The Cruise (1998)

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Collecting over three years of footage, 1998 saw the release of Bennett Miller (Moneyball, Foxcatcher, Capote)’s hilarious documentary The Cruise, centering around oddball New Yorker Timothy “Speed” Levitch. Throughout the 90s, Levitch was a guide for various New York sightseeing tours; during the time in which the doc was filmed, he was working for Gray Line, with whom he has a contentious relationship, while he and a former co-worker fondly recall having worked for Apple Tours in the past. The film takes its title from Levitch’s life philosophy about “cruising” (no relation), an idiosyncratic ideology about how life “should” flow. This approach to life finds Levitch working twenty hours a week giving tours (no more, no less) and spending the rest of his time enjoying “the cruise.” In many ways, his belief system is more about what systems and concepts he defines as being “anti-cruise,” which range from the obvious examples like the institution of policing, to more personal examples like people who have personally wronged him and Gray Line for instituting the use of work uniform shirts, to more esoteric instances like the NYC grid pattern.

Levitch’s New York is a more complex presentation than we normally get, as most of the people who are interested in showing off “their” New York usually follow a virtually identical script where they fellate the city to the point of apotheosis. I don’t have any particular dislike for the city—I quite enjoy myself there—but in all cities there is a vocal chorus about how their city is the best city in the world, baby! (For those of you based in Swampflix’s home of New Orleans, you’ll recognize this hometown tendency from the number of shirts that say “Only New Orleans is real, everything else is smoke and mirrors,” etc.) Like most of the things that people consider to be unique about their city, this is not unique to New York, but because of the sheer amount of our shared media that is produced there, it is the one whose citizen propaganda is often spread farthest and widest. As such, I don’t blame anyone who’s sick of it, but this is a piece of filmic art that shows something a little different, a more thoughtful, critical, and nuanced portrait of a city that could only come from one particular point of view. 

Of course, that’s not to say that the New York of Levitch and Miller still exists. As a document of the end of the twentieth century, the film is in fascinating conversation with Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, a collection of essays about the New York that was and its counterpoint in the New York that is, mostly drawing attention to the way that the Giuliani administration transformed the city into a real estate investment and playground for the rich and helped to institutionalize and cement the strata of class difference. Levitch is a man who is homeless but never unhoused, gliding (or rather, cruising) through life as a series of couch surfing and house sitting adventures, sustaining his lifestyle through the delivery of screeds for and against the city to a captive audience. Levitch’s NYC is ephemeral and fleeting, and nowhere is this more present than in a notable sequence in which Levitch tells someone that one of his favorite activities is to go to the plaza between the World Trade Center towers and spin around until he makes himself dizzy, then lie down on the ground and look up at them so that he feels like they’re falling down on top of him. 

We get a great taste for what a tour from Levitch would be like, as he pontificates how many blocks apart certain writers and other artists lived from where they are passing, about the unity of those actors and playwrights in a singular city and in a singular past is less interesting than the difference and distance between those thinkers in space and time. Art and artistry are delineated through proximity but not bound together by it, except in the ways that Levitch weaves together disparate facts into a cohesive whole. He’s obviously well-versed in the city’s rich history, with him occasionally delivering off-the-cuff lessons in architecture to the documentarian following him on the street during his “off hours.” He calls attention to the undulation of the curves of ceramic building shells—better than stone because of its lighter weight and easier affixation to the steel that undergirds the construction—and then, in a kind of religious spasm, compares the curvature of the building to the shape of a woman and makes noises of rapture. He describes the “utter catharsis” of architecture as phallic enterprise in the body of the Empire State Building from within “its silhouette.” He’s exactly the kind of person that it’s wonderful to be able to observe from a distance, to get to know through the remove of the camera lens, because while he’s very funny and is a fantastic entertainer, he is exactly the kind of person one would imagine has an energy that it would be difficult to be in the presence of for longer than the length of a sightseeing tour.

