Welcome to Episode #227 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss a grab bag of movies about women who reinvent themselves with made-up identities, starting with the 1966 Lana Turner drama Madame X.
00:00 Welcome
01:31 Hot Frosty (2024) 05:25 Mother’s Instinct (2024) 07:33 Endless Love (1981) 11:22 My Old Ass (2024) 18:30 Out of the Blue (1980) 24:16 The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978)
31:00 Madame X (1966) 55:00 A Woman’s Face (1938) 1:12:22 Sleeping with the Enemy (1991) 1:30:07 The Last Seduction (1994)
After over a decade of avoiding the evil conveniences of streaming music on Spotify, I have finally given up. I’ve been enjoying the exploitative service for a full year now, contributing fractions of pennies to my favorite artists and turning my head when Belly’s “Delete Spotify” profile-pic message appears while their songs play. As proof of this shame, I’ll share my Spotify Wrapped data for 2024 below. As you might expect, it’s changed my music-listening habits quite a bit, fracturing the full-album sessions I get listening to LPS & cassettes at home to instead rely on shuffling songs on discordant playlists while I’m on the go – something I haven’t experienced since owning iPods in the aughts. That fracturing is not entirely inherent to the digital-listening era, though. There were plenty of artist-showcase compilations that preceded the LimeWire playlist era, and some were even released into movie theaters. I remember being especially blown away by the near-impossible line-up of the 1964 concert film The T.A.M.I. Show, which improbably included performances by Chuck Berry, Smoky Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Lesley Gore, The Beach Boys, The Supremes, James Brown, and The Rolling Stones. That roster is nearly indistinguishable from hitting shuffle on a 1960s playlist on Spotify, and I have since discovered its 1980s punk equivalent in Urgh! A Music War.
Urgh! A Music War is a no-nonsense marathon of live performances from early-80s New Wavers, attempting to document the exact moment when punk got weird. It’s like stumbling into a local Battle of the Bands contest and discovering your all-time-top-10 favorite acts in just a couple hours . . . mixed in with a bunch of other bands that are pretty good too. The MVPs of this live-performance playlist include Devo, Oingo Boingo, The Go-Go’s, Klaus Nomi, Gary Numan, Joan Jett, The Cramps, Gang of Four, Dead Kennedys, Au Pairs, Echo & the Bunnymen, Pere Ubu, Magazine, X, XTC, and I guess The Police, if you’re into that kind of thing. There is no narration or context provided to connect these acts and, unlike the single-event documentation of The T.A.M.I. Show, the performances are split between separate concerts in the US & the UK. Urgh! makes more sense as a live compilation album than as a feature film, which might help explain why it was released on vinyl a full year before the movie version hit theaters, and why it mostly faded into obscurity outside a few cable broadcasts and a subsequent made-on-demand DVD-R release from the Warner Archive. Still, it’s a staggeringly impressive list of new wave & post-punk acts to collect under one label, as long as you’re willing to look past the disconcerting number of white Brits playing reggae in the mix. I even made a couple new-to-me discoveries in the process, adding some tracks from Toyah to my “Liked” playlist on Spotify and finding no results on the app when I searched for the band Invisible Sex.
The major triumph of Urgh! is entirely in the assemblage of its line-up, since most of its filmed performances are straight-forward rock & roll numbers; such is the essence of punk. Only The Police introduce a stadium-rock grandeur at the film’s bookends, concluding this breakneck showcase on a bloated, dubbed-out medley of “Roxanne” and “So Lonely” that’s drained of whatever punk ethos the band might’ve had in them before they blew up. Without the sing-along crowd participation that bolsters The Police, the 27 other bands on the docket have to stand out through pure rock & roll energy, since the camerawork & editing do little to back them up besides occasionally scanning the crowd in the pit and on the curb for streetwear fashion reports. The political reggae band Steelpulse spices things up with a skanking Klansman. Lux Interior from The Cramps enthusiastically fellates his microphone while teasing the exposure of his actual dick, which is barely concealed by sagging leather pants. Spizzenergi vocalist Spizz goes a little overboard trying to add novelty to the band’s performance of their punk-circuit hit “Where’s Captain Kirk?”, putting more energy into spraying the crowd & camera with silly string than into reciting his lyrics. Since the talent on hand is so overwhelming in total, each band’s memorability relies on small moments of novelty. That is, except for Devo, Gary Numan, and Klaus Nomi, who incorporated a keen sense of visual art to their stage craft that translates exceptionally well to this medium.
Urgh! A Music War is glaringly imperfect. As amazing as the line-up is, it’s sorely missing The B-52s, whose Wild Planet-era material would’ve fit in perfectly. Of the acts included, there are a few like X, XTC, and Peru Ubu that appear to be suffering late-in-the-set exhaustion, not quite living up to the energy they bring to their studio recordings. The imperfections and inconsistences frequently account for the appeal of this musical-styles mashup compilation, though; it’s the same appeal in listening to a well-curated Spotify playlist on shuffle. The cut from Gary Numan’s future-synth phantasmagoria to the no-frills rock & roll of Joan Jett and The Blackhearts is especially jarring and says a lot about the precarious identity of punk at the start of its new decade. It’s the same thrill I get when my Spotify “Liked” list jumps from City Girls to Xiu Xiu to Liz Phair, except that it used to be immortalized on vinyl & celluloid instead of relying on the whims of a malfunctioning algorithm.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Romanian gig-economy comedy Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2024).
02:46 Heretic (2024) 08:08 Wicked – Part 1 (2024) 20:07 Noirvember 22:08 High Sierra (1941) 26:17 Human Desire (1954) 30:52 Coma (2024) 34:48 Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) 38:25 Am I OK? (2024) 42:31 The Apprentice (2024) 45:12 The Last Showgirl (2024) 47:21 The End (2024) 52:01 A Different Man (2024) 56:04 Carol Doda Topless at the Condor (2024) 58:32 Queen of the Deuce (2024) 1:00:31 A Real Pain (2024) 1:02:59 Nightbitch (2024) 1:05:07 Hard Truths (2024)
1:07:52 Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2024)
When questioned on why the lighting & color grading of Wicked: Part 1 was so muted & chalky when compared to the Technicolor wonders of the classic MGM adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, director Jon M. Chu explained that he wanted to “immerse people into Oz, to make it a real place […] Because if it was a fake place, if it was a dream in someone’s mind, then the real relationships and stakes that [the characters] are going through wouldn’t feel real.” Given the immense popularity of the film, I have to assume that most audiences understand the appeal of that desaturated, “real stakes” take on the movie musical and are hungry for more reality-bound singalongs just like it. Luckily, they do not have to wait an entire year for the arrival of Wicked: Part 2 to scratch that itch. Joshua Oppenheimer’s climate-change musical The End has arrived to immediately supply what the people demand: a drab, real-world movie musical with grim, real-world stakes. Set entirely in a single, secluded bunker after our impending global environmental collapse, The End is as grounded in reality as any musical has been since the semi-documentary London Road. The stakes are the continued survival of human life on planet Earth. The relationships are strictly parental or economic. Oppenheimer even has the good sense to luxuriate in a near three-hour runtime, just like the first half of Wicked. With an immersive approach like that, it’s sure to be a hit.
George MacKay stars as a twentysomething brat who’s spent his entire life sheltered from the apocalypse in his family’s luxurious bunker, located inside a salt mine. His only social interaction has been confined to his erudite parents and their small staff: a cook, a doctor, and a butler. Playing the mother, Tilda Swinton frets nervously with her fine-art home decor with the same sense of existential dread that she brought to Memoria. Playing the father, Michael Shannon maintains order & civility while grappling with his first-hand contributions to the environmental disaster as a vaguely defined executive in The Energy Business. The domestic fantasy of their life underground is disrupted by the arrival of a starving, haunted survivor of the world outside, played by Moses Ingram. The newcomer’s only potential place in the house is as a mate for McKay’s poorly socialized, brainwashed rich boy, which is not verbally acknowledged but weighs heavily on her every decision. Helpfully, every character confesses their internal emotional conflicts to the audience in song, which never escalates from patter to barnburner but at least adds a minor note of escapism to an otherwise grim, limited setting. The musical numbers are conversational, recalling the sung-through movie musical style of films like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (or, more recently, Annette), except they’re much more sparingly deployed among the more traditional, reserved dialogue.
With The End, Oppenheimer has leapt from documentary to the deep end of narrative filmmaking: the movie musical. Or, at least, that’s what the movie musical should be. Jon M. Chu’s quotes about making Oz “a real place” where audiences can “feel the dirt” is entirely antithetical to the pleasures of movie musical filmmaking, a fundamental misunderstanding of the artform. By contrast, Oppenheimer appears to understand the artform but actively seeks to subvert it to make a political point. The End is a movie musical about the economics of surviving climate change; it only cares about the “real relationships” between the ultra-wealthy and their small staff within the terms of economic power & control. It speaks in Old Hollywood musical language but limits its setting to what would traditionally account for one isolated set-piece song & dance, contrasting the grandeur of the salt mine to the smallness of its characters’ hermetic world. I can’t say that he fully manages the discordance between movie magic & political doomsaying with anything near the success of his breakthrough triumph The Act of Killing, but The End is at least occasionally uncanny in an interesting, provocative way, as opposed to uncanny in a cowardly way. Anyone who’s praising Wicked for its political allegories about fascism & repression will surely find their next favorite musical in the new Oppenheimer film . . . unless everyone’s just needlessly making excuses for enjoying assembly-line Hollywood spectacle. Its current state requires many such excuses.
There was a lot of understandable pushback against the initial wave of “pandemic cinema” that was made during the first couple years of COVID-19, movies that distilled the mood & setting of our global lockdown into the same smartphone video diaries and Zoom meeting windows that we were already submerged in outside of The Movies anyway. A lot of the resistance to that iconography from audiences & critics alike was just fatigue with the cheapness & smallness of that era in image production, but it was always couched in a concern that in the long term even the best pandemic movies were going to be instantly dated and, thus, disposable. Betrand Bonello’s Coma defies that line of criticism by expanding the scope of lockdown-era doldrums as a symptom of a larger global illness, one that’s now persisted a half-decade beyond the initial COVID-19 outbreak. It’s been nearly five years since the earliest COVID lockdowns and the world still feels like it hasn’t broken the spell we fell under then; we’re all still sleeping under the same weighted blanket of dread & futility. That’s bad news for our collective mental health, but it’s great for the thematic shelf life of Coma, which finally went into wide release in 2024 after premiering at European film festivals two long, grueling years earlier.
Coma is a multimedia experiment in which Bonello attempts to relive the early lockdown days of the pandemic through his teenage daughter’s eyes. A five-minute intro directly addresses the teen in subtitles without accompanying audio, urging her to not “surrender to the current mood,” because he believes things will eventually get better if we survive long enough to see it. The drama that follows is mostly confined to a teen girl’s bedroom, with an actress playing a fictionalized version of his child (Louise Labèque, notably of Bonello’s Zombi Child). She reaches out to peers through Zoom & FaceTime calls—at one point organizing a group-chat ranking of history’s greatest serial killers—but for the most part she’s tasked with entertaining herself in isolation. She plays with Barbie dolls the way an 18-year-old would, imagining them in salacious soap opera sex scandals and feeding them outrageous dialogue from internet sources like Trump’s Twitter scroll. She obsesses over the New Age musings of a social media influencer called Patricia Coma (Julia Faure, soon to appear in Bonello’s The Beast), who seems wise & poised until it becomes apparent that she’s suffering the same existential malaise as her followers. The room alternates between rotoscope animation, Blair Witch found-footage nightmares set in a limbo-like “Free Zone” between worlds, paranoiac surveillance footage, and sponcon commercials for a pointless, existential memory game called The Revelator. The entire movie is just the daily toiling of a teenager who passes her time “doing nothing much,” and the oppressive listlessness of it all is suffocating.
Bonello is mostly being playful here, and most of the appeal of the movie is in watching an accomplished filmmaker daydream in internet language, mentally drifting from the boredom of modern life. Still, there is a heartfelt urgency in his appeal to his daughter to remain resilient despite the great Enshitification of everything, to the point where the movie is less about her interior response to the lockdown than it is about his own anxieties about having created a young child in such grim, impotent times. In pandemic cinema terms, the result lands somewhere between the vulnerable earnestness of Bo Burnham’s Inside and the digital-age terror of the screenlife horror Host. It’s the same push-and-pull tension between dread and romantic idealism in Bonello’s follow-up, The Beast, except that this time he’s actively fighting to not let the dread win. Coma finds Bonello desperately searching for hope in an increasingly isolating dead-end world, because he has to believe his child is not going to suffer through The End. The real horror of it all, of course, is that no one ever imagined the apocalypse would be this much of a bore. As a species, we’ve never been lonelier or more useless than we are right now, and the first year of COVID lockdowns was only the start of that cultural decomposition. I wish this movie had aged poorly in the past couple years, but unfortunately it’s still painfully relevant.
It’s likely cliché to describe any movie’s editing style as being similar to jazz, but in the case of Soundtrack to a Coup d’État the descriptor is literal. The anxious sounds & stylish block text of vintage jazz albums overlay news-report propaganda clips for 150 relentless minutes in this essay-style documentary film, which covers the CIA’s efforts to rebrand the Cold War as a “Cool War” by deploying popular jazz musicians to distract from its conspiratorial overthrow of the Congolese government. While political figures of the era as formidable & dissonant as Nikita Khrushchev, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Malcolm X weigh in on the UN machinations that led to the CIA’s conspiracy to assassinate Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, the soundtrack to that coup is provided by formidable & dissonant jazz greats of the era: Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Charles Mingus, and, most improbably, Louis Armstrong. That soundtrack is not a formalistic choice made by director Johan Grimonprez so much as it is the core of his subject. He details how those musicians were manipulated into working as semi-official “jazz ambassadors” for Black American culture in African nations that recently joined the UN, and how those ambassadors of Cool were used to distract from and cover for the planned execution of a newly sovereign foreign leader.
There’s a sharp specificity to this doc’s subject, walking the audience through how African nations newly inducted into the United Nations were seen as a threat to be squashed by paranoid US leadership. Their power within the UN as a young, organized voting block was especially threatening to the US government’s interests, since it relied on those nations remaining colonized so they could be mined for uranium supplies in the ongoing nuclear Cold War against the Communist Bloc. Each subversive maneuver to ensure Belgium’s continued rule over the Congo is thoroughly documented in the onscreen text that interrupts the archival clips, often with page numbers & footnotes to encourage further research on your own time. What Khrushchev describes as the “cacophony” of jazz guides the everything-goes, free-association editing style of that archival footage, so that the film ends up snapshotting the greater context of late-50s & early-60s global culture outside its duty to detail the step-by-step progress of its titular coup. By the time Khrushchev is making jokes about visiting Disney World in a press conference attended by Marilyn Monroe, it plays like an alternate version of Joe Dante’s The Movie Orgy made for lefty academics: an impressive feat of politically fueled editing-room mania that captures & compresses the moral & political rot of an entire era.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’État‘s focus on the CIA’s appropriation & manipulation of Black American artists recalls a few other recent documentaries about the politics of Black artistic life in the US,namely Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project,Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, and I Am Not Your Negro. It distinguishes itself from that cluster of radical docs by slightly shifting focus away from Civil Rights clashes of the 1960s to a different form of racist US state violence, but it’s still racist US state violence all the same. Grimonprez uses a key Malcolm X clip to link the two struggles, in which the activist encourages his audience to get angrier about the US’s violence abroad instead of just the Civil Rights struggle at home, emphasizing that foreign governments are dropping American bombs on Americans’ behalf. All efforts to de-colonize are worth supporting, but it’s especially egregious to ignore the ones suppressed by bombs bearing your country’s name. That line of thought has obvious current relevance in the continued bombing of Gaza by the Israeli military—backed by US weapons supplies—resonating just as loudly as the continued cultural racism of the US and the continued, aggressive unpredictability of jazz. It’s a documentary about a very specific political moment in time, but the global fight for post-colonial freedom smashes through that temporal window.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, Britnee, James, and Hanna discuss the 1997 DTV actioner Drive, recommended by a listener for its “transcendently unhinged Brittany Murphy performance.”
Sean Baker’s time is here. After nailing down his gig-labor docufiction style in the 2004 food-delivery tragedy Take Out and then applying it to a long string of sex-industry dramas in the couple decades since, Baker has finally earned his moment in the prestige-circuit spotlight. Earlier breakthroughs like Tangerine& The Florida Project perfectly calibrated his caustically funny, soberingly traumatic storytelling style in his best work to date, but he emerged from those triumphs recognized as a name to watch rather than one of the modern greats. He’s been recalibrating in the years since, going full heel in his deliberately unlovable black comedy Red Rocket before face-turning to the opposite extreme in his latest work, Anora. Clearly, Baker has decided he wants audiences to love him again, and it’s impressive to see him swing so wildly in tone between his last two features without losing his voice. Anora is the feel-good sweet counterbalance to the feel-bad sour Sean Baker of Red Rocket. Both are equally funny & frantic, but only one is affable enough to set the filmmaker up for a Best-Picture Oscar run after taking home the top prize at Cannes. It’s his time.
The surprising thing about Anora’s critical success is that it’s such a dutiful continuation of the work Baker’s already been doing for years – just with an extra dash of sugar to help sweeten the bitter. Mikey Madison stars as the titular erotic dancer, another trapped-by-capitalism sex worker in a long tradition of Sean Baker anti-heroines dating at least as far back as 2012’s Starlet. Anora is a thorny, chaotic, unfiltered baddie whom the audience instantly loves for her faults, because she’s fun to be around. Like in Tangerine & The Florida Project, we meet her working customers in a high-stress but manageable profession, then follow her on an anarchic journey through her larger urban community, walking a tightrope between slapstick physical comedy & face-slap physical violence until she’s offered a moment of grace in the final beat. As the editor, Baker has worked out a well-timed rhythm for this story template through its many repetitions in previous works. He sweeps the audience up in the hedonistic romance of Anora’s Vegas-strip marriage to a big-spender Russian brat who offers a Cinderellic escape from the strip club circuit in exchange for helping secure a green card. The quick-edit montage of that fantasy then slows down to linger on its real-world fallout, investing increasingly long, painful stretches of time on Russian gangsters’ retribution for the young couple generating tabloid headlines that embarrass the brat’s oligarch father. The laughs continue to roll in, but the punchlines (and physical punches) get more brutal with each impact until it just isn’t fun anymore, as is the Sean Baker way.
There’s nothing especially revelatory about the Sean Baker formula in Anora. In the context of his filmography, it’s just more of the same (of a very good thing). However, the increased attention to his career-long project as an auteur has had its immediate benefits, not least of all in Baker’s collaboration with the local repertory series Gap Tooth Cinema (formerly known as Wildwood). When asked to program a screening for Gap Tooth as a primer for what he was aiming to achieve in Anora, Baker offered three titles as options: Fellini’s Oscar-winning sex worker drama Nights of Cabiria, the fish-out-of-water Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America, and a second Italian sex-work story in 1960’s Adua and Her Friends. Gap Tooth ultimately selected Adua, the most obscure title of the trio and, more importantly, one of the very best titles they’ve screened to date. I don’t know that Sean Baker’s name would have come to mind had I discovered Adua and Her Friends in a different context, since it’s a much more formally polished picture than the anarchic comedies he’s become known for since he filmed Tangerine on an iPhone. The comparisons that more readily came to mind were Mildred Pierce, Volver, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. It’s a less recognizable title than any of those comparisons, but that’s the only way in which it’s lesser. It’s an incredibly stylish, sexy, tragic, and cool story of self-reinvented sex workers making do in late-50s Italy, one that speaks well to Baker’s genuine interest in his characters’ inner lives beyond what they symbolize as society’s economic casualties.
Adua and Her Friends is a darkly comic drama about a small crew of sex workers who are forcibly retired by the Merlin Law of 1958, which ceased the legal operation of all Italian brothels. Unsure how to get by without the only trade they have experience in, the women conspire to open a rural, roadside restaurant as a front for a new, illegal brothel they will run themselves. Only, after a few successful months of food service—depicted as being equally difficult as prostitution—they decide they’d rather “go straight” in their new business than convert it into an underground brothel. As you’d expect, the self-reinvented women’s lives as restaurateurs are upended by men from their past that refuse to let them start fresh, the same way Anora is blocked from upgrading her social position from escort to wife. Where Adua excels is in taking the time to flesh out the inner lives & conflicts of each woman in its main cast. Lolita is led astray by conmen who take advantage of her youthful naivete; Marilina struggles to reestablish a familial relationship with her estranged son; Milly hopes to leave her past behind and start over as a devoted housewife, Anora-style. Adua (Oscar-winner Simone Signoret) gets the first & final word in her struggle to establish a new career before she ages out of her livelihood, but the movie is an ensemble-cast melodrama at heart, asking you to love, laugh with, and weep for every woman at the roadside restaurant (and to hiss at the cads who selfishly ruin it all).
Much like in Baker’s films, the majority of Adua and Her Friends is a surprisingly good time, with plenty slapstick gags & irreverently bawdy jokes undercutting the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold tropes typical to this subject. Like Anora, it’s a 2+ hour comedy with an emotionally devastating ending, one that carefully avoids making its titular sex worker a purely pitiable symbol of societal cruelty even while acknowledging that she’s backed into a pretty shitty corner. Adua and Anora can be plenty cruel themselves when it helps their day-to-day survival. That might be where the two films’ overlapping interests end, since Adua lounges in a much more relaxed hangout vibe than Anora, scored by repetitions of Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk” rather than t.A.T.u.’s “All the Things She Said.” Adua and her friends loiter around their Italian villa, fanning themselves in a deep-focus tableau, while Anora is dragged around Vegas & NYC by Russian mobsters who (for the most part) don’t see her as a human being. There is one early sequence in Adua where a black-out drunken night is represented in choppy lost-time edits that may have been an influence on the rhythms of Anora’s first act, but otherwise I assume Baker was inspired less by the film’s formal style than he was by the characterizations of its main cast. The frank, sincere, humanizing approach to sex-worker portraiture in Adua and Her Friends speaks well to Sean Baker’s continued interest in sex-work as a cinematic subject and, although both were great, I feel like I learned more about his work through its presentation than I did by watching his latest film.
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