reviews

The American Friend (1977)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Every year, social media posts come out during that period of time between Christmas and the beginning of the new year asking what they’re supposed to do with their idle hours. Most years, those days are filled with companionship and social engagements, but I found myself with a completely unoccupied Saturday this year. I went to the mall to get my calendar for the new year from the kiosk there, took a long bath, and then went to my local video store, where I wandered the aisles for over half an hour before finally settling on The Lady Vanishes; I grabbed dinner from the birria truck that’s on the same block and went home, settled in, and quite enjoyed it. It was still early in the evening, however, and I convinced myself to go back to the video store and get another movie, since they operate on a monthly subscription model and you can, essentially, rent as many movies as you want, simply one at a time. While walking past the bar next door to the video store, I ran into some neighbors that I rarely see, and one of them was vehemently excited to recommend the recent Ripley series starring Andrew Scott. This, along with a recent trip to the Austin Film Society to see Cinema Paradiso and thus once again seeing the poster for Der amerikanische Freund that hangs above one of the urinals there, I decided to check out the Wim Wenders adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s third Ripley novel, Ripley’s Game. 

The first thing to note about this film is that, despite first billing, Tom Ripley is not the main character. Also, the image that is conjured in your mind when you think of Ripley as a character—successful in his ongoing criminal enterprises and sociopathic activities due to his suave sophistication and urbane, well-cultured manner—is not the Tom Ripley that is portrayed herein by Dennis Hopper. This Ripley is slovenly, neurotic, unsure of himself, and unkempt, a far cry from the character as portrayed in the novels and in most adaptations. As in the novel (based on the summaries I’ve consulted; I only ever read Talented, and that was many years ago), Ripley is living in Europe off of stashed funds while continuing to grift. These days, he’s got an American painter producing “newly discovered” works from a deceased artist, which he then takes to Germany and auctions off to great profit. During the auction of the newest “Derwatt” piece, Ripley overhears Jonathan Zimmerman (Bruno Ganz) attempting to convince his friend not to bid on the painting, citing that the colors are slightly off and that it may be a forgery. Ripley attempts to introduce himself to Zimmerman, but is rebuffed coldly, as Zimmerman does not shake his proffered hand and instead simply says “I’ve heard of you.” Ripley then learns from the manager of the auction house, Gantner, that Zimmerman was once a great restoration artist as well as a master frame-maker, but that his restoration work has suffered due to Zimmerman’s struggle with terminal leukemia, and Zimmerman’s wife Marianne (Lisa Kreuzer) has had to come to work at the auction house to help supplement their income for his ongoing treatment. 

When Ripley is approached by French mobster Raoul Minot (Gérard Blain) about a hit on one of his American competitors, Ripley sends him to Zimmerman out of spite over the latter man’s curtness, and even sends a forged telegram to Zimmerman that indicates his condition is worsening. Despite initial resistance, Zimmerman is lured to Paris by Minot with the promise of seeing a specialist there; documents are falsified that maintain the ruse that Zimmerman’s time is growing short, and he is eventually convinced to kill Minot’s rival. As Marianne grows suspicious of what is really going on, Ripley and Zimmerman meet again, and ZImmerman’s apology for his previous behavior leads to Ripley softening toward him, and when he learns that Minot intends to have Zimmerman perform a second murder (and one with a much higher risk of being caught), he tries to convince the gangster not to, unsuccessfully. Wracked with guilt but feeling the hand of death on his shoulder and desiring to ensure that his widow and their young son Daniel are cared for, Zimmerman agrees to the second hit. When he botches it, Ripley appears and saves Zimmerman’s life, and the two work together to get rid of the evidence. 

It took some time for me to get into this one. It’s not what you would think of when you imagine a Highsmith adaptation. As mentioned above, Hopper is not the platonic ideal of Tom Ripley, and adjusting to that difference takes some time. What salves this change is that our main character here is Zimmerman. In the plot description above, Ripley’s name comes up a lot, but a lot of his action is invisible and offscreen, while the film follows Zimmerman for most of its runtime. What we see of Ripley is minimal; he’s neurotic, self-obsessed, and does little to ingratiate himself with those around him. For the first half of the film, what we know of him is that he’s a con man with no real people skills, and he spends his lonely hours recording nonsensical self-pitying monologues on cassette (which were largely improvised by Hopper) and then listens back to them later while driving around aimlessly. Zimmerman, on the other hand, has very clear motivations and beliefs, and watching his descent from loving father and husband to secretive, tortured man is heartbreaking. 

At a NYE party, I mentioned having seen this one to a friend who I know to be a big Ripley appreciator, which led to a larger discussion about how Winders’s work (with which he is more familiar than I) is often quiet, solemn, and—depending upon the viewer—kind of boring, but with at least one magnificent sequence that makes it worthwhile. For Der amerikanische Freund, the standout sequence comes around the halfway mark, when Zimmerman, having just been given the (false) news that his health has taken a turn for the worst and opts to accept Minot’s offer in the hopes not of getting treatment but of making sure that his family is cared for after his death. There is a solid ten minute dialogue-free sequence in which Zimmerman slowly and purposely follows his victim as he transfers from one train platform to another and boards different metros, a reluctant stalker, before he finally works up the nerve to shoot the man. Once the deed is done, despite Minot’s instructions to simply walk away calmly and quietly and disappear into a crowd, Zimmerman flees the scene, sprinting like a madman, and we see this flight play out over closed circuit surveillance footage, at a remove. It’s fantastic, one of the greatest versions of this kind of scene that I have ever seen. It’s also a fun subversion of Zimmerman’s constant running throughout the film; virtually everywhere he goes, he’s never moving at a pace slower than a brisk jog, except when he’s with his family. This is a nice little bit of characterization, that he knows he has a finite amount of time left in his life and he wants to spend the quiet, slow moments with his wife and son, rushing through all of his other obligations to get to what’s important. Zimmerman never stops, and it helps propel the film forward, even in its quiet moments. It’s a strange chapter in the saga of Highsmith adaptations, but one that’s ultimately very compelling. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

I really took my time picking out a movie at the video store last weekend. It was that Saturday between Christmas and the new year, and I had spent the day in solitude, which is not normally my way. I went to the mall to pick out my new sexy wall calendar for the year (you have to wait until after Christmas to buy one for yourself, otherwise someone may get one for you), idly wandered for a bit thinking about the lyrics of “Hard Candy Christmas,” and went to a coffee shop to see a friend who works there but who wasn’t there. I went to the home of a friend who had given me a very nice bath bomb for the holiday and offered up their modern, fancy bathtub for my use while they were out of town, and I sat on their balcony and stared into space. Then I wandered the aisles, trying to think of what I wanted to watch that night, with each DVD box that I picked up making me realize I would rather watch this or that with my friend once he got back to town. I spent a lot of time debating over the director wall and finally settled on a Hitchcock I had never seen. 

The Lady Vanishes is the last of the master’s works that he completed in England before he came to the states and engaged with the Hollywood system. Released in 1938, the film follows the misadventure of one Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), a Londoner who has spent her last few weeks of being single skiing with her girlfriends at a town in the fictional country of Bandrika. On her final night, she meets the charming Mrs. Froy, a governess who is returning back to England now that her charges have outgrown their need for her tutelage, and she also encounters the ethnomusicologist Gilbert Redman (Michael Redgrave, father of Vanessa and Lynn, in his first film role), who is in the room above her and recording information about a local folk dance, which disturbs her rest. With the rail lines snowed in, two proper English snoots named Charters and Caldicott (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, two of the most English names I have ever seen) are also forced to stay at the same inn, where they fret over the dwindling menu and the increasing unlikelihood that they will make it to any of the cricket matches that are on their agenda. That night, unbeknownst to any of the travellers, a serenader below Mrs. Froy’s window is strangled. The next morning, an attempt is made on Mrs. Froy’s life by someone pushing a potted plant onto her head from an upper window, but Iris is struck instead. Mrs. Froy helps her onto the train and they find themselves in a compartment together. Ultimately, the two wind up having tea and getting to know each other a bit better before Iris takes a short rest. When she awakes, however, she finds Mrs. Froy missing and, worse, everyone in the compartment claims that there never was a Mrs. Froy. As she searches the train for the woman, she happens upon Gilbert again and reluctantly accepts his assistance. The two of them also encounter renowned surgeon Dr. Hartz (Paul Lukas), who attempts to persuade Iris that perhaps the whole thing is the result of her earlier blow to the head. Elsewhere, however, an English barrister named Todhunter orders his mistress (Linden Travers, cheekily credited as playing “Mrs.” Todhunter) not to admit that she saw Froy earlier, lest their involvement in an investigation reveal their affair. Who was Mrs. Froy? Where has she gone? Who is involved? 

As a longtime fan of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series, I had long thought very little about this film, as I assumed it would follow the same plot as that program’s episode “Into Thin Air,” which was likewise about a young woman who is told that an older woman (in this case, her mother) was never present at the hotel in which the two are lodging. This turns out to have a completely different narrative, but according to some sources, the novel upon which The Lady Vanishes was based, Ethel Lina White’s The Wheel Spins, was partially inspired by the urban legend of The Vanishing Hotel Room, which was also more explicitly recapitulated in the aforementioned “Into Thin Air,” so it turns out I wasn’t pulling that connection out of, um, thin air. I would recommend that episode as a companion to this film; it’s one of the most cinematic, and makes great use of the minimal sets that the TV production would have had access to. Visually, this is one of Hitchcock’s most striking and sumptuous of his pre-Hollywood era. Although the modern eye can’t help but notice that the Bandrikan town in the film’s opening is a miniature, it’s a very high quality one that allows for some beautiful sweeping shots that move from the train yard to the inn. The rear projection work for the scenes set aboard the train are very effective at conveying a perfect closed loop of a narrative intertwined with a constant momentum, which is quite a lot of fun. 

Lockwood and Redgrave are fantastic together. When we first meet Iris, she comes off as a bit of a brat, being treated like royalty by the staff of the inn, who treat the milling crowd in the lobby as an afterthought. Gilbert, for this part, comes off as a cad from the outset as well, as it’s not unreasonable for Iris to request that his guests cease stomp-dancing on the floor directly above her bed. Their initial antipathy is the kind of electric interplay that the nostalgic crowd laments as lacking from contemporary film, and the way that it blossoms into a romance between them is what we go to the movies for, baby. Their interplay would be comic relief enough without the stuffy Caldicott and Charters, but the latter two are merely part of a truly iconic cast of supporting characters. I was particularly taken with “Mrs.” Todhunter, whose moral convictions and equivocations wield the power of life and death at points, even though she herself is unaware of the implications of both her silence and her admissions. Catherine Lacey, who comes into the film as the Nun late in the film, is also a world class addition, and I loved every moment we got to spend with her. The presentation is exciting, the cast is marvelous, and the mystery is wonderful. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Dark Passage (1947)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

One of the weirdest ways that the right wing griftosphere has managed to warp the minds of otherwise leftward and progressive young folks who are insufficiently critical of the online sources that inform their beliefs in the past couple of years has been the age gap discourse. In a very short period of time, we’ve gone from debating separating the art from the artist with regards to legitimate predators like Woody Allen and Roman Polanski to fully accepting the specious pseudoscience about when a brain is “fully formed” based on a tweet about a tweet about a tweet about a peer-reviewed study. I’m not going to pretend like we don’t live in a predatory world, especially for those who lack (or have been prevented from having) the ability to advocate for themselves. But I also can’t pretend that every time I see another young YouTuber fully and uncritically spread the idea that all age gap relationships are inherently unethical or immoral, it makes my heart preemptively hurt for all the ways that these uninformed blanket ideas are going to hurt the people that the purveyors of social commentary think they’re helping. If the right can get the left to eat itself by pushing the idea that women can’t make their own decisions at 18, or at 25, then they’ll eventually move the Overton window far enough to get people to think that women can’t make their own decisions at any age, or use this same logic to prevent trans people from living as their most authentic selves at any age. We’re only going to see it get worse. Luckily, Humphrey Bogart (born 1899) and Lauren Bacall (born 1924) have been dead long enough that (hopefully), they will escape the scrutiny of the neo-Puritans in Breadtube clothing.

Dark Passage was the third of four film that Bogey and Bacall made together during their marriage, and it’s a great little low-commitment noir. Bogart plays Vince Parry, a man wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife, and Bacall plays Irene Jansen, a woman who is sympathetic to him because of her own father’s false murder conviction. When Parry escapes from San Quentin, he first is picked up by a man named Baker (Clifton Young), but when Baker overhears the radio bulletin about Parry’s escape, the two scuffle and Parry steals his clothing. Before he does anything too rash, Irene appears on the scene and manages to secret him into San Francisco past the manhunt. While she’s out shopping for clothes, her snoopy friend Madge (Agnes Moorhead) appears at her door and, hearing the record playing inside, insists that Irene open up, until Parry has to pretend that he’s Irene’s gentleman caller. As it turns out, Madge and Parry have a history of their own; she wanted him and tried to induce him to an affair, and she provided the damning evidence (read: perjury) at Parry’s trial. Madge is also the ex-fiance of Bob (Bruce Bennett), who is now pursuing Irene. Parry leaves Irene’s and meets a sympathetic cabby named Sam (Tom D’Andrea) who sets Parry up with a discredited back alley plastic surgeon (Houseley Stevenson) to change his face. Unfortunately, upon awakening, Parry returns to the home of the friend who promised to house him during recovery only to find the man murdered, and Parry once again at the end of a frame job. 

The general consensus about this one is that the first half is much more exciting than the second, and I can see why. For the first forty minutes, the film is shot almost entirely in first person from Parry’s point of view, and it’s such a refreshingly modern and unconventional stylistic device that you can’t help but marvel at it, even nearly seven decades later. It’s Bogart’s voice throughout, of course, but we only ever see “Vincent Parry” as a photo in the newspaper, and the only time that Parry is on screen pre-face change is when he’s in the back of Sam’s cab and is backlit so that not even the outline of a face can be seen, which lends this one a great noir gravitas. This also allows for the opportunity for Bacall to make long, lingering stares straight down the barrel of the camera, as if she’s looking straight into your soul as she tells you that she believes in your innocence; she’s absolute magic here. While Parry is getting the surgery, he undergoes a marvelously psychedelic subjective dream sequence, with great kaleidoscopic effects and double (and triple) exposure overlays that also manages to feel very modern and fresh. The issue for a lot of people seems to be that this is where they start to lose interest, and the complete abandonment of those ahead-of-their-time visual choices as the rest of the movie plays out as a much more straightforward noir picture. I didn’t mind this, though, as I found the narrative sufficiently compelling and remained invested in whether Parry would ever be able to escape from the city and if Irene would be able to join him, as well as figuring out who actually did kill the late Mrs. Parry and Parry’s friend George. And the film is not completely without some very exciting shots to follow, especially as the action picks up; Parry is nearly apprehended by the police at one point, there’s a sequence of dangerous driving, and there are even two separate fall deaths with surprisingly decent dummy work. I liked it quite a lot. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Swampflix just hit its tenth anniversary as a movie blog, which was already a dead medium when we started posting reviews on the site in January of 2015.  The longer I stick with this project the more I question what, exactly, I’m getting out of it, which is a question likely best left unanswered.  There are some obvious, tangible benefits that come with time.  I can look back to the earliest writing & illustrations published on this site ten years ago and have confidence that my basic skills have improved with practice (even though the early drawings are still in active rotations, like the camera pictured above).  It’s also beneficial to have an ongoing log of the movies and thoughts that have passed through my brain in that time, since the majority of that memory would be lost otherwise.  Not least of all, Swampflix has become a social ritual for me, especially as the entirety of the crew has been assimilated into weekly podcast recordings, so that my friends are routinely obligated to talk to me about my personal favorite small-talk subject: movies.  The grand Swampflix project is one of self-fulfillment, operated entirely at a monetary loss, so the question is more about what I get out of publishing the site for public view and less about what I get out of it as a personal hobby.

That difference between internal and external fulfillment in a long-term amateur art project is one of the major tensions at the core of Patricia Rozema’s coming-of-middle-age drama I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing.  Our aimless, thirtysomething protagonist, Polly, is unsure of who she is and what she wants out of life.  She does not care about what she does for work, getting by on office temp jobs until she stumbles into a sweet regular gig assisting at a hip Toronto art gallery.  She’s disconnected from her own sexual desire, just now discovering in her thirties that she’s attracted to women, thanks to the magnetic allure of that gallery’s erudite curator, Gabrielle.  The only thing Polly knows for sure is that she loves taking photographs, and she’s transformed her one-bedroom apartment into an impromptu art gallery of its own, carpeting the walls with photos she’s taken of images that make her happy – mostly urban architecture & candid portraiture.  Only, her heart is broken when she anonymously submits these photographs for her employer’s consideration and is eviscerated by dismissive critiques that the artist behind them represents “the trite made flesh.”  Before that unknowing betrayal, her photography hobby was the one thing that Polly found personally fulfilling in life.  Hearing a negative, outside opinion on her work breaks the spell, and she’s left with little to live for, especially since she’s betrayed by the one person she looks up to.

I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing finds immense beauty in “the trite,” the twee, the quirky.  Polly is a kind of Holy Fool archetype who makes great art (to the audience’s eye, anyway) simply by amusing herself with a camera.  Gabrielle is her Art World foil: a cynical materialist who only values art based on its marketability and its relevance to hip New Yorkers’ tastes, which plays as a joke on Torontonian insecurities.  Their ideological clash escalates when Gabrielle starts passing off widely beloved “golden” paintings created by her lover, Mary, as her own original work for marketing purposes, which causes Polly to lose even more respect for her idol.  Meanwhile, Polly goes on fantastic mental adventures while developing prints in her dark room, living a true artist’s inner life in an over-imaginative dream space of her own making while the more successful Art World team of Gabrielle & Mary waste their time orchestrating much pettier, more lucrative schemes.  It’s the same volatile mixture of authentic authorship debates and adventures in self-fulfilling sensuality that Rozema pushed to a further extreme in her follow-up film White Room, except this time it’s framed as a quirky indie romcom instead of a Hitchcockian voyeur thriller.

I’ve only seen a couple of Rozema’s films so far, but she has a distinct eye for fairy tale visuals and an ear for dreamworld tones that make for singular work that could’ve been made by no one else, despite the fact that she’s often shooting commercial-grade video art in a major Canadian city.  Still, the major triumph of I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing is Sheila McCarthy’s adorably insecure performance as Polly.  McCarthy approximates what it would be like if the Jim Henson Creature Shop captured the spirit of Ann Magnuson & Pee-wee Herman in a single Muppet.  She’s simultaneously a dorky, overgrown child who can’t get through a business lunch at a sushi restaurant without giving herself a milk mustache and the chicest person in every room she enters, largely thanks to her total lack of self-awareness.  She might not know what to do with any appendage of her body in any social scenario, but she out-cools all of the Art World poseurs who turn their noses up at her.  Polly is proof that the “Adulting!” brand of stunted maturity is not unique to Millennials as a generation, since Rozema’s film was produced when we were mere babies.  It’s also evidence that the main reason so many of us are Like That (useless but adorably dorky) is that we’re only suited to be making art for our own pleasure but living in a world that requires us to make money for survival.  I can say this for certain: Swampflix would improve greatly if I didn’t spend so much of my time working for a paycheck elsewhere.  It would likely also improve if I turned this hobby into my paycheck, but I assume that would zap all of the fun & self-fulfillment out of it, so no thanks.

-Brandon Ledet

Kiss of Death (1947)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Usually, when a classic-period noir is singled out for praise, it’s because it’s lean, rapid-fire machine gun entertainment – a high-style, high-energy crime picture achieved on a low-rent budget.  1947’s Kiss of Death has none of those qualities.  After opening on a botched Christmas Eve jewel heist in a tense, largely wordless sequence, the film’s urge to entertain goes dark.  This is an oddly leisurely, somber noir about the jail-sweat struggles of one of those failed jewel thieves (played by the aptly named Victor Mature) as he’s pressured to rat on his accomplices who got away.  At first, he refuses to squeal, but threats against his family change his tune, and he reluctantly becomes an undercover rat helping cops bust the crime rings that used to supply his income, much to his personal shame.  Watching this family man squirm under police pressure in his jail cell is far from the perverse sex-and-violence pleasures audiences usually seek in classic noir, so most of Kiss of Death ends up feeling limp in its genre payoffs.  It’s still worthy of all its praise & attention, though, thanks to a maniac villain by the name of Tommy Udo.

Richard Windmark’s performance as the sad-sack squealer’s charismatic, villainous foil heroically brings Kiss of Death back to life after the much more reserved Victor Mature drowns it in moralistic tedium.  Windmark’s infamous gangster Tommy Udo is a murderous sociopath whom the D.A. wants the jewel thief to snitch on as a fellow convict, but he proves too dangerous to be around, even for a minute.  Windmark is such an energizing lunatic in the role that he earned an unlikely Oscar nomination for it, presumably for being the only sign of life in an otherwise plodding picture.  Along with the likes of James Cagney, Peter Lorre, and Ann Savage, he gives one of the all-time great unhinged noir-villain performances, often credited alongside Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs for inspiring the look & persona of The Joker.  When a cop asks Udo if he has a minute to talk, he spits back “I wouldn’t give you the skin off a grape.”  He condescendingly refers to his fellow gangsters by the uniform nickname “Squirt.”  He pushes wheelchair-using biddies down the stairs just for rubbing him the wrong way.  He is the entertaining volatility that most noirs exude in their filmmaking personified in a single movie-stealing character.

Besides the dark, revitalizing energy of Windmark’s performance, Kiss of Death is most commendable for its early use of location shooting around 1940s New York City, including prison scenes shot at Sing Sing.  Shooting outside of a Los Angeles studio lot was atypical for a small-scale crime picture at the time, which you can tell as soon as an opening-credits title card brags about the novelty.  It’s also unusual for a noir of this kind to be narrated by the doomed antihero’s love interest (and, weirdly, his kids’ former babysitter, played by Colleen Gray), but I can’t say her voice adds as much interest or texture to the picture as the location shooting, except maybe in softening the genre’s macho tendencies.  Otherwise, Hollywood workman director Henry Hathaway (True Grit, Niagara, Call Northside 777) brings a controlled, level-headed approach to the production that keeps it from achieving anything especially flashy or memorable within its genre template.  Only Tommy Udo breaks through that containment of Old Hollywood professionalism, transforming a cozy afternoon watch into a momentarily thrilling freak show.  He is the spectacle worth seeking out here, the only reason the film is remembered at all.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #228: Frankie Freako (2024) & Gremlinsploitation

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Welcome to Episode #228 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Pete Moran of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss the retro horror comedy Frankie Freako (2024) and the late-80s wave of Gremlins knockoffs that inspired it.

00:00 Welcome

06:50 Frankie Freako

26:06 Ghoulies
48:25 Critters
56:45 Trolls
1:09:18 Munchies
1:23:14 Beasties
1:28:22 Hobgoblins

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

– The Podcast Crew

Wicked (2024)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

In our recent podcast episode about Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds, Brandon mentioned having seen (and not enjoyed) Wicked. I had previously shared that, when this film was over, I turned to my viewing companion and said, “I have a confession to make. I thought I was going to hate this,” but admitted that I had, in fact, loved it. The Wizard of Oz is one of the first movies that I can ever remember seeing, and I had a secondhand walkman that the red cassette of Oz songs basically lived inside of for years. I loved the books, reading them repeatedly (my favorite characters were Tik Tok and The Hungry Tiger, whose tormented existence torn between desire and moral conviction probably spoke to me at a deeper level, even at that young age). We named one of our chickens Billina and I even spent an entire summer saving my chore money toward a layaway copy of the much-maligned SNES Wizard video game. (The only other person I have ever met with any memory of the game, my friend Eric, also admitted he had never been able to beat it. About five years ago, we got together to watch a playthrough of it on YouTube and were shocked to discover that, of about 110 minutes of gameplay, neither of us had ever gotten past the first 25 minutes, which is where we inevitably died. It was just that hard.) I read Gregory Maguire’s Wicked in the summer between undergrad and grad school, and while I didn’t love it, I didn’t think it was bad, just that I preferred to imagine Oz as I had when I was a child. But after so many bad Oz movies and series over the years (especially Oz the Great and Powerful), I didn’t expect that I would fall into the magic of a movie that had so much negative press surrounding its visual style, especially since a musical is already kind of a hard sell for me. I was mostly there for the Jonathan Bailey of it all (since Broadchurch, if you’re keeping score at home). 

Wicked (Part 1, as everyone suspected) is about Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo), a woman from Munchkinland who, as the result of some magical hanky-panky in the middle of some extramarital hanky-panky, was born with green skin. This makes her an ostracized outsider among the Munchkins and leaves her the less-favored daughter of her widowed father, who dotes upon her paraplegic younger sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode). Nessarose is accepted to attend Oz’s Shiz University, and although Elphaba is not a prospective student, her accidental use of real magic in the presence of Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) leads her to being invited to attend, under direct tutelage of Morrible, on the spot. As the result of a misunderstanding, Elphaba is set up to room with Galinda (Ariana Grande), the prettiest, most popular girl in all of Oz, although Elphaba ends up shoved into a small corner of their shared lodgings as a result of Galinda’s extensive pink wardrobe. Initial conflict between the two leads to Elphaba’s further isolation at school, and it is further exacerbated with the arrival of Prince Fiyero from Winkieland, whose devil-may-care attitude and carpe diem approach to academics, love, and life in general. Fiyero and Elphaba meet before he arrives at the school, and he is charmed by her lack of deference to either his royal title (of which she is ignorant) or his stunning good looks (which she cannot help but notice). However, upon arrival at the school, Galinda immediately gloms onto him and he accepts and reciprocates the attention, attempting to get the entire student body to reject the boredom of academia in favor of vice and fun, much to Elphaba’s annoyance. Meanwhile, there is an undercurrent of fascism and racism at Shiz U, as the once-diverse teaching body of the university has been whittled down to have only one remaining talking Animal instructor, the goat Dr. Dillamond (Peter Dinklage), who is the person willing to befriend Elphaba. Galinda and Elphaba eventually reconcile when, after a particularly cruel prank, Galinda learns that Elphaba has done something genuinely kind and meaningful in helping Galinda pursue her greatest ambitions; Galinda then makes it her project to rehabilitate Elphaba’s public image and make her, as the song says, popular. When Elphaba at last receives an invite to come to the Emerald City and meet The Wizard (Jeff Goldblum), she chooses instead to argue on behalf of the plight of the Animals rather than ask him to cure her of her green skin, setting events into motion that change the destinies of everyone involved. 

I’ve long been known to be a musical-averse person, but I’m coming around. After having seen recorded versions of Sweeney Todd (the one with Angela Lansbury) and Phantom of the Opera (the 25th anniversary production) this year, I’m more open to them than I once was, and it’s no secret that Wicked is one of the biggest and most widely acclaimed ones of all time. I can’t really speak to this one as an adaptation, but I really enjoyed it. I didn’t love every song (“Dancing Through Life” is acceptable as a bit of exposition/character development, but it’s very boring to me, and if it didn’t have Jonathan Bailey dancing through it, I wouldn’t work at all), but I thoroughly enjoyed most of them, and some are real standouts. Erivo’s voice is fantastic, and in some behind-the-scenes footage she’s singing live in several scenes that show that the magic is coming from her and not from any studio enhancements. She’s entrancing here as Elphaba, and I see so much of people I’ve known and loved in her performance that she completely won me over. I’ve also never been all that interested in Ariana Grande; she came along after I had already long graduated from the age group that she’s aimed at. I was of the generation whose adolescent-aimed-cable-channel-musical-industrial-complex products were Raven and Hillary Duff, so Grande’s rise from that same metaphorical farm league came long after I was among the target demographic. She’s quite fun here, and separates herself from the others on the same career path with a lot of genuine charm and a willingness to commit to the bit that’s quite admirable. 

As for most people’s complaints about the film and its visual style, I have to admit that I didn’t mind it. It would have been nice to have the film try to replicate the Technicolor-sais quoi of the MGM classic, but there’s still a lot to love here in the designs and the details. The costuming is fantastic, and at no point did I think that Oz looked boring or colorless, except in moments in which there’s an intentionality to the blandness that I find appropriate. This one left me feeling elevated and effervescent, and I loved that, even if what we’re watching is the real time character assassination of our protagonist at the hands of an evil government. What more could one really ask for?

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Evil Does Not Exist (2024)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

My number one movie of last year, La vaca que cantó una canción hacia el futuro, was advertised at my local arthouse theater with a quote calling the film an “eco-fable,” a term I had theretofore been unfamiliar with. When Aku wa Sonzai Shinai, or Evil Does Not Exist, was advertised at the same earlier this year, there was another quote in their trailer referring to it using the same neogenre epithet. I was excited by this, but missed the window in which it was playing and had to wait for other means to view it to come around. 

The film primarily concerns a widower named Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), who lives in the rural mountain village of Mizubiki, with his daughter, Hana. Takumi is a vital member of the community as a performer of local odd jobs, like collecting and transporting water directly from a mountain stream to a cafe in town that is noted for its exceptional udon. He lives in a state of constant distraction caused by the grief of the loss of his wife, not necessarily reliable but relied upon, with the fact that he often forgets to pick his daughter up from school being established early on. Two representatives from a glamping development project that is set to begin construction near Mizubiki arrive in town from Tokyo, and a polite-but-tense interaction ensues. Initially, the male representative, Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka), comes off as condescending while his partner Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) is more receptive to the locals’ concerns. These include but are not limited to: the placement of the glamping site’s septic tank will result in runoff that will enter the water table for the village, that the location is part of the migration area of local deer, that the lack of 24-hour on-site management opens up the possibility of guests starting campfires that result in major forest fires. By the end, even Takahashi recognizes that the concerns of the villagers are far from trivial, but his and Mayuzumi’s efforts to have all issues addressed are rebuffed by their upper management in Tokyo, who concede on the issue of 24-hour support but not moving the septic tank, and who recommend hiring Takumi to act as the caretaker of the site. As he and Mayuzumi return to Mizubiki to discuss this with Takumi, Takahashi confesses that he’s grown tired of this, as he entered the industry as an entertainment agent and feels that his work has moved him into places that he finds morally questionable and for which he is largely unsuited; he’s even considering applying for the caretaker position himself. He can barely keep from repeating this to Takumi shortly after they arrive, and the local man takes the two on his rounds, before realizing that he’s forgotten to pick up his daughter from school yet again, although this time, she’s not home when he gets there. 

The title is incorrect, of course. Evil does exist, it simply rarely announces itself and is good at obfuscation. When Takahashi and Mayuzumi’s boss refuses to consider the possibility of finding some other way to address the septic tank issue at the proposed glamping site, he does so with a tense and polite smile that demonstrates that he’s only willing to concede on the issue of having a caretaker because it’s possible to do it without any additional funding. He says that they’ll just have to cut overall staff. On the issue of making sure that the precise natural resource that forms the most delicate, intricate part of the experience that the company is selling is threatened, he is unmovable. Comically underscoring his point, he presents as evidence a “stocks go up” style graph that says merely that the glamping industry exists and is profitable. None of this is seen by him as “evil,” merely as him fulfilling his position in a capitalist hierarchy. Nonetheless, each of his decisions has a direct effect on the health of a village of people “downstream.” That is the nature of evil, that it’s all a series of selfish decisions that each person justifies to oneself, snowballing downhill and getting larger and more harmful as it goes. No person’s individual choices are evil in their own hearts, but it does exist. 

Unfortunately, this film lacks the clarity and cohesion of La vaca que cantó. That film dove hard into its magical realism, while this one is straightforwardly realistic, at least until its final minutes, which are narratively ambiguous to the point of potential frustration. I have a feeling that most people will be turned off by the film’s pace, which one could describe as “meditative” or “glacial,” depending upon how much patience you’re willing to lend it. Evil Does Not Exist spends a lot of time in observation of the peaceful stillness of its setting, as it is filled with long and loving shots of people travelling through the picturesque beauty of the forests and mountains that fill virtually every frame of the film. To be frank, I found this one taxing my patience, and I have a lot more patience for these kinds of slow, sprawling pastorals than most. It could be argued that it’s a necessary part of the package for interpretation of this as a text, but the parts of the film in which something does happen are electric, even when it’s something that’s as objectively uninteresting as a town hall meeting in which no one ever raises their voice. I can see what’s being done here, by making the banality of real estate development and the resultant community conflict more interesting by juxtaposing it against a landscape which is beautiful but also harsh and empty – that is, not in the least bit escapist. However, that doesn’t make the movie a more enjoyable experience for me. 

What I did like was the density of the narrative that exists. When we first meet Takahashi, he seems like just another stuffed shirt who’s been sent solely in order to make it appear that his employing corporation checked all the boxes needed to get nominal approval from the local community. And that’s exactly what he is, but he does soften up a bit after hearing from the people of Mizubiki. Unfortunately, he learns exactly the wrong thing from this, as he immediately thinks that he would be best suited for the caretaker position, and he’s exhilarated and energized when Takumi allows him to chop a single log and assist with the collection of springwater for the udon restaurant. Earlier in the film, one of the local women asks for a clarification on what “glamping” is, and settles for the definition that the new development will be a “camping themed hotel.” Takahashi, despite rejecting his company because of their treatment of the people of the village, completely buys into the exact thing that they are selling. That’s one of the more interesting insights that the movie plays with. One of my other favorite moments is when Takumi refers to his grandparents as “settlers,” and notes that even the people who already reside there are responsible for “deform[ing]” the nature that exists there to some extent. The issue is not so straightforward as “glamping bad,” but that there’s no action without reaction. I like all of that quite a lot. Unfortunately, I just can’t find it in my heart to love this one as much as I wish I did. I see why it is the way that it is, but I just can’t bring myself to love it.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Nickel Boys (2024)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

It has been heartbreaking to watch Barry Jenkins succumb to the Disney filmmaking machine, pouring years of his life & art into the lifeless, artless product of the studio’s “live-action” CG prequel to The Lion King.  Regardless of whether Jenkins’s Mufasa is any good, it’s undeniably a waste of the talented filmmaker’s time when compared to his previous critical hits Moonlight & If Beale Street Could Talk: two gorgeous, somber portraits of Black American life, as opposed to a pale, sickly sing-along starring computer-animated lions.  Anyone who’s mourning that loss and feeling nostalgic for The Old Jenkins is likely to find refuge in RaMel Ross’s Awards Season sweetheart Nickel Boys, which offers a more formally extreme version of Jenkins’s earlier triumphs.  As already evidenced in his own earlier, artsier documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Ross is a more challenging, experimental filmmaker than Jenkins, but the two directors share a fearless, formalist approach to Black portraiture and work well in tandem.  Nickel Boys softens a little of Hale County‘s narrative looseness in its distraction with other tools of filmmaking language, but it’s still a potentially alienating work with uncompromising politics.  Let’s just hope that its Oscars buzz doesn’t lead to Ross directing Moana 3 or Black Panther 4 over the next few years; the financial paycheck is never worth the artistic payoff.

The formal experiment in this case is in adapting a novel written from a 3rd-person POV into a 1st-person narrative film, putting the audience in the alternating minds & bodies of its two main characters.  Instead of taking a straight historical look at the recent abusive, racist past of boys’ reformatory schools in the American South, Ross walks you through the first-hand experience of being imprisoned there as a young, innocent victim of the system.  It’s like playing a 1st-person shooter video game except instead of committing acts of violence you walk into the wrong place at the wrong time, and your fate is locked into a one-way track you have no opportunity to break away from, which accounts for the experience of many young Black men in America.  The result is a clear, direct argument that the institution of American slavery continued well after the Civil War; it’s just now carried out through schoolyard & prison labor under the guise of punitive justice.  To his credit, Ross breaks away from the linear one-way-track structure of that political argument with intrusions of memory and glimpses of his protagonists’ future—which fully take over in the final, fragmentary montage that pulls the full scope of his story together—but the central conceit is having to suffer inside the two boys’ bodies & minds as if they were your own, fearful that you might not make it to the end credits without getting dumped into one of the school’s unmarked graves.

If you end up watching Nickel Boys at home instead of the theater, I recommend using headphones. A lot of attention has been paid to the 1st-person perspective of its imagery, but its sound design is just as intensely, complexly immersive.  I wish I had more to say about what it’s doing dramatically rather than formally, but the technical achievement of that sensory immersion can’t be dismissed.  If it has any narrative grace to it, it’s in the smaller, observational details that distract from his larger historical & political bullet points: focusing on the thread of a garment while news reports of a landmark Civil Rights event echo in the background, using the recurring image of a freshly picked orange to anchor the audience to the Floridian setting, throwing in a couple alligator jump scares to heighten the already tense experience of being a sensitive boy raised in a macho, militarized environment, etc.  I can’t say the dramatic exchanges between actors ever overpowered the visual & aural devices that Ross spent so much of his energy tinkering with; it plays more like a VR experience than a traditional narrative film.  Still, that’s more of an exciting, daring technical achievement than figuring out how to get a CG lion to mouth the words to a Lin Manuel-Miranda song or whatever Jenkins has been up to in his Disney Vault prison cell. 

-Brandon Ledet

Holding Back the Tide (2024)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

One of the more diabolical trends in recent film promotion & distribution has been the decrease in access to premiere screenings for professional critics in favor of inviting online influencers instead.  The thought is that the younger, less journalistic influencer crowd is more likely review a new movie favorably than a traditional critic—especially when buttered up with parties, booze, and merch—so studios can effectively purchase cheap advertising by elbowing the old-world press out of the way to make room for the brats.  Being neither a paid critic nor a young upstart with a substantial online following myself, I’ve never experienced that kind of blatant buttering-up first-hand, but I did get a small taste of it at last weekend’s local premiere of the microbudget documentary Holding Back the Tide at The Broadside.  The ticket price for the screening included a Happy Hour icebreaker where local shuckers supplied unlimited raw oysters for the crowd to slurp down in excess, supposedly as a live demonstration of the shell-recycling program helmed by The Coalition to Restore Costal Louisiana, which has been repurposing shells from local bars & restaurants to rebuild the state’s eroding coastline.  No matter how many helpful CRCL representatives were around to answer questions via personal interaction or post-film panel discussion about the recycling program, I could clearly see the truth; those oysters were a bribe – a bribe far more valuable than any Los Angeles red carpet meet-and-greet with the voice cast of Mufasa.  They put the audience in a euphoric mood that was impossible to break.

In all seriousness, Holding Back the Tide does pair extraordinarily well with pre-screening oysters, since half of the movie’s credibility relies on a shared understanding that oysters are an exquisitely delicious treat.  Once you agree to that premise, all the movie has to do is explain that they are also an admirable political tool & role model, as exemplified locally by CRCL’s Oyster Shell Recycling Program.  This is not a talking-heads advocacy doc so much as it’s an invitation to mediate on the nature of the oyster as a divine organism for 77 breezy minutes, best enjoyed with the mollusks’ briny taste still lingering on your tongue.  It walks a thin line between poetry and incoherence, but it also makes a convincing enough argument that oysters deserve that awestruck aspiration.  By the time this seafood industry documentary ends on a heartfelt dedication “to The Queer Future,” it earns a hearty “Right on,” from its audience.  At that point, we’ve touched on the oyster’s relationships with and answers to political subjects as wide-ranging as Climate Change, gender identity, communal solidarity, racial justice, and capitalistic overconsumption – each with seemingly enough contextual history worthy of their own standalone doc.  Oyster farmers, vendors, shuckers, and scientists pontificate about their collective fav in fragmentary interviews, focusing mostly on the oyster’s significance to the life & history of New York City.  This hands-on academia is counterbalanced by a more metaphorical appreciation of the oyster’s tendency to change genders mid-life to maintain social balance, as voiced & modeled by trans performers who personify the little wonders. 

Holding Back the Tide is resistant to linear explanations of the oyster’s significance to NYC culture, choosing instead to mimic the circular, repetitive structure of human breath or crashing waves.  Its imagery can be abstract to the point of counterproductivity, such as its gorgeous underwater photography of subway cars being used to restore coastal reefs along with humanmade, recycled oyster beds – which are seen but not verbally explained.  When a seemingly cis-het couple orally exchange an oyster back & forth Tampopo-style, then emerge from the experience as a different pair of lesbian actors, their literalized transformation into The Queer Future is just as confused as it is corny.  However, the living-tableau recreation of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in an oversized oyster shell, reworked as a portrait of modern transgender beauty, is one genius image among many, with clear thematic intent.  It’s especially easy to get on board with the movie’s religious exaltation of the oyster as a Louisianian familiar with its pleasures as a seasonal delicacy and its uses in coastal hurricane protection, maybe even more so than for the average New Yorkers in the target audience.  Love for the oyster is something you feel more than it is something you can articulate, like the stupefying awe for rocks expressed in Deborah Stratman’s recent film Last Things.  Holding Back the Tide is less abrasive & challenging than Stratman’s film, calling back to the more playful 90s NYC indie filmmaking of a Fresh Kill than anything so academically experimental.  Its love for the oyster is raw & heartfelt, and it wants to be shared to its audience so badly it sometimes comes with a real-life oyster bar to help supplement the experience.

-Brandon Ledet