Levitch is a person who’s too much of a character to be fictional, a man who, if he were generated from the mind of an author, would be too grating and strange for us to identify with, but because he is a real person in our real world, we must accept his existence as fact. A font of unconventional wisdom with a vast knowledge of history and literature, there are moments when I found myself identifying with him very much. There’s a particularly fun bit near the end in which Levitch goes on a tirade about all of the people who have wronged him in his life, from unrequited childhood crushes to teachers to members of his family, and it’s wonderful stuff. I’m sorry that I never got the chance to get a tour from Levitch, even if I can’t help but wonder if I’d ever fully recover from the experience. As the film is currently in re-release, the local arthouse where I attended a screening noted that they had reached out to the distributor to see if it would be possible to have Levitch do a Q&A or even just videoconference in for an introduction. Apparently, the distributor said that this was far from the first request of this kind that they had fielded, but that “[they]’re having trouble finding him.” What a legacy; in fact, I fear that having to comment on this might be too anti-cruise for him to want to participate, so there’s a part of me that hopes they never find him, and he’s still out there, unfettered.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #231: 187 (1997) & Inner-City Schools

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Welcome to Episode #231 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss a grab bag of 90s movies about well-meaning teachers confronted with the violent chaos of inner-city schools, starting with the 1997 Sam Jackson vehicle 187.

00:00 Welcome

01:55 Presence (2025)
02:56 The Brutalist (2024)
06:14 The Cranes are Flying (1957)
08:17 The Lives of Others (2006)
14:39 It’s Complicated (2009)
18:13 Two Days in Paris (2007)
20:48 Willard (1971)
23:12 The Colors Within (2025)

28:17 187 (1997)
50:06 Dangerous Minds (1995)
1:03:17 Sister Act 2 – Back in the Habit (1993)
1:24:16 High School High (1996)

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

The Colors Within (2025)

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The coming-of-age anime drama The Colors Within is about a teenager with extreme synesthesia who forms a synthpop band to express her unusual relationship with color through song. It’s a much gentler picture than that descriptor implies. Naoko Yamada’s color-pencil sketchbook vision is exceptionally quiet for a story about teenage rock ‘n rollers and exceptionally pale for an animated movie about the divine beauty of color. It celebrates the soft smears of color you see when you view the world without eyeglasses. It dwells in the dead air of band practice as the collective idea of a song is just starting to materialize, before it has any foundational structure to cling to. The three members of the band are each fragile recluses who spook easy, to the point where you’re skeptical that they’ll ever have the courage to perform for an audience. When all that restraint melts away during the climactic concert, however, the relief of its release feels good enough to make you cry.

Our protagonist is an adorable, shy teenager who can only relate to the people around her by reading the colors of their auras. Her sweetness and mental abstraction are a kind of social liability, so her only real friend at her Catholic boarding school is a well-meaning nun who encourages her to find “secular ways to honor God” outside the official curriculum. The opportunity to do so presents itself when an older, more rebellious classmate drops out to work at a local bookstore, and a panicked schoolgirl crush inspires her to demand they start a band together to keep in touch. A third lonely, shy musician who hangs around the bookstore brings the project together, but it’s a triumph that mostly manifests as long stretches of downtime between sparse songwriting sessions.

While our protagonist’s synesthesia is presented as a defining character trait, it really doesn’t affect her journey to self and communal discovery except in providing the language to express something she can’t otherwise vocalize. This is mostly a story about youthful, innocent yearning, both in romance and in art. Every member of the band has a secret, both in their unexpressed attraction to each other and in the ways their individual duties to education, work, and religion conflict with their art project. A lot of their yearning is just the desire to spend more time creating that art, finding it difficult to engineer opportunities to all meet in one place, working on one idea. I remember finding time to practice to be an eternal struggle back when I used to write songs for punk bands in high school & college, but I also remember the times when everything aligned just right for us to play songs together satisfying my soul like few other joys of my youth. It’s easy to be nostalgic while returning to that distinctly teenage headspace, so the story can feel like it’s set decades in the past despite all the smartphones and laptops.

The music our trio of sweethearts eventually plays together is catchy, soulful, and well worth the effort of waiting through the stunted progress of its writing. It’s also the music of dissociation, finding immense beauty, joy, and creative expression through the distinctly intangible sounds of synths, theremin, and guitar feedback. Synthpop is a perfect aesthetic choice for a character who sees the world through hazy, swirling aesthetics. It gives her a way to reinterpret her visions of color into the sounds of color, in the process expressing her love for her bandmates in a more direct way than she could previously express anything about anyone. None of the routine prayer nor rigid interpretation of God’s will at her Catholic boarding school ever approaches anything so purely divine. Thankfully, there was one cool nun around to help her see the positive value in those secular pleasures without feeling any unnecessary, residual shame for the indulgence. This is how I remember writing songs with my friends feeling at that age, but that is not at all how I remember my own Catholic schooling.

-Brandon Ledet

Presence (2025)

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There’s a playfulness in the basic tech and form of every Steven Soderbergh picture that invites us to wonder what new toy the director is going to be most excited to play with. However, there isn’t much time to wonder in his new haunted house picture, where his playful tech-tinkering is at its most immediately conspicuous. Shot in a single house over the course of eleven days, Presence is a ghost story told from the 1st-person point of view of the ghost. It’s a clever premise that frees Soderbergh to be as playful with the camera as ever, handling the equipment himself as he follows around his small haunted-family cast and constantly directs the audience’s attention to the act of observation through his wandering lens. The resulting image is a kind of supernatural found footage horror that leans into the improbability of the genre by strapping its GoPro to a ghost, so we don’t question why the camera continues rolling once the violence starts; we only question why that camera operator is choosing to observe what we see (and to ignore what we don’t). The last-minute answer to that question gave me a shock of goosebumps and made me want to immediately rewatch in the way that the best ghost stories do. It’s in the asking of the question where Soderbergh gets to have his fun, though, and it’s delightful to see a filmmaker this many decades into their career still excited by the opportunity to play with the basic tools of their craft.

Lucy Liu stars as the high-strung, wine-guzzling matriarch of a nuclear suburban family. She’s poured all of her hopes and self-worth into the athletic achievements of her jock teen son Tyler (Eddy Maday), whose burgeoning persona as an egotistical bully is directly correlated with the effort she puts into supporting his swim-team dreams. Meanwhile, her daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) is treated as the mother’s genetic leftovers, molding in the back of the fridge while the father (Chris Sullivan) solemnly shakes his head in exasperation. It’s not an especially complicated family dynamic, but it’s one that becomes increasingly eerie & foreboding as it’s filtered through the security-camera eyes of a ghost. At the start of the film, the ghost is trapped in an empty, echoey suburban house, and what fills that void once its tenants arrive (with the help of a comically unprofessional real estate agent played by Julia Fox) are the typical horrors that haunt the modern American family: loneliness, mental illness, drugs, alcohol, the violent radicalization of young men, etc. As the most isolated member of the family, Chloe is the most vulnerable to those horrors, and so the ghost (and, by extension, the audience) spends the most time watching over her, eventually stepping in to protect her from whatever harm can be prevented by a noncorporeal force . . . since no one alive seems especially motivated to actively help.

Since it’s a formal experiment more concerned with what’s implied by every subtle movement of the camera than it is a mechanism for delivering routine scare gags, most audiences are going to be reluctant to engage with Presence as a horror film, likely likening it to titles like A Ghost Story, Nickel Boys, and Here. Personally, I found its icy, distancing approach to form to be effectively chilling, and the movie I most thought about during its runtime was the creepypasta novelty Skinamarink. Both films repurpose the filmic language of the found footage horror genre to coldly observe the isolation & cruelty of modern domestic life from an impossible supernatural vantage point, dwelling on an eerie mood that most people only feel when we’re alone in an empty home. Presence ultimately forms a more traditional narrative than Skinamarink thanks to the mainstream professionalism of screenwriter David Koepp, choosing to answer the question of its ghost’s mysterious identity in a final explanatory reveal instead of letting it hang in the air. I appreciate Soderbergh’s eagerness to bring distancing, arthouse abstraction into mainstream venues in that way, along with implied political commentary that reaches beyond the boundaries of his increasingly small, generic stories. Like other recent Soderbergh successes Unsane & Kimi, Presence is high-style genre pulp that only becomes complex & nuanced when you poke at the decisions behind its creation – most importantly, in this case, the decisions on where to point the camera and when to look away.

-Brandon Ledet

Tomie (1998)

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A few months ago, we talked about the 2000 live action Junji Ito adaptation of Uzumaki on the podcast. This month, my most frequent arthouse viewing companion wanted to take over calendar duties for our outings, and he expressed immediate interest in Tomie, based on a particular line in the blurb calling it a “peculiar tale of an evil high school femme fatale whose kiss drives men to madness.” The “kiss” element is perhaps overstated there, but this is nonetheless a creepy little feature that I enjoyed quite a lot, and is a much more accessible film than Uzumaki was. 

Tsukiko Izumisawa (Mami Nakamura) is a young photography student living with her boyfriend Yuuichi (Kouta Kusano), a chef at a local restaurant. She’s also undergoing regressive hypnotherapy under the care of Dr. Hosono (Yoriko Douguchi) to uncover what really happened to her during a recent period of total amnesia. She gets an update from her landlord that there’s a new tenant in the apartment beneath hers, a recent high school graduate named Kenichi (Kenji Mizuhashi). Although she does not meet her new neighbor, we get to see that he is raising a decapitated head as a baby, which very quickly transforms into a child, then a teenager under his care. This is Tomie Kawakami (Miho Kanno), who is not so much a young woman as she is some kind of evil entity, as we learn from Detective Harada (Tomorowo Taguchi), who comes to Dr. Hosono with a seemingly impossible story. As it turns out, he’s looking for Tsukiko, as she and another young girl named Tomie were classmates and best friends, before their entire class broke out in a rash of murders and suicides, with Tomie ultimately being decapitated. However, upon further investigation, he has found a series of such events that have been happening for over a century, all centering around a woman with the name Tomie Kawakami, her seduction of a man with a wife or girlfriend, and an outbreak of madness and violence that ends with Tomie’s death. He has come to believe that there is a supernatural element at play, and that learning the truth about what happened during the period that Tsukiko cannot remember holds the key to solving the mystery. 

As we watched Uzumaki so recently, it’s difficult not to view this film in conversation with that one, especially as they were also released in such close proximity to one another. Uzumaki is an artifact of early digital filmmaking, with sickly green color correction, Further, that film’s narrative demand for repeated spiral imagery also required the use of computer-generated imagery which was not up to the task at hand. Although Tomie also centers around people being driven mad and acting out violently, the impetus is merely the presence of a wraithlike woman, which makes for a much easier transition into live action presentation. We don’t see Tomie’s face until long after the film’s midpoint. Instead, we see her from the back, her face completely hidden by her hair, or in silhouette. There are no distractingly bad CGI tornadoes or hair spirals here to detract from the horror that the film is trying to convey, and Tomie remains a frightening presence throughout as a result. She lingers in doorways, she glides down the street in pursuit of a victim, and our lack of an impression of her makes this all the more interesting. She enters (or re-enters, rather) Tsukiko’s life through her extended circle, first by having her caretaker move into the downstairs apartment sight unseen, then by getting a job at the restaurant where Yuuichi works, where her (still invisible to the audience) beauty causes the manager and Yuuichi’s co-workers to start to compete for her affection, with disastrous results. Even Tsukiko’s landlord eventually falls under Tomie’s spell, attacking her when she enters the flat below hers and discovers the dead body of one of her friends. Eventually, the two are reunited, and their true history is revealed. 

Apparently, this film kicked off a franchise that includes eight more movies about Tomie, continuing the story from where it ends here (Tomie: Replay, was even released on a double bill with Uzumaki). This was fairly common practice for J-Horror of the time; just take a look at how many sequels there were to Ju-on and Ringu, both of which were released in the same year as Tomie. There’s not much information about those films online, certainly not enough for me to make a judgment about whether they’re worth checking out. I’m sure that there’s value in continuing to adapt the rest of the manga on which they are based, but this is a perfect example of an understated horror film that, despite being an adaptation of a longer, serialized work, functions as a singular text unto itself. Nakamura’s Tsukiko is a character who should be more widely recognized as an archetypical, textbook-perfect final girl. I appreciated the attention to detail that a woman with amnesia might find herself drawn to photography, perhaps the most documentarian method of artistic expression, as an art form, even if she’s not very good at it. We learn in the backstory that Tsukiko spread pictures of Tomie around school with “monster girl” written on them, and she has recurring dreams about this photograph that portend a dark reunion between the two girls in the near future, as well as a connection that’s more consequential than it initially appears. 

When it comes to effective screen boogeymen, Tomie herself is a standout as well. For much of the film, we see very little of her. In the first scene of the film, she’s just a head in a plastic bag, a singular eye peering out of it (which became the film’s iconic poster image), and then we see nothing of her face for a long time. Even in the scene where Detective Harada visits Dr. Hosono, he shows her a picture of the class of students that Tsukiko, Tenichi, and Tomie were in, but Tomie’s face is scratched out, as if the precise nature of her evil prevents her image from being recreated. When she gets work at the restaurant where Tsukiko’s boyfriend works, there’s a distinct contrast between the malice the audience feels radiating from her and the effect that her face, which remains in shadow, has on the men around her. It’s effective, and the reveal that she looks like a normal girl—a pretty girl, certainly, but no more so than any of the other women cast in the film—but one with an otherworldly oddness. This did start to come apart a little at the end, however, as I prefer her unassuming soft-spokenness over whatever was happening at the end when she was trying to feed Tsukiko live roaches. It moves from deft and subtle to a little too vibey, and the shift moves too quickly to fully work. 

Still, this is a perfectly fun late-90s J-horror movie. It reminded me of others from about this same time. In particular, the hypnotherapy plot reminded me a lot of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure released just the year prior. The conversation between the two films was further solidified by this movie’s violence largely emerging from people being mesmerized (although this time it’s by a demon). There’s also something very The Thing about the way that Tomie is an unslayable enemy who, even when reduced to nothing more than a head, will regrow like a starfish to restart a cycle of violence. Definitely worth the watch if you can find it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Closely Watched Trains (1966)

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At the time of posting, the social media platform TikTok is back online after briefly being banned in the United States over some vague Red Scare surveillance paranoia involving the app’s ownership by a Chinese company. Despite having called for this ban during his first presidency, Trump has found an executive-order workaround for the Supreme Court’s decision against TikTok’s fate in the US, retroactively pinning the unpopular decision to the recently concluded Biden administration. The brief banning of the app inspired US TikTok users to flock to an alternative platform to alleviate their #content addiction (including the Chinese-owned app RedNote, which spiked in American usership), and it also had me reflecting on what TikTok has contributed to Online Film Discourse. Like with all platforms, there are both good & bad data points that color TikTok’s character, from the shameless shilling for corporate media that the app’s Influencer class indulge for red carpet access to the stray surges of interest one out-of-nowhere video could draw to obscure works like Żuławski’s On the Silver Globe. Overall, though, when I think of what “MovieTok” (which I would happily rename “FlikTok” if I had the power) brings to Film Discourse, my mind goes to the trend of slagging art films as purposefully inscrutable puzzles that cinephiles only pretend to appreciate in order to appear smart. Anytime a celebrity lists a European art film during their “Letterboxd Top 4” interviews on the platform, a TikToker mocks their supposed pretention in a parodic video listing fictional titles.  Instead of expressing curiosity in any film outside the bounds of the MCU (or their more recent Major Studio equivalents), they make up a “4-hour black and white film about the Serbian government through the eyes of a pigeon.” It’s a stubbornly ignorant way to approach unfamiliarity with art, and I personally hope it dies with the app.

For any younger audiences doubtful that black & white European art films can be accessible & entertaining, I’d recommend checking out the 1966 Czech New Wave classic Closely Watched Trains, which was accessible enough to American audiences in its initial release that it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Closely Watched Trains is a shockingly light entertainment for a black & white Czechoslovakian art film about making sure the trains run on time under Nazi occupation. Its historical circumstances and its final scene are tragic, but structurally it’s a 90-minute boner comedy packed with prurient goofball schtick. While the MovieTok commentariat would have you to expect a Czech New Wave art film about Nazis to be a non-stop misery parade, Closely Watch Trains mostly plays out like one of those coming-of-age comedies about a teen’s sexual misadventures while working their first summer job … except it’s set at the edge of a frosty, war-torn Prague. There’s even a little “Welcome to my life” narration track at the start, as if you’re watching the original foreign-language version of Ferris Bueller instead of a project that was passed over by Věra Chytilová for seeming too difficult to adapt from page to screen. Sure, its final beat is deadly serious about the violent circumstances of Nazi rule, but its scene-to-scene concerns are refreshingly honest about what a teen working their first job outside the house would be paying most attention to: getting laid. It’s a shame that the MovieTok platform isn’t used to introduce younger viewers to a wilder world of cinema through accessible gateway films like this and instead tends to dismiss the entire concept of European Art Films outright for an easy punchline. Or, more likely, the more dismissive responses are the ones that reach a wider audience thanks to the algorithm’s bottomless love for Rage Bait, which is exactly how it works on my own evil #content app of choice, Twitter.

As a coming-of-age story, Closely Watched Trains keeps things simple. A scrawny sweetheart named Miloš attempts to follow in his father & grandfather’s footsteps by apprenticing as a railroad dispatcher. The circumstances of the job might have become a little more strained now that the trains are under Nazi command, but he’s told that if he sticks it out long enough he’ll get to retire with a pension. At the start of the job, he’s offered a crossroads of three different priorities: work, politics, or women. Unsure of which direction he wants his life to go, he tries his hand at each – flirting with rigid professionalism, flirting with a plot to bomb a Nazi supply train, and flirting with a cute train conductor who’s his age and eager to become his girlfriend. His physical urges overpower his higher mind for most of the runtime, leading to a series of proto-Porky’s sexual escapades that include train car orgies, ink-stamped butt cheeks, and a lot of vulnerable discussion of premature ejaculation. As silly as some of these sexual encounters can be in the moment, Miloš has Big Teenage Feelings about them that occasionally raise the stakes of the story into more traditional War Drama territory, sometimes under Nazi threat, sometimes under threat of self-harm. It would be reductive to present the film purely as a comedy, given its political & historical context, but for the majority of its runtime it’s more adorable than grim. Even its more overt indulgences in the art of the moving image are less challenging that they are cute. Wide-shot frames arrange the actors & trains with dollhouse meticulousness, which combined with the dark irony of the sex & romance recalls the work of Wes Anderson – maybe art cinema’s most widely accessible auteur.

I do not have much at stake in the ultimate fate of TikTok, but I do have something to say to the art-phobic influencers of MovieTok. There is no reason to be intimidated by the Great Works of European Cinema just because they’re initially unfamiliar. No matter how artsy, The Movies are ultimately just as much of a populist medium as TikTok #content; you can handle it.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Downsizing (2017)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Alexander Payne’s climate change sci-fi comedy Downsizing (2017).

00:00 The Top 10 Films of 2024

02:30 Anora (2024)
12:05 Barfly (1987)
13:48 Single White Female (1992)
22:03 The Cruise (1998)
23:03 Tomie (1998)
24:28 The Thing (1982)
27:39 To Die For (1995)
34:03 Gattaca (1997)
38:36 Mulholland Drive (2001)
45:25 The Devil and Miss Jones (1941)
50:09 Closely Watched Trains (1966)
53:46 McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
58:17 Feels Good Man (2020)

1:03:38 Downsizing (2017)

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

Cross-Promotion: Le Samouraï (1967) on the We Love to Watch Podcast

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I recently returned as a guest on the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss Jean-Pierre Melville’s coolly detached hitman thriller Le Samouraï (1967) as part of their ongoing “Hitmania” theme month.

Aaron & Peter were kind to invite me back after previous discussions of The X from Outer Space (1967), Brigsby Bear (2017), Dagon (2001), The Fly (1958), and Xanadu (1980). It’s always a blast to guest on their podcast, since I also listen as a fan. Their show is wonderfully in sync with the enthusiasm & sincerity we try to maintain on this site, so I highly recommend digging through their back catalog if you haven’t already. And, of course, please start by giving a listen to their episode on Le Samouraï below.

-Brandon Ledet

Barfly (1987)

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I have a friend whose resolution for the new year was to ensure that he try a new restaurant every week, after having spent nearly a decade in Austin without properly branching out into the cuisine scene. When discussing where to dine this past weekend, I asked if he had tried Golden Horn yet, a newish eatery on the ground floor under Barfly’s, a bar that our friend group frequents. “Oh, he said! Like in Barfly!” Off of my puzzled look, he said “You know! ‘Your mother’s cunt smells like carpet cleaner’!” I had no idea what he was quoting until, after dinner (which ended up not being at Golden Horn after all), he showed a group of us this film, in which Mickey Rourke says this line to Frank Stallone in an alleyway while goading him into a fight. And wouldn’t you know it, this takes place right behind the Golden Horn, and damned if they didn’t copy the sign from the movie down to the last neon stroke: 

The Golden Horn in Barfly (1987)

The Golden Horn below Barfly’s, from their Instagram. 

I love the food at this place, but I can’t say that I loved this movie very much, unfortunately. Produced by Francis Ford Coppola and directed by Barbet Schroeder from a script by Charles Bukowski, Barfly is one in a line of pieces of fiction about Bukowski’s literary alter ego Henry Chinaski (Rourke). Chinaski is a nearly permanent fixture at The Golden Horn, a corner dive bar directly beneath the slummy long-term hotel that he occupies. Although he has a close relationship with one of the bartenders, Jim (J.C. Quinn), he’s constantly in conflict with the muscular Eddie (Stallone), hence his frequent goading of the latter into fistfights in the alley. Other fixtures include elderly prostitute Grandma Moses (Gloria LeRoy) and Janice (Sandy Martin, a.k.a. Mac’s mom from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia). When Chinaski manages to best Eddie one night, he’s convinced on the following evening to drink elsewhere, and initially declines any more than a few dollars from Jim, just enough to get a drink or two. He finds himself in a different bar, where he meets Wanda Wilcox (Faye Dunaway), another unrepentant drunk whose standards are so far underground that she finds him sufficiently charming. After Wanda acquires more liquor and beer for them for the evening on credit from her sugar daddy, the two spend a night together, and she gives him a key the next morning and tells him to move in. She warns him, however, that she’ll go home with any man who has a fifth of whiskey, and she does so that very night, with Eddie. Meanwhile, a sneaky man (Jack Nance) is lurking around Chinaski’s old place and The Golden Horn, and he reports back to the beautiful Tully Sorenson (Alice Krige) that Chinaski is the man that they’ve been looking for. Tully eventually catches up with him and reveals that she works for one of the countless publishers to whom Chinaski has been unsuccessfully submitting his work. An upper-class woman, she finds herself completely taken by Chinaski’s bohemian lifestyle and wants to be his patron, publisher, and lover. 

The morning after I saw this movie, I texted a friend who was absent the previous night that we had watched a terrible movie, and when he asked what it was, I responded “It was called Barfly, from 1987, written by Charles Bukowski and boy did it show.” He was unfamiliar, so I elaborated, “Bukowski was a poet/novelist/screenwriter who was widely beloved in his day and still is by a certain kind of youngish, roguish, predominantly white, edgelord type who thinks they’re the first person to mistake their amateur collegiate alcoholism for literary significance. If you were to know someone with a Fight Club poster and they had a favorite poet, their favorite poet would be Bukowski.” And I stand by that! Which is not to say that the Buke’s alcoholism was amateur; if one could drink at a professional level, the man did so. What I tried to articulate to my viewing companions that night was that this was a movie about drinking that was at once both portraying alcoholism as harrowing but also, you know, kinda fun. Make no mistake, the people in this film who suffer from alcoholism do the sorts of things that addicts (functional and dysfunctional) might do, and when viewed objectively, are horrible to witness. In a euphoric drunken state, Wanda steals some corn from where someone is growing it on the street near her apartment despite Chinaski warning her that it’s not ready to be eaten. Later, she grouses that nothing in her life works as she spits partially masticated, unripe green corn into a napkin. Grandma Moses is forced to haggle with her johns over the price of a blow job, and Chinaski himself ends up stabbing a man in a neighboring apartment in an altercation that arose from overhearing violent sexual roleplay (if he ever faces consequences for it, we don’t learn about it). 

This isn’t Trainspotting or some other film that commits to treating the haunting experiences of its characters as traumas, however. As one would expect from the screenwriter, Barfly treats drunkenness as next to godliness, with the quotidian given meaning via dual-wielding a pen in one hand and a handle of bourbon in the other. When Chinaski seeks out employment so that he can help pay the rent at Wanda’s hovel, his overt drunkenness means that he was never going to get past the interview that he attends, but attention is drawn to his rejection of norms in all forms. He instinctually bristles against the nature of completing applications and rejects the meanings of the questions he’s asked in favor of answering them with flamboyance; he’s too cool to get bogged down in all that stuff, man. He’s insufferable, and the film supports Chinaski’s masturbatory self-congratulation: he’s the author’s self-insert character! The most obvious example of this comes in the form of his two “love” interests. Wanda is a mostly functional alcoholic who manages to put on the appearance of a responsible citizen when she goes out in public (at least when she isn’t thieving corn) but whose drunkenness rivals Chinaski’s, and we get the sense that she’s his “true equal.” Tully, on the other hand, is like the walking embodiment of the girlfriend in Pulp’s “Common People,” a professional woman who finds the slovenly, slurring Chinaski’s work deeply moving and profound and, confusing the art with the artist, finds herself drawn to Chinaski sexually. Everywhere Tully goes, she’s perpetually clad in billowing white outfits, floating above it all, untouched by the filth of Chinaski’s life. 

The authorial fantasy of this, being pursued by two beautiful women, is unmistakable, and it boggles the mind. Recently, I’ve been watching Deadwood, and there are many scenes of Ian McShane as Ed Swearengen getting out of bed in his unwashed union suit and pissing in a bucket in the corner, and you have to be really disgusting for that to compare favorably, and Chinaski obliges. We never see him bathe or change clothes, and his undergarments are fascinatingly nauseating. There’s no visible soiling of his boxers, but they’re so boxy and greasy looking that one can only imagine how filthy he is. Despite this, Wanda falls for him overnight, and Tully even tracks him down to The Golden Horn after he leaves her place and gets into a bar fight with Wanda over him. Bukowski, via his proxy in Chinaski, gets the sleep with two gorgeous women who—despite their own disparate classes—are still both far, far too good for him, and he even gets to reject one and her “gilded cage” and then watch her be humiliated socially. Wanda even rips out a chuck of her hair! Alcoholism has never been more romanticized.

Where there is something to be praised here, it’s in the cinematography. All of these smoky, hazy bars are gorgeously photographed. There’s a magic to making a dingy dive, with its vinyl bumpers held together with duct tape and hideous clientele, into a tableaux of beauty. The lighting is also worth noting, and there are so many perfect compositions of neon signs and the glow that they cast that it’s a shame that this movie is largely unwatchable. This is a pre-boxing Rourke, and there are attempts to ugly up his pretty mug to make him seem more bedraggled, and they’re intermittently successful. Dunaway steals the spotlight from him in every scene that she’s in, however, and it’s a quietly understated performance from her. This was a decade after her Oscar win for Network, and there was a feeling I got when she gets into a tub at one point in the film and shows off her chest that she decided that the time was right to immortalize her breasts on screen. I was surprised to learn later from the film’s Wikipedia page that a glamor shot of her legs had been filmed at her insistence, which I think lends some credence to my theory. If I looked as good as she does here, I would do the same. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Boomer’s Academy Ballot 2024

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I have a deep and abiding love for watching old Siskel and Ebert reviews. You can find a lot of them on YouTube where people’s VHS copies have been cleaned up as much as possible, and there’s an even deeper back catalog on a dedicated site. Many of the episodes on the latter, like their 1983 “If We Picked the Oscars Special,” contain the commercials from the broadcast, which can be fun. In their honor, and so that I can highlight elements that I found fantastic even in works that I didn’t otherwise care for, I have begun to do this myself, annually. Feel free to check out my list from last year, and see below, the winners and the nominees, if I picked the Oscars. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond