If Released in Another Time, Big Business (1988) Could’ve Easily Been a ZAZ-Style Spoof of Old Hollywood Farces

February 21, 2016 / swampflix / 1 Comment

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Somehow during our lengthy conversation surrounding our February Movie of the Month, the Bette Midler/Lily Tomlin swapped-twins comedy Big Business, I had foolishly overlooked who had actually directed the damned thing. Big Business‘s director, Jim Abrahams, is the “A” in the infamous comedic filmmaking team ZAZ. Along with brothers David & Jerry Zucker, Abrahams was responsible for popularizing the concept of the spoof comedy. As a collaborative trio ZAZ penned & directed Airplane!, Top Secret!, Hot Shots, Hot Shots Part Deux, and the Naked Gun trilogy, which pretty much covers the pillars of the medium. Flying solo, Abrahams also has screenwriting credits for Scary Movie 4, Kentucky Fried Movie, an some horrific-looking monster titled Jane Austen’s Mafia!. In isolation the name Jim Abrahams failed to ring any bells, but the team of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker was a force to be reckoned with, one that changed the comedy cinema landscape if not for the better than at least for the sillier.

Although I feel foolish that I didn’t recognize Abrahams’ hand in Big Business sooner, it totally makes sense in retrospect. The most crucial aspect of the film that stuck out to me was its dedicated homage to Old Hollywood comedies. Viewing the film with Abrahams in mind now, I see a much different sort of half-formed homage lurking in Big Business. It’s basically just one gentle push away from an Old Hollywood spoof. The film’s swapped-twins contrivance, grand hotel setting, borrowed gag from Duck Soup, endless line of eligible bachelors waiting to marry its protagonists, narrow-minded depictions of the difference between wealth & poverty, and over-the-top lengths to keep its mismatched twins from ending the ruse all once played like a love letter to a bygone era in studio system filmmaking. Now they feel like seeds to what could’ve been a fullblown Old Hollywood spoof after a couple of joke-heavy rewrites. The framework for a ZAZ-style spoof is lurking just under the surface of Big Business, waiting, begging for a sea of juvenile gags to fill in the blanks.

I think the major reason why Big Business didn’t take that direction is a question of timing. The film was released during a time frame where Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker were still a functioning unit, but the timing was off for an Old Hollywood spoof in terms of box office potential. If you look at the trio’s M.O., they generally stuck to spoofing film genres that were active in the era in which they worked. Airplane! spoofed the large-cast disaster film genre (specifically parodying Airport 1975 most heavily) at the tail end of the decade when they were A Thing. Top Secret! spoofed spy movies, a genre that never dies. The Hot Shots! series spoofed 80s & 90s action cinema in a time when that would’ve still been a relevant target, focusing heavily on Top Gun & Rambo for inspiration. Seeing as how it would’ve been impossible for Abrahams to create an Old Hollywood spoof in the Old Hollywood era, given that he was a child in its heyday, he would have had to achieved that distinction sometime in the 2000s or 2010s, long after the dissolution of the ZAZ partnership & well into his old age. Why so recently? Nostalgia has been kind to homages & parodies to the genre, which made room for wonderful comedies like Forgotten Silver & Hail, Caesar! to exist (though not flourish financially, unfortunately). In the 1988 an Old Hollywood spoof might’ve been hard to pitch to financiers, but in 2016 it’d have a much easier time making it to the cinema.

As is, Big Business has no interest in being an Old Hollywood parody. It is instead a loving homage to a bygone era in filmmaking. What Abrahams does instead is update the era’s comedic farce conventions for a 1980s sensibility, which was much less of a commercial gamble. That’s not to say that his history in genre parody did not inform his work in Big Business, though. If nothing else, Abrahams’ films display a consistent, innate understanding of genre tropes & how they can be made effective, whether for a genuine or a sarcastic effect. And if there’s any question to whether or not Big Business‘s toying with the idea of Old Hollywood parody was intentional, just look to Abrahams’ directorial cameo in the film. He plays a homeless drunk who rubs his eyes & tosses his liquor bottle aside when he keeps seeing the two sets of twins separately, a gag that’s about as old as comedy cinema itself (if not older). At the very beat before the end credits the film reveals that a second, well-dressed, far-from-homeless character was also portrayed by Abrahams, a reveal that’s meant to play as a huge prank. That moment feels like it easily could’ve been at home in the theoretical spoof version of Big Business that sadly doesn’t exist, not only because it feels so hokily old-fashioned, but also because its “Gotcha!” sarcasm is such a classic ZAZ-style tactic.

For more on February’s Movie of the Month, 1988’s Big Business, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film & last week’s look at its borrowed gag from The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup.

-Brandon Ledet

The Late Great Planet Mirth II – Revelation (1999)

February 17, 2016March 1, 2016 / swampflix / 10 Comments

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Welcome to The Late Great Planet Mirth, an ongoing series in which a reformed survivor of PreMillenialist Dispensationalism explores the often silly, occasionally absurd, and sometimes surprisingly compelling tropes, traits, and treasures of films about the Rapture. Get caught up in it with us!

Revelation, sometimes stylized as Apocalypse II: Revelation, is the first of three sequels to 1998 PPI release Apocalypse, and it is a massive improvement on the previous installment. Gone are the bargain basement community theatre actors who clogged up the works in the first flick, replaced by people you may have actually heard of before; gone is the soundtrack that consists almost entirely of Contemporary Christian Music artists, replaced by music that was actually scored for the film rather than haphazardly arranged behind it. Furthermore, the production value on Revelation is exponentially higher than that of Apocalypse, as this movie succeeds in actually looking like a movie and not a poorly produced television pilot shot on VHS. Although the proselytizing elements are still present in this film, they’re toned down significantly, and Revelation feels like it was conceived as a movie with the soapbox added as an afterthought, rather than the other way around.

The film opens on Thorold Stone, a counter-terrorism specialist whose wife and young daughter were among those who vanished three months prior; he spends his evenings reminiscing and watching old home films while flashing back to all the times his wife tried to convince him to join her in church. He is awoken from his reverie by news of a schoolbus bombing (which is a bit of a continuity problem, as all children were supposedly raptured, although this could have been a bus for teenagers), and he meets his partner at the scene of the crime. They trace the detonation signal to an underground church meeting of “haters,” Christians who oppose the apparently benevolent Antichrist Franco Macalusso (recast and now played by Nick Mancuso, who would portray him for the rest of the quadrilogy). Although their orders are to kill all the Haters on sight, Stone and his partner arrest the group instead, allowing the Hater sect leader (Marium Carvell) to plant the seeds of doubt in Stone’s mind and pass him a CD-ROM that she says will show him the truth. Macalusso sends Len Parker (David Roddis, previously seen as the new head of WNN last time) to kill Stone and his partner, fearing they may have learned too much. Stone’s partner is killed, but Stone survives while the captured Haters are imprisoned and prepared for re-education.

The disc leads Stone to Willie Spino (Tony Nappo), a wheelchair-bound computer programmer who has been working on an incredibly advanced virtual reality program for Macalusso’s upcoming “Day of Wonders.” Spino is unable to access the disc despite it being part of his design, and his attempts to access the O.N.E. network reveal his location to the Antichrist’s forces; the two escape and make their way to the Christian underground, where Nappo reunites with his stepsister, who is revealed to be Apocalypse MVP Leigh Lewis, reprising her role as Helen Hannah. While the incarcerated Haters continue to persevere throughout their torture, blind cynic Cindy (supermodel Carol Alt), a member of Helen’s underground, voices her increasing frustration at having to live in hiding. When Willie manages to crack the final line of code, he learns what the Day of Wonders actually is: in the virtual world, everyone will face the choice of accepting the Mark of the Beast or death.

As noted above, Revelation is a departure from Apocalypse in quality across the board. Whereas Apocalypse featured a lot of montages in which the members of the audience are meant to meditate upon the ideas presented, this film finds its footing quickly and stays strong through the end. There’s a great sequence that follows Thorold’s introduction to Helen in which the two have a conversation about faith, which includes Thorold begging that God show him a sign as small as knocking over a water glass; Helen tells him that God doesn’t work that way, and even if he did make himself evident by causing the glass to tumble, Thorold’s mind would find another explanation for the event. After their discussion, Thorold stands and bumps the table on which the glass is standing, causing it to fall to the floor; still later, when their safehouse is raided by the Antichrist’s forces, the group is able to make their escape because Len Parker trips on the glass. It’s not the most elegantly composed chain of events, but it reflects an understanding of irony and foreshadowing that wasn’t present in Apocalypse, and the scene demonstrates a real understanding of how many people approach the question of the existence of a higher power. It’s surprisingly subtle and well-composed, and the film deserves credit for that.

On the other hand, there are problems with the script. Although the film’s intentional diversity is admirable in its inclusion not just of people of color but also the differently abled, the end of the film is arguably ableist in its approach to physical handicaps. Willie is the most fleshed-out character in the movie, and Nappo is obviously a talented actor, but his turn from reluctant ally to outright antagonist is abrupt. Further, the fact that only Willie and the blind Cindy are so quick to accept the Antichrist’s offer (which restores his ability to walk and her ability to see), and that they are the only two main characters to do so, is problematic in its implications; both are so desperate to be “whole” that they sacrifice their souls to do so, with the influence of the Antichrist turning them into cackling villains in the final act. It’s not a great message.

The film’s major issue, however, is also its greatest strength. Whereas Apocalypse was made with the intention of being an evangelical tool, Revelation has elements of that but is largely focused on telling a compelling story first, and it mostly succeeds. The problem with this is that the series has moved past the “world-building” stage and now expects the audience to be well-versed in the premillenialist dispensationalism that forms the narrative background. We learn in the opening moments that Thorold works for the O.N.E., which is never defined or explained. Readers of Left Behind and the works of Hal Lindsey will recognize that this is the “foretold” one-world government that the Antichrist will supposedly set up on the earth, and will likely assume that the O.N.E. is the One Nation Empire or One Nation Earth, but the casual viewer without a background in this particular eschatological concept is asked to accept a lot about this world that is not clearly explicated, which hurts the film overall. It may have been the intent of the filmmakers that non-specialized viewers then ask the PMD Christian friend who loaned the film to them to explain, but that’s asking a lot of a casual audience member. Still, this is a much more thoughtful approach to the subject matter than we got last time, and it manages to be genuinely compelling for most of its runtime.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Late Great Planet Mirth I – Introduction & Apocalypse (1998)

February 15, 2016 / swampflix / 13 Comments

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Before we get started, let’s get this out of the way: the opinions contained herein are strictly those of the author and do not reflect upon Swampflix or its editors. These opinions are born out of a lifetime spent being reared in a particular theological worldview and its intersection with academic and scholarly studies of religious doctrine and eschatology. The introduction below is provided solely to present the ideologies that serve to make up the mindset from which the film(s) reviewed were created. No harm is intended, and this should not be interpreted as an invitation to discuss religion, positively or negatively.

