mark boomer redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: The Conversation (1974)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 surveillance paranoia thriller The Conversation, which recently screened at Prytania’s Classic Movie Series.

00:00 Welcome

05:08 George Dureau: New Orleans Artist (2023)
19:10 The Roommate (2011)
32:35 Crimes of Passion (1984)

45:08 The Conversation (1974)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: Please Stand By (2017)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the 2017 road-trip dramedy Please Stand By, starring Dakota Fanning as an autistic Star Trek obsessive on the run.

00:00 Welcome

01:09 Indiana Jones and The Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
04:13 Nosferatu (2024)
06:17 Cunk on Life (2025)
10:53 Dark Match (2025)
17:29 Companion (2025)
23:46 Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (2025)
27:40 Son in Law (1993)

34:08 Please Stand By (2017)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Companion (2025)

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

It’s no surprise that Companion is advertised by association with producer Zach Creggers’s previous film Barbarian, as there’s a lot of fun being had by mixing an inconsistent light tone with a genuinely tense horror atmosphere, bending what could otherwise be pretty straightforward genre fare into something novel. Iris (Sophie Thatcher) is the sweetly innocent girlfriend of Josh (Jack Quaid), with whom she had a cute first meeting at a supermarket. The film opens on them making their way to the lakehouse of Sergey (Rupert Friend), who is the boyfriend of Josh’s friend Kat (Megan Suri). Also joining for the weekend are Kat and Josh’s old friend Eli (Harvey Guillén), and Eli’s partner Patrick (Lucas Gage). After an awkward interaction between Kat and Iris that establishes Iris’s belief that Kat hates her isn’t all in her head, the group has a little dance party and Iris’s reaction to the story of Patrick and Eli’s own meet cute implies she may be overinvested in her relationship. Things go completely awry the next morning when Sergey attempts to assault Iris while the two are alone at the lake shore, with deadly results. 

I’m going to go into BIG SPOILERS here, even though I’m not sure we can even call them that, since the marketing for this film has largely given it away. In fact, one of the friends that I invited to the screening I attended spoiled herself from the trailer so much that she decided she didn’t even want to see it. It’s almost impossible to talk about this movie without getting into it. Still here? Okay. The title “Companion” isn’t just about Iris being Josh’s girlfriend; it relates to the fact that she is a gynoid girlfriend. If you manage to avoid being spoiled for this, as I was, this is foreshadowed several times. First, Iris awakens in the car when Josh says “Iris, wake up,” which doesn’t seem unusual at that time but later turns out to be her activation phrase (with its inverse being her sleep mode instruction). She’s also extremely polite to Josh’s self-driving car, which seems to bemuse him, and Kat later tells Iris that the latter’s existence makes her feel replaceable. The hints get thicker as the revelation approaches, like when Iris responds with precise temperature and forecast information when Josh asks her what the weather will be like that day. 

Iris herself is a model from the Empathix company, and although the companionship droids that they provide have safeguards built in—the same strength as a human of the same build, programming that prevents the droids from harming people or other living things, and an inability to lie—Josh has “jailbroken” her so that she responded with lethal force to Sergey. This is part of an elaborate plan between Josh and Kat to steal Sergey’s money, with Patrick and Eli in attendance to unwittingly provide corroborating testimony that Sergey was killed by Iris. When Josh reactivates Iris in order to “say goodbye,” he sets up his own downfall, as she is able to escape from the lakehouse and flee into the wilderness nearby, and Josh et al must track her down and reboot her before the police arrive in order to disguise his complicity in her reprogramming and ensure their impunity in Sergey’s death. 

Like Barbarian before it, this is an exciting ride with twists and turns beyond the initial reveal that Iris isn’t the girl she seems to be that propel the action along. Jack Quaid plays a variation on his 5cream character, the seemingly nice, perfect boyfriend who turns out to be a pathetic manchild whose motivations are driven by a sense of entitlement. In that slasher, it was that he was a superfan with a grudge (“How can fandom be toxic?”). Here, he’s a seemingly unambitious man who rants about nice guys finishing last and demonstrates other such personality flaws. That’s two-for-two for movies getting a lot of mileage out of Quaid’s cute face and presumed innocence, but I hope we don’t go to that well too often (this screening featured a trailer for his upcoming action-hero-who-can’t-feel-pain flick Novocaine, and it’s nice to see him doing something different). I praised Sophie Thatcher up and down for her work in Heretic, and she carries this movie with aplomb. Iris is both Sarah Connor and the Terminator (a comparison that the film makes textual through both recreating the metal endoskeletal hand scene and putting a killer android in a police uniform à la T2), determined but not unstoppable. I’m sure a lot of this may seem derivative to some: yes, we also saw sliders for personality traits for robotic humans on Westworld; yes, this is in some ways another take on The Stepford Wives. But all writing is rewriting and all creation is remixing, and Companion is clever and novel in its approach. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (2025)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

Nearly ten years ago, a trove of presumed lost photographic prints and negatives belonging to the late exiled South African photographer Ernest Cole was discovered in several Swiss bank deposit boxes. Cole, born in 1940, was a critical component in the eventual overturning of the policies of apartheid in South Africa, as the 1967 release of his photobook House of Bondage was one of the first pieces of media to expose the inhuman cruelties occurring in South Africa under the hand of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd (the “architect of apartheid”). Exiled as a result of this act of activism, Cole ended up in the United States, where he ultimately died—essentially homeless—in 1990. At the time, much of his work, which he had stored in a boarding house storeroom and had been unable to regain access to, was assumed to have been tossed out and lost forever, until the 2017 Swiss bank discovery. One of Cole’s last living relatives, a nephew, was flown into the country to collect these items, and found himself unable to get any information about why his uncle’s work had ended up in the safe at this bank, who had deposited it, or how they had paid for it. 

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found spends some time on this Swiss mystery, and I want to get that out of the way first since it is, to me, the least important aspect of this documentary. When it was first mentioned that Cole’s assumed-lost work had been found intact and preserved in the SEB vault, I considered this a cause for joy, and it didn’t occur to me to presume malice on the part of whoever put it there. Surely, it would have to be someone who wanted to keep that material safe and preserved. If someone wanted to get rid of his documentation of social injustice, they would just destroy it, right? Once we learn later in the documentary that Cole’s mental (and physical) health had degraded to the point that he was unable to regain possession of his work before his death, one could almost imagine some Good Samaritan rescuing the work from being hauled away in the back of a sanitation truck, although this doesn’t explain how it ended up on the other side of the Atlantic. When the doc revealed that there were a remaining 504 photographs that the Swiss government was still fighting for possession of with Cole’s estate, I was a bit more convinced of the possibility of malintent on the part of whomever had spirited away Cole’s work. It was only after I started to write this paragraph that it struck me that I might be failing to inspect the colonialism of the idea altogether since any preservationist instinct that removed art from Africa to “protect” it by storing it in Europe is, well … colonialist by default. We may never know how a collection of Cole’s work ended up there, but its return to Cole’s family prompted filmmaker Raoul Peck to create Lost and Found, and it’s an unequivocal good that this film exists. 

Nearly all of the footage within the film is Cole’s own, as are the words; LaKeith Stanfield provides voiceover that is taken from Cole’s correspondence and other writings, weaving together the narrative of a life. Cole talks about where he grew up, how a racist campaign of term-redefinition and expansionist neologisms led to the destruction of homes, communities, and families of native Africans under European rule. He escaped with his negatives and published House of Bondage, and as a result of his political exile, found himself adrift in a world that he had no hand in making and in which he could find little purchase. An attempt to expose the racism of the American South as he had the racism of South Africa was mounted, with Cole being sponsored by publishers to travel, but contemporary critics were less receptive to this work. Whether this is purely a matter of Western tendencies to find depictions of injustice abroad moving and empathy-inspiring while bristling when we see it in the mirror, or if there is some validity to the idea that his artistic eye was less capable of capturing the emotion of his subjects because of the cultural differences between the kind of racism that they experienced, I shall leave to your discretion. Despite the horrors of what he saw at home, his exile had a profoundly depressive effect on Cole, leaving him constantly in search of work and making it nearly impossible for him to keep a residence for long. Changes in leadership at publishing houses would mean that he was only half paid for a job and thus never finished it, and the discrepancies between how Cole would describe himself in his journals (not depressed) versus how his friends remember him to have been at the time (severely affected by depression) reveal a man who was lost, alone, and who never fully recovered from what he witnessed in his youth. Ultimately, he never did return home, although his aged mother was able to be at his bedside in New York when he died on February 19, 1990, just eight days after Nelson Mandela was released from prison in one of the defining moments in the collapse of the apartheid regime within the next few years. 

This documentary is deeply felt, wonderfully composed, and unfortunately timely. The portrait of Cole that is created is a warm but not overly sentimental one. The narrative choice to use only Cole’s words is one that means that the voiceover informs but does not contextualize and, thus, requires you to build the story yourself from the juxtaposition and editing rather than having your hand held about what you should be thinking or how you should feel. One feature that stood out to me particularly was the frequent appearance of filmed political speeches and U.N. forums that, for decades, repeated the same tired canards justifying a lack of embargoes or sanctions against South Africa. “It would only harm those we are trying to help” says the U.N. president in grainy black and white footage from the 1960s, and which is said again by his successor in the 1970s, before being repeated almost word-for-word in vibrant color video of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. I have to be honest with you; it’s bleak, and the portrait it paints of what’s in store for us in the coming years is even bleaker. When House of Bondage was released, it created a sense of moral outrage in the populace that, even at full force, was completely incapable of causing national and international leadership to take any action to end apartheid. We’ve spent the last 15 months with constant, new images of harrowing, monstrous, evil violence enacted by an apartheid state that currently exists, and the modern American is so inured to this kind of wickedness that the coalition of those who are rightly horrified is mocked, belittled, shouted down, fired, and legally silenced by conmen, grifters, and empowered bigots. If it took two and a half decades for apartheid to fall despite international (citizen-level) support for its abolition, then it does not bode well for the end of any current campaign of government terror, when people are unmoved by the plight of their fellow man. The past is never dead. It is not even the past. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Cruise (1998)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Collecting over three years of footage, 1998 saw the release of Bennett Miller (Moneyball, Foxcatcher, Capote)’s hilarious documentary The Cruise, centering around oddball New Yorker Timothy “Speed” Levitch. Throughout the 90s, Levitch was a guide for various New York sightseeing tours; during the time in which the doc was filmed, he was working for Gray Line, with whom he has a contentious relationship, while he and a former co-worker fondly recall having worked for Apple Tours in the past. The film takes its title from Levitch’s life philosophy about “cruising” (no relation), an idiosyncratic ideology about how life “should” flow. This approach to life finds Levitch working twenty hours a week giving tours (no more, no less) and spending the rest of his time enjoying “the cruise.” In many ways, his belief system is more about what systems and concepts he defines as being “anti-cruise,” which range from the obvious examples like the institution of policing, to more personal examples like people who have personally wronged him and Gray Line for instituting the use of work uniform shirts, to more esoteric instances like the NYC grid pattern.

Levitch’s New York is a more complex presentation than we normally get, as most of the people who are interested in showing off “their” New York usually follow a virtually identical script where they fellate the city to the point of apotheosis. I don’t have any particular dislike for the city—I quite enjoy myself there—but in all cities there is a vocal chorus about how their city is the best city in the world, baby! (For those of you based in Swampflix’s home of New Orleans, you’ll recognize this hometown tendency from the number of shirts that say “Only New Orleans is real, everything else is smoke and mirrors,” etc.) Like most of the things that people consider to be unique about their city, this is not unique to New York, but because of the sheer amount of our shared media that is produced there, it is the one whose citizen propaganda is often spread farthest and widest. As such, I don’t blame anyone who’s sick of it, but this is a piece of filmic art that shows something a little different, a more thoughtful, critical, and nuanced portrait of a city that could only come from one particular point of view. 

Of course, that’s not to say that the New York of Levitch and Miller still exists. As a document of the end of the twentieth century, the film is in fascinating conversation with Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, a collection of essays about the New York that was and its counterpoint in the New York that is, mostly drawing attention to the way that the Giuliani administration transformed the city into a real estate investment and playground for the rich and helped to institutionalize and cement the strata of class difference. Levitch is a man who is homeless but never unhoused, gliding (or rather, cruising) through life as a series of couch surfing and house sitting adventures, sustaining his lifestyle through the delivery of screeds for and against the city to a captive audience. Levitch’s NYC is ephemeral and fleeting, and nowhere is this more present than in a notable sequence in which Levitch tells someone that one of his favorite activities is to go to the plaza between the World Trade Center towers and spin around until he makes himself dizzy, then lie down on the ground and look up at them so that he feels like they’re falling down on top of him. 

We get a great taste for what a tour from Levitch would be like, as he pontificates how many blocks apart certain writers and other artists lived from where they are passing, about the unity of those actors and playwrights in a singular city and in a singular past is less interesting than the difference and distance between those thinkers in space and time. Art and artistry are delineated through proximity but not bound together by it, except in the ways that Levitch weaves together disparate facts into a cohesive whole. He’s obviously well-versed in the city’s rich history, with him occasionally delivering off-the-cuff lessons in architecture to the documentarian following him on the street during his “off hours.” He calls attention to the undulation of the curves of ceramic building shells—better than stone because of its lighter weight and easier affixation to the steel that undergirds the construction—and then, in a kind of religious spasm, compares the curvature of the building to the shape of a woman and makes noises of rapture. He describes the “utter catharsis” of architecture as phallic enterprise in the body of the Empire State Building from within “its silhouette.” He’s exactly the kind of person that it’s wonderful to be able to observe from a distance, to get to know through the remove of the camera lens, because while he’s very funny and is a fantastic entertainer, he is exactly the kind of person one would imagine has an energy that it would be difficult to be in the presence of for longer than the length of a sightseeing tour.

Levitch is a person who’s too much of a character to be fictional, a man who, if he were generated from the mind of an author, would be too grating and strange for us to identify with, but because he is a real person in our real world, we must accept his existence as fact. A font of unconventional wisdom with a vast knowledge of history and literature, there are moments when I found myself identifying with him very much. There’s a particularly fun bit near the end in which Levitch goes on a tirade about all of the people who have wronged him in his life, from unrequited childhood crushes to teachers to members of his family, and it’s wonderful stuff. I’m sorry that I never got the chance to get a tour from Levitch, even if I can’t help but wonder if I’d ever fully recover from the experience. As the film is currently in re-release, the local arthouse where I attended a screening noted that they had reached out to the distributor to see if it would be possible to have Levitch do a Q&A or even just videoconference in for an introduction. Apparently, the distributor said that this was far from the first request of this kind that they had fielded, but that “[they]’re having trouble finding him.” What a legacy; in fact, I fear that having to comment on this might be too anti-cruise for him to want to participate, so there’s a part of me that hopes they never find him, and he’s still out there, unfettered.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Tomie (1998)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

A few months ago, we talked about the 2000 live action Junji Ito adaptation of Uzumaki on the podcast. This month, my most frequent arthouse viewing companion wanted to take over calendar duties for our outings, and he expressed immediate interest in Tomie, based on a particular line in the blurb calling it a “peculiar tale of an evil high school femme fatale whose kiss drives men to madness.” The “kiss” element is perhaps overstated there, but this is nonetheless a creepy little feature that I enjoyed quite a lot, and is a much more accessible film than Uzumaki was. 

Tsukiko Izumisawa (Mami Nakamura) is a young photography student living with her boyfriend Yuuichi (Kouta Kusano), a chef at a local restaurant. She’s also undergoing regressive hypnotherapy under the care of Dr. Hosono (Yoriko Douguchi) to uncover what really happened to her during a recent period of total amnesia. She gets an update from her landlord that there’s a new tenant in the apartment beneath hers, a recent high school graduate named Kenichi (Kenji Mizuhashi). Although she does not meet her new neighbor, we get to see that he is raising a decapitated head as a baby, which very quickly transforms into a child, then a teenager under his care. This is Tomie Kawakami (Miho Kanno), who is not so much a young woman as she is some kind of evil entity, as we learn from Detective Harada (Tomorowo Taguchi), who comes to Dr. Hosono with a seemingly impossible story. As it turns out, he’s looking for Tsukiko, as she and another young girl named Tomie were classmates and best friends, before their entire class broke out in a rash of murders and suicides, with Tomie ultimately being decapitated. However, upon further investigation, he has found a series of such events that have been happening for over a century, all centering around a woman with the name Tomie Kawakami, her seduction of a man with a wife or girlfriend, and an outbreak of madness and violence that ends with Tomie’s death. He has come to believe that there is a supernatural element at play, and that learning the truth about what happened during the period that Tsukiko cannot remember holds the key to solving the mystery. 

As we watched Uzumaki so recently, it’s difficult not to view this film in conversation with that one, especially as they were also released in such close proximity to one another. Uzumaki is an artifact of early digital filmmaking, with sickly green color correction, Further, that film’s narrative demand for repeated spiral imagery also required the use of computer-generated imagery which was not up to the task at hand. Although Tomie also centers around people being driven mad and acting out violently, the impetus is merely the presence of a wraithlike woman, which makes for a much easier transition into live action presentation. We don’t see Tomie’s face until long after the film’s midpoint. Instead, we see her from the back, her face completely hidden by her hair, or in silhouette. There are no distractingly bad CGI tornadoes or hair spirals here to detract from the horror that the film is trying to convey, and Tomie remains a frightening presence throughout as a result. She lingers in doorways, she glides down the street in pursuit of a victim, and our lack of an impression of her makes this all the more interesting. She enters (or re-enters, rather) Tsukiko’s life through her extended circle, first by having her caretaker move into the downstairs apartment sight unseen, then by getting a job at the restaurant where Yuuichi works, where her (still invisible to the audience) beauty causes the manager and Yuuichi’s co-workers to start to compete for her affection, with disastrous results. Even Tsukiko’s landlord eventually falls under Tomie’s spell, attacking her when she enters the flat below hers and discovers the dead body of one of her friends. Eventually, the two are reunited, and their true history is revealed. 

Apparently, this film kicked off a franchise that includes eight more movies about Tomie, continuing the story from where it ends here (Tomie: Replay, was even released on a double bill with Uzumaki). This was fairly common practice for J-Horror of the time; just take a look at how many sequels there were to Ju-on and Ringu, both of which were released in the same year as Tomie. There’s not much information about those films online, certainly not enough for me to make a judgment about whether they’re worth checking out. I’m sure that there’s value in continuing to adapt the rest of the manga on which they are based, but this is a perfect example of an understated horror film that, despite being an adaptation of a longer, serialized work, functions as a singular text unto itself. Nakamura’s Tsukiko is a character who should be more widely recognized as an archetypical, textbook-perfect final girl. I appreciated the attention to detail that a woman with amnesia might find herself drawn to photography, perhaps the most documentarian method of artistic expression, as an art form, even if she’s not very good at it. We learn in the backstory that Tsukiko spread pictures of Tomie around school with “monster girl” written on them, and she has recurring dreams about this photograph that portend a dark reunion between the two girls in the near future, as well as a connection that’s more consequential than it initially appears. 

When it comes to effective screen boogeymen, Tomie herself is a standout as well. For much of the film, we see very little of her. In the first scene of the film, she’s just a head in a plastic bag, a singular eye peering out of it (which became the film’s iconic poster image), and then we see nothing of her face for a long time. Even in the scene where Detective Harada visits Dr. Hosono, he shows her a picture of the class of students that Tsukiko, Tenichi, and Tomie were in, but Tomie’s face is scratched out, as if the precise nature of her evil prevents her image from being recreated. When she gets work at the restaurant where Tsukiko’s boyfriend works, there’s a distinct contrast between the malice the audience feels radiating from her and the effect that her face, which remains in shadow, has on the men around her. It’s effective, and the reveal that she looks like a normal girl—a pretty girl, certainly, but no more so than any of the other women cast in the film—but one with an otherworldly oddness. This did start to come apart a little at the end, however, as I prefer her unassuming soft-spokenness over whatever was happening at the end when she was trying to feed Tsukiko live roaches. It moves from deft and subtle to a little too vibey, and the shift moves too quickly to fully work. 

Still, this is a perfectly fun late-90s J-horror movie. It reminded me of others from about this same time. In particular, the hypnotherapy plot reminded me a lot of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure released just the year prior. The conversation between the two films was further solidified by this movie’s violence largely emerging from people being mesmerized (although this time it’s by a demon). There’s also something very The Thing about the way that Tomie is an unslayable enemy who, even when reduced to nothing more than a head, will regrow like a starfish to restart a cycle of violence. Definitely worth the watch if you can find it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Downsizing (2017)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Alexander Payne’s climate change sci-fi comedy Downsizing (2017).

00:00 The Top 10 Films of 2024

02:30 Anora (2024)
12:05 Barfly (1987)
13:48 Single White Female (1992)
22:03 The Cruise (1998)
23:03 Tomie (1998)
24:28 The Thing (1982)
27:39 To Die For (1995)
34:03 Gattaca (1997)
38:36 Mulholland Drive (2001)
45:25 The Devil and Miss Jones (1941)
50:09 Closely Watched Trains (1966)
53:46 McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
58:17 Feels Good Man (2020)

1:03:38 Downsizing (2017)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Barfly (1987)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

I have a friend whose resolution for the new year was to ensure that he try a new restaurant every week, after having spent nearly a decade in Austin without properly branching out into the cuisine scene. When discussing where to dine this past weekend, I asked if he had tried Golden Horn yet, a newish eatery on the ground floor under Barfly’s, a bar that our friend group frequents. “Oh, he said! Like in Barfly!” Off of my puzzled look, he said “You know! ‘Your mother’s cunt smells like carpet cleaner’!” I had no idea what he was quoting until, after dinner (which ended up not being at Golden Horn after all), he showed a group of us this film, in which Mickey Rourke says this line to Frank Stallone in an alleyway while goading him into a fight. And wouldn’t you know it, this takes place right behind the Golden Horn, and damned if they didn’t copy the sign from the movie down to the last neon stroke: 

The Golden Horn in Barfly (1987)

The Golden Horn below Barfly’s, from their Instagram. 

I love the food at this place, but I can’t say that I loved this movie very much, unfortunately. Produced by Francis Ford Coppola and directed by Barbet Schroeder from a script by Charles Bukowski, Barfly is one in a line of pieces of fiction about Bukowski’s literary alter ego Henry Chinaski (Rourke). Chinaski is a nearly permanent fixture at The Golden Horn, a corner dive bar directly beneath the slummy long-term hotel that he occupies. Although he has a close relationship with one of the bartenders, Jim (J.C. Quinn), he’s constantly in conflict with the muscular Eddie (Stallone), hence his frequent goading of the latter into fistfights in the alley. Other fixtures include elderly prostitute Grandma Moses (Gloria LeRoy) and Janice (Sandy Martin, a.k.a. Mac’s mom from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia). When Chinaski manages to best Eddie one night, he’s convinced on the following evening to drink elsewhere, and initially declines any more than a few dollars from Jim, just enough to get a drink or two. He finds himself in a different bar, where he meets Wanda Wilcox (Faye Dunaway), another unrepentant drunk whose standards are so far underground that she finds him sufficiently charming. After Wanda acquires more liquor and beer for them for the evening on credit from her sugar daddy, the two spend a night together, and she gives him a key the next morning and tells him to move in. She warns him, however, that she’ll go home with any man who has a fifth of whiskey, and she does so that very night, with Eddie. Meanwhile, a sneaky man (Jack Nance) is lurking around Chinaski’s old place and The Golden Horn, and he reports back to the beautiful Tully Sorenson (Alice Krige) that Chinaski is the man that they’ve been looking for. Tully eventually catches up with him and reveals that she works for one of the countless publishers to whom Chinaski has been unsuccessfully submitting his work. An upper-class woman, she finds herself completely taken by Chinaski’s bohemian lifestyle and wants to be his patron, publisher, and lover. 

The morning after I saw this movie, I texted a friend who was absent the previous night that we had watched a terrible movie, and when he asked what it was, I responded “It was called Barfly, from 1987, written by Charles Bukowski and boy did it show.” He was unfamiliar, so I elaborated, “Bukowski was a poet/novelist/screenwriter who was widely beloved in his day and still is by a certain kind of youngish, roguish, predominantly white, edgelord type who thinks they’re the first person to mistake their amateur collegiate alcoholism for literary significance. If you were to know someone with a Fight Club poster and they had a favorite poet, their favorite poet would be Bukowski.” And I stand by that! Which is not to say that the Buke’s alcoholism was amateur; if one could drink at a professional level, the man did so. What I tried to articulate to my viewing companions that night was that this was a movie about drinking that was at once both portraying alcoholism as harrowing but also, you know, kinda fun. Make no mistake, the people in this film who suffer from alcoholism do the sorts of things that addicts (functional and dysfunctional) might do, and when viewed objectively, are horrible to witness. In a euphoric drunken state, Wanda steals some corn from where someone is growing it on the street near her apartment despite Chinaski warning her that it’s not ready to be eaten. Later, she grouses that nothing in her life works as she spits partially masticated, unripe green corn into a napkin. Grandma Moses is forced to haggle with her johns over the price of a blow job, and Chinaski himself ends up stabbing a man in a neighboring apartment in an altercation that arose from overhearing violent sexual roleplay (if he ever faces consequences for it, we don’t learn about it). 

This isn’t Trainspotting or some other film that commits to treating the haunting experiences of its characters as traumas, however. As one would expect from the screenwriter, Barfly treats drunkenness as next to godliness, with the quotidian given meaning via dual-wielding a pen in one hand and a handle of bourbon in the other. When Chinaski seeks out employment so that he can help pay the rent at Wanda’s hovel, his overt drunkenness means that he was never going to get past the interview that he attends, but attention is drawn to his rejection of norms in all forms. He instinctually bristles against the nature of completing applications and rejects the meanings of the questions he’s asked in favor of answering them with flamboyance; he’s too cool to get bogged down in all that stuff, man. He’s insufferable, and the film supports Chinaski’s masturbatory self-congratulation: he’s the author’s self-insert character! The most obvious example of this comes in the form of his two “love” interests. Wanda is a mostly functional alcoholic who manages to put on the appearance of a responsible citizen when she goes out in public (at least when she isn’t thieving corn) but whose drunkenness rivals Chinaski’s, and we get the sense that she’s his “true equal.” Tully, on the other hand, is like the walking embodiment of the girlfriend in Pulp’s “Common People,” a professional woman who finds the slovenly, slurring Chinaski’s work deeply moving and profound and, confusing the art with the artist, finds herself drawn to Chinaski sexually. Everywhere Tully goes, she’s perpetually clad in billowing white outfits, floating above it all, untouched by the filth of Chinaski’s life. 

The authorial fantasy of this, being pursued by two beautiful women, is unmistakable, and it boggles the mind. Recently, I’ve been watching Deadwood, and there are many scenes of Ian McShane as Ed Swearengen getting out of bed in his unwashed union suit and pissing in a bucket in the corner, and you have to be really disgusting for that to compare favorably, and Chinaski obliges. We never see him bathe or change clothes, and his undergarments are fascinatingly nauseating. There’s no visible soiling of his boxers, but they’re so boxy and greasy looking that one can only imagine how filthy he is. Despite this, Wanda falls for him overnight, and Tully even tracks him down to The Golden Horn after he leaves her place and gets into a bar fight with Wanda over him. Bukowski, via his proxy in Chinaski, gets the sleep with two gorgeous women who—despite their own disparate classes—are still both far, far too good for him, and he even gets to reject one and her “gilded cage” and then watch her be humiliated socially. Wanda even rips out a chuck of her hair! Alcoholism has never been more romanticized.

Where there is something to be praised here, it’s in the cinematography. All of these smoky, hazy bars are gorgeously photographed. There’s a magic to making a dingy dive, with its vinyl bumpers held together with duct tape and hideous clientele, into a tableaux of beauty. The lighting is also worth noting, and there are so many perfect compositions of neon signs and the glow that they cast that it’s a shame that this movie is largely unwatchable. This is a pre-boxing Rourke, and there are attempts to ugly up his pretty mug to make him seem more bedraggled, and they’re intermittently successful. Dunaway steals the spotlight from him in every scene that she’s in, however, and it’s a quietly understated performance from her. This was a decade after her Oscar win for Network, and there was a feeling I got when she gets into a tub at one point in the film and shows off her chest that she decided that the time was right to immortalize her breasts on screen. I was surprised to learn later from the film’s Wikipedia page that a glamor shot of her legs had been filmed at her insistence, which I think lends some credence to my theory. If I looked as good as she does here, I would do the same. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Boomer’s Academy Ballot 2024

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

I have a deep and abiding love for watching old Siskel and Ebert reviews. You can find a lot of them on YouTube where people’s VHS copies have been cleaned up as much as possible, and there’s an even deeper back catalog on a dedicated site. Many of the episodes on the latter, like their 1983 “If We Picked the Oscars Special,” contain the commercials from the broadcast, which can be fun. In their honor, and so that I can highlight elements that I found fantastic even in works that I didn’t otherwise care for, I have begun to do this myself, annually. Feel free to check out my list from last year, and see below, the winners and the nominees, if I picked the Oscars. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Swampflix Oscars Guide 2025

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

There are 35 feature films nominated for the 2025 Academy Awards ceremony.  We here at Swampflix have reviewed less than half of the films nominated (so far!), which isn’t nearly a high enough ratio to comment on the quality of the overall selection with any authority.  We’re still happy to see movies we enjoyed listed among the nominees, though, including one of our own Top 10 Films of 2024. The Academy rarely gets these things right when actually choosing the winners, but from what we’ve seen this year’s list is a decent sample of what 2024 cinema had to offer.

Listed below are the 14 Oscar-Nominated films from 2024 that we covered for the site, loosely ranked based on our star ratings and internal voting. Each entry is accompanied by a blurb, a link to our corresponding review, and a mention of the awards the films were nominated for.

The Substance, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Coralie Fargeat), Best Actress in a Leading Role (Demi Moore), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Makeup & Hairstyling 

“Coralie Fargeat’s satirical body-horror comedy is a fun little fable about the ageism, sexism, and self-hatred in pop culture’s obsession with the past – all embellished with surrealistic gore effects worthy of Screaming Mad George. Show up for Demi Moore’s mainstream comeback; stick around for funhouse mirror reflections on how being alive and made of meat is gross, how the things that we have to consume to stay alive are often also gross, and how the things that self-hatred drives us to do to ourselves are the absolute grossest.”

Memoir of a Snail, nominated for Best Animated Feature

“A stop-motion animated dramedy about cruelty, loneliness, and mental illness from the director of Mary & Max: a stop-motion animated dramedy about cruelty, loneliness, and mental illness. I really like what Adam Elliot’s doing. He’s got a tangible, darkly comic sense of despair to his work matched only by fellow snail’s pace animator Don Hertzfeldt … thankfully this time borrowing a little Jean-Pierre Juenet whimsy to help cut the tension.”

Dune: Part Two, nominated for Best Picture, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, Best Sound, and Best Visual Effects

““This is a huge movie, just big and bold and broad and beautiful. It’s so captivating that even a week later, I still feel more like it was something that I experienced more than it was something that I saw; talking about it as a film almost feels like the wrong way to discuss it.”

A Different Man, nominated for Best Makeup & Hairstyling

“Aaron Schimberg ventures further into the ethical & psychological labyrinth of rethinking onscreen disfigurement & disability representation that he first stepped into with Chained for Life, this time with less third-act abstraction.  Sebastian Stan does incredible work building complex layers in the lead role until Adam Pearson completely wrecks the whole thing in the funniest way possible.  It’s a great dark comedy about the tensions between internal & external identity.”

Anora, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Sean Baker), Best Actress in a Leading Role (Mikey Madison), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Yura Borisov), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing

“This sex-work Cinderella story is the feel-good sweet counterbalance to the feel-bad sour notes of Sean Baker’s Red Rocket. Both films are equally funny & frantic, but Baker has clearly decided he wants audiences to love him again after his brief heel era, and it’s impressive to see him face-turn to this opposite tonal extreme of his work without losing his voice.”

Nosferatu, nominated for Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Makeup & Hairstyling, and Best Production Design

“Robert Eggers has softened his alienating approach to narrative structure so that he can escalate his exquisite, traditionalist images to a grander, major-studio scale.  As a result, this cracked costume drama doesn’t add much to the ongoing ritual of restaging Dracula (except for accidentally making the argument that Coppola’s version is the best to date).  It’s a gorgeous, heinous nightmare in pure visual terms, though, which obviously goes a long way in a largely visual medium.”

Alien: Romulus, nominated for Best Visual Effects

“Pretty solid. The action sequences are fantastic (there’s a particular standout zero gravity sequence) and build logically upon one another, the introduction of a ticking clock in the form of the station’s deteriorating orbit is well-done and ups the stakes at exactly the right time, and the characters who have characters are interesting. Their interactions feel at home in this universe of films in which the night is dark and full of monsters but in which humans (and maybe androids) can find a connection with each other that makes the dual horrors of late-stage space capitalism and acidic organisms that impregnate and kill seem surmountable, if at great cost. A worthy sequel in an uneven franchise.”

Wicked Part 1, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress in a Leading Role (Cynthia Erivo), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Ariana Grande), Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, Best Makeup & Hairstyling, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound, and Best Visual Effects

“It would have been nice to have the film try to replicate the Technicolor-sais quoi of the MGM classic, but there’s still a lot to love here in the designs and the details. The costuming is fantastic, and at no point did I think that Oz looked boring or colorless, except in moments in which there’s an intentionality to the blandness that I find appropriate. Overall, it left me feeling elevated and effervescent, and I loved that, even if what we’re watching is the real time character assassination of our protagonist at the hands of an evil government.”

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, nominated for Best Documentary Feature Film

“A frantic essay film about the CIA’s attempts to rebrand the Cold War as a ‘Cool War’ by deploying popular jazz musicians to distract from conspiratorial overthrow of the Congolese government in 1960. It’s a little overwhelming as the anxious sounds & stylish block text of vintage jazz albums play over news-report propaganda clips for 150 relentless minutes, but it’s an impressive feat of politically fueled editing-room mania nonetheless. It’s like a version of The Movie Orgy for lefty academics.”

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, nominated for Best Animated Feature

“Just as cute & funny as expected, but also surprisingly smart about its skepticism of easy-fix tech solutions like AI, in that it’s most critical of using that tech to eliminate life’s pleasurable tasks: gardening, making tea, petting the dog, etc.”

Conclave, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role (Ralph Fiennes), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Isabella Rossellini), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Score

“I’m a lapsed Catholic in most ways except that I still have a huge soft spot for all the costumes & ritual, so this was an oddly cozy watch for something that’s supposed to be a kind of paranoid political thriller. It plays more like an HBO miniseries than an Important Movie for the most part, but those series are handsome & amusing enough that the distinction doesn’t matter much.”

A Real Pain, nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Kieran Culkin) and Best Original Screenplay

“Darkly, uncomfortably funny as a story about two men who love each other but have incompatible mental illnesses. I, of course, have whatever form of anxiety Eisenberg’s character suffers, which Culkin aptly describes as ‘an awesome guy stuck inside the body of someone who’s always running late’.”

Nickel Boys, nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay

“If you end up watching this at home instead of the theater, I recommend using headphones. A lot of attention will be paid to the 1st-person POV of its imagery, but the sound design is just as intensely, complexly immersive. I wish I had more to say about what it’s doing dramatically rather than formally, but the technical achievement can’t be dismissed.”

The Apprentice, nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Sebastian Stan) and Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Jeremy Strong)

“A dirtbag sitcom featuring two talented actors playing two despicable ghouls. It’s not especially insightful as a political text, but it’s impressive as an acting showcase, which means it must be Awards Season again.”

-The Swampflix Crew