comedy

The Drama (2026)

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In Kristoffer Borgli’s international breakout Sick of Myself, a woman becomes jealous of her boyfriend’s sudden art-world fame, so she fakes a disfiguring medical condition to one-up the attention he’s been getting online. In the funniest scene, she worries that her CT scan results at the hospital will expose this fraud, imagining an official medical diagnosis that she is “a liar” with “a bad personality,” which is legally punishable by death. Borgli’s first American film, Dream Scenario, follows the foibles of a schlubby college professor who becomes a living meme when he inexplicably starts appearing in people’s dreams across the world, a phenomenon that quickly sours once the novelty wears off and everyone’s sick of seeing his uninvited face. Borgli’s latest, The Drama, smartly continues the understated fantasy-sequence playfulness of those two previous pictures, often illustrating its characters’ intrusive thoughts as they occur in real time, then doubling back to show those characters as they actually are: unremarkable in their social anguish. Like Borgli’s previous films, The Drama also presents an absurd scenario that can easily be read as a moving think-piece on the nature of “cancel culture” but somehow never fully tips into reactionary apologia. His flippant engagement with hot-button topics in The Cancel Culture Era teeters dangerously close to a kind of online edgelord conservatism but, so far, he’s always landed somewhere on the safe side of good taste. His interest appears to be in exploring the ways that our internal thoughts—however momentary—might betray our external politics, and he finds an endless wealth of humor in that tension.

The Drama starts with a young couple’s fairy-tale love story, sprinting through the full romcom meet-cute, first-date, romantic-proposal cycle in rapid montage. Borgli very quickly maps out what a crowd-pleaser romance between stars Robert Pattinson & Zendaya might look like (if Hollywood was still interested in producing such a thing) before he announces the stakes of his latest prank. Days before the couple’s wedding, they engage in a dinner-party game where everyone at the table confesses the worst thing they’ve ever done. It’s an uneasy but revelatory ritual that pushes through some of the awkward shame of the “getting to know you” phase in a young romance, until Zendaya’s character gets her turn. Her confession crosses an invisible social boundary that she doesn’t realize exists until it’s too late, and everyone else present is so shocked that it threatens to derail the wedding they’re supposed to be celebrating. Notably, what she confesses is technically a thought crime, an ugly impulse that she did not ultimately act on but very seriously considered. It’s also something I won’t dare to spoil in this review, since it is the bait on the film’s proverbial hook, something that is meant to be discovered and digested in real time with the bride-to-be’s immediate social circle. All I can say, really, is that this first-act reveal positions The Drama as a throwback to a kind of classic water cooler romcom, however bleak, with certified movie stars on their worst behavior. You’re supposed to ask yourself how you would react to it while you watch Robert Pattinson go through the same hypothetical turmoil, and you’re supposed to find your own sense of morality lacking in the process.

There’s plenty of ammunition here for the offended to dismiss Borgli as a shock-value provocateur, but I don’t think that’s the case. Once it gets past the initial shock of its first-act confession, The Drama finds some genuinely productive provocation in asking how much modern outrage is personal, as opposed to communal. This is not a typical “How much can you truly know a person?” thought exercise. It instead asks whether modern moral outrage is driven less by the thought, “Am I okay with this?” than it is by the thought, “What would other people think of me if I were okay with this?” Very little of the central conflict is mediated through phone & computer screens like in Borgli’s previous pictures, but it still feels like it’s depicting a moral crisis specific to a post-social media world. Pattinson’s protagonist is not allowed time to internally process what he’s learned about his fiancée’s past; he’s pressured to immediately take a moral stance on it as a kind of performative social spectacle, causing great anxiety as he attempts to keep his shit together for the ultimate social spectacle: an expensive wedding. The pressure of publicly responding to this moral crisis makes for great comedic tension as the wedding deadline approaches, and it inspires anxious daydreams & nightmares that recall the low-level surrealism of Borgli’s previous works. It’s neither his meanest nor his most expressive film to date, but it does manage to throttle its audience with various social & moral crises while most of its imagery ultimately amounts to People Talking in Rooms — an increasingly rare feat at the American cineplex.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #261: Homer & Eddie (1989) and The Whoopi Cushion

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Welcome to Episode #261 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of Whoopi Goldberg vehicles from her Hollywood heyday, starting with the 1989 road trip comedy Homer & Eddie.

00:00 Welcome
04:42 Eye of God (1997)
09:46 High Art (1998)
13:50 Together (2025)
16:10 Videoheaven (2026)
23:28 The Piano Accident (2026)

28:06 Homer & Eddie (1989)
46:45 Made in America (1993)
56:30 Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986)
1:10:46 Ghost (1990)
1:21:58 Corrina, Corrina (1994)

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

– The Podcast Crew

Thank God It’s Friday (1978)

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What’s the ultimate disco movie? Most people’s immediate thought would be Saturday Night Fever, but that’s because they’re picturing the few minutes of strutting & dancing that interrupt the other two hours of abject human misery that make up the rest of the runtime. Boogie Nights almost qualifies from a nostalgic throwback angle, but it’s more about disco partiers’ day jobs as pornographers than it is about their nighttime dance routines. Both the Village People vehicle Can’t Stop the Music and the Olivia Newton John musical Xanadu are strong contenders, but it’s hard to say that with a straight face without being laughed out of the room. That leaves 1978’s Thank God It’s Friday as the only legitimate pick for the ultimate disco flick, by which I mean it’s the one that you’d most readily show audiences who were too young or too square to be there and say, “This is how it was.” I assume that was the thinking behind the film’s recent screening at The Broad, anyway, which was programmed by the disco-themed Mardi Gras dance krewe Disco Amigos. Thank God It’s Friday may not be the best or most popular disco movie, but it is the most illustrative, like a cocaine-fueled time machine back to the most over-packed, overpriced nightclub of the 1970s.

This all-in-one-Friday-night ensemble cast comedy is set entirely inside and around the fictional LA disco club The Zoo. Much like the titular club in Xanadu (and, by extension, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”), The Zoo is an impossible fantasy space that offers multiple levels of amoral hedonism. There are multiple bars, an arcade, a makeout room, a crow’s nest DJ booth overlooking the dance floor, and multi-story bird statues seemingly themed after Baba Yaga’s home for reasons unknown. There isn’t a plot so much as there is an whole lot of chaotic busyness leading up to a climactic Commodores concert, which includes a much-anticipated dance contest for the audience. Thank God It’s Friday does a great job of keeping a fun party vibe going in the leadup to that payoff, despite its struggles as a comedy with an excess of whiny characters and no discernible jokes. Every single person who enters the club complains at top volume about how crowded, expensive, and awkward it is to be there, except in the few blissful sequences when they’re dancing too vigorously to talk. The only true standouts in the cast are a young Jeff Goldblum as the nightclub’s sleazebag owner, who spends that evening wooing an uptight married woman (Andrea Howard), and Donna Summer, who spends it trying to trick the DJ into allowing her to perform “Last Dance” as The Commodore’s unofficial opener. The DJ eventually relents (while the tempted housewife ultimately doesn’t), and “Last Dance” got enough of a main-stage spotlight to earn a much deserved Oscar for Best Original Song. Then, The Commodores perform “Too Hot ta Trot” to leave you on a strobelit high note, convincing you that this sweatily unfunny comedy was overall a pretty good time. In the movie’s own words, “Dancing! Everything else is bullshit.”

The best parts of Thank God It’s Friday‘s recent screening at The Broad were more a matter of presentation than of content. The showtime was scheduled during a pop-up poster sale run by Deadly Prey Gallery, who sell reproduced artwork inspired by hyper-violent horror & action flicks, hand-painted by artists in Ghana. When I arrived at the theater, the Disco Amigos were doing happy-faced disco routines in the sunshine, the exploitation genre freaks were gawking at art-gallery grotesqueries inside, and the city itself has rarely felt so beautiful. There was a second dance break during the film’s climactic rendition of “Too Hot ta Trot,” which the Disco Amigos performed quietly shuffling the dark, bravely pushing through the brief interjections of dialogue that lowered the song in the sound mix. They also handed out free kazoos at the door for a Rocky Horror-style call & response game that I still don’t fully understand, since I cannot recall a single kazoo appearing in the actual film. After Krewe da Bhan Gras’s recent screening of Mississippi Masala, that’s the second time I attended a Mardi Gras krewe’s promotional event at The Broad this year. In both instances, I felt like I was crashing someone else’s party, since both audiences were packed with krewe members and their immediate family, and in both instances I felt a warm welcome in the room anyway. I recommend keeping an eye out for future events from those krewes and other Mardi Gras contingents on The Broad’s monthly calendar more so than I recommend revisiting Thank God It’s Friday in particular. Like disco itself, it’s largely a “You had to be there” phenomenon, better experienced than described.

-Brandon Ledet

Number Seventeen (1932)

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The last fifteen minutes of Number Seventeen are representative of Alfred Hitchcock at his finest: tense, thrilling, laden with spectacle, and very fun. It’s unfortunate that for a film with such a short runtime (under 65 minutes!), it spends its first three quarters treading water in a sloppy, lousy, mishmash of an Agatha Christie locked room mystery and an Oscar Wilde farce. 

The titular location is a seemingly abandoned house where a number of figures converge over the course of a dark and stormy night. There’s an awful lot of farting about during which the difficulty in telling all of the characters apart is made even more complicated by the fact that a lot of proper names are thrown around—Fordyce, Sheldrake, Brant, Barton, etc—among four of the five men, but the characters give false identities at different times and swap them about between each other. Two of the men even have matching hats and identical moustaches! The gist is that a very expensive diamond necklace has been stolen, some number of the men are criminals, one of them is probably a detective, a seemingly dead body is actually alive (twice!), and one of the criminals is accompanied by a woman named Nora (Anne Grey) who is pretending to be deaf and mute, for reasons that are never entirely clear. The only man who seems to be what he presents himself to be is a squatter named Ben (Leon St. Lion, who had previously appeared in the stage version), an alcoholic who has a much-abused sausage in his pocket. It’s all even less thrilling than it sounds. 

The plot gets going at last when the necklace turns up and it’s revealed that the house sits atop an access hatch that allows one to descend to a set of railroad tracks that eventually lead to a train ferry. A few of the criminals manage to board it with Nora in tow believing that the necklace is in their possession despite it having been picked from one of their pockets by Ben, while the man who introduced himself as Fordyce attempts to head off their getaway by commandeering a public bus. This is when things finally get interesting, as the thieves crawl around on the outside of the train to take out its various crew when they refuse to accommodate their demands, leaving a few petty burglars at the helm of a runaway locomotive that they don’t know how to stop. This is intercut with the rapid approach of the bus, as we watch the riders’ initial thrill of it all before they start to get tossed around a bit, and there are even brief moments when it appears that the bus and the train will collide, only for the engine to divert to an overpass while the bus passes through a tunnel that goes under the tracks. All the while, peacefully and inexorably, the ferry ship is coming into port. 

All of this is done with miniature work that most modern viewers would find laughable, but which I find utterly charming. That’s come to be one of my favorite things about revisiting his earlier films of late, from the impressive opening sequence of The Lady Vanishes to Young and Innocent’s delightful trainyard sequences. This was also a young director who just absolutely loved a train derailment, and Number Seventeen has one that involves smashing through a series of gates and crashing into a ship, with the train car bearing characters I presume we are supposed to care about are slowly sinking beneath the surface of the water like one of those convenient submarine air pockets that the photogenic leads on Baywatch were always finding themselves trapped in. It’s a delight, and it’s almost enough to save the film, but not quite. The final fifteen minutes alone in isolation are worth the ticket price, but if you can, just skip to that ending and don’t worry about the plot at all. Hitchcock didn’t. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

By Design (2026)

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How do you feel about performance art? Interpretive dance? Experimental theatre? Poetry? If you walked into an art gallery and were confronted with a live performer pretending to inhabit the persona of a piece of furniture or an animal or an abstract concept, would you be repulsed or intrigued? Amanda Kramer does not make movies for audiences who recoil from earnest theatricality; she makes high-artifice headscratchers for the intrigued. Her latest stars Juliette Lewis as a tragically bored woman who inexplicably trades identities with a designer chair, leaving her human body behind as a lifeless piece of furniture. A large portion of By Design‘s audience will be immediately repulsed by its self-aware, mannered tone, which engages with big-picture abstract concepts through absurdist artifice and practiced affectation. Miranda July & Peter Strickland haters, stay away. Everyone else who can tune into its wavelength will find a wryly funny meditation on how we all socially function as objects, assessed & valued more as physical presences than as human beings.

Camille (Juliette Lewis) trudges through punishingly boring, repetitive days shopping & brunching with her gal pals in a life “devoid of ideas” . . . until she finally discovers something that arouses true desire in her: the perfect designer chair. Only, by the time she gathers the money needed to make the “perfect purchase,” the chair has already been sold and gifted to a lonely man (Mamoudou Athie). The heartbreak of not being able to own this “object of desire” shatters Camille’s sense of self, so instead of parting ways with the chair she makes a desperate, magical wish to become it, to be the object that is desired. Her essence leaves her body behind for the new, curvaceous body of the chair, and her old body collapses onto the floor, catatonic. From there, she is split into two separate selves: Camille The Chair, who comfortably basks in her newfound sense of purpose & desirability, and Camille The Human, who continues to have an active social life even though she has effectively become an inanimate object. Her friends and family continue to interact with her as if she were alert & responsive while she remains motionless, painting all person-to-person social interaction as a kind of one-sided narcissism where the other participant is more of a sounding board then a fellow human being.

Lewis is one of several actresses in the cast whose careers peaked in the 1990s. Her small friend group is rounded out by Robin Tunney (Empire Records, The Craft) & Samantha Mathis (Little Women, Super Mario Bros.), and the trio’s petty conflicts are narrated by the honey-voiced Melanie Griffith, who lands most of the best laugh lines about how all women are already treated (and, eventually, discarded) like furniture — not just Camille. There’s such a stilted, dazed affect to each performance that any one of these women could’ve been substituted with Jennifer Coolidge without significantly changing the meaning or tone of the overall picture, but through them Kramer still manages to work out some sincerely heady ideas about gendered objectification and how women’s friendships are often corrupted by competition & envy. Maybe it’s all one big, elaborate “Women be shoppin'” joke, but it’s one that takes the existential crisis of its literal chairwoman seriously. Camille has been societally reduced to a physical, purchased product, and the abstract meaning of that is just as horrific as the physical mechanics of it are amusingly absurd.

Aesthetically, Kramer leaves behind the disco & leather-kink nightclub fantasia of Give Me Pity! & Please Baby Please for a more clinical, brighter-lit art gallery feel. The frame is sparsely decorated with individual, identifiable objects (both Camilles included) as if to leave space for blocks of ad copy in a designer furniture catalog. That stylistic choice is announced as early as the opening credits, which are designed to resemble a fussy luxury brand catalog, setting the mood for the film’s high-end, inhuman shopping trips. It’s a visual sparseness that echoes Camille’s feared life “devoid of ideas” without distracting from the icy, abstracted zingers in the script, like Griffith’s intonation of “Wherever she goes, there she is — a lifetime horror” or a character answering the question “Who doesn’t like women?” with “Most men, most women.” If you’re at all allergic to camp, whimsy, or art-gallery pretentiousness, you already knew this movie is not for you as soon as you read the logline “A woman swaps bodies with a char, and everyone likes her better as a chair,” no review needed. It’s an odd, thorny little delight for everyone else, as all of Kramer’s films to date have been.

-Brandon Ledet

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