brandon ledet

The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2014)

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fourstar

I’ve been on a bit of a Studio Ghibli kick lately, which lead me to watching a couple animation classics I should’ve watched a long time ago: Howl’s Moving Castle & Pom Poko. A much more recent blindspot/missed opportunity entertainment from Studio Ghibli was 2014’s The Tale of Princess Kaguya, the only Ghibli film I can think of where I planned to catch it in the theater, but missed out due to poor scheduling. It’s probably for the best that I didn’t watch The Tale of Princess Kaguya in public, though. I spent much of the film’s second hour spontaneously bursting into big, ugly tears. I’m not saying that I’m embarrassed to cry in public; it’s just that my couch is a really comfortable place to weep.

Retelling the Japanese folktale “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter”, The Tale of Princess Kaguya immediately has a different look to it than I’m used to from Studio Ghibli’s more typical, polished style. The film has a storybook illustration look to it, recalling the visual work of the recent Irish animation feature The Secret of Kells. It’s a visual language that never allows you to lose sight of its hand-drawn origins. Its brush strokes & pencil marks always on open display. At first the effect of this choice is more cute than breathtaking, but as the story’s reverence for the beauty of Nature starts to takes shape, the visual choices start too make all too much sense. The pencil & watercolor visual palette works like intensely pretty & delicate nature studies that you’d fine in the sketchbook or a botanist or some other kind of observer of Nature’s beauty.

“The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter” begins with said bamboo cutter discovering a Thumbelina-sized princess sprouting from a magical bamboo stalk in the mountainside wilderness where he lives & works. The miniature princess then transforms into a human-sized infant who seemingly grows as quickly as the bamboo. The bamboo cutter & his wife raise this “beautiful little princess” as if she were their own natural child, a “blessing from Heaven.” Nature opens up & beautifies at the princess’s presence and she similarly brightens up when immersed in the natural world. Her adoptive father, however, encouraged by other gifts found in the bamboo like gold & fine silks, believes that she is destined to become a “real”princess & transports her to the capitol for training in royal etiquette. As she struggles against the social constraints that try to transform her from an active force of Nature to a passive object to be possessed & adored, the princess is haunted by a dark cloud of yearning and the mystery & purpose of who/what she is, exactly, comes to a magical, dramatic climax.

There is some really touching character work in The Tale of Princess Kaguya, particularly between the princess & her “mother”, but that’s not what made me cry. The film’s music, especially the repeated motif of a song titled “Distant Time” just destroyed me. It was almost a purely physical reaction. The song’s minor chords were just pulling tears out of me effortlessly like a magnet collecting metal shavings. This tenderly emotional soundtrack combines with the film’s teenage-yearning, reverence for Nature, and excessive style of hand-drawn animation to amount to a singularly beautiful & delicately sad viewing experience. The Tale of Princess Kaguya is not as immersive of a film as I’m used to from Studio Ghibli titles, but it still lands with full emotional impact, especially when its soundtrack takes center stage.

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 4: A Day at the Races (1937)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where A Day at the Races (1937) is referenced in Life Itself: In the first edition hardback, A Day at the Races is referenced on page 28. Roger remembers the film as his first trip to the cinema. He says he was so young at the time that he had to stand on his seat to see the screen. He also remembers this occasion as the hardest he’s ever heard his father laugh & mentions that his father was a huge Marx Brothers fan, having seen them on the vaudeville stage before they were in motion pictures.

What Ebert had to say in his review: Roger never had the chance to review the film proper, but he does recount the very same anecdote about watching A Day at the Races as a child in his “Great Movies” review of Duck Soup.

The seventh Marx Brothers feature film, A Day at the Races is par for the course in terms of the impossibly talented comedy crew/family’s brand of sublime silliness & rapidfire insanity. I’ve only ever seen a few Marx Brothers titles, leaning towards indisputable classics like A Night at the Opera & (my personal favorite) Duck Soup, but their comedic style is so instantly comfortable & genuinely funny that familiarity with their work is not necessary for enjoying their material. I have no qualms admitting that of all the comedic acts that spilled over from vaudeville to motion pictures, the Marx Brothers are an easy favorite for me, outshining even names like Charlie Chaplin and Abbott & Costello. I’d like to say that this is due to the quick, oddly sophisticated wit of Marx Brothers poster boy Groucho, but the truth is that it’s Harpo who steals my heart in every picture. Taking physical, slapstick comedy to deeply deranged, yet subtly masterful territory, Harpo is a one of a kind talent. Part of the reason I ended up liking the somewhat minor Marx title A Day at the Races so much is that Harpo is so damn funny in it. I was laughing at his madman antics as the criminal horse jockey Stuffy so hard that almost all of the film’s third act problems (of which there are many) ultimately felt meaningless.

The plot of A Day at the Races concerns a young couple in financial crisis. An entrepreneur owner of a sanitarium (a type of health resort) is struggling to keep her business alive & out of the hands of overeager financial vultures. Her bonehead beau is a musician who foolishly decides to get into the horseracing business without knowing thing one about what he’s doing. Groucho, Harpo, and Chico Marx get caught up in both ends of this struggle. Chico & Harpo help the musician doofus evade the law & prepare his horse to race in competition. Chico & Groucho conspire to keep a wealthy hypochondriac, Mrs. Upjohn, enrolled in the sanitarium’s care, luring her into complacency through seduction & encouragement of her groundless worrying. Long story short, they all fail miserably. Groucho is ludicrously incompetent as Dr. Hackenbush (originally named Dr. Quackenbush, but subsequently changed due to fear that the dozen or so real Dr. Quackenbushes in the country might potentially sue), a veterinarian posing as a medical doctor, an easily recognizable hack/quack (it’s right there in the name, after all). When described as “a doctor with peculiar talents”, he retorts that he has “the most peculiar talents of any doctor around.” Harpo is a silent, deranged jockey who sends far more time running from the sheriff that he does wining races. Chico plays both sides of the coin as an eternal huckster who’s always able to scrape by on a quick buck, but rarely able to pull off any large scale schemes. Their collective incompetence brings the whole story down to the fate of both the sanitarium & the potential marriage of the central couple depending on the outcome of a single horse race. Its a tidy conclusion to a very messy farce that largely exists to support the Marx Brothers’ zany comedy antics, which are all top notch even when the film isn’t trying too hard on a formal level.

As I said, there are some major third act problems with A Day at the Races that keep it from being an entirely perfect product. The fact that it boasts the all-time longest Marx Brothers runtime weighs heavily on the proceedings. There’s a definite point towards the end where the laughter starts to die down & it transitions into time-to-constantly-check-your-watch territory. At first it’s endearing that A Day at the Races fits firmly in the kind of Old Hollywood variety show spectacle that tries to have it all: romance, suspense, comedy, musical numbers, etc. It’s the exact kind of expensive mixed bag that Josh Brolin’s overworked producer struggles to hold together in Hail, Caesar!. By the time it reaches its second song & dance number this variety is a little more trying. It’s time for the movie to wrap up its plot, so a sequence where Harpo plays a demonic pied piper to a poor black community who burst into a rendition of “All God’s Chillun’ Got Rhythm”that might normally be a welcome diversion in another context starts to  feel like wasted time. It also doesn’t help that this sequence is played like a long setup for an unfortunate punchline involving the Marx Brothers evading the law by donning blackface to “blend in”. All of this and a singularly terrible performance by an overacting oaf playing an indignant Dr. Steinberg that goes way too broad to remain endearing, perhaps even watchable, which is saying a lot for a comedy this zany.

With or without that mess of a concluding half hour, though, A Day the the Races is a finely tuned comedic act, one that values spotlighting the talents of its three sibling stars over telling a concise, well-rounded story. It’s no wonder that Ebert remembers his first trip to the cinema so vividly as the hardest he’s ever seen his father laugh. The film really is a laugh riot, especially in its early proceedings. Watching Harpo chew & swallow a thermometer (with a chaser clearly marked “POISON”) when Dr. Hackenbush takes his temperature in one scene & turn around to beautifully pluck the strings of a harp in  another is a treat I’ll never forget. Groucho’s proto-Bugs Bunny one-liners & Chico’s slick, smooth-talking scams are also pricelessly amusing, even if I’m heavily biased toward Harpo’s particular brand of comedic madness. A Day at the Races is widely considered the beginning of the end for the Marx Brothers’ cinematic winning streak, but for me the joke never felt stale in this film, just a little overlong & unfocused in the back end.

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Roger’s Rating: N/A

Brandon’s Rating: (4/5, 80%)

fourstar

Next Lesson: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

-Brandon Ledet

 

Gods of Egypt (2016)

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onehalfstar

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Director Alex Proyas has been going on some epic Facebook rants lately, decrying the violently dire critical & commercial response his latest film, Gods of Egypt, is being met with at the box office. He’s particularly frustrated that what he describes as “hate bloggers” have organized a boycott of the film due to its predominately whitewashed casting of its Egyptian characters. Much like the recent Ridley Scott epic Exodus: Gods and Kings, Gods of Egypt represents for a lot of people yet another example of a long line of Hollywood pictures in which POC actors have been locked out of the lead roles that, at the very least for historical accuracy, should not have been granted to white actors. Proyas claims that the reason critics have been harping on his film’s problematic casting is that they’re too overworked to form opinions on their own & instead parrot the shrill voices of “hate blogging” (whatever that is) out of convenience or laziness. Proyas genuinely believes that if his film were able to stand on its own merits outside of its political controversy, it’d be doing much better at the box office. He’s taken to the soapbox he claims to hate the most (online criticism) to cry foul, to complain that he hasn’t been given a fair shake as a filmmaker.

Now, I’m not sure if this makes me a lazy critic or a “hate blogger” (maybe both?), but I also hated Gods of Egypt. However, despite what Proyas might believe, I didn’t enter the film wanting to hate it. In fact, I set the bar for my enjoyment so pathetically low that it’s incredible that the film failed to clear it (despite its excess of golden wings). Equipped ahead of time with foreknowledge of the film’s controversial casting, dire reviews, and crackpot director (whose work ranges from total shit like The Crow to actually-enjoyable nonsense like Knowing), I felt like I was steeled to what the film had going against it. Still, there was a visual element in the trailer that made me hopeful that it might be mildly enjoyable as a campy trifle. What I was expecting was the visually striking, narratively undercooked mess of Snow White & The Huntsmen, which I enjoyed despite its negative critical consensus. What the film delivered instead was the bland CGI worldscape that put me to sleep (literally) both times I tried to watch 300 in the theater (and, curiously enough, both films star Gerard Butler). Gods of Egypt has problems that extend far beyond its racially tone deaf casting & temper tantrum-prone director. The film is also a hopeless bore, which might be the most damning fault of them all.

Similar to the way The Witch attempts to breathe life into the religious paranoia of Puritan beliefs, Gods of Egypt aims to illustrate the myths of gods living among men that once populated ancient, polytheistic Egyptian philosophy. The difference is that The Witch dealt in sincere historical recreation while Gods of Egypt attempted to mold its subject’s mythology into a goofy action epic framework & the most despicable genre of them all: the shameless franchise-starter. Through overbearing storybook narration, Indiana Jones-style action adventure, and flat-on-their-face quips, Gods of Egypt tells the story of a half-blind god & a mortal thief who team up to stop a deranged relative who plans on merging life & the afterlife in a quest to claim absolute power. I won’t bother you with many plot details, since very few are of interest & can be boiled down to dual damsel in distress rescues. True love prevails over death & destruction, the men save their ladyfriends, the universe maintains its balance, etc. The stakes rarely feel high in Gods of Egypt, because each challenge is conquered with ease by a pair of protagonists who have no option but to succeed. The Egyptian mythology setting mostly serves as a backdrop for a white knight story we’ve all seen play out countless times before.

The best chance you have of enjoying Gods of Egypt is either as mindless eye candy or as a so-bad-it’s-good camp fest. May the gods pity you in either case. The film’s costume & set design are bathed in sweet, delicious gold, but the effect was tiring after its initial introduction. The brevity of the film’s trailers did its visual style a huge favor, distracting the eye from its bland CGI mediocrity by making it seem downright lush through rapid editing. There’s a few interesting details here or there: a masked army in blood-red robes, a flying chariot pulled by scarabs, gods bleeding gold when wounded in battle, etc. For the most part, though, the film is about as visually interesting as a video game cutscene (something else I find unbearably boring). The creatures were particularly disappointing on that front. I kept waiting for them to prompt me to press “X”. As far as goofy camp goes, there isn’t much of interest to chew on there either. There’s exactly one line that made me laugh. When asked where his buddy is hiding, the mortal half of our heroic tag team responds “Up your butt,” which, you know, isn’t the height of wit or anything like that, but I’m honestly an easy audience. I also found a lot of humor in the way that they visually conveyed the gods’ imposing stature by making giant-sized versions of their props to dwarf their human counterparts. That’s the kind of tactic you’d expect in an old midnight movie like Attack of the Puppet People, not a modern $140 million action epic.

Acting wise, most of Gods of Egypt‘s (again, controversial) cast is on autopilot. Gerard Butler performs as if he’s in 300 Part Deux. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau phones it in as a barely-engaged Jamie Lannister, trading in his missing hand for a missing eye & swapping the moniker “King Slayer” for “Lion Slayer”. Brenton Thwaites & Chadwick Boseman (a legit POC actor! and he’s not even an extra!) overact in a way that’s far more annoying than it is entertaining. The female leads are given little more to do than to dress provocatively & await rescue. Only Geoffrey Rush’s out of nowhere turn as the sun god Ra stands out as wildly-entertaining scenery chewing. One gets the distinct feeling that the renowned actor is slumming it in this feature-length high resolution screensaver, but his delightfully bitchy take on the all-powerful Ra was one of the sole bright spots in a film that could’ve used a lot more of them. At least half a star in this review’s rating is due to his performance alone, which, as you can probably tell, was a much-needed boost.

Part of me kinda feels bad for Proyas. He’s such a typical 90s Guy that he probably had no idea that such a cultural backlash was going to plague Gods of Egypt from its initial announcement to its dismal box office opening. In his mind, he made a grand scale Hollywood epic with a handsome cast & a lot of browbeating about how “In this world you’re either rich or you’re nothing” & the radical idea that slavery is cruel. He expected to get by on good intentions, particularly perplexed that his own Egyptian heritage didn’t allow him to sidestep criticism for whitewashed casting in yet another mishandled Hollywood take on the region’s past. The truth is that just as many people would’ve been annoyed with Gods of Egypt’s casting pre-Internet, but would’ve had a much more difficult time publishing/publicizing their complaints. Casting isn’t the only way the film feels politically stale, though. Take, for instance, the protagonist god’s jealousy that his lover had sex with her wicked, power-hungry enslaver. It’s the romantic jealousy that’s played as a character fault, not the fact that he’s slutshaming his lover for being serially raped. That’s the exact kind of outdated sentiment that seems to be going over Proyas’s head, making him subject to intense scrutiny from “hate bloggers” & “lazy critics”. If released sometime in the 90s, Gods of Egypt might’ve been able to skate by as a mediocre prequel to a forgettable blockbuster like The Mummy. In 2016 its moral ickinees is too much of a sore thumb to overlook, especially for something that aims to be a franchise starter. You get the distinct feeling throughout the film that Proyas & company should’ve known better (or at least tried harder). After reading Proyas’s rants it’s all the more confusing that Gods of Egypt is such a dull slog. This is the film he’s going to bat for? This is what he’s confused about no one liking?

There’s a single scene in Gods of Egypt that perfectly sums up my whole experience watching the film. During a heavily green-screened chariot chase an arrow strikes & kills the mortal doofus hero’s beloved & she dies while he blankly looks on & continues to steer their escape. This scene is everything Gods of Egypt is in a nutshell: visually uninteresting, passionless, seemingly plucked from a time long gone (and I don’t mean ancient Egypt). Again, Proyas should’ve known better. Or he at least should’ve known to concede defeat when it failed to connect with audiences & critics, who, despite what the director seems to believe, are the very same people.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #2 of The Swampflix Podcast: Evil Doll Movies & Boxing Helena (1993)

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inaworld

Welcome to Episode #2 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our much-delayed second episode, James & Brandon discuss movies about evil dolls with fellow contributor Britnee. Also, James makes Brandon watch Jennifer Lynch’s body horror melodrama Boxing Helena (1994) for the first time. Enjoy!

Production note: The guitar riff musical “bumps” between segments were also provided by James.

-James Cohn, Brandon Ledet, and Britnee Lombas

Movie of the Month: Mrs. Winterbourne (1996)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Erin made Boomer, Brandon, and Britnee watch Mrs. Winterbourne (1996).

Erin:  Picture it:  1996.  Clothes are big, scrunchies are bigger, and a Hollywood team looked at the script for Mrs. Winterbourne and decided that this was the perfect vehicle to launch Ricki Lake into Leading Lady-hood.

The same Hollywood team also thought that the best way to adapt a gritty noir novel about a pregnant woman escaping domestic abuse in the midst of a deadly train wreck and a grieving family was as a lighthearted romcom.

That’s right.  Mrs. Winterbourne is a romantic comedy about a pregnant teenager (Connie, played by Ricki Lake) escaping her scummy, abusive boyfriend, surviving a train wreck that kills another pregnant woman and her kind husband, and being mistakenly taken in by the in-laws (Shirley MacLaine and Bredan Fraser as mother- and brother-in-law) of the dead woman as they attempt to put their hearts back together.  That’s only the first act.  In the second act, just as Connie is starting to connect to the Winterbournes and is struggling with the decision of either revealing her true identity or keeping up the charade indefinitely, her slimy ex-boyfriend comes back to blackmail her. There’s singing! Dancing!  A makeover montage! Murder!

Although I really enjoy Mrs. Winterbourne, the incongruity between the gritty (and bizarre) premise and the lighthearted style in which it is presented makes for a weird movie-watching experience.  There’s a lot of whiplash as the film attempts tell a gritty noir story through the lens of a quirky romcom.

The supporting cast does several things rather well – Shirley MacLaine as the elder Mrs. Winterbourne might be the true heart of the film, and there is real chemistry between her and Lake’s Connie and Fraser’s Bill.  Miguel Sandoval, as the Cuban ex-pat chauffeur, is truly charming as he slings knowing glances and come-to-Jesus talks left and right.  Loren Dean brings a completely awful character to life in Steve DeCunzo, throwing change at a pregnant Connie through his window as she begs for help in pouring rain and stomping around in the baby’s playpen as he threatens blackmail.

Honestly, the least believable thing for me in this movie is the lack of chemistry between Lake and Fraser.  Brendan Fraser had hit his stride in the mid ‘90s, playing hot and goofy leading men after a few years of playing stoner and college roles.  He still had George of the Jungle (1997), Gods and Monsters (1998), and The Mummy (1999) to come.  Ricki Lake, while she never really hit leading lady status outside of Mrs. Winterbourne, was a ‘90s fixture, and would start her talk show in 1998. Despite being in their respective zones in 1996, they just don’t really connect, which is a shame.

Over all, I think that Mrs. Winterbourne is a fun watch.  It’s good natured about its downer plot line, and has a few really funny and touching moments.  I like strange movies, and this one is definitely strange enough to keep my attention.

Brandon, Mrs. Winterbourne is pretty wacky.  What are your first impressions of it? How does well does the romcom genre flesh out the noir bones? What caught your attention about Mrs. Winterbourne?

Brandon: Yeah it’s difficult to write my first impressions on this film without zeroing in on the fact that it’s a fish-out-of-water romcom with a “hilarious” comedic set-up that’s put into motion by a pregnant woman dying in a train wreck. The film’s moody vibe as a neo-noir is in direct conflict with its more lighthearted comedy stylings: a pregnant & homeless Ricki Lake wandering aimlessly in the rain, a butler who escaped homophobic persecution in Cuba through prostitution, a third act murder mystery, the fact that Brendan Fraser’s cad finds himself falling in love with a woman who might be his dead twin’s widow. So much of Mrs. Winterbourne is so darkly fucked up that it’s jarring to watch the film wrap itself in the soft-edge confines of the romcom genre. My favorite moment where these two tones clash is when Ricki Lake’s pregnant/homeless Jersey Girl shouts to her deadbeat baby daddy “I’m about to have your baby out on the street! Wanna come watch?” Uncaring, he tosses a quarter at her feet & shuts his window. Later the baby daddy’s new baby mama recognizes Lake’s protagonist only as “The Bitch Out in the Rain With the Quarter.” I shouldn’t have gotten such a hearty laugh out of that but I shrieked with delight. What a messed up “gag”.

The weirdest part about the film’s compromised tone is how much weight it puts on Ricki Lake’s shoulders. She’s asked to deliver most of the film’s yuck-it-up comedy, which I’d say she accomplishes with just as much bright eyed enthusiasm she brings to John Waters’ (utterly flawless) Serial Mom. At the same time, I’d say that the sole reason the film’s central romance plays like a joke is the very same Ricki Lake performance. Brendan Fraser is entirely believable as the romcom heartthrob, but Lake is too much of a bumbling fool for me to genuinely commit to her end of the romance angle. Maybe it’s all those years of watching her host a Jerry Springer-style talk show that keep me from forgetting the clownish aspects of her screen presence, but I think her making homelessness amusing was an asset, but her making romance funny might’ve been somewhat of a detriment.

Where do you fall on Lake’s performance, Boomer? Is she a sold lead in this role or did the film ask too much of her in too many directions for the performance to be taken seriously?

Boomer: I have a confession to make; I used to hate Ricki Lake. This was through no fault of her own and was based entirely on Baton Rouge NBC affiliate WVLA’s decision in 1997 to replace their daily 4 PM rerun of Star Trek: The Next Generation with her syndicated talk show. In the many years since this great sin was committed, I’ve actually come to like Lake quite a bit, especially as I came to be aware of her partnerships with John Waters in my teenage years. She’s a perfectly serviceable actress, and she’s genuinely likable in this role, which could so easily have not been the case with a plot like this that revolves around deception (although Connie does admirably make every effort to correct misconceptions up to the point where revealing the truth could potentially literally kill a woman). Her weakest acting moments come in the scenes in which she is called upon to be histrionic and melodramatic that she comes across more like one of the sideshow people who populated her television stage. Lake can act; she just can’t overact, and she works best when she’s playing off of MacLaine, who brings a warmth to her performance that Lake can’t help but reflect back at her.

The weakest acting link, frankly, is Fraser, who comes across as a bit of a hack here. He seems to think that “playing rich” requires foppishness that borders on recreating stereotypical portrayals of gay men, up to and including the fey and effete way that he drops his napkin in his lap in affected shock at Connie’s initial appearance at the dinner table. There are many other ways to play a man of privilege who assumes that the new family member in his midst is an interloper, but Fraser read his part and went straight to “dandiest dandy that ever dandied,” and the later scenes that show him as a man with the potential to be more open doesn’t erase his performance in his introduction. In fact, when he first started falling for Connie, my assumption was that the film was leading into his public confession that he had latched onto her in an attempt to disprove his homosexual leanings. But no, it was just that Fraser made poor character choices when filming the earlier sequences in the film, and, admittedly, I came around on his character by the end, even if he is stiff and wooden when confronting Connie about having (he assumes) killed Steve.

The standout performance was MacLaine’s, and I especially liked how I expected the plot to unfold in the opposite direction that it does (i.e., that the rich patrician mother would be slow to warm to the new bride her son took an instant liking to, rather than the other way around). This twist helps the film feel less stale than it otherwise could. What do you think, Britnee? Did MacLaine help make this movie “work” for you, or no?

Britnee: MacLaine’s performance was nothing short of perfection. Every line she spoke and move she made was so effortless. I just couldn’t take my eyes off her! However, she officially stole my heart when she hid a lit cigarette in her mouth. It’s definitely not the kind of behavior one would expect from an elderly socialite, and that’s the kind of shock value that I live for.

When I think of how the film would be if there was no MacLaine, I have to say that I still would have enjoyed it. Of course, it wouldn’t be as pleasurable without her, but it would still be a great film. As a fan of Ricki Lake, I can’t help but feel as though she was the one who stole the show. She brings this sort of ridiculous yet unique style of humor to every film I’ve ever seen her in, and this is especially true with Mrs. Winterbourne. Lake as Connie Doyle was beyond entertaining. She does a good bit of overacting throughout the film, especially when she bring her Jersey Girl sass to the upper-class society of Boston. While overacting is usually viewed as a acting flaw, it’s a huge part of Lake’s comedic style, and it always brings out tons of laughs from me.

It’s interesting how this film and our previous movie of the month, Big Business, share the “poor girl in a rich world” theme. Erin, what are your thoughts on this similarity? Does this theme work better with Mrs. Winterbourne’s style of comedy as opposed to Big Business?

Erin: You know, Britnee, it didn’t occur to me that Mrs. Winterbourne and Big Business are similar in their fish-out-water, mistaken identity plots.  Now that we’re looking at similarities, I think the over all feel of these movies has something else in common – while Big Business feels like an Old Hollywood screwball comedy, Mrs. Winterbourne is based on a 1948 noir novel.  I think that the old camp melodrama present in both movies gives them a feeling of a previous era in which audiences might have had more forgiveness for such silly premises.

I’m not sure if either movie works “better” with the “poor girl in a rich world” theme.  Big Business is a madcap comedy, and hardly touches the ground at all.  It’s a hysterical rush through a farcical plot.  Mrs. Winterbourne attempts to have some soul or grounding in drama, but all in all seems to have trouble straddling the line.  Both movies take that particular plot point, as well as the mistaken identities and old school feel, to push different stories along.

I think that one of the biggest differences between Mrs. Winterbourne and Big Business is something that I only noticed in this viewing.  Big Business holds its main characters as intrinsically subjective within the world of the movies.  The movie starts with something beyond their control, the baby swap, but then only advances with actions of the characters.  The Sadies and the Roses are shown, despite their immersion in a comically out of hand situation, to make the world of their movie theirs.  Connie, despite being the main character of Mrs. Winterbourne, is almost completely an object in her own world. She decides to leave her father’s house in the first minutes of the movie, and then everything else happens to her.  Her attempts to take actions are either preempted by other characters or she is talked or coerced out of decisions.

I’m not sure how to understand or interpret this lack of subjectivity in the main character.  Brandon, what do you think?  Any thoughts on why Connie is so objective in her own story, and what that means for Mrs. Winterbourne?

Brandon: If you’re looking to further solidify Mrs. Winterbourne‘s connection with Big Business, consider that they not only both deal in mistaken identities & fish out of water humor. Their plots also revolve around sets of estranged twins, which is kind of an obscure angle for a comedy. Ricki Lake’s protagonist has no twin in this film, though, which is unfortunate, as it would’ve been fun to see her match the eccentricity of the rest of the cast. She also doesn’t, as Erin points out, ever really enact the changes in her life that transform her from homeless Jersey Girl to wealthy heiress. The film’s events just sort of swirl around her as if her rightful place among the affluent was simply a matter of fate.

I think the passive aspects of Connie’s personality transforms parts of Mrs Winterbourne from a silly romantic comedy to a kind of a fairy tale. And I mean fairy tale in the sense of fantasy wish fulfillment more so than Brothers Grimm. Connie never really learns any lessons or grows as a person throughout the film. She mostly just allows the world to pave the way for her road to happiness in which Brendan Fraser is the closest thing to a prince a modern girl could wish for & a milquetoast life surrounded by immense wealth is the height of happily ever after. Keeping Connie passive & grounded leaves open a hopeful It Could Happen to You interpretation for the audience at home, which is not far from the kind of escapism romcoms aim to sell in general. The details that make this fairy tale angle in Mrs Winterbourne feel tonally bizarre, though, are the film’s darker plot points: a miscarriage, a train wreck, a murder. It seems that, according to the film, happily ever after often comes with a body count on its price tag.

What do you think, Boomer? Is Connnie’s passiveness an intentional choice that allows the viewer to step into her shoes & live out her (somewhat deadly) fairy tale or did the writers merely fail to consider giving their protagonist a sense of agency?

Boomer: I’m glad that Erin brought up the original novel above, because I was shocked to learn when viewing Winterbourne‘s Wikipedia page that it was adapted from a Cornell Woolrich novel. I went through a noir phase in my teens and although I never read the novel from which this film drew inspiration, I did read some of his other works, and this movie is quite dissonant tonally. I recently reviewed the Francois Truffaut film The Bride Wore Black, which was also adapted from a Woolrich novel of the same name, and that film is much more in line with the Woolrich vision. As counterparts to each other, Bride and Winterbourne couldn’t be more dissimilar, because Brandon is right; this flick is essentially a fairy tale of wish fulfillment.

Connie doesn’t exhibit much in the way of agency in any of the directions that her life takes. This makes sense if you think of her as a rags-to-riches fairy tale girl. Cinderella doesn’t do much but have decisions made for her and be lucky enough to have a magical godmother; Rapunzel is stuck away in a tower until the plot finds her; Talia is comatose in a castle until her “hero” comes along. Connie is much the same; she gets conned, kicked out into the street, pushed onto a train that she doesn’t intend to board, and wakes up after it crashes wearing a dead woman’s nightgown and life. The film is smart to counterpose the agency-free Connie with Grace (and even give them both names that are virtues, as we learn “Connie” is short for “Constance” in the final scene). Although Paco and Bill pester her about taking her medication and not drinking or smoking, it’s evident that Grace runs the Winterbourne household. We would normally see a woman like Connie, who is moved about like a chess piece by other people, used to prop up the story of her love interest. Instead, her more static narrative is used to expand Grace’s dynamic story. In a lot of ways, the film ends up being more of a love story between Grace and Connie than Connie and Bill.

The film is also smart to allow Connie time to make multiple attempts to tell others that they have mistaken her for somebody else only to be ignored, and she still considers it up to the point where she realizes that the truth could literally kill the elder Mrs. Winterbourne. It helps keep the audience’s sympathy with Connie instead of against her. I know you said above that you feel Lake’s broader approach to the material helps it play as funnier than it would otherwise. Imagine that Lake was not available; who would you cast in her part, and why? If you could recast one other person, who and why?

Britnee: Ideally, I would love to see a young Barbra Streisand play the role of Connie. Not only is she my favorite “funny lady,” but she knows how to pull off a romcom, which, as much as I adore her, Lake just can’t seem to accomplish. Unfortunately, Streisand would be more suited for the role of Ms. Winterbourne during the time of the film’s release, so this an impractical choice. Being a little more realistic, I would without a doubt cast Natasha Lyonne for the role of Connie. I can’t help but think of how perfect she was as Vivian in Slums of Beverly Hills, and I see a lot of Vivian in Connie. Two sassy, street smart ladies trying to make their way in this big, cruel world.

If I was given the choice to recast another person, it would definitely be Brendan Fraser. He was just so bland and almost robotic. I understand that his character (Bill) is supposed to come off that way for the most part, but when Connie becomes his love interest and he goes through his little personality change, it just doesn’t feel natural. However, I do have to say that he was excellent in George of the Jungle and Airheads, but I’m not sure if that’s necessarily a good thing. When it comes to recasting Bill, I would chose  James Spader because he is perfect for that type of role. He’s great at being a total snob (Pretty in Pink), but he’s even better at being a romantic snob (White Castle). Spader and Lyonne would have been such an iconic romcom couple.

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Erin: It’s a shame that Brendan Fraser and Ricki Lake have such little genuine chemistry.  The plot is already pretty forced, and some real passion between Fraser’s Bill and Lake’s Connie would have given an ounce or two of believability to a storyline that requires a man to fall in love with his twin brother’s widow.

Britnee: Connie’s little “makeover” was so unnecessary. I could understand the need for a makeover scene if she had ratty hair and holes in her clothes, but her hair was gorgeous and her outfits were so on point. All they did was give her shorter hair and a couple of new tops. Lame!

Brandon: One of the more absurdly funny aspects of Mrs. Winterbourne was how undercooked Connie’s baby looked in the film. I’m not sure if they cast an infant that was too young for that kind of physical labor or what, but the way Connie’s child was always helplessly thrusting its little arms in the air as a wide range of actors jostled & played with it was so dangerous looking in a way that made me laugh fairly consistently (through my heartfelt concern, of course) whenever it was being passed around. I’d like to check back in with the now-20 year old Mrs. Winterbourne Baby in 2016 to see how their neck & limbs are doing, because I could swear the camera caught some permanent damage somewhere in there.

Boomer: I didn’t expect that the truth would be revealed by the appearance of Connie’s ex; I was looking for the late Mrs. Hugh Winterbourne’s family to look up their daughter and discover Connie living her life. Given that this never happens, I can’t help but wonder what will occur when they come to visit their grandchild. Further, considering that all their problems were resolved by a stranger murdering the loose ends, I hope they just send letters. It’s bad luck to interfere with the Winterbourne family destiny, apparently.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
March: Boomer presents My Demon Lover (1987)
April: Brandon presents Girl Walk//All Day (2011)
May: Britnee presents Alligator (1980)

-The Swampflix Crew

 

Howl’s Moving Castle (2005)

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Acclaimed, visionary animator Hayao Miyazaki recently announced that he’ll be returning from what has been a very brief “retirement” to work on a 3D-animation short film, which is exciting news for rabid fans of Studio Ghibli & innovative visual craft of all kinds. Not being especially well-versed in Ghibli’s or Miyazaki’s history, I didn’t realize that this decision was a case of history repeating itself. Miyazaki had “retired”several times before in the past, once doubling back on his resolve to return to the director’s chair (does that idiom translate to animation?) to helm the somewhat troubled production of 2005’s Howl’s Moving Castle. Whether or not Miyazaki was brought in as a pinch-hitter/afterthought on a project that apparently needed a strong guiding hand, Howl’s Moving Castle was well worth the animation giant’s time & efforts. It’s not the most mindblowing or heartwarming film among the few Ghibli titles I’ve seen but it is a singularly magical experience that the world is better off for being enriched with (with its context as a pacifist take on the war in Iraq being especially fascinating). If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Miyazaki in the few works I’ve seen from him it’s that the world is all too lucky to have him & we should all be grateful for each precious gift he delivers on his own time.

I call Howl’s Moving Castle magical because it’s a film that values the folklore of magic, wizards, and witches over the more human realm of physical labor & constant war. A lover’s quarrel between The Wicked Witch of the Waste(land) & a frivolous, vain wizard named Howl claims the health & well-being of an innocent passerby, a young hat shop clerk whose meeting of Howl in passing enraged the jealous, possessive witch. This jealousy inspires the wicked witch to cast a spell that ages the hat shop girl horribly, so that she loses her precious youth & beauty to an old, withered body that upends her life. Determined to win back her cursed youth, the girl moves into Howl’s castle, which is indeed a moving, walking, transitive structure that would serve as event the most casual of steam punk’s wet dream. What she discovers is that he wizard is in a perpetual state of adolescence, in desperate need of someone to care for his body & home, and prone to teen angst temper tantrums that result in him summoning “the spirits of darkness” when he’s bummed & exclaiming things like “I see no point in living if I cant be beautiful!” Howl is in no shape to deal with the crushing realities of a hard-fought war & ends up needing the help & emotional support of the cursed hat shop girl just as much as she needs him.

What feels so right about the approach to magic in Howl’s Moving Castle is just how fluid everything feels in the details. The rules of the curse seem to change from scene to scene as the girl’s age fluctuates depending on her mood. Enemies who initially appear to be pure evil soon reveal themselves to be hurt, vulnerable souls in need of repair. Physical spaces (especially the titular castle) & people’s bodies (especially the wizard’s) change constantly, directly reflecting the ebb & flow of a universe that can be hopelessly cruel or endlessly wonderful depending on the tides of fate in life’s current direction. The only thing that seemingly doesn’t change is the way the film values magic & fluidity over the concrete, destructive concerns of governments & war.

Appropriately enough, it’s that exact value system that makes Miyazaki & other folks at Ghibli feel like such a gift & a blessing. They’re constantly exploring new ideas & techniques within their craft, but their general spirit is deeply rooted in an old world magic & tradition that feels both authentic & endlessly endearing. It’s a testament to how powerful the the studio’s output is that I was greatly impressed by Howl’s Moving Castle, but still hung up on the Ghibli flim about racoon testicles that I had just watched a few days before. Every Miyazaki work is worthy of attention & adoration to some degree and Howl’s Moving Castle was no exception to that rule. It wasn’t the most spectacular, wonderful, magical animated feature I’d ever seen or anything like that,but I still felt like I was lucky to have seen the film, which feels like par for the course for Miyazaki & his peers. May his retirement never be permanent & may the studio never officially close its doors. May our luck never run out.

-Brandon Ledet

The Swampflix Guide to the Oscars, 2016

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Including short films, there are 57 movies nominated for the 2016 Oscars. We here at Swampflix have covered less than half of the films nominated (so far!), but we’re still happy to see so many movies we enjoyed listed among the nominees. The Academy rarely gets these things right (last year’s Birdman Best Picture win comes to mind in that regard), but as a list this isn’t too shabby in terms of representing what 2015 had to offer to cinema. Listed below are the 19 Oscar-Nominated films from 2015 that we reviewed for the site, ranked from best to . . . least-best (*cough* Fifty Shades *cough*) based on our star ratings. With each entry we’ve listed a blurb, a link to our corresponding review, and a mention of the awards the films were nominated for.

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1) Ex Machina, nominated for Best Original Screenplay, Best Visual Effects

“There’s something about Ex Machina’s straight-forward, no nonsense approach to sci-fi storytelling that struck a real chord in me. It’s not likely to win over folks who are looking to be surprised by every single development in its plot, but for those willing to enjoy the movie on its own stripped-down terms there’s a lot of intense visual rewards & interesting thematic explorations of, among other things, masculine romantic possessiveness that can be deeply satisfying.”

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2) Mad Max: Fury Road, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (George Miller), Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing, Best Visual Effects

“In a time where a lot of movies, such as Zombeavers & WolfCop, intentionally aim for a cult film aesthetic, it’s refreshing when something as authentically bizarre as Fury Road comes along and earns its rabid, isolated fan base naturally. Although the movie is less than a month old, it’s already gathered a cult following so strong that I doubt that there’s any praise I can throw at it that hasn’t already been bested elsewhere. I loved the film. I thought it was fantastic, wonderfully distinct, up there with The Road Warrior, The Witches of Eastwick, and Pig in the City as one of the best things Miller has ever released onto the world. I still feel like that’s merely faint praise when compared to some of the more hyperbolic reactions out there.”

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3) Star Wars, Episode VII: The Force Awakens, nominated for Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing, Best Visual Effects

“The overall feeling I got while watching The Force Awakens is “What more could you ask for?” Abrams has successfully walked the Star Wars tightrope & delivered something sure to please both newcomers & skeptics and, more importantly, something that’s deliriously fun to watch when divorced from the burden of expectation.”

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4) Straight Outta Compton, nominated for Best Original Screenplay

“Straight Outta Compton is not a particularly great example of a historical document, but damn if it didn’t achieve an incredible Cinematic Aesthetic in every scene, somehow managing to squeeze out a great biopic with exactly zero deviations from the format (unlike more experimental films like Love & Mercy). The cinematography, provided by longtime Aronofsky collaborator Matthew Libatique, confidently supported the film’s surface pleasures (including an onslaught of still-great songs & pandering nostalgia) to the point where any & all faults were essentially irrelevant.”

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5) Anomalisa, nominated for Best Animated Feature

“Anomalisa is a great film that draws you into its headspace with compelling imagery. While the plot may not be as much of a technical masterpiece as its cinematography, its potentially played-out story is sufficiently fleshed out (again, no pun intended) that it will likely remain culturally relevant long after the genre of paint-by-numbers privileged-white-guy-versus-ennui has receded back into the ether from which it came. If not a masterpiece, then the film is definitively a cinematic experience that demands to be seen.”

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6) Creed, nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Sylvester Stallone)

“The pugilist protagonist (played by an all-grown-up The Wire vet Michael B. Jordan) of Creed‘s narrative may go through the motions of successes & failures the audience sees coming from miles away, but the movie is visceral enough in its brutal in-the-ring action & tender enough in its out-the-ring romance & familial strife that only the most jaded of audiences are likely to get through its runtime without once pumping a fist or shedding a tear before the end credits.”

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7) Carol, nominated for Best Actress (Cate Blanchett), Best Supporting Actress (Rooney Mara), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, Best Costume Design

“Carol is a handsome, but muted drama about homosexual desire in a harsh environment where it can’t be expressed openly. The subtle glances & body language that make the film work as an epic romance are very delicate, sometimes barely perceptible. In fact, if you had no idea what the film’s about going in, it’s possible it’d take you a good 20min or so to piece it together. That kind of quiet grace is in no way detrimental to the film’s quality as a work of art. It’s just that the critical hype surrounding the picture puts an unnecessary amount of pressure of what should be experienced as a collection of small, deeply intimate moments shared between two star-crossed lovers.”

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8) Inside Out, nominated for Best Original Screenplay, Best Animated Feature

“The way Inside Out visualizes abstract thoughts like memories, angst, imagination, acceptance, and abstract thought itself is incredibly intricate & well considered. Its central message of the importance of sadness in well-rounded emotional growth is not only admirable, but downright necessary for kids to experience. Even if I downright hated the film’s visual aesthetic (I didn’t; it was just okay), I’d still have to concede that its intent & its world-building were top notch in the context of children’s media.”

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9) The Hateful Eight, nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Best Cinematography, Best Original Score

“At one point in The Hateful Eight, Samuel L. Jackson’s balding, ex-military bounty hunter says, ‘Not so fast. Let’s slow it down. Let’s slow it way down.’ That seems to be the film’s M.O. in general. Tarantino is, of course, known to luxuriate in his own dialogue, but there is something particularly bare bones & talkative about The Hateful Eight. It’d say it’s his most patient & relaxed work yet, one that uses the Western format as a springboard for relying on limited locations & old-fashioned storytelling to propel the plot toward a blood-soaked finale.”

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10) Joy, nominated for Best Actress (Jennifer Lawrence)

“Expectation might be to blame for what turned a lot of audiences off from Joy. Based on the advertising, I know a lot of folks expected an organized crime flick about a mob wife, not the deranged biopic about the woman who invented the Miracle Mop that was delivered. Even more so, I believe that audiences expected a lighthearted drama from the guy who made Silver Linings Playbook. Instead, Joy finds Russell exploring the same weirdo impulses that lead him to making I ♥ Huckabees, an absurdist comedy that might be the very definition of “not for everyone”.”

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11) Sicario, nominated for Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, Best Sound Editing

“Much like how the recent Johnny Depp vehicle Black Mass gets by purely on the strength of its acting, Sicario might be a mostly predictable film in terms of narrative, but it creates such a violent, foreboding atmosphere that some scenes make you want to step out in the lobby for a breath of fresh air (or to puke, as the cops who discovered the early scenes’ in-the-wall corpses couldn’t help doing).”

12) Steve Jobs, nominated for Best Actor (Michael Fassbender), Supporting Actress (Kate Winslet)

“Between Sorkin & Fassbender’s work here, the myth of Steve Jobs is most certainly an arresting contrast between genius & emotional sadism. He’s a true to form Sorkin protagonist who’s better judged by his work than his persona. I’m not sure I left the film knowing any more about the real Steve Jobs than I did going in, but I’m also not sure that matters in terms of the film’s failure or success.”

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13) Room, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Lenny Abrahamson), Best Actress (Brie Larson), Best Adapted Screenplay

“Room is not all broken spirits & grim yearnings. The film can at times be quite imaginative & uplifting, thanks to young Jack’s warped sense of reality & Jacob Tremblay’s wonderful performance. Room‘s strongest asset is how it adopts a child POV the way films like The Adventures of Baron Mucnchausen, The Fall, and Beasts of the Southern Wild have in the past. Because Jack has only known life inside Room (which he refers to as a proper noun, like a god or a planet), he has a fascinatingly unique/warped perception of how life works & how the universe is structured.”

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14) Amy, nominated for Best Documentary (Feature)

“By giving so much attention to a person who obviously did not want it, Winehouse’s unwitting fans made a market out of her gradual death. Again, it’s very similar to what slowly killed Kurt Cobain as well & I’m sure there are to be more examples in the future. A lot of what makes Amy interesting as a documentary is not necessarily the details of Winehouse’s personal life that it turns into a fairly straight-forward narrative, but rather the way it subtly makes you feel like a murderer for wanting those details in the first place.”

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15) The Revenant, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Alejandro G. Iñárritu), Best Actor (Leonardo DiCaprio), Best Supporting Actor (Tom Hardy), Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing, Best Visual Effects

“At times the film itself feels like DiCaprio’s broken protagonist, crawling & gurgling blood for days on end under the weight of an over-achieving runtime. Shave a good 40 minutes of The Revenant by tightening a few scenes & losing a shot here or there (as precious as Lubezki makes each image) & you might have a masterful man vs. nature (both human & otherwise) revenge pic. As is, there’s an overbearing sense of self-importance that sours the whole ordeal.”

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16) The Martian, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (Matt Damon), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Production Design, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing, Best Visual Effects

“Despite facing almost certain death in The Martian’s first act, Watney logically explains the details of exactly how/why he’s fucked as well as the practical day-to-day details other films would usually skip over, such as the bathroom situation in a Martian space lab. Speaking of the scatological, there’s a surprising amount of poop in this film. You could even say that poop saves the day, which is certainly more interesting than whatever control room shenanigans solve the conflict in Apollo 13 or other similar fare.”

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17) Shaun the Sheep, nominated for Best Animated Feature

“As always, Aardman delivers fantastic stop-motion work here, but although their films are consistently entertaining, there’s something particularly special about Shaun the Sheep that makes it feel like their best feature at least since 2005’s Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Because the movie is largely a non-verbal affair, its success relies entirely on visual comedy that feels like a callback to the silent film era & it’s incredible just how much mileage it squeezes out of each individual gag.”

18) Brooklyn, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress (Saoirse Ronan), Best Adapted Screenplay

“Outside Saoirse Ronan’s effective lead performance, I mostly found Brooklyn entertaining as a visual treat. Its costume & set design are wonderful, particularly in the detail of Eilis’ wardrobe – beach wear, summer dresses, cocktail attire, etc. That’s probably far from the kind of distinction the Brooklyn‘s looking for in terms of accolades, but there’s far worse things a film can be than a traditional, well-dressed romance.”

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19) Fifty Shades of Grey, nominated for Best Original Song (“Earned It,” performed by The Weeknd)

“The best-selling erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey recently made its long-awaited debut on the silver screen and, as a fan of the book series, I was very curious to see how this film could possibly be tame enough for movie theaters. What could have been one of the most iconic movies of the year turned out to be a total snoozefest. Literally. People in my theater were sleeping so hard they were snoring.”

-The Swampflix Crew

How to Be Single (2016)

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When Bridesmaids was released to enthusiastic commercial success in 2011 there was an exciting feeling in the air that maybe, just maybe, there was going to be a significant, feminine answer to the decades-long boys’ club of raunchy sex comedies. Now that the honeymoon’s over, so to speak, Bridesmaids & its ilk doesn’t quite feel as revolutionary as they first seemed. For instance, there’s a sequence in Bridesmaids where the titular gaggle of women are on their way to Hangover-style sexual misbehavior in Las Vegas only to have their flight cancelled at the last possible second, effectively nipping their mischief in the bud. Half a decade later, female raunch comedies are still acting a lot more tame & subdued than their masculine peers. Take, for instance, last year’s Trainwreck. The Amy Schumer vehicle pretended to be a raunchy, no-holds-barred sex farce about a total mess of an overgrown child who can out-drink, out-fuck, and out-drug any of her juvenile man-boy counterparts without missing a beat. That setup somehow ended up being a Trojan Horse for some unfortunate moralizing about how she should probably stop smoking weed & get married ASAP to redeem herself as a worthwhile character. Joke-wise the film was satisfying, but its narrative arc was kind of a disappointment.

How to Be Single doesn’t even pretend to Trojan Horse its lame-ass, monogamy-promoting moralizing the way Trainwreck does. In fact, it does the total opposite. The film presents itself as a celebration of life outside of monogamous relationships, but spends its entire runtime focusing on women seeking & finding fulfillment through marriage & childbearing only to double back in its concluding few minutes to declare that, you know what, being alone is actually pretty okay . . . for a while. How to Be Single‘s title is a total misnomer. A more truthful moniker could’ve been How to Yearn for a Man Without Appearing Too Desperate or How to Cope with a Shameful, Childless Life Through Socially Acceptable Alcoholism. At nearly every turn where the film could subvert societal pressure to “grow up” & settle down, it instead reinforces the idea that life outside of romantic bonds is narcissistic & self-destructive. It even repurposes the Amy Schumer brand of a party animal “trainwreck” by reducing her to a sidekick role (portrayed by Rebel Wilson, in case you couldn’t tell from the ads) & an eternal punchline meant to warn you about the exact wrong way to live  your life alone in The Big City. At the film’s conclusion one main character is engaged, one is new to motherhood & in a serious relationship, one is a lovelorn clown, and one is happily enjoying a life without a romantic partner . . . as a refreshing break between her long line of longterm, life-defining relationships.

Besides being on shaky, stuck-in-the-past moral ground, How to Be Single also suffers from some glaring technical problems as well. The whole film has the look of a television ad for cheap vodka, giving off the distinct over-sleek vibe that if Zima were still a thing people could buy, these are the people who would be drinking Zima. The film is at first posed as a survival guide on how to enjoy casual sex in (a suspiciously whitewashed) NYC, but much like Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, that structure is a flimsy launching pad at best & the film mostly operates within a typical romcom plot structure. As soon as the protagonist (played by Dakota Johnson) experiments with casual sex for the first time, she immediately regrets her decision & doubles back to land herself in the most easily accessible relationship available. The movie makes an interesting structural choice once she gets what she wants  & lands herself in said relationship, skipping its three month duration until he’s she’s single again & declaring “This story isn’t about relationships. It’s about all of those times in-between.” The truth is, though, that the movie is about relationships. It’s just about pining for them from the outside looking in. Throw in a meandering, unfocused runtime that’s at least 20min overlong & you have  self-conflicted, too-well-behaved mess of a bland comedy that feels like a television ad for a product its endorsers can’t even pretend to believe in.

The biggest tragedy about How to Be Single falling short is the staggering amount of talent it wastes along the way. Comedic actors Leslie Mann, Alison Brie, Jason Mantzoukas, Anders Holm, Rebel Wilson, Colin Jost, and Obvious Child/Carol‘s Jake Lacy all belong in a much better-realized comedy. I’ll even stand up for Dakota Johnson, who gets a lot of flak for the total shitshow 50 Shades of Grey, as being perfectly lovely in a role that asks her to be pathetic & vulnerable to the point that it’s a major turn-off. Her petty jealousies & lack of basic life skills (like, no exaggeration, dressing herself) are not as charming as the film believes them to be, but that’s more of a problem on the writing end than it is of Johnson’s at-the-very-least serviceable performance. She may occupy a kind of strained Zooey Deschanel quirkiness that isn’t usually my thing, but she pulls it off reasonably well. Rebel Wilson, by comparison, gets most of the better one-liners in, like when she encourages her regretting-the-single-life friend to “Go past ‘Go’, collect 200 dicks” before she seeks another relationship, but, again, she’s mostly played as a joke & any of her subversive potential is severely undercut. In a perfect world a cast this stacked would’ve been put to better, less-regressive use, but How to Be Single has no interest in pushing any boundaries & its marketing unfortunately spoiled most of its better gags in its omni-present, repetitious ad campaign.

The truth is that I’m far outside How to Be Single‘s target audience. It certainly doesn’t help that I saw the film in a laughless, mid-afternoon crowd of three stone-silent men (myself included). Still, the film felt like a long line of missed opportunities & a half-cooked screenplay that never fully commits to its basic premise that being single & childless is a perfectly okay way to live (until it’s way too late in the runtime to believably change its mind). This isn’t necessarily the film’s fault, but it’s also a little dispiriting that How to Be Single feels like yet another example of female-led sex comedies that deliver a much tamer, better-behaved product than promised. If this is supposed to be feminine counter-programming for bro-minded, male-driven raunch its idea of genre subversion is milquetoast at best. There have been a few comedies along this line that actually misbehave in a satisfying way: Broad City, Appropriate Behavior, Bachelorette, and The To Do List all immediately come to mind. However, many recent, high-profile, female-lead sex comedies are a lot more sexually & politically regressive than they’d need to be to actually make waves. How to Be Single declares that it supports single women who are “living longer, marrying later, and not leaving the party until [they’re] really, truly done.” What’s disappointing is the way the movie suggests that the party does have to end, that living single is a temporary respite, that marriage & motherhood are an inevitability, that there is a “later”. I’m not single & I’m not a woman, but I still found that idea regressive & patronizing, not to mention a total cop-out to what could’ve been a refreshing premise in a couple sharper, more-pointed drafts.

-Brandon Ledet

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (1990) is to John Hughes’ Oeuvre what Big Business (1988) is to Old Hollywood Comedies

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After my discovery that our February Movie of the Month, Big Business, was directed by one third of the ZAZ creative team behind classic genre parodies like Airplane!, Top Secret!, and The Naked Gun, I’ve been trying to make sense of the rest of Jim Abrahams’ catalog. What I found most interesting was that there were only three titles that didn’t fall in line with his genre-defining work in parody comedy. Big Business, as we know, is more of an homage than an outright spoof, but it could’ve easily undergone the typical ZAZ treatment with a couple re-writes. Ruthless People is a much more difficult film to understand in that context. A pitch black comedy inspired by the kidnapping of Patty Hearst (and starring Bette Midler, who steals the show in Big Business), it was made by the full ZAZ team, but never really threatens to be a parody or a spoof of the ransom-driven thriller as a genre. It’s by far the the furthest ZAZ outlier. Much closer in line to what Abrahams achieves in Big Business‘s Old Hollywood pastiche is the Winona Rider comedy Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael, which feels palpably close to spoofing John Hughes’ work in teen comedies, but ends up functioning much more like a loving tribute.

A moody, gothy Winona Ryder headlines Roxy Carmichael as a fullblown version Aly Sheedy’s dour recluse in The Breakfast Club. Just like Sheedy, she looks like the world’s biggest Robert Smith fan, intentionally  isolates herself from peers, and treats the idea of personal hygiene like the exact kind of afflictions you might acquire if you completely disregarded personal hygiene. The movie pushes her high school “weird kid” attributes to an even more cartoonish degree, though, equipping her with an “ark” of abandoned animals that she adopts like a shanty farm, because that’s apparently what weirdo high schoolers do in their free time. The aching-for-a-boy-out-of-her-league growing pains, poor kid vs. the world class warfare, and uncaring parents all resemble characteristics of Molly Ringwald films like Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles, except that they’re all crammed into the same feature. The movie even ends in a Big Dance confrontation, which feels like classic Hughes, and Ryder’s protagonist’s name sounds exactly like what she’d be called if she were the Weird Kid archetype in Not Another 80s Teen Movie: Dinky. Much like with Big Business, the line between homage & spoof feels very thin here & with the right push, Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael could’ve easily fallen in line with the rest of the ZAZ catalog.

There’s something about working in the John Hughes realm that brings out new territory in Abraham’s work that might’ve been missing in his spoof & pastiche films (and whatever you want to call Ruthless People): genuine heart. It takes an innate understanding of genre tropes to be able to understand how to make an homage or a spoof work as a feature film & here Abrahams recognizes that what distinguishes John Hughes’ brand of 80s teen comedies is their heart on the sleeve sentimentality. It’s possible in this case, though, that he might’ve outdone his source material in creating the homage. Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael has some brutal character moments, carried by both Winona Ryder & costar Jeff Daniels, who both play broken shells of people who feel cruelly rejected by both the ones they love & the world at large. And instead of bringing the drama to an everything-works-out-fine cinema magic climax, the film instead stages a huge emotional gut punch that feels a little rough for the genre that Abrahams was working in here. It was surprisingly powerful stuff.

