For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer and Alli discuss Charlie Kaufman’s writer’s-block anxiety thriller Adaptation (2002), starring Nicolas Cage & Meryl Streep.
One of my weaknesses as a critical thinker is that I’m pathetically vulnerable to enjoying movies about how great The Movies are, from nostalgic recreations of large-scale Old Hollywood spectacles in movies like Hail, Caesar!to comedic takes on scrappy D.I.Y. communal filmmaking in low-budget genre trash like One Cut of the Dead. I even choke up during those hokey little Magic of the Movies montages that everyone else complains about during Oscars broadcasts every year. The same goes for poems about poetry and rock songs about rocking out. The creation of art ranks highly among the few worthy things you can do with your brief time on this planet, so it deserves to be the subject of that art just as much as the few other go-to subjects of every other song, poem, and movie out there (mainly God, sex, and death). So, I’m less willing than most movie-obsessed cynics to roll my eyes when Oscar voters award top prizes to love-letter-to-cinema movies about The Movies. I totally understand the impulse. The cool, hip opinion to have is that Jean-Luc Godard’s poison-penned hate letters to cinema like The Image Book are much worthier of time and study than his intellectual frenemy François Truffaut’s magic-of-moviemaking dramedy Day for Night, because they are more challenging in their observation & interrogation of the medium. The thing is, though, that as intellectually lazy as it may be, it feels much better to celebrate than to challenge, especially when the subject is as wonderful as the art of the moving image. If my two choices as a cinephile are to be corny or self-loathing, I’m perfectly fine being corny.
Director François Truffaut stars in Day for Night as a François Truffaut-type director, lording over the film shoot of a mediocre-looking melodrama titled Meet Pamela. The metatextual joke of the movie is that there’s nothing as dramatic nor exciting in the narrative of Meet Pamela as the drama & excitement of its production. As the auteur du jour, Truffaut is responsible for guiding the decision-making of hundreds of cast & crew members, who bombard him with random, dissonant either/or questions as he attempts to funnel their chaotic input into a single, coherent picture. The bigger personalities he struggles to manage are, of course, his actors, who include Fellini collaborator Valentina Cortese as a has-been drunk who refuses to learn her cues and longtime Truffaut muse Jean-Pierre Léaud as a “spoiled brat who will not grow up,” always angling to go to the movies instead of making one. Newcomer chanteuse Dani also makes a star-making impact as the level-headed script girl who puts out the fires Truffaut himself does not notice, simply because she’s a true believer in the cause of Cinema. Explaining her passion for the medium above all else, she sweetly declares “I’d drop a guy for a film. I’d never drop a film for a guy.” True to the nature of real-life film production, most of the drama between these players occurs during the punishing rhythm of having to get multiple takes until a scene fully works or during the punishing boredom of time spent on set waiting around for those takes to be fully set up. It’s essentially an ensemble cast comedy set in a hyper-specific industry & locale, made by the people who know that industry better than anyone else in the world.
Where Day for Night becomes a transcendent piece of art in its own right (rather than just an appreciation for the transcendent nature of art) is in the sweeping montages when all of these chaotic personalities are overpowered by the momentum of the production, and everything fall exactly into place. The behind-the-camera busyness of the set is drowned out by heavy orchestration on the soundtrack, relaxing all tension & frustration with the stop-and-start repetition of filming a scene to instead ease into the flow of a shooting day where everything goes exactly right. Given how many different, opposing people it takes to make a professional movie, it’s a miracle every time one is completed, let alone is any good. Truffaut digs deep into the mechanics of how movies are made, to the point where it’s likely Day for Night was many people’s first instance of hearing the terms “headshots,” “pans,” “rushes,” and “reshoots” outside of the trades. You can tell that those practical details aren’t as interesting to him as the poetry that they produce, though, especially in scenes where he doesn’t bother hiding the shadow of the crane-shot camera crew shooting the fictional camera crew of the movie-within-the movie. He puts a lot more care & effort into displaying a reading list of film books on the great auteurs, proudly displaying names like Dreyer, Bergman, and Buñuel for the camera while romantic orchestrations swells. The only sequence where this mechanics-vs-poetry dynamic is flipped is the opener, where an extensive tracking shot full of life & wonder is revealed to be a movie-within-the-movie fake-out and is then broken down into individual, choreographed components through multiple takes. Otherwise, it works the other way around; the mechanics come before the poetry.
I can only think of two instances in Day for Night wherein Truffaut becomes noticeably cynical about his craft. The major one is in Léaud’s characterization as a petulant child who refuses to grow up, treating women as either caretakers or playthings depending on his scene-to-scene whims. It’s very much the same fuckboy posturing that he displays in The Mother and the Whore, and both instances feel like a knowing commentary on the sexual & moral immaturity of Léaud’s generation, since he had become a kind of living mascot for The French New Wave as soon as Truffaut first cast him in The 400 Blows. The other cynical note is a one-liner potshot at Hollywood as a competing movie industry, dismissing it as a playground “where kids try to live up to their famous parents.” If Hollywood was offended by that friendly jab, they didn’t show it in their adoring appreciation of Day for Night, which they awarded the 1975 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. In a way, the film is a major pioneer in the Magic of the Movies montages that have become an annual tradition for the ceremony’s television broadcasts, but with an obvious major difference. Those montages only celebrate The Movies when they achieve transcendent visual poetry (and box office profits), whereas Truffaut loves The Movies as they are, warts & all. You get the sense watching Day for Night that he genuinely enjoyed the chaos of wrangling brats, drunks, and freaks to make mediocre art in artificial locales; he loved making movies. That might seem like a shallow subject to rigorous academic cynics or to more narrative-focused moviegoers who are just “looking for a good story,” but it feels deeply spiritual & meaningful to me, a guy who also loves The Movies.
If you spend enough time on the Internet, you’ll find that the two biggest stories to result from the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris were not of personal or athletic triumph. They were stories of spectacular, humanizing failure. I am, of course, referring to French athlete Anthony Ammirati’s pole-vaulting mishap when his Olympic dreams were thwarted by his massive dong, which knocked down the bar he was supposed to clear in an otherwise successful jump. I am also referring to new online microcelebrity Raygun, an Australian breakdancer who partially worked her way into the competition by earning her PhD in the “sport”. There were some legitimately impressive breakdancers who competed at the Olympics this year, but Raygun was not one of them. Her awkward, corny dance moves on that worldwide stage were comically embarrassing, epitomizing the instant cringe of watching white people participate in hip-hop with a little too much gusto. As funny as Raygun’s televised failure and the resulting memes have been in the past week, she’s also left a mark on The Culture in negative ways. It’s not difficult to imagine that the announced decision to exclude breaking from the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles was somewhat influenced by the worldwide mockery her performance attracted to the event, despite the athleticism of the dozens of talented dancers who competed beside her. She also set public opinion on white nerds’ enthusiasm for old-school hip-hop back decades, at least as far back as the Backpack Rap days of the early 2000s.
Thankfully, there’s an excellent counterbalance to Raygun’s breakdancing shenanigans currently making the theatrical rounds, rehabilitating some of that white nerd street cred. The new Irish music industry drama Kneecap details the rise to fame of the titular rap trio Kneecap, played by the group’s real-life members. Set during a recent push to have Ireland’s native language recognized by the occupying government of the United Kingdom as legitimate and politically protected, the film characterizes its Irish-speaking stars as both cultural activists and shameless hedonists. Because their public persona includes openly distributing & consuming hard drugs, they’re seen by fellow Irish speakers as a threat to the legitimacy of their shared Civil Rights cause. Kneecap may be partyboys at heart, but they’re just as dedicated to the mission as the advocates pushing for the Irish Language Act on television. They’re just doing it in dive bars and Spotify playlists instead, inspiring renewed interest and usage of the language by modernizing it through hip-hop. Both the group and the movie are clear-eyed in their political messaging, repeating the mantra “Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom” as many times as it can be shoehorned into the dialogue. That’s about as legitimate of a case of white artists participating in old school hip-hop as you’re ever likely to find. It’s purposeful, and it’s genuine.
While the political messaging and the rags-to-slightly-nicer-rags story structure of Kneecap are fairly straightforward, director Rich Peppiatt at least finds ways to match the group’s messy, energetic songwriting in the film’s visual style. English translations of Irish rap lyrics appear onscreen in animated notebook scribbles. Drug-induced hallucinations are represented in extreme fish-eye lens framing and crude stop-motion puppetry. Michael Fassbender, playing one of the rappers’ political activist father, appears in a strobelit, dreamlike sequence so directly inspired by the liminal nightclub visions of Aftersun that it’s surprising when he returns alive just a couple scenes later. All of this frantic music video visual style is wrangled in by a guiding voice narration track, framing Kneecap as a revision of Trainspotting about how doing drugs with your friends will improve your life, not ruin it. That Trainspotting connection gets explicit when the band’s DJ dives headfirst into a garbage can to recover a lost strip of LSD, recalling Ewan McGregor flushing himself down a dive bar toilet. I don’t know that Kneecap is the most dramatically satisfying rise-to-fame story for D.I.Y. musicians suffering the remnants of British imperialism that I’ve seen in recent years; that honor likely belongs to either Gully Boy or We Are Ladyparts. It’s an exceptionally energetic one, though, and it’s got a great soundtrack to match.
Just in case the novelty of an Irish-language rap soundtrack or the effort to make the best Danny Boyle movie since 28 Days Later is not enough to draw an audience, Kneecap also mine some genuine dramatic tension from its relatively small cast. Michael Fassbender represents an older, more reserved way of undermining British oppression, continuing to participate in IRA resistance as a kind of ineffectual ghost. Simone Kirby is a scene-stealer as his estranged wife, struggling against her agoraphobia to mobilize the silent but powerful mothers behind the more vocal Irish rebels. The middle-aged DJ Próvaí is committed to the cause as well, but has to hide from his wife and school-faculty employers that he’s been publicly doing hard drugs with twentysomethings at rap concerts as part of his own political praxis. In one of the more surprising dramatic side plots, one Kneecap member grapples with the intoxicating eroticism of oppression, bringing his politics into the bedroom by having kinky roleplay sex with a local Brit who’s offended by his more inflammatory lyrics. Not all of Kneecap is a rap-soundtracked party fueled by raver drugs ordered over the internet. There’s actual substance and political intent behind its participation in hip-hop culture, which is more than you can say for poor Raygun’s brief moment of fame on the Olympic stage.
When I first moved to Austin, there were four different video rental locations that were still open, despite the fact that streaming was already nearly omnipresent at the time. There were two locations for I Luv Video and two for Vulcan Video, with both organizations consolidating into one storefront each by 2020 and both of them ultimately closing during the pandemic. In those days, my devotion was to Vulcan Video, even though the giant outdoor mural of Spock on their campus-adjacent “North Vulcan” location, which I saw when visiting the city before moving, was long gone by the time that they had been pushed out to North Loop Boulevard. Back then, I Luv Video’s website didn’t have a catalog search feature, while Vulcan did, and that won me over. Back when I wrote about every Dario Argento movie, every single one of those DVDs was rented from Vulcan North (except for Le cinque giornate, which was, and to my knowledge remains, only available on VHS). Within the past year, however, both Vulcan and ILV have returned in some form, with the collection of the former being donated to the Alamo Drafthouse and operating as “Vulcan” out of the Village location, while ILV is now known as We Luv Video and has set up shop in the exact location that was once Vulcan North. They recently had their first anniversary and threw a block party to celebrate, with VHS swapping and getting new members to sign up. I was won over by the pitch, and invited my friend to have a nineties movie night this week, wherein we would go to the video store to pick out a movie, order a pizza, and enjoy. One of the great things about having a local rental store again is the “Staff Picks” selection, and my companion was immediately drawn to Happy Together, Wong Kar-wai’s tender but turbulent 1997 drama that’s easily one of the best examples of New Queer Cinema.
Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung) are a gay couple from Hong Kong who, hoping that a visit to Argentina will break the cycle of their constant break-ups and reconciliations. Po-Wing insists that they rent a car instead of taking a bus to visit the Iguaza Falls, which results in them getting lost and never making it to their destination. Their trip is marked by the acquisition of a lamp that creates a simulated image of a waterfall, which Fai keeps when he and Po-Wing break up once more because of the stress of their failed venture and the conflict that ensues. Lacking the funds to fly home, Fai takes up residence in a rundown motel in Buenos Aires, where he has a shoebox of a room and shares cooking facilities with all of the other residents, and he finds work as a doorman at a tango club. Po-Wing takes up a life as a sex worker, and Fai is forced to watch him entertain john after john at the club where he works. After the two of them argue and Fai confronts Po-Wing about spending all of their money and stranding them there, Po-Wing steals an expensive watch from one of his clients so that Fai can pawn it and go home but is badly beaten by the man over it. Po-Wing’s hands are badly injured, and he is forced to wear plaster bandages on them for an extended period, and Fai reluctantly becomes his caretaker.
Po-Wing makes his interest in resuming their affair clear—Fai notes that Po-Wing’s “Let’s start over” was a constant refrain over their rocky separations and reunions—but while Fai clearly still loves and cares for him, they do not become lovers again. Po-Wing’s attempts to climb into bed with Fai only alienate him, and his constant whining and demanding tell us a great deal about what their relationship was like, even before he became largely incapable of fending for himself. He forces Fai to go jogging with him in terrible weather despite his ex’s reluctance, and when Fai takes ill because of the weather, Po-Wing still demands that he cook for them. Of course, Fai is revealed to be no shrinking violet or victim either, as we see that he becomes intensely jealous; when Po-Wing goes to get cigarettes and isn’t home when Fai returns from work, Fai buys multiple cartons so that Po-Wing has no reason to leave. He even takes Po-Wing’s passport the first night that his former lover stays with him following his release from the hospital and hides it so that Po-Wing can’t leave him. It’s clear that they were always toxic for each other, but that they were also madly, passionately in love in a way that defies all logic and common sense and drives one to extreme highs that make the extreme lows seem worthwhile. And that love is still present, even if it’s so tainted by mutual bitterness at this point that there’s no way for them to walk the same path ever again.
Fai is fired from the tango bar when he attacks the man who beat Po-Wing and starts working at a Chinese restaurant. There, he befriends a young, handsome Taiwanese man named Chang (Chen Chang). Although Chang never expresses overt attraction to Fai, his affection is clear. Po-Wing becomes jealous after overhearing Chang in the background of one of his constant, demanding phone calls to Fai at work, and this, combined with Fai’s continuous refusal to return his passport, leads Po-Wing to move out when he is recovered from his injuries. Fai opens up to Chang about having left Hong Kong in disgrace due to stealing money from his employer, who was a friend of his father’s, and Chang tells Fai about his family’s food stall in the night market in Taipei. Chang eventually earns enough money to continue his travels and tells Fai he intends to travel to the southernmost tip of South America, where he has heard that one can release all their cares. He offers his tape recorder to Fai so he can carry his worries for him, but Fai can muster no words, only sobs. Fai starts to work nights in an abattoir so that he can get his body back on Hong Kong time and goes home, with Po-Wing breaking down upon realizing that Fai is really gone.
This is one of the most moving films that I have ever seen. I’ve never been in the kind of relationship that the film depicts, one in which one partner’s jealousy and control issues and the other’s learned helplessness and deliberate provocation of envy put them in constant conflict with one another, but I’ve been a teenager (and a twentysomething, and a thirtysomething) in love, the kind of love that’s so big and so loud that it takes up the whole room. Love immiserates as well as illuminates, love consumes as well as sustains, and love can craze as much as it can ground. Po-Wing and Fai’s relationship is one that can swing back and forth between Po-Wing’s mad desire for the physical intimacy of sharing a bed even if they don’t touch, with complete disregard for Fai’s boundaries or well-being, to Fai berating his former lover for his promiscuous ways (before later cruising in the same ways and in the same places after Chang leaves, noting in his internal monologue that all lonely people are the same, deep down) while making him a virtual prisoner, to the two of them slow dancing in the shared kitchen of Fai’s hostel, sweet and kind and perfect — but only for a moment.
The copy of this film that I watched was a grey market region-free DVD, and although the transfer was terrible (there are several scenes during the portion of the film where Fai is working in the restaurant wherein the subtitles are completely illegible against his white chef’s wear), it was nonetheless a beautiful movie. It’s a mood piece, wherein there are several long shots of urban decrepity punctuated by neon and headlights as well as very long shots of Iguaza Falls as we take in the majesty of the pouring, pulsing water, countless gallons and tons of the stuff moving at incomprehensible volume, churning with a power that can only be imagined and yet which pales in comparison to the raging waters that push and pull inside of Po–Wing and Fai. It’s powerful stuff, and worth tracking down.
I am by no means well studied in the broader history of German Expressionism, but I have seen a horror movie or two. When I think of the German Expressionist visual style, my mind immediately conjures up the fantastic, transportive images of titles like Nosferatu,M, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Man Who Laughs, The Hands of Orlac, Destiny, The Golem and, of course, Metropolis. Even the cultural impact of those films’ innovative directors & cinematographers emigrating to America has always been most immediately apparent in early Hollywood horrors like The Black Cat & Dracula, given their surrealistic production design and shadowy visual play. It was surprising, then, to find no supernatural dream logic in the once-lost German Expressionist drama Asphalt, which might account for the film’s relatively low name recognition in that field. In terms of narrative, Joe May’s tragic story of mismatched lovers feels more familiar to early Hollywood dramas about misbehaved women than it does to the nightmare-realm horrors more typically associated with German Expressionism. However, all of the ecstatic visual flourish associated with that film movement is in full swing, as the camera sways wildly in an attempt to capture the bustling urban chaos of Berlin, where its doomed love story is set. Its plot synopsis might sound like the German equivalent of early US films like A Fool There Was, The Red Kimona, Parisian Love, or A Woman of the World, but it’s way less restrained & stage-bound than any of those titles. It’s pure cinema, made by the people who established the language of that artform in its infancy.
Metropolis star Gustav Fröhlich plays a bumbling, naive cop who’s not quite streetwise enough to handle the streets of Berlin. Else Heller (doing her best Louise Brooks drag) plays the young man’s downfall: a cunning, compulsive thief he catches robbing a jewelry store when he should be directing traffic his first day on the job. The poor rube buys her sob story about needing to steal to survive, as she is perilously close to being evicted onto the harsh streets of Berlin. An unlikely romance blossoms between cop & criminal as his sympathy grows, until she can’t stand his naivety any longer and fully confesses her betrayal of trust. She does not, in fact, steal for survival. She steals because it’s thrilling to get away with taking home diamonds & furs. She steals for the fun of stealing. What ruins the fun is the way her flirty pickpocket lifestyle gets her new beau into steep trouble, both with the macho brutes of her past and with the strictly law-abiding members of his own family. The dramatic entertainment value of Asphalt is in watching a young, fashionable woman thieve, lie, and cheat in hedonistic excess, even if the morals of the era require it to eventually condemn her for crimes against morality. No matter how deplorable the femme fatale’s behavior is in the abstract, the movie takes obvious delight in watching her smoke cigarettes and smolder in a heated bathtub, treating herself to a life of luxury that she would be denied through any legal path. She might not steal to survive, exactly, but she does steal to make life worth surviving.
Asphalt intuitively takes for granted that crime is sexy & fun, so it gets to spend a lot of its time playing around with new, exciting ways to move the camera instead of complicating its central romantic dynamic. It opens with kaleidoscopic mirroring of Berlin street traffic and sweeping montages of the rain-slicked asphalt beneath those cars & feet. The camera is in constant motion, either evoking the mania of navigating a city’s cacophonous busyness in exterior scenes or taking inventory of individual objects & players on interior sets. It represents an end of an era for ecstatic, inventive German filmmaking, but there’s no solemn, settled maturity to its cinematography. It’s desperate to impress. Like Metropolis, a complete print of Asphalt was considered lost media for decades, until it pieced back together through archival discovery & recovery in the 1990s. Unlike Metropolis, it’s been largely forgotten to time a second time since that restoration. There just isn’t as much of a completionist streak among romance & crime film enjoyers the same way that horror & sci-fi freaks will seek out anything that falls into their genre of choice. I’m as guilty of that bias as anyone, having never heard of this film until a used DVD copy fell into my hands at the Minneapolis record store Electric Fetus. Meanwhile, I’ve actively sought out at least a dozen horror films from the German Expressionist era in my frantic search to guzzle down all things horror. It turns out they were making romantic dramas in that period too, just like in Hollywood (except way dreamier & prettier).
One venue in which enthusiastic moviegoing is still alive & well is the Outdoor Movie Night, especially the free, inflatable-screen showings of Family Friendly favorites like Coco or Moana. Those screenings are more of a community event than your typical, isolating trip to the cinema. Families spread out on picnic blankets, halfheartedly try to keep their kids in eyesight as they play around with new friends and, whenever bored enough, pay attention to the movie being projected. It’s cute. The Broadside offers that same kind of Outdoor Movie Night experience with a little more formal structure & focus, having built a Family Friend compound next to The Broad Theater for regular concerts & laid-back screenings. The recent Wildwood showing of 1980’s Carny made great use of that communal atmosphere. To play off the movie’s traveling-carnival setting, they invited face-painters, stilt-walkers, tarot readers, and cotton candy spinners as a pre-show warmup, concluding with local musician Brookiecita (of LSD Clownsystem) introducing the film over a slideshow of her own childhood photographs from growing up on the carnival circuit. There were indeed kids running around the grounds too, this time eating cotton candy and enjoying the “VIP room” of inflatable pools.
That Outdoor Movie Night atmosphere is worth noting here because Carny is absolutely not a Family Friendly affair. This is one of those teenage Jodie Foster roles that edge right up to the line of being too slimy to stomach without ever fully crossing it (see also: Taxi Driver, Foxes, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane). Foster plays an underage waitress who’s bored with the tedium of small-town living, so she joins a traveling carnival on a whim after lusting after its most boisterous performer (Gary Busey in horrifying clown makeup). Struggling to establish her place in the carnival beyond her function as The Dunk Tank Clown’s girlfriend, she briefly auditions as one of the striptease dancers in the “hoochie coochie” tent. This decision lands the teenager in multiple compromising scenarios: modeling lingerie for hooting drunkards, getting body-slammed onto the stage by said drunkards, and eventually getting tied to a bed by a villainous goon who threatens to sexually assault her before her fellow carnies intervene. The worst part is that her much older boyfriend knows exactly how old she is (while she lies to everyone else about already being 18), and the safer, more appropriate job he eventually finds for her is still as sexual bait in one of the carnival-game booths – this time working marks for pocket change, which we see play out in a lengthy sequence of lesbian cruising.
All of this dangerous flirtation with Jodie Foster’s early cinematic persona as Teenage Jailbait is eased by the film always implying its sex scenes instead of fully illustrating them and by its characterization of her as a consenting participant in her own seduction & indoctrination. It’s also eased by the fact that Carny isn’t really about her seduction into the carny lifestyle at all. It’s more of a love story about the two best bros she gets between: Busey as the clown and musician Robbie Robertson as his “midway” hustler trailer-mate. Busey & Robertson love each other with furious devotion, often expressing their mutual affection in drunken acts of group sex with women they pick up on the road. It throws off their dynamic when Busey catches real feelings for Foster, then, and that goes double for when Robertson inevitably has sex with her too. Their seething jealousies & whispered bickering just outside of her earshot end up taking over the foreground of the movie while her own coming of age carny-life story fades into the background, so that it’s less of a love triangle than it is a tortured bromance. That helps steal some attention away from the situational leering at Foster’s body, but Carny still made for an intensely uncomfortable watch at times, especially in an Outdoor Movie Night setting.
Of course, discomfort was the intent. The movie opens with Busey smearing on his greasy clown paint before hopping into the dunk-tank cage, antagonizing every mark who strolls by like a screeching gorilla. It concludes with a classic hall-of-mirrors horror sequence in which the carnies plot to scare off local thugs who are shaking them down for obscene payouts, essentially borrowing its climax from Tod Browning’s 1930s cult classic Freaks. Despite those intentionally scary images and the amoral sexual politics of Foster’s seduction into the carny lifestyle, Brookiecita introduced the movie as a humanizing, empathetic portrayal of traveling carnival folk as a type of found family. Likewise, Robertson co-wrote, produced, and partially scored the picture based on his own experiences as a teenage carnival worker, fondly remembering his time in the business. Personally, I got my own “seedy underbelly of the carnival” crash course from Bikini Kill’s “Carnival,” not The Band’s “Life is a Carnival,” but I like to think I still got the message. In Carny, Robertson seemed to be acknowledging both the warmth of the carnival community when dealing with their own and the grimy, violent hucksterism they could stoop to when dealing with outsiders. In a way, that clash of familial warmth and carnival grime actually made it a perfect Outdoor Movie Night selection, the best one I’ve seen since The Broadside screened Demons with live prog-rock accompaniment.
Even more so than your Slow Cinema auteur of choice, Steven Soderbergh is the master of the mundane. He consistently makes tight, thrilling, wryly funny dispatches from the florescent-lit hell pits of American tedium. A 70min experiment in early-2000s digi cinematography and purposefully deflated genre payoffs, Bubble is a perfect illustration of that skill. Its vision of America is a complex labyrinth of small-town diners, factory breakrooms, and low-ceiling apartments. The doomed souls who navigate those mundane spaces all work multiple jobs for the privilege of getting paid minimum wage, wondering in their spare time what it might have been like if they had stuck it out for a full high school diploma. When jailed for a violent crime, they complain “It’s horrible in here,” but it’s so oppressively bland everywhere else that it’s questionable whether rotting in a concrete cell is any worse than being free to work their next shift. Even the murder that lands them there is bleakly, purposefully uninteresting.
I suppose there’s some novelty in what type of Midwest factory employs these small-town workers. Bubble was shot in a real, operational doll parts factory in Ohio, which makes for some horrific digital-video footage in early scenes. The mundanity of the world outside the assembly line quickly closes in, though. Loneliness & petty jealousies shared among three of the factory workers leads to one of their murders, with only one clear suspect and no real need to investigate. A deleted scene explains the psychology behind that act of violence like the Freudian denouement of Hitchcock’s Psycho, but Soderbergh removes even that morsel of narrative satisfaction from the final cut. He also undercuts the potential for dramatic excitement or emotion by casting non-actor locals to play the central parts, mumbling their semi-improvised lines through obvious shyness. Even the camera’s movements are pedestrian, often just swiveling on a stationary tri-pod like an oscillating security cam. It’s all very matter of fact, and the facts of the matter are all grim, grey gruel.
Handling the editing & cinematography himself under pseudonyms, Soderbergh seemed to be having fun playing around with the unpretentious tools of the new digital filmmaking era. He even got hands-on in Bubble‘s distribution strategy, striking a deal with the Mark Cuban-owned cable company HDNet to release the film simultaneously in theaters, on-demand, and on physical disc. His pitch was that hopefully audiences would be drawn to see the movie in theaters and, if they liked it, would pick up a physical copy for repeat viewings on the way home. Corporate theater chains were outraged at this disruption to the traditional theatrical window, but that day-and-date release strategy has obviously become more of a standard practice in recent years. Bubble was supposed to be the first of six HDNet releases with the same improvised-drama filming methods and unconventional home distribution schedules, but instead it flopped and mostly fell out of circulation. I had to find my DVD copy second-hand, and it only includes a Spanish-language subtitles track, so it likely traveled far to reach me.
Forever adaptable, Soderbergh has been doing just fine in the two decades since the Bubble debacle. If anything, he’s since moved on to making straight-to-HBO cheapies instead of straight-to-HDNet cheapies, which feels like a minor step up in prestige. He’s also had a few theatrical hits since then and has flirted with the idea of early retirement, only to discover that he’d rather be making movies no matter the scale in production or distribution. Bubble is not his most exciting, imaginative dispatch from the great mediocre American void (that would be Schizopolis), but it might be the most indicative example of his stripped-down, unfussy style. In most other cases where a career-shifting work from a major filmmaker had fallen out of distribution, it would be tempting to petition for a spiffy new digital restoration from a boutique Blu-ray label. In Bubble‘s case, it feels totally appropriate for it to be stuck in time on thrift-store DVDs. The only reason to reissue it, really, would be for a new director’s commentary track looking back on how the industry has changed in the past couple decades, since Soderbergh happens to be the master of those too.
The thing about shamelessly borrowing from Scorsese’s Goodfellasis that it works. It worked for Paul Thomas Anderson when he applied the Goodfellas template to the Golden Age of porno in Boogie Nights. It worked for Todd Haynes when he applied it to the classic glam rock scene in Velvet Goldmine (even if he had to mix in a healthy dose of Citizen Kaneto throw critics off the scent). And now it has worked just as well for Jeff Nichols in his new film The Bikeriders, which is essentially just Goodfellas on motorbikes. All three of these Goodfellas derivatives follow a distinct pattern that starts in a Fuck Around era (in which they introduce the audience to the power outsiders feel when they find community in seemingly dangerous subcultures), followed by the requisite Find Out Era (in which those subcultures are unraveled by drugs & violence), distinctly marked by the turning of a decade. They all heavily rely on vintage pop-music montage and period-specific costume design to evoke the cool-factor appeal of their subcultural settings, often underlined in wry voiceover. I’m also of the lowbrow opinion that all three are the career-best feature films of their respective directors to date. It’s an overly familiar genre template, but that’s because it’s a consistently effective one.
If Nichols narrows in on any particular element of the Goodfellas formula that other imitators miss, it’s in the second-act narrator switch in which the protagonist-gangster’s wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), highjacks the story’s POV for a short stretch. We get a great taste of how overwhelming it is to be plunged into the deep end of a foreign subculture during Karen’s wedding-sequence narration in particular, but more importantly we get a woman’s perspective on what makes that particular subculture sexy. One of the most important line-readings of Scorsese’s script is Karen describing the first time she directly witnessed mobster violence first-hand, confessing “I know there are women, like my best friends, who would have gotten out of there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide. But I didn’t. I got to admit the truth. It turned me on.” Jodie Comer’s wife-of-a-motorcycle rebel narrator Kathy keeps that horny engine running throughout the entire runtime of The Bikeriders, whereas Goodfellas only takes Karen’s POV for a few minutes. It’s not enough that Jeff Nichols dresses up every young character-actor hunk of today in the fetishistic biker gear of yesteryear, mounted on the backs of roaring sex machines. He also frames them from the perspective of a woman panting like a cartoon hound in disbelief of how ridiculous and how ridiculously sexy they are. Comer gives the best lead performance of the year as a result, even if she is just a regional accent in high-waist jeans.
Otherwise, the movie rides within the painted lines of the road that Goodfellas paved. The Shangri-Las check off the 60s-Girl-Group-Soundtrack requirement of the template, with “Out in the Streets” deployed as an overture that explains Comer’s lustful fascination with Austin Butler’s bad-boy rebel. She has to compete for his attention with Tom Hardy’s gang leader, who is living out a fantasy in his head in which he is the Wild One Brando to Butler’s Causeless Rebel Dean. Nichols positions Hardy as a weekend-warrior poser and Butler as the real-deal biker rebel that all of his fellow riders strive to emulate. They form a motorcycle riding club in the Fuck Around 1960s, then cower in disgust as it spirals out of control in the Find Out 1970s, mostly due to Vietnam War PTSD from their younger recruits. Comer maintains a “Can you believe these guys?” incredulity throughout that helps keep the mood light, recounting tales from the road to a photojournalist played by Mike Faist, who in real life published the anthropological portraits that Nichols adapted to the screen. From there, the cast is rounded out by young That Guy character actors playing eccentric bikers with ludicrous nicknames: Norman Reedus as Funny Sonny, Karl Glusman as Corky, Michael Shannon as Zipco, Toby Wallace as The Kid, etc. They all look just as great in their grimy leather jackets as the cast of Goodfellas looked in their shiny silk suits.
All of this posing & posturing in vintage biker gear makes total sense for a movie adapted from a series of portraits where motorcycle nerds & freaks posed for still images. It’s also appropriate for a subculture that was so intrinsically image-obsessed, wherein men with regular jobs & families would play dress-up with their buddies to live out the rebel-biker fantasies they would otherwise only see at The Movies. The Bikeriders is not a pure, prurient portrait of handsome men in leather & denim, though. It’s much less of a capital-A Art Film than Katherine Bigelow’s The Loveless in that way, even though it shares its themes & interests. The Goodfellas template allows it to indulge in as much sexy rebel-biker fantasy and subcultural anthropology as it wants without leaving a mainstream audience behind in its dust. It might be an unimaginative way to hold a movie together, but dammit it works every time.
It’s been a strangely quiet summer for theatrical moviegoing so far, thanks largely to last year’s Hollywood labor strikes. All of the usual corporate slop that clogs up American movie marquees has been arriving in a slow trickle instead of a constant flood, which has many box office pundits panicking about the collapse of theatrical exhibition as a viable industry. I understand that theaters need weekly hits to sell enough popcorn to keep the projectors running, but I have to admit I’ve mostly been enjoying the lull. This year’s short supply of substantial superhero sequels & IP extenders has left a lot of room for smaller, gentler films to breathe in local cinemas – from digital restorations of already venerated classics like Le Samouraï & It’s Such a Beautiful Day to future classics in D.I.Y. outsider art like Hundreds of Beavers & The People’s Joker. It’s actually been a great summer for movies so far if all you care about is easy access to high-quality cinema, which pretty much fully accounts for my selfish POV.
