brandon ledet

Johnny Handsome (1989)

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I just finished reading the deceptively dense travel guide San Francisco Noir by essayist Nathaniel Rich, which doubles as both a guided tour of San Francisco’s many character-defining landmarks and a critical history of “the city in film noir from 1940 to the present.”  There are so many noirs set in San Francisco that Rich is able to map out all of the city’s disparate moods & neighborhoods by cataloging how they’ve been portrayed onscreen in that one specific genre, frequently stopping the tour for incisive, short-form reviews of the dozens of noirs set in and around The Bay.  As a movie nerd, the book was a great way to familiarize myself with a city I love to visit but never get to stay long enough to feel submerged below its touristy surface.  As a New Orleanian, it made me jealous.  Besides the impracticality of its distance from Los Angeles, why is it that so few classic noirs were set in New Orleans compared to the seemingly infinite noirs of San Francisco?  Reading through Rich’s illustrated history of his port city’s deep well of art, music, crime, sex, and scandal, I couldn’t shake the feeling that all of the hallmarks that made San Francisco such a perfect setting for noir are echoed in my own city’s alluringly sordid history.  And yet I can only name a few classic noir titles I’ve seen set on New Orleans streets: New Orleans Uncensored, Swamp Women, and Panic in the Streets.  That’s a relatively puny list when compared to such formidable San Francisco noir titles as The Maltese Falcon, The Lady from Shanghai, Out of the Past, and Vertigo.

It turns out I’m not the only person convinced of New Orleans’s hospitality to noir moods & tropes, as I found Roger Ebert entertaining the same thought in his 1989 review of the Walter Hill neo-noir Johnny Handsome.  Ebert wrote, “Johnny Handsome comes out of the film noir atmosphere of the 1940s, out of movies with dark streets and bitter laughter, with characters who live in cold-water flats and treat saloons as their living rooms.  It is set in New Orleans, a city with a film noir soul, and it stars Mickey Rourke as a weary loser who has just about given up on himself.”  Struck by Ebert’s assessment of New Orleans’s “film noir soul,” I dug into his other contemporary reviews of New Orleans-set thrillers starring the leads of Johnny Handsome.  The results were mostly silly, including a thumbs-down dismissal of Hard Target (featuring Johnny Handsome villain Lance Henriksen) as being “not very smart and not very original” and a positive review of Angel Heart (also starring Mickey Rourke) that describes the West Bank neighborhood of Algiers as a “town across from New Orleans that makes the fleshpots of Bourbon Street look like Disneyland.”  Sure, Roger.  I’m glad I kept digging, though, because his 1987 review of the neo-noir erotic thriller The Big Easy (which shares a star with Johnny Handsome‘s secondary villain, Ellen Barkin), captures the city’s “film noir soul” perfectly in the paragraph, “The movie takes place in New Orleans, that most mysterious of American cities, a city where you can have the feeling you never will really know what goes down on those shadowy passages into those green and humid courtyards so guarded from the street.”  That’s some good poetry.

As you can likely tell by my stalling to discuss this film directly by recapping the works of more talented & prestigious film critics, Johnny Dangerously is not especially interesting, at least not when compared to the rest of its era’s New Orleans crime pictures.  It’s not as scuzzy as Angel Heart, nor as steamy as The Big Easy, nor as deliriously over-the-top as Hard Target.  Its one claim to novelty among the other 80s New Orleans crime thrillers starring its central trio of volatile performers is that it’s the most faithful to the genre’s classic noir roots.  Johnny Handsome evokes the drunken, downtrodden storytelling logic of vintage crime story paperbacks, ones written decades before its actual 1970s source material.  Walter Hill reportedly dragged his feet on adapting that novel for years despite multiple offers, but his eventual decision to move its setting from New Jersey to New Orleans and to frame it within a traditionalist noir sensibility makes perfect sense for the material.  The results just aren’t particularly exciting.  Johnny Handsome is bookended by two heists: an early one in which Rourke’s titular disfigured anti-hero is abandoned by his gangster cohorts (Barkin & Henriksen) while looting a French Quarter jewelry store, and a climactic one in which he pays them back by trapping them in a doomed robbery of a shipyard construction site.  Both sequences are fantastic, but there’s a lot of dead air between, which Hill mostly fills with achingly sincere melodrama about a supposedly reformed criminal who can’t seem to get out of the game.  It’s the same level of heightened pastiche he brought to his 50s greaser throwback Streets of Fire, but something about it feels weirdly subdued & unenthused this go-round.

There are actually two old-school genre tributes at play in Johnny Handsome, both of which are signaled to the audience in black & white flashback.  While the film’s classic noir tropes are introduced in an early flashback washed in an aged sepia tone, its simultaneous echo of German Expressionist horror is presented in a starker Xerox contrast.  We’re told that Johnny Handsome was born with a monstrous, mutated face, even though he honestly doesn’t look too out of place in the context of The French Quarter – a circus without tents.  His disfigurement is important to the plot, though, so much so that Hill allowed Rourke to mumble his lines under heavy prosthetics to achieve the effect.  After getting busted during the first botched heist and before plotting to launch the second, Rourke finds himself imprisoned in Angola, where a kind mad scientist (Forest Whitaker) offers to lessen his sentence if he agrees to experimental facial reconstruction surgery.  The surgery goes so well that Rourke is able to insert himself into his old, leather-clad cohorts’ lives incognito, luring them into participating in their own demise with the second heist.  That sci-fi aspect of the plot has a distinct Hands of Orlac feel to it, which was also echoed in contemporary thrillers like Scalpel & Body Parts to much greater effect.  At least Johnny Handsome switches up the formula by combining its German Expressionist patina with classic noir tropes.  It’s a unique genre hybrid, even if subtly played, and it all comes together beautifully by the time the semi-reformed Rourke’s new girlfriend is practically screeching at his old frenemies, “No! No, don’t cut up Johnny’s beautiful face!”

All of the classic New Orleans noirs I’ve seen are fairly mediocre pictures.  Most of the San Francisco noirs covered in Nathaniel Rich’s book are mediocre too, which is true of most movie genres and of all art everywhere.  By the erotic thriller boom of the 1980s (which was essentially just neo-noir with an emphasis on video store sleaze), the movie industry had caught up with New Orleans’s noir potential and set some pretty great crime thrillers here: The Big Easy, Angel Heart, Tightrope, Cat People, Down By Law, etc.  Johnny Dangerously is far from the best example of that wave of locally set 80s thrillers, but it’s the one that best evokes the city’s classic-period noir past that never was.  I enjoyed the movie less as a sincere, in-the-moment thriller than I appreciated it as a what-could’ve-been simulation of what New Orleans’s “film noir soul” might’ve looked like if given the same amount of screentime as San Francisco noir in the genre’s heyday. 

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Richard III (1995)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Ian McKellen’s 1995 anachronization of Shakespeare’s Richard III, set in an alternate-history fascist Britain.

00:00 Welcome

02:00 Stephen King miniseries
08:28 There’s Something Wrong with the Children (2023)
10:00 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)
15:15 Asteroid City (2023)
18:03 Oink (2023)
21:00 65 (2023)
27:30 Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

32:12 Richard III (1995)

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

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

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I caught up with the animated superhero actioner Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse a full month into its theatrical run, which is just about the least compelling time I could possibly chime in on a populist film’s artistic merits & demerits.  After their initial tidal waves of ecstatic buzz and the exhaustive cataloging of fan-service Easter eggs that inevitably follows, there’s not much left to be said about 4-quadrant crowd pleasers that hasn’t already been repeated a thousand times over (or that won’t be worthier of deeper cultural analysis years down the line).  Across the discourse-verse, the new Spider-Man movie has already been declared to be “in the running for best superhero film ever“, celebrated for its covert trans teen representation, had said representation called out as corporate queerbaiting, and then taken to task for abusive labor practices that are disturbingly common among all modern animated productions.  It’s that overwhelming deluge of opinion & observation that has kept me from checking out the latest chapter in the interdimensional travels of Miles Morales, despite having very much enjoyed his origin-story game changer Into the Spider-Verse in 2018.  Even more so than I’ve been exhausted this summer’s record temperatures, I’ve been so drained by the season’s bleakly uninspiring new release schedule that I couldn’t work up much excitement to see any superhero picture on the big screen, even a good one.  The near-unanimous praise for it eventually wore me down and bullied me into having another good time with my friendly neighborhood webslinger, but I can’t say I found much in it that wasn’t already showcased beautifully in the previous film.  Across the Spider-Verse strictly adheres to a “continuing adventures of” style of comic book storytelling (complete with a cliffhanger ending), so even its highest highs can’t help but feel like more of the same.  “The same” just happens to be especially great in this case, at least in contrast to how dire the rest of mainstream animation & superhero cinema is looking right now.

I’ve experienced a strange, almost physical response to these Spider-Verse movies that I rarely get from American studio products these days.  There’s nothing particularly interesting about the Spider-Man story as it’s told (and retold and retold) here.  In the first film, Miles’s version of reality is invaded by alternate-dimension Spider-People, displaced by a glitch in The Multiverse.  In its sequel, Miles travels outside his little reality bubble to meet the other infinite-variation Spiders-Men in their interdimensional clubhouse.  There, they insist that he go through the Stations of the Canon that all Spider-Men suffer (most essentially, mourning the loss of a dead loved one), reinforcing that his story has to be boringly familiar to count as a Spider-Man story in the first place.  There are a couple variations in perspective that shake up the way Spider-Man is typically depicted onscreen—mostly in the familial Afro Latino community of Miles’s universe and in the femme teen fury of his closest friend Spider-Gwen’s—but it’s still a template we’ve seen repeated dozens of times before, even within this specific series.  Still, something happens to me when I watch these movies, where even though I’m not especially interested in the characters or story I unexpectedly well up with emotion because of how beautiful everything is visually.  Let’s call it the art of the moving image.  The layered, off-register Ben Day dots comic book artistry of the Spider-Verse films is an awesome breakthrough in computer animation technique & technology, a psychotronic deviation from the rounded edges & hyperreal backdrops Pixar has set the industry standard for in recent decades.  There’s no discernible deviation in the routine of superhero storytelling to match that visual extravagance (especially not while every superhero franchise is currently mired in multiverse tedium), but the psychedelic visual art is itself substantial enough to fill that void and, apparently, fill my heart as a movie lover.

At least, it feels substantial enough for now.  As gorgeous and as playful as the Spider-Verse animation style can feel in the moment, there’s something exhausting about watching yet another connective-tissue superhero film in such a bleak box office wasteland where everything is part of a larger cinematic universe, and nothing is functional as a self-contained work.  Across the Spider-Verse is half a movie, with its Part II conclusion supposedly arriving sometime next summer (although the behind-the-scenes drama of Phil Lord’s mismanagement suggests it may take even longer).  Meanwhile, the novelty of its CG art style is being diluted by application of the technique to other studio-licensed IP: a recent Shrek spin-off, an upcoming Ninja Turtles reboot and, most novel of all, the original standalone feature film The Mitchells vs The Machines.  In a field increasingly crowded by those few newly expressive experiments in CG animation and by countless other episodic superhero sagas, I’m struggling to find Across the Spider-Verse as exciting or essential as Into the Spider-Verse felt just a few years ago.  And yet there’s still some genuine emotional power in its visual artwork, especially in the spectacle of a climactic chase sequence where Miles is hunted by his interdimensional Spider-Siblings and in scenes where Gwen Stacy’s watercolor dimension bleeds into various warm & cool tones to match her big teenage feelings like an atmospheric mood ring.  I don’t know that the Spider-Verse films can ever make another industry-shifting impact the way they did in the first entry; that would require another technological innovation or radical shift in narrative style that’s unlikely to be introduced (and unfair to expect) three movies into a continuing series.  Still, I’m always going to be onboard for a visual-style-over-narrative-substance approach to filmmaking, especially when the style is this substantial and when all other modern superhero media is so lacking on both counts.

-Brandon Ledet

65 (2023)

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There’s something adorably quaint about the recent sci-fi action picture 65, in which a sweaty Adam Driver going to intergalactic war with dinosaurs in Earth’s futuristic past.  Driver is technically playing a space alien, but he has no physical features that distinguish him from Earthling humanity: no antennae, no fins, no gills, nothing beyond his usual unique physique.  When he arrives on Earth, he removes his helmet and vocally declares the air breathable.  His weapon against our prehistoric planet’s dinosaur creatures is a ray gun.  Whether intentionally or not, 65 is essentially a dumb-as-rocks throwback to 1950s schlock.  It plays like a basic-premise remake of an MST3k punching bag with a title like Beasts of a Savage World or Journey to the Planet Earth, updated with modern CG but thankfully not softened with modern self-referential irony.  There isn’t much to the film beyond its bar napkin premise, in which Driver drives a spaceship into Earth’s dirt 65 million years ago, then fights off the dinosaurs (and dino-adjacent monsters) that attempt to eat him along with the only other survivor of the crash.  The film’s only real value beyond the novelty of watching Driver shoot laser guns at dinosaurs, then, is in comparing how differently modern action schlock handles the premise from how Atomic Age sci-fi might have over half a century ago.

The major modern affect that drags down 65‘s entertainment value is the compulsion to overexplain itself with expositional context.  Directed by the screenwriters of the similarly weighed-down A Quiet Place—Scott Beck & Bryan Woods—the film is seemingly fearful of YouTube fanboy criticism of its “plot holes” & fanciful outlandishness.  Because humanity evolved after dinosaurs went extinct, Driver must belong to another humanoid race of people to share the screen with the towering beasts.  Surviving a spaceship crash alongside a young adolescent passenger is apparently not enough motivation for him to protect her against this far-out world’s Jurassic beasts; it’s also explained that he has a daughter of a similar age back on his homeworld, whose diaries in his absence are doled out through a device lifted wholesale from Interstellar.  Between the film’s opening storybook narration informing us that these events occur “prior to the advent of mankind, in the infinity of space” and the unnecessary prologue set on Driver’s alien planet, it isn’t until 40 minutes into the runtime that our hero actually shoots a laser beam at a dinosaur.  And since the film is only worth the novelty of its one-sentence premise, that’s a huge problem.  If 65 were made in the 1950s, Driver would’ve been from Earth, crash-landed on a similar planet with its own dinosaurs, immediately opened fire, smooched an “alien” babe, discovered in a last-minute twist that he had merely time-traveled backwards, and the whole thing would’ve been wrapped up in 65 minutes to leave room for the next movie on the drive-in double bill.  The dinosaurs would’ve been stop-motion too, and maybe even borrowed from the footage of a better-funded picture.  Roger Corman is still alive & working somewhere out there, but Hollywood really doesn’t make efficient, delirious schlock like it used to, mostly because every fanciful creative impulse now has to be “justified” to keep online cynics at bay.

Still, I appreciated that this modern DTV action treatment of a retro pulp sci-fi premise never slips into winking-at-the-camera Deadpool irony.  Although Driver has a knack for comedic delivery, the world is better off being spared of his alien-invasion equivalent of Kong: Skull Island.  I suspect that happened because Beck & Woods are largely humorless in their craft and were somehow unaware that they were making 1950s sci-fi pastiche in the first place.  Whatever the reason, the movie’s self-serious tone is a great counterbalance to its glaringly unserious premise.  Its internal aversion to irony & camp does mean that it’s a little boring in stretches (especially in the dino-free opening half), but it’s a pleasant, cozy kind of boring.  65 is crash-landing on Netflix soon, but its ultimate, ideal presentation is in afternoon daylight programming on whatever basic cable channel dads nap to these days.  As a creature feature, it’s got a playfully unscientific approach to what counts as a “dinosaur.”  As an Adam Driver vehicle, it’s going to make for a delightfully odd footnote in what’s sure to be a delightfully odd movie star career.  It was also partially filmed in Louisiana swamps (the parts that weren’t filmed against green screens on New Orleans sound stages), which gives it an extra layer of novelty for local napping dads, too tired to find the clicker.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #189: Give Me Pity! (2023) & New Releases

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Welcome to Episode #189 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of new releases from the first half of 2023, starting with Give Me Pity!, Amanda Kramer’s feature length spoof of one-woman TV specials in the disco era.

00:00 Mozzarella sticks

04:25 Past Lives (2023)
11:45 There’s Something Wrong with the Children (2023)
17:00 Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2023)
20:12 Stalking Laura (1993)

29:18 Give Me Pity! (2023)
51:00 Polite Society (2023)
1:03:25 How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2023)
1:19:40 Huesera: The Bone Woman (2023)

1:45:35 Best of 2023 so far

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

White Palace (1990)

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From the Criterion Channel’s recent Erotic Thriller streaming program to Karina Longworth’s recent “Erotic 90s” podcast run to the documentary We Kill for Love‘s exhaustive catalog of the erotic thriller’s DTV era, much attention is currently being paid to streamy Hollywood smut from decades past.  The dumbest, schlockiest, most preposterous VHS rentals of yesteryear are currently being paraded around as high art worthy of deep academic analysis, no longer just late-night time filler for horndogs.  It’s a great time to be a cinephile.  If I were going to throw one more lost-to-time erotic artifact on top of this already mountainous pile of moldy cassettes, I’d like to direct audiences to the 1990 melodrama White Palace, which stars two icons of the genre – Bull Durham‘s Susan Sarandon & Sex, Lies, and Videotape‘s James Spader.  White Palace is worth revisiting for the same reason all of these sweaty schlock “classics” are; it’s proof that Hollywood used to regularly make racy movies for adults instead of four-quadrant crowdpleasers where “everyone is beautiful, and no one is horny.”  It’s also great contrast to the more desperate, over-the-top erotic thrillers of that era, in that its own sexuality is much more confident, relaxed, and underplayed than its competitors on the Major Video shelf.  While most Erotic 90s™ relics twisted themselves in knots trying to steam up the audience, White Palace simply casts the two hottest actors in Hollywood as its leads and lets their chemistry do the work.  It makes it look easy.

“The story of a younger man and a bolder woman,” White Palace stars Spader as a highly successful 20-something lawyer and Sarandon as his disheveled 40-something diner waitress – the hottest woman on the planet.  They first lock eyes when he Karens out demanding a refund at her knockoff White Castle burger joint; they quickly bond over cheap booze & familial grief in the bar down the street; and then, against all glaring red flags that they are not made for each other, they bone.  They bone a lot.  There’s nothing especially sinister nor traumatic to get in the way of their boning either.  Transgressing the borders of class & culture (he’s Jewish; she’s a godless hedonist) is certainly taboo in the context of an American romance, but it’s not an insurmountable hurdle for their passionate fuck fests.  If you compare it against the twisty illogic of the era’s erotic thrillers—the identity hijack of Single White Female, the underground bisexual conspiracy network of Basic Instinct, the virtual reality espionage of Disclosure, etc.—this erotic drama’s central conflict is relatively tame & understated.  If anything, its biggest transgressions are in how often it centers female pleasure in its animalistic boning sessions, integrating cunnilingus & vibrator use with the same frankness as fellatio.  Even with most of Spader & Sarandon’s thrusting hidden under a thin layer of bed sheets, it’s incredible that they got that much honest, non-misogynist sexuality past the sex-negative ghouls at the MPAA.  Usually, they’d have to punish the sexpot diner waitress for her crimes against decency with a last-minute storm of Fatal Attraction bathtub bullets to justify the indulgence, but this movie is much more wholesome & low-key than its hyperviolent equivalents.

White Palace is a glorious time capsule of early-90s cheese & sleaze.  You may want to snicker at its saxophone-heavy scoring of St. Louis tourism shots, or its sex montage set to a chipper country tune about the joys of fucking younger men, but its most dated qualities are central to its charm.  There are plenty of 90s-specific casting choices to celebrate in the supporting cast too, including Misery‘s Kathy Bates, Pretty Woman‘s Jason Alexander, and two central players from the iconic Jewish sitcom The Nanny (Renee Taylor & Rachel Chagall).  Its adjacency to more histrionic Erotic 90s classics is its greatest strength, though, even if you can only feel their twisted influence in scenes where Sarandon is encouraging Spader to drive while wasted or where Spader stares at his wife’s grave while listening to mental replays of Sarandon’s moans.  In a way, it’s White Palace‘s resistance to indulging the trashier war-of-the-sexes tropes of the era that’s holding it back from being critically exalted among the best of its kind.  It’s just not flashy enough to earn the same attention as all-out smut fests like The Doom Generation, which just enjoyed a full theatrical victory lap among all this Erotic 90s fanfare.  Instead, it’s currently unavailable to watch by any legal means other than, I suppose, borrowing the out-of-print Full Screen DVD I happened to find at a local thrift store.  White Palace wasn’t quite sleazy enough to earn a spot in The Criterion Channel’s Erotic Thrillers package, so its day in the sun as a recovered erotic relic is still to come (and come and come and come).  I hope to see it come soon.

-Brandon Ledet

Rimini (2023)

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Sometimes you don’t realize how regressive & puritanical most American cinema is until you watch a European art film.  For instance, the recent Austrian-French drama Rimini was revelatory in just how squicked out most American filmmakers are about nude, elderly bodies.  I’ve become so accustomed to seeing old naked bodies exploited for gross-out jump scares in American horror that it felt genuinely transgressive to see geriatric sex shot without shame or judgement.  The nude-geriatric jump scare is a well established American tradition, dating at least as far back as the bathtub scene in Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining.  The practice has ramped up exponentially in recent years, though, and you can see elderly nudity depicted as skin-crawly grotesqueries in such buzzy horror titles as Barbarian, IT, It Follows, X, The Visit, The Witch, Hereditary, Midsommar, and (for the full Ari Aster trifecta) Beau is Afraid.  Any one of those examples could be individually defended for their reasoning in perpetuating the trope, but as a group they do indicate a fairly damnable ageist trend.  And so, when the elderly women of Rimini pay to have vigorous, onscreen sex with their favorite washed-up pop star, it’s surprisingly refreshing to see their sexual activities and sexual bodies presented in a matter-of-fact, semi-documentary style instead of the heightened American nightmare equivalent where they are shocking & gross.

Well, that’s not entirely true.  The geriatric sex in Rimini is also shocking & gross, but only because of the context.  The film itself is a shocking & gross character study of a shocking & gross man, played by Austrian actor Michael Thomas.  Thomas stars as the fictional has-been pop singer Ricky Bravo, who drinks and fucks away the remaining scraps of his life in the off-season beachside hotel rooms of the titular Italian tourist town.  The tourists have left for winter, so seemingly all that’s left in Rimini’s frozen-over water parks and hotel suites is Ricky Bravo’s horned-up fans, who are bussed in from distant Euro retirement homes to bask in his kitschy caricature of romance novel machismo.  Ricky Bravo recalls a wide range of cornball sex symbols from decades past without parodying any one example in particular, instead approximating what it might be like if Meatloaf had starred in a 1980s Beauty and the Beast TV show instead of Ron Perlman.  He even dresses in a ragged, beastly fur coat he tosses onto hotel room beds like a Viking pelt that he ravages his paying customers on top of, essentially wearing an unwashable cum rag around town between gigs.  All of Bravo’s handsome affectations get increasingly grotesque when you squint at them in that way.  He presents himself as a passionate lush, but he’s really just a lonely alcoholic and a low-effort gigolo.  His decadence is decorated with the faded hallmarks of wealth from much brighter times, and it all looks so increasingly tacky in the cold, sober light of day – especially by the dozenth time his de-glamourized routine repeats onscreen.

Ricky Bravo’s racism also becomes increasingly apparent as his macho facade erodes.  He sees himself as a progressive rebel who’s transcended the fascistic politics of his demented Nazi father (played by German actor Hans-Michael Rehberg in his final film role), whom he’s permanently parked in a grimly mundane nursing home.  Bravo has, of course, absorbed plenty of his father’s racism despite himself, though, and the film is just as much about the crooner’s reactions to Rimini’s immigrant populations as it is about his unconventional sex work.  While the tourists and seasonal workers can afford to leave town for the winter, there are large communities of homeless Muslim refugees who cannot.  They slowly freeze to death on Rimini’s beaches while the town’s hotel rooms (and Ricky’s tacky mansion) remain mostly empty, since there is no practical way to make money off sheltering them.  Bravo’s initial discomfort towards homeless refugees escalates to blatant hostility when his estranged daughter arrives in town with a silent Muslim boyfriend, demanding backpay for decades of missed child support.  Bravo loses focus from satisfying his adoring fans (on stage and in bed) just long enough to scheme his way into the petty cash needed to purchase his daughter’s unearned affection, which means that he rips off and exploits the few people he can exert power over in the smallest, cruelest ways – all while looking down on the immigrant people who share his otherwise desolate city streets.

As you can likely tell, Rimini is grim.  It’s also wryly funny, and the joke is always on Ricky Bravo for being such a drunken, dirty asshole.  Even the camera’s extreme wide-shot framing treats Bravo’s life as a sad joke.  He’s often shrunken to puny insignificance by the camera’s cold distancing, especially whenever he’s performing his dusty pop songs for his dwindling crowd of devotees.  The camera never lets him get away with big-timing the audience, making sure we see every inch of the hotels’ drop-tile ceilings while he performs his sappy love ballads.  The film’s funeral parlors, nursing homes, and hotel conference rooms make for oppressively bland mise-en-scène, and there’s never a hint of music video escapism in the pop singer’s meaningless life haunting those spaces.  That’s not how the sex is shot, though.  In the bedroom, the camera is borderline pornographic in its handheld, documentary framing of Ricky Bravo’s performance.  Bravo’s only meaningful contribution to the world is his ability to provide pleasure & fantasy to elderly women who find him hot.  You will not be surprised to learn that he eventually finds a way to fuck that up too.  Rimini is a distinctly European flavor of feel-bad movie where everything eventually sours & rots for our squirmy displeasure at the nearest non-corporate theater.  It says something, then, that it still has a less shameful, othering eye for shooting geriatric sex than mainstream American cinema, even if the people having that sex are inevitably demeaned & destroyed in other ways.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Prefab Story (1979)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Czech New Wave whatsit Prefab Story (1979), an experimental ensemble-cast drama about infinite urban construction from Věra “Daisies” Chytilová

00:00 Welcome

02:30 Until the Light Takes Us (2008)
09:27 The Last Starfighter (1984)
20:12 The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari (2022)
25:53 Arrietty (2010)
26:53 Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)
31:50 The Flash (2023)

39:57 Panelstory, or Birth of a Community (1979)

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

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

The Last Starfighter (1984)

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I am reporting from deep within the bowels of New Nerd America: a pop art dystopia in which nerds have decidedly won the culture war and allowed the media landscape to rot in decades-old rubble instead of encouraging anything fresh to flourish.  What I mean to say is that there’s nothing especially interesting to me in theaters right now, because all the local marquees are cluttered with nostalgia-bait IP.  Our poptimistic celebration of vintage nerd culture has gone too far, to the point where nearly all American screen space has been gobbled up by bajillion dollar intellectual propertie$ that service some long gestating fandom: Marvel fans, DC fans, Mario fans, Transformer fans, Fast & Furious fans, Little Mermaid fans, oscillating fans, and fans of the Boogeyman.  Even the more artistic alternatives to this deluge of summertime corporate schlock—the new Spider-Man and the new Kamen Rider—are reverently referential to the nerdy histories of their titular superheroes; they just happen to be better crafted than most other nerd-culture nostalgia stokers currently on the market.  In these moments of early-summer panic, I always think back to Spielberg’s dystopian adaptation of Ready Player One, a movie that mourned the cultural brain rot of a society willing to dwell in the artistic triumphs of the past instead of innovating new populist art for the future.  As you’ll remember, Ready Player One was a critical failure upon its release, mostly for its association with its vapid source-material novel, which celebrated the dawning of the New Nerd America with uncritical nerdgasmic glee.  I personally thought Spielberg did a good job of undercutting the nostalgic poptimism of Ernest Cline’s book, though, the same way that Verhoeven “adapted” Starship Troopers into an argument against its own militaristic thesis.  To me, Ready Player One was a nightmare vision of a near-future Hell dominated by 1980s nerd culture bullshit (one we’re already living in just five years later).  The only way its Pre-Existing IP Futurism could possibly look fun & celebratory is if nerds were still the pop culture underdogs fighting to earn wider cultural respect for their personal pet obsessions.  Basically, it’s as if everyone misread 2018’s Ready Player One as a remake of 1984’s The Last Starfighter.

There’s something fascinating about the pop culture ouroboros of The Last Starfighter borrowing heavily from early Spielberg, then being echoed in Ready Player One, which was then adapted into a legitimate Spielberg film with outright contempt for its own source material.  Like in Cline’s celebration of New Nerd America, The Last Starfighter is the story of a Fanboy loser who proves the local Haters who doubt him wrong when his video gaming skills end up saving the planet instead of just wasting countless hours of his youth.  The 1980s setting means that he’s addicted to an arcade cabinet instead of a VR headset, but the spirit remains the same.  Lance Guest “stars” as a frustrated, go-nowhere teen who earns the high score on his trailer park’s communal arcade game while all the Cool Kids are off enjoying a social day at the beach.  The game turns out to be an intergalactic recruitment tool for a noble space alien army who need the nerd’s joystick skills to win their space-laser war with a vaguely defined enemy.  Instead of directly adapting the gameplay “plot” of a specific game the way most Video Game Movies would (the animated Super Mario Bros movie being a recent example), The Last Starfighter instead portrays the reason nerdy kids obsess over those games in the first place.  It’s a live-action illustration of the escapist power fantasy the medium offers its pasty shut-in players.  And since video games were still a nerds-only proposition at the time The Last Starfighter was produced, it’s a charming prototype for the much sourer escapist power fantasy that would be echoed in the Ready Player One novel, which is a gloating celebration of the dominant pop culture of its time.  The Last Starfighter is almost just as much a celebration of 1980s kitsch as its 2010s equivalent.  Its titular arcade game is a shameless Star Wars rip-off; its space-age adventurism is directly informed by early Spielberg titles like E.T. & Close Encounters; and its basic video-game-recruitment premise is essentially a too-soon remake of Tron‘s.  It’s so deeply steeped in 80s nerd shit that its inclusion of a DeLorean-shaped spaceship feels like an homage to Back to the Future, even though it was released a year earlier than that Zemeckis touchstone.  There’s just something wholesome about that reverence for 80s nerd culture being filmed when it could still get you dunked in a toilet or shoved in a locker, as opposed to it being screen-printed on every Target brand t-shirt on the shelf.

Not every aspect of The Last Starfighter is wholesome & quaint.  In my dusty DVD’s behind-the-scenes documentary on the movie’s “continued popularity”, the computer effects artists behind its creation are loudly proud of their contribution to modern blockbuster filmmaking, claiming that The Last Starfighter was the first feature film to primarily use CG effects to produce its “real world” space-fighting environments.  The early-80s CG has aged about as well as you would expect, often giving the film the feel of a vintage PC video game instead of a proper sci-fi picture.  It was certainly ahead of the industrial curve, though, which you can tell in how improbably advanced its star-war graphics look in the arcade gameplay vs. how surreally dated they look once our nerdy hero is playing the game “for real.”  It was also made in a time before programmers were brave enough to attempt computerizing their space alien characters, so there are thankfully plenty of adorable rubber-mask monsters cheering on & fighting alongside our fanboy gamer hero.  The computer animation team did a decent job for their era, but they could have done even better if the studio had given them the proper time & resources needed to complete the project.  Even in my DVD’s victory lap featurette, they complain about the stress of completing the project on time, having been given an impossible 6-month deadline to finalize their effects work. As a result, they rushed the project to completion, putting in overworked, undercompensated hours to make sure the movie could hit its predetermined release date.  In that way, the New Nerd America is nothing new at all.  The way the computer animators behind all the nostalgic fan service behemoths currently on the market are treated by the studios who subcontract them is bottomlessly cruel & abusive, especially considering how much money their employers are making on their undervalued labor.  The Last Starfighter was a template for modern nerd culture filmmaking both its reverence for schlocky 80s pop art (which was at least fresh & interesting at the time) and in its exploitation of the actual, real-life nerds behind the keyboards that made it come to life.  I’m going to guess that the Ready Player One film, no matter how much higher in quality than the Ready Player One book, also participated in that modern industry standard, which has only gotten worse as the demand for this kind of material has exponentially risen.

I didn’t revisit The Last Starfighter in order to heap more praise onto a five-year-old Spielberg film most people hate or have totally forgotten.  I also didn’t revisit it to make some kind of Galaxy Brain point about the state of modern populist filmmaking.  I revisited it because I was bored, I wanted to watch a movie, and nothing currently playing in theaters looked novel or exciting enough to justify leaving my couch.  However, I did venture out the next day to sell my Last Starfighter DVD (along with other dusty pop culture leftovers) and was greeted with two bittersweet responses from the incurably nerdy clerk at my local 2nd & Charles: 1. “We’re no longer buying back DVDs,” which is a real heartbreaker for me — the end of an era.  And, 2. “That movie’s badass,” which I hope is the same reaction whoever picks up my copy from the Mid-City Goodwill has as well.  It turns out these 80s nerd culture leftovers aren’t worth all that much after all.  They’re meant to sell popcorn & digital downloads for a few months then promptly be forgotten forever, which would be the ideal amount of reverence for this kind of nerdy pop art if it weren’t for the fact that all of its latest examples are regurgitations of past triumphs. 

-Brandon Ledet

Quick Takes: Summer Flings

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It’s summertime, which means every movie marquee in America is clogged with corporate slop, and even the more artistic counterprogramming offered at your local multiplex is going to be a frantic superhero IP refresher like Shin Kamen Rider or Across the Spider-Verse.  There’s no refuge for weirdo cineastes in these conditions, which means that I won’t be leaving my couch much until Halloween & Oscars schlock reclaim their rightful screen space in October.  Naturally, I’m still watching movies, but I’m trying to keep everything light & low-key instead of getting my brain hammered smooth by the fast & furious transformer machinery of the summer’s new release schedule. 

As a result, I’ve been watching a lot of quiet indie films about love & romance in recent weeks, none of which will be lighting up my personal Best of the Year list at the end of 2023 but all of which have been a pleasant distraction while soaking up AC at my home box office.  So, here are a few short-form reviews of the smaller-scale, smaller-budget romances I’ve been watching this summer.

Rye Lane

When I try to name the most romantic movies of all time, the walk-and-talk European meet cute Before Sunrise is high on the hypothetical list.  Its 2023 equivalent, Rye Lane, continues the Before brand tradition of casual first-date swooning but shakes up the usual Beformula by transporting the action to the mostly Black neighborhoods of South London.  Meeting by chance at a mutual friend’s hilariously hacky art show, two South Londoners endlessly chat on what spirals into an accidental all-day first date, despite their recent, respective heartbreaks over failed relationships.  Their getting-to-know-you banter is decidedly low-key, but their walking tour of hip city neighborhoods provides a vibrant, near-psychedelic backdrop of food, art, fashion, sex, and music.  One sequence involving a petty heist temporarily raises the stakes (as our giddy couple breaks into an ex’s flat to liberate a vinyl copy of The Low End Theory), but for the most part the will-they-won’t-they tension of their tryst has an obvious, inevitable and, most importantly, adorable conclusion.

Rye Lane offers all of the usual chaotic, inexplicable behavior of a bubbly romcom, except now matched with chaotic, inexplicable camera work.  The whole thing is shot with a Soderberghian fisheye lens, bending a familiar modern comedy template around the constantly surprising visual flourishes of music videos & vintage animation.  Its central hook-up story of a meek man shaken out of his comfort zone by a manic pixie dream hedonist isn’t ever mind-blowing, but its warped visual presentation often can be.  In short, it’s a feel-good Before Sunrise for the Instagram era, and it’s a shame that its direct-to-Hulu distro means it has a much smaller chance of making a splash as that 90s indie-scene charmer.

Emily

Wuthering Heights may be the greatest romance ever written, but its story of life-long ferocious obsession & betrayal isn’t likely to be described as “small” or “low-key” by anyone who’s actually read it.  However, this factually loose biopic of its author imagines a brief, intimate affair that might have inspired its tale of feral, soul-destroying love, dragging it down to the level of a more recognizable, real-world romance.  Emma “Maeve from Sex Education” Mackey stars as a teenage Emily Brontë doing field research (i.e., getting her heart broken) before writing the novel that made her infamous.  According to the movie’s made-up version of events, her source inspiration behind Cathy’s wild, untamed desire for Heathcliff is split between the only two young men in her life: her libertine brother and their isolated village’s local curate. Thankfully, the story never tips into full-on incest (although that wouldn’t be too out of place in a Wuthering Heights context).  Instead, the young Brontë shares a fiery, oft-consummated passion with the clergyman – which is just sinful & blasphemous enough to justify its supposed connection to the novel, especially once the curate breaks her spirit by abruptly breaking things off.

Emily may not be useful as a historical text, but its deviations from the facts of Brontë’s sheltered bookworm life help make it an entertaining tribute to the greatest romance ever penned.  There’s something especially endearing about the way her handwritten prose & poetry are too powerful for the small-minded prudes around her to gaze at directly (including her sister & fellow author Charlotte, whom the film slanders as a proto-Karen scold).  Once a grief-stricken Emily sits down to scribble the entirety of Wuthering Heights in a single, furious tantrum, the fictionalized power of her writing can come across a little goofy, but it helps that the novel in question has stood the test of time as an incendiary work that either enraptures or enrages its readers to this day.  More importantly, the film itself is a gloomy love letter to all angsty goth girls everywhere, often making Brontë’s imagined loves & literary triumphs secondary to her iconoclastic status as a teenage “free thinker” who dabbles in opium, dirty poems, and the occult.  It’s romantic in its portrayal of a doomed fling that can only last a single season, but it’s also romantic in its aspirational posturing as a ghost story about the original shy-girl goth kid who became infamous for her dark-sided art and her intense brooding on the moors.

Sanctuary

It’s not exactly true that there’s no artsy counterprogramming in theaters right now.  In some ways, I’ve just been trained over the pandemic to treat this kind of low-budget, low-stakes movie as a small-screen experience that I’ll eventually catch whenever it hits streaming.  So, I have admittedly shot myself in the foot several times over the past month, skipping out on local showings of Past Lives, Monica, You Hurt My Feelings, and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.  I guess I’ll be cramming in those titles in the mad scramble to bulk up my Best of the Year list in December.  In the meantime, though, I did recently venture out of the house to see the single-room two hander Sanctuary, despite it being no bigger nor flashier than those competitors.  I suppose after already being suckered into watching Piercing, any movie where Christopher Abbott is tortured by a high-class dominatrix is something of an Event Film for me, although I can’t say either example so far has been especially exceptional.  In Sanctuary, Abbott’s pro-domme tormentor is played by Margaret Qualley, who refuses to take “No” for an answer when her millionaire hotel-heir client (Abbott) decides to break off their professional relationship just as he takes over his dad’s business and the real money starts flowing in.  Feeling like he owes his success to her sexual “training” and like their sessions have transcended a purely transactional nature to something more sweetly romantic, she holds him hostage in his luxury hotel suite until he caves and gives her everything her volatile whims demand.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of Sanctuary.  It’s either a disappointingly flat erotic thriller or a charmingly daffy romcom.  Maybe it’s both.  It needed to feel like a finely constructed stage play to fully work, but its ditzy internal logic is written more in the spirit of online erotica.  The result is something like an off-Broadway adaptation of Succession fan fiction (a Roman Roy fantasy, specifically), which can be adorably goofy in the moment but quickly falls apart under any prolonged scrutiny.  I did laugh at the camera movements that simulated the power dynamic flipping between characters by literally flipping the frame upside down (a move that’s coincidentally mirrored in Emily, which enters the twisted mind of Emily Brontë by literally twisting the camera’s zoom-in on her dark goth-girl eyes).  I also chuckled at the baffling, seemingly arbitrary decisions those characters make every few minutes, either to convey the frustration & desperation of someone who’s wildly horny or to convey the frustration & desperation of a screenwriter who doesn’t know how to keep the story going.  I appreciated that Qualley kept the mood light by playing her domme persona bratty instead of severe, but I can’t say that her performance wouldn’t have been better suited for, say, a Rachel Sennott or a Mia Goth or a Mia Wasikowska – one of whom has already proven her worth in this exact Abbott-teasing scenario.  I don’t know.  I’m the exact target audience for this kind of perversely playful filth, and yet I walked away from the theater only mildly satisfied, so I can’t imagine most people will work up much enthusiasm for it.  At least there are no green screen backdrops, and Christopher Abbott isn’t playing a superhero?  Arthouse victories can feel so minor this time of year, but I’m still thankful that they’re out there.

-Brandon Ledet