It’s difficult to say whether or not a fan of Big Business would necessarily be floored by what’s offered in Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael. The films are both heavily rooted in 80s fashion & genre convention, so there’s at least a chance that fans would bleed over. What’s far more important, though, is what the two films reveal about Jim Abrahams as a comedy director. It’s tempting to think of the ZAZ team as a sarcastic group of pranksters who simply regurgitate tropes with silly gags added, especially after watching how their comedy style has lead to such creative voids as Fifty Shades of Black, Vampires Suck, and Superfast!. However, what Big Business & Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael reveal is that Abrahams & his Zucker brother collaborators had a genuine love for the movies they were parodying & a deep understanding of how their tropes could be picked apart, reproduced, and repurposed for a new effect. Whether or not Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael is just as good as the genuine John Hughes product is debatable (although it’d certainly be an easier case than arguing that Big Business is just as good as the Old Hollywood farces it emulates), but it’s undeniable that Abrahams understood how those films ticked & how they could be replicated for a new effect, a skill he presumably learned as a parody-happy prankster.

For more on February’s Movie of the Month, 1988’s Big Business, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, a look at its borrowed gag from The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, and a reflection on where the film sits in relation to the rest of the Jim Abrahams catalog.

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 3: Apocalypse Now (1979)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Apocalypse Now (1979) is referenced in Life Itself: In the first edition hardback, Apocalypse Now is referenced on page 2. Roger mentions that when “The Ride of the Valkyres”plays during a helicopter attack in the film, he got a rare, tingling sensation of “reality realigning itself,” the same feeling he had when he proposed marriage to Chaz & the day his father announced he was dying of cancer. In the film version of Life Itself, Ebert is shown arguing the merits of Apocalypse Now to a nonplussed Gene Siskel on two separate occasions. He seemed especially aggravated that Siskel enjoyed Full Metal Jacket more than Apocalypse Now.

What Ebert had to say in his reviews: “Years and years from now, when Coppola’s budget and his problems have long been forgotten, ‘Apocalypse’ will still stand, I think, as a grand and grave and insanely inspired gesture of filmmaking — of moments that are operatic in their style and scope, and of other moments so silent we can almost hear the director thinking to himself.” – From his 1979 review for the Chicago Sun Times

“Other important films such as ‘Platoon,’ ‘The Deer Hunter,’ ‘Full Metal Jacket’ and ‘Casualties of War’ take their own approaches to Vietnam. Once at the Hawaii Film Festival I saw five North Vietnamese films about the war. (They never mentioned ‘America,’ only ‘the enemy,’ and one director told me, ‘It is all the same–we have been invaded by China, France, the U.S. . . .’) But ‘Apocalypse Now’ is the best Vietnam film, one of the greatest of all films, because it pushes beyond the others, into the dark places of the soul. It is not about war so much as about how war reveals truths we would be happy never to discover.” -From his 1999 review for his “Great Movies” series

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It’s near impossible to tell whether or not I’ve seen Apocalypse Now before. Surely, there are plenty of scenes in the film that are vivid to me out of context, but I might’ve picked those up incidentally by catching them on a Greatest Movies of All Time clip show or playing on television while channel surfing. The reason I’m unsure if I’ve ever watched Apocalypse Now in its entirety before is that I feel like I’d more clearly remember a viewing experience as weighty as the film’s 3+hour runtime. I hate to be the kind of cinematic philistine who knocks a slow-paced “classic” for testing my patience, but Apocalypse Now is too damn long. There is a wealth of individual scenes in the film that carry a forceful impact in isolation, but when they’re broken up by a slow trudge upriver & Batman-gritty narration about “the horror, the horror” of war, Apocalypse Now reveals itself to be a huge commitment of time & effort that might not deliver everything it promises. As a literary adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness I think the film is a fresh, interesting take that reveals new truths about its source material by shifting its setting & narrative detail, but the truth is I found Heart of Darkness to be just as much of a chore as consuming Apocalypse Now in one sitting. This is a great adaptation of a novel I don’t care for & a runtime that spiraled out of control even before its extended “Redux” treatment. There’s no denying that the film is packing several powerful punches, though, and it’s all too easy to see how someone could fall in love with the film as a massive whole.

A lot of Apocalypse Now‘s imagery & one-liners are perhaps a little too over-familiar after years of reverent repetition: the ceiling fan blades fading into helicopter sounds, Martin Sheen’s mud-painted face emerging form the bog, the utterance of “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”, etc. However, it’s clear as day with two stretches of the film still play freshest in 2016. I feel like I’ve seen a lot of the film’s war-is-Hell grittiness covered thoroughly in other works. the alcohol-fueled PTSD, overbearing narration, and off-hand soldier quips like, “You’re in the asshole of the world, Captain” all feel like old hat at this point, whether or not they were groundbreaking representation in 1979. What does feel important & unique still is the film’s approach to representing madness among soldiers. Robert Duvall’s colonel might be remembered most for what he likes to smell in the morning, but his emotionally detached obsession with surfing under fire is what stands out most in modern viewings. While dodging bombs & bullets from the Viet Cong, Duvall orders his terrified young men to surf the incoming tide as if they were kicking back beers on a California beach instead of fearing for their lives under fire in Vietnam. It’s a perfect representation of how the war left many men emotionally detached & downright deranged.

Of course, Duvall’s colonel is just a small taste of wartime madness before the main feast: Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz. It takes a three hour effort for Martin Sheen’s broken shell of a captain to make it upriver to meet Kurtz & decide whether or not to complete his mission of assassinating the defected madman. A lot of anticipation is built by the time Martin Sheen & Marlon Brando share their infamous face to face in the film’s third act and it’s amazing just how much Brando delivers under that pressure. His intensely weird performance as Kurtz is a tangible, skin-crawling kind of madness that feels inseparable from Brando as an actor, especially in light of the recent documentary Listen to Me Marlon that hits a lot of the same deranged, hypnotic notes. A lot of audiences in 1979 believed that, like Kurtz, Brando “had gone totally insane & that [his] methods were unsound.” However, if his performance were indeed a work of madness, it’s undeniably of the mad genius variety.

As Ebert points out in this review, any movie is lucky to have one or two great scenes & Apocalypse Now has many. The film gets on a particular roll in its final sequence once Kurtz’s mania graces the screen and the imagery & music combine to create a sort of wartime tone poem that just screams “art house darling” in every frame. There was a lot made of the troubled, over-budget production that plagued Apocalypse Now at the time of its release & there was indeed enough snafus during filming to support a feature length documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. The prevailing wisdom of the time is that director Francis Ford Coppola, was in the middle of a winning streak that included titles like The Godfather & The Outsiders might’ve bitten off more than he could chew with Apocalypse Now & the resulting film was somewhat of an untethered mess that couldn’t quite match its ambition with a unifying sense of discipline. Discerning critics like Ebert, who heralded the film like a masterpiece, had a completely different take, lauding the film as an impeccably visualized descent into madness, an entirely new & powerful way of representing war’s savage effect on the fragile human mind.

I think the truth probably lies somewhere between these two takes. The third, Kurtz-focused hour of the film really does feel like it taps into a troubled soldier’s plight in a way that few film scan claim to do, with much of the credit for that accomplishment resting firmly on Marlon Brando’s beyond mad shoulders & Coppola’s eye for haunting visuals. However, the film’s sprawling runtime & three separate versions (including the “Redux” & an infamous bootleg of a workprint) point to a director who may have flew a little too close to the sun to fully realize his vision. I respect Apocalypse Now‘s ambition & find its messy approach to Vietnam War cinema to be a lot more satisfying than more cookie-cutter examples of the genre, but I also find the idea of the film being a masterpiece to be a somewhat flimsy argument. It really does have more truly great scenes than most movies could dream to bring to the screen, but the film itself never feels like more than the sum of its parts. Much like Sheen’s protagonist, Apocalypse Now goes on a dangerous, mind-threatening journey upriver to seek great existential truths, only to discover it’s not sure what to do once it reaches its destination.

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Roger’s Rating: (4/4, 100%)

fourstar

Brandon’s Rating: (3.5/5, 70%)

threehalfstar

-Brandon Ledet