Welcome to Episode #178 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna continue our discussion of the Top Films of 2022 with some honorable mentions, starting with the Jerrod Carmichael suicide comedy On the Count of Three.
1. Everything Everywhere All at Once — Maybe we’re living in the worst possible timeline, but maybe we’re just living in the one where Michel Gondry directed The Matrix. It’s nice here. The absurdism, creativity, and all-out maximalism of Everything Everywhere has made it the most talked-about movie of the year, and with good reason. Films about intergenerational trauma and poor parental relationships often come across as schmaltzy and reductive, but this one is complex in ways that you can’t predict or imagine. You’ll even find yourself empathizing with a googly-eyed rock.
2. Marcel the Shell With Shoes On — In the tradition of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, the Borrowers books, and the half-remembered TV show The Littles, Marcel the Shell shrinks itself down to the level of a tiny being to view the world from their perspective. Like the original stop-motion YouTube shorts, it’s a rapid-fire joke delivery system where every punchline is “So small!” It also has a big heart, though, acting as an emotional defibrillator to shock us back into the great wide world of familial & communal joy after a few years of intense isolation.
3. Mad God — Both a for-its-own sake immersion in scatological mayhem and an oddly touching reflection on the creative process, the indifference of time, and the cruelty of everything. Phil Tippet’s stop-motion descent into Hell is meticulously designed to either delight or irritate, so count us among the awed freaks who never wanted the nightmare to end.
4. RRR — An anti-colonialist epic about the power of friendship (and the power of bullets, and the power of wolves, and the power of grenades, and the power of dynamite, and the power of tigers, and the power of bears, oh my). A real skull-cracker of a good time.
5. Neptune Frost — A post-gender Afrofuturist musical that triangulates unlikely holy ground between Space is the Place, Black Orpheus, and Hackers. This movie is gorgeous, even if it takes more than one viewing to piece together a thorough understanding of its plot, since it phrases its protests against colonialism & strip-mining in the language of dreams & poetry.
6. Men — If it weren’t for the tabloidization of Don’t Worry Darling, this would easily be the most over-complained about movie of 2022. The Discourse was not kind to Alex Garland’s shift from chilly sci-fi to atmospheric folk horror, but the spectacular MPreg climax & Rory Kinnear’s terrifying face will haunt us forever anyway.
7. Triangle of Sadness— A delightfully cruel, unsettling comedy that invites you to laugh at the grotesquely rich as they slide around in their own piss, shit, and vomit on a swaying luxury cruise ship. It’s incredibly satisfying—and maybe even Östlund’s best—as long as you prefer catharsis & entertainment over subtlety & nuance.
8. Funny Pages — Proudly wears its 2000s indie nostalgia as a grimy badge of dishonor, questioning why Ghost World and The Safdies can’t share the same marquee. You might wonder where its alt-comics slackerdom fits in the modern world, but any dipshit suburbanite poser who’s ever romanticized suffering an “authentic” life as a starving artist in The City should be able to relate.
9. Nope— After examining the horror of suburbia and neoliberalism in Get Out (our #1 film of 2017) and the horror of self and manifest destiny in Us (our #7 film of 2019), Jordan Peele’s latest is an oddly laidback, immensely scaled sci-fi thriller about a brother & sister’s fight to understand, outsmart, document, and monetize an extraterrestrial being beyond our comprehension. Consider it a Signs of the times.
10. Hatching — A great entry in the Puberty as Monstrous Transformation canon, alongside titles like Ginger Snaps, Jennifer’s Body, Teeth, and Carrie. Hatching stands out in that crowd by adding an extra layer about mothers living through their daughters in unhealthy ways. In fact, we recommend all mothers and daughters watch this twisted Finnish fairy tale together; it’s gross-out fun for the whole family.
Read Alli’s list here. Read Boomer’s list here. Read Brandon’s list here. Read Britnee’s list here. See Hanna’s list here. Hear James’s list here.
Besides maybe the horny-old-biddies football comedy 80 For Brady being inexplicably set in 2017, the new straight-to-Peacock slasher Sick is likely to be the most conceptually bizarre period piece of the season. The COVID-19 pandemic might be waning, but it is still ongoing, which makes screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s decision to set Sick in the early-pandemic days of Spring 2020 a little confusing, if not outright immoral. COVID-themed horror that takes advantage of the pandemic’s of-the-moment novelty and finance-forgiving social isolation is now a three-year-old gimmick at this point, with early standouts like the excellent screenlife ghost story Host getting produced & released in the same timeframe when Sick is set. So, why would Williamson bother stepping outside his highly successful slasher franchise Scream to dial the clock back to those early COVID days, when that’s already such an overcrowded market? Apparently, it’s because he’s been itching to complain about people who are a little too zealous & militant about mask-wearing, social-distancing safety measures in public life, and he couldn’t be satisfied venting about it in a Facebook rant like every other Gen-X crank, so he made a feature film instead.
In its opening hour, Sick appears to take the ambient terror of COVID very seriously, likening it to the intangible menace of horrors like Final Destination, The Happening, and Skinamarink. Again, this is a period piece set in the early wiping-down-your-groceries era of the pandemic, when coherent public understanding of how COVID spreads—let alone vaccines—had yet to formulate. There’s an oppressive paranoia in all public life that’s distinct to that era, illustrated by how a single cough in a grocery store has all other shoppers shooting daggers in your direction. The tension is instantly high, and the vibes are instantly bad, which is a great start for a lean, low-budget slasher with only 80 minutes of playtime. It’s also a great excuse to isolate a slasher’s teens-in-peril victims, who plan to ride the pandemic out by self-quarantining in a cabin in the woods. The knife-wielding killer who stalks them also comes pre-masked, as was the fashion (and legitimate safety precaution) of the time. All of this COVID-based terror is cleverly considered, but once the killer’s face & motives are revealed, Williamson’s screenplay devolves from we’re-all-in-this-together societal camaraderie into bitchy “Some of you are taking this pandemic stuff a little too seriously” apathy, and all of the tension gives way to eyerolls & jerk-off motions.
As often as Williams is determined to step on rakes in the last few pages of his screenplay, a lot of Sick‘s faults are smoothed over by DTV action director John Hyams’s knack for bone-crunching impact & small-scale visual spectacle. The novelty of COVID horror is fading, and the basic tropes of the home-invasion slasher are so familiar that Williamson made a name for himself mocking them in a meta-horror franchise nearly three decades ago, but Hyams manages to make Sick feel consistently thrilling & surprising from moment to moment. Yes, we have already seen Jason Voorhees emerge from Crystal Lake as an unkillable ghoul, but have we ever seen him thrust his blade at victims from under the water, like a deadly-sharp Jaws fin? Yes, we’ve already seen teens chased around a remote cabin after enjoying a few hand-rolled joints, but rarely with such creative, dynamic blocking & fight choreography – since most independent first-wave slashers of that ilk were made by youngsters who enjoyed a few beers & joints on-set themselves. Honestly, Sick has all the hallmarks of a classic slasher: style, efficiency, brutality, novelty, and boneheaded reactionary politics that sour nearly all of those merits. According to that scorecard, Hyams has acquitted himself, Williamson has embarrassed everyone and, as is always true, Jane Adams (whose role I won’t spoil) deserves better.
For anyone disappointed that Jane Schoenbrun’s microbudget darling We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was a somber teen-crisis drama instead of the low-fi creepypasta horror it was mismarketed as, Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink might be the salve for your year-old wounds. Curiously, the next project on Schoenbrun’s docket is titled I Saw the TV Glow, which is the closest thing to a coherent plot synopsis you could apply to Ball’s narrative-light experiment in digital-grained dread. Skinamarink is crowdsourced Internet Age horror, both in funding and in conception. After honing his craft by adapting user-submitted dream journals into horror shorts on his YouTube channel Bitesized Nightmares, Ball crowdfunded a feature-length amalgamation of those comment-section submissions’ most common themes & images for his official, theatrical debut. Skinamarink was essentially conceived by the internet hivemind. It was marketed by it too, illegally leaked out of online film festival platforms and spread around as a slumber party-style dare among TikTok Zoomers, as if it were vintage found footage instead of an upcoming theatrical release. Whereas We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is about creepypasta, Skinamarink is a genuine example of it, which makes the two films an unlikely, unholy pair (and possibly just the start of a larger, not-yet-defined Internet Age film movement).
It’s easy to forget Skinamarink‘s Internet Age DNA in the moment, though, since it’s aesthetically nostalgic for an earlier era. While the look & feel of Skinamarink conjures memories of impossibly late nights spent online in my teen years, its 1995 setting dials the clock back even further to a time before when it was affordable to bring the internet home. Ball shot the film in his own childhood home, perfectly preserved with popcorn ceilings and unstylish lighting fixtures that recall a bland childhood everyhome. In its one overtly nightmarish conceit, two young siblings—Kevin and Kaylee—wake to discover that not only are their parents missing, but the doors & windows to the outside world are missing too, with the remaining smoothed-out walls forming an endless, featureless labyrinth. Ball creates a first-person-POV childhood nightmare experience by removing all possible distinguishing features from both the setting and his characters, ensuring there are no framed art pieces, family portraits, or even characters’ faces to differentiate this eerie childhood memory from your own (presuming you’re old enough to remember a pre-internet world). The exact vintage toys, cartoons, and drab carpeting of a 90s childhood immerse the audience in an uneasy familiarity with this forgotten psychic space. Even the title—a reference to an ancient novelty song best remembered as the repurposed theme for The Elephant Show in the 1980s—feels eerily familiar, but initially difficult to place.
That dual familiarity to 1990s suburban homes and 2000s internet subdungeons is an important sensory anchor in a film with very little narrative structure to speak of. Kevin and Kaylee are young children with malleable minds, so they take the sudden disappearance of their parents & escape paths as a simple matter of fact, choosing to ride out the nightmare by playing with their off-brand Legos in front of public-domain Fleischman cartoons looping on the basement TV. On their occasional excursions up the stairs and down the hallways it becomes increasingly apparent that something is in the house with them, an evil presence that’s destined to be colloquially known as The Skinamarink as this film’s legacy stretches into the future. To explain how The Skinamarink torments these faceless children in this featureless suburban prison would spoil the three or four identifiable events in the otherwise sparse 100 minutes of film grain & room tone. It’s a work mostly made of textures, not narrative. The heavily distorted tape hiss & digital grain invite you to lean in, searching for something tangibly evil in the undulating darkness. You do eventually find it, usually in loud flashes that interrupt long stretches of wooshy quiet with the arthouse equivalent of a jump scare. What’s much more important is the dread you feel looking for something that isn’t there, though, which leaves a much starker, more memorable impression than the spooky shapes The Skinamarink eventually takes.
Skinamarink is simultaneously a familiar experience and an alien one, mixing generic horror tropes with an experimental sensibility – like a Poltergeist remake guided by the spirit of Un Chien Andalou. It’s the kind of loosely plotted, bad-vibes-only, liminal-space horror that requires the audience to meet it halfway both in emotional impact and in logical interpretation. In the best-case scenario, audiences will find traces of their own childhood nightmares in its darkened hallways & Lego-piece art instillations. Personally, I was more hung up on the way it evokes two entirely separate eras of my youth: my alone-time online as a sleep-starved teen and my alone-time in front of cathode TVs as a sleep-starved tyke a decade earlier. There’s some dark magic in the way it buries its analog horror tropes under a heavy digital shroud, and the looping, undulating patterns of the digital film grain were often just as mesmerizing as the search for the monster they obscure. Even if the film doesn’t ignite your brain on that digital-psychedelia level or stir a more sinister, subliminal reaction in your chest, its immediate financial & cultural success is still a victory worth celebrating. It isn’t often that a film this strange breaks out of the straight-to-Shudder release model, much less one shot in a single week for $15,000. Skinamarink is a good omen for the continued theatrical distribution of Weird Art in our sanitized corporate hell-future, even if it plays like a cursed internet broadcast from a post-theatrical world.
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the neorealist Italian poverty drama The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978).
0:00 Welcome
03:58 Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2022) 08:22 Queen of Versailles Reigns Again 15:52 Blue Lagoon: The Awakening (2012) 19:10 Rosaline (2022) 22:40 Blue Hawaii (1961) 26:40 M3GAN (2023) 33:50 The Woman in Black (2012) 37:59 The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982)
Just as the original Godzilla series quickly backslid from heartbreaking political allegory to novelty children’s fluff, Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla franchise starter has already made way for quirky kitsch in its immediate follow-up – Shin Ultraman. I could not be happier about it. While Shin Godzilla is the smarter, more thematically purposeful film, Shin Ultraman is the more fun, breezy, rewatchable one. It continues Shin Godzilla’s satirical illustration of the ineffectiveness of bureaucracy in the face of a kaiju-scale threat, but that governmental buffoonery is more of a background hum here than it is the main show. Anno’s Ultraman film—which the Neon Genesis Evangelion mastermind wrote, produced, edited and, most surprisingly, mo-capped—is more of an upbeat celebration of both sides of the human/monster divide. It crams in tons more of the skyscraper CG monsters than Godzilla’s solo outing could manage (although the individual designs of Godzilla’s Pokémon evolutions were a major highlight in the earlier film), and it also celebrates the humans below as adorable dorks who are just trying their best in a world stacked high against them.
If Shin Ultraman echoes any of Shin Godzilla’s high-minded artistic merit (beyond a main-cast performance from Drive My Car’s Hidetoshi Nishijima), it’s in its look & pacing. Director Shinji Higuchi shoots governmental office scenes like he’s competing with Soderbergh in full showoff mode, finding the most improbable camera angles possible to accentuate the absurdism of modern office work’s fluorescent-lit mundanity. Anno matches that overachiever energy in the editing room, cutting between Higuchi’s off-kilter shot compositions with a distinct anime sensibility – always going 10,000% hard no matter the occasion, even when depicting paperwork. That dynamic attention to detail makes this a formidable contender for one of the most visually impressive comedies in decades; it’s just also one of the goofiest. Instead of trying to conjure realistic-looking CG monsters (which was never a concern in the genre’s early rubber-suit days anyway), Shin Ultraman’s kaiju creatures lean into the uncanny end of the medium. That means it will be taken less seriously than aggressively dour competitors like Gareth Edwards’s American Godzilla film from 2014, but also means it’s a lot more fun to watch. If it resembles any big-name kaiju movie from the past couple decades, it’s the goofball free-for-all Big Man Japan, which is at least a comparison that does it a lot of favors.
Story-wise, Shin Ultraman returns its titular space alien superhero to his children’s TV roots, pitting him against a series of skyscraper monsters in a consistent episodic rhythm. Ultraman walks among us in a barely concealed Clark Kent disguise, powering up to kaiju scale whenever another post-Godzilla CG monster emerges to tear up Japanese cities & countryside. His Earth-saving superheroics are even scored by a tin-canny mix of 60s throwback stock music presumably lifted from the original Ultraman series. It’s a familiar formula for anyone old enough to remember a pre-MCU media landscape, but in the 2020s its vintage earnestness feels remarkably refreshing. Ultraman is genuinely fascinated with the go-getter exuberance of the human spirit—especially when threatened by impossible odds—and, by extension, so is the film. The hook of seeing Shin Ultraman big & loud at the theater is in the promise of weird-looking CG monsters doing battle over miniature cities while shooting laser beams out of their eyes, hands, and mouths. Once your butt is in the seat, though, the real show is in its celebration of humanity’s adorable perseverance & naivete. It can’t help but feel a little frivolous in comparison to the political cynicism of Shin Godzilla, then, but that unashamed frivolity is incredibly endearing.
Maybe I’m making Shin Ultraman sound like disposable kids’ fluff here, and in some ways maybe it is. Its plot machinations surrounding intergalactic superweapons that can transform human beings into kaiju-scale war drones and Ultraman’s superheroic sacrifice in merging his alien DNA with a human’s are all old-hat comic book nonsense. I’d much rather watch earnest nonsense like this than its ironic callbacks in post-modern works like Big Man Japan & Psycho Goreman, though, which borrow from the pop art beauty of its vintage kitsch but are too embarrassed to be mistaken for the genuine thing. There’s plenty “adult” material lurking under this film’s Saturday Morning Cartoon surface too – from the governmental bureaucracy satire to the CG psychedelia to the momentary indulgences in sexual fetishism (including some especially shameless pandering to the giantess community). They’re just not the main draw. Shin Ultraman is a delight precisely because of its childlike exuberance, which is just as fitting to its titular alien hero’s television origins as Shin Godzilla’s political cynicism is to the original Gojira.
I never engaged much with the Harry Potter movies as they rolled out throughout the aughts, but from what I remember glimpsing in Dear Reader, Wizard People, Daniel Radcliffe was not an especially talented child actor. I couldn’t hear Radcliffe’s pipsqueak line-readings over the drunken growls of Brad Neely’s alternate narration track, but I distinctly remember him having a dazed, deer-in-headlights look in Wizard People that suggested even he didn’t know why he was helming the blockbuster franchise. It’s incredible, then, that Radcliffe was able to turn that early windfall into what’s now a decades-running acting career instead of just a passive, eternal source of royalty checks. What’s even more incredible is just how weird he’s committed to making that career. Radcliffe continually chooses projects where he gets to play absolute freaks: Dr. Frankenstein’s groveling hunchback lab assistant (and possible boyfriend), a computer nerd with guns surgically bolted to his hands, a farting corpse with a magical boner, any role he can land to distance himself from his association with Harry Potter – efforts I am cruelly undermining here. Much like the kids who headlined the Twilight series, Radcliffe has put his blockbuster blood money to great use in the years since he broke free. Only, while RPat & KStew are chasing high-brow critical prestige, Radcliffe is out there determined to be seen as the biggest weirdo to grace the screen since Nic Cage screeched about the bees. It’s been a truly magical transformation.
Radcliffe’s determination to let his freak flag fly recently reached its highest fever pitch in the Funny or Die sketch turned Roku Channel Original Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. Weird is a mock biopic that sensationalizes the notoriously squeaky-clean polka musician Weird Al’s life to match the more traditional rock ‘n roll hedonism of his MTV-era colleagues, complete with Dr. Demento scouting talent at the local biker bar and Al’s father forbidding him to play “the devil’s squeezebox.” It’s a single-joke premise that might feel a little redundant for anyone who’s already seen similar music industry parodies like Walk Hard & Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, but its single joke is still—importantly—very funny. Weird is the kind of comedy nerd’s comedy where every character introduction has you muttering “Oh, that’s good casting” under your breath. It’s Radcliffe’s casting that really makes the film special, though. As much as the purpose of Weird is to contextualize Al Yankovic as an essential American pop culture icon—alongside fellow greats like Madonna, Elvira, Pee-wee, and Divine—it also completes the mission of contextualizing Daniel Radcliffe as a true weirdo himself (although a Brit). Radcliffe commits to the bit with full fervor, playing the raw, scuzzy, self-destructive sexuality of Weird Al as if he were starring in an Iggy Pop biopic instead, strengthening the over-the-top absurdism of the film’s only joke by playing it with a straight face unseen in the genre since Leslie Nielsen passed. Radcliffe has played much weirder characters than Al in the past—the titular Swiss Army Man chief among them—but I’m not sure he’s ever done so more convincingly.
