mark boomer redmond

The Nest (2020)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment


The Nest avoids beating a dead horse, but it does bury one. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In this second feature from director Sean Durkin following the 2011 debut showstopper Martha Marcy May Marlene, Rory O’Hara (Jude Law) and his wife Allison (Carrie Coon) move their small family to Rory’s native England from suburban New York, in their fourth move in a decade. Like WW84, this is a mid-eighties period piece, and at first theirs appears to be an ideal Reagan-era nuclear family, with teenage daughter Sam (Oona Roche) and ten-year-old son Ben (Charlie Shotwell) getting along in the way that siblings rarely do. We ultimately learn that the truth is a little messier (Allison was a single mother to Sam when she and Rory met and thus this is a blended family) and that this artifice is purely for the sake of creating a perfect impression to the outside world despite the reality being perfectly normal. The family is fine as it is, but Rory needs it to be more perfect, and like most of the facades that Rory spends so much time building, it’s an unnecessary gilding that endangers the foundation.

When proposing that they return to England so that Rory can go back to work for his old boss Arthur (Michael Culkin), Allison asks him if he’s hiding the truth about the family’s financial situation, with the implication being that it wouldn’t be the first time. Discussing the move with her mother (Wendy Crewson), the older woman tells her to simply trust in her spouse—”It’s not your job to worry, let your husband do that”—and Allison, mirthfully but sincerely, teases her that this is a worrisome ideology. When Allison and the kids arrive at their new home in England, they discover that Rory has rented a positively gigantic mansion, which has grounds on which he promises to build a six-stable barn for Allison’s horse Richmond and promised future stallions and mares, with the implication that Allison can one day resume equestrian instruction, which had been her occupation prior to Rory’s repatriation.

What plays out is, essentially, a dramatic version of the Simpsons episode “You Only Move Twice,” as each member of the family succumbs to negatives in their personal and social lives in their new environment. The long distance that the family must commute into London (it’s a little under an hour’s drive from Surrey to London in 2020 and was likely longer 35 years ago) wreaks havoc on their previous unity, which fell into place with ease in their earlier suburban life. Rory insists his children attend the best private* school, which results in Ben being bullied extensively and Sam spending time with a rougher crowd of local kids, presumably in rebellion against being expected to socialize with her fancypants classmates. Ben and Sam also drift apart, as Ben clings to Sam when their parents are away because the large, empty house frightens him. The house itself also immediately becomes another millstone around the struggling family’s collective neck as it’s too large for them to even furnish, although this doesn’t stop Rory from boasting at parties about their “farm” and the intent to purchase a “pied-à-terre in Mayfair” (a very chintzy part of London’s Hyde Park area) while Allison expresses discomfort with this; whether Rory’s dishonest or delusional, she’s still troubled, as well she should be. Things come to a head when a business deal that Rory is pushing Arthur to sign off on is rejected and Allison’s horse falls ill and collapses while she’s riding him; she has to go to a neighboring farmer for help (i.e., to put Richmond out of his misery) and, because Rory has allowed the phone bill to lapse, he’s unable to let her know that he’s spending the night in London, leaving Allison alone to bear the brunt of it all. The stress drives her to a point of dissociation, in which she declares that everyone in her family has become a stranger to her.

There’s nothing wrong with The Nest. In fact, it falls into my sweet spot of “woman on the verge.” Narratively, the film is solid, as the screenplay deftly weaves in good bits of foreshadowing early on that come into play later. When we first see Rory and Ben interacting, the two are playing soccer with one of Ben’s young friends, and although Rory wins, his son declares that he did so by cheating, demonstrating that Rory doesn’t let anything stand in his way, even when the opponent is his son and the stakes are as low as backyard bragging rights. We also get to see Allison in her element as a horseback riding instructor, where she deftly and calmly handles both the beasts and her clients, collecting their payments without wheedling or the slightest hesitation. She’s better at her job than Rory is at his, and although he’s no Gordon Gecko, he is a member of that deplorable group of eighties businessmen who turn money into more money by moving it around and for whom the impending deregulation (you know, the one that allowed wealth aggregators to plunder the economy of Western society and destroy the middle class) is a cause for celebration.

We are made to sympathize with Rory to an extent, as we’re told about his lousy childhood, including social exclusion and mediocre educational opportunities (which is what prompts him to overcompensate with the enrollments of Ben and Sam), although his mother, while cold, isn’t entirely unreasonable. She accuses Rory of never reaching out to her, and he retorts that she never called him, either, but we in the audience have no reason to disbelieve her complaint that Rory moved so much that she lost track of him. Ben is ten years old at this point and we’re told that this face-to-face reunion between Rory and his mother (orchestrated so that he can ask her for financial assistance) is the first time she’s been made aware that he’s married or that she has a grandson. However, while Rory’s story is tragic, it’s tragic in a classical way, as the ultimate cause of his ruination is not the change in broad social trends, or the dissatisfaction of his family as they overcome their culture shock and become accustomed to this new old world, or even his own poor handling of his emotions in the workplace (he’s allowed to have a lot more outbursts, consequence free, than would be allowed in a contemporary office). It would also be reductive to say that Rory’s life falls apart because of his greed, although that’s certainly part of it. It’s most accurate and honest to say that Rory’s loss comes equally from his unerring adherence to using the successes of others as the yardstick against which he measures himself, even when he could live comfortably within his means, and his devotion to the “fake it until you make it” ideology that has become even more common in the intervening decades. In his attempts to emulate success as part of a campaign to acquire the wealth that he craves and plays at having, he overextends what was likely a perfectly reasonable income, because he thinks that he deserves to have access to the same playground.

As Arthur tells Rory at one point, the latter has mistaken his coincidental success (that is, being in a rising tide that lifted all boats) for genuine intelligence and aptitude, which is simply untrue. He even tells the younger man that striving for a sudden, imminent payday to put paid to all of his current woes is foolish, as he should be striving to build something for himself over time instead of impatiently demanding his success now now now. And this is where the film missteps for me on a conceptual level, as it apparently presents Arthur’s advice about what Rory should do as a kind of blanket truth, when it isn’t. What Rory even does is kept deliberately obscured with industry buzzwords that ultimately mean nothing, and neither he nor Arthur are actually productive; they simply maintain the paradigm of ownership of the means of production and acquire wealth by buying and selling that labor. In case you forgot, labor creates all value, so make sure to write that one down somewhere that you see it every day. Allison’s manual labor that she performs for the neighboring farmer is the only work that we see anyone get any emotional satisfaction from, which isn’t a bad storytelling point, but Arthur’s presentation of the idea that a living wage can be earned simply by living within one’s means, delivered from the last point in Western history when upward social mobility through hard work actually was possible (before it was brought to an end by the very deregulation that Rory worships), misses the mark, although it’s possible that this was intentional and I’m being dense about it.

Like I said, there’s nothing “wrong” with The Nest. The performances are great, as Law effectively plays a man whose charm is so powerful he’s managed to convince even himself that his delusions are true, and he’s magnetic and contemptible in equal turns. You wouldn’t be able to accept a lesser actor in this role without thoroughly hating him, and that’s a testament. He’s also possibly the only actor who has ever managed to make BVD briefs look sexy, and at nearly 50 to boot. Similarly, Carrie Coon’s Allison is pitch perfect (and she’s proper fit, as one of Sam’s rude teenage friends notes). Each interaction contains the perfect amount of emotional distance and intimacy, and Coon is fantastic. By the time she really starts to fall apart, she’s held it together with such aplomb for so long that the audience feels her every revelation with empathetic exhaustion. I also like that there’s no beating around the bush about what the family’s problems are: there’s no infidelity (if anything, the couple’s sex life is the only thing about which they both remain passionate through the entire runtime), and all of the family’s anxieties stem entirely from Rory’s pathological obsession with money.

Outside of the performances, however, the whole thing feels very rote. Allison discovers that Sam has been smoking, but doesn’t confront her about it. Sam throws a rebellious teenage party when she’s supposed to be watching Ben. Ben discovers that his mother’s dead horse is starting to rise from the ground because it was buried improperly and has a little freak out about it (ok, maybe that last one is novel). There’s simply nothing new on the table, and a full throated denunciation of deregulated economics followed by a halfhearted commemoration of a time when a single breadwinner could provide–comfortably if not extravagantly–for a nuclear unit makes for a tonally confused film. Not to bring up Queen of Earth again, but that’s a film in which what’s being attempted here is successfully pulled off: a thriller where all of the violence is emotional and the tension comes from wondering who’s going to break first, and in what way. But where Queen made that work, Nest feels like a pale version that gets by solely on the strength of its performances and its cinematography (which is gorgeous), but which lacks the freakout that would take it to the next level.

*Here using the American definition of “private,” that is, a school which stipulates a hefty tuition and is not available to members of the general public and practices elitism and classism in practice even if it disavows it in theory. In England, the terms are reversed so that “public” schools in the U.K. meet this definition while their use of “private” generally correlates to the American “public,” i.e., state-funded. Yes, it is confusing.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Black Box (2020)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Black Box is the story of Nolan (Mamoudou Athie), a man suffering from amnesia following severe injury in a car crash that also claimed the life of his wife. He struggles with keeping up with the basics, like eating breakfast, making dinner, turning off the coffee pot, and picking up his daughter Ava (Amanda Christine) after school. Although he wants to go back to work as a photojournalist, his editor (Gretchen Koerner) gently rejects his new portfolio, citing both budget cuts and that his work doesn’t have the spark that it used to. After receiving nothing but negative prognoses for the return of his memories from multiple doctors, he’s not very optimistic when his doctor brother Gary (Tosin Morohunfola) recommends he see a noted specialist, Dr. Lillian Brooks (Phylicia Rashad), who works in the same hospital as Gary. Brooks, through a combination of hypnotherapy and virtual reality brainwave augmentation, tells Nolan that there is hope to retrieve his seemingly-lost years with his wife and daughter. As Nolan starts to go deeper into the titular black box, however, what gets pulled out of his subconscious doesn’t seem to match the life he’s living now. Was he someone else once? Was Nolan once the person who could have done the things that he now remembers? 

Charmaine Bingwa and Donald Watkins also star in this sci-fi thriller from first time feature director Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour, who also shares a writing credit with Stephen Herman. Both men have experience with several shorts, and it’s not immediately apparent that this is their first feature. It does feel a little slight in places, and it’s not a surprise when Jason Blum’s Executive Producer credit shows up in the early credits, as this feels very much like a slightly off-brand episode of Black Mirror, which is an appellation that could also be applied to some of the more sci-fi slanted episodes of Into the Dark, like All That We Destroy or Culture Shock, but with a sensibility that’s more in the realm of Bloodride. This works better than any of those, however, as it never feels like a TV show, but it does exist in the realm of the near-future speculative fiction indie realm that features pictures like Marjorie Prime.

Between the time that I first started writing this review and picking it back up to complete it, I reread the Wikipedia page for it, and wouldn’t you know, there’s a reason it feels so much like Into the Dark: it’s an “installment in the anthological Welcome to the Blumhouse film series.” Still, it’s worth noting that Into the Dark has still produced multiple films that are actually quite good, and one of them (New Year, New You) even made it into my best of 2019 list. Like New Year, New You, Black Box uses its “smallness” as an asset instead of fighting the smaller budget and trying to make something outside of its grasp, creating a world in which the stakes are personal and rooted in internal struggles with the worst elements of our nature. The twist that centers the film comes very late in the game, but it’s well-seeded with just the right amount of foreshadowing, and there’s still sufficient screen time in the movie’s relatively lean 100 minutes that follow that reveal to let us explore the implications of what we’ve learned and the ethics of what our lead has to do next. But one of the ways that Black Box spins its humble budget of straw into passable onscreen gold is in its cleverness.

For instance, the representative mind world inside the box features a frightening creature in human form but which moves with distinctly inhuman noises (like the cracking of bones) and motions (crabwalking in the upward bow yoga pose); this is accomplished by the hiring of contortionist Troy James for the role, but instead of attempting to CGI a different face onto him, every face in the dream world is initially blurred Ringu style. This is incorporated into the narrative as part of the process, as the blurry face represents an incomplete memory for Nolan to reconstruct. A lesser movie would try to do something more complex and ultimately overcomplicate things, but by leaning into the limitations, Black Box turns them from flaws into strengths. 

I don’t want to spend too much time talking about the film because writing around the twist is always a little tricky. In films like this one, that’s often the main drawing point, and my lifetime love of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits, and Twilight Zone proves that I’m always on board for it, as long as the twist is good. This one’s a little more complex than normal, and it requires a bit of suspension of disbelief, but you’d have to be a real taskmaster for realism to be unwilling to go along with this one. It’s not the strongest one I’ve ever seen in this type of film, but as someone who has the unfortunate writer’s tendency to try and guess the next twist instead of letting the work take me on a journey, this was one in which I couldn’t guess the twist, and that’s always a plus. Luckily, Black Box doesn’t depend solely on that twist, as it becomes a different story afterward, about what the reframing of what has happened so far and what could happen next is a pivot that changes the film but doesn’t muddy it at all, which would be a feat for even a more experienced director. Its only real crime is that it lacks a truly cinematic eye, which is clearly a matter of budget in this case and not behind-the-camera crew. It remains to be seen how many pies Jason Blum can stick his thumb into, and Into the Dark has already run thin in a few places, but you wouldn’t know it from Black Box

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Kajillionaire (2020)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

When I was going through a really bad breakup in 2014, there was a quote that I stumbled across on Tumblr (again, it was 2014) that spoke to me on an intimate, deep level. I thought it was part of a poem, but I could never find it again, and I spent six years occasionally plugging the random bits of it that I could remember into Google to see if it would spit out the name of the poem, or the poet. Finally, in September, the search engine of record returned a result. The author was Miranda July, and it wasn’t a poem, it was an excerpt from her book It Chooses You: 

“All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.”

It may not seem like much to you (although if you’ve ever struggled with depression, it probably does), but I never felt more seen than I did in the moment that I first read this assortment of words in this particular order. How do other people make it through? Where are they parking their bodies and coping inside of those bodies, hour after endless hour? When you’re in the bottom of your emotional well and every hour feels like days, how are you supposed to live with that? I wanted to know and even knowing that someone else wanted to know it too made me feel less isolated and alone.

The answer to that question is not found in Kajillionaire, Miranda July’s 2020 film (she is credited as both writer and director). The film tells the story of Old Dolio Dyne (Evan Rachel Wood), who was so named by her con artist parents in honor of an unhoused person who won the lottery in the hopes that their daughter would be put in his will (in vain). Her father Robert (Richard Jenkins) prides himself on having no interest in or connection to mainstream consumerism, instead preferring to reject society’s pursuit of wealth and the accompanying desire to become “kajillionaires” to instead live a life in the margins, and her mother Theresa (Debra Winger) is in complete sympatico. They’re rejection of the conventional economy extends to making their home in an inexpensive office next to a soap factory, which also includes a twice-daily scooping of soap bubble overflow that comes out of the walls into a drain in the floor. They’re not just freegans, though: they’re pickpockets, scammers, and con artists, meticulously and obsessively keeping track of surveillance cameras and performing elaborate movements to avoid being seen, largely oblivious to the fact that they stick out like sore thumbs otherwise. Since Old Dolio’s childhood, they have split everything three ways. 

After attending a pregnancy preparation course taught by Dead to Me’s Diana-Maria Riva, Old Dolio starts to recognize how little her parents care for her emotional well being (read: not even a little bit). This is exacerbated when, while doing a quick airline luggage fraud scam, Robert and Theresa meet Melanie (Gina Rodriguez) and adopt her into their schemes while also immediately beginning to treat her with more tenderness and concern than their daughter, which does not escape her notice. Seemingly charmed by the thought of Hollywood-style heists, Melanie puts forth the idea of going to the homes of the lonely, elderly customers at the mall-based ophthalmology office where she works and complimenting their antiques until they offer her something of value, which the quartet could then flip. Ultimately, she finds the desperate, morally questionable actions of the Dyne clan to be seedier and less Ocean’s Eleven than she expected, but not before she develops a crush on the emotionally damaged Old Dolio. When Theresa can’t manage to use a single term of endearment for her daughter, Melanie promises to do all of that and more. 

Wood is giving a solid performance here,

On a recent Lagniappe episode of the podcast in which we discussed The Other Lamb, Brandon noted that he thought that the film would fall within my wheelhouse because of my interest in cults, be it real life cults like NXIVM or fictional cults like those in The Lodge and The Endless. And it’s true, and it’s also true that, as we discussed in that episode (and in other places), although I wasn’t raised in a cult per se, I did grow up in a particular segment of Evangelical Christianity that was very particular in its beliefs, and, like the Dyne parents here, created a mythology that was not only outside of and opposed to the mainstream, but was also strictly about opposition to the mainstream as part of its ideology. What really worked for me about Kajillionaire was Robert and Theresa’s strange little beliefs and how those beliefs so heavily affected their raising of Old Dolio not as a child but as a tool. Their self-centeredness and codependence upon each other, to the point of ostracizing their daughter, is played for laughs, and it’s often funny, but it’s also horribly depressing. When Old Dolio wins a trip to New York, her earnest attempts to take the trip with just her mother is not only rebuffed by Theresa, but Robert later uses it to denigrate his daughter as part of one of his many angry diatribes about how their way of life is the only feasible way. When Old Dolio manages to graft the aforementioned lost-luggage-insurance-fraud scam onto the trip to net just enough for the family to pay their back rent, said con involves flying to NYC together and flying back separately as strangers, but George immediately insists that he and Theresa will be a couple, and Old Dolio will travel alone. Not only is an arrangement of Richard flying alone while Theresa and Old Dolio fly together not even considered, but Richard and his wife are true narcissists who only see their daughter as a prop for their “jobs,” and nothing more. 

The Dynes don’t want to be “fake” people, behaving as society expects a parent to, and they find the idea of treating Old Dolio with tenderness as both artificial and patronizing, as if undignified. And I’ll be honest: that speaks to me, too. It’s probably the a reason that I am not very good with children (and wasn’t even when I was one, although there was also the bullying), as I find it hard to engage with them when the situation (very rarely, thankfully) requires me to do so. But this film carries that idea through to its inevitable dark end when applied to parenting, and although the film’s marketing makes it look like this situation will be at least somewhat charming before conflict arises, it’s clear from the earliest moments that this is completely unhealthy, and that the world within which Old Dolio is trapped is one where even the slightest kindness or touch of comfort or is completely alien to her. 

There’s something fascinatingly and fantastically alien about Old Dolio’s situation, on top of and adjacent to the world that the rest of us live in. Miranda July seems to have asked herself about how one extremely specific person was making it through life —where she was putting her body, hour by hour, and how she was coping inside of it. It’s a character study of someone raised in a culture that is invisible, tangential, and almost inconceivable. In that, it’s worth a watch, although I’d wait until after its hefty rental price comes down a little.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Bill and Ted Face the Music (2020)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Bill & Ted Face the Music finds our lovable slacker buds, William S. Preston Esq. (Alex Winter) and Theodore Logan (Keanu Reeves), still at the great work that Rufus (the late George Carlin) foretold for them: the song that would unite the world. They’re also middle aged, with daughters of their own, named for the other: Wilhelmina “Billie” Logan (Brigette Lundy-Paine) is dark-haired, shy, and androgynous like Ted, while Theadora Preston (Samara Weaving) is blonde, confident, and hyperactive like Bill. The film opens on the wedding of Missy (Amy Stoch), who was once our hapless duo’s babysitter, then was Ted’s step-mother, then Bill’s step-mother, and is now marrying Ted’s younger brother Deacon (Beck Bennett, taking over for Frazier Bain). At the reception, Bill and Ted plan to perform the first three movements of their latest composition, entitled “That Which Binds Us Through Time: The Chemical, Physical, and Biological Nature of Love and the Exploration of the Meaning of Meaning — Part 1,” and it starts with throat-singing and theremin, so I’m on board, but it’s not a crowd pleaser. At the suggestion of their wives, the princesses (Erinn Hayes and Jayma Mays), Bill and Ted attend couple’s therapy with their respective spouse, as a quartet. 

Meanwhile in the future, time and space are falling apart. Rufus’s daughter Kelly (Kristen Schaal) and widow The Great Leader (Holland Taylor) have different interpretations of the prophesied Wyld Stallyns song, with the latter believing in her father’s vision of universal unity through the power of music, and her mother hoping to put things back on track by reluctantly killing the Stallyns. To that end, she sends a time-traveling murderbot (Anthony Carrigan) to hunt them down across space and time. Learning about the dire situation, Bill and Ted steal their old phone booth time machine and move progressively forward in time along their own lifelines in an attempt to acquire the song from their future selves. Meanwhile, Billie and Thea travel through time to acquire various historical musicians (and Kid Cudi) in preparation for the performance. 

The sad thing about Face the Music is that, all too often, Bill and Ted are the least interesting things in it. This movie made me feel young, and then it made me feel old, and then it made me feel young again, but not in a way I was happy about. There’s just a little too much happening here, in a sequel to a movie that knew just how many juggling pins it could keep in the air at one time, and there are too many narrative threads. Offscreen, the princesses have been invited by future versions of themselves to see all of space and time and see if there’s any way they can actually be happy in their marriages to the men of the title (not to sound too much like the boys, but, like, that plot is majorly a downer). Meanwhile, the daughters are having their adventure, which is a mixed bag; Weaving and Lundy-Paine are both great here but are sometimes forced into delivering dialogue that hits the ear with neither subtlety or comedy. They have a kind of abridged version of Excellent Adventure as they collect Mozart, Hendrix, and Louis Armstrong (Daniel Dorr, DazMann Still, and Jeremiah Craft) and others, to form a supergroup rather than for a history project, but each encounter feels more expository than fun. They encounter one instance of resistance in their plot and overcome it almost immediately, then have nothing but easy success from there on out, which doesn’t make for a compelling watch. Conversely, each future version of the adult Bill and Ted is drunker and less helpful than the last, and these encounters go on for too long (especially in 2025), making the whole thing feel more like a labor than a good time. Then, as if that weren’t enough, we get a slight rehash of Bogus Journey with a trip to Hell, where the guys, their daughters, several time-displaced musicians, and Ted’s dad once again meet up with Death (William Sadler) to get back to the world of the living in time to perform the song and prevent the end of existence as we know it–because, if there’s one thing you have to remember, it’s this: the clock in San Dimas is always running. 

I didn’t even get into the plot that’s running concurrently in the future in which The Great Leader keeps getting summoned into the same amphitheater to look at the hologram of space and time (represented as the earth as a turntable, with a record deck at the equator like Saturn’s rings) to fret, which seems to happen nearly half a dozen times. In an overstuffed movie, it’s crammed in there too for some reason but there seems to be a disconcerting lack of a narrative purpose for us to keep going back there. Obviously one would want to get their money’s worth when hiring Holland Taylor, but from a story standpoint, there’s just no reason to keep doing this; a ninety-three minute movie shouldn’t have 125 minutes of plot crowding it up like the suitcase of a Looney Tunes character, as it leaves no breathing room and creates the situation mentioned earlier, in which character dialogue is rushed and overly expositional.  

I loved Bill & Ted in my youth, and no one wanted this movie to be better than I did. There are a few solid jokes here, but even some of the best are in service of generating a nostalgic feeling, which isn’t the wrong way to go with this particular franchise, but could have been scaled back by about 35% and had both more room to breathe and been just as effective. Lundy-Paine and Weaving are doing a lot of heavy lifting, and they’re up to most of it, but there are lines that they’re asked to sell that are simply impossible to pull off, and while Reeves has continued to carve out a niche for himself with John Wick and one-off minor roles in things like Neon Demon, Alex Winter has remained largely out of the public eye, mostly making documentaries. It’s great to see him here; he seems to be having the most fun of anyone, and it’s infectious, even when the film drags. It’s a less than delightful end(?) to a franchise that had a better ending in Bogus Journey.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

Once again helmed by Patty Jenkins and starring Gal Gadot and Chris Pine as Diana Prince/Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor/sorta, respectively, along with additions Pedro Pascal (as Maxwell Lord) and Kristen Wiig (as Barbara Minerva, aka Cheetah), sequel Wonder Woman 1984 (stylized as WW84) has hit the big screens and small screens at the same time. Like many people who spent their Christmas apart from their family this year, and also have HBO Max, my Christmas morning involved watching WW84. As a Christmas present, it was like the gag candy that looks like coal and you get in your stocking, where for a moment you think that you’ve been punished before realizing it’s a sweet, except in reverse, where what seems like sugary fun at first turns out to be kind of a piece of coal. Wonder Woman 1984 is … pretty bad. And not in the way that the first one was considered “bad” by a lot of people who (understandably) lost the thread somewhere in that muddy finale or who just have a mental block that makes them hate the Wonder Woman character. This movie is a mess, with a few true gems in the narrative, but also with some troubling philosophical underpinnings. But what WW84 is, at its core, is something that Diana of Themyscira never would be: cowardly. 

It’s 1984, and Diana is working at the Smithsonian in her civilian identity, where she has access to artifacts recently recovered from a black market jewelry shop front that was revealed during a botched robbery that Diana foiled as Wonder Woman. She meets colleague Dr. Barbara Minerva, who establishes the value of everything save for one object: a citrine sculpture with an inscription that Diana translates to, essentially, “you get one wish.” She absently reminisces about Steve, and there’s magic little tinkly sounds and an air machine, and I can admit that I loved that bit. Barbara, for her part, wishes she could be more like Diana: effortlessly confident, eternally alluring, and tirelessly kind. Diana discovers that the wishing stone was actually en route to Maxwell Lord, a televised Ponzi schemer selling the idea of a socialistic communally owned oil reserve (I don’t get it either) when the FBI confiscated the artifacts, but she fails to stop him before he obtains and then acquires the power of the artifact. Steve comes back to life and although the two are happy to be reunited, the method of his resurrection reveals that the artifact operates on Monkey’s Paw rules (explicitly; it’s invoked, and it’s an admittedly nice touch that it’s Steve who calls it by name, as it would be a recent reference for him), and Lord’s using the granting of wishes to increase his personal power even as his body and society start to fall apart. Will Diana be able to stop him in blah blah blah?

If you’re completely removed from The Discourse or are Very Offline to the point that you’re in a bubble vis-a-vis politics, both contemporary and of the 1980s, then it might be possible for you to just turn your brain off and enjoy a nostalgic throwback about Wonder Woman fighting a Ponzi schemer in 1984. It’s certainly what the film wants you to do, and to that end, there are a lot of elements that are super fun.

Everything to do with Kristen Wiig’s Barbara Minerva, aka Cheetah, is great from a performance standpoint. Wiig is once again playing a character similar to her previous role in Ghostbusters: a woman of high academic achievement who is nerdy, Hollywood Homely, and largely ignored/disdained by her peers to exaggerated comic effect (none of her male colleagues help her collect her dropped documents, only Diana does). Her own boss doesn’t even remember meeting her previously, which was funny in Office Space but just feels painful and awkward here, especially as it comes so early in the film that the tone hasn’t really been set yet (more on that in a moment). Her immediate interest in Diana is adorable, as she sees in the literally divine Amazon a reflection of what she wishes she could be, in more ways than one, and her friendship with Diana is fun and likable, before it inevitably goes sour. Wiig is having a lot of fun playing “frumpy” and excitable, and while that’s definitely within her wheelhouse, it’s also fun seeing her stretch those muscles playing some of Minerva’s more subdued moments. Unfortunately, the material she’s working with plays against her talents, especially once she’s turned into a clawing, snarling CGI abomination (seriously, the practical effects in The Island of Dr. Moreau from 1996 are better than how this looks). 

The film’s length works both for and against it. When you’ve got a movie like this that’s premiering in people’s homes, it’s not like a theater in which the audience’s attention is captivated and captive; at home, there’s a lot more to distract you, and if you’re not drawn in by the opening, you’ve already lost a lot of people to their phones. As for how it works in its favor, I’m not opposed to a 2.5 hour movie (if anything, mine and Brandon’s recent discussion of Doctor Sleep proves that I thrive on them), and the film’s decompression allows for some of the film’s best elements to have sufficient breathing room. We get to see Diana reignite her love with Steve Trevor, who is brought back to life* via the magic of the film’s MacGuffin, and start to develop a friendship with Barbara that’s warm and kind. There’s an awful lot of complaining that this film is too light on thrills and that the length of time between action sequences is to the film’s detriment, but the same complaints were made about Spider-Man 2 when it was first released, and even after 15 years in which the prevalence of superhero media has done nothing but grow at an exponential rate, that’s still considered one of the most triumphant examples of the genre. It’s what doesn’t move the plot along that makes the film work when it does work; although this film has a different resolution than a big blue laser beam (and one that’s a novel choice, if nothing else), it still follows the rote and prescriptive stations of the plot outline for all of these movies.

The action sequences are also nothing to scoff at (most of the time). The opening scene on Themyscira is a fun contest, if a little Quidditch-y at points and hosting the film’s most questionable CGI choices, but there’s also really gorgeous location work that makes you just yearn for the beach; it really does look like Paradise. The mall sequence that brings us to the film’s 1984 “present” is really what sets the tone for what’s to come: it’s light, pastel, a little goofy, but warm and inviting and not too threatening. As Diana runs around stopping people from being injured during a robbery gone awry, she really seems like Wonder Woman, the real deal, the friend to all living things  who loves kids and Christmas and ice cream and justice, and it’s very clear that the movie’s operating on G.I. Joe/A-Team rules: nobody dies, they always parachute out or land in water instead, etc. There’s an extended roadway set piece that’s very impressive and makes inventive use of the lasso, and the best White House-based action since X2. The battle with Barbara in her Cheetah form is less fun, but the fact that the climactic sequence is not about beating Maxwell Lord into submission and is instead about saving his soul is a nice change of pace from the third act megafight that’s become the standard. Although the film is explicitly set mostly in midsummer (there are Independence Day fireworks over Washington at one point), that the film’s major conflict comes to a head when a greedy Dickensian man renounces his need to own the world gives the whole thing more of a Christmas vibe than the tacked-on snowy holiday set piece that ends the film proper. 

That having been said, there’s a lot going on here that’s … questionable. I couldn’t put it more eloquently than Walter Chaw does here, and I won’t try to, other than to say that all of the things that WW84 brings to the table pale in comparison to its gross narrative choices. And if you’re sitting there after having gone and read Chaw’s review and you’re thinking that he’s reading too much into it, then I’d direct you to a follow-up Tweet of his, which says, succinctly and simply, “The nature of bias is that yours is invisible to you.” It’s easy to hear the siren call to overlook the hard-to-face fact that this film has a supervillainess’s face-heel-turn be her self-defense against a sexual assailant. A woman is punished for wanting to be powerful, and instead of breaking through her defenses by lifting her up, Wonder Woman (who is friend to all living things and loves ice cream, remember), gives her one chance to recant without any encouragement or warmth, and then gives her the old toaster-in-the-bathtub treatment. Chaw wrote about the implications of the Bialyan anti-colonial sentiment expressed by an oil baron, but there’s so much being implied in the margins here that even he couldn’t get them all down. How about the fact that the wish stone is tied to the fall of multiple civilizations due to the chaos that it creates, including the Roman Empire and the Mayan civilization, and that the Mayans are explicitly stated to have been unwilling to take the actions needed to save their society? Yeah, yikes. For recommended further reading, there’s also Roxana Hadadi’s discussion of the film’s Middle Eastern stereotypes here.

At the top, I mentioned that WW84 was cowardly, and where that shines through the most to me on a personal level is in the choice of place and time without the willingness to tackle the topics of the time. The POTUS in the film is nothing like Reagan, other than in the raging hard on for nukes, and the unwillingness to attack the tarnished late-blooming legacy of a president who was despised (even within his party and even in his time) and who turned a blind eye to the HIV/AIDS pandemic with callous disregard for human life (by the end of 1984, nearly 8000 people had contracted HIV, and nearly half of that number had died). Maxwell Lord is clearly supposed to echo the soon-to-be-former-President Donald Trump, with his facial bloat, unconvincing dye job, and all-consuming greed, but in a year dominated by politicized response to public health emergencies and dangerous alliances between pulpit and podium, history was lobbing a slowball straight over the plate, and WW84 not only didn’t make contact, it didn’t even swing. 

Some films we’re able to appreciate despite their flaws by recognizing that they are products of their times. Unfortunately, WW84 is the same, as its flawed technical achievements and interesting character moments take place in a narrative that’s circumscribed by peak white liberalism, blind to its own faults like a lot of capitalist products that aim to capture leftward social momentum and leverage it into profit. Maybe Wonder Woman is harder to get right than we thought when lighting was captured in a bottle in 2017. I don’t think it had to be this way, but unfortunately, this is what we got. 

*Some restrictions may apply.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Doctor Sleep (2019)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer and Brandon discuss Mike Flanagan’s epic The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep, which strives to bridge the gap between Stephen King & Stanley Kubrick’s disparate versions of the original.

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

– Mark “Boomer” Redmond & Brandon Ledet

The Night Stalker (1972)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments


It’s that time of year again: every time you turn on the television, A Christmas Story is playing. I don’t have cable and haven’t in something like six years, and I don’t even think I’ve been in a place that did have cable in over a year (although given that I’ve barely left the house in nine months, that figure is bound to be skewed), but even without access to TNT or TBS, I know that right now, as I write this (although perhaps not as you read it), Alfie is deciphering an advertisement for Ovaltine hidden in his Little Orphan Annie program, or he’s turning in his thesis about what a responsible gun owner he would be, or saying something that’s similar to “fudge” as lug nuts scatter in the road. But this Christmas season, I’m asking you to think about my favorite Darren McGavin role, which is much greater than “father obsessed with a sexy lamp.” I want to tell you about Carl Kolchak, the unlikeliest vampire slayer.

The Night Stalker was a made-for-TV movie that aired on ABC in 1972. It was a ratings smash, prompting a sequel telefilm, The Night Strangler, which in turn led to the creation of one-season wonder TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker (confusing, I know, as the titular night stalker of the first film is the villain), which I’ve sung the praises of in a few different episodes of the lagniappe podcast with Brandon. Kolchak was an early influence on the genre of mysterious urban fantasy/sci-fi on television, although I don’t think it would fall very easily into that category (think X-Files, not Dresden Files*). What it is, above all things really, is a noir, with all of the tropes of the 1940s adapted for a trashier 1970s world: it’s ambiguous as to whether Kolchak’s girlfriend is a prostitute or a showgirl (or both), the traditional noir voiceover is here embodied by Kolchak’s omnipresent journalistic dictaphone narration, etc. And did I mention that the screenplay was written by Richard Matheson? But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Carl Kolchak is employed as a reporter by the Daily News, operating out of Las Vegas, albeit reluctantly according to his long-suffering editor, Vincenzo (Simon Oakland), who claims that Kolchak’s continued unlikely employment is owed solely to a soft spot on the part of the paper’s owner. As we later learn when Kolchak is talking to his girlfriend Gail Foster (Carol Lynley), he’s been fired twice in Chicago, once in New York, twice on the West Coast, and, somehow, he was fired from three different papers in Boston. Whatever the journalistic equivalent of an ambulance chaser is, that’s Carl Kolchak, and although “sleaze” isn’t the right word for what he’s got, he cuts a particularly slovenly figure in his powder blue seersucker jacket and straw porkpie hat. He spends his evenings driving from crime scene to crime scene as directed by the police scanner, often arriving at the same time as backup, and he’s forever throwing himself right into the middle of the action with his camera with no regard for his own safety. He’s a complete disaster, and I love him.

Our feature opens with the murder of a swing-shift casino cashier as she walks home alone at night, which turns out to be only the first in a string of slayings—and exsanguinations—of young women, all at the hands of someone oddly strong. Things get even weirder when a hospital is robbed of its entire blood supply, and the local law enforcement briefs the press with the news that the latest victim of the serial killer was bitten on her neck, that the body was completely emptied of blood, and that there was human saliva in and around the wound. Kolchak tries to file a piece with “vampire killer” in the headline, and although he makes it clear in the body of the article that there’s simply a killer on the loose who’s suffering from the delusion that he’s a vampire, Vincenzo refuses to print it. It’s only when Gail starts to express concern that Carl might end up running afoul of a real life vampire that he starts to consider this as a possibility, which is further cemented when Carl arrives at the scene of a second blood bank burglary in process and watches a man fight off nearly a dozen cops and shrug off multiple gunshots.

The Night Stalker clocks in at 72 short minutes, which I must assume is an average length for TV movies of that era, and it’s a perfect little time capsule of mishmashed genres and tones that come together in an unlikely, brassy symphony. What I love about Kolchak, the show, is that our title character occupies a world in which every single person that he encounters is shockingly hostile, from fellow reporters to every LEO that crosses his path to random citizens who happen to be on the same sidewalk. Carl Kolchak is a walking magnet for two things: supernatural weirdness and people on the verge of boiling over, and it really gives the impression that every person in an urban environment in the early seventies was a ticking time bomb. The broad strokes of the show that is to come exists here in this early feature form: Vincenzo will carry over into the show (albeit as the editor of the International New Service based out of Chicago, were the series was set), and Kolchak’s stable of informants are here in a primordial version as well: the coroner with the big mouth, the switchboard operator with the weakness for a Whitman’s sampler, Bernie the FBI buddy with who’s willing to give the benefit of the doubt—you know, the usual suspects.

