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.
Hello there, reader! Because of the nature of this movie, the seemingly endless stream of (alleged) criminal acts that the lead star continues to perform, and the fact that a nearly-completed movie starring and helmed by creators of color was shelved for back asswards financial reasons while this one was still released to the general public despite starring an (alleged) criminal, I have chosen to forego a star rating for this film to prevent even the appearance of advocating for you to contribute to its box office or rental take. I myself had no intention of seeing this movie and contributing to it monetarily, but for reasons I cannot disclose, I was able to see it on opening weekend, and Warner Bros. footed the bill. For reasons of legal disavowment, I must reiterate that Swampflix and its affiliates do not endorse piracy, and the fact that I am bringing this up here is not a playful endorsement for pirating this film⸮ Wait, shit, what does that punctuation mark mean? I’ve never seen it before! Anyway, on with The Flash!
When I recently had the good fortune to visit with our fearless leader Brandon in real life recently, he recited a piece of wisdom that I’ve heard him voice before: CGI ages like milk. I don’t disagree, but in the case of today’s film, the CGI arrived rancid upon delivery, and the fact that it did so means that this film has no right to exist in the form that it does. I’m going to reference two pieces of media that, based on box office, Nielsen numbers, and anecdotal evidence in the form of responses to my general questions, you’ve probably never seen: 2013’s regrettable Sam Raimi Baum adaptation Oz the Great and Powerful Movie and the 2019 sexy Spanish drama series Toy Boy. In regards to the latter, the opening sequence of the show contains scenes from within the narrative, but with the characters and all surfaces rendered as if they are made of glazed ceramics (see it here, although it’s possible NSFW for sexy reasons); in the former, there is a character named the China Girl, an animate, living porcelain doll who joins the protagonist’s journey (see a clip here, although it’s possible NSFW for James Franco reasons). The reason that I bring these up is because what these two things are doing in earnest The Flash does blindly, blanketly, and with no remorse; so, so, so many of the images that we see here look like soulless, shiny mannequins as those glazed figurines that a certain generation of our elders collected. Some of the time, it could be argued, that the images are supposed to look like that (we’ll get to the time arena in a minute), but other times, they are clearly not – most notably and frequently, every time we see two different Barry Allens on screen, both played by Ezra Miller, it’s abundantly clear which of the two was played by a stand in upon whom Miller’s visage was pasted, based solely on how nonplastic and uncanny they look.
I know that Hayley Mills and Lindsay Lohan were never tasked with playing speedsters in their respective Traps, but the technology in the 1990s and the 1960s was more convincing at portraying reunited twins than this movie is at Ezra Miller walking down the street side by side with themself. And the Flash suit! It’s so … bad. Genuinely awful. I went on a bit of a tear just now in the middle of writing this to see if I could find any behind-the-scenes photos of Miller in the suit on set, and there are none, which almost makes it seem to me like they were never in the full suit on set at all, which would in turn explain why it never looked “real” for a single moment that it was on screen. And I’m not just talking every time that there was a fight scene and everything immediately started to look exactly like a super move from Injustice 2, but every time Barry was just standing around doing comedic bits, the suit looked like someone trying to 3-D animate amphibian skin and doing a poor job of it. Ryan Reynolds’s Green Lantern was at least supposed to look the way that it did; this one looks like a mistake that they decided to go ahead and leave in, which makes it completely bananas that this film was released in this form with this lead performer. It boggles the mind that executives were considering recasting the part of Barry Allen because of Miller’s (allegedly) many, many (alleged) crimes and then decided that they didn’t need to, because this looked good enough to put on the big screen. Bananas! Bananas!
Narratively, the film takes its inspiration from the comic Flashpoint, which was released in 2011 as a way to reset the status quo for DC comics, leading into a new continuity that was, in theory, supposed to make the material more accessible to new readers and thus increase circulation. In most recent versions of the Flash comic-book canon, he’s driven by the fact that his mother was killed when he was a child and his father was arrested and (wrongly) convicted of her murder. Since it’s been part and parcel of the whole Flash deal for a while that he can run so fast that he can either travel through time using his speed outright or by access to something called the Speed Force (let’s not get bogged down in those details), it occurs to Barry Allen to try and prevent the murder of his mother, leading to unforeseen consequences on the timeline. If you’re sure you’ve never read that story but it still sounds familiar, it’s because it also formed the basis of the third season of CW’s The Flash, which just finished its ninth and final season, or perhaps you saw the animated direct-to-video film Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox sometime since its release in 2013. It’s not exactly new territory at this point, is what I’m saying. We get an opening sequence that exists solely to trot out a couple of characters that we’ve seen before and establish that Barry sees Bruce Wayne/Batman as his mentor and that Bruce isn’t necessarily unwelcoming of the younger man but retains his normal aloofness; all of this is here to establish the status quo that they’re going to demolish completely before this movie is over.
When it looks like Barry’s father (Ron Livingston) is about to lose his appeal, Barry takes off into the past to make one simple change: to make sure his mother (Maribel Verdú, one of the best parts of the film) doesn’t forget to pick up tomatoes at the supermarket the morning the day that she dies, so that his father isn’t absent when someone finds her in a house that they assumed would be empty. As Barry returns to the present, he sees how the wings of that butterfly have affected his life but, before he gets there, something else invades the Speed Force and knocks him out of his time bubble, straight into 2013, on the same day that he was initially struck by lightning and gained his powers. Only this time, since his parents are alive and Barry grew up with a happy childhood, he wasn’t driven to go into forensics to one day learn something that would help him clear his father’s name, so he won’t be in that police lab, so Barry has to take the younger version of himself—differentiated from Present!Flash by nothing more than his longer hair—to the lab to make sure that this happens, which results in the loss of his own powers. Past!Flash, lacking the maturity that Present!Flash had at the same age, grates against the older version of himself, who in turn has to give his younger self a crash course in Being the Flash 101 while powerless and stunned to learn that his little time travel event has affected things that happened even before the changes that he made, including that Eric Stoltz played Marty McFly in Back to the Future as originally cast (a gag that Fringe did once), which resulted in Michael J. Fox taking the leading role in Footloose, which in turn caused Kevin Bacon to play Maverick in Top Gun. Another of the changes he caused is that there are no other metahumans in this timeline, so there’s no one present to stop the Kryptonian invasion led by General Zod (Michael Shannon) that is happening concurrently, but unlike in Man of Steel, there’s no Superman here to stop them. There does happen to be a Batman, so the two Barries seek him out at Wayne Manor, only to find that he’s not the man that Present!Barry has come to know, literally.
I’m about to reference another piece of media that I’m almost entirely certain you’ve never heard of: a 1984 desktop computer game titled Bouncing Babies, which I played on the very first computer that our family owned (I’m not that old, we were just that poor). In the game, wave after wave of babies are thrown from a burning building, and the player controls a group of paramedics who use a trampoline to bounce the falling babies into the back of an ambulance. The opening action scene of this film is … that? While Batman (Ben Affleck … for now) is embroiled in a high speed chase, Flash is called upon to help prevent the collapse of a hospital that was damaged; this hospital, as it happens, keeps all of the babies in a nursery on the top floor, and when one of the building wings collapses, they all go flying out of the broken windows as the building loses its bearings, and Flash has to whip around on all of the falling debris and such as they fall. One never feels that there’s a real threat, of course, since it’s PS4 Injustice 2 Flash running around saving PS4 Injustice 2 babies, but it’s a fun sequence nonetheless, and that’s something worth noting throughout the film: these are the best action cutscenes from a video game that you’ve ever seen, but there will never be a single moment that you think to yourself that you’re having a cinematic experience.
And on top of all that, since this is a multiversal story, they end up bringing in soulless CGI golems made in the images of George Reeves and Christopher Reeve as their respective versions of Superman, staring out of the screen like they’re waiting for you to press start to open the game menu; there’s even a bit where a digitally de-aged (or a digitally everythinged) Nicolas Cage fights a giant spider, which was a major point of contention in the direction of the never-finished Superman Lives, with the implication being that there was a timeline in this multiverse where the narrative of that aborted film played out. It’s really banking on your nostalgia factor, which it has to, because while there have been a few good (or at least fun) eggs in this weird DCEU basket of mostly stinkers, there’s nothing iconic in any of these movies onto which one could anchor any meaningful moments. That they went back to the General Zod’s invasion well is very telling here. And if you somehow haven’t been spoiled on one of the big reveals in this movie (the best one, to be honest), I’m not going to ruin that for you here, but to pretend that it’s anything other than a great big nostalgia grab would be pathologically dishonest.
There’s so much wrong with this movie. The (allegedly) criminal star, an utterly inconsequential love-story plot tumor, the way that Miller plays Barry not so much like someone who’s done some deep actor work on portraying a neurodivergent person as much as they play him like a bully mocking a neurodivergent classmate, the endless parade of ceramic fight sequences, and the way they managed to make poor Helen Slater look like aLifeforce zombie (that woman deserves better than this, dammit). And yet … and yet …. Twice during this movie I leaned over to my viewing companion: first, during the sequence that adapted Bouncing Babies to the screen, I leaned over and said, with surprise, “I’m … enjoying this?” Later, during yet another action sequence, I said “I hate how much I’m enjoying this.” And, as we left the theater, I confessed: “I regret to inform you of this, but I had a great time.” However, I am once again advising that I do not endorse that you see it, at least not in any way that could contribute to the film financially. If your kids are demanding to watch it, now is the perfect time to trick them into watching the 1990s show starring John Wesley Schipp (I’m not going to link it, but a quick search shows that it’s on YouTube right now, probably illegally), and that will cost you nothing and buy you enough time to Google “how to talk to your family about Ezra Miller” and then just bide your time until this film becomes available in a way that’s free to you. Apropos of nothing, do you have a VPN? I use ExpressVPN, and I love it! (Not sponsored.)
Because yes, dear reader, it’s true, I do regret to inform you that I had a great time. I’m sorry that I saw it in a way that didn’t contribute to the coffers of the Pharisees that canceled Batgirl and that you don’t have that option available to you (yet). Just be patient. You’ll get to look into Superman’s dead eyes soon enough.
I am reporting from deep within the bowels of New Nerd America: a pop art dystopia in which nerds have decidedly won the culture war and allowed the media landscape to rot in decades-old rubble instead of encouraging anything fresh to flourish. What I mean to say is that there’s nothing especially interesting to me in theaters right now, because all the local marquees are cluttered with nostalgia-bait IP. Our poptimistic celebration of vintage nerd culture has gone too far, to the point where nearly all American screen space has been gobbled up by bajillion dollar intellectual propertie$ that service some long gestating fandom: Marvel fans, DC fans, Mario fans, Transformer fans, Fast & Furious fans, Little Mermaid fans, oscillating fans, and fans of the Boogeyman. Even the more artistic alternatives to this deluge of summertime corporate schlock—the new Spider-Man and the new Kamen Rider—are reverently referential to the nerdy histories of their titular superheroes; they just happen to be better crafted than most other nerd-culture nostalgia stokers currently on the market. In these moments of early-summer panic, I always think back to Spielberg’s dystopian adaptation of Ready Player One, a movie that mourned the cultural brain rot of a society willing to dwell in the artistic triumphs of the past instead of innovating new populist art for the future. As you’ll remember, Ready Player One was a critical failure upon its release, mostly for its association with its vapid source-material novel, which celebrated the dawning of the New Nerd America with uncritical nerdgasmic glee. I personally thought Spielberg did a good job of undercutting the nostalgic poptimism of Ernest Cline’s book, though, the same way that Verhoeven “adapted” Starship Troopers into an argument against its own militaristic thesis. To me, Ready Player One was a nightmare vision of a near-future Hell dominated by 1980s nerd culture bullshit (one we’re already living in just five years later). The only way its Pre-Existing IP Futurism could possibly look fun & celebratory is if nerds were still the pop culture underdogs fighting to earn wider cultural respect for their personal pet obsessions. Basically, it’s as if everyone misread 2018’s Ready Player One as a remake of 1984’s The Last Starfighter.
There’s something fascinating about the pop culture ouroboros of The Last Starfighter borrowing heavily from early Spielberg, then being echoed in Ready Player One, which was then adapted into a legitimate Spielberg film with outright contempt for its own source material. Like in Cline’s celebration of New Nerd America, The Last Starfighter is the story of a Fanboy loser who proves the local Haters who doubt him wrong when his video gaming skills end up saving the planet instead of just wasting countless hours of his youth. The 1980s setting means that he’s addicted to an arcade cabinet instead of a VR headset, but the spirit remains the same. Lance Guest “stars” as a frustrated, go-nowhere teen who earns the high score on his trailer park’s communal arcade game while all the Cool Kids are off enjoying a social day at the beach. The game turns out to be an intergalactic recruitment tool for a noble space alien army who need the nerd’s joystick skills to win their space-laser war with a vaguely defined enemy. Instead of directly adapting the gameplay “plot” of a specific game the way most Video Game Movies would (the animated Super Mario Bros movie being a recent example), The Last Starfighter instead portrays the reason nerdy kids obsess over those games in the first place. It’s a live-action illustration of the escapist power fantasy the medium offers its pasty shut-in players. And since video games were still a nerds-only proposition at the time The Last Starfighter was produced, it’s a charming prototype for the much sourer escapist power fantasy that would be echoed in the Ready Player One novel, which is a gloating celebration of the dominant pop culture of its time. The Last Starfighter is almost just as much a celebration of 1980s kitsch as its 2010s equivalent. Its titular arcade game is a shameless Star Wars rip-off; its space-age adventurism is directly informed by early Spielberg titles like E.T. & Close Encounters; and its basic video-game-recruitment premise is essentially a too-soon remake of Tron‘s. It’s so deeply steeped in 80s nerd shit that its inclusion of a DeLorean-shaped spaceship feels like an homage to Back to the Future, even though it was released a year earlier than that Zemeckis touchstone. There’s just something wholesome about that reverence for 80s nerd culture being filmed when it could still get you dunked in a toilet or shoved in a locker, as opposed to it being screen-printed on every Target brand t-shirt on the shelf.
Not every aspect of The Last Starfighter is wholesome & quaint. In my dusty DVD’s behind-the-scenes documentary on the movie’s “continued popularity”, the computer effects artists behind its creation are loudly proud of their contribution to modern blockbuster filmmaking, claiming that The Last Starfighter was the first feature film to primarily use CG effects to produce its “real world” space-fighting environments. The early-80s CG has aged about as well as you would expect, often giving the film the feel of a vintage PC video game instead of a proper sci-fi picture. It was certainly ahead of the industrial curve, though, which you can tell in how improbably advanced its star-war graphics look in the arcade gameplay vs. how surreally dated they look once our nerdy hero is playing the game “for real.” It was also made in a time before programmers were brave enough to attempt computerizing their space alien characters, so there are thankfully plenty of adorable rubber-mask monsters cheering on & fighting alongside our fanboy gamer hero. The computer animation team did a decent job for their era, but they could have done even better if the studio had given them the proper time & resources needed to complete the project. Even in my DVD’s victory lap featurette, they complain about the stress of completing the project on time, having been given an impossible 6-month deadline to finalize their effects work. As a result, they rushed the project to completion, putting in overworked, undercompensated hours to make sure the movie could hit its predetermined release date. In that way, the New Nerd America is nothing new at all. The way the computer animators behind all the nostalgic fan service behemoths currently on the market are treated by the studios who subcontract them is bottomlessly cruel & abusive, especially considering how much money their employers are making on their undervalued labor. The Last Starfighter was a template for modern nerd culture filmmaking both its reverence for schlocky 80s pop art (which was at least fresh & interesting at the time) and in its exploitation of the actual, real-life nerds behind the keyboards that made it come to life. I’m going to guess that the Ready Player One film, no matter how much higher in quality than the Ready Player One book, also participated in that modern industry standard, which has only gotten worse as the demand for this kind of material has exponentially risen.
I didn’t revisit The Last Starfighter in order to heap more praise onto a five-year-old Spielberg film most people hate or have totally forgotten. I also didn’t revisit it to make some kind of Galaxy Brain point about the state of modern populist filmmaking. I revisited it because I was bored, I wanted to watch a movie, and nothing currently playing in theaters looked novel or exciting enough to justify leaving my couch. However, I did venture out the next day to sell my Last Starfighter DVD (along with other dusty pop culture leftovers) and was greeted with two bittersweet responses from the incurably nerdy clerk at my local 2nd & Charles: 1. “We’re no longer buying back DVDs,” which is a real heartbreaker for me — the end of an era. And, 2. “That movie’s badass,” which I hope is the same reaction whoever picks up my copy from the Mid-City Goodwill has as well. It turns out these 80s nerd culture leftovers aren’t worth all that much after all. They’re meant to sell popcorn & digital downloads for a few months then promptly be forgotten forever, which would be the ideal amount of reverence for this kind of nerdy pop art if it weren’t for the fact that all of its latest examples are regurgitations of past triumphs.
It’s summertime, which means every movie marquee in America is clogged with corporate slop, and even the more artistic counterprogramming offered at your local multiplex is going to be a frantic superhero IP refresher like Shin Kamen Rider or Across the Spider-Verse. There’s no refuge for weirdo cineastes in these conditions, which means that I won’t be leaving my couch much until Halloween & Oscars schlock reclaim their rightful screen space in October. Naturally, I’m still watching movies, but I’m trying to keep everything light & low-key instead of getting my brain hammered smooth by the fast & furious transformer machinery of the summer’s new release schedule.
As a result, I’ve been watching a lot of quiet indie films about love & romance in recent weeks, none of which will be lighting up my personal Best of the Year list at the end of 2023 but all of which have been a pleasant distraction while soaking up AC at my home box office. So, here are a few short-form reviews of the smaller-scale, smaller-budget romances I’ve been watching this summer.
Rye Lane
When I try to name the most romantic movies of all time, the walk-and-talk European meet cute Before Sunrise is high on the hypothetical list. Its 2023 equivalent, Rye Lane, continues the Before brand tradition of casual first-date swooning but shakes up the usual Beformula by transporting the action to the mostly Black neighborhoods of South London. Meeting by chance at a mutual friend’s hilariously hacky art show, two South Londoners endlessly chat on what spirals into an accidental all-day first date, despite their recent, respective heartbreaks over failed relationships. Their getting-to-know-you banter is decidedly low-key, but their walking tour of hip city neighborhoods provides a vibrant, near-psychedelic backdrop of food, art, fashion, sex, and music. One sequence involving a petty heist temporarily raises the stakes (as our giddy couple breaks into an ex’s flat to liberate a vinyl copy of The Low End Theory), but for the most part the will-they-won’t-they tension of their tryst has an obvious, inevitable and, most importantly, adorable conclusion.
Rye Lane offers all of the usual chaotic, inexplicable behavior of a bubbly romcom, except now matched with chaotic, inexplicable camera work. The whole thing is shot with a Soderberghian fisheye lens, bending a familiar modern comedy template around the constantly surprising visual flourishes of music videos & vintage animation. Its central hook-up story of a meek man shaken out of his comfort zone by a manic pixie dream hedonist isn’t ever mind-blowing, but its warped visual presentation often can be. In short, it’s a feel-good Before Sunrise for the Instagram era, and it’s a shame that its direct-to-Hulu distro means it has a much smaller chance of making a splash as that 90s indie-scene charmer.
Emily
Wuthering Heights may be the greatest romance ever written, but its story of life-long ferocious obsession & betrayal isn’t likely to be described as “small” or “low-key” by anyone who’s actually read it. However, this factually loose biopic of its author imagines a brief, intimate affair that might have inspired its tale of feral, soul-destroying love, dragging it down to the level of a more recognizable, real-world romance. Emma “Maeve from Sex Education” Mackey stars as a teenage Emily Brontë doing field research (i.e., getting her heart broken) before writing the novel that made her infamous. According to the movie’s made-up version of events, her source inspiration behind Cathy’s wild, untamed desire for Heathcliff is split between the only two young men in her life: her libertine brother and their isolated village’s local curate. Thankfully, the story never tips into full-on incest (although that wouldn’t be too out of place in a Wuthering Heights context). Instead, the young Brontë shares a fiery, oft-consummated passion with the clergyman – which is just sinful & blasphemous enough to justify its supposed connection to the novel, especially once the curate breaks her spirit by abruptly breaking things off.
Emily may not be useful as a historical text, but its deviations from the facts of Brontë’s sheltered bookworm life help make it an entertaining tribute to the greatest romance ever penned. There’s something especially endearing about the way her handwritten prose & poetry are too powerful for the small-minded prudes around her to gaze at directly (including her sister & fellow author Charlotte, whom the film slanders as a proto-Karen scold). Once a grief-stricken Emily sits down to scribble the entirety of Wuthering Heights in a single, furious tantrum, the fictionalized power of her writing can come across a little goofy, but it helps that the novel in question has stood the test of time as an incendiary work that either enraptures or enrages its readers to this day. More importantly, the film itself is a gloomy love letter to all angsty goth girls everywhere, often making Brontë’s imagined loves & literary triumphs secondary to her iconoclastic status as a teenage “free thinker” who dabbles in opium, dirty poems, and the occult. It’s romantic in its portrayal of a doomed fling that can only last a single season, but it’s also romantic in its aspirational posturing as a ghost story about the original shy-girl goth kid who became infamous for her dark-sided art and her intense brooding on the moors.
Sanctuary
It’s not exactly true that there’s no artsy counterprogramming in theaters right now. In some ways, I’ve just been trained over the pandemic to treat this kind of low-budget, low-stakes movie as a small-screen experience that I’ll eventually catch whenever it hits streaming. So, I have admittedly shot myself in the foot several times over the past month, skipping out on local showings of Past Lives, Monica, You Hurt My Feelings, and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. I guess I’ll be cramming in those titles in the mad scramble to bulk up my Best of the Year list in December. In the meantime, though, I did recently venture out of the house to see the single-room two hander Sanctuary, despite it being no bigger nor flashier than those competitors. I suppose after already being suckered into watching Piercing, any movie where Christopher Abbott is tortured by a high-class dominatrix is something of an Event Film for me, although I can’t say either example so far has been especially exceptional. In Sanctuary, Abbott’s pro-domme tormentor is played by Margaret Qualley, who refuses to take “No” for an answer when her millionaire hotel-heir client (Abbott) decides to break off their professional relationship just as he takes over his dad’s business and the real money starts flowing in. Feeling like he owes his success to her sexual “training” and like their sessions have transcended a purely transactional nature to something more sweetly romantic, she holds him hostage in his luxury hotel suite until he caves and gives her everything her volatile whims demand.
I’m not entirely sure what to make of Sanctuary. It’s either a disappointingly flat erotic thriller or a charmingly daffy romcom. Maybe it’s both. It needed to feel like a finely constructed stage play to fully work, but its ditzy internal logic is written more in the spirit of online erotica. The result is something like an off-Broadway adaptation of Succession fan fiction (a Roman Roy fantasy, specifically), which can be adorably goofy in the moment but quickly falls apart under any prolonged scrutiny. I did laugh at the camera movements that simulated the power dynamic flipping between characters by literally flipping the frame upside down (a move that’s coincidentally mirrored in Emily, which enters the twisted mind of Emily Brontë by literally twisting the camera’s zoom-in on her dark goth-girl eyes). I also chuckled at the baffling, seemingly arbitrary decisions those characters make every few minutes, either to convey the frustration & desperation of someone who’s wildly horny or to convey the frustration & desperation of a screenwriter who doesn’t know how to keep the story going. I appreciated that Qualley kept the mood light by playing her domme persona bratty instead of severe, but I can’t say that her performance wouldn’t have been better suited for, say, a Rachel Sennott or a Mia Goth or a Mia Wasikowska – one of whom has already proven her worth in this exact Abbott-teasing scenario. I don’t know. I’m the exact target audience for this kind of perversely playful filth, and yet I walked away from the theater only mildly satisfied, so I can’t imagine most people will work up much enthusiasm for it. At least there are no green screen backdrops, and Christopher Abbott isn’t playing a superhero? Arthouse victories can feel so minor this time of year, but I’m still thankful that they’re out there.
Welcome to Episode #188 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Hanna, and Britnee discuss the glamorously adulterous romcoms of Old Hollywood legend Ernst Lubitsch, starting with Trouble in Paradise (1932)
00:00 Welcome
03:03 Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) 05:48 Sorcerer (1977) 07:50 Reality (2023) 12:45 Savage Grace (2007) 16:55 You Hurt My Feelings (2023) 23:03 Rimini (2023) 28:08 Sanctuary (2023)
30:51 Ernst Lubitsch 39:35 Trouble in Paradise (1932) 55:55 Design for Living (1933) 1:13:43 The Shop Around the Corner (1940) 1:28:10 That Lady in Ermine (1948)
On a recent episode of the Lagniappe podcast, I mentioned that I had recently watched the abysmal 2000 Cersei Lannister/Norman Reedus vehicle Gossip, which couldn’t even be saved by an appearance from Edward James Olmos and starrings role by two of my sweetest baboos, James Marsden and Joshua Jackson. Luckily, it wasn’t long before I found a more entertaining (if not technically better) tonal analog that fit the bill for trashy-chic urban-legend dark comedy in 1998’s The Curve, playing on a Tubi near you!
Chris (Michael Vartan) is the token scholarship kid among his friends at a prestigious Ivy League feeder college. He’s working harder with less while his two upper class roommates—utter asshole Rand (Randall Batinkoff) and unmedicated manic pixie nightmare twink Tim (Matthew Lillard)—are able to largely skate by in their courses. Chris needs a 4.0 to qualify not just for entry to Harvard Med but the funding needed to attend, and there’s a B+ in one of his classes that might be the deciding factor in whether or not he moves on to his next academic waypoint for levelling up or faces an unknown fate. When he’s unable to change his grade through cheating or hacking, Tim comes up with a way to make sure that Chris gets the grade; as it turns out, it’s university policy to offer any student whose roommate commits suicide a 4.0 for the semester. Chris balks at this idea at first, but when he witnesses some truly awful behavior from Rand, including verbally abusing and embarrassing his girlfriend Nicole (Tamara Craig Thomas) at a party in front of dozens of people when she was just trying to get him alone to tell him that she was pregnant, he commits. After all, at this point, they’ve already laid the groundwork by gathering material that would lead investigators to no other conclusion than suicide, including Joy Division CDs, Poe novels, and a copy of The Bell Jar, and by planting the idea that he’s been acting differently lately in the mind of Chris’s girlfriend Emma (Keri Russell). Things get more complicated, however, when Rand’s body can’t be found, but Natalie’s is discovered, leading everyone involved to question who they trust, who they believe, and whether they can escape the tangled web they’ve woven alive and free.
This one was not well received in its time, but I am once again here to tell you that I’ve unearthed another latter day 90s gem that deserves critical re-evaluation. For one thing, the soundtrack is a lot of fun, with original score composition by Shark and rounded out by The Smiths and a catalog of oh-so-1998-tracks by the likes of Unwritten Law, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Aimee Mann, Bauhaus, and, perfectly enough, The Belljars. The number of twists that unveil themselves as the film goes along are successively less believable but exponentially more fun, as the litany of who’s scamming whom, who’s in cahoots with whom, and who really hates whom layers upon itself to the point of absurdity. The real magic here, as it often is, is Lillard, who is absolutely devouring the scenery. Playing on his Stu Macher screwball energy, he’s using it to a much more malicious effect, and not only is it more threatening than one would expect, it’s also hornier, which contributes a lot to the fun factor for me. In one scene, Lillard’s Tim tricks another character into seeing him getting intimate with said character’s girlfriend, and as his body glistens in the candlelight and the camera dollies in on his smug, red-lit face, it’s truly both menacing and magnetic. The other actors are all competent here; Batinkoff isn’t asked to stretch his acting muscles much, nor is Thomas asked to do more than cry and complain, and Russell is, uncharacteristically, a virtual non-entity, phoning it in. Vartan could stand to loosen up a little on camera; he should be the Robert Redford type, a man caught in a conspiracy and trying to get out of it with an everyman charm instead of a James Bondian wit, but instead he’s very stiff and wooden, especially against Lillard’s lithe serpentine business.
This isn’t a great movie, but it is a fun one, and the perfect thing to put on in the background while you pack for your summer vacation, while visions of Lillard’s threatening abs dance in your dreams.
It hasn’t come up in a while, but I’m a big fan of author Haruki Murakami, having first read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle nearly twenty years ago and having devoured several other novels and short story collections in the years since; in fact, as I write this, I have a copy of his short story collection First Person Singular sitting next to my bed. As such, when I settled into the theater to see Master Gardener, I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was an upcoming screening of a new animated feature that would consolidate several of his short pieces into a single narrative. The common elements of the stories that make up the aforementioned Singular is that they are all from the point of view of an unnamed protagonist, none of whom are the same from piece to piece but all of whom are quintessentially Murakami. Not universally, but among them are people seeking missing cats, characters fascinated by wells, men who share Murakami’s interest in running, people who meticulously cook delicious-sounding meals from simple ingredients, lots of discussion about staying in shape by swimming at the local natatorium, detailed descriptions for the care and upkeep of vinyl records, and, above all, men who yearn. From the lowliest television fee collector’s son to the everyday salaryman to the reclusive artist, all of Murakami’s men yearn — for the lives that they might have lived, for the loves that they never had or that they had and lost, for meaning. I can’t say that it never would have occurred to me that any number of these men could have ever been the same man because, in a way, they were all always Murakami to me, even when they had names, various fractals of the man who has been the weaver of many of the images and ideas that have gotten stuck in the craw of my consciousness over the years.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is the great crossover between six different pieces of short fiction, familiar and unfamiliar, and was adapted, produced, directed, and scored by Pierre Földes, who has largely worked previously as a composer; I didn’t recognize his name, but his C.V. contains two melancholic films I recall from my teenage years: L.I.E. and 12 and Holding. The film establishes three major characters: Katagiri, a perpetually overworked and overlooked accountant who lives a lonely life as the result of his inability to bond with others; his colleague Komura, a younger man whose future with the company looks bleak and whose life is further rattled by the sudden departure of his wife Kyoko, who leaves him a note comparing life with him to living with a “chunk of air;” and Kyoko herself who, after several days of watching constant news coverage of the 2011 earthquake, packs her things and leaves. Although the film is divided into numbered chapters, the stories are not discrete but melded together, and done so inventively. Most notably, there is one story that was almost too familiar, an adaptation of the story “The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” which was initially published in 1986 in The New Yorker before appearing as the first story in the 1993 collection The Elephant Vanishes and which was later reworked into the first chapter of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which was published in 1994 in Japan and 1997 in the U.S. Ironically, this actually comprises the final section of the film, placing what has always been treated as an introduction as a conclusion instead.
Set in 2011 in the wake of that year’s devastating earthquake in Tokyo, most of the narrative follows Komura, with the film opening on his married life to Kyoko at a time just when their marriage is falling apart; for days, she has been unresponsive in front of the TV, watching news coverage of the attempts to save trapped citizens. When Komura is at work, she leaves him, writing a note asking him not to contact her, to look for her cat, and that she is never coming back. This sets up two plot elements: a trip that Komura takes to visit his younger teenage cousin to accompany him for a hospital visit, and a second trip that Komura is encouraged to take by his co-worker Sasaki. The former is the title story from the Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman collection and was originally about an unnamed man who accompanies his cousin to the doctor and takes the opportunity to relate how he would accompany his best friend to visit his girlfriend after an operation and is largely focused on time, daydreams, and recollections; here, this narrative is recast as the story of how Komura and Kyoko met, putting her in the place of the ill girlfriend who settled for Komura when her boyfriend died, at least in this version. The second of these is largely the plot of “UFO in Kushiro,” the first story in after the quake and the story from which Komura’s name is drawn. In it, Komura travels to Kushiro at the behest of his friend to deliver a small, nondescript package, and there he is drawn in by his colleague’s sister Keiko and her friend Shimao, who tries to draw Komura out of his funk. Alongside these two journeys is an adaptation of “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” in which Katagiri (who, it should go without saying, had no connection to Komura in any of the source materials) is visited by a man-sized frog who requests the timid man’s moral support in Frog’s upcoming battle with Worm, the creature who caused the recent earthquake (in the story the January 1995 earthquake) and whose ongoing efforts threaten to fully reduce the city to rubble. Elsewhere, Kyoko relates the story of a strange offer she received on the night of her twentieth birthday, in a story (“Birthday Girl”) also taken from the Blind Willow collection.
The animation here is unsettling, even when it’s not intended to be. Director Földes apparently filmed the whole thing as a live action “reference” and then covered the heads of the actors with 3D models, which were then traced and animated. Other people who exist in the background or in the space through which our main characters move are thus translucent against the solid background. It’s an image that calls to mind the way that children draw things: a table first, and then the objects on it, so that the table and the wallpaper shine through the phone and the lamp drawn over them, but here it’s not the mark of a child’s process of learning about object permanence and layering images but is instead an evocation of the ephemerality. Whether or not Katagiri’s interactions with Frog are real is left to the interpretation of the reader (or viewer, as is the case here), but this is a world that is haunted, where the people who are not interacted with are ghosts and wisps. I hesitate to call it ugly (although it is, at times) and instead will simply call it unique. That method, combined with the easy pace at which the film progresses, makes the whole thing seem dreamlike. I’m sure that there will be others for whom this feels like a slog, but the film picks up the pace as it progresses, and every part of it feels as if it’s crafted with care, even if the aesthetic is intentionally haphazard. Ironically, however, I think the people least likely to enjoy this may be Murakami fans. Not that the author’s readers are a toxic fandom who will hate this melting together of different stories, but because transforming these from prose to film necessitates the loss of much of the narration that creates the rhetorical space in which his literary mannerisms flourish. His dialogue is still here, however, as is his sense of what makes people “tick,” and I still think it’s well worth visiting for fans and novices alike.
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