Heretofore a director of mostly short films and music videos, first-time feature director Francis Galluppi has burst onto the scene with something that’s both indebted to indie upstarts of the past and which feels like a breath of fresh air. Last Stop in Yuma County is a spare movie; it doesn’t look or feel cheap although you can definitely tell it was made on a marginal budget. It’s lean in just the right places to take this story to the next level.
In the 1970s, an unnamed traveling knife salesman (Jim Cummings) stops for gas while en route to see his daughter, in the custody of his ex-wife, for her birthday. He arrives at a filling station only to learn from the attendant, Vernon (Faizon Love), that he’s waiting for the fuel truck to arrive, and that he’s welcome to wait in the attached diner. Since this is, as the title says, the last stop in Yuma, he has little choice. The diner’s waitress and possibly sole employee, Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue), is dropped off by her sheriff husband, Charlie, while the salesman hears on the radio about a bank robbery a few counties over. Once the diner opens, Charlotte and the salesman make pleasant chit-chat while trying to ignore the rising heat, as the diner’s air conditioner is no longer working. Before long, another car stops in for gas and gets the same bad news, and its occupants also choose to idle the time away in the diner. While Charlotte takes their order, the salesman notices that they are driving the same green Pinto described in the radio bulletin. The robbers, young hothead Travis (Nicholas Logan) and middle-aged, stone-cold Beau (Richard Brake), take note that the salesman and the waitress seem to be exchanging confidences, and cut the phone line when Charlotte tries to call Charlie, who takes too long to come to the phone. (Charlie’s assistant, Virginia, is played by the one and only Barbara Crampton.) Beau tells them to play nice and tasks Charlotte with grilling each customer who comes in about their fuel situation and, if any of them have gas, he’ll simply take that car and let everyone live.
The diner starts to fill up as more and more people arrive at the fill-up station. An elderly couple from Texas (Robin Bartlett and Gene Jones, the latter of whom you may remember as the gas station attendant whose small talk infuriates Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men) takes up residence at one table, and Charlie’s deputy Gavin (Connor Paolo) comes in for coffee, which sets Beau and Travis on edge. Charlotte almost manages to get a warning out, but Gavin’s careless collision with Travis costs her the opportunity. Two drifters, Miles (Ryan Masson) and Sybil (Sierra McCormick), also find their way to the diner, and Miles, who already idolized the criminals he heard about on the radio since he and Sybil have a whole anti-social folie-a-deux, attempts to steal the bank loot from the Pinto’s trunk before he’s spotted and they have to head into the diner to avoid being caught. It’s when local rancher Pete (Jon Proudstar) arrives, solely to have lunch since he filled up the day before, that things finally get out of hand. The meek salesman writes a note to his daughter and sticks it in his pocket and prepares to make a stand, but a standoff occurs when Beau takes Charlotte hostage, with Pete, the Texans, and Miles all pulling their guns on each other. Miles tries to bargain for part of the loot for helping Beau and Travis, and then things take a real turn for the worse.
There are a couple of minor elements that spotlight Yuma as a first-time outing for a feature director. Throughout the film, one of its strengths is a beautiful, constant, yellow desert light coming in from the outside; it’s very atmospheric in a way that contributes to the tension. But when the salesman shows up at the diner around dawn (it’s specifically said that it opens at six o’clock, and he watches Charlotte enter and turn the “open” sign around), the light is already that same pallid yellow of noon. It’s unchanging, and it’s a minor detail, but one that I couldn’t help but notice. The scene in which Beau explains—calmly, coolly, and dispassionately—exactly why the salesman and Charlotte are still alive, it’s delivered as a monologue. It’s a strong one, and one that’s done in a single long take, which works great with the tone. However, there’s a moment in the speech when Beau says, “Do you understand?” [beat] “Good,” and then continues with his directions. We can assume, yes, that Charlotte and/or the salesman nodded their assent, but it feels weird not to see that response in the text, without a cutaway. You can’t cut the question from the monologue without cutting the long take, and you can’t cut to the other characters reacting without doing the same, but it nonetheless feels a little awkward.
That’s all that there is to quibble about, though. This is a great piece of work, moody and tense. From the opening credits on, we know that the fuel truck isn’t coming, as the opening credits play out over its crash site, so we know that things can only go tragically (and boy do they). Cummings’ transformation from timidity to reluctant courage is fun to watch, and when his character starts to make selfish choices, we go into full Coen Brothers mode as he succumbs to his own personal greed, up to and including a moment where it seems like he will be forced to bury the cash beside the road like Jerry Lundegaard. Beau and Travis even superficially resemble other pairs of criminals that the Coens often conceive in their films, with Braker’s Beau in particular a welcome presence as his casual cruelty means the stakes are as high as possible, and the performance of base, blood simple (ha) meanness that Braker brings to the role is a highlight. The placement of the dominoes that create the narrative flow is excellent, with some really elegant foreshadowing and rhyming imagery. It’s hard to say more about this one without giving too much away (in fact, I may already have), but if you’re yearning for something in the vein of a less sprawling No Country in a tight ninety minutes, this is a perfect choice.
Kinds of Kindness is a dense text. A triptych of stories from director Yorgos Lanthimos that are only loosely connected by the appearance of a single minor character (with each of the major billed actors appearing as different characters in each segment), they are nonetheless in conversation with one another, as they are all about the way that kindness can be many things — sincere as well as selfish, sacrificial as well as superficial. The segments, titled “The Death of R.M.F.,” “R.M.F. is Flying,” and “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” each relay a fable in which a character is “kind,” with consequences.
In “The Death,” we first see a man with the initials “R.M.F.” (Yorgos Stefanakos) embroidered on his shirt pocket as he accepts an envelope of cash from a woman we later learn is named Vivian (Margaret Qualley), and watch as a man named Robert Fletcher (Jesse Plemmons) works up the nerve to run a red light and smash his Bronco into R.M.F.’s car, although neither man is seriously injured. The next morning, Robert tells his wife Sarah (Hong Chau) about the incident while she fawns over a piece of sports memorabilia—a broken John McEnroe racquet—that was received that morning from Robert’s employer, Raymond (Willem Dafoe), calling it Raymond’s best gift yet. Once he arrives at the office, we get a better picture of Robert and Raymond’s relationship; Robert is more of a pet or a toy for Raymond than an employee. Every aspect of Robert’s life is dictated by the older man: what clothes he wears, what drinks he orders at the bar, what he eats for every meal, when he sleeps and wakes and has sex with his wife. He even engineered Sarah and Robert’s marriage by having Robert fake an injury at a bar in order to gain her sympathy. But Robert can’t bring himself to kill a stranger in a car “accident,” which leads Raymond to ice him out, setting off a chain of events in which Sarah leaves him and a chance encounter—or is it?—with a woman named Rita Fanning (Emma Stone) make him more and more desperate to get back into Raymond’s good graces.
In “Flying,” Denham Springs police officer Daniel (Plemmons) is dealing with the recent disappearance of his wife, Liz (Emma Stone), along with some other researchers on a ship that went missing, presumably in the gulf. While his partner Neil (Mamoudou Athie) and Neil’s wife Martha (Qualley) attempt to assuage his fears while also remaining realistic about the chances that Liz will be found, Daniel’s erratic behavior, which includes intimately and romantically brushing the hair of a suspect behind their ear, causes concern within the DSPD. When Liz and another survivor are found (flown back in a rescue copter piloted by R.M.F., giving the segment its title), she comes back … different. It was well established that Liz’s hatred of chocolate meant that it was banned from the house, but this newly returned woman devours chocolate cake with gusto. She smokes a cigarette for the first time, feels unconfident in her favorite outfit, and none of her shoes fit her anymore. Daniel becomes more and more suspicious that she is an impostor, but his attempts to explain to others that he thinks his wife is no longer his wife because she doesn’t remember his favorite song make him seem even more unstable than when she was missing. Liz, if this is Liz, seems to live only to please him, and after shooting a man in the hand during a routine traffic stop, he’s placed on suspension, where the two have nothing but time together, and he tests the limits of her emotional and physical generosity.
In “Sandwich,” Andrew (Plemmons) and Emily (Stone) are two members of a cult, run by Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Chau), that is seeking a woman with the power to heal and even reanimate the dead. Their search is specific; the woman will be about five foot nine, weigh about 130 pounds, and will be the survivor of a pair of twins. Their search brings them close enough to her old home that Emily sneaks away one morning to the house where her husband and daughter are still living and leaves a gift for her, which Andrew notices but promises to keep a secret, although she admits nothing. After a trip back to the commune compound, in which we get to see the cult’s grounds, practices, and yacht (specially designed for the awaited messiah), Andrew and Emily are sent on another expedition to the same town, where a woman named Rebecca approaches them and tells them that her twin sister Ruth (both Qualley) is the woman that they are looking for, but Andrew brushes her off. When another visit to her old house results in Emily being caught by her husband and daughter, he convinces her to have a drink with him, surreptitiously drugging and then sexually assaulting her. When she awakes the next morning, Omi and Aka are waiting for her outside, and for her “contamination” is exiled from the cult, although she hopes that finding Ruth will be her ticket back in.
The first segment is a lot of fun, and there’s a lot of playfulness going on to toy with the audience and their expectations. Although the man with the embroidered initials “R.M.F.” is the first person that we see, this could be a misdirect, as we never learn Raymond’s last name, nor the middle names of Robert Fletcher or Rita Fanning, so any one of them could turn out to be the character who has a date with destiny and death. It also introduces several of the film’s recurring motifs. When a desperate Robert is trying to sell all of the sports memorabilia that he has accumulated as a result of Raymond’s gifts over the years, he’s unable to get a fair deal for it. Even as he repeats what must be Raymond’s words (notably calling out that yellow represented youthfulness on the helmet of a driver who died tragically while wearing it, just before he exchanges his aubergine turtleneck for a mustard one and sets out to try and win back Raymond’s affection), it’s clear that every bit of the older man’s largesse, his “kindness,” was all about control, and that even the gifts thereof are ultimately cheaper than they seem.
That discussion of color symbolism cuts directly to an extreme close up of the yolk of an egg being fried, although Robert finds himself unable to eat it and tosses it out. That ties into a larger motif of appetite that runs throughout all three films. In “Flying,” the first thing that Daniel offers to do for the returned Liz is make her an omelet, which she declines, and the cult in “Sandwich” is particularly averse to eating fish, while Aka and (presumably) Omi’s son’s food intake is monitored, and he’s given conflicting directions from each of his parents. It’s most present in “Flying,” however. Throughout all of the film’s constituent segments, flashbacks and dreams are represented in black-and-white footage, and “Flying” features one such sequence in which Liz is seen resorting to cannibalism while deserted and awaiting rescue. It’s unclear if this is a real memory, a delusion, or even a projection of Daniel’s fears, especially since he seems to be the one most consumed with a desire for flesh; the beef he serves to Neil and Martha wouldn’t even be considered “rare” by most standards, he impulsively licks the wound of the man he shoots on Tulane Ave, and when he starts to test what lengths this “Liz” will go to in order to ingratiate herself to him, he asks her to excise and cook first her thumb and then her liver for him, as a test of her “kindness.”
There’s also an interesting throughline about foot injuries, which I interpret to mean something along the lines of “kindness can shoot you in the foot,” but which also seems to have an undercurrent of dishonesty. In “Death,” Robert first attempts to recreate his meet cute with Sarah by pretending to injure his hand again, but is unsuccessful. Instead, he deliberately injures his foot in the bar bathroom by kicking the wall and breaking a couple of bones, which leads him to meeting Rita, who shows him sympathy and, well, kindness (although an air of mystery is retained regarding how altruistic this is and if it’s yet another one of Raymond’s manipulations). In “Flying,” it’s mentioned that the only other survivor from Liz’s ship has a leg infection that will likely result in the need for amputation, and it happens twice in “Sandwich,” as Emily’s husband lures her back to their old house to drug and assault her by spinning a lie about their daughter having hurt her ankle at ballet class and Emily herself injures a dog’s leg in order to have an excuse to meet with the veterinarian she believes is the savior. Notably, all of these injuries are used manipulatively; whether it’s a self-inflicted wound to get attention, a lie about an injury to get an ex to come over, or a recitation of something bad that happened to someone, they are all used to elicit “kindness.”
Speaking of dogs, they’re present, in one form or another, in every segment. In “Flying,” Liz tells Daniel about a dream that she had when she was on the island (or which was about the island, it’s unclear to her and to us), where she was in a world where people were pets and dogs were the dominant species, and we get to see that world in the credits sequence of that segment. There is the aforementioned dog in “Sandwich,” whom Emily finds on the street and uses as a ticket to see Ruth. There are no animals in “Death,” however, unless one considers that Robert is Raymond’s dog. He fetches, he rolls over, he begs, and he performs for Raymond. Robert is his pet, his doll, he dresses him up and he picks out his food and he controls Robert’s entire environment. At one point, he directs him to go to a specific bar and order a non-alcoholic drink; Robert attempts to order bourbon, but the bartender asks him if he’s sure, and when he orders a Virgin Mary, it’s handed to him in seconds, having been waiting for him, just as a demonstration of just how far and wide the net of power Raymond controls is. It’s even telling that one of the scenes from Liz’s dreamworld of dogs-as-humans involves a dog driving an SUV who swerves to avoid a piece of human roadkill, which ties back thematically to the end of “Death,” which I won’t spoil. There’s a narrative present in all of them about the power that people have over animals; we all love our pets and we all are kind to them, but that kindness doesn’t change the fact that power flows only one way in that relationship, and that this may be true of all relationships.
Before closing out, I want to talk about one particular scene in “Death,” wherein Robert confronts Raymond at his home to tell him that he can’t go through with his vehicular manslaughter plan. Initially, he has Vivian show Robert in, but the “scene” doesn’t feel right, so he has him do it again after sitting down in a chair, then has him take it from the top again and enter to deliver his news standing. When watching a film like this, in which a person takes on the role of “director” in their personal life, one can’t help but assume that the film’s director is also telling us something about themselves, or about the nature of control. I’m not sure that I’ve cracked what that is yet, or what Lanthimos is saying here. I have a feeling that this is one of those texts that only really reveals itself on multiple viewings, and with time. Both of my viewing companions for this screening were much more mixed in their opinions, but I’m feeling positive, and looking forward to what the next screening will reveal.
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
If you were on any message board, TV Tropes page, or fan forum that was every even loosely connected to DC Comics during a certain period of time, then you know all about Terra, the earthbending girl whose inevitable betrayal of the Teen Titans caused the first faneurysm (™ me) in an uncountable number of fragile young minds and whose specific betrayal of poor little Beast Boy broke more hearts than the siege of Troy. The hair-pulling, the weeping, the gnashing of teeth – it was all the rage at exactly the same moment that every nerd boy was creaming himself over Summer Glau and the rosy fingers of the dawning of SuperWhoLock were just taking hold of the horizon. It’s so well known that, when Young Justice used the character in its fourth season, they managed to pull out a few unexpected surprised by subverting the same old story. See, back in the 80s, there was a relaunch of an older comic, now rechristened The New Teen Titans, and the most well-remembered storyline from that series’s entire run was entitled “The Judas Contract,” in which fan favorite character Terra turned out to be a plant within the organization, operating under the guidance of Slade “Deathstroke” Wilson. Terra appeared in an unvoiced cameo in the post-credits sequence of Justice League vs. Teen Titans, setting up this film’s narrative.
After a flashback sequence that shows us the meet cute between Dick Grayson (Sean Maher), then still the original Robin, and alien refugee Starfire (Kari Wahlgren), we return to the present, where it has been almost a year since Tara “Terra” Markov (Pumpkin star Christina Ricci, who may not be the biggest “get” these movies have managed to bring on board, but who is perhaps the most exciting to me) joined the team. The team is currently working to bring down an organization known as Hive, which is fronted by a cult leader called Brother Blood (Gregg Henry) and his right-hand woman, Mother Mayhem (Meg Foster!). In between missions, we get insight into their various slices of life. Jaime “Blue Beetle” Reyes (Jake T. Austin) starts volunteering at the local shelter, as it helps him feel connected to the family that he is currently separate from because the alien machine on his back mistrusts Jaime’s father. Raven (Taissa Farmiga) is continuing to work on controlling her powers, and she now has a gem in her forehead in which her demonic father is imprisoned. Dick and Starfire are preparing to move in together, while Garfield “Beast Boy” Logan (Brandon Soo Hoo) is nursing an obvious crush on Terra. All of the team is invested in getting her to open up, but she remains reserved and standoffish. Life gets more complicated when the assumed-dead Slade “Deathstroke” Wilson (Miguel Ferrera, replacing Thomas Gibson) re-emerges working with Brother Blood in pursuit of his vengeance against Damian (Stuart Allan).
As much as I liked JLvTT (with some reservations, especially that horrible emo song), this one is still an improvement on that installment. Unlike the unrepentant psychopath that she is in most versions, this Terra is legitimately conflicted. I’ve always really liked when an ongoing piece of long from media has a “breather” installment in which we get to see a more relaxed side of our characters and learn more about them and what they’re like in their down time. I enjoy a lot of the moments between Starfire and Dick, since we’ve mostly seen him as a tangential character to the various and sundry Batman-focused entries on this list, and Starfire’s playful energy breathes life into the film, especially the teases about their sex life; I appreciate that if there’s one thing we know about these two, it’s that they are Gomez-and-Morticia horny for one another, and you love to see it. There are a few other things that are risque here, including what a horn dog Garfield is for Terra. My personal favorite, though, comes in a scene in which Jaime gets a little too worked up about his fellow volunteer, Traci, and has to hop into the walk-in freezer to try and get his “scarab” to understand that his quickening pulse doesn’t mean he’s in danger. It’s played like an erection joke, including the position that he’s in, hiding his gun arm, when Traci finds him:
It’s notable that this movie is the most successful comedy in this series so far. There have been little touches of humor throughout, which has been hit or miss. Steve Trevor’s “comical” outdated sexism in Wonder Woman didn’t work for me, but the banter in JL: War was fun, and it still mostly worked in JL: Throne of Atlantis. I don’t normally laugh aloud when I’m watching most comedies at home by myself, but this one elicited multiple chuckles from me. I probably shouldn’t have found it so funny, but there’s a scene where Terra asks Garfield if he knows how she became an orphan, and he responds with “Umm … your parents died?” that made me laugh aloud. Later still, when Deathstroke has set various traps for the Titans, Dick escapes and is searching for the others and finds the trap set for Garfield—a big red button labeled “Do Not Press” that, when pressed, shoots tranquilizer darts—his exasperated muttering of “Come on, Gar,” is legitimately hilarious. Screenwriter E.J. Altbacker has mostly done TV series writing, but he has done two previous animated features: previous installment Justice League Dark and, um, Scooby-Doo! & WWE: Curse of the Speed Demon, which I suppose explains his comedy credentials. That kind of crossover energy may also explain why Kevin Smith appears as himself in this one, which was one of the few off-notes in play here, and I say that as someone who doesn’t particularly dislike him like many other critics. Still, once again, even though we’re past the halfway point, I’m still occasionally finding something new to praise in these movies, and even though there have been a few that felt like such a chore to get through that I started to doubt my commitment to Sparkle Motion this project, this renews my vigor.
Which is not to say that this movie is all fun and games. Brother Blood isn’t a character who was created just for this film, obviously, but if you did play Mad Libs to come up with a goofy name for an edgelord, “Brother Blood” has a pretty high likelihood of ending up on the list. His brand of violence is a little ho-hum; it may be more that my brain is broken, but when we find him bathing in a pool of blood, I wasn’t impressed, even when we panned up to see the drained body of a reporter who had tried holding him accountable in an earlier interview. It could be that he’s simply not that scary next to Mayhem, since Foster’s trademark rasp imbues all of her lines with a coldness so lacking in compassion that it’s genuinely unsettling. Even more skin-crawling, however, is a scene that occurs after Terra’s true colors have been revealed and she’s back with Deathstroke, entering his command center with cheeks rouged to hell and back and wearing a little pink shift with one spaghetti strap seductively pulled off of the shoulder. We’re not given an exact age for her, but I’d say she’s probably fifteen but looks younger, and her Alicia-Silverstone-in-The–Crush act toward the much older Deathstroke is effectively gross. It’s clear that he’s not into it, but that doesn’t stop him from continuing to promise her that the two of them can be together on some elusive someday, encouraging her ongoing affections but rebuffing her when she acts on them, so that he can continue to manipulate her and use her powers for his own ends. It’s surprisingly dark for a series of movies that have normally equated more adult with more violent, and gives this film a bit more depth than the flicks it shares shelf space with.
I mentioned Young Justice above, and there was a tactic that the animators of that series turned to in seasons three and four to help cut some corners on the budget. Starting in the third season, the episode’s credits would play over a mostly still image (with the occasional shooting star in the night sky, or the repeated motion of an animal’s breathing in their sleep) while characters had conversations with each other. I was a big fan of this, actually, as it broadened the world a bit, followed up on lingering plot threads and in some cases provided closure on characters who were no longer a part of the main storylines. This started to become more obvious in the show proper during the fourth season, when montages of still images became a part of the storytelling, and although it was noticeable, I wouldn’t call it detrimental. That technique is also becoming somewhat more apparent in these films. In the last Teen Titans movie, it was used during the montage of the characters getting to know each other at the carnival (with that aforementioned terrible emo song), and it happens here, too, when the others throw Terra a surprise party to commemorate the anniversary of her joining the team, among other scenes. In Young Justice, I was happy to accept this as part of an ongoing effort to keep costs under control, and whatever got me more Young Justice was just fine with me. Here, it feels a little cheaper. Conversely, I’ve often cited in these reviews that I wish that there was a little more dynamic movement in the action sequences, and this one delivered on that; in particular, there’s a scene in which Dick’s shoulder is dislodged, and he has to fight Deathstroke with one arm hanging limply, and it’s exceptionally animated. You win some, you lose some. And hey, at least for the first time since Superman: Unbound, we made it through a whole movie without Batman in it.
I read online that this one is considered the point where the DCAMU (sigh) really matured and came into its own. I’d grant that, although I think that JLvTT and JL Dark would also be contenders for that title. It feels like a real movie, and its tragic ending evokes the conclusion of my cherished Under the Red Hood, which is always a plus in my book. I hope that’s true, since these have mostly been pretty average so far, and I hope we can only go up from here.
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made Brandon & Boomer watch Baby Cakes (1989).
Britnee: Have you ever believed that you imagined a movie? For years, I had faded images in my mind of a young Ricki Lake eating a bag of Sugar Babies. I had separate memories of a grocery store wedding that felt like something I visualized from a retelling of a family event. I even wrote those images down in various notebooks in my preteen bedroom, just so I wouldn’t forget. When I finally got frequent access to the internet, I plugged in these descriptions on Ask Jeeves, and viola, the answer to these burning mysteries was the 1989 made-for-TV movie Baby Cakes. More recently, I found out it’s a remake of a 1985 German film called Sugarbaby, which I have yet to see but am very interested in watching. Perhaps it’s the reason behind Ricki Lake’s candy of choice?
Grace (Lake) is an overweight mortician living in Queens. When she’s not working, she’s spending time with her incredibly pessimistic friend, Keri, or indulging in snacks while watching horror movies alone in her apartment. She’s very relatable. Her mother has passed, and her father marries a woman who is cold towards Grace, and the couple make frequent disparaging comments about her weight. While Grace and Keri are hanging out at an ice-skating rink, Grace spots “the most beautiful man she’s ever seen” skating his butt off on the ice. He ends up being a subway train conductor, and Grace, who takes the subway every day, starts to stalk him. It’s more like the type of stalking teens do to their crushes than Baby Reindeer stalking, so it’s more cute than creepy.
It turns out that Grace’s crush, Rob (Craig Sheffer), is in an unhappy relationship, and she shoots her shot. He politely brushes her off at first, but he has a couple of drinks and shows up to her apartment for a romantic dinner gone bad. Their relationship starts off with a pity date where she brings him to her parents’ home to show him off (along with her own sassy makeover), ultimately to prove to them that she can have a boyfriend who loves her for who she is. But after she and Rob start to spend time together, their relationship blossoms into genuine romance.
Baby Cakes is a feel-good romcom with a John Waters touch. What I admire about this film is that that it avoids the overweight main actress cliche by not having a segment where Grace tries to lose weight to win over a man. If anything, she leans into her love for food to seduce him. Brandon, other than Grace’s non-changing relationship with food, what are some other unique touches to the film that caught your attention?
Brandon: Like all romcoms, Baby Cakes is entirely defined by its unique touches. We know exactly what’s going to happen to our couple-to-be as soon as Grace forces a meet-cute through some light, adorable stalking, so the joys of the film are entirely to be found in the quirks of its details. That manufactured meet-cute being staged at a Sugar Babies vending machine was a memorable enough quirk to linger in Britnee’s mind for decades, as was the grocery-store wedding, which is so oddly adorable that it’s incredible the idea hasn’t been stolen by a film with a bigger budget. As with all romcoms, our leads both have quirky professions (corpse beautician & subway train conductor) and quirky hobbies (stalking & figure skating) unlikely to be shared by the audience. Then there’s the quirky prop of the awkward family portrait Grace had commissioned of her younger, thinner self and her younger, happier father, which the movie mines for genuine pathos while never losing sight of the fact that it looks ridiculous. Baby Cakes is all quirks all the time, as required by its choice of genre.
Personally, my favorite quirks were the dour personality ticks of Grace’s sidekick, Keri, who absolutely kills her job as the movie’s wet blanket. Mostly, I was just excited to see actor Nada Despotovich in an extended, feature-length role, since her biggest impact on the cinematic artform was a single scene as Chrissy in Moonstruck. It was like getting to hang out with my favorite cryptid for 90 minutes after years of only catching blurry glimpses of her in roles like “Receptionist” (The Boyfriend School), “Bartender” (Castle Rock), and “Mom” (Challengers). Despotovich’s pouting over Nic Cage’s romantic indifference (and her pouty refusal to “get the big knife”) in Moonstruck is Hall of Fame-level romcom quirk, so it’s delightful to watch her pout at length in Baby Cakes as a hypochondriac doomsayer who hates everyone & everything except her equally tragic bestie. There’s some genuine friendship drama shared between the women, too, as Keri predictably becomes frustrated when Grace finds confidence & happiness, since it ruins their miserabilist dynamic.
The audience knows to cheer on Grace’s newfound confidence, though, even if Keri has a point that she’s setting herself up for heartbreak by falling for a man who’s already engaged. The victory of Baby Cakes is more than Grace achieving self-actualization without losing weight; it’s that she consciously stops trying to lose weight and instead learns to love her body as it is. That confidence radiates off of her, making her more attractive to people who usually look right past her. One of the best sequences is a montage of Grace’s neighbors complimenting her “punk” makeover as she runs her daily errands, modeling Desperately Seeking Susan-era Madonna outfits and flipping around a ponytail. The inward search for that confidence being sparked by outside validation from a man who’s initially embarrassed to be seen with her in public is a complicated, queasy issue, but that’s exactly what drags this story out of romcom quirks and into the realm of real-life human behavior. I understand why the early, cutesy stalking sequence invites Baby Reindeer jokes from the overly cynical Letterboxd commentariat, but the modern work this most reminded me of was the Aidy Bryant sitcom Shrill, which still felt progressive for touching on these same body positivity issues decades later (if not only because there are so few other representations in mainstream media that take the inner lives of women seriously if they’re not exceptionally thin).
To me, Grace’s short-lived stint as Rob’s stalker didn’t feel entirely out of line with typical romcom behavior. Her outlandish personal-boundary violations while luring him to her apartment are just as integral to romcoms’ entertainment value as the outlandish personality quirks of the film’s various side characters, to the point where they’d be parodied by Julia Roberts’s “pond scum” protagonist in My Best Friend’s Wedding less than a decade later. The question of a romcom’s success mostly relies on whether an audience can look past the unethical behavior & eccentric personalities and still feel genuine emotion when the couple-to-be finally, inevitably gets together. By that metric, Boomer, was the drama of Baby Cakes successful for you? Did you feel anything for Grace & Rob beyond amusement?
Boomer: I found this dynamic pretty effective, honestly. I don’t know how widespread knowledge about this issue is in the mainstream, but the gay community is a pretty image-focused, fatphobic, and body-fascistic group – especially the most visible community members, who are usually white, cis men. There are historical reasons for this. In the 70s, the biggest sex symbols of the era were slender rock stars with lean bodies and who were playful with gender norms: your Jaggers, your Mercurys, your Bowies, etc. When the AIDS Crisis hit its peak, those things that had defined sexiness in the previous decade were stigmatized by society at large, as the public associated that leanness with illness and queerness with disease. This gave rise, in part, to the action star of the 80s: a he-man with huge biceps. There was large-scale adoption of your Stallones and your Schwarzeneggers as the new blueprint of sexiness affected both straight and queer communities, as gay men all over attempted to emphasize their health through bodybuilding (and steroid use, which—as a needle drug—made the situation worse). Things have swung back the other way in the years since (famously, 2018 was crowned by one writer as the dawning of the age of the twink), and back again at an even faster rate. Widespread use of social media platforms that keep its audience engaged by feeling bad about themselves, the rise of self-marketing on said social media as one of the few (extremely unlikely) bids for class mobility, the propaganda about health and virility that always accompany fascist trends, and pandemic-era social isolation combining into a horrible Voltron of body dysmorphia unlike anything history has ever seen.
I spent a long time at war with my body because of the culture I came of age in, and there’s an existential loneliness that I recognize in Grace from certain points in my life (not that I’m any less single now, but I’m managing). Life can be miserable when there’s something about your physical appearance that you can’t change, that you exhaust yourself trying to change (Grace mentions a half dozen diets that produced no results), and when people not only can’t see past that, but also see your inability to change it as a moral failure of willpower. For Grace, this is further compounded by her father’s negligent absenteeism in her life, and he and her stepmother both pile on her about how her life would improve if she just lost some weight. I felt for Grace, and so her desire to go outside the bounds of acceptable social behavior was understandable, albeit only condonable in a fictional, heightened romcom world. Grand romantic plans of this nature rarely work out in the real world, but it’s fun to watch it play out in a fairy tale fantasy where the girl with the wicked(ish) stepmother finds love with the prince when she wins his heart while breaking him free of a loveless engagement. And then they kiss in a subway!
About twenty years later, this same kind of thing would be tackled again, but less deftly. TV movies of the 90s and the turn of the century were more focused on “in” eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, and were either fictionalized “ripped from the headlines” scripts or biopics like Dying to be Thin (1996). Starting around 2005, however, there were a lot more films focused on what it was like to be stigmatized as a fat person. To Be Fat Like Me, a 2007 Lifetime original starring Kaley Cuoco who puts on a fat suit to prove to her heavier family members that their experiences of bullying are overstated, only to realize that, nope, people do treat her differently (none of this is made up). A year later, the crown jewel (to some, and crown turd to others), Queen Sized, about an overweight teen girl who becomes her suburban high school’s homecoming queen, also premiered on Lifetime; this one is worth mentioning since the main character was played by Nikki Blonsky, who portrayed Tracy Turnblad (a role originated by Ricki Lake) just a year prior in the 2007 Hairspray. Although films like these are aiming at the same “accept yourself” theme as Baby Cakes, they don’t feel as authentic. They feel manufactured to fulfill a quota or try to cheat some kind of grant out of a “stop bullying” campaign rather than an honest story about a girl whose looks don’t match the current zeitgeist but who is empowered to take the reins of her life by a few passionate weeks with a troubled (but not too troubled) stud. She stands up for herself to her family, she leaves behind her abusive boss and takes the first steps into finding work in the land of the living, and she gets the guy in the end. The big speeches in the Aughts TV movies about this kind of thing are too serious and self-important, while the offbeat surreality of Baby Cakes means that Grace’s monologues can be sweet without being saccharine, sincere but injected with bits of humor that make her feel more like a fully realized person and less like a sock puppet for a workshopped-to-death speech in a basic cable melodrama.
Since we’ve mentioned most of the supporting characters who contributed to the overall atmosphere of the film, I think it would be a missed opportunity not to bring up Grace’s boss at the funeral parlor, who was both hilariously awful and awfully hilarious. He’s clearly a terrible employer, as he attempts to tell Grace she can’t take four weeks off (for her long-term plan to stalk Rob day and night, but he doesn’t know this) because she was late for a cumulative thirteen minutes that month. This tips into funny when he goes on that he needs her – not only because of Keri’s terrible workmanship (we later learn that she tried to fluff up a corpse’s chest with tissue paper, so he’s not incorrect on this point), but also because it’s the holidays, which means it’s their busy season. Later on, he can’t help but play salesman in the middle of a funeral, giving a eulogy in which he mentions the deceased’s desire to one day own a white Cadillac, and that he was “driving one today!”, smacking the casket by his side and declaring it the best that money can buy like he was peddling a 1988 Taurus. Truly wonderful stuff.
Lagniappe
Britnee: Currently, Ricki Lake is getting a lot of media attention for her recent weight loss. If you Google her, you’ll be bombarded with articles about her losing 35 pounds. I’m glad that she’s thriving, but I hate that this latest Ricki Lake revival is focused, yet again, on her body. How long until the general public rediscovers Baby Cakes? Will they reboot a second time to modernize it? My anxiety about this sacred film being tainted with a terrible remake is very real. I just know they’re going to put the new Grace on Ozempic and, God forbid, bring in Ricki Lake for a cameo where she slaps the Sugar Babies out of Grace’s hands.
Brandon: I, of course, had to watch the original 1985 German film Sugarbaby for completion’s sake, and it turns out this made-for-American-TV remake is a shockingly faithful adaptation. A lot of the exact scenes and plot details of Baby Cakes are copied directly from its source text, and everything it adds to flesh out the story is pure romcom quirk: the figure-skating hobby, the goofy painting, the supermarket wedding, the hypochondriac bestie, etc. Sugarbaby is a much sparser, sadder movie as a result, but it’s also incredibly stylish. Every scene is overloaded with enough color-gel crosslighting to make you wonder if it was directed by Dario Argento under a pseudonym, and it’s much more comfortable hanging out in silence with its downer protagonist instead of constantly voicing her internal anxieties in dialogue. It also doesn’t go out of its way to leave the audience feeling clean & upbeat. In Sugarbaby, the subway conductor is married, not engaged, and his affair with the mortician doesn’t necessarily leave either lover in better shape, making for a much more emotionally & morally complicated narrative. It’s almost objectively true that Sugarbaby is smarter, cooler, and prettier than Baby Cakes by every cinematic metric, and yet because it doesn’t have the bubbly star power of a Hairspray-era Ricki Lake (or that incredible elevator-music theme song) it ends up feeling like the inferior film anyway.
Boomer: Sometimes, looking back over the width and breadth of topics that we’ve covered, in print and audio, in brief and perhaps too extensively, I’m fascinated to see how much we’ve grown at Swampflix over a decade, but I also love how each of us has a handful of movies that “feel” like they were made for just one amongst us. I was five minutes into this one and I thought, “This is such a Britnee movie,” and I mean that in the most affectionate way possible. Weirdly, another example I thought of as a definitive Britnee movie was Mrs. Winterbourne, so I was surprised when I went back to that one to realize that it was actually nominated by a different contributor. This one shares that only-in-the-80s romcom energy where our lead finds love through fraud, stalking, and seduction with The Boyfriend School, though, which was a Britnee selection. Salud, colleague; you are a woman of distinct and delightful taste.
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
After a semi-successful attempt at horror with Justice League vs. Teen Titans, we return to the ongoing animated cinematic universe with another horror-adjacent picture as well as a revisitation of supernatural themes. Following an opening sequence in which the big three—Wonder Woman, Superman, and Batman—each deal with acts of violence instigated by normal civilians seeing other people as monstrous demons, we find DC’s resident occultist, we get our first glimpse of John Constantine (voiced by Matt Ryan, who played the character in live action on his own short-lived live action series that premiered in the 2014 TV season, and was later imported into the CW’s “Arrowverse” proper). He and Jason Blood (Ray Chase), a functionally immortal former medieval knight permanently bonded to a noble demon named Etrigan, are playing poker against some of Hell’s bigwigs. When Constantine wins big, it turns into a magic fight, in which Constantine and Blood/Etrigan emerge victorious. Elsewhere, Batman, who has faced off against magical villains multiple times, remains skeptical about the supernatural elements of his current cases, until he begins to receive messages telling him to seek out Constantine. To do so, he must first reunite with an old flame, the stage magician Zatanna (Camilla Luddington), who supplements her prestidigitation with real sorcery. She reveals that the messages he has been receiving are from Boston “Deadman” Brand (Nicholas Turturro), a former acrobat who was killed mid-act and who is now a roaming spirit with the ability to possess the living in order to fight crime. Once this “Justice League Dark” is assembled, they learn that their fight has something to do with the long presumed-dead villain Destiny, and that reality hangs in the balance.
Personal confession time: Zatanna is one of my favorite comic book characters. I’m revealing my age a little here, but back when I still had a Tumblr, my custom background was a repeating image of Zatanna’s face from Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers run, which was one of the first comics that I read and, although it’s not as fondly remembered now as it once was, it was formative for me. I wish that she was in her more traditional magician’s outfit in this instead of the goofy ass New 52 costume that they’ve stuck her in here (it may be purely to make the animation easier, but the fact that they’ve given her detached sleeves here instead of those fishnet gauntlets from the comic book improves this look a solid 10%), but at least we’ll always have Young Justice for that, at least until Max cycles it off to some internet backwater like they’ve done with so much other programming. I also really like Ryan’s take on Constantine, and he’s played the character across so many mediums now that I can’t help but feel like he’s stamped himself onto the character just as much as the late Kevin Conroy did with Batman. There’s something deliciously Kolchak-like about his portrayal; everywhere that Constantine goes, everybody knows him, and they all hate his guts. It’s fun.
As far as the horror elements go, this one is more understated than JLvTT. How scary it is depends on how weirded out you are by the demons that we meet. It’s frontloaded a little bit in that regard, as when we see the points of view of the characters who are enspelled to see demons in the form of those around them, the monsters they are seeing are truly repulsive and nauseating. The ultimate villain of the piece isn’t as imposing or uncannily inhuman as Trigon was, and while the magical fight at the end is cool, it doesn’t have that opening-scene-of-Wishmaster viscerality that made JLvTT stand out. That doesn’t mean it isn’t impressive or interesting, however. In fact, as this one gets to do a big magic battle that doesn’t come down to a big punch-’em-up at the end. Those vary in quality, but I can say that having watched so many of these in quick succession, a lot of them have become an undifferentiated battle sequence in my memories, if I retain any of those parts at all. This could have easily degenerated into a blue-beam-versus-red-beam fight as well, but some real detail went into differentiating the kinds of magic that each character wields and creating a sequence in which they work together and in conflict with each other at certain points. Like I said, it’s just not scary. But it is cool.
Speaking of cool, we have to talk about the omnipresence of Batman in this series. So far, this seventh film is the fourth “Justice League” title, while all three other films have been “Batman” movies, and of the ones that have “Justice League” in the title, he’s been one of the major players in those plots as well, with him being the only member of the League in this movie with more than five minutes of screentime. It’s clear that DC Animation knows that he’s the moneymaker, and they’re not afraid to milk his presence for all that it’s worth, or overutilize him the same way that Marvel did Wolverine in the nineties or Star Wars is still doing with Darth Vader. Those aren’t positive comparisons, but I don’t think that this is as detrimental to the product. I would probably feel differently if this wasn’t following right on the heels of The Killing Joke, so I’m willing to account for viewer saturation fatigue as I remind myself once again that these films were never meant to be watched so shortly after one another. I just felt it was worth noting that the Leaguer most closely associated with the “dark” Justice League of the comics was Wonder Woman, which makes sense as she is a demigoddess and therefore a magical being. It’s Batman here for purely marketing purposes, and although that hasn’t created a negative effect yet, any time that becomes the case, the art itself declines.
Narratively, this one felt a bit like a Clive Barker novel. There’s a sequence in the movie where Constantine and Zatanna have to go into an enspelled victim’s mind, and the villain takes advantage of them being out of play in the physical world to make a move on them there. In order to do so, it creates a monster out of shit by backing up all of the toilets in the hospital where the man lies comatose. I know for sure that there was a shitmonster in Everville, and although I wouldn’t bet money on it, I think that there’s one in Imajica as well (as with these movies, I read those two in too-close proximity to one another and there’s a few things that are blended together in my recollection). That lends this rendition of Constantine a little bit of Barker’s Harry D’Amour character, which mixes well with Constantine’s constant—no pun intended—escapes from the consequences of his actions at the expense of those around him. It really comes back to bite him in the ass in this one, and it’s well-conceived. This one also feels like it can be watched separately from the rest of this series, if you’re just a Constantine (or Zatanna) fan and can’t be arsed with consuming the others. It’s a little more cheaply made than some of the others, but the seams are still pretty intact.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic Golden Age of Porno drama Boogie Nights (1997).
00:00 Boomer rants
12:04 Winter Kills (1979) 18:39 Dazed and Confused (1993) 24:12 Mars Express (2024) 30:46 Class Action Park (2020) 36:28 The First Omen (2024) 44:54 Kalki 2898 AD (2024) 49:29 The Bikeriders (2024) 52:39 Pandora’s Mirror (1981)
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
When we were recently discussing Brandon’s viewing of Theodore Rex on the podcast, he talked about how it was comforting to know that there are movies that have been universally derided as bad which are, in fact, bad. Batman: The Killing Joke has the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score out of any of these movies; although there are nine films that didn’t get enough reviews to provide a score, that list of non-scored films includes some of the best, like All Star Superman and Crisis on Two Earths. Rotten Tomatoes is, as we always say, an imperfect criterion, but because it got a one-day theatrical release in order to generate buzz, it also has the highest number of reviews on that site with forty-one critics weighing in (the next highest, Batman: The Long Halloween, Part One, has nineteen reviews), so in this case, it bears out in the critical response. It’s true: this one is bad bad. I always assumed that it generated a negative response because it’s an adaptation of a truly top-tier Batman (and Joker) story, and that people simply didn’t like some of the changes that were made to it or were otherwise disappointed. I had also heard rumblings about the “character assassination” of Barbara Gordon/Batgirl, which at the time seemed like typical Comic Book Guy grumblings, but no, that part is true as well. If anything, all the backlash against it that I remember seeing at the time was insufficient to express just what a fucking disaster this is.
The film starts with voiceover from Batgirl (Tara Strong), as she opens with a fourth-wall wink about how we the viewers probably didn’t expect this story to begin this way. The first half, which is all new material, is mostly about her. She watches from afar as her father, the venerable Commissioner Gordon (Ray Wise), meets with her Batmentor (Kevin Conroy, our beloved); she becomes the obsessive fixation of the unlikely named Paris Franz (Maury Sterling), an upstart crime family scion who aims to decapitate and replace the organization’s leadership; she even gets a catty gay best friend with whom she works at the library and who provides a sounding board for her thinly disguised musings about her crush on Batman. Yep, that’s right. Barbara has the hots for Bruce in this one, and that relationship culminates. See, he gets on her about taking too many risks in her pursuit of Franz, and the narrative goes out of its way to make him correct, as she consistently gets in over her head and has to be rescued by Batman. Every scene in which she strikes out on her own, he has to bail her out, so yeah, you could say that one of the most beloved and competent characters in the canon does undergo character assassination, for sure. This eventually leads up to the two of them having an argument before she pins the older man down, and they have sex.
I’ve seen this scene described as being “played for fanservice” in certain parts of the internet, and I don’t think that’s the case at all. What happens on screen takes barely a few seconds; Barbara is on top of Bats, she straddles him fully clothed and takes off the top half of her costume to reveal her bra, and the camera does a (to me) comical pan up to a gargoyle statue on the rooftop with them that appears to be enjoying the show. I’ve also seen a lot of criticism about that tired canard about age gap issues, and I also personally do not see a problem with that here. Bruce could have done more to discourage her, but as she is the initiator and the most enthusiastic participant, even with absolutely no previous encouragement from Bruce, my judgment is that she’s completely in control and has full agency in the situation. She’s got a thing for an emotionally unavailable older man, she gets her rocks off, and afterward, she talks to her one-dimensional gay BFF about how good it was. The problem here is that, shortly after this, she shakes off the cowl and hood for good when she nearly beats Franz to death and retires, then disappears from the narrative until it’s time for her to play her role in the part of the movie that’s actually an adaptation of The Killing Joke from 1988.
In the second half of the film, Batman comes to the realization that one day, he and the Joker will reach a point where the only choice will be to kill the villain or be killed by him. In an effort to try and prevent this, he goes to see Joker in Arkham, only to realize that the man himself has escaped yet again and left a decoy in his place. Elsewhere, Joker obtains an amusement park and a new band of sideshow folks—conjoined ladies, wolf boy, bearded lady, etc.—to act as his goons du jour. Interspersed in his new plans are flashbacks to before he became the Clown Prince of Crime. He was a comedian who couldn’t support his family, so he took a job with a local crime syndicate that was supposed to be for only one night; on the day of the heist, he learns his wife and unborn child were killed, but he’s strong-armed into moving forward with the crime anyway; when the robbery he’s involved in goes south, Batman arrives and he is frightened into falling over the edge into a vat of chemicals, which turns him into the Joker we know. Once everything is all arranged, he kidnaps Jim Gordon from his home and, in the process, shoots Barbara in her torso, the bullet ripping through her body and rendering her paraplegic. He also does something … untoward with her. Trigger warning for assault; skip to the next paragraph if that’s not something you can handle. You see, in the comic, I never got the impression that Joker raped Barbara. He definitely sexually assaulted her, as he stripped her and took pictures of her nude, gunshot body so that he could further torture Gordon with these images (the image of him holding his camera is the most iconic frame from the comic), but this film takes it further. When Batman is informed of the state that Barbara was in when she was found, much is left unsaid, and it’s implied that the Joker took advantage of her, beyond photography. The manhunt for Joker leads to a group of sex workers who tell the investigator with whom they are talking that the villain normally comes straight to them first as soon as he escapes, but that they haven’t heard from him and assume that this means he was able to get his kicks elsewhere. And that’s part of what makes this movie not just bad, but gross. We get two additions to the narrative here about Barbara’s sexuality: one a desired, consensual encounter with Batman, and the other a non-consensual assault by the Joker, with the former being added to the narrative to raise the stakes of the latter, not for Barbara’s sake, but for Bruce’s. See, now it’s even worse because Joker took that from him, too.
The rest of the story plays out along the canonical narrative beats of the comic on which the film is based. Batman goes to the amusement park lair, he and Joker have a little cat and mouse game where they talk about their relationship and how it appears that it can only end one way, and Batman tries to get through to his insane archnemesis that things could be different and offers him another path. Jim Gordon survives Joker’s attempts to turn him into another Joker by breaking him psychologically. At the end, Joker is subdued, and he tells Batman a joke about two escaping asylum inmates that demonstrates the futility of one insane person trying to help the other, which forces even the dour Bats to laugh. Barbara awakens in the hospital and is on the road to recovery (if you’re curious, no, her friend never comes to see her and we never hear about him again after his last scene, because he’s just that superfluous), and we see her prepare to get to work fighting crime in a new way. Fin.
I hated this. The animation is lazy in ways that I didn’t think I’d see in one of these productions (there seem to be about a dozen different book spines that were drawn for the movie, and they are repeated endlessly in both Barbara’s home and in the library scenes, sometimes in huge groups). The narrative choices are abysmal and so grossly misogynistic that the decades-old source material, which was criticized as sexist in its day, feels more modern. In this line of work and especially as the torch-bearers of low-art-as-real-art that we of Swampflix have been slotted into by the appetite for trash that drew us together in the first place, we end up revisiting a lot of things that mainstream (and armchair) critics have designated as “bad movies.” It’s simply in our nature to find the fun and joy in these, to see what glisters in the crap, and our evaluation is positive. However, as with Brandon and Theodore Rex, sometimes a film comes along that reminds you that, yeah, movies can be bad, actually, and that not everything to which that appellation is applied is a secret gem waiting to be unearthed. Sometimes, garbage is just garbage.
One of the most beloved jokes among film people is the one about how everyone wishes that they could be like Terence Malick and take a twenty year vacation. This is a reference to the fact that Malick was so exhausted by the making of 1978’s Days of Heaven that he didn’t attempt to mount another film production until The Thin Red Line, which was released in 1998. The fact of the matter is that if this had been the last thing that Malick ever made, it would still be a masterpiece. With almost all of the film being shot during dawn and dusk, this is without a doubt one of the most beautiful movies of all time, an almost impossibly staggering work of art.
Bill (Richard Gere) is a manual laborer in a steel mill in Chicago in the mid 1910s. He has a temper, and when he knocks over a foreman during an argument and accidentally kills the man, he flees the city with his younger sister Linda (Linda Manz) and his lover, Abby (Brooke Adams). In order to avoid judgment and gossip for being an unwed couple, they pretend to all be siblings. They find themselves in the Texas panhandle, not far from Amarillo, and take on work as seasonal laborers at the farm of a wealthy but reclusive farmer (Sam Shepard). When Bill overhears that the farmer has been given a prognosis of only a few months, he convinces Abby to marry the man so that she can inherit his wealth when he dies and they can be set for life. Abby does so, reluctantly, but then finds herself actually falling for the farmer, while he in turn seems revitalized. Only the farmer’s trusted foreman (Robert Wilke) seems to think that anything’s amiss, but the farmer sends him off to another part of the huge ranch in a fit of pique. After a period of easy living, Abby and Bill get a little careless, and her husband starts to sense what’s happening. Before anything can really be done about it, Bill leaves the farm for a time, citing “business” elsewhere; he returns the following harvest at the same time as a new group of seasonal laborers, but a swarm of locusts isn’t far behind, and the attempts to burn them out only create more tribulation, with tragedy soon to follow.
Narratively, Days of Heaven is a little thin. Famously, Malick decided late in the process to cut a great deal of the dialogue and instead let a voiceover from young Linda carry most of the exposition, along with her insights. In turn, the voiceover was largely ad-libbed, which lends the whole thing an unfinished, extemporaneous quality. It’s the thing that I like least in this film, even though it was, legendarily, the only way that he could think of to make the film work, so who am I to judge? Further, I would say that there are parts of the film in which the narration is to the film’s benefit; this is most obvious in the early scenes, as it establishes the characters and their relationships to one another. There’s also a good bit of foreshadowing built in when she talks about her encounter with a traveling hellfire-and-brimstone minister, which neatly sets up the fire at the farm at the end in particular but also the general biblical influences that are found throughout, fitting for a film with “heaven” in the title. Like Abraham and Sarai/Sarah, a couple has to go into hiding and pretend to be siblings; like Jacob, Bill is kept from being with his beloved and forced to labor instead; like Moses, Bill survives a plague of locusts but never gets to enter the promised land because of the consequences of his temper. It’s relying on those associations to make the plot work, but that’s really not what’s important here.
What matters are the feelings of longing, and the way that the photography captures that transitional space between day and night (and vice versa). Everybody here is in a constant state of utter yearning, and the way that this is caught on film is lightning in a bottle. I also can understand why that made this one a nightmare to create, with less than an hour a day of the perfect light. That craftsmanship is apparent in every frame, however, and it’s definitely worth seeing if you have the chance. I was fortunate enough to catch this one at my local arthouse cinema, and I would say it’s the best way to go about it. If that’s not an option for you, then you’re in luck; although the original 2007 Criterion release has been out of print for a long time, there’s a Blu-Ray pressing that’s currently available.
I also don’t want to end this review without calling out Brooke Adams’s performance. I adore her as the mother to Ione Skye and Fairuza Balk in 1992’s Gas, Food, Lodging, and she’s also amazing as Sarah in Cronenberg’s Dead Zone adaptation. And who could forget her performance in the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers? In spite of all of those triumphs, this might be a career best performance for her, as she’s torn between the two men in her life. There’s a way that her face just breaks when she realizes that her world was never as solid as she thought it was when Bill’s temper gets the best of him for the last time, and it’s so subtle and so lovely. This is a slow one, but its reputation is as well-earned as Malick’s rest was.
For a moment, I considered not opening this review with a reference to Laurence Sterne’s novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, thinking to myself, “Surely, I’ve referenced it enough already.” Then I double checked and realized I’ve only brought it up twice previously (in my reviews for Beau is Afraid and The Love Butcher), so here we go! Tristram Shandy was published in multiple volumes, the first of which was released in 1759, not even two decades after the publication of the first novel of the English language, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, in 1740. Shandy has long been a fascinating point of study not just because it’s one of the first novels in our language, but because despite being one of the earliest examples, it already demonstrated many stylistic and literary characteristics that we associate with postmodern fiction. Novels went from a complete, well, novelty to something that could be deconstructed within an astonishingly short time, with Shandy featuring a stream of consciousness narrative, a playful interaction with the nature of the printed word on the page (including several pages left intentionally blank to demonstrate a story that the narrator does not know), and various other elements first-time readers are often shocked to find in something so old.
Fritz Lang’s most famous work, the pioneering silent science fiction film Metropolis, premiered in 1927; just four years later, his first sound picture M was screened for the first time. Within the short period between them, Lang had already developed some of the basic elements of what we would consider keystones of narrative filmmaking and used them in an effective way that’s the equal of any film that’s been produced in the intervening nine decades. In many ways, the introduction of “talkies” was like the building of a cinematic Tower of Babel (quick note here—I started writing this before seeing Metropolis and learning that the biblical Babel story is actually a big part of that text), necessitating a foundational re-evaluation of the language of the art down to its very core. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
M is the story of a Berlin in terror, as several children have been found murdered in a way that demonstrates they share the same killer. As the film opens, a woman scolds the kids in the courtyard of her building for singing a nursery rhyme about a killer of children as she sets the table for her daughter, who never appears, despite her mother’s increasingly plaintive shouts of the daughter’s name into an empty street. The girl, Elsie Beckmann, has already fallen beneath the dark shadow of Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre), who lures the child to accompany him by purchasing her sweets and a balloon from a blind street vendor. Her eventual fate is implied as we see her beloved ball bounce into a ditch, and the balloon she was given drifts in the wind, abandoned. This sets off a fury in the city, as angry parents demand that more be done to apprehend the child predator, and this creates a domino effect. First, Inspector Lohmann (Otto Wernicke) of the police begins to crack down on various underworld activity, including harassing the patrons of a seemingly legal drinking establishment. That leads, in turn, to a meeting between various capos—led by a man known only as “The Safecracker” (Gustaf Gründgens)—for different criminal elements around the city to convene so that they can start their own manhunt so that the investigation will end and they can get back to racketeering, prostitution, and the like.
While Lohmann’s men set out to find the murderer using then-novel forensic science like fingerprints, handwriting analysis, and behavioral studies, Safecracker’s boys set up an organized city-wide network of informants among the unhoused. Both end up finding Beckert at roughly the same time, as the killer’s habit of whistling “In the Hall of the Mountain King” during his compulsory episodes leads the blind balloon vendor from the beginning to identify Beckert to one of Safecracker’s men, and they tail him and even manage to tag him (with a white “M,” hence the title) before he realizes he’s being followed and ends up trapped in an office complex. The criminal underworld sets out searching the entire building where Beckert has gone to ground, while Lohmann’s men lay in wait at Beckert’s home, having discovered where he lived through methodical search and the discovery of red pencil shavings that matched the letters Beckert had written to the police. With Beckert now in their hands, Safecracker and company hold a kangaroo trial for the man, one in which he must plead his case for mercy, leading Lorre to give one of the greatest monologues in cinematic history.
One of the truly great inventions that Lang gives us here is the narrative montage. In a silent film, narrative has to be displayed entirely through image and action, with dialogue and the occasional expository interstitial card, while M takes advantage of the opportunity to deliver information through audible dialogue and visuals at the same time. There’s a point in the film where Inspector Lohmann explains the methodologies that he and his men are using to try and locate the murderer, and as he describes various departments and what they do, we’re able to “visit” those people and places without a break in his monologue and without having to create interstitial expository cards (the closest we come is to a sign that identifies the homicide department). It’s such a common part of contemporary film language that its use is invisible to us now but is a quantum leap in filmic storytelling that we shouldn’t take for granted. Germany’s first “talkie” was The Blue Angel starring Marlene Dietrich, appearing at the movie theater only a year before M, and yet Lang had already created something that’s as integral to the nature of film as we know it as the letter “e” is to our language. And this could have been catalyzed in just about any movie, but it just so happens to have happened in one of the true masterpieces.
That’s not the only thing that makes it feel so ahead of its time. So much of what we talk about when we talk about a film’s morals and ethics in the present is a discussion of the clarity of the value that the text espouses, but M is less concerned with blame than it is with prevention. That’s demonstrated in two ways: one that’s clearly intentional and is core to the reading of the film, and the other that’s a little more ambiguous and may have been unintentional. First, Lorre’s Beckert is one of the most compelling depictions of a compulsive evil on film. His utter fear at being trapped like a hunted animal pleading for mercy and compassion making him almost pitiable, in spite of the fear we know he inspires. At first appearing solely as a menacing figure, his terrified screaming about how he lives in a constant state of mental agony and that he can only quiet the voices when he commits these heinous acts, one can’t help but pity him, even while affirming that his afflictions don’t justify his crimes. Although there are several minutes of footage that are missing and the abruptness of the ending implies (at least to me) that there may be some frames missing from that final reel, the film that exists is the text that we have and so we must interpret from it. We never hear the verdict of Beckert’s trial; we cut away from the doors of a courtroom to find a few weeping mothers on the bench outside. “This won’t bring back our children,” is all that they have to say, and then “We, too, should keep a closer watch on our children.” Beckert is certainly to blame for his crimes, but he is not the only one responsible, and the only thing that we can exert influence over is ourselves and the company we keep, so that’s where our energy should go. Secondly and more subtly, it’s worth noting that although the police and organized crime figure out Beckert’s identity at roughly the same time, the police go about arresting Beckert by waiting for him in his home while Safecracker’s men catch Beckert when he already has his next victim in hand. Their methodology may not be “just,” but if this had been left entirely to the law, they would have only apprehended him after he had already slain another child, while community action prevented another death. The depiction of a kangaroo court makes it clear that we’re not supposed to see the summary execution of this guy as “justice,” and that the state’s justice should prevail (even if Beckert’s fate is ambiguous), but it’s still inarguable that one more little girl would have died if those same people hadn’t taken the law into their own hands in the first place. Prevention supersedes responsibility.
M has been so beloved for so long that it’s difficult to say anything new about it. It’s the kind of classic film urtext that has been dissected, contextualized, and decoded nearly to death in nine decades since its release. That also makes it the kind of urtext that has so much discourse that most people are intimidated by the sheer amount of scholarship surrounding it or think that it’ll be outside of their grasp to understand, or they think it falls into the category of impenetrable artsy-fartsy stuff that culture snobs are always going on about. None of that is true. This movie is extremely accessible, not to mention scary, beautiful, and bewitching. There’s a reason that it’s stood the test of time.
There’s something charming about the way that Blue Sunshine features several pans up to a full moon between snippets of action in the lead up to and following the title reveal. Every time you think “Surely I’ve seen the last of these goofy ass moon pan shots,” as we cut to a domestic scene in a kitchen, but then, nope, here comes another one. This film, like The Parallax View, was programmed for my local arthouse theater’s “The Paranoid Style in American Cinema” signature program, but unlike that film (or Lumet’s Network, which is coming up later in the month), this one treads into slightly campier territory. Weirdly, it seems to blend elements from movies that actually came after it, with the paranoid, on-the-run everyman at the center of events in which people lose control of themselves seeming to presage the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, while the way that past casual drug experimentation comes back to haunt people years after their college days reminded me quite a bit of Firestarter, the original novel version of which wouldn’t be published until 1980. Even the mall setting of the finale seemed to presciently “borrow” from Dawn of the Dead.
Blue Sunshine opens at a party, where a group of friends gather around one of their friends, Frannie, as he does a bit of a crooner act. As part of the bit, he pretends to kiss one of the ladies present, and in their playful tussle, his hair is revealed to be a wig when it comes off in her hands. He has a psychotic break and flees into the woods. While a few of the partygoers go into town to see if Frannie found his way there, Jerry Zipkin (Zalman King) remains behind to search the woods, sending his girlfriend Alicia (Deborah Winters) into town with the others so that she can get a calmative for her nausea. Searching the woods, Zipkin hears the other women who were left behind at the house scream, and rushes in to discover that Frannie has returned and murdered them, throwing their bodies into a fireplace. Frannie reappears and the two struggle, making their way to the road as Zipkin tries to flee, finally pushing the seemingly superhuman Frannie into the path of an oncoming truck. The truck’s occupants, thinking that Zipkin has murdered an innocent man, attempt to apprehend him and even manage to shoot him in the arm. Back at the location of the party, the police have put all the pieces together and come to the conclusion that Zipkin is a murderer.
I’m going to skip ahead a little to the conspiracy here, because the film takes its sweet time getting to it. Frannie is not alone in his condition; all over the city, there are people losing their hair completely and then flying into psychotic, murderous rages. As it turns out, this is all owing to a particular batch of LSD, the titular Blue Sunshine, that all of the affected people tried ten years previously when they were all at Stanford. Zipkin, on the run and trying to prove his innocence, is forced to put this together, and it’s in this that the film really tips its hand vis-a-vis how unbaked an idea this is. Unlike Beatty’s reporter character in The Parallax View, Zipkin doesn’t seem particularly well suited for investigation, and comes to some of his conclusions with all the logic of a quick wrap-up at the end of an episode of Adam West’s Batman. He’s bumbling and sweaty, and King is very, very earnest in the role. And unlike other movies in which an innocent bystander is targeted because they photographed (Blow Up, Cat o’ Nine Tails), recorded (Blow Out, The Conversation), overheard, or otherwise became aware of something that someone wants to cover up, our hero isn’t fleeing the conspiracy or the killer, but the police.
You’d think that this would put an interesting spin on it, but what it means is that the conspiracy proper happens so far outside of the context of Zipkin’s story that the fact that the man behind the coverup is an up-and-coming politician is completely ancillary to the narrative. It doesn’t contribute anything to the film, and instead seems to have been included solely to cash in on the production decade’s general antipathy toward governmental figures in the national psychological wake of Watergate. That questioning of authority seems to run counterintuitive to the film’s Reefer Madness-like propaganda about the dangers of taking LSD in college, and long-time fears from self-appointed moral guardians that dropping acid would have severe deleterious effects in the long term (in this case, turning people into homicidal maniacs with instantaneous alopecia). That tonal whiplash is present throughout this thing, which is the exact kind of camp that ends up turning a movie like this into a cult classic. For instance, one of the opening scenes we see involves a woman confiding in her neighbor that her husband has been behaving strangely lately and losing his hair, and in the course of the scene there are a few fun character moments that wouldn’t be out of place in a John Waters film, as she screams at her son to stop eating chocolate pudding while her other son parades around the room with a parrot on his shoulder that’s nearly half his size. The next time we’re in that same location, Zipkin is rummaging through the house after reading about the family’s slaying in the newspaper and connecting some of the details to what happened with Frannie, and the soundtrack is filled with the family’s dying screams as Zipkin stumbles upon child-sized body outlines on the floor, complete with bloodstains of horrific proportions; it’s like something out of the early scenes of Manhunter, and it’s truly gruesome stuff. But then the next scene is a goofy bit where Zipkin Bat-deduces that he can get some information out of Senator Ed Flemming (Mark Goddard), or a scene wherein Flemming’s ex-wife (Ann Cooper) suddenly snaps and starts to attack the children that she’s babysitting with a knife, but the kids clearly find the bald cap on the actress hilarious, so they’re laughing as they recite their “frightened child” dialogue.
Granted, I would say that there aren’t any scenes of shocking violence so much as shocking images of the aftermath of violence, like the murder scene noted above. For the most part, the scenes in which the acid-activated killers feature them going about their sprees with very little energy, falling somewhere between Romero’s zombies and Karloff’s Creature on the scale of vitality. I have to wonder if this was, in part, a utilitarian choice; bald prosthetic technology wasn’t exactly at its peak in the mid-seventies, and there are many shots in the film in which the plasticky material the bald caps are composed of visibly wrinkles in ways that flesh does not. Further, the killers’ eyes also all turn black when their sprees begin, and the contacts used for the effect might have made it difficult to navigate the soundstage. When the former Mrs. Fleming is brandishing a prop knife at the not-actually-scared children in her apartment, she’s certainly moving with a sluggishness that suggests she’s just repeating a (barely) choreographed motion, and the fact that her gaze is focused directly in front of her (as opposed to down at the children) seems to indicate she also couldn’t see for shit. The only maniac that’s truly scary is the first one, Frannie, since he manages to get in a couple of good jump scares and his attack on the three partying women is the most shocking since it’s the first act of violence that we see. The showdown at the end between Zipkin and Flemming’s security man Mulligan—whom we are repeatedly reminded is a former football player—is delightful to watch, but Mulligan is so lumbering and slow that there’s never any real sense of danger. Normally, the tension that we get in a paranoid thriller like this one is whether our protagonist can escape the clutches of the shadowy cabal and get the truth out to the people, but here, it’s just a matter of being able to speed walk and hide; and you don’t even have to be that good at it either. When Mulligan starts his rampage, Alicia manages to escape from him by closing herself up in a very flimsy-looking plexiglass DJ booth, and she’s completely safe, even as he impotently pounds his fists against it.
Chances are, if the title of this film sounds familiar to you, you’re either too into the movies (in which case, pull up a chair and join us) or you’re a fan of either The Cure or Siouxsie and the Banshees, as Robert Smith of the former and Steven Severin of the latter collaborated as a micro supergroup under the name The Glove, which released only one album that took its title from this film. That alone would probably qualify it as a cult classic for some, but what makes this one work is how campy it is in spite of its earnestness. Writer and director Jeff Lieberman (perhaps best known for Squirm) really thought he was cooking with this plot, but that didn’t stop him from allowing (or perhaps encouraging) some of Zalman King’s acting choices here. I’m not familiar enough with any of the actor’s other work to say whether or not he’s capable of playing “anxious” with his face, but he’s certainly capable of doing it with his body language, even if the ways that this is displayed are comical. Late in the film, Zipkin meets with a doctor friend (Robert Walden, who turns in the most magnetic performance here, with Winters a close second) in a park to acquire tranquilizers, as part of his scheme to apprehend one of the Blue Sunshine killers without killing them, so that he can have them tested for chromosomal abnormalities that would prove his innocence. They convene discreetly in a public park, and the doctor has to tell Zipkin multiple times to just shake his hand and take the drugs. When he spots a cop, he tells Zipkin to walk away calmly, only to watch as he climbs up an embankment, swinging his arms and legs with Rowan Atkinson level gusto in the most conspicuous getaway possible.
This movie is also chock full of imminently quotable lines. The police are puzzled why a man who quit his last job because they wouldn’t hire enough women would suddenly turn around and barbecue three of them, but never consider that maybe their first guess isn’t actually correct. A woman consoles another woman about the upcoming anniversary of her divorce by telling her that the worst thing that “Nothing affected [her] more than when The Beatles broke up,” and that “[Her] divorce was nothing compared to that.” And, because watching an hour of Designing Women every day from 1997 to 1999 broke my brain in ways that have never healed, I instantly recognized the woman who tells Zipkin about one of the killings that happened to her neighbor as Bernice (Alice Ghostley), which made that scene even funnier, although I think that it’s being played for comedy intentionally (although you can never be too sure here). The finale of the film takes place in an unoccupied department store that’s part of the mall where Flemming is holding a rally, and everything about the whole sequence is hilarious: the fact that Alicia arranges to meet Mulligan (so he can be arrested) at a discotheque called “Big Daddy’s” inside a mall, the fact that she doesn’t let the fact that she’s technically on a stakeout stop her from getting drunk on martinis, the delivery of the line “There’s a bald maniac in there and he’s going bat shit!,” and even the way that Zipkin recites the entire spiel he was given by a gun shop employee like it’s the Bene Gesserit “fear is the mind killer” speech before he can shoot Mulligan with a tranq dart.
This one seems to be relatively hard to find; there was a DVD release twenty years ago, but it appears to be long out of print, and there wasn’t a copy of it anywhere in my vast municipal library system. If you get the chance to see it, I recommend it, especially if you’re a fan of movies that are competently made but with no apparent reason to exist or want to see a (sort of) conspiracy thriller version of a campy slasher.
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