The Swimmer

I hadn't even heard of this movie until yesterday, when I randomly saw a Reddit post about the new Grindhouse Releasing edition. I knew I wanted to watch it after I looked it up on Letterboxd and saw words like "surreal" and "dread" used to describe it, but what really drew me in was the Grindhouse cover art. It reminded me, in a distant kind of way, of David Hockney's pool paintings, which have always exerted a weird sort of pull on me. The movie itself, it turns out, reminds me even more of those paintings. The film's landscapes are the same sort of bland upper-class backyards, and there's... read more

The Swimmer by Noel Murray MARCH 31, 2014 Years after Frank and Eleanor Perrys 1968 adaptation of John Cheevers short story “The Swimmer” flopped at the box office, star Burt Lancaster wondered if it mightve done better if it had been directed by someone like François Truffaut, who couldve prepared the audience more for the surreal and allegorical aspects of the film. Its not that theres anything drastically wrong with what the Perrys did with the material. But as the years have gone by and The Swimmer has become more of a cult favorite, some people—like Lancasters co-star Janet... read more