comedy

The Art of the Pre-Show

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Like many New Orleanians, I spent Ash Wednesday hung over at church. For most people, that would mean getting your forehead smeared with ashes at St. Louis Cathedral (often while still wearing tattered remnants of a Mardi Gras costume), but for me it meant taking off work to cool down at The Movies. I made a rare trip out to the AMC Palaces of the suburbs for a discordant double feature of Scarlet & Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, easing a mild headache by enjoying junk food & soda in the dark. It was a restorative experience, as always, but it was also a reminder of how much more pleasant & casual of a ritual it is to visit independent theaters like The Prytania & The Broad closer to home. In particular, the AMC pre-show is especially uncomfortable & draining if you’re not used to visiting that chain on a regular basis and forget that it’s custom to deliberately show up late. Before the trailers begin, you’re bombarded with advertisements hosted by Maria Menounos, who only occasionally pops in to reframe the experience as a trivia game instead of a bigger, louder TV ad break. Then, at the announced start time, the actual previews begin, and they’re also bookended with TV-style advertisements for products like Coca-Cola, M&Ms, and luxury cars. That thirty-minute(!) trailer package then concludes with additional advertisements for AMC itself (an experience you’ve already purchased and are seated for), including the infamous Nicole Kidman “We come to this place for magic” commercial which has now been chopped up and streamlined to the point of total incoherence. The entire experience is exhausting and, seemingly, designed to be avoided rather than engaged with. I can’t believe I did it twice in one day. It’s possible my hangover wasn’t even a result of the previous day’s partying; it was at least partly an AMC A-List branded headache.

I had completely forgotten about my Ash Wednesday pre-show woes until my next discordant double feature experience a few weeks later, when I caught two classic movies at two independent theaters in New Orleans proper. I spent a recent Sunday morning watching Sidney Lumet’s 1976 classic Network in The Prytania’s Classic Movies series, then hopped over to Zeitgeist in Arabi for an afternoon screening of Harold Lloyd’s 1923 career-maker Safety Last!, presented with live piano accompaniment. Those two movies have very little to say about each other in their themes or methods, despite both being riotously funny comedies from the American studio system. If they share a common theme, it’s about rat-race Capitalism. Network posits itself as a vicious blow in the great war between cinema & television for mass media supremacy, then openly acknowledges that the distinction between the two mediums ultimately doesn’t matter because it’s all just corporate sludge anyway. The pursuit of profits in its fictional TV broadcast newsrooms quickly leads to manic, lethal decision making that gets people killed — live, on-air, for ratings. For its part, Safety Last! asks “Why climb the corporate ladder when you can just climb the corporation itself?” In an effort to earn enough money to marry his small-town sweetheart, Harold Lloyd climbs the department store that employs him as a sales clerk to drum up publicity for sales, nearly killing himself in the process — for our delight & entertainment. You know what, maybe they aren’t so different after all. They’re both New York City stories about violent publicity stunts, and both of their most iconic moments (Network‘s “I’m mad as Hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” monologue and Safety Lasts!‘s death-defying climb up the side of a skyscraper) are decorated with ticking clocks. Not for nothing, they’re also two widely revered classics, so I have less to report about how great they are than I do about how they were presented.

Most of the Prytania Classic Movies I’ve attended recently have been preceded by a classic cartoon. There are no trailers or TV commercials in the pre-roll, just a brief in-person intro from the series’ programmer, followed by classic shorts of Popeye & Bugs Bunny doing bits. It’s wonderful, as it’s just about as close as you’ll ever get to experiencing the pre-show packages of Old Hollywood. Their presentation of Network indulged a slight deviation from the usual format, as they substituted the Looney Tunes short for a different kind of old-system pre-show: the newsreel. Network was preceded by an old MGM short titled “Beautiful Banff and Lake Louise,” produced for the studio’s TravelTalks travelogue series. There’s no apparent reason why that exact TravelTalks short was chosen out of the hundreds that MGM produced from the 1930s through the 1950s, as it transports the viewers in the theater to the Canadian Rockies, thousands of miles away from Network‘s NYC skyscrapers. However, it did serve as sharp contrast against the more contemporary version of news coverage that Network depicts, as well as the more contemporary movie-studio culture that got Network greenlit. The inciting incident of Network is the firing of an alcoholic TV news anchor (Peter Finch), who quickly becomes famous by threatening to kill himself on air and declaring that all TV news is “bullshit.” You won’t find a more exemplary example of vintage news-reporting bullshit than TravelTalks, which is functionally an advertisement for distant vacation resorts while pretending to offer the public documentary footage of Nature. It’s especially jarring to hear the short’s narrator boast about the gorgeous Canadian vistas which had been unseen by “the white race” until recent years, previously guarded from intruders by indigenous “Indian” combatants but now available to serve as a postcard backdrop for your next hotel stay. As a piece of filmmaking, it’s as boring and artless as the AMC pre-show commercials of today, but it was also a useful snapshot of the world Network later attempted to shake up with its more cynical, radical politics.

Zeitgeist’s pre-show selection for Safety Last! was more of a no-brainer. To warm the audience up for Lloyd’s building-scaling antics, in-house pianist David Bradley also live-scored a previous short from the same Criterion disc titled “His Royal Slyness.” Instead of being set in modern NYC, “His Royal Slyness” takes place in the fictional European kingdom of Thermosa, where Lloyd’s vaudevillian antics upset the propriety of a royal court. Much like in Safety Last!, Lloyd woos his love interest by pretending to be above his station — in this case a noble prince instead of a department store bigwig. Antics ensue, but notably it’s the same kind of antics that followed in the feature presentation. Both films depict Lloyd mindlessly plucking at the accoutrement of a fellow bystander when nervous (flower petals in Safety Last!, war metals in “His Royal Slyness”), covering the heads of nuisances he doesn’t want to deal with (with a fabric sample in Safety Last! and a king’s robe in “His Royal Slyness”), and evading the capture of authorities through increasingly elaborate schemes (vengeful cops in Safety Last!, insurrectionist mobs in “His Royal Slyness”). In a better world where movie theaters didn’t have to constantly squeeze more pennies out of every aspect of the moviegoing experience just to keep the lights on, this would be the perfect formula for a pre-show package: a feature-relevant short film that expands the context of the main presentation for audiences who made it to their seats on time but still helpfully delays the show by a few minutes for anyone who happens to be running late. I only mention the running late bit because I caught a passing train and a raised bridge on my drive out to Arabi that afternoon, and it eased my mind knowing that even if I missed the start time, the listed pre-show short would ensure I wouldn’t miss a minute of Safety Last!.

Safety Last! is over a century old now, Network has been around for half that time, and both still kill with modern audiences. Even if you’re already familiar with their most iconic moments—the “Mad as hell!” speech and the clock hanging, respectively—the rest of the runtime around those moments still hits with full, fresh impact. Network was infinitely more heightened & insane that I imagined it would be, since the crazed-news-anchor-holds-a-TV-station-hostage premise I was familiar with only accounts for the first act, and things get exponentially out of control from there, presenting a major-studio escalation of Putney Swope. Safety Last! also has a strikingly modern anti-cop sentiment in its own heightened politics, with the hapless hero of the piece only put in danger because his best bud is being chased by a pig who can’t take a joke. Even without a live piano punctuating the room’s constant laughs & gasps, it would still be an electric communal experience. Some small part of that communality, I think, is attributable to the pre-show. Instead of being held hostage by a corporate ad package that buried us in our seats under a mountain of Coca-Cola slogans, we were all acclimating to the same wavelength with pre-feature mood-setters. Even the pre-show advertisements for concessions were more pleasant at the neighborhood spots, with The Prytania rolling its usual “Let’s all go to the lobby!” jingle and Zeitgeist pausing briefly for a snack-purchasing intermission between short & feature because that just happened to be the mood of the room. The pre-show is ultimately a small, trivial aspect of the movie-going experience, but I wouldn’t say it’s totally inconsequential. It can greatly affect the mood of the room, mostly by signaling the levels of hostility or solidarity theaters hold for their audience.

-Brandon Ledet

I’m A Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006)

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We love Park Chan-Wook around here. We recently discussed Oldboy on the Lagniappe Podcast (and Stoker years before), there was strong support for No Other Choice around here last year (it ended up in the number eight spot for our collective top ten of 2025), and I was personally very fond of both Decision to Leave and Lady Vengeance. It seemed to me that his thrillers generally have more cultural penetration in the west than his comedies, and I was finally able to track down a copy of I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK, his 2006 romcom via my library. Alas, it is with a heavy heart that I report that I didn’t care for it. 

Young-goon (Im Soo-Jung) is a young woman working in a factory building transistor radios, when one day the instructions on the overhead loudspeaker tell her to slash open her wrist and insert connecting cords under her skin. Following what is presumed to be a suicide attempt, Young-goon’s mother admits to the psychiatric facility’s doctors that her own mother (Young-goon’s grandmother) had been admitted to a sanatorium in later years, after decades of her own delusions, including that she was actually a mouse. Before leaving Young-goon at the hospital, her mother advises her not to admit to anyone that she believes that she is a cyborg. On her first day, the seemingly catatonic Young-goon is observed by Il-soon (Rain, credited here as Jung Ji-hoon rather than under his stage name), a boy who is serving time after being diagnosed as an anti-social kleptomaniac, as Young-goon climbs out of bed after everyone else is asleep and puts in her grandmother’s dentures, seemingly in order to commune with the various machines around the facility. 

Il-soon’s supposed thievery around the hospital seems to revolve around other patients’ delusions that he is stealing some part of their essence, and he goes along with these ideas by pretending to “transfer” various neuroses between them. These stolen possessions are as ephemeral as one patient’s ability to play ping-pong or another’s neurotic “courtly behavior” of only walking backward. Within her own psychologically unwell self-storytelling, Young-goon believes that she must overcome the seven deadly sins for cyborgs, which include expressing gratitude, daydreaming, and having sympathy. She asks Il-soon to steal this from her, and he’s romantically fascinated enough with her that he attempts to work within the schema of her madness to try and nurse her back to health. Namely, Young-goon has been allowing another patient to eat all of her food because she believes that she gets all the energy that she needs from holding batteries, but knows that if she’s noticed not taking food during meal times, she’ll be forcefed, and if she stops eating altogether, she’s in for shock treatment. 

This movie comes at an important inflection point in Park’s filmography, coming right on the heels of his “Vengeance Trilogy” and before he experimented with more standard horror forms (2009’s vampire horror Thirst) and working in English (directing the aforementioned Stoker and producing Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer, both in 2013). Bracketing Cyborg on both sides are films that Park wrote but did not direct: Boy Goes to Heaven, a fantasy romcom, in 2005, and 2008’s Cush and Blush, which is a more straightforward comedy but with clear romance elements. The Vengeance Trilogy is a set of dark, miserable films, and if I spent years of my life making them I would want to lighten up a little bit with my creative output for a while too, if for no other reason than to get the taste out of my mouth. Unfortunately, I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK doesn’t work much as a romance (the tagline “She’s crazy; he’s crazy about her” is as accurate as it is awful) and the comedic elements mostly fail to land as well, since so much of it is dependent upon the viewer laughing at people with sufficiently severe mental illnesses to warrant medical intervention. 

One of the patients is a consummate liar, a pathological “mythomaniac,” whose constructed narratives are there to replace the memories that she’s lost as a result of application of ECT “therapy.” Another patient lives an entire life within a compact mirror in which she imagines herself as one of the von Trapp children, while the same overweight patient who eats all of Young-goon’s food believes that she is capable of flight by rubbing together two socks of her own creation that repel her from the ground via static electricity (the script is much meaner about her weight than it is about her madness). All of this becomes important because Il-soon is able to weave together all of their counter-factual beliefs into a series of stories that, theoretically, will draw Young-goon out of her own delirium. This doesn’t work, although it does reach a decent ending when Il-soon refashions his sole beloved possession into a “device” that will allow Young-goon’s cyborg form to allow her to convert food into energy instead, including a cute scene in which he pretends to put the mechanism into her back. Despite feeling like the natural conclusion to the story, the film goes on for another fifteen minutes of nonsense that doesn’t make the whole any more complete or enjoyable. 

As a fan of this director, I reached what felt like the halfway point of the film’s total runtime and was ready for it to deliver a big midpoint twist that would make everything prior to this point fall into place, but this was not to be the case. The two of them don’t escape from the psych hospital and find that their reality is as malleable as they believe it to be, nor is it revealed that all of these seemingly goofy hijinx surrounding our characters is reflective of a darker objective reality outside of either of their perceptions. There is a moment where it seems like the movie is going to really break out of the box and go in an interesting direction, as Young-goon’s “battery” reaches its full charge and she starts laying down automatic weapons fire out of every fingertip, massacring the staff of the place (whom she associates with the sanatorium employees to whom her grandmother was remanded). This proves to be another fantasy sequence, however, as Young-goon then faints from starvation and the forced feeding begins in earnest. 

It’s only in these fantasy fugues that Park really shows off his distinct style. So much of the film is shot in the sterile confines of the asylum that the breaks from reality feel like a breath of fresh air. The girl with the Sound of Music obsession who is only ever seen with her back to the camera and observing the world through her reflection allows for some impressive transitional trickery as it zooms in and out of her mirror, which is fun. Overall, however, this misses the mark for me, and it isn’t one that I would recommend. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: A Mighty Wind (2003)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Christopher Guest’s folk-music mockumentary A Mighty Wind (2003).

00:00 Welcome
03:21 “Wuthering Heights” (2026)
09:42 Flowers in the Attic (1987)
18:42 Casablanca (1942)
24:05 Scarlet (2026)
28:00 I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006)
33:43 Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026)
39:50 Swallow (2019)
48:06 Possessor (2020)
56:16 Barb and Star Go to Vista Go to Vista del Mar (2021)

1:02:35 A Mighty Wind (2003)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026)

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Usually, when cult sitcoms get a “The Movie” treatment I’m already a fan of the show. By the time televised series like The Simpsons, Beavis & Butt-Head, Strangers with Candy, Trailer Park Boys, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and Reno 911! mutated into their “The Movie” forms for the big screen, I was already multiple seasons deep into their respective runs, pre-amused with each character’s respective faults & follies. It’s always been frustrating, then, that part of getting a “The Movie” version of a TV show has meant having to dial the clock back to the very beginning, re-explaining the series’ basic premise to a wider audience who might not already be in the know. So, it was kinda nice to finally watch one where I actually did need that labored reintroduction, instead of being impatient to get past it. It also helps that this particular Sitcom: The Movie adaptation makes the act of dialing the clock back to its origin point a major aspect of its plot, instead of pretending that the intervening seasons didn’t happen so latecomers like me don’t feel left behind.

Nirvanna the Band the Show started as a web series in the mid-aughts, later graduated to a cable-broadcast sitcom, and has since been pulled from distribution so that there’s currently no legal way to catch up on it if you’re not already a savvy fan. You don’t need to have seen Nirvanna the Band the Show to appreciate Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, though, since it is so deliberately recursive in its themes & plotting that it functions as both an escalation and a recap. The film opens with series co-creator Matt Johnson rushing down the stairs of his Toronto apartment to manically accost his in-universe roommate (and show co-creator) Jay McCarrol with an elaborate scheme on how to book their band a gig at local music club The Rivoli. You quickly get the sense that the plan to get the gig is more thought out than the gig itself, since their copyright-skirting rock group Nirvana The Band doesn’t seem to have any completed original songs beyond some opening stage choreography. It’s also quickly assumable that each episode of the show is another failed plan to book a show at The Rivoli in particular, which after nearly a decade of elaborate coups they likely could’ve accomplished by rehearsing instead of scheming. So, the movie itself functions as a two-parter episode of the original show, escalated in scope to match the grander scale of its canvas — a classic TV-to-big-screen adaptation formula.

In the first half of this escalated two-parter, Matt & Jay illegally skydive off the observation deck of the CN Tower (Toronto’s version of Seattle’s Space Needle) in a botched attempt to promote their hypothetical Rivoli gig on the baseball field below. In the second episode, they improbably travel back in time to 2008 via a magical RV camper (powered by a long-discontinued soda called Orbitz) to re-manipulate their earliest attempts to book The Rivoli from a new vantage point. Matt keeps pushing the plans to further, more ridiculous extremes while Jay keeps trying to find a safe exit to this vicious cycle, only to be pulled back in by the magnetic allure of lifelong friendship with his favorite tragic idiot. There are three major stunts that make this particular double-episode feel worthy of its “The Movie” designation: its non-permitted stolen footage pranks at the top of the CN Tower, its seamless reintegration of aughts-era footage with the modern-aged Matt & Jay, and the constant copyright-skirting references to Back to the Futures I & II (continuing the show’s legally iffy association with the actual band Nirvana). Otherwise, it’s the story of two small, pathetic people reliving the same ruts & routines they’ve always been stuck in, which is exactly what you want out of a long-running sitcom.

Obviously, the other thing you want out of a long-running sitcom is for the joke to still be funny, which is a bar Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie clears effortlessly. One of its funniest sources of humor is in taking stock of how much pop culture has changed since the show started, with the clearest indicators that our two pet bozos have returned to 2008 being a wide cultural acceptance of pop icons who are now social pariahs: Bill Cosby, Jared Fogle, the playfully homophobic bros of The Hangover series, and so on. It’s a running gag that plays on the fact that culture has progressed more than we think in the past couple decades, even if Matt & Jay personally haven’t. The only thing the passage of time has done for their own internal dynamic is added a layer of sweetness to their routine buffoonery. When they revisit their earliest domestic scenes together as middle-aged men who are still go-nowhere slacker roommates, it plays like a bickering married couple who rediscover their love for one another by recreating their first date. Only, being stuck in their ways is part of what makes their friendship so hilariously tense in the first place, so their relationship is ultimately more co-dependent and mutually destructive than it is healthy or cute. It’s important that they don’t grow as people so their dynamic can stay as funny as possible, which is something that modern post-Good Place sitcoms tend to forget. I hope to watch them not learn or grow in past episodes once the show is back in full public view.

-Brandon Ledet

Bean (1997)

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Cinema is a democratizing artform. While the average family might not be able to afford a trip to see an opera or a ballet in-person, anyone with a library card can get a taste of those highbrow artforms by borrowing Powell & Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann from the library for free. Moviegoers regularly get exposed to great works of literature, far-off gorgeous vistas, and heady academic pursuits just by keeping our eyes on the screen, distracted from the financial inequalities that separate us from enjoying those experiences in real life. For instance, as a small child growing up in Chalmette, Louisiana, there was no chance I was ever going to travel to Paris to see the iconic American painting Whistler’s Mother in person, but thanks to the British culture-clash comedy Bean, I was educated on the piece’s historical importance anyway. Thanks to Bean, I was also exposed at an early age to the refined tastes of dry British wit, as embodied by the titular rubber-faced goon, Mr. Bean.

The basic premise of Bean hinges on Americans’ assumption that because Mr. Bean is British, he is therefore an erudite sophisticate. In reality, he is a working-class dolt who can barely keep his job as an art museum security guard, which mostly entails sitting quietly in a chair. Bean is such a disastrous embarrassment that his employer ships him off to America as the unlikely shepherd for the aforementioned James McNeill Whistler painting, risking major lawsuits & profit loss just to be rid of him for a while. It takes a few days for the Los Angeles clout chasers who are purchasing that famous painting to catch on that Mr. Bean is not the art-history expert Dr. Bean they made up in their heads when they heard he works for a British art museum. By then, he has already destroyed the multi-million-dollar painting through a series of escalating slapstick pratfalls, threatening to take down the life & reputation of an American museum curator with him (played Ghostbusters II‘s Peter MacNicol). And so, Whistler’s Mother was never the same again, in the film or out.

Rowan Atkinson is hilarious as Mr. Bean. That’s just a fact. It’s easy to brush off his style of humor as a haphazard collection of silly face contortions, but I believe there’s a genuine, traditional elegance to his sub-verbal shenanigans. He brought some classic Charlie Chaplin & Harpo Marx silent-comedy clowning to the 1990s video market, whereas American equivalents like Jim Carrey & Robin Williams were more focused on shouting t-shirt worthy catchphrases. When we first meet Bean in the opening scene, he breaks his ceramic mug while running late to work, so he resolves to mix his entire instant coffee concoction in his mouth to not waste time: coffee powder, sugar, cream, and boiling water straight from the kettle — swished around like mouthwash before painfully swallowed. While traveling by plane to America, he manages to explode a barf bag all over his fellow first-class clientele. The movie’s most infamous gag involves losing his wristwatch while stuffing a turkey. When he looks inside to find it, he ends up wearing the entire bird on his head, suffocating to death while stumbling around like a buffoon. Every room he enters is a potential disaster zone. Characters beg him to understand that, “If you do nothing, nothing can go wrong,” but he persists in fucking up everything he touches anyway. Children everywhere love him for it, as do the smartest of adults.

I was only being partially sarcastic in that opening paragraph. Bean really was my first exposure to Whistler’s Mother as a 10-year-old Chalmatian, and most of the movie’s plot revolves around showing that painting respect as one of the most important works of American art, positioning it as the nation’s Mona Lisa. Of course, the comedy’s art museum setting is mostly an excuse to shoehorn Mr. Bean into a quiet, stuffy atmosphere where his goofball theatrics can do the most damage, but it made an impression on me at that age nonetheless. Its jokes about the crass commercialization of fine art in the wide range of Whistler’s Mother merch designed for the LA museum’s gift shops is the kind of low-level satire that kids can feel smart for catching onto. It’s mixed with for-their-own-sake gags like Mr. Bean ironing his tighty-whiteys—which are funny to kids for reasons unknown—but the satire’s there all the same. One slapstick gag involves Bean getting smacked in the head by giant Alexander Calder mobile in the museum’s driveway, which is the perfect meeting point between its high-culture setting and its dumb-as-rocks humor. We’re always going to make idiotic slapstick comedies for kids as long as we’re making movies at all, so we might as well smack the little tikes over the head with some great works of art while we’re at it. It’s a public service, an investment in our future.

-Brandon Ledet

No Other Choice (2025)

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“No other choice,” the new, American corporate overlords of Solar Paper say to Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) when he attempts to confront them about their mass lay-offs at the company where he has worked for decades. “No other choice,” Goo Beom-mo (Lee Sung-min) says to his wife when she asks why he can’t get a job in another industry; “Paper has fed me for 25 years, honey. It’s how I’m meant to be.” “No other choice,” say Man Su’s interviewers at Moon Paper as they describe their company’s movement to more automation and the removal of all human labor from their process. “No other choice,” Man Su murmurs to himself over and over again, taking the mantra-repeating practice taught in his lay-off exit group counseling session and applying it not to positive affirmations but to reassurances that his increasingly violent actions are justifiable. It’s the refrain of the past as it overshadows the present, a soundbite of self-flagellation about the impossibility of changing the future while actively creating that future in the same moment. 

If you’ve seen the trailers for No Other Choice, then you probably think you know what the film will be about, and to an extent, you’re going to get some of what you’re expecting. That’s the Park Chan-Wook special! I’ve still never seen Oldboy, the film he’s probably best known for, but I have seen (and loved) The Handmaiden, Lady Vengeance, Decision to Leave, and Stoker, and No Other Choice can now be added to that list of Park’s great achievements. If you’ve seen any of those films, you’ll also likely remember that they all feature a major upheaval right around the middle of the runtime to the expectations regarding all the ways that the plot could branch and pivot, based on what you’ve become accustomed to from other films in the same genre. No Other Choice presents itself as a film about a man who loses his job and, desperate to cling to the status and lifestyle that his former position offered, turns to murderous ends to eliminate his competitors for a position with a paper company that has “cracked the Japanese market.” That’s true, but in classic Park style, the director manages to take unexpected but plausible turns, with that mid-film sharp turn taking things in entirely unexpected directions. 

In narratives of this type, the protagonist’s family is often left on the margins of the story, treated as merely branches upon which some extensions of the male lead’s drama can hang. Most often, the wife leaves, taking the kids with her, if there are any. Sometimes, she leaves with blackmail material so that her husband must keep his distance. Other films that have a superficially happy ending, as this one does, see the family shunted to the side until the final moments reunite them before the credits roll. Man Su, his wife, stepson, and daughter are all once again ensconced in their home again at the end of the film, but the victory feels temporary. For one, Man Su’s wife Miri (Son Ye-Jin) doesn’t know the width and breadth of her husband’s activities, but she knows enough to know that he’s killed, and she not only keeps this secret, but also lies to her son about her husband’s nocturnal adventures to cover for him, so as to prevent him from fearing Man Su. For the rest of her life (or at least the rest of her marriage), she will be forced to maintain a facade of normalcy while compartmentalizing her deception of her son and of her husband, from whom she keeps the knowledge that she had seen one of the bodies he buried. Miri and Man Su have also kept the fact that their boy is not his son, acknowledging between themselves that they promised to tell him once he was old enough to shave, but they decide to maintain that lie as well. For Man Su, it’s also clear to the audience that although he may have wormed his way back into the world of paper manufacturing, this position is even less solid than the one he had before, and it’s likely only a matter of time before he’s laid off again, and then this whole violent cycle may begin anew. 

If I had to treat this review like a middle school book report and identify its theme, I would highlight that this film is about the fickle nature of independence. Man Su and Miri’s daughter is a nonverbal cello prodigy who refuses to play for the family, and even when the characters forego a lot of their costlier possessions—selling both of the family’s luxury cars and consolidating to a singular utilitarian sedan, giving their beloved dogs to Miri’s parents to care for, cancelling their tennis lessons and Netflix subscriptions, and even slowly selling off their furniture and electronics—the one thing that they ensure continues to be paid for are her cello lessons. When she reaches a point when her tutor is no longer able to teach her anything and refers the family to a music professor, the parents replay a conversation that they had earlier in which they talked about how the most important thing that they could do for their daughter would be to ensure that she is able to be independent, which they only see being possible if she becomes a musician. Their son also attempts to attain his own minor financial independence, in a poorly thought out cell phone reselling scheme that almost ends in tragedy, but offers Man Su the opportunity to show off his new, tough attitude in front of Miri when facing off against the owner of the shop, whose son is their son’s best friend and co-conspirator. 

Independence is good for one but not the other, and it’s unclear where Miri lies in all of this. Strangely, almost all of the wives of the four men in competition with one another are unemployed women of leisure; Miri’s life consists of ferrying her children about between their academic and extracurricular activities between tennis bouts, Beom-mo’s wife is an actress who can’t seem to get a part and has so much free time she still manages to carry on an affair in a house with a laid-off husband, second victim Ko Si-jo (Cha Seung-won)’s wife is unmentioned, and his final victim Choi Seon-chul (Park Hee-soon) is recently divorced and seems to still be supporting his ex. All of them are literally dependent, and what independence they do achieve undermines their respective husbands’ masculinity, through adultery, the perception of infidelity, or something completely different. Man Su’s suspicions about his wife are unfounded, with his overall hypocrisy highlighted by the fact that what he’s done is much, much worse than being unfaithful. Every man here tells himself that he has no other choice, and they’re all wrong, to their respective downfalls. 

This is a beautifully shot film, with fantastic and imaginative use of color. That’s never been something that Park has been afraid of, but it makes this combination of his uniquely unforgiving style and a (new to me) almost slapstick sense of comedy synthesize into something unique, and the almost Technicolor landscape makes it all the more special. The film is also full of seeming mundanities that might be metaphors for us to puzzle out over multiple viewings. A great deal is made out of Man Su’s tooth pain, as he has a molar that’s rotting away but he can’t do anything about it, until he finally pries the thing out in a primal rage in the film’s final half hour. There’s also time spent on the backstory of the house, that it was the house he grew up in and it stood on the edge of his father’s pig farm, but the farm went bust when a couple hundred pigs had to be put down due to a disease and were buried in a mass grave that still exists under part of the property. It’s grim stuff, and I’m looking forward to reading other critics’ analyses and interpretations in the coming months just as much as I’m looking forward to a rewatch. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025)

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“His flock has not only begun to shrink, but to calcify,” Bishop Langstron (Jeffrey Wright) warns young Reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) about his reassignment to serve under Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude in upstate New York. Jud has just faced a committee of three upper-level members of the church for punching a fellow priest in the face, and he recounts the story of his turn to Christ, one of redemption not achieved but ongoing. Jud was a boxer in his youth before he found salvation, and for large parts of the film, the driving conflict is between Jud’s willingness to sacrifice, his sincere desire to bring others closer to Christ, and his testament to Christ’s love, versus Wicks’s egotistical self-martyrdom, his drive to consolidate his power at the expense of eroding his flock’s faith, and his heretical performance of his own prejudices as if they were God’s words. If Glass Onion could be (rightly) criticized for being a little too on-the-nose with its depiction of an Elon Musk-like richer-than-sin weenie loser villain, Wake Up Dead Man instead goes for a less specific target with the same ostentation by taking on all of the sins of modern right wing nationalism that cloak their evil under a banner of faith, and those who put darkness for light. Like me, director Rian Johnson had a profoundly religious upbringing, and although we both have left the churches in which we were raised, this film demonstrates a deep and abiding admiration for and fondness of true believers who practice God’s love, and I both respect and was moved by the approach. Johnson may have, intentionally or unintentionally, created one of the best pieces of Christian propaganda since Chronicles of Narnia or “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and he did it showing the apotheosis of contemporary American Christian Nationalism tending to a church that was literally without Christ. 

When I was young, one of the oft-repeated sermons that I witnessed (through countless Thursday chapel sessions at the fundamentalist Christian school that I attended, Sunday School sermons, Children’s Church ministries, and Wednesday Youth Pastor recitations) was one about the Christ-shaped hole in everyone’s being. Sometimes the hole was in your soul, and sometimes it was in your heart; if it was in your latter, they would occasionally use a piece of wood cut into a heart, with a lower-case-t-shaped void in the middle, into which a conveniently sized cross could slot as a visual representation. (Presumably, the more ambiguous nature of the soul prevented it from being carved out of scrap wood for these performances). I get the feeling that Johnson likely sat through some of these same services, and he transposes that metaphor in this film to a literal void in the shape of a crucifix on the walls of Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude. We learn the reason for this in a story related by Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), who witnessed the destruction of the temple as a child; the monsignor’s grandfather Prentice was a widower with a daughter, Grace, when he became the shepherd of the town’s flock, and the daughter was a girl of “loose morals” who ended up a pregnant teen. Prentice promised her his fortune if she remained under his roof and didn’t embarrass him by going into the town, and she honored her end of the bargain until his dying day, watching as Prentice poisoned her own son against her and groomed him into becoming the next in a line of men who disguise their hatred behind their vestments. She found his bank accounts empty, and destroyed much of the church, supposedly out of rage, before dying while pounding on the outside of his “Lazarus tomb,” which can only be opened from the outside by construction equipment but which can be opened from within with only a light push. Ever since, Grace has been characterized as “The Harlot Whore,” and has become a key figure in Monsignor Jefferson’s fiery sermons.

It’s to this lost flock, not only shrinking but calcifying, that Jud arrives. That sounds like a coldly analytical way to describe it, but it’s with that same clinicality that Jud diagnoses the rot at the heart of Perpetual Fortitude, metaphorically calling it a cancer that must be cut out. This raises suspicions, of course, when Jefferson Wicks dies, seemingly impossibly. He entered a small cubby near the pulpit with no apparent exit, in full view of all witnesses, and collapsed before a knife was found in his back. Those in attendance that day other than Jud were a select few extremely devoted followers, who form our cast of suspects and witnesses. Martha was there, as was her husband Samson (Thomas Haden Church), the church groundskeeper who has found the strength to maintain his own sobriety because of his respect for the Monsignor’s own dubious overcoming of his addictions. Town doctor Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), whose wife recently left him for someone she met on a Phish message board and took the kids with him, is present, as is concert cellist Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), who is currently funneling all of her savings into Perpetual Fortitude in the hopes that the Monsignor will be able to cure her of her painful, disabling neuropathy. The town has also become home to Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), a former pulp sci-fi novelist of some (niche) renown whose pivot into libertarianism has made him an outcast in the elite literary circles he envies and left him with only a small but devoted fandom of survivalists who, in his words, “all look like John Goodman in The Big Lebowski.” Ross hopes to make his way back into polite society by publishing a book of Wicks’s sermons and his own accompanying essays and commentary, and as such is one of the Monsignor’s sycophants. Rounding out the group is Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), who is carrying on the family tradition of acting as the Wicks family’s lawyer, following in her father’s footsteps, as well as Cy (Daryl McCormack), the son her father forced her to adopt when she was still a student and the boy was already old enough to be in school. Cy has returned to Perpetual Fortitude, tail between his legs, after a failed attempt at breaking into politics. 

Most of the film’s political satire revolves around Cy. I mentioned before that the satire in this one is less about mocking a specific individual than about painting a broader picture, but Cy seems like a deliberate invocation of Christian Walker, at least if I’m reading Cy as being as closeted (which I am). When Cy complains to Jud that he failed to make his political ambitions come true, it was in spite of the fact that he hit every single right-wing talking point, listing them one by one in a screed that lasts for over a minute of the film’s runtime. He describes his playbook as, to paraphrase, “making people think about something that they hate and then make them afraid it will take away something that they love,” which is an encapsulation of the go-to method of reactionary appeals to perceived attacks on normalcy. Wicks is clearly not a technically adept person, a member of an older generation, but Cy’s incessant need to constantly curate his existence for his online following means that Wicks’s ideas work their way out to Cy’s followers, a genealogy of intolerance. It works thematically while also justifying why there’s footage of a very important meeting that reveals every participant’s motivation. 

We’ve gotten pretty far into this without ever mentioning Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), the gentleman detective who is ostensibly the star of this series. He enters the film fairly late as well, but it’s a damned good entrance, as he finds himself inside Perpetual Fortitude and face to face with Jud, who has provided the narration to this point, and finds it difficult to find something nice to say about the church and can only bring himself to compliment the architecture. Blanc has been brought in by the local sheriff (Mila Kunis), and he’s fascinated by the opportunity to solve what is, despite the lack of a door, a locked-room mystery. It turns out that the church reading group has all read multiple examples of the genre, including The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Hollow Man, which means that any one of them could have drawn inspiration from them. It was here that I first suspected that we were being led to the inevitable conclusion that Jud had committed the crime and was merely an unreliable narrator, as is the case in Roger Ackroyd (um, spoiler alert for a book that turns one hundred next year, I suppose); after all, his name sounds like someone trying to say the word “duplicity” after too many drinks. As it turns out, the presence of Roger Ackroyd is a clue, but not the one that I thought. 

Blanc, despite a slightly smaller presence here, is nonetheless excellent when he’s on screen. As with the previous two installments in this series, there’s much to laugh at and be puzzled by here, and the audience for my screening had a delightful time. You will too. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Erica’s First Holy Sh!t (2022)

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I’ve been living in Austin for over a decade now, and there’s still a goodly number of famous locals that I have yet to encounter or even learn about. Most recently, some friends hosted a backyard cookout/projector movie night at their home in East Austin, as they had acquired a VHS copy of the locally-produced 2022 comedy Erica’s First Holy Sh!t, starring “Very Famous [Austin Specific] Fitness Guru” Erica Nix. I was fairly certain that night that I had never heard of Erica Nix before, but the very next morning I went to the same local coffee shop where I had hosted my recent Halloween film screenings and there on the bar was a flyer for one of her workout classes:

This past weekend was also the second weekend of the Austin Art Crawl/Studio Tour, and I asked some friends that I ran into at Canopy Studios if they had ever heard of her; some had, some hadn’t, and one had made out with her once. It also turns out that she’s participated in some of the same Austin Public TV sketch stuff that I occasionally do (although we’ve never worked in a scene together), so maybe the problem is just that I don’t pay enough attention. Upon further reflection, I did remember her brief run for Austin mayor, which features as a plot point in Holy Sh!t, but didn’t connect her name to the one that I recalled from reading that story in the newspaper years ago. Regardless, Erica’s First Holy Sh!t is a stunning piece of art for someone whose extreme fame is so geographically fixed. 

In the midst of the pandemic lockdown, Erica Nix hosts a queer virtual orgy of mostly witches before settling in for some self care via a long soak with a Lush beauty mask. Realizing that the mask contains molly, meth, and more, she flashes back to purchasing the goop in the days leading up to the lockdown, then goes on a psychedelic journey that takes her to her childhood bedroom to interrupt her pubescent self (P1Nkstar)’s pillow-humping session, a Zoom call with God (Nikki DaVaughn), an erotic encounter with Mother Nature (Christeene), a quick sidebar with Satan herself (Andie Flores) while exploring the inside of Mother Nature’s anus like Lemmiwinks, and a wellness session with Gwyneth Paltrow (Lynn Metcalf) in which Erica learns to forgive herself. She also runs the gauntlet of several of her personal issues, American Gladiators style, facing off against personifications of her nemeses/weaknesses: Olestra, Xanax, Prolapse, and Buzzfeed, all of it hosted by the Effie Trinket-esque Edie Teflon and her co-host, Problematic. 

It’s all great fun, but it’s also one of those films that’s a deeply revelatory exploration of its creator’s soul. Erica bares it all—literally and figuratively—many times. Some of the things that she’s concerned about are so specific that they transcend the personal and become universal; one standout is a scene during one of the gauntlet challenges where Erica has to vibrate herself to climax while ignoring increasingly mounting concerns, and another is the fact that she’s supposed to be feeding a friend’s cat but she suddenly can’t remember the last time she checked in on the pet. It’s a small thing, but in microcosm represents so much about the tendency to prioritize self care, which is something that Erica tackles over and over again throughout the movie. There’s also a great bit where Erica has her Zoom call with God, represented here by a Black actress, who chides Erica for calling her real-life counterpart (each of the people Erica encounters were also part of her Zoom orgy at the beginning, to ensure we get one last Oz allusion in at the end with the “And you were there, and you were there . . .” scene) after the death of George Floyd, as if her Black friend was now going to be somehow responsible for helping Erica navigate the social and political situations that were to follow. This is followed up on again later, when Erica has to face off against one of the Gladiators, who is shooting lasers at her as she navigates a literalized obstacle course of allyship, activism, and insecurities about being perceived as being merely performative. It’s self-reflective without being too self-forgiving, and it makes for an interesting film. 

This is also a production that clearly managed to navigate COVID restrictions and still create something special. Aside from the big outdoor dance number at the end, I’m hard pressed to think of many scenes in which two actors are physically in the same space; there’s Erica and her younger self, the two hosts of the American Gladiators spoof are together in the same room, and the outdoor sequence in which Erica meets Gwyneth Paltrow and learns to forgive herself for her flaws. Almost everything else is green screened and edited together into shot/reverse-shot compositions, but it’s pretty seamless. Speaking of, Metcalf’s performance as Paltrow is alongside DaVaughn’s as God, Flores’s as Satan, and Christeene’s as Mother Nature as one of the best in the film; she doesn’t even superficially resemble the GOOP “guru,” but her vocal impersonation is spot on. It’s quite good. 

I would recommend this film pretty highly, and although it’s not streaming for free anywhere, you can find it for rent on Vimeo here. Or, if you’re local to Austin, you can always rent a VHS copy from WeLuvVideo on North Loop Blvd, presuming you’ve got a membership of sufficient tenure. It won’t be for everyone, but if it’s for you, you know who you are.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Save the Green Planet! (2003)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the alien-invasion conspiracy comedy Save the Green Planet! (2003), recently remade by Yorgos Lanthimos.

00:00 Freaky Fridays at Double Trouble
09:33 Starchaser (1985)
14:15 Child of Peach (1987)
20:24 Nothing But Trouble (1991)
25:01 Linda Linda Linda (2005)
34:31 Him (2025)
38:28 The Smashing Machine (2025)
45:56 Animation Mixtape (2025)
50:22 One Battle After Another (2025)
56:45 Move Ya Body (2025)
1:00:24 Butthole Surfers – The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt (2025)
1:04:52 We Are Pat (2025)

1:10:40 Save the Green Planet! (2003)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Nothing But Trouble (1991)

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For most of my life, I’ve heard about what a terrible movie Nothing But Trouble is. From my friend Michael telling me that the appearance of Dan Aykroyd’s judge character’s phallic nose scarred him as a child to the fact that the film was the subject of one of the earliest episodes of the movie-mocking podcast How Did This Get Made? (all the way back in 2013!), all signs pointed to this movie being utterly irredeemable. Our very own Brandon has even called it “a cinematic abomination.” With Spooky Season starting to get into swing, it happened to come up again in conversation when talking about what to watch among a small group of friends, and it ended up being a surprising crowd pleaser (as well as a crowd disguster). 

Chris Thorne (Chevy Chase) is the publisher of a financial newsletter who meets Diane Lightson (Demi Moore), a beautiful lawyer, on the elevator up to his Manhattan penthouse for a party in his honor featuring some clients whom he despises. She’s been dating one of her clients who is now proceeding with some kind of landfill redevelopment plan she warned him against, and she enlists Thorne to drive her to Atlantic City the following morning so that she can meet with her ex/client in person. Two of Thorne’s obnoxious South American clients (they’re stated to be Brazilian but speak Spanish rather than Portuguese, and an image of their documents later indicate that they are from Argentina), siblings Fausto (Taylor Negron) and Renalda (Bertila Damas), invite themselves on this trip and cannot be avoided. The unlikely quartet takes off for Atlantic City, but the siblings insist that they packed a nice picnic lunch and that they should leave the highway and instead take a nice back road so that they can enjoy it. After detouring onto a series of country roads that feature nothing but the blighted panorama of industry, Thorne fails to make a complete stop at a sign in the rural nowhere of Valkenvania. Although he at first attempts to evade the pursuing officer, Chief Dennis (John Candy), the beat-up old police cruiser proves capable of overtaking Chase’s European luxury car. Dennis hauls the group before the local Justice of the Peace, Alvin Valkenheiser (Aykroyd), who doesn’t take kindly to out-of-towners. 

All of this set-up is the least interesting thing in the whole film. Chase is a charisma-free doorjamb in this one. He’s always been stated to be someone who was difficult to work with and all material I’ve read about this film indicates that Nothing But Trouble was just another notch on the old asshole bedpost for Chase. Moore and Chase feuded constantly on set, and Chase spread his malice around by acting like the larger paycheck he was making for starring in the film gave him seniority over director/co-star Aykroyd, to the point that multiple sources state that someone in the crew threatened to drop a brick on his head if he kept it up. I’m not really sure how contemporary audiences read this film, and I’m curious if they found Thorne to be a sympathetic character and if that is part of the reason that this failed to find an audience. My reading of the text is that Thorne is an unrepentant asshole; he sees a beautiful woman crying and immediately maneuvers to be alone with her in an elevator to take advantage of her presumed vulnerability, nearly sends her off with his driver when he’s hungover on the day of their trip and only decides to proceed when he sees Diane’s skimpy outfit, and allows himself to be goaded into trying to outrun local police because it stokes his ego. Although it’s arguably not fair that he’s going to end up dead on Judge Valkenheiser’s compound simply because the judge has a grudge against bankers (Thorne’s protestations that he’s a financial advisor falling on deaf ears), he’s also a smug and arrogant yuppie whose flirtation verges on predatory, and his constant smarm at the presumed lack of sophistication regarding the people of Valkenvania (accurate or not) doesn’t make him someone in whose fate we are terribly invested. Ironically, however, this makes the harrows of the situation in which he finds himself more palatable than if the film featured a more likable character (or actor). 

Negron’s character was the first to get a legitimate laugh out of me, when he begs Thorne to find “a nice vista” for them to pull over at, and that’s mere moments before the car chase begins, a solid chunk of the way into the film’s runtime. Once the group is captured and sequestered at the Valkenheiser manse, things really start to pick up. We get a solid idea of what terrible fate could befall our leads when a car of even more unsavory characters arrives in Valkenvania and appears before the judge, only for him to sentence them to death via Bonestripper, which is a roller coaster that ends in a mashing metal mouth and which features a hair metal theme tune that plays every time that Bonestripper appears; the description is literal, as the end of the machine is a chute which disposes Halloween decor skeletons into a pile, complete with cartoonish sound effects. It’s ridiculous and quite a lot of fun, and although I understand the need to establish a more grounded reality outside of Valkenvania in order for the outlandish, deadly Saturday morning hijinks to land, it’s a shame it takes so long to get there. The Valkenheiser home and compound is an excellent location and effectively quite creepy; there’s a genuine sense of a former power in decay as a mansion that was clearly quite elegant in its day is now covered in detritus juts out of the middle of a maze of scrap metal. There’s even a great matte painting as the quartet first enters the compound where we can see a downed airplane at the property’s periphery, visually implying that this place is nothing but an industrial graveyard. My friend Sam marveled at “the pulley budget alone,” and the production design here really is something to admire. 

We haven’t gotten into the prosthetic work yet, and it’s probably this that people find the most distasteful, or at the very least off-putting, about the film. Both Candy and Aykroyd appear in dual roles, and while Candy’s characters don’t require a lot of time in make-up (there’s the previously mentioned Officer Dennis, but also Dennis’s presumed twin sister Eldona, who’s just Candy in drag), Aykroyd’s sure does. The biggest groan of disgust came after the midpoint of the film, when we see Judge Valkenheiser preparing for bed, and he removes his already disgusting (and dick-like) prosthetic nose to reveal that he has no nose at all and there’s just scar tissue where it would be. It’s a great bit of grossout prosthesis, credit where credit is due. Less convincing (but no less disgusting) are the severely deformed twins Bobo (Aykroyd again) and Li’l Debbul; imagine someone in a more realistic padded sumo wrestler suit that’s been slightly deflated, then covered with a fine mist of bacon grease. They are always wet, they are always disgusting, and every moment that they’re on screen is revolting, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not also fun. 

In a contemporary review, LA Times critic Peter Rainer described the film as “a slap-happy cross between Psycho and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” and Baltimore Sun’s Lou Cedrone called it an attempt at a comedic Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I would make similar comparisons, although the cultural touchstones I would reach for are probably more esoteric. The town itself and its insular nature bring to mind Deliverance or the arrival of our characters to the dilapidated town in Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, through the lens of the comedic shenanigans of Scooby Doo or Scary Movie 2 (whether this is damning or not is up to you, dear reader). I wouldn’t move this movie to the top of any lists, but as a Halloween season watch that’s troubling but largely bloodless, it might be of interest to some.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond