mark boomer redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the psychedelic daylight horror Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971), a New England ghost story.

00:00 Welcome

02:14 The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982)
08:50 Dr. Strangelove (1964)
15:45 The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future (2023)
25:30 Batman vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2019)
35:55 Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 3 (2023)
44:50 Invincible (2001)

51:20 Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

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

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: 2046 (2004)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Wong Kar-wai’s indirect, sci-fi tinged sequel to In the Mood for Love, 2046 (2004).

00:00 Welcome

06:06 The Hairy Bird (1998)
08:22 Leonor Will Never Die (2023)
13:00 Smoking Causes Coughing (2023)
17:50 The Dark Knight Trilogy (2005 – 2012)
26:56 Nimona (2023)
31:36 The First Wives Club (1996)
38:48 Oppenheimer (2023)
47:00 Touch of Evil (1958)
53:10 Talk to Me (2023)

57:27 2046 (2004)

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

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Movie of the Month: A Night in Heaven (1983)

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Boomer: I first saw A Night in Heaven on my 31st birthday, at Weird Wednesday in May of 2018, with a couple of friends. Jazmyne Moreno, who had programmed the film for that week, looked out over the audience and said, and I paraphrase, that she was surprised to see so few women and so many “burly men” in the audience (“bears” is the term she was looking for). Normally, when I tell this story, I follow that part up with a joke that this was followed by chants of “Show us the twink! Give us the twink!” from those in attendance, but that part’s purely fiction. Or is it? 

A Night in Heaven is a romantic drama that isn’t really all that romantic, or maybe it’s an erotic thriller that’s not quite thrilling, but either way, it’s … unique. Directed by John G. Avidsen seven years after he helmed Rocky and one year before the release of his next hit, 1984’s The Karate Kid (and as unlike either of those movies as you can imagine), the film tells the story of Faye Hanlon (Lesley Ann Warren), a teacher at Titusville Community College in Florida, one hour from Orlando. Her husband Whitney (Robert Logan) is a NASA rocket scientist and amateur recumbent bicycle designer at a career crossroads, finding himself being tasked with ballistic missile design instead of the astronomic rocketry about which he is passionate. Forming the third leg—no pun intended—of the love triangle at the center of the film is Rick Monroe (Christopher Atkins), a student in Faye’s speech class whose flippant attitude toward his final presentation leads her to give him a failing grade for the semester. That night, Faye and Rick’s paths cross outside of the classroom when her vacationing sister Patsy (Deborah Rush) drags her out to a male strip revue called Heaven, where she discovers that her student is an exotic dancer under the name “Ricky Rocket,” and they experience an intimate moment when he gives her a personal dance. 

Faye returns home horned up, and attempts to initiate sex with her husband, who turns her down and tells her that he’s been fired, leading Faye to wonder if there is a future for their relationship. Her feelings are further complicated by Rick’s ongoing flirtations with her as he tries to convince her to let him retake his final exam, and since her sister is staying at the hotel where Rick’s mother and sister work, they keep running into each other. She tries to avoid admitting her attraction to the younger man, but when Patsy has to go home a day early because her daughter is ill, she convinces Faye to stay the night in the paid-for hotel room rather than try to drive back late. Faye spends most of the night trying to reach her husband at home but there’s no answer (we see him reconnecting with a recently-divorced old flame that he runs into), and she ultimately ends up spending the night with Rick. An unwise phone call from Patsy, now back home in Chicago, leads Whitney to realize that his jealousy isn’t baseless, and he travels to the hotel. Faye realizes that she’s been used when she catches Rick in the shower with his girlfriend Slick (Sandra Beall), and it all comes to a head when Rick and Whitney have a confrontation. 

I don’t always feel the need to provide such a thorough recapitulation of a plot when we discuss a movie for this feature, but I did this time, since the Wikipedia plot summary is confused, to say the least. It cites that “Faye is going through a slump in her marriage to Whitney Hanlon, a rocket scientist who has just been laid off,” and that this is the reason that Patsy takes her out to Heaven to cheer her up, but that’s not the case. For one thing, it skips a few plot points ahead, given that there’s no real indication that the Hanlons’ marriage is on rocky ground at the outset, other than that Whitney’s been working nights and he can’t convince Faye to play hooky with him when she has finals to perform. The first indication of strife happens when Whitney isn’t interested in intimacy because of his firing, which Faye only learns about after coming back from the club. I’m not sure it’s the fault of the editor of that wiki page, however, as the film does seem to be missing a few plot points of its own – a fairly common issue with low budget films of this era. This is one of those movies that I feel probably had a more thoughtful script, since there are the vague outlines of something more nuanced and deeper going on at the edges.  Patsy’s description of the failures in her own marriage read like they’re supposed to echo something that’s happening in Faye’s marriage, but Faye’s issues are so vague that they don’t track. It also feels like we’re supposed to track that Whitney’s experiencing something of a crisis because he fears replacement in his relationship with his wife by a younger, sexier man while also confronting failure in finding a new job, citing “they hired a 14-year-old instead,” but again, it’s lacking. It’s not that the movie is just playing coy and being subtle, it’s more that there are gaps in the story, and that would be frustrating, if you come to the movie for that. Most people aren’t though; they’re here for the flesh. 

As thin and threadbare as the movie may be in other areas, one thing that it really has going for it is a striking soundtrack, which far outshines the film itself and has remained in the public consciousness for far longer. There are three undeniable bangers that were written specifically for this film, two of which are still pop culture touchstones while the third is (unfairly, in my opinion) largely forgotten. The first is the title track, which happens to be “Heaven” by Canadian singer-songwriter Bryan Adams, which plays in its entirety while Whitney rides his recumbent bike home after a night shift, creating some unintentional bathos. The song hit #9 on the Billboard charts with that release, and it also ended up on Adams’s album Reckless later that year, putting it back on the Billboard as the third single from the album, reaching #1 in April of 1985, completely eclipsing A Night in Heaven as far as cultural cachet and longevity. Perhaps almost as notable was the track “Obsession,” which was written and performed by Michael Des Barres and Holly Knight, and which was covered the following year by LA-based synth-pop band Animotion, becoming the biggest single of that band’s career, ensuring a pop culture legacy that’s more fondly (and more often) remembered than the film from which it spawned. Finally, I have a real fondness for “Like What You See,” which was composed by the film’s music supervisor Jan Hammer, a Czech-American composer with a long history of collaboration with a variety of household names like Mick Jagger and Carlos Santana. The track, performed by Hammer and the band Next, is a real treat, a peculiar blend of sultry and yacht rock-adjacent synths, and it’s undeniably sexy, even when it’s not paired with erotic dancing. 

What did you think? Did you like the soundtrack or was there a dissonance caused by the presence of much more famous music? Would you call this a romantic drama, an erotic thriller, or something completely different? 

Brandon: If I was at all distracted by the pop tunes plugged into the soundtrack, it was only in the immense difference in quality between the aforementioned “Heaven” & “Obsession” – respectfully, one of the all-time worst and one of the all-time best pop songs of all time.  Personal taste aside, as a pair they do exemplify what is so jarring about the movie’s volatile sense of tone, which alternates wildly from scene to scene.  “Heaven” represents its penchant for soft romantic melodrama, in which a troubled couple negotiates a rough patch in their marriage through teary-eyed phone calls and kitchen table heart-to-hearts.  By contrast, “Obsession” amplifies the erotically thrilling hedonism of the wife’s trips to the strip bar and her cuckolded husband’s parallel trips to the shooting range, an explosive recipe for sex & violence that thankfully only pays off on the sex end.  The way the film alternates between those two opposing tones can be a little clumsy, but the tension between them is also what makes the story so compelling.  Here we have the rare mainstream picture that sincerely engages with and markets to female sexual desire, tempting its timid protagonist to step outside the tedious complications and relative safety of her suburban marriage to enter a more dangerous, thrilling world of hedonistic excess.  In some ways, it softens the danger of her transgressions by making the object of her desire such a boyish, twinky goofball that she has immediate power over as his college professor, but by indulging her urges she also turns her husband into a potential mass shooter so I guess it all evens out. 

In a way, it’s incredible that a major Hollywood studio distributed a Magic Mike prototype decades before Soderbergh cornered the market on male stripper cinema, and it’s somehow become an out-of-print curio instead of a regular rowdy-screening cult favorite.  However, considering that Disney now owns the 20th Century Fox repertory catalog and there are several shots of the hot twink’s exposed peen, maybe it’s less incredible than it is just shameful.  There’s nothing especially vulgar nor raunchy about A Night in Heaven outside those brief flashes of male nudity and the fact that the zipper to Ricky Rocket’s pants is centered in the back instead of the front.  Still, it’s shocking to see a retro movie sincerely marketed to stoke women’s libidos, since that’s such a rare mode for mainstream Hollywood filmmaking.  There’s a detectable relishment over the film’s financial & artistic missteps in its contemporary reviews (including a New York Times writer declaring it “Flashdunce”) that’s typical to most media that dares to market directly to women.  Hell, maybe even my aversion to Bryan Adams’s “Heaven” is a result of that extremely gendered form of cringe, which rejects feminine artistic aesthetics as automatically lesser-than.  It’s a tough habit to shake.  In hindsight, though, it’s wonderfully endearing to see that a sexy strip club with a softcore porno title was marketed to that eternally underserved audience, even if only as a fluke inspired by the fad popularity of Chippendales male stripper shows.  The early exchange “I just flunked that kid,” “You did WHAT?” between girlfriends would have still been a mainstream-media novelty when Sex and the City was a zeitgeist changer two decades later, so it probably shouldn’t be surprising that America wasn’t ready to spend a night in Heaven when Reagan was still president.

Britnee: I am so grateful for being introduced to A Night in Heaven. This confusing mess of a movie is extremely entertaining, and I’ve already put rare DVD copies on my eBay and Mercari watchlists. I need this in my collection to watch over and over again. First off, I adore Leslie Anne Warren. Her performances in two of my favorite films, Victor/Victoria and Clue, are iconic, and she killed it as Susan Mayer’s mother, Sophie, in the Desperate Housewives series. She was perfect in the role of Faye, the conservatively dressed academic with a suppressed wild side. 

The question Boomer asked is the same question I had when I finished watching the film: “What genre is this?” It’s not romantic enough to be a romance. It’s also not purposefully funny, and not really erotic either. It’s a slightly sexy wholesome drama? I really don’t know the answer. All I know is that it’s a mystery that makes for a damn good time. The extended, pointless Bryan Adams bike ride really set the tone for what was to come! I laughed so much while singing along to “Heaven”. Yes, I’m a Bryan Adams fan, so I really enjoyed the soundtrack, especially the early original version of “Obsession”. That song is on just about every 80s mixed CD I’ve ever made. The soundtrack itself is a mixed tape that encapsulates everything the film does or is trying to do, and I think that’s wonderful.

What I wanted so badly was for Faye and Ricky Rocket to have multiple trysts and a stronger sexual connection with each other. The initial Ricky Rocket dance scene was insanely hot (and I watched it multiple times), but that was as strong as the tension between the two got. I wanted this to be more of a genuine age-gap romance like White Palace rather than a douche bag trying to get a passing grade by flirting with his professor. Why couldn’t Faye unleash her inner cougar with a young stud who was legitimately attracted to her? And then leave her boring husband for her new lover? I wanted this to be trashier, dammit!

Alli: Wow, maybe it’s my recent interest in trashy romance novels, or maybe it’s just from identifying strongly as a woman for most of my life, but I had a lot of fun with this. There’s a kitsch quality to it that directly hits my brain’s pleasure center: the straight laced, tight bunned school marm who’s secretly a hotty if she would only let down her hair; the nerdy husband who will do anything for her; the temptation, some kind of snake (wink wink, nudge nudge). It’s a parade of archetypes that just work. I can’t believe that this movie has somehow slid into obscurity, regardless of its pop songs. It just highlights the lack of cultural hype around movies about women’s pleasure and desires. (From what I’ve experienced on romance-novel-internet, books are not suffering from the same treatment somehow despite being far more numerous.) I hope that this Swampflix feature at least partly helps rectify that obscurity.

Something that really hit me, in terms of kitsch and lush texture, was the art direction and lighting. Yes, the changes in costumes mark shifts in character. Okay, now she’s the hot teacher because she let her hair down and put on a “racy dress.” Okay, look at these stripper outfits and how they differ from regular day to day. The night-time versus the daytime. Yeah, these shifts are obvious, but I love it. It’s so rare to see such blatant shifts outside teen make-over comedies. And the lighting here is perfect for it, especially the contrast between the regular classroom, office, daytime, household lighting versus the lighting in Heaven, where Ricky Rocket at one point literally has a Byzantine halo made of the colored lights above as he’s giving a lap dance. I was absolutely living for it.

As far as whether or not this is a romantic thriller or drama, it feels much more like a drama to me. Yeah, eventually a gun is involved, but it feels so minor compared to the switches between boring wife-dom and the straight woman paradise of Heaven. It plays so much more like a fantasy than a drama. Faye gets to have her cake (sleeping with Ricky when her marriage feels stagnant) and eat it too (going back to her husband with better communication and knowledge of her needs). The fact that she’s not punished for desiring a younger man is so refreshing. 

Lagniappe

Britnee:  I was surprised to see so much exposed man pubes here. Truly, A Night in Heaven walked so Magic Mike could run.

Alli: In a world full of male fantasies about big men hoarding guns, setting off explosions, and saving the world, we need more counter programming like this. We need more soft fantasies about young (of legal age) men desiring school teachers. Or, you know, just generally about women getting to explore their sexuality without drastic consequences. There’s a reason this is such a HUGE genre of literary fiction.

Brandon: I would like to personally welcome Jerri Blank’s stepmother, Deborah Rush, back to the Movie of the Month family after such a long hiatus following her early appearances in the screwball comedy Big Business and the cosmic horror The Box.  As a Strangers with Candy obsessive, I am so used to Rush being an ice-cold suburban terminator who “drinks to kill the pain” that I was shocked & delighted to see her bubblier 80s side as the sassy, squeaky sidekick here.  If y’all ever want to pivot this feature into a Deborah Rush Movie of the Month ritual instead, I am totally down.

Boomer: I’m very pleased that this one went over so well. This movie is disjointed—there’s no denying it—and its tonal inconsistencies could be a turn off, but I knew this would be this gaggle of freaks and weirdos to appreciate it. 

-The Swampflix Crew

The Hairy Bird (1998)

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In 1998, Miramax swept one of its finest films under the rug, plopping it in theaters like an unwanted runny egg with no promotion, then shuffling it off to home video. Director Sarah Kernochan, who was one of the co-directors of Marjoe among many other accolades, has laid the blame for this at the feet of none other than infamous sex pest Harvey Weinstein. It appears that, although he promised her distribution to at least 2000 screens, Weinstein recanted when Kernochan refused to hand over editorial control so that he could turn the film into something less like The Trouble with Angels-meets-The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys and more like a distaff Porky’s, with a broader appeal to a more mainstream (read: male) audience. As a result, a true classic has largely fallen through the cracks, not helped by the fact that it’s had three different titles: the original The Hairy Bird (which was rejected as it’s a slang reference to a phallus), then the generically nondescript All I Wanna Do for release in some regions, and the spoilery title Strike! in others. It’s out there, though, and if you can find it, it’s worth digging into. 

It’s 1963, and Odette “Odie” Sinclair (Gaby Hoffman) has been packed off to board at Miss Godard’s Preparatory School for Girls following her mother’s discovery of her diaphragm, to get her as far away from her boyfriend, Dennis (Matt Lawrence), as possible. Upon arrival, she is given a tour of the place by Abby Sawyer (Rachel Leigh Cook), an uptight legacy student who’s parlayed that status into a student leader position that allows her to act as militaristic hall monitor of other students. Odie is placed into a room with Verena von Stefan (Kirsten Dunst) and Tinka Parker (Monica Keena), the school’s foremost shit-stirrers who mockingly insert vulgarities into the school song as the students sing before dinner, smoke cigarettes on the school grounds, and (accurately) call Abby a fascist to her face. They induct Odie into their group, which also includes bulimic aspiring psychologist Tweety Goldberg (Heather Matarazzo) and science-inclined Maureen Haines (Merritt Weaver), and show her their secret hideout in a disused attic room that is accessible only through the ceiling of a linen closet. This secret clubhouse also allows them access to the school kitchen and its many canned goods, leading them to dub themselves the Daughters of the American Ravioli. Each is ambitious in her own way, declaring their intention to reject society’s intention to turn them into cookie-cutter wives and mothers with the motto “No more white gloves.” 

The first half of the film is largely made up of your standard mid-century boarding school hijinx. The girls sneak around and smoke, talk about their hopes and dreams, attempt to get a lecherous teacher fired through an elaborate hoax that involves a fake care package, and learn from each other. One of the major elevating factors in the movie is the presence of Lynn Redgrave in the role of headmistress Miss McVane. She’s amazing and powerful here as a stern but insightful and warm mentor figure who doles out advice to Odie when the girl first has friction with her roommates and peers. “Don’t reject them,” McVane tells her. “They’re not ‘just girls.’ They’re you. If you get to know them, you’ll be discovering yourself.” She’s right, too, and it’s amazing to watch just how much these characters bond, quickly but profoundly, with the distraction of boys completely removed from the equation, even if they’re never far from the girls’ minds (especially not Odie’s). The girls hatch a plan to get her off campus to one of their houses for a weekend so that she and Dennis can see each other, but when this plan is ruined, Odie ends up confined to campus for the remainder of the year. Discussion is made of finding a way to get Dennis on campus and into the attic room so that Odie can meet him there, but everything changes when Tweety overhears that the school is in such dire financial straits that the board is forcing the school to merge with nearby boys’ school St. Ambrose Academy. 

The girls’ fellowship is broken over different reactions to the news. Verena is incensed at the idea of losing what little space there is in the world that isn’t overrun by men and delivers a rampaging speech about how being forced to start worrying about primping and preening instead of studying and learning will have a net negative effect on all of them, and Maureen is distraught about how applying to MIT as one of eight students from St. Ambrose instead of as the only applicant from Miss Godard’s will dilute her chances of matriculating there, even before getting into how being absorbed by a school with a more middling academic reputation will bring down the perception of her education. The other girls, in particular the boy-crazy Tinka, are more excited by the prospect of going co-ed and the resultant opportunities for sexual gratification. Tensions run high following this schism, and they come to a head when a busload of St. Ambrose students arrive at Miss Godard’s for an introductory dance and choir concert. Verena and Maureen have a plan to make the students of St. Ambrose look bad, and the other girls realize Verena may be right when Tweety is taken advantage of by a boy who tricks her into exposing herself for a photograph. This puts Tinka on the warpath, and soon all of the girls are united in their effort to do anything they can to prevent the schools from merging. 

The resultant payoff to these plans is exactly the kind of thing that would, in any other movie, act as the climax of the film and save the school, but it’s not so simple. Although they are able to frame and/or expose (depending on the nature of the boy in question) the students of St. Ambrose as drunks and creeps, everything is covered up by the boards of both schools. Verena is expelled for her role in the plan, leading to the conversation in which she and the audience learn that she failed and that the school(s) will be going forward with co-education. As McVane explains it, it’s not “the first time women have had to marry for money,” delivering a wonderful speech about how the alumni have forsaken the school because they don’t see the use in investing in the futures of other women. “The men give generously to their schools. It’s a solid investment. They are ensuring that a steady supply of the nation’s leaders will be men.” She extols Verena, in a final impassioned plea to keep the faith: “After the men plant their flag in this school, they’ll bury us. It will be subtle and insidious, as in real life. Now, I may be at the end of the road here, but you’re young, you have the talent and power to lead; don’t stop the fight.” It may seem like it’s sitting there limply on the page, but this is powerful stuff in Redgrave’s hands, and she milks it for everything that it’s worth, and it is glorious.

The young cast is great as well. In addition to the above-mentioned students at Miss Godard’s, there’s a recurring character named Snake (Vincent Kartheiser) who leads a gang of local beatniks who are all named after common roadkill animals, and the St. Ambrose boy that Verena attempts to frame is played by Vincent Kartheiser, best known as Smalls from The Sandlot. Other boys from the academy include a pre-Animorphs Shawn Ashmore, a pre-Star Wars Hayden Christensen, and Robin Dunne, who you’re bound to recognize from something (and who has been in no fewer than nine movies with “Christmas” in the title). One of Snake’s hoodlums is also Zachary Bennett, the future star of Cube Zero, which may be of interest to longtime Swampflix fans. This is a stacked cast, and it’s a shame that dick-wagging has pushed it out of the public eye for so long. There’s not a bad performance in the bunch. It’s telling that, for all the clout that he amassed during his reign of terror, Weinstein couldn’t see what was so special about this movie and what quintessential magic that the film has would have been lost if he had gotten his way; he wanted to “sex up” the narrative, not realizing that this movie already is sexual, it simply handles its topic with great care. This is a movie about a group of young women who are fully in control of their sexuality. They’re not “desexualized,” but they don’t exist for the male gaze at all, and that’s likely why no one had any faith in it. Regardless, this is an undisputed classic in my opinion, and deserves to be tracked down. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Barbie (2023)

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When we were talking about coverage and discussing the Barbenheimer phenomenon, Brandon generously offered me the opportunity to be the one who covered Barbie, after I declared in no uncertain terms that I had no interest in Oppenheimer (sorry, Cillian). I did my part, going to the movie on opening night, wearing the only garment I own with any pink in it—a mostly-blue luau shirt with flamingos nestled in the pattern—and having my picture taken in the doll box that was being hastily assembled in the lobby when I arrived. It’s looking like this one will end up being a favorite for a lot of the Swampflix crew, and I’m happy to report that I had a good time as well. 

Barbie (Margot Robbie) is the most popular resident of Barbieland, a pink utopia inhabited by a seemingly endless series of Barbies, including President Barbie (Issa Rae), Doctor Barbie (Hari Neff), Physicist Barbie (Emma Mackey), Journalist Barbie (Ritu Arya), and Author Barbie (Alexandra Schipp). There are also a multitude of Kens, including the “stereotypical” Ken (Ryan Gosling), whose job is “beach” and who is paired with likewise stereotypical Prime!Barbie. Also present is his primary rival Ken (Simu Liu), and several others (including Ncuti Gatwa), as well as one-offs like Ken’s friend Allan (Michael Cera) and poor pregnant Midge (Emerald Fennell). Every day is beautiful, as Barbie interacts with her dreamhouse, drinking imaginary milk from empty doll cups and bathing in a waterless shower, then goes about her adventures before retiring back to her home for a nightly dance party. Things couldn’t be more perfect, until one day Prime!Barbie asks the others if they ever think about dying, which brings the party to a screeching halt. The next day, nothing goes right; her shower is inexplicably cold, her imaginary milk is spoiled, her heart shaped waffles are burned and fail to land perfectly on her plate, and worst of all, she’s somehow become a flat-footed doll in a world of high heels. At the advice of her compatriots, she seeks guidance about her situation from “Weird” Barbie (Kate McKinnon), who was “played with too hard.” Weird Barbie sends Prime!Barbie on a quest to the real world to find the girl who’s playing with her so that she can cheer her back up so that her distinctly un-Barbie thoughts stop finding their way into Prime!Barbie’s head. 

In the real world, Gloria (America Ferrera) is the receptionist at Mattel, a company that, despite depending on the monetization of the fantasies of little girls, is run entirely by men in identical gray suits; she finds herself drawing concepts for new dolls that share/embody her personal ennui. When Barbie (with stowaway Ken) escapes the boundaries of Barbieland and enters California via a portal at Venice Beach, young Mattel employee Aaron (Connor Swindells, the third alum from Sex Education in the movie) is contacted by the FBI to warn the dollmakers about this breach, and he delivers the news directly to the CEO (Will Ferrell). Elsewhere, Barbie’s search for her doll seems to lead to a dead end as she finds Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), her presumed dollplayer, only to find that the girl has become a tween edgelady who dresses down the cowboy-clad living doll for her ties to capitalism, neoliberal feminism, and body dysmorphia. While this is happening, Ken comes face-to-face with the omnipresent patriarchal nature of the real world, wholeheartedly buying into the ideals of male domination because of his own lack of fulfillment in his non-relationship with Barbie. Upon his return, he spreads this anti-gospel around to the other Kens, which leads to all of the Barbies losing the memories of their impressive accomplishments in lieu of becoming servile dolls to the Kens with whom they are paired. With help from Gloria and Sasha, who are mother and daughter, Prime!Barbie has to try and wrest control of Barbieland back before it becomes the Kendom forever. 

Early marketing for the movie featured that famous image of Margot Robbie, currently poised at the moment between memetic and iconic, with the tagline “Barbie is everything.” And not only is she, but Robbie is a star, baby. Although there may never come a day when society forgives Suicide Squad, it’s time for us to all try and forget it, because Robbie is really outdoing herself with each new project. As an actress, her absolute control over her every movement and facial muscle is astonishing. When confronted by a world in which she is frequently hated instead of universally beloved, it would be easy for this sort of narrative turn to feel like one of those “the regent learns their subjects hate them” plots, but because Robbie’s Barbie is kind, empathetic, fun-loving, and heretofore carefree, it’s emotionally devastating, and Robbie makes it work. That having been said, the beating emotional heart at the center of the film is America Ferrera, whose Gloria is the motivating factor behind all of the events of the film, and who gives a powerhouse monologue near the film’s climax that utterly steals the show. Kate McKinnon’s smaller part is also a delight, and the explanations of how she came to be the way that she is have a kind of quintessence of truth that I couldn’t help but laugh at. I was a bit disappointed upon the initial entrance into the real world with Gosling’s Ken instead of Liu’s, the latter of whom I found much more charming in their initial scenes, but given that specific Ken is called on to temporarily become the king of the jerks, literally and figuratively, I came to prefer that it was Gosling’s Ken who becomes the film’s antagonist for a bit. 

At the core of that antagonism is Ken’s deep and profound insecurity. Ken’s existence, his destiny, is to be “and Ken” to Prime!Barbie, secondary to her. Since Barbie—as the idealization of a certain idea of liberated womanhood—doesn’t need him the way that he needs her, he lives in a perpetual existential crisis in which he has no real job or purpose other than an  exaggeratedly asymmetrical relationship. It’s precisely this lack of security in his identity that leaves him open to being brain-poisoned by patriarchy, and he even ultimately admits that he got carried away and that what he really wanted to get into wasn’t phallocentric government so much as horses (it makes sense in context … sort of). There was no way that a movie like this one wasn’t going to end up on the radar of all the expected grifter outrage manufacturing machine mouthpieces, but the ones who can’t stop blathering on and on about film’s “woke” agenda with the fury of a man who’s mad that his wife put the cookies on a shelf he can’t reach; they’re really tattling on themselves with this outing, even more than usual. It takes a truly deep level of self-doubt and an utter dearth of self-reflection to take a look at this movie, which is about how sad, unfulfilled men unsuccessfully try to fill that void inside with toxic masculinity and be like “This is a movie that attacks me personally.” Do you not even see how much you’re showing your whole ass with that, bro? The Kens aren’t even doing the things that are violent, just the things that are annoying, like keeping a slovenly house, favoring patent leather couches, and mansplaining The Godfather. They’re not trying to entrap women through emotionally manipulative therapy lingo, or being shitty to their pregnant wife while she begs to be allowed to leave the house without administering veterinary medicine that she’s medically forbidden to handle, or isolating a woman with the intent to do harm. Don’t be like that. Just have a “brewski-beer” and teach yourself how to play a Matchbox Twenty song or two and let this one float past you in the stream, man. 

In this case, the MST3k mantra applies on a couple of levels. Remember, this is just a movie, and you should just relax, both in any attempts to make this light, effervescent, bubblegum movie into another wedge in the culture war, and in the more traditional sense of letting go of the urge to try to figure out the exact limits of the film’s internal logic. It’s not what anyone is here for. This is an aesthetic experience just as much as (if not more than) it is a narrative one, and that’s what art is, baby. Just have a good time. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Who Killed Teddy Bear? (1965)

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Who Killed Teddy Bear? is a 1965 neo-noir about a woman named Norah Dain who receives threatening phone calls from an unknown stalker, whose attentions escalate. You might not know that the identity of the stalker is meant to be unknown if you read virtually any synopsis, including the one that appears when you select the film on just about any streaming service where it is housed, or on the Google search results landing page. I’m telling you this now so you can avert your eyes as much as possible in navigating to watch this one, which I (mostly) recommend. 

Norah (Juliet Prowse, who was involved with both Elvis and Frank Sinatra at the same time in 1962!) has a small life, but it’s her own. She works at a discotheque as a DJ under the watchful eye of the world-weary but rapier-witted Marian (Elaine Stritch). It’s a job that occasionally means that drunken men try to get handsy with her, but it’s the kind of classy joint with not only waiters like Larry (Sal Mineo) but also hulking doormen like Carlo (Dan Travanty) to take care of men who get a little too familiar. On one such night, Carlo tosses a man into the alley, but gets slashed by the man when he turns his back, forcing Carlo, Marian, and Norah to go to the station to provide statements. There, Norah meets Lt. Dave Madden (Jan Murray), who appears to become interested when he overhears about the heavy-breather who keeps calling her at all hours. She continues to get these calls, and, until the midpoint, we are kept in suspense about who keeps making them. Could it be that the supposedly mute Carlo was being overprotective of Norah the night he was hurt, because he has his own interest? Could it be the slasher himself, who escaped into the night? Perhaps it’s soft-spoken Larry, who checks in on Norah whenever men pester her. It might even be Lt. Madden himself, who seems to become over-invested in Norah’s situation very quickly, and who is seen performing such odd behavior as listening to recordings of the calls. 

For the first half, the identity of the lecherous caller is hidden behind a series of interesting, noir visuals: a hand that seeks and finds a pack of cigarettes, only to find them empty and crush the package in a rage; gaussy shots of the man’s body as the camera’s focus renders his white-knuckle grip on the telephone in the foreground in stark relief; the corner of a mouth peeking around the jet black phone receiver, twisted in a leering grin. Although the implied sexual violence is palpable, there’s also something strangely erotic about the way that the film’s eye lingers on the killer’s muscular frame. Like a Grindr photo, he’s a torso without a face, and the way that he’s often almost-but-not-quite touching himself makes this feel like an under-the-radar muscleman flick. Both he and Norah are presented in states of undress, but in her case, the image is impersonal and detached, as we see her through Madden’s eyes as she changes, while the images of the killer’s body are intimate, almost first person, with no room for us to create a level of rhetorical distance between ourselves and the image. There’s something about it that reminds me of Dead Calm, where Billy Zane’s killer character is obviously dangerous and unstable, but also undeniably sexy, both in the text and the metatext. 

The film takes its title from a question asked by Larry’s sister Edie (Margot Bennett), a developmentally disabled young woman who he looks after. Her childlike innocence is framed as a foil to the worldly knowledge of Madden’s daughter, Pam (Diane Moore), who is younger but has learned too much about how the world and its dangers operate, both as the result of losing her mother to a random act of violence and from being too aware of her father’s work as he obsesses over criminal deviance. The men are likewise foils to one another, and although I won’t say who the killer is (or even if it’s one of these two), Madden is by far the more menacing to Norah. He’s hard-boiled and has a chip on his shoulder, and although that’s not an uncommon thing for a police character for this era and this genre, he’s boorish and pushy to the modern viewer. Despite the fact that his behavior ties this film to a certain place and time, there are many elements, especially in the cinematography, that feel very modern. There are multiple scenes in which Norah is followed around the city that are clearly shot from a moving car, which could easily be a normal tracking shot but because of its handheld-like camera movement, it creates a sense of unease as the audience is put in the point of view of her stalker, unless she isn’t being stalked at all. The scene in which the killer, in an attempt to purge himself of his sexual urges, wanders the streets of the city and stares into the windows of erotic bookstores is fantastic (as long as your brain hasn’t been completely broken by that Kath & Kim gay panic scene, which resembles this sequence). Where the film feels the most dated, however, is in its ending. Yes, Norah’s stalker does eventually get her alone and forces himself upon her, and it’s very distressing, before he meets his end at the hands of the police; this was, after all, the final year of the Hayes Code, so he must. But as a late-60s noir piece, there’s a lot to enjoy here, especially since this one often seems to end up on various free, ad-supported streaming services. It’s an oddball, but worth finding. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Dead Man on Campus (1998)

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TW: Suicide, throughout

When recently writing about middling campus thriller The Curve, several people commented that they thought that film was called Dead Man on Campus; in fact, The Curve was previously titled Dead Man’s Curve and its title was changed to avoid just that confusion. Both came out in 1998, both feature a serious scholarship student paired with a perpetually manic roommate, and both feature plots that are predicated on the urban legend that the roommate(s) of any college student who commits suicide automatically passes their classes that semester. Whereas The Curve was rarely intentionally funny and attempted a kind of campus noir that fails to be compelling, Dead Man on Campus is an outright comedy, from the creative team that would four years later release a personal favorite, Pumpkin. Pumpkin director Anthony Abrams is on the writing side this time, co-penning this one with future Pumpkin co-writer Adam Larson Broder and Michael Traeger. This one errs a little broader than Pumpkin‘s melodrama satire but has a lot of the same semi-sequitur one-liners, slapstick treated with unblinking stoicism, and invoked tonal whiplash. 

Josh (Tom Everett Scott) is an incoming student attending a prestigious northeastern university on a scholarship, on a pre-med track with a heavy, difficult course load. In the dorms, he’s placed into a suite with non-stop party machine Cooper (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and hair-trigger Catholic rage jock Kyle (Jason Segel). Kyle pairs off with a girl he meets at a party (Linda Cardellini) and moves in with her, leaving Josh and Cooper with a spare room. Josh loses some of his academic focus when Cooper introduces him to Rachel (Poppy Montgomery), a creative writing student with whom he hits it off, and Cooper’s lackadaisical attitude rubs off on Josh a little too hard. By midterms, both are failing, with doomed prospects on the horizon: Josh will lose his scholarship and drop out of school, and Cooper’s father will stop paying his tuition and force him to start at an entry level position in the family custodial business. Cooper, upon hearing the urban legend about automatic A grades for the roommates of students who take their own life, forces Josh to accompany him to break into the library and review the school charter to see if this rule actually exists, and, upon learning that it does, hatches a scheme to use Josh’s student job at the housing office to file paperwork to move a suicidal person into the vacant room and wait things out, possibly even pushing over a domino or two. Josh is initially horrified, but is ultimately convinced to join in, and they set their sights on a few prospects: untameable frat moron Cliff (Lochlyn Munro), paranoid Unabomber-esque Buckley (Randy Pearlstein), and depressed British goth rocker Matt (Corey Page). 

Like Pumpkin, Dead Man on Campus is a tasteless movie, but I have an appetite for tasteless movies, especially ones that are as willing to go all in like this one does. Through a modern lens, it’s insensitive (and may even have been so for the time), but its insensitivity reads more as irreverence than edginess, and at times it verges on prescience … for the most part. The film’s weakest link is the first contender that the boys select; he’s loud, brash, oversexed, dim-witted, and within the already wacky reality of the film, he stands out as a particularly poorly placed element, like he dropped in from National Lampoon’s Van Wilder. It’s a pretty small role, but Alyson Hannigan is here as one of Rachel’s roommates, and Cliff immediately asks “Which one is for [him]?” from among the women, getting so amped up to share a bong with her that he lights her hair on fire (Hannigan has her longer ‘do from Buffy seasons 1 and 2 here), and it feels like it’s presaging some of the indignities that she’ll experience over the course of the American Pie movies, but less funny (or that she’ll find herself in in Date Movie, but funnier). In a film that’s mostly raucous and only occasionally raunchy, Cliff’s scenes are the weakest. Gosselaar toes the line with Cooper; he’s also obnoxious, but it’s more moderate. It’s as if Gosselaar is aping the title character of Parker Lewis Can’t Lose but can’t quite break free from Saved by the Bell‘s Zack and ends up annoying, but there’s a certain Bugs Bunny-esque playfulness to his frenetic energy that keeps him from crossing the line into being too annoying. 

The second and third contenders that the boys select are much better suited to the film’s tone. Conspiracy theorist Buckley is a lot of fun, down to the choices in set dressing (his dorm room is adorned with black and white posters of … himself). Even though this film is from the pre-9/11 time when conspiracy theories were just some nonsense that your older stoner friend would prattle on about and not matters of legislation in a crumbling empire, Buckley manages to spout some ideas that wouldn’t be unreasonable to hear (from morons) in this day and age; notably, he believes that he is being stalked by Bill Gates, who wants to steal the rest of his brain (having already stolen half of it when Buckley fell asleep in a Gateway store). The way that Josh and Cooper convince him to move in with them, which includes Josh dressing up in a hazmat suit and spraying water on the plants outside of Buckley’s first dorm building, hits the right level of absurdity, and it’s a welcome change after suffering through the Cliff portions. All of the boys’ interactions with third contender Matt are even funnier once it’s revealed that his suicidal ideology is all an act to seem more mysterious as a tragic musician, and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of making fun of self-flagellating college-aged artists. Some sample lyrics for Kiss My Ass, Matt’s band, include the utterly self-satisfied lines “My words are my sperm/Spewing forth my tragic germ/I’m dying to kiss you/I soil the tissue.” That’s art, baby. 

The movie is not without other weaknesses outside of Cliff. Things get a little saccharine at the climax, and it’s not handled as deftly as it would be later in Pumpkin; just compare any of the maudlin-to-the-point-of-ridicule scenes that make up that film’s finale with the mostly-played-straight conclusion to this one. The romance between Josh and Rachel also feels a bit tacked-on, and Poppy Montgomery is largely wasted in a shallow role. That Josh could fall into drinking and partying without the temptation to spend time with her makes it so that she could largely be excised from the plot, especially as her later actions—giving Josh a copy of her short story to read and then being disappointed that he didn’t—do nothing to put more pressure on Josh than he is already under. It’s ridiculous that she’s third billed and is less memorable than Hannigan, who at least has a later role in the film when she arrives at a party in a ridiculous wig. Still, if you saw The Curve and thought it would work better as an irreverent comedy, or if you’re itching for something in the vein of Pumpkin and are willing to accept the diet cola version, this one’s out there waiting for you. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Demonlover (2002)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Olivier Assayas’s early-aughts hentai thriller Demonlover (2002).

00:00 Welcome

02:45 X (2022)
07:45 Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
11:45 Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
15:25 Past Lives (2023)
24:08 Asteroid City (2023)
37:10 Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1979)

41:55 Demonlover (2002)

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

-The Podcast Crew

Past Lives (2023)

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There’s a little piece of quotational wisdom that’s never far from my mind: “Life is made up of meetings and partings. That is the way of it.” That it comes from The Muppet Christmas Carol and is recited by Kermit the Frog does not make it less poignant, or less true. Sometimes, when those words resurface in my mind, I also recall illustrator Olivia de Recat’s simple line drawings of closeness lines over time, which depict how two individual lives intersect (or don’t) based on the way that relationships change over time. They’re minimalistic, with only two lines in each image, but they resonate: the gentle curves of “first love” speak volumes, the angular intersection of “one night stand” has a kind of vivacious energy that I love, and the “friends with benefits” lines, where one party starts to move away from the other and the second party tries to follow before separating in a way that can only be described as dejected, is my personal favorite. I recently acted it out (or had it enacted upon me), actually, and I walked away from that schism having taken some real psychic damage. Past Lives has come along at exactly the right moment to make sense of everything by envisioning meetings and partings in a way that breathes meaning and beauty into our sadnesses, our joys, and our presumed certainties. 

Twenty-four years ago, Na Young and Hae Sung were classmates, competitors, best friends, and potentially more. When we meet them, at age 12, Na Young is trying not to cry over the fact that Hae Sung has bested her academically, perhaps for the first time. Unfortunately, their halcyon days of walking home together from school and playing among public sculptuary are cut short by Na Young’s family’s immigration to Canada. Twelve years pass, and Na Young, now going by her Anglicized name of Nora Moon (Greta Lee), is a student playwright in NYC. While on the phone with her mother, she decides to look Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) up on Facebook and discovers that he has tried to reach out to her. The two reconnect and share the maximum level of emotional intimacy that two people on opposite sides of the planet communicating via a glitchy Skype connection can. Unable to meet in person for a prolonged period of time because of their individual studies, the two take a temporary break that lasts a lot longer than either intended. Nora meets Arthur (John Magaro) at a writing residency, and she tells him about the concept of in-yun, a concept relating to fate that paints the serendipitous connections of life as predestined. Twelve years later, Nora and Arthur are married and still in NYC, and Hae Sung comes to visit, supposedly on vacation, but really to reunite. The immediate and intense magnetism between the two is palpable, but their paths have been going in opposite directions for so long that their destinies may be forever parted. 

Early in the film, Na Young’s mother explains to Hae Sung’s that she and her husband have chosen to immigrate despite having good careers and social networks because, to paraphrase, when you let go of something, you also gain something. It’s a very simple idea in a sparse text, but it’s nonetheless true. Nora and Hae Sung both recognize this, but in different ways and at different points in their lives, and they realize the opposite as well, that hanging onto something means the death (at least in this life) of all the things that might have been. Nora meets Arthur when she lets Hae Sung go, and Hae Sung meets his unnamed girlfriend at about the same time. Hae Sung, at 24, is insistent that he hang onto the blueprint of his planned career by going to Shanghai to learn Mandarin instead of taking the option to learn English in NYC and be near Nora instead, and in so doing ensures that there is only one path this life will take — one without her, even if he doesn’t realize it at the time. In the film, as in life, there are a million little moments where the choices of holding fast or letting go have an effect that echoes throughout one’s lifetime (or lifetimes), and in every single one, I felt the intensity of each of those tiny, almost imperceptible forks in the road. When Nora and Hae Sung start talking to each other again at 24, there’s a sense of such  in every wording choice that feels immense in the way that every exchange of words with a crush or someone you feel an intense connection to but aren’t intimately familiar with always feels … portentous. That blending of the feeling of getting to know one another (again, or for the first time) and that sense of something so much bigger taking form on the horizon, it’s effervescent and light and yet so big, so bold, so beautiful. 

Past Lives is truly a perfect title. Each time that the two meet, so much about themselves has changed, to the point that they don’t perceive themselves as the same people. This is textual; at one point, Nora draws a distinction between her adult self and the child Na Young that Hae Sung used to know. Hae Sung, however, still sees Na Young inside of Nora, and she does the same for him; they may not be literally reincarnated, but they are different people with something innate and unchanging inside that they recognize in one another. This cycle is reinforced in the way that Nora and Hae Sung see each other only every twelve years, like clockwork. Even the location choices reiterate the cyclical nature of the two’s relationship: on the day that they reunite in their thirties, the two are framed against Jane’s Carousel, and they later also take the ferry tour around the Statue of Liberty. Both are rides that ultimately end in the same place that they begin and then cycle again, in a lovely metaphor. 

Nora is a fascinating character, and Greta Lee is an astonishing performer. This is a sparse movie, with very little non-diegetic sound and music sprinkled in only very occasionally, and that aesthetic plays out on screen as well, with a lot of the performance of Nora coming down to the smallest of facial movements on both Lee and Teo’s parts, the tiniest wrinkling of doubt, the smallest twinge of hope at the edge of the lip, the almost imperceptible brow tightening of longing deferred. It’s pure magic, and it wouldn’t work if we didn’t spend so much time with these two people, learning them. In a different world, there’s a version of this narrative where we love Nora a little less, find her dismissal of Hae Sung in 2012 cold and heartless, or find her honesty with her husband and her reassurances to him hollow and false, but Lee imbues Nora with an almost impossible level of likability. We see ourselves in her. She papers over the things that she can’t control by making blanket statements of agency that are questionably true: when her parents choose to immigrate to Canada, she tells her friends that she wants to go, supposedly so that she can one day win the Nobel Prize (at age 24, this dream has changed to winning the Pulitzer, and at 36, when prompted by Hae Sung, she jokes that she’s now aiming for a Tony). When realizing that she and Hae Sung will not see each other for at least a year when they reconnect in 2012, she tells him that she needs a break to focus on her life in New York, but we know that this isn’t completely true because she begins dating Arthur very shortly thereafter. Lee deftly navigates all of this, and I can’t wait to see more of her.  

I’m hesitant to make a comparison between this film and one with a white person at the directorial helm and starring an entirely white European cast, but I feel I must; when I walked out of the theater, I felt much the same as I did when I left my screening of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It wasn’t just the sparsity of intrusions from more filmic elements, or that both filmmakers were named Celine, but in the way that both works are about loves which are so vast that they fill up every space that presents itself and thus feel certain and immovable, but which are ultimately all-too-fragile. There’s a scene in Past Lives in which Nora walks through the empty house that will be her home for the duration of her writing residency and we get to hear every footstep as she crosses the space, just as every footfall in Portrait was likewise audible and meaningful; later, there’s a loud metallic thump when Nora walks over a metal grate on the sidewalk. It’s human, it’s real, it’s tangible. That doesn’t always mean that some alchemical process of “art” is happening, but in a movie so intimate and so suffused with longing as Past Lives, the magic is there. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

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Is nostalgia a disease? If you ask the internet (which one should rarely or, perhaps, never do), there are vigorous discussions about whether the fact that the term “nostalgia” was created to describe a disease of the mind is relevant or not. To wit: “a psychopathological condition affecting individuals who are uprooted, whose social contacts are fragmented, who are isolated and who feel totally frustrated and alienated” (source). I think that, depending upon its gravity, it can be either a harmless diversion or a sign of actual disordered thinking. There should never be any confusion about certain things, and one of them is this: within the narrative of Western history, our current host of problems are generally better than they have ever been in the past. We’ve tainted every bit of progress with nonsense, of course — what benefit is it to a society that can save lives a hundredfold more successfully than three centuries ago if the law allows for the use of such lifesaving measures to act as a middle-class bankruptcy manufacturing system? What good has it done to raise generations to see the consumption of meat at every meal as a sign of financial security and an unquestioned right, when it means that we’ve sausaged ourselves into a climate collapse? Still, in general, things are better than they were one, two, and three hundred years ago (at least until the last few years, jeez). Cutting your foot on a rock in a river isn’t a death sentence, and even though your dumb relatives who think climate change is a hoax think that crime is out of control because of shoplifting, crime is actually going down, with violent crime on a decline for a while now — with stories as far back as 2000 citing constant decline year after year that we’ve only seen more of since. 

Nostalgia for a time when things were “simpler” is a normal part of the human experience, because people (who didn’t experience daily and consistent traumas as a child) look back on that period of their life as having a simplicity that they do not recognize as false. Failing to acknowledge the inaccuracies of their recollection is the danger; in so doing, one fails to recall the banal wickednesses of the past and learn from them. Each generation remembers the simplicity of their childhood when the time period about which they reminisce saw the AIDS crisis in full bloom, or the quotidian threat of nuclear death sending an entire generation of kids cowering for cover underneath their desks, or every class had several kids who had lost relatives in Vietnam or Korea or Normandy, or undisguised bigotry was 9/10ths of the law, or people were trapped in abusive relationships because of the draconic nature of divorce laws, or … you get the picture. The difference between that kind of nostalgia, which leaves one open to being manipulated into thinking that reversion to the values of a bygone era simply because of coercive aesthetic or ideation (while ignoring its attendant prejudices), and the kind that pumps out something like, I don’t know, Turbo Kid, can be imperceptible when you’re caught up in the moment. Recent years have shown us that appealing to the nostalgia of the masses in order to draw them to the banner of political hatred in the name of their lionization of a false past can be effective. The algorithm can take your dad from watching reruns of Barney Miller straight into Kyle Rittenhouse apologism pretty damn fast, so there’s not not a reason to be concerned about, say, a 15-years-later sequel to a 19-years-later sequel to a trilogy of classics (your mileage may vary). Of course, when that nostalgia trip has the cathartic element of watching Nazis get absolutely fucking wrecked for two and a half hours, who am I to say that it’s wrong? 

It’s summer 1969, and the now elderly Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is a professor of archaeology at Hunter College in New York. His days of dashing adventures against the footsoldiers of the Third Reich and defying death in search of ancient treasures to unearth are long over, and in a world whose focus is on the future (embodied in the presence of a ticker tape parade for the returning Apollo 11 astronauts and counterposed by the apathy of his students for his historical lectures), he’s a man stuck in the past. His personal life is also rocky, as he’s estranged from wife Marion (Karen Allen) for reasons that become clear later, and his seemingly forced retirement from Hunter College means he will no longer have academia to fill his empty days. Enter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), Indy’s godchild and daughter of heretofore unmentioned friend Basil Shaw (Tobey Jones). At the tail end of WWII, the elder Shaw and a digitally de-aged Indy had an encounter with Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) during which they came into possession of half of Archimedes’s Antikythera, a kind of orrery that was theorized to be capable of charting rifts in time. Helena’s reappearance in Jones’s life is to acquire the artifact, and hot on her trail is the still-living Voller, having presumably made his way to the U.S. as a part of Operation Paperclip. Thus ensues several multi-party chases and races against time to reach the other half of the dial before Voller and his henchmen (Olivier Richters and Boyd Holbrook) can use it to change the outcome of WWII. Indy is aided in this by help from old friends that we know like Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) and those we don’t like Renaldo (Antonio Banderas), while Helena has her own Short Round-style sidekick in Teddy Kumar (Ethann Isidore), and all are pursued by CIA agent Mason (Shaunette Renée Wilson). 

I was looking forward to a real treat when Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out. I grew up watching the original movies, but some of my earliest memories are also of watching not only the now largely forgotten Young Indiana Jones Chronicles but also the enduring image of Kermit as Indiana Jones in The Muppet Babies. When that Crystal Skull trailer came out, I was naively exhilarated for what I thought was to come, and when I went to see it, on my birthday, it was perhaps one of the great media-related disappointments of my life. (I know that film has had some late-stage revisionist reappraisal in recent years, but not from me.) Having been burned on that stove before, I was more reticent about this one, especially with septuagenarian Ford being called back into service to perform a duty in which, from all appearances in Crystal Skull, he had no interest. There were no weeks of anticipation, just a realization that it had been released and a midday holiday weekend expectation of a moderate amount of thrills. Perhaps this says more about how low my expectations were than about the quality of the film overall, but I was pleasantly surprised overall. The opening sequence in 1944 is a bit prolonged, but I was less put-off by the uncanny nature of the de-aged Ford to play a younger Jones than by other recent abominations, and I appreciated the grafting of Waller-Bridge’s character into the story quite a lot. I’m sure that many of the reviews popping up online are already spouting all the usual aphorisms and cliches that every manchild says about a self-possessed woman in a movie (here’s a tip: if you hear someone say that she’s annoying and that person is also the most annoying person you know, those things are not as disconnected as they may seem). I find her rather likable, and she adds a bit of flair to the proceedings as someone who is solely concerned with opportunities to cash in on her father’s research and no regard for history as anything other than a means to an economic end. This could go too far, but the inclusion of Teddy humanizes her and makes her seem more impishly roguish than her initial monetary focus makes her seem. Even the child actor is pretty good, and that’s rare praise from me. 

If there are any complaints, it’s that the film runs a little long. Every chase scene is, frankly, excellent, with the only real set-piece that felt like “too much” being the swarm of eels that Indie must face while diving for a map on the floor of the Aegean Sea, and even that is, at the very least, visually distinctive from any other action sequence seen before in this franchise. It feels true to the spirit of the franchise and the character in a way that Crystal Skull barely attempts; one would expect there to be more fanservice-y elements present, but all the nostalgia factor was largely used up in the last movie, meaning that this one had to do some real lifting, and it does. The CGI on Ford’s face is apparent, but all of the other sequences feel real and practical (other than the horse chase through the subway, admittedly). The sins of Crystal Skull may never be fully painted over, but this one does a pretty good job, and even has a truly ludicrous final action sequence that strides up to the line of cartoonish but falls back at the perfect second, which is a lot of fun. I don’t know that you need to rush out and see it since the current timeline of theater-to-home-release is so short now, but if you need to get out of the heat and into a cold, air-conditioned vehicle for a while, at 154 minutes that never get boring, this one’s a pretty solid choice. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond