White Heat (1949)

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I’m only a few episodes into my first-time watch of the HBO series The Sopranos, and I already see why it became a pet favorite among cinephiles.  Not only is it one of the first watercooler shows that nudged the TV drama format towards the more cinematic anti-hero era of so-called “Peak Television” (I’m more of a sitcom guy personally, don’t shoot), but it also constantly references the exact kinds of Italo-American gangster dramas that turn pimply college freshmen into cinephiles in the first place.  In just the first few episodes of the show, characters have already made multiple references to the Godfather trilogy and to Goodfellas; there’s even a brief appearance from a Scorsese lookalike, coked out and ducking into a trashy nightclub.  It’s safe to assume, then, that the Sopranos writers’ room was well versed in the rich history of the American gangster picture, so I’m also going to assume it was no coincidence that I was thinking a lot about Tony Soprano while recently watching the 1949 James Cagney noir White Heat (also for the first time).

Like The Sopranos, White Heat is also specifically about the pathological neuroses of the American mobster archetype. James Cagney’s Cody Jarrett is an unhinged sadist of a mob boss with a “psychopathic devotion” to his mother and not much affection for any other living being.  Despite ruling over his goons with an iron fist, Jarrett frequently suffers intense (possibly psychosomatic) migraines that require that his mother remain on standby to coddle him back to good health.  At the start of The Sopranos, James Gandolfini’s New Jersey mafia don Tony suffers similar spells.  Stressed to the brink by the various pressures of his job as the local head of “sanitation,” Tony Soprano starts experiencing panic attacks that cause him to faint, inspiring him to take up regular sessions with a psychiatrist (Lorraine Bracco) that provide the show with a convenient episodic narrative structure.  Tony also has a remarkably evil mother whom he loves dearly, but that parallel appears unrelated.  Most mafia media centered on a mob boss in crisis tracks the way these anti-hero archetypes must delicately balance the necessary brutality of their jobs with the vulnerability of becoming so brutal that it inspires mutiny (whether among members of their own crew or among the cops on their payroll).  What makes White Heat & The Sopranos stand out in that genre is in their Freudian interest in those powerful brutes’ troubled psychology, an interest that places the 1940s Cagney picture decades ahead of the curve.

Cagney was enough of a studio star by the time he made White Heat that he had a sweetheart deal to develop his own projects as a creative voice.  Already having set the high standard for the American gangster picture in 1931’s The Public Enemy, he wasn’t particularly interested in returning to the genre until he was inspired to push his character’s psychology to shocking extremes.  One way you can tell Cagney gives an all-timer performance in White Heat is that he manages to make a character named “Cody” genuinely intimidating, scary even.   He’s described as “inhuman” by the cops on his tail, shooting lead into their bellies with reckless abandon – sometimes to cover his tracks, sometimes just because.  The film’s opening train heist is particularly brutal, with Cagney’s stunt double hopping onto a moving locomotive and shooting every cop, conductor, and railway worker who gets a good look at him dead, just in case.  When one of his most trusted goons accidentally has his face melted off by the train’s furious steam, Cody cruelly leaves him for dead, writhing in pain under his bandages.  Cody’s boyishly sweet to his mother but an absolute terror to everyone else.  He grinds his teeth.  He strangles his moll.  He’s little more than an excuse for Cagney to run wild as a murderous psychopath, more Norman Bates than Vito Corleone.

White Heat is not as iconic of a Cagney mobster picture as The Public Enemy, which is more directly referenced in episodes of The Sopranos that I have not gotten to yet.  This later work from Cagney is a little too tardy & bloated to register as the height of classic-period American noir.  The opening train heist and subsequent fallout is shocking in its brutality, but that effect slowly dulls in the lull leading up to the second heist in the final act, which is delayed by a largely uninteresting plot involving a voluntary jail stint and an undercover cop.  Cagney’s feverish performance keeps the energy up in the meantime, though, as you immediately get the sense that there’s no other way for a character so psychotically chaotic to meet his end than in a storm of bullets; all of the tension is just in waiting for that storm to approach and worrying about who he’ll hurt before it arrives.  Cagney never takes his foot off the gas, delivering his final “Made it ma! Top of the world!” line readings as if he’s winning the lottery instead of being shot to death.  I haven’t yet spoiled myself on how Tony Soprano’s going to go out six seasons of television from where I am now, but I assume it’s going to be just as tragic of an end, just likely without Cody Jarrett’s celebratory zeal for violence.  Tony may be suffering a mental health crisis, but he’s not nearly as violently, manically crazed as Cody; few characters are.

-Brandon Ledet

Coonskin (1975)

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The 1928 animated short “Steamboat Willie” entered the public domain last month, which has inspired a lot of speculation about what perverted things people are going to do to and with Mickey Mouse now that his copyright protection is loosening up.  Unfortunately, there isn’t likely to be much great cinematic payoff to this historical pop culture moment, at least not if last year’s dreadful slasher Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is any indication.  There might be a couple “Steamboat Willie”-inspired public domainsploitation horrors released in the near future, but it’s likely that our imaginative play with Mickey Mouse’s image will stop there.  That’s what makes it so wild that animator Ralph Bakshi already warped & perverted the cursed rodent’s image 50 years ago in his ironic minstrel cartoon parody of Disney’s Song of the South.  The brief appearance of a disc-eared rat might not rank among the top 100 wildest things about 1975’s Coonskin, but it’s still indicative of how limited our imagination has been as icons like Mickey & Winnie have entered the public domain recently – not to mention our litigious cowardice when it comes to playing with fair-use parody (The People’s Joker innocent).

Given that Coonskin was produced three decades after The Song of the South, it cannot be totally contextualized as a direct response to that nostalgic Disney apologia for slavery-era racism in the American South.  Rather, the film ties a long history of racial caricature in American media together for one confrontational comedy of discomforts, with Song of the South standing as the nexus.  Coonskin is effectively an animated take on blacksploitation cinema, both mocking and indulging in the Black action filmmaking aesthetics of its own era.  The broad-stereotype caricature of 1970s blacksploitation tropes is emphasized here as a revival vintage blackface iconography, sometimes literally so in archival photographs that provide the animation’s multi-media backgrounds.  Song of the South was far from the only animated continuation of that racist iconography into the 21st century; it just happened to be the most racist.  You can also see classic minstrel imagery reflected in the white gloves and blackface mugging of classic Looney Tunes character designs (which are also alluded to in Coonskin through the repurposing of the classic “That’s all folks!” Merry Melodies backdrop) as well as the original design of Steamboat Willie himself.  Bakshi’s nightmare perversion of “Mickey Mouse” may only materialize for a brief few seconds of screentime (as a rat who is executed by gunfire from an unnamed character, mid-anecdote) but his ugly, racist legacy as Disney’s mascot is a specter that haunts the entire picture.

The question of whether white men like Bakshi (namely him & contemporary Robert Crumb) were doing anything politically valuable by resurrecting this incendiary racial iconography has been debated since they first started on the 1960s underground comics scene.  I first encountered that moral grey area in the 2001 high school drama Ghost World (directed by R. Crumb documentarian Terry Zwigoff), which includes a climactic art show controversy about whether it’s more racist to dredge up these vintage minstrel-show images for fresh debate or to pretend they never existed in the first place – effectively locking them away forever in the Disney Vault.  I felt no more comfortable with that question watching a Ghost World VHS rental as a teenager in the early 2000s than I did watching a repertory screening of Coonskin with a live crowd in my 30s.  Hell, I felt deeply embarrassed just saying the title aloud at the box office.  Bakshi’s film is transgressive in a way that truly feels dangerous & subversive half a century later, which I can’t honestly say about most Cult Cinema provocations of its kind.  It can be a productive discomfort at times, at least in its willingness to acknowledge that America is a racist country with an even more racist past (something politicians have been struggling to avoid admitting to news cameras this year).  At other times, it just feels like Bakshi regurgitating the racist iconography of his youth without much purposeful subversion of the tropes.  Often, it’s both.

There isn’t much plot to hang onto here, as Bakshi films are more about experiment in form than coherence in narrative.  A live-action jailbreak sequence provides a framing device for a narrated parody of Song of the South, chronicling the many adventures of an animated rabbit, fox, and bear in 1970s Harlem.  The three animal friends go on the lam, Sweet Sweetback-style, after killing a white Southern sheriff and hustle their way up the Harlem hierarchy to local positions of power – outmaneuvering phony preachers & activists, grotesque mobsters, and an endless supply of even more racist cops during their ascent.  Like the cartoon animals of the famous “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” sequence in Song of the South, Rabbit, Fox, and Bear are animated on top of live-action cinematography; only, Bakshi pushes that mixed-media style to point of experimental psychedelia.  Sometimes the background is a still image.  Sometimes the camera spins in a nauseating circle.  Sometimes the real, hip citizens of Harlem mix with the vintage-minstrel cartoons that reduce them to stereotypes.  The only constant is that every hand-drawn character is a grotesque exaggeration of an American cliché, from the racial caricatures of the main protagonists to the scrotal monstrosities of their white oppressors to the homophobic condemnation of the ninnies who play both sides.  The only exception to that treatment is the personification of America herself: a buxom blonde who seduces the Black men beneath her to their peril, releasing machine gunfire from between her legs.

The more I think about it, the only truly subversive thing artists could do with the Steamboat Willie image at this point is to return Mickey Mouse to his racist minstrel-show roots to expose how rotten American culture is at its core.  Maybe that approach is better suited for a quick Robert Smigel gag in a TV Funhouse sketch than it is for a feature-length comedy, but Bakshi still gets major credit for fearlessly getting to the punchline early and punching it harder than he really had any right to.  I’d also like to give major credit to WW Cinema (the local screening program formerly known as Wildwood) for daring to publicly exhibit this film in the 2020s, which in some ways feels even more dangerous than if they went straight to the source and screened Song of the South.  It was an uncomfortable night at the movies, productively & memorably so.

-Brandon Ledet

The Lathe of Heaven (1980)

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The recent career-overview documentary The Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin is a decent enough introduction to the sci-fi author’s big-picture concepts & beliefs.  The posthumous doc unfortunately highlights Le Guin’s Earthsea series as a source of inspiration for Harry Potter, of all indignities, but it’s a faux pas I’m willing to forgive since it also indulges in some transcendent Loving Vincent-style animation that illustrates her ideas beautifully.  I’m also willing to forgive it because there is so little visual, extratextual material to pull from when marrying images to Le Guin’s words.  Goro Miyazaki’s condensed anime adaptation of the Earthsea series also felt like a lazy cash-in on the popularity of Harry Potter in the 2000s, mixed with generic Games of Thrones-style fantasy tropes.  Tales from Earthsea certainly didn’t engage with the meaning behind the story of its source text in any authentic or substantial way, so it makes sense that The Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin would have to re-illustrate its central concepts instead of licensing Miyazaki’s imagery from Studio Ghibli.  There wasn’t much else to pull from beyond the Goro Miyazaki movie either – a noticeable void of extratextual illustration that becomes exponentially unignorable the further the documentary digs into Le Guin’s legacy. 

It’s outright absurd that there are only four direct film adaptations of Le Guin’s work listed on her official website.  Half adapt stories from Earthsea – including the Ghibli movie and a Syfy Channel miniseries.  The other half are TV movie adaptations of The Lathe of Heaven – one for public access and one for A&E.  That’s a shockingly thin catalog for an incalculably influential author with dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories to her name.  Luckily, there’s at least one great work lurking among these meager titles, one that eases the bitterly bland aftertaste of the middling Earthsea anime.  The very first film adaptation of Le Guin’s writing was also credited as the first made-for-Public-Access-TV movie ever.  The 1980 Lathe of Heaven is something of a cult curio for New Yorkers who happened to catch it on WNET Channel 13 in its original broadcast, and its scarcity on home video has only intensified its status as a niche object of sci-fi nerd affection in the decades since.  Made by experimental video art weirdos from the NYC area (David Loxton & Fred Barzyk), the 1980 version of The Lathe of Heaven is much more stylish than the A&E version from the 2000s.  Le Guin also had so much direct involvement in the production that she earned an official “creative consultant” credit, which is something you won’t find in the other adaptations of her work. 

The Lathe of Heaven stars Bruce “Willard” Davison as a troubled citizen of near-future Portland (Le Guin’s home city), a suicide attempt survivor who’s assigned to a “voluntary therapy clinic” to assess the mysterious sleep disorder that’s tanking his mental health.  He’s isolated by his suffering, since he is being plagued by phenomenon he describes as “effective dreams”: dreams that alter the fabric of reality in waking life, unbeknownst to everyone but him.  Against all odds, the patient convinces his new sleep therapist that the “effective dream” phenomenon is real in just a few sessions, but instead of working towards a cure, the doctor immediately exploits his fantastical power.  Using suggestive hypnosis, the therapist influences the content of his patient’s dreams, attempting to improve society and the planet through the unwieldy power.  After a couple minor successes transforming the famously rainy city of Portland into “The Sunshine City” and dreaming his way into a bigger office, the therapist quickly starts dreaming bigger – to the entire world’s peril.  His patient effectively has a cursed Monkey’s Paw for a brain, leading to a series of Twilight Zone style ironies in dreams fulfilled.  Dreaming the planet’s relief from over-population leads to genocide.  Dreaming for world peace leads to global suffering under alien invaders.  Dreaming the end of racism leads to oppressive cultural homogenization; etc.

There’s an overt philosophical conundrum at the heart of Le Guin’s story, stemming specifically from her interest in Taoism.  Although the therapist is relatively well-intentioned in his efforts to improve the world by exploiting his patient’s effective dreams, he’s constantly violating the natural flow of life & the universe, suffering grand-scale consequences for the transgression.  The dreamer, by contrast, is much better suited to a proper Taoist lifestyle, gradually accepting that there is no grand purpose or meaning to Life, explaining to his doctor, “It just is.”  The philosophical clash between those opposing forces would only be enough material to cover an hour-long block of Outer Limits, though, so it’s for the best that Loxton & Barzyk bring some much-needed visual flair to the dream sequences & sleep study experiments to translate Le Guin’s written ideas into cinema.  The directors’ video art psychedelia shines through on the display screens of the retro-futurist lab equipment and in the film-negative illustrations of invading UFOs.  It’s an effect that’s only been amplified by the film’s degenerated imagery.  Since its original production materials were lost, its most current DVD prints were remastered from time-damaged video elements – leaving it with a “ghosting” effect that smears all rapid movement onscreen in a transparent trail.  That would be a frustrating limitation in most archival contexts, but it’s appropriate to the film’s deliberately dreamlike visual style in this particular instance.

Truth be told, The Lathe of Heaven is more “great for a TV movie” than it is great for a movie-movie.  There are a few flashes of brilliance in its planetarium laser shows, its stage-bound visualization of a global plague, its Ed Woodian stock footage of jellyfish & space rockets, and its stunning montage of Portland landscapes warped by their reflection in skyscraper windowpanes.  Otherwise, the production is glaringly limited by its Public Access TV production budget, and so it’s most commendable for the imaginative & philosophical strengths of Le Guin’s writing.  The most you could say of the 1980 Lathe of Heaven as an art object is that it lands as a more level-headed, made-for-TV version of Ken Russell’s much wilder Altered States, which happened to be released the same year.  Otherwise, it’s a scrappy, serviceable illustration of its much more substantial source text.  That service just can’t be overvalued in this case, since the text’s author is so greatly talented and so strangely underadapted, with only a few relatively puny competitors, all devoid of any discernible visual style.

-Brandon Ledet

Robot Dreams (2024)

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I had two animated features on my personal Best Films of 2023 list (Suzume & Mutant Mayhem), and neither one was nominated for Oscars.  I am at peace with this outcome, just as I was last year when my pet favorites Mad God & Inu-Oh weren’t nominated either.  In general, I find the practice of getting hung up on Oscar “snubs” to be deeply silly, since the process of narrowing down the best movies of the year to just a few selections in any category is silly by nature.  There are only five slots for Best Animated Feature nominations and only a few movie distributors with enough marketing funds set aside for substantial FYC campaigns, so it’s obvious that dozens of worthy titles are going to be left off the list.  My personal favorites may not have made the cut, but the 2024 slate is largely decent.   If nothing else, I enjoyed both The Boy and the Heron and Across the Spider-Verse a great deal, and I would be delighted if either of those titles takes home a statue; they’re both worth rooting for.  Disney’s Elemental and the Disney-forsaken Nimona represent the kinds of kid-friendly CG animation that eats up Oscar noms by default in this post-Pixar world, but it feels encouraging that they’re no longer the dominating force in every new round of Awards Season discourse.  That leaves one open slot for this year’s long-shot outsider, a cutesy buddy comedy titled Robot Dreams.  Since it’s the one film on this year’s list that hasn’t yet been distributed wide, it’s the only one I hadn’t seen or heard much about before the nominations were announced.  And since its distributor Neon can now easily market it off of its awards buzz, it will soon be hitting a large number of theaters across the US – which is exactly what The Oscars ritual is good for: not determining the best movies of the year but boosting awareness & appreciation for a select few lucky contenders.

The premise of Robot Dreams sounds like the exact Disney-branded kids’ fluff that clutters up the Oscars slate most years.  It’s a movie about the friendship between a robot & a dog, set in 1980s NYC.  They dance in City Park, they enjoy a fun day at the beach, and they strut around the city whistling the Earth, Wind & Fire hit “September” while other various animals & robots beam smiles back at them.  After a short stint of happy companionship, they’re separated and spend the rest of the movie trying to get back to each other to revive the good vibes from the opening act.  There isn’t much narrative or thematic complexity to Robot Dreams, at least not when compared to the new Miyazaki & Spider-Verse films it’s competing against for an Oscar statue.  Thankfully, it’s a much more artistically complex movie than it is a complex story.  It’s entirely dialogue free, which forces it to rely on the traditionalist physical humor of an ancient Charlie Chaplin or Jacques Tati comedy, something that makes it feel both widely accessible & vaguely classy.  Despite its American setting (which is nostalgic enough for the past that it prominently features the Twin Towers in as many frames as possible), its Spanish production also gives it a default air of Euro sophistication, despite sounding more on paper like The Secret Lives of Pets than The Triplets of Belleville.  It’s also a strangely melancholy film.  There’s nothing sadder than a lonely dog, since they were specifically bred to love & obey, so the movie taps into some easy emotional heft in its earliest stretch where the canine protagonist gets so lonely that he orders a robot friend from a TV infomercial.  Watching his new robo-friend learn the basic rules of public life is funny in the same way that watching Bella Baxter & Stereotypical Barbie navigate the world for the first time was in last year’s funniest comedies, but then the unlikely friends are separated for long stretches of heartbreak & isolation until they can find companionship again. 

Of all the things that make Robot Dreams commendable among this year’s Best Animated Feature nominations, the thing that I most want to celebrate is its chosen medium of traditional, hand drawn 2D animation.  Just as the visual gags in the film’s comedy sequences are more cute than hilarious, its animation style is more tidy than expressive – recalling the simple, clean lines and character designs of a syndicated cartoon.  Watching the movie is like reading the Sunday funnies on a week when the cartoonists are feeling especially sentimental; neither the highs nor the lows are especially surprising, but it’s still a warmly nostalgic act.  The “dreams” of the film’s title also hint at its adherence to one of my favorite plot structures in narrative filmmaking: the repeated fakeout that our hero has emerged from a nightmare, only to be pulled back to their starting position like a rotary dial (best exemplified by my all-time favorite X-Files episode, “Field Trip”, in which Mulder & Scully repeatedly hallucinate that they’ve escaped a magic mushroom prison while they continue to rot there).  In short, Robot Dreams is not an especially great movie, but it is an especially likeable one.  Considering that it’s competing in an Oscar category that was created to award something as abominable as Shrek in its first year, getting by as “likeable” is a worthy enough achievement to celebrate.  If it does win an Oscar at this year’s ceremony, it will fall more into the low-key charmer category of former winner Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit than it would fall into the category of a hideous embarrassment like former winner Happy Feet.  Even if it doesn’t win anything, it’s already greatly benefited from its nomination, which is one of the few ways that non-Disney, non-Pixar, non-superhero animation has a chance to land proper distribution & marketing in our modern corporate hellscape.  I’m only ever rooting for a few reasonably good movies to benefit from an Oscars bump—not necessarily my exact personal favorites—and this one fits that descriptor just fine.

-Brandon Ledet

The Prince of Pennsylvania (1988)

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We’ve said it before around these parts, but it bears repeating: Tubi really is the people’s streaming service. While recently browsing through the “leaving soon” section of the app after rewatching the underrated Earth Girls Are Easy, some friends and I stumbled across a movie none of us had ever heard of entitled Prince of Pennsylvania. As the service auto-played a scene from the movie, we did a quick review of its credentials: a staggeringly low 14% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a caustic Roger Ebert review of not just the movie but the trend in which the movie is a participant and society as a whole (he’s just like me!). We gave it a shot, partially because my best friend loves to needle her boyfriend about the acting talents of one Keanu Reeves (a trend that started after we all watched Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula a little while back) and partially because, well, it’s been an arctic vortex, and what else can you do? 

The film follows Rupert Marshetta (Reeves), a recent high school dropout in the coal town of Mars, PA. His mother Pam (Bonnie Bedelia) has had only one wish for him and his brother their entire lives, which is that neither of them would end up working the mines like their father, Gary (Fred Ward). For the time being, Rupert is living in his parents’ garage, which is filled with various gizmos that the boy has built, and working at the local ice cream shoppe owned and operated by disillusioned hippie Carla (Amy Madigan), on whom he has a crush despite her on-again, off-again relationship with “Trooper” Joe (Jay O. Sanders). As the film opens, the philosophy-quoting Rupert goes to a junkyard and happens upon some bikers, and a biker girl close to his own age gives him a (very stupid looking) punk haircut, just before he is supposed to attend the christening of the most recent addition to the neighboring Sike family, which enrages his father. Things in Rupert’s life get turned even more upside down when several major life events happen in succession: he follows his mother to a run-down trailer that belonged to Gary’s father and discovers her in a secret tryst with new father Jack Sike; he and Carla sleep together after her most recent split from Trooper Joe; his father reveals that he has gotten an offer for his father’s old land that will change the life of the family immeasurably; and, finally, a fire in the mine traps Gary and Jack below ground where the latter, believing that they are about to die, confesses his affair with the former’s wife. 

In his review, that lovable curmudgeon Ebert laments that this movie represents a then-contemporary movie trend that “forces realistic characters into an absurd plot, and expects us to accept the plot because we believe in the characters.” And he’s not wrong about that; the film does have a bit of a tone problem. You see, the complicating action is that Rupert hatches a plan to get himself and his mother out from under their father’s thumb by kidnapping his father, under the assumption that this would somehow allow his mother to convince the courts to let her sell Gary’s valuable land in order to pay the ransom, which Rupert would collect and then split with her. He doesn’t loop her into this plan until after he and Carla have already gone through with the kidnapping; once Pam is informed, she attempts to go along with it, only to learn that Gary already sold the land and took payment in cash, which complicates the plan. 

It’s an utterly absurd premise that is completely at odds with the extremely grounded nature of the relationships at play and the characterizations of the people we’ve met. We learn a lot about each of them, and what motivates them. All Gary wanted was to give his own children a better opportunity than he had growing up in his father’s little trailer, and although they are better off, his inability to connect with (or even understand) his eldest son pushes him to a breaking point, and the revelation that his wife has been infidelious enrages him further, as if the two of them are in some kind of conspiracy together to make him angry when it’s his inability to let go of his fantasy of how things “ought” to be that has driven both of them away. (It’s worth noting here that his speech about this is where he mentions that he thought of himself and Pam as the “king and queen of Pennsylvania” with Rupert as their prince who would inherit everything one day, and it’s one of the worst, most belabored title justifications that I have ever encountered, made only worse when it is called back to in the film’s final moments.) Carla’s life is no picnic either; she and Trooper Joe used to live in another state where they had an affair that resulted in the birth of a little girl, whom Carla turned over to Joe and his wife to raise. The couple moved out of state and by the time that Carla was able to save enough to move closer to them to be nearer to her daughter, they had already divorced and Joe didn’t fight his ex-wife for custody of his and Carla’s child. 

The film is excellent at creating rich, full backstories for its characters, and I’m not surprised that Ebert found the tonal dissonance between this and the goofy kidnapping plot to be an insurmountable problem when trying to enjoy the story. “Give me a great big break,” he wrote. “A movie about any of these people might have had a chance, if the filmmakers had retained a shred of sanity.” I don’t have that same problem, however, because (whenever we aren’t getting backstory about Carla’s baby and Gary isn’t smacking his wife around after finding out about her adulter) this movie is one of the most genuinely funny comedies that I have ever seen. Reeves is adorable in his role as a hapless, gifted-but-aimless layabout teenager whose lack of ambition is only matched by his lack of opportunities. From the moment that he shows up with his (very, very stupid) punk haircut, it’s impossible not to enjoy his antics, whether he’s futzing about with the light-up ice cream cone on top of Carla’s shoppe, running from a burly man in a towel after knocking the guy’s coffee out of his hand as a distraction while Carla impersonates Gary for the sake of the kidnapping plan, or playing at espionage, he’s utterly magnetic and a total joy to watch. 

There are two scenes here that will stick with me forever. The first is an amazing setpiece; following his interruption of the altercation between his parents that results in a physical fight with his father, Rupert goes to the ice cream parlor and sees Trooper Joe’s car, enraging him, and then he is baited by some kids on the way to their homecoming dance. Angered, Rupert goes to the bikers from the opening scene and invites them to come raise hell at the dance, which is themed “Nights of Dallas” (“You can’t come in here unless you’re dressed from Dallas or Dynasty,” says the ticket-taking girl who wonders where he’s been all year). It’s all very hilarious and tacky and Texan, with the band performing in front of a giant Texas state flag while wearing cowboy hats, a punch bowl shaped like an oil derrick, a papier-mâché armadillo the size of a VW bug, and a model drilling platform that’s got to be over two stories tall. The whole scene is a delight even before Rupert is chased offscreen while trying to make a quick getaway. But what really made me fall out of my seat laughing was a scene in which Carla, wearing a trench coat and a Freddy Krueger mask to disguise herself while taking care of the kidnapped Gary, attempts to keep the man calm with written messages that have a very distinct and recognizable style from her restaurant. It’s comic gold, and I’m still laughing about it days later. 

By the time that you read this, The Prince of Pennsylvania will likely be long gone from Tubi, but it seems like exactly the kind of cheap, easily licensed movie that will end up on another streaming service sooner than later. Adjust your expectations before going into it, and you’ll have a good time. Or just fast forward to the homecoming and kidnapping scenes; I’m not your dad.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: The Silent Partner (1978)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Canuxploitation bank heist thriller The Silent Partner (1978), written by Curtis Hanson and starring Elliott Gould.

00:00 Welcome
01:38 Swampflix’s Top 10 Films of 2023

16:16 Total Recall (1990)
19:01 Minority Report (2002)
23;20 The Not-So-New 52
24:07 Earth Girls are Easy (1988)
28:00 The Prince of Pennsylvania (1988)
31:38 Soy Cuba (1964)
34:04 The Cranes are Flying (1957)
37:57 The Book of Clarence (2024)
42:11 Robot Dreams (2024)
45:09 Destroy All Neighbors (2024)
49:00 The Beekeeper (2024)

55:38 The Silent Partner (1978)

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 Not-So-New 52: Green Lantern — First Flight (2009)

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

Rewatching these DC animated movies has been a strange ride so far. I remembered enjoying Superman: Doomsday as decent but not noteworthy, New Frontier as an unassailable masterpiece, Gotham Knight as forgettable, corporate-driven trash, and Wonder Woman as being quite good. It’s strange to come to such different conclusions now, with Doomsday as a memorable story of grief on the part of Lois Lane despite the film’s off-putting and occasionally ugly stylistic choices, Frontier as fun and novel but hampered but its sudden and overt jingoism, Knight as stylish and fascinating, and Wonder Woman in particular as being much grosser and more sexist than I remembered. The change in my perspective on this one, however, is perhaps the most extreme to date. Green Lantern: First Flight is truly adult in a way that the preceding films have attempted but not achieved. And it’s not simply about going grim and dark through violence (although that is present here, and it’s spectacular), but through a more nuanced approach to the narrative and a few genuine surprises. 

Hal Jordan is a modern-day test pilot for Ferris Aircraft whose simulation pod is forcibly drawn to the dying corpse of extraterrestrial humanoid Abin Sur, who explains that he is a member of an extraterrestrial police organization called the Green Lantern Corps, and that he has chosen Hal as his successor. Within a fairly short time, several other members of the Corps show up to take Hal back to Oa, the planet from which the Corps operates under the supervision of the Guardians, little floating blue guys with red robes and giant heads. These beings were the first intelligent life in the universe, and they created the giant lantern-shaped battery from which the many members of the Corps draw their power. As the rest of the galaxy considers Earth to be a backwards planet of smelly, greedy, crude brutes, the Guardians are resistant to the idea of letting a human join the ranks of the Green Lanterns, but highly decorated and trusted veteran Sinestro requests the opportunity to train Hal and, in so doing, test his worthiness. Their first order of business is tracking down the man who dealt Abin Sur his mortal blow, and use him to locate his employer, the warlord Kanjar Ro, who is rumored to be building his own powerful battery to rival that of the Guardians. 

If you thought Wonder Woman speedran through that character’s origin (it handles in 20 minutes what took an hour or so in the 70s pilot movie), this one really puts the pedal to the metal, with Hal getting the ring before the 5 minute mark and him en route to Oa within three minutes of that scene (not counting the credits). That’s not a bad thing; New Frontier had already covered much of the same territory (albeit in a different era) and the ill-fated Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern was in production already at this time and would cover the origin story yet again, so it was wise to breeze through all of that and get to the meat of the story so that it could spend more time developing the plot rather than the exposition. That may be why this feels the most like a proper movie of these first five, since it hits the ground running and gets to the point with enough time to explore the characters better. By fifteen minutes into the film, Hal is already on a mission with Sinestro that plays out like a scene from Training Day, wherein Sinestro tracks down the mistress of their suspect and, using an orb that produces a narcotic-like euphoric effect, tortures her to the point of nearly overdosing until Hal intervenes (a little too late for us to find him “heroic,” to be honest, but the narrative requires that Sinestro pushes the envelope, so I’ll allow it). 

The cast here is great, as it has been in all of these films. Christopher Meloni is an obvious choice to voice a cop, even one who operates across an entire sector of space rather than simply a unit for special victims. The real standout, however, is Victor Garber as Sinestro. You don’t even really have to be familiar with the comics or any of its adaptations to see his turn to the dark side coming—I mean, his name is Sinestro—but this is one of the more interesting versions of this character that we’ve seen. He’s the epitome of a cop: looking down on those he is supposed to serve and protect, an outsider in the communities that he is policing who thinks his badge ring gives him immunity to instigate and escalate violence with little regard for collateral. He’s trusted and respected by his superiors and peers, but he doesn’t hide this side of himself from Hal for long, immediately saying upon their arrival at the standard wretched hive of scum and villainy that he suggested that the place be destroyed via meteor shower, only for his leaders to laugh off his earnest suggestion. Sinestro is often a character that it is difficult to take seriously—again, his name is Sinestro—but Garber imbues his performance with such strong contempt that he sells the character’s malice completely. It’s really something to behold. Juliet Landau, probably best known either for being Martin Landau’s daughter or for portraying Drusilla in Buffy and Angel, gives a great performance as minor character Labella that sells the pathos of her position, but it’s another actress best known for her genre work, Tricia Helfer of Battlestar Galactica, who deserves a call out here. As fellow Green Lantern Boodikka (I know), Helfer makes Boodikka vulnerable and trustworthy in a way that—spoilers for a fifteen year old movie incoming—make her betrayal of Hal all the more agonizing, even if the fact that it’s Helfer in the role means we should have seen that twist coming. 

When it comes to stakes and action/violence, this is the best of these films yet. Late in the film, Sinestro deactivates the lantern battery, preventing any Lanterns in the field from using their rings, so that any who were traveling through space or in a situation where they were protected by said ring are killed, with the rings then returning to Oa where they fall from the sky as thickly as rain in a raging storm. And that’s offscreen violence—characters die by falling into the walls of space transit tunnels and exploding into vapor, Sinestro temporarily reanimates the corpse of a fallen foe into a shambling semi-conscious undead thing in order to ask it some final questions, and one of Kanjar Ro’s men is sucked into space spine-first through a six-inch hole punched in the hull of a spaceship. It’s not simply darkness for the sake of being edgy, it’s often very inventive and integral to the plot. I’ve already given away too much, I fear, so I won’t spoil anything else, but I will say, this is the best one so far, and the most worthwhile one yet. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Cranes are Flying (1957)

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Immediately after our viewing of Soy Cuba, my viewing companion started reading about the director, Mikhail Kalatozov, and discovered that he had also previously directed Letyat zhuravli (The Cranes are Flying), and that it had won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1958. We checked to see if it was on the Criterion streaming service and discovered that it was, and immediately made plans to watch it as soon as possible. Although it lacks some of the spectacular work that was present in Soy Cuba, the seeds for many of that film’s finest moments are on full display here, and this one is likewise worthy of revisiting for a modern audience. 

Boris (Aleksey Batalov) is a young Soviet factory worker with lofty ideals, deeply in love with Veronika (Tatiana Samoilova), whom he has nicknamed “Squirrel,” and he plans to marry her as soon as he can. Boris lives in a multi room apartment with his family: his grandmother, his father Fyodor (Vasili Merkuryev), and his cousins Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin) and Irina (Svetlana Kharitonova). Fyodor is a doctor and Irina is in training to enter the same profession, while Mark is a composer and piano player who is himself obsessed with Veronika. Boris and Veronika’s meetings are often delayed by his duties at the factory, which gives Mark the opportunity to try and ingratiate himself with his cousin’s betrothed, but Veronika soundly rejects him at every advance. When the Soviet Union enters WWII, many of Boris’s colleagues worry that they will be drafted, and there is much discussion about the possibility of receiving exemptions, and Veronika worries incessantly that Boris will be conscripted, unaware that her naive, doe-eyed love has already volunteered, alongside his friend Stepan (Valentin Zubkov). 

On the day before Veronika’s birthday, he is ordered to report for duty, and the two are unable to find each other in the crowd, prevented from saying a final goodbye. In his absence, things go from bad to worse for Veronika when her parents are killed in an air raid; she is taken in by Boris’s family, but this leaves her vulnerable to Mark’s machinations, and he forces himself upon her during another raid while the rest of the family is in hiding, then forces her to marry him. On the front, Boris is shot while saving a fellow soldier and declared missing. Veronika never gives up hope that he will return, however, even as she is trapped in a loveless marriage with Mark, evacuated to Siberia from Moscow as the enemy’s forces encroach, and made to endure the bitter lamentations of returning wounded who have more harsh words for the women who failed to wait for them than they do for the fascists that they fight. 

This movie is stunning. Samoilova is doing unprecedented work here as Veronika, from the first time that she sees the cranes flying over Moscow with Boris at her side, to the film’s bittersweet final moments when she sees them again after learning that Boris will not be returning home to her. This isn’t a spoiler—the film treats his death as an inevitability from the moment that we learn he has volunteered, and although there are a few moments in which it seems that there may be reason to hope, it is a foregone conclusion that he will not be coming home. The film knows it, the characters know it, and we know it, even as Veronika keeps hope alive in her heart for a reunion that will never come. 

This was, apparently, one of the first films within the USSR to treat the war as a tragedy and not a source of tremendous patriotic pride. Prior to this, all films that dealt with WWII did so in an overtly propagandistic way, with the films creating an image of a cheery populace without flaw, all working together in blissful harmony and without want or need. This was a lightning bolt of realism thrust into that industry, a film in which our heroes and our villains espouse the same political philosophies even if they enact very different systems of morality, showing both the mask that the USSR presented the west and the varied faces beneath it. Boris is lovable but he is also not only an obvious fool but dishonest, as evidenced not only by his immediately volunteering for the war effort but also when he lies straight to Veronika’s face about their plans for the immediate future, despite knowing he will not be able to fulfill any of it while he is out on the front lines. Mark is an utter cad, moving in on his cousin’s beloved even before he goes off to war and making every effort to take her for himself (up to and including an implied sexual assault) and resorting to bribery in order to receive a draft exemption—an action that also includes him using his respected uncle’s name without his knowledge and besmirching the man’s honor. Irina is likewise flawed. Her earliest scenes in the film show her belittling Boris for staying out late and sleeping in on his day off, despite the fact that he’s more exhausted from extended days of honest work than he is from catting around the city with Veronika; later, she treats Veronika like garbage for marrying Mark, even though it’s clear that she had little choice in the matter and Irina didn’t respect Boris in the first place. These are people, not propagandists. 

There’s something beautiful about the sense of impending doom here, and the way that it plays out in the visuals and the performances. Of particular note here are Fyodor and his mother, both of whom I completely adore. Grandmother (as she is credited) is weary with wisdom; unlike her naive grandson, she has seen wars before and she knows how the play out, and the knowing look in her eye when she learns that Boris is going to serve and she gazes into his face with the certain knowledge that this intimacy between them is now finite and has an expiration date is heartbreaking. On the day that Boris is to report, two women are sent to the family home bearing gifts from the Communist Party, and as they begin to recite the exhortation of Boris’s bravery and patriotism that they were sent to deliver, Fyodor interrupts them and finishes the last half of the speech for them. He’s heard it before, and too many times, and although he himself will later serve the effort in his capacity as surgeon and head of a medical facility, he knows that war is an ugly, inglorious thing in which young men die, not a call to some greater glory or honor. This, too, was unusual at the time, as the process of De-Stalinization had only really become state policy some half a decade before the film was made, and creating art that professed such a view of war prior to this could very well have been considered insidious or even treasonous. As Boris departs for the assembly grounds, Grandmother first shuts the door behind him as voices retreat down the stairs, only to rush back out onto the landing and call down to him; Fyodor admonishes her for her emotion, perhaps feeling some shame at his own emotional outburst and transferring that embarrassment to his mother, only to join her in their pre-emptive (but correct) grieving when she tells him that she just wanted to see Boris “one last time” (emphasis added). 

Visually, this is a masterpiece, even if it doesn’t reach the same heights that the director would later achieve in Soy Cuba. There’s nothing as breathtakingly awe-inspiring as that bus transition scene or the funeral march in the third segment of that narrative, but this is nonetheless a gorgeously shot film, and the abundance of epic tracking shots is already on full display, from the way that the camera follows Veronika through the throngs of people as she struggles to find Boris before he ships out, to the similar scene at the end when she searches for him amongst the returning soldiers at the train station in Moscow, to the way that the camera moves with perfect precision as it follows Boris on the front lines as he races for the safety of the tree line with his injured compatriot on his back. The most stunning may be the repeated images of characters climbing a mind-boggling amount of stairs—first, Boris climbs them because he cannot bear to leave Veronika’s building after they have spent the night walking the city together; later, he bounds up them in a surreally shot sequence wherein he returns home triumphantly and marries Veronika as he promised, a dream as he lays dying; still later, those stairs are all that remain of Veronika’s apartment building when she returns home from the subway shelter after an air raid as she ascends them rapidly, already knowing that her parents have been killed but needing to see for herself. And that’s not even getting into the other ways that this film uses visual language with such style and aplomb; the choice to have Mark pursue Veronika through the streets of the city in the same places and from the same angles as we earlier saw her walk with Boris is particularly inspired, as if he is taking even that from her and making it revolting.

There’s a real sense of modernity that Soy Cuba had that is missing here, it’s true. That film felt like it could have been made yesterday, while this one definitely feels more like a product of its decade, with many of the hallmarks thereof. Still, as someone who usually can’t stand war movies, this one is a beautiful film, and although I don’t really know what the other contenders were, I have no doubt that it deserved its Golden Palm win. If you were interested in watching both, I might suggest starting here and watching the later film afterward, but both are beautiful, noteworthy, and deserving of attention, either as a pair or in isolation. The Cranes are Flying is currently streaming on Criterion. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba, 1964)

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Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba) is one of the greatest movies ever made – possibly the greatest. I say that without hyperbole. At the end of watching this movie, even though there was only one other person in the room with me, I stood up as the credits rolled, unable to contain the puzzled look on my face and started to clap. This is the first and only film to ever get a standing ovation in my living room, and I’m absolutely desperate for everyone else to see it. 

Soy Cuba initially came to my attention over a year ago, when one of the many film folks that I follow on social media talked about how a particular scene featuring a bus should be studied by student filmmakers before they ever even touch a camera. This sparked my interest, but after an exhaustive search for it online, I gave up on ever seeing it and put it in the back of my mind. The film became part of the discourse again recently, when Phil Lord (half of the “Lord & Miller” duo) responded to the announcement of the film’s upcoming Criterion physical release to criticize it as a “distorted Soviet propaganda piece”, saying that the film should be contextualized as such, citing later that he had largely seen Soy Cuba “generally presented as a romantic documentary,” which I think says more about his college than it does about the film. It is Soviet propaganda, to be sure, albeit one that the Soviets didn’t care for much at the time of release (due to its accidental framing of capitalist excess as “cool”) and buried it, leaving the film largely forgotten until it was rediscovered by Martin Scorsese and remastered. And bless that man and all his progeny, because this is a treasure. 

The film unfolds in four separate narratives. In the first, a woman named Maria, who lives in a hovel in a slum, goes to a casino to prostitute herself; her john for the night, an American, insists on seeing where she lives rather than taking her back to his hotel room, essentially acting as a tourist in her poverty for the evening before buying her most beloved possession—a crucifix—and leaving her behind. In the second, a sugarcane farmer named Pedro is told by his landlord that he must vacate the property, on which he has just raised his best crop after decades of working the soil, as the landlord has sold the land to United Fruit. In the third, a student rebel named Enrique takes part in the symbolic torching of a drive-in movie theater screen that is showing propaganda about Fulgencio Batista, the dictator of Cuba prior to Castro’s uprising. After he rescues a local woman from marauding American sailors, he retires for the night, only to learn the next morning that one of his comrades has been murdered by the police and to find that Batista’s regime is spreading the lie that Castro has been killed as a way of suppressing hope among the rebelling proletariat. In the fourth and final story, another farmer named Mariano is eating his meager breakfast with his family when an exhausted rebel stumbles upon their meager shack and entreats Mariano to join the revolution. The farmer declines, but the trajectory of his destiny is forever altered when Batista’s air forces bomb the valley in which he lives, with deadly collateral damage. 

There are things that the camera does in this movie that utterly boggle my mind. The movie is made up almost entirely of stunning standalone shots, which would be impressive on its own, but there are ways that the camera moves that seem impossible to me. Right from the outset, there’s a sequence at one of the casinos that starts on a rooftop where a band is playing, as the camera zooms in and out on various musicians in a way that organically blends with the music itself, before our audience POV goes over the edge of the building and glides down to the poolside below, even diving below the surface to show off all the shiny, happy people who are having a great time at the expense of the impoverished locals. Even more impressive is a later scene in the third segment, which starts on the left side of a bus as the vehicle is approached by a news-seller on a bicycle. He rides straight up to Enrique’s outstretched hand and puts the paper in it, as the camera strafes leftward to enter the bus and focus on Enrique’s reaction to the news he’s reading. We get a full shot of the rest of the bus that shows that this wasn’t done with some kind of cutaway, either; when the bus comes to a stop, Enrique departs, and the camera stays within the bus to watch him descend, cross the street, and then run up a long set of steps, all without batting an eye. When I was watching this, I turned to my viewing companion and asked “Did we just go through the bus?” before shaking my head and declaring “I can’t figure out how the hell they did that.” It’s a technical masterpiece, a breakthrough on par with breaking through to the technicolor world from drab Kansas in The Wizard of Oz. A later scene moves away from a massive funeral procession into a building and then climbs to the top of it before panning through a room full of laborers and then back out through their window to watch the march proceed into the distance, unstoppable. It’s stunning. 

It’s not just that mastery of the craft that makes this so impressive, though; it’s the humanity. The story of Maria, from the moment that we first meet her, is one of such tragic hopelessness that it’s impossible not to have your heart break for her. We first meet her as herself, as she encounters a poor fruitseller who is in love with her and dreams of marrying her one day in the nearby chapel, excitedly dreaming about her beauty in her white dress. She is forced to go from here almost immediately to a casino, where three boorish American sex tourists that we have already seen harass her and a few other working girls into drinking with them. One of them, who earlier waved off two of Maria’s colleagues and was accused of being prudish by his buddies, spots her immediately, and he makes it clear what attracts him to her: her faith and innocence, as evidenced by her displayed crucifix. She is entreated to dance and initially hesitant, but ultimately gives in and begins to move with such frenetic energy that she almost loses shape on film, a dervish, as she metaphorically resists the attempts of these capitalist pigs to buy her—buy her body, buy her dignity, buy her innocence, buy her soul—before being forced to relent, and in so doing gives up control of herself. After the tourist spends the night with her, he tells her that he is a collector of crucifixes, and as he lays a couple of bills on the bed, he offers her another, then a second, then lays a third beside her before he takes the symbol of her faith (et al) from her. It’s five bills in total; he pays more for her innocence than for her body, and it’s clear that he’s done this many times and plans to continue to do it forever, pillaging and plundering the colonized world for its body and its soul. What it lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in its overt reminder that, yes, all colonization is predatory, now and for all time. 

Not a day has gone by since my screening that I haven’t thought about this movie, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop thinking about it. Through the modern lens, it’s impossible not to look at the representation of the suffering of the people of Cuba under Batista and not see in their struggles and in their faces the embattlement and the countenance of all people, everywhere, who suffer under the oppression of colonialism and the evils of an economic system that can only exist by enforcing suffering on others. We are living in a time of great moral darkness, watching the systematic and unconscionable evil that is being forced upon the people of Palestine at the hands of the West and its collaborators, and although this movie is explicitly propagandistic, we can’t lose sight of the fact that this simple fact does not necessarily make its message incorrect or inapplicable. Across all spectrums, all marginalized people are struggling together, and our oppressor is always the same system. To fight that is the only fight that matters. 

I’m not sure when the Criterion disc is expected to be released and I’m not sure that, when it is, it will also mean that the movie will be on their streaming service. You can watch it for free right now, however, as one of your four free monthly borrows with your library card, on Hoopla. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Down By Law (1986)

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Big changes are afoot at Wildwood, the weekly series that has recently brought classics as varied as John Waters’s Desperate Living and Barbara Loden’s Wanda to local cinemas for packed-room repertory screenings.  Firstly, the series doesn’t officially appear to be called Wildwood anymore; all social media presence has been temporarily rebranded to “WWCinema” while the programmers soul-search for a new name.  More importantly, it has switched times & locations to Wednesday nights at The Broad, which is much more easily accessible to me by bus than their previous slot on Thursdays at Canal Place.  So, it was my solemn duty to attend WWCinema’s “debut” at The Broad this month, despite the fact that I don’t particularly care for the films of notorious No Wave slacker Jim Jarmusch.  Programming Jarmusch’s 1986 prison escape comedy Down By Law in any local screening series is kind of a no-brainer, since it’s the exact kind of high-style, low-ambition filmmaking that convinces college-age hipsters from around the world to move to New Orleans and inspires lifelong New Orleanians to pick up cameras to capture the local mise-en-scène.  It’s often cited by cineastes as the best movie ever set here (an honor that actually belongs to Paul Schrader’s Cat People, also a former Wildwood selection), which always sets my teeth on edge even though it is, from what I can recall, the only Jarmusch movie I’ve ever fully enjoyed.  Thankfully, rewatching it with an enthusiastic crowd did remind me exactly why I have vaguely fond feelings for Down By Law despite all of its minimal-effort hipster posturing & N’awlins Y’all cultural cachet, which already makes me grateful that Wildwood is moving closer to home.

My knee-jerk resistance to Down By Law comes from two separate places of distrust.  The major issue is my longstanding bias against Jarmusch as a filmmaker with an incredible wealth of resources who often deliberately chooses to do nothing with them, because doing nothing is the Gen-X ideal of cool.  Speaking more personally, this is the project that brought that performative Gen-X slackerdom to my home turf, making hip-cred outsider musicians Tom Waits & John Lurie the poster boys for laidback New Orleans cool.  When I hear someone declare Down By Law their favorite film set in New Orleans, I automatically assume they idolize the kind of dirtbag alpha male behavior exemplified by those two leads, who are both role models for a specific kind of French Quarter hipster that’s been around as long as I can remember (likely because this movie was released the year I was born).  Waits stars as a WWOZ radio DJ with a dumb little porkpie hat & goatee combo to match his dumb Cool Guy™ personality.  Lurie co-leads as a suave street hustler out of a classic shot-on-location noir starring a Sal Mineo or a James Dean (or, in the case of King Creole, Elvis doing his best impersonation of Dean).  They’re both framed for crimes they didn’t commit and are locked up in a small cell at OPP, spending the rest of the picture trying to out-alpha each other as top dog of their block.  For the first twenty minutes or so, Down By Law is the exact ambitionless, inert slacker drama Jarmusch always delivers, more concerned with cool cred than artistic ambition.  Then, the film’s third lead arrives in the form of Roberto Benigni as an Italian tourist who was arrested for manslaughter – the only one of the cellmates who wasn’t framed for his crime, and the movie’s saving grace.

I have whatever rare brain disorder causes people to find Robert Benigni funny; in my worst moments, I’m convinced he’s the funniest man who ever lived.  If nothing else, he’s the only comedic performer who’s ever dared to ask the question “What if Harpo Marx was obnoxiously loud?”, a true visionary.  Setting his chaotic cornball energy loose on an otherwise typically laidback Jarmusch set is the genius of Down By Law, a magic trick the director only ever came close to repeating with Mia Wasikowska’s vampire-brat in Only Lovers Left Alive.  Jarmusch clearly understands the value of what he has in Benigni, and he allows that vaudevillian presence to reshape the entire movie to great effect.  While Lurie & Waits are participating in an imaginary Cool Guy™ contest, pretending to heroically care the least about what’s going on around them, Benigni strives with every atom in his body to be classically entertaining.  He wills the movie into becoming more exciting, citing The Great Escape as an example of great American cinema because it has “lots of action.”  His cellmates put on stoic Tough Guy personae, but he’s the only character in the movie who hunts, who kills, who fucks.  By the final scenes the difference between him and the other boys verges on the philosophical; Lurie & Waits split into arbitrary, opposing directions just to spite each other while Benigni finds happiness staying in place, a fully content man.  In short, the problem with New Orleans these days is that too many young, impressionable dudes watch Down By Law and move here with ambitions to become suave street hustlers and hipster radio DJs, when what we really need is more classical Italian clowns.

The funny thing about Down By Law‘s reputation as New Orleans’s finest moment onscreen is that very little of the film’s runtime actually showcases the city.  Sure, it opens with sideways pans of shotgun homes & cemetery tombs set to one of Tom Waits’s greatest hits, but just as much of the third act features forward-facing boat trips into mysterious channels of the swamps outside the city.  The story opens with Waits & Lurie committing petty crimes as French Quarter gutter rats, but after they’re pinched by the NOPD we never return to the city streets.  Shot on cheap black & white film stock and deliberately ignoring the basic facts of New Orleans geography, the film often recalls the Poverty Row noir aesthetics of schlock like the 1956 Roger Corman cheapie Swamp Women.  The OPP cell block looks like it could’ve been filmed in a hastily decorated warehouse or apartment.  The prisoners’ escape from OPP directly leads into swamp water instead of the intersection of Tulane & Broad.  The cops-and-hounds hunt for the escaped prisoners is represented entirely as distant sounds to keep the costs of casting down.  This is scrappy, D.I.Y. filmmaking from the height of the Indie Boom that made festival darlings like Jarmusch moderately famous instead of desperately auditioning them for career-crushing deals with Marvel or Netflix.  WWCinema is pitched to its audience as a series programmed by and for legitimate working filmmakers, so it’s not surprising Jarmusch’s current go-to editor Affonso Gonçalves selected Down Bay Law for the series, given its local connections and its inspirational model for high-style, low-budget filmmaking.  Let’s just hope most of the impressionable young men in the audience latched onto the right role model at that screening; the city already has more than enough Tom Waits wannabes hanging around, doing nothing especially worthwhile.

-Brandon Ledet