There can be something reassuring about watching a truly Bad movie. Comforting, even. The term “Bad Movies” has been applied to a growing canon of “so-bad-they’re-good” oddities with such wild abandon that a lot of so-good-they’re-great titles like Showgirls, Glen or Glenda, and Freddy Got Fingered have gotten swept up in the momentum, either because their intent is misunderstood or because they fail to meet arbitrary standards of objective, professional quality. The further I’ve immersed myself in the deep end of iconoclastic, outsider-art filmmaking the more difficult it is to find any value in a Good vs Bad dichotomy. If I had to come up with my own binary, I’d say movies are usually either Interesting or Boring. So, it’s helpful to have a reality check like the 1995 buddy-cop comedy Theodore Rex to remind me that, yes, movies can be objectively Bad. Everything about Whoopi Goldberg playing a future-cop who’s reluctantly partnered with a talking animatronic dinosaur sounds like the kind of nonsense novelty that gets me to overlook objective quality markers to instead find joy in the inane and the absurd. And yet, there is no joy to be found in Theodore Rex. It’s bad; it’s boring. It’s more chore than art.
I mean “chore” in the literal sense. Whoopi Goldberg was contracted to star in this 90s Dino Craze kids’ film though an oral agreement that she tried back out of once she smelled the stink on the project, then was forced to follow through on her promise via lawsuit. As a result, most of the blame for its dead-eyed energy has defaulted to criticism of her performance, which is indeed a legally obligated sleepwalk. The real shame, though, is that her T-Rex screen partner has no personality to speak of either. His human-scale dino suit is cute enough to appeal to kids, but George Newbern’s vocal work as Teddy Rex is embarrassingly whiny & unenthused. He spends the entire film mumbling to himself like a socially awkward nerd who just got dropped off for his first day at a party college (speaking from personal experience), draining all of the ferocious cool out of the T-Rex’s street cred and replacing it with generalized, unmedicated anxiety. Worse yet, these two lifeless drips are investigating the conspiratorial murder of another T-Rex, so kids not only have to hang out with the least exciting dinosaur alive, but they’re also confronted with the limp corpse of their favorite dino in multiple scenes. The whole thing plays like a cult deprogramming tape meant to convince children that dinosaurs are in no way interesting or cool.
If there are any signs of life in this dino-themed court summons, it’s in the production design. Theodore Rex was one of the most expensive direct-to-video productions of its time, as it was initially budgeted for theatrical release. That bloated scale mostly translates to big explosions, a thoughtful mix of animatronic puppetry & 90s computer graphics, and surprisingly engaged performances from recognizable names like Bud Cort, Carol Kane, and Richard “Shaft” Roundtree. The money also shows in its intensely artificial sets, which take the “Once upon a time in the future …” framing of its sci-fi noir premise to a cartoon extreme where all the world is a DZ Discovery Zone. However, you could just revisit the live-action Super Mario Bros movie or the TV-sitcom Dinosaurs for that exact effect without having to spend time with these dipshit dino cops. They suck all of the fun out of every room they enter, and as a result the movie just kinda sucks. There’s something especially painful about how every failed, flat punchline is punctuated with goofball sound effects to remind the audience that we’re supposed to be having fun! fun! fun!, so that our participation in this bullshit feels just as mandatory as Whoopi’s. When it ends on a sequel-teasing title card that reads “See Ya!”, it reads like a threat. Leave me out of it.
Welcome to Episode #208 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna celebrate March Madness by discussing a handful of basketball documentaries, starting with the Safdie Brothers’ 2013 profile of Lenny Cooke.
00:00 Welcome
07:23 How to Have Sex (2024) 13:52 The Double Life of Véronique (1991) 19:11 The Marsh King’s Daughter (2023) 24:11 Out of the Blue (1980)
30:23 Lenny Cooke (2013) 55:30 Hoop Dreams (1994) 1:19:46 AND1 Ball Access – The Mixtape Tour (2002) 1:40:01 Dennis Rodman’s Big Bang in Pyongyang (2015)
There’s been a lot of recent online conjecture & debate about the future of Tubi. Following the streamer’s rebrand with a uglier, bubblier logo, rumors spread that Tubi has been requesting that distributors upload censored versions of their films, with all graphic depictions of sex & violence obscured from public view. It’s unclear whether this is true for the entirety of Tubi’s streaming library—which is miles deeper than any of its fellow competitors’—or if it’s just true for the movies that play on its “Live TV” channels that simulate pre-streaming movie broadcasts. Or maybe it isn’t true at all. There’s more speculation than evidence out there so far, so the only thing that’s really resulted from this scrutiny over Tubi’s supposed swerve into puritanism has been the constant reminder of who owns the company: the same Murdoch family who owns Fox News. It’s not out of the question, then, that Tubi might go squeaky clean in the near future, which makes it my solemn duty as a film journalist to watch the most degenerate smut I can find on the platform just to keep an eye on the evolving facts of the situation.
You have to search for 1967’s Blood of the Virgins by its original Spanish-language title “Sangre de Virgenes” for it to populate on Tubi, but I can confirm that it has not yet been censored or removed. The dream is still alive; tits & gore are still welcome on The People’s Streaming Service. This apparently includes movies where tits & gore are the only thing on the filmmakers’ minds, as is the case with this sub-Jesús Franco vampire smut – a genre the poster specifies as “Erotomania”. Blood of the Virgins is an oddball novelty even within the context of dirt-cheap, horned-up vampire schlock. If nothing else, I’ve never seen a vampire movie try to pass off stock footage of seagulls as if they were its vampires’ bat form, aided only by a red color filter and some unconvincing squeaks on the soundtrack. I’ve also never seen a vampire movie produced in Argentina, an unusual cultural perspective that shows in the film’s vintage telenovela blocking & scoring and in its central location of a vampire-infested log cabin instead of a vampire-infested Gothic castle. Of course, these cultural & aesthetic details are all secondary to the film’s main goal: dousing beautiful naked bodies in artificial stage blood.
If you cannot tell from its listed 72-minute runtime, Blood of the Virgins was designed to pad out a double feature for drive-in make-out sessions, not to scare. It’s closer to softcore pornography than it is to horror, especially in its best, earliest stretch where it chronicles a Swinging 60s ski cabin trip taken by its doomed hippie victims, who eventually break into the wrong cabin to their own peril. After a period-piece vignette establishes the existence of vampires in centuries past, the audience is bombarded with an energetic Russ Meyer-style nudie cutie montage in which hippie freaks indulge in dive-bar go-go dancing between bouts of road trip heavy petting and wholesome downhill skiing. It’s an invigorating, titillating start to what’s ultimately a low-energy Hammer Horror knockoff. Once the vampires isolate & drain those hippies (who, I must note, are very much not virgins), the movie slows way down and loses both its momentum and its overall sense of purpose. By then, it has outlived its function as background noise for drive-in canoodling, and it’s really your fault if you’re still paying attention to see how the story plays out.
There are a lot of fun little touches to this Argentinian oddity for anyone familiar with this genre. Its hand-drawn credits, its soap opera zoom-ins, its seagull shaped “bats”, and its main vampire’s predilections as more of a titty sucker than a neck biter all make it an amusing novelty for anyone who can stay awake long enough to gawk at those details. Blood of the Virgins is just slightly off in its bargain-bin approximation of Jesús Franco vampire erotica, making it a fascinating outlier for anyone who knows how these things are supposed to play out. For instance, it’s weirdly sheepish about depicting lesbian acts between the hippies & vampires, but eager to gesture at male-hippie-on-female-vampire cunnilingus, which is a much rarer treat. The Russ Meyer-style hippie montage at the beginning is also remarkably energetic for a genre that’s usually so sluggish & unrushed, and this might have been a bonafide cult classic if had sustained that rhythm throughout. As is, it’s still great fun and great confirmation that you can still find boobies on Tubi despite recent reports otherwise.
Sometime during my bus trip from watching the 4-hour French culinary documentary Menus-Plaisirs at The Prytania to immediately follow it with the 3-hour Polish sci-fi epic On the Silver Globe at The Broad, it hit me. If I lived in a bigger city with a full, robust repertory scene, I would have a weekly meltdown. Thankfully, New Orleans is relatively laidback in its repertory programming, with most of the heavy lifting done by The Prytania’s Sunday-morning Classic Movies series and now Wildwood‘s Wednesday-night screenings at The Broad. There’s usually only one or two now-or-never selections in any given month here, which is much more manageable than the nonstop deluge of rare 35mm prints that flood cities like Chicago & NYC. Having a large portion of those screenings recently relocate to The Broad has made it even more manageable for me personally, since it’s the theater closest to my home. So, I’ve been spending a lot of time watching older releases at my neighborhood cinema, but not too much time. Except for the rare occasions when I have to choose between two once-in-a-lifetime screenings on opposite sides of town, I’m mostly unbothered, moisturized, happy, in my lane, focused, flourishing.
As a result, I’ve racked up a few short-form reviews of older movies I happened to catch at The Broad in recent weeks. All three movies happen to be about rebellious young women’s lives as social outcasts, which likely says less about the kinds of films being programmed around town than it says about the kinds of films that motivate me to leave the couch. Here they are in all their grimy, leather-jacketed glory (listed in the order that I watched them).
Vagabond (1985)
Second only to Alfred Hitchcock’s routine appearances in Prytania’s Classic Movies program, Agnès Varda has got to be the most frequently programmed director in town (or at least has been for as long as I’ve been paying attention to such things). Since 2018, I’ve seen Le Bonheur, Faces Places, The Gleaners & I, and Cléofrom 5 to 7 at local specialty screenings, and I even missed one of Jane B. It’s an incredible string of luck that’s made me reluctant to catch up with Varda’s most iconic titles at home, with the assumption that they’ll eventually play in a proper theater if I’m patient enough to wait. That spoiled brat entitlement recently paid off when Wildwood screened the 1985 drama Vagabond, one of Varda’s most celebrated post-Cléo triumphs. I immediately understood its reputation as one of her best, since it works equally well as a prequel to her dumpster-diving documentary The Gleaners & I (my personal favorite Varda) and as a crust-punk take on Citizen Kane (many serious critics’ personal favorite by anyone).
Sandrine Bonnaire stars as a transient young woman named Mona, hitchhiking her way across France with no particular purpose or destination. Mona loves smoking weed, listening to generic pop radio, and not being hassled to do much else. We’re introduced to her as a corpse, frozen in a ditch without anyone looking for her or even really knowing who she is. We get to know her through the posthumous testimonials of people whose lives she drifted through, her aimless story playing out in fractured flashback. Everyone projects their own dreams, regrets, uses, and prejudices onto her but she was never vulnerable enough with any stranger ever to fully reveal herself, making her just as impossible to pin down in testimonial as Charles Foster Kane. Only, Kane was defined by the crushing weight of his own ambition, while Mona is defined by her total lack of it. As she camps on isolated roadsides and squats in abandoned estates, the people around her attempt to parse out the romance of her wandering vs the self-destructive impulse of her “withering.” It’s essentially unacceptable for her to merely exist, and the world inevitably punishes her for it by abandoning her body in a ditch.
One of the reasons I put off watching this particular Varda film for so long is that its premise sounds so unrelentingly grim. In truth, Vagabond strikes the same real-life balance between joy & misery that most of Varda’s films achieve; it just starts with tragedy instead of saving it for a last-minute shock. Even Mona’s death has an absurdist humor to it in the end, as it results from the joyous carnival celebrations of a local community who isn’t aware how vulnerable she is to their drunken shenanigans. As doomed as she is from the start and as unknowable as she remains to everyone she meets, Mona is a loveable, recognizable kind of rebel. Varda might mock the people who project their own psychological hangups onto the character’s blank canvas, but she includes herself and her audience in that indictment. By the end you really feel like you know Mona, especially if you’ve ever smelled the particular sweet-yeast/old-mold stench crusties tend to cultivate in their unwashed denim. You don’t know her, though. No one possibly could.
Rebel Dykes (2021)
I don’t know that Patois Film Fest‘s screening of the 2021 documentary Rebel Dykes technically counts as repertory, since it might very well have been the film’s local premiere. I’ve been waiting to see this low-budget, D.I.Y. punk doc for years, but it seemingly never landed official distribution outside its initial festival run. It was a perfect fit for Patois programmers’ focus on political activism, though, since it’s specifically about the anti-assimilationist queer politics of post-punk lesbian leather bars in 1980s London. Ostracized both by internal debates over whether S&M & pornography were acceptable feminist practices and by external governmental oppression in Thatcher’s UK, the heavy-leather lesbians of the era formed a tight community initially mobilized by lust but eventually galvanized into political fury – mostly by necessity. A lot of them are still around to tell the tale, too (a rare luxury for 1980s urban queer communities), including producer Siobhan Fahey, who’s interviewed among her friends as a first-hand witness to the scene.
Rebel Dykes has all the hallmarks of a self-indulgent documentary in which talking heads wax nostalgic about the “You had to be there” glory days, but it’s thankfully working with a deep archive of vintage material from the era that helps illustrate the scene’s historical importance. That archive is especially helped by its subjects recalling a time when home video camcorders were first becoming affordable, giving a lot of the vintage footage the feel of grimy video art and, more practically, homemade pornography. The animated interstitials that stitch those clips together are a lot less visually impressive, but there is a kind of homemade charm to them as well, as if a bored teenage punk made their own Flash Animation versions of Love & Rockets comic book covers. Mostly, though, Rebel Dykes‘s nostalgia is sidestepped through its usefulness as a modern political motivator. It was a perfect selection for the activism angle of the Patois program, as it got a rowdy crowd amped up to either throw some bricks through some government windows or to throw some BDSM sex parties with their friends – whichever is more politically expedient.
Out of the Blue (1980)
Appropriately enough, Wildwood also recently screened Dennis Hopper’s teen-punk precursor to Vagabond—1980’s Out of the Blue—which likewise features an aimless, denim & leather-clad rebel whose most prized possession is her portable radio. Linda Manz stars as an Elvis & punk obsessed brat who rebels against her eternal car-crash homelife by running away from home and mimicking the destructive, hedonistic behaviors of the drug-addict grownups around her. Meanwhile, Hopper rebels with equal gusto against every studio exec who ever gave him a chance, combining the ecstatic antisocial freedoms of Easy Rider with the ecstatic career-torching incoherence of The Last Movie to deliver the least commercial project of his notoriously chaotic stint as a New Hollywood auteur. Belligerent, sloppy, brilliant – Out of the Blue had me laughing and holding back tears throughout, often simultaneously.
Almost all of the credit for the movie’s power belongs to Manz, of course, whose lead performance anchors Hopper’s messy narrative style in the exact way her voiceover narration anchored Malick’s in Days of Heaven. Her thick New Yawka felt out of place in that Americana period piece, but it’s perfectly suited to her character here, since she’s essentially auditioning to become the fifth Ramone. Manz’s dialogue mostly consists of provocative catchphrases like “Elvis!”, “Punk rock!”, “Kill hippies!”, “Subvert normality!” and “I hate men!”, all of which she either delivers in confrontational shouts at the dysfunctional adults around her or in mumbled private reassurances to herself. She’s a teenage thumbsucker who loves her teddy bear, but she’s eager to break out of her addiction-rotted home to live the full Fabulous Stains punk rock fantasy on the road, a volatile combo of innocence & bravado. The result of that combination is inevitably bleak, but she’s explosively entertaining & surprisingly funny on her journey to self-destruction.
Out of the Blue is the total Rebel Girl package. It’s got the oddly joyful nihilism of Vagabond, the take-no-shit toughness of Rebel Dykes, and a special one-of-a-kind teen rebel quality that’s only ever been credibly brought to the screen by Linda Manz (give or take a Natasha Lyonne, who is partially credited for fostering the film’s recent digital restoration). It’s also got one of hell of a theme song in that titular Neil Young track, which helps add instant emotional impact to Hopper’s aggressively abject, abrasive imagery.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the erotic Greek sci-fi thriller Blind Date (1984).
00:00 Oscars
04:45 Hundreds of Beavers (2024) 08:10 Eye of the Cat (1969) 11:42 Mamma Roma (1962) 16:16 Raising Arizona (1987) 19:20 Drive-Away Dolls (2024) 24:40 Dick (1999) 27:53 The Ritz (1976) 33:30 Gasoline Rainbow (2024) 39:03 Sleater-Kinney 41:05 Rebel Dykes (2021) 46:25 How to Have Sex (2024) 51:43 Blood of the Virgins (1967)
In the somber Brits-on-holiday drama How to Have Sex, a trio of teen besties spend a week getting wasted drunk at a Greek resort built to house teens getting wasted drunk. If they were teen boys in the early aughts, this would be a boneheaded boner comedy about virginal losers’ bumbling attempts to get laid for the first time among the Girls Gone Wild college crowd. Since they’re teen girls in a modern drama, that same mission to ditch their virginal status before the return flight home plays like a horror film. How to Have Sex dredged up some deeply unpleasant memories of my first couple years on my own at a binge-drinking “party college”, as well as more recent memories of being dragged out of the house by friends for a nightmarish stroll down Bourbon Street. It’s just as terrifying onscreen as it is in person, especially the longer you sit with how realistic it is to a lot of people’s first sexual experiences inside those neon-lit Hell pits. This is not just a film about the way alcohol violently fuels the flames of social pressure; it’s also a film about rape, even though everyone shows up eager to get each other in bed.
Mia McKenna-Bruce stars as our POV character, Taz, who travels to a MTV Spring Break-style hedonist resort with the sole intention of getting drunk and shedding her virginity. The resort comes with its own pre-planned parties & mating rituals designed to make that dream come true, mostly by getting the already horny hordes of kids so blotto on grain alcohol that they can’t remember whether or not they’ve actually, finally done it. There’s no room for authentic connection or intimate interaction within the cacophony of that DJ dance party dystopia, in which all the world’s a 24-hour nightclub. It would be easy, then, to script a physically violent rape between strangers there, but first time writer-director Molly Manning Walker instead scripts a more common, less sensational kind of sexual trauma. This is a story about the gradual erosion of consent by someone Taz knows. She vulnerably puts herself out there for consensual sex but is rejected; then she is isolated, pressured to consent to acts she’s uncomfortable with, and then physically overpowered by her abuser once her will is fully worn down. It’s tough to watch, mostly because it’s true to life.
In terms of recent erosion-of-consent stories about the gender politics of sexual assault, How to Have Sex is not nearly as feverishly overcharged as the service-industry thriller The Royal Hotel, nor as politically didactic as the porno-industry exposé Pleasure. It deliberately avoids glamorizing the allure of the nonstop nightclub atmosphere, sticking to the grating, real-world details of teens sloppily gobbling cheese fries & screeching karaoke instead of depicting the fantasy of the fabulous night they’re having in their heads. It might reframe the debaucherous mise-en-scène of a vintage Skins episode through clear-eyed sobriety of docu-fiction, but what it lacks in ecstatic cinematic style it more than makes up for in depth of character. Taz is a real person to us, not just a symbolic victim or a political mechanism. After her assault, she continues to think, feel, act, and react in ways that are authentic to real-life human behavior, which only amplifies the sinister inauthenticity of the world around her. McKenna-Bruce plays the part with heartbreaking sweetness & insecurity, while Walker surrounds her with just enough sense-memory detail to put the audience right back in her ankle-breaking heels. It’s a scarily vulnerable feeling.
There are 38 feature films nominated for the 2024 Academy Awards ceremony. We here at Swampflix have reviewed exactly half of the films nominated (so far!), which isn’t nearly a high enough ratio to comment on the quality of the overall selection with any authority. We’re still happy to see movies we enjoyed listed among the nominees, though, including two major titles from our own Top 10 Films of 2023 list. The Academy rarely gets these things right when actually choosing the winners, but from what we’ve seen this year’s list is a decent sample of what 2023 cinema had to offer.
Listed below are the 18 Oscar-Nominated films from 2023 that we covered for the site, ranked from best to . . . least-best, based on our star ratings and internal voting. Each entry is accompanied by a blurb, a link to our corresponding review, and a mention of the awards the films were nominated for.
Barbie, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Ryan Gosling), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (America Ferrera), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, Best Original Song (“What Was I Made For?”), and Best Original Song (“I’m Just Ken”)
“Greta Gerwig’s hot-pink meta daydream combines the bubbly pop feminism of Legally Blonde with the movie-magic artifice of The Wizard of Oz to craft the modern ideal of wide-appeal Hollywood filmmaking. It’s fantastic, an instant classic.”
Poor Things, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Yorgos Lanthimos), Best Actress in a Leading Role (Emma Stone), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Mark Ruffalo), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Editing, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Production Design, and Best Original Score
“Yorgos Lanthimos has always poked at assumed social norms as if they were a corpse he found in the woods. That naive interrogation has never been as scientifically thorough nor as wickedly fun as it is here, though, to the point where he’s articulated the entire human experience through repurposed dead flesh. We love everything about this perverse Frankenstein story: every outrageous set & costume design, every grotesque CG creature that toddles in the background, every one of Mark Ruffalo’s man-baby tantrums and, of course, every moment of Emma Stone’s central performance as an unhinged goblin child.”
Past Lives, nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay
“Past Lives is truly a perfect title. Each time that the two meet, so much about themselves has changed, to the point that they don’t perceive themselves as the same people. This is textual; at one point, Nora draws a distinction between her adult self and the child Na Young that Hae Sung used to know. Hae Sung, however, still sees Na Young inside of Nora, and she does the same for him; they may not be literally reincarnated, but they are different people with something innate and unchanging inside that they recognize in one another. This cycle is reinforced in the way that Nora and Hae Sung see each other only every twelve years, like clockwork. Even the location choices reiterate the cyclical nature of the two’s relationship: on the day that they reunite in their thirties, the two are framed against Jane’s Carousel, and they later also take the ferry tour around the Statue of Liberty. Both are rides that ultimately end in the same place that they begin and then cycle again, in a lovely metaphor.”
Anatomy of a Fall, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Justine Triet), Best Actress in a Leading Role (Sandra Hüller), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing
“Sandra Hüller is captivating in Anatomie d’une chute (Anatomy of a Fall) as a woman who must stand trial for the murder of her husband, all while we in the audience never learn whether his death was an accident, suicide, or murder. That absence of information is a shadowy void in the center of this film, a known unknown whose invisibility means that, just as in life, all we have to go on are people’s imperfect memories, their self-serving rationalizations, and the presumption of honesty. One of the most mature movies for adults of recent years and the one with the most enduring appeal of 2023.”
The Holdovers, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Roll (Paul Giamatti), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Editing
“Is there a way to describe something that’s almost the platonic ideal of an indie darling? Like, something that could accurately be said to be simply a rebundling of cliches but which is also somehow entirely new? That’s what Christmas sleeper hit The Holdovers is—to be honest, there may not be an entirely original idea anywhere in here, but that doesn’t make it any less affecting, emotional, or funny. Alexander Payne masterfully molds together a film that made me ache for every person on screen, a story I’d seen before but nonetheless brand new.”
“It was a great year for nostalgic throwbacks to vintage tokusatsu (see also: Shin Ultraman, Shin Kamen Rider, Smoking Causes Coughing), but this is the only title in that crop to hit the notes of deep communal hurt from the original 1954 Godzilla film that started it all. That sincerity is incredibly rewarding, if not only because it’s the only Godzilla movie I can remember making me cry.”
“A coming-of-age story that incorporates many of the best parts of children’s fantasy that came before it, from The Chronicles of Narnia to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and more, The Boy and the Heron sees these familiar narrative devices through the lens of a childhood haunted by grief and as imagined by the most talented living animation director, Hayao Miyazaki. A movie that can be frustrating to an audience that is unwilling to float along with its dream logic or to those viewers who are uncomfortable with ambiguity, it’s hard to imagine that something this stuffed with the fantastic could be said to leave a lot to the imagination, but it does. Most recommended movie of the year for bird people.”
“There were moments that made me think of Basket Case 2, of all things, which is a strange thing to say about a movie in this larger franchise, owned and operated by a monopolistic media empire.”
May December, nominated for Best Original Screenplay
“Netflix is kind of the perfect home for this, since it’s playing with TV Movie aesthetics anyway. Usually when great directors’ work gets sidelined there it’s disappointing; this time it’s darkly funny.”
“By some miracle nearly matches both the absurdly convoluted humanity-vs-AI combat of Mrs. Davis and the absurdly over-the-top espionage action spectacle of Pathaan, making it one of the most entertaining American blockbusters of the year by default. Unfortunately, like a lot of other American blockbusters this year, it’s also only half a movie.”
“A weird thing happens to me when I watch these movies where I’m not especially invested in the story but I still well up with emotion because of how beautiful everything is visually. The art of the moving image and such.”
The Zone of Interest, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Jonathan Glazer), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best International Feature (United Kingdom), Best Sound
“I don’t know that further into ice-cold Haneke cruelty was the direction I wanted Glazer’s career to go, but he at least makes the misery worthwhile. The rare war atrocity movie that doesn’t let you off the hook for not being as bad as a literal Nazi, but instead prompts you to dwell on the ways all modern life & labor parallels that specific moment in normalized Evil.”
Killers of the Flower Moon, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Martin Scorsese), Best Actress in a Leading Role (Lily Gladstone), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Robert De Niro), Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Production Design, Best Original Score, and Best Original Song (“Wahzhazhe – A Song for My People”)
“Feels more like Scorsese in Boardwalk Empire mode than Scorsese in Goodfellas mode (more dramatic than cinematic), save for a few stylistic jolts in the final hour. Still, it’s a quintessentially American story told by a quintessential American storyteller, and there are far less noble things he could be doing with $treaming $ervice money than turbocharging Lily Gladstone’s career.”
American Fiction, nominated forBest Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role (Jeffrey Wright), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Sterling K. Brown), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score
“A delightfully cynical skewering of NPR liberalism, even if it often feels like the call is coming from inside the house.”
“If there are any complaints, it’s that the film runs a little long. Every chase scene is, frankly, excellent, with the only real set-piece that felt like ‘too much’ being the swarm of eels that Indie must face while diving for a map on the floor of the Aegean Sea, and even that is, at the very least, visually distinctive from any other action sequence seen before in this franchise. It feels true to the spirit of the franchise and the character in a way that Crystal Skull barely attempts; one would expect there to be more fanservice-y elements present, but all the nostalgia factor was largely used up in the last movie, meaning that this one had to do some real lifting, and it does. The CGI on Ford’s face is apparent, but all of the other sequences feel real and practical (other than the horse chase through the subway, admittedly). The sins of Crystal Skull may never be fully painted over, but this one does a pretty good job, and even has a truly ludicrous final action sequence that strides up to the line of cartoonish but falls back at the perfect second, which is a lot of fun.”
“The jokes are more cute than hilarious. The animation is more tidy than expressive. It’s like reading the Sunday funnies on a week when the cartoonists are feeling especially sentimental.”
Oppenheimer, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Christopher Nolan), Best Actor in a Leading Role (Cillian Murphy), Best Actor in a Sup. Role (Robert Downey Jr.), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Emily Blunt), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Production Design, Best Original Score, and Best Sound
“Strives to overcome its limitations as a legal testimony drama by drawing immense energy from a three-hour crosscutting montage and relentless repetition of its own title at a Gabbo! Gabbo! Gabbo! rhythm. It mostly succeeds, but at what cost??”
Flamin’ Hot, nominated for Best Original Song (“The Fire Inside”)
“Maybe the most egregious of the infinite PR movies in this Year of the Brands; corporate bullshit of the lowest order.”
Welcome to Episode #207 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss the earlier works of this year’s Best Director Oscar nominees, starting with Christopher Nolan’s backwards-explosions sci-fi action thriller Tenet (2020). Enjoy!
It’s the more laidback of the New Orleans Film Society‘s two annual film festivals, but New Orleans French Film Fest is still always a major highlight of the city’s cinematic calendar. It’s more of a for-the-locals event than the Oscars-qualifying red-carpet pageantry of New Orleans Film Fest proper, and since it’s all contained to one single-screen venue, attendees tend to become fast friends in line between movies. Every spring, French Film Fest takes over the original Uptown location of The Prytania for a solid week of French-language cinema from all over the world. It’s usually slotted in the lull between the chaos of Mardi Gras and the chaos of Festival Season, a time when there’s nothing better to do but hide from the few weeks of nice weather we’re allotted every year in a darkened movie theater. I’m forever looking forward to it, even now that this year’s fest has just concluded.
One of the more charming rituals of French Film Fest is the way it integrates The Prytania’s usual Sunday morning slot for the Rene Brunet Classic Movies series. This year, that repertory slot was filled by 1978’s La Cage aux Folles, the French farce that was remade as The Birdcage in 1990s Hollywood. Curiously, the projection was SD quality, when past years’ Classic Movie selections like Breathless, Children of Paradise, and Cleo from 5 to 7 were screened in crisp digital restoration. It was a warmly lowkey presentation that fit the tone of the film, though, recalling the feeling of renting a Blockbuster Video cassette of a classic comedy to watch with the family. A lot of the jokes in La Cage aux Folles might be overly familiar for audiences who’ve seen them repeated beat-for-beat in The Birdcage, but I can report that the VHS-quality scan absolutely killed with a full 10am audience anyway. It’s classically funny stuff.
Everything else I saw at this year’s festival were new releases, many of them just now arriving in the US after premiering at last year’s Euro festivals like Cannes & Berlinale. They were the kinds of non-commercial art cinema that most audiences can only access at home on streaming services and borrowed public-library DVDs, unless they happen to live in a city with a bustling Film Festival calendar. As a couple of titles were real patience-testers in their sprawling, unrushed runtimes, I appreciated the chance to watch them without distraction in a proper theater. Even moreso, it just felt great to spend a week watching esoteric cinema with up-for-anything filmgoers in a century-old single-screener – downing gallons of black coffee between screenings to keep up the momentum. To quote every hack journalist who’s ever been flown out to Cannes … Vive le cinéma, vive la différence!
Below, you’ll find a rating & blurb for every new release I caught at this year’s New Orleans French Film Fest, ranked from favorite to least favorite. Enjoy!
Omen (Augure)
What’s scarier: sorcery or disappointing your family? Omen is a magical-realist emigration drama about a Congolese-born man who returns to visit his family after growing up estranged in Belgium. The family is displeased to see him and his white, pregnant wife, both of whom they greet more like demons than like fellow human beings. After an ill-timed nosebleed is misinterpreted as an attempt to curse the family with his demonic spirit, he and his wife are briefly held hostage for a sorcery ritual meant to disarm their threat to the community. Then, the central POV of the story fragments into multiple perspectives, abstracting Omen into a much more unique, open-minded story than what’s initially presented. I’ve seen tons of Afro-European emigration dramas of its kind at film festivals in the past (most often dramatizing the shifting identity of French-Senegalese immigrants), which set a very clear expectation of where this story would go. It turns out the movie was deliberately fucking with me through those set expectations, much to my delight.
Rapper-turned-filmmaker Baloji Tshiani leaves a lot more room for voices from the opposite side of this post-colonial culture clash to be heard with clarity & sincerity than what audiences have been trained to expect. Usually, we follow characters who were born in Africa but socialized in Europe as they float between the two worlds, untethered to any clear sense of personal identity. That’s how Omen starts, but then we get to know the Congo Republic through the eyes of its lifelong citizens who never left. The two worlds are described as belonging to “a different reality” and “a different space time”, conveyed here through magical-realist fairy tale logic that includes breast-milk witchcraft, a music video retelling of “Hansel & Gretel,” a Neptune Frost-style “Cyber Utopia,” and Warriors-style street gangs of warring marching bands, luchadores, and crossdressing ballerinas. None of these stylistic touches come across as empty aesthetics, either. The region’s religious conservatism, political corruption, labor exploitation, financial desperation, and mass stripping of identity are all taken gravely seriously; they’re just expressed through the visual language of a culture that operates in a “different space-time” from what most audiences are used to seeing.
Omen is packed with tons of striking images, tons of eerie atmosphere, and tons of characters squirming under soul-crushing tons of guilt. The familiar, opening-segment protagonist is just one of many.
Our Body (Notre corps)
The dark fantasy of Omen was somewhat of an outlier at this year’s festival. Most of this year’s program was defined by rigorous, realistic documentation of French-language cultures across the globe. The major highlights hyped in the fest’s pre-screening intros were two documentaries that sprawled past the 2-hour runtime mark, with programmers half-apologizing and half-daring the audience with durational cinema ordeals. I showed up for both. Of the two, Claire Simon’s exhaustive, 3-hour documentary about the daily operations of a Parisian hospital’s gynecology ward was my favorite. It starts as a fly-on-the-wall doc that observes the medical consultations & procedures that everyday French citizens undergo at the hospital. Then, it gets incredibly personal incredibly quick as Simon becomes a patient herself.
Our Body is a little frustratingly slack in moments but overall impressive in scope, basically covering the entire span of human life in a single location. Simon starts the film with mention that she walks past a graveyard when traveling from her home to the hospital for every day’s shoot. In the hospital, she witnesses multiple modes of birth, therapeutic preparation for death, and endless variations of bodily transformation between those two points (including transgender perspectives that might otherwise be excluded from a less thoughtful gynecology doc). It would have been a compelling film even if it maintained a Frederick Wiseman-style distance in its fascination with daily bureaucratic process, but its eventual Agnès Varda-style inclusion of Simon’s own medical crisis & recovery is what makes it something special. As the title indicates, it’s impossible to maintain emotional distance when studying the creation, transformation, and expiration of the human body like this; we’re all intimately familiar with the condition of being human, even if only a fraction of us have ever had a C-Section.
Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros
Speaking of Frederick Wiseman, the 93-year-old director also had a sprawling documentary on this year’s French Film Fest lineup. The four-hour runtime of Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros made Claire Simon’s film look puny by comparison, though. It’s easily the longest movie I’ve ever watched in a theater (an experience made doubly daunting by the fact that I immediately bussed to The Broad Theater to watch Żuławski’s 3-hour sci-fi abstraction On the Silver Globe after it was over). Thankfully, Menus-Plaisirs does not make its audience weep & squirm quite as much as Our Body does, since it’s about a trio of family-owned fine dining restaurants instead of the immense beauty & cruel limitations of the human body. I can’t say it was an especially significant experience for me, at least not when compared to critics who recently declared it the Film of the Year. Mostly, it was just a pleasant afternoon sit, like binge-watching a season of Top Chef guest-produced by Dodin Bouffant.
In Wiseman tradition, there is no voiceover or onscreen text explaining the interpersonal drama of the chefs at the story’s center. In fact, all of the contextual background info about how the three restaurants operate is saved for a tableside conversation in the final 2 minutes of the runtime, so feel free to fast-forward 4 hours for that explanation if you’re feeling lost. Even without the context, though, you gradually get to know the trio of chefs as a father who can’t quite let go of his business and his two apprentice sons, who struggle with a low, consistent hum of brotherly competition. Because it’s a Wiseman movie, though, most of the drama is just the garnish decorating the main course: process. We mostly just watch the chefs source ingredients, brief staff, prepare food, and schmooze guests. The scenery is beautiful, the personality clashes are mostly under control, and everyone is well fed. Life goes on.
The Animal Kingdom (Le règne animal)
One of my favorite French Film Fest traditions is selecting movies based entirely on the actresses featured in the cast, regardless of director, genre, or subtext. The French Film Fest ritual is incomplete if I haven’t seen a mediocre movie starring at least one of a handful of festival-standard actresses: Isabelle Huppert, Juliette Binoche, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Marion Cotillard, etc. And now, I can confidently say that Adèle Exarchopoulos has earned her place on that prestigious list. I’m at the point where I’ll enjoy pretty much anything as long as Exarchopoulos is in it, including this supernatural thriller that was instantly forgotten after it premiered last year in Cannes’s Un Certain Regard program.
The Animal Kingdom is a moody fantasy film about a world where humans start mutating into other animal species, like a somber revision of the Netflix series Sweet Tooth. The central drama is a coming-of-age story about a teenager who’s struggling with the sudden loss (or, rather, transformation) of his mother during this phenomenon. He also struggles with the terrifying possibility that his own body might be transforming as well, in an especially monstrous version of puberty. Then there’s his struggle to connect with his distracted father, who’s fixated on retrieving his feral-beast mother and reassimilating her into the family home. Exarchopoulos operates at the fringes of the story as the father’s reluctant love interest. She plays a kind of stock FBI character from 90s action thrillers, the kind who are always 2 or 3 steps behind the fugitive main players. It’s like watching Tommy Lee Jones track escapees from the Island of Dr. Moreau – a part she plays with only mild enthusiasm.
There are a few Icarian moments when the ambition of the film’s superhuman CGI are not matched by the might of its budget, which often breaks the spell of the story it’s telling. There’s some grounding, visceral detail in the body horror of the beastly transformations, though, especially as characters pick at their bloodied nails, teeth, and stitches the way a wounded animal would. That’s another time-honored French Film Fest tradition in itself, come to think of it: listening to an audience who don’t typically watch a lot of genre cinema express disgust with the ordeal of a well-executed gore gag. I have particularly fond memories of watching the grotesque erotic thriller Double Lover with this exact festival crowd for that exact reason. I just wish Adèle Exarchopoulos was given something half as interesting to do in this film as any one scene in that all-timer from Ozon.
The Crime is Mine (Mon crime)
François Ozon’s selection in this year’s French Film Fest was nowhere near as memorable as the nonstop freakshow of Double Lover, but it did hit a different quota for what I love to see at the fest. The Crime is Mine is a traditional crowd-pleaser comedy that features a performance from festival-standard Isabelle Huppert, making for two collaborators who are both capable of much weirder, wilder work. Huppert stars in this 1930s-throwback farce as a Silent Era film starlet who struggled to make the transition to talkies, so she instead attempts to become famous through a headline-grabbing murder. It’s an adaptation of a stage-play comedy that mildly updates its source material, but mostly just aims to please. It’s very charming & cute but deliberately unspecial, like a mildly more subversive version of See How They Run. If you want to see Isabelle Huppert go big in an outrageous wig, you could do much worse, but you won’t walk away accusing Ozon of having The Lubitsch Touch.
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