If you spend enough time on the Internet, you’ll find that the two biggest stories to result from the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris were not of personal or athletic triumph. They were stories of spectacular, humanizing failure. I am, of course, referring to French athlete Anthony Ammirati’s pole-vaulting mishap when his Olympic dreams were thwarted by his massive dong, which knocked down the bar he was supposed to clear in an otherwise successful jump. I am also referring to new online microcelebrity Raygun, an Australian breakdancer who partially worked her way into the competition by earning her PhD in the “sport”. There were some legitimately impressive breakdancers who competed at the Olympics this year, but Raygun was not one of them. Her awkward, corny dance moves on that worldwide stage were comically embarrassing, epitomizing the instant cringe of watching white people participate in hip-hop with a little too much gusto. As funny as Raygun’s televised failure and the resulting memes have been in the past week, she’s also left a mark on The Culture in negative ways. It’s not difficult to imagine that the announced decision to exclude breaking from the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles was somewhat influenced by the worldwide mockery her performance attracted to the event, despite the athleticism of the dozens of talented dancers who competed beside her. She also set public opinion on white nerds’ enthusiasm for old-school hip-hop back decades, at least as far back as the Backpack Rap days of the early 2000s.
Thankfully, there’s an excellent counterbalance to Raygun’s breakdancing shenanigans currently making the theatrical rounds, rehabilitating some of that white nerd street cred. The new Irish music industry drama Kneecap details the rise to fame of the titular rap trio Kneecap, played by the group’s real-life members. Set during a recent push to have Ireland’s native language recognized by the occupying government of the United Kingdom as legitimate and politically protected, the film characterizes its Irish-speaking stars as both cultural activists and shameless hedonists. Because their public persona includes openly distributing & consuming hard drugs, they’re seen by fellow Irish speakers as a threat to the legitimacy of their shared Civil Rights cause. Kneecap may be partyboys at heart, but they’re just as dedicated to the mission as the advocates pushing for the Irish Language Act on television. They’re just doing it in dive bars and Spotify playlists instead, inspiring renewed interest and usage of the language by modernizing it through hip-hop. Both the group and the movie are clear-eyed in their political messaging, repeating the mantra “Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom” as many times as it can be shoehorned into the dialogue. That’s about as legitimate of a case of white artists participating in old school hip-hop as you’re ever likely to find. It’s purposeful, and it’s genuine.
While the political messaging and the rags-to-slightly-nicer-rags story structure of Kneecap are fairly straightforward, director Rich Peppiatt at least finds ways to match the group’s messy, energetic songwriting in the film’s visual style. English translations of Irish rap lyrics appear onscreen in animated notebook scribbles. Drug-induced hallucinations are represented in extreme fish-eye lens framing and crude stop-motion puppetry. Michael Fassbender, playing one of the rappers’ political activist father, appears in a strobelit, dreamlike sequence so directly inspired by the liminal nightclub visions of Aftersun that it’s surprising when he returns alive just a couple scenes later. All of this frantic music video visual style is wrangled in by a guiding voice narration track, framing Kneecap as a revision of Trainspotting about how doing drugs with your friends will improve your life, not ruin it. That Trainspotting connection gets explicit when the band’s DJ dives headfirst into a garbage can to recover a lost strip of LSD, recalling Ewan McGregor flushing himself down a dive bar toilet. I don’t know that Kneecap is the most dramatically satisfying rise-to-fame story for D.I.Y. musicians suffering the remnants of British imperialism that I’ve seen in recent years; that honor likely belongs to either Gully Boy or We Are Ladyparts. It’s an exceptionally energetic one, though, and it’s got a great soundtrack to match.
Just in case the novelty of an Irish-language rap soundtrack or the effort to make the best Danny Boyle movie since 28 Days Later is not enough to draw an audience, Kneecap also mine some genuine dramatic tension from its relatively small cast. Michael Fassbender represents an older, more reserved way of undermining British oppression, continuing to participate in IRA resistance as a kind of ineffectual ghost. Simone Kirby is a scene-stealer as his estranged wife, struggling against her agoraphobia to mobilize the silent but powerful mothers behind the more vocal Irish rebels. The middle-aged DJ Próvaí is committed to the cause as well, but has to hide from his wife and school-faculty employers that he’s been publicly doing hard drugs with twentysomethings at rap concerts as part of his own political praxis. In one of the more surprising dramatic side plots, one Kneecap member grapples with the intoxicating eroticism of oppression, bringing his politics into the bedroom by having kinky roleplay sex with a local Brit who’s offended by his more inflammatory lyrics. Not all of Kneecap is a rap-soundtracked party fueled by raver drugs ordered over the internet. There’s actual substance and political intent behind its participation in hip-hop culture, which is more than you can say for poor Raygun’s brief moment of fame on the Olympic stage.
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, Boomeris 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.
Following on the heels of The Death of Superman, this film picks up six months later. Despite the appearance of four heirs apparent to the mantle of the Man of Steel, crime in Metropolis is on the rise. Who are these mystery men? There’s the youthful “Metropolis Kid” (who insists he is the new Superman but is nicknamed “Superboy”), a teen with Superman’s powers; there’s the more “energy projection” less “physical punching” Last Son of Krypton (who is later dubbed “The Eradicator” because of his catchphrase that “[X] must be eradicated”), who practices a less nuanced view of morality and justice than the Superman we knew and loved; there’s a new Man of Steel as embodied by super-scientist John Henry Irons in a mech suit (you know him as “Steel”); and finally, claiming to be the real Superman reanimated and undergoing ongoing repair by Kryptonian technology, there’s a half-mechanical Man of Tomorrow, a “Cyborg Superman,” if you will. In the midst of all of this, Lois and the Kents are forced to veil their grief, as “Clark” is simply “missing,” while they alone know that Superman and Clark were buried in the same coffin, although that resting place has been disturbed and the body of the late Kryptonian is missing . . .
I was surprised how much I ended up enjoying this one. The last film was little more than set-up for this one, and to be honest, there was more foreshadowing in that one that paid off here than even I realized. For instance, I did mention that there was a tour that Lois took of the lab where Kal-El’s ship was being stored and that there were holograms that were part of that ship’s records, but I didn’t imagine at the time that this was laying the groundwork for one of the false heirs, Eradicator, to actually be a hologram from the ship, one that we got to see in the first film. It had also been a while since we saw Kal-El and Diana dating, so the reminder in Death that they had a past not only contributed to the reality of their close friendship in that film, but also laid groundwork for some really nice interaction between Diana and Lois. That’s a level of detail I didn’t expect to see, and was pleasantly surprised by. These movies usually run half the length of their MCU “counterparts,” so there’s a lot less of the casual hanging out that characterizes those films and which were such an important component in that series becoming as popular as it did at its height. They run leaner and sparser, but the decision to split this overarching story into two films serves both but does this one a lot of good (that this one is 87 minutes, one of the longer of these animated features, also helps). There’s room to breathe, and there came a moment in the film where I thought to myself “Wow, a lot sure has happened in this one,” which is not something that often crosses my mind during these screenings.
There are a lot of touches here that I really like. Superboy is initially pretty obnoxious, but the revelation that he picks up his cringeworthy slang from nineties sitcoms makes it a little more tolerable, and there’s an unusually subtle animation choice that works as a nice piece of foreshadowing; the supposed clone of Superman does not share the hero’s blue eyes, and his eyes are instead grey, like Luthor’s, which makes sense when we later learn that Lex’s DNA was added to the mix. That’s an uncommon level of attention to detail for these movies, and it did not go unnoticed in this household. The misdirect regarding the Fortress of Solitude caretaker robots referring to “Kal-El” absorbing energy while the camera pans past Eradicator is a nice one too; although we in the audience know that he’s not the real Superman, it still creates an air of mystery as to why his robots would think that Eradicator was, until it’s revealed that this was the audience’s confusion, not theirs. The scenes between Lois and Irons are also a lot of fun as she, a woman infamous for not seeing through the thinnest of disguises, says that his civilian cover isn’t very good. As the most straightforwardly heroic of the potential new Supermen, he feels like a good addition to this universe, alongside Superboy, who is a lot more fun once the narrative stops making him such a horndog.
Within the narrative, there’s a really nice escalation of stakes when a visit from the president (who bears a marked resemblance to Hillary Clinton, which, um) to the site of the launch of the Justice League’s new Watchtower satellite. The Cyborg Superman, who has just spent some time trying to convince Lois that he’s the real Supes—just with really extensive prosthetics and some memory loss—mostly stands by when a boom tube portal opens and several of Darkseid’s minions, called “parademons,” exit and start to attack the site. Although the combined forces of the League and the Supermen are enough to fight off the parademons, the portal through which they arrived “falls” to the earth and appears to kill the League, leaving only a crater. From there, it’s revealed that the Cyborg Superman is none other than Hank Henshaw, the presumed dead astronaut from part one, who was “rescued” by Darkseid so that he could be an emissary. He begins to hand out devices that give normal people superpowers, although this is a feint intended to use the newly empowered individuals to help bring Darkseid’s forces to earth. And, of course, the real Superman, who has been slowly recovering inside of his pod, emerges just in time to resume the fight, although he’s initially too weak to do much fighting, until the Watchtower is launched and the sun rises, and … well, the rest is history.
Everyone gets a moment to shine here, which is nice. I was surprised by how emotionally invested I had become by the time of this film’s climax, and the moment when Steel and Superboy team up to distract the assimilated Darkseid army was surprisingly potent; I didn’t pump my fist in the air, but I did get a big smile on my face, despite the fact that the fight scenes in these movies are rarely that exciting to me. Lois gets to have her face-off with the man who claimed to be her dead lover, and even Lex gets a rare moment of heroism when he manages to activate a portal that allows the Justice League to return from the purgatory dimension they were stuck in and act as the cavalry in the final battle. The fight scenes themselves are some of the best that these movies have had to offer, too, with more fluid and dynamic motion than these films have mustered, giving a slightly anime-esque feel that I appreciated. I was ultimately pretty taken aback at just how well this one worked, both as a film unto itself and as a part of this subfranchise, and it really stands out. If I had to make a complaint, it’s that there’s an extratextual piece of information that makes this feel somewhat abortive. There are only three of these “DCAMU” films left, one of which is a Batman feature (of course), one of which is a Wonder Woman movie (the first since 2009’s Wonder Woman, ten years and thirty-three films prior), and a Justice League Dark sequel to serve as the finale. It doesn’t really feel like there’s going to be another chance to check in on Superboy and Steel, which is a bit of a bummer, as they really helped with the feeling that this franchise still had a lot of room to grow and expand, and they were fun characters with the potential for some really fascinating storytelling. Of course, if there’s anything about DC that’s proven to be true over the years, it’s that they will squeeze every last drop out of their IP and then grind the dust to make break if they can, so it’s possible that these last three won’t be the last three, but I won’t be holding my breath. This is a high note for one of the last few installments, and I’d give it a chance, especially if you can combine it as a double feature with its predecessor.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Georges Franju’s surgical horror classic Eyes Without a Face (1960).
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 Brandon made Britnee & Boomer watch The Swimmer (1968).
Brandon: I first discovered the surreal 60s melodrama The Swimmer when we covered director Frank Perry’s late-career mainstream comedy Hello Again for a previous Movie of the Month. I watched a few great films from Perry that month, but the dream-state machismo of this one in particular has constantly been on my mind in the few years since. Even so, I can’t think of a better time to revisit The Swimmer than now. Not only was its film-nerd awareness boosted during its brief run on the Criterion Channel earlier this year, but it’s also been so brutally, unrelentingly hot outside that all I want to do is look at, dive into, and drown in swimming pools. Every day that I have to take the bus or walk home from work in the Caribbean hell heat of downtown New Orleans, I like to imagine how wonderful it would be if I could swim my way across the city in an endless line of swimming pools instead, just like in Perry’s film. It really put a different spin on those awful “Proud to swim home” bumper stickers that littered the city in the years after Hurricane Katrina.
On a less whimsical note, The Swimmer has also taken on some additional relevance for me this US presidential election season. There’s something about watching a delusional egotist refuse to face the reality of his age and his social responsibilities until he crashes into it like a brick wall that just “hits different” this year. A past-his-prime Burt Lancaster stars as that titular egotist: a functional alcoholic who relies a little too heavily on his outdated social status as the neighborhood partyboy for a family man of his middle age. He spends the entire movie downing cocktails poolside in his signature Speedo, shamelessly flirting with every woman who’s in butt-slapping distance no matter age or marital status. You can’t say he’s a man without ambition, though. On a whim, the suburban hedonist declares that he is going to “swim home” by visiting a string of friends’ backyard pools across his wealthy upstate Connecticut neighborhood. On the journey, we witness the exact moment his carefree hunk status sours among the local socialites, so that he has no friends or family left at the end of his selfish, Quixotic quest for permanent leisure.
The “swimming home” plot of The Swimmer sounds like an absurdly vapid premise for a movie, but Frank Perry (along with then-wife Eleanor Perry, who wrote most of his early screenplays) somehow molds it into a low-key mind-melter of 1960s moral rot. He mostly pulls that off by digging into the aquatic anti-hero’s psyche, charting the progress of the story more through character revelations than through the practical details of the borderline supernatural plot. Instead of only traveling by the “continuous” “river” of swimming pools he initially envisions over his morning cocktail, Lancaster spends a lot of runtime galloping alongside horses, casually strolling through forests, and crossing highway traffic barefoot. He does often emerge from one borrowed swimming pool to the next, though, and along the way we sink deeper into the ugliness of his himbo playboy lifestyle. He starts the film as a masterful charmer, seducing the world (or at least the world’s wives and mistresses) with an infectious swinging-60s bravado. By the time he swims his last pool, we recognize him as a miserable piece of shit who doesn’t deserve to kiss the feet of the infinite wonderful women from his past who we meet along the way. The overall result is sinisterly ludicrous beefcake melodrama, presented in lurid Technicolor.
I do think it’s strange that a movie with such a high-concept premise is so willing to brush aside its own internal logic. Perry could have easily edited the story together so that the pools all appeared connected, without worrying about real-world practicality. What did y’all make of the parts of The Swimmer where Lancaster travels by land instead of by water? Did they feel like a shortcut cheat on his “swimming home” project or were they just as strangely compelling as his dips in the pool?
Britnee: Ned is bonkers, and I absolutely loved watching him unravel among the country club elite. Particularly the hot dog cart scene where Ned fights with the homeowner of the party he crashes about ownership of a hot dog cart. This is Americana!
When thinking about Ned’s swimming pool challenge, having him truly not swim all the way home made watching his misery all the more delightful. He failed his own project where he made the rules; this guy sucks so much. I also really enjoyed all of the wild non-swimming barefoot activities, such as jumping horse hurdles and walking on the road while barefoot. I wasn’t expecting a gore element in this movie, but good God, those feet were torn up.
Boomer: Oh boy, but I did love this one. I have my own affection for the idea of swimming home. For years, my best friend has teased me whenever I look at a body of water and think “I wonder if I could swim in that,” and living where I live now, there are so many beautiful bodies of water that are tempting, especially when the pool in my building often gets too hot in the summer to be refreshing (last year, my neighbor temped it at 92 degrees one August day). Last year, we defused the summer heat by going to a local outdoor watering hole called Jessica Hollis Park, which was wonderful. We would load up the car, head out as a quartet, and spend five to six hours out there in the crisp, cool water from the Colorado River; one friend got a snorkel set for me and I would often spend a couple of those hours just snorkeling and swimming. On one of the last days of summer, while I looked back wistfully as our car climbed the hill, I said that sometimes I wished that I could just live down there, and my best friend said that, while the rest of the party watched me snorkeling, they had joked that “every summer, he gets closer and closer to becoming amphibious.” I never get tired of it. Luckily, unlike Ned, I never have to experience a series of increasingly hostile neighbors and former friends each time that I surface.
What I liked most about this was the tinge of surreal horror that goes on throughout. When we first meet Ned, he emerges from the woods, clad only in his bathing suit, and greets two neighbors who welcome him warmly and affectionately. Even they, however, are surprised by some of the things that he says, particularly when he mentions that he has a desire for his two daughters to have their weddings in the Merrill house one day; this takes them aback and is our first and earliest indication that Ned is, in some way, living in a state of delusion. For the rest of the film, no matter how much time passes, he is insistent on a few precepts, from which he cannot deviate: that he must “swim home” via the pool route, that his daughters are at that very moment playing tennis, and that his wife Lucinda is waiting for him. The first few people whom he encounters take this in stride with little exception, but as he approaches his destination, those he meets are less inclined to partake in the maintenance of his illusions, although they are never able to dissuade him or bring him back to reality. Of particular note is one man who seems to be Ned’s true friend, who tells him about a job that Ned might be right for that could help him get back on his feet, which Ned shrugs off as unnecessary, causing the man to be somewhat offended that Ned thinks he has to maintain his pride and insist that he needs no such thing; to watch him shout “There’s no need to pretend with me,” while Ned runs off with a girl less than half his age, rejecting what may well be his last chance at salvation, is heartbreaking.
I also really loved the way that we get a slow trickle of information about what a fraud and a failure Ned is that slowly turns into a torrent, before ending in a rainstorm so vast that it threatens to consume him. Although this information never shakes his faith in his destination, it does begin to deteriorate his image of himself, so that the sexy, still fit older man who, in the film’s opening scenes, is the envy of his fellow middle aged men and declares that he still feels as athletic and powerful as he did before he took his first drink or had his first smoke (he can even keep pace with a horse!), eventually becomes a limping, tired, cold man whose feet are (as Britnee noted) in bad shape. First, there is the couple that is happy to greet him, then the mother of a man he says was a friend of his, but whom she states he never came to see in the hospital; Ned doesn’t even know that the man, Eric Hammar, seems to have died from his injuries. He happens upon his daughters’ former babysitter, now twenty, and whisks her away, indicating that he’s moving into a place where only the sweetly naive have faith in him, and even the girl’s younger brother seems to find the whole idea of “swimming home” odd and perhaps even sinister. Here, we learn more about just how delusional he is, as he asks the girl, Julie, to come up to the house and babysit, but she knows that his daughters are too old to need that kind of minding. From here, we head to the party where Ned is presented with his last chance to get off of his self-destructive path, as he comes upon the only woman in the film who would be responsive to his advances and the aforementioned friend who tells him about a potential job, but he rejects them both in favor of running off with a woman thirty-five years younger than he is in order to lovebomb her following her confession of a childhood crush on him. He scares her off eventually, and the narrative takes a real turn here, as things become more sinister and we get to see Ned in his worst moment in the film.
There is a moment where Ned comes upon the home of a wealthy nudist couple, just as their chauffeur arrives at the gate. Ned calls out to him using the wrong name, which in part reiterates for us that Ned’s regression into fantasy is also a regression into his past, as if he has a kind of euphoria-induced amnesia of the last few years when everything went wrong. It’s textual that he “forgets” how old his daughters are and that his wife has left him, as well as “not remembering” that one of his “friends” had died, so it’s natural that he might also “not remember” that one of his neighbors had changed employees. Subtextually, however, I think that this is also meant to highlight that Ned is, well, kind of a racist—mistaking one Black employee for another, as he asks the new driver if he ever met his predecessor, and then talks up said predecessor for all of his fine qualities. The new driver (he’s credited as “Halloran’s Chauffeur;” my apologies for not being able to give a name) then asks if the old driver had “natural rhythm,” to which Ned too-quickly replies, which earns him a bit of a side eye and a harrumph. Ned couldn’t tell these two men apart and then tried to ingratiate himself through stereotypes, and although his mental state degrades further, this is the first time that we see him commit a real moral wrong (trespassing and grabassing notwithstanding).
Things just get worse from here, where he ends up at a party where the hostess calls him a gate crasher and insults him, implying a past when Ned was her social better and the Merrills snubbed her and her husband, but that the latter couple is now the one with more social cache and status. After embarrassing himself by throwing a fit over the hot dog wagon that Britnee mentioned, he ends up in the middle of the film’s show-stopping performance from Janice Rule, who reveals herself to be an actress and Ned’s former lover before he ditched her. This is where we learn the most about Ned, and it’s delivered terrifically: he was always a charmer, they had their affair, during which time he only ever took her out where they could blend in and be invisible, before dumping her in a very crowded and hoity-toity place via a bunch of tired old saws about “the duties of a father and a husband,” hoping that she wouldn’t make a scene (she did). It’s great stuff, and reveals to both us and—seemingly—Ned himself that he’s a real cad. Then, emerging from the largest pool yet (after having to degrade himself by begging for fifty cents as well as show an attendant that he had washed between his toes), he’s further humiliated by a grocer and a barshop owner. The barman initially shows sympathy and compassion for Ned while his wife and the grocer taunt him for his wife’s expensive and pretentious tastes, his lack of discipline with his children that has led them to running wild (there’s even a reference to their “wild driving” and an accident that was kept out of the papers, which I interpreted to possibly mean that one of his own children had been responsible for the collision that ultimately killed Eric Hammar), and his unpaid tabs at both establishments. The barman’s wife even degrades the memory of his daughters, saying that the two girls would come in and mock him constantly. First a trickle of information about Ned, then a river, and all of it very bleak and haunting.
One of the things that tickled me most about Ned was his constant referent to “tomorrow.” Every time someone talks about getting together: “Let’s grab lunch tomorrow,” “bring your money because we’re playing golf tomorrow,” “you’ll have to come out and babysit the girls tomorrow,” “come over tomorrow and play tennis with my daughters.” It tells us something interesting about his character, which is that Ned is a man who over-commits, just as he has to the physically demanding “swimming home” idea, just as he wanted to become Julie’s overly devoted lover/mentor/protector (ew) after spending a couple of hours together, just as he has bought too much into the idea that he can make something real if he believes it hard enough. It reminded me of the Popeye character Wimpy, and his classic quote (I guess?) “I’d gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today,” which only got funnier and sadder as he extorted a cup of lemonade from a child by buying it on credit, then later found himself groveling for the entry fee to a public pool. Ned’s problems are always tomorrow’s problems; today, he has to swim home.
Lagniappe
Britnee: I’ve heard wonderful things about The Swimmer for years, but I never had the appetite to watch it. Something about watching Burt Lancaster swim in suburbia for over an hour just didn’t put me in the movie watching mood. Back in my college years, I had to watch Lancaster’s Go Tell the Spartans movie for a history course, and ever since then, I can only see Lancaster as a very tired and very tan macho man in his late 60s/70s film era. In The Swimmer, he is indeed a very tired and very tan macho man, but with a much better flavor (and much worse hair).
Boomer: I would be remiss in my duties if I were not to note that Diana Muldaur appeared in both the original Star Trek series and Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the latter, she spent an entire season as the ship’s doctor while Gates McFadden took some time away from the show (coming back almost immediately after the firing of a producer whose had sexually harassed her). In the former, she played two separate guest characters. I looked them up again to be sure, but this film actually came out during the summer between her two appearances, as she appeared in “Return to Tomorrow” in February 1968, The Swimmer released in May of 1968, and her second ST episode “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” aired in October of 1968. Big year for Muldaur-heads! (It also feels remiss not to note that Joan Rivers is in this movie, as a woman who tells Ned that she doesn’t get the appeal of pools, as they’re “murder on [her] hair.”)
I borrowed the Blu-ray for this one from my local library, and it’s a fun disc. The FBI warning and the “opinions expressed” disclaimer both have this goofy cartoon “water” overlay to make it look like you’re viewing it underwater, which was a novelty that I was surprisingly charmed by. The main menu also has a slickly edited montage of out-of-context scenes and beachy music that set up the feeling that you’re in for a groovy, sexy romp, which this movie definitely isn’t. I can only imagine the reaction of someone who wasn’t already vaguely familiar with the film’s concept picking this off of the shelf or out of a streaming line-up because of the hunky Lancaster on the cover and thinking that’s what they were about to watch, which is also very funny to me. Of course, they probably didn’t want to use the original poster despite the tagline “When you talk about ‘The Swimmer’ will you talk about yourself?” which is an all-timer—legendary—piece of film marketing.
Brandon: Time moves quick, whether or not you move along with it, as our overaged playboy protagonist discovers here. When I revisited The Swimmer for this conversation, Joe Biden was still stubbornly running for President in spite of loud, constant uproar urging him to step aside for someone younger & sharper to lead the Democratic Party. Trained to expect that nothing good ever happens, I assumed he was going to hold onto his delusions of youth & vigor all the way until an easily lost election. A lot has changed since then, but not so much that the film’s themes of a geriatric egotist refusing to cede power despite their obvious mental & moral slippage no longer has resonance in American electoral politics. Hell, as of this posting, there’s still one running for the office of US President.
Next month: Boomer presents Inherit the Wind (1960)
I recently picked up a used copy of Linda Williams’s landmark academic text Hard Core at The Book House in Dinky Town, a wonderful Minneapolis bookstore. Written in response to the anti-porn feminist movements of the 1980s, the cultural context of Hard Core‘s arguments may initially seem outdated, but it’s proven to be an extremely useful read. In attempting to assess the filmic medium of pornography from a neutral, objective distance, Williams found herself writing one of the first substantial academic works on the subject. She breaks the genre down to its building-block elements, performing a kind of autopsy on the fresh corpse of porno’s Golden Age, killed by the rise of home video. One of her methods in attempting to define pornography in academic terms (beyond the famously vague “I know it when I see it” definition coined by the Supreme Court) is finding direct 1:1 comparison with other cinematic genres. The most obvious go-to for those comparisons is usually the horror film, since they are both genres that intend to stimulate a physiological response in the audience. Williams goes a step further by citing horror’s “Final Girl” trope, indicating that pornography invites male viewers to identify with its female stars the same way they are when watching slashers. The genre comparison that really tickled me in Hard Core, though, was pornography’s likeness to the Old Hollywood musical, which I had never considered before.
The generic parallels between the porno and the musical are obvious once you start looking for them. Williams spends a lot of time cataloging the individual “numbers” that make up a typical porno feature (i.e, the blowjob scene, the masturbation scene, the lesbian scene, the group sex climax, etc.) and likens them to the way musicals stop their plot momentum dead to deliver a full song-and-dance number. She writes, “It is commonplace for critics and viewers to ridicule narrative genres that seem to be only flimsy excuses for something else—musicals and phonography in particular are often singled out as being really about song and dance or sex. But as much recent work on the movie musical has demonstrated, the episodic narratives typical of the genre are not simply frivolous pretexts for the display of song and dance; rather, narrative often permits the staging of song and dance spectacles as events themselves within the larger structure afforded by the story line.” In that paradigm, the spectacle of a blowjob or a threesome is just as worthy of a minutes-long break from narrative as a Fred & Ginger dance routine; they’re the very reason for the film’s existence. Porno may be similar to horror in its intent to provoke a bodily response in its audience, but in terms of narrative structure it’s much more akin to the movie musical. It’s a variation of musical with all of the usual song-and-dance numbers replaced by suck-and-fuck numbers instead.
Given this astute observation of the structural similarities between the porno and the musical, it’s incredible that Williams does not cite the 1981 feature Blonde Ambition in her research. It perfectly illustrates her point. Blonde Ambition is deliberately structured as an Old Hollywood backstage musical wherein all of the song-and-dance numbers are replaced by sex numbers. The movie chronicles the sexual exploits of the Kane Sisters (Suzy Mandel & Dory Devon) as they rise up the entertainment industry ranks from Podunk South vaudeville performers to reluctant porn stars to makeshift drag queens to Broadway legends. They’re characterized with a Gentlemen Prefer Blondes dynamic, wherein the older sister (Mendel) shrewdly negotiates their business deals while the younger, ditsier sister (Devon) constantly cruises for men. Like in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, there’s even a comedic mix-up involving a wealthy man’s inherited jewels (in this case, a diamond-encrusted broach instead of a diamond-encrusted tiara). Otherwise, Blonde Ambition reaches even further back into the great Hollywood songbook to follow the example of Busby Berkeley backstage musicals like 42nd Street, finding hokey humor & romance in the lives of off-duty Broadway performers. Only, the joke is that that the Kane Sisters are not especially talented. When they receive their first round of applause from a smitten hunk during their dive-bar stage act, they ask “What was that noise?” in total confusion.
Blonde Ambition‘s substitution of song-and-dance numbers for hardcore sex numbers is so direct and so literal that there’s no point in hammering the point home any further. My favorite example is a shower masturbation scene in which one of the sisters slips into what would normally be a dream ballet in another musical but instead is a kaleidoscopic homage to the gay-male psychedelia of Wakefield Poole’s Bijou. Directed by and partially starring gay men, Blonde Ambition also shares DNA with the Old Hollywood musical in the conceptual conflict of its heterosexual romance narrative versus its aesthetic appeals to queer sensibilities. Once the sisters make it to New York, they become overly friendly with a gay couple who live one floor below their apartment (including coercing them into sex with women, of course), and the whole saga climaxes at a dive-bar drag night hosted by one of those men. In an effort to reclaim possession of the Buckingham Broach, the women sneak into the bar undercover as drag queens, performing for a room full of leather daddies who find themselves disappointed (and comically horrified) by the resulting strip show. Blonde Ambition was ostensibly made with a straight male audience in mind, but it’s so classically Old Hollywood gay that it includes an “original gowns by” credit in its opening scroll.
Less surprisingly, it turns out the shared intersection of the Golden Age porno and the Golden Age musical is shameless hack comedy. Comedically, Blonde Ambition is located much closer to Branson than it is to Broadway, but its punny, campy humor is charming all the same. Between its cutaways to barnyard animal reaction shots and the costuming of its orgiastic Gone with the Wind parody sequence, the musical it most directly resembles is The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (released just one year later), which has just the right sweetly hokey flavor to counterbalance its old-fashioned sensibilities. Presumably, the locker room jockstrap number in that musical was also designed for a gay audience’s gaze, despite the totally hetero sex shenanigans in the foreground. Although Linda Williams does not directly assess Blonde Ambition in her book, she does frequently touch on that dissonance between the presumed sexual orientation of pornography’s target audience and the audience mostly likely to enjoy it. That topic mostly crops up in the way presumed-straight male consumers view pornography socially and value extraordinarily large male genitalia in their erotica, suggesting their enjoyment of the medium is somewhat inherently bisexual. In the addendum of my 1999 edition of Hard Core, Williams also references her own participation in that dissonance, explaining that as a straight female viewer, her favorite, most effective category of pornography depicts male-on-male gay sex, something that was presumably not made with her gaze in mind. Blonde Ambition works much in the same way. It’s self-categorized as a straight film, but most of its scene-to-scene appeal would be to gay men who enjoy vintage showtunes. Those men might have preferred to watch actual musical numbers instead of the sex numbers that provide the movie’s narrative-stopping spectacles, but the genre’s dissonance is often its greatest source of fascination & entertainment, especially after decades of distance.
When I first moved to Austin, there were four different video rental locations that were still open, despite the fact that streaming was already nearly omnipresent at the time. There were two locations for I Luv Video and two for Vulcan Video, with both organizations consolidating into one storefront each by 2020 and both of them ultimately closing during the pandemic. In those days, my devotion was to Vulcan Video, even though the giant outdoor mural of Spock on their campus-adjacent “North Vulcan” location, which I saw when visiting the city before moving, was long gone by the time that they had been pushed out to North Loop Boulevard. Back then, I Luv Video’s website didn’t have a catalog search feature, while Vulcan did, and that won me over. Back when I wrote about every Dario Argento movie, every single one of those DVDs was rented from Vulcan North (except for Le cinque giornate, which was, and to my knowledge remains, only available on VHS). Within the past year, however, both Vulcan and ILV have returned in some form, with the collection of the former being donated to the Alamo Drafthouse and operating as “Vulcan” out of the Village location, while ILV is now known as We Luv Video and has set up shop in the exact location that was once Vulcan North. They recently had their first anniversary and threw a block party to celebrate, with VHS swapping and getting new members to sign up. I was won over by the pitch, and invited my friend to have a nineties movie night this week, wherein we would go to the video store to pick out a movie, order a pizza, and enjoy. One of the great things about having a local rental store again is the “Staff Picks” selection, and my companion was immediately drawn to Happy Together, Wong Kar-wai’s tender but turbulent 1997 drama that’s easily one of the best examples of New Queer Cinema.
Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung) are a gay couple from Hong Kong who, hoping that a visit to Argentina will break the cycle of their constant break-ups and reconciliations. Po-Wing insists that they rent a car instead of taking a bus to visit the Iguaza Falls, which results in them getting lost and never making it to their destination. Their trip is marked by the acquisition of a lamp that creates a simulated image of a waterfall, which Fai keeps when he and Po-Wing break up once more because of the stress of their failed venture and the conflict that ensues. Lacking the funds to fly home, Fai takes up residence in a rundown motel in Buenos Aires, where he has a shoebox of a room and shares cooking facilities with all of the other residents, and he finds work as a doorman at a tango club. Po-Wing takes up a life as a sex worker, and Fai is forced to watch him entertain john after john at the club where he works. After the two of them argue and Fai confronts Po-Wing about spending all of their money and stranding them there, Po-Wing steals an expensive watch from one of his clients so that Fai can pawn it and go home but is badly beaten by the man over it. Po-Wing’s hands are badly injured, and he is forced to wear plaster bandages on them for an extended period, and Fai reluctantly becomes his caretaker.
Po-Wing makes his interest in resuming their affair clear—Fai notes that Po-Wing’s “Let’s start over” was a constant refrain over their rocky separations and reunions—but while Fai clearly still loves and cares for him, they do not become lovers again. Po-Wing’s attempts to climb into bed with Fai only alienate him, and his constant whining and demanding tell us a great deal about what their relationship was like, even before he became largely incapable of fending for himself. He forces Fai to go jogging with him in terrible weather despite his ex’s reluctance, and when Fai takes ill because of the weather, Po-Wing still demands that he cook for them. Of course, Fai is revealed to be no shrinking violet or victim either, as we see that he becomes intensely jealous; when Po-Wing goes to get cigarettes and isn’t home when Fai returns from work, Fai buys multiple cartons so that Po-Wing has no reason to leave. He even takes Po-Wing’s passport the first night that his former lover stays with him following his release from the hospital and hides it so that Po-Wing can’t leave him. It’s clear that they were always toxic for each other, but that they were also madly, passionately in love in a way that defies all logic and common sense and drives one to extreme highs that make the extreme lows seem worthwhile. And that love is still present, even if it’s so tainted by mutual bitterness at this point that there’s no way for them to walk the same path ever again.
Fai is fired from the tango bar when he attacks the man who beat Po-Wing and starts working at a Chinese restaurant. There, he befriends a young, handsome Taiwanese man named Chang (Chen Chang). Although Chang never expresses overt attraction to Fai, his affection is clear. Po-Wing becomes jealous after overhearing Chang in the background of one of his constant, demanding phone calls to Fai at work, and this, combined with Fai’s continuous refusal to return his passport, leads Po-Wing to move out when he is recovered from his injuries. Fai opens up to Chang about having left Hong Kong in disgrace due to stealing money from his employer, who was a friend of his father’s, and Chang tells Fai about his family’s food stall in the night market in Taipei. Chang eventually earns enough money to continue his travels and tells Fai he intends to travel to the southernmost tip of South America, where he has heard that one can release all their cares. He offers his tape recorder to Fai so he can carry his worries for him, but Fai can muster no words, only sobs. Fai starts to work nights in an abattoir so that he can get his body back on Hong Kong time and goes home, with Po-Wing breaking down upon realizing that Fai is really gone.
This is one of the most moving films that I have ever seen. I’ve never been in the kind of relationship that the film depicts, one in which one partner’s jealousy and control issues and the other’s learned helplessness and deliberate provocation of envy put them in constant conflict with one another, but I’ve been a teenager (and a twentysomething, and a thirtysomething) in love, the kind of love that’s so big and so loud that it takes up the whole room. Love immiserates as well as illuminates, love consumes as well as sustains, and love can craze as much as it can ground. Po-Wing and Fai’s relationship is one that can swing back and forth between Po-Wing’s mad desire for the physical intimacy of sharing a bed even if they don’t touch, with complete disregard for Fai’s boundaries or well-being, to Fai berating his former lover for his promiscuous ways (before later cruising in the same ways and in the same places after Chang leaves, noting in his internal monologue that all lonely people are the same, deep down) while making him a virtual prisoner, to the two of them slow dancing in the shared kitchen of Fai’s hostel, sweet and kind and perfect — but only for a moment.
The copy of this film that I watched was a grey market region-free DVD, and although the transfer was terrible (there are several scenes during the portion of the film where Fai is working in the restaurant wherein the subtitles are completely illegible against his white chef’s wear), it was nonetheless a beautiful movie. It’s a mood piece, wherein there are several long shots of urban decrepity punctuated by neon and headlights as well as very long shots of Iguaza Falls as we take in the majesty of the pouring, pulsing water, countless gallons and tons of the stuff moving at incomprehensible volume, churning with a power that can only be imagined and yet which pales in comparison to the raging waters that push and pull inside of Po–Wing and Fai. It’s powerful stuff, and worth tracking down.
Guys, I think I just really like Dakota Johnson. Whatever it is that she’s doing, her charm just completely works on me. I sang the praises of Madame Web both upon release and again months later when I forced Brandon and Alli to watch it so we could talk about it. I love her performance in the Suspiria remake and I am among those who thoroughly enjoyed Bad Times at the El Royale. Those last two show that she has range, but I find myself still thoroughly enjoying when she plays a character that is either (a) just like she is in real life, or (b) the “Dakota Johnson” character that she performs when she’s called upon to be “herself.” I first heard about this movie when a friend—whom I had drafted into watching Madame Web with me on my May rewatch—came back from vacation having seen it, and recommended it to me directly because of my fondness for MW and DJ. And he was right!
Am I OK? tells the story of thirty-two-year-old Lucy (Johnson), a painter who no longer paints and instead earns a living as a receptionist at a spa. Her best friend, Jane (Sonoya Mizuno), has a more professional career and is settled with her boyfriend Danny (Jermaine Fowler), until her boss (Sean Hayes) offers her an opportunity for a promotion, albeit one that would require Jane to relocate to London. The night that she learns of this, Jane takes Lucy and Danny out to celebrate; once they’re all good and drunk, Jane admits to having kissed another girl in high school, causing Lucy to spiral and admit to herself for the first time that she’s not attracted to men. With six months before she must move to the other side of the Atlantic, Jane sets out to help Lucy find a girlfriend. The biggest stumbling block is Lucy’s awkwardness and a shyness that verges on being antisocial, and her feelings of anxiety about Jane’s upcoming move only grow when she learns that Jane will be accompanied by her outgoing colleague Kat (Molly Gordon), an eccentric and fairly self-absorbed woman with whom Jane is friendly but whom Lucy can’t stand. When a new masseuse at Lucy’s work, Brittany (Kiersey Clemons), seems very flirtatious, Lucy attempts to respond but has to overcome her extreme, ingrained tendency to resist change.
This movie takes precisely one risk, which is that it demands that you be smitten with Dakota Johnson (or “Dakota Johnson”) and enjoy watching her do her thing. (Luckily, I am and I do.) The script is very funny, and the performances are quite engaging, but this is a movie that is all about pushing Lucy out of her comfort zone while never doing the same with the viewer. And, hey, maybe that’s all that a comedy like this one needs. There were many scenes that reminded me of a friend’s recent complaint after seeing Hit Man, which was that half of the movie looked like it had been shot in an AirBnB; this movie has a very similar visual … blandness. I’ve heard Brandon bring this up in many episodes of the podcast—that a lot of movies now have a very even, clean, TV-camera friendly, CW lighting—and although that’s something that I don’t often notice (perhaps because the CW was one of the many straws that broke the camel’s back of my mind a long time ago now) this movie made it almost impossible to miss. It’s probably not something that most people would notice or care about, but I’ve never experienced this phenomenon so clearly. I really don’t want to insult the people who made this movie; I quite liked it, and I love Tig Notaro (who, alongside Stephanie Allynne, is credited as director), but there’s no camera, lighting, or blocking choice in this movie that one could describe as imaginative, thoughtful, or stylish.
Looking at the list of other works that the film’s cinematographer Cristina Dunlap worked on, it’s a lot of shorts, TV work, and music videos, which strikes me as odd. The static nature of a lot of TV photography is present in the movie, which is, as noted, shot so conventionally that it’s almost an apotheosis of inoffensiveness; but there’s a lot of life in some of the music videos (and tour footage) that she’s shot, which doesn’t appear here at all. One of the few times that the film does something dynamic instead of rotating through the same sets (yoga studio, spa, Jane’s office, Lucy’s apartment, the diner where Lucy always orders the same thing) is when Jane and Lucy go on an exercise outing together, and it’s the scene from which the poster image of Lucy crying is taken. Jane and Lucy are going up and down a set of outdoor stairs, and the setting felt like an homage to that scene in You’ve Got Mail that shows Tom Hanks and Dave Chappelle at the gym. It’s the only time that the film ever really breaks out of its shot/reverse-shot TV rhythm and its antiseptic interiors, but that this is the only time it does so (other than a short sequence near the end at a “hammock retreat”) means that there’s a lot of this movie that relies solely on the wittiness of the dialogue and the charm of the characters. Luckily, there’s more than enough of that to go around.
I will admit that I was hoping I could play The Madame Web Game while watching this one (that’s where you point at the screen and shout “It’s a web!” every time something vaguely weblike appears), and while I have to give it a zero out of ten for web sightings, it’s a solid seven out of ten spiders for comedy.
Welcome to Episode #218 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss the longtime creative partnership between French New Wave director Claude Chabrol and powerhouse actress Isabelle Huppert, starting with their chocolate-flavored psychological thriller Nightcap (2000).
00:00 Welcome
02:45 Trap (2024) 08:05 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) 14:44 Three Amigos (1986) 20:51 La Piscine (1969)
26:58 Nightcap (2000) 48:42 Story of Women (1988) 1:01:34 La Cérémonie (1995) 1:13:41 The Swindle (1997)
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, Boomeris 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.
When I first heard that DC animated had released a film titled The Death of Superman, I wasn’t that surprised. I had, at the time, only recently attempted to watch Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay and had, as I noted in the review of that film, found the opening to be rather tasteless. As a result, when hearing that a new adaptation of Superman’s death was about to be released, I thought, “Didn’t they already do that?” and then thought, “Oh, I guess they’re really just out of ideas.” Now that I’ve watched all of these (so far) in order, I have to say that it was more that this was where an adaptation of that story best slotted into this sub-franchise of the DCAMU, the eleventh of these films overall. It’s a little thin, all things considered, but that’s really because it’s more about setting up the next film than it is about the actual narrative that this adaptation covers. A little comic history: back in the nineties, DC was getting ready to marry Lois and Clark/Superman. However, at the time, the ABC series Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, was currently airing, and they wanted to marry the two characters to one another, but not for at least another season. So, ABC called in a favor and DC came up with a plan to delay the comic marriage of Clark and Lois until it was time for it to happen in the show as well, for synergy. As a result, they came up with the idea to “kill” Superman temporarily and then have a yearlong series of stories in which various characters attempt to fill the void that his death created, before the real deal triumphantly returns to reassume his place. That one little decision on behalf of a mostly forgotten Superman-adjacent primetime TV show is why we’re here today.
Despite their previous appearances together showing them enjoying one another’s company on a few dates, Superman (Jerry O’Connell) and Wonder Woman (Rosario Dawson) are now merely good friends and colleagues, and Superman has taken up dating his beloved Lois Lane (Rebecca Romijn) in his civilian identity as Clark Kent, although he has not yet come out to her as being Superman. Wonder Woman encourages him to do so, and his need to make a decision sooner than later is exacerbated when a meeting of the Justice League reveals that The Flash (Christopher Gorham) is getting married soon, and when Kal-El asks Barry if Iris “knows,” Barry tells him that he revealed his identity to her “ages ago.” Shortly after Superman gives Lois a tour of S.T.A.R. Labs, which houses the spacepod that brought him to earth and which contains holographic records that include an image of his parents, his other family, the Kents, arrive in town and want to meet Lois. Over the course of their dinner, Lois comes to realize that she actually knows almost nothing about her beau, for the first time recognizing how guarded he is around her and wondering what the cause is. She leaves him for the night, and he has a heart to heart with his mother wherein she admits that, at her age, it doesn’t seem like keeping secrets is really all that important anymore.
On the less domestic, more superheroic side of things, we learn that Lex Luthor (Rainn Wilson) has found a way to circumvent his house arrest and is still up to nefarious doings, including attempting to create a clone version of Superman which he can control as well as merging earth and Apokoliptian technology to sell to criminals. Seemingly coincidentally, a “boom tube” wormhole opens not far from the earth, spitting out a misshapen asteroid that starts to fall toward the planet, crashing into the ocean. Several of Aquaman (Matt Lanter)’s guards converge on the undersea crash site at the same time as a Lexcorp submersible. All are slain by a monster that emerges from the wreckage, who then makes his way to land and toward Metropolis, killing every living thing in his path. In the meantime, Clark reveals his secret to Lois, only to be called away to deal with the monster after it takes out the entire rest of the Justice League, although Wonder Woman goes down last and hardest. Clark leaves a note for Lois with his last secret (“I love you”) and then heads out to defeat the monster, while also having to deal with interference from Luthor, who gets involved both because of his ego and because he believes that the monster’s genetics will help him to stabilize the unstable makeup of all the deformed clones he’s hiding in the basement of Lexcorp.
While 2007’s Superman: Doomsday served to condense both the “Death of Superman” and the “Reign of the Supermen” comic arcs into a single movie, this one covers only the former and gives that original narrative some breathing room. I’m torn about the ongoing expansion of the Justice League as it seems to continue to happen largely offscreen and/or in the background. Justice League: Dark showed Hawkman and Martian Manhunter hanging around the League’s headquarters in non-speaking roles, and while Manhunter gets a line this film (voiced by Nyambi Nyambi), it’s strange that we don’t get a sense of camaraderie between the characters in the way that the earliest of these movies did. The relationship between Clark and Diana is strong, but the fact that Superman didn’t even know that the Flash was getting married makes it seem like, although this team is growing in number between movies when we’re not getting to see it, they’re not growing in friendship, and that’s the only reason that anyone would have to remain emotionally invested in this series as it advances. At least this one, since Batman is really and truly powerless against an unstoppable killing machine with no weak points, he gets out of the way and lets Superman take center stage here, although Wonder Woman is no slouch either. That inclusion of the whole League, however, allows for a consistent heightening of the stakes that appropriately ratchets the tension, even if we already know Superman is headed for his death because, you know, the title is at the beginning.
Of course, there are the seeds of the Supermen to come in this one. We see a young super clone being grown in a vat like a Venture brother; we meet Dr. John Henry Irons, who will eventually become Steel; we even get to see a hopeful astronaut named Hank Henshaw remain optimistic that Superman will save his crew even as their ship is pelted by debris from the asteroid’s incursion, killing his wife and their other companions, and even if you don’t know where that’s going, it’s successful as foreshadowing. Those are fun little seeds being planted. As for other things I really like, having O’Connell’s real life spouse voice Lois is a cute little treat, and their great natural chemistry comes through in the performance. Romijn is an underappreciated star, in my opinion, but she’s not given the same potency of material here that Anne Heche had on her plate in Doomsday. The best parts of that movie come after the fight with Doomsday that take up only Act I of that film (and which serves as the final climax of this one), wherein Lois grieves in secret because while the whole world mourns Superman she’s mourning Clark, struggles with her conflicting feelings about seeking comfort with the Kents, who are (as in this one) strangers to her, is initially delighted that Superman seems to have been resurrected only to be devastated by his reserved treatment of her. Romijn’s Lois isn’t given as much to do; the story focuses more on Clark’s internal struggle with whether to tell her his secret than it does on her learning the truth and puzzling out all the implications. When she thinks Clark is going to break up with her, she tells him that she’s absolutely not going to stop coming into the office, as if this eighties-ass Kate & Allie punchline is supposed to be empowering, when instead it besmirches the entire script. Hepburn and Tracy it ain’t. This one is fine. It’s not predictable that some fringe film critic is going to sit down and watch all of these movies week after week; it’s logical to assume that the decade plus between the release of Doomsday and this movie would mean that you probably forgot most of the story beats for this even before they changed up other plot elements, or that Doomsday came out when you were too young to notice these things and now you’re a sophomore or a junior and thus the primary audience for this. (We should never really be under any illusion about that, and recognize that these movies rise above mediocrity at any point is kind of a miracle, to be honest.) This one is above the average for this overall franchise, but it’s missing something special that would push it into a more memorable state. It’s a necessary step in this film series, and thus can’t really be skipped, but it’s one that there’s no real reason to recommend other than for that reason, so take from that what you will.
Hundreds of Beavers is a film that doesn’t seem like it would be able to sustain its premise or its vision for the entirety of its 108 minute runtime, but it somehow manages to do so. This movie made me laugh aloud, on average, about every thirty seconds all the way through. I don’t know that it will work for everyone, but it certainly did for me. Shot in black and white, this is a Looney Tunes sketch stretched to feature length, about a man named Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), a successful applejacker who loses everything in a fire after imbibing a bit too much one night and finds himself alone and cold in the Canadian wilderness. After several unsuccessful attempts at catching wild game, he finally manages to put together a few Wile E. Coyote-esque traps (without any assistance from ACME at all) and sustain himself. Eventually, he stumbles upon a fur trader (Doug Mancheski) and his lovely daughter (Olivia Graves), decides to become a fur trapper himself in order to win her hand, and sets out to acquire the furs of the titular hundreds of beavers. Oh, and did we mention that every animal in this film is portrayed via high-quality mascot costumes?
Our generation (and those bracketing it, so don’t think you’re not included in this, dear reader) usually encounter the animated shorts of the past at such a young age that their surreality is lost on us. The language of it is simple and straightforward in a way that we understand, even when we’re still piloting safety scissors with mushy, mushy brains. In Wackiki Wabbit, when Bugs Bunny ends up on an island with two castaways who look at him and see not a cartoon rabbit but a piping hot, meaty entree, we don’t give it a second thought. Seeing that gag translated to live action, and then grow more bizarrely envisioned and strangely realized each time the increasingly starved Kayak fails to gather eggs or catch a fish, one comes face to face with just how surreal the cartoon world is, and that makes it all the funnier as these man-sized fursuit beavers start to demonstrate a human-like complexity of thought. They go from animals that are slightly too clever to be caught by Kayak’s first attempts at traps to full on rocket scientists as the film moves along, and it happens so gradually that you find yourself trying to remember where everything went off the rails before you remember this happened moments after you started the movie.
I recently had some trouble trying to figure out what to say about Spirited Away for similar reasons. It was hard to explain what works so well about Spirited Away because you find yourself simply recapping the movie, which undersells what makes it so special. It’s really best for you to discover all the things that it has in store for you by watching it, because no description of any of the film’s gags will do justice to taking it in with your own (presumably two) eyeballs. But, since you’re already here, I might as well list some of my favorites, right? At one point in the film, Kayak is taken under the wing of an older, wiser fur trapper (Wes Tank), who teaches him how to master the art; said trapper uses a dog-driven sled, and each night, the dogs (remember, every animal is a person in a mascot suit) play a card game. As they camp in a wolf-ridden forest, the dogs are slowly taken in the night, so that we go from a full table of dogs in the iconic “dogs playing poker” mold to a single, shivering dog playing solitaire alone. It’s a gag on top of a gag on top of a gag, and that’s Hundreds of Beavers to the core: gags all the way down. I was also particularly taken with a very droopy, stoned-looking frog puppet and was delighted when it reappeared later in the film, and the commitment to the humans-as-animals bit extends all the way to having the horses in the film be that stereotypical sitcom get-up of two people acting as the front and rear of a mare. It never gets old, and that’s the real treasure here. The film never lets you catch your breath long enough to get tired of its schtick, and that kind of sustained humor is a rarity.
You (yes, you!) can watch Hundreds of Beavers, for free, right now, as long as you have your library card, and you’re stateside. As of this writing, the film is still streaming for free on Hoopla, the service that provides you with four free borrows a month via your local library.
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