Things weren’t always this way. A decade before The Al Yankovic Story, Radcliffe’s career appeared to be taking a much more pedestrian leading-man path, starting with the 2012 adaptation of The Woman in Black. A comeback production for the legendary Gothic horror studio Hammer, The Woman in Black is super scary, both as a traditional ghost story and as a worst-case-scenario vision of Radcliffe’s potential career as a bland leading man instead of an eccentric weirdo millionaire. Both Hammer and Radcliffe had a lot to prove in the otherwise low-stakes, low-profile production, and only Hammer scored high in that gamble. In its story of a vengeful ghost who targets rural village children, Hammer was able to prove they were ready to produce well-balanced, traditionalist ghost stories again – offering a mix of shameless jump scares and long stretches of atmospheric quiet where all of the spookery lingers in backgrounds, mirrors, and mist. It’s not an especially shocking nor inventive horror film, but it is an efficient & effective one, where every adaptive choice helps amplify its eerie scares . . . except for Radcliffe’s casting as the lead. Much like in the early Harry Potter films, Radcliffe is just kinda there. He’d be easily replaceable as the film’s lead if it weren’t for his box-office draw as a recognizable name on the poster, which would only lead to diminishing returns if his career continued down that path (especially as the Harry Potter franchise sunk further into the toxic muck of TERFdom). The Woman in Black was marketed as Radcliffe’s debut as a serious adult actor, a legitimate talent with real staying power beyond the franchise that made him famous as a tyke. Instead, he comes across as just some guy, totally replaceable by any number of BBC repertory players.
The curious thing here is that The Woman in Black is a much better movie than Weird; it’s just not a better Daniel Radcliffe Movie. I would much rather live in a world where Radcliffe is a walking, talking Nic Cagian meme than one where he’s a competent but unnoticeable leading man. Looking back at the ten years between The Woman in Black and Weird, it appears that Radcliffe also wants to live in that world. He’s a genuine weirdo, and I think that’s beautiful.
Spending the holidays with family was a healthy shake-up for me after a couple years of COVID-related isolation, which only compounded my usual, longstanding reluctance to travel to rural & suburban Louisiana. Getting outside the city meant getting outside my bubble, and I talked to a few distant loved ones about movies without being able to cite relatively popular artists like Bergman, Lynch, and Cronenberg as household names. Meanwhile, actual household name Steven Spielberg’s magic-of-the-movies memoir The Fabelmans was being categorized as elitist snobbery for Julliard graduates on Twitter, and every movie without a blue space alien in it was drowning at the box office. And if you count cameos, at least one movie with a blue space alien was drowning too. Damien Chazelle’s Babylon sank while James Cameron’s Avatar sequel soared, and it was impossible not to fret over the two films’ disparate levels of success, since the madman Chazelle dared to include a few frames of Cameron’s Na’vi creatures in his film’s climactic Movies-Through-The-Years montage. The financial failure of Chazelle’s star-studded movie industry drama sounds surprising in the abstract, but after a few days of talking about movies with people who don’t often Talk About Movies it makes total sense to me. Caring about the craft & history of cinema as an artform is a niche interest, even when the cinema itself is populist media. The thing is that Babylon is explicitly about that exact disconnect: the horrifying gap between how much general audiences love to be entertained by The Movies and how indifferent those audiences are to the lives & wellbeing of the people who make them.
The obvious reasons for Babylon‘s financial failure extend far beyond expectations that general audiences would share its nerdy academic interest in the century-old history of pre-Code Hollywood moviemaking. If anything, Chazelle’s $80mil flop is most impressive in how eager it is to alienate its audience, regardless of its movie-nerd subject matter. It’s a three-hour, coke-fueled montage on double-speed that not only indicts the unwashed masses for our indifference to the artistry behind our favorite movies but also assaults our eyes with every fluid the human body can produce. Piss, shit, tears, blood, puke, and cum all dutifully grace the screen in their own time, with the piss & shit ticked off the checklist early on to help set the tone. Modern-day movie stars Brad Pitt & Margot Robbie suffer the same rough transition from silents to talkies that has been mythologized as the downfall of Early Hollywood since as far back as 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain. Only, their backstage debauchery between productions is cranked to a year-round Mardi Gras bacchanal never before depicted with so much onscreen hedonistic excess. It’s enough to make you want to puke yourself, if not only from the carsick momentum of the film’s manic pacing, which rarely slows down from its intercutting dialogue barrages to stage a genuine scene of real-time drama.
Because its characters are more symbolic than dramatic (directly recalling past industry castoffs like Clara Bow, Louis Armstrong, and Anna Mae Wong), Babylon is often more interesting for what it’s trying to say on a big-picture scale than it is for its scene-to-scene drama. I was particularly struck by the way its repetition of Singin’ in the Rain‘s talkies-downfall plot is directly acknowledged in the text, with Babylon consciously positioning itself as yet another example of Hollywood’s cyclical, self-cannibalizing nature. When most movies cite the magic of cinema being greater and more enduring than the people who make it, it’s coming from a place of awe & respect for the artform. Here, Chazelle projects pure disgust & horror. In its mission-statement climax, our low-level-fixer-turned-high-level producer POV character Manny (Diego Calva) watches caricatures of his dead friends & colleagues mocked as comic archetypes at a screening of Singin’ in the Rain, then slips into a subliminal montage of the next 100 years of Hollywood-spectacle filmmaking, with each successive title—Un Chien Andelou, The Wizard of Oz, 2001, Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, Avatar, etc.—building on and borrowing from the past for its own in-the-moment splendor until there’s no splendor left to go around. Chazelle even shamelessly participates in this ritual himself, as Babylon can easily be passed off a cruder, shallower Hail, Caesar! crammed into a Boogie Nights-shaped box. It’s an ungenerous reading of how cinema perpetually “borrows” from itself in a way that feels like homage but rarely acknowledges or takes care of the real-life people who built its founding texts. And when Manny snaps out of it to gawk at the uncaring, unknowledgeable audience cackling at ghosts of his loved ones, the tragedy of his cruelly perpetual industry hits way harder than any of the character deaths that sparked his melancholy in the first place.
I was most impressed with Babylon in its scale and in its eagerness to alienate casual moviegoing audiences. It likely would have been better received if it were a 10-hour miniseries that allowed each of its overlapping character arcs to breathe (especially since it already intercuts their stories like a long-running soap opera anyway), but its manic tempo is exactly what makes it special among the million other movies about The Movies, so it was probably better off flopping than capitulating. I also love that Chazelle projects such a sour view of moviemaking as an artform, a compulsory practice he immediately likens to dragging a diarrheal elephant uphill. The only reason I don’t fully love this movie is I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve already seen it all before (even if at half-time pace), but that kind of complaint only plays into exactly what Chazelle is trying to say about Hollywood’s cyclical history here. Even his climactic montage’s assertion that cinema has already reached its end—a death knell also sounded by the hundreds of click-bait articles that auto-populate every time a major production like Babylon flops—feels like a self-cannibalizing repetition of Hollywood lore. How many times has cinema already “died”? Did it die when the talkies ended the silent era, when television became affordable, when television went prestige, when normies began to stream? Every generation thinks they’re going to be the last, and although one day they’ll be proven right, the cinemapocalypse has yet to fully come to fruition. In the meantime, artists can only watch in horror as their work and their peers are absorbed, digested, and regurgitated by subsequent art movements they do not understand, with no wide audience recognition for how they contributed to that greater continuum. Even the populist Spielbergs of the industry become historical, esoteric references in the long run, and there will come a time when Chazelle’s own name is synonymous with The Russo Brothers, Kevin Feige, and Michael Bay as dusty antiques only of interest to high-brow academics.
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli welcome in the New Year by discussing one of 2022’s underseen gems: Neptune Frost, an Afrofuturist musical about the poetry of hacking.
00:00 Welcome
07:57 Babylon (2022) 14:08 The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) 15:33 Psycho Beach Party (2000) 18:00 The Coen Brothers 32:00 Funny Girl (1968) 34:03 Moonstruck (1987) 38:08 Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022) 45:22 Glass Onion (2022) 49:49 Crimes of the Future (2022) 56:14 Mad God (2022)
Swampflix 