Godzilla Minus One (2023)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

As I’m piecing together my personal Best Films of 2023 list in these last few weeks of the year, I’m becoming increasingly self-conscious of how many of my favorite new releases are shamelessly nostalgic for the toys & kitsch collectibles of my youth.  Even without a new Godzilla film juicing the numbers, it’s been a great year for films about Furbies, Barbie dolls, Ninja Turtles, and tokusatsu superheroes like Ultraman, Kamen Rider, and The Power Rangers.  My Best of the Year list is starting to look like a 1998 Toys”R”Us TV commercial, which is somewhat embarrassing for a man of my age.  I am approaching 40 years old, and I still don’t wanna grow up.  Thankfully, Godzilla Minus One‘s inclusion in this year’s throwback-toy-commercial canon is at least helping to class up the list a little, as it’s a much more sincere, severe drama than most movies that have excited me lately.  It’s just as openly nostalgic for vintage tokusatsu media as Shin Ultraman, Shin Kamen Rider, and Smoking Causes Coughing, announcing itself as an official 70th anniversary celebration of the original 1954 Godzilla film that started it all.  However, it’s the only film in this year’s crop to hit the same notes of deep communal hurt as the ’54 Godzilla, which is a much more ambitious aim than reviving the goofball slapstick antics of the child-friendly kaiju & superhero media that followed in its wake.  Godzilla Minus One‘s sincerity is incredibly rewarding in that contrast, to the point where it’s the only Godzilla movie I can remember making me cry.

To commemorate that 70th anniversary, Godzilla Minus One dials the clock back to the widescale destruction of post-WWII Japan, covering the first few years of national rebuilding after nuclear devastation.  The giant primordial lizard of the title is once again shaken awake by the human folly of the atomic bomb, a great sin against Nature echoed in the creature’s flamethrower-style “atomic breath.”  The film’s limited budget means that Godzilla gets limited screentime, but the monster is deployed wisely as an unstoppable, unfathomable horror whose atomic power is so great that it burns away the flesh of its own towering body.  Godzilla is scary again, more of a harrowing extension of war survivors’ PTSD than a rollicking hero to children everywhere.  The cleverest move the movie makes, then, is by limiting the scope of its drama to match the limited scope of its monster attacks.  We feel the fear Godzilla stirs in just a few cowering citizens’ lives, even though both the monster and its victims represent large-scale national grief in metaphor.  It’s a small-cast wartime melodrama that’s occasionally interrupted by kaiju-scale mayhem, the same way a soldier who survives war is supposed to go through the motions of normal life in peacetime despite frequent, violent reminders & memories of the atrocities they’ve witnessed or participated in.  The “Minus One” of the title refers to people struggling to rebuild their lives from Ground Zero, only to be reset even further back by the grand-scale cruelties of life & Nature, through the monster.  It’s tough to watch.

The drama gets even more intimate & insular from there.  Most Godzilla movies dwell on the city-wide chaos of the monster attacks, depicting thousands of victims scattering away from Godzilla’s path like helpless insects.  In contrast, Godzilla Minus One zooms in to assess the value of just one, individual life in that mayhem.  Its mournful protagonist (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is a kamikaze pilot who dodged his suicidal mission during the war and now suffers intense survivor’s guilt, convinced that he morally failed in his duty to serve his nation.  The sudden appearance of Godzilla offers the self-hating young man a second attempt at wartime valor, to the point where he’s disturbingly excited by the prospect of facing off against the monster instead of experiencing healthier responses like fear & grief.  In a more proudly nationalistic action thriller, this sentiment would go unchallenged, and his self-assigned self-sacrifice would be celebrated as traditional macho heroism.  Instead, Godzilla Minus One is about the community of people around the pilot—each having survived their own war atrocities & personal shortcomings—convincing him that his life is worth living, that he has value beyond the damage he can cause as a lone soldier in a war that’s officially over.  The honor of serving his country through death is no nobler than risking his life de-activating leftover explosive mines to put food on his family’s table; it’s sad & disgraceful, and it should be treated as a worst-case scenario.

The dramatic beats of Godzilla Minus One are just as predictable as the rhythm of its monster attacks, and just as devastatingly effective.  I cried with surprising frequency during the final twenty-minute stretch, even though I saw each dramatic reveal coming from a nautical mile away.  Maybe it’s because I vaguely related to the communal struggle to rebuild after multiple unfathomable catastrophes, having remained in New Orleans through a series of floods & hurricanes.  Maybe it’s because I more personally related to the pilot’s struggle to learn a foundational sense of self-worth, the toughest aspect of adult life.  Maybe it’s because composer Naoki Satō’s gargantuan score drummed those sentimental feelings out of me through intense physical vibration.  Who’s to say?  All I can confidently report is that the drama is just thunderously affecting as Godzilla’s roars, which is a rarity in the series.

-Brandon Ledet

Poor Things (2023)

/ swampflix / 16 Comments

“We are a fucked species; know it.”
“We are all cruel beasts – born that way, die that way.”
“Polite society is fucking boring.”
“Polite society will destroy you.”
“All sexuality is basically immoral.”

Poor Things is the kind of movie about the total scope of life as a human being that allows characters to voice those kinds of abstract philosophical statements, often with immediate dismissive pushback from the poor souls hearing them.  In that way, it’s the culmination of everything provoc-auteur Yorgos Lanthimos has been working towards since early antisocial provocations like Dogtooth & Alps.  He’s always had a coldly detached fascination with basic human behavior & relationships, but he has yet to dissect & catalog them all in a single text the way he does here.  Every new Lanthimos movie feels like it’s poking at some assumed social norm as if it were a corpse he found in the woods.  Poor Things finds that naive interrogation at its most scientifically thorough & perversely fun, to the point where he articulates the entire human experience through repurposed dead flesh.  In doing so, he’s clearly made The Movie of the Year, and so far the movie of his career.

Emma Stone stars as the repurposed corpse in question: a suicide victim who has been reborn as a Frankenstein-style brain transplant experiment in a mad scientist’s Turn-of-the-Century laboratory.  Her monstrous “Daddy God” creator—played with pitiable Elephant Man anguish by Willem Dafoe—initially keeps his experiment on a short leash, confining her entire life to his grotesque but lavish home.  She eventually breaks free, though, as all Frankenstein monsters do, and ventures into the world as an adult-bodied woman with the mind of a rapidly developing child.  Her resulting interrogation of the world outside her home is intensely violent, as anyone who can picture an adult-sized toddler throwing a temper tantrum would expect.  It’s also intensely sexual, as she can find no joy more immediately self-fulfilling than orgasmic bliss but lacks basic understanding of that joy’s socially appropriate boundaries: assumed monogamy, acceptable dinner conversation, the stigma of sex work, when & where it’s permissible to masturbate, etc.  If she is meant to represent humanity at its most basic & untouched by learned social restrictions, she represents us as insatiably horny, violent beasts who have to consciously strive to learn empathy for each other because it is not innate in our souls.  It’s a hilarious, uncomfortably accurate assessment of the species.

If there’s any one particular social norm that Lanthimos naively interrogates here, it’s a gendered one.  Much of the reanimated monster’s exploration of Life is limited by the men who wish to control her.  First, her Daddy God confines her as a domestic prisoner, the same way all fathers of young women fear their freedom as autonomous adults.  Once she’s loose, a small succession of selfish bachelors aim to trap her again in the domestic prison of marriage: Ramy Youssef as an ineffectual Nice Guy, Mark Ruffalo as a dastardly fuckboy fop, and Christopher Abbott as a sociopathic abuser.  All the men in the monster’s life seek to control her in ways that stifle her self-development.  It’s a movie about male possessiveness just as much as it’s about the absurdities of Life & societal decorum in that way, and the heroic triumph at the center is mostly in watching the creature fuck & read her way out of her patriarchal bonds to become her own person.  At times, that sentiment is expressed through philosophical assessment of what it means to live as an ethical person in modern society.  More often, it’s a crass celebration of women being annoying & gross in public despite the men around them demanding they calm it down.  It’s oddly uplifting in either case.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s films have become more recognizably comedic since he broke through to a wider audience with The Lobster, and they’re all the better for it.  There’s a sense of playful collaboration here where the director allows each contributor freedom to run wild: Stone & Ruffalo in their sketch comedy acting choices, cinematographer Robbie Ryan in his fish-eye lens fantasia, screenwriter Tony McNamara in his violent perversions of vintage humorist quips.  It’s telling that the only work that’s directly alluded to onscreen (besides, arguably, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its James Whale mutations) is Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, another prankishly prurient comedy of manners.  Lanthimos has always morbidly poked at social norms & decorum with this same curious outsider’s perspective, but never before while taking so much obvious glee in the act, nor on this wide of a scope.  I rarely have this much fun thinking about how we’re “a fucked species” of “cruel beasts,” and how our rules of appropriate social interaction are so, so very “fucking boring.”

-Brandon Ledet

Fallen Leaves (2023)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Finnish arthouse darling Aki Kaurismäki is neither the first renowned director to return from self-imposed “retirement” (Miyazaki, Soderbergh, Lynch), nor will he be the last (Tarantino).  What’s funny about the six-years-later follow-up to his announced “retirement” film The Other Side of Hope is that Kaurismäki has not returned for some grand, career-defining statement that shakes the foundation of everything he made in his heyday (The Boy and the Heron, Twin Peaks: The Return).  He simply just made another Aki Kaurismäki movie.  Everything I’ve written previously about Kaurismäki classics like Shadows in Paradise and The Match Factory Girl could easily be copied & pasted into a review of his comeback picture, Fallen Leaves.  So, I’m just going to go for it.  It looks like “a Polaroid in motion.”  It totally nails “the absurd indignities of modernized labor & urban living.”  It’s got everything you could possibly want from a Kaurismäki film: “the carefully curated visuals, the low-key absurdist humor, the fixation on the embarrassing exploitations of entry-level labor.”  He’s maybe the most consistent, unsurprising director around, and yet each individual film is so thoroughly, methodically lovely that he keeps getting away with it.  Every Aki Kaurismäki movie is another refresher on why he is one of the greatest; Fallen Leaves is just the latest.

If there’s any late-career reflection on the director’s previous work here, it’s all in the background.  One of the film’s central locations is a Helsinki arthouse movie theater plastered with posters advertising an assortment of New Hollywood, French New Wave, and genre schlock classics, suggesting Kaurismäki has spent time pondering where he fits in the grand, ongoing conversation that is cinema.  You will not believe which Jarmusch film he plucks from that conversation to illustrate the confusion.  Otherwise, he just sticks to the usual script.  Fallen Leaves is a low-key, high-charm love story about two pitifully lonely people struggling to make room for each other’s messes in their small, tidy lives.  They’re cute together, but it takes a while to make the pieces to fit.  One hands the other their phone number, and it’s immediately lost.  One is an alcoholic, while the other is hurt by their family’s history with the disease.  One adopts a pet, while the other suffers a horrific accident.  Their parallel lives in Helsinki are soundtracked by throwback rock ‘n roll karaoke and radio news broadcasts covering the Russian-Ukrainian war.  Eventually their missed connections and self-guarding defenses recede long enough for them to meet on the right page.  It’s sweet, even though the world around them can be so sad & cruel.  It’s like finding love in real life.

I can’t confidently say where Kaurismäki’s work fits in the grand conversation of cinema, mostly because his artistic statements remain so intimately personal & self-contained.  In in the interest of keeping things small & tidy, it’s much easier to hear where Fallen Leaves chimes in on the cinema of this year in particular.  It fits neatly in two of 2023’s more rewarding trends: established directors excelling just by playing the hits (Anderson, Coppola, Haynes) and Mubi absolutely killing it in curating their festival acquisitions (The Five Devils, Passages, Rimini).  It also fits neatly in Kaurismäki’s larger catalog: modest, tidy, uncluttered, expressive only in its primary colors and Tati-styled visual gags.  He’s the kind of director who makes people say, “Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.”  Only, every time you watch one you find yourself thinking “I really need to see them all.” 

-Brandon Ledet

FYC 2023: Bad Boys of Literature

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

Awards Season is traditionally the one stretch in the cinematic calendar when pro critics and Hollywood publicists are allowed to aggressively promote Serious Art instead of Tentpole IP.  Neither the rush to crank out Best of the Year lists before competing publications nor the wine-and-dine FYC Industry parties that secure Oscar nominations are the most dignified way of highlighting what’s new & great in cinema, but it’s the system we’ve got to work with, and I appreciate the rhythm of the ritual.  One of the sure-sign markers that we are deep in Awards Season territory right now is that distributors & publicists are starting to screen movies (the lowest of low-brow artforms) about literature (the highest of high-brow subjects).  Anytime an academically minded movie about the morals, politics, and commerce of literature breaks out of the festival circuit to earn theatrical distribution in the final month of the year, you can be sure that it’s being positioned as a serious Awards Contender worthy of critical & industrial accolades.  What’s fun about the two high-profile literary titles that recently hit my FYC inbox is that they’re not well-behaved, agreeable participators in that tradition.  They’re both political provocations determined to shake up the literary status quo – too thorny to truly be considered Awards Bait crowd-pleasers, to their credit.

The major contender in this pairing is the publishing-world satire American Fiction, starring Jeffrey Wright as a frustrated English professor who writes a deliberately shitty, racist novel to parody the worst trends of the industry that regularly rejects his pitches, only to be horrified when it’s a runaway success.  The film isn’t exactly Bamboozled-level confrontational in its satire of what white audiences want from Black art, but it isn’t far off, giving its fake in-movie novels titles like My Pafology and We’s Lives in Da Ghetto.  The movie is often very funny as a cynical skewering of NPR liberalism, even if it often feels like the call is coming from inside the house. More importantly, it might finally be the Jeffrey Wright showcase that graduates him from That Guy character actor to household name (the NPR household, at least).  He’s given plenty of space to rattle off humorist dialogue as a fast-talking catty academic, and there’s a surprising amount of sincere domestic drama that fills the space between his satirist jokes.  Maybe too much.  American Fiction commits the most common sin of adapting a novel to the screen (in this case Erasure by Percival Everett), in that it’s willing to feel busy & overstuffed instead of editing out characters & plot events for a more streamlined narrative.  The upside of that approach is that Wright is given room to interact with other greatly talented Black actors like Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae, Keith David, and Sterling K. Brown, each of whom play characters as complicated as his grumpy cynic protagonist.  It’s a funny satire about the grotesque commercialization of “The African American Experience” in modern media, but it’s also just an emotionally satisfying family drama with an excellent cast.

The other literary provocation making the rounds right now is the trans-rights essay film Orlando, My Political Biography, in which philosopher-turned-filmmaker Paul B. Preciado praises & confronts the literary genius of Virginia Woolf.  In particular, Preciado stages a conceptually shaky rebuttal to Woolf’s novel Orlando, taking it to task for not holding up to the scrutiny of modern gender & class politics (while also effusively praising it as an artistic triumph with profound personal insight into his own life).  Dozens of trans & nonbinary performers announce themselves in the film as a living continuation of the Orlando character, who “changes sex” while asleep halfway into Woolf’s novel.  They mix readings from the text with personal accounts of their own lives in the current political push for trans rights, often with Preciado’s narration pushing back on Woolf for making transitioning sound so magically easy & carefree.  The performative artifice of the project reminds me a lot of the communal therapy in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing or Kitty Green’s Casting JonBenet, which create academic playgrounds for real people to work out their real feelings in false environments.  Despite that playfulness in form, though, I just wasn’t fully convinced by My Political Biography‘s academic approach to literary representation, especially by the time it starts referring to famous trans women like Christine Jorgensen and Marsha P. Johnson as extensions of Orlando.  Woolf’s fantastical novel evokes themes of gender fluidity that might still be applicable to the modern world in abstract terms, but the way this project demands that it concretely speaks for the individual experiences of all trans & nonbinary people gets decreasingly credible the further the metaphor is stretched.

Even if I wasn’t fully convinced by the academic rigor of Orlando, My Political Biography, I still appreciated its daringness as a political & literary provocation.  The way it casually claims Virginia Woolf as “perhaps nonbinary” herself, proudly demonstrates hormone shots & top surgery scars as a form of “pharmacoliberation,” and bends every personal monologue from its contributors into an affront to “The Binary Empire” is admirably confrontational as political activism, even if it falls short elsewhere in marrying abstract concepts to individual experiences.  There’s also some wonderfully playful anachronism in its attempts to graft Orlando the character onto the modern world, especially in early scenes where a nonbinary performer is modernizing Woolf’s text on a laptop while dressed in football pads & an Elizabethan collar.  Likewise, American Fiction makes a few momentary missteps in its academic satire (particularly in its opening-scene parody of “safe space” campus culture), but it’s still admirable for being willing to throw punches in the first place.  The movie directly grapples with its own participation in marketing Black stories to apologetic white audiences, culminating in an indecision on how best to conclude its narrative without creating the illusion that the issue of Race in the publishing industry has been resolved.  Where it comes ahead as the better film in this pairing is that it manages to pose those kinds of grand political provocations without losing touch with the (fictional) individuals at its center, never speaking for an entire social class through a strict, prescriptive lens.  In either case, though, I’m just happy there’s something out there to talk about other than the latest Marvel movie or Tom Cruise actioner; I almost feel like I’ve been reading books instead of mindlessly watching a screen.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Off Ramp & NOFF 2023

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Brandon is joined by Moviegoing with Bill‘s Bill Arceneaux to review the films they caught at the 34th annual New Orleans Film Festival, culminating with the gross-out juggalo road trip comedy Off Ramp (winner of the Audience Award for Best Louisiana Narrative Feature).

00:00 Welcome

04:22 Burnt Roux
06:45 Fck’n Nuts
13:19 Chokehole: Drag Wrestlers Do Deutschland
29:46 The Disappearance of Shere Hite
39:53 Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project

44:45 Off Ramp

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

– The Podcast Crew

The Killer (2023)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

I would consider myself a David Fincher fan. I’ve long been a defender of Alien³, Se7en is a classic, and The Game is underrated. Although Fight Club is hyped to hell and back by the worst kind of people is not a negative for the film itself, in my opinion, because I think that Fincher is in on the joke that a lot of the film’s fanbase seems to have misunderstood. I also think that’s the case in his most recent work, The Killer, although several of the reviews I’ve read so far do not seem to agree. 

Michael Fassbender is The Killer, an assassin whose internal monologue is right up there with Christian Bale’s as Patrick Bateman or Ewan McGregor’s in Trainspotting, as he details the comings and goings in his day as he waits in an abandoned WeWork location in Paris for the right opportunity to slay a high-profile target. This includes a lot of unnecessary recitation of statistics about the world’s population, how his job as a professional killer has very little effect on these numbers and is therefore (to his mind) irrelevant, and how the clandestine nature of his work requires him to maintain the delicate balance between being intermittent garishness (because tourists are ignored in most big cities) and boringly invisible. In many ways, he’s not that different from Fincher’s previous unnamed protagonist in Fight Club, in that he is a disaffected man who believes he’s managed to concentrate all of life’s idiosyncrasies down into a series of mantras, but who isn’t really as smart, clever, or effective as he thinks he is. 

I watched the recent Sandman adaptation from Netflix with some trepidation, especially as it approached the adaptation of one of my favorite issues, “Men of Good Fortune.” That story comments about the constancy of human life despite the passage of what we perceive to be great periods of time in a way that I have always loved: when Dream enters a tavern in 1389, there are several overlapping, unattributed dialogue balloons that reveal little pieces of information about the people and the times in which they live: the “spirit of the working man” having died with the executed leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt, complaints about the mediocre restaurant fare and poll taxes, the need for the return of “law and order,” and how the general state of things means “the end of the world is soon.” When he returns to that same tavern in 1989, despite the change in the decor and the intervening centuries, the same talk is happening: “There’s going to be a revolution [over] Thatcher’s bloody poll tax,” “the labour movement died with the miners’ strike,” “no respect for law and order,” and, of course, “all the signs are there in the Bible[;] it’ll be the end of the world very soon.” There’s been so much superhero saturation in the last decade and a half, without much consideration of the fact that comic books and film/TV are very different media forms. That overlapping of dialogue balloons is something that the show tried to emulate but couldn’t capture.

When I was first getting into comics as a teenager, decompression comics were all the rage, as comics attempted to emulate filmic narrative, and as films continue to adapt and echo comics, some of the seams are showing. I didn’t know that this was based on a graphic novel before starting the movie, but as soon as a credit popped up at the film’s opening which stated that it was “based on The Killer by Alexis ‘Matz’ Nolent [and] Illustrated by Luc Jacamon,” I had an inkling of what I was in for, and it did not disappoint. While Fassbender delivered his character’s long internal monologue, I felt like I could see exactly how it would play out on the page. The Killer’s monologue in a series of rectangular boxes, with his repeated mantras of “Stick to the plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise” (which appears five times) and “Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight” (four times) broken out as their own individual pieces of the monologue, trailing down the page. And in my mind’s eye, it totally worked, that decompression of the monologue over a series of still images as The Killer does his dirty work, presumably only repeating it to himself once per issue/chapter as he performs that segment’s murder. But when repeated like this over and over again in a film, its effect seems more silly than anything else. If you’ve ever read a collection of old Chris Claremont X-Men titles from the 80s and 90s, you’ll know what I’m talking about—it feels like every issue contains Wolverine repeating to himself that “[he’s] the best there is at what [he] do[es] … and what [he] do[es] isn’t very pretty,” and either Jean or Scott explaining their “psychic rapport,” or Cannonball expositing his powers by declaring “Ah’m nigh invulnerable when ah’m blasting!” If you’re only getting that month’s issue and reading it, then waiting until the next month, these things don’t stand out as much, but when you’re reading them all at once, it’s not only noticeable, but intrusive. That feels like it’s happening here in The Killer, but it somehow still manages to work in Fincher’s hands because he manages to make that repetition feel more like an indictment of the character and his ego, at least in my reading of the film. 

The Killer is often shown to be less adept at his profession than his internal monologue would imply, and the film’s humor (to me) lies in the irony between how good said Killer thinks that he is and his multiple bumbling failures. The whole thing feels like an indictment of the manosphere way of thinking; every few weeks, some guy will post something online like “My wife freaked out that I didn’t check my blindspots before changing lanes, and I explained to her that I have kept precise track of every single other vehicle on the interstate for the last hour,” and a bunch of other dudes will post “Hell yeah, brother” and their own stupid variation on “I too inflate my ego by LARPing as a hypervigilant hero.” The Killer feels like one of these guys, and it’s not lost on me that Fincher’s most famous work, the one that so many people fundamentally misunderstand, is one of the pieces of media that is a favorite of exactly this kind of person; this guy saw Fight Club and loved it for all the stupidest reasons. It’s not an out-and-out comedy; this isn’t the kind of movie where the Killer completes a monologue about how badass he is after field stripping and rebuilding a rifle only for a spring to pop out of somewhere accompanied by a sound effect. It is a movie, however, where the first twenty minutes are spent entirely in the head of our lead as he watches for his opportunity to take his shot while sharing his exercise and dietary regimen like it’s the opening of American Psycho, right down to listing the number of McDonald’s restaurants in France before reciting the protein content of his meals. And, after all of that … he doesn’t get the shot, instead killing the woman that his target is entertaining. He recites to himself that he must “Forbid empathy” as “Empathy is weakness,” but from the second chapter of the movie onward, his entire motivation is revenge because his girlfriend got roughed up because he screwed up his assignment (which he fouled up by … killing his target’s lover, a symmetry that he never recognizes or acknowledges because, again, he’s just not as smart as he thinks he is). Like a lot of manosphere grifters, he pretends that he has no emotions at all, but he only listens to his “work” playlists, and they’re all just The Smiths, which is the saddest of sadboy music ever committed to audiotape. 

I’ve really only focused on that first chapter for the most part. Chapter 2 features The Killer’s flight from Paris and return to his home in the Dominican Republic to find his home ransacked before tracking down his injured girlfriend to the hospital and gathering information about the people who were sent to kill him. Chapter 3 takes place in New Orleans, where The Killer was first recruited and where his handler lives (although not for long), as well as his steps to prepare for his revenge and further track down the people who tried to kill his girlfriend, and in Chapters 4 and 5 he travels to Florida and then New York to take out these two killers, one called the Brute and the other known as the Expert (Tilda Swinton). Finally, in Chapter 6, he confronts the man who contracted him in the first place. Through all of this, he experiences good luck much more than he demonstrates cleverness; it may make sense that European airline employees don’t find his sitcom aliases (which include Archie Bunker from All in the Family, Lou Grant from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and both Felix and Oscar from The Odd Couple) unusual, but once he’s back in The States, someone should at least make a joke about it. Most of the things that he manages to accomplish are things that just about anyone with access to the internet can do (like cloning a key card) or rely on other people to respond amicably to him (the garage owner who lets him use the washroom as if it were a public restroom, the taxi dispatcher allowing him entry after closing, the taxi driver agreeing to drive him despite the presence of other cabs and said driver’s impending smoke break), which is impossible to predict. 

The Killer sails through all of these interactions with ease and attributes it to his skill, but we rarely see anything that requires any actual skills. After missing that first shot, he does kill everyone else who crosses his path, but does so either by shooting from point blank range and thus making it impossible to miss, or breaking a middle-aged woman’s neck and pushing her down a flight of stairs, either of which are manageable feats of strength or skill for most able-bodied adults. His internal monologue frequently dips into smug assurances to an invisible audience that he knows what he’s doing by, for instance, predicting just how long it should take a person of a certain age and fitness to die from a particular attack, only to be instantly proven wrong when his victim doesn’t make it past thirty seconds. None of this ever makes The Killer question his self-assurance about how good he is at what he does, and while that’s a very annoying trait in the participants in the alpha male subculture that I feel is the target of the film’s mockery, it makes for a kind of tragicomic character that I found sufficiently amusing, if not precisely comedic. The most impressive thing that he does is fight off a much taller opponent, which relies more on his ability to take a beating than the memorization of little Snapple trivia facts. . 

What is funny about this is that, at least in my interpretation of the text, Fincher has made another movie that will see its proponents divided starkly along the lines of those who think that the machismo that the film is parodying is something to be unironically emulated and those who will read it as a satire of exactly that kind of person. It’s well-made and well-executed, but it honestly feels more like a mini-series than anything else, especially with its perfectly divided “chapters,” which I have no doubt is meant to invoke the nature of comic book storytelling if it isn’t directly lifted from the source material. Each one has something going for it, but taken altogether, the whole thing feels less than the sum of its parts, like when you binge a TV program and are suddenly taken aback at having reached the ending so suddenly and so quickly and are annoyed at yourself for not having savored the experience more. When it comes to staying power, it will likely find itself more in the lukewarm waters alongside Panic Room rather than Gone Girl, but it’s nonetheless solid, entertaining, and tongue-in-cheek. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Get Excited! Swampflix is Exhibiting at This Year’s New Orleans Bookfair

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Attention, Swampflix readers in the New Orleans area! Swampflix will be selling zines this Saturday (December 2nd) at the twentieth annual New Orleans Bookfair along with a bunch of other super cool book & zine exhibitors.  We will be selling the print versions of five Swampflix zines, including a brand new “flash art” collection of hand-drawn illustrations from past reviews.

The New Orleans Bookfair will take place on Saturday, December 2, from 11am-4pm at the Main Branch of the New Orleans Public Library (219 Loyola Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70112) downtown.

We hope to see y’all there!

-The Swampflix Crew

FYC 2023: Delicious Melodrama

/ swampflix / 13 Comments

One great thing about the Awards Season ritual is that it sets aside a commercially viable space for traditional melodramas, which have otherwise been banished to the depths of Lifetime & Hallmark television broadcasts.  The only way you can still attract a sizeable audience to the grandly emotional domestic dramas Hollywood used to routinely market as “women’s pictures” is to save them for Oscar-qualifying runs in the last month of the year, when interviews with their stars are suddenly headline worthy news items instead of background promotional noise.  In general, that’s all the Oscars are good for anyway: clearing out a little space in the calendar for wide audiences to discuss & celebrate movies outside the usual big-ticket tentpole IP.  Few genres benefit more from that space than the emotional-breakdown acting showcases and lavish period pieces that are traditionally marketed to women, though, if not only for their value as easy filler for Best Actress and Best Costume Design awards ballots.  It’s the most blubbering time of the year, and I’m always in need of a good cry.

If there’s any working director who understands the artistic value of the woman’s picture, it’s surely Todd Haynes, who was effectively anointed this generation’s Douglas Sirk after his period-piece melodramas Carol & Far from Heaven.  Haynes worked his way back into Awards Consideration this year with May December, a film that purposefully, perversely plays with the hallmarks of modern melodrama in the director’s signature style.  The film stars Natalie Portman as a method actor studying the quirks & mannerisms of the real-life tabloid headliner who inspired her latest role, played by longtime Haynes collaborator Julianne Moore.  Moore plays a notorious Movie-of-the-Week topic due to the sordid formation of her family, which started in the 90s when she had an affair with a 7th grader, birthed his twin children behind bars, and then married him after prison to cover up the abuse with the cultural fix-all of good old fashioned family values.  Portman promises to give Moore’s . . . unique family history the thoughtful, empathetic representation onscreen that was missing from its earlier, trashier depictions, but in the process of studying her subject, she uncovers ugly, festering truths just beneath the peachy family surface: Moore’s continued abuses of manipulative power, the young husband’s stunted emotional development in the years since the crime (played with heartbreaking vulnerability by Charles Melton), and her own twisted attraction to the role. 

If there’s anything surprising about May December‘s stature as a serious Awards Contender, it’s that Haynes tells its story through disposable TV Movie aesthetics.  Usually when a great directors’ film festival darling gets sidelined on Netflix it’s disappointing; this time it’s darkly funny.  Haynes calls attention to the heightened melodrama of the piece by ironically deploying soap opera music stings over minor, everyday domestic concerns, the same way Moore’s character violently sobs every time she overbakes a cake or forgets to buy enough hotdogs for a family cookout.  The director is at his most prankish here, riffing on the real-life tabloid story of child rapist Mary Kay Letourneau in a parody of Movie-of-the-Week melodrama, revealing the bizarre details as Portman does research by literally flipping through a tabloid.  He takes the emotional pain of the story seriously, though, the same way his Barbie-doll retelling of Karen Carpenter’s tragic life’s story in Superstar is far more dramatically severe in practice than its tongue-in-cheek presentation sounds in the abstract.  The hazy soap opera filters, icy camp performances, and throwaway jokes about dwindling hotdog supplies set May December up to be a perverse laugh riot, but Haynes’s love for melodrama is too sincere for things to devolve that way.  It’s the same effect as ironic audiences settling in to laugh at the “No more wire hangers!” histrionics of Mommie Dearest, only to be confronted by the film’s non-stop onslaught of genuinely upsetting domestic abuses.

As much as I appreciate Todd Haynes’s unique brand of weaponized irony, I can’t say that May December is my favorite melodrama that screened for critics this Awards Season.  That honor belongs to the culinary period piece The Pot-au-Feu, which will eventually be released in the United States as The Taste of Things.  The film is a romantically penned love letter to Juliette Binoche, just as every Todd Haynes film is a loving tribute to Julianne Moore.  Binoche stars as the most underappreciated chef in 19th Century France, doing all of the complex, hands-on kitchen work that gets the master of her house recognized as “The Napoleon of Gastronomy.”  That restaurateur (Benoît Magimel) acknowledges her value as a culinary artist, at least, and he spends every minute they’re not cooking together begging for her hand in marriage.  Binoche prefers to let her cooking do the talking and expresses her mutual adoration for her employer through the beauty & poetry of her food.  Only he and a small social club of nerdy gourmets (essentially, the world’s first foodie podcast) truly understand her value in the field, but the audience is invited to share in their awe.  The emotions in the household get exponentially bigger as the two chefs’ mutual yearning starts to border on ritualistic kink, and it all eventually boils over into a fiery romance with no safety valve.  Love, life, and tragedy inevitably ensue.

The Taste of Things is an aggressively sensual romance about the joy of sharing thoughtfully prepared meals – very likely the best film about food since Pig.  Its honeyed tone & lighting are absurdly cozy & warm, with handheld camerawork that takes the term “food porn” as literally as it can without indulging in sploshing.  Still, the big emotions of its central tearjerker romance place it just as firmly in the melodrama category as Haynes’s latest, which is much colder & more detached.  Both are great Wine Mom movies, but only May December plays into that genre with ironic, Lifetime-parodying self-awareness, while The Taste of Things is achingly sincere & straightforward in its full-hearted commitment to melodrama.  Maybe that commitment makes it more mawkish & cliche, but it also makes it more emotionally satisfying when it violently yanks your heartstrings the way only the best women’s pictures can.

-Brandon Ledet

FYC 2023: Primo Trash

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

There are a few tried & true Awards Bait subgenres that always get released in bulk this time of year, in hopes of dredging up some much-coveted Oscar Buzz: the miserabilist drama in which glamorous movie stars bravely ugly themselves up to look like downtrodden commonfolk, the Wikipedia-summary biopic in which movie stars cosplay as recognizable historical figures through prosthetic “transformations”, the buttoned-up period piece that scoops up a couple easy Best Costume Design statues while no one is looking, etc.  As much as The Academy has strived to change public perception of what qualifies as “An Oscars Movie” by diversifying its voting membership in recent years, we all still recognize Awards Bait when we see it.  That’s what makes it so fun to spot the interlopers among traditional late-in-the-year releases – the trashy genre pictures that somehow get mismarketed as Serious Dramas for Adults to help fill out studios’ FYC publicity campaigns.  Every now and then a sickly, grotesque psychological thriller like Joker will win a couple Oscars because it happens to star Joaquin Phoenix, who was grandfathered in as an Awards Contender from past, prestigious work.  The Shape of Water, The Silence of the Lambs, Misery, Traffic, Training Day, Suicide Squad, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo . . . There’s room for one or two trashy genre pictures to sneak into every Awards Season conversation, often resulting in the Oscars’ most controversial Major Category wins.  Personally, I always find the chaotic discourse sparked by those lowly genre outliers amusing this time of year, since everything else about the Awards Season ritual feels so predictably repetitive & set in stone.

Since the hyperbolic decrying of Joker as “dangerous” and (more credibly) creatively bankrupt in 2019, I’m not sure there’s been a more divisive genre winner than Emerald Fennell’s debut Promising Young Woman, which won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar the very next year (among five nominations, including Best Picture).  A bitterly funny rape revenge thriller with a music video pop art aesthetic, Promising Young Woman was mostly treated as a Serious Film worthy of awards consideration because of its relevance to #MeToo era feminism.  If released in any other context than the Awards Season window the year Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to prison, it likely would have been ignored by the Awards Industry establishment, as most high-style, low-logic thrillers are.  Instead, it became a hotly debated item of great political importance that year, picked apart for months by critics and the general commentariat for the ways its feminist talking points fall apart under politically informed scrutiny (especially as it resolves in last-minute copaganda).  Just a couple years later, Fennell’s follow-up, Saltburn, is repeating the same pattern.  An airport paperback mockbuster version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Saltburn is trashy, catty pulp that has the misfortune of being marketed & evaluated as Serious Art.  It’s another deliciously styled, politically vapid thriller from Fennell, who still has yet to learn how to land a dismount in the last few pages of her screenplays but fills those pages with plenty eye candy to keep you smiling on the journey to that letdown.  If released in the summer under any other director’s name, it would likely get by okay as Skinsploitation schlock, but the film festival & FYC awards screener ritual is unkind to that kind of beach-read indulgence – whether or not it eventually wins her a second Oscar. 

I don’t think all of this instant, widespread scrutiny is healthy for Emerald Fennell’s art or career.  Saltburn is an improvement over Promising Young Woman in most formalist contexts, but her loopy screenwriting impulses & confused politics persist here in a way that’s going to make her a repeat target for vitriolic discourse if she doesn’t start cutting her teeth on quieter projects.  Here, she makes a grand political statement on the issue of Class instead of the issue of Misogyny, tracking the sinister social ladder maneuvers of a cash-strapped Barry Keoghan among the friends, family, and portraits of “dead rellies” on Jacob Elordi’s grand, titular estate.  Anyone who’s ever seen a class-interloper thriller before knows exactly where Saltburn is going about halfway into the first act, so it’s unclear how shocking the details of Keoghan’s violent climb up the University of Oxford social ladder are supposed to be as they’re gradually doled out as gotcha reveals.  The details of his obsessive, covetous attraction to Elordi’s dirtbag rich boy hunk are a fun diversion from the FYC season’s traditionally stuffy, buttoned up fare, though, especially by the time Keoghan is slurping up Elordi’s bathwater after a vigorous jerk off session.  There’s a lot to be annoyed about in Saltburn if you’re looking for critical ammunition: the impatient trailer & recap montages that bookend the story, the choice to frame the grand opulence of its vast exteriors in Academy Ratio, the anachronistic needle drops that fall outside its 2006 setting, etc.  I guess I just didn’t take it seriously enough to be enraged by it, the way much more serious critics are.  To me, it falls more in the trashy, disposable lineage of a Gossip Girl, Cruel Intentions, Fierce People, or Do Revenge than in the lineage of great works like Mr. Ripley or Kind Hearts & Coronets.  It’s dumb, harmless fun.

I at least understand how Fennell’s precedence as a promising Oscar Winner earns Saltburn an automatic slot in the Awards Season conversation.  The Thomasin McKenzie vehicle Eileen is more of an enigma in that context, even though it’s the better film.  Is it McKenzie’s association with recent (and likewise divisive) Oscar-winner Jojo Rabbit?  Is it the venerated movie star glamour of co-star Anne Hathaway?  Hard to say.  The marketing for Eileen seems to be leaning on its Christmastime setting and its themes of lesbian obsession to position it as an indulgence in Carol cosplay.  Calling it “Carol for perverts” might be bordering on redundancy, so maybe let’s settle for “Carol as dime store paperback noir.”  It’s as if a Patricia Highsmith obsessive found Todd Haynes’s adaptation of The Price of Salt a little too classy to properly represent her work, so it was time to dirty up her reputation again.  As soon as its title card materializes in throwback 40s noir font, it’s clear that the movie is having fun with familiar genre tropes, resurrecting an outdated mode of crime thriller screenwriting in seedy homage.  What follows is a fun, loopy, perversely detailed daydream that doesn’t make much sense in the context of real-world logic, but follows the sweaty, impulsive logic of noir-era crime novels.  It’s a story told through intrusive thoughts, illustrating the violent & sexual fantasies of McKenzie’s character as she imagines fucking or killing everyone within arm’s reach – depending on whichever desire applies.  It takes a while for her to lose the distinction between imagined behavior vs. real-world action, saving the movie’s physically violent turn for third-act catharsis, but there’s plenty trashy, sordid imagery to string the audience along to that shocker conclusion.

Like Saltburn, Eileen is less commendable for the events of its plot than it is for the tensions between its two main characters.  McKenzie’s protagonist is just as much of a violent little outsider weirdo as Keoghan’s; she just does as a better job of managing her violent impulses . . . for a while.  She stars as a lonely small-town prison employee with no regular social interaction outside the verbal abuses of her alcoholic father (Shea Whigham), who describes her as a non-person, the 1960s equivalent of an NPC.  Filling her days with chronic masturbation and daydreams of bloodshed, she’s shaken out of her routine by the hiring of a new prison psychologist: a chain-smoking Hitchcock blonde played by an unusually devious Hathaway.  The film’s visual echoes of Carol set up an expectation that Hathaway will be more involved in the central drama than she really is; she’s really just there to accelerate the obsessive, intrusive impulses of McKenzie’s imagination until tragedy inevitably strikes.  Like in Saltburn, the lurid promise of their same-sex attraction is never physically consummated between bedsheets, but instead pays off in murder.  Neither work could be credibly accused of “queerbaiting”, though, since their main characters’ sexual desires are explicitly detailed to the point of obsessive kink.  It’s just that they’re both more psychological thrillers about intensely strange social outsiders than they are proper erotic thrillers about genuine, dangerous relationships.  Most of the sordid action takes place in the characters’ warped imaginations.  In that context, Eileen is the more satisfying movie of the pair, since it’s more of a thorough character study of a single person’s psyche than it is diagnostic of a larger, metaphorical social issue.

I don’t mean for this pairing to be predictive of either film’s Awards Season chances.  I have no idea whether Saltburn or Eileen will make a dent on professional publications’ Best of the Year lists or stick around for the grueling gauntlet of Oscars Discourse.  I’m only responding to them in this context because they were screened for critics’ Awards Consideration in the final month of the year instead of being unceremoniously ignored the way most trashy, pulpy thrillers are for rest of the calendar.  The reasoning for that awards push is baffling to me in both cases, outside maybe the chance they give their actors to try out new, exotic accents onscreen (English & New English, respectively).  I welcome the kind of discoursive chaos genre films like this bring to the Awards Season ritual, though, no matter how little they belong in conversation or how annoying that conversation gets when they happen to break through & win something.

-Brandon Ledet

The Marvels (2023)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

It’s been a long time since one of these movies was good, hasn’t it? It’s been four and a half years since Endgame, and since then even I, longtime superhero movie proponent-turned-apathetic-turned-detractor, have grown tired of talking about how this franchise had degenerated into serviceable if dreary (Guardians 3), effective if propagandistically nostalgia-driven (No Way Home), and even ugly and miserable (The Eternals, which I/we never even bothered to review, and Quantumania). I couldn’t quite bring myself to finish Shang-Chi, never bothered with Love and Thunder, and only watched the Doctor Strange sequel because I will watch anything Sam Raimi does, but again, there’s no hyperlink for that because no one around these parts could be arsed to write one. Not even me! But sometimes you get an invitation that you can’t (or don’t want to) reject, and you find yourself drinking a milkshake and looking at Brie Larson’s face and really enjoying yourself. 

The big joke going around about this one is that, in order to understand it, you’ll have had to done a ton of homework, including not only watching all of the films but also the TV series Ms. Marvel and WandaVision (which, full disclosure, I did see), and perhaps the universally reviled Secret Invasion, which was so far from my radar that I initially typed out Secret Wars and then had to correct myself after a quick Google search. One of the great things about the Alamo Drafthouse is that, for these movies, they often edit together a quick homemade “previously on” segment to introduce the film for audience members who may not be trying to pass the MCU SATs (the voiceover of which is slowly sounding more and more acerbic, which I cannot object to). Even without that, however, I think this one is actually an easy entry point, with the only truly required “reading” is Captain Marvel, and I think it’s fair to say that if you care about this movie at all, you’re probably caught up. The character introductions to one another in this one serve as functional introductions for the audience as well, and they handle the “who’s who” as deftly as is possible for dialogue that is expository, both in and outside of the text. 

Brie Larson returns as Carol “Captain Marvel” Danvers, who is shown to be working for Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) in checking out various disruptions that he’s now detecting from his satellite base. Also on said station—or technically just outside, as we first see her performing EVA—is Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), who picked up some various light-based powers like being able to phase through matter and shoot light blasts in WandaVision. She and Carol have a past, specifically that “Aunt Carol” was like her second mother before disappearing in the 1990s with the (unfulfilled) promise to return; further, she was one of the people who disappeared during “the Blip,” and returned to learn that she was just a few months too late to be able to say goodbye to her mother before she succumbed to cancer. Meanwhile, planetside in Jersey City, teenaged Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), Captain Marvel superfan who has styled her own superhero identity of “Ms. Marvel” after Carol’s, is drawing her fanfic of getting to team up with her hero, when she suddenly disappears. It seems that elsewhere, a woman named Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton) from the resource-depleted planet of Hala has discovered the location of a seemingly magical gauntlet/bangle, which she plans to use to restore her world to its prior glory. Because of wibbly-wobbly spacey-wacey quantumbabble, this leads to Kamala, Carol, and Monica becoming “entangled,” such that any time two of them use their powers, they physically exchange places. 

This fairly absurd premise introduces a freshness and a spontaneity to the proceedings that makes it fun and frenetic in a way that this franchise hasn’t really managed to elicit in a while. When the MCU goes cosmic, that’s generally where it has the most room to play around and be weird and fun, as evidenced by the first two Guardians and Rangarok, and this one takes a page from the playbooks of those movies to visit some novel backdrops for interesting action sequences in vibrant color—and it’s been a while since you could say that about one of these. This includes a sequence of hand-drawn animation of Kamala’s comics that feature her fighting alongside Captain Marvel, complete with onomatopoeic “booms,” as well as an extended scene  in a palace on a world where the language is song, but the highlight for me comes at the climax. This is the kind of movie where there aren’t enough undamaged escape pods to flee a deteriorating space station, but there are a few dozen kitten-like aliens with secretly tentacled mouths and which have previously been demonstrated to be capable of swallowing people whole and spitting them back out again. As a last ditch effort, these “cats” are let loose to devour the remaining 150 people on board as they run in terror before adorable kittens, so that the cats can be put in the last escape pod and then vomit everyone up later once they’ve escaped. All of this literal cat herding is set to “Memory” from Webber’s Cats. It’s the kind of fun that these movies should be having/inducing, if they must continue to be made. 

What really makes the movie work, however, is the chemistry between its cast members. The three women, whom Kamala dubs “The Marvels” even though Monica claims no such moniker (in the movies, at least), play well against each other. Carol and Monica’s estrangement makes for easy relationship shorthand, but that’s not a criticism, since this film could (as its detractors have assumed) be too lore-dense for its own good. Kamala’s hero worship of Carol makes her fulfillment of that fantasy a lot of fun to watch, and although it would be very easy for a different performer to fail to stay on this side of the line between endearing and overbearing, Vellani is doing stellar work as the younger Marvel; she’s not even close to going out of bounds. Her energy is infectious, and her realistic reactions to things that the other characters (and we who have been watching these movies for fifteen years) have become jaded to make it all feel fresh and new again. 

I’m sure there is good faith criticism of this movie that doesn’t focus solely on the product so much as its perceived “wokeness” or its box office performance. This is a show that follows the maxim of MST3K: “repeat to yourself it’s just a show” (and at this point, this is more of a fun, not-too-serious episode of a long-runner show than it is a movie unto itself; it’s time we all stopped kidding ourselves about that), “and you should really just relax.” For a lot of extremely online people who have a hyperfixation on this franchise and experience no joy outside of taking it away from others, I’m sure they’ll also find no end of faults to complain about here. I can already sense them opening their microblogging platforms; I can already hear the deep inhale as they prepare to unleash an incogent rant about how Disney is trying to ram something down their throats (it’s always about throats with those guys). I’m not here to carry water for that monopoly, I assure you, and the company’s failure to invite the director to the premiere is outrageous. If anything, though, Thanksgiving season is a time when a lot of people end up cooped up with their families for extended periods of time, and sometimes the best way to get everyone to shut up for a while is to let the local Regal play babysitter for a while. There are worse things to do. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond