In the 2000s, Kiyoshi Kurosawa captured the sinister liminality of the early Internet in his online ghost story Pulse. Two decades later, Kurosawa’s Cloud meets the Internet where it currently is in the 2020s: crassly capitalistic and decidedly non-mysterious. Instead of promising a new digital frontier where humanity can diverge from its corporeal form into something new & vaguely defined (and, thus, horrific), the Internet is now just another point of sale for banal, capitalist trade. It’s all empty opportunism as far as the mouse can click, leaving us selfish, isolated, and misanthropic in a competitive market of products instead of ideas. As a result, Kurosawa’s latest rumination on the Nature of the Internet is flatter & hollower that it is imaginative or atmospheric, but the implications of what living online has done to our souls are just as scary as they were in the temporal snapshot of aughts-era online culture in Pulse.
Premiering locally at the horror-leaning Overlook Film Festival, Cloud asksatruly scary question: What if online flamewars became physical, literal, and consequential? It turns out they’d still be at least a little bit silly and a lotta bit pathetic. Masaki Suda stars as a shameless online retailer who buys limited-supply products at wholesale prices en masse to deplete supplies so that he can resell them to desperate buyers at extortionist prices. Think of the pricks who force concerts to immediately, artificially sell out on Ticketmaster for personal profit, and you get the gist. It’s easy to screw his buyers over from the safety of online anonymity, but things turn violent when those buyers band together to get revenge on him in the meat space — threatening to live-stream his torture as retribution for his crimes. Only, even that vigilante organization has been disjointed by the selfishness of online culture, causing them to squabble & fall apart instead of acting as a collective. Deadly slapstick violence ensues.
The flat, digital cinematography of Cloud, combined with the slow escalation of its daylit absurdism, is more reminiscent of Kurosawa’s sci-fi satire Doppelganger than something as moody & menacing as Pulse. As with several other Kurosawa stories, it all culminates in a warehouse shootout, leaving practically everyone dead on the concrete as victims of capitalist violence. It isn’t until Kurosawa pushes past that banal, real-world violence into something more immensely, supernaturally evil in the final coda that the entire picture comes together. Cloud is a slow build to a loud, buffoonish conclusion, followed by a moment of “What have we become?” existential crisis. It’s the kind of movie that only becomes more thematically complex & darkly hilarious the longer you dwell on it after the credits roll. Some of that dwelling is extratextual too, given that its current festival-circuit rollout has been compromised by the film being leaked in its entirety via a Twitter link for brief online clout — the exact kind of selfish, misanthropic behavior that the film satirizes.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the Shaw Brothers’ laser-wizards martial arts actioner Buddha’s Palm (1982).
For anyone out there arguing that movie studios should start cutting “unnecessary” sex scenes for the sin of not “advancing the plot,” I recommend seeking out populist art from earlier, safer decades, when that kind of conservative moralism was more shameless. Take, for instance, the teen-punks-on-the-run love story Times Square from 1980, which had all of its sex & kissing scenes removed post-production by money men who were scared that its queer themes would cut into the film’s profitability. The surviving prints are proof of sex-scene-censorship in action, leaving behind implications of sapphic teen romance without any physical consummation that might scare off the cinematically illiterate who don’t catch on. Of course, this very nearly ruins the movie. Not knowing exactly when the two girls at the center first acknowledge their mutual attraction is alone frustrating enough, but there’s also so much communication & characterization lost by averting the audience’s eyes from their bedroom intimacy that it feels like a story half-told. This is the future Liberals want: sexless, indistinct, defanged. That contingent even gets their own onscreen avatar in the form of the film’s villain, Peter Coffield as a Liberal politician who’s campaigning to “clean up” the smut of late-70s Times Square, to make it safer for families (and business). Eat up, prudes.
That politician’s daughter is effectively our main character: Trini Alvarado as a sheltered Uptown Girl who’s essentially left catatonic by her father’s blowhard moralizing. She’s checked into a mental hospital for being an inconvenience in her father’s busy schedule as a public figure, despite the fact that there’s nothing medically wrong with her. Her hospital roommate is a street-smart punk rocker played by newcomer Robin Johnson (counterbalancing her porcelain-doll fragility with some manic Linda Manz brashness), who might legitimately be mentally ill. The girls quickly bond over mutual disregard for the authority figures in their lives and make a break for it, fleeing the hospital in a stolen ambulance to their new, domestic life squatting in a warehouse by the river. It’s unclear exactly when their friendship tips over into romance, thanks to post-production censorship, but that aspect of their dynamic is undeniably present throughout. They write each other poems, they scream each other’s names, they wear each other’s clothes; they’re in love. Meanwhile, their new life on the streets is turned into a publicity flame war between the Liberal politician who believes Times Square has become an “X-rated” public space in need of governmental censorship and a shock-jock radio DJ who wants to keep the city grimy for the punk-at-heart, played by an especially pouty Tim Curry.
While I don’t think the kissing or sex scenes removed from Times Square would have been redundant, I did laugh at the redundancy of the concluding title card that announces it was “filmed entirely on location in New York City.” This a film that spends half of its runtime strutting up and down 42nd Street in search of classic New York City cool before Giuliani power-washed it off the sidewalk forever. It’s a treasure trove for movie freaks who like to take notes on what’s being advertised on vintage marquees in the background. Its soundtrack is overflowing with classic New York City bands, including The Ramones, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and that one Talking Heads song where they name-drop CBGB. The runaways aren’t solely fighting to carve out a place for themselves at the edge of adult surveillance & censorship; they’re also fighting to make it big as micro-celebrities in the first-wave NYC punk boom. They brand themselves as The Sleez Sisters, smashing televisions on city streets as a vague protest of modern complacency and crashing the alt radio station to speak directly to their adoring public of frustrated, sheltered teen girls. The major political question at the heart of the film is who really owns New York City, the freaks who walk the concrete or the inhuman politicians who govern their public & private lives from afar? It’s a question with a loud, celebratory answer, as observed from the rooftops by Tim Curry & Robin Johnson, who survey the city streets below from gargoyle perches like a punk-rock Batman.
Times Square is the most [SCENE MISSING]iest movie I’ve fallen in love with in a while. It was crudely chopped to bits by The Man, but its crudeness & messiness is at least appropriate for a story about teenage runaways in love. Director Allan Moyle has, understandably, expressed frustration over the surviving, compromised cut of the film, but he still at least seems proud of its documentation of Times Square’s final days in sleaze, and he effectively plagiarized its rooftop concert ending for his record-store hangout comedy Empire Records years later. The film shares a lot of post-production-fuckery woes with fellow teen-girl-punks-on-the-lam relic The Fabulous Stains, but it likewise has outlived attempts to chop it down and achieved a kind of cult-cinema immortality. To be clear, though, it’s a great film despite its sex-and-smooches censorship, not because of it. Audiences have been robbed of experiencing the film’s full passionate glory by Liberal do-gooders who sought to make a safer, cleaner picture at the expense of honesty & art. It’s the same political principles that scrubbed Times Square clean of all of the grit, smut, and vitality that made it interesting and replaced them with a Disney Mega Store & Guy Fieri’s latest restaurant venture. Congratulations, the streets are no longer X-rated; now it’s just as formless, indistinct, and sanitized as everywhere else in this corporate hell hole of a country.
The erotic thriller is alive & well . . . in France and in France only. From François Ozon’s Double Lover to Justine Triet’s Sibyl to Yann Gonzalez’s Knife+Heart, all of the best erotic thrillers in recent memory have been French productions, likely because the European festival circuit is the last surviving refuge for Mid-Budget Movies for Adults. Even the master of the Hollywood erotic thriller, Paul Verhoeven, had to make his most recent contributions to the genre there, in Benedetta & Elle. French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie has been a recent MVP in keeping the genre alive in particular, at least since making his beachside cruising thriller Stranger by the Lake. Lower-profile follow-ups like Staying Vertical and, now, Misericordia have kept up the eroticism of Guiraudie’s 2013 name-maker, even if they’ve strayed a little further from real-world logic into outright surrealism. Staying Vertical found Guiraudie making a Charlie Kauffman-style existential thriller about a writer’s block crisis that spirals its protagonist’s life out of control . . . with unexpected jags of menacing eroticism. With Misericordia, he’s made a surprisingly gentle, grounded variation of the Pasolini classic Teorema . . . with unexpected jags of menacing eroticism. God bless the great nation of France and all the perverts therein, Guiraudie especially.
Drawing inspiration from Terence Stamp’s angelic slut in Teorema, Félix Kysyl stars in Misericorida as a mysterious outsider who serves as the target for an entire community’s sexual desires. Only, in this case he’s not a total stranger to those many, many potential sex partners. Jérémie returns to his hometown from a life in the Big City to mourn the loss of his former employer, the town baker. He lingers beyond the normal funereal mourning process to relive his teen years in the home of the recently widowed baker’s wife, where he’s constantly bombarded by unspoken sexual advances from everyone in the small-town social circle: the widow, her priest, her son, and her son’s best friend – the last two of whom seem totally unaware that they’re even flirting. All of this social pressure and the expiration of his welcome quickly culminate in a violent crime that leaves Jérémie under surveillance & interrogation by the local cops. He spends his days halfheartedly foraging for mushrooms in the woods to appear innocently busy. Meanwhile, he’s paranoid about leading the cops to the shallowly buried evidence of his crime of passion, which has become a suspiciously fertile garden bed for off-season mushrooms. Everyone seems to know he’s guilty, but no one wants to turn him in, in case they might be able to consummate their lust for him. Yet, he can’t leave town without looking like he’s fleeing a crime scene. He’s essentially imprisoned by his fuckability.
There are no actual sex scenes in Misericorida, which sounds absurd for a Teorema riff from the director of Stranger by the Lake. It’s a low-key, autumnal thriller that propels itself with sexual tension, though, often so erotically charged in its otherwise casual exchanges of dialogue that the entire project plays like an understated prank. There’s something undeniably perverse, for instance, when Jérémie is pressured to receive the town priest’s confession from the ordained side of the booth. Although there’s no actual sex, Guiraudie finds room to squeeze in two on-screen dicks – one limp, one erect. There’s even something slyly funny about Félix Kysyl’s costuming as Jérémie, styling the 30-something actor’s hair with an inappropriately boyish look that presents him as a kind of expired twink. Does that look say something about his arrested adolescence, possibly as a result of his past sexual tension with the now-deceased town baker? I have no idea, but it does add to the strangeness of his erotic dynamic with his more geriatric sexual suitors. In general, it’s difficult to pinpoint any specific social commentary or prescriptive point of view in Guiraudie’s work. If his quietly surreal erotic thrillers say anything about the world, it’s just that sex & violence are a constant aspect of human nature, as natural of forces as the wind blowing trees outside. For whatever reason, those winds just seem to blow harder & louder in France.
When I think of movies about The Banality of Evil, I generally expect them to be a little, well, banal. The reason The Zone of Interest is such an effectively chilling picture, for instance, is that its visual patina and its editing rhythms are just as coldly impersonal as its Nazi ghouls. It’s framed as automated security-cam footage, documenting the domestic & bureaucratic rituals behind Nazi violence, while Holocaust victims ambiently scream in agony on the opposite side of the garden wall. Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 spy thriller The Conformist takes the opposite approach. The Italo-French co-production is mostly staged in cold, clinical spaces, but its minimalist mise-en-scène is more akin to the fine-art production design of Last Year at Marienbad than anything credibly bureaucratic. The women in its cast model gorgeous 1930s Euro fashions, while the men in their lives dress in full Old Hollywood noir costume, segmented by the graphic parallel lines of Venetian blinds. Driving cars are shot in a wide angle from street level, as if Bertolucci was the main inspiration for Beastie Boys music videos to follow. The rear-projection imagery of train rides are pure Old Hollywood magic, reaching more for pop-art abstraction than real-world novelty. There’s something outright perverse in making a movie about The Banality of Evil so aggressively stylish & beautiful. Somehow, though, that approach doesn’t even register as one of the top-five most perverse things about the picture.
If Bertolucci was trying to make a point by making his Banality of Evil treatise so achingly beautiful & cool (besides attempting to make a name for himself as an up-and-coming auteur), it’s that the Banality itself is contrary to basic human behavior. Our antihero protagonist Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is an undercover assassin struggling to complete his most recent mission because he falls in love with his target’s bisexual wife, likely because he recognizes a mutual queer sexuality in her that lingers in his own persona. However, as the title indicates, he spends his every waking moment suppressing anything about himself that could be read as morally deviant, mostly in response to the childhood trauma of being raised by mentally ill parents and being sexually assaulted by an adult stranger. Marcello volunteers to become an assassin-spy for Mussolini’s Italo-fascist regime, seeking to squash all moral deviancy in others’ behaviors instead of just focusing on his own. When a former professor & mentor (and current political target) accuses him of asserting his conformist moralism “through oppression,” he counters that he’s actually asserting it “through example,” which is so much stranger and more perverse. Fascists don’t usually buy into the restrictive morals they enforce on the masses, at least not behind closed doors. Clerici is the one true believer in fascist bullshit, seeking the ideal of normalcy in a world where it fundamentally can’t exist.
Clerici’s rigid, moralistic worldview is constantly subverted by the animalistic sexual desires & behaviors of every human being he comes into contact with, including himself. The main thrust of the story concerns a semi-requited love triangle with his friend-turned-target’s wife while she torments him by sexually pursuing his own wife, who is too blissfully ditzy to keep up with the dangerous game being played. The tensions & revelations of that sexual competition ultimately have no effect on his actions in the field, since he’s pathologically predisposed to do What He’s Supposed to Do. The only reason he married a woman he doesn’t love is because a man his age is supposed to be married. Likewise, there’s never really any question of whether he will follow through on violently betraying his former mentor; he loves following orders. The Conformist posits Evil Banality as a participatory choice. It’s something that fascists consciously opt into, as opposed to getting swept up in the momentum of a political movement. Bertolucci undercuts any of the spy-thriller conventions of the story to instead dwell on how inhumanly strange that choice is, allowing editor Franco Arcalli to scramble the timeline with a disorienting, overlapping flashback structure. It’s ultimately a hyper-stylized character study of a deeply perverse man, one whose single-minded pursuit of normal human behavior makes him the most abnormal freak walking the planet. Meanwhile, everyone around him is just trying to enjoy a few orgasms before they die, which is the way things are supposed to be.
A.I. tech bros’ latest attack on the basic dignity of everyday life targeted Studio Ghibli of all things, proving that absolutely nothing is sacred to these ghouls. There’s a recent software upgrade to the Plagiarism Generator technology that was advertised in the form of “Ghiblifying” pre-existing images with digital filters that adapt them to the visual style of the legendary animation studio. Nevermind the blatant copyright infringement that amalgamates already underpaid artists’ work into digital-age corporate slop. Nevermind that the studio’s broad cultural association with Hayao Miyazaki—and Hayao Miyazaki only—disregards the work of fellow directors & animators under that brand who have their own distinct style. The most insulting insinuation about the “Ghiblified” A.I. image trend is that it reduces decades of finely crafted animation to a few vague visual signifiers that could be summed up in a single word: “Cute.” Like the A.I.-generated Wes Anderson videos before it, this recent dispatch from Tech Bro Hell makes Studio Ghibli’s work look simpler, safer, and more twee than it is in practice, mining its surface aesthetics without engaging with the substance beneath. It’s just as empty & lazy as it is profane.
What would these “Ghiblified” A.I. images look like, for instance, if they pulled their visual cues from Isao Takahata’s work instead of Miyazaki’s? Would it capture the full span of life’s tenderness, cruelty, warmth, and pain, as gorgeously illustrated in The Tale of Princess Kaguya, or would it reduce the immensity of that film’s beauty to a few strokes of an algorithmic color-pencil? Would it convey the collectivist environmentalism of Pom Poko‘s radical politics, or just automatically equip all figures pictured with comically large scrotums? The real gotcha example, of course, is what an A.I. “Ghiblified” photo implicates about a film as devastating as Takahata’s WWII drama Grave of the Fireflies. I’m not sure how valuable the cutesy surface aesthetics of the studio’s character designs are in the context of a story about children starving to death during the societal disruption of war. In-film, the contrast between the characters’ classic anime cuteness (which Roger Ebert summarized as “enormous eyes, childlike bodies, and features of great plasticity”) and the real-life atrocities those characters suffer makes for horrific emotional impact, perfectly illustrating the inhuman evil of war. Using those visual signifiers out of context to cutesy-up your beach vacation photos is incredibly crass, then, if you take more than a half-second to think about it.
The biggest emotional gut punch of Grave of the Fireflies arrives in the first couple minutes, before you even get to know the children at the center. We’re introduced to our coming-of-age protagonist Seita in his dying minute, actively starving to death in a train station while passersby treat him as an inconvenient obstacle during their daily commute. When he passes, he leaves his body behind to reunite with the spirit of his even younger sister, Setsuko, who has apparently been waiting for him to join her in a firefly-lit afterlife. Both children’s fates are succinctly & poetically spelled out in this one quiet moment, so all the audience can do when the timeline dials back to 1945 is slowly watch it happen with no way to stop it. Seita & Setsuko are orphaned in the final days of WWII by firebombing raids and Naval attacks that leave both their parents dead. They live in a world sandwiched between mass graves below and falling ash from above, but they can at least depend on each other for community. Seita takes on housing & feeding his sister as his sole responsibility, dodging any pressure to join the war effort that would distract from her survival. As the opening warns, he fails, but he does manage to leave her with some joyous memories along the way despite the pain & indignity of starving to death, unhoused. It’s incredibly tough to watch.
Grave of the Fireflies indulges in all the usual youth-nostalgia and hand-drawn natural wonder that typifies Studio Ghibli’s broader approach to 2D animation, but it’s mostly in service of making the emotional tolls of war weigh as heavily on the heart as possible. It turns out that even when gorgeously animated, war is Hell. Worse than Hell, maybe. The most insidious images I saw during last week’s A.I. Ghibli Fest were from the official Twitter account of the Israeli army, cutesifying their real-time, real-world bombing & starvation of Palestinian children en masse as if they regard Grave of the Fireflies as an aspirational roadmap rather than a dire warning of past evils that should not be repeated. Of course, most people using the Ghiblified A.I. generators have much cuter, gentler works from the studio in mind, like My Neighbor Totoro (presuming they have any direct familiarity with the studio at all, beyond walking past advertisements for routine repertory screenings at the local AMC). When Grave of the Fireflies was first released in Japan, it was paired with Totoro on a double bill that confused & traumatized unsuspecting children who weren’t prepared for such a heavy night out. That late-80s programming choice underestimated the full scope of what Studio Ghibli offers as a movie studio that produces daring, emotionally complex art decades before the A.I. C.H.U.D.s repeated the same mistake. They’re not in the game to sell twee digital filters and stuffed commemorative plushies; Grave of the Fireflies is alone proof of that.
Welcome to Episode #235 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of low-budget horror films about ballerinas in crisis, starting with the 1989 Supsiria knockoff Étoile, starring Jennifer Connelly.
00:00 Concerts 07:21 Two English Girls (1971) 10:32 Adolescence (2025) 15:37 Down with Love (2003) 19:20 Chocolate Babies(1996)
We try our best to cover both the highest and the lowest ends of cinema here, from the finest of fine art to the trashiest of genre trash. Occasionally, those two polar-opposite ends of the medium intersect in unexpected ways. Last week, I found myself watching two seemingly discordant movies that covered the exact same metatextual topic – one because it screened in The Prytania’s Classic Cinema series during New Orleans French Film Fest and one because the Blu-ray was heavily discounted during an online flash sale. Both 1963’s Contempt and 1989’s The Black Cat are movies about screenwriters who jeopardize their marriages by taking on doomed-from-the-start film projects that put their wives’ personal safety at risk. The former was directed by French New Wave innovator Jean-Luc Godard at the height of his professional career, while the latter was directed by Italo schlockteur Luigi Cozzi in a sly attempt to cash in on his tutelage under his much more famous mentor, Dario Argento. They also both happen to be literary adaptations, at least in theory. While Godard was relatively faithful to his source-material novel, Cozzi’s film is an adaptation in name only, daring to bill itself as “Edgar Allen Poe’s The Black Cat” in its opening-credits title card before immediately abandoning its source text to leech off Argento’s legacy instead of Poe’s. Godard does indulge in his own allusions to an earlier, foundational filmmaker’s work in Contempt, though, by casting Fritz Lang as himself and including discussions of Lang’s early artistic triumphs, like M. You’d never expect these two movies to have anything in common at first glance, but The Black Cat really is Contempt‘s trashy cousin, long estranged.
Typically, I don’t think of Jean-Luc Godard’s signature aesthetic to be all that distant from the low-budget, high-style genre filmmaking ethos that guided the Italo horror brats of the 70s & 80s. At the very least, both sides of that divide would have been passionately reverent of Alfred Hitchcock as a cinematic stylist. However, Contempt is so far removed from the handheld, D.I.Y. crime picture days of Breathless that it’s hardly Godardian at all, at least not visually. Shot on location at seaside Italian villas in Technicolor & Cinemascope, Contempt is often breathtaking in its visual grandeur, especially in its 2023 digital restoration that aggressively pops the intensity of its colors. Godard presents star Brigitte Bardot in several magazine glamour-shoot set-ups that accentuate the otherworldly beauty of her body, with particular attention paid to her buttcheeks. Of course, vacationing with a beautiful woman in an exotic locale doesn’t fundamentally change who you are, so the usual self-defeating macho bullshit that plagues Godard’s protagonists follow him there too. Michel Piccoli co-leads as a cash-strapped screenwriter who takes a well-paying job doing re-writes on an already-in-production Fritz Lang adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Lang is making a much more abstract, artsier picture than what his American producer had greenlit, so Piccoli ends up in a sickening position where he must undermine the work of a genius he respects to instead please a meathead cad from The States who values commerce over art (Jack Palance, playing a pitch-perfect dipshit). Worse yet, the American pig has the hots for Bardot, and Piccoli does nothing to get in his way or to protect his obviously uncomfortable wife. This leads to an endlessly vicious, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-style argument between the couple, so that they spend much of their time in an Italian paradise bickering about the purity of their love and the corruption of money. Meanwhile, Fritz Lang amusedly shakes his head, as if he’s seen this all before.
The marital crisis of The Black Cat is much more outlandish & abstract, but it also starts with a filmmaker taking on an ill-advised project. Our protagonist is a Luigi Cozzi-style horror director who decides to make good use of the Italian film industry’s loose copyright laws to make his own unsanctioned sequel to Suspiria. The project is in the early writing phase, where he is collaborating with a writing partner to sketch out the backstory of the Third Mother referenced in Argento’s Suspiria, believing there was room for another cash-grab witchcraft story in that lore (after the Second Mother was covered in Argento’s Inferno, and long before the Third Mother was covered in Argento’s Mother of Tears). They foolishly decide to pull inspiration from a “real”, powerful witch named Levana, who is awakened from her cosmic slumber by the project. Specifically, once the wart-faced Levana catches wind that she will be played onscreen by the director’s wife, she flips the fuck out and invades the real world through a mirror in the couple’s home, puking a chunky green goo in the actress’s face and then generally causing havoc. From there, The Black Cat is a supernatural horror free-for-all, following its scene-to-scene whims without any care or attention paid to the pre-existing work of Dario Argento, Edgar Allen Poe, or high school physics teachers. The movie is a jumbled mess of demonically possessed space fetuses, witchcraft-practicing house cats, 19th Century ghost children, telekinetic explosions, laser-shooting eyeballs, internal organ ruptures, creepy-crawly spiders, and whatever else amuses Levana as she tears apart this doomed marriage, all because she doesn’t want a movie made about her. What a diva.
You can assume a lot of what was on Godard’s mind while he was making Contempt just by watching the movie. Between the intensely bitter (and even more intensely gendered) marital argument that eats up most of the runtime and the art-vs-commerce argument that eats up the rest, you get a pretty clear picture of what was going on in his internal & professional life at the time. Even after watching the “Cat on the Brain” interview included on the Blu-ray disc, I cannot begin to tell you what Cozzi was attempting to communicate in The Black Cat. During the interview, he describes the picture as “science fiction,” likening it to his Star Wars knockoff Starcrash, with which it only shares a few extraneous insert shots of outer space. I’d say it’s much more spiritually in line with his supernatural slasher film Paganini Horror, which hooks the audience with the undead spirit of famous composer Niccolo Pagnini for a familiar starting point, then launches into a series of hair-metal music video vignettes where he just does whatever amuses him from scene to scene. Both of these vintage European relics might generally be about the artform of screenwriting, but only Contempt seems to put any sincere thought into that craft, while The Black Cat is much more about trying whatever looks cool in a scene, internal logic be damned. Something the two pictures do have in common, though, is the assertion that the basic labor & finance of filmmaking will ruin your marriage, whether through the intrusion of jackass Hollywood money men or the intrusion of evil mirror-dimension witches. If two movies so far apart in philosophy, tone, and intent happen to come to that same conclusion, I have to believe there’s some truth to it. Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be screenwriters.
I am not sure how, but my grandfather watched a baseball game for the entire span of my childhood. No matter when we stopped by his house, that one Atlanta Braves game was playing on the television, with no beginning or end. No one ever won or lost. Nothing especially interesting ever happened on the field. It was just plain, old baseball for all of eternity. I never understood the appeal until I attended a game in-person as an adult. With a couple beers and an Italian sausage in the stands, the endless stasis of plain, old baseball became pleasant instead of confounding. It was a calm background texture, an occasional distraction from the casual conversation & junk food consumption I would be indulging in anyway. Baseball is, essentially, the hangout movie of sports.
The new gloomy hangout comedy Eephus understands the spirit of that sport more deeply than any other baseball movie I can name. It’s a slow-paced, aimless picture that feels like watching a sub-professional baseball game played in real time. None of the players are especially athletic, much less talented. They’re playing a game so pointless that they can opt to get drunk & nap in the outfield with no direct effect on the final score. And yet, the dead-space background texture of the sport leaves a lot of room for what really matters in movies: detailed observations of human behavior, character quirks, and the poetic graces of life. Every single dialogue exchange & character detail of Eephus is deeply charming, riotously funny, or both, making for an exceptionally pleasant day at the park.
The occasion of this specific baseball game is the closing of Soldiers Field in Nowhere, Massachusetts. Before the site is demolished to make room for a school, two recreational-league teams of middle-aged men gather for one final game. They complain about the cruel absurdity of building a school on such hallowed ground, as if their field were being replaced with a strip mall or prison. The next-nearest field is only a 30-minute drive away, which they consider an insurmountable distance, deciding instead to retire from the sport forever. As the sun sets on their final game, the field lights never kick on, so they play in the dark, unable to see the ball or accurately call a play. They can barely haul their sagging dad-bods around the bases, joking “They should put me down” as if they’ve fully outlived their usefulness. There’s no real momentum or purpose to the game beyond going through the motions to give the field a proper send-off. When they celebrate with fireworks after the final play, we don’t even watch the display. There’s no sense of ceremony here, just lives being lived.
Eephus lingers somewhere in the vast liminal space between Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets &Field of Dreams, but its moment-to-moment charms are more kinetic than that description indicates. There are seemingly no repeated camera set-ups as cinematographer-turned-director Carson Lund (Ham on Rye, Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point) finds infinite angles from which to shoot a generally unimpressive recreational field. Standalone shots of an empty dugout, a good cloud, or the moon peeking out in daylight register with a quiet, warm beauty, but Lund never allows the tempo to drift from hangout movie to slow-cinema abstraction. He mostly finds the humor & humanity in the minor, unimportant behaviors of his small cast of minor, unimportant men. Meanwhile a series of local Halloween-themed radio commercials and an opening news broadcast voiced by Frederick Wiseman keep the energy up with loud, frantic background chatter. As an end-of-an-era movie about people who’ve outlived their purpose, it’s unavoidably melancholy, but it moves quick, looks great, and delivers constant laughs as it waits out the final hours of the day.
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