brandon ledet

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1979)

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The consensus opinion on 1979’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is that it’s a mediocre document of a magnificent concert.  Even its recent re-release was timed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1973 London concert captured on film by D.A. Pennebaker, not the anniversary of the documentary.  The newly expanded and remastered version of the film cleans up Pennebaker’s footage in digital 4K resolution and includes additional backstage & onstage tidbits “lost” in the original, 90min cut (including brief appearances from Jeff Beck and Ringo Starr).  It was alternately referred to as Bowie ’73 in its original theatrical run, again stressing the importance of the event filmed rather than the film itself.  By ’79, Bowie had evolved past the Ziggy Stardust glam rocker persona, moving onto more depressive, cerebral projects like his Low collaboration with Brian Eno and his Iggy Pop collab The Idiot.  The Ziggy Stardust project was already a satellite broadcast from a distant past, and this 1973 concert was billed as the farewell to the persona and to David Bowie as the public knew him, with announcements on the PA declaring “For the last time, David Bowie . . .”  So, the logic goes that it’s worth suffering through this shabby, low-lighting footage just so there was some remnant of the Ziggy Stardust band on the record before Bowie transformed into something else altogether. 

I personally found the film much more substantial than that, at least in its new theatrical presentation.  All of the imperfections audiences have cited over the years are still present—if not expanded—in this restoration.  The 4:3 framing is frustratingly tight for a performer known for his galactic-scale glamour.  The dim lighting of the venue makes the crowd shots borderline incompressible, which undercuts the pleasure of scanning the faces & fashions of the audience.  The camera swings wildly around the room, finding a point of interest halfway into a shot instead of starting with a detail worth documenting.  Some shots go entirely black, the audio reel continuing to record while the film cartridges are switched out.  Maybe it’s my decades of being brainwashed by D.I.Y. punk aesthetics, but I found those grimy human fingerprints on Bowie’s pristine visual art to be a feature, not a distraction.  Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is a raw document of an immaculate art project, pulling great tension out of the disparate qualities of Bowie’s perfectionist songwriting and Pennebaker’s imperfect imagery.  The live arrangements of the Ziggy Stardust songbook work the same way, with guitarist Mick Ronson unraveling tight, familiar pop tunes into abstract, psychedelic noise.  The sweaty, sped-up performances of Bowie’s early bangers map out a solid bridge from glam to punk, which couldn’t be more direct by the time the band covers “White Light, White Heat” in raucous encore.

I suspect I had that rapturous, energizing experience with the Ziggy Stardust movie because of the newly restored sound mix.  Listening to a digitally cleaned-up, surround sound presentation of this concert in a modern movie theater is easily the best sound quality I’ve ever heard in a David Bowie recording, which certainly elevated the images captured by Pennebaker’s cameras.  This is the clearest case of “The work speaks for itself” that I can recall, given that a few minutes of Ziggy’s band performing “Moonage Daydream” in this shaky, cramped frame packs in more mystique & meaning than the entirety of the recent Brett Morgen documentary of the same name.  You do not need to dress Bowie up in iTunes visualizer kaleidoscopes to make his words & sounds intriguing to a modern audience.  He already dressed himself up in a slutty little kimono and put on a full show, so all Pennebaker had to do was show up with professional recording equipment, sit back, and gaze.  The low lighting of the venue and the chaotic movements of the camera evoke UFO conspiracy footage, desperate to catch a glimpse of this glam rock clown from outer space before he disappears back into the night sky.  Bowie often appears in orange monotone lighting against a black void, glowing as a strange visual object that just happens to produce beautiful music.  The sight of him is arresting, and so long-familiar tracks like “Changes” & “Space Oddity” are captivating in a way they haven’t been since I first heard their proper studio recordings on my sub-par headphones in high school.

My only lingering disappointment with this film is that I couldn’t get a better look at the crowd.  There’s enough strobe & disco ball lighting to catch glimpses of the queer nerds swooning in ecstasy over Bowie’s presence, but not enough to fully document their presence in the room.  Bowie’s sassy, talkative performances of “Changes” and “Oh, You Pretty Things” slow the momentum of Ronson’s guitar licks down to draw attention to the lyrics, which celebrate the eternal passion & progression of Youth Culture in a way I found genuinely touching.  So many of his early songs dwell on time, death, and impermanence that he comes across as a real Gloomy Gus, but he does take obvious solace in how those “changes” are a positive influence on the world from the perspective of youth.  So, I found myself scanning the youth in the crowd for their real-time reactions to his art – whether they were gently moshing to manic performances of “Hang Onto Yourself” & “Suffragette City” or they were awestruck by his genderless supermodel posing in various Space Age onesies.  It would’ve been nice to fully see those faces before the impermanence of time changed them into something unrecognizable, but there’s no way to fully go back and correct that mistake.  What this restoration was able to excavate & accentuate in Pennebaker’s documentary is well worth experiencing big & loud with an enthusiastic crowd of fellow Bowie obsessives.  Maybe the form doesn’t fully live up to the content, but in this case it’s difficult to imagine that any one movie ever could.

-Brandon Ledet

You Can’t Wake Up if You Don’t Fall Asleep

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I am no longer a true believer in the oft-repeated Ebert quote, “The movies are like a machine that generates empathy.” Or, I at least no longer believe that empathy is the most interesting or noble thing the movies machine can generate.  The more I’ve succumbed to incurable cinephilia in recent years the less interested I’ve become in the movies’ ability to document or reflect objective reality back at the audience, as if we don’t get more than enough real-life tedium outside the theater walls.  Even if there’s value to learning and vicariously experiencing the intimate details of each other’s lives through cinema, reducing the artform to its ability to generate empathy feels small & unimaginative, especially if that’s the only thing on a movie’s mind.  Subtlety, restraint, and adherence to real-world logic are boring, self-imposed restrictions for a medium that’s so apt for dreams & poetry.  It’s just as much of a well-worn cliché, but I’ve come to the point where cinema’s function as a machine that generates shared, communal dreams is its primary cultural value to me.  Empathy is a useful byproduct of the movie dream machine, but it’s at best secondary to the way cinema can deeply submerge us in the subconscious id of the artists behind it.  If a filmmaker is using the art of the moving image to achieve anything other than full sensory intoxication or communal mesmerism, they might as well write prose or record a podcast instead.  There’s so much more to the medium than farming empathy in the documentation or dramatic retelling of each other’s daily drudgery.

At least, that’s what I was thinking about while watching a double feature of this summer’s most critically lauded works: Wes Anderson’s ensemble cast sci-fi comedy Asteroid City and Celine Song’s long-distance relationship breakdown Past Lives.  I likely shouldn’t have bothered seeing Past Lives at all, since subtle, tastefully underplayed dramas aren’t really my thing.  I do allow myself to get talked into seeing a few gloomy exercises in real-world restraint every year, though, if not just to see what everyone else is gushing about while I’m seeking out high-style histrionics & novelty.  I had about the same experience with Past Lives as I had with last year’s similarly lauded & restrained Aftersun: respect for its craft but bafflement over its ecstatic praise, since practically every film festival is overflowing with similarly subtle, underplayed titles just like it (most of which never land proper distribution).  In contrast, I watched Asteroid City for the second time in 24 hours on that double bill and found its dreamlike artifice much more emotionally rewarding than Past Lives‘s real-world resignation.  In The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson self-assessed how his fussy live-action New Yorker cartoons function as populist entertainment; in Asteroid City, the self-assessment peers inward, shifting to their function as emotional Trojan horses. I found the former funnier but the latter more affecting, sinking several layers of framing-devices deeper into his subconscious to pick at the same somber tones of yearning & heartbreak as Past Lives with less of a literal, straight-forward approach.  It likely says less about the merits of the movies than it says about my facilities as an audience that I needed to puzzle at the complex narrative structure & fussy visual craft of Asteroid City (a movie within a stage play within a television special) to enjoy its small, intimate character moments for their own pleasure, while Past Lives was willing to serve those pleasures to me directly. Apparently, to fully appreciate the small things I need them buried under a crushing excess of style & artifice; I need to feel like they came to me in a dream.

The pattern repeated with my library DVD haul that same week, which happened to include two coming-of-age stories about young women: the 70s-set Judy Blume adaptation Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and the French dirt-bike crime thriller Rodeo.  One was a critically-lauded empathy machine that documents and validates the awkwardness & inner turmoil of puberty in all young American girls who are impatient to become young American women.  The other alternates between the quiet restraint of a crime world docudrama and the sensory free-for-all of a legitimate art piece, submerging the audience in the dreams & volatile emotions of one particular teenage reprobate with an ecstatic passion for racing stolen dirt bikes.  You can likely guess which one I preferred.  Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is less extraordinary than it is warmly familiar.  It reminded me of a lot of classic comfort watches that I grew up with in the 1990s: Mermaids, My Girl, Now & Then, etc.  It’s a pleasant movie about pleasant people, one that directly asks you to empathize with common, everyday rites of passage.  Rodeo is a much thornier picture.  It documents the experiences of real-world dirt bike stunt racers by casting them as their own fictional avatars and—in the case of its disgruntled antiheroine—inviting you into their prophetic nightmares of self-destruction & immolation.  There’s no reason to contrast & compare the two movies other than that my public library requests for them happened to be fulfilled on the same day; they’re as structurally & aesthetically distinct from each other as the vintage postcard artifice of Asteroid City and the real-world melancholy of Past Lives.  The same questions of which film was making better, more purposeful use of their shared medium were rattling around in my empty skull, though, and I again came down in favor of the dream machine over the empathy machine.

I’ve been writing reviews for this humble movie blog for eight years now, which is a long enough duration that I can’t help but reflect on what I value in this artform I’ve spent so much time admiring & picking apart.  Wes Anderson’s spent at least three decades admiring & picking apart the artform himself, and Asteroid City appears to find him arriving at similar conclusions.  Throughout the film, performers within his multi-layered narrative break character to question the meaning behind their dialogue & actions as written, as well as their place within specific framing devices at specific times.  The Anderson avatar who wrote the piece they’re performing has no clear answers for the reasoning behind his words, only that they work to express subconscious emotion.  In a climactic scene that lovingly parodies The Twilight Zone, the performers stare at the camera directly and chant “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” in a rhythmic, zombified monotone, reinforcing that to experience & share in that subconscious emotion the audience must give into the artifice of the work and forget the reasoning behind it.  We have to dream.  As thoughtful & empathetic as they are, neither Past Lives nor Are You There God? ever fully fall asleep; they are awake to the logical restrictions of the real world.  Rodeo drifts along in that in-between state you feel just before you fall asleep, purposefully confusing a documentation of reality with the shared-dream intoxication of cinema, only fully letting go of the handlebars in its emotional climax.  Of this group, only Asteroid City fully falls asleep, and I found its emotional provocations the most effective among them because they were allowed to be as indirect and inexplicable as our own internal responses to the world outside our heads.  It would be foolish to expect every movie to interact with (or entirely ignore) reality in that way, but the ones that do so are the ones that are most fully engaging with the tools, methods, and uses of the artform.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #191: Mac and Me (1988) & Junk Food Ads

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Welcome to Episode #191 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss feature films that advertise junk food brands, starting with the McDonald’s-sponsored E.T. rip-off Mac and Me (1988).

00:00 Welcome

04:25 Dear Evan Hansen (2021)
06:25 Stutz (2022)
08:25 They Cloned Tyrone (2023)
11:25 Miracle Mile (1988)
14:37 Barbie (2023)
16:44 Last Action Hero (1993)
20:18 Mystery Men (1999)

26:06 Mac and Me (1988)
56:53 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)
1:22:07 Demolition Man (1993)
1:45:34 Flamin’ Hot (2023)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Podcast Crew

Cutie Honey (2004)

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I’ve been talking a lot of shit this year about the exhausting routine of superhero media.  It’s just been non-stop whining, to the point where I couldn’t even praise the ecstatic animation style of the universally beloved Across the Spider-Verse without also citing its narrative contributions to our growing, culture-wide superhero fatigue.  I should probably take time to note, then, that I am a total hypocrite on this exact subject.  While I’ve been mostly avoiding the ongoing deluge of major-studio superhero sequels (the new Guardians, the new Shazam, the new Justice League spinoff, etc.), two of my favorite trips to the theater so far this year were specialty screenings of two Japanese superhero films: Shin Ultraman & Shin Kamen Rider.  Hideaki Anno’s post-Evangelion career pivot to lovingly remaking the vintage tokusatsu media of his youth has been hugely rewarding lately, with the wholesome humanism of his Ultraman film and the earnest inner-turmoil of his take on Kamen Rider reviving the otherwise artistically dead medium of live-action superhero filmmaking.  It turns out there’s still plenty novelty & enthusiasm to be found in the tokusatsu end of superhero media, at least for Western audiences whose only major exposure to the subgenre was decades-old broadcasts of The Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.  So, even though I’m supposedly fatigued by the Hollywood assembly line of live-action comic book adaptations, I recently found myself looking back to the first time Anno dipped his toe in the genre two decades ago with his take on the bubbly kawaii superhero Cutie Honey.

Reviving source material originally published as manga and animated series in the 1970s, Anno’s live-action Cutie Honey film is the clear bridge between his early anime career and his recent swerve into retro live-action tokusatsu reboots.  All of the absurd, anime-style shot compositions of his recent “Shin” films were already part of his established visual style in 2004, complete with his needlessly stylistic depictions of bureaucratic desk work.  He even incorporates hand-drawn animated sequences into Cutie Honey‘s opening credits & action set pieces, both as a nod to the character’s comic book origins and as a shrewd cost-saving tactic.  For all of its stylistic connections to Anno’s other work, it’s the first time I’ve seen him participate in the “magical girl” anime trope, which helps separate the film’s familiar Anno-isms from the macho, Batman-style brooding of Shin Kamen Rider and the gee-willickers Space Age awe of Shin Ultraman.  Cutie Honey approximates what it might be like if Anno produced a Shin Sailor Moon movie next; or at least that’s what came to mind for an anime-newb like me who’s only been exposed to the medium’s most iconic “magical girl” titles. He does update the vintage anime’s visual sensibilities with a little ironic kitsch and mid-aughts fashion choices (including an amusing amount of attention to flip phone bling), but for the most part the highlights of his Cutie Honey film are in the same register as his recent Ultraman & Kamen Rider films.  He approaches this kind of material with the goofy exuberance of a Looney Tunes short or an episode of Adam West’s 1960s Batman series, except amped up with the psychedelic visuals & self-hating sleaze he made a name for himself with in Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The titular Cutie Honey is a cute, sweet-as-honey office worker who loves taking bubble baths and playing dress-up.  She’s also a cyborg superhero who can “transform” into any conceivable disguise by pressing the heart-shaped pendant on her magical choker and shouting “Honey flash!” into the cosmic void. Her disguises mostly amount to her playing Gene Parmesan style dress-up games to fool her enemies, but when the situation at hand calls for violence she does change into hot pink body armor, going full kawaii superhero.  Anno takes a lot of obvious delight in filming the Sailor Moon-style magical girl transformation sequences in those battle scenes, as well as staging her fights with legions of faceless goons that she kicks into the air like limp mannequins.  The details of Cutie Honey’s global espionage sidekicks or her gender-ambiguous arch-enemies—known collectively as Panther Claw—don’t matter as much as the sugary joy of her cutesy quips & superheroic costume changes.  The film is simultaneously goofier and sleazier than Anno’s recent “Shin” movies, constantly ogling its bouncy superhero in her underwear between costumes and trapping her in damsel-in-distress lesbian kink scenarios.  Despite all that old-man leering, it’s aggressively girly for a superhero film, which pushes it even further into a campy, gay sensibility than the Batman ’66 vibes of Anno’s recent works.  It’s especially amusing that Cutie Honey fuels up for her superhero transformations by eating ungodly piles of junk food, which makes her the perfect hero for little girls and overgrown gay stoners everywhere.

Although Cutie Honey is an early rough-draft sketch of what he would later achieve in his “Shin Japan Heroes Universe” projects, I don’t know that I would as readily recommend it to Hideaki Anno die-hards as I would to fans of Girl Power superhero media like Tank Girl, Birds of Prey, Josie and the Pussycats, and Spice World.  It neatly belongs in that hyperactive, hyperfemme superhero canon, even with the thick male-gaze lens strapped to Anno’s camera.  In either case, it’s refreshing in the context of our modern MCU/DCEU sponsored hellscape, which 2008’s Iron Man kicked off just a few years after this seemingly ancient early-aughts novelty.  I highly recommend checking it out while Anno’s perspective on the superhero genre still feels fresh & exciting, even though the legal means of doing so is a little shaky.  YouTube has it dubbed; Internet Archive has it subbed.  Neither transfer is in especially great shape but, hey, at least you won’t be watching Uncle Ben’s corpse or Mrs. Batman’s pearls hit the pavement for the thousandth time.

-Brandon Ledet

Virtual Combat (1995)

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It’s well established by now that Tubi is the people’s streaming service – the only platform offering a century’s worth of high-brow cinema & cheap-thrills entertainment at an affordable price point: free with ads.  Even the bigger players in the business want what Tubi has, with more robust services like Netflix, Hulu, Paramount, and Peacock now dabbling in an ads-supported model the industry has been resisting for years (but without matching the immense depth of Tubi’s streaming library).  I can’t say I’m totally happy about that development.  I appreciate Tubi for being one of the few streamers with a historical view that extends past the 2010s, something you’ll usually only find in hoitier, toitier art cinema streamers like Criterion, Kanopy, and Mubi.  Still, there’s something deflating about watching a New Hollywood classic or an avant-garde Euro art piece with out-of-nowhere ad breaks where the State Farm hunk or the Geico lizard interrupt the flow of the picture.  Tubi is arriving to the scene well after the Netflixes of the world have fully “disrupted” traditional modes of at-home film distribution and, like with all tech industry “disrupters,” the only thing streaming has really accomplished is replacing a perfectly functional industry with a near-exact, buggier copy.  What I mean to say is that Tubi provides the 2020s equivalent of the TV movie, and as a stubborn old man I need my TV movies to be cheap & trashy enough to justify being downgraded to that platform.  Tubi is great for watching Lifetime thrillers, DTV action schlock, and ancient re-runs of Project Runway.  For anything more artistically substantial than that, I usually put in the effort to pay for a VOD rental or drive to the library for an SD transfer on DVD.  Anything to avoid watching the Charmin bears wipe their asses in the middle of a movie I genuinely care about.

By that standard, 1995’s Virtual Combat is quintessential late-night Tubi programming.  Half a VR-themed Mortal Kombat mockbuster and half a VR-themed softcore porno, it’s the exact kind of video store shelf-filler that would be forgotten to time (and to jumps in physical media formats) if it weren’t for the archival diligence of the basement-dwelling genre freaks who upload this stuff to platforms like Tubi, YouTube, and Amazon Prime.  It’s a movie that marvels at the vague concept of Virtual Reality video gaming with the same naïve awe as The Lawnmower Man, at least three years past the novelty’s expiration date.  It’s a movie where a 30-second gag featuring Rip Taylor as a virtual carnival barker in the shape of a Zordon-style floating head counts as a celebrity cameo.  It’s a movie that treats a Paul W.S. Anderson adaptation of a video game as if it were as major of a Hollywood player as a Stephen Spielberg blockbuster starring animatronic dinosaurs, ripe for a rip-off. To be fair, Mortal Kombat was the biggest hit of Anderson’s career, making $120 million on a $20 million budget.  There was clearly a market for Virtual Combat‘s video game fight tournament premise among young men in videoland, especially if you could rush it to Blockbuster shelves for the brief time when every local VHS copy of Mortal Kombat was already checked out.  Adding gratuitous shots of naked breasts could only juice those sale & rental numbers too, as softcore-director-turned-action-schlockteur Andrew Stephens surely knew in his bones.  Every creative decision in Virtual Combat is driven by either production budget desperation or mockbuster market exploitation.  Therefore, it’s perfectly suited for crass commercial breaks in a way a Godard or Buñuel classic could never be (although I’m sure both appreciators of the crass & the absurd would’ve been fascinated by the random intrusions on their work).

Don “The Dragon” Wilson, World Kickboxing Champion (as he’s credited in the end scroll), stars as a Nevada border cop in the far-off future of 2025.  No lazy pig, his physical training regimen involves fighting a series of increasingly formidable, entirely digital martial artists in a virtual gaming realm.  Virtual Combat goes a step further than Mortal Kombat by setting its video game fighting tournament inside an actual video game, represented onscreen in weirdly artificial sound stages decorated by smoke machines & laser lights.  Because the nearby city of Las Vegas that houses this immersive fighting game is itself an artificial sin pit, that same VR tech is also used for simulated, legalized sex work that allows tourists to have “cybersex” with virtual hunks & pixelated babes.  The future’s looking pretty bright at first, until an overreaching scientist develops a way to “clone” the AI cybersex workers into physical real-world bodies, taking the technology a step too far.  Things go immediately awry when the invincible Final Boss of the cop’s favorite fighting game escapes into the real world too and uses his robotic voiceover hypnosis to recruit all the other newly birthed VR clones into his own personal digi militia, hell bent on Las Vegas (and perhaps world) domination.  Because this is a severely cheap, limited production, there are really only two other major AI players besides the fighting game’s Final Boss: a nudie mag Babe Next Door and a viciously militant dominatrix, whip in manicured hand.  These digi facsimiles of human beings are obviously no match for the real-world street smarts and world-class kickboxing skills of Don “The Dragon” Wilson, and so his face-kicking road to victory is not all that exciting or surprising. Most of the film’s novelty is in the absurdity of its first-act set up and in its weirdly fetishistic detail.

There’s not much on Virtual Combat‘s mind, thematically speaking.  Its vapid sci-fi pondering of AI technology never goes too far beyond the frustration of defeating a soulless enemy that you’ve trained yourself through pattern recognition as a user, kind of like how corporations are currently attempting to put writers & visual artists out of work by mining their previously published art through algorithmic synthesis.  I get the sense that it was a lot more interested in the sex trade end of that AI conundrum, though, especially by the time it gets to the sequence where Don “The Dragon” Wilson teaches a buxom VR clone about autonomy & consent so that she can immediately consent to having sex with him – of her own free will of course.  Everything else is action movie novelty and fetishistic titillation.  There’s no particular reason, really, why the corporate bad guys had to control their VR sex clones via shock collar, except the obvious reasons why men would write that detail into the script.  The sexual politics are just as quaintly dated as the real-world simulation of video game fighting (boosted by cheapo CGI credited onscreen to Motion Opticals), a novelty that demands the hero declare “Game Over” to the inevitably defeated Final Boss.  Surprisingly, there are a few fun smash-cut edits too, like when a poor victim’s snapped neck is immediately mirrored by the swing of a kicked-open door, or when cybersex being insulted as “sex with a machine” is immediately followed by the tacky casino lights of Las Vegas in montage – a city-size sex machine.  There’s nothing especially memorable or substantive about Virtual Combat beyond those minute-to-minute novelties, though, and its relative anonymity is exactly what makes it such a perfect candidate for streaming on Tubi.  In fact, Tubi goes out of its way to emphasize its anonymity by suggesting you watch an identical-looking movie titled Virtual Assassin as soon as the credits roll.  I’m sure it’s a hoot, just as I’m sure it’s better suitable to commercial breaks than the last movie I remember watching on the platform – Un Chien Andelou.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Demonlover (2002)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Olivier Assayas’s early-aughts hentai thriller Demonlover (2002).

00:00 Welcome

02:45 X (2022)
07:45 Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
11:45 Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
15:25 Past Lives (2023)
24:08 Asteroid City (2023)
37:10 Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1979)

41:55 Demonlover (2002)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Podcast Crew

Oink (2023)

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I don’t watch enough modern children’s animation to know what adults are supposed to get out of it, but whatever it is I do know that it’s missing from Oink.  The recent farm animal morality tale is billed as the first stop-motion feature ever produced in the Netherlands and, if true, that’s the only remarkable thing about it.  I assume that all most parents want out of children’s films is amusing flashes of vibrant colors to babysit the kiddos for a couple hours, accompanied by metaphorical messaging that’s wholesome & innocuous enough that it won’t poison their little developing brains (i.e., “Believe in yourself,” “Don’t be selfish,” “Obey your parents, your teachers, and the police state,” etc.).  Oink is passable on both counts, at least in my estimation.  It’s got an adorable hand-animated stop-motion technique akin to the recent French film My Life as a Zucchini, which offers a welcome, tactile counterbalance to our post-Pixar CG animation landscape.  Its messaging is a little more daring than its visuals, deliberately teaching kids vegan & vegetarian values in opposition to the evils of the meat industry.  Some parents will object to that blatant political advocacy, but only because there isn’t much else happening onscreen to distract from it.  There’s plenty of anti-capitalist, pro-environmentalist messaging in modern children’s media, but it’s often buried under distracting, for-the-parents pandering like Shrek parodying The Matrix, or the Angry Birds dabbing, or the Minions twerking, or whatever.  Oink does feature a cute cartoon animal doing goofy physical comedy for the whole family’s amusement, but all of its drama is centered on children’s desire to not see that animal butchered for sausage meat, so that there isn’t much to it beyond its overt politics.  Essentially, it’s moralistic propaganda for children with a cute piglet mascot.  So, if you’re not a child who needs the moral conundrum of industrialized meat consumption explained to you in simple, black & white terms, there just isn’t much happening onscreen worth engaging with.

As you can tell by the title, the animal in peril is an adorable piglet named Oink.  The cutesy baby pig is adopted by a misfit Dutch girl with uptight vegetarian parents who cannot abide the chaos an untrained pet brings into their household, but they relent to their daughter’s infatuation with the animal almost instantly.  The pig is accompanied by an estranged grandfather figure from the United States, who’s reluctantly invited back into the family home despite past selfishness & cruelty to his own daughter.  It’s immediately clear that the grandfather encourages the protagonist’s affection for the pig because he wants to fatten & butcher it for an upcoming sausage-grilling competition, one he narrowly lost the trophy for decades ago.  There’s no twist or nuance to this foreshadowed villainy.  As the competition approaches, he kidnaps the pig and attempts to feed it directly into the meat grinder.  All butchers & meat eaters are monstrous in this shameless vegetarian propaganda.  They’re intimidating old men who lie to their families, sneak rat tails into sausage links, and chase children down the street, yelling “I’ll put you in the meat grinder!” at the helpless tykes.  Oink‘s anti-meat messaging makes Okja look subtle by comparison, but that wouldn’t be much of a problem if there were literally any other moral or dramatic tension in the film.  I wasn’t especially shocked or offended by its vegetarian righteousness as an occasional meat-eater myself.  Although, I did object to a last-minute claim that vegetarian sausages taste better than pork; that’s just a lie.  It’s just that I’ve already weighed out the grey-area nuances of how my personal meat consumption affects my fellow animals and the planet we share, and I’ve ultimately decided for myself that meat is a sometimes treat instead of a dietary cornerstone (after a few sporadic years of cutting out beef & pork entirely, most recently inspired by the aforementioned Okja).  Most adults watching Oink have likely already wrestled with the nuanced morality of that personal decision, and so the film’s naked vegetarian messaging is only really useful to adults if they’re looking to convert children to a specific side of that internal debate.

Oink is at its best when it functions as pure visual comedy.  There’s something classically funny about calm family gatherings being disrupted by a rambunctious pet, especially when that pet is as small & cute as Oink.  The film even goes a step further by disrupting that prissy decorum with scatological mayhem.  Oink shits everywhere, smearing long streaks of brown clay all over his hapless owner’s once-pristine family home.  He also continually farts stop-motion clouds of cotton and, eventually, saves the day with his overactive colon.  The film’s scatology is funny, but it’s never as shockingly over the top as the recent stop-motion gross-out The Old Man Movie, which was similarly billed as the first stop-motion feature from Estonia.  Its depressive outcast protagonist is adorable & relatable, but the movie doesn’t dig nearly as deep into her emotional turmoil as My Life as a Zucchini does with its cast of melancholy orphans.  The Netherlands may be lacking in stop-motion feature films to be gushing over, but the world at large is not, with plenty more novelty & nuance to be found in recent titles like Mad God, Wendell & Wild, Marcel the Shell, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, and the still-not-released-in-the-US Little Nicholas, to name a few.  Everything that happens in Oink is meant to underline how cute pigs are and how despicable it is that Texan barbeque enthusiasts like to kill & eat them.  That dynamic is just far too morally & thematically simplistic for the film to amount to much, at least not for adults.  The best I can say in its favor is that it’s got an adorable visual aesthetic and I got a few solid chuckles out of the stop-motion pig farts.  Well, that, and at least it’s not another Shrek.

-Brandon Ledet

Will-o’-the-Wisp (2023)

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Is there a sizable audience out there still steaming mad that the erotic firefighter sequences of Titane weren’t even gayer?  João Pedro Rodrigues appears to believe so, as evidenced by his pornographic firefighter musical Will-o’-the-Wisp, which is being pitched at the dwindling crowd of arthouse shut-ins who remember that Titane even exists (i.e., losers like me who pay attention to “the news out of Cannes”).  Or rather, its indulgence firefighter fantasia is shiny packaging meant to lure those art snobs into the theater.  Once ensnared, Rodrigues sits us down for abstract academic pontification about climate change, racial justice, and outdated governmental power structures, which helps give the film a sense of political purpose beyond its initial novelty.  Boiling Will-o’-the-Wisp down to any one genre or tone is a fool’s game; the arthouse curio is a one-stop-shop for art history lectures, environmentalist theory, gay pornography, rage-bait trolling, sitcom schtick, and interpretive dance – all in an hour’s time.   I’m something of a fool, though, so I’ll do my best to condense & summarize by declaring the Titane stage musical sequence at its center to be is its most attention-grabbing tangent, which makes it an effective Trojan horse for the million other things on Rodrigues’s mind.

In the year 2069, an ineffective Portuguese king waits out his last few days of hospice before death, wistfully watching his great grandnephew play with a toy firetruck.  The toy evokes the king’s most cherished memory: a time when he was a young, idealistic prince who abandoned his royal duties to join the local fire brigade.  This decision is partly influenced by his royal parents’ indifference to the global disaster of climate change, listening to news reports of wildfires and their son’s recitation of Greta Thunberg’s “How Dare You” speech as mild annoyances instead of immediate crises.  It’s also influenced by his childlike naivete, which approaches firefighter iconography and a mythical royal pine tree forest with the same awestruck fascination as the young grandnephew playing with the toy.  Once in training, the prince grows up quick.  He learns real-life, adult responsibilities & passions on the job, both physically combating the immediate effects of climate change and physically making love to his hot fireman instructor, a commoner hunk with impeccable abs.  The prince’s ferocious joy for his new, meaningful life is expressed through song & dance in the film’s erotic centerpiece, which is why it’s such a betrayal when he quickly throws it away the second his meaningless “royal duties” call him back to the throne – where he gradually dies a pointless life.

The most important thing to understand about Will-o’-the-Wisp is that it’s a total troll job, a flippant provocation aimed at post-irony academics.  It’s politically furious, eager to throw intellectual bombs at institutional failures to address climate change and at the roles race & class play in the romance between the white prince and his Black fireman hunk.  It’s also seemingly resigned to the futility of attempting institutional change, throwing those bombs for self-amusement as the world burns to the ground regardless.  Its indulgence in incendiary race-play kink and coronavirus death feel no more serious than its erotic CPR training, its gay-porno restagings of classical art, or the absurdly fake ejaculating dildos featured in its climactic 69 set piece.  The Thunbergian urgency of its climate change activism is the only genuine impulse in its arsenal; it just also sees any response to the crisis beyond large-scale institutional disruption or intervention to be useless, amounting only to academic infighting.  Maybe the idea behind the Titane musical sequence is a nihilist one, trying to find a little novelty & levity in the world before it melts away.  A more generous reading is that it’s a novel attempt to draw attention to the urgency of a political issue that will kill billions of people if the wealth class who can afford to travel to Cannes don’t wake up and take charge.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #190: Picnic (1955) & Summer Heat

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Welcome to Episode #190 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of sweaty films set in summer heat, starting with the sordid beefcake melodrama Picnic (1955).

00:00 Welcome

02:45 Her (2013)
07:40 V.C. Andrews’ Heaven (2019)
13:45 Will-o’-the-Wisp (2023)
17:07 Falling Down (1993)

23:33 Picnic (1955)
46:22 Baby Doll (1956)
1:07:40 The Beach (2000)
1:23:55 Call Me By Your Name (2017)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Podcast Crew

Rhinestone (1984)

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Dolly Parton owes her half-century of success & popularity to two specific talents.  First & foremost, she’s a songwriting machine.  Parton’s distinctive, meticulously crafted image & voice would’ve only taken her career so far if it weren’t for her uncanny ability to crank out a hit song in an afternoon as if it were as easy as washing the dishes.  Over 3,000 titles into her songbook, her career is overflowing with anecdotes about writing “Jolene” & “I Will Always Love You” in a single session or tapping out the rhythm for “9 to 5” while she was bored between takes in her trailer.  She also owes her longevity to her talent for the business end of show business, always knowing exactly what moves to make at what time to expand her brand far beyond the typical boundaries of a Nashville singer-songwriter career.  When she started performing as a side act on The Porter Wagoner Show in the 1960s, she was able to reach a much wider audience than she would’ve just cutting records.  Once she had thoroughly charmed every country music fan in the US through their television sets, she left the show to become a main attraction elsewhere, aiming to charm the rest of America as a big-screen movie star.  Parton quickly accomplished that goal in her first couple roles, finding a perfect vehicle for her talents in the legalized-prostitution musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and stealing the show from legendary comedian Lily Tomlin in 9 to 5.  The only problem is that most Hollywood executives don’t share Dolly’s creative or business talents, and they weren’t entirely sure how to package her as a comedic lead without the ensemble-cast support of hits like 9 to 5 or Steel Magnolias.  Her awkwardly chaste chemistry with Burt Reynolds in Whorehouse was cute and a huge part of the film’s Broadway musical appeal, but by the time she was romantically paired with the eternal asshole cynic James Woods in 1992’s Straight Talk, it was clear casting directors & boardroom executives weren’t sure how to balance Dolly’s country-fried warmth with a proper love-interest leading man.  This disconnect, of course, was never more glaring than it is in her pairing with Sylvester Stallone in the 1984 romcom Rhinestone, the most notorious flop of Dolly’s career – at no fault of her own.

Rhinestone finds Dolly & Stallone at their Dolliest & Stalloniest, clashing their respective rural sweetness & urban gruff in cultural combat instead of romantic entanglement.  They fire incoherent line readings at each other for two schticky, jittery hours without ever once having an actual conversation, not even for a second.  Intentionally or not, it’s America in a nutshell, capturing the great, wide cultural divide between small-town hospitality & big-city living.  If that either/or cultural binary were a contest for moral & intellectual high ground, Dolly clearly wins the debate, sassing Stallone with the zinger “There are two kinds of people in the world, and you ain’t one of them.”  She’s correct.   Her costar is an Italian NYC cabbie & proud knuckledragger, navigating modern urban life like a drunk toddler who missed naptime.  Nothing he does or says makes a lick of sense, which makes Dolly’s simplified country livin’ sensibilities seem like the only reasonable way to live.  She did move to the big city herself to become a famous singer, though, which is how she gets involved in a classic Cinderella bet that she can turn the lughead city-dweller into a popular country musician in just a few weeks’ time.  When agreeing to the bet, she failed to take into account that she was working with subhuman raw material, which becomes apparent by the time Stallone is screaming half-remembered lyrics to “Tutti Frutti” while banging on random piano keys at his helpless parents’ family-owned funeral parlor (mid-service, of course, for full comedic effect).  Thanks to the touring Acrocats band, I have literally seen cats & chickens play musical instruments with a clearer sense of rhythm & song structure.  Dolly’s helpless country star-to-be also didn’t take into account matters of the heart, which catches her off-guard when the mismatched pair’s discordant rapport suddenly turns romantic without warning.  The first time they kiss & make love is a scarier plot development than anything you’ll see in director Bob Clark’s landmark slasher Black Christmas; it’s so wrong it’s haunting.  And yet there’s something sweet about watching these two crazy kids get together, if not only because the heart & social fabric of America itself hangs in the balance of their volatile dynamic.

As bizarre as Dolly’s chemistry with Stallone can be, she does have clear, coherent chemistry with New York City at large.  Although the song never actually plays in the movie, Rhinestone is “adapted” from the Glen Campbell novelty hit “Rhinestone Cowboy,” which it essentially boils down to the clash of big-city glam vs. simple country livin’.  If there’s anything about the film that “works” the way it’s intended to, it’s the fish-out-of-water humor of sending Dolly to the bright lights & mean streets of NYC.  In an opening song (penned by Dolly herself, naturally), she yodels over helicopter footage of the Statue of Liberty and complains “Life ain’t as simple as it used to be, since the Big Apple took a bite out of me.”  The Big Apple of Rhinestone is defined by discos, pizza, room service, and casual racism. Meanwhile, small-town America is all front-porch concerts, farm animals, and Christian sweethearts who are willing to teach a city boy how to honky tonk even though the city is way less inviting when the cultural exchange flows the other way.  Stallone’s fish-out-of-water humor as a boneheaded, punch-drunk cabbie who can’t walk ten feet in the country without slipping and falling in pig shit is much less convincing, but only because he’s much less convincing as a human being.  Dolly also wrote Stallone his own song to define his struggles in life, a novelty tune about black-out alcoholism called “Drinkenstein” that he barks & howls more than sings.  It’s difficult to tell how much of the film’s baffling, uncanny humor is a result of the miscasting of Dolly & Stallone as a romantic pairing vs how much is just a result of Stallone going off the rails in a Nic Cagian freakshow that disrupts the flow of the picture around him.  In Straight Talk, there is absolutely no chemistry between Dolly & Woods, who might as well have filmed their shot-reverse-shot “conversations” on entirely different shooting schedules.  In Rhinestone, by contrast, there is disastrously explosive chemistry between Dolly & Stallone – like, the poorly homemade pipe bomb kind of chemistry, the chemistry of an oil spill disrupting freshwater pH. 

In the short term, Rhinestone may have been a professional embarrassment for Parton, but everything that makes it so off-putting & ill-fitting for her rests on Stallone’s shoulders.  In the long term, it’s endured as one of her strangest, most memorable movie projects, one that inadvertently exemplified how refreshingly out of place she was in Big City show business outside her Nashville songwriting roots (and how bizarrely inhuman the show business urbanites could be on the other side of the table).  Or, at least, it could endure that way if those Big City lugheads hadn’t allowed it to slip into distribution limbo after its decades-old DVD went out of print.

-Brandon Ledet