comedy

Dead Man on Campus (1998)

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TW: Suicide, throughout

When recently writing about middling campus thriller The Curve, several people commented that they thought that film was called Dead Man on Campus; in fact, The Curve was previously titled Dead Man’s Curve and its title was changed to avoid just that confusion. Both came out in 1998, both feature a serious scholarship student paired with a perpetually manic roommate, and both feature plots that are predicated on the urban legend that the roommate(s) of any college student who commits suicide automatically passes their classes that semester. Whereas The Curve was rarely intentionally funny and attempted a kind of campus noir that fails to be compelling, Dead Man on Campus is an outright comedy, from the creative team that would four years later release a personal favorite, Pumpkin. Pumpkin director Anthony Abrams is on the writing side this time, co-penning this one with future Pumpkin co-writer Adam Larson Broder and Michael Traeger. This one errs a little broader than Pumpkin‘s melodrama satire but has a lot of the same semi-sequitur one-liners, slapstick treated with unblinking stoicism, and invoked tonal whiplash. 

Josh (Tom Everett Scott) is an incoming student attending a prestigious northeastern university on a scholarship, on a pre-med track with a heavy, difficult course load. In the dorms, he’s placed into a suite with non-stop party machine Cooper (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and hair-trigger Catholic rage jock Kyle (Jason Segel). Kyle pairs off with a girl he meets at a party (Linda Cardellini) and moves in with her, leaving Josh and Cooper with a spare room. Josh loses some of his academic focus when Cooper introduces him to Rachel (Poppy Montgomery), a creative writing student with whom he hits it off, and Cooper’s lackadaisical attitude rubs off on Josh a little too hard. By midterms, both are failing, with doomed prospects on the horizon: Josh will lose his scholarship and drop out of school, and Cooper’s father will stop paying his tuition and force him to start at an entry level position in the family custodial business. Cooper, upon hearing the urban legend about automatic A grades for the roommates of students who take their own life, forces Josh to accompany him to break into the library and review the school charter to see if this rule actually exists, and, upon learning that it does, hatches a scheme to use Josh’s student job at the housing office to file paperwork to move a suicidal person into the vacant room and wait things out, possibly even pushing over a domino or two. Josh is initially horrified, but is ultimately convinced to join in, and they set their sights on a few prospects: untameable frat moron Cliff (Lochlyn Munro), paranoid Unabomber-esque Buckley (Randy Pearlstein), and depressed British goth rocker Matt (Corey Page). 

Like Pumpkin, Dead Man on Campus is a tasteless movie, but I have an appetite for tasteless movies, especially ones that are as willing to go all in like this one does. Through a modern lens, it’s insensitive (and may even have been so for the time), but its insensitivity reads more as irreverence than edginess, and at times it verges on prescience … for the most part. The film’s weakest link is the first contender that the boys select; he’s loud, brash, oversexed, dim-witted, and within the already wacky reality of the film, he stands out as a particularly poorly placed element, like he dropped in from National Lampoon’s Van Wilder. It’s a pretty small role, but Alyson Hannigan is here as one of Rachel’s roommates, and Cliff immediately asks “Which one is for [him]?” from among the women, getting so amped up to share a bong with her that he lights her hair on fire (Hannigan has her longer ‘do from Buffy seasons 1 and 2 here), and it feels like it’s presaging some of the indignities that she’ll experience over the course of the American Pie movies, but less funny (or that she’ll find herself in in Date Movie, but funnier). In a film that’s mostly raucous and only occasionally raunchy, Cliff’s scenes are the weakest. Gosselaar toes the line with Cooper; he’s also obnoxious, but it’s more moderate. It’s as if Gosselaar is aping the title character of Parker Lewis Can’t Lose but can’t quite break free from Saved by the Bell‘s Zack and ends up annoying, but there’s a certain Bugs Bunny-esque playfulness to his frenetic energy that keeps him from crossing the line into being too annoying. 

The second and third contenders that the boys select are much better suited to the film’s tone. Conspiracy theorist Buckley is a lot of fun, down to the choices in set dressing (his dorm room is adorned with black and white posters of … himself). Even though this film is from the pre-9/11 time when conspiracy theories were just some nonsense that your older stoner friend would prattle on about and not matters of legislation in a crumbling empire, Buckley manages to spout some ideas that wouldn’t be unreasonable to hear (from morons) in this day and age; notably, he believes that he is being stalked by Bill Gates, who wants to steal the rest of his brain (having already stolen half of it when Buckley fell asleep in a Gateway store). The way that Josh and Cooper convince him to move in with them, which includes Josh dressing up in a hazmat suit and spraying water on the plants outside of Buckley’s first dorm building, hits the right level of absurdity, and it’s a welcome change after suffering through the Cliff portions. All of the boys’ interactions with third contender Matt are even funnier once it’s revealed that his suicidal ideology is all an act to seem more mysterious as a tragic musician, and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of making fun of self-flagellating college-aged artists. Some sample lyrics for Kiss My Ass, Matt’s band, include the utterly self-satisfied lines “My words are my sperm/Spewing forth my tragic germ/I’m dying to kiss you/I soil the tissue.” That’s art, baby. 

The movie is not without other weaknesses outside of Cliff. Things get a little saccharine at the climax, and it’s not handled as deftly as it would be later in Pumpkin; just compare any of the maudlin-to-the-point-of-ridicule scenes that make up that film’s finale with the mostly-played-straight conclusion to this one. The romance between Josh and Rachel also feels a bit tacked-on, and Poppy Montgomery is largely wasted in a shallow role. That Josh could fall into drinking and partying without the temptation to spend time with her makes it so that she could largely be excised from the plot, especially as her later actions—giving Josh a copy of her short story to read and then being disappointed that he didn’t—do nothing to put more pressure on Josh than he is already under. It’s ridiculous that she’s third billed and is less memorable than Hannigan, who at least has a later role in the film when she arrives at a party in a ridiculous wig. Still, if you saw The Curve and thought it would work better as an irreverent comedy, or if you’re itching for something in the vein of Pumpkin and are willing to accept the diet cola version, this one’s out there waiting for you. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Rhinestone (1984)

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

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

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

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

-Brandon Ledet

Asteroid City (2023)

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There’s something about the way that people have been reacting to the sudden appearance of A.I.-generated “art” that makes me sad. Not because I think that it’s “coming for my job” or because I think it can replace art made by human beings (it definitely can’t, no matter how many attempts your preferred media monopoly makes in order to try to make that happen), but because it once again reveals just how unbelievably stupid a lot of people are, or perhaps how lacking they are in that ineffable quality we might call “a soul.” Specifically, I’m talking any person who looked at any of the A.I.-generated trailers for movies within the past couple of months and then reposted it on social media. Some did it with a dire warning that this braying abomination heralded the death of artistic careers, others relished in the lizard brain delight of watching an algorithm shuffle a deck of Star Wars images into a deck of almost-but-not-quite-accurate Wes Anderson references and create a nightmare. To take a quick diversion, think about all of the fairy tales that you read as a kid in which some clever boy or girl defeated something wicked posing as a human because they recognize the villain’s otherworldly bizarreness and think out a method to outwit them. What I’m trying to say is that there were a lot of eyeballs on these monstrosities and an awful lot of people failed to recognize the fundamental inhumanity of the image with which they were presented. Nothing is real, nothing is convincing, and it’s like people have no real interest in being convinced. 

Into all of this comes a real Wes Anderson film, and one which plays with the concept of narrative and nesting stories. It also deals with the nature of separation, distance, and isolation. Software can’t do that because software doesn’t get lonely; software is never tempted to give their ex-boyfriend another chance; software never had to figure out how to deliver bad news. Software doesn’t have to go into quarantine for a time that ends up stretching to the horizon, and software doesn’t understand how that kind of thing might make one lose their grip on reality, and software really, really can’t grasp why people might come out of the other side of that with a song in their heart and a spring in their step. 

Asteroid City is a play, being performed for a broadcast over the air in the days of pre-color TV. It’s also the name of the tiny desert settlement in which the play takes place. The TV program host (Bryan Cranston) introduces us to this setting through the use of stage directions, which include a hand-painted mountain backdrop, an eternally incomplete elevated highway on-ramp as a permanent testament to the apparent insignificance of the place, a diner, a mechanic, a motor court with individual cabins, and, most importantly, a meteorite (and its attendant scientific complex). Each of these elements is first presented as stage dressing before we enter the full color world of the narrative itself, complete with proportion shift in addition to the Wizard of Oz-esque transition between the world of the artificial mundane and the imaginative sublime … which is somewhere that shouldn’t be that interesting, and yet it is. That is, perhaps, the point. Asteroid City the place shouldn’t be anything special; it’s the tiny little nowhere that, in a film with broader, more mainstream appeal, we would only see as a crane or drone shot as our protagonist dashes through it so that we can see that they are leaving everything behind through the visual language of them speeding away from the last outcropping of civilization into a desert of the unknown. For Anderson, this isn’t fly-over (or drive-through) country; this inhospitable specimen is made hospitable, and fascinating. 

Within the play, Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) is, like Chas Tenenbaum before him, a widower who has not yet figured out how to tell his children that their mother has died. He and his four kids—teen genius Woodrow (Jake Ryan) and girl triplets Andromeda, Pandora, and Cassiopeia—find themselves stranded in Asteroid City when their car breaks down, and Augie calls his father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks) to collect the girls. The town was already the final destination for Augie and Woodrow, however, as the boy is a finalist for a scholarship prize in the Junior Stargazer convention, as a result of his invention of a device that allows one to project an image onto the moon. There, he falls in puppy love with another finalist, Dinah (Grace Edwards), whose mother happens to be famous actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), with whom the emotionally raw Augie finds some connection and solace. The play itself has a huge cast, including an entire class of children on a field trip with their teacher (Maya Hawke), a singing cowboy who seeks to woo her, three other finalists with their own strange inventions (including death rays, jet packs, and brand new elemental particles), the meteor science team leader Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) – honestly, too many names to name without essentially reciting the IMDb page. And that doesn’t include the “outer” layer of “reality,” which features not only the aforementioned host, but also stage director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), his wife Polly (Hong Chau in a brief but memorable scene), and the actress who would have played Augie’s wife in a flashback if that scene hadn’t been cut in the final draft (Margot Robbie). And that’s not even the half of them. 

Asteroid City is a matryoshka doll of stories, like a few of Anderson’s recent works. He’s always had an obvious talent for creating a sort of tableau within itself and an intentionality in his evocation of stage elements for the purpose of drawing attention to the artificiality of the form. There’s an escalation of it here that I really love, because the inherent staginess of Asteroid City and the way that it gives way to the vibrant “real” Asteroid City is a beautiful externalization of what we mean when we talk about the suspension of disbelief. I recently ranted in my There’s Something Wrong with the Children review about how far (that is, not very) most modern audiences are willing to extend their patience for narratives that require more than 25% attentiveness, and along comes this movie with imagery that illustrates this exact idea. Art can sometimes merely be evocative and then transport you to some distant place; it’s your choice to stay trapped in the Platonic cave staring at the set decoration, or you can choose to transcend the limited ability of painted flats to stand in for an open sky and just see the sky. Any text with which we interact must put in some of the work to meet us halfway, of course, but it’s on us to let go a little and embrace the opportunity to slip these surly bonds and let our spirits soar. 

And soar you will, or at least I did. There is a distinct loneliness that flows out of the screen, and even if Anderson hadn’t confirmed in an interview that the story was informed by COVID, the fact that the play’s third act (and therefore the film’s final act as well) takes place in quarantine makes this all but explicit. There are many scenes in which Augie and Midge talk to each other between cabins, sitting at their respective windows, at once so close that they don’t have to raise their voices to be heard while nonetheless separated by a distinct barrier – a tableau that calls to mind the imagery of early quarantine when these sorts of six-feet-apart casual visitations were the temporary norm. Every character, like every human being on earth, is lonely in his or her own way; Stanley has lost his beloved only daughter, Augie his wife, his children their mother, the schoolteacher her certainty about the order of the cosmos, Schubert his own wife, and the world a brilliant playwright with the death of Asteroid City‘s author, Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). Even quarantined on top of one another in a tiny town, we are all alone, but that’s okay, because we’re all alone together. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #188: Trouble in Paradise (1932) & The Lubitsch Touch

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Welcome to Episode #188 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Hanna, and Britnee discuss the glamorously adulterous romcoms of Old Hollywood legend Ernst Lubitsch, starting with Trouble in Paradise (1932)

00:00 Welcome

03:03 Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
05:48 Sorcerer (1977)
07:50 Reality (2023)
12:45 Savage Grace (2007)
16:55 You Hurt My Feelings (2023)
23:03 Rimini (2023)
28:08 Sanctuary (2023)

30:51 Ernst Lubitsch
39:35 Trouble in Paradise (1932)
55:55 Design for Living (1933)
1:13:43 The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
1:28:10 That Lady in Ermine (1948)

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

-The Podcast Crew

Ed and His Dead Mother (1993)

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Ed Chilton (Steve Buscemi) is a mama’s boy; he may, in fact, be the mama’s boy to end all mama’s boys. See, her voice is still ringing in his ears, a year after her death. The late Mabel Chilton (Miriam Margolyes) went to her grave a full twelve months ago, leaving her hardware store to Ed, where he employs the kindly (Gary Farmer) and fields phone calls from the murderous Reverend Paxton (Rance Howard), who has frequent questions about what hardware would be best to kill his adulterous wife. On an otherwise normal day, Ed finds himself visited by A. J. Pattle (John Glover), a salesman peddling resurrection for the late Mabel, payable on delivery. Ed agrees, much to the chagrin of his live-in uncle, Benny (Ned Beatty), the exact kind of peeping tom horndog that pegs this movie to 1993. The object of Benny’s desire is next-door-neighbor Storm Reynolds (Sam Sorbo credited under her maiden name), who, in fairness, parades around intentionally, trying to attract attention. Uncle Benny is even further perturbed when his sister reappears in the flesh, little worse for wear. She and Ed both have something to fear from the unstable Rob Sundheimer (Jon Gries), a former employer who was convicted by Mabel’s testimony and who’s out on parole with vengeance in his mind. 

There’s something very familiar about Ed and His Dead Mother. It’s very tonally inconsistent in a way that really pigeonholes it as something that could only be created at a certain time; it felt a lot like My Boyfriend’s Back and Stepmonster. And wouldn’t you just know it, all three films were released in 1993 (there’s also a little hint of 1991’s Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead).  There’s some played-for-laughs not-quite-body-horror here that’s very reminiscent of Boyfriend; for one thing, a distinction is made between bringing someone back to life and bringing someone back from the dead, and as Pattle notes while upselling Ed another product, only latter was promised, not the former. As such, Mabel is forced to consume “life,” meaning living things (mostly roaches), but she isn’t above considering a neighborhood dog, or worse. We never have to see Mabel eat roaches like it’s Fear Factor, nor are we confronted with the image of a canine in distress; like Boyfriend and Don’t Tell Mom, there’s no real gore (at least until the end, where it’s still not very realistic), and there’s very little real sense of menace. Like Stepmonster, it places itself in a very specific time when someone can peep on their hot lady neighbor and the film acts like this is perfectly acceptable behavior that doesn’t soil our protagonist’s character, and here, this goes beyond simple safe-for-TV underwear shots, but a full-on bare-assed striptease and even frontal nudity, a little more than you’d expect from a PG-13 flick and especially something that you wouldn’t expect in a film where the humor feels as juvenile as the aforementioned movies. The sex factor is too high for kids in this movie, but the jokes are either too heady or too obvious for a more upper-teen demographic. It is still darker than any of those, however, as none of the end in a cemetery in which a man must bury his mother’s head in one corner and her body in another, lest she rise again. 

There are a lot of bits here that are quite good. The increasingly unhinged Reverend whose rage at his wife’s infidelities (with all of the church council no less, even the women — all at once!) is a lot of fun, and when we get to see another side of Pattle, whom we’ve only seen as a hectoring salesbully with Ed, sheepishly being lectured by upper management about draining Ed of every cent that he got from his mother’s insurance instead of giving so many discounts. Margolyes is clearly having a lot of fun chewing the scenery as Mabel, especially when she’s cartoonishly grinding meat, chasing dogs, and locking herself in the fridge. Glover is always fun, especially when he’s getting to push people around, and Buscemi carries the thankless lead role of the feckless Ed effortlessly. I just wish it was funnier, that it made me laugh a little more. Maybe I’m just not in the target demographic, but then again, I don’t know who is.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Beau is Afraid (2023)

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Middle-aged Beau Wasserman lives in a nightmare. To be more accurate, he lives in several nightmares, some of them in succession, some layered atop one another like an onion of misery. Beau is a man who is haunted: by images of overflowing bathtubs, by visions of choppy water, by memories of an unconventionally abusive childhood, by the gap in his life where his father should be, by the ever-present preoccupation with the possibility of death imposed upon him by congenital health issues, and by a thousand other intangible things that aren’t immediate threats but which nevertheless ostensibly guide him through his choices, moment by moment, day after day. Beau is also a man who is endangered, not by those things which haunt him, but by real menaces that confront him on a daily basis. His neighborhood is parodically dangerous, as if the entire area is the product of a fever dream of someone whose brain was rotted by conservative cable news fabrications about hellish city life. Just going home from his appointment with his therapist requires Beau to start sprinting down his street from blocks away so that he can get into his building and lock the door behind him before a menacing vagrant can chase him down; not in the abstract, either, as he’s actually racing against his attacker. There’s no real order or authority in the world; a dangerous nude murderer wanders the streets, there are men gouging each others’ eyes out between Beau’s building and the Cheapo Depot across the street, and there are automatic weapons being sold on the street with abandon. His home itself provides little comfort, as there is a known brown recluse in the building and he spends the entire night receiving increasingly threatening notes slipped under his door in regards to an increasingly loud sound system that does not exist. Beau is afraid, and he has every reason to be, but things really only get worse for him from here. 

Beau is Afraid is almost a picaresque. In fact, it opens almost exactly the same way that one of the foremost examples of the genre, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, does: with the protagonist’s birth. However, unlike Tristram (or Candide, or Huckleberry Finn), there’s not much appealing about Beau. He’s not roguish, or courageous, or even much of an active player in his own life. A series of horrible things happen to him and his only option, over and over again, is to run, because he has no defense against the things that haunt or endanger him. In each of these vignettes, things seem to be taking a turn for the better for Beau before deflating every potential chance for his luck to improve. He’s hit by a car, then nursed back to health by kind strangers, then that situation falls apart because of the impulsive actions of the family’s youngest child and he is pursued into the forest by a shell-shocked veteran, then he’s found by a woman who’s part of a traveling forest theatre troupe which performs a play that transports him on an emotional journey by playing out this hope-to-despair cycle in miniature, then the performance is disrupted by a spree killing, and so on. 

In the first scene following the opening P.O.V. birth sequence, Beau’s therapist asks Beau if he would return to a well that made him sick the next time that he was thirsty. This is a film with nigh-constant imagery of water, in its abundance and in its absence, and in the film’s first (of many, many) acts, we the audience are introduced to the arc words “always with water,” which is Beau’s therapist’s warning to him about his new prescription. Beau is adrift on that water (literally, by the end); he bobs in it and he is pushed by its motion as it surges and recedes like waves, and he is never in control. Beau’s journey truly begins when he is forced to leave his building to cross the street for a bottle of water in order to finish taking his pills because the water in his apartment is out. Because of circumstances beyond his control, he has to leave his building and apartment open in order to get back in once he does so, which results in his home being invaded and destroyed. After getting back inside, he immediately receives terrible news, resulting in his bathtub overflowing even before he can get in. 

This absence-to-abundance-to-absence imagery cycle is obviously no accident. Between the opening horror show that is Beau’s everyday life and the next vignette (which is at first hopeful and then violently terrifying, another cycle to be prepared for in this narrative), he flashes back to a childhood cruise that he took with his mother and on which he met his first and only love, Elaine. In all of these sequences, however, there’s one thing that we never see: the ocean. Characters dine above deck, sunbathe above deck, and take walks in the moonlight, but for the audience, all of this is happening against a backdrop of sky alone, as if in a void. In his dreams, Beau is in a bathtub (one that overflows, naturally, in abundance), watching a braver version of himself standing up to his mother and being punished for it by being sent into the attic. When he is being cared for by Grace and Roger, great attention is paid to the fact that he is given water in the monogrammed cup which belonged to their son, who was killed in action overseas. When he finds the actors in the woods, we see water pour over a point-of-view shot from Beau’s perspective as a fresh head wound is tended, and in the sequence in which the drugged, concussed Beau becomes the character on the stage who builds a life that is completely destroyed by a flood. In the end, Beau meets his destiny on the water, sailing out to face judgment for his supposed sins. The waves go forth and they retract, and a buoy rises and falls, and through it all, Beau has no agency in what moves him. 

This absence and abundance is everywhere. When Beau is taken in to be cared for by Grace and Roger, he is put in their teen daughter’s room, where she has posters for various K-pop acts and similar-to-but-legally-distinct-from Marvel “grrl power” pin-ups on her walls. With regards to the former, she has posters both for a solo artist named Only1 and a gigantic boy band called KI55, as a reference to the number of members, all of whom are crammed onto the same poster in quarter-sized photos. I’m sure that there are many more that I’m missing or didn’t pick up on, because this film is dense, and for someone like me who loves details and puzzle pieces, there’s a lot happening. Much criticism has been directed at the film with regards to its length, but I only felt its runtime in my bladder, not in my attention. With that said, I’m not at all surprised that this movie hasn’t been to everyone’s liking. 

Beau is Afraid largely concerns itself with guilt, but it isn’t titled Beau is Guilty because Beau isn’t guilty, he is simply made to feel guilt. His therapist projects guilt onto him, his mother’s lawyer lays a guilt trip on him for his worthlessness, and his mother herself, in flashbacks and in the present, manipulates him over and over again and then pelts him with guilt when he reacts in just the way she has set him up to. Before we see her in flashbacks or the present—when she’s no more than a voice on the phone—we see that Beau has one photo of each parent; his father is a blur, his snapshot taken while he was moving, so that there’s no clear image of his face at all, and in the photo of his mother, she is holding him as a newborn, his bald head in the foreground, but instead of a gentle hand supporting his wobbly noggin, her long, pointed nails create an image of her son trapped in her claw like prey, which is all that he ever is. There’s even the implication that everything that he has suffered (or at least large parts of it) are the result of her machinations, given that there’s a photomosaic of her face at her home that is composed of her employees’ staff photos, and it includes a character who appeared earlier as a good samaritan Beau encountered. This isn’t the kind of movie that “makes sense” in the traditional way, as it’s a surreal fantasy that’s not supposed to be treated as a straightforward, rational narrative, so even when the film implies Beau’s mother has been acting behind the scenes, we’re still then treated to the revelation of who (or more accurately what) Beau’s father is, in a way that defies any attempt to rationalize what’s happened to Beau as being merely a protracted trial to demonstrate his love for his mother. 

There are two major touchpoints that the film reminded me of: mother! and Marie NDiaye’s 2007 novel Mon Cœur à l’étroit. In the case of the latter, there is a scene in the film’s first act in which Beau, unable to return to his apartment, climbs the scaffolding outside of the building and is forced to watch as his home is ransacked and destroyed, which was reminiscent of the scene in Darren Aronofsky’s film where the titular character is running from room to room, unable to stop her husband’s unruly party guests from destroying her meticulously planned and curated home. That sense of helplessness and desperation that you feel when empathizing with Jennifer Lawrence’s character in that movie is present here as well; everything in this movie is happening to Beau, as he has no choice but to continue to be compelled forward by the motion of the sea on which he is adrift, the tide carrying him to an unjust damnation. Mon Cœur à l’étroit, which was translated into English as My Heart Hemmed In in 2017, is about a woman who awakens one morning to the sudden realization that she is hated by everyone around her. Where Beau most resembles it is in the way that people interact with him. The protagonist of the novel, Nadia, is confused by all of her neighbors’ and friends’ sudden antipathy toward her, which is only further agitated by the fact that, when she confronts them, they all start to voice an accusation that trails off without providing any real information. This happens to Beau as well, as the people he encounters continuously approach him with variations on “You know what you did” and leave notes for him to find that say “Stop implicating yourself.” How much his mother was influencing things (not to mention how much that matters to the reading of the text, really) is up for debate; how much Mona Wasserman shaped her son’s reality is less important than how she shaped his perception of reality, which was … a lot. He can only perceive reality through the lens of guilt, both when she’s gaslighting him directly and when she’s gaslighting him by proxy through the way her abuse has shaped his brain so that he induces it in himself. 

Like Mon Cœur à l’étroit, mother!, and Tristram Shandy for that matter, Beau is Afraid will not be for everyone. It’s been pretty divisive, and I’m not surprised. Between the length of the movie, some detours into the kind of wacky ground that wouldn’t be out of place in a movie by The Daniels, and mainstream American audiences’ overall aversion to anything too complicated to be half-watched while you fart around on your phone, there are sure to be plenty of people who find this one off-putting, not fun, and too strange to enjoy, but I’m not one of them. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Vibes (1988)

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As is often my wont, I was recently extolling to a friend about the virtues of our local library, and declared I would purchase said friend an inexpensive DVD player the next time I saw one at an estate sale (there’s a one-in-four chance there will be, in my experience) so that he could enjoy some of the more obscure picks that are available. This was perhaps days before the announcement that Netflix would be discontinuing its DVD-by-mail service, which was very close to my heart and which flung wide the doors for me to discover a plethora of movies and shows that had been out of my reach before. I couldn’t afford to have internet in my home when I was in college, but even at nineteen I could spare $8 a month for a constant stream of discs into my apartment, and although my local library can’t boast that it has a copy of everything (and for some reason doesn’t do interlibrary loans for media), there are thousands of things that are otherwise inaccessible now. My friend joked (I hope) that everything is streaming now, and that there’s no reason to own such a thing; I pointed out that I have been watching a lot of episodes of Ebert & Roeper at the Movies recently and that it’s opened my eyes to a huge number of movies that I never would have known existed otherwise. Every episode, the boys discuss 4-5 movies, with two of them usually being films that have remained in the public consciousness or otherwise has some kind of name brand recognition (your Top Gun, your Beauty and the Beast, a Silence of the Lambs), one or two movies that fall into the moderately obscure “oh, yeah,” category, (Uncle Buck, for instance, or She-Devil, or Major League: Back to the Minors; anything that you’d watch at a hotel when you’re on vacation and it’s raining on a Saturday afternoon), and then one or two movies that have, for all intents and purposes, vanished from the face of the earth. Is it worth listing those? We Think the World of You from 1988 and 1994’s BackBeat aren’t the kinds of titles you drop when you’re trying to impress someone. Buried among these episodes, I stumbled across their review of Vibes that sparked my interest and, having finally seen it (thanks, libraries!), has also stolen my heart. 

Ostentatious but insecure Sylvia (Cyndi Lauper – yes, really) meets staid museum curator Nick (Jeff Goldblum doing the platonic ideal of a Jeff Goldblum performance) under strange circumstances; they and several others are guests of Dr. Steele (Julian Sands), a parapsychologist. They’re both psychics; he’s a psychometrist, meaning that he can read the history of an object and even information about the people who have touched it, while she gained clairvoyance via a psychic guide named Louise, whom only she can see and hear. Louise, via Sylvia, warns Nick that his long-term girlfriend has been unfaithful while he’s been away, and although he doesn’t believe it, he’s confronted with the truth when his powers inadvertently reveal her deceit. Sylvia, meanwhile, meets her occasional flame Fred (Steve Buscemi) at the racetrack, where she is cajoled into using her powers to pick a winning horse on his behalf, only to be unceremoniously ditched for another woman moments later. Returning home, she finds a man named Harry (Peter Falk) in her kitchen, where he offers her $50K to help find his son, who has gone missing in Ecuador. Sylvia then enlists Nick to go along as well, since two psychics are better than one, and he opts to go rather than continue to spiral out and stew over the failure of his relationship. Once they arrive, Nick deduces with his powers that Harry has deceived them, and the older man admits that he’s actually seeking a fabled room of gold in the mountains, which was previously discovered by his business partner, but the latter man has since been hospitalized in a persistent vegetative state. The two psychics reluctantly agree to go, falling in love while being pursued the whole way by Steele, fellow psychic Ingo (Googy Gress), and a sexy assassin (Elizabeth Peña). 

I mentioned above that Gene and Roger reviewed this movie; I didn’t mention that they both hated it. Not hated hated hated it, but neither was very impressed. In fact, most critics seem to have felt this way, as it’s sitting at 13% on Rotten Tomatoes. I’ve never considered that a perfect metric for a movie’s actual quality, but as a measurement of critical favor, it’s very telling. About halfway through this movie, my best friend, after several chuckles aloud, asked me how the film could have been reviewed so poorly, and neither of us could believe it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that long after this that the film’s quality dipped, to the point where I could understand how a general audience may have been turned off by the pacing issues in the film’s third act. We can’t really go any further without noting, however, that Lauper is incredibly charming here, and a delight to watch. 

I can’t remember the last time I watched one of these kinds of movies—you know, where a non-actor performer (or sports star) is trying to break into pictures—and the non-traditional actor really disappears into the role. She has great comedic timing for someone with no real background in that field, and she and Falk have amazing chemistry. She and Goldblum are a delight to watch together as well; according to her autobiography, they didn’t get along, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from how well they play off of each other here. Goldblum’s decision to go full Goldblum matches her energy perfectly, as even though Lauper’s hair, make-up, and sartorial choices are always completely over the top, her vibe (sorry) is much more subdued than the man standing next to her, eyes bugging and stams stammering. 

The first few scenes in Ecuador are fun, as the trio arrives there to head for the mountains, albeit there’s some All in the Family-era racism from Falk’s character that doesn’t pass the sniff test these days. At first, these seem like mannerisms of the character Harry is playing, of the terrified father of a missing boy, but he spouts off a few other Bunkerisms even after the reveal that are jarring in an otherwise very goofy movie. Travelogue scenes set prior to the cresting of the mountain are gorgeous, capturing the natural verdant beauty of the Ecuadorian mountains, like something out of a movie with a much higher budget. Unfortunately, once Sylvia, Nicky, and their pursuers get to the mountaintop where Harry’s partner found a small, glowing pyramid in the film’s cold open, the plot drags considerably. All of this takes place on a set, which is fine, but the effect of being at the top of a high peak with nothing in the background makes the whole thing feel like it’s taking place in a void. Right before they arrive, we’re treated to a gorgeously rendered matte painting, but once on the actual mountaintop set, characters move around and make choices that feel like shuffling the deck before the denouement. This goes some way to explain why contemporary critics may have turned on the movie when the third act trended toward boredom, but I’m more forgiving, especially when there’s so much charm and appreciable humor on display. 

The film manages to run the gamut of different comedic styles. When the trio first arrive in Ecuador, Sylvia teases Nick for bringing so much luggage, assuming that he’s overpacked. He reveals that one of the suitcases contains an entire month’s worth of dehydrated rations; when Sylvia points out that it’s normally the bacteria in the water that caused travellers of the time to become ill, Nick reveals that another suitcase is full of giant jugs of water, which he also brought along. Later, after Harry’s deception has been revealed, he and Sylvia find themselves at the tiki-themed hotel bar, where he is drinking directly from one of the jugs, which has a festive paper umbrella embellishment. It’s a good visual gag, one among many, including one in which the 5’3” Lauper and the 6’4″ Goldblum perform a tango that ends with her arms around his shoulders, essentially being carried, with her legs dangling back and forth. It all leads one to believe that the contemporary audiences and critics of the time may simply have misunderstood that the film understands that its zany, sometimes cartoony plot is intentional, not the result of poor writing or direction. 

The real crime here is that the public reaction pushed Lauper to abandon film business, albeit not completely. She’s effervescent here in a very real way, like she’s trying some things out. At one point, when Nick rejects her because he misunderstands the reasons that she’s expressing interest, Lauper shifts into an affected Transatlantic accent and mockingly blurts “I want you bad all right. I dream about you and me and a house in Long Island. I’m only half a woman until I make love to you.” For someone who’s not really part of the business, she’s making interesting acting choices that reveal a talent range that most people wouldn’t assume. Reportedly, Dan Aykroyd was first interested in the project (which makes sense, since he’s a big believer in the paranormal in real life) but left because he refused to be in a movie with Lauper, which is both absurd and for the best, since Goldblum’s take on Nick is a much more believable match for Sylvia than I could imagine Aykroyd providing. As a fun bit of fluff, this is one worth tracking down. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Chatterbox! (1977)

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I’m currently watching Sex and the City for the first time without ever having much interest in it until now, and it’s instantly become an all-time favorite show.  It turns out it makes a lot more sense once you hit your thirties. Who knew? In the last episode I watched, Charlotte confesses to her brunch buddies that her gynecologist prescribed a mild antidepressant to help get a vaginal infection in-check, pouting in a hushed panic “My vagina is depressed!”  That kind of candid sexual humor was a large part of what made the show such a cultural phenomenon in the early aughts, when it was a lot less common to hear women openly joke about their genitals on national television.  Before then, you had to go digging in smut to find that kind of ribald women’s humor, as evidenced by 1977’s (incredibly well-titled) talking vagina comedy Chatterbox! being directed by gay porno auteur Tom DeSimone.  Chatterbox! only qualifies as a softcore porno if you squint at its AM Gold soft-rock lovemaking scenes with the most puritanical eye. Its main-attraction talking vagina never even makes an appearance on-screen, whether to avoid an X rating or to avoid the practical mechanics of gynecological puppetry.  Still, it’s got a mildly naughty pedigree as an out-of-time, post-hardcore nudie cutie.  It wasn’t until the early 2000s that you could hear women joke about their vaginas having minds of their own on the HBO sitcom equivalent of Seinfeld.  Before then, you had to go see a dirty movie, even if not in the same sketchy theaters where they played DeSimone’s true trenchcoaters.

Most contemporary reviews of Chatterbox! dismissed it as a low-brow, juvenile sex comedy and a masturbatory fantasy for men.  They were only half right.  Yes, the jokes are idiotically crude, like when Virginia the Talking Vagina greets her mother with the zinger, “You didn’t even kiss me hello!” or when a potential sex partner responds to her propositions with “You didn’t even move your lips!”  It’s all harmless schtick, but it’s schtick all the same.  Still, the hapless hairdresser who happens to be attached to Virginia, Penelope, reacts to her supernatural genital predicament with such embarrassed horror that it’s difficult to imagine someone treating the film as pure masturbation fodder.  As much fun as Virginia is having seducing every man (and most women) in their presence, Penelope is mortified that her crotch is getting so much attention, especially by the time the pair become late night talk show regulars as a kind of side show act.  The film is pitched more directly to the women in the audience than you might expect, playing less like a macho fantasy than an adolescent stress dream about showing up to school naked.  Its closest comparison point is The Peanut Butter Solution—a childhood nightmare about rapid hair growth—not the rearranged-female-body misogyny of Deep Throat.  Penelope’s talking, misbehaving vagina is presumably voicing her sexual id, but it does little to bring her out of her shell as a sexual person.  The two are mostly at odds with each other and struggle to find an equilibrium they’re happy with, much like Charlotte York whining about her depressed vagina to friends at brunch.

Chatterbox! is the kind of ramshackle production where the boom mic is onscreen so much it deserves its own character credit.  At one point, Rip Taylor—a total pro—stealthily swats it out of the frame in annoyance for stealing his moment.  The film’s sub-mainstream production values and other titles director’s back catalog (including gems like Swap Meat and Confessions of a Male Groupie) might raise questions of why it didn’t go full-porno, but I personally admire its decision to launch directly into its premise with no funny business.  Virginia starts talking immediately in the first scene, complaining about Penelope’s longtime boyfriend’s lovemaking skills because Penelope would never voice those complaints herself.  It’s not long before they make their debut on stage & television, after Penelope quickly manages to convince her friends & psychiatrist that Virginia really does have a mind of her own.  That efficiency leaves room in the tight 70min runtime for Virginia to launch a star-making career as a disco singer, including multiple performances of her nonsense hit single “Wang Dang Doodle.”  This is an aggressively silly, unsexy sex comedy about a woman’s war with her own body, like a Doris Wishman prototype for How to Get Ahead in Advertising – one with a lot less to say but a much more interesting place to say it from.  I’m sure there are so-bad-its-good cult movie obsessives who think they’re laughing at the movie’s expense—the A Talking Pussy!?! jokes write themselves—but it appears to know exactly how silly and misshapen it is, to the point where it’s always in on the joke. In a word, it’s a hoot.

Also, in case you’re wondering, Penelope is a Charlotte but Virginia is a textbook Samantha. And, yes, I plan on ending every review with this exact analytical lens until I get this show out of my system.

-Brandon Ledet

Signature Move (2017)

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I remember Jennifer Reeder’s surrealist high school melodrama Knives & Skin harshly dividing the audience at Overlook Film Fest in 2019, with the more macho Horror Bros in the crowd grumbling that it was the worst film they’d seen all fest and with other scattered weirdos gushing that it was the best.  Personally, I dug it, especially for the way it warped the teen-friendly Lynchian melodrama of early Riverdale by submerging it in a hallucinatory Robotrip aesthetic.  I wasn’t especially surprised that Knives & Skin confused the more rigidly horror-minded section of the crowd, though, since it’s a Laura Palmer-style murder mystery that doesn’t care as much about the murder as it cares about teen-girl bedroom decor and eerie vocal choir renditions of 80s pop tunes.  Hell, even my own reaction was confused.   I left the theater thinking I had watched a messy but ambitious debut feature from a boldly stylistic genre nerd.  I was wrong.  Reeder had not only made a name for herself as a prolific short filmmaker on the festival circuit, but she also had already completed her first feature in 2017’s Signature Move.  And now having caught up with that debut, I’m as confused as ever.  After the slow-motion, high-style freakout of Knives & Skin, I was expecting a lot more visual panache out of the straightforward, Sundancey romcom that preceded it.  I still don’t have a clear answer to the question “Who is Jennifer Reeder?” Maybe I never will.

Signature Move stars Fawzia Mirza as a closeted, thirtysomething Chicagoan who hides her lesbian social life from her first-generation mother, an agoraphobic shut-in who spends all her time watching Pakistani soap operas and needling her daughter about marriage.  As an act of private rebellion and stress relief, Mirza secretly trains as a professional wrestler between dull dayshifts working the desk at a law office.  She also sneaks around the city’s lesbian bar scene, where she meets a much more out-and-proud love interest played by Sari Sanchez.  Her new girlfriend lives a freer, more honest lesbian life, having grown up with an actual professional wrestler as her mother – an open-minded luchadora named Luna Peligrosa.  As one woman struggles to reveal her true self to her conservative parent and the other refuses to regress into the closet, conflict ensues.  From there, there isn’t much to Signature Move that you can’t find in any 90s festival-circuit romcom or, more recently, any streaming-era sitcom.  Even the lesbian-scene setting isn’t especially distinctive amongst similar, superior titles like Saving Face, Appropriate Behavior, The Watermelon Woman, or whatever was the first queer romcom you happened to catch on IFC before Netflix “disrupted” (i.e., gutted) the original purpose of cable.  I suppose there’s some value in documenting the food, fabrics, art, jewelry, and bootleg DVDs of Chicago’s Muslim & Latinx neighborhoods as our two mismatched-but-perfectly-matched lovers negotiate their new relationship, but in some ways those moments of cultural window dressing almost make the film more anonymous among similar low-budget comedies that pad out the programs at Sundance & Outfest every single year.

If there’s any detectable trace of Jennifer Reeder auteurism in Signature Move, it’s in the inevitable climax where Mirza’s shut-in mother bravely ventures out of their shared apartment to witness her daughter’s pro wrestling debut at what appears to be a lucha-drag hybrid event akin to our local Choke Hole drag-wrasslin’ promotion.  There’s a heightened artificiality to that queer-dream-realm wrestling venue that Reeder would later intensify & expand in Knives & Skin until it consumed an entire fictional suburb.  Otherwise, I can’t say I found much to either praise or pick apart with any fervor in Signature Move, which is just as straightforward & unassuming as Knives & Skin is uncanny & confounding.  It’s a cute enough movie on its own terms, though, and there can never be enough media celebrating how gay wrestling is as a microculture.  Otherwise, it appears that I time-traveled in the wrong direction when trying to get a firmer handle on Jennifer Reeder’s signature aesthetics as a director.  Her two follow-up features after Knives & Skin—last year’s Night’s End and the upcoming Perpetrator—are both supernatural horrors that promise a lot more room for the high-style, low-logic playfulness that caught my attention at Overlook than this cookie-cutter indie romcom was ever going to deliver.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Murder by Death (1976)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the murder mystery meta comedy Murder by Death (1976), a direct precursor to Clue (1985).

00:00 Welcome

06:33 Heavenly Creatures (1994)
12:30 Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)
15:38 Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)
19:01 Lust in the Dust (1984)
23:50 Scream VI (2023)
40:52 Cocaine Bear (2023)
42:45 Day of the Animals (1977)
46:46 Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962)
51:14 Nathan for You: Finding Frances (2017)

58:13 Murder by Death (1976

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

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew