winona ryder

The Age of Innocence (1993)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

The period-piece romance The Age of Innocence is never the first title that comes to mind in discussions of Martin Scorsese’s work, nor even the tenth. After a long career defined by stories of Catholic faith, brutal violence, and the mafia, the name Scorsese usually conjures crime-thriller titles like GoodFellas, Casino, The Departed, and The Irishman, not his adaptation of a Gilded Age romance novel by Edith Wharton. The Age of Innocence is not all that extreme of an outlier within his larger catalog, though, at least not in terms of theme. Despite first appearances, it is a quintessential Martin Scorsese picture, in that it’s a distinctly New York story about violent passion & conspiracy. It’s also immediately recognizable as one of his very best, calling into question whether his career would’ve been improved if he were diverted into only directing the American equivalent of Merchant-Ivory costume dramas instead of sticking to his typical crisis-of-faith & organized-crime stories.

The plot is centered on a love-triangle scandal in 19th Century NYC, in which a young, ambitious lawyer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is distracted from his impending marriage to a naive socialite (Winona Ryder) by the arrival of her disgraced, free-spirited cousin (Michelle Pfeiffer), to whom he is a better-suited romantic match. While helping the cousin break free from an abusive marriage to a European nobleman without stumbling into the public scandal of divorce, the lawyer falls into obsessive, feverish love with her without even noticing his transgression. Everyone around the forbidden couple notices, however, even if the organized gossip network of NYC society would never speak such sin aloud in mixed company. The result is a competition between two simultaneous conspiracies: one in which the potentially adulterous lovers believe they are discreetly indulging in their shared passion without notice, and a larger one in which their city-wide social circle closes ranks to shut their emotional affair down for good before it has a chance to become physical. The shock of the story is in learning just how active the younger, performatively dim fiancée is within the conspiracy to nip the affair in the bud, which is the kind of last-minute reveal that makes you want to immediately rewatch from the beginning through a new lens — the highest compliment that can be paid to any movie.

All of the passion, yearning, and unspoken political maneuvering of the story is inherited from its literary source material, with Scorsese going as far as to preserve the beauty of Wharton’s prose in a constant narration track from Joanne Woodward. He makes his presence known in the visual language, though, pulling influence from infamously showy, experimental directors in his mental cinematic encyclopedia. He employed Saul Bass for the opening credits sequence—time-elapsed flowers blooming in double exposure over vintage lace—sharing a core collaborator with Alfred Hitchcock. Full-screen flashes of white, yellow, and red express the violent passion of his characters in direct allusion to François Truffaut. Stuttered montage of opera-house audiences recalls the crude, tactile animation of Stan Brakhage. The opera theatre itself—the grandest temple of New York social life—is shot with the erratic, swooping verve of Argento’s Opera. Longtime Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker is equally aggressive in the editing room, overwhelming the audience with insert shots of extravagant meals & tobacco-smoking instruments in fetishistic detail. The director even physically inserts himself into the picture in a single-scene cameo as a portrait photographer, again recalling the legend & legacy of Hitchcock. He is respectful of Wharton’s source text, but he’s not delicate with it.

Even without Scorsese’s technical bravado intensifying the breathy dialogue exchanges, The Age of Innocence would still register as a cut above most of the literary dramas that rack up easy Best Costume Design Oscars year to year. The central cast is phenomenal, with Winona Ryder weaponizing her appearance of naivety to devastating effect, Michelle Pfeiffer causing havoc as the only member of New York Society who dares to speak & live honestly, and Daniel Day-Lewis showing a softer, more vulnerable side of himself before his wayward yearning transforms him into one of the violently passionate freaks he usually plays. His own naivety is neither cultivated nor performative, as he believes he is keeping his sinful desires hidden from the public while comparing the idea of his would-be lover returning to her marriage as a sentence worse than death & Hell in Byronic hyperbole. He never allows himself to fully consummate his lust, but the small ways he indulges it is somehow more sexual than actual sex — sneaking kisses to her wrists, her slippers, and her parasol as if those sneaky micro-transgressions could go possibly go unnoticed. The other two corners of the central love triangle are equally strong, but all of the passion, pain, and betrayal of the story is clearly visible in his dark, burning eyes, a reminder that he used to be one of the best actors in the world before he became an unlikely fashionista.

One of Wharton’s most clever lines preserved here is Pfeiffer’s observation that “all of the blind obeying of traditions, somebody else’s traditions” in New York society is self-defeating, since “it seems stupid to have discovered America only it make it a copy of another country.” All of the rules about virtue, propriety, fashion, and divorce that keep the central trio locked in a social prison of their own design are leftover from the social values of upper-class Europe. An entirely new world is being actively built around them, while they insist in living by the rules of an old one. Scorsese appears to be operating in a temporal limbo between old & new worlds here as well, gazing slack-jawed at the gorgeous oil-painting galleries & soaring architecture of the story’s Gilded Age setting while also brazenly distorting the visual aesthetics of the era through his own distinctly 1990s style. Both the romance of the picture and the auteur behind it are torn in two by the conflicting interests of tradition & passion. In that way, the seemingly incongruous marriage of filmmaker & genre is exactly what makes The Age of Innocence so remarkably great. It’s almost enough to make you wonder what would happen if Julian Fellows were making a hyperviolent organized-crime saga instead of coasting on Downton Abbey fumes with The Gilded Age.

-Brandon Ledet

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

I don’t have strong feelings about the original Beetlejuice. I definitely saw it as a kid (although the Saturday morning cartoon spinoff was verboten in our God-fearing trailerhold), and, through the magic of channel surfing and intermittent cable access in my adult years, I’ve “rewatched” it a few times since. It’s a fun one, although most of that fun comes in the form of the underworld bureaucracy that the recently deceased Maitlands have to navigate and their great character work between themselves and teenaged Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), with the title role of the chaos demon Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) being less a presence in the film proper than most people correctly recall. Upon the film’s great success as the most profitable movie that Geffen Film put out in the eighties, a sequel was immediately greenlit, but never came to pass. Until now, three and a half decades later. I wasn’t thrilled by initial promotional material, but the second theatrical trailer did manage to generate some interest in me, and my cautious optimism was rewarded. 

It’s been a long time since Lydia Deetz was in Winter River, the town to which she moved as a teenager and first became aware of her ability to see through the veil that separates the living and the dead. Now, she’s a TV show host of Ghost House with Lydia Deetz, a hybrid talk show/ghost hunters program, produced by her current beau, Rory (Justin Theroux). She’s disrupted when she starts to see flashes of her old nemesis Beetlejuice in the crowd at her show, and her day only gets worse when she learns that her father, Charles, has been killed in a freak accident. Along with her still overly theatrical stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara), she retrieves her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) from boarding school to attend the funeral, which is to be held in Winter River. Astrid doesn’t believe in her mother’s abilities and is disgusted by what she perceives as her mother’s disingenuousness about why she can’t contact her deceased husband Richard, Astrid’s father. Some of the tension between them is eased when Astrid discovers some old photo albums in the attic of “the original ghost house,” but her mother’s apparent overreaction to her discovery of an ad for the services of “Betelgeuse” causes Astrid to put her guard up again. The situation is further exacerbated when Rory chooses Charles’s wake as the opportunity to compel Lydia publicly to set a date for their wedding; and why not Halloween, which is only a couple of days away. Repulsed, Astrid rides off on her bike, eventually crashing through a fence into the backyard of a cute boy named Jeremy (Arthur Conti), prompting a little romance. Rory’s insistence that Lydia confront her supposed repressed childhood trauma by repeating the name “Beetlejuice” three times opens the door for the old trickster to do his ghoulish Cat-in-the-Hat thing all over Winter River again. 

I’m going to level with you: with this cast, it would be impossible for this movie to have no redeeming qualities. My house is a “Free Winona” house, now and forever, and this feels like the first time in a long time that I can tell she’s having a lot of fun. Although I’m sure Lydia is the first character that a lot of people think of when you invoke Winona’s name, that’s not the case for me. I’m team Veronica Sawyer all day every day, and after that I think of Mermaids, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and then that moment in Strangers with Candy wherein she tosses out a cigarette and then pulls another lit cigarette from offscreen. With so much time having passed, Lydia Deetz could essentially be a completely different person, but there’s a consistency that I appreciated and that only Ryder could bring to the table. Apparently, Ryder’s sole condition for taking on her role in Stranger Things was that she had to be allowed time to play this character again if the opportunity arose, so you know it’s one that she’s invested in, and it shows. When it comes to Delia, I don’t really know what their relationship is like off-camera, but there’s a part of me that believes with every fiber of my being that O’Hara and Ryder are having the time of their lives reuniting here, as O’Hara is also clearly having a great time reprising her role as well. Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek is one of many refractions of a similar (but always distinct) archetype in the O’Hara oeuvre, and it’s one that’s found a way into this character. I have to think that’s somewhat textual, as we see that her current multimedia gallery space includes at least one screen showing a video of Delia in a white wig and gown with images of birds projected over her, and it has to be a visual reference to Moira’s in-universe memetic role in The Crows Have Eyes III. 

When it comes to the film itself, there are ways that it writes around and includes the length of time since its predecessor, as well as elements that must be written around because of certain performers’ . . . unsavory lives. The elephant in the room here is that Jeffrey Jones, who played Charles in the first film, is a convicted sex offender now. To get around this, the film shows his unfortunate demise in the form of a claymation-esque sequence in which Charles’s plane goes down over the ocean when he is on his way back from a birdwatching expedition; he survives the crash but is then killed by a shark. This also allows for him to appear in the underworld with most of his upper torso missing, and thus allows the character to (sort of) continue to be a part of the narrative. There’s also some clever foreshadowing throughout, like the fact that Astrid notices Jeremy’s vinyl collection is very nineties-heavy and thinks that this is an affectation, but this sets up not one twist but two. Less cleverly, the Maitlands are simply written off as having been able to move on to the afterlife through a loophole that Lydia helped them find. 

The biggest problem with the film is that it’s overstuffed. You might have read that synopsis above and thought to yourself, “Wait, isn’t Willem Dafoe in this movie? And Monica Belluci?” And yes, they are. In the thirty-six years since Beetlejuice was released, countless sequel ideas must have been proposed, and this film feels like it tries to contain all of them at once. What if Lydia had a television show about her powers? Topical! What about a sequel about Beetlejuice’s literally soul-sucking wife coming back to life (well, undeath) and seeking vengeance against him? Sounds good, throw it in. What about a sequel about an egotistical actor specializing in law enforcement action films who is inexplicably the head of the underworld police? Why not. What if the Deetz family’s teenage daughter falls for a ghost boy whose true intentions might be more sinister than it seems? Oh, sounds romantic! (This plot in particular feels like it was meant to be in a more immediate sequel to the original film with a still-teenaged Lydia.) What if Lydia’s daughter doesn’t believe her and has the same fraught relationship with her that Lydia once had with Delia? What if Lydia was going to marry a man who didn’t really love her, didn’t really believe in her abilities, and whose new age bullshit was a front to meet vulnerable women, and Beetlejuice gets her out of this marriage for his own selfish reasons? Check and check! 

This means that the movie moves at a pretty frenetic pace, and I’m pleased to say that there was never a moment when I was bored or felt my mind wandering, although I did start to feel the length of Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park” by the time everyone was being Beetlejuice-puppeted to it in the film’s climax. It wears out its welcome a little, but the fact that this is the only scene that does so (other than the tedious scenes of Willem Dafoe as the not-a-cop hunting Beetlejuice’s undead Belluci wife, all of which could have been cut without anything being lost—and you know that if I’m saying this about Dafoe, they have to be very tedious) tells you something about this film’s overall energy, which is surprisingly high. I don’t think that I’ve appreciated a new Tim Burton film in twenty years (I’m a Big Fish defender), and this one works. There’s CGI, of course, but it’s largely used to imitate the cartoony stop-motion images of the original, and there’re still plenty of practical effects that I was pleased to see in action. Of all the legacy sequels we’ve seen in the past few years, this one is solid and fun. It’s a little more toothless than the original, but it’s not without its gory eccentricities (a well-delivered “spill my guts” bit in the trailer is what won me over). It seems to have become even more toned-down in the editing process as well, as Astrid snidely predicts the futures of the girls who bully her by joking about “driving carpool and banging Pilates instructors to fill the empty void” in the trailer, while in the film, the line is a tamer bit about “having [their] third children with [their] second husbands.” I have to think that the marketing push for this one and the need to make it more palatable for a wider audience is to blame, and that’s a shame. It’s still worth seeing, but I do think it could have been just a smidge meaner. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Reality Bites (1994)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

If there’s any one clear enemy that Gen-X kids rallied against in the 90s it was “Phoniness.” It was as if the entire Slacker generation had taken Holden Caulfield’s tirades against “phonies” as gospel instead of mocking the blowhard for his own vapid narcissism, creating a kind of low-effort religious movement that worshipped Authenticity as the main driver of counterculture. Any artist in search of a self-sustaining paycheck was labeled a sell-out. Any bozo who debased themselves by wearing a suit was a corporate clown. Anyone caught caring especially deeply on any topic at all was a sucker & a loser, at least in the eyes of Generation Apathy. That anti-phonies mindset made Gen-X especially difficult to pander to as a movie-going audience, since any studio actually caught putting an effort into marketing to that demographic had already committed their intended audience’s cardinal sin: putting effort into anything at all. So, the few times that Hollywood did openly pander to Gen-X sensibilities mostly produced flops – both critically & financially. While “indie cinema” flourished, Slacker Era studio pictures like Empire Records, Airheads, and Reality Bites were slapped aside as phonies by the Gen-X audience they were actually aimed at, only to gradually gain cult status among younger viewers who foolishly looked up to that generation as The Cool Kids.

Speaking as a foolish Millennial myself, I’m highly susceptible to being charmed by these big-studio attempts at X-tremely 90s Gen-X pandering, which is why I recently gave Reality Bites a shot despite its contemporary critical dismissal. It’s easy to see why this film in particular was such a target for claims of corporate phoniness, while goofier titles like Empire Records & Airheads were merely forgotten as trivialities. It’s just so achingly sincere as a romantic comedy in a way that just does not jive at all with Gen-X apathy politics. Reality Bites tries to have it both ways in “giving voice” to a generation that only wants to eat pizza, watch syndicated television, and smoke weed out of half-crushed soda cans while also committing wholeheartedly to a traditional romantic triangle plot. Because all three participants in that central melodrama are such Apathetic brats, it’s difficult to care at all about who ends up with whom as the story shakes out, which I’m saying even as a product of the Radical Empathy generation that eagerly followed in the Slackers’ footsteps. Reality Bites is terminally phony, but only because it can’t find a proper way to marry genuine heartfelt emotion with the who-cares slackerdom of its target demographic. In the attempt, it amounts to nothing at all, just wasted time.

The one saving grace of this big-studio Slacker facsimile is the charm of its Ultra 90s cast. If nothing else, Winona Ryder is always some baseline level of delightful, apparently even as a privileged brat with no sense of morals, goals, or an internal life. Jeanine Garofalo & Steve Zahn are likewise adorably chummy as her pizza-loving, couch-dwelling roommates, so much so that you wish the movie were solely about that trio’s friendship so you could spend more time in their smoky living room with them, just hanging out. Instead, the film details a romantic rivalry in which a greasy go-nowhere musician (Ethan Hawke) and a yuppie corporate stooge (Ben Stiller) play tug of war with Ryder’s confused heart – a literalized conflict between Authenticity & Phoniness. I’ll spare you the reveal of which undeserving beau she chooses in this review, but know this: the movie would have been vastly improved if it didn’t care about that romantic conflict at all. Reality Bites pretends to be interested in the static ennui of a generation with no sense of ambition or enthusiasm for participating in established social norms, but it quickly bails on that inert navel-gazing to instead dive headfirst into the normiest bullshit I can possibly think of: a potentially flourishing young woman wasting her time on two bonehead men who don’t deserve a second’s pause.

Directed by Ben Stiller around the time when he was producing much more successful Gen-X comedy with The Ben Stiller Show, Reality Bites does make some admirable motions towards actively mocking its own Slacker sensibilities instead of merely pandering to them. Stiller was genius to cast himself as the nexus of this sarcastic, self-effacing humor. As a suited network exec for an MTV-parodying cable channel called In Your Face Television, Stiller positions himself as a money-grubbing goon who literally peddles youth counterculture for cheap payouts. Ryder’s character is an amateur documentarian who interviews her immediate social circle about their post-college ennui as a self-satisfying art project, which Stiller turns around to sell to his network as a slapstick comedy mutation of The Real World. This line of generational parody brilliantly goes one level deeper in the end credits, when Stiller’s network exec bozo turns the love triangle drama that drives the film into a scripted Gen-X soap opera. If Reality Bites were ever going to speak directly to its intended audience, this self-parody would have to have been way more pronounced & exaggerated to mean much of anything. As is, it takes the romantic lives of the privileged brats it lightly ribs very seriously, so unfortunately all that registers is its tragic phoniness as a corporate product.

Aesthetics-wise, there’s a lot to admire here. The film’s soundtrack is peppered with some pure 90s car-cassette gems, including the 5-star Lisa Loeb classic “Stay,” which it popularized with a tie-in music video (sadly, a dead artform). Ryder & Garofalo’s costuming is distinctly College Grad 90s chic, which is a pleasure in itself. However, the movie’s strongest asset is its VHS camcorder-style cinematography meant to mimic Ryder’s D.I.Y. documentary project, a vivid visual texture achieved by a young Emmanuel Lubezki of all people. The thing is, though, that you can get those same camcorder vibes from Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape without having to hang out with total dipshits for 100 minutes. Nothing is good enough to survive the contrived, dispiriting dirge of this film’s love triangle conflict: not Lubezki’s spectacularly Authentic camerawork, not Stiller’s astute Gen-X self-parody, not even Ryder’s consistently stellar on-screen charm. Reality Bites isn’t a total waste of time, but it’s also not much of anything at all. It’s ultimately stuck between two disparate sensibilities—the romantic & the apathetic—and thus ultimately panders to no one. This is one of those cases where the Gen-X kids were right to shrug it off, of which there are many since their collective impulse was to immediately shrug off Everything.

-Brandon Ledet

Little Modern Women

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

It used to be a matter of course that a new big-screen adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel Little Women would go into production every few years. As cinema jumped from silence to sound, from black & white to color, a new version of the same story would grace the screen – ensuring that each new generation of young readers in love with Alcott’s setting & characters could experience them in the flesh. Sadly, that tradition dried up after the 1940s version (featuring Elizabeth Taylor as an overgrown Amy, the littlest woman), leaving a forty-five-year gap before Little Women would be refreshed in adaptation for a new generation. The two major productions that ended that drought—1994’s Gillian Armstrong adaptation and the 2019 Greta Gerwig remix—had a lot of catching up to do, then. It wouldn’t be enough to just revive the same story with the updated stars & filmmaking tech of the modern day. Armstrong & Gerwig instead had to overhaul the material in a drastic display to make up for all the lost time. Both resulting films are great works in their own respects, but only one of the pair truly swung for the fences in its attempt to launch Little Women into the modern world.

On its surface, the 1994 version of Little Women appears to play it safe in its duties as a literary adaptation. Like the Old Hollywood adaptations that came before it, it tells the story of the fictional March sisters’ coming-of-age during the leanest years of the Civil War (an apparently autobiographical account of Alcott’s own youth) in a traditional, linear narrative. The will-they/won’t-they drama of its protagonist’s potentially romantic friendship with the wealthy boy next door drives the heart of the story. Meanwhile, the incidental episodes amongst her sisters that make the novel such a recognizably genuine depiction of childhood (which is almost entirely a series of incidental episodes, at least in memory) fill out the frame around that structural romantic storyline, so that Amstrong’s take on the material is practically a hangout film as much as it is a costume drama. Like in the previous routine of adaptations, the major overhaul in Armstrong’s picture was in seeing up-to-date actors breathe fresh air into iconic scenes from the long-familiar source material. The star-power appeal of 90s-specific heavy-hitters like Winona Ryder, Claire Danes, Susan Sarandon, Kirsten Dunst, and baby-faced newsie Christian Bale is the major update to the source material in Armstrong’s adaptation, same as in the previous revisions. The only difference (besides sound & color no longer being new inventions) is in just how much that youth-culture casting was allowed to reshape the text.

In particular, Winona Ryder’s starring role as Jo March is the casting choice that really jolts Alcott’s writing into a 90s era sensibility. As a hopeless 90s Kid™ myself, my love for Winona Ryder as a screen presence predates even my earliest childhood memories – thanks largely to her collaborations with Tim Burton in Beetlejuice & Edward Scissorhands. I still wouldn’t exactly call her approach to acting “versatile,” though. Like fellow Gen-X icons Keanu Reeves, Christina Ricci, and Jeanine Garofalo, Ryder more or less always gives the same performance no matter the project; the trick is just casting her in the exact right role. The brilliance of casting Ryder as Jo March is that her schtick fits both the original profile of the character (a powder keg mix of dorky enthusiasm within her home & righteous disgust with the ways of the world at large) and is distinctly of her own time – effortlessly conveying a sardonic wit central to Gen-X cynicism. If nothing else, the way she rants about the ills of the outside world and indulges in oddball slang like “Capital!” & “Christopher Columbus!” from her writing desk can’t help but recall the parallel narration of Ryder’s career-defining role in Heathers. If Armstrong’s Little Women were made just a few years later it might have updated the setting around Ryder to 1990s suburbia, the way Emma was transformed into Clueless or The Taming of the Shrew became 10 Things I Hate About You. As is, Ryder is doing all of that modernization work herself, performing Alcott’s century-old text with a 90s attitude & inflection.

Greta Gerwig’s more recent, currently Oscar-nominated take on Little Women was much more stylistically aggressive in its attempts to modernize Alcott’s novel. At the very least, it doesn’t rely entirely on the 2010s indie darlings of its cast (Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet) to do all of its heavy lifting in refreshing the material. Instead, Gerwig violently shakes the story loose from the page – assuming that audiences are familiar enough with the source material to appreciate it scrambled out of sequence. In her version, the audience is informed up-front that Jo turned down the well-off heartthrob next door, essentially stripping the story of its will-they/won’t-they drama to push through to other concerns. Instead of following a linear retelling of the entire novel, we watch an adult Jo from the second volume reflect on childhood memories from the first. Meanwhile, debates between Jo and her publisher in New York City prompt metatextual speculations on how, exactly, Little Women relates to Louisa May Alcott’s actual life and what biographical events may have been altered to please her own Male publishers’ demands – forever reshaping how the original text will be interpreted for the screen in the future. In many ways, this recent adaptation of Little Women is about the very act of adapting Little Women – a much headier, more exclusively cinematic approach to the material than the versions that preceded it.

The major narrative innovation of Gerwig’s take on this story is in how it makes the adult half of Jo’s story more compelling by drawing direct parallels to the childhood half. The most iconic, memorable episodes of Little Women tend to fall in its first volume, which captures an enduring portrait of girlhood that allows the work to resonate & reverberate from generation to generation. Centering this adaptation on the adult end of the book is a bold choice, then, but it unlocks a lot of the untapped power of that second half by making direct in-the-moment connections to events from the first. As Jo returns home from New York City to care for a sister who’s taken ill, the familiar sights & personalities of her hometown trigger memories of the book’s most iconic childhood moments, revealing the power of the novel’s bifurcated structure. It also frees Gerwig to pick & choose what parts of the story she wants to emphasize thematically. Gerwig shifts the core story from focusing on Jo’s possible romance with her neighbor to instead exploring her combative relationship with her youngest, brattiest sister. Gerwig also searches for the border between truth & artifice in Alcott’s source material and interrogates how outside influences may have distorted the author’s original vision. While most adaptations lovingly stage Alcott’s exact narrative for the screen, Gerwig’s actively interprets it and its legacy.

There’s a brief image of young children playing pretend as pirates in the March sisters’ attic that flashes in the last minute or so of Gerwig’s Little Women that I cannot stop thinking about. After Jo’s debates with her publisher call into question what “really” happened in her story vs. what literary tastes of the time dictated should happen, I couldn’t help but puzzle over what that image was implying. Was it merely a memory from earlier in Jo’s childhood play than what the book or its resulting movies cover? Was it an implication of how Jo’s published memoir would influence the childhood play of her readers? Or was it a vision of How Things Really Were, as opposed to the distorted version of Jo’s memory that we had been watching the entire film? I don’t really want an Answer to this query. The more important thing is just appreciating how the film’s metatextual self-examination had my mind racing in its final minutes to the point where I got hung up on what, like, three seconds of footage “meant” within the larger story. I really liked how Gillian Armstrong updated Little Women for Generation X by handing the source material over to one of the era’s most distinct personalities (namely, Veronica Sawyer). This latest adaptation from Gerwig is far more adventurous in its own modernization efforts, though. There’s no single image in the 90s version of Little Women that incites personal interpretation or extrapolation the way Gerwig’s film does, which makes the newer film not only more modern but also more outright cinematic.

-Brandon Ledet

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (1990) is to John Hughes’ Oeuvre what Big Business (1988) is to Old Hollywood Comedies

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

EPSON MFP image

After my discovery that our February Movie of the Month, Big Business, was directed by one third of the ZAZ creative team behind classic genre parodies like Airplane!, Top Secret!, and The Naked Gun, I’ve been trying to make sense of the rest of Jim Abrahams’ catalog. What I found most interesting was that there were only three titles that didn’t fall in line with his genre-defining work in parody comedy. Big Business, as we know, is more of an homage than an outright spoof, but it could’ve easily undergone the typical ZAZ treatment with a couple re-writes. Ruthless People is a much more difficult film to understand in that context. A pitch black comedy inspired by the kidnapping of Patty Hearst (and starring Bette Midler, who steals the show in Big Business), it was made by the full ZAZ team, but never really threatens to be a parody or a spoof of the ransom-driven thriller as a genre. It’s by far the the furthest ZAZ outlier. Much closer in line to what Abrahams achieves in Big Business‘s Old Hollywood pastiche is the Winona Rider comedy Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael, which feels palpably close to spoofing John Hughes’ work in teen comedies, but ends up functioning much more like a loving tribute.

A moody, gothy Winona Ryder headlines Roxy Carmichael as a fullblown version Aly Sheedy’s dour recluse in The Breakfast Club. Just like Sheedy, she looks like the world’s biggest Robert Smith fan, intentionally  isolates herself from peers, and treats the idea of personal hygiene like the exact kind of afflictions you might acquire if you completely disregarded personal hygiene. The movie pushes her high school “weird kid” attributes to an even more cartoonish degree, though, equipping her with an “ark” of abandoned animals that she adopts like a shanty farm, because that’s apparently what weirdo high schoolers do in their free time. The aching-for-a-boy-out-of-her-league growing pains, poor kid vs. the world class warfare, and uncaring parents all resemble characteristics of Molly Ringwald films like Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles, except that they’re all crammed into the same feature. The movie even ends in a Big Dance confrontation, which feels like classic Hughes, and Ryder’s protagonist’s name sounds exactly like what she’d be called if she were the Weird Kid archetype in Not Another 80s Teen Movie: Dinky. Much like with Big Business, the line between homage & spoof feels very thin here & with the right push, Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael could’ve easily fallen in line with the rest of the ZAZ catalog.

There’s something about working in the John Hughes realm that brings out new territory in Abraham’s work that might’ve been missing in his spoof & pastiche films (and whatever you want to call Ruthless People): genuine heart. It takes an innate understanding of genre tropes to be able to understand how to make an homage or a spoof work as a feature film & here Abrahams recognizes that what distinguishes John Hughes’ brand of 80s teen comedies is their heart on the sleeve sentimentality. It’s possible in this case, though, that he might’ve outdone his source material in creating the homage. Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael has some brutal character moments, carried by both Winona Ryder & costar Jeff Daniels, who both play broken shells of people who feel cruelly rejected by both the ones they love & the world at large. And instead of bringing the drama to an everything-works-out-fine cinema magic climax, the film instead stages a huge emotional gut punch that feels a little rough for the genre that Abrahams was working in here. It was surprisingly powerful stuff.

It’s difficult to say whether or not a fan of Big Business would necessarily be floored by what’s offered in Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael. The films are both heavily rooted in 80s fashion & genre convention, so there’s at least a chance that fans would bleed over. What’s far more important, though, is what the two films reveal about Jim Abrahams as a comedy director. It’s tempting to think of the ZAZ team as a sarcastic group of pranksters who simply regurgitate tropes with silly gags added, especially after watching how their comedy style has lead to such creative voids as Fifty Shades of Black, Vampires Suck, and Superfast!. However, what Big Business & Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael reveal is that Abrahams & his Zucker brother collaborators had a genuine love for the movies they were parodying & a deep understanding of how their tropes could be picked apart, reproduced, and repurposed for a new effect. Whether or not Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael is just as good as the genuine John Hughes product is debatable (although it’d certainly be an easier case than arguing that Big Business is just as good as the Old Hollywood farces it emulates), but it’s undeniable that Abrahams understood how those films ticked & how they could be replicated for a new effect, a skill he presumably learned as a parody-happy prankster.

For more on February’s Movie of the Month, 1988’s Big Business, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, a look at its borrowed gag from The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, and a reflection on where the film sits in relation to the rest of the Jim Abrahams catalog.

-Brandon Ledet