romance

Drop (2025)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Watching all of those Final Destination movies in a single week must have rewired my brain, because I spent the first forty minutes of Drop waiting for a huge disaster to occur. After the film opens on a flashback to protagonist Violet (Meghann Fahy)’s final altercation with her violent, abusive husband as her infant watches, we cut forward to the present, where she is planning to go on her first date since then, leaving her now Pre-K aged son Toby with her sister, Jen (Violett Beane). This is the first time she and her son have been apart, and she’s understandably nervous. As we have all already seen this trailer (presumably many times), we know that on this date she is going to begin receiving airdropped directions to do something awful to her companion, we spend the first several minutes after her arrival to the (begging to be a Final Destination location) restaurant meeting all of the potential subjects. There’s Matt (Jeffrey Self), the UCB hopeful and waiter who’s on his first shift and whose oversharing about his sketch ideas may be either an actual annoying character trait or a cover for his activities; there’s pianist Phil (Ed Weeks), who attempts to hit on Violet sleazily before he’s warned off by bartender Cara (Gabrielle Ryan), who seems very invested in Violet’s first date; there’s Richard (Reed Diamond), a nervous man who approaches Violet thinking that she might be the blind date he’s been set up with before meeting his actual date; there’s also Connor (Travis Nelson), a handsome man that Violet bumps into on two separate occasions, which may have given him access to clone her phone; and finally the hostess (Sarah McCormack), whose access to all of the security cameras gives her a bird’s eye view that may be what’s enabling Violet’s harassment. By the time her date, Henry (Brandon Sklenar), arrives, we’ve got quite the list of potential suspects to keep us guessing about who’s behind the home invasion that Violet witnesses on her phone via her home security cameras, with the threat against Jen and Toby used to force Violet to steal from Henry and potentially murder him. 

The date starts casually enough, with Henry having the patience of multiple saints as Violet keeps checking her phone fairly constantly throughout the date, which she attributes to separation anxiety from her son. She shares the first couple of things that are airdropped to her with Henry; they’re mostly memes to get her attention, but quickly turn into threats and directions to destroy a memory card that Henry, who is the mayor’s photographer, has in his camera bag. This is the first clue that we get to the purpose of the unknown dropper’s motives, as we see there are photos of some documents which may point to corruption in Chicago’s upper echelons. Once this is complete, she’s directed to retrieve something from the paper towel dispenser in the ladies’ room, which turns out to be a vial of poison that she must use against Henry. It’s all a fairly tense affair, and it’s fun to watch Violet figure out reasons to keep going back to the washroom or direct Henry to help her look for her watch, while she also tries to figure out how to ask for help despite her every movement being monitored. The final climax of the film goes for a full-on action sequence as the identity of the dropper is revealed and Violet manages to get the upper hand, but not before they direct their accomplice to kill Jen and Toby, which means Violet has to race home and try to stop the assassin, in a mirror of her first scene in which her husband threatened her and baby Toby with a handgun. 

This is a pretty decent premise, and one that’s followed through upon well. It bears mentioning that the narrative has a lot of the same plot beats as the 2005 Wes Craven picture Red Eye starring Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy. In that flick, McAdams’s character is a hotel manager who is blackmailed under threat of deadly violence against her father into moving a political appointee into a specific suite so that Murphy’s terrorist organization can complete an assassination. Like Violet, she too experienced a horrific event just a couple of years earlier that left her unwilling to give up, and the fury of which she channels into attacking her aggressor before rushing home to save her threatened family. Both films are very much of their era, as the earlier film explicitly labels Murphy a domestic terrorist and the object of his violence is associated with the Department of Homeland Security, making it a clear example of Bush era domestic terror politics. In this one, not only is the target of the killer’s ire someone who’s looking to expose corruption (and therefore automatically a hero), but the film’s entire gimmick centering around the whole “airdrop” smartphone element feels like a premise that should have been done a couple of years ago when that was a newer feature. One gets the feeling that this one will seem just as much like an unintentional period piece as Red Eye in just a few years, although I’m not certain it will have the same punch two decades from now that Red Eye still does today. 

Fahy is great here, and it’s fun to see her again after her stellar run on the second season of White Lotus, especially since she was also in the much maligned The Unbreakable Boy earlier this year, which had the misfortune of shooting in 2022 and then being shelved until after Fahy gained more recognition. Sklenar is attractive as Henry and definitely fits the mold of a handsome leading man, but I couldn’t help but notice how much chemistry Violet and Cara had from the outset, and in between wondering when the penthouse restaurant was going to fall out of the sky like the opening scene of Final Destination: Bloodlines, I kept thinking that Violet should just skip her date and make out with Cara instead. Even when my suspicions fell on Cara as the airdropper (or a conspirator thereof), I was still kind of rooting for a sapphic resolution to the story. 

This is exactly the kind of mid-budget thriller that movie studios used to churn out at a rate of a dozen a year, a quickly cobbled together script that took some recent tech news item and ran with it to craft a thriller around, usually relying on the audience’s general lack of tech savvy to be effective. I’ve never owned an iPhone and thus have never sent or received an airdrop (although they are careful to never use any of Apple’s branded products or tech names and even their use of the fiery Elmo meme replaces the Muppet with a generic stuffed animal), so I have no idea how plausible or implausible this is as a technological MacGuffin. I saw this with a few friends, some of whom are iPhone users, and they mentioned that this would have been more believable several years ago before everyone turned off the default airdrop “receive” setting, as most folks have stopped accepting airdrops as it largely became a method for pervs and other creeps to spam a given area with unsolicited dick pics. I have to take their word for it. For a nice, easy thriller that doesn’t require too much mental energy, Drop is decent, and fun enough for what it is. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Chunking Express (1994)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

I recently celebrated my birthday, and coincidentally, over the course of Chungking Express, so does the protagonist of the first half. And he’s a May baby, too! This was not an intentional viewing choice on my part, but it was a fun little accident, and since I, like all of Wong Kar-Wai’s protagonists, am a hardcore yearner, that wasn’t the only thing that aligned for me. 

Express is neatly divided into two halves, each narrative connected solely by the presence of the Mandarin Express fast-food bar located in Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions, a seventeen-story building originally built as a residential complex but which ultimately mostly houses low-budget guest houses and shops. Our first protagonist, Chi-Moo (Takeshi Kaneshiro), is a police officer whose girlfriend, May, breaks up with him on April 1st, initially leading him to believe that she is joking. As the month wears on, he finds himself committing to a silly ritual of buying a can of pineapple from the local convenience store every day, each one with an expiration date of May 1st, his upcoming 25th birthday. When the month ends and May has yet to tell him that she was kidding, he eats all thirty cans in one night, then goes out drinking. While out, he meets a woman in a blonde wig (Brigitte Lin); unbeknownst to him, she is a professional criminal specializing in drug trafficking, whose most recent scheme has run aground as her newest recruits disappeared at the airport with her product and never appeared at their final destination. After he vomits up a prodigious amount of canned pineapple, the two retire to a hotel room where she finally sleeps after days on the run while he watches over her. 

They both disappear completely from the film after this as the narrative view shifts. Chi-Moo runs through his entire little black book on the payphone at the Mandarin Express, where the owner attempts to set him up with one of his employees, coincidentally also named May, with no success. Said proprietor also tries to make a date for another frequent visitor, a beat cop known only by his badge number, 663 (Tony Leung), with May, but when he walks by on his patrol after having been dumped by his flight attendant girlfriend (Valerie Chow), May has gone off on a vacation and relative Faye (Faye Wong) is covering for her in her absence. 663 is still too heartbroken about his recent relationship to notice that Faye is utterly smitten with him from the get-go. When his ex drops by with a letter for him along with his house keys, every employee of the Express reads the letter and gossips about its contents among themselves, with only Faye finding the deeper resonance in the words between two separated lovers. 663 initially refuses to take the letter, saying that he will simply get it another time, and this allows Faye the opportunity to, in true manic pixie dream girl fashion, start using his keys to let herself into his home and spruce up the place. Over time, the lovelorn 663 moves through his grief (in no small part because of her attempts to cheer him up) and becomes fascinated by this strange woman and her quirks: her forgetfulness, her attitude, and her eternal fascination with The Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’,” which plays approximately one hundred times throughout the film. She has her own dreams that will take her away from him, however, but that doesn’t mean that the time that they walked a path together wasn’t the catalyst that led them both to pursue something meaningful in their lives, and it also doesn’t mean that they’ll never walk the same path again. 

Wong’s filmography, at least the parts with which I’m familiar (mostly Happy Together and In the Mood for Love; I’ve seen 2046 but have no memory of it), is all about longing, almost entirely without any kind of physical intimacy. It’s love that exists in the brooding, in the shared looks, expressed in the lingering of presence and the acceptance of absence. Happy Together does open with a sex scene, which serves to express the once-easy intimacy of Po–Wing and Fai in comparison to the slow, backsliding dissolution of their relationship that plays out over the rest of the film. There’s nothing that explicit here, other than a brief scene of 663 and the stewardess in bed together before she takes off on one of her flights (possibly the last time they were together before a chance reunion at the same corner store where Chi-Moo buys all his pineapple, near the finale), and the director is once again exploring the yearn, even if it doesn’t initially appear to be headed in that direction. The film opens with a much more action-y style as we meet the Woman in the Wig and see her recruit several men to be her drug runners, then follows the process of them being outfitted by special tailors who create clothing designed with secret pockets and compartments as well as the creation of false documentation to allow them to travel. She takes the cadre to the airport and sees them off, then learns that she’s been double crossed and the drugs never reached their destination. She tries to extort the return of the drugs by kidnapping a child, ultimately giving up on this half-hearted attempt, which is where we leave her before we spend some time with Chi-Moo before their two stories collide. A lot of this opening action is shot using a sort of shutter effect that I assume was in vogue in action films of the time (I recently attempted to watch the 1999 Korean action flick Nowhere to Hide, which featured the same kind of photography to ramp up the action, although I couldn’t finish that one). 

This changes completely once the film pivots to its two leading yearners, Chi-Moo and (later) 663. Apparently, the script was not complete at the time that filming began, and the second segment about 663 was written in a single day, which might explain the abrupt bifurcation of the film into its two largely separate halves. As such, there’s not as much consistency throughout this one as there is in his other works that I’ve seen. They’re not unified narratively or even structurally and are instead linked solely by the emotions of Leung and Takeshi’s characters. This gives the film an effortless and breathless quality, one that wanders but does not meander. Where it most reminded me of this other work, however, was in its musical choices. As a period piece, In the Mood for Love featured a lot of classic jazz numbers, notably several performed by Nat King Cole (“You Belong To My Heart,” “Magic Is The Moonlight,” “Quizas, Quizas, Quizas,” and more), with the frequent presence of his album Cole Español serving to tell us something about the characters. Chow and Su are both Shanghainese expatriates living in the eighth decade of British rule of Hong Kong, and their blossoming (but unconsummated) romance being soundtracked by the American Cole’s album created for the Latin market creates a feeling of being untethered from any sense of place or identity but finding root in love, a language that transcends tongues. The use of “Happy Together” by The Turtles as the concluding track in the film that takes its name from the song is an ironic, or at least ambiguous, one. Po-Wing and Yiu-Fai are not happy together and have not been for a long time, and it’s apparent that they likely cannot be happy together, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t both fondly recall the (admittedly brief) times in which this was the case, and the clinging to the past is preventing either of them from moving on. 

Here, the omnipresence of “California Dreamin’” acts as Faye’s leitmotif, underlining her desire to get out and experience something more than working in her uncle’s food counter, while also expressing a melancholy about that kind of change. Notably, when she returns from her first year of being a flight attendant to visit the Mandarin Express, she finds 663 there performing renovations, as he has bought the place and is turning it into his own restaurant; while he works, he listens to The Mamas and the Papas just as she had when working the counter when he first met her. Her willingness to commit to something took her far from him, and the same temerity that she brought out in him has caused him to forge a new career and life that will anchor him to one spot. Maybe they were so different that it never could have worked. Maybe this reunion will have them find a way to compromise. We’ll never know; we can only imagine it, and I love Wong’s ongoing commitment to that kind of ambiguity. Also worth noting is that Faye Wong sings a cover of “Dreams” by The Cranberries in this one, and it’s simply beautiful. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Dead Lover (2025)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

Grace Glowicki’s directorial career debuted in the genderfucked stoner-comedy freak show Tito, which might very well have been the world’s first Crispin Glover drag king act. The fuckery continues in her sophomore film Dead Lover, which locally premiered at this year’s Overlook Film Festival (and, to my eye, was the best of the fest). Dead Lover perfectly exemplifies the Overlook brand of horror-themed genre films that skew more artsy than scary, delivering a flippantly surreal Hammer Horror throwback that filters the Frankenstein myth through the Tim & Eric meme machine. Glowicki has focused her eye in the years since Tito, crafting some of cinema’s most gorgeous, perverted images in recent memory. Her sense of humor has remained decidedly prankish & juvenile, though, punctuating punchlines with ADR’d fart noises and ejaculations of vomit. It’s a masterclass lesson in the refinement of bad taste.

Glowicki stars as a 19th Century gravedigger who has become lonely in her continuation of the family business, as she stinks too badly of rotting corpses for any other locals to socialize with her. Her pursuit of sexual partners despite that putrid stench does eventually prove fruitful, drawing the eye (and nose) of a nearby wealthy pervert who’s grieving the loss of his sister but still makes time to fetishize the gravedigger’s offense to the senses. They fall in love and bone like mad, but tragedy soon strikes when, as the title promises, her long-awaited lover dies by sea. She refuses to give up on her one shot at genuine romance, though, so she attempts to reconstitute her dead lover using the one remaining body part that was recovered from the shipwreck (his severed finger) . . . with a little help from the stockpile of corpses that happen to be buried around the cemetery where she works & lives.

The tension between Dead Lover‘s high-art visual style and low-trash sense of humor is also echoed in its bifurcated tone, which alternates between the extremities of camp & sincerity in erratic mood swings. Much of the gravedigger’s dialogue is addressed to a gigantic arts-and-crafts rendering of the moon, recalling the operatic poetry of Kenneth Anger’s experimental short “Rabbit’s Moon.” She confesses all of her most vulnerable yearnings to Mr. Moon, but those thoughts are frequently interrupted by hissing, selfish jags of animalistic horniness & greed. Combined with her insultingly inaccurate Cockney accent, this internal romantic/vicious struggle estimates what it might be like if Lily Sullivan’s unhinged impersonation of Bridgette Jones on Comedy Bang Bang suffered the same fate as Gollum from Lord of the Rings. My apologies if that CBB reference means nothing to you, but it really is the only accurate point of comparison.

There’s a sound-stage artificiality to Dead Lover that recalls both the perverted visual poetry of Stephen Sayadian’s Dr. Caligari and the low-budget carelessness of the graveyard set in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space. It’s a picture overflowing with bad wigs and even worse accents, as its four main players alternate through multiple sets of characters with the ramshackle energy of a sketch comedy revue. Still, there’s a lot of heart to its romantic yearning in which characters love one another for their quirks & stench rather than in spite of it. It also has surprisingly provocative ideas about the physical embodiment of gender, as the gravedigger rebuilds her male lover with indiscriminate concern for whether the corpses she sources spare parts from are male or female (or, even more strangely, whether they are related to her lover by blood). All she cares about is still being able to orgasm by the thrust of his finger; how romantic.

I was greatly amused by the strangeness of Glowicki’s debut, but this follow-up exceeded my expectations even so. In my mind, she’s now joined an elite class of high-style, low-budget filmmakers who are pushing the outer limits of how sex, gender, and desire can be represented on screen while also just goofing off with their friends: namely Cole Escola, Amanda Kramer, and Betrand Mandico. At times, it really does feel like some of the most exciting, immediate art being made right now, even though it’s an outdated genre throwback featuring a severed finger that stretches to the length of a broomstick and a potential suitor professing his love by declaring he wants to eat one of the gravedigger’s turds longways, “like a banana.”

-Brandon Ledet

Times Square (1980)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

For anyone out there arguing that movie studios should start cutting “unnecessary” sex scenes for the sin of not “advancing the plot,” I recommend seeking out populist art from earlier, safer decades, when that kind of conservative moralism was more shameless. Take, for instance, the teen-punks-on-the-run love story Times Square from 1980, which had all of its sex & kissing scenes removed post-production by money men who were scared that its queer themes would cut into the film’s profitability. The surviving prints are proof of sex-scene-censorship in action, leaving behind implications of sapphic teen romance without any physical consummation that might scare off the cinematically illiterate who don’t catch on. Of course, this very nearly ruins the movie. Not knowing exactly when the two girls at the center first acknowledge their mutual attraction is alone frustrating enough, but there’s also so much communication & characterization lost by averting the audience’s eyes from their bedroom intimacy that it feels like a story half-told. This is the future Liberals want: sexless, indistinct, defanged. That contingent even gets their own onscreen avatar in the form of the film’s villain, Peter Coffield as a Liberal politician who’s campaigning to “clean up” the smut of late-70s Times Square, to make it safer for families (and business). Eat up, prudes.

That politician’s daughter is effectively our main character: Trini Alvarado as a sheltered Uptown Girl who’s essentially left catatonic by her father’s blowhard moralizing. She’s checked into a mental hospital for being an inconvenience in her father’s busy schedule as a public figure, despite the fact that there’s nothing medically wrong with her. Her hospital roommate is a street-smart punk rocker played by newcomer Robin Johnson (counterbalancing her porcelain-doll fragility with some manic Linda Manz brashness), who might legitimately be mentally ill. The girls quickly bond over mutual disregard for the authority figures in their lives and make a break for it, fleeing the hospital in a stolen ambulance to their new, domestic life squatting in a warehouse by the river. It’s unclear exactly when their friendship tips over into romance, thanks to post-production censorship, but that aspect of their dynamic is undeniably present throughout. They write each other poems, they scream each other’s names, they wear each other’s clothes; they’re in love. Meanwhile, their new life on the streets is turned into a publicity flame war between the Liberal politician who believes Times Square has become an “X-rated” public space in need of governmental censorship and a shock-jock radio DJ who wants to keep the city grimy for the punk-at-heart, played by an especially pouty Tim Curry.

While I don’t think the kissing or sex scenes removed from Times Square would have been redundant, I did laugh at the redundancy of the concluding title card that announces it was “filmed entirely on location in New York City.” This a film that spends half of its runtime strutting up and down 42nd Street in search of classic New York City cool before Giuliani power-washed it off the sidewalk forever. It’s a treasure trove for movie freaks who like to take notes on what’s being advertised on vintage marquees in the background. Its soundtrack is overflowing with classic New York City bands, including The Ramones, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and that one Talking Heads song where they name-drop CBGB. The runaways aren’t solely fighting to carve out a place for themselves at the edge of adult surveillance & censorship; they’re also fighting to make it big as micro-celebrities in the first-wave NYC punk boom. They brand themselves as The Sleez Sisters, smashing televisions on city streets as a vague protest of modern complacency and crashing the alt radio station to speak directly to their adoring public of frustrated, sheltered teen girls. The major political question at the heart of the film is who really owns New York City, the freaks who walk the concrete or the inhuman politicians who govern their public & private lives from afar? It’s a question with a loud, celebratory answer, as observed from the rooftops by Tim Curry & Robin Johnson, who survey the city streets below from gargoyle perches like a punk-rock Batman.

Times Square is the most [SCENE MISSING]iest movie I’ve fallen in love with in a while.  It was crudely chopped to bits by The Man, but its crudeness & messiness is at least appropriate for a story about teenage runaways in love. Director Allan Moyle has, understandably, expressed frustration over the surviving, compromised cut of the film, but he still at least seems proud of its documentation of Times Square’s final days in sleaze, and he effectively plagiarized its rooftop concert ending for his record-store hangout comedy Empire Records years later. The film shares a lot of post-production-fuckery woes with fellow teen-girl-punks-on-the-lam relic The Fabulous Stains, but it likewise has outlived attempts to chop it down and achieved a kind of cult-cinema immortality. To be clear, though, it’s a great film despite its sex-and-smooches censorship, not because of it. Audiences have been robbed of experiencing the film’s full passionate glory by Liberal do-gooders who sought to make a safer, cleaner picture at the expense of honesty & art. It’s the same political principles that scrubbed Times Square clean of all of the grit, smut, and vitality that made it interesting and replaced them with a Disney Mega Store & Guy Fieri’s latest restaurant venture. Congratulations, the streets are no longer X-rated; now it’s just as formless, indistinct, and sanitized as everywhere else in this corporate hell hole of a country.

-Brandon Ledet

Scenes from a Screenwriter’s Marriage

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

We try our best to cover both the highest and the lowest ends of cinema here, from the finest of fine art to the trashiest of genre trash. Occasionally, those two polar-opposite ends of the medium intersect in unexpected ways. Last week, I found myself watching two seemingly discordant movies that covered the exact same metatextual topic – one because it screened in The Prytania’s Classic Cinema series during New Orleans French Film Fest and one because the Blu-ray was heavily discounted during an online flash sale. Both 1963’s Contempt and 1989’s The Black Cat are movies about screenwriters who jeopardize their marriages by taking on doomed-from-the-start film projects that put their wives’ personal safety at risk. The former was directed by French New Wave innovator Jean-Luc Godard at the height of his professional career, while the latter was directed by Italo schlockteur Luigi Cozzi in a sly attempt to cash in on his tutelage under his much more famous mentor, Dario Argento. They also both happen to be literary adaptations, at least in theory. While Godard was relatively faithful to his source-material novel, Cozzi’s film is an adaptation in name only, daring to bill itself as “Edgar Allen Poe’s The Black Cat” in its opening-credits title card before immediately abandoning its source text to leech off Argento’s legacy instead of Poe’s. Godard does indulge in his own allusions to an earlier, foundational filmmaker’s work in Contempt, though, by casting Fritz Lang as himself and including discussions of Lang’s early artistic triumphs, like M. You’d never expect these two movies to have anything in common at first glance, but The Black Cat really is Contempt‘s trashy cousin, long estranged.

Typically, I don’t think of Jean-Luc Godard’s signature aesthetic to be all that distant from the low-budget, high-style genre filmmaking ethos that guided the Italo horror brats of the 70s & 80s. At the very least, both sides of that divide would have been passionately reverent of Alfred Hitchcock as a cinematic stylist. However, Contempt is so far removed from the handheld, D.I.Y. crime picture days of Breathless that it’s hardly Godardian at all, at least not visually. Shot on location at seaside Italian villas in Technicolor & Cinemascope, Contempt is often breathtaking in its visual grandeur, especially in its 2023 digital restoration that aggressively pops the intensity of its colors. Godard presents star Brigitte Bardot in several magazine glamour-shoot set-ups that accentuate the otherworldly beauty of her body, with particular attention paid to her buttcheeks. Of course, vacationing with a beautiful woman in an exotic locale doesn’t fundamentally change who you are, so the usual self-defeating macho bullshit that plagues Godard’s protagonists follow him there too. Michel Piccoli co-leads as a cash-strapped screenwriter who takes a well-paying job doing re-writes on an already-in-production Fritz Lang adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Lang is making a much more abstract, artsier picture than what his American producer had greenlit, so Piccoli ends up in a sickening position where he must undermine the work of a genius he respects to instead please a meathead cad from The States who values commerce over art (Jack Palance, playing a pitch-perfect dipshit). Worse yet, the American pig has the hots for Bardot, and Piccoli does nothing to get in his way or to protect his obviously uncomfortable wife. This leads to an endlessly vicious, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-style argument between the couple, so that they spend much of their time in an Italian paradise bickering about the purity of their love and the corruption of money. Meanwhile, Fritz Lang amusedly shakes his head, as if he’s seen this all before.

The marital crisis of The Black Cat is much more outlandish & abstract, but it also starts with a filmmaker taking on an ill-advised project. Our protagonist is a Luigi Cozzi-style horror director who decides to make good use of the Italian film industry’s loose copyright laws to make his own unsanctioned sequel to Suspiria. The project is in the early writing phase, where he is collaborating with a writing partner to sketch out the backstory of the Third Mother referenced in Argento’s Suspiria, believing there was room for another cash-grab witchcraft story in that lore (after the Second Mother was covered in Argento’s Inferno, and long before the Third Mother was covered in Argento’s Mother of Tears). They foolishly decide to pull inspiration from a “real”, powerful witch named Levana, who is awakened from her cosmic slumber by the project. Specifically, once the wart-faced Levana catches wind that she will be played onscreen by the director’s wife, she flips the fuck out and invades the real world through a mirror in the couple’s home, puking a chunky green goo in the actress’s face and then generally causing havoc. From there, The Black Cat is a supernatural horror free-for-all, following its scene-to-scene whims without any care or attention paid to the pre-existing work of Dario Argento, Edgar Allen Poe, or high school physics teachers. The movie is a jumbled mess of demonically possessed space fetuses, witchcraft-practicing house cats, 19th Century ghost children, telekinetic explosions, laser-shooting eyeballs, internal organ ruptures, creepy-crawly spiders, and whatever else amuses Levana as she tears apart this doomed marriage, all because she doesn’t want a movie made about her. What a diva.

You can assume a lot of what was on Godard’s mind while he was making Contempt just by watching the movie. Between the intensely bitter (and even more intensely gendered) marital argument that eats up most of the runtime and the art-vs-commerce argument that eats up the rest, you get a pretty clear picture of what was going on in his internal & professional life at the time. Even after watching the “Cat on the Brain” interview included on the Blu-ray disc, I cannot begin to tell you what Cozzi was attempting to communicate in The Black Cat. During the interview, he describes the picture as “science fiction,” likening it to his Star Wars knockoff Starcrash, with which it only shares a few extraneous insert shots of outer space. I’d say it’s much more spiritually in line with his supernatural slasher film Paganini Horror, which hooks the audience with the undead spirit of famous composer Niccolo Pagnini for a familiar starting point, then launches into a series of hair-metal music video vignettes where he just does whatever amuses him from scene to scene. Both of these vintage European relics might generally be about the artform of screenwriting, but only Contempt seems to put any sincere thought into that craft, while The Black Cat is much more about trying whatever looks cool in a scene, internal logic be damned. Something the two pictures do have in common, though, is the assertion that the basic labor & finance of filmmaking will ruin your marriage, whether through the intrusion of jackass Hollywood money men or the intrusion of evil mirror-dimension witches. If two movies so far apart in philosophy, tone, and intent happen to come to that same conclusion, I have to believe there’s some truth to it. Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be screenwriters.

-Brandon Ledet

Working Girl (1988)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking a lot about Harrison Ford lately, mostly by happenstance. He’s in TV commercials promoting a new Captain America film as a tomato-red variation of The Hulk transformed by the magic of CGI. He’s lurking in the background of Awards Season ceremonies, disrupting live broadcasts with his signature geriatric-stoner aloofness. When I last went to the theater, he unexpectedly appeared against-type as a young, stone-faced villain in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Harrison Ford is everywhere, as long as you happen to be making the exact programming choices I am. So, when I was flipping through my stack of unwatched DVD purchases, I had to follow the pattern and watch the first movie that featured Ford’s handsome face on the cover: Mike Nichols’s late-80s romcom Working Girl, where Harrison Ford plays the lead romantic interest for star Melanie Griffith. Despite Ford’s lengthy screentime and central importance to the plot, it turned out to not be an especially great watch if you’re looking for pure Harrison Ford content. He’s mostly used as a sex-symbol prop, an object to be ogled. Like in my recent everyday life, he’s just kind of . . . there.

Besides the film being a star-vehicle for Melanie Griffith, the reason Harrison Ford doesn’t make much of a strong impression in Working Girl is that the cast is overflowing with a surplus of supporting players, of which he just happens to play the primary hunk. Alec Baldwin plays Hunk #2, a perfectly cast meathead himbo. Sigourney Weaver gives a hilariously broad performance as Griffith’s boss & romantic rival. Joan Cusack plays her even more eccentric bestie. Oliver Platt appears as her workplace enemy, a Wall Street slimeball. Kevin Spacey plays an even slimier Wall Street slimeball. David Duchovny shows up as a background player at her surprise birthday party. Working Girl has the kind of stacked cast of character actors that has you shouting “Holy shit, look who it is!” all the way until the final minute. The last one that got me was Suzanne “Big Ethel” Shepherd from A Dirty Shame delivering exactly one line as an unnamed receptionist in the final few minutes, one of two single-scene appearances from John Waters players, including an earlier appearance from Ricki Lake. Casting director Juliet Taylor was a real over-achiever, as evidenced by roping in someone as classically charismatic as Harrison Ford to just stand around and look handsome.

Working Girl is essentially a fish-out-of-water comedy about a Staten Island party girl (Griffith) who struggles to be taken seriously in the Big Business world of Manhattan across the bay. She rides the ferry to work every morning in her stockings & tennis shoes, switches to the sensible heels stored under her desk, and struggles to keep her hairspray-sculpted lioness mane vertical while battling sexist stereotypes in the lion’s den of stock trading. Her big break arrives in the form of a broken leg, when her much more refined Manhattanite boss (Weaver) injures herself skiing and is briefly taken out of the picture. Our titular working girl makes a power move by taking over her boss’s life & wardrobe, Single White Female-style, and attempting to broker a major corporate-buyout deal with a hotshot fuckboy broker (Ford) before she’s discovered to be a fraud. After the movie comes dangerously close to kicking things off with a date-rape meet cute, they genuinely fall in love and a series of silly deceits & misunderstandings ensue. The entire two-hour runtime is dedicated to the contract negotiations of their singular business deal together, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is Griffith’s self-described persona of having “a head for business and a body for sin,” a line so perfectly written it belonged on the poster instead of in the dialogue.

Griffith’s sinful body is frequently put on display here, as lacy, overly complicated lingerie appears to be just as much of her Big Business uniform as her pencil skirt; she even vacuums in it. Harrison Ford is tasked to strip too, for a sense of balance, at one point taking a whore’s bath during a phone call in his glass-walled office while his female coworkers gawk & applaud. As a Reaganite cultural clash between the small-town vulgarity of Staten Island and the big-city sophistication of Manhattan, Working Girl is a little conceptually vague. As a collection of always-welcome faces, however, it’s exceedingly charming from start to end (Spacey excluded). You can tell it’s charming just by clocking that there are two overlapping cast members from Moonstruck featured here (Cher’s mom & Cher’s hairdresser), which is the undisputable masterpiece of this 80s NYC romcom subgenre. Harrison Ford is just one handsome face among many. He hadn’t yet learned how to be a dazed, scene-stealing agent of chaos, but thankfully there were plenty of other over-the-top performers around to pick up the slack (with Weaver & Cusack doing most of the heavy lifting in that respect).

-Brandon Ledet

Bratty Woman

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

This year’s Best Picture winner at the Oscars was about a sex worker who foolishly allows herself to be swept off her feet by a fantasy romance proposal from a wealthy fuckboy client, clashing classic “Cinderella story” & “hooker with a heart of gold” tropes with the harsh, transactional realities of the modern world. There’s obviously a lot of Pretty Woman (1990) DNA running through Anora‘s veins, even if the older, schmaltzier film is distanced from its offspring by several decades and the entire length of the United States. As opposing coastal stories, both movies are appropriately anchored, with Anora playing the scrappy Brooklynite brat who throws stray punches at Pretty Woman‘s dream-factory Hollywood romance. They have too much in common to be purely read as polar opposites, though. Pretty Woman strut the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard so that Anora could clack its Lucite heels on NYC pavement. The former was rewarded with great box office returns & terrible reviews, while the latter is a niche art-circuit crowdpleaser that sneakily nabbed Cinema’s Top Prize despite a relatively meager scale & budget.

Julia Roberts sealed her status as a Hollywood A-lister by playing a fresh-faced streetwalker. She hooks a once-in-a-lifetime trick in the form of a sleepwalking Richard Gere, playing a slutty businessman who’s feeling numb & lonely after the recent loss of his father. Their single-night luxury hotel room tryst quickly escalates into a weeklong engagement for the lifechanging sum of $3,000 (a figure that provided the working title of the original screenplay) and then, eventually, a genuine proposal of marriage. In Anora, the modern fairy-tale romance of that premise unravels quickly & violently, leaving its titular sex worker scrambling to hold onto some compensation after blowing up her life for a dishonorable john. In Pretty Woman, the big-kiss acceptance of the proposal is the end-goal, a consummation of Roberts declaring she “wants the fairy tale” instead of being kept as an on-staff sex worker. The deal-sealing kiss is then punctuated by an unnamed observer on the street pontificating, “Welcome to Hollywood! What’s your dream? Everybody comes here. This is Hollywood, land of dreams. Some dreams come true, some don’t; but keep dreamin’. This is Hollywood.”

The original scripted ending of Pretty Woman had a distinctly Sean Baker touch, mirroring the end of The Florida Project with Roberts taking her fairy-tale romance to Disneyland. I doubt the toothless Gary Marshall’s version of that trip would’ve had the same dramatic or satirical impact as Baker’s, but they’re both consciously dealing in the same tropes & cliches. If anything, I don’t see Anora upending Pretty Woman‘s naive view of sex-worker-and-client romance; I just see it starting where Pretty Woman ends, logically teasing the story out past the rush of the first Big Kiss. Julia Roberts’s Vivian has plenty in common with Mikey Madison’s Ani throughout the movie. She’s just as defiantly bratty in the face of obscene wealth, and she’s just as friendly to fellow staff workers who serve the same clientele. Marshall mixes sex & slapstick in a way that recalls Baker’s sensibilities in Roberts’s first sexual act with Gere, having her initiate fellatio between giggling fits during an I Love Lucy rerun. I doubt even Baker would call Anora a refutation of Pretty Woman, given that Roberts’s declaration that her tryst with her new client is just like “Cinder-fuckin’-rella” might as well have been recited word-for-word in his version of the story.

Overall, Anora really is the better film. It’s got an anarchic energy that swings wildly from comedic confection to bitter drama within the span of a single scene, whereas Pretty Woman is almost pure confection. After Roberts’s & Gere’s first night together, they immediately slip into a comfortable, domestic dynamic, and most of their scene-to-scene interactions are genuinely romantic, like their Moonstruck trip to the opera or the john playing Vivian’s body like a grand piano. The darker notes of a rape attempt (from Gere’s sleazy lawyer, played by Jason Alexander) or a fellow sex worker’s body being discovered in a nearby dumpster are just illustrations of why the fairy-tale romance is necessary for Vivian, who will accept no less. Gary Marshall is working in tonal contrast there, while Baker lets opposing tones wrestle & tangle until they’re indistinguishable. The audience is scared for Ani in the same scene where we’re laughing at the bumbling incompetence of the male brutes keeping her in place. All we’re really allowed to feel for Vivian is pure adoration, only scared that Julia Roberts might hurt her back carrying the movie while Richard Gere shrugs & mumbles his way through the script. She does so ably, though, with a 3,000-watt smile.

-Brandon Ledet

Companion (2025)

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

It’s no surprise that Companion is advertised by association with producer Zach Creggers’s previous film Barbarian, as there’s a lot of fun being had by mixing an inconsistent light tone with a genuinely tense horror atmosphere, bending what could otherwise be pretty straightforward genre fare into something novel. Iris (Sophie Thatcher) is the sweetly innocent girlfriend of Josh (Jack Quaid), with whom she had a cute first meeting at a supermarket. The film opens on them making their way to the lakehouse of Sergey (Rupert Friend), who is the boyfriend of Josh’s friend Kat (Megan Suri). Also joining for the weekend are Kat and Josh’s old friend Eli (Harvey Guillén), and Eli’s partner Patrick (Lucas Gage). After an awkward interaction between Kat and Iris that establishes Iris’s belief that Kat hates her isn’t all in her head, the group has a little dance party and Iris’s reaction to the story of Patrick and Eli’s own meet cute implies she may be overinvested in her relationship. Things go completely awry the next morning when Sergey attempts to assault Iris while the two are alone at the lake shore, with deadly results. 

I’m going to go into BIG SPOILERS here, even though I’m not sure we can even call them that, since the marketing for this film has largely given it away. In fact, one of the friends that I invited to the screening I attended spoiled herself from the trailer so much that she decided she didn’t even want to see it. It’s almost impossible to talk about this movie without getting into it. Still here? Okay. The title “Companion” isn’t just about Iris being Josh’s girlfriend; it relates to the fact that she is a gynoid girlfriend. If you manage to avoid being spoiled for this, as I was, this is foreshadowed several times. First, Iris awakens in the car when Josh says “Iris, wake up,” which doesn’t seem unusual at that time but later turns out to be her activation phrase (with its inverse being her sleep mode instruction). She’s also extremely polite to Josh’s self-driving car, which seems to bemuse him, and Kat later tells Iris that the latter’s existence makes her feel replaceable. The hints get thicker as the revelation approaches, like when Iris responds with precise temperature and forecast information when Josh asks her what the weather will be like that day. 

Iris herself is a model from the Empathix company, and although the companionship droids that they provide have safeguards built in—the same strength as a human of the same build, programming that prevents the droids from harming people or other living things, and an inability to lie—Josh has “jailbroken” her so that she responded with lethal force to Sergey. This is part of an elaborate plan between Josh and Kat to steal Sergey’s money, with Patrick and Eli in attendance to unwittingly provide corroborating testimony that Sergey was killed by Iris. When Josh reactivates Iris in order to “say goodbye,” he sets up his own downfall, as she is able to escape from the lakehouse and flee into the wilderness nearby, and Josh et al must track her down and reboot her before the police arrive in order to disguise his complicity in her reprogramming and ensure their impunity in Sergey’s death. 

Like Barbarian before it, this is an exciting ride with twists and turns beyond the initial reveal that Iris isn’t the girl she seems to be that propel the action along. Jack Quaid plays a variation on his 5cream character, the seemingly nice, perfect boyfriend who turns out to be a pathetic manchild whose motivations are driven by a sense of entitlement. In that slasher, it was that he was a superfan with a grudge (“How can fandom be toxic?”). Here, he’s a seemingly unambitious man who rants about nice guys finishing last and demonstrates other such personality flaws. That’s two-for-two for movies getting a lot of mileage out of Quaid’s cute face and presumed innocence, but I hope we don’t go to that well too often (this screening featured a trailer for his upcoming action-hero-who-can’t-feel-pain flick Novocaine, and it’s nice to see him doing something different). I praised Sophie Thatcher up and down for her work in Heretic, and she carries this movie with aplomb. Iris is both Sarah Connor and the Terminator (a comparison that the film makes textual through both recreating the metal endoskeletal hand scene and putting a killer android in a police uniform à la T2), determined but not unstoppable. I’m sure a lot of this may seem derivative to some: yes, we also saw sliders for personality traits for robotic humans on Westworld; yes, this is in some ways another take on The Stepford Wives. But all writing is rewriting and all creation is remixing, and Companion is clever and novel in its approach. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Happy Together (1997)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

When I first moved to Austin, there were four different video rental locations that were still open, despite the fact that streaming was already nearly omnipresent at the time. There were two locations for I Luv Video and two for Vulcan Video, with both organizations consolidating into one storefront each by 2020 and both of them ultimately closing during the pandemic. In those days, my devotion was to Vulcan Video, even though the giant outdoor mural of Spock on their campus-adjacent “North Vulcan” location, which I saw when visiting the city before moving, was long gone by the time that they had been pushed out to North Loop Boulevard. Back then, I Luv Video’s website didn’t have a catalog search feature, while Vulcan did, and that won me over. Back when I wrote about every Dario Argento movie, every single one of those DVDs was rented from Vulcan North (except for Le cinque giornate, which was, and to my knowledge remains, only available on VHS). Within the past year, however, both Vulcan and ILV have returned in some form, with the collection of the former being donated to the Alamo Drafthouse and operating as “Vulcan” out of the Village location, while ILV is now known as We Luv Video and has set up shop in the exact location that was once Vulcan North. They recently had their first anniversary and threw a block party to celebrate, with VHS swapping and getting new members to sign up. I was won over by the pitch, and invited my friend to have a nineties movie night this week, wherein we would go to the video store to pick out a movie, order a pizza, and enjoy. One of the great things about having a local rental store again is the “Staff Picks” selection, and my companion was immediately drawn to Happy Together, Wong Kar-wai’s tender but turbulent 1997 drama that’s easily one of the best examples of New Queer Cinema. 

Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung) are a gay couple from Hong Kong who, hoping that a visit to Argentina will break the cycle of their constant break-ups and reconciliations. Po-Wing insists that they rent a car instead of taking a bus to visit the Iguaza Falls, which results in them getting lost and never making it to their destination. Their trip is marked by the acquisition of a lamp that creates a simulated image of a waterfall, which Fai keeps when he and Po-Wing break up once more because of the stress of their failed venture and the conflict that ensues. Lacking the funds to fly home, Fai takes up residence in a rundown motel in Buenos Aires, where he has a shoebox of a room and shares cooking facilities with all of the other residents, and he finds work as a doorman at a tango club. Po-Wing takes up a life as a sex worker, and Fai is forced to watch him entertain john after john at the club where he works. After the two of them argue and Fai confronts Po-Wing about spending all of their money and stranding them there, Po-Wing steals an expensive watch from one of his clients so that Fai can pawn it and go home but is badly beaten by the man over it. Po-Wing’s hands are badly injured, and he is forced to wear plaster bandages on them for an extended period, and Fai reluctantly becomes his caretaker. 

Po-Wing makes his interest in resuming their affair clear—Fai notes that Po-Wing’s “Let’s start over” was a constant refrain over their rocky separations and reunions—but while Fai clearly still loves and cares for him, they do not become lovers again. Po-Wing’s attempts to climb into bed with Fai only alienate him, and his constant whining and demanding tell us a great deal about what their relationship was like, even before he became largely incapable of fending for himself. He forces Fai to go jogging with him in terrible weather despite his ex’s reluctance, and when Fai takes ill because of the weather, Po-Wing still demands that he cook for them. Of course, Fai is revealed to be no shrinking violet or victim either, as we see that he becomes intensely jealous; when Po-Wing goes to get cigarettes and isn’t home when Fai returns from work, Fai buys multiple cartons so that Po-Wing has no reason to leave. He even takes Po-Wing’s passport the first night that his former lover stays with him following his release from the hospital and hides it so that Po-Wing can’t leave him. It’s clear that they were always toxic for each other, but that they were also madly, passionately in love in a way that defies all logic and common sense and drives one to extreme highs that make the extreme lows seem worthwhile. And that love is still present, even if it’s so tainted by mutual bitterness at this point that there’s no way for them to walk the same path ever again. 

Fai is fired from the tango bar when he attacks the man who beat Po-Wing and starts working at a Chinese restaurant. There, he befriends a young, handsome Taiwanese man named Chang (Chen Chang). Although Chang never expresses overt attraction to Fai, his affection is clear. Po-Wing becomes jealous after overhearing Chang in the background of one of his constant, demanding phone calls to Fai at work, and this, combined with Fai’s continuous refusal to return his passport, leads Po-Wing to move out when he is recovered from his injuries. Fai opens up to Chang about having left Hong Kong in disgrace due to stealing money from his employer, who was a friend of his father’s, and Chang tells Fai about his family’s food stall in the night market in Taipei. Chang eventually earns enough money to continue his travels and tells Fai he intends to travel to the southernmost tip of South America, where he has heard that one can release all their cares. He offers his tape recorder to Fai so he can carry his worries for him, but Fai can muster no words, only sobs. Fai starts to work nights in an abattoir so that he can get his body back on Hong Kong time and goes home, with Po-Wing breaking down upon realizing that Fai is really gone. 

This is one of the most moving films that I have ever seen. I’ve never been in the kind of relationship that the film depicts, one in which one partner’s jealousy and control issues and the other’s learned helplessness and deliberate provocation of envy put them in constant conflict with one another, but I’ve been a teenager (and a twentysomething, and a thirtysomething) in love, the kind of love that’s so big and so loud that it takes up the whole room. Love immiserates as well as illuminates, love consumes as well as sustains, and love can craze as much as it can ground. Po-Wing and Fai’s relationship is one that can swing back and forth between Po-Wing’s mad desire for the physical intimacy of sharing a bed even if they don’t touch, with complete disregard for Fai’s boundaries or well-being, to Fai berating his former lover for his promiscuous ways (before later cruising in the same ways and in the same places after Chang leaves, noting in his internal monologue that all lonely people are the same, deep down) while making him a virtual prisoner, to the two of them slow dancing in the shared kitchen of Fai’s hostel, sweet and kind and perfect — but only for a moment. 

The copy of this film that I watched was a grey market region-free DVD, and although the transfer was terrible (there are several scenes during the portion of the film where Fai is working in the restaurant wherein the subtitles are completely illegible against his white chef’s wear), it was nonetheless a beautiful movie. It’s a mood piece, wherein there are several long shots of urban decrepity punctuated by neon and headlights as well as very long shots of Iguaza Falls as we take in the majesty of the pouring, pulsing water, countless gallons and tons of the stuff moving at incomprehensible volume, churning with a power that can only be imagined and yet which pales in comparison to the raging waters that push and pull inside of Po–Wing and Fai. It’s powerful stuff, and worth tracking down.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Am I OK? (2024)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Guys, I think I just really like Dakota Johnson. Whatever it is that she’s doing, her charm just completely works on me. I sang the praises of Madame Web both upon release and again months later when I forced Brandon and Alli to watch it so we could talk about it. I love her performance in the Suspiria remake and I am among those who thoroughly enjoyed Bad Times at the El Royale. Those last two show that she has range, but I find myself still thoroughly enjoying when she plays a character that is either (a) just like she is in real life, or (b) the “Dakota Johnson” character that she performs when she’s called upon to be “herself.” I first heard about this movie when a friend—whom I had drafted into watching Madame Web with me on my May rewatch—came back from vacation having seen it, and recommended it to me directly because of my fondness for MW and DJ. And he was right! 

Am I OK? tells the story of thirty-two-year-old Lucy (Johnson), a painter who no longer paints and instead earns a living as a receptionist at a spa. Her best friend, Jane (Sonoya Mizuno), has a more professional career and is settled with her boyfriend Danny (Jermaine Fowler), until her boss (Sean Hayes) offers her an opportunity for a promotion, albeit one that would require Jane to relocate to London. The night that she learns of this, Jane takes Lucy and Danny out to celebrate; once they’re all good and drunk, Jane admits to having kissed another girl in high school, causing Lucy to spiral and admit to herself for the first time that she’s not attracted to men. With six months before she must move to the other side of the Atlantic, Jane sets out to help Lucy find a girlfriend. The biggest stumbling block is Lucy’s awkwardness and a shyness that verges on being antisocial, and her feelings of anxiety about Jane’s upcoming move only grow when she learns that Jane will be accompanied by her outgoing colleague Kat (Molly Gordon), an eccentric and fairly self-absorbed woman with whom Jane is friendly but whom Lucy can’t stand. When a new masseuse at Lucy’s work, Brittany (Kiersey Clemons), seems very flirtatious, Lucy attempts to respond but has to overcome her extreme, ingrained tendency to resist change. 

This movie takes precisely one risk, which is that it demands that you be smitten with Dakota Johnson (or “Dakota Johnson”) and enjoy watching her do her thing. (Luckily, I am and I do.) The script is very funny, and the performances are quite engaging, but this is a movie that is all about pushing Lucy out of her comfort zone while never doing the same with the viewer. And, hey, maybe that’s all that a comedy like this one needs. There were many scenes that reminded me of a friend’s recent complaint after seeing Hit Man, which was that half of the movie looked like it had been shot in an AirBnB; this movie has a very similar visual … blandness. I’ve heard Brandon bring this up in many episodes of the podcast—that a lot of movies now have a very even, clean, TV-camera friendly, CW lighting—and although that’s something that I don’t often notice (perhaps because the CW was one of the many straws that broke the camel’s back of my mind a long time ago now) this movie made it almost impossible to miss. It’s probably not something that most people would notice or care about, but I’ve never experienced this phenomenon so clearly. I really don’t want to insult the people who made this movie; I quite liked it, and I love Tig Notaro (who, alongside Stephanie Allynne, is credited as director), but there’s no camera, lighting, or blocking choice in this movie that one could describe as imaginative, thoughtful, or stylish. 

Looking at the list of other works that the film’s cinematographer Cristina Dunlap worked on, it’s a lot of shorts, TV work, and music videos, which strikes me as odd. The static nature of a lot of TV photography is present in the movie, which is, as noted, shot so conventionally that it’s almost an apotheosis of inoffensiveness; but there’s a lot of life in some of the music videos (and tour footage) that she’s shot, which doesn’t appear here at all. One of the few times that the film does something dynamic instead of rotating through the same sets (yoga studio, spa, Jane’s office, Lucy’s apartment, the diner where Lucy always orders the same thing) is when Jane and Lucy go on an exercise outing together, and it’s the scene from which the poster image of Lucy crying is taken. Jane and Lucy are going up and down a set of outdoor stairs, and the setting felt like an homage to that scene in You’ve Got Mail that shows Tom Hanks and Dave Chappelle at the gym. It’s the only time that the film ever really breaks out of its shot/reverse-shot TV rhythm and its antiseptic interiors, but that this is the only time it does so (other than a short sequence near the end at a “hammock retreat”) means that there’s a lot of this movie that relies solely on the wittiness of the dialogue and the charm of the characters. Luckily, there’s more than enough of that to go around. 

I will admit that I was hoping I could play The Madame Web Game while watching this one (that’s where you point at the screen and shout “It’s a web!” every time something vaguely weblike appears), and while I have to give it a zero out of ten for web sightings, it’s a solid seven out of ten spiders for comedy. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond