Strange Invaders (1983)

August 9, 2015 / swampflix / 1 Comment

There’s nothing misleading about the title of Strange Invaders. Much like the recently-mentioned Invaders from Mars, the 80s sci-fi cheapie attempts to profess its love for 50s alien schlock sensibilities while updating them for a modern audience, but unfortunately the results are much less successful here than they are in the Tobe Hooper film. There are plenty of interesting ideas at work in Strange Invaders & enough grotesque practical effects to fill a decent YouTube highlight reel, but getting through the painfully paced 90 min runtime is a lot less fun than it should be. This is highly dispiriting, considering that the filmed was partially penned by a young Bill Condon, who I have a certain affection for, but it still remains true.

Strange Invaders‘ plot involves a bland everyman searching for his missing ex-wife in a ghost town populated by some gross-ass aliens who can transform human beings into floating balls of energy merely by zapping them with their fingertip lightning. Oh yeah, and this town, which was, officially-speaking, “destroyed by a tornado”, is temporally trapped in the 1950s. And the government totally knows about it. And the aliens can (and do) mate with the human populace to create human-alien hybrids. And so on & so forth. You’d think that with as much of a narratively stacked deck that Strange Invaders has to play with it’d be a breezily entertaining picture, but the truth is that its sublime moments of occasional alien invasion weirdness are mere respites from a slog of a movie that more of often than not bores its audience to tears.

The most significantly enjoyable aspect of Strange Invaders is its fleeting moments of body horror. Aliens ripping off their human disguises, spewing green blood from bulletholes, and sucking the life out of human victims to add to their precious orb collection are the sole bright moments in an desperately dull film, probably all better experienced as .gifs than as complete scenes. You get a real sense here that Bill Condon has a love for dated genre films, a love best put to use in his breakout film Gods & Monsters, but that influence just makes Strange Invaders al the more frustrating. You can feel a better movie dying to be cut loose from the bland, pooly-paced orb that contains it, trapped in time decades later, still waiting to be rescued in the editing room.

-Brandon Ledet

Card Subject to Change: Pro Wrestling’s Underground (2010)

August 8, 2015 / swampflix / Leave a comment

Although Card Subject to Change boasts the subtitle “Pro Wrestling’s Underground”, it does very little to define the landscape of underground wrestling as a whole. The small-scale documentary instead mostly follows a single New Jersey indie promotion called NWS (National Wrestling Superstars) with only a few familiar underground faces & former legends popping in from time to time to afford the project some wide-scope legitimacy. Card Subject to Change is pretty decent for a financially-limited wrestling documentary, but its list of notable interviewees & exemplifying tragic stories are likely to only be worthwhile for the already-converted. Anyone looking for an informational gateway into the world of pro wrestling or a history lesson as to where or what the indies have been or meant in the past will likely be disappointed, but ingrained smarks are likely to be generally pleased by what is admittedly a cheap little charmer.

Card Subject to Change may not capture the entire history of local, indie wrestling circuits & how they evolved into (read: were destroyed by) the nationally-televised promotions most people are familiar with (for that I recommend 1999’s The Unreal Story of Professional Wrestling), but it does have a nifty glimpse into what the remains of that world looks like in the 2010s. The drop tile ceilings & wooden panelling of VFW halls and the corrugated roofs & raised basketball hoops of middle school gymnasiums set a definitive tone for the limited scope of the indie pro wrestling circuit. As I’ve already griped in my review of Body Slam, though, the bloated spectacle of mainstream promotions isn’t what makes pro wrestling special. It’s entirely possible to put on a great show without the opulence & fireworks of the WWE.

Speaking of putting on a great show, the promoter of NWS that eats up most of the film’s interview time, Johnny Falco, is a rare breed of show business everyman. Starting as a roller derby announcer, Falco tried to make it as a wrestler himself before finding his calling as a promoter. He makes no bones about his humble place in pro wrestling’s “minor leagues”, openly admitting that NWS mostly serves as a limbo for elderly legends, performers between major gigs, and newcomers who are just learning the trade. He poses the indie circuit as the start & end of a career cycle. It’s where wrestlers begin & often conclude their runs, but rarely where they see their greatest heights.

On the performers’ end of the interviewees, a relative unknown named Trent Acid provides most of the film’s insight as a subject. Although Card Subject to Change tends to glorify the indie circuit as a concept, it doesn’t shy away from its downfalls either. The sickening brutality of certain “hardcore” promotions & some on-screen steroid abuse both stick out as examples of where the film pokes holes in the indies’ splendor, but it’s Trent Acid’s specific story that gives the film a face & a narrative to exemplify the more problematic side of the “minor leagues”. A grungy Raven or Hardy Boyz type, Acid made quite a name for himself on the indie circuit, but allowed substance abuse & domestic troubles keep him from “making it big”. Instead of using independent promotions as a start to the cycle of a typical career, he made it a lifestyle & the results are tragic.

Besides the insightful glimpses into Falco’s & Acid’s lives, Card Subject to Change features an interesting list of interview subjects including Terry Funk, Necro Butcher (who had a terrifying turn in The Wrestler), Paul Bearer (billed here as Percy Pringle III), and Sabu (who now eerily looks like a drug-addicted HHH) among others. The movie mostly sidesteps the horrendous soundtrack problem I generally associate with wrestling documentaries (the end credits song is legitimately pretty great if nothing else), but for the most part it isn’t a particularly special example of its genre, form-wise. Outside of the insights of Falco’s & Acid’s lives, the film mostly just sort of checks in on its subjects, quickly updating the audience on where things were around 2010, larger context be damned. If you aren’t already invested in the world of pro wrestling before you arrive to the film, you aren’t likely to get much out of this limited scope, but if you’re used to marking out on a weekly basis, there’s plenty of interest to chew on, especially in the cases of Falco & Acid.

-Brandon Ledet

Tangerine (2015)

August 7, 2015 / swampflix / 26 Comments

Not many Christmas films dare to take you down the nightmarish, sun-soaked rabbit hole of Los Angeles sex trade, but then again not many films behave like Tangerine at all. Set on a particularly busy, but far from well-behaved Christmas Eve, Tangerine is overflowing with the visual eccentricity & moral ambiguity you’d expect from an indie director making his breakout film on a handful of iPhone 5s (he has a name & it’s Sean Baker). However, what’s so great about the film is not necessarily the behind-the-camera showiness (although that stuff’s fun too). It’s the verisimilitude of its non-actress leads being let loose to run wild across the Los Angeles cityscape, dragging the audience by the hair through a violent, but hilarious whirlwind of drug abuse, sex trade, and tender exchanges of friendship & love in a world that’s been relentlessly unkind. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in the skeezy fun of the film’s cracksmoke-fueled bathroom primping & puke-drenched cab rides that when the film slows down long enough to remind you of the cruel world its protagonists inhabit (a rare recess, that) the emotional toll is all the more affecting.

Our guides to this very specific version of a L.A.’s underbelly are a pair of trans sex workers named Alexandra & Sin-Dee. Alexandra is the audience surrogate. An aspiring singer with no interest in the intense flood of drama that drives the film, Alexandra is cool, collected, and often surprisingly wise, serving almost as a one-woman Greek chorus who’s there to comment on the goings on & offer support to her friend when needed. Sin-Dee, on the other hand, is the living personification of drama. Released from a one-month prison stay on Christmas Eve, Sin-Dee immediately launches into a revenge plot to destroy the woman she’s told her lover/former-pimp Chester has been cheating on her with while she was locked up. Once she finds the cisgender sex worker in question, Sin-Dee physically drags & beats on the unsuspecting adulteress until she can stage her intentionally climactic showdown at the film’s central meeting place, Donut Time. Joining them for the shouting match in the donut shop is Razmik, an Armenian cab driver/gentle john who lives at the fringes of their lives, but opens a gateway for the audience into another side of L.A. that Alexandra & Sin-Dee have no access to.

Even with the Donut Time blowup, the plot is unlikely to be what sticks in the viewer’s memory. Tangerine is a film most likely to be remembered for the story of its inexpensive production. For a feature filmed entirely on iPhones, it has a nice visual poetry to it, drawing an impressive potency out of images like graffiti murals, Christmas lights, automated car washes and, of course, donuts. Much like with this year’s pair of Patrick Brice films, Creep & The Overnight, Tangerine is an inspiring reminder of how much a determined filmmaker can accomplish with even the smallest pool of resources (all three films were produced by the Duplass Brothers, by the way).

The true-to-life (and riotously funny) performances from actresses Mya Taylor (Alexandra) & Kitana Kiki Rodriguez (Sin-Dee) are also likely to eat up much of the conversation surrounding the film, and deservedly so. Taylor & Rodriguez are vibrant talents with a natural, but wildly mischievous authenticity to them that’s rarely seen outside of John Waters’ films. I don’t say that lightly. John Waters is my favorite living artist. If there’s one movie I’d love to talk to him about at this very moment it would be Tangerine & all the credit for that impulse goes to Taylor & Rodriguez. The fact that they’re debuting in such a wickedly transgressive & visually impressive revenge comedy is almost secondary. Almost.

-Brandon Ledet

After Midnight (1989)

August 6, 2015 / swampflix / Leave a comment

Brothers Jim and Ken Wheat are a director/writer duo best known for the Riddick franchise and, my personal favorite, Ewoks: The Battle for Endor. In 1989, the brothers decided to dabble in the wonderful world of horror anthologies, and as a result, After Midnight was born. The film focuses on the element of fear and the fact that we tend to truly fear things that can actually occur (being stalked and murdered) more than things that are unrealistic (having a monster in the closet). Like the majority of horror films from the 80’s, this film is far from being a serious movie, but it’s interesting to say the least.

The film opens with a very bold scene involving a terrifyingly handsome college instructor, Professor Edward Derek, introducing himself to his Psychology of Fear class. Derek demonstrates his philosophy of fear on a frat boy by pointing a gun to his head for a game of Russian roulette, causing to student to piss his pants. He then turns the gun on himself and blasts his brains out, but it turns out that he’s a psycho-jokester and this was a well-planned hoax. The school doesn’t agree with his teaching methods (obviously), so he is forced to have more traditional lessons in the classroom; however, he invites his students to his home if they’re interested in experiencing his unusual approach to teaching. A couple of bozos decide to take him up on his offer, and on a dark, stormy night, they share scary stories with one another.

In the first story, “The Old Dark House,” a married couple takes a late-night drive home after the husband’s birthday dinner, and their car catches a flat near a spooky old house. This is so cliché, but there’s a surprisingly dark ending. “A Night on the Town” is the second tale in the anthology, and it follows the story of a group of teens that sneak out for, well, a night on the town. This was probably the worst out of all the stories because the segment was essentially a pack of street dogs chasing girls through city streets. After about 5 minutes of watching the ridiculous dog chase, I was hoping for the dog to rip them all to pieces so I could move on to the next and final story, which was “All Night Messenger.” This one was creepy, but not as much as the “The Old Dark House.” A call operator is working the late shift all alone and gets numerous disturbing calls from an anonymous male caller. By the time I asked myself, “How the hell is he going to find and kill this poor woman?” he was already inside the building!

After everyone finishes sharing their tales of fear, things get really silly really fast. The pee-pants boy from the first scene returns with an axe and some rope to get revenge on the twisted professor, and then it’s just one very bad plot twist after another. After Midnight is the perfect choice when you just can’t decide on what to watch. It’s terrible, yet very entertaining. All in all, I got a lot of laughs out of this one, and while I probably won’t watch it again anytime soon, I think it will eventually make its way into my DVD collection.

-Britnee Lombas

Clouds of Sils Maria (2015)

August 6, 2015July 17, 2023 / swampflix / 5 Comments

EPSON MFP image

Nothing can sink a film faster or more thoroughly than the viewer’s misplaced expectations. I know it’s not fair to judge a film based on what you expect it to deliver as opposed to what’s actually on the screen, but sometimes I can’t help myself. Clouds of Sils Maria is a good movie. It’s visually stunning, hosts a handful of excellent performances from greatly talented actresses, and doesn’t have any particular scenes that fall flat without impact. Still, I can’t help but feel like the movie let me down in some way that I can’t quite put my finger on. It was good, but I was expecting it to be great, an unfair expectation or not.

As far as the film’s performances go, most of Clouds‘ emotional weight rests on the shoulders of Juliete Binoche & Kristen Stewart, who play an aging actress of stage & screen who’s struggling with an ever-evolving industry & her young, no-bullshit assistant, respectively. Having never seen Stewart in a single Twilight movie (okay maybe I drunkenly heckled the first one), I’ve only ever had positive experiences with her work, so her success in Clouds of Sils Maria comes as no surprise to me. Juliet Binoche’s immense talent is another no-brainer, but it’s her unlikely chemistry with Stewart that makes the screen sing. Whether the two are tensely conducting business across a series of electronic devices, tensely rehearsing lines for Binoche’s latest role, or tensely enjoying an alcoholic beverage, there’s a great push & pull to their relationship that unfortunately proves to be a well-played non-starter. Chloë Grace Moretz also cashes in on some long detected, but rarely seen acting chops here in a role as a Lindsay Lohan/Miley Cyrus archetype, but there’s no mistake that this is Binoche’s & Stewart’s show.

The other significant element in play is the movie’s play within a play structure, which of course comes with an avalanche of meta context. As Stewart’s & Binoche’s characters discuss acting as a craft, it’s difficult to separate their words from the real-life actors speaking them. As they rehearse lines from a script about an older executive seducing a younger version of herself, it’s difficult to separate the-play-within-the-movie’s sexual power dynamics from their characters’ relationship as intimate coworkers. As they discuss the current state of tabloid culture & celebrity gossip it’s difficult not to think of the dialogue as the actresses venting on camera. Clouds of Sils Maria has a lot of fun playing with audience perception, blurring the lines between fiction & reality in an admittedly catty, but intricately layered fashion.

There’s also a lot of simplistic, but effective visual majesty derived from the location of the film’s title. The clouds of Sils Maria’s mountaintops are flowing, river-like washes that add a drowning sadness to the separation, death, and axiety that plague the opening of the film. At one point the clouds & mountain roads overwhelm Stewart’s character in a psychedelic cacophony that suggests a drastic change coming in the film’s structure (à la Bergman’s Persona) is imminent, but alas very little changes & the film silently rolls along, just like the clouds that decorate it. There’s so much commendable about Clouds of Sils Maria that it pains me to admit that I wasn’t fully satisfied with the entirety of what was delivered. I left the film with a mind full of pleasant sentiments & images, but still feeling empty-handed, as if I had tried to grasp a passing cloud, only to watch it dissipate between my fingers. It’s a difficult reaction to describe, but I also doubt I’m the only one who felt it.

-Brandon Ledet

Trainwreck (2015)

August 6, 2015 / swampflix / 10 Comments

Trainwreck is a weird movie. Culturally, we are no longer standing on the threshold of a new era in which comedy, especially raunchy comedy, is the domain of men—but we haven’t finished crossing into that new world on the other side, either. It’s likely we’ve all heard the story about how Amy Poehler took a definitive stance against subliminal sexism in the SNL writers’ room stating that she was there to be funny, not cute; we all know how Bridesmaids was a huge hit that surprised our dudebro friends who thought that women couldn’t be funny or gross, and how that opened the door for fare like Trainwreck (I personally prefer the widely-reviled The Sweetest Thing for its uninhibited provocativeness, but that’s neither here nor there). Comedy Central, formerly the home of media catering exclusively to douches and douches in training, now features transgressive shows like Key & Peele, Another Period, and Broad City, helmed by and starring women and people of color in the timeslots that used to feature Adam Corolla and Jimmy Kimmel mocking little people and ogling women on trampolines. Sure, Daniel Tosh still finds his home there, but he’s old news now, and I’d be surprised if Tosh.0 exists beyond 2017. And, of course, that’s where Amy Schumer’s series airs.

Inside Amy Schumer, recently having completed its third season, is easily one of the most insightful and thoughtful shows on air. A sketch comedy show featuring interstitial footage from Schumer’s stand-up routines, the show has skewered toxic patriarchy and the roles women are forced to play in society, from a sketch in which various successful women in STEM fields participate in a panel in which none of them can stop apologizing, portraying the way women are trained to be “sorry” about everything, to the now viral sketch parodying Friday Night Lights to address the issue of sexual violence against young women, at once targeting both rape culture and the deification of high school athletics culture, and the intersectionality between these two social problems. My personal favorite is the sketch in which Amy’s character attempts to play the military first-person-shooter that her boyfriend is obsessed with; she selects to play as a woman, and said video game avatar is immediately the victim of sexual assault. When given the opportunity to report the assault, the game’s narrator attempts to talk her out of doing so, asking “Did you know he has a family?” The pixelated assailant is convicted at court martial, but his commanding officer disregards the ruling while Amy’s soldier character is relegated to a lifetime of paperwork in retribution. Amy complains to the boyfriend, who runs off to check the message boards; they say nothing about this situation, so he declares she must have played incorrectly somehow. The sketch takes aim at so many things at once, it’s almost hard to keep track: the pervasiveness of sexual assault against women in the American armed forces, the horrible manner in which these women have their careers destroyed for reporting their assaults, the insular toxic “just us boys” attitude that permeates video game culture (the fact that the assault is a de facto result of playing as a woman, coupled the fact that there is no discussion of this gameplay mechanic online, implies that Amy is the first person to actually choose to play as a woman), and the act of “mansplaining.” Given how much of Schumer’s body of work takes aim at the absurdity and darkness of phallocentric culture and mocking that culture’s paradigms, it’s a surprise that Trainwreck follows such a standard romcom formula, albeit one populated by more colorful characters than is the norm.

The film opens with a flashback to the young Amy and her sister, Kim, being given a lecture by their father (Colin Quinn) about how monogamy is an unrealistic expectation, complete with an analogy about only being allowed to play with one doll for the rest of one’s life, especially when you occasionally want to play with a stewardess doll or the best friend of your main doll. As an adult, Amy embraces this philosophy, engaging in a series of one-night sexual encounters with various men with the caveat that she never sleeps over and never becomes emotionally attached. She’s also sleeping consistently with Steve (John Cena), who is completely oblivious to the closet that he’s living in, although this “relationship,” such as it is, comes to an end fairly early in the film’s running time when he discovers that Amy is not sleeping with him exclusively. Amy works for men’s magazine S’Nuff, where her boss, Diana (a perfect-as-always Tilda Swinton), assigns her to work on a story about sports doctor Aaron Conners (Bill Hader), and implies that Amy is up for an editor position.

The film’s most emotionally and comedically satisfying scenes, however, center around Amy’s relationship with her family. Amy’s father has recently been admitted to assisted living due to deteriorating health. He’s a Mets-obsessed alcoholic with a heart of copper, and Amy has an amicable spiritual kinship with him, despite the fact that her sister resents him for his outdated bigotry and the way that his infidelity broke up their family when she and Amy were kids. Kim (Brie Larson, always a delightful screen presence) is now married to the incredibly dorky Tom (Mike Birbiglia) and has a young stepson (Evan Brinkman) whose fascination with esoteric miscellany Amy finds annoying. Both male characters are odd in a way that the audience can’t help but find endearing and charming despite the fact that Amy finds them, and the culturally normative lifestyle they represent in spite of their individual eccentricities, off-putting. Kim is genuinely happy with her family unit, soon to include a new baby; she also tries to convince Amy that she, too, will one day find fulfillment in embracing the narrative of domesticity. Amy’s having none of that… at first.

The plot outline of the romcom is nothing new, and there haven’t been many tweaks to the idea since the genre crystallized into a single formula as part of the Meg Ryan oeuvre. Woman is in an unfulfilling or boring relationship; this relationship ends, and Woman dedicates herself to the abstract art of self-understanding or focusing on her career; despite her protestations, Woman’s Friend or Friends manage to put her in a situation where she meets Love Interest; Woman falls for Love Interest, but forced drama and farcical misunderstandings push the two apart; finally, one party makes a grand sweeping gesture to demonstrate their love for the other party, they kiss, fin.

Since watching Trainwreck, a movie that I unabashedly enjoyed and found riotously funny, I’ve spent a great deal of time meditating on the ways that Schumer’s script managed to find something novel and original in that formula and exploring those nooks and crannies to mine for comedy gold—at least in the first hour. Like Greg Kinnear in You’ve Got Mail (and Bill Pullman in Sleepless in Seattle, Liev Schrieber in Kate & Leopold, etc.), Cena’s Steve is a disposable love interest. Unlike his genre forbears, however, he does fulfill Amy in the only way she cares about, and he extricates himself from her life not in order for a new love to bloom, but because he can’t feel secure in their relationship (and because he’s totally, totally gay). He also elaborates on Amy’s apparent flaws, and that’s where my confusion about the film’s thesis lies; Amy likes to drink and smoke pot and have noncommittal sex, and anyone familiar with Schumer’s comedy knows that she views these activities as lacking moral or ethical components. Who cares if someone’s taking puffs off of a one-hitter during a pretentious indie movie called The Dogwalker, as long as it’s not hurting anyone? Right? But her inability to communicate with Steve because she is stoned does hurt him. And, at the end of the movie, she gives her liquor and drug paraphernalia away in order to take the next step in her life and commit to her love for Aaron, implying that being a pothead really was a character flaw, and not just a characteristic.

I’m not really sure what to make of this. For the last hour of the film, I kept expecting some twist to occur that would further subvert the tropes of the genre the way that the first hour had–maybe Aaron and Amy don’t end up together, or some other variation from the romcom norm. Instead, after Amy meets Aaron and falls into a relationship with him in spite of her misgivings about a heteronormative monogamous lifestyle, the formula plays out fairly standardly. There is something new about the way that the friction between the breeding couple comes not from lies (Amy makes no apologies for or attempts to hide her party-hard lifestyle) or misunderstandings, but from slowly building unspoken resentment of Amy’s choices on Aaron’s part and Amy’s struggles with grief over her father’s death, but this alone isn’t enough to mitigate the predictability of that final scene where Woman and Love Interest declare their love for each other. There’s just something about it that doesn’t feel like it was created by the same Amy Schumer who spent an entire episode of her show appropriating the structure of 12 Angry Men to satirize the way American men are socialized to treat women as sex objects, regardless of the lack of an inherent connection between talent and conformity to a particular beauty ideal.

Don’t get me wrong: this is a funny movie, probably the funniest I’ve seen in theaters in years. The comedy is sometimes broad, sometimes particular, always insightful, and biting; the relationships between Amy and her father and Amy and Kim are emotionally resonant in ways that are superior to most dramas. I just can’t help feeling a little let down because the movie wasn’t as iconoclastic or transgressive as I wanted it to be. It’s not an “anti-romcom,” it’s a romcom that’s smarter, funnier, and more inventive than its predecessors–but it’s a romcom nonetheless. That’s not a negation of the film’s inventiveness, but it is an accurate assessment. Regardless, it’s a delightful movie, and not to be missed.

–Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Girlhood (2015)

August 5, 2015August 5, 2015 / swampflix / 21 Comments

Despite what you might expect from a film about roving packs of French girl gangs, Girlhood is far from an on-the-nose melodrama with explicit messages about the powder keg of poverty & puberty. Instead, it’s a brutally melancholy slow burner about an especially shitty youth with dwindling options for escape. It’s far more open-ended & hazy than I was anticipating, opting more for a gradual unravelling than a grand statement. It’s that aversion to closure & moralizing that makes the film special when it easily could’ve gone through the motions of rote Lifetime Movie schmaltz.

That’s not to say that Girlhood is all grays, haze, and sadness. It certainly does have it’s . . . bright, shining moments. Specifically, the scene where the central gang is dancing to Rihanna’s “Diamonds” alone in a fancy hotel room while sporting shoplifted dresses is a transcendent dream of a respite that briefly shakes the dull pastel voids of the movie’s housing projects in favor of an intense music video chic. In that moment it’s not at all difficult to see why the protagonist Marieme would choose gang life over her only other viable options: vocational school or a life of housekeeping. Besides the “Diamonds” scene & several other moments of otherworldly dance parties, Girlhood also shines in its opening sequence, in which two female football teams clash to the sounds of minimal synth in an oddly beautiful, but violent display that sets the tone for what’s to come. As the football match lets out, the girls roam in a cloud of raucous chatter.

These dreamlike escapes are always fleeting, though. The group gradually splinters & the scene shifts from an unbridled, decidedly feminine joy to a quietly fearful trip through a very literal, very dangerous-feeling male gaze. A lot of what lurks in Girlhood‘s pensive silence is an unspoken oppression & the threat of violence from the few men in Marieme’s life, particularly her older brother. Torn between fending for herself & protecting her younger siblings, Marieme finds herself in the vulnerable position of not qualifying for high school and decides, rather quickly, to trade in her makeshift football gang for a much more purposeful gang of loveable reprobates. It’s through the empowerment of her new crew that she builds the confidence to occupy traditionally male spaces: night time public streets, fistfights, sexual exploration, etc. The meek quiet of that opening football sequence is quickly supplanted by the rush of Marieme getting whatever she wants through brute force & the solidarity of her newfound sisterhood. The problem is that Marieme is too smart to play the girl gang game forever. As much fun as she has with the scene’s selfies & shoplifting, pocket knives & smart phones, she begins to plan for the future, which is about as dangerously unsure & open-ended in the film as it is in real life.

Much of the Girlhood‘s back half deliberately raises more questions than it dares to answer as its protagonist tries to figure out exactly who she is & what she wants. Due to an unfortunate (but perhaps intentional, marketing-wise) similarities in titles, Girlhood has of course suffered a lot of comparisons to Richard Linklater’s technically impressive, but (in this reviewer’s eyes) messy at best in practice Boyhood. Given Boyhood‘s never-ending need to wrap everything up tightly in a neat little package, the two films couldn’t be further apart in their approaches to capturing the essence of youth on film. Girlhood has no interest in telling a complete story, but rather indulges in soaking in the cold, grey pastels of a life drifting through housing projects and the inevitable doom of the pull between personal & familial obligations that poverty & shrinking options for escape can often inflict upon far too many young people. Girlhood’s disinterest in closure is a commendable impulse with thoroughly satisfying results, even if those results don’t include straight answers or an A to B narrative. It’s less of a complete story than it is a solemn mood piece, a melancholy tone poem with occasional dance breaks and much-needed gasps for air.

-Brandon Ledet

Advantageous (2015)

August 4, 2015 / swampflix / 1 Comment

Some dystopian futures are wildly chaotic & packed to the gills with dirt & grime, like this year’s Fury Road, for instance. Others, like the indie sleeper Advantageous, imagine a cleaner, more tightly controlled future, where any semblance of chaos & grime are swept to the edges. There’s a lot of unrest in the world Advantageous presents as a possible tomorrow (rampant homelessness, reports of large-scale child prostitution, frequent terrorist attacks), but that aspect is relegated to the margins, mostly hidden from sight, making the calm, too-clean façade of the big city all the more nerve-racking in its artificiality. The movie’s cheaply-filmed digital photography is actually somewhat . . . advantageous in that aspect, fitting in perfectly with its sterilized, surveillance-laden atmosphere. Advantageous is a shining example of cheap sci-fi done right. It has a lot of big ideas, but limits its scope to intimate implications, focusing on the emotional turmoil of a single family instead of relying heavily on lowgrade CGI spectacle (which is only used sparingly here, when necessary in detailing a terrorist attack or an unusually voluptuous skyscraper).

The story Advantageous tells is all too appropriate for our current Recession-troubled economic climate. As the protagonist struggles with the degrading loss of a job, an overcrowded job market, a lack of professional opportunity (for aging women in particular), and the struggle to fund a worthy education for her bright, young daughter who will inevitably suffer similar circumstances, she encounters a financial back-against-the-wall position that a lot of people can undoubtedly empathize with these days. She just happens to be suffering these indignities in the future with strange & uncomfortable ways out that leave the viewer dying to know What’s Going to Happen? In order to save her family from financial ruin she’s pressured into a futuristic cosmetic operation that challenges her sense of self, the nature of her loyalty to her daughter, and the very nature of the human soul as a physically tangible & transferable property.

Advantageous is, admittedly, much more satisfying in its world-building than in the would-be rug-pull of its conclusion. Even the most casual observers of dystopian sci-fi will expect the film’s threatened cosmetic operation to be both inevitable & inevitably doomed to failure, but that’s not what makes the movie special. It’s the detail & circumstances of the world surrounding the operation that distinguish it. Precocious children, classical music, impossible skyscrapers, casually-observed terrorism, the homeless, The Elite, a catty little minx of a surveillance state operator named Drake: these are the details likely to stick with you, not the unavoidable fallout of the climactic act. Much more restrained than the similarly-minded, but infinitely goofier The Congress (which I loved much more deeply, because I have a general inclination towards lack of restraint), Advantageous is a well-executed, small-scale sci-fi slow burner that may not have a lot tricks up its sleeve narratively speaking, but does have a lot of insight into how cold the world can be for a single mother struggling to get by in the face of professional, financial, and political turmoil. Even if it doesn’t surprise you in its third act, you can at least bet that its reflection & exaggeration of our current cultural climate will touch you with an uncomfortable pang of recognition, which is always a great sign in the context of the dystopian genre.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Babe 2 – Pig in the City (1998)

August 3, 2015 / swampflix / 18 Comments

Every month one of us makes the others watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Brandon made Britnee watch Babe 2: Pig in the City (1998).

Brandon: Nearly four decades into his beyond bizarre career as a director, George Miller recently wowed audiences by breathing new, absurdly energetic life into the long dead Mad Max franchise with the film Fury Road. When I reviewed Fury Road in June I echoed the praise of its “surprisingly satisfying feminist bent for something so thoroughly violent” and called it “one of the best action films released in years” & “an incredible technical feat stuffed to the gills with impressive practical stunts & confident art design”. Although the idea of a rebooted 80s franchise is generally a dreadful proposition these days, Miller was smart enough to throw out nearly everything he had already accomplished with Mad Max & start over with renewed enthusiasm, creating one of the defining films of his career. This shouldn’t be surprising, though, since Miller had already pulled off this very same trick twice before: once with The Road Warrior and, much more surprisingly, once with Babe 2: Pig in the City.

The first Babe film is a perfect, small-scale children’s media charmer in which a clever pig is raised by farm dogs to herd sheep, much to his delightful owner’s surprise. In the words of the farmer (played deftly by James Cromwell), “That’ll do.” Miller was a producer & screenwriter for the first film, leaving the director duties to a largely unknown Christopher Noonan. With the sequel Pig in the City, Miller takes over the director’s chair & furiously tosses the “That’ll do” attitude to the wayside. Pig in the City is a bizarre fever dream of a film, a terrifying spectacle populated by nightmarish clowns, talking animals, cops, pig people, and all sorts of various creeps & reprobates. Leaving the quiet farm of the first film far behind, Babe ventures into the cold bureaucracy & literal dog-eat-dog viciousness of the big city and through the sheer virtue of his pure little pig heart becomes the de facto leader of a small band of abandoned animals starving for affection . . . and a decent meal. The world Babe navigates here is cruel & unusual. An over-the-top set design & constant barrage of heartless obstacles never stops twisting the knife on just how out of his element & against the odds our little swine hero is in The Big City (a strange amalgamation of every big city imaginable contained in a single, impossible metropolis).

Britnee, I’m 28 years old and I’m petrified of this movie; I can’t possibly imagine what it’d be like if I had seen it 20 years ago, when I was in the range of what I assume the target audience would’ve been. Do any moments stand out to you as particularly nightmarish or does the entirety of Pig in the City just sort of all blur together as one extended scare?

Britnee: I watched the first Babe film in theaters back in 1995, so all I could remember was that it starred a talking pig that humans couldn’t understand. As a die-hard Charlotte’s Web fan, I didn’t get into the Babe craze all that much. This allowed me to watch Babe 2: Pig in the City with a fresh mind, and it was, in fact, a horrifying experience (in a good way). Pig in the City was such a strange film that I didn’t expect to be all that outlandish. Yes, it’s based on talking animals, but that’s not something unusual for children and family films. It’s everything else about the film that makes it a huge magical nightmare. The city streets’ whimsical buildings (sort of like Paris meets the Shire), the vulgar attitudes of the city’s animals, and the warped, bizarre human characters are examples of why this nightmare is so “magical.”

There were a couple of standout parts that were particularly terrifying for me, such as the farmer’s brutal near death experience in the well, the dirty old clown with his thieving gang of talking monkeys, and the junkyard dog hanging and drowning from a cobblestone bridge. The film was really like a mild horror film for adults that kids could enjoy as well.

Brandon, it seemed as though most of the humans in this film were more terrifying than the talking animals. What are your thoughts on that? What human character was the scariest?

Brandon: First of all, there’s a definite dichotomy the film’s trying to set up between the coldhearted big city people and the small town weirdos who “get it”. When the farmer’s wife first arrives in The City with Babe in tow, she’s met with the cold sting of bureaucracy. Mistaken for a drug dealer at the airport, she’s physically assaulted, misses her connecting flight, and is left stranded with nowhere to stay for days. To contrast the humorless big city folk that derail Mrs. Hoggett’s life, the movie also presents a network of colorful weirdos with small town backgrounds (and, often enough, pig-like snouts) who help her out by providing a safe haven for her & her animal while she’s stranded in The City . . . that is, until she’s arrested following a Rube Goldberg-esque mishap and finds herself once again trapped in the unforgiving entanglement of bureaucracy.

The thing is that both the big city folk & the network of weirdos are all disturbing in their own ways. There’s a *shudder* clown in the film that performs for the amusement of the deathly ill & an innkeeper that provides a safe haven for animals & pet owners in an unforgiving environment that are both technically sympathetic characters plot-wise, but look so strange & daunting that they’re a terror to behold. The entirety of Pig in the City has a child’s funhouse mirror POV that makes virtually all adults feel terrifying, whether they’re helpful or not. This child’s POV is even reflected in the wardrobe. The big city meanies are all dressed in drab greys, while the weirdos have a much more colorful palette, but both groups are horrifying in their own way. If I had to single out a most terrifying human character, I’d probably settle for a clown named Fugly, a part silently played by Mickey Rooney, as a default. The idea of Mickey Rooney in clown makeup is terrifying enough on its own, but as presented here, decorated with fire & confetti, it’s even worse than you’d expect. Fuck that clown.

Britnee, in a lot of ways the human characters in the film feel a lot less . . . human than the animals. This is especially apparent in the portrayal of a family of chimpanzees & their dignified orangutan leader Thelonius. Do you think Thelonius was a “good guy” or a “bad guy” within the film, or was his role more complicated than that? How does the question of his character’s goodness or badness compare/contrast with the oversimplified morality of other members of the cast, both human & animal?

Britnee: Thelonius was so strange. At times, I had difficulty deciding if he was good or evil, and to be honest, most of my memory about Thelonius in the beginning of the film is a bit fuzzy. It wasn’t until the latter half of the film that I really started to pay attention to him. I don’t think he was ever a “bad guy,” but more of a self-absorbed grump. I think that he was a “good guy” all along, he was just stuck in a crappy situation and his inner goodness didn’t show until the latter half of the film. One scene that is so vivid in my mind is when the animals are attempting to sneak out of the pound/laboratory. The animals finally get the chance to escape to safety, but Thelonius makes them wait for him to get dressed. As he slowly puts on his fancy attire, he ruins their getaway plan. I wasn’t sure if this was supposed to be a funny scene or if this was to show how egotistical Thelonius was. He doesn’t really shine through as a “good guy” until he saves the life of a baby chimp at the chaotic gala.

It was much easier to determine the good and evil elements of the human characters, but as for the animals, it wasn’t as much of a walk in the park. The human characters had no depth, so it was easy to determine who was “bad” and who was “good.” The animal characters were much more confusing, like Thelonius. The wheelchair pup and a couple of other animals at the hotel were pretty rude, and the street animals were pretty heartless (especially that horrible pink poodle); however, they are all viewed as “good” when compared to the humans.

Brandon, I’m having a hard time with remembering details about all of the animals because the amount of important animal characters was a bit overwhelming. Do you feel that the film focused on too many animal characters? Would the film be better with a tighter focus on only a couple of animals?

Brandon: I actually think it’s the depth of the animal cast that makes this film so rewatchable. I’ll admit that on the first run through, I was a little overwhelmed by the endless parade of personalities. There’s the wheelchair bound Jack Russell, the queer dog couple in the matching sweaters, the operatic room of cats, the reformed bully bull terrier, the tragic Southern belle poodle, the Steven Wright-voiced chimp that strangely reminded me of Michael Shannon for no apparent reason, and the list goes on. The thing is, though, that as exhausting as this list can be in the abstract, the movie deftly makes time for each character to have their “moment”. The Jack Russell terrier has his brief trip to the afterlife. The bull terrier has a turnaround in personality after Babe saves his hide. The queer couple literally comes out of the closet during a police raid, etc. I feel like Thelonius was the most well-developed animal personality in the film in that he had so many moments like this that complicated his character, but the rest of the animal cast helped color the world around him that the movie would be all-too-thin without.

The difference between our views on this aspect might be that I found the animal characters much more empathetic than you seemed to. I think it’s interesting, for instance, that you call the pink poodle character heartless, when I think of her as a tragic Blanche DuBois type whose heart is way too big, if anything. Also, the “gag” where Thelonius’ need to dress before escaping the lab didn’t play for me like a jab at his ego that had made him out to be a cold-hearted figure earlier in the film. It was more or a quietly sad deflation of his dignity to me & helped flesh out just how much pained effort he was putting into keep his chimp & clown family together. I think that’s a lot of what Miller was aiming to say with the film. Each animal may seem cruel or selfish on the surface, but they’re all disenfranchised & down on their luck, essentially fighting over scraps (like a stolen jar of candy, for instance) for survival. It isn’t until Babe teaches them that if they’re kind to one another & learn to share their scraps evenly as a community they all have a better chance of survival that the animals let their defensive guards down & start being kind to one another.

Britnee, how effective do you think Miller’s message about the importance of community over the strength of the individual was in Pig in the City? Do you think the alternating scary & goofy strangeness of the film completely overshadowed the film’s message of the importance of solidarity?

Britnee: Honestly, I think the film’s bizarre nature definitely overshadowed any sort of message that Miller was attempting to put out. Even during scenes where the animals began to be more compassionate, I couldn’t help but focus on all of the twisted happenings. You’ve seen this film multiple times, and I think this could be a reason as to why our opinions differ. Because the film’s strangeness was so overwhelming, I had a difficult time paying attention to anything else. Watching Pig in the City for a second time would probably change a lot of my current thoughts about the film.

You do make an interesting point about how the animal characters were struggling to survive, and Babe was a beacon of light in their hard knock lives. Actually, I don’t think I ever noticed how great Babe was until now. He was just a little pig leaving his simple farm life for the very first time, and even though he was put into tons of terrifying and unfortunate situations, he remained brave. His courage and compassion had an impact on just about every character, and this is more than apparent in the film’s final scenes. Of all the great pigs in film, I think Babe is up there with the best of them.

Lagniappe

Brandon: Although George Miller is generally associated with the wanton mayhem of the Mad Max franchise, Pig in the City isn’t nearly as out of touch with the rest of his catalog as you’d expect. There are traces of many of his films lingering in this one, from the bungee chord battle of Beyond Thunderdome to the surreal balloon drop of The Witches of Eastwick to the childish goofery & political ponderings of the Happy Feet films. I’ve slowly come to realize that Pig in the City is far from an outlier in Miller’s career, but more of a gateway film that serves as an unlikely combination of all of his achievements in one aggressively strange package.

Britnee: After reflecting on this Swampchat, I believe there is a lot of heart in this film that I ignorantly overlooked, which is why I really need and want to watch Babe 2: Pig in the City again. It seems that this movie has a reputation for being a little too dark to be considered a children’s film, but I think that it’s a perfect film for children. Real life is nothing like a fairytale, and sometimes you have to make the most of your situation and create your own happy ending. That’s a message that people of all ages can benefit from.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
September: Britnee presents The Boyfriend School (1990)
October: Erin presents Innocent Blood (1992)

-The Swampflix Crew

Invaders from Mars (1986)

August 2, 2015 / swampflix / 8 Comments

When I first watched Invaders from Mars, I was expecting (based on title alone) the kind of black & white 50s sci-fi cheapie you’d typically find playing on late night television. It turns out that the DVD copy I had purchased on a whim was actually a remake of such a movie. The original Invaders from Mars film was a rushed 1953 production meant to beat War of the Worlds to the punch of showing extraterrestrial invaders on screen in color for the first time ever. What I had in my hands had even stranger origins, however. Not only was the 1986 Invaders from Mars produced by Golan-Globus, one of the era’s finest peddlers of over-the-top schlock (with titles like Invasion USA & Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo lurking in their extensive catalog), but it was also directed by Tom Hooper, who is most widely known for bringing the world The Texas Chainsaw Massacre & Poltergeist. The result of that powerful genre movie combo & the production’s 50s schlock origins is a fun little cartoon of a sci-fi horror teeming with wholesome camp & decidedly unwholesome practical effects.

Invaders from Mars comes from a nice little sweet spot in 80s cinema where movies ostensibly aimed at little kids were more than eager to scare its pintsized audience shitless. Although the film boasts the general vibe of a Goosebumps paperback about parents & teachers turned into aliens, it’s also crawling with hideous, handmade creature effects worthy of any adult’s sweatiest nightmare. Released just a year after Joe Dante’s wonderful film Explorers, Invaders mimics that film’s child-meets-alien dynamic, but adds a much more twisted, grotesque layer to the exercise. It’s not only smart enough to acknowledge its roots in 50s schlock, but also to update that aesthetic to a more modern, more terrifying approach to children’s horror media that unfortunately has faded out of fashion in the decades since.

When I was a kid my favorite films used to scare the crap out of me (Monster Squad, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, etc) and I have no doubt that if I had seen the 1980s Invaders from Mars at the time it’d have been among my most cherished VHS selections. As is, I appreciate it a great deal for its combination of childlike wonder & hideous alien beasts. This isn’t an Invasion of the Body Snatchers kind of film that’s going to earn any accolades as the heights of the alien invasion genre, but it is a surprisingly fun & wickedly dark little love letter to camp cinema from a crew of 70s & 80s weirdos who themselves know a thing or two about memorable camp cinema.

-Brandon Ledet