Last year, when I wrote about the state of summertime moviegoing in early June, I reported that I had retreated from theaters to watch smaller, quieter movies than what they were offering at home instead. This year, I don’t have to stream those quiet dramas from my couch; they’re actually playing in New Orleans cinemas right now. Theaters may be struggling, but attentive cinephiles are thriving. So, here are a few short-form reviews of the smaller-scale, smaller-budget dramas currently playing across the city (among other titles I haven’t had time to catch up with yet, like The Bikeriders, Tuesday, and I Used to Be Funny).
Ghostlight
The most consistent, predictable supplier of the small-scale indie drama is, of course, The Sundance Film Festival, which typically opens the year with a handful of buzzy, awardsy titles that inevitably get drowned out by louder, flashier titles from later festivals like Cannes. Somehow, Ghostlight plays directly into the tropes & expectations of a typical Sundance selection but earns sharp laughs and emotional pangs though that familiar template. A family drama about a macho, emotionally closed-off construction worker who gets in touch with his feelings by signing up to play Romeo Montague in a community-theatre Shakespeare production, it’s got the general shape of a standard post-Little Miss Sunshine festival breakout. However, it ends up being an inversion of hokey indie drama tropes instead of playing them straight. There are plenty dramas that are shot like documentaries, and there are plenty documentaries that are shot like dramas; Ghostlight is a drama shot like a documentary that’s shot like a drama (a turdocen, if you will). There are also plenty dramas wherein an actor’s real life starts to mirror a role they’re playing in their art, but Ghostlight is about an already famous play that starts to mirror the actor’s life instead, taking the teen-suicide themes of Romeo & Juliet more seriously than most modern adaptations and interpretations. It’s shockingly successful in that inversion too. If nothing else, it made me cry earlier & more often than any other new release I’ve seen so far this year.
I don’t often cry when something sad happens in a movie, like when the farm burns down in Minari. I tend to cry at mawkish acts of kindness, like when Mrs. Harris is gifted the dress she desperately wanted after her trip to Paris. In Ghostlight, all of the saddest events in our tough-exterior construction worker’s life happen before the audience meets the big softie. All we really know about him at first is that he’s explosively angry when pressed to talk about his feelings, and that he’s currently rehearsing for two auditions: one for a legal deposition in a civil lawsuit and one for his first theatrical role as Romeo. The audience is able to deduce the details of the lawsuit long before our grieving hero has the strength to voice them, based on his discomfort with the plot of the Shakespearean tragedy he was roped into performing. The biggest tearjerking moments are all in the way his small social circle gently pushes him to heal without scaring him off: Dolly de Leon as a failed pro actor who takes him in like a wounded puppy, Katherine Mallen Kupferer as his theatre-nerd daughter who finally has a mechanism for bonding with her walled-off father, Tara Mallen as his put-upon wife who supports his surprising new hobby even though it threatens the couple’s domestic intimacy. It’s a lovely, loving communal dynamic that only gets more emotionally effective once you learn that the central family unit is played by a real-life family of Chicago-area actors, led by Keith Kupferer as the hard-hatted thespian. So much of Ghostlight‘s premise and presentation sounds phony in the abstract, but in practice there’s a raw, healing truth to it that’s cathartic to anyone willing to be vulnerable.
Janet Planet
Not everyone wants to spend the hot summer months having a public ugly-cry about small acts of kindness. Maybe you just want to space out in your neighborhood theater’s AC and observe small acts of being. The 1990s period piece Janet Planet is a warmly familiar coming-of-age story slowwwed down to the tempo of summer bugs ambiently chirping in the woods. It’s like a less traumatic Aftersun, chronicling the summer months spent by a young girl named Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) quietly observing her mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson). The film’s chapter breaks are named after various temporary boarders & lovers who drift through the small family’s home, mostly without incident. Lacy is a bookworm introvert who observes the adult behavior around her with searing intensity, which redirects the dramatic scrutiny of the movie towards Janet’s relationships. Occasionally, she’ll match her mother’s impulsive, depressed disposition with unprompted one-liners like “Do you know what’s funny? Every moment of my life is hell.” Mostly, though, this is a drama of recognition, dragging the audience back to childhood experiences of being lonely, bored, and disregarded – filling your empty schedule with personal rituals, like compulsively plastering your loose hairs on the shower wall. Lacy is realistically awkward, selfish, and nosy for a child her age. We’ve all been there, but not all of us were so still and so quiet about it.
I would have never guessed that Janet Planet is the debut film of a well-known playwright (Annie Baker), given the general sparseness of its spoken dialogue. There’s a detailed specificity to Lacy’s environment at the edge of 1990s Massachusetts hippie communes that feels like the work of a novelist, especially by the time she’s attending midsummer puppet festivals and watching her mother run an at-home acupuncture clinic (the titular Janet Planet). At the same time, it belongs to a broad lineage of observational coming-of-age stories broadcasting the inner lives of young girls: Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, My Girl, Mermaids, Now & Then, Eighth Grade, Peppermint Soda, the aforementioned Aftersun, etc. Its major distinction within that canon is in its slow-cinema distancing, in which a fixed camera silently observes the figures shrinking in its frame as they wander at the edges of American wilderness, their thoughts drowned out by the roaring static of birds & bugs. I suppose it’s also distinct in that it’s the only film in this canon with a Laurie Anderson needle drop, which alone says a lot about the idiosyncrasies of Lacy & Janet’s particular, peculiar home environment.
Evil Does Not Exist
Falling further down the slow-cinema rabbit hole, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest drama Evil Does Not Exist is even more quietly observant of its characters’ bodies shrinking against the enormity of nature, often staring into a fixed place in the wooded distance for minutes on end. Unlike Janet Planet, though, it’s set in the snowy mountains of a small village outside Tokyo, which is a visually appealing reprieve from the Climate Change heat waves outside the cinema walls. That village will not be small for long. After distantly observing the daily lives & labor of the rural locals, we’re led to a fluorescent-lit townhall meeting wherein greedy real estate developers announce a plan to establish a large-scale “glamping” site for tourists that will transform the village forever, despite protests. The rest of the film is a tense battle of wills between skeptical locals who want to maintain an authentic relationship with their environment (represented by Hitoshi Okima) and big-city phonies who want to commodify that authenticity as an amusement-park experience (represented by Tyuji Kosaka). This philosophical clash inevitably culminates in a shocking act of violence in the final seconds, but most of the “evil” depicted in the film is quietly bureaucratic and told through the grimaces of the locals being steamrolled for short-term profits.
I had an unexpectedly conflicted reaction to Evil Does Not Exist, especially to its cheap digi-video image quality. Its amateur-grade digital video felt appropriately soulless when mocking the sinister mundanity of City Brain but felt flat & ugly when gazing at the idyllic mundanity of Country Life. Dramatically, it packs neither the emotional wallop of Ghostlight nor the melancholic beauty of Janet Planet, even if its political & philosophical themes are more sharply defined. It ended up being a mixed bag for me, which was a surprise after being enthusiastic about the other Hamaguchis I’ve seen (Drive My Car and Asako I & II). Still, its quiet mood and overly patient pacing make for excellent summertime counterprogramming just as much as Ghostlight or Janet Planet. These are the kinds of movies that theaters usually only have space for in the last-minute awards campaigns of winter, so excuse me if I’m a little perversely grateful for mainstream Hollywood’s current supply-chain struggles.
One of the most beloved jokes among film people is the one about how everyone wishes that they could be like Terence Malick and take a twenty year vacation. This is a reference to the fact that Malick was so exhausted by the making of 1978’s Days of Heaven that he didn’t attempt to mount another film production until The Thin Red Line, which was released in 1998. The fact of the matter is that if this had been the last thing that Malick ever made, it would still be a masterpiece. With almost all of the film being shot during dawn and dusk, this is without a doubt one of the most beautiful movies of all time, an almost impossibly staggering work of art.
Bill (Richard Gere) is a manual laborer in a steel mill in Chicago in the mid 1910s. He has a temper, and when he knocks over a foreman during an argument and accidentally kills the man, he flees the city with his younger sister Linda (Linda Manz) and his lover, Abby (Brooke Adams). In order to avoid judgment and gossip for being an unwed couple, they pretend to all be siblings. They find themselves in the Texas panhandle, not far from Amarillo, and take on work as seasonal laborers at the farm of a wealthy but reclusive farmer (Sam Shepard). When Bill overhears that the farmer has been given a prognosis of only a few months, he convinces Abby to marry the man so that she can inherit his wealth when he dies and they can be set for life. Abby does so, reluctantly, but then finds herself actually falling for the farmer, while he in turn seems revitalized. Only the farmer’s trusted foreman (Robert Wilke) seems to think that anything’s amiss, but the farmer sends him off to another part of the huge ranch in a fit of pique. After a period of easy living, Abby and Bill get a little careless, and her husband starts to sense what’s happening. Before anything can really be done about it, Bill leaves the farm for a time, citing “business” elsewhere; he returns the following harvest at the same time as a new group of seasonal laborers, but a swarm of locusts isn’t far behind, and the attempts to burn them out only create more tribulation, with tragedy soon to follow.
Narratively, Days of Heaven is a little thin. Famously, Malick decided late in the process to cut a great deal of the dialogue and instead let a voiceover from young Linda carry most of the exposition, along with her insights. In turn, the voiceover was largely ad-libbed, which lends the whole thing an unfinished, extemporaneous quality. It’s the thing that I like least in this film, even though it was, legendarily, the only way that he could think of to make the film work, so who am I to judge? Further, I would say that there are parts of the film in which the narration is to the film’s benefit; this is most obvious in the early scenes, as it establishes the characters and their relationships to one another. There’s also a good bit of foreshadowing built in when she talks about her encounter with a traveling hellfire-and-brimstone minister, which neatly sets up the fire at the farm at the end in particular but also the general biblical influences that are found throughout, fitting for a film with “heaven” in the title. Like Abraham and Sarai/Sarah, a couple has to go into hiding and pretend to be siblings; like Jacob, Bill is kept from being with his beloved and forced to labor instead; like Moses, Bill survives a plague of locusts but never gets to enter the promised land because of the consequences of his temper. It’s relying on those associations to make the plot work, but that’s really not what’s important here.
What matters are the feelings of longing, and the way that the photography captures that transitional space between day and night (and vice versa). Everybody here is in a constant state of utter yearning, and the way that this is caught on film is lightning in a bottle. I also can understand why that made this one a nightmare to create, with less than an hour a day of the perfect light. That craftsmanship is apparent in every frame, however, and it’s definitely worth seeing if you have the chance. I was fortunate enough to catch this one at my local arthouse cinema, and I would say it’s the best way to go about it. If that’s not an option for you, then you’re in luck; although the original 2007 Criterion release has been out of print for a long time, there’s a Blu-Ray pressing that’s currently available.
I also don’t want to end this review without calling out Brooke Adams’s performance. I adore her as the mother to Ione Skye and Fairuza Balk in 1992’s Gas, Food, Lodging, and she’s also amazing as Sarah in Cronenberg’s Dead Zone adaptation. And who could forget her performance in the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers? In spite of all of those triumphs, this might be a career best performance for her, as she’s torn between the two men in her life. There’s a way that her face just breaks when she realizes that her world was never as solid as she thought it was when Bill’s temper gets the best of him for the last time, and it’s so subtle and so lovely. This is a slow one, but its reputation is as well-earned as Malick’s rest was.
Swampflix 