For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Ian McKellen’s 1995 anachronization of Shakespeare’s Richard III, set in an alternate-history fascist Britain.
I caught up with the animated superhero actioner Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse a full month into its theatrical run, which is just about the least compelling time I could possibly chime in on a populist film’s artistic merits & demerits. After their initial tidal waves of ecstatic buzz and the exhaustive cataloging of fan-service Easter eggs that inevitably follows, there’s not much left to be said about 4-quadrant crowd pleasers that hasn’t already been repeated a thousand times over (or that won’t be worthier of deeper cultural analysis years down the line). Across the discourse-verse, the new Spider-Man movie has already been declared to be “in the running for best superhero film ever“, celebrated for its covert trans teen representation, had said representation called out as corporate queerbaiting, and then taken to task for abusive labor practices that are disturbingly common among all modern animated productions. It’s that overwhelming deluge of opinion & observation that has kept me from checking out the latest chapter in the interdimensional travels of Miles Morales, despite having very much enjoyed his origin-story game changer Into the Spider-Verse in 2018. Even more so than I’ve been exhausted this summer’s record temperatures, I’ve been so drained by the season’s bleakly uninspiring new release schedule that I couldn’t work up much excitement to see any superhero picture on the big screen, even a good one. The near-unanimous praise for it eventually wore me down and bullied me into having another good time with my friendly neighborhood webslinger, but I can’t say I found much in it that wasn’t already showcased beautifully in the previous film. Across the Spider-Verse strictly adheres to a “continuing adventures of” style of comic book storytelling (complete with a cliffhanger ending), so even its highest highs can’t help but feel like more of the same. “The same” just happens to be especially great in this case, at least in contrast to how dire the rest of mainstream animation & superhero cinema is looking right now.
I’ve experienced a strange, almost physical response to these Spider-Verse movies that I rarely get from American studio products these days. There’s nothing particularly interesting about the Spider-Man story as it’s told (and retold and retold) here. In the first film, Miles’s version of reality is invaded by alternate-dimension Spider-People, displaced by a glitch in The Multiverse. In its sequel, Miles travels outside his little reality bubble to meet the other infinite-variation Spiders-Men in their interdimensional clubhouse. There, they insist that he go through the Stations of the Canon that all Spider-Men suffer (most essentially, mourning the loss of a dead loved one), reinforcing that his story has to be boringly familiar to count as a Spider-Man story in the first place. There are a couple variations in perspective that shake up the way Spider-Man is typically depicted onscreen—mostly in the familial Afro Latino community of Miles’s universe and in the femme teen fury of his closest friend Spider-Gwen’s—but it’s still a template we’ve seen repeated dozens of times before, even within this specific series. Still, something happens to me when I watch these movies, where even though I’m not especially interested in the characters or story I unexpectedly well up with emotion because of how beautiful everything is visually. Let’s call it the art of the moving image. The layered, off-register Ben Day dots comic book artistry of the Spider-Verse films is an awesome breakthrough in computer animation technique & technology, a psychotronic deviation from the rounded edges & hyperreal backdrops Pixar has set the industry standard for in recent decades. There’s no discernible deviation in the routine of superhero storytelling to match that visual extravagance (especially not while every superhero franchise is currently mired in multiverse tedium), but the psychedelic visual art is itself substantial enough to fill that void and, apparently, fill my heart as a movie lover.
At least, it feels substantial enough for now. As gorgeous and as playful as the Spider-Verse animation style can feel in the moment, there’s something exhausting about watching yet another connective-tissue superhero film in such a bleak box office wasteland where everything is part of a larger cinematic universe, and nothing is functional as a self-contained work. Across the Spider-Verse is half a movie, with its Part II conclusion supposedly arriving sometime next summer (although the behind-the-scenes drama of Phil Lord’s mismanagement suggests it may take even longer). Meanwhile, the novelty of its CG art style is being diluted by application of the technique to other studio-licensed IP: a recent Shrek spin-off, an upcoming Ninja Turtles reboot and, most novel of all, the original standalone feature film The Mitchells vs The Machines. In a field increasingly crowded by those few newly expressive experiments in CG animation and by countless other episodic superhero sagas, I’m struggling to find Across the Spider-Verse as exciting or essential as Into the Spider-Verse felt just a few years ago. And yet there’s still some genuine emotional power in its visual artwork, especially in the spectacle of a climactic chase sequence where Miles is hunted by his interdimensional Spider-Siblings and in scenes where Gwen Stacy’s watercolor dimension bleeds into various warm & cool tones to match her big teenage feelings like an atmospheric mood ring. I don’t know that the Spider-Verse films can ever make another industry-shifting impact the way they did in the first entry; that would require another technological innovation or radical shift in narrative style that’s unlikely to be introduced (and unfair to expect) three movies into a continuing series. Still, I’m always going to be onboard for a visual-style-over-narrative-substance approach to filmmaking, especially when the style is this substantial and when all other modern superhero media is so lacking on both counts.
There’s something about the way that people have been reacting to the sudden appearance of A.I.-generated “art” that makes me sad. Not because I think that it’s “coming for my job” or because I think it can replace art made by human beings (it definitely can’t, no matter how many attempts your preferred media monopoly makes in order to try to make that happen), but because it once again reveals just how unbelievably stupid a lot of people are, or perhaps how lacking they are in that ineffable quality we might call “a soul.” Specifically, I’m talking any person who looked at any of the A.I.-generated trailers for movies within the past couple of months and then reposted it on social media. Some did it with a dire warning that this braying abomination heralded the death of artistic careers, others relished in the lizard brain delight of watching an algorithm shuffle a deck of Star Wars images into a deck of almost-but-not-quite-accurate Wes Anderson references and create a nightmare. To take a quick diversion, think about all of the fairy tales that you read as a kid in which some clever boy or girl defeated something wicked posing as a human because they recognize the villain’s otherworldly bizarreness and think out a method to outwit them. What I’m trying to say is that there were a lot of eyeballs on these monstrosities and an awful lot of people failed to recognize the fundamental inhumanity of the image with which they were presented. Nothing is real, nothing is convincing, and it’s like people have no real interest in being convinced.
Into all of this comes a real Wes Anderson film, and one which plays with the concept of narrative and nesting stories. It also deals with the nature of separation, distance, and isolation. Software can’t do that because software doesn’t get lonely; software is never tempted to give their ex-boyfriend another chance; software never had to figure out how to deliver bad news. Software doesn’t have to go into quarantine for a time that ends up stretching to the horizon, and software doesn’t understand how that kind of thing might make one lose their grip on reality, and software really, really can’t grasp why people might come out of the other side of that with a song in their heart and a spring in their step.
Asteroid City is a play, being performed for a broadcast over the air in the days of pre-color TV. It’s also the name of the tiny desert settlement in which the play takes place. The TV program host (Bryan Cranston) introduces us to this setting through the use of stage directions, which include a hand-painted mountain backdrop, an eternally incomplete elevated highway on-ramp as a permanent testament to the apparent insignificance of the place, a diner, a mechanic, a motor court with individual cabins, and, most importantly, a meteorite (and its attendant scientific complex). Each of these elements is first presented as stage dressing before we enter the full color world of the narrative itself, complete with proportion shift in addition to the Wizard of Oz-esque transition between the world of the artificial mundane and the imaginative sublime … which is somewhere that shouldn’t be that interesting, and yet it is. That is, perhaps, the point. Asteroid City the place shouldn’t be anything special; it’s the tiny little nowhere that, in a film with broader, more mainstream appeal, we would only see as a crane or drone shot as our protagonist dashes through it so that we can see that they are leaving everything behind through the visual language of them speeding away from the last outcropping of civilization into a desert of the unknown. For Anderson, this isn’t fly-over (or drive-through) country; this inhospitable specimen is made hospitable, and fascinating.
Within the play, Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) is, like Chas Tenenbaum before him, a widower who has not yet figured out how to tell his children that their mother has died. He and his four kids—teen genius Woodrow (Jake Ryan) and girl triplets Andromeda, Pandora, and Cassiopeia—find themselves stranded in Asteroid City when their car breaks down, and Augie calls his father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks) to collect the girls. The town was already the final destination for Augie and Woodrow, however, as the boy is a finalist for a scholarship prize in the Junior Stargazer convention, as a result of his invention of a device that allows one to project an image onto the moon. There, he falls in puppy love with another finalist, Dinah (Grace Edwards), whose mother happens to be famous actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), with whom the emotionally raw Augie finds some connection and solace. The play itself has a huge cast, including an entire class of children on a field trip with their teacher (Maya Hawke), a singing cowboy who seeks to woo her, three other finalists with their own strange inventions (including death rays, jet packs, and brand new elemental particles), the meteor science team leader Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) – honestly, too many names to name without essentially reciting the IMDb page. And that doesn’t include the “outer” layer of “reality,” which features not only the aforementioned host, but also stage director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), his wife Polly (Hong Chau in a brief but memorable scene), and the actress who would have played Augie’s wife in a flashback if that scene hadn’t been cut in the final draft (Margot Robbie). And that’s not even the half of them.
Asteroid City is a matryoshka doll of stories, like a few of Anderson’s recent works. He’s always had an obvious talent for creating a sort of tableau within itself and an intentionality in his evocation of stage elements for the purpose of drawing attention to the artificiality of the form. There’s an escalation of it here that I really love, because the inherent staginess of Asteroid City and the way that it gives way to the vibrant “real” Asteroid City is a beautiful externalization of what we mean when we talk about the suspension of disbelief. I recently ranted in my There’s Something Wrong with the Children review about how far (that is, not very) most modern audiences are willing to extend their patience for narratives that require more than 25% attentiveness, and along comes this movie with imagery that illustrates this exact idea. Art can sometimes merely be evocative and then transport you to some distant place; it’s your choice to stay trapped in the Platonic cave staring at the set decoration, or you can choose to transcend the limited ability of painted flats to stand in for an open sky and just see the sky. Any text with which we interact must put in some of the work to meet us halfway, of course, but it’s on us to let go a little and embrace the opportunity to slip these surly bonds and let our spirits soar.
And soar you will, or at least I did. There is a distinct loneliness that flows out of the screen, and even if Anderson hadn’t confirmed in an interview that the story was informed by COVID, the fact that the play’s third act (and therefore the film’s final act as well) takes place in quarantine makes this all but explicit. There are many scenes in which Augie and Midge talk to each other between cabins, sitting at their respective windows, at once so close that they don’t have to raise their voices to be heard while nonetheless separated by a distinct barrier – a tableau that calls to mind the imagery of early quarantine when these sorts of six-feet-apart casual visitations were the temporary norm. Every character, like every human being on earth, is lonely in his or her own way; Stanley has lost his beloved only daughter, Augie his wife, his children their mother, the schoolteacher her certainty about the order of the cosmos, Schubert his own wife, and the world a brilliant playwright with the death of Asteroid City‘s author, Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). Even quarantined on top of one another in a tiny town, we are all alone, but that’s okay, because we’re all alone together.
There’s something adorably quaint about the recent sci-fi action picture 65, in which a sweaty Adam Driver going to intergalactic war with dinosaurs in Earth’s futuristic past. Driver is technically playing a space alien, but he has no physical features that distinguish him from Earthling humanity: no antennae, no fins, no gills, nothing beyond his usual unique physique. When he arrives on Earth, he removes his helmet and vocally declares the air breathable. His weapon against our prehistoric planet’s dinosaur creatures is a ray gun. Whether intentionally or not, 65 is essentially a dumb-as-rocks throwback to 1950s schlock. It plays like a basic-premise remake of an MST3k punching bag with a title like Beasts of a Savage World or Journey to the Planet Earth, updated with modern CG but thankfully not softened with modern self-referential irony. There isn’t much to the film beyond its bar napkin premise, in which Driver drives a spaceship into Earth’s dirt 65 million years ago, then fights off the dinosaurs (and dino-adjacent monsters) that attempt to eat him along with the only other survivor of the crash. The film’s only real value beyond the novelty of watching Driver shoot laser guns at dinosaurs, then, is in comparing how differently modern action schlock handles the premise from how Atomic Age sci-fi might have over half a century ago.
The major modern affect that drags down 65‘s entertainment value is the compulsion to overexplain itself with expositional context. Directed by the screenwriters of the similarly weighed-down A Quiet Place—Scott Beck & Bryan Woods—the film is seemingly fearful of YouTube fanboy criticism of its “plot holes” & fanciful outlandishness. Because humanity evolved after dinosaurs went extinct, Driver must belong to another humanoid race of people to share the screen with the towering beasts. Surviving a spaceship crash alongside a young adolescent passenger is apparently not enough motivation for him to protect her against this far-out world’s Jurassic beasts; it’s also explained that he has a daughter of a similar age back on his homeworld, whose diaries in his absence are doled out through a device lifted wholesale from Interstellar. Between the film’s opening storybook narration informing us that these events occur “prior to the advent of mankind, in the infinity of space” and the unnecessary prologue set on Driver’s alien planet, it isn’t until 40 minutes into the runtime that our hero actually shoots a laser beam at a dinosaur. And since the film is only worth the novelty of its one-sentence premise, that’s a huge problem. If 65 were made in the 1950s, Driver would’ve been from Earth, crash-landed on a similar planet with its own dinosaurs, immediately opened fire, smooched an “alien” babe, discovered in a last-minute twist that he had merely time-traveled backwards, and the whole thing would’ve been wrapped up in 65 minutes to leave room for the next movie on the drive-in double bill. The dinosaurs would’ve been stop-motion too, and maybe even borrowed from the footage of a better-funded picture. Roger Corman is still alive & working somewhere out there, but Hollywood really doesn’t make efficient, delirious schlock like it used to, mostly because every fanciful creative impulse now has to be “justified” to keep online cynics at bay.
Still, I appreciated that this modern DTV action treatment of a retro pulp sci-fi premise never slips into winking-at-the-camera Deadpool irony. Although Driver has a knack for comedic delivery, the world is better off being spared of his alien-invasion equivalent of Kong: Skull Island. I suspect that happened because Beck & Woods are largely humorless in their craft and were somehow unaware that they were making 1950s sci-fi pastiche in the first place. Whatever the reason, the movie’s self-serious tone is a great counterbalance to its glaringly unserious premise. Its internal aversion to irony & camp does mean that it’s a little boring in stretches (especially in the dino-free opening half), but it’s a pleasant, cozy kind of boring. 65 is crash-landing on Netflix soon, but its ultimate, ideal presentation is in afternoon daylight programming on whatever basic cable channel dads nap to these days. As a creature feature, it’s got a playfully unscientific approach to what counts as a “dinosaur.” As an Adam Driver vehicle, it’s going to make for a delightfully odd footnote in what’s sure to be a delightfully odd movie star career. It was also partially filmed in Louisiana swamps (the parts that weren’t filmed against green screens on New Orleans sound stages), which gives it an extra layer of novelty for local napping dads, too tired to find the clicker.
Welcome to Episode #189 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of new releases from the first half of 2023, starting with Give Me Pity!, Amanda Kramer’s feature length spoof of one-woman TV specials in the disco era.
Kids are scary. I say this as a reformed “I hate kids” person (thanks for helping me see the ignorance of my ways, Tara Mooknee), just to make it clear that I don’t mean it that way, and I don’t mean it in the way that most single-income-no-kids people intend either. Not that I think kids are great, either; I moved into a small multi-household complex of single bedroom units intentionally because it greatly reduces the chance that I will have to see or interact with children, or that I will have to deal with the building’s pool being filled with the shrill sound of kids’ joy all summer long. I also have been heard to bemoan the fact that many places my friends and I used to hang out are now more family-dense; my favorite cafe, once a place of refuge and Sunday morning recovery over greasy breakfast tacos, now hosts a kids band (in the Wiggles sense, not the Jackson 5 sense) on some Sundays. If you’re unlucky enough that you pick the wrong time to go to one of my favorite outdoor watering holes that happens to have a great burger truck, pupal humans range freely and run around in the gravel despite the placards at each table asking patrons to mind their children, with the reminder “We are still technically a bar!” But, considering how few of these kids are going to get the chance to grow up, either because they’ve got a date with gun violence destiny or because we’ve got maybe ten years left before widespread crop failure from climate change starves most of us, I have much more pity and sympathy in my heart than disgust these days. What I mean when I say “kids are scary” is that being around other people’s children naturally makes people anxious and nervous, or at least that’s my experience. What if they trip and fall while running past my table at a cafe? Do I suddenly become responsible for their well being? What if the parent thinks I tripped them? What if the kid thinks I tripped them and blames me? Kids are tiny, vulnerable people, but they also have a capability for pure, unfiltered malice that can be creepy as well, and since they’re only just learning how to regulate their emotions and communicate their thoughts, interaction with them can be a minefield.
There’s Something Wrong with the Children is probably the first film that I’ve ever seen that captures that particular unease. Childless couple Margaret (Alisha Wainwright) and Ben (Zach Gilford) are on a glamping trip with Margaret’s best friend Ellie (Amanda Crew), her husband Thomas (Carlos Santos), and their children, upper elementary aged Lucy (Briella Guiza) and younger boy Spencer (David Mattle). Each couple has their own issues; a recent experimentation with swinging has rendered Ellie and Thomas emotionally raw, and while Margaret remains supportive of her husband despite his ongoing struggles with his mental health, that very issue makes her hesitant to start a family with him, especially as it recently cost him a job. The scenes in which we spend time with these characters, to bear witness to their chemistry and the way that they feel comfortable with and play off of one another, is time well spent, unlike in many such films where such exposition feels forced and long-winded. There’s something very natural about the casual, easy way that they all interact that lends the film a level of verisimilitude that makes what comes next that much more wrenching. On a hike, the sextet finds some ruins which they enter and explore, eventually stumbling upon a circular pit that descends so deep into the earth that the bottom is invisible, and even a rock dropped into it never seems to hit bottom. The two kids are immediately entranced by it, with Spencer even calling it the place where light comes from, despite the fact that there’s no light inside of it, and Ben has to catch the boy before he falls/steps into the hole. That night, Margaret offers to let the kids spend the night in the cabin she and Ben are occupying, so that Thomas and Ellie can have some romantic time, and the latter couple accepts. Although the kids exhibit some odd behavior (at one point, Spencer hisses at Ben like some kind of animal when the latter refuses to take the boy back to the ruins that night), it’s chalked up to their age and dismissed pleasantly enough. The next morning, the kids aren’t in the bedroom, and Margaret and Ben both begin looking for them, with Ben jogging back up the previous day’s hike path to the ruins to see if the kids are there; he finds them standing at the precipice, and to his dismay, they leap into its maw. Horror-stricken, he returns to the camp in shock, unsure of how to tell the others the awful truth… only for the kids to come running out of their parents’ cabin, seemingly perfectly healthy.
Ben’s discomfort and, later, terror throughout Act II is palpable, and felt very real to me. Being responsible for someone else’s child, especially for those of us who don’t have a lot of experience with children (I didn’t even “get” other kids when I was a kid), can create a real sense of dread, especially when there’s a possibility of danger. I never had any younger siblings but when I was a teenager, I would babysit my younger twin cousins, who were 7 or 8 at the time. Both of them were much more energetic and rebellious than I could really handle (one of them I found riding her bike down the street during her nap, having climbed out of her window in a tantrum). Although many of my friends have had children in the intervening years and I’ve spent lots of time with those kids and even been a godparent, I’ve still never really gotten the hang of kids; it’s my great hope that my goddaughter sees me like Daria’s cool aunt, but I get the feeling that my discomfort with children comes through and I’m just like Seven of Nine with every child that I encounter. The only thing I do seem well-suited for that some real parents struggle with is understanding where the things that they verbalize may come from. I’ve seen countless listicles over the years that gather various “creepy” things that kids have said to their parents, and I can see how a child talking about an imaginary friend in an unclear way can make people who grew up reading Scary Stories to Read in the Dark interpret their child’s imaginative play as being spooky or ghostly. Although I think a basic understanding of child psychology explains these little creepy tidbits away, I understand the knee-jerk fright response as well. Children are pure id, have no filter, possess limited language skills, and are learning about the world, so they can say shit that sounds like it’s coming out of the mouth of the devil himself while looking like innocence incarnate, but that’s not really uncommon or even abnormal. This also contributes to the paranoia at the heart of Ben’s narrative arc: he never doubts that what he’s experiencing is objectively real, but everyone around him does and we in the audience must as well. Maybe the kids are possessed, or he could just as easily be having a psychological break that is making the common (but not not creepy) behavior of children seem like malicious supernatural evil.
Of course, being a Blumhouse movie, the children are possessed. Both child actors do quite well in their roles, with Spencer as the more impulsive of the two while Lucy’s malevolence is more restrained; their evil rictus grins are very effective, and the way that they can turn from tauntingly wicked to simpering victims depending upon the audience is very scary. Working in tandem, they first make Ben appear to be losing his self-control and sense of reality, then they frame him for violent behavior. There’s a midstream protagonist swap here as the story then moves to focus more on Margaret, as she watches her husband (seemingly) lose his mind and attack her best friend’s kids, and then the film becomes a more standard cabin-in-the-woods scare flick as the adults are separated and picked off one by one until only Margaret is left standing to try and escape. Surprisingly, this tonal shift actually worked rather well for me; up to that point, I was definitely experiencing Ben’s discomfort with the situation, but wasn’t fully won over by the film. Normally the psychological elements are what are more fascinating to me, but once the ball gets rolling with more traditional horror scares, my estimation of the movie was kicked up a notch or two, and Margaret makes for a compelling final girl, especially once Ben becomes fairly catatonic from the horrors of what he’s witnessed.
This is director Roxanne Benjamin’s sophomore feature, but if her name sounds familiar to you, you may remember her segment Don’t Fall from the anthology filmXX. There’s Something Wrong with the Children feels like a more successful attempt at telling that story, which also featured a group of campers stumbling across something otherworldly and one of them becoming inhabited by something evil and then killing the others, but that’s not a criticism. Don’t Fall, because of its brevity, was naturally more scant on characterization, which is one of this film’s strengths; when the relationships between the adults start to fall apart because of the deceptive activity of whatever has a hold on the children. I also really like the choice to have the ruins in this film be something constructed relatively recently; the hikers don’t come upon a sacred burial ground or (as in Don’t Fall) an ancient cave painting warning of some primordial evil. This is a post-colonial structure built from familiar brick and mortar, which the adults theorize may have been a factory that was part of the fur trapper trade or a decommissioned and abandoned military site. There’s a symmetry between the way that the building has been grown over with plants and vegetation and the way that this bottomless pit seems to have wormed its way up into this building, like a long-buried secret that forced its way up in the same way that weeds pop up through cracks in sidewalk. The mystery of the pit’s origin is never explained, nor are we given solid information about what exactly Lucy and Spencer brought back with them. There’s something vaguely insectoid about the kids after their transformation, as sometimes their shadows exhibit Caelifera like wings and heads, and the “secret language” that the two use with each other from that point forward sounds like cicada song, but they’re also clearly demonic in nature as well. There’s some fun foreshadowing of that in all of this as well, from a metal shirt that Ellie wears with the word “devil” on it, to Spencer and Lucy’s fascination with some kind of customizable card game and especially Lucy’s mention of her favorite card, which depicts a serpentine god that devours souls, to Ben’s gift to Spencer of the juggling sticks colloquially referred to as “devil sticks,” to the cartoony triangular cat ears on the hood of Lucy’s red jacket, which also resemble horns. Yellow mountain pansies also play a role somehow, but it’s left mysterious as well.
Of course, this is yet another one of those films which has seen a huge backlash of 1-star, complaint-filled, repetitive negative reviews. I’m almost to the point in my life where I feel like the blurb reviews from the general public are an algorithmically-driven outrage manufacturing experiment to make me hate young people by exaggerating the stereotypes about their expectations and attention spans. One reviewer really had the gall to say “The movie had a lot of unnecessary conversations and plot points,” which is an almost perfect distillation of the addle-brained post-“Why didn’t the eagles just fly the ring to Mordor?” discourse that’s so common now. That’s what the movie is, my guy. The conversations aren’t unnecessary; they’re the point. “Money would of [sic] been better off going to the homeless,” another person wrote, while another review reads “It absolutely didn’t explain the whole reason of [sic] the children being Psycho about holes [sic] at all.” A slightly more positive review reads “Nothing is [sic] this movie is explained to the viewer that gives us knowledge [sic] to know why things are happening.” This unwillingness to accept ambiguity feels like a bigger issue than just some bad reviews on the internet, to be honest; this feels like some real “decline of empire” shit. For me, the well-like shape of the pit and the supposed glow within it called to mind Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space, so in my mind I’m like “Oh, it’s inexplicable and eldritch,” and then I just enjoy the movie. Even if you don’t subscribe to that interpretation, there’s plenty of devilish symbolism, but you’re not going to catch Ellie’s t-shirt or Lucy’s jacket or the dialogue about the card game if you’re only half-watching the movie with your fucking phone in your hand. The movie is only “boring” to you because you’ve been taking psychic damage from a commercially corrupted, consumption driven internet for the past fifteen years.
Diatribe over (for now). I’ve had this one on the backburner for a little while now, and when a friend’s birthday night swim was called off because of severe thunderstorms, it was the perfect atmosphere for this viewing. If you can’t recreate that exactly, I recommend getting as close to it as you can, put your phone on the charger in the other room, and enjoy.
From the Criterion Channel’s recent Erotic Thriller streaming program to Karina Longworth’s recent “Erotic 90s” podcast run to the documentary We Kill for Love‘s exhaustive catalog of the erotic thriller’s DTV era, much attention is currently being paid to streamy Hollywood smut from decades past. The dumbest, schlockiest, most preposterous VHS rentals of yesteryear are currently being paraded around as high art worthy of deep academic analysis, no longer just late-night time filler for horndogs. It’s a great time to be a cinephile. If I were going to throw one more lost-to-time erotic artifact on top of this already mountainous pile of moldy cassettes, I’d like to direct audiences to the 1990 melodrama White Palace, which stars two icons of the genre – Bull Durham‘s Susan Sarandon & Sex, Lies, and Videotape‘s James Spader. White Palace is worth revisiting for the same reason all of these sweaty schlock “classics” are; it’s proof that Hollywood used to regularly make racy movies for adults instead of four-quadrant crowdpleasers where “everyone is beautiful, and no one is horny.” It’s also great contrast to the more desperate, over-the-top erotic thrillers of that era, in that its own sexuality is much more confident, relaxed, and underplayed than its competitors on the Major Video shelf. While most Erotic 90s™ relics twisted themselves in knots trying to steam up the audience, White Palace simply casts the two hottest actors in Hollywood as its leads and lets their chemistry do the work. It makes it look easy.
“The story of a younger man and a bolder woman,” White Palace stars Spader as a highly successful 20-something lawyer and Sarandon as his disheveled 40-something diner waitress – the hottest woman on the planet. They first lock eyes when he Karens out demanding a refund at her knockoff White Castle burger joint; they quickly bond over cheap booze & familial grief in the bar down the street; and then, against all glaring red flags that they are not made for each other, they bone. They bone a lot. There’s nothing especially sinister nor traumatic to get in the way of their boning either. Transgressing the borders of class & culture (he’s Jewish; she’s a godless hedonist) is certainly taboo in the context of an American romance, but it’s not an insurmountable hurdle for their passionate fuck fests. If you compare it against the twisty illogic of the era’s erotic thrillers—the identity hijack of Single White Female, the underground bisexual conspiracy network of Basic Instinct, the virtual reality espionage of Disclosure, etc.—this erotic drama’s central conflict is relatively tame & understated. If anything, its biggest transgressions are in how often it centers female pleasure in its animalistic boning sessions, integrating cunnilingus & vibrator use with the same frankness as fellatio. Even with most of Spader & Sarandon’s thrusting hidden under a thin layer of bed sheets, it’s incredible that they got that much honest, non-misogynist sexuality past the sex-negative ghouls at the MPAA. Usually, they’d have to punish the sexpot diner waitress for her crimes against decency with a last-minute storm of Fatal Attraction bathtub bullets to justify the indulgence, but this movie is much more wholesome & low-key than its hyperviolent equivalents.
White Palace is a glorious time capsule of early-90s cheese & sleaze. You may want to snicker at its saxophone-heavy scoring of St. Louis tourism shots, or its sex montage set to a chipper country tune about the joys of fucking younger men, but its most dated qualities are central to its charm. There are plenty of 90s-specific casting choices to celebrate in the supporting cast too, including Misery‘s Kathy Bates, Pretty Woman‘s Jason Alexander, and two central players from the iconic Jewish sitcom The Nanny (Renee Taylor & Rachel Chagall). Its adjacency to more histrionic Erotic 90s classics is its greatest strength, though, even if you can only feel their twisted influence in scenes where Sarandon is encouraging Spader to drive while wasted or where Spader stares at his wife’s grave while listening to mental replays of Sarandon’s moans. In a way, it’s White Palace‘s resistance to indulging the trashier war-of-the-sexes tropes of the era that’s holding it back from being critically exalted among the best of its kind. It’s just not flashy enough to earn the same attention as all-out smut fests like The Doom Generation, which just enjoyed a full theatrical victory lap among all this Erotic 90s fanfare. Instead, it’s currently unavailable to watch by any legal means other than, I suppose, borrowing the out-of-print Full Screen DVD I happened to find at a local thrift store. White Palace wasn’t quite sleazy enough to earn a spot in The Criterion Channel’s Erotic Thrillers package, so its day in the sun as a recovered erotic relic is still to come (and come and come and come). I hope to see it come soon.
Sometimes you don’t realize how regressive & puritanical most American cinema is until you watch a European art film. For instance, the recent Austrian-French drama Rimini was revelatory in just how squicked out most American filmmakers are about nude, elderly bodies. I’ve become so accustomed to seeing old naked bodies exploited for gross-out jump scares in American horror that it felt genuinely transgressive to see geriatric sex shot without shame or judgement. The nude-geriatric jump scare is a well established American tradition, dating at least as far back as the bathtub scene in Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining. The practice has ramped up exponentially in recent years, though, and you can see elderly nudity depicted as skin-crawly grotesqueries in such buzzy horror titles as Barbarian, IT, It Follows, X, The Visit, The Witch, Hereditary, Midsommar, and (for the full Ari Aster trifecta) Beau is Afraid. Any one of those examples could be individually defended for their reasoning in perpetuating the trope, but as a group they do indicate a fairly damnable ageist trend. And so, when the elderly women of Rimini pay to have vigorous, onscreen sex with their favorite washed-up pop star, it’s surprisingly refreshing to see their sexual activities and sexual bodies presented in a matter-of-fact, semi-documentary style instead of the heightened American nightmare equivalent where they are shocking & gross.
Well, that’s not entirely true. The geriatric sex in Rimini is also shocking & gross, but only because of the context. The film itself is a shocking & gross character study of a shocking & gross man, played by Austrian actor Michael Thomas. Thomas stars as the fictional has-been pop singer Ricky Bravo, who drinks and fucks away the remaining scraps of his life in the off-season beachside hotel rooms of the titular Italian tourist town. The tourists have left for winter, so seemingly all that’s left in Rimini’s frozen-over water parks and hotel suites is Ricky Bravo’s horned-up fans, who are bussed in from distant Euro retirement homes to bask in his kitschy caricature of romance novel machismo. Ricky Bravo recalls a wide range of cornball sex symbols from decades past without parodying any one example in particular, instead approximating what it might be like if Meatloaf had starred in a 1980s Beauty and the Beast TV show instead of Ron Perlman. He even dresses in a ragged, beastly fur coat he tosses onto hotel room beds like a Viking pelt that he ravages his paying customers on top of, essentially wearing an unwashable cum rag around town between gigs. All of Bravo’s handsome affectations get increasingly grotesque when you squint at them in that way. He presents himself as a passionate lush, but he’s really just a lonely alcoholic and a low-effort gigolo. His decadence is decorated with the faded hallmarks of wealth from much brighter times, and it all looks so increasingly tacky in the cold, sober light of day – especially by the dozenth time his de-glamourized routine repeats onscreen.
Ricky Bravo’s racism also becomes increasingly apparent as his macho facade erodes. He sees himself as a progressive rebel who’s transcended the fascistic politics of his demented Nazi father (played by German actor Hans-Michael Rehberg in his final film role), whom he’s permanently parked in a grimly mundane nursing home. Bravo has, of course, absorbed plenty of his father’s racism despite himself, though, and the film is just as much about the crooner’s reactions to Rimini’s immigrant populations as it is about his unconventional sex work. While the tourists and seasonal workers can afford to leave town for the winter, there are large communities of homeless Muslim refugees who cannot. They slowly freeze to death on Rimini’s beaches while the town’s hotel rooms (and Ricky’s tacky mansion) remain mostly empty, since there is no practical way to make money off sheltering them. Bravo’s initial discomfort towards homeless refugees escalates to blatant hostility when his estranged daughter arrives in town with a silent Muslim boyfriend, demanding backpay for decades of missed child support. Bravo loses focus from satisfying his adoring fans (on stage and in bed) just long enough to scheme his way into the petty cash needed to purchase his daughter’s unearned affection, which means that he rips off and exploits the few people he can exert power over in the smallest, cruelest ways – all while looking down on the immigrant people who share his otherwise desolate city streets.
As you can likely tell, Rimini is grim. It’s also wryly funny, and the joke is always on Ricky Bravo for being such a drunken, dirty asshole. Even the camera’s extreme wide-shot framing treats Bravo’s life as a sad joke. He’s often shrunken to puny insignificance by the camera’s cold distancing, especially whenever he’s performing his dusty pop songs for his dwindling crowd of devotees. The camera never lets him get away with big-timing the audience, making sure we see every inch of the hotels’ drop-tile ceilings while he performs his sappy love ballads. The film’s funeral parlors, nursing homes, and hotel conference rooms make for oppressively bland mise-en-scène, and there’s never a hint of music video escapism in the pop singer’s meaningless life haunting those spaces. That’s not how the sex is shot, though. In the bedroom, the camera is borderline pornographic in its handheld, documentary framing of Ricky Bravo’s performance. Bravo’s only meaningful contribution to the world is his ability to provide pleasure & fantasy to elderly women who find him hot. You will not be surprised to learn that he eventually finds a way to fuck that up too. Rimini is a distinctly European flavor of feel-bad movie where everything eventually sours & rots for our squirmy displeasure at the nearest non-corporate theater. It says something, then, that it still has a less shameful, othering eye for shooting geriatric sex than mainstream American cinema, even if the people having that sex are inevitably demeaned & destroyed in other ways.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Czech New Wave whatsit Prefab Story (1979), an experimental ensemble-cast drama about infinite urban construction from Věra “Daisies” Chytilová
00:00 Welcome
02:30 Until the Light Takes Us (2008) 09:27 The Last Starfighter (1984) 20:12 The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari (2022) 25:53 Arrietty (2010) 26:53 Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) 31:50 The Flash (2023)
It comes up here from time to time, but my favorite fictional thing is a story about tiny people in a normal sized world. I’ve talked about my childhood love of Honey I Shrunk the Kids and how that translated into a fondness for the (first two) Ant-Man movies, but a lot of it can be traced back to my utter absorption into one specific series of novels I read in my youth: The Borrowers, by Mary Norton. There’s nothing more magical to me than tiny beings using normal-sized objects in novel ways: the knight from a chess set as a kind of decorative bust; a watch, sans band, hung on a wall as a clock; a postage stamp framed as a piece of art. I never understood why those books were so much less well known than other fantasy novels of the same ilk, and I never could figure why Arrietty Clock, who was just about the coolest girl in the world, was less famous than Lucy Pevensie, Dorothy Gale, Pippi Longstocking, or Wendy Moira Angela Darling. There have been numerous adaptations over the years, but one of the best came out when I was too busy with grad school to take note of it, but I finally have, and it’s a delight.
Arrietty was released in Japan in 2010 before seeing a U.K. release the following year and U.S. distribution through Disney in 2012, under the title The Secret World of Arrietty. I refuse to call it that (can you imagine if The Wizard of Oz was titled Dorothy’s Secret World or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was called The Secret World of Lucy?), but I do want to list it here for those of you who will want to seek it out for your own enjoyment. I’ll also recommend that, since the film is available on HBOMax in both the original Japanese and the U.S. English version, that you check it out in its original language, in spite of my love for Carol Burnett, who voices the Haru equivalent in the English dub. I was particularly fascinated to see this adaptation, which sets the story in (seemingly) 1980s Japan rather than Edwardian England, as I’ve always thought of this as a quintessentially English story, like Mary Poppins or the Narnia series, and although the idea of updating the setting to the U.S. seems heretical to me, I knew the Studio Ghibli aesthetic would more than make up for any displacement.
Arrietty is a fourteen-year-old girl who lives with her mother Homily and father Pod. The three of them are “borrowers”: humanoid beings of 4-5 inches in height, who live alongside and parallel to full-sized humans. The former survive by “borrowing” from the latter, whom they call “human beans,” keeping themselves hidden and their existence secret. As the story opens, Arrietty has finally reached an age when she is to be taken on her first borrowing expedition into the home of an older woman named Sadako, who lives with her housekeeper Haru and who has recently taken in her great nephew Shō, a boy roughly Arrietty’s age who suffers from a heart condition. In the novel, Arrietty’s family lived in the base of a clock (hence their surname there), but here, they live largely beneath the house in a beautifully detailed home of their own; they access the larger house through a series of secret holes that are accessible only to them because of their size, although the passageways between them require a bit of exploration and adventure to navigate, and vermin like rats pose a threat to them. Shō spotted Arrietty in the garden when he first arrived and is fascinated by her, and he startles her when she and her father are on one of their expeditions, causing her to drop a precious sugar cube, which the Borrowers are forced to forsake. Shō further attempts to befriend Arrietty, with whom he shares both a profound loneliness and a deep melancholy, as she is likely to be among the last of her kind and has never known anyone other than her parents, while he has spent his short life as an invalid with few friends and little hope for a future despite an upcoming operation. Despite his best intentions, however, their friendship endangers the Borrower family in ways that neither could have predicted.
This is not a perfect translation of the novel(s), but it is a marvelous and lovely example of how to translate a denser text for the screen. Some changes are small; I already mentioned above that the family lives in a crawlspace rather than a mantel clock, but there are also character changes that shift the story subtlely, and not for the worse. Shō is much friendlier from the outset than the unnamed boy in the novel, who has a bit of the old British superiority complex despite having been raised mostly in India; that is completely removed here, as is the fact that he had little English literacy as a result of having lived abroad. In the novel, it is this fact and Arrietty’s willingness to read to him that helps the two to bond, while here, the things that he does for the Borrowers he does purely out of the goodness of his heart. There are also fewer Borrowers here and the Clock family’s isolation is more profound as a result; Pod mentions to his daughter that there used to be others of their kind elsewhere in the house but that they have either moved on or been killed. The Clock’s relatives like Uncle Hendreary (Pod’s brother) who are rumored to have moved to a nearby badger sett and the boy’s attempts to transmit letters between the two families are cut, which also adds to the textual richness of the questions regarding any other Borrowers out there in the world; until we meet feralish Borrower Spiller later in the film, we’re unsure whether Arrietty and her family are the last of her kind, deepening her kinship with Shō. This also eliminates a lot of the squabbling between the various Borrowers, which is a fun comedic element in the novels as they get into rather large rows for such tiny specimens but makes for a more concise narrative here.
But what’s most impressive here, of course, are the visuals. The backdrops are painted with that lovely Ghibli precision, and the style lends itself well to creating the sumptuous verdancy of an ivy-draped garden from the perspective of a four-inch teenager. Because Arrietty and her family are so tiny, the idiosyncrasies of every teacup, sideboard, and wainscot are terrifically magnified, and all of it is lovingly rendered in gorgeous detail. Great attention is paid to smaller characteristics as well; in one scene, Homily pours tea for her family, and it comes out in (relatively) huge globs because of the surface tension of the water, a characteristic that carries over to the behavior of rain in a different beautifully animated section of the narrative. A glob of cheese on toast, likewise, does not flatten, but retains its bead-like shape. All of these details combine to make the film incredibly immersive, and it’s all the more to its benefit.
Swampflix 