I have a real fondness for media pertaining to that particular brand of Christian eschatology that centers around The Rapture. I was raised in a church that was highly obsessed with Christ’s ever-nearer return, and being born into and reared in that environment had an intense effect on me, as we were always preparing for the Second Coming and expecting it to happen any day now. From the outside, it’s impossible to understand just how deeply the conviction that the Glorious Return will play out exactly as depicted in the Left Behind series of books runs, but suffice it to say that the true believers of this worldview are true believers, and there’s not a lot of room for discussion or alternate opinions/interpretations on/of the subject.

Speaking of Left Behind, theologian Fred Clark over at Patheos has been working on dissecting that novel series for several years now, exploring all the ways in which they can be deemed “the worst books of all time” on both the literary and theological level (not to mention the revelations-no pun intended-he has uncovered about the personality defects of authors Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye). In his ongoing exploration of the series, he gets into all of the ways that the novels are poorly written and center around horribly unlikable protagonists who are terrifyingly self-absorbed as well as the ways that the theological underpinnings of the books revolve around a questionable-at-best reading of Biblical scripture. He’s been writing that blog for a long time, and it’s absolutely brilliant and beautiful, often offering spiritual and moral guidance that is more scripturally sound and moving than anything Jenkins and LaHaye have to offer. Of course, I only know this because young Mark was a huge fan of Left Behind; it combined Biblical “prophecy” (in a very loose sense, which I’ll get to more in a moment) with political intrigue, and I was uneducated and foolish enough to find the plot compelling and intriguing. Only with the benefit of Clark’s insight and my own hindsight is it clear just how bankrupt LB is as a piece of art or theological investigation, and I highly recommend reading his analysis for anyone who is curious, although I must warn you that it’s just as staggering in it’s length as it is in its scholarship and entertainment value.

Of course, LaHaye and Jenkins didn’t create The Rapture out of whole cloth. The concept that Christ’s return will be heralded by the physical disappearance of Christians all over the world is nearly as old as the American nation, if not older, and its popularity as one of the myriad eschatologies is cyclical. One of my favorite stories of awaited Rapture is that of preacher William Miller, who led a congregation of Millerites (naturally) in his belief that the Rapture was definitively going to happen in May of 1844 (google “The Great Disappointment” for more information). Still, the fervor that overtook America in the nineties was born out of a renewed interest in Rapture theology, which first began to rise within evangelical Christianity in the 1970s following the release of several apocalyptic books by Hal Lindsey, with The Late Great Planet Earth being the most noteworthy among them (The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon also holds a special place in my heart). The 1980s brought with it the rebranding of the Republican party, which helped cement Lindsey in the public consciousness and allowed Rapture fever to hit its zenith in the 1990s and early 2000s. Lindsey was a virulent believer in what has become the most commonly believed Rapture theory of modern times, more accurately called Premillennialist Dispensationalism.

The millennium referred to in the name of this approach has nothing to do with the divisions of the gregorian calendar and instead refer to a thousand-year period of earthly peace and prosperity. This period of piece will, they say, come after a period of Tribulation (usually seven years, but there is dissention about that). Premillenialists believe that the Second Coming will come at the beginning of this period and thus it will be ruled over by none other than Jesus himself, while postmillenialists are of the belief that Christ’s return will occur at the end of the millennium. Dispensationalism is the belief that Christ’s “flock” will disappear from the face of the earth in the Rapture before this period of Tribulation, rather than after, which is opposed by those who hold to the tenets of Raptural Historicism, which states that the Rapture will occur after the Tribulation. Still with me? I hope so, because it only gets more complicated from here; for the sake of brevity, I’ll be referring to adherents of this belief as PMDs.

Now, when I was a child, my paternal grandparents were very steeped in this paradigm of scriptural interpretation. They had only a small shelf of books in their home, and all of them were devotionals, hymnals, or books of the Lindsey mold: jeremiads about the rise of insidious cultural evil like tolerance, “Eastern Mysticism,” and (of course) homosexuality, and how these were signs and signifiers of the fact that the Rapture was so close that if Jesus wasn’t already on the threshhold, he was surely coming up the steps. As a voracious reader deprived of other material, I devoured these books when I would stay with my grandparents, and I would be lying if I said that didn’t warp me and my worldview for a very long time. It also put me in a unique position of being intimately familiar with the theological “scholarship” that underlines and supports the presuppositions of Jenkins, LaHaye, and their acolytes. I’ll try to summarize and synthesize as much as I can here, but it’s a big Gordian Knot that I’m trying to map for you, and having lived on the shore doesn’t always mean you’re going to be a great cartographer.

So here’s the deal: the thing that I liked about Left Behind when I was a kid was the way that it looked at lots of disparate pieces and put them together into one big prophecy puzzle, all the verses and chapters coming together into what seemed like an intuitive map of the near future. The problem, however, is that the methodology that led to the explosion of Rapture believers in the past few decades is that, to the layman, it looks like a brilliant decryption of arcane text. In reality, however, it’s more of an exercise in practiced self-deception and selective reading, itself colored by the political environs from which it was birthed. For instance, the Left Behind branch of Rapture belief is heavily influenced by Lindsey’s prophecies, which were in turn highly affected by the international political climate of the 1980s; Lindsey and his followers identified the nations of Gog and Magog in John’s Revelation as obvious references to the U.S.S.R., and used that assumption as a metaphorical weight-bearing cornerstone in their philosophy. With the dissolution of that federation, successive additions to this unusual canon have had to deal with the fact that no-longer-relevant nations, rulers, and ideologies played a pivotal role in the development of Lindsey’s eschatology, with each pulled thread threatening to destroy the entire tapestry.

And that’s just in the application of Biblical archetypes to the contemporary modern world; there’s a slew of other issues with the basis of this ideology. Lindsey, like William Miller before him, has a bit of an obsession with numerology and drawing lines between dots that probably weren’t meant to be connected on anything other than a thematic level. As such, Lindsey’s underlying conceits often rely upon an equation that involves several erratically chosen numerical references, divided by seven, or maybe twelve, and then assigning to the solution a number of years or days or other delineation of time. Then, once you factor in the year of an event of Biblical or historical relevance; 1948 is a favorite year of significance as adherents to this methodology are obsessed with the reestablishment of the nation of Israel and the way that it seems to echo the repeated diaspora and reunification of the Israelites in the Bible. And once you factor in that one such iteration of that cycle took place during the Babylonian Exile, and Babylon is mentioned in John’s Revelation, well, baby you got a stew goin’! Just ignore the fact that John was also writing in exile and drawing upon imagery with which his contemporary audience would have been familiar (“It’s a little thing called the Book of Daniel; you’ve probably never heard of it.” –Early Christian Hipsters, probably). Does this seem like an erratic train of thought? Are you picturing Lindsey standing in front of a corkboard full of Bible pages with red string tied between different pushpins next to highlighted passages, like the conspiracy theorist in every thriller you’ve ever seen? Then you’re starting to get the idea.

And let’s not forget that all of this is based on what the figureheads of the movement would call a “literal” reading of the text, even though this is pretty much the opposite of the meaning of the word. A reference to multi-headed dragons monsters with crowns? Surely, that literally means ten nation states that will make up the one world government that the United Nations will morph into under the advisement of the Antichrist. And, of course, there’s the small matter of nonsensical ideas that have made their way out of esoteric circles into the mainstream, like the very concept of the Antichrist himself; the word is only used in 1 John and 2 John, and an actual literal reading of those texts makes it obvious that the “antichrist” is a term to be used for corrupter or false teacher, not an infernally inspired world leader (for further reading on this topic, I suggest “The Antichrist Hoax,” by Dr. Joel McDurmon). Essentially, what I’m saying is that the genealogy of this branch of Biblical “scholarship” reveals a poisonous tree with its roots in half-understood historical contexts, willful ignorance about current events that do not coincide with their prescribed worldview, and numerology, which most Christians would recognize as an outright heresy were it not so thoroughly ingrained in the makeup of this eschatology.

I’ve given you the basics and the background, so here’s the Left Behind (et al) standard apocalypse gameplan: very soon, we will all be witness to The Rapture, in which the dead in Christ shall rise and living Christians will disappear in the blink of an eye (usually dramatized by showing piles of empty clothing). Included in the Rapture are also children who have not yet reached “The Age of Accountability,” an apocryphal, largely Southern Baptist theological concept that assumes children are inherently innocent and are deserving of Heaven by default.Thus, those who believed the Gospel Truth™ are spared the Tribulation, a seven year period that begins either with the Rapture or when the Antichrist signs a peace treaty with Israel, depending upon your interpretation. The Antichrist is himself a European politician who will assume power over the world by demonstrating great leadership (and perhaps even miracles) in the wake of the disappearances; he will install a global political system with himself at the head, and citizens will be forced to take his Mark or face persecution. The first three and a half years of this period will be marked by prosperity, while the last three and a half will be full of death, famine, war, plagues, toxic meteors, etc. The end of this period will see the glorious return of Jesus, to banish the Antichrist to the pit and rule for a thousand years, after which it’s all Heaven, all the time.

So that’s the basic premise, which brings us to the reason we’re here today: to discuss PPI Films’ 1998 DTV film Apocalypse. Apocalypse is not the first film about the Rapture. Actually, it’s not even the instigator of the first series of films about the Rapture; that honor belongs to 1973’s superior A Thief in the Night, which was followed by three sequels: A Distant Thunder (1978), The Image of the Beast (1981), and The Prodigal Planet (1983). The Thief series was so popular, in fact, that LaHaye and Jenkins have even admitted that it helped inspire them to draft Left Behind. Left Behind, in turn, influenced the Apocalypse series, so overtly that the first film’s protagonist has a great deal is essentially an even more bargain-basement version of Left Behind’s Cameron “Buck” Williams. Still, all of these films are part of an esoteric canon of movies that are long overdue for an investigation, and Apocalypse was the big one of the nineties.

Let’s get this out of the way: Apocalypse is a terrible movie. This is a film in which millions of people disappear from the face of the earth, nuclear war nearly breaks out in the Middle East and is only averted by divine intervention, Christians are herded into camps for execution and/or reeducation, and the President of the European Union announces that he is the Messiah. Yet, somehow, all of these situations feel as if the stakes are no higher than they would be if the main characters’ arcs revolved entirely around dealing with poor customer service. Never before or since has the apocalypse been presented in such a blasé and uninvolved manner. A lot of that has to do with the visual presentation of the film; it looks like it was shot using a video camera borrowed from the set of Passions and no one bothered to clean the Vaseline caked onto the lens. It creates a rhetorical space with which the audience is mostly familiar as reminiscent of daytime television, which is hardly the effect one would want when presenting the literal rise of Satan on Earth.

The film quality isn’t the only place where the film feels cheap, either. Peter LaLonde (who, along with his brother, created film distribution company PPI, which would later become CloudTen, the name under which the rest of the films in this series were released) was once the host of a Christian television program called This Week in Bible Prophecy, which sought to draw a connection between contemporary events and the End Times as outlined by PMDs. Clips from this series, as well as others hosted by noted PMDs/televangelists like John Hagee and husband/wife duo Jack and Rexella Van Impe, are present throughout the film, filling out running time that would be better served by character or world building. Instead, we watch characters as they watch television screens in silence, which is exactly as exciting as it sounds.

Above and beyond that, this movie feels like it’s about 50% montage, with half of those montages consisting of 1990s Contemporary Christian Music playing over real footage of actual riots and disasters, which is horrifying and offensive. In a perfect encapsulation of many of the bad ideas in this film, there is a scene in which an unseen video journalist is providing voiceover for footage of a protester of some kind immolating himself and lunging at police. The dialogue is just atrocious (“This man who lost his wife and daughter literally went crazy […] here he is literally setting himself on fire…”), and the scene appropriates this real-world footage for its purpose, overtly divorcing this protest from its historical context and the desired impact of the person whose image was used for this presentation. Burning churches, police brutality, freedom fighters: all are just set dressing for the film’s message, which is nauseating.

The plot follows World News Network anchors Bronson Pearl (Richard Nester) and Helen Hannah (Leigh Lewis) and their work leading up to and immediately following The Rapture. Pearl is on-site in the Middle East at the historical site Armageddon, where the Israeli Air Force is assembling against their vaguely defined enemies, and this struggle leads up to a mutually assured nuclear strike. Just as the missiles are ready to fall, they disappear from the skies, along with a particular subset of the population worldwide: Christians and children. Hannah, whose grandmother was one such vanished person and who had previously warned her of the impending return of Christ, struggles to accept that the warnings were real. After watching some John Hagee and Van Impe videos, she returns to work, only to find that EU President Franco Macalusso (Sam Bornstein) has taken credit for the miraculous event and declared himself the new Messiah, stating that he removed all the “haters” (i.e., followers of the false Messiah, Jesus) from the world in order to usher in a new era of peace. Hannah tries desperately to convince Pearl of the truth before it’s too late.

As noted above, the film is mostly padding, but there are some good ideas here. Immediately after Macalusso’s declaration, WNN is taken over by Len Parker (David Roddis), a weaselly man who is to serve as the Antichrist’s mouthpiece, and Roddis is obviously having a lot of fun devouring every bit of scenery in sight. There’s also a nice moment of foreshadowing when one of Pearl and Hannah’s co-workers leans over and instructs a technician to record Pearl’s frontlines exclamation that Macalusso is the Antichrist, saying that the recording “might come in handy;” this same person later barricades himself in the WNN booth to broadcast that same speech as an interruption of Pearl’s televised execution. It’s not a great example of narrative subterfuge, but bears mentioning as one of the few touches of subtlety in the film. The real MVP here is Lewis, however, as she manages to imbue a paper-thin character with a lot of real, earnest emotion. Even though the end of the movie makes it seem as if she, too, is about to face death, I don’t mind that the next film shows her alive and well and leading the resistance, as she’s by far the strongest actor in this first outing and I’m glad she was chosen to be the de facto main character of the series. It’s a shame that her IMDb page is so sparse, as, of all the performers on screen, she was the only one to show actual talent.

Nester easily stands out as the worst actor of the bunch; in fairness, I don’t know that the role as written gave him enough to work with to warrant calling out his particular theatrical failings. Pearl is essentially a carbon copy of the Buck Williams character from the Left Behind series, portrayed by fallen teen heartthrobs Kirk Cameron and Chad Michael Murray in their respective franchises. Unlike Williams, Pearl doesn’t get the chance to be unsuccessfully courted by the Antichrist’s new regime, which is a missed opportunity. There’s a parallel to the aforementioned scene wherein the media comes under the Antichrist’s control in the LB canon: Williams bears witness to the Antichrist performing supernatural mind control over his new cabal but is protected from this misdirection by his newfound faith. It’s a poorly written scene (as is LB in its entirety), but it does effectively build the Antichrist as a threat and gives insight into how he could gain the power that he does. In Apocalypse, Len just shows up and tells everyone he’s the new boss, and virtually all of Macalusso’s appearances are on a TV screen, which really goes to show the extent to which this film is but a shadow of something that wasn’t all that substantial to begin with.

What really sets Apocalypse apart from the later films in the series, aside from poor production value and an obnoxiously meandering narrative and the lack of “name” actors, is how obvious it is that this film was meant as a preaching tool. At the time when this film was made, I remember many pastors making their own post-Rapture videotapes, to be placed prominently in churches so they could be found by those left behind and provide guidance for them in the coming Tribulation (in the Left Behind films, if I remember correctly, the characters watch such a video prepared by Bishop T.D. Jakes). While watching someone struggle to come to terms with the fact that their entire conception of the universe is flawed could make for compelling viewing in theory, in practice these scenes are long and unengaging, as this is obviously the point in the film where the Christian audience is supposed to turn to the unsaved friend they foisted this movie upon and offer to guide them in prayer. Regardless of one’s point of view on that kind of proselytization, it’s inarguably bad film-making. Luckily for viewers, it gets better (and worse) from here.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 2: Persona (1966)

February 11, 2016April 22, 2016 / swampflix / 20 Comments

Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Persona (1966) is referenced in Life Itself: In the first edition hardback, Persona is referenced on pages 1, 154, 267, and 270. It is the film most often referenced in Roger’s book. He first likens its opening credits & mid-film “break” to the way life & memory flicker into existence, initially without cohesion. He later describes how as a young critic he met an inability to discuss exactly what happens in the film, which prompted him to write about what happened to him as an audience instead (a technique of critical subjectivity he would return to often). He also describes Bergman’s casting of the film as being surprisingly impulsive in a brief anecdote.

What Ebert had to say in his reviews: “Most movies try to seduce us into forgetting we’re ‘only’ watching a movie. But Bergman keeps reminding us his story isn’t ‘real.’ At a crucial moment in his plot the film seemingly breaks, and after it rips for a dozen frames it seems to catch fire within the projector. We see it melting on the screen. Then blackness, then light and then the old silent comedies again, as Persona starts again at the beginning.” – From his 1967 review for the Chicago Sun Times

“Persona is a film we return to over the years, for the beauty of its images and because we hope to understand its mysteries. It is apparently not a difficult film: Everything that happens is perfectly clear, and even the dream sequences are clear–as dreams. But it suggests buried truths, and we despair of finding them. Persona was one of the first movies I reviewed, in 1967. I did not think I understood it. A third of a century later I know most of what I am ever likely to know about films, and I think I understand that the best approach to Persona is a literal one.” – From his 2001 review in his “Great Movies” series

There are two massive, go for broke moments in Ingmar Bergman’s small cast drama Persona that tend to overwhelm discussion of the film. The first is the film’s opening six minutes. A chaotic montage of loose film strips, whirring projectors, impossibly bright light bulbs, grainy footage of what looks like a silent era horror, spiders, human hands, animal slaughter, exposed organs, an erect penis, and crucifixion imagery overwhelm the film’s first breaths. Even today these fist few minutes of visual chaos are disturbingly vivid, but difficult to pinpoint with any certainty as to what they could mean, exactly. Somewhere in the fog I see a progression of life → art → death, but that personal interpretation is far from concrete in any significant way. As difficult as it is to decipher Persona‘s opening minutes today, it’s even more of a mystery to me what the experience would’ve been like for someone watching the film fifty years ago. As if that opening barrage weren’t enough, Bergman then repeats the trick a second time in the film’s second Go For Broke moment. A little over halfway into the film’s runtime the movie essentially breaks down & returns to the visual chaos of its opening minutes, wiping the slate clean & completely changing the rules of its delicately laid-out narrative. It makes total sense that these two moments would dominate most discussion of Persona & the strange places its story goes in its haunting final minutes, but for the most part the film itself is a rather quiet, intimate drama.

A somewhat mousy nurse is assigned as a caretaker for an actress who has not spoken in three months’ time. After a dreary stay at a hospital, the two women attempt a therapeutic, seaside respite to help cure the actress of her anxieties. To fill the void left by her nonverbal companion, the nurse gabs incessantly, first about seemingly nothing at all and then about deep seated fears & regrets. Take away the two experimental jaunts of rapidfire montage & Persona is mostly a collection of monologues, sometimes delivered directly to the audience in a way of breaking the fourth wall that recalls the grave seriousness of a stage play instead of the winking Ferris Beullers of the world. The topics covered in these speeches are a wide range of concerns from the importance of art in people’s lives to a distant memory of casual sex & subsequent abortion. If it were anyone but Bergman at the helm, the film’s existential crises could possibly play as arthouse self-parody, especially once one character starts pondering about “the hopeless dream of being. Not seeing but being. In every waking moment aware, alert. The tug of war between what you are with others & who you truly are.” The navel-gazing & despair in Persona is so tragically sincere, however, that there’s no way to avoid being arrested by it. Bergman may work with a tone of cinematic obfuscation that’s been copied & parodied endlessly in the last few decades, but he does it with such sincerity & confidence that it still knocks you on your ass, despite familiarity with how his style has been assimilated into cinema at large. In a lot of ways the bare bones monologues of Persona can be just as unsettling as the film’s Big Risk montages of pure light & sound.

Of course, Persona‘s ambitious Big Risk montages & low-key, confessional monologues cannot be considered in total isolation. One plays directly into the other. Shortly before Persona‘s mid-film narrative “break”, the overly-talkative nurse confesses to her silent companion “Somehow I think I could change myself into you if I tried. I mean, inside. You could be me, just like that.” An act or two of betrayal sets in motion the pure light & sound montage “break” that allows that fantasy to become a tangible reality. The two women’s identities shift & meld. Ugly anxieties about fear of motherhood & questions of sexual desire bubble to the surface in such a horrific, unsettling way that you could consider the film a work of avant-garde horror if you view it in the right context. Persona was my first introduction to Bergman as a filmmaker and I’ve heard that entry point likened to jumping into the deep end. This is a messy, languid picture that somehow pulls together a pointed & purposeful tone from the wreckage without ever affording the audience a clear picture of what exactly is transpiring.

It’s no surprise, then, that reviewing Persona was such a daunting task for a young Ebert or that the film resonated with him in such a vivid way throughout his life & career. One thing I picked up while reading over his reviews of the film that I may have missed the first time I watched it was how artificial the whole thing felt. While watching Bergman’s so-called “Silence of God” trilogy during our Movie of the Month discussion of The Seventh Seal last year, I became intensely focused on the way the director called attention to the artificiality of his films by making them feel like staged plays. Returning to Persona (with Ebert’s take in mind) made me realize how much that film in particular pushes that idea to an extreme. In the film, Bergman not only calls into focus the artificial stage of his narrative, but also the medium through which he delivers it. Literal film strips & projectors appear in the film’s two biggest moments (even breaking down the narrative in the second instance) and the film’s final scene cuts away to show camera crews filming the actors on set. As Ebert puts it, “Most movies try to seduce us into forgetting we’re ‘only’ watching a movie. But Bergman keeps reminding us his story isn’t ‘real.’ […] We have been brutally reminded that the story is being filtered through technical equipment.” Persona‘s ambiguity & existential distress is rewarding enough on its own to demand multiple viewings, but looking for that self-referential artificiality in the film was alone well worth a revisit.

Roger’s Rating: (4/4, 100%)

Brandon’s Rating: (4.5/5, 90%)

Next Lesson: Apocalypse Now (1979)

-Brandon Ledet

Big Business (1988)’s Old Hollywood Roots in Duck Soup (1933)

February 10, 2016 / swampflix / 2 Comments

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During our Swampchat discussion of February’s Movie of the Month, the Bette Midler/Lily Tomlin swapped-twins comedy Big Business, we paid a lot of attention to the film’s roots in Old Hollywood farces. Although Big Business originates as an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, its tone & setting are much more in line with a very specific era of 30s & 40s Hollywood comedy pictures. This makes total sense, since it’s the exact kind of stuff Tomlin & Midler would’ve grown up loving.

It’s easy to see the Old Hollywood love all throughout Big Business, but I think the most recognizable, highly specific moment where its homage to the era bleeds through is in the scene where Midler meets her estranged twin in a bathroom “mirror”. Besides being an exquisite display of physical comedy that recalls leftover tricks of the trade from the silent era & vaudevillian performance, it’s also a near-exact replica of a scene from my favorite Marx Brothers’ film, Duck Soup. Midler’s scene requires her to carry a full load of work that was shared between Harpo & Groucho Marx in its Duck Soup origins, so the dynamics of the gag are a little different, but I believe the sentiment shared between the two scenes is nearly identical.

See for yourself! If you haven’t had the pleasure of watching Big Business or Duck Soup (and you really should), at least check out the extended “mirror” gag shared between the two films. They’re sublimely choreographed examples of physical comedy at its best.

For more on February’s Movie of the Month, 1988’s Big Business, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.: Iron Man 3 (2013)

February 7, 2016February 23, 2016 / swampflix / 9 Comments

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Superhero Watching: Alternating Marvel Perspectives, Fresh and Longterm, Ignoring X-Men, or S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X., is a feature in which Boomer (who reads superhero comics & is well versed in the MCU) & Brandon (who reads alternative comics & had, at the start of this project, seen less than 25% of the MCU’s output) revisit the films that make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe from the perspective of someone who knows what they’re talking about & someone who doesn’t have the slightest clue.

Boomer: In 2014, director Jon Favreau released the indie critical darling Chef, in which he appeared as a man who tired of the world of elite haute cuisine that values style over substance, a man who forsakes that world to fix up an old food truck and take a more “back to basics” approach to food. As has been pointed out by other critics, this can be seen as a metaphor for Favreau’s fatigue with the Iron Man franchise, as he bowed out of directing the third film, although he reprised his role as Hogan (if spending 80% of the film comatose can be considered a reprisal). Instead, the reins were handed over to Shane Black, whose resume as a writer includes Lethal Weapon, Monster Squad, and The Long Kiss Goodnight, and as such was already well-regarded before he began directing with 2005’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

In 2007, British TV producer Drew Pearce created the cult hit No Heroics, a sitcom focusing on the downtime of troubled British superheroes, and the series aired in late 2008. The surprise cult following of the show led to some interest in an American adaptation during the shaky post-Heroes years in which many stations were looking to ride the superhero wave to the top. An American No Heroics pilot was shot, but ABC ultimately passed on the project (although they greenlit No Ordinary Family, a show that should have gotten a hard pass, just a few years later). Still, this had been enough to bring him to the attention of stateside production companies, and Pearce was initially hired to write the film adaptation of Marvel series Runaways. Although that film’s production stalled out, he was invited to co-write IM3 with Black. The resulting story took large chunks from Warren Ellis’s work on the popular “Extremis” arc from the Iron Man comics (homage is paid in the film by naming the president, played by William Sadler, after Ellis).

Robert Downey, Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, and Paul Bettany(‘s voice) reprise their roles from previous films, and the post-credits gag features a cameo from Mark Ruffalo as Dr. Bruce Banner. New faces include Ben Kingsley as Mandarin, Guy Pearce as Aldrich Killian, and Rebecca Hall as Maya Hansen. As the lead-in to what Marvel Studios called “Phase Two,” IM3 follows up on the events of The Avengers, showing a Tony Stark who is traumatized and living with the aftereffects of the Battle of New York. And, since Shane Black is involved, the film is set at Christmastime for no real reason.

Brandon, what did you think?

Brandon: Because I had heard that director Shane Black had taken over Jon Favreau’s directoral duties for the third Iron Man installment, I had gotten my hopes up that it might be the turning point where I started liking the Iron Man franchise at large. Black’s darkly comic work on properties like Lethal Weapon, The Last Action Hero, and The Monster Squad seemed to position him as a perfect fit for taking the Iron Man films into a new, more purposeful direction. I can recognize flashes of that newfound sense of purpose straining to break through this feature’s bogged down mess of a narrative, but ultimately Iron Man 3 felt like just as much of a mixed bag as Iron Man 2.

The film opens with America’s Favorite D-Bag Tony Stark tooting his own horn to Eiffel 65’s “I’m Blue” & referring to the absolute worst era in popular culture (the late 90s, *shudder*) as “the [good] old days” (which, appropriately enough, is when his bad boy schtick & awful facial hair might’ve actually felt fresh). Things get worse from there. The film’s completely-besides-the-point Christmastime setting allows Stark to move on from his previous soundtrack of AC/DC dad jams to dance club remixes of Yuletide carols, which is, musically speaking, my worst nightmare. Tony’s snarkiness has also gotten worse, since the success of the character had apparently lead Feige & company to believe that what the world wanted more of was exchanges like [from a pretty lady] “Where are we going?” “To town on each other,” [to a lady on fire] “I’ve dated hotter chicks than you,” and [to a boy who’s been abandoned by his father] “Guys leave. No need to be a pussy about it.” There are other ways in which the Iron Man franchise has improved in a general sense, but its billionaire playboy protagonist might be a bigger piece of shit than ever here and the worst part is it still feels like the movies are asking its audience to celebrate him for it.

The frustrating thing is that there’s so much of Iron Man 3 that does work, especially elsewhere in the cast. I was a little dubious at first about the series’s return to its War on Terror roots, but Don Cheadle’s transition from toeing the water as The War Machine to full-blown superhero status as The Iron Patriot was encouraging to see. Ben Kingsely’s villain, who I’m pretty sure he was told was supposed to be named Osama Bin Nixon instead of The Mandarin, also has some entertaining moments in the film. I particularly enjoyed the following monologue that accompanied one of his terrorist-funded propaganda films: “True story about fortune cookies – They look Chinese. They sound Chinese. But they’re actually an American invention, which is why they’re hollow, full of lies, and leave a bad taste in the mouth.” The MVP for me, though, believe it or not, was Gwyneth Paltrow as the surprisingly endearing Pepper Potts. I don’t have any particularly strong opinions about Paltrow as an actress, but get the sense that her performances in these films aren’t especially popular among diehard MCU fans, which is a shame. Iron Man 3 allows Potts the opportunity to try on one of Stark’s mech suits, which made for a kinda awesome (and on a personal note, oddly sexy) moment when she gets to save the day for a change. Better yet is her climactic freakout moment, which releases a feral side to Paltrow’s screen presence I didn’t know she had in her (although it was teased in her line-reading of “Are you out of your mind?!” in Iron Man 2).

Speaking of the suit-sharing, Iron Man 3 features more Iron Man suits than ever, which, when combined with remote-controlled automation, makes for some absolutely killer action sequences involving an Iron Man army, some ludicrously complicated suit-hopping/exploding choreography, and a sublimely corny, parachuteless freefall rescue that played nicely into the film’s comic book origins. It’s a shame that none of these charming moments or character beats ever amount to a satisfying whole, though. Repeating the exact same mistakes of Iron Man 2, the film splits its time between two villains, a formula that bogs down its plot, only to make a third act decision to follow the least interesting of the pair to the conclusion. Iron Man 3 even takes this mistake a step further and retroactively ruins its most interesting threat, reducing Kingley’s monstrous terrorist from an Osama bin Nixon to a buffoonish Russell Brand archetype. What a waste. And to think, they casually kick him aside in favor of a fire-breathing version of Val Kilmer’s generic Dieter Von Cunth villain from MacGruber. It’s not a good sign when your film’s lead antagonist most closely resembles a character meant to spoof the genre you’re working in.

Once that shift occurs, Iron Man 3 devolves into generic superhero action cinema. The last 40 minutes of the film feel like a total waste, despite the suit-hopping heroics & Pepper Potts silliness mentioned above. Every now & then Iron Man 3 would throw out a fistpump-worthy moment or two (Stark taking out a helicopter by hurling a grand piano comes to mind), but for the most part the film felt like a mess of compromises & disappointments with half-cooked references to A Christmas Carol that went more or less nowhere & an entirely unnecessary performance by series-vet Jon Favreau as The World’s Shittiest Comic Relief. At best, it’s a generic mixed bag of an action film that almost gets its shit together before completely losing track of what makes it special. At worst, it’s a disappointingly low entry to Shane Black’s catalog, whether or not it helped him gain some notoriety for the strange body of work he had quietly put together prior.

Boomer: A lot of people really disliked this movie when it came out, citing the appearance of a kid sidekick character and the purported ruination of The Mandarin. Personally, however, I have to say that this is probably my favorite of the Iron Man flicks. I’ll admit that the kid sidekick character doesn’t really bother me in the slightest (and he appears onscreen for such a short period of time that his presence is virtually negligible). As for the way that the film used The Mandarin… I actually think that it was a bit of an ingenious move. I understand that this is a character into whom a lot of people have invested time and emotional energy, and I can understand the outrage because I felt much the same way when Star Trek Into Darkness sprang a whitewashed terrible Khan on the audience. The difference, however, is that the fact that Benedict Cumberbatch’s character is Khan contributes nothing to the film other than a familiar name, whereas the Mandarin reveal in Iron Man 3 actually serves to further the plot in an interesting way, and the film does well to play that reveal close to the chest up to the point where we finally meet Trevor Slattery. This was a neat twist that played on expectations of comic book fans and mainstream filmgoers alike, and I think a lot of people were simply caught off guard by the revelation and overreacted to it.

As for other issues viewers took with the film, I don’t really lend a lot of credence to what could be called the Avengers Problem, or, more loosely, the Shared Universe Problem. For some, once a shared universe is established or canonized, there is a need to ask why such-and-such character doesn’t appear in so-and-so’s film. I don’t really understand this impulse on the part of the audience to criticize this element of a work; it’s not as if every character spends all of their downtime together, nor is it a far-fetched idea that a person like Tony Stark who is accustomed to self-reliance would, in a period of self-doubt, try to fix all of his problems without calling on his superfriends. It’s not a problem for me that Banner shows up after the fact and only for a chat, and I feel that a lot of people were looking for elements of the film to complain about, as the honeymoon patina of the MCU was starting to wear thin. All of this is to say: this is a movie about a man who is pried loose from his moorings and forced to confront both his mortality and his potential for failure, and ends up being the least cliche of the Iron Man movies as a result.

There are problems, of course. The film is smart to focus on Tony and his one-man journey, but Paltrow and Cheadle end up underutilized this time around as a matter of consequence. Although Kingsley’s performance as both Slattery and The Mandarin is fantastic, Hall’s botanist character ends up feeling underdeveloped, and we never get a real feeling for her motivations. Pearce’s motivations are also less than perfectly defined, but he stands out as still being a better villain than either Hammer or Whiplash from Tony’s last solo outing. The deus ex machina elements of Pepper’s superheroics at the end of the film are a little on-the-nose, but it was nice to see her get to have more agency this time around, especially since her appearance early in the film painted her in a less than stellar light.

Still, I liked this one. The film largely restrains its elaborate set-pieces to the film’s back half, instead focusing the first half on character building and establishing the new relationships between all the characters, new and old, and the film benefits greatly from this structure. The humor here isn’t derived solely from trying to elicit envy of the Tony Stark way of life, which is a refreshing change of pace. Furthermore, making Stark more vulnerable provides Downey with additional ways to approach the character, which makes both actor and character come off as more likable than in previous installments. It’s a different approach, and the non-standard format of the film’s narrative sets a good example for the way that this film and the five that followed it would change the tone of the MCU at large.

Lagniappe

Boomer: It’s super weird to me that the MCU has a white president. It’s something that felt strange the first time I saw it; normally, I wouldn’t bring it up, but with recent news that Marvel bigwig Ike Perlmutter donated a hefty chunk of money to the Trump campaign, it does raise some questions. Also, it’s a bummer that we don’t hear about Extremis or see any of the fallout in the films that follow. Pepper’s newfound superherodom doesn’t even get a line of dialogue in Age of Ultron, even though she is mentioned. It’s strange, given the fact that the movie seems to set her up as a new power player–not that we needed another character in Ultron gumming up the works.

Brandon: Here’s where I praise Iron Man 3 for what it gets exactly right. Part of what’s been bugging me about the MCU as a cohesive unit of films is that outside of the Avengers crossovers the individual properties haven’t interacted with each other in any significant way. Iron Man 2 was better than most MCU properties on that front, mostly in the way that it gave outside characters Black Widow & Nick Fury something more significant to do besides popping up for a post-credits cameo. Iron Man 3 finally works the Marvel Universe at large into its core narrative, though, which posits it as the most well-integrated MCU property yet (well, outside The Avengers, which is integration by nature).

In the film, Tony Stark is suffering from PTSD after the “gods, aliens, other dimensions,” and robots caused so much mayhem at the climax of The Avengers. He confesses to Potts, “Nothing’s been the same since New York” and in a nice change of pace his ego is put into check by nightmares & panic attacks that can occasionally become life-threatening, especially once he begins operating mech suits in his sleep. I love this sense of progression. It finally feels like a standalone MCU property is actually, significantly affected by the preceding films outside its realm. I look forward to seeing more of the franchise function this way.

Curiously, although Iron Man 3 is the most well-integrated, non-Avengers MCU film so far, it feels like it brings its narrative to a close by the end credits. Everything feels thoroughly wrapped up, finite, as if Tony STark’s time with the franchise were over. If I didn’t know any better, I’d believe that “I am Iron Man” would be Starks’s final word to tie a neat little ribbon on his entire d-bag story arc. What’s even weirder is that after all this finality & integration, the film reverts back to a meaningless post-credits cameo for Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner. Again, the film is the definition of a mixed bag.

Side note: Did anybody else find it strange that this film found time for references to Joan Rivers, Downton Abbey, and the Home Shopping Network? I don’t know what to make of those nods other than to say they felt bizarre in this context.

Combined S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. Rating for Iron Man 3 (2013)

-Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 1: Life Itself (2014)

February 3, 2016April 22, 2016 / swampflix / 2 Comments

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After viewing & reviewing every feature film in Russ Meyer’s catalog over the last few months, I’ve found myself in need of a new film-watching project to break up the monotony of chasing down every newer release that hits the theaters. I’m getting some fulfillment on that end with the Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. MCU retrospective I’m tackling with Boomer, but I’m in the need of something more ambitious & longerm. Recently, reading the excellent Russ Meyer biography Big Bosoms & Square Jaws a second time finally lead me to tackling Roger Ebert’s autobiography Life Itself, an endeavor that’s been intimidating me for years due to the potential emotional toll. Something I noticed while reading Life Itself was how eclectic & intimidating the list of movies Ebert references in the book is. Among titles I have already seen one hundred times (The Wizard of Oz, Reservoir Dogs, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, etc.), there were a ton of Important Movies I’ve been meaning to watch for years (Citizen Kane, Casa Blanca, Lawrence of Arabia, etc.) & even more films I’ve never heard of (Bwana Devil, French Peep Show, Breakheart Pass and so on).

So, as a means of self education, I plan on visiting all 200+ films referenced in Life Itself, both the book & the documentary of the same name. Unlike the Russ Meyer project, which took just a few months to complete, I expect putting myself (and whoever’s reading) through Roger Ebert Film School will take at least two years to complete. I do believe it is a worthwhile effort, though. Since Ebert naturally referenced these films in his writing instead of assembling a definitive list (like his Great Movies feature), they should be a very interesting overview of cinema’s highest highs & lowest lows. I’m looking forward to both ends. That being said, let’s get started. The class bell has effectively rung.

Where Life Itself (2014) is referenced in Life Itself: On the cover, naturally.

What Ebert had to say in his review: Unfortunately, he died before it completed filming, so he didn’t get a chance to see the final product.

As I said, I had been avoiding reading Ebert’s autobiography, Life Itself, for years by the time it was adapted into a feature length documentary by Steve James in 2014. James’ movie gave me an excuse to delay the inevitable even longer. I’d be able to digest Ebert’s life story & indulge in some healthy sobbing all within two hours’ time, then walk away from the ordeal. I even made a sort of party out of it, dragging a group of friends to Chalmette Movies to watch it on the week of my 28th birthday. Having since read the book, I can happily report that James’ film is an excellent adaptation, considering the length of its runtime. It touches on nearly all of the topics covered in the print version of Life Itself, but with understandably less depth than the way they’re explored by Roger’s pen (except, of course, the more up to date health problems & eventual death that occurred during filming). James could’ve easily expanded Life Itself to match the massive runtime of his seminal work Hoop Dreams, if not longer, but as is the film is a touching, concise overview of Roger’s life & career from start to end.

Besides expediting the process of reviewing Ebert’s life story, the film version of Life Itself offers something inarguably valuable for the life story of a man who spent so much of his time in cinemas: imagery. Photographs, movie scenes, interview footage, and clips from Ebert’s fellow Chicagoan critic Gene Siskel add a whole layer of depth to Life Itself that the autobiography couldn’t afford due to the limits of its medium. The book version of Life Itself is 100% Roger’s voice, which at times can be overly humble or self-deprecating (especially when discussing his alcoholism) in a matter of fact sort of way. The film, on the other hand, is more concerned with his legacy. Talking head interviews with his loving wife Chaz & filmmaker heavyweights like Scorsese & Herzog make Ebert out to be a perfect angel in a way that would’ve made him blush had he been alive to see the final product. It’s very telling that the film also only lightly skims his relationship with perv auteur Russ Meyer, an area where Roger’s life most likely saw its most salacious lows. What’s most invaluable here, though, is the contentious outtakes of Roger going at it with Siskel. In the book he tends to sugarcoat the nastier side of their rivalry, which is entirely understandable given that his friend & colleague was deceased when he wrote it. The movie paints a much more complicated picture & it’s fascinating to watch the extremes of their brotherly (in a thoroughly competitive way) dynamic play out for the camera.

As a documentary divorced from the instant-likability of its subject, I’m not sure that Life Itself is necessarily a grand feat in modern filmmaking. James’ camera is fearless in capturing Ebert’s hard-to-stomach bouts with cancer, as was Roger himself for putting those struggles on public display. There’s also the strange detail that passages from the book are read by an eerily accurate Ebert impersonator, so it feels as though you’re being spoken to from beyond the grave (not unlike the digitized Marlon Brando in Listen to Me Marlon). For the most part, though, Life Itself is firmly a Wikipedia-in-motion type of documentary. It adds some new information not included in its source material, especially when discussing how Roger championed small voices in filmmaking & opened doors for names like Martin Scorsese, Ava DuVernay, Werner Herzog, and Steve James himself. Life Itself mostly works as a companion piece, though. Ebert’s autobiography is loaded with priceless ponderings on the nature of cinema and, well, life itself. James’ film matches imagery to those ideas & boils them down to an easily digestible morsel.

A filmmaking feat or not, Life Itself is a very moving portrait of one of America’s all time great writers in any medium. It’s a film that has moved me to tears on all four of my viewings (this time it was DuVernay’s story about meeting Roger as a child that choked me up). It may not be a mold-breaking or technically ambitious film, but is an undeniably indispensable one. Highly recommended for those who’ve yet to have the pleasure.

Roger’s Rating: N/A

Brandon’s Rating: (4/5, 80%)

Next Lesson: Persona (1966)

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Big Business (1988)

February 1, 2016February 28, 2016 / swampflix / 14 Comments

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made Boomer, Brandon, and Erin watch Big Business (1988).

Britnee: Many years ago, there was a local video rental shop in my hometown called Slick Sam’s (sounds more like a dirty sex shop), and that’s where I first came across one of my all-time favorite movies, Jim Abrahams’ 1988 comedy, Big Business. I can still see that sun-damaged, styrofoam-stuffed VHS cover sitting on the shelf just waiting for me to grab it. Needless to say, I was thrilled to find out that no one in the Swampflix crew had seen Big Business before, so I was able to make it my Movie of the Month selection for February. There’s not much love out there for this comic masterpiece, and it really does deserve some recognition.

In a small town called Jupiter Hollow, two women give birth to two sets of identical twin girls at the same time at a local hospital. One woman, Binky Shelton (Deborah Rush), is a big city snob that just so happened to go into labor while passing through Jupiter Hollow with her husband, but the other woman, Iona Ratliff (Patricia Gaul), is a local. The Sheltons and the Ratliffs coincidentally both name their twin daughters Rose and Sadie, and a kooky old nurse mixes up the sets of identical twins. About 40 years later, Sadie and Rose Shelton (Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin) are rich business women living in NYC while Sadie and Rose Ratliff (Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin) are country bumpkins living in Jupiter Hollow. Eventually, the two sets of twins end up in NYC at the same time, and all sorts of wacky things happen.

The performances by Midler and Tomlin are insanely impressive in this film. Midler plays a bitchy NYC snob (Sadie Shelton) and a kind small-town girl looking for adventure (Sadie Ratliff), and Tomlin plays a sweet, softspoken city girl (Rose Shelton) and a rough n’ tough country gal (Rose Ratliff). Portraying such different characters must’ve been such a difficult task for these comedy queens, but they both deliver.

Brandon, were you impressed by the versatile performances from Midler and Tomlin? Or were they just mediocre?

Brandon: I mean, Midler & Tomlin are both phenomenal personalities in general, so it’d be a total lie to say that anything they do or say is mediocre. However, it’s pretty clear that they both had a part they had more fun playing. It’s difficult to say which performance stands out most here between the two actresses, not because there isn’t a clear winner, but because the movie splits their performances into four quadrants: Rich Sadie & Poor Sadie (Midler) and Rich Rose & Poor Rose (Tomlin). There’s a definite, old fashioned nature>nurture mentality at work in Big Business, though, so the individual sisters who lucked into being raised in their “rightful” class environments are the more fun characters to watch, because their confidence is infectious. Poor Rose is certainly amusing in her bossy-but-small-minded local yokel skepticism. It’s Rich Sadie, however, who steals the show for me. As the Reaganomics-personified antagonist of the film, she’s allowed to be the most devious and, because Bette Midler is such a fabulous comedic performer, she strikes just the right tone of evil bitch that this film needed. Midler’s performance as Rich Sadie is just short of being a world-class drag routine. The way she saunters & pouts, insulting people’s outfits by saying “You look like a blood clot” while rocking the world’s largest shoulder pads is just begging for a drag-themed floor show revival. Poor Sadie has a couple of funny moments, mostly in a scene where she milks a cow to the beat of a country song & in her unholy fusion of Carribean-themed yodeling, but it feels like not nearly as much effort went into her character as the over-the-top vamping of her wealthy counterpart. The same could be said of Rich Rose. Tomlin & Midler are both fantastic in this film, but as far as versatility goes, it’s easy to see which characters got more attention.

Besides the easy likability of Midler & Tomlin in this film, something that really stood out to me is how old-fashioned everything feels. The swapped-twins plot of Big Business feels like it’s straight out of an Old Hollywood comedy, the kind that Fred & Ginger might’ve starred in if it had been released 50 years earlier. The nature-over-nurture value system of the movie is very much an antiquated line of thinking and (although there’s some confusion about who winds up with whom at the end) the film’s intense concern with finding each sister a potential mate is very much in line with the structure of a traditional comedy. Instead of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Big Business is more like A Million Beaus for Four Sisters. As the two sets of mismatched twins find themselves nearly-but-never-quite bumping into each other while all staying at the same hotel, I felt like I was watching a Marx Brothers movie. Hammering the point home, Midler even recreates the infamous Marx Brothers mirror gag from Duck Soup in the scene where her two characters finally meet for the first time. Fred Ward’s oblivious-to-homosexuality line reading of “You guys are alright” reads a lot like the classic “Nobody’s perfect!” zinger in Some Like It Hot. There’s even a gag where a homeless drunk rubs his eyes in disbelief when he sees both sets of twins walk by, immediately tossing away the bottle he’s clutching. I’m not sure that cinematic gags get much older than that.

What do you think of this film’s classic Hollywood callbacks, Boomer? Were they an intentional homage to the Old Hollywood era or just a strange coincidence for a comedy that happened to be old-fashioned by nature?

Boomer: I’m not much of a fan of comedies of error in which the humor relies too heavily on farcical near-misses, and there was a point in this movie where I lost heart as I realized that the film was saving the inevitable serendipitous union of the City and Country Mice for the end of the film. Once I had this epiphany and stopped waiting for the film to get to that point, I found myself enjoying the movie more straightforwardly, and was pleased that the mistaken-identity elements weren’t played for cringe-comedy as much as I had expected. As has been noted, this is a classic Hollywood farce, which really serves to demonstrate to what extent Old Hollywood was still working from a centuries-old storytelling paradigm; this isn’t really an Old Hollywood Farce so much as it is a Old Globe Farce, based on William Shakespeare’s genre-defining Comedy of Errors. In essence, Big Business is a throwback to a time when films were based almost entirely on dramas that were ancient even then, making the film old-fashioned by default, not that this is necessarily a bad thing. My major problem with the film comes from the way that its antiquated nature shows through in the film’s moral.

When viewing the four main characters, only Poor Rose and Rich Sadie seem truly suited for their positions in life, with Rich Rose and Poor Sadie being reasonably well-adjusted but largely unfulfilled. Ignoring the two women who are in their “rightful” lives, Poor Sadie’s desire for a more exciting life than pig wrasslin’ and yodeling can provide evokes more empathy for her than the audience can really muster for Rich Rose, who certainly has the financial means to forsake her supposedly incomplete life for the purported pleasures of rural domesticity. As such, Rich Rose is the character who gets the least characterization, really only developing once Roone shows up in the third act. This would be a fine exploration of the nature/nurture dichotomy, were it not for the fact that, ultimately, Poor Sadie comes to the decision that not only is the way of life in Jupiter Hollow worth preserving, it’s worth praising as well; she forsakes her biological sister’s urban and urbane world to return to performing percussive cow milking alongside toothless men whose musical expertise is limited to playing moonshine jugs, and we, as an audience, are supposed to feel gratified by this conclusion. Rural living is the right fit for everyone, except the shrewish antagonist.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I got plenty of laughs out of Tomlin and Midler’s performances here, and even the potentially painful farce worked for me. I was just hoping for one more twist (for instance, that the Sadies were actually the children of the Ratliffs and that the Roses were the Sheltons’ daughters) that would make the film less overt in its praise for downhome simplicity over metropolitan cynicism. To a man, all of the New York-based characters that are not Rich Rose are foppish, conceited, untrustworthy, manipulative, and greedy, with the implication being that Rose feels unfulfilled because she is genetically predisposed toward “goodness,” being the child of salt-of-the-earth outlanders. But the “goodness” of rural living is enough to almost completely deprogram Poor Sadie, who is tempted by the carnal delights that ensnare and comprise Rich Sadie’s identity and existence but is able to reject them. It just doesn’t sit well with me.

Erin, am I reading too much into this, or allowing my perception of the film to color my enjoyment of it too much? Is there something that mitigates this seeming moral that I may have overlooked? And what do you think about the Old Hollywood elements–do they work?

Erin: Boomer, I feel a little differently about the portrayal of country vs. city life, and I think that I came to slightly different conclusions about Big Business‘s moral assessment of both. I’d have to say that in true farcical fashion, both city life and country life are portrayed with an eye to their preposterous sides – yodeling and “making love in the back of a recreational vehicle” versus designer women in designer sneakers and the pompousness of grapefruits under silver lids.

Where I feel differently is that the on-screen portrayal of urban life seems to be much more positive than the portrayal of rural life. The Welcome to New York Montage, while funny, adheres pretty closely to the cinematic trope of New York as a vibrant, wonderful city (thought this might be more related to the visual presentation of Poor Sadie’s desires). Big Business‘s New York seems to be entirely made of the Plaza hotel and satin, even if its denizens are amoral and greedy. Rural life has gingham, and large, poor families.

If the moral of the story really is that rural life is better, I think it balances strangely against the onscreen portrayals of the rural and urban worlds. In a way, I think that starts to answer the second part of your question about the Old Hollywood elements (or the Old Globe elements, Big Business is truly a Shakespearean farce). I agree that that the movie reads as an old-fashioned screwball comedy and is pretty simple in terms of plot. On the other hand, I think that Big Business reads extremely well as an 80s movie. It’s got Bette Midler as a Power Lead (in TWO roles!), Big Business as the Big Bad, and steel drums lining the streets of New York.

What do you think, Britnee? To continue Boomer’s line of question, does Big Business manage to read well as an 80s movie? Does the old fashioned plot work well amongst the shoulder pads and polka dots of the 1980s?

Britnee: I’ve always viewed Big Business as a prime example of an 80s comedy. It’s packed with cheesy humor, wacky facial expressions, pumps and power suits, and of course, Bette Midler in her prime. It’s an 80s explosion! It wasn’t until this discussion that I realized that there are quite a few Old Hollywood elements present in this film. Now that I’m looking at the film through a much different lens, the movie is more interesting and much smarter than I initially thought. Creating a film that contains classical comic film features for an 80s audience mustn’t have been an easy task, but it’s a match made in heaven.

I know that this is completely off track, but I think that the film’s music deserves a bit of discussion. There are only two major lyrical songs in the film: Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” and George Benson’s “On Broadway.” Both songs work well in the film (they’re so New York!), but as for the film’s instrumental tracks, they’re all kinds of ridiculous. It’s the type of music that belongs in a department store’s training video. Part of me feels as though the music was a bit too much, but another part of me thinks that the obnoxious tunes contributed to the film’s campiness.

Brandon, did you find the instrumental music in the film to be annoying or am I overthinking this?

Brandon: I don’t know if “annoying” is the word I would use. Maybe “cheesy”? Maybe “eccentric”? It’s undeniable that the background music of Big Business is always present, always noticeable, and perhaps even always awful, but I found it somehow added to the film’s charm. The soundtrack is another one of the areas where the film feels trapped between two times. Its big band music (which is mostly contained in the 1940s prologue) & countryside yodeling are decidedly old-fashioned, but the department store pop songs Britnee mentioned & the endless droning sax are so 80s it ain’t even funny (well, it’s a little funny). I don’t know if it was the exact DVD copy Britnee & I were watching or if the film was intentionally mixed this way, but the soft sax rock aspects were particularly noticeable (in that they were deafening) & particularly amusing. What really got me laughing, though, was the obnoxiously dramatic drum fills that crash the scene at the film’s climax. It’s as if Neil Peart had dropped in at the sound booth to add some last minute touches for the soundtrack.

Going back to that 1940s prologue for a second, the film starts in the old-timey countryside town of Jupiter Hollow, which prompted me to write “Stars Hollow” (the fictional town from Gilmore Girls, of course) in my notes. It was a surprise, then, that Gilmore Girls vet Edward Hermann (who, sadly, passed away a little over a year ago) appears in this film, delivering one of many great performances. It was also cool to see Seth Green run around as a raucous baby (almost literally) as well as the weird coincidence that both of the Roses’ beaus are future Tremors compatriots (Michael Gross & Fred Ward). All of this and Deborah Rush, aka Jerri Blank’s mom. The cast of supporting characters is surprisingly stacked, as long as you care about the niche pop culture properties they’re best known for.

Boomer, were there any supporting roles in particular that stood out to you as a favorite? Midler & Tomlin easily get the most to do, but I feel there was plenty enough opportunities for the other actors to shine.

Boomer: It’s funny, I was delighted to see Deborah Rush in this film, as she’s always an absolute delight, especially when she’s playing a terrible mother figure (Jerri Blank was a hot mess before she ever showed up, but Piper Chapman’s insufferable insulated white privilege nonsense is all on Rush’s padded shoulders). I was pretty disappointed that she disappears after her part in initiating the plot, but she does make the best of her limited screen time. I also really enjoyed watching tiny Seth Green run around as a screaming terror, and got a kick out of seeing Michael Gross, who will always be doomsday prepper Burt Gummer of the Tremors franchise to me (although I didn’t make the Fred Ward connection that Brandon did). My favorite minor role came from Mary Gross, Michael’s sister, who played the soft-voiced secretary working for the Sheltons; as an actress, she’ll always have a place in my heart because of her involvement in Troop Beverly Hills. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I looked up the name of the actor who played the put-upon desk clerk, Joe Grifasi, but I couldn’t place him in any memorable roles based on a quick scan of his IMDb page; he must simply be one of those classic “that guy” actors.

It was a very minor role that has really stuck with me since watching the film. The narrative saw fit to include a vagrant character who oversees the comings and goings of the Plaza. This is a well-worn comedy cliche: a drunken vagrant sees some unbelievable sight, looks at the bottle in his hand, back at the unbelievable sight, and then tosses the bottle behind him. Normally, this character is never seen again, but this film brings back our friend a few times; we watch him catch sight of the Roses and Sadies coming and going multiple times. All in all, it seems like he gets more screen time than some of the lesser love interests. From the outside, this mostly low-stakes (give or take the fate of Jupiter Hollow, which is easy to forget in all the identity confusion shenanigans) rom com farce occurs entirely outside of the context of this character; as a result, his story plays out as a window into an existential horror that he can only passively observe. The Plaza: if you stand outside long enough, you’ll see yourself come out of there. And then he does! That’s some In The Mouth of Madness… um, madness.

While prowling through the sparse information that the internet has to offer about this film and its development, I read that the sets for the film were so expensive that ABC created an entire television series to use the sets in an attempt to recoup their losses. The series flopped and never made it out of its first season. It does make one wonder, though; would Big Business have worked as an ongoing series? It seems like it would, what with the potential to have stock twin hijinx intersect with stock cultural differences plots.

What do you think, Erin? Would this idea have legs? And in what stock sitcom situations would you most like to see the Shelton-Ratliff sisters (recast for a TV budget, of course)?

Erin: Boomer, I can definitely see at least a two-season Big Business show combining stock twin hijinks and stock cultural differences. It would take a deft hand to extend the premise outside of the obvious shenanigans. I’m envisioning a Green Acres meets Beverly Hillbillies situation. Shoulder pads on the farm! Country Rose get mixed up with big city Mafia! Mistaken identities galore! Pie and jam competitions at the fair! Rich Sadie turns out to be a heck of a pig-caller! Moonshine! Country twins accidentally attend the Met Ball!

There’s at least half a season right there. The challenge would be extending the premise into something stable and complex enough to keep a show on the air, but the promise of the ensemble cast might make it work. I wonder if it’s cheaper to find multiple sets of twins or to constantly produce a double effect through camera and editing tricks.

I think that that my best description of Big Business would include words like madcap and zany. It was definitely a lot of fun to watch, and it looked like the cast was also having a great time during filming. That always makes a movie better for me. All in all, I think that it was a solid entry in the filmography of the 1980s. It’s charming and fluffy, with few dull moments and lots of shoulder pads.

Lagniappe

Erin: The fashions worn by the two sets of sisters are almost characters in themselves. Big Business is almost worth watching just for the clothes!

Britnee: I really like Poor Sadie’s initial yodeling number that she performed at the Jupiter Hallow fair. “Well, hello, Jupiter Hallow. I know you’re doing fine. Every day you work the factory, every night a jug of wine,” is what immediately enters my head when I think about Big Business. I’m not a big fan of yodeling, but Midler has one of those voices that can make anything catchy and enjoyable.

Boomer: I was a bit disappointed that Sadie Ratliff ended up with (as I interpreted it) Sadie Shelton’s ex husband. They barely shared a scene or two, and she had much more chemistry with the desk clerk.

Brandon: Going back to what Boomer was saying about the vilification of city life vs the deification of the countryside, that push & pull didn’t bother me too, too much, but I will say that the evil “big business” end of the equation felt a lot more convincing & well-developed. I especially appreciated the Reaganomics-speak of the NYC twins’ inherited company, Moramax: “More for America”. As far as satire goes, that specific phrase easily ranks up there with Robocop & Gremlins II: The New Batch in poking fun at the state of class structure in the 1980s, even if most of the film’s message boils down to a simple rich = stressed out & snooty, poor = sweet & serene.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
March: Erin presents Mrs. Winterbourne (1996)
April: Boomer presents My Demon Lover (1987)
May: Brandon presents Girl Walk // All Day (2011)

-The Swampflix Crew

Three Hidden Gems in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986)

January 28, 2016January 28, 2016 / swampflix / 12 Comments

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Recently, the Prytania Theatre (Louisiana’s oldest operating single-screen movie theater) had several special screenings of Labyrinth as a tribute to the late and great David Bowie. Bowie has had a pretty interesting acting career, starring in films such as The Hunger and Absolute Beginners, but Labyrinth is without a doubt the film he is best known for. His character, Jareth (the Goblin King), has been the source of so many sexual awakenings due to his mysterious aura and dashing appearance (not to mention that giant codpiece), but more importantly, the music that he created for the film is extraordinary. The soundtrack to Labyrinth is definitely my favorite film soundtrack of all-time. Each song has a lot of heart, a lot of fun, and a whole lot of Bowie.

Needless to say, watching this film on the big screen for the very first time was an unforgettable, life-altering experience, and viewing such a familiar film in a different setting caused me to notice a few things I never caught before:

1. The image of Jareth’s face appears in different areas in the labyrinth during several scenes, but it’s very well hidden (for the most part). His face can been seen a few times in the following places: the walls and floor of the labyrinth, the rocks in the tunnel, and the trees in the Bog of Eternal Stench. After doing some quick research, I found out that the hidden faces were put in the film for the DVD release. Whoever decided to place these hidden “Easter eggs” throughout the film is a genius.

2. Within the first few minutes of the film, you get a quick tour of Sarah’s bedroom. There are quite a few items throughout her room that become part of her labyrinth experience (stuffed animals that resemble Sir Dydimus and the Fireys, bookends that resemble Hoggle, etc.), but I never noticed the newspaper clippings of David Bowie attached to her vanity’s mirror. Also, directly on the side of the clippings is a doll that looks very similar to the Goblin King. How did I miss this all these years?

3. There is a fountain in the Goblin City that is basically a circle of Hoggle-like goblins urinating. When Sarah first encounters Hoggle, he’s peeing in a fountain. I’m not quite sure what this connection means or if it means anything at all. My guess is that it is a sign that her journey is ending. Once Sarah enters the Goblin City, she’s coming close to finishing her quest. The Hoggles in the fountain look similar to her Hoggle-like bookends back in the “real world,” so this could be a sign that change is coming. Or this could simply be a goof. The world may never know.

-Britnee Lombas

Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.: The Avengers (2012)

January 25, 2016January 25, 2016 / swampflix / 27 Comments

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Boomer: The Avengers was always one of Kevin Feige’s goals. Audacious and ambitious, when Feige started conceptualizing the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe his intention was to create a crossover film that united characters originally featured in individual films, mirroring the character/team dichotomy that permeates superhero comics. As such, a great deal of the history of the Avengers film project is really the history of the MCU up to this point, which has been discussed in our previous posts.

Casting for the film began in 2010, with Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye being cast far enough in advance that Kenneth Branagh was able to insert an early cameo from him into Thor in 2011. Marvel’s official story is that they “declined” to have Ed Norton return as Bruce Banner, whereas Norton has claimed that he never intended to return to the role after the 2008 The Hulk flick, as he “wanted more diversity” in his career. His role was recast with Mark Ruffalo. The only other major addition to the ensemble was Cobie Smulders, who was cast in the role of Maria Hill. Hill is well-known to comic book fans as the sometime director of S.H.I.E.L.D., and she was a key player in Marvel’s then-recent Secret Invasion storyline. As a result, her casing fueled fan theory that her casting was an indication that the metamorphic Skrulls would be the primary antagonists in the film, especially when the Chitauri (who essentially stand in for the Skrulls under Marvel’s Ultimate imprint) were announced as well; ultimately, these theories were proven incorrect. Other than the six Avengers themselves, the film also featured the return of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts and Paul Bettany’s Jarvis from the Iron Man flicks and Stellan Skarsgård’s Erik Selvig and Tom Hiddleston’s Loki from Thor. Clark Gregg also reprised his role as Agent Coulson, and Samuel L. Jackson is featured as Director Nick Fury.

Early story work was completed by Zak Penn, who also contributed to the story for the excellent X2 and co-wrote the screenplay for the abysmal X3; the script was rewritten by Joss Whedon when he was brought on board to direct. There’s no need to explain who Whedon is, right? There are probably sea mollusks out there that are sick of hearing about the Cancellation of Firefly like it was an actual battle that was lost. Still, Whedon’s experience as a director as well as a purveyor of superhero yarns (his run on Astonishing X-Men was particularly good, although I didn’t care for his work on Runaways) made him the perfect fit for bringing the Avengers to celluloid life. Composer Alan Silvestri so impressed Marvel Studios with his composition for Captain America that he was brought back to score this film as well.

But enough about the seeds of the franchise. Brandon, what did you think?

Brandon: Finally, an MCU film I’ve actually seen before! When I went to the theater to see The Avengers in 2012 I was aware of its individual characters’ basic attributes, but a little lost as to what exactly was happening in the film plot-wise until about halfway into its massive runtime. The funny thing is that now that I’ve watched all five standalone films that have lead up to this crossover effort, I still found myself somewhat lost. The Avengers is the beginning of the MCU’s descent into full-blown Infinity Stone, MacGuffin-chasing nonsense. The film’s opening sequence feels like the ending of a nondescript action film that just happens to include a magic scepter and a “tesseract”. It’s a pretty clever idea to throw the film’s in-the-know audience into just as much of a confused state as those who just happened to wander into the universe for the first time, but the film’s central Infinity Stone caper is not nearly as much of a draw as the thrill of seeing six wildly varied superheroes share top billing in a single feature, so it feels a bit like wasted time. And once the film sets up its stolen tesseract conflict, it then takes way too much time to re-introduce each of the film’s disparate heroes & bring them together as a single unit. I had a lot of fun with going into an IMAX 3D screening of The Avengers completely blind of context in 2012, but returning to the film fully-informed (movie-wise, anyway) dampened my enthusiasm a good deal. It’s still a fun, crowd-pleasing action film, to be sure, but I think the effort required to get to its gang’s-all-here charm rolling reveals itself to be a little more labored on repeat viewings.

That being said, there are at least two scenes in The Avengers that rank among the best moments in superhero cinema of all time. I’m thinking, firstly, of the scene where the pissant god Loki’s evil scepter causes all six Avengers & (released from his post-credits stinger prison) Nick Fury to bicker in a slowly ratcheted moment of bitter discontent. It’s a well-played moment that sets up how a group of inflated superegos would have a near-impossible time working together as a unit. That scene functions as a set-up for the much more obvious centerpiece: the climactic battle with the alien robot army that destroys an entire metropolis. I don’t really have much to say about the film’s concluding action sequence other than it’s a grand spectacle of fist-pumping action that might be one of the single most fun to watch half hour stretches in the history of superheroes on film. I have no doubt that the reason I left the theater so satisfied in 2012 is that the spectacle of that Battle for the Fate of the Universe completely obliterated any concerns about the labor it took to get there. I was probably also less bored with the film’s individual introductions to the characters & the concept of Infinity Stones on that first go-round, since I feel now like I already put in that effort in the 10 hours of media leading up to that point. Still, I’m entirely grateful for the isolated moments of excellence that The Avengers delivers on its own time, not to mention some wonderful character beats for my favorite duo within the franchise so far (Black Widow & Captain America) and a fantastic revision of a character who simply did not work the first time around (The Hulk). I’ll just be more likely to return to those moments as isolated scenes in the future instead of watching the film as a whole, unless it’s as background noise. The Avengers is one of those movies I can see working best as something you can drift in and out of, maybe while channel surfing or housecleaning or something along those lines.

Boomer: It’s been three-and-a-half years (and roughly 7,283 thinkpieces of varying insight and coherence about whether or not Joss Whedon’s body of work is sufficiently feminist or hopelessly static and outdated) since a group of friends and I went to see The Avengers after a long and trying semester. There was some concern that the film would be bloated or an overall mess. While there’s certainly a case to be made that Age of Ultron would realize those concerns three summers later, I find myself drawn in by Whedon’s first MCU outing every time I watch it, despite the number of times that I have seen it. Between the whip-smart dialogue, the extended but imaginative action set-pieces, and the undeniable cool of seeing super-powered characters come together and coalesce into a united, if volatile, front, there’s so much to enjoy about the film that even the most cantankerous of critics found it hard to commit to panning the movie.

The Avengers is a fun ride, and although the Battle of New York—as the final action sequence would come to be called in later MCU media—admittedly experienced a series of diminishing returns, most of the myriad of other high-octane set-pieces were genuinely thrilling and engaging. It was a smart move to start the film with an action sequence that was largely Avenger-free and which instead focused on Fury, Coulson, and Maria Hill before following that up with a series of smaller scenes that reintroduce each of the key players with varying degrees of bombasity. Other checkmarks in the “good idea” column include the decision to have characters express reluctance and hesitance to commit to the idea of a full-on superhero team, and to introduce the seeds of discord early on. As a result, when the temporary falling out occurs at the end of Act Two, it feels properly earned and not as forced as it so easily could have.

As a writer, Whedon has always had a talent for drafting dialogue and characterization that is at once clever, observational, and occasionally devastating. Jeremy Renner isn’t given much to do in this first flick as he spends most of the film under the brainwashed control of Loki’s staff, but the other Avengers work well here. In particular, Tony Stark improves a great deal as a character under the direction of Whedon, as his dialogue, while still pompous, is less obnoxious in all its crackling Buffy-esque witticism than when other writers have put words in his mouth. Chris Hemsworth’s Thor gets in some good lines as well (the reference to the bilgesnipe is a favorite of mine despite its brevity, as it’s totally wacky while remaining oddly conversational), and Evans gets to show more dimensions to Cap, now a man out of time. Evans’s performance is particularly strong, but, for my money, Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha is the MVP here, not that it should be any surprise that Whedon would expand her role significantly from her previous appearance in Iron Man 2.

Throughout the film, Romanoff is surrounded by men who project assumptions onto her: the Russians she is “interrogating” in her first scene see her only as an object of sexual scorn, using derogatory and charged language; Banner initially underestimates her strength and resolve; Loki spits insults at her, concluding that her investment in saving her friend is purely the result of pathetic romantic attachment. In every instance, these assumptions are false, and Black Widow uses these misogynistic and presumptive attitudes against the antagonists at every turn. Despite some well-choreographed ass-kicking in her last appearance, Natasha was still mostly played for the male gaze (potentially an inevitable consequence of appearing in an Iron Man film); here, she’s an extremely competent agent who is so skilled that she doesn’t seem out of place as a team-member alongside supersoldiers and literal gods. And, like Buffy before her, Nat is not an “strong female character” in the sense that she is an emotionless and implacable badass–she gets hurt, experiences doubt, mourns her comrades, and is forced to fight her closest friend. She doesn’t have to be coded as a male character, and it’s just grand.

Overall, The Avengers is an ambitious but well-suited capstone to the first phase of the MCU. It expands a lot from here, as Phase Two would include not only six films but two network television series (it’s not clear where Daredevil and Jessica Jones fit into the “phase” structure, if they fit in at all) over the following three years. It’s big fun that’s mostly (but not wholly) a surface-deep spectacle.

Lagniappe

Boomer: Not only did my friends and I go see this film in costume, but we caught it in 3D as well, as we had with Thor. For those so inclined, I daresay that Chris Evan’s punching bag scene towards the beginning of the film may well justify the extra dollars spent on the post-conversion.

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(image courtesy of user thecaptainrogers of rebloggy)

With regards to the larger MCU, the events of the Battle of New York will come up again and again, especially in regards to how the public and governments will respond to the team. The death of Phil Coulson is cheapened by the knowledge that his character returned a mere three months later when Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. debuted; the reason for his sudden and unexpected resurrection was one of the ongoing mysteries of that show’s lukewarm first season (arguably the weakest). My original theory at the time was that his mind would be used to create the personality imprint for Vision when that character eventually appeared in the MCU, standing in for Wonder Man, although the MCU obviously went in a different direction.

Brandon: The feeling I got while watching The Avengers‘ 2015 followup, Age of Ultron, was that the MCU was stretching itself a little thin trying to include both barely-interested newcomers & deeply invested comic book supernerds in the same audience. Now that the novelty of meeting the MCU’s characters for the first time in the first Avengers film has worn off a bit for me, I feel that strained divide might’ve begun as soon as 2012. As a compromise between pleasing both the well-informed and the completely contextless, The Avengers is a massively impressive balancing act. However, I think that these crossover films might be better served as standalone works of art if they left newcomers behind completely & just focused on serving the audience who’ve already put in the effort to get there. And I’m saying that as a recent convert who’s just barely keeping up as is.

Combined S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. Rating for The Avengers (2012)

-Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.

Swampflix

New Orleans film blog & podcast

Lists & Articles

If Released in Another Time, Big Business (1988) Could’ve Easily Been a ZAZ-Style Spoof of Old Hollywood Farces

The Late Great Planet Mirth II – Revelation (1999)

The Late Great Planet Mirth I – Introduction & Apocalypse (1998)

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 2: Persona (1966)

Big Business (1988)’s Old Hollywood Roots in Duck Soup (1933)

Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.: Iron Man 3 (2013)

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 1: Life Itself (2014)

Movie of the Month: Big Business (1988)

Three Hidden Gems in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986)

Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.: The Avengers (2012)