It’s not hard to see why this was so successful as a telefilm, or why it had potential as a franchise. I mean, a TV movie of the week where two sweaty, middle-aged men, one with a potbelly, defeating a vampire isn’t necessarily such stuff that dreams are made on, but despite what one must assume was a fairly minimal budget, there are several great action sequences. Although the climactic defeat of the undead is fun, I was very impressed by the hospital scene in which vampire Janos Skorzeny (Barry Atwater) fights off a several hospital employees, including one orderly being thrown out of an upper floor window in some nice stunt work for the time, followed by a shockingly well-executed bit of automotive choreography as several police cars and even a motorcycle cop glide around in an alley.

Other than the increased budget (you’re not gonna see Kolchak going Baja across lanes of traffic in the show, or an intense six-car ballet like you do here, and the occasional defenestration, such as in the opening of “The Trevi Collection,” creates the action through editing, not practical effects), there’s one other thing that the film has over the show, which is that its presumption of finality allows the film to fully commit to having a bleak, noir ending. We see, multiple times, that modern (or at least contemporary, as this was produced fifty years ago) police forces are just as incapable of defending the neon-filled oasis of Vegas from an old world vampire as a Transylvanian village, and they’re hopelessly outmatched despite their manpower and firearms. This makes for an interesting backdrop, as each skeptic is forced to accept the reality of the situation, and Kolchak shares his knowledge with law enforcement. In the end, however, despite the authorities’ full understanding of the situation, they use the threat of an arrest for homicide of Skorzeny to run Kolchak out of town permanently. His bags are delivered directly to the D.A.’s office where his lawkeeping nemeses wave a warrant in his face, present him with the supernatural-free article that they’ll be running instead of his correct piece, and tell him not to bother trying to reach Gail, as they’ve already ejected her from Vegas as an “undesirable element.” It’s a grim conclusion for our newspaperman, who has seen the truth and had it denied by the powers that be, and we close on his recollection of the events with the narration telling us that Carl and Gail never found each other again.

Of course, as an audience, we know that Kolchak will have many** more adventures, but it’s a fittingly depressing final note for our hero, all things considered. Ironically, had this not done so well, this would have been Kolchak’s end, and while I’m glad it wasn’t, had this been all the Kolchak that the world was given, it would still be solid.

*I’m just kidding. No one thinks about The Dresden Files.

**Well, one season’s worth.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

In Secret (2013)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment


I wrote before about the recent shuttering of both Vulcan Video and I Luv Video, and how neither one managed to survive the consequences of prolonged COVID-related shutdowns. In truth, both have been struggling for a while. When I was still living in Louisiana and only visiting Austin, there was a Vulcan Video location in North Austin near UT’s campus, complete with a giant mural of Spock, one block south from the apartment building where I would ultimately get my first place in Austin. One block west was the second location for I Luv Video on Guadalupe. By the end of my first year of residence, Vulcan had relocated their North location by about 25 blocks, and the I Luv Video on Guad posted a bunch of their DVDs and memorabilia for sale and consolidated with the main location on Airport Boulevard. It was at this sale that I found the Mrs. Winterbourne press packet that I wrote about when that was our Movie of the Month, lo these many years ago now. Most of the good horror had already been picked over, and what remained was risky. Jessica Lange had just left American Horror Story and I was hankering for some of that good Lange content when I stumbled across the DVD for In Secret, which featured her prominently on the cover. It was a fairly recent release (2013), too, and I figured I could risk the $4 and see if it would soothe my jonesing. But then, as these things often happen, I had to move and the DVD got stuffed into a box, and then put on a shelf for three years where it was occasionally discussed and then rejected as I could never quite sell my roommate on it. And then it went into another box, and then onto another shelf in another new place, where it’s sat for another year, until it took a trip with me to a cottage in the Texas Hill Country as part of my “emergency media” stash for my wi-fi free solo writing retreat (it’s going great, by the way). I’m sorry to say that it doesn’t live up to the hype. Spoiler alert for an Emile Zola novel that’s older than harnessed electricity.

In Secret is the very rote 19th century story of Thérèse, a young girl whose mother dies and leaves her in the care of her indigent explorer father, who immediately deposits the child with his own sister, Madame Raquin (Jessica Lange) and her chronically ill, possibly hypochondriac son Camille. Raquin is no wicked aunt/stepmother, but while she lacks ill intentions, she has an abundance of ideas of propriety and the natural progress of a life that are rigid in both structure and enforcement. In time, Thérèse grows up to be Elizabeth Olsen, and Camille grows up to be Tom Felton, and all the while the two are still forced to sleep in the same bed. When word arrives that Thérèse’s father, who has been gone for what must be at least eight years but feels like more, has died, Madame Raquin wastes no time in marrying the cousins to each other, which was the style at the time. She secures a job for Camille in Paris doing some kind of office work, and she opens a dress shop in a dingy alley with Thérèse as her assistant. Camille is soon reunited with Laurent (Oscar Isaacs), a childhood friend whose family relocated before Thérèse came to live with the Raquins, and his vivaciousness and bohemian nature capture Thérèse’s fancy, as her life is otherwise completely passionless and dictated by her aunt/mother-in-law.

The two soon begin a sordid, torrid affair, but when Camille decides to move the family back to their country home, their desperation to stay together pushes Thérèse and Laurent to kill Camille so that they can stay together in the city. While on a day trip in the park that culminates in renting a boat, they push him overboard before sinking the boat and framing the whole thing as an accident. While waiting what seems an appropriate amount of time before marrying one another, Laurent and Thérèse grow bitter and resentful of one another, and even after they have married, this hatred for one another continues to grow, especially once Madame Raquin suffers a stroke that leaves her largely paralyzed and requiring constant care, until they both seek desperate measures to extricate themselves from the circumstances.

This movie is … not very good. You know how, sometimes, you see that a movie was filmed in Serbia, and you’re like, “Oh, this movie was made specifically so that they would have something to show on buses for people traveling across Eastern Europe”? This is one of those films. This is, to date, the only feature helmed by director Charlie Stratton, who looks to have come up through the Hollywood ranks as an actor first, with sporadic one-off roles in TV series like L.A. Law, Thirtysomething, Dallas, and Matlock, with a major role on the Dirty Dancing television show, which apparently existed. From there, he’s mostly directed for television sporadically (Revenge, The Fosters, Chasing Life, Everwood), but the problem here isn’t one of direction (it’s competent), it’s one of story. This is a very 19th Century story, and it feels like it.

Certain narratives of that age can be endlessly reinvented or reinterpreted (say Bronte, Austen, Alcott), and this is a story penned by Émile Zola, who was nominated for both the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature. He wrote it with the intent of examining the relationships between the four temperaments, with each of the characters representing one of them, and as such considered the narrative itself to be a foregone conclusion, as this was the only way the four archetypes could interact, and the tragic ending was a foregone conclusion. That’s fine for the era in which it was written and is even fine if one were to engage with that worldview/mindset and re-examine and reinvent the narrative. There’s nothing inventive or novel about this extremely faithful approach, and as such, it feels more like an outdated morality play than anything else. One may as well make a completely straightforward adaptation of Pamela if one isn’t going to engage with the text in a meaningful, transformative, inspective way.

Most contemporary criticism revolved around Lange’s performance, and she delivers a great one, as usual, as she wrings great drama out of the scenes in which she is trapped in her body and attempting to communicate to others that all is not as it seems. Felton is serviceable, and Olsen and Issacs deliver characteristically invested performances as well, but there’s only so much overwrought peak-Romanticism era histrionics that one can stand. The film’s more somber moments are undercut by an air of (one hopes) unintentional comedy, delivered mostly by the presence and performances of Matt Lucas, then best known for Little Britain, and Shirley Henderson as, respectively, Olivier and his wife Suzanne. Above and beyond the fact that no one, from Lange down, even attempted to portray a hint of Franconess in this very French story, these two Brits seem to be playing every scene in which they appear for humor, and although it’s tonally jarring, these few morsels manage to be the only moments of real entertainment that the film has. The scene in which Lange’s Raquin painfully attempts to tell her assembled friends that Laurent and Thérèse killed Camille by painstakingly drawing individual letters with her enfeebled hand, only to get out “Thérèse and Laurent” before exhausting herself, only for Olivier to declare that she must have been writing “Thérèse and Laurent are taking great care of me,” is camp of the highest order, and completely out of place in what is otherwise a dour and dreary film.

Matt Lucas should never be the saving grace of anything.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

I Declare War (2012)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments


I wrote previously about the DVDs-and-booze Alamo Drafthouse at home program that the Austin-based movie tavern dynasty has rolled out as part of their COVID business model. I wasn’t terribly impressed with The FP, but the second selection, I Declare War, really hit for me.

I Declare War is the story of two factions of children playing war, with shockingly high stakes and consequences that will echo far beyond this one hot afternoon. On one side, there’s longstanding champion P.K. (Gage Munroe) and his crew: P.K.’s best friend Paul (Siam Yu), hothead rule challenger Kenney (Eric Hanson), enigmatic scout Caleb (Kolton Steward), timid altar boy Wesley (Andy Reid), and brash loudmouth Joker (Spencer Howes), who has a tendency to be a little bit of a bully. On the other side is Quinn (Aidan Gouveia), the first kid that P.K. thinks has the tactical knowledge to beat him, and Quinn’s team: anger-management-challenged and budding sociopath Skinner (Michael Friend), diminutive chatterbox Frost (Alex Cardillo), thuggish but dim-witted Sikorski (Dyson Fyke), and Jessica (Mackenzie Munroe), the only girl playing the game, who’s only there because of her crush on Quinn. The game will end when the general of one team captures the opponent’s flag.

We’re introduced to the rules—both those of the game itself and the rules of the visual language of the war itself—immediately. Each child has a firearm, and after we first see it established that these weapons are actually made of sticks, tin cans, and other assorted debris, we then see them as the children see them: Jessica’s slingshot is a crossbow, P.K. carries a pistol that looks far too large for his little hands, and Frost and several others carry automatics. The rules are as follows: if you’re hit, you’re paralyzed for ten speedboats (“one speedboat, two speedboat, three speedboat …”), giving your opponent time to move in and perform the finishing/killing move with a grenade (a balloon filled with red liquid). After you’ve counted to ten, you’re able to escape. Generals can’t move their bases after the game has started, and when you’re out, you go home. The war is over when a general captures the opponent’s flag.

We get a lot of detail about the characters that we’ll be following from pretty early on, as the cast drops to a more manageable number pretty quickly, when a fully committed Kenney, complete with ‘Nam-esque camo paint, takes out one of Quinn’s men before “dying” himself. Skinner instructs Sikorski to kick Kenney around in the dirt for information about P.K.’s base, which is cheating (the dead can’t be interrogated), establishing Skinner as a bully and a cheat. Kenney likewise wants to stick around and assist P.K., but the latter insists that the rules be followed, establishing P.K. as committed to honoring the rules of engagement and to his successful victory at any cost within those parameters, although he does attempt some subterfuge of his own later on. P.K.’s own establishing character moment comes when he and Paul talk about what they’re doing after the battle: pizza and a movie at P.K.’s. Paul asks what movie, to which P.K. replies that they’ll be watching Patton, to Paul’s chagrin, as this is explicitly not for the first time P.K. has subjected him to this particular film. Wesley takes up a role as the platoon’s chaplain by default, serving as the coward who’s too afraid to stand up for himself or even shoot his “gun,” initially finding himself in conflict with Joker, whose shtick is outlandish hypothetical situations and calling Christian concepts of God’s love “gay.” One such hypothetical shows P.K. thinking outside the box to create his own resolution that gives him the best of both situations, to which Joker objects, showing us early on that P.K. doesn’t see himself as bound within the binary between options A and B, but as entitled to “winning” in every situation.

Paul is our real lead here, however, as we see much of the conflict between P.K. and Skinner (who deposes Quinn in a coup early on) through his eyes. When Paul is cornered, Skinner takes him prisoner instead of grenading him outright, under the assumption that P.K. will personally come and rescue Paul, leaving their base unguarded and enabling Skinner to steal their flag. Skinner goes into full-on Lord of the Flies mode pretty much immediately, issuing contradictory orders to Frost, Sikorski, and Jessica and quickly realizing that knocking Quinn off so soon has left them undermanned. What he really wants, however, is for the others to leave him alone with the bound Paul so he can torture the smaller boy. And not play-torture, either; as soon as they’re alone, he threatens Paul with a knife and lays a section of plywood across Paul’s prone body and starts piling rocks and cement blocks on him, calling Paul racial slurs and telling him that this was how people were put to death before hanging became the standard form of execution. It’s troubling and dark, and only slightly marred by some of the more over-the-top deliveries from the young actors (these are all extremely solid performances for child actors–shockingly so, so I’m more inclined to forgive the moments when their reach exceeds their grasp).

We learn that, before Paul and his family moved to the community, P.K. and Skinner were best friends, but that P.K. ultimately rejected him because of his issues with anger management. We also learn that Skinner is bullied at school, including a prank enacted upon him by two girl classmates who invited him to go swimming and gave him a fake address, and he also blames some of his social isolation on no longer being friends with P.K., although it’s unclear how much of this is true or is simply part of Skinner’s obsession with P.K. in general and retaking what he perceives as his rightful place next to P.K. that Paul has “usurped” from him. Paul, however, ultimately learns that P.K.’s friendship may not be all that it’s cracked up to be; it’s not just endless viewings of Patton (although that would be enough to stretch any friendship to a near-breaking point), but carelessness about their relationship. Even after Paul escapes from literal physical torture at Skinner’s hands, P.K. sends him back to be recaptured intentionally so that he can proceed with his current plan to take Skinner’s flag. When Skinner is willing to concede defeat if P.K. simply cuts Paul with the knife from earlier, it’s left ambiguous whether P.K. was willing to do so in the name of winning or not.

There’s a lot going on in the margins here: Frost and Sikorski as the Rosencrantz and Gildenstern of this private little war, Joker’s intermittent fantasies about being able to blow away annoyances with laser eyes, and Caleb using the R/C airplane that Quinn had left behind to deal a climactic blow. I’m not sure how I feel about Jessica doing her own thing and imagining fantasy conversations with Quinn, however. There’s value in noting that her internal life and how she perceives the activities of the day is different from the boys, but there’s something just a little bit… off about her characterization. At one point, Skinner suggests she use her feminine wiles to distract the enemy, and she is rightfully put out by the ignorance of this, but by reducing the number of girl characters to one and having her participation be solely for the purpose of impressing the boy on whom she has a crush, the script makes the same reductive mistake that Skinner does, in a way.

As the movie goes on, each character becomes more and more filthy and disheveled, their faces first getting dirty and then transforming into a kind of warpaint. There’s also something beautifully upsetting about the validity of Skinner’s frustration; his issues could easily stem from an undiagnosed neurodivergence or potentially treatable personality disorder, but his peers see him as simply “a spaz” and ostracize him, leading him to engage in behavior that’s not terribly dissimilar from P.K.’s own in its casual disregard for conventions of friendship but more openly antagonistic. At the film’s end, we’re left wondering if this has ended Paul and P.K.’s friendship as well, or if they can repair what P.K. and Skinner clearly cannot.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The FP (2011)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

As the pandemic continues to rage around us virtually unchecked, threatening to bring the age of movie theaters to an ignoble end, the Alamo Drafthouse has continued to work hard to keep itself afloat during this year and with an eye on the next. Alongside the mind-boggling and largely unnecessary loss of life, Austin has seen the permanent shuttering of two of its pop culture stalwarts, Vulcan Video and I Luv Video, both of which managed to survive both the large scale destruction of independent video stores by corporate giant Blockbuster and its competitors as well as the endangerment of the home video rental marketplace as a whole when Blockbuster was itself ousted by the rise of DVD-by-mail retailer turned streaming giant Netflix. Drafthouse is still hanging in there, and one of its COVID-necessitated diversifications was the introduction of Drafthouse at home, which saw the delivery to one’s home of a mixed six pack of beer, six single serving liquors, and one Drafthouse Films DVD. Two months into the pandemic, my old roommate and one of his current housemates were kind enough to send two such packages on to me as a gift for my birthday. It’s a kind and thoughtful gift, and I wish I could say those same adjectives held true for the first of the films I watched. 

The FP is trying very desperately to be something greater than the sum of its parts, but is held back and ultimately defeated by some extremely questionable choices with regards to world-building and humor. 

Our setting is the real world California suburb of Frazier Park, but in an alternate reality. Most plot descriptions you’d find tucked away in various corners of the internet refer to it as an apocalyptic future, but what we’re presented with isn’t really a potential future of our present reality (or of the potential future reality of the film’s release year of 2011); it’s situated firmly in a not too distant future as imagined by the sci-fi creators of the 1980s (you know, Turbo Kid rules). For example, despite being made within the past decade, all communication is done via payphones and pagers, and the most advanced technology that appears on screen is one of those programmable raver kid LED scrolling text belt-buckles, as worn by our protagonist JTRO (Jason Trost) and his older brother, BTRO (Brandon Barrera). The film’s commitment to that 1980s aesthetic, even when using what is clearly digital video, is admirable and reflects the sincerity of the film overall. It’s just too bad that the film’s worst choices render it nearly impossible to defend. 

We first meet JTRO, of the “248” gang, on the eve of his planned battle with the lieutenant of the leader of the rival “245” gang in the FP, or Frazier Park. After getting a pep talk from BTRO, he faces off against his opponent in combat—at Dance Dance Revolution, er, I mean “Beat Beat Revelation.” JTRO wins his match handily, but when BTRO steps up for his fight against rival gang leader L Dubba E (Lee Valmassy), his legs give out and he dies in his younger brother’s arms, ceding control of the FP to 245. We then flash forward to a year later, when BBR emcee KCDC (Art Hsu) tracks down JTRO in the forest, where he’s been working as a lumberjack. Citing that the FP has become a hellish place since the 245took power, made even worse by L Dubba E inheriting his family’s liquor store and thus having control over the sole source of alcohol for the entire community, KCDC convinces JTRO to come home and restore the FP. 

Upon his return, JTRO learns that an old flame of his, Stacy (Caitlyn Folley), has taken up with L Dubba E in order to maintain a steady supply of booze for her abusive father, lest he turn to harder drugs as many others have in the intervening year. He also learns that getting the community back on its feet won’t be simple, as JTRO must first gain enough street cred for L Dubba E to consider his  challenge (as Dubba E says in his one good line, this is because of “Politics and shit”). To help out, KCDC brings JTRO to BLT (Nick Principe), who serves the role of the “wizened master” in this hero’s journey. Can JTRO train hard enough to beat L Dubba E and save the FP, win Stacy’s heart, and avenge his brother’s death? 

On the face of it, the idea of a gangland showdown revolving around battles performed using an interface that is essentially-identical-to-but-legally-distinct-from Dance Dance Revolution is funny, and has a lot of potential charm. You’d think that if there was going to be a failure in the film it would come from these sequences, as there’s only so much investment you can expect from an audience watching someone else play BBR, but these clashes are generally some of the more fun parts of the movie, with dynamic and innovative camera choices, synchronized movement from the opponents, and great shots of extras hamming it up as colorful eighties-style punks. The training montages that appear throughout the second act are also effective in capturing the essence of the films of this type that came before, and there’s a shot where JTRO is ambling down a mountain road en route back to Frazier Park and comes to an unobstructed view of the valley below that is legitimately beautiful. The performances are also much better than you’d expect from a low ($45,000) budget film starring mostly people from the neighborhood. Trost is fairly wooden, but I feel comfortable giving the benefit of the doubt here and saying that’s deliberately evocative of the antagonists of the films from which this plot is lovingly cribbed. Special mention should also be made of Folley, who, although amateurish in some of her delivery, displays genuine vulnerability and internal conflict at other points, and her mimicry of well-meaning-but-dimwitted tropes is well-studied. 

Where this film fails is in its South Park-esque edgelordery. Trost is not only the lead here, he also has a Story By credit, and he gets co-credits with his brother Brandon Trost for both Screenplay By and Director, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but he’s openly stated that the idea for the film came to him when he was 16, and … it shows. If you were to sit down and read this script without any context, you’d expect this to have an all-Black cast based on how frequently the n-word appears, or at least you’d pray that it wouldn’t be an almost all-white cast. Spoiler alert: you’d be wrong. There are no Black people in this film at all*. A late-in-the-game “explanation” that the “n***a” variant used almost exclusively but pervasively is an acronym (that I won’t bother transcribing here) does nothing to quell this problem. Most of the uses come from KCDC, a (non-Black) POC character doing so as part of his hype man schtick, but again, there’s no real excuse for this: the people who made this were young white kids from Frazier Park and thought that the co-option of BVE/AAVE and gangsta archetypes was hilarious (in case it needs to be said: it is not). And did I mention that the L Dubba E had a giant golden grill that encompasses the entire upper row of his teeth? Or that his gang uses Confederate imagery? Or what about the fact that when we finally meet Stacy’s father, whom we’ve only heard screaming from offscreen to this point, he emerges from their trailer wearing femme undergarments, just because it’s “hilarious” to make a couple of transphobic jabs at the expense of a character we’re supposed to hate? If this were floated as a Drafthouse film in 2020 instead of 2011, it probably wouldn’t get past the first round of consideration. At least I hope it wouldn’t. 

The FP almost has a lot going for it. An original concept, a specific vision, an encyclopedic knowledge of the material being reimagined and rebuilt: all great things to have when building what this movie wanted to be. But an uncritical adoption of Black culture (which isn’t to say that a critical use of AAVE by white kids as inspected by these particular filmmakers would have been better–it definitely would not have) and tone-deaf jokes that misgender and actively engage in othering turn what could have been a worthy part of the pantheon of eighties reimagination that contains treasures like Turbo Kid and Son of Rambow into another forgotten amateur indie. If I had a storeroom full of DVDs of this, I’d be foisting them off on people if I could, too. 

*Shockingly, this reflects a 0.0% Black/African American population for the real-life Frazier Park, which tells us that virtually every aspect of Black culture present in the real Frazier Park and in the film is completely appropriated, which kind of says everything, doesn’t it?  

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond