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

Lagniappe Podcast: Richard III (1995)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Ian McKellen’s 1995 anachronization of Shakespeare’s Richard III, set in an alternate-history fascist Britain.

00:00 Welcome

02:00 Stephen King miniseries
08:28 There’s Something Wrong with the Children (2023)
10:00 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)
15:15 Asteroid City (2023)
18:03 Oink (2023)
21:00 65 (2023)
27:30 Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

32:12 Richard III (1995)

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

Asteroid City (2023)

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There’s something about the way that people have been reacting to the sudden appearance of A.I.-generated “art” that makes me sad. Not because I think that it’s “coming for my job” or because I think it can replace art made by human beings (it definitely can’t, no matter how many attempts your preferred media monopoly makes in order to try to make that happen), but because it once again reveals just how unbelievably stupid a lot of people are, or perhaps how lacking they are in that ineffable quality we might call “a soul.” Specifically, I’m talking any person who looked at any of the A.I.-generated trailers for movies within the past couple of months and then reposted it on social media. Some did it with a dire warning that this braying abomination heralded the death of artistic careers, others relished in the lizard brain delight of watching an algorithm shuffle a deck of Star Wars images into a deck of almost-but-not-quite-accurate Wes Anderson references and create a nightmare. To take a quick diversion, think about all of the fairy tales that you read as a kid in which some clever boy or girl defeated something wicked posing as a human because they recognize the villain’s otherworldly bizarreness and think out a method to outwit them. What I’m trying to say is that there were a lot of eyeballs on these monstrosities and an awful lot of people failed to recognize the fundamental inhumanity of the image with which they were presented. Nothing is real, nothing is convincing, and it’s like people have no real interest in being convinced. 

Into all of this comes a real Wes Anderson film, and one which plays with the concept of narrative and nesting stories. It also deals with the nature of separation, distance, and isolation. Software can’t do that because software doesn’t get lonely; software is never tempted to give their ex-boyfriend another chance; software never had to figure out how to deliver bad news. Software doesn’t have to go into quarantine for a time that ends up stretching to the horizon, and software doesn’t understand how that kind of thing might make one lose their grip on reality, and software really, really can’t grasp why people might come out of the other side of that with a song in their heart and a spring in their step. 

Asteroid City is a play, being performed for a broadcast over the air in the days of pre-color TV. It’s also the name of the tiny desert settlement in which the play takes place. The TV program host (Bryan Cranston) introduces us to this setting through the use of stage directions, which include a hand-painted mountain backdrop, an eternally incomplete elevated highway on-ramp as a permanent testament to the apparent insignificance of the place, a diner, a mechanic, a motor court with individual cabins, and, most importantly, a meteorite (and its attendant scientific complex). Each of these elements is first presented as stage dressing before we enter the full color world of the narrative itself, complete with proportion shift in addition to the Wizard of Oz-esque transition between the world of the artificial mundane and the imaginative sublime … which is somewhere that shouldn’t be that interesting, and yet it is. That is, perhaps, the point. Asteroid City the place shouldn’t be anything special; it’s the tiny little nowhere that, in a film with broader, more mainstream appeal, we would only see as a crane or drone shot as our protagonist dashes through it so that we can see that they are leaving everything behind through the visual language of them speeding away from the last outcropping of civilization into a desert of the unknown. For Anderson, this isn’t fly-over (or drive-through) country; this inhospitable specimen is made hospitable, and fascinating. 

Within the play, Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) is, like Chas Tenenbaum before him, a widower who has not yet figured out how to tell his children that their mother has died. He and his four kids—teen genius Woodrow (Jake Ryan) and girl triplets Andromeda, Pandora, and Cassiopeia—find themselves stranded in Asteroid City when their car breaks down, and Augie calls his father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks) to collect the girls. The town was already the final destination for Augie and Woodrow, however, as the boy is a finalist for a scholarship prize in the Junior Stargazer convention, as a result of his invention of a device that allows one to project an image onto the moon. There, he falls in puppy love with another finalist, Dinah (Grace Edwards), whose mother happens to be famous actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), with whom the emotionally raw Augie finds some connection and solace. The play itself has a huge cast, including an entire class of children on a field trip with their teacher (Maya Hawke), a singing cowboy who seeks to woo her, three other finalists with their own strange inventions (including death rays, jet packs, and brand new elemental particles), the meteor science team leader Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) – honestly, too many names to name without essentially reciting the IMDb page. And that doesn’t include the “outer” layer of “reality,” which features not only the aforementioned host, but also stage director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), his wife Polly (Hong Chau in a brief but memorable scene), and the actress who would have played Augie’s wife in a flashback if that scene hadn’t been cut in the final draft (Margot Robbie). And that’s not even the half of them. 

Asteroid City is a matryoshka doll of stories, like a few of Anderson’s recent works. He’s always had an obvious talent for creating a sort of tableau within itself and an intentionality in his evocation of stage elements for the purpose of drawing attention to the artificiality of the form. There’s an escalation of it here that I really love, because the inherent staginess of Asteroid City and the way that it gives way to the vibrant “real” Asteroid City is a beautiful externalization of what we mean when we talk about the suspension of disbelief. I recently ranted in my There’s Something Wrong with the Children review about how far (that is, not very) most modern audiences are willing to extend their patience for narratives that require more than 25% attentiveness, and along comes this movie with imagery that illustrates this exact idea. Art can sometimes merely be evocative and then transport you to some distant place; it’s your choice to stay trapped in the Platonic cave staring at the set decoration, or you can choose to transcend the limited ability of painted flats to stand in for an open sky and just see the sky. Any text with which we interact must put in some of the work to meet us halfway, of course, but it’s on us to let go a little and embrace the opportunity to slip these surly bonds and let our spirits soar. 

And soar you will, or at least I did. There is a distinct loneliness that flows out of the screen, and even if Anderson hadn’t confirmed in an interview that the story was informed by COVID, the fact that the play’s third act (and therefore the film’s final act as well) takes place in quarantine makes this all but explicit. There are many scenes in which Augie and Midge talk to each other between cabins, sitting at their respective windows, at once so close that they don’t have to raise their voices to be heard while nonetheless separated by a distinct barrier – a tableau that calls to mind the imagery of early quarantine when these sorts of six-feet-apart casual visitations were the temporary norm. Every character, like every human being on earth, is lonely in his or her own way; Stanley has lost his beloved only daughter, Augie his wife, his children their mother, the schoolteacher her certainty about the order of the cosmos, Schubert his own wife, and the world a brilliant playwright with the death of Asteroid City‘s author, Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). Even quarantined on top of one another in a tiny town, we are all alone, but that’s okay, because we’re all alone together. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

There’s Something Wrong with the Children (2023)

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Kids are scary. I say this as a reformed “I hate kids” person (thanks for helping me see the ignorance of my ways, Tara Mooknee), just to make it clear that I don’t mean it that way, and I don’t mean it in the way that most single-income-no-kids people intend either. Not that I think kids are great, either; I moved into a small multi-household complex of single bedroom units intentionally because it greatly reduces the chance that I will have to see or interact with children, or that I will have to deal with the building’s pool being filled with the shrill sound of kids’ joy all summer long. I also have been heard to bemoan the fact that many places my friends and I used to hang out are now more family-dense; my favorite cafe, once a place of refuge and Sunday morning recovery over greasy breakfast tacos, now hosts a kids band (in the Wiggles sense, not the Jackson 5 sense) on some Sundays. If you’re unlucky enough that you pick the wrong time to go to one of my favorite outdoor watering holes that happens to have a great burger truck, pupal humans range freely and run around in the gravel despite the placards at each table asking patrons to mind their children, with the reminder “We are still technically a bar!” But, considering how few of these kids are going to get the chance to grow up, either because they’ve got a date with gun violence destiny or because we’ve got maybe ten years left before widespread crop failure from climate change starves most of us, I have much more pity and sympathy in my heart than disgust these days. What I mean when I say “kids are scary” is that being around other people’s children naturally makes people anxious and nervous, or at least that’s my experience. What if they trip and fall while running past my table at a cafe? Do I suddenly become responsible for their well being? What if the parent thinks I tripped them? What if the kid thinks I tripped them and blames me? Kids are tiny, vulnerable people, but they also have a capability for pure, unfiltered malice that can be creepy as well, and since they’re only just learning how to regulate their emotions and communicate their thoughts, interaction with them can be a minefield. 

There’s Something Wrong with the Children is probably the first film that I’ve ever seen that captures that particular unease. Childless couple Margaret (Alisha Wainwright) and Ben (Zach Gilford) are on a glamping trip with Margaret’s best friend Ellie (Amanda Crew), her husband Thomas (Carlos Santos), and their children, upper elementary aged Lucy (Briella Guiza) and younger boy Spencer (David Mattle). Each couple has their own issues; a recent experimentation with swinging has rendered Ellie and Thomas emotionally raw, and while Margaret remains supportive of her husband despite his ongoing struggles with his mental health, that very issue makes her hesitant to start a family with him, especially as it recently cost him a job. The scenes in which we spend time with these characters, to bear witness to their chemistry and the way that they feel comfortable with and play off of one another, is time well spent, unlike in many such films where such exposition feels forced and long-winded. There’s something very natural about the casual, easy way that they all interact that lends the film a level of verisimilitude that makes what comes next that much more wrenching. On a hike, the sextet finds some ruins which they enter and explore, eventually stumbling upon a circular pit that descends so deep into the earth that the bottom is invisible, and even a rock dropped into it never seems to hit bottom. The two kids are immediately entranced by it, with Spencer even calling it the place where light comes from, despite the fact that there’s no light inside of it, and Ben has to catch the boy before he falls/steps into the hole. That night, Margaret offers to let the kids spend the night in the cabin she and Ben are occupying, so that Thomas and Ellie can have some romantic time, and the latter couple accepts. Although the kids exhibit some odd behavior (at one point, Spencer hisses at Ben like some kind of animal when the latter refuses to take the boy back to the ruins that night), it’s chalked up to their age and dismissed pleasantly enough. The next morning, the kids aren’t in the bedroom, and Margaret and Ben both begin looking for them, with Ben jogging back up the previous day’s hike path to the ruins to see if the kids are there; he finds them standing at the precipice, and to his dismay, they leap into its maw. Horror-stricken, he returns to the camp in shock, unsure of how to tell the others the awful truth… only for the kids to come running out of their parents’ cabin, seemingly perfectly healthy. 

Ben’s discomfort and, later, terror throughout Act II is palpable, and felt very real to me. Being responsible for someone else’s child, especially for those of us who don’t have a lot of experience with children (I didn’t even “get” other kids when I was a kid), can create a real sense of dread, especially when there’s a possibility of danger. I never had any younger siblings but when I was a teenager, I would babysit my younger twin cousins, who were 7 or 8 at the time. Both of them were much more energetic and rebellious than I could really handle (one of them I found riding her bike down the street during her nap, having climbed out of her window in a tantrum). Although many of my friends have had children in the intervening years and I’ve spent lots of time with those kids and even been a godparent, I’ve still never really gotten the hang of kids; it’s my great hope that my goddaughter sees me like Daria’s cool aunt, but I get the feeling that my discomfort with children comes through and I’m just like Seven of Nine with every child that I encounter. The only thing I do seem well-suited for that some real parents struggle with is understanding where the things that they verbalize may come from. I’ve seen countless listicles over the years that gather various “creepy” things that kids have said to their parents, and I can see how a child talking about an imaginary friend in an unclear way can make people who grew up reading Scary Stories to Read in the Dark interpret their child’s imaginative play as being spooky or ghostly. Although I think a basic understanding of child psychology explains these little creepy tidbits away, I understand the knee-jerk fright response as well. Children are pure id, have no filter, possess limited language skills, and are learning about the world, so they can say shit that sounds like it’s coming out of the mouth of the devil himself while looking like innocence incarnate, but that’s not really uncommon or even abnormal. This also contributes to the paranoia at the heart of Ben’s narrative arc: he never doubts that what he’s experiencing is objectively real, but everyone around him does and we in the audience must as well. Maybe the kids are possessed, or he could just as easily be having a psychological break that is making the common (but not not creepy) behavior of children seem like malicious supernatural evil. 

Of course, being a Blumhouse movie, the children are possessed. Both child actors do quite well in their roles, with Spencer as the more impulsive of the two while Lucy’s malevolence is more restrained; their evil rictus grins are very effective, and the way that they can turn from tauntingly wicked to simpering victims depending upon the audience is very scary. Working in tandem, they first make Ben appear to be losing his self-control and sense of reality, then they frame him for violent behavior. There’s a midstream protagonist swap here as the story then moves to focus more on Margaret, as she watches her husband (seemingly) lose his mind and attack her best friend’s kids, and then the film becomes a more standard cabin-in-the-woods scare flick as the adults are separated and picked off one by one until only Margaret is left standing to try and escape. Surprisingly, this tonal shift actually worked rather well for me; up to that point, I was definitely experiencing Ben’s discomfort with the situation, but wasn’t fully won over by the film. Normally the psychological elements are what are more fascinating to me, but once the ball gets rolling with more traditional horror scares, my estimation of the movie was kicked up a notch or two, and Margaret makes for a compelling final girl, especially once Ben becomes fairly catatonic from the horrors of what he’s witnessed. 

This is director Roxanne Benjamin’s sophomore feature, but if her name sounds familiar to you, you may remember her segment Don’t Fall from the anthology film XX. There’s Something Wrong with the Children feels like a more successful attempt at telling that story, which also featured a group of campers stumbling across something otherworldly and one of them becoming inhabited by something evil and then killing the others, but that’s not a criticism. Don’t Fall, because of its brevity, was naturally more scant on characterization, which is one of this film’s strengths; when the relationships between the adults start to fall apart because of the deceptive activity of whatever has a hold on the children. I also really like the choice to have the ruins in this film be something constructed relatively recently; the hikers don’t come upon a sacred burial ground or (as in Don’t Fall) an ancient cave painting warning of some primordial evil. This is a post-colonial structure built from familiar brick and mortar, which the adults theorize may have been a factory that was part of the fur trapper trade or a decommissioned and abandoned military site. There’s a symmetry between the way that the building has been grown over with plants and vegetation and the way that this bottomless pit seems to have wormed its way up into this building, like a long-buried secret that forced its way up in the same way that weeds pop up through cracks in sidewalk. The mystery of the pit’s origin is never explained, nor are we given solid information about what exactly Lucy and Spencer brought back with them. There’s something vaguely insectoid about the kids after their transformation, as sometimes their shadows exhibit Caelifera like wings and heads, and the “secret language” that the two use with each other from that point forward sounds like cicada song, but they’re also clearly demonic in nature as well. There’s some fun foreshadowing of that in all of this as well, from a metal shirt that Ellie wears with the word “devil” on it, to Spencer and Lucy’s fascination with some kind of customizable card game and especially Lucy’s mention of her favorite card, which depicts a serpentine god that devours souls, to Ben’s gift to Spencer of the juggling sticks colloquially referred to as “devil sticks,” to the cartoony triangular cat ears on the hood of Lucy’s red jacket, which also resemble horns. Yellow mountain pansies also play a role somehow, but it’s left mysterious as well. 

Of course, this is yet another one of those films which has seen a huge backlash of 1-star, complaint-filled, repetitive negative reviews. I’m almost to the point in my life where I feel like the blurb reviews from the general public are an algorithmically-driven outrage manufacturing experiment to make me hate young people by exaggerating the stereotypes about their expectations and attention spans. One reviewer really had the gall to say “The movie had a lot of unnecessary conversations and plot points,” which is an almost perfect distillation of the addle-brained post-“Why didn’t the eagles just fly the ring to Mordor?” discourse that’s so common now. That’s what the movie is, my guy. The conversations aren’t unnecessary; they’re the point. “Money would of [sic] been better off going to the homeless,” another person wrote, while another review reads “It absolutely didn’t explain the whole reason of [sic] the children being Psycho about holes [sic] at all.” A slightly more positive review reads “Nothing is [sic] this movie is explained to the viewer that gives us knowledge [sic] to know why things are happening.” This unwillingness to accept ambiguity feels like a bigger issue than just some bad reviews on the internet, to be honest; this feels like some real “decline of empire” shit. For me, the well-like shape of the pit and the supposed glow within it called to mind Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space, so in my mind I’m like “Oh, it’s inexplicable and eldritch,” and then I just enjoy the movie. Even if you don’t subscribe to that interpretation, there’s plenty of devilish symbolism, but you’re not going to catch Ellie’s t-shirt or Lucy’s jacket or the dialogue about the card game if you’re only half-watching the movie with your fucking phone in your hand. The movie is only “boring” to you because you’ve been taking psychic damage from a commercially corrupted, consumption driven internet for the past fifteen years. 

Diatribe over (for now). I’ve had this one on the backburner for a little while now, and when a friend’s birthday night swim was called off because of severe thunderstorms, it was the perfect atmosphere for this viewing. If you can’t recreate that exactly, I recommend getting as close to it as you can, put your phone on the charger in the other room, and enjoy.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Prefab Story (1979)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Czech New Wave whatsit Prefab Story (1979), an experimental ensemble-cast drama about infinite urban construction from Věra “Daisies” Chytilová

00:00 Welcome

02:30 Until the Light Takes Us (2008)
09:27 The Last Starfighter (1984)
20:12 The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari (2022)
25:53 Arrietty (2010)
26:53 Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)
31:50 The Flash (2023)

39:57 Panelstory, or Birth of a Community (1979)

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

Arrietty (2010)

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It comes up here from time to time, but my favorite fictional thing is a story about tiny people in a normal sized world. I’ve talked about my childhood love of Honey I Shrunk the Kids and how that translated into a fondness for the (first two) Ant-Man movies, but a lot of it can be traced back to my utter absorption into one specific series of novels I read in my youth: The Borrowers, by Mary Norton. There’s nothing more magical to me than tiny beings using normal-sized objects in novel ways: the knight from a chess set as a kind of decorative bust; a watch, sans band, hung on a wall as a clock; a postage stamp framed as a piece of art. I never understood why those books were so much less well known than other fantasy novels of the same ilk, and I never could figure why Arrietty Clock, who was just about the coolest girl in the world, was less famous than Lucy Pevensie, Dorothy Gale, Pippi Longstocking, or Wendy Moira Angela Darling. There have been numerous adaptations over the years, but one of the best came out when I was too busy with grad school to take note of it, but I finally have, and it’s a delight. 

Arrietty was released in Japan in 2010 before seeing a U.K. release the following year and U.S. distribution through Disney in 2012, under the title The Secret World of Arrietty. I refuse to call it that (can you imagine if The Wizard of Oz was titled Dorothy’s Secret World or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was called The Secret World of Lucy?), but I do want to list it here for those of you who will want to seek it out for your own enjoyment. I’ll also recommend that, since the film is available on HBOMax in both the original Japanese and the U.S. English version, that you check it out in its original language, in spite of my love for Carol Burnett, who voices the Haru equivalent in the English dub. I was particularly fascinated to see this adaptation, which sets the story in (seemingly) 1980s Japan rather than Edwardian England, as I’ve always thought of this as a quintessentially English story, like Mary Poppins or the Narnia series, and although the idea of updating the setting to the U.S. seems heretical to me, I knew the Studio Ghibli aesthetic would more than make up for any displacement. 

Arrietty is a fourteen-year-old girl who lives with her mother Homily and father Pod. The three of them are “borrowers”: humanoid beings of 4-5 inches in height, who live alongside and parallel to full-sized humans. The former survive by “borrowing” from the latter, whom they call “human beans,” keeping themselves hidden and their existence secret. As the story opens, Arrietty has finally reached an age when she is to be taken on her first borrowing expedition into the home of an older woman named Sadako, who lives with her housekeeper Haru and who has recently taken in her great nephew Shō, a boy roughly Arrietty’s age who suffers from a heart condition. In the novel, Arrietty’s family lived in the base of a clock (hence their surname there), but here, they live largely beneath the house in a beautifully detailed home of their own; they access the larger house through a series of secret holes that are accessible only to them because of their size, although the passageways between them require a bit of exploration and adventure to navigate, and vermin like rats pose a threat to them. Shō spotted Arrietty in the garden when he first arrived and is fascinated by her, and he startles her when she and her father are on one of their expeditions, causing her to drop a precious sugar cube, which the Borrowers are forced to forsake. Shō further attempts to befriend Arrietty, with whom he shares both a profound loneliness and a deep melancholy, as she is likely to be among the last of her kind and has never known anyone other than her parents, while he has spent his short life as an invalid with few friends and little hope for a future despite an upcoming operation. Despite his best intentions, however, their friendship endangers the Borrower family in ways that neither could have predicted. 

This is not a perfect translation of the novel(s), but it is a marvelous and lovely example of how to translate a denser text for the screen. Some changes are small; I already mentioned above that the family lives in a crawlspace rather than a mantel clock, but there are also character changes that shift the story subtlely, and not for the worse. Shō is much friendlier from the outset than the unnamed boy in the novel, who has a bit of the old British superiority complex despite having been raised mostly in India; that is completely removed here, as is the fact that he had little English literacy as a result of having lived abroad. In the novel, it is this fact and Arrietty’s willingness to read to him that helps the two to bond, while here, the things that he does for the Borrowers he does purely out of the goodness of his heart. There are also fewer Borrowers here and the Clock family’s isolation is more profound as a result; Pod mentions to his daughter that there used to be others of their kind elsewhere in the house but that they have either moved on or been killed. The Clock’s relatives like Uncle Hendreary (Pod’s brother) who are rumored to have moved to a nearby badger sett and the boy’s attempts to transmit letters between the two families are cut, which also adds to the textual richness of the questions regarding any other Borrowers out there in the world; until we meet feralish Borrower Spiller later in the film, we’re unsure whether Arrietty and her family are the last of her kind, deepening her kinship with Shō. This also eliminates a lot of the squabbling between the various Borrowers, which is a fun comedic element in the novels as they get into rather large rows for such tiny specimens but makes for a more concise narrative here. 

But what’s most impressive here, of course, are the visuals. The backdrops are painted with that lovely Ghibli precision, and the style lends itself well to creating the sumptuous verdancy of an ivy-draped garden from the perspective of a four-inch teenager. Because Arrietty and her family are so tiny, the idiosyncrasies of every teacup, sideboard, and wainscot are terrifically magnified, and all of it is lovingly rendered in gorgeous detail. Great attention is paid to smaller characteristics as well; in one scene, Homily pours tea for her family, and it comes out in (relatively) huge globs because of the surface tension of the water, a characteristic that carries over to the behavior of rain in a different beautifully animated section of the narrative. A glob of cheese on toast, likewise, does not flatten, but retains its bead-like shape. All of these details combine to make the film incredibly immersive, and it’s all the more to its benefit. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Flash (2023)

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Hello there, reader! Because of the nature of this movie, the seemingly endless stream of (alleged) criminal acts that the lead star continues to perform, and the fact that a nearly-completed movie starring and helmed by creators of color was shelved for back asswards financial reasons while this one was still released to the general public despite starring an (alleged) criminal, I have chosen to forego a star rating for this film to prevent even the appearance of advocating for you to contribute to its box office or rental take. I myself had no intention of seeing this movie and contributing to it monetarily, but for reasons I cannot disclose, I was able to see it on opening weekend, and Warner Bros. footed the bill. For reasons of legal disavowment, I must reiterate that Swampflix and its affiliates do not endorse piracy, and the fact that I am bringing this up here is not a playful endorsement for pirating this film⸮ Wait, shit, what does that punctuation mark mean? I’ve never seen it before! Anyway, on with The Flash!

When I recently had the good fortune to visit with our fearless leader Brandon in real life recently, he recited a piece of wisdom that I’ve heard him voice before: CGI ages like milk. I don’t disagree, but in the case of today’s film, the CGI arrived rancid upon delivery, and the fact that it did so means that this film has no right to exist in the form that it does. I’m going to reference two pieces of media that, based on box office, Nielsen numbers, and anecdotal evidence in the form of responses to my general questions, you’ve probably never seen: 2013’s regrettable Sam Raimi Baum adaptation Oz the Great and Powerful Movie and the 2019 sexy Spanish drama series Toy Boy. In regards to the latter, the opening sequence of the show contains scenes from within the narrative, but with the characters and all surfaces rendered as if they are made of glazed ceramics (see it here, although it’s possible NSFW for sexy reasons); in the former, there is a character named the China Girl, an animate, living porcelain doll who joins the protagonist’s journey (see a clip here, although it’s possible NSFW for James Franco reasons). The reason that I bring these up is because what these two things are doing in earnest The Flash does blindly, blanketly, and with no remorse; so, so, so many of the images that we see here look like soulless, shiny mannequins as those glazed figurines that a certain generation of our elders collected. Some of the time, it could be argued, that the images are supposed to look like that (we’ll get to the time arena in a minute), but other times, they are clearly not – most notably and frequently, every time we see two different Barry Allens on screen, both played by Ezra Miller, it’s abundantly clear which of the two was played by a stand in upon whom Miller’s visage was pasted, based solely on how nonplastic and uncanny they look. 

I know that Hayley Mills and Lindsay Lohan were never tasked with playing speedsters in their respective Traps, but the technology in the 1990s and the 1960s was more convincing at portraying reunited twins than this movie is at Ezra Miller walking down the street side by side with themself. And the Flash suit! It’s so … bad. Genuinely awful. I went on a bit of a tear just now in the middle of writing this to see if I could find any behind-the-scenes photos of Miller in the suit on set, and there are none, which almost makes it seem to me like they were never in the full suit on set at all, which would in turn explain why it never looked “real” for a single moment that it was on screen. And I’m not just talking every time that there was a fight scene and everything immediately started to look exactly like a super move from Injustice 2, but every time Barry was just standing around doing comedic bits, the suit looked like someone trying to 3-D animate amphibian skin and doing a poor job of it. Ryan Reynolds’s Green Lantern was at least supposed to look the way that it did; this one looks like a mistake that they decided to go ahead and leave in, which makes it completely bananas that this film was released in this form with this lead performer. It boggles the mind that executives were considering recasting the part of Barry Allen because of Miller’s (allegedly) many, many (alleged) crimes and then decided that they didn’t need to, because this looked good enough to put on the big screen. Bananas! Bananas!

Narratively, the film takes its inspiration from the comic Flashpoint, which was released in 2011 as a way to reset the status quo for DC comics, leading into a new continuity that was, in theory, supposed to make the material more accessible to new readers and thus increase circulation. In most recent versions of the Flash comic-book canon, he’s driven by the fact that his mother was killed when he was a child and his father was arrested and (wrongly) convicted of her murder. Since it’s been part and parcel of the whole Flash deal for a while that he can run so fast that he can either travel through time using his speed outright or by access to something called the Speed Force (let’s not get bogged down in those details), it occurs to Barry Allen to try and prevent the murder of his mother, leading to unforeseen consequences on the timeline. If you’re sure you’ve never read that story but it still sounds familiar, it’s because it also formed the basis of the third season of CW’s The Flash, which just finished its ninth and final season, or perhaps you saw the animated direct-to-video film Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox sometime since its release in 2013. It’s not exactly new territory at this point, is what I’m saying. We get an opening sequence that exists solely to trot out a couple of characters that we’ve seen before and establish that Barry sees Bruce Wayne/Batman as his mentor and that Bruce isn’t necessarily unwelcoming of the younger man but retains his normal aloofness; all of this is here to establish the status quo that they’re going to demolish completely before this movie is over. 

When it looks like Barry’s father (Ron Livingston) is about to lose his appeal, Barry takes off into the past to make one simple change: to make sure his mother (Maribel Verdú, one of the best parts of the film) doesn’t forget to pick up tomatoes at the supermarket the morning the day that she dies, so that his father isn’t absent when someone finds her in a house that they assumed would be empty. As Barry returns to the present, he sees how the wings of that butterfly have affected his life but, before he gets there, something else invades the Speed Force and knocks him out of his time bubble, straight into 2013, on the same day that he was initially struck by lightning and gained his powers. Only this time, since his parents are alive and Barry grew up with a happy childhood, he wasn’t driven to go into forensics to one day learn something that would help him clear his father’s name, so he won’t be in that police lab, so Barry has to take the younger version of himself—differentiated from Present!Flash by nothing more than his longer hair—to the lab to make sure that this happens, which results in the loss of his own powers. Past!Flash, lacking the maturity that Present!Flash had at the same age, grates against the older version of himself, who in turn has to give his younger self a crash course in Being the Flash 101 while powerless and stunned to learn that his little time travel event has affected things that happened even before the changes that he made, including that Eric Stoltz played Marty McFly in Back to the Future as originally cast (a gag that Fringe did once), which resulted in Michael J. Fox taking the leading role in Footloose, which in turn caused Kevin Bacon to play Maverick in Top Gun. Another of the changes he caused is that there are no other metahumans in this timeline, so there’s no one present to stop the Kryptonian invasion led by General Zod (Michael Shannon) that is happening concurrently, but unlike in Man of Steel, there’s no Superman here to stop them. There does happen to be a Batman, so the two Barries seek him out at Wayne Manor, only to find that he’s not the man that Present!Barry has come to know, literally. 

I’m about to reference another piece of media that I’m almost entirely certain you’ve never heard of: a 1984 desktop computer game titled Bouncing Babies, which I played on the very first computer that our family owned (I’m not that old, we were just that poor). In the game, wave after wave of babies are thrown from a burning building, and the player controls a group of paramedics who use a trampoline to bounce the falling babies into the back of an ambulance. The opening action scene of this film is … that? While Batman (Ben Affleck … for now) is embroiled in a high speed chase, Flash is called upon to help prevent the collapse of a hospital that was damaged; this hospital, as it happens, keeps all of the babies in a nursery on the top floor, and when one of the building wings collapses, they all go flying out of the broken windows as the building loses its bearings, and Flash has to whip around on all of the falling debris and such as they fall. One never feels that there’s a real threat, of course, since it’s PS4 Injustice 2 Flash running around saving PS4 Injustice 2 babies, but it’s a fun sequence nonetheless, and that’s something worth noting throughout the film: these are the best action cutscenes from a video game that you’ve ever seen, but there will never be a single moment that you think to yourself that you’re having a cinematic experience. 

And on top of all that, since this is a multiversal story, they end up bringing in soulless CGI golems made in the images of George Reeves and Christopher Reeve as their respective versions of Superman, staring out of the screen like they’re waiting for you to press start to open the game menu; there’s even a bit where a digitally de-aged (or a digitally everythinged) Nicolas Cage fights a giant spider, which was a major point of contention in the direction of the never-finished Superman Lives, with the implication being that there was a timeline in this multiverse where the narrative of that aborted film played out. It’s really banking on your nostalgia factor, which it has to, because while there have been a few good (or at least fun) eggs in this weird DCEU basket of mostly stinkers, there’s nothing iconic in any of these movies onto which one could anchor any meaningful moments. That they went back to the General Zod’s invasion well is very telling here. And if you somehow haven’t been spoiled on one of the big reveals in this movie (the best one, to be honest), I’m not going to ruin that for you here, but to pretend that it’s anything other than a great big nostalgia grab would be pathologically dishonest. 

There’s so much wrong with this movie. The (allegedly) criminal star, an utterly inconsequential love-story plot tumor, the way that Miller plays Barry not so much like someone who’s done some deep actor work on portraying a neurodivergent person as much as they play him like a bully mocking a neurodivergent classmate, the endless parade of ceramic fight sequences, and the way they managed to make poor Helen Slater look like a Lifeforce zombie (that woman deserves better than this, dammit). And yet … and yet …. Twice during this movie I leaned over to my viewing companion: first, during the sequence that adapted Bouncing Babies to the screen, I leaned over and said, with surprise, “I’m … enjoying this?” Later, during yet another action sequence, I said “I hate how much I’m enjoying this.” And, as we left the theater, I confessed: “I regret to inform you of this, but I had a great time.” However, I am once again advising that I do not endorse that you see it, at least not in any way that could contribute to the film financially. If your kids are demanding to watch it, now is the perfect time to trick them into watching the 1990s show starring John Wesley Schipp (I’m not going to link it, but a quick search shows that it’s on YouTube right now, probably illegally), and that will cost you nothing and buy you enough time to Google “how to talk to your family about Ezra Miller” and then just bide your time until this film becomes available in a way that’s free to you. Apropos of nothing, do you have a VPN? I use ExpressVPN, and I love it! (Not sponsored.)

Because yes, dear reader, it’s true, I do regret to inform you that I had a great time. I’m sorry that I saw it in a way that didn’t contribute to the coffers of the Pharisees that canceled Batgirl and that you don’t have that option available to you (yet). Just be patient. You’ll get to look into Superman’s dead eyes soon enough. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Curve (1998)

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CW/TW: Suicide, throughout

On a recent episode of the Lagniappe podcast, I mentioned that I had recently watched the abysmal 2000 Cersei Lannister/Norman Reedus vehicle Gossip, which couldn’t even be saved by an appearance from Edward James Olmos and starrings role by two of my sweetest baboos, James Marsden and Joshua Jackson. Luckily, it wasn’t long before I found a more entertaining (if not technically better) tonal analog that fit the bill for trashy-chic urban-legend dark comedy in 1998’s The Curve, playing on a Tubi near you! 

Chris (Michael Vartan) is the token scholarship kid among his friends at a prestigious Ivy League feeder college. He’s working harder with less while his two upper class roommates—utter asshole Rand (Randall Batinkoff) and unmedicated manic pixie nightmare twink Tim (Matthew Lillard)—are able to largely skate by in their courses. Chris needs a 4.0 to qualify not just for entry to Harvard Med but the funding needed to attend, and there’s a B+ in one of his classes that might be the deciding factor in whether or not he moves on to his next academic waypoint for levelling up or faces an unknown fate. When he’s unable to change his grade through cheating or hacking, Tim comes up with a way to make sure that Chris gets the grade; as it turns out, it’s university policy to offer any student whose roommate commits suicide a 4.0 for the semester. Chris balks at this idea at first, but when he witnesses some truly awful behavior from Rand, including verbally abusing and embarrassing his girlfriend Nicole (Tamara Craig Thomas) at a party in front of dozens of people when she was just trying to get him alone to tell him that she was pregnant, he commits. After all, at this point, they’ve already laid the groundwork by gathering material that would lead investigators to no other conclusion than suicide, including Joy Division CDs, Poe novels, and a copy of The Bell Jar, and by planting the idea that he’s been acting differently lately in the mind of Chris’s girlfriend Emma (Keri Russell). Things get more complicated, however, when Rand’s body can’t be found, but Natalie’s is discovered, leading everyone involved to question who they trust, who they believe, and whether they can escape the tangled web they’ve woven alive and free. 

This one was not well received in its time, but I am once again here to tell you that I’ve unearthed another latter day 90s gem that deserves critical re-evaluation. For one thing, the soundtrack is a lot of fun, with original score composition by Shark and rounded out by The Smiths and a catalog of oh-so-1998-tracks by the likes of Unwritten Law, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Aimee Mann, Bauhaus, and, perfectly enough, The Belljars. The number of twists that unveil themselves as the film goes along are successively less believable but exponentially more fun, as the litany of who’s scamming whom, who’s in cahoots with whom, and who really hates whom layers upon itself to the point of absurdity. The real magic here, as it often is, is Lillard, who is absolutely devouring the scenery. Playing on his Stu Macher screwball energy, he’s using it to a much more malicious effect, and not only is it more threatening than one would expect, it’s also hornier, which contributes a lot to the fun factor for me. In one scene, Lillard’s Tim tricks another character into seeing him getting intimate with said character’s girlfriend, and as his body glistens in the candlelight and the camera dollies in on his smug, red-lit face, it’s truly both menacing and magnetic. The other actors are all competent here; Batinkoff isn’t asked to stretch his acting muscles much, nor is Thomas asked to do more than cry and complain, and Russell is, uncharacteristically, a virtual non-entity, phoning it in. Vartan could stand to loosen up a little on camera; he should be the Robert Redford type, a man caught in a conspiracy and trying to get out of it with an everyman charm instead of a James Bondian wit, but instead he’s very stiff and wooden, especially against Lillard’s lithe serpentine business. 

This isn’t a great movie, but it is a fun one, and the perfect thing to put on in the background while you pack for your summer vacation, while visions of Lillard’s threatening abs dance in your dreams.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond 

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2023)

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It hasn’t come up in a while, but I’m a big fan of author Haruki Murakami, having first read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle nearly twenty years ago and having devoured several other novels and short story collections in the years since; in fact, as I write this, I have a copy of his short story collection First Person Singular sitting next to my bed. As such, when I settled into the theater to see Master Gardener, I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was an upcoming screening of a new animated feature that would consolidate several of his short pieces into a single narrative. The common elements of the stories that make up the aforementioned Singular is that they are all from the point of view of an unnamed protagonist, none of whom are the same from piece to piece but all of whom are quintessentially Murakami. Not universally, but among them are people seeking missing cats, characters fascinated by wells, men who share Murakami’s interest in running, people who meticulously cook delicious-sounding meals from simple ingredients, lots of discussion about staying in shape by swimming at the local natatorium, detailed descriptions for the care and upkeep of vinyl records, and, above all, men who yearn. From the lowliest television fee collector’s son to the everyday salaryman to the reclusive artist, all of Murakami’s men yearn — for the lives that they might have lived, for the loves that they never had or that they had and lost, for meaning. I can’t say that it never would have occurred to me that any number of these men could have ever been the same man because, in a way, they were all always Murakami to me, even when they had names, various fractals of the man who has been the weaver of many of the images and ideas that have gotten stuck in the craw of my consciousness over the years. 

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is the great crossover between six different pieces of short fiction, familiar and unfamiliar, and was adapted, produced, directed, and scored by Pierre Földes, who has largely worked previously as a composer; I didn’t recognize his name, but his C.V. contains two melancholic films I recall from my teenage years: L.I.E. and 12 and Holding. The film establishes three major characters: Katagiri, a perpetually overworked and overlooked accountant who lives a lonely life as the result of his inability to bond with others; his colleague Komura, a younger man whose future with the company looks bleak and whose life is further rattled by the sudden departure of his wife Kyoko, who leaves him a note comparing life with him to living with a “chunk of air;” and Kyoko herself who, after several days of watching constant news coverage of the 2011 earthquake, packs her things and leaves. Although the film is divided into numbered chapters, the stories are not discrete but melded together, and done so inventively. Most notably, there is one story that was almost too familiar, an adaptation of the story “The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” which was initially published in 1986 in The New Yorker before appearing as the first story in the 1993 collection The Elephant Vanishes and which was later reworked into the first chapter of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which was published in 1994 in Japan and 1997 in the U.S. Ironically, this actually comprises the final section of the film, placing what has always been treated as an introduction as a conclusion instead. 

Set in 2011 in the wake of that year’s devastating earthquake in Tokyo, most of the narrative follows Komura, with the film opening on his married life to Kyoko at a time just when their marriage is falling apart; for days, she has been unresponsive in front of the TV, watching news coverage of the attempts to save trapped citizens. When Komura is at work, she leaves him, writing a note asking him not to contact her, to look for her cat, and that she is never coming back. This sets up two plot elements: a trip that Komura takes to visit his younger teenage cousin to accompany him for a hospital visit, and a second trip that Komura is encouraged to take by his co-worker Sasaki. The former is the title story from the Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman collection and was originally about an unnamed man who accompanies his cousin to the doctor and takes the opportunity to relate how he would accompany his best friend to visit his girlfriend after an operation and is largely focused on time, daydreams, and recollections; here, this narrative is recast as the story of how Komura and Kyoko met, putting her in the place of the ill girlfriend who settled for Komura when her boyfriend died, at least in this version. The second of these is largely the plot of “UFO in Kushiro,” the first story in after the quake and the story from which Komura’s name is drawn. In it, Komura travels to Kushiro at the behest of his friend to deliver a small, nondescript package, and there he is drawn in by his colleague’s sister Keiko and her friend Shimao, who tries to draw Komura out of his funk. Alongside these two journeys is an adaptation of “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” in which Katagiri (who, it should go without saying, had no connection to Komura in any of the source materials) is visited by a man-sized frog who requests the timid man’s moral support in Frog’s upcoming battle with Worm, the creature who caused the recent earthquake (in the story the January 1995 earthquake) and whose ongoing efforts threaten to fully reduce the city to rubble. Elsewhere, Kyoko relates the story of a strange offer she received on the night of her twentieth birthday, in a story (“Birthday Girl”) also taken from the Blind Willow collection. 

The animation here is unsettling, even when it’s not intended to be. Director Földes apparently filmed the whole thing as a live action “reference” and then covered the heads of the actors with 3D models, which were then traced and animated. Other people who exist in the background or in the space through which our main characters move are thus translucent against the solid background. It’s an image that calls to mind the way that children draw things: a table first, and then the objects on it, so that the table and the wallpaper shine through the phone and the lamp drawn over them, but here it’s not the mark of a child’s process of learning about object permanence and layering images but is instead an evocation of the ephemerality. Whether or not Katagiri’s interactions with Frog are real is left to the interpretation of the reader (or viewer, as is the case here), but this is a world that is haunted, where the people who are not interacted with are ghosts and wisps. I hesitate to call it ugly (although it is, at times) and instead will simply call it unique. That method, combined with the easy pace at which the film progresses, makes the whole thing seem dreamlike. I’m sure that there will be others for whom this feels like a slog, but the film picks up the pace as it progresses, and every part of it feels as if it’s crafted with care, even if the aesthetic is intentionally haphazard. Ironically, however, I think the people least likely to enjoy this may be Murakami fans. Not that the author’s readers are a toxic fandom who will hate this melting together of different stories, but because transforming these from prose to film necessitates the loss of much of the narration that creates the rhetorical space in which his literary mannerisms flourish. His dialogue is still here, however, as is his sense of what makes people “tick,” and I still think it’s well worth visiting for fans and novices alike.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Memories of Murder (2003)

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Bong Joon-ho’s 2003 feature 살인의 추억 (Memories of Murder) is an example of a familiar genre made unfamiliar in its trappings, at least at first. Initially, this is because it is set in the yesteryear of 1986—and, as L.P. Hartley noted in his 1953 novel The Go-Between, “the past is a foreign country” where things are done differently—but also because it takes place in the South Korean city of Hwaseong. It follows two police officers on opposite ends of the scale of corruption who, because of the depravity and darkness of the crimes that they are investigating, eventually exchange places on this spectrum. Detective Park (Song Kang-ho) is local to Hwaseong and is the lead on the investigation into a nascent series of serial assaults and murders on women in the community, and Detective Seo (Kim Sang-kyung) has been sent from Seoul to assist after the discovery of a second body. There’s some jurisdictional friction between the two, including a vigorous discussion about the lack of a national investigative agency like the U.S. has with the FBI. (A useful note here: S. Korea’s National Police Agency wasn’t founded until 1991, and during the time in which this film is set, this would theoretically have fallen under the auspices of the National Security Headquarters, but with Chun Doo-hwan and his junta in power, it’s a wonder that Seo was even sent.) Their biggest difference, however, lies in their approaches. Park may not be as violent or hot-tempered as his partner, another local detective named Cho (Kim Roi-ha), but his apathy about justice is in many ways worse; it’s clear that Cho is driven by his temper and his aggression, while Park’s casual treatment of, for instance, the elicitation of a false confession in order to close the case, demonstrates that performing that kind of quotidian evil is driven by nothing more than the banality of doing one’s job. Seo, in contrast, is more evidence and psychology driven, and sees through Park and Cho’s arrest of an innocent man with developmental disabilities and the rehearsed admission of guilt that he recites in Seo’s presence. 

As I was thinking about how I would open my review while watching the film, a phrase came to mind about how the world that these characters inhabit is so unlike our own, where police brutality is so naked and unafraid, where violence and torture are commonplace means of maintaining the status quo. Then I remembered that we do live in that world. A girls’ school is visited in the film by one of the investigators, and the students there are practicing drills on how to escape from deadly attack and provide each other with first aid in the event of violence on the school grounds. Cho, the very same detective who has a special boot cover for when he is kicking prisoners to avoid leaving obvious marks, grows enraged when a local eatery’s television displays a report about a Seoul officer being indicted for similar actions, and he both destroys the television and physically attacks the students there who cheer on justice being served, protesting too much. Even the “good cop” Seo sits by idly while Park and Cho hang a suspect upside down, only becoming involved when the man says something that provides an epiphanic deduction. Park, an unapologetically bad cop, thinks he has some kind of preternatural sense that allows him to discern when someone is guilty or not, a frightening look into how someone can get the idea that they can sense other people’s spirits and then mete out punishment on them based on their own preconceptions. What Bong was saying in 2003 about both the contemporary present of the film’s production and about the 1986 on which it focused is the same thing that he’s still saying about the distant past, the near past, and today: “Essentially,” he said in 2019, “we all live in the same country called capitalism.” The S. Korea of 2003 is the present United States is S. Korea in 1986, and it’s jackboots all the way down. 

For those who haven’t seen the film, a brief synopsis: Detectives Park and Cho, under orders from Sergeant Shin (Song Jae-ho), partner with Seoul city detective Seo when the body of a woman is found in a roadside culvert, the second victim of a potential serial killer. The two local detectives physically torture Kwang-ho (Park No-shik), their first prime suspect, the mentally handicapped and physically scarred son of a local restaurateur. They take him out to the woods to force him to dig a hole under the pretense that he is digging his own grave if he does not confess, and he does so, into a tape recorder. Seo is not convinced by any of this and, much to Shin’s chagrin, finds evidence that exonerates the man, embarrassing Park and Cho. Seo connects the dots on the fact that both women were murdered in the rain to a missing person case for a woman who also disappeared on a rainy night, and he is able to turn the search to a specific area and a search team finds her body relatively quickly, further driving a wedge between Park and Seo, the former of whom thinks the latter looks down on him as a comparative bumpkin. A trap is laid for the killer the next evening that it rains, but it fails; although Officer Kwon (Go Seo-hee), who was used as bait, fails to draw out the killer, she does discover a link between the nights of the murders, the rain, and a series of postcards to a local radio station that requests the song “Sad Letter” be played when it’s a rainy day. An accidental sting operation at the location where the fourth body was found leads to the arrest of the next prime suspect, Jo (Ryu Tae-Ho), while a follow up on the song requests leads to another, Park Hyeon-gyu (Park Hae-il). Jo is Park’s collar, and he grows infuriated when Seo finds proof of the man’s innocence, once again enraged that his case closure has been torn out of his hands, and Hyeon-gyu is Park’s man, but there’s no solid proof and even some physical evidence that seems to exonerate him. I wouldn’t consider any of this a spoiler, though, because although this is a crime thriller, it’s not a mystery, even though it occasionally wears one’s clothes. 

Like the crime on which it was based (at least at the time of release), the killer is not found in this film. He’s present in the movie, in peripheral glances and blurred visions of final moments, but we never see his face and the police never apprehend him. The final scenes of the film, which take place in 2003, find Park returning to the road where the opening scene took place and staring into the culvert in which the second victim’s body was found, seventeen years older and now a small kitchen appliance salesman. A little girl asks him what he’s doing and tells him that another man was there a few weeks prior, also looking into the same space and, upon being asked, said he was remembering something that he did there a long time before, implying that the killer is still loose, but history ended up proving this one wrong. As it turns out, the Hwaseong serial killer had actually been in prison since 1994, for killing his sister-in-law, and he was prompted to confess to the Hwaseong killings upon the discovery of further DNA evidence to confess in 2019. This doesn’t hurt the film in any way, but I don’t want to leave pedant bait out there in the open like that. 

This movie is beautifully shot, and the action is often kinetic and fun. Clocking in at 2 hours and 10 minutes, I can see how some of the scenes in the middle could feel like the film is going in circles if you don’t have the attention span for a film of that length, but I never felt like the film was spinning its wheels. There are countless independent pieces at play here that add up into a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts. Some of the police violence can be hard to stomach, and without some knowledge of S. Korean politics of the 1980s there are probably some details in the film’s metaphorical filigree that are lost. Even if you don’t, the violence of the police against protestors and students speaks for itself, as does the way that different members of the institution behave, with Cho being more violent than before and Shin growing increasingly furious that his subordinates are disobeying his direct orders to show restraint while they are under the microscope. It’s familiar even if the time and place are foreign to you, because we do all live in one national police state. If you can stomach that, this is a masterpiece you should see as soon as you can. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond