so in love with Nasha that he doesn’t mind dying over and over again as long as they are together. Things go sideways, however, when he’s left to die after falling into a crevasse. He’s rescued by the tardigrade-like aliens that are native to the planet and brought back to the surface, and when he manages to get back aboard the ship, he learns that his replacement, Mickey 18, has already been printed. If anyone learns that there are two of them, they’ll both be killed and the brain backup deleted in accordance with law, and Sen. and Mrs. Marshal are all too happy to kill both Mickey and the tardigrade aliens (whom they dub “Creepers”) despite the indigenous life form’s apparent sentience. 

It’s a small detail, but one of the things that I liked at the beginning was that we see Mickey and Timo wearing the shirts for their failed macaron business, which features the slogan “macarons are not a sin.” It’s an unusual slogan but one that makes some modicum of sense since desserts and sweets are often considered an indulgence. However, we later learn in the film that “multiples are not a sin” was a rallying cry for a certain perspective on the question of the legality of the human backup-and-restore program. This all leads us to see how short-sighted Mickey is, as he clearly would have to know enough about the cloning process to see this as a reasonable macaron peddling tagline, but he also isn’t paying enough attention to know what he’s signing up for when he first enlists as an Expendable. Further, his taking inspiration (or willingness to go along with Timo’s inspiration) from a complicated legal and social issue for a myopic macaron business is more insight into Mickey’s doofiness. There is a charm in that, though, and the way that Nasha is instantly smitten with this dumb, lost puppy is endearing, as is her ongoing devotion to him despite the personality changes—some almost imperceptible, some quite obvious—that come with each rebirth. 

Shortly after Mickey 17 returns to the ship and discovers that Mickey 18 is already up and about, Mickey 18 takes it upon himself to assassinate Marshall. 17 is able to stop him in time, but this action reveals their existence as multiples and also ends in the death of one of two baby Creepers who came aboard the ship inside of a rock sample. There’s some slapstick, Ruffalo bellows as Marshall, the little cat-sized alien beings run around, then one of them is gunned to pieces. My viewing companion leaned over to me and said “I hated that,” the moment that the sequence ended. I didn’t agree, but I also understand that Mickey 17 isn’t going to win over as many people as Bong’s previous works have; it’s a familiar theme of his in a new environment and with different sci-fi trappings, but for some, it just doesn’t have that same “wow” factor. Unfortunately, I find myself completely sympathizing with the underwhelmed.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Urban Legend (1998)

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The 1998 college-campus horror Urban Legend resides at the crossroads of two major 1990s cultural projects, both involving the legacy of Wes Craven. First & foremost, it’s a post-Scream third wave slasher, coasting on a deluge of self-aware meta horrors starring young, hot teen actors who are conscious they are in a horror movie and provide live commentary on the tropes of the genre as they’re systematically killed. In this case, the famous-at-the-time teenyboppers in question (Alicia Witt, Jared Leto, Tara Reid, Joshua Jackson, etc.) attempt to guess the next patterned kill of a serial murderer who’s recreating long-debunked urban legends rather than recreating famous movie scenes—like in Scream—but the effect is the same. The secondary project of Urban Legend was part of a larger 1990s effort to reclaim the public reputation of Robert Englund as more than just the creep who played Freddy Kreuger, presenting him instead as a kind of effete academic. His late-80s turn as the Phantom of the Opera transported his Freddy Kreuger persona to the more refined cultural space of a period-piece opera house.  He later turned up as himself in Craven’s proto-Scream meta slasher A New Nightmare, appearing out of Kreuger drag as a thoughtful, classically trained actor haunted by the grotesqueries he was typecast as post-Elm Street fame. In Urban Legend, Englund’s past professional triumphs as Freddy Kreuger still linger in the audience’s mind as his character is floated as the most obvious suspect in the serial-killer investigations, but he’s quickly cleared of guilt and presented as something much more respectable: a bespectacled, leather-patched college professor and the leading expert in his field, which conveniently happens to be urban legends.

Of course, the only reason to return to Urban Legend all these decades past its expiration date is to pinpoint what, exactly, is the most 1990s-specific detail about it. There are plenty of late-90s time capsule contributions competing for that honor: frustrations with dial-up internet connections tying up a shared phone line, Joshua Jackson’s frosted-tips Peroxide hairdo, a meta joke at the expense of Jackson’s Dawson’s Creek fame, “Goth 4 Goth” campus hookup message boards, needle drops from Stabbing Westward and Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. When I saw the film was screening on a Monday evening down the street from my house, I didn’t attend in hopes that it would hold up as a wrongly dismissed 90s classic, à la The Rage, The Craft, or Cherry Falls. I attended out of nostalgia for the film’s value as a retro Blockbuster Video rental, watched alone on my bedroom VCR when I was old enough to crave teenage transgressions but too young to experience them first-hand. It was a pleasant time to return to, if not only to reminisce about a moment when teen slashers were slickly produced, hot commodities. Every exterior scene involves a completely unnecessary crane shot, and every nighttime slashing sequence is set during a music video-style thunderstorm for atmospheric effect, flaunting money most modern slashers couldn’t afford to scrape together. The only embarrassing thing about the movie, really, is watching the adults in the room have to play archetypes for mouthbreathing teens’ entertainment: Brad Dourif as a creepy gas station attendant, Loretta Devine as a Coffy-obsessed campus cop and, of course, Robert Englund as a learned professor of the macabre.

As for the urban-legends-obsessed serial killer conceit, even the teenage victims point out that the premise is “a bit of a stretch.” There are a few obvious go-to urban legends that map well to the teen slasher format. There’s the classic “The call’s coming from inside the house” story of the babysitter being killed by a home invader, restaged here in a frat house much like how the foundational 70s slasher Black Christmas restaged it in a sorority house. The first kill involves an axe murderer hiding in the backseat of a woman’s car, played for ironic humor as she sings along to the “Turn around” refrain of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” painfully off-key. The killer’s motivation being a disastrous prank version of the “flashing headlights gang initiation” legend is similarly effective. Three or four clever kills are not enough to fill the 100-minute runtime, though, which inspires the movie to reach for urban legends that don’t fully map to the genre. In the most egregious example, one character is force-fed a combo of Pop Rocks & Drano in a violent escalation of the schoolyard myth that combining Pop Rocks & soda will explode your stomach. Otherwise, things get exceedingly silly when the legends are updated with modern twists, like switching phone calls for online chatrooms or creating new teen slang in which victims-to-be each share their “favorite U.L.” at the campus coffee shop. With the gnarly exception of a microwaved dog, the violence of the film is never especially gruesome, but it does find plenty of novelty in its post-Scream meta slasher premise. It’s a wonder there were any legends left for its two less-remembered sequels; it seems like this one ran through all the standards.

If you want a smart, level-headed version of this movie, you’re much better off revisiting the 1992 classic Candyman, which starts with a grad student recording a broad range of urban legends before settling on one specific, hyperlocal one that destroys her life. The modern folklore academia of Urban Legend is much broader, and it only serves two cynical purposes: cashing in on the popularity of Scream and making Robert Englund appear intellectual. A couple decades later, the only cultural significance the movie has gained is as a reminder that Jared Leto was once passable as a normal, functional human being, albeit a strikingly pretty one. Everything else is pure late-90s nostalgia, the cinematic equivalent of binging Stabbing Westward & Cherry Poppin’ Daddies music videos on YouTube.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #234: Nashville (1975) & Altman’s America

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Welcome to Episode #234 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss the portrait of America stretched across Robert Altman’s filmography, starting with his 1975 country-music industry drama Nashville.

00:00 Pearl Jam
01:23 Striptease (1996)
05:06 Incendies (2010)
08:01 La Moustache (2005)
10:30 American Sniper (2014)
17:13 Rambo I – V (1982 – 2019)

25:20 Nashville (1975)
54:50 McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
1:15:30 Come Back to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982)
1:36:05 Short Cuts (1993)

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

– The Podcast Crew

Fade to Black (1980)

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“Why don’t you live in the real world with the rest of us?”
“No thanks.”

During the opening credits of the early-80s horror curio Fade to Black, our serial killer anti-hero Eric Binfold (Dennis Christopher) is mumbling to himself about Bogart & books, likely in reference to the Howard Hawks noir The Big Sleep. He’s then revealed to be lounging in his underwear, studying local TV broadcast & repertory theatre listings in the newspaper to plan out his week. His bedroom is wallpapered with movie posters for violent genre films like Don’t Bother to Knock, Frenzy, and White Heat. His first kill, halfway into the film, is pushing his wheelchair-using adoptive aunt down their apartment stairs, inspired by an infamously vicious murder in Kiss of Death. He is later depicted masturbating to a Marilyn Monroe poster while wearing a Nosferatu t-shirt. He changes his name from Eric Binfold to Cody Jarrett in honor of James Cagney’s performance in White Heat, reflecting the way he deals with his mommy issues by violently lashing out against the world. Eric Binfold is living my exact life and watching the exact same movies I am, except that he’s a sociopathic murderer, and it scares me.

Fade to Black is an uncomfortably prescient film about how anyone with a Letterboxd account is an antisocial degenerate. It makes visual allusions to early slashers like Psycho & Halloween to help guide the audience with genre-template guardrails, but the horror classic it most closely resembles is Willard. All Eric Binfold wants to do is be left alone to watch his movies, but he keeps being hassled by family, coworkers, and bullies who interrupt his hobby. Like how Willard eventually exacts revenge on the world by weaponizing his own hobby of training rats, Eric snaps and goes on a killing spree using The Movies as his weapon of choice. He dresses as vampires, cowboys, and classic-noir gangsters, hunting anyone who belittles his favorite pastime of sitting alone in the dark, watching a glowing screen. Dennis Christopher gives an intensely nervous performance in the role, calling into question why Willard got the Crispin Glover remake treatment instead of this one. He’s also, of course, a prototypical incel – not committing his first murder until he’s stood up by an Australian flirt who happens to vaguely resemble Marilyn Monroe. What a dweeb; I hate that he’s so relatable.

The real horror here is the isolation & frustration of dedicating every waking thought to the antisocial pursuit of Watching Movies. It’s an unhealthy lifestyle, but given the choice between “escapist trash” and the cruel mundanity of the real world, it’s a relatively attractive one. The trick when “going to the movies a lot” is “your thing” is to remember how to talk & relate to other people in the hours you inevitably have to spend outside the theater. You can’t just fire off movie trivia at normal, functional human beings and consider the exchange Polite Conversation. Universal’s Famous Monsters aren’t famous to everyone; you have to recognize that you are the town freak, not the local genius, and adjust your behavior accordingly. When Eric’s killing spree spirals fully out of control and he takes the Marilyn impersonator hostage at gunpoint, the taboo he can’t wait to break is touching a movie theater screen with his hands, something that wouldn’t register as a blasphemous transgression to most. He’s an avatar for Cinephile Brain Rot at its most rotten, another reminder to periodically step outside the cinema and touch some grass.

-Brandon Ledet