Coens Countdown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Last Stop in Yuma County (2024)

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

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

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

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

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

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Santo vs The Martian Invasion (1967)

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Most genre movie freaks may have moved on to shiny new boutique Blu-rays and moldy old VHS tapes, but I still collect most of my movies at the tried-and-true distribution hub of the thrift store DVD rack.  You don’t always find rare gems at the thrift store, but you often find movies cheaper than they cost to rent on streaming, with the added bonus of a Special Features menu that most streamers don’t bother to upload.  My recent pickup of the 1960s sci-fi lucha libre classic Santo vs. The Martian Invasion felt like a blessing by both metrics; it’s rare enough that it’s not currently available to stream at home with English subtitles, and the disc includes several Bonus Features, including full-length commentaries and a 30-minute interview with Santo’s heir, Son of Santo.  It felt like even more of a blessing when those subtitles turned out to be a variation of Comic Sans, which I’m not sure I’ve ever seen outside of an ironic lyrics-only music video on YouTube. I don’t know that reporting on these details is useful to anyone who didn’t happen to be shopping at the Thrift City USA on the West Bank last weekend, but I still want to advertise that the dream is still alive in the thrift store DVD racks of New Orleans in general. I suppose I also want to report that the home distribution label Kit Parker Films is surprisingly generous with their bargain-bin DVDs’ bonus content, so look out for those discs in particular while you’re digging through the stacks.

Billed on its title card as Santo the Silver Mask vs The Invasion of the Martians, this specific bargain-bin discovery is a fairly typical Atomic Age sci-fi cheapie about an alien invasion of planet Earth; its hero just happens to be the masked luchador Santo, protector of “the weak and the defenseless.”  The alien-invasion plot is a little confused, with the Martians announcing their presence to the citizens of Mexico via multiple television broadcasts and having their evil deeds widely reported in local newspapers, then later being treated as a conspiratorial government secret hidden from the public.  Instead of getting that story straight, the movie intensely focuses on the physical abilities & vulnerabilities of the Martians.  Much attention is paid to the fact that they frequently take “oxygen pills” to be able to withstand Earth’s atmosphere, among other needless explanations of their uncanny ability to speak Spanish.  There’s also an intense fixation on their cube-shaped helmets’ Astral Eye, a glowing eyeball that allows them to either hypnotize or disintegrate nearby Earthlings, depending on the demands of the day.  They can also wrestle fairly well, which makes them the perfect opponent for Santo, the greatest & bravest wrestler who ever lived.  Santo repeatedly grapples with the blonde-wigged beefcake models from planet Mars, eternally flustered by their ability to teleport back to the safety of their spaceship every time the impromptu matches don’t go their way.  He eventually wins by stealing one of their teleportation devices to infiltrate and explode that ship himself, like a wrestler claiming a championship belt (literally; the device is belt-shaped).

The Martian Invasion loses a little steam once these intergalactic lucha libre matches return to a proper wrestling ring instead of being staged in exterior locations on the streets of Mexico, but most of its vintage sci-fi hijinks remain adorable & fun.  Instead of brooding in the bootleg Gothic atmosphere of horror pictures like Santo vs The Vampire Women or Santo and the Blue Demon vs Dracula and the Wolf Man, a lot of the runtime is filled with insane, rapid-fire dialogue about the peculiarities of the Martian species.  There’s also some fun 60s kitsch to the cheesecake Martian women in particular, who hypnotize & seduce the major players of Mexican patriarchy with the laziest futuristic go-go dancing you’ve ever seen.  Between that half-hearted eroticism and the absurd over-reliance on stock footage to pad out the budget, I was often reminded of some of my favorite Atomic Age sci-fi novelties: Nude on the Moon, Cat-Women of the Moon, Queen of Blood, The Astounding She-Monster, etc.  None of those comparison points feature extensive wrestling matches, though, which gives this an extra layer of novelty the same way the Santo horror films feel novel compared to their classic Universal Horror equivalents. 

Something I don’t have context for is how much of an anomaly The Martian Invasion is within the larger Santo canon.  It felt a little zippier & goofier than the couple horror films I’ve seen starring the masked luchador, which rely heavily on classic haunted-house mood & dread.  I don’t have enough evidence to say how typical that is to Santo’s filmography, though, because I’ve only seen three of what Wikipedia lists as “at least 54” titles in his catalog.  Given the pace at which I’m finding notable Santo movies on used discs or streaming, it’s likely I’ll never get the complete picture of his big-screen work before I run out of time and die. Honestly, I still can’t even pin down the exact list of titles that make up that catalog.  Wikipedia, IMDb, and Letterboxd all have conflicting lists of what count as an official Santo film, and the “Filmografia” Special Feature on my Martian Invasion disc only includes 52 of his “at least 54” titles.  To help illustrate the immensity & inconsistency of that catalog, I have transcribed the entire “Filmografia” feature of the Kit Parker DVD below.  It’s the kind of list that has made me accept that I will only see whichever films I happen to pick up at local thrift stores, completionism be damned.  May they all be as fun & loaded with bonus features as Santo vs The Martian Invasion.

Filmografia

1958

SANTO CONTRA EL CEREBRO DEL MAL
aka El Cerebro del Mal
Santo vs The Evil Brain

SANTO CONTRA LOS HOMBRES INFERNALES
Santo vs The Infernal Men aka White Cargo

1961

SANTO CONTRA LOS ZOMBIES
Santo vs The Zombies
Released in the U.S. as Invasion of the Zombies

SANTO CONTRA EL RED DEL CRIMEN
Santo vs The King of Crime

SANTO EN EL HOTEL DE LA MUERTE
Santo in The Hotel of Death

SANTO CONTRA EL CEREBRO DIABOLICO
Santo vs The Diabolical Brain

1962

SANTO CONTRA LAS MUJERES VAMPIRAS
Santo vs The Vampire Women
Released in the U.S. as Samson vs The Vampire Women

1963

SANTO EN EL MUSEO DE CERA
Santo in The Wax Museum
Released in the U.S. as Samson in the Wax Museum

SANTO CONTRA EL ESTRANGULADOR
Santo vs The Strangler

SANTO CONTRA EL ESPECTRO DEL ESTRANGULADOR
Santo vs The Ghost of the Strangler

1964

SANTO EN ATACAN LAS BRUJAS
aka Santo En La Casa De Las Brujas
Santo in The Witches Attack

BLUE DEMON CONTRA EL PODER SATANICO
Blue Demon vs The Satanic Power
Cameo appearance

SANTO CONTRA EL HACHA DIABOLICA
Santo vs The Diabolical Ax

1965

SANTO EN LOS PROFANADORES DE TUMBAS
aka Los Traficantes De La Muerte
Santo in The Grave Robbers

SANTO EN EL BARON BRAKOLA
Santo in Baron Brakola

1966

SANTO CONTRA LA INVASION DE LOS MARCIANOS
Santo vs The Martian Invasion

SANTO CONTRA LOS VILLANOS DEL RING
Santo vs The Villains of The Ring

SANTO EN OPERACION 67
Santo in Operation 67

1967

SANTO EN EL TESORO DE MOCTEZUMA
Santo in The Treasure of Moctezuma

1968

SANTO EN EL TESORO DE DRACULA
Santo in Dracula’s Treasure
aka EL Vampiro y El Sexo

SANTO CONTRA CAPULINA
Santo vs Capulina

1969

SANTO CONTRA BLUE DEMON EN LA ATLANTIDA
Santo vs Blue Demon in Atlantis

SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA LOS MONSTRUOS
Santo & Blue Demon vs The Monsters

SANTO Y BLUE DEMON EN EL MUNDO DE LOS MUERTOS
Santo & Blue Demon in The World of the Dead

SANTO CONTRA LOS CAZADORES DE CABEZAS
Santo vs The Headhunters

SANTO FRENTE A LA MUERTE
Santo Faces Death
aka Santo vs The Mafia Killers

1970

SANTO CONTRA LOS JINETES DEL TERROR
Santo vs The Terror Riders
aka The Lepers and Sex

SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LAS MUJERES VAMPIRAS
Santo in The Revenge of the Vampire Women

SANTO CONTRA LA MAFIA DEL VICIO
Santo vs The Mafia of Vice
aka Mission Sabotage

SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LA MOMIA
Santo in The Revenge of the Mummy

LAS MOMIAS DE GUANAJUATO
The Mummies of Guanajuato
Co-starring Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras

1971

SANTO CONTRA LA HIJA DE FRANKENSTEIN
Santo vs Frankenstein’s Daughter

SANTO CONTRA LOS ASESINOS DE OTROS MUNDOS
Santo vs The Killers from Other Worlds
aka Santo vs The Living Atom

SANTO Y EL AGUILA REAL
Santo and The Royal Eagle
aka Santo and The Tigress in The Royal Eagle

SANTO EN MISION SUICIDA
Santo in Suicide Mission

SANTO EN EL MISTERIO DE LA PERLA NEGRA
Santo in The Mystery of The Black Pearl
aka Santo in The Caribbean Connection
Released in Spain in 1971 and in Mexico in 1974

1972

SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA DRACULA Y EL HOMBRE LOBO
Santo & Blue Demon vs Dracula & The Wolfman

SANTO CONTRA LOS SECUESTRADORES
Santo vs The Kidnappers

SANTO CONTRA LA MAGIA NEGRA
Santo vs Black Magic

SANTO & BLUE DEMON EN LAS BESTIAS DEL TERROR
Santo & Blue Demon in The Beasts of Terror

SANTO EN LAS LOBAS
Santo in The She-Wolves

SANTO EN ANONIMO MORTAL
Santo in Anonymous Death Threat

1973

SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA EL DR. FRANKENSTEIN
Santo & Blue Demon vs Dr. Frankenstein

SANTO CONTRA EL DR. MURERTE
Santo vs Dr. Death
aka Santo Strikes Again

1974

SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LA LLORONA
Santo in The Revenge of The Crying Woman

1975

SANTO EN ORO NEGRO
aka La Noche De San Juan
Santo in Black Gold

1977

MISTERIO EN LAS BERMUDAS
Mystery in Bermuda
Co-starring Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras

1979

SANTO EN LA FRONTERA DEL TERROR
Santo at the Border of Terror
aka Santo vs The White Shadow

1981

SANTO CONTRA EL ASESINO DE LA TELEVISION
Santo vs The Television Killer

CHANOC Y EL HIJO DEL SANTO VS LOS VAMPIROS ASESINOS
Chanoc & The Son of Santo vs The Killer Vampires
Cameo appearance

1982

SANTO EN EL PUNO DE LA MUERTE
Santo in The Fist of Death

SANTO EN LA FURIA DE LOS KARATECAS
Santo in The Fury of the Karate Experts

-Brandon Ledet

Angrier Young Men

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

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

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

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

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

-Brandon Ledet

Kinds of Kindness (2024)

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Kinds of Kindness is a dense text. A triptych of stories from director Yorgos Lanthimos that are only loosely connected by the appearance of a single minor character (with each of the major billed actors appearing as different characters in each segment), they are nonetheless in conversation with one another, as they are all about the way that kindness can be many things — sincere as well as selfish, sacrificial as well as superficial. The segments, titled “The Death of R.M.F.,” “R.M.F. is Flying,” and “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” each relay a fable in which a character is “kind,” with consequences. 

In “The Death,” we first see a man with the initials “R.M.F.” (Yorgos Stefanakos) embroidered on his shirt pocket as he accepts an envelope of cash from a woman we later learn is named Vivian (Margaret Qualley), and watch as a man named Robert Fletcher (Jesse Plemmons) works up the nerve to run a red light and smash his Bronco into R.M.F.’s car, although neither man is seriously injured. The next morning, Robert tells his wife Sarah (Hong Chau) about the incident while she fawns over a piece of sports memorabilia—a broken John McEnroe racquet—that was received that morning from Robert’s employer, Raymond (Willem Dafoe), calling it Raymond’s best gift yet. Once he arrives at the office, we get a better picture of Robert and Raymond’s relationship; Robert is more of a pet or a toy for Raymond than an employee. Every aspect of Robert’s life is dictated by the older man: what clothes he wears, what drinks he orders at the bar, what he eats for every meal, when he sleeps and wakes and has sex with his wife. He even engineered Sarah and Robert’s marriage by having Robert fake an injury at a bar in order to gain her sympathy. But Robert can’t bring himself to kill a stranger in a car “accident,” which leads Raymond to ice him out, setting off a chain of events in which Sarah leaves him and a chance encounter—or is it?—with a woman named Rita Fanning (Emma Stone) make him more and more desperate to get back into Raymond’s good graces. 

In “Flying,” Denham Springs police officer Daniel (Plemmons) is dealing with the recent disappearance of his wife, Liz (Emma Stone), along with some other researchers on a ship that went missing, presumably in the gulf. While his partner Neil (Mamoudou Athie) and Neil’s wife Martha (Qualley) attempt to assuage his fears while also remaining realistic about the chances that Liz will be found, Daniel’s erratic behavior, which includes intimately and romantically brushing the hair of a suspect behind their ear, causes concern within the DSPD. When Liz and another survivor are found (flown back in a rescue copter piloted by R.M.F., giving the segment its title), she comes back … different. It was well established that Liz’s hatred of chocolate meant that it was banned from the house, but this newly returned woman devours chocolate cake with gusto. She smokes a cigarette for the first time, feels unconfident in her favorite outfit, and none of her shoes fit her anymore. Daniel becomes more and more suspicious that she is an impostor, but his attempts to explain to others that he thinks his wife is no longer his wife because she doesn’t remember his favorite song make him seem even more unstable than when she was missing. Liz, if this is Liz, seems to live only to please him, and after shooting a man in the hand during a routine traffic stop, he’s placed on suspension, where the two have nothing but time together, and he tests the limits of her emotional and physical generosity. 

In “Sandwich,” Andrew (Plemmons) and Emily (Stone) are two members of a cult, run by Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Chau), that is seeking a woman with the power to heal and even reanimate the dead. Their search is specific; the woman will be about five foot nine, weigh about 130 pounds, and will be the survivor of a pair of twins. Their search brings them close enough to her old home that Emily sneaks away one morning to the house where her husband and daughter are still living and leaves a gift for her, which Andrew notices but promises to keep a secret, although she admits nothing. After a trip back to the commune compound, in which we get to see the cult’s grounds, practices, and yacht (specially designed for the awaited messiah), Andrew and Emily are sent on another expedition to the same town, where a woman named Rebecca approaches them and tells them that her twin sister Ruth (both Qualley) is the woman that they are looking for, but Andrew brushes her off. When another visit to her old house results in Emily being caught by her husband and daughter, he convinces her to have a drink with him, surreptitiously drugging and then sexually assaulting her. When she awakes the next morning, Omi and Aka are waiting for her outside, and for her “contamination” is exiled from the cult, although she hopes that finding Ruth will be her ticket back in. 

The first segment is a lot of fun, and there’s a lot of playfulness going on to toy with the audience and their expectations. Although the man with the embroidered initials “R.M.F.” is the first person that we see, this could be a misdirect, as we never learn Raymond’s last name, nor the middle names of Robert Fletcher or Rita Fanning, so any one of them could turn out to be the character who has a date with destiny and death. It also introduces several of the film’s recurring motifs. When a desperate Robert is trying to sell all of the sports memorabilia that he has accumulated as a result of Raymond’s gifts over the years, he’s unable to get a fair deal for it. Even as he repeats what must be Raymond’s words (notably calling out that yellow represented youthfulness on the helmet of a driver who died tragically while wearing it, just before he exchanges his aubergine turtleneck for a mustard one and sets out to try and win back Raymond’s affection), it’s clear that every bit of the older man’s largesse, his “kindness,” was all about control, and that even the gifts thereof are ultimately cheaper than they seem. 

That discussion of color symbolism cuts directly to an extreme close up of the yolk of an egg being fried, although Robert finds himself unable to eat it and tosses it out. That ties into a larger motif of appetite that runs throughout all three films. In “Flying,” the first thing that Daniel offers to do for the returned Liz is make her an omelet, which she declines, and the cult in “Sandwich” is particularly averse to eating fish, while Aka and (presumably) Omi’s son’s food intake is monitored, and he’s given conflicting directions from each of his parents. It’s most present in “Flying,” however. Throughout all of the film’s constituent segments, flashbacks and dreams are represented in black-and-white footage, and “Flying” features one such sequence in which Liz is seen resorting to cannibalism while deserted and awaiting rescue. It’s unclear if this is a real memory, a delusion, or even a projection of Daniel’s fears, especially since he seems to be the one most consumed with a desire for flesh; the beef he serves to Neil and Martha wouldn’t even be considered “rare” by most standards, he impulsively licks the wound of the man he shoots on Tulane Ave, and when he starts to test what lengths this “Liz” will go to in order to ingratiate herself to him, he asks her to excise and cook first her thumb and then her liver for him, as a test of her “kindness.” 

There’s also an interesting throughline about foot injuries, which I interpret to mean something along the lines of “kindness can shoot you in the foot,” but which also seems to have an undercurrent of dishonesty. In “Death,” Robert first attempts to recreate his meet cute with Sarah by pretending to injure his hand again, but is unsuccessful. Instead, he deliberately injures his foot in the bar bathroom by kicking the wall and breaking a couple of bones, which leads him to meeting Rita, who shows him sympathy and, well, kindness (although an air of mystery is retained regarding how altruistic this is and if it’s yet another one of Raymond’s manipulations). In “Flying,” it’s mentioned that the only other survivor from Liz’s ship has a leg infection that will likely result in the need for amputation, and it happens twice in “Sandwich,” as Emily’s husband lures her back to their old house to drug and assault her by spinning a lie about their daughter having hurt her ankle at ballet class and Emily herself injures a dog’s leg in order to have an excuse to meet with the veterinarian she believes is the savior. Notably, all of these injuries are used manipulatively; whether it’s a self-inflicted wound to get attention, a lie about an injury to get an ex to come over, or a recitation of something bad that happened to someone, they are all used to elicit “kindness.” 

Speaking of dogs, they’re present, in one form or another, in every segment. In “Flying,” Liz tells Daniel about a dream that she had when she was on the island (or which was about the island, it’s unclear to her and to us), where she was in a world where people were pets and dogs were the dominant species, and we get to see that world in the credits sequence of that segment. There is the aforementioned dog in “Sandwich,” whom Emily finds on the street and uses as a ticket to see Ruth. There are no animals in “Death,” however, unless one considers that Robert is Raymond’s dog. He fetches, he rolls over, he begs, and he performs for Raymond. Robert is his pet, his doll, he dresses him up and he picks out his food and he controls Robert’s entire environment. At one point, he directs him to go to a specific bar and order a non-alcoholic drink; Robert attempts to order bourbon, but the bartender asks him if he’s sure, and when he orders a Virgin Mary, it’s handed to him in seconds, having been waiting for him, just as a demonstration of just how far and wide the net of power Raymond controls is. It’s even telling that one of the scenes from Liz’s dreamworld of dogs-as-humans involves a dog driving an SUV who swerves to avoid a piece of human roadkill, which ties back thematically to the end of “Death,” which I won’t spoil. There’s a narrative present in all of them about the power that people have over animals; we all love our pets and we all are kind to them, but that kindness doesn’t change the fact that power flows only one way in that relationship, and that this may be true of all relationships. 

Before closing out, I want to talk about one particular scene in “Death,” wherein Robert confronts Raymond at his home to tell him that he can’t go through with his vehicular manslaughter plan. Initially, he has Vivian show Robert in, but the “scene” doesn’t feel right, so he has him do it again after sitting down in a chair, then has him take it from the top again and enter to deliver his news standing. When watching a film like this, in which a person takes on the role of “director” in their personal life, one can’t help but assume that the film’s director is also telling us something about themselves, or about the nature of control. I’m not sure that I’ve cracked what that is yet, or what Lanthimos is saying here. I have a feeling that this is one of those texts that only really reveals itself on multiple viewings, and with time. Both of my viewing companions for this screening were much more mixed in their opinions, but I’m feeling positive, and looking forward to what the next screening will reveal.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Teen Titans – The Judas Contract (2017)

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

If you were on any message board, TV Tropes page, or fan forum that was every even loosely connected to DC Comics during a certain period of time, then you know all about Terra, the earthbending girl whose inevitable betrayal of the Teen Titans caused the first faneurysm (™ me) in an uncountable number of fragile young minds and whose specific betrayal of poor little Beast Boy broke more hearts than the siege of Troy. The hair-pulling, the weeping, the gnashing of teeth – it was all the rage at exactly the same moment that every nerd boy was creaming himself over Summer Glau and the rosy fingers of the dawning of SuperWhoLock were just taking hold of the horizon. It’s so well known that, when Young Justice used the character in its fourth season, they managed to pull out a few unexpected surprised by subverting the same old story. See, back in the 80s, there was a relaunch of an older comic, now rechristened The New Teen Titans, and the most well-remembered storyline from that series’s entire run was entitled “The Judas Contract,” in which fan favorite character Terra turned out to be a plant within the organization, operating under the guidance of Slade “Deathstroke” Wilson. Terra appeared in an unvoiced cameo in the post-credits sequence of Justice League vs. Teen Titans, setting up this film’s narrative. 

After a flashback sequence that shows us the meet cute between Dick Grayson (Sean Maher), then still the original Robin, and alien refugee Starfire (Kari Wahlgren), we return to the present, where it has been almost a year since Tara “Terra” Markov (Pumpkin star Christina Ricci, who may not be the biggest “get” these movies have managed to bring on board, but who is perhaps the most exciting to me) joined the team. The team is currently working to bring down an organization known as Hive, which is fronted by a cult leader called Brother Blood (Gregg Henry) and his right-hand woman, Mother Mayhem (Meg Foster!). In between missions, we get insight into their various slices of life. Jaime “Blue Beetle” Reyes (Jake T. Austin) starts volunteering at the local shelter, as it helps him feel connected to the family that he is currently separate from because the alien machine on his back mistrusts Jaime’s father. Raven (Taissa Farmiga) is continuing to work on controlling her powers, and she now has a gem in her forehead in which her demonic father is imprisoned. Dick and Starfire are preparing to move in together, while Garfield “Beast Boy” Logan (Brandon Soo Hoo) is nursing an obvious crush on Terra. All of the team is invested in getting her to open up, but she remains reserved and standoffish. Life gets more complicated when the assumed-dead Slade “Deathstroke” Wilson (Miguel Ferrera, replacing Thomas Gibson) re-emerges working with Brother Blood in pursuit of his vengeance against Damian (Stuart Allan). 

As much as I liked JLvTT (with some reservations, especially that horrible emo song), this one is still an improvement on that installment. Unlike the unrepentant psychopath that she is in most versions, this Terra is legitimately conflicted. I’ve always really liked when an ongoing piece of long from media has a “breather” installment in which we get to see a more relaxed side of our characters and learn more about them and what they’re like in their down time. I enjoy a lot of the moments between Starfire and Dick, since we’ve mostly seen him as a tangential character to the various and sundry Batman-focused entries on this list, and Starfire’s playful energy breathes life into the film, especially the teases about their sex life; I appreciate that if there’s one thing we know about these two, it’s that they are Gomez-and-Morticia horny for one another, and you love to see it. There are a few other things that are risque here, including what a horn dog Garfield is for Terra. My personal favorite, though, comes in a scene in which Jaime gets a little too worked up about his fellow volunteer, Traci, and has to hop into the walk-in freezer to try and get his “scarab” to understand that his quickening pulse doesn’t mean he’s in danger. It’s played like an erection joke, including the position that he’s in, hiding his gun arm, when Traci finds him:


It’s notable that this movie is the most successful comedy in this series so far. There have been little touches of humor throughout, which has been hit or miss. Steve Trevor’s “comical” outdated sexism in Wonder Woman didn’t work for me, but the banter in JL: War was fun, and it still mostly worked in JL: Throne of Atlantis. I don’t normally laugh aloud when I’m watching most comedies at home by myself, but this one elicited multiple chuckles from me. I probably shouldn’t have found it so funny, but there’s a scene where Terra asks Garfield if he knows how she became an orphan, and he responds with “Umm … your parents died?” that made me laugh aloud. Later still, when Deathstroke has set various traps for the Titans, Dick escapes and is searching for the others and finds the trap set for Garfield—a big red button labeled “Do Not Press” that, when pressed, shoots tranquilizer darts—his exasperated muttering of “Come on, Gar,” is legitimately hilarious. Screenwriter E.J. Altbacker has mostly done TV series writing, but he has done two previous animated features: previous installment Justice League Dark and, um, Scooby-Doo! & WWE: Curse of the Speed Demon, which I suppose explains his comedy credentials. That kind of crossover energy may also explain why Kevin Smith appears as himself in this one, which was one of the few off-notes in play here, and I say that as someone who doesn’t particularly dislike him like many other critics. Still, once again, even though we’re past the halfway point, I’m still occasionally finding something new to praise in these movies, and even though there have been a few that felt like such a chore to get through that I started to doubt my commitment to Sparkle Motion this project, this renews my vigor. 

Which is not to say that this movie is all fun and games. Brother Blood isn’t a character who was created just for this film, obviously, but if you did play Mad Libs to come up with a goofy name for an edgelord, “Brother Blood” has a pretty high likelihood of ending up on the list. His brand of violence is a little ho-hum; it may be more that my brain is broken, but when we find him bathing in a pool of blood, I wasn’t impressed, even when we panned up to see the drained body of a reporter who had tried holding him accountable in an earlier interview. It could be that he’s simply not that scary next to Mayhem, since Foster’s trademark rasp imbues all of her lines with a coldness so lacking in compassion that it’s genuinely unsettling. Even more skin-crawling, however, is a scene that occurs after Terra’s true colors have been revealed and she’s back with Deathstroke, entering his command center with cheeks rouged to hell and back and wearing a little pink shift with one spaghetti strap seductively pulled off of the shoulder. We’re not given an exact age for her, but I’d say she’s probably fifteen but looks younger, and her Alicia-Silverstone-in-The–Crush act toward the much older Deathstroke is effectively gross. It’s clear that he’s not into it, but that doesn’t stop him from continuing to promise her that the two of them can be together on some elusive someday, encouraging her ongoing affections but rebuffing her when she acts on them, so that he can continue to manipulate her and use her powers for his own ends. It’s surprisingly dark for a series of movies that have normally equated more adult with more violent, and gives this film a bit more depth than the flicks it shares shelf space with. 

I mentioned Young Justice above, and there was a tactic that the animators of that series turned to in seasons three and four to help cut some corners on the budget. Starting in the third season, the episode’s credits would play over a mostly still image (with the occasional shooting star in the night sky, or the repeated motion of an animal’s breathing in their sleep) while characters had conversations with each other. I was a big fan of this, actually, as it broadened the world a bit, followed up on lingering plot threads and in some cases provided closure on characters who were no longer a part of the main storylines. This started to become more obvious in the show proper during the fourth season, when montages of still images became a part of the storytelling, and although it was noticeable, I wouldn’t call it detrimental. That technique is also becoming somewhat more apparent in these films. In the last Teen Titans movie, it was used during the montage of the characters getting to know each other at the carnival (with that aforementioned terrible emo song), and it happens here, too, when the others throw Terra a surprise party to commemorate the anniversary of her joining the team, among other scenes. In Young Justice, I was happy to accept this as part of an ongoing effort to keep costs under control, and whatever got me more Young Justice was just fine with me. Here, it feels a little cheaper. Conversely, I’ve often cited in these reviews that I wish that there was a little more dynamic movement in the action sequences, and this one delivered on that; in particular, there’s a scene in which Dick’s shoulder is dislodged, and he has to fight Deathstroke with one arm hanging limply, and it’s exceptionally animated. You win some, you lose some. And hey, at least for the first time since Superman: Unbound, we made it through a whole movie without Batman in it. 

I read online that this one is considered the point where the DCAMU (sigh) really matured and came into its own. I’d grant that, although I think that JLvTT and JL Dark would also be contenders for that title. It feels like a real movie, and its tragic ending evokes the conclusion of my cherished Under the Red Hood, which is always a plus in my book. I hope that’s true, since these have mostly been pretty average so far, and I hope we can only go up from here. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Movie of the Month: Baby Cakes (1989)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made Brandon & Boomer watch Baby Cakes (1989).

Britnee: Have you ever believed that you imagined a movie? For years, I had faded images in my mind of a young Ricki Lake eating a bag of Sugar Babies. I had separate memories of a grocery store wedding that felt like something I visualized from a retelling of a family event. I even wrote those images down in various notebooks in my preteen bedroom, just so I wouldn’t forget. When I finally got frequent access to the internet, I plugged in these descriptions on Ask Jeeves, and viola, the answer to these burning mysteries was the 1989 made-for-TV movie Baby Cakes. More recently, I found out it’s a remake of a 1985 German film called Sugarbaby, which I have yet to see but am very interested in watching. Perhaps it’s the reason behind Ricki Lake’s candy of choice?

Grace (Lake) is an overweight mortician living in Queens. When she’s not working, she’s spending time with her incredibly pessimistic friend, Keri, or indulging in snacks while watching horror movies alone in her apartment. She’s very relatable. Her mother has passed, and her father marries a woman who is cold towards Grace, and the couple make frequent disparaging comments about her weight. While Grace and Keri are hanging out at an ice-skating rink, Grace spots “the most beautiful man she’s ever seen” skating his butt off on the ice. He ends up being a subway train conductor, and Grace, who takes the subway every day, starts to stalk him. It’s more like the type of stalking teens do to their crushes than Baby Reindeer stalking, so it’s more cute than creepy.

It turns out that Grace’s crush, Rob (Craig Sheffer), is in an unhappy relationship, and she shoots her shot. He politely brushes her off at first, but he has a couple of drinks and shows up to her apartment for a romantic dinner gone bad. Their relationship starts off with a pity date where she brings him to her parents’ home to show him off (along with her own sassy makeover), ultimately to prove to them that she can have a boyfriend who loves her for who she is. But after she and Rob start to spend time together, their relationship blossoms into genuine romance.

Baby Cakes is a feel-good romcom with a John Waters touch. What I admire about this film is that that it avoids the overweight main actress cliche by not having a segment where Grace tries to lose weight to win over a man. If anything, she leans into her love for food to seduce him. Brandon, other than Grace’s non-changing relationship with food, what are some other unique touches to the film that caught your attention?

Brandon: Like all romcoms, Baby Cakes is entirely defined by its unique touches.  We know exactly what’s going to happen to our couple-to-be as soon as Grace forces a meet-cute through some light, adorable stalking, so the joys of the film are entirely to be found in the quirks of its details.  That manufactured meet-cute being staged at a Sugar Babies vending machine was a memorable enough quirk to linger in Britnee’s mind for decades, as was the grocery-store wedding, which is so oddly adorable that it’s incredible the idea hasn’t been stolen by a film with a bigger budget.  As with all romcoms, our leads both have quirky professions (corpse beautician & subway train conductor) and quirky hobbies (stalking & figure skating) unlikely to be shared by the audience.  Then there’s the quirky prop of the awkward family portrait Grace had commissioned of her younger, thinner self and her younger, happier father, which the movie mines for genuine pathos while never losing sight of the fact that it looks ridiculous.  Baby Cakes is all quirks all the time, as required by its choice of genre.

Personally, my favorite quirks were the dour personality ticks of Grace’s sidekick, Keri, who absolutely kills her job as the movie’s wet blanket.  Mostly, I was just excited to see actor Nada Despotovich in an extended, feature-length role, since her biggest impact on the cinematic artform was a single scene as Chrissy in Moonstruck.  It was like getting to hang out with my favorite cryptid for 90 minutes after years of only catching blurry glimpses of her in roles like “Receptionist” (The Boyfriend School), “Bartender” (Castle Rock), and “Mom” (Challengers).  Despotovich’s pouting over Nic Cage’s romantic indifference (and her pouty refusal to “get the big knife”) in Moonstruck is Hall of Fame-level romcom quirk, so it’s delightful to watch her pout at length in Baby Cakes as a hypochondriac doomsayer who hates everyone & everything except her equally tragic bestie.  There’s some genuine friendship drama shared between the women, too, as Keri predictably becomes frustrated when Grace finds confidence & happiness, since it ruins their miserabilist dynamic.

The audience knows to cheer on Grace’s newfound confidence, though, even if Keri has a point that she’s setting herself up for heartbreak by falling for a man who’s already engaged.  The victory of Baby Cakes is more than Grace achieving self-actualization without losing weight; it’s that she consciously stops trying to lose weight and instead learns to love her body as it is.  That confidence radiates off of her, making her more attractive to people who usually look right past her.  One of the best sequences is a montage of Grace’s neighbors complimenting her “punk” makeover as she runs her daily errands, modeling Desperately Seeking Susan-era Madonna outfits and flipping around a ponytail.  The inward search for that confidence being sparked by outside validation from a man who’s initially embarrassed to be seen with her in public is a complicated, queasy issue, but that’s exactly what drags this story out of romcom quirks and into the realm of real-life human behavior.  I understand why the early, cutesy stalking sequence invites Baby Reindeer jokes from the overly cynical Letterboxd commentariat, but the modern work this most reminded me of was the Aidy Bryant sitcom Shrill, which still felt progressive for touching on these same body positivity issues decades later (if not only because there are so few other representations in mainstream media that take the inner lives of women seriously if they’re not exceptionally thin).

To me, Grace’s short-lived stint as Rob’s stalker didn’t feel entirely out of line with typical romcom behavior.  Her outlandish personal-boundary violations while luring him to her apartment are just as integral to romcoms’ entertainment value as the outlandish personality quirks of the film’s various side characters, to the point where they’d be parodied by Julia Roberts’s “pond scum” protagonist in My Best Friend’s Wedding less than a decade later.   The question of a romcom’s success mostly relies on whether an audience can look past the unethical behavior & eccentric personalities and still feel genuine emotion when the couple-to-be finally, inevitably gets together.  By that metric, Boomer, was the drama of Baby Cakes successful for you?  Did you feel anything for Grace & Rob beyond amusement?

Boomer: I found this dynamic pretty effective, honestly. I don’t know how widespread knowledge about this issue is in the mainstream, but the gay community is a pretty image-focused, fatphobic, and body-fascistic group – especially the most visible community members, who are usually white, cis men. There are historical reasons for this. In the 70s, the biggest sex symbols of the era were slender rock stars with lean bodies and who were playful with gender norms: your Jaggers, your Mercurys, your Bowies, etc. When the AIDS Crisis hit its peak, those things that had defined sexiness in the previous decade were stigmatized by society at large, as the public associated that leanness with illness and queerness with disease. This gave rise, in part, to the action star of the 80s: a he-man with huge biceps. There was large-scale adoption of your Stallones and your Schwarzeneggers as the new blueprint of sexiness affected both straight and queer communities, as gay men all over attempted to emphasize their health through bodybuilding (and steroid use, which—as a needle drug—made the situation worse). Things have swung back the other way in the years since (famously, 2018 was crowned by one writer as the dawning of the age of the twink), and back again at an even faster rate. Widespread use of social media platforms that keep its audience engaged by feeling bad about themselves, the rise of self-marketing on said social media as one of the few (extremely unlikely) bids for class mobility, the propaganda about health and virility that always accompany fascist trends, and pandemic-era social isolation combining into a horrible Voltron of body dysmorphia unlike anything history has ever seen. 

I spent a long time at war with my body because of the culture I came of age in, and there’s an existential loneliness that I recognize in Grace from certain points in my life (not that I’m any less single now, but I’m managing). Life can be miserable when there’s something about your physical appearance that you can’t change, that you exhaust yourself trying to change (Grace mentions a half dozen diets that produced no results), and when people not only can’t see past that, but also see your inability to change it as a moral failure of willpower. For Grace, this is further compounded by her father’s negligent absenteeism in her life, and he and her stepmother both pile on her about how her life would improve if she just lost some weight. I felt for Grace, and so her desire to go outside the bounds of acceptable social behavior was understandable, albeit only condonable in a fictional, heightened romcom world. Grand romantic plans of this nature rarely work out in the real world, but it’s fun to watch it play out in a fairy tale fantasy where the girl with the wicked(ish) stepmother finds love with the prince when she wins his heart while breaking him free of a loveless engagement. And then they kiss in a subway!

About twenty years later, this same kind of thing would be tackled again, but less deftly. TV movies of the 90s and the turn of the century were more focused on “in” eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, and were either fictionalized “ripped from the headlines” scripts or biopics like Dying to be Thin (1996). Starting around 2005, however, there were a lot more films focused on what it was like to be stigmatized as a fat person. To Be Fat Like Me, a 2007 Lifetime original starring Kaley Cuoco who puts on a fat suit to prove to her heavier family members that their experiences of bullying are overstated, only to realize that, nope, people do treat her differently (none of this is made up). A year later, the crown jewel (to some, and crown turd to others), Queen Sized, about an overweight teen girl who becomes her suburban high school’s homecoming queen, also premiered on Lifetime; this one is worth mentioning since the main character was played by Nikki Blonsky, who portrayed Tracy Turnblad (a role originated by Ricki Lake) just a year prior in the 2007 Hairspray. Although films like these are aiming at the same “accept yourself” theme as Baby Cakes, they don’t feel as authentic. They feel manufactured to fulfill a quota or try to cheat some kind of grant out of a “stop bullying” campaign rather than an honest story about a girl whose looks don’t match the current zeitgeist but who is empowered to take the reins of her life by a few passionate weeks with a troubled (but not too troubled) stud. She stands up for herself to her family, she leaves behind her abusive boss and takes the first steps into finding work in the land of the living, and she gets the guy in the end. The big speeches in the Aughts TV movies about this kind of thing are too serious and self-important, while the offbeat surreality of Baby Cakes means that Grace’s monologues can be sweet without being saccharine, sincere but injected with bits of humor that make her feel more like a fully realized person and less like a sock puppet for a workshopped-to-death speech in a basic cable melodrama. 

Since we’ve mentioned most of the supporting characters who contributed to the overall atmosphere of the film, I think it would be a missed opportunity not to bring up Grace’s boss at the funeral parlor, who was both hilariously awful and awfully hilarious. He’s clearly a terrible employer, as he attempts to tell Grace she can’t take four weeks off (for her long-term plan to stalk Rob day and night, but he doesn’t know this) because she was late for a cumulative thirteen minutes that month. This tips into funny when he goes on that he needs her – not only because of Keri’s terrible workmanship (we later learn that she tried to fluff up a corpse’s chest with tissue paper, so he’s not incorrect on this point), but also because it’s the holidays, which means it’s their busy season. Later on, he can’t help but play salesman in the middle of a funeral, giving a eulogy in which he mentions the deceased’s desire to one day own a white Cadillac, and that he was “driving one today!”, smacking the casket by his side and declaring it the best that money can buy like he was peddling a 1988 Taurus. Truly wonderful stuff. 

Lagniappe

Britnee: Currently, Ricki Lake is getting a lot of media attention for her recent weight loss. If you Google her, you’ll be bombarded with articles about her losing 35 pounds. I’m glad that she’s thriving, but I hate that this latest Ricki Lake revival is focused, yet again, on her body. How long until the general public rediscovers Baby Cakes? Will they reboot a second time to modernize it? My anxiety about this sacred film being tainted with a terrible remake is very real. I just know they’re going to put the new Grace on Ozempic and, God forbid, bring in Ricki Lake for a cameo where she slaps the Sugar Babies out of Grace’s hands.

Brandon: I, of course, had to watch the original 1985 German film Sugarbaby for completion’s sake, and it turns out this made-for-American-TV remake is a shockingly faithful adaptation.  A lot of the exact scenes and plot details of Baby Cakes are copied directly from its source text, and everything it adds to flesh out the story is pure romcom quirk: the figure-skating hobby, the goofy painting, the supermarket wedding, the hypochondriac bestie, etc.  Sugarbaby is a much sparser, sadder movie as a result, but it’s also incredibly stylish.  Every scene is overloaded with enough color-gel crosslighting to make you wonder if it was directed by Dario Argento under a pseudonym, and it’s much more comfortable hanging out in silence with its downer protagonist instead of constantly voicing her internal anxieties in dialogue.  It also doesn’t go out of its way to leave the audience feeling clean & upbeat.  In Sugarbaby, the subway conductor is married, not engaged, and his affair with the mortician doesn’t necessarily leave either lover in better shape, making for a much more emotionally & morally complicated narrative. It’s almost objectively true that Sugarbaby is smarter, cooler, and prettier than Baby Cakes by every cinematic metric, and yet because it doesn’t have the bubbly star power of a Hairspray-era Ricki Lake (or that incredible elevator-music theme song) it ends up feeling like the inferior film anyway. 

Boomer: Sometimes, looking back over the width and breadth of topics that we’ve covered, in print and audio, in brief and perhaps too extensively, I’m fascinated to see how much we’ve grown at Swampflix over a decade, but I also love how each of us has a handful of movies that “feel” like they were made for just one amongst us. I was five minutes into this one and I thought, “This is such a Britnee movie,” and I mean that in the most affectionate way possible. Weirdly, another example I thought of as a definitive Britnee movie was Mrs. Winterbourne, so I was surprised when I went back to that one to realize that it was actually nominated by a different contributor. This one shares that only-in-the-80s romcom energy where our lead finds love through fraud, stalking, and seduction with The Boyfriend School, though, which was a Britnee selection. Salud, colleague; you are a woman of distinct and delightful taste. 

Next month: Brandon presents The Swimmer (1968)

-The Swampflix Crew

Podcast #216: Sick – The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997)

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Welcome to Episode #216 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Nail Club‘s Sara Nicole Storm to discuss the 1997 outsider-artist documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist.

00:00 Nail Club
12:56 Sick (1997)

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

Bubble (2005)

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Even more so than your Slow Cinema auteur of choice, Steven Soderbergh is the master of the mundane. He consistently makes tight, thrilling, wryly funny dispatches from the florescent-lit hell pits of American tedium.  A 70min experiment in early-2000s digi cinematography and purposefully deflated genre payoffs, Bubble is a perfect illustration of that skill.  Its vision of America is a complex labyrinth of small-town diners, factory breakrooms, and low-ceiling apartments.  The doomed souls who navigate those mundane spaces all work multiple jobs for the privilege of getting paid minimum wage, wondering in their spare time what it might have been like if they had stuck it out for a full high school diploma.  When jailed for a violent crime, they complain “It’s horrible in here,” but it’s so oppressively bland everywhere else that it’s questionable whether rotting in a concrete cell is any worse than being free to work their next shift.  Even the murder that lands them there is bleakly, purposefully uninteresting. 

I suppose there’s some novelty in what type of Midwest factory employs these small-town workers.  Bubble was shot in a real, operational doll parts factory in Ohio, which makes for some horrific digital-video footage in early scenes.  The mundanity of the world outside the assembly line quickly closes in, though.  Loneliness & petty jealousies shared among three of the factory workers leads to one of their murders, with only one clear suspect and no real need to investigate.  A deleted scene explains the psychology behind that act of violence like the Freudian denouement of Hitchcock’s Psycho, but Soderbergh removes even that morsel of narrative satisfaction from the final cut.  He also undercuts the potential for dramatic excitement or emotion by casting non-actor locals to play the central parts, mumbling their semi-improvised lines through obvious shyness.  Even the camera’s movements are pedestrian, often just swiveling on a stationary tri-pod like an oscillating security cam.  It’s all very matter of fact, and the facts of the matter are all grim, grey gruel.

Handling the editing & cinematography himself under pseudonyms, Soderbergh seemed to be having fun playing around with the unpretentious tools of the new digital filmmaking era.  He even got hands-on in Bubble‘s distribution strategy, striking a deal with the Mark Cuban-owned cable company HDNet to release the film simultaneously in theaters, on-demand, and on physical disc.  His pitch was that hopefully audiences would be drawn to see the movie in theaters and, if they liked it, would pick up a physical copy for repeat viewings on the way home.  Corporate theater chains were outraged at this disruption to the traditional theatrical window, but that day-and-date release strategy has obviously become more of a standard practice in recent years.  Bubble was supposed to be the first of six HDNet releases with the same improvised-drama filming methods and unconventional home distribution schedules, but instead it flopped and mostly fell out of circulation.  I had to find my DVD copy second-hand, and it only includes a Spanish-language subtitles track, so it likely traveled far to reach me.

Forever adaptable, Soderbergh has been doing just fine in the two decades since the Bubble debacle.  If anything, he’s since moved on to making straight-to-HBO cheapies instead of straight-to-HDNet cheapies, which feels like a minor step up in prestige.  He’s also had a few theatrical hits since then and has flirted with the idea of early retirement, only to discover that he’d rather be making movies no matter the scale in production or distribution.  Bubble is not his most exciting, imaginative dispatch from the great mediocre American void (that would be Schizopolis), but it might be the most indicative example of his stripped-down, unfussy style.  In most other cases where a career-shifting work from a major filmmaker had fallen out of distribution, it would be tempting to petition for a spiffy new digital restoration from a boutique Blu-ray label.  In Bubble‘s case, it feels totally appropriate for it to be stuck in time on thrift-store DVDs.  The only reason to reissue it, really, would be for a new director’s commentary track looking back on how the industry has changed in the past couple decades, since Soderbergh happens to be the master of those too.

-Brandon Ledet

But I’m a Bootlegger

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1999 was an incredible year for the high school comedy.  It was the year of Drop Dead Gorgeous, 10 Things I Hate About You, Drive Me Crazy, Cruel Intentions, Jawbreaker, Election, and the lesbian conversion-therapy satire But I’m a Cheerleader.  Only, I didn’t immediately see But I’m a Cheerleader the year it was released, nor did I find a copy at my local video store in the years that followed.  Jamie Babbit’s calling-card comedy was just as revered as its better-distributed contemporaries among my friends in the early aughts, but as someone who relied on the limited, sanitized selection of the Meraux branch of Blockbuster Video in those days, it just never made its way into my bedroom VCR.  So, But I’m a Cheerleader fell under a distinctly 90s category of movies that I saw for the first time after listening to their CD soundtracks for years.  See also: Clueless, Romeo+Juliet, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; all bangers.  I eventually fell in love with the candy-coated production design and post-John Waters queer irreverence of the film proper when I finally had access to it on DVD in the 2010s, but it already occupied a pastel-painted corner of my mind by then thanks to the familiar sounds of Dressy Bessy, Wanda Jackson, and soundtrack-MVP April March (whose anglicized cover of “Chick Habit” fully conveys the movie’s tone & aesthetic before you’ve made it through the opening credits).

Imagine my shock, then, to recently learn that But I’m a Cheerleader never had an official soundtrack release.  To me, its pop music soundscape is just as iconic as any teen movies’ you could name – Fast Times, Breakfast Club, Dirty Dancing, whatever.  And yet, there was apparently no legal way to access that soundtrack outside watching the movie start to end, straining to hear the songs past the spoken dialogue and VHS tape hiss.  In retrospect, the copy of the soundtrack I owned in high school must have been a burned CD traded with a friend, which was some truly heroic mixtape work that I never fully appreciated until now.  Come to think of it, I remember that CD having more April March tracks than the one that’s actually associated with the film, so I’m not even fully sure what was on it anymore.  It was a one-of-a-kind bootleg put together by an obsessive fan who was frustrated that they couldn’t access an official release, passed around as an act of public service thanks to the modern miracle of the CD-R drive. It may not have been accurate to the track list of the songs as they were sequenced in the film, but it was accurate enough to the cheeky humor, swooning romance, and cult enthusiasm of But I’m a Cheerleader that it kept the movie fresh in my mind for as long as it took to find it.  It’s yet another reminder “bootlegger” is just a dirty word for D.I.Y. archivist.

I didn’t know about this outrageous distribution oversight until a recent screening of But I’m a Cheerleader at a neighborhood bar, hosted by Future Shock Video.  A kind of bootleg revival of the vintage video store experience, Future Shock has been screening VHS-era classics around the city in recent months, mostly to promote the opening of their new weekends-only storefront.  This particular screening was a special one, though.  As a Pride Month event and a fundraiser for the Covenant House homeless shelter, Future Shock not only projected But I’m a Cheerleader for a packed barroom, but they also dubbed a small batch of unofficial But I’m a Cheerleader soundtracks on audio cassette.  By now, the movie itself has unquestionably been canonized among the Queer Cinema greats, but I was still delighted that the event was designed as a celebration of its all-timer of a soundtrack in particular.  I was also shocked to learn that the practice of distributing that soundtrack has always been a mixtape-only endeavor, when it should have been in just as many record stores as the official tie-in soundtracks for Clueless or Can’t Hardly Wait.  It turns out that passing around copies of the But I’m a Cheerleader soundtrack was just as much of a public service in the early 2000s as it is now in the mid-2020s.  My Sharpie-labeled CD copy then was not as pretty as the cassette I picked up the other night, though, so I’m including pictures of Future Shock’s version below.

It’s not too late for an official release of the But I’m a Cheerleader soundtrack.  If anything, the time is ripe.  Not only is the film more widely seen and beloved than ever, but its exclusivity as a first-time release would also play directly into physical media obsessives’ debilitating FOMO.  I just watched a bar full of young, queer movie nerds crowd around a humble tripod projector screen to watch this movie with their friends on a Wednesday night; there’s an audience for it.  Until that historical wrong is corrected and the soundtrack receives its first official release, all you can really do is make your own mixtape version based on the track list compiled below.  That can be a little tricky for the more independent artists on the soundtrack like Tattle Tale, who do not have the same far-reaching distribution as a Wanda Jackson or a RuPaul.  Speaking from experience, though, you could probably just sub out a similar-sounding track from the Tattle Tale-adjacent act Bonfire Madigan and no one would really know the difference.  Thankfully, Future Shock did not cut any corners in their own unofficial But I’m a Cheerleader soundtrack, but it would have been okay if they did. The off-brand, inaccurate version I had on CD in high school still did the trick.

  1. “Chick Habit (Laisse tomber les filles)” by April March
  2. “Just Like Henry” by Dressy Bessy
  3. “If You Should Try and Kiss Her” by Dressy Bessy
  4. “Trailer Song” by Sissy Bar
  5. “All or Nothing” by Miisa
  6. “We’re in the City” by Saint Etienne
  7. “The Swisher” by Summer’s Eve
  8. “Funnel of Love” by Wanda Jackson
  9. “Ray of Sunshine” by Go Sailor
  10. “Glass Vase Cello Case” by Tattle Tale
  11. “Party Train” by RuPaul
  12. “Evening in Paris” Lois Maffeo
  13. “Together Forever in Love” by Go Sailor

-Brandon Ledet