Jason Schwartzman

Pavements (2025)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

The 90s alt-rock band Pavement is, undoubtedly, one of “the most important and influential” bands of their time. There’s just no way to point that out without betraying their relationship with artistic sincerity & professional ambition. So, the new career-retrospective documentary Pavements has to hide that sentiment behind several layers of self-protective sarcasm & ironic remove, declaring Pavement to be “The World’s Most Important and Influential Band” of all time, forever . . . as a goof. Here, Alex Ross Perry gives the rock-band mascot of 90s slackerdom the same kaleidoscopic hagiography treatment Brett Morgan gave David Bowie in Moonage Daydream, except in this case his subject is around to make fun of that idea the entire time they’re going through the motions of it. They made fun of the positive press & financial success they found in the 90s too, constantly mocking the concept of rock stardom until they were no longer in danger of achieving it. And yet, both their songs and this nostalgic overview of their history can be genuinely beautiful & moving at times, despite all efforts to undercut any overt sincerity. The words are pyrite, but the soundz are gold.

Pavements is a loosely constructed document of four simultaneous projects meant to commemorate the important, influential art of Pavement’s heyday: a diary of their recent reunion tour, an art-gallery exhibition of their vintage artifacts, a Bohemian Rhapsody-style biopic spoof and, most improbably, a staging of an original jukebox musical. All of your favorite Pavement tracks from their Quarantine The Past greatest-hits compilation repeat several times throughout, but none are heard in total. They’re all fragmented between fictional & real-world variations in the four simultaneous projects, practically lyric by lyric. As a result, the film feels deliberately formless & unfinished, a documentary that runs over two hours in length but never feels like it truly gets started. That approach might be frustrating for newcomers hoping to actually learn something about the band or to at the very least be hooked by their standout singles. Anything I learned as a casual fan was entirely by accident – gleaning some interpersonal band member dynamics and album-cycle evolutions of their sound that I didn’t pick up on while discovering their records the decade after they broke up. Still, it’s a perfect approach for a band that was so stubbornly committed to maintaining their detached 90s slacker cool while contemporaries like Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and The Smashing Pumpkins were becoming unlikely household names.

The biggest surprise of Pavements is the comedic chops of Stranger Things alumnus Joe Keery, cast here as the fictional biopic version of Pavement singer Stephen Malkmus. Keery outshines the much more luminary comedic performers Jason Schwartzman & Tim Heidecker in those sequences, making a big show out of impersonating Malkmus with unwarranted method-acting commitment. Like everything else in Pavement lore, it’s a flippant mockery of artistic pretension, but it also occasionally touches on something strikingly impressive & true. There are several interview clips in which Malkmus is being aggressively sarcastic & uncooperative with press that are indistinguishable from their corresponding Joe Keery parodies until the camera reveals which of the two brats is yapping. Much like Sophie Thatcher’s performance in the recent music video for the once-obscure Pavement B-side “Harness Your Hopes,” Keery acts as a modern avatar for the band’s pranksterism so that they don’t have to take the spotlight themselves, and he provides a lot of the movie’s most coherent reference points for tone & narrative. Otherwise, Pavements is a scrapbook of 90s-era college radio slacker rock, as soundtracked by “the most important and influential” band to define the sound. Its fragmented approach that avoids enthusiastically committing to any one framework for retelling Pavement’s story is likely the only way that story could be told; it could only make fun of itself for trying at all.

-Brandon Ledet

Mountainhead (2025)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

I’ve never seen Succession, so I wasn’t terribly interested when I heard that the show’s creator had written and directed a new direct-to-HBO feature, but I found myself on a couch watching it with friends on a lazy Sunday afternoon after a dip in a municipal pool. Of the five of us, two of them had already watched it within the past couple of days and were excited to watch it again, one of whom was Erstwhile Roommate of Boomer, who described the film as having one of the funniest sequences he had ever seen in a movie. After this declaration, he expressed that he hoped he hadn’t hyped it up too much. This did turn out to be probably the funniest movie I’ve seen so far this year, although general audiences don’t seem to be connecting with it. 

Hugo Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman), known to his “friends” as “Souper,” has invited the rest of said quartet to his recently constructed mansion, Mountainhead, in the remote mountains of Utah. The group, which calls themselves the “Brewsters” (presumably a play on Brewster’s Millions), consists of mega-wealthy a-holes who only have a few rules for when they get together for a boys’ retreat: “no deals, no meals, no high heels,” which is to say snacks only, no business, and no women. Despite the “no deals” disclaimer, Souper plans to use the time together to pitch the other three on investing in his meditation app, which he continuously and defensively insists is a “total wellness superapp.” The patriarch of the group is Randall Garrett (a pleasantly salt-and-peppered Steve Carrell), who has recently received a cancer diagnosis that gives him five to fifteen years, but don’t let that make you overly sympathetic to him right out of the gate. The two remaining members, Venis “Ven” Parish (Cory Michael Smith) and Jeff Abredazi (Ramy Youssef), are currently at odds with one another, as Jeff’s currently riding a rising tide made out of dollar bills as algorithm software that he invested in is seeing a major return at the same time that Ven’s 4-million user social networking app has just released a (too) powerful AI that’s literally breaking the internet. 

As the first order of business, we must establish that everyone here (with the possible exception of Jeff) is very, very stupid. They use a great deal of tech-based neologisms and throw around the names of philosophers like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Søren Kierkegaard as supposed sources for their personal philosophies (although Souper doesn’t seem to be able to graduate past Ayn Rand, given that his obsession with The Fountainhead influenced the name of the home for which the film is titled, with a copy sitting on a nightstand in one of the house’s many bedrooms). It’s clear from their feigned eloquence that they have, at best, secondhand knowledge of these schools of thought from pared-down excerpts that appear in the kind of pop-psych self-help/business fusion books that legions of “self-made men” are forever recommending to one another. They are society’s rotten creme which has risen to the top through lucky breaks, access to generational wealth, and stolen labor, and upon seeing themselves exalted to this position believe that they did so through some innate, unique specialness. We see this right off the bat when Randall, getting (at least) a second opinion that aligns with his previous doctors’ terminal diagnosis, insults his current oncologist’s intelligence directly to his face. Anger is just as normal a part of grief as denial is, but instead of raging against the heavens or the dying of the light, Randall defaults to personal degradation of someone who is, at a minimum, an order of magnitude more intelligent than himself. He’s so smart, you see? Intelligence makes money and since he has the most money, that makes him the most smartestest. 

Perhaps the worst among the crew is Ven, who is a borderline psychopath and, worse, their Elon Musk equivalent. His social network Traam has the exact same user interface, has tasked himself with moving mankind toward the singularity, and has a relationship with his oddly-named son Sabre that is so lacking in paternal qualities that it verges on being inhuman. He also hints at his belief in Simulation Theory in a conversation with Randall in which they both express that they don’t believe that there are really eight million real people in the world, and his desperation to seem approachable and well-humored makes him more alien and unlikable. At one point, he attempts to smile like a normal person and ends up looking like Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs. Most tellingly, he has no reaction to the fact that Traam’s new AI platform is causing the end of the world while these four assholes are snowmobiling up to a mountain peak together to write their net worth on their chests and howl into the sky. Randall and Souper are likewise largely unphased by the breakdown of society, at their metaphorical and geographical remove from the real-world consequences of what Ven and Traam have wrought. Social media becomes inundated with AI-generated perfect deepfakes of everything from messages from loved ones to literal fake news; a man with a grudge against his neighbor can stir up a lynch mob to carry out his personal grievances in half an hour by quickly creating a video of a newscast calling the man as a pedophile. Literal wars break out globally as computer generated images of invasions along borders prompt real responses from governments and militaries, and Ven celebrates as his bank account swells. 

If there’s anyone here who has a speck of decency, it’s Jeff, as he’s rightfully horrified about the imminent downfall of nation states, while the others spitball the idea of a coup to establish their dominance in the world that is to come. Some of this is due to his anxiety about his girlfriend attending a sex party in one of the hot zones and his concern about her (a) survival and (b) fidelity, but he also has a moral framework that the others are completely lacking. He’s no saint, though, as his and Jeff’s falling out was over Jeff’s hiring of several of Ven’s programmers, who then went on to develop the exact content moderation algorithm that Ven needs, but for Jeff’s company instead. Selling the algorithm to Ven for Traam would at least prevent more new violence from breaking out, but he refuses to consider it, even as Rome (and D.C., and Buenos Aires, and Paris, and Melbourne …) burns. He does reach a point where he confesses to Randall that he’s thinking about turning the AI over to the real authorities so that they can try and put a cap on all this apocalyptic business, but this goes over poorly, and that’s when the film gets really interesting. 

I wasn’t terribly impressed with Guy Maddin’s Rumours last year, and although that one was about G7 leaders rather than four men with more riches than the pharaohs of old, the “Powerful people converge in a remote location while the world is ending over every horizon” structure is quite similar. Whereas that one is both too gentle in its handling of its characters and too broad in their characterization, Mountainhead goes full-tilt into making the Brewsters complete—and very specific—pieces of shit so that the movie can play around with people’s fates since there’s no real reason to root for any of these people for most of the runtime. By the time three of them turn on the other, the plot kicks into high gear with slapstick taking over, and although it never loses the witty dialogue of the first half, the film definitely picks up in the second half. One of my viewing companions mentioned to me after the film that he didn’t really enjoy it until this mid-film shift, and I can’t say that I blame him. Most of the film’s humor comes from the counterpoint between the Brewsters’ unflappable internal sense of entitlement and self-adulation and the external reality that they are all sad, sick men whose superiority complexes and narcissism mask deep neuroses and fatal flaws. It’s easy to get lost in their constant use of business buzzwords, but this also means that the film lends itself to an easy rewatch to pick up on even more of the rapid-fire nonsense that the leads spit out. It’s so fast that even though I rarely stopped laughing for much of the runtime, the bons mot were coming so furiously that few of them managed to embed themselves. It’s a movie that could easily become overquoted in the future, but is solidly funny in the moment. My favorite was probably Randall’s insistence that “We’re not talking about killing [character], we’re talking about killing a non-fungible human being who is identical to [character],” which really speaks for itself. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Asteroid City (2023)

/ swampflix / 12 Comments

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

My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea (2017)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

I don’t often get excited for modern animation. The flat, rounded-out, overly precise digital designs of CG-animated movies, including well-respected behemoths of the medium like Disney & Pixar, are largely uninspiring to me, even if they illustrate a well-told story. My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea is the perfect antidote to these troubled, CG animation times. Jumping from Fantagraphics-published graphic novels to feature-length filmmaking, visual artist Dash Shaw overwhelms the senses in My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea with a tactile, unnecessarily complex visual style that feels like the philosophical opposite of modern CG animation doldrums. Shaw’s loosely sketched figures navigate blindingly colorful backgrounds of ever-shifting multimedia collage, recalling the more psychedelic impulses that invade the black & white stick figure frames of Don Herzfeld’s work or the short-form experiments you might catch in a late-night haze on Adult Swim. This eccentric visual design is paired with an over-the-top, go-for-broke plot (spelled out plainly in the title), but is also tempered by a laid-back, juvenile attitude that calmly strolls through its dizzying whirlpool of ambitious ideas. In a perfect world, a film this visually stunning & naturally cool would gather at least a cult audience through its challenge to the inhuman computer graphics style that typically guides modern animation aesthetics. Instead, My Entire High School Singing into the Sea had a single-week, single-screen theatrical run in New Orleans before disappearing for nearly a full year and then popping up on Netflix to little fanfare. Dash Shaw dared to leave his grubby little fingerprints all over this messy, overly-ambitious debut, delivering the film that modern animation needs, but no audience seems to want.

Jason Schwartzman stars as an unpopular jerk of a high school student who wastes his energy overachieving as a “journalist” for the school newspaper, making this film feel somewhat like an unsanctioned Rushmore sequel. Since he’s both a social nuisance and a known blowhard, his warnings to the student body that the school (which was built both cliffside and on a fault line) is at risk of crumbling at the slightest earthquake are an act of crying wolf. Early in the runtime, this foretold earthquake knocks the entire high school into the adjacent sea and the majority of the film is a Titanic-like race for survival as the building sinks into the water. Schwartzman’s prickly protagonist is joined on his voyage to safety by an impressive voice cast of tagalongs: Reggie Watts & Maya Rudolph as fellow newspaper nerds, Lena Dunham as a Tracy Flick-like over-achiever, and (the MVP of the movie) Susan Sarandon as a tough-as-nails lunch lady who acts as the group’s only muscle. Each speak in hushed, flat voices, incredibly calm in the face of their surroundings burning, crumbling and flooding in ever-worsening mayhem. My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea is a laid-back irreverent comedy, but it does not shy away from the Hellish displays of widespread destruction its over-the-top premise naturally inspires. Our ragtag group of aggressively casual, self-obsessed teens (and their remarkably buff lunch lady) are subjected to the horrors of libraries aflame, flesh-eating miniature sharks, haunted locker rooms, and makeshift dystopian societies that deify social popularity to determine their leaders. It’s all very goofy & flippantly nonchalant about the panic that defines its borders, but it’s also a perilous journey to safety & rescue littered with the blood, guts, limbs, and severed heads of the less-fortunate students who don’t make the cut.

The simplicity of that story is a necessity, as it allows room for the much busier visual assault that obliterates eyeballs for the entirety of the runtime. Before the picture starts, a title card warns of potential risks for inducing photosensitive epilepsy. It becomes immediately apparent why, as just a character running to catch a school bus in the opening scene is a layered, video game-inspired adventure of visual hyperactivity. Dash Shaw’s debut movie is bursting with weirdo experiments that push animation as a medium by remixing older, more hands-on methods into new, stunning arrangements. It’s like the mashup DJ equivalent of a modern animated feature in that way, except that its adoption of past, rudimentary techniques are transformative, not nostalgic. Crayon scribbles, amateur sketchbook doodling, and Prince Achmed-style cutouts supply its elemental building blocks, but their cumulative, layered effect is something much more impressively complex than those D.I.Y. tactics imply. My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea is a simple, irreverent comedy about teen brats winging their way through an absurd, impossible crisis. It’s also a bold vision for how animation can evolve in meaningful, tactile ways without fully succumbing to 100% computerization. And if you don’t personally enjoy what Shaw accomplishes in the picture, don’t worry. His dialogue promises, “Next time I’ll water it down so that it’s shitty and more popular!”

-Brandon Ledet

The Overnight (2015)

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

Usually, filmmakers have a tendency to keep their dark comedy & their sex romps separate. Full-blown sex comedies are usually mindless entertainment more concerned with raunchy gags than existential contemplation & while a black comedy might lighten the mood with an occassional sexual diversion (last year’s sadistic Cheap Thrills comes to mind), it’s rare that sex is its main focus. Even the recent raunch fest Wetlands, which I absolutely loved, kept its dark streak separate from its hedonism, a difficult task for a movie mostly remembered for its ungodly volume of on-screen semen. There might be a reluctance in blending the sexual with the menacing both because it’s awkward to take sex seriously & because sexual menace is difficult to play for a laugh for reasons that should be more than obvious without explanation.

In The Overnight, we have a surprisingly successful homogeneous blend of the black comedy & the sex romp, one where both elements are fused together completely instead of played off each other for a contrasting effect. The movie strikes a consistently terrifying tone through its depiction of underhanded sexual coercion, but somehow never loses grasp of the sillier raunch tangents you’d expect in a typical sex comedy. The effect of this powerful combination is that the sex gags are twice as funny as they’d normally play, thanks to the way they relieve overbearing tension of the the film’s sexual menace. In a lot of ways The Overnight follows the typical party out of bounds story structure of classic black comedies like The Exterminating Angel & Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where in-over-their-heads guests feel compelled to remain at a social function even though the mood has soured, but the four characters at the center of this particular party out of bounds & their surprising tenderness for each other are unique to the genre. It’s a very well-written example of a very familiar story that I have a huge soft-spot for.

Besides the deft balance & gradual escalation of the razor sharp script, The Overnight‘s strongest asset is its cast. Adam Scott & Taylor Schilling are fantastic as the befuddled North Westerners struggling to decide if their Los Angeles party hosts are just having a California-style good time or if they’re swingers trying to take their newfound friends to bed. Jason Schwartzman & Judith Godrèche steal the show as the film’s sexual menace, making both sly & overt sexual advances through maneuevers as simple as a hand on a knee and as ludicrous as an art studio packed with abstract paintings of buttholes. It’s difficult to decide through most of The Overnight whether the L.A. couple is taking advantage of their more uptight out-of-towners guests or if they’re apparent sweetness is genuine. The tension between those two competing readings is a great dynamic and both tones could be read in some of the film’s best scenes, like in a stoned, strobe-lit dance party or in a literal dick-measuring contest by the poolside. It’s a testament to the film’s effectiveness that what lingers in your mind after the credits is not the film’s individual sex gags, but rather the implications of the relationships that form between the film’s two central couples. It’s both an equally fun & terrifying experience, as well as a must-see for fans of Jason Schwartzman at his most mischievous.

-Brandon Ledet