Every movie is documentary. Whether or not the scene-to-scene narrative of a picture is a record of True Events (manipulated, as they all are, by the filmmakers’ selective curation), the picture itself is a record, a document of the past. This becomes more apparent the older the picture has aged, as its performers, locations, and cultural context are cyclically replaced in the real world but remain intact onscreen. That’s why it’s best not to get too hung up on genre boundaries when watching a picture like 1961’s The Exiles, which is presented as a documentary but is obviously driven by a semi-scripted narrative. Documenting one drunken night in the lives of the Indigenous rock n roll greasers of 1950s Los Angeles, it’s a record of a time, a place, a people, and a moment in pop culture that have since been replaced and would otherwise be forgotten. Which elements of the film qualify as documentary by definition of artistic medium are up for interpretation, but over time that distinction has mattered less & less.
Personally, I mostly receive the films’ clothes, locations, and voiceover narration as purely documentary in the genre sense. Everything else onscreen plays as a recognition of and participation in the inherent artifice of cinema. I believe the performers in the film are actual residents of the since-gentrified-into-oblivion neighborhood of Bunker Hill where they’re shown drinking, dancing, shouting, fighting, and just generally cutting up. They appear to typify a genuine subculture of Indigenous youth who left the rural isolation of their government-assigned reservations to live out a hedonistic rock ‘n roll fantasy lifestyle in the big city, passing around the same little scraps of money amongst themselves for shared swigs of booze. Their voiceover confessions about the never-ending cycle of getting drunk every single night with no particular plan or purpose feel bleakly sincere, while the onscreen illustration of that hedonism often feels more like reenactment in pantomime. It has a very similar approach to narrative as its recent docufiction successor Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, except it’s shot as if it were a high-style Poverty Row noir.
The Exiles is factual but not exactly educational. Its aimless, loosely scripted drunkenness might read as a kind of road-to-ruin moral lesson about alcoholism, but there’s no clear momentum or consequence to drive that point home. Mostly, it’s just a slice-of-life document of one very specific community living out the Boomer rock ‘n roller fantasy of American Graffiti in real time, which to the sober eye can appear fashionably cool or hideously grotesque depending on the momentary vibes of the nonstop party. I most appreciated it as a low-budget D.I.Y. project that couldn’t afford luxuries like color film or on-set sync sound recordings but still had a keen eye for aesthetic & cultural detail, most strikingly in scenes where the Native American stereotypes of the Westerns playing on background TV & movie screens clashed with the matter-of-fact representation of the real-life youth centered here. At the same time, the way British filmmaker Kent Mackenzie opens the picture with historical photographs of Indigenous elders and never thinks to include mention of any specific tribe or nation now feels just as dusty as those Westerns did then. It’s very much a picture of its time, as all pictures are.
Confession: I periodically fell asleep during a recent theatrical screening of this film, and I had to rewatch the final 20 minutes at home to piece together what I had missed during a few long blinks. I’m not proud of this response to such a unique work. I’m only mentioning it to note that as cool as the cultural documentation & vintage rock ‘n roll aesthetics are, the presentation can be a little dry. I would usually apologize to anyone else who happened to be in that theater in case I snored during those mid-film disco naps, but I feel like after that guy got arrested for jacking it & nodding off duringLove Lies Bleeding, the bar has been lowered enough for me to get away with it; at least I didn’t wake up with my peener out. There are ways in which The Exiles‘s hands-off aimlessness decreases its value as filmic entertainment, but that approach is also exactly what makes it useful as an archival document, so I’m noting its patience-testing dryness less as a complaint than as an honest acknowledgement.
Sometime recently, I was telling a friend of mine (a fellow freak, if you will) a story that I had just read in an interview with one of Yukio Mishima’s former lovers. The person was a sex worker, and Mishima picked them up at a gay bar with the intention of having something longer term, but they ended up only meeting twice, because the sex worker was so disturbed by the scene that Mishima wanted. In essence, he didn’t want a partner; he wanted a witness, someone to watch as Mishima committed play-seppuku – complete with a false dagger and a red sash that took the place of Mishima’s entrails and blood. According to the account, Mishima came to complete erection and ejaculated at the time that he drew the false blade across his stomach, all without ever touching his genitals. I haven’t been able to find that interview again, but it crosses my mind often. Mishima was an awful man, but he’s nonetheless fascinating, and it’s an endless source of fascination to me whenever I stumble across some incel fascist on the internet who worships Mishima but is bigoted against queer people; it’s a truly fascinating compartmentalization of ideological conflicts. As a result of recounting that anecdote, there’s been a lot of Mishima talk in the friend group lately, which culminated in a recent screening of Paul Schrader’s 1985 biopic Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.
The film, which features a score composed by Philip Glass (when his name appeared on screen, one of my friends declared “I knew it! He loves arpeggios!”) and which was executive produced by both Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, is a true technical achievement. The narrative takes place in three different segments, some of which break down further into smaller sub-sections. There are the biographical sections, which include everything prior to the fateful day that Mishima attempted his coup (all in black & white) and the day of said sad little effort (in color). Although there is factual information in these sections—like the fact that Mishima was isolated from the rest of his family as a child by his grandmother, who forbade him from sport, sunlight, and playing with other boys—the film has very little interest in the elements that make up a traditional drama about a real person. This isn’t a biography of Mishima so much as it is a portrait of him, and it’s an expressionistic one at that.
Where this is most apparent is in the way that Schrader adapts, with extreme brevity, parts of three different Mishima novels. The first segment is based upon The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which was loosely based upon the arson of the golden pavilion at Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto. In it, a boy named Mizoguchi, who is afflicted with a debilitating stammer, becomes an acolyte of the titular temple but comes to hate it and ultimately burns it down (this is an oversimplification of the plot, but so is the retelling in the film). The second segment is based loosely on one of the four characters who populate the novel Kyoko’s House, in which a young actor named Osamu agrees to sell himself to a woman who is part of the yakuza in exchange for the cancellation of his mother’s debts; he and the woman become lovers, and they begin to partake in sadomasochism that ultimately leads to both his death and hers. The third adapts part of Runaway Horses, a 1930s-set period piece about a young man named Isao who, trained in the samurai code by his father, resents the apparent Westernization and materialism of his community and nation, so he plots to assassinate several key government figures in order to halt the spread of capitalism and its influence upon Japan.
Although the biographical segments are shot in a more realistic style (the black & white “history” being filmed very traditionally, while the “day of the coup attempt” segments are all done with handheld cameras to add a kinetic energy to the proceedings), the narrative adaptation sections have a lovely artificiality. The room that Osuma and his lover share is a vaporwave lover’s nest in a black void, and Mizoguchi and his friend walk a constant path around a scale replica of the temple on stones that imply a path across a body of water that is no more than a painted floor. Isao and his friends plan their assassinations within another room in a void, but when their plans are stopped by the authorities, this is represented by all of the panels comprising the room’s walls being pulled outward and collapsing as police surround them from all sides. It’s a bold stylistic choice, but one that pays off, as these are the coolest and most interesting parts of the film, and as a metaphor for Mishima himself, it’s also very clever. Each of the men who populate these narratives represent some part of Mishima’s psyche. Pavilion’s Mizoguchi is obsessed with an ideal of beauty and longs to set it free just as Mishima was obsessed with the traditional Yamato-damashii (Japanese cultural traditions and values) and was willing to commit destructive acts to see it unshackled; Osuma represents Mishima’s devotion to his ideal, imperialist vision of Japan and his willingness to be hurt or even killed in a masochistic relationship with that vision; and Runaway Isao’s ultranationalism is Mishima to the core, down to the eerie way in which Mishima predicted (or perhaps announced) his death, as he and Isao share the same fate.
If you’re looking for a scholarly work about Yukio Mishima, this isn’t it. One of our friends (the same one who identified Glass’s arpeggios) asked if she would need to know anything about Mishima before watching the movie, and we told her “no” before the screening, but I’m not sure I’d say the same thing now. From a narrative perspective, having no knowledge about Mishima (and especially not knowing how he died) makes the ending more shocking and perhaps more powerful, but I’m also not sure how much one would get out of this if this was their first introduction to him. If anything, as the film does little to elaborate on the extent to which Mishima’s views were utterly fascistic, it could end up making him more of a figure of admiration for his life (which is, uh, bad) and not for his literature (which is fine, in my opinion). The man wrote a play entitled My Friend Hitler, after all, and although scholarship is split on whether it’s a fascist work or an anti-fascist one, I’m going to make Roland Barthes roll over in his grave a little on this one and say that, in this case, what we know of the author is relevant to interpretation of the text. On the whole, that’s a bit of a Paul Schrader specialty—the line between apologia and empathy is always fuzzy in his work—but it’s worth noting that his first choice was to adapt Forbidden Colors, arguably Mishima’s most overtly homosexual work, was rejected by the Mishima estate, which led to the inclusion of Kyoko’s Room instead, so the extent to which he was able to craft a fuller portrait of the man was undeniably curtailed.
The movie is vibrant, and, as an impressionistic telling of the life of a … let’s say “conflicted” writer, it’s beautiful and impressive. I’m not sure it’s a great movie, but it’s certainly a cool one, and it’s worth checking out if you have any interest in Mishima and his work.
There’s a new Godzilla & King Kong wrestling match in multiplexes right now: a tag team formation of the legendary monsters just three years after their last onscreen battle in the American production Godzilla vs Kong. Do you know what’s never reached American theaters, though? The original 1962 crossover film King Kong vs Godzilla – at least not in any wholly intact, wholly legal form. It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that the 1954 Japanese cut of the original Godzilla officially reached American audiences, with the only widely available version being a warped American edit featuring awkward post-production inserts of actor Raymond Burr. Twenty years later, that film’s second sequel, King Kong vs Godzilla, has still not yet been made wholly available for American audiences … but we’ve gotten damn close. In 2019, The Criterion Collection released a gorgeous box set of digitally restored Showa Era Godzilla films, with every title dutifully de-Americanized except for King Kong vs Godzilla. The original Japanese edit of that film is included in the set, but it’s stashed away among the supplementary Bonus Features on the final disc, not listed in sequence. It’s also not fully restored to the image quality standards of the rest of the set; only the scenes left untouched by the American edit are in Blu-ray quality, while the reintegrated Japanese-only scenes switch to a jarring standard-definition DVD scan. The reason for this choppy, half-complete restoration is somewhat mysterious to anyone who’s not an employee of Criterion, Toho, or Warner Bros, but I can at least say I’m grateful that it was included in the set at all, compromised or not.
The only reason King Kong vs Godzilla‘s muddled distribution history is worth noting in the first place is that the film was a significant creative swerve for both of its overlapping franchises. If nothing else, it marks the first time either Kong or Godzilla were featured in color or in widescreen, three entries into both respective series. The monsters’ onscreen crossover match being billed like a boxing PPV was a big deal, as it set the template for dozens of sequels to come: Godzilla vs. Hedorah, Godzilla vs. Mothra, Mothra vs. Godzilla, Godzilla vs. Megalon, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla … all the way to the aforementioned Godzilla vs. Kong. More importantly, it was a major change in course for its titular monsters in terms of its intent & tone. The original Godzilla film has obvious, deep roots in the cultural & historical contexts of 1950s Japan, but it also pulled a lot of narrative influence from the monster-movie template established by the 1930s American classic King Kong. Kong’s second outing in 1933’s Son of Kong and Godzilla’s second outing in 1955’s Godzilla Raids Again—both rushed to market mere months after the success of their predecessors—were mostly just pathetic cash-in imitators of former glories. Of the pair, Godzilla Raids Again feels especially superfluous, since it can only offer the novelty of seeing the pro-wrestling style kaiju battles of later Godzilla sequels filtered through the relatively elegant aesthetics of the original (through Godzilla’s fights with the dinosaur-like Anguirus, again recalling plot details from the original King Kong) with no other notable deviations. Son of Kong is likewise shameless in its willingness to repeat the exact tones & events of its predecessor, but it at least introduces the adorably useless Little Kong of its title to keep the rote proceedings novel. Together, they make for convincing evidence that both series would have to get goofy to keep going, which is where King Kong vs. Godzilla comes to the rescue.
1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla is a wonderfully goofy corporate satire that feels like it has less in common with previous Kong or Godzilla pictures than it has in common with more cartoonish titles like Giants & Toys and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?. A lot of the early stirrings of my beloved Godzilla vs Hedorah seem to have originated here, from the psychedelic pop-art color palette to the tangential indulgences in Looney Tunes goofballery. Our two skyscraper combatants are unleashed upon the modern world in ways that feel true to their origin stories but are heightened for comedic effect. When an American nuclear submarine gets wedged on an iceberg in Japanese waters, a slumbering Godzilla explodes out of the ice to attack the crew onboard. Meanwhile, Kong is once again collected from his island home to participate in low-brow vaudevillian entertainment, but this time it’s to boost the ratings for a television program that promotes the Japanese company Pacific Pharmaceuticals. Shockingly, the island extraction sequence that sets Kong loose somehow feels even more racist than the 1930s film that inspired it (a sequence the original Godzilla copied with much more tact & grace), but if you can stomach the blackface humor long enough to get past it, the rewards are worthwhile. Pacific Pharmaceuticals quickly establishes itself as the villain of the piece, exploiting their bungled extraction of Kong and the simultaneous emergence of Godzilla to craft the ultimate ratings booster: the world’s first televised kaiju battle. Instead of nuclear proliferation or the exploitation of Nature, a novelty television program advertising Big Pharma drives the horror of the plot, damning capitalistic greed and bloodthirsty quests for increased ratings. That theme can’t help but feel a little silly by comparison, and the movie smartly leans into the humor of its villains being incompetently evil in their selfishness instead of being knowingly evil in some grand mastermind scheme. The world suffers for their folly regardless.
Of course, all of this plot detail and background context ceases to matter during the final act, when Godzilla & Kong finally start going at it in earnest. I won’t spoil who wins that fight, but I will say that the result is bullshit. There’s some great monster action throughout, though, including a sequence where a lightning-powered Kong fights an especially slimy octopus and one where Godzilla survives miniature missile fire from an army of toy tanks. The most notable dynamic to the monsters’ one-on-one match-up is the difference in the care put into their respective looks. Godzilla looks just as great as ever here, while Kong looks like his costume was left to melt on some forgetful production assistant’s dashboard on a summer afternoon. I could not get over the bizarre, lumpy proportions of Kong’s hairy, apish body; it felt like I was standing naked in front of a full-length mirror, my exact body type finally represented onscreen. The half-SD, half-HD lumpiness of the movie’s presentation had a similar kind of misshapen charm to it as well. In truth, it was no worse than watching a movie on a streaming platform that frequently buffered down to a lower quality due to internet bandwidth constraints, which isn’t ideal for a Blu-ray purchase but also isn’t a total deal breaker. However, it did have the unintended benefit of highlighting just how much of the original Japanese version of the film had been removed from its American cut, denoted by alternatingly crisped & blurred visual details. It’s obviously a wonderful thing that Criterion was able to officially present King Kong vs Godzilla to an American audience for the first time in the half-century since it premiered in Japan, regardless of lumpiness. It’s been so long since the film first came out that its titular combatants have since become tag team partners in fights against other, lesser monsters, so it’s somewhat embarrassing that their original outing together is still partially stuck in a distribution limbo. King Kong vs. Godzilla is a deeply silly film, but it’s also a historically important one, and it should be treated as such.
Saint Maud was one of the movies I was most looking forward to prior to the first quarantine back in 2020, having seen many trailers for it all through the last half of 2019. When I finally did get the chance to see it, it was revelatory – an amazing, understatedly vitriolic little thriller that handled religious trauma in a different way. Instead of Maud having been victimized by a past religious indoctrination or being someone who’s so well-versed in scriptural tradition that she can twist it to whatever her ends might be, she’s a dangerously unwell person making up her own faith through incomplete, piecemeal understanding of religion coupled with hallucinatory, delusional “visions.” Throughout that film, we see her interpretation of the world through her perspective; the face of the woman for whom she is a hospice carer takes on elements of the demonic in moments, “God” speaks to her through a roach in her apartment, and she sees herself as an angel in the film’s last moments, until the final split-second that shows us in the audience what’s actually happening to Maud (brutally and horrifically).
I wasn’t terribly interested in Love Lies Bleeding until the friend with whom I went to see Drive-Away Dolls asked me if we would be seeing it as well, and told me that it was directed by Rose Glass, who also helmed Saint Maud. That was better advertisement than any of the trailers for the film that I had seen, and I was not disappointed. Bleeding is the story of an intensely passionate love between two women and the way that drugs, troubled pasts, unrequited longing, and violence conspire to keep them apart. Somewhere in west Texas—I assume, given the prevalence of Lone Star beer—it’s 1989, and Lou (Kristen Stewart) works at Crater Gym, a cavernous warehouse full of free weights, meatheads, and stenciled slogans like “Pain is weakness leaving the body” and its ilk. It’s a shit life, rubbing one out every night on the couch while her TV dinner goes cold, trying and failing to quit smoking, and unclogging the same gym toilet over and over while fending off the advances of Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), who may be the only other queer woman in town but whom Lou finds repellant. One day, bisexual bodybuilder Jackie (Kay O’Brian) appears in the gym and upends Lou’s world; she’s hitch-hiking her way to a body-building competition in Vegas and is stopping over here for a bit after getting a job waiting tables at the local gun range/club’s cantina.
The two immediately hit it off and after a passionate night together in which Lou introduces Jackie to steroids to which she has access, Lou agrees to let Jackie stay with her until she goes further west to the competition. The situation is complicated by the fact that the gun range is owned by Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), Lou’s father. The range is just a cover, though, as his real business is running guns across the border to Mexico, and he’s got local law enforcement in his pocket, and Lou knows he’s bad news since she was once more involved in the family business, although she hasn’t spoken to her father in years following the suspicious disappearance of her mother. The only other remaining family Lou has is her sister Bethany (Jena Malone), mother of three married to utter piece of shit J.J. (Dave Franco), who also works for Lou Sr. and got Jackie her job after he has sex with her in a bar parking lot, the night before she and Lou meet. J.J. is habitually physically abusive of Bethany, and when he puts her in the hospital, the simmering rage, resentment, and violence under the surface of everything comes to a boil, with tragic consequences.
The southern fried thriller-noir bona fides of this movie are on full display. A mixture of Blood Simple, Thelma & Louise, and Blue Velvet with a little Requiem for a Dream sprinkled in for good measure, the film is elegant in its construction. The fingerprints from Blood Simple are all over this one, from its grimy, sweaty, eighties, west Texas setting to that classic visual of the highway at night, a dark void surrounding the small halo of light from a vehicle’s headlights. Bleeding’s final moments could take place in the exact same field as the one in which Ray buries Dan Hedaya’s Marty, just in daylight. Moreover, just like Abby and Ray in the Coen brothers’ film, our protagonists are forced to commit larger and larger acts of violence in order to try and be together, free from the potential for violence. Ed Harris channels Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth here, albeit in a more subdued manner. Although his violence is free from any psychosexual elements (give or take how much enjoyment he gets from forcing Jackie to learn to shoot while he “coaches” her through extensive body contact), he is just as sadistic as Booth, and Lou Sr. is perhaps the most frightening onscreen psychopath since Anton Chigurh. The similarities to Thelma & Louise are fairly close to the surface, and there’s something fascinating happening with the way that steroids are treated with the same intensity and as having the potential for the same fall out as intravenous drugs in Requiem.
Where this film picks up the torch from Glass’s earlier work is in the way that we are once again made privy to the internal life of an emotionally and mentally unwell person. Jackie is a fascinating character. When we first meet her, she’s using her body to get what she needs, and is at peace with that. She has history, but no origin; the earliest part of her life that she mentions is being adopted at age thirteen (by parents that no longer speak to her and who call her a “monster”), and she tells Lou that she turned to bodybuilding as a way to change her body due to fatphobic bullying. Like Maud, she’s running from something, but unlike her, she also has a goal in mind and is relying on herself to get there, self-actualizing where Maud turned to a hollow, false spirituality. She’s remarkably self-sufficient and dedicated, as we see when she wakes up under an overpass and immediately gets to work on both exercise and brushing her teeth. In this, she is a contrast to both Lou, who is never seen exercising and is instead trying to shortcut with steroids, and Daisy, who is most clearly communicated to us as undesirable through the centering of her poor dental hygiene. She’s still human, however, and allows her lust-turned-passion for Lou and her thirst for validation through victory in the Vegas competition to lead her down a path that deteriorates her mental state. At first, her steroid-affected hallucinations of developing greater vein and muscle definition are empowering and concurrent with her deepening passion with Lou, but when she tries to run from the consequences of her first major (albeit justified) act of violence, she ultimately has a nightmarish series of visions in Vegas that cause her to become even more aggressive, resulting in her falling first into the hands of the authorities and then under the influence of Lou Sr.
Another thing that’s fun about these visions is the way that they relate back to things that we see her absorbing, even if they’re making their way into her subconscious without her really noticing. After their first night together, Lou prepares breakfast for Jackie, who (somewhat ungratefully) asks her to leave the yolks out, a period-appropriate “healthier” alternative to eating a whole egg; later, in a montage we see Lou carefully separating out the yolks while preparing breakfast, and several shots of the eggs ending up in the garbage alongside the remnants of emptied ashtrays. This comes back around when Jackie later hallucinates that she has vomited Lou onto the stage in front of her at the competition, covered in a sort of amniotic egg white mixture. Further, in the film’s climax, Jackie imagines herself fully hulking out and turning into a giant woman (apologies that that song will be stuck in your head for the rest of the day, Steven Universe fans), and this is actually foreshadowed earlier on, when we see her watching the 1939 animated version of Gulliver’s Travels. (If you’re like me, you probably assumed that this was used because the film is in the public domain, and were delighted to see that there was a narrative reason behind its inclusion.) It’s all very elegantly constructed, and as a man who always loves it when things fall perfectly into place, it was incredibly satisfying.
There should be no mistaking that this is still a brutal movie. It’s not one for those with queasy stomachs, and I’m not just talking about all of the disgusting mullets (of which there are … many). J.J.’s death is extreme, and we see the aftereffects of it multiple times. That’s the kind of thing you’d probably expect from a movie with the word “bleeding” in the title, but just in case you’re somehow floating around out there with the idea that this is more romance than grit, I want to make it clear that this is a ferocious, vicious piece of work, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
A direct sequel to Crisis on Two Earths, Justice League: Doom does not follow up on the apparent membership drive that ended the previous film. It seems that only one new recruit has joined the team since that movie’s finale, but it’s still a continuation, if one knows that this is the case and what to look for. This was another one that I had seen a few times even before beginning this project, not so much out of any particular fondness for it, but because it was the last one that was released before I finished grad school and moved back to Baton Rouge, so it was an easy one to put on in the background and do some unpacking or chores. It’s not as strong a film as Crisis was, but it still has some of the same magic, and it’s pretty good, even if it’s a little thinner than its predecessor.
The Royal Flush gang, a villainous group that is characterized by their costumes taking inspiration from the highest point cards for the suit of spades, has been engaging in a series of break-ins, and Batman is on the case. He discovers that they have been using a piece of technology that allows them to pass through walls in order to complete their crimes, and when he engages them, the rest of the Justice League gets involved. During this distraction, Flash villain Mirror Master is able to use his ability to hide in reflections to surreptitiously enter the Batcave via the Batmobile’s rear view mirror, where he downloads files from the main computer. Some time later, each member of the League is attacked while they are alone. The man behind the attacks is Vandal Savage, an immortal who has been alive since the dawn of mankind, and he offers each of the League’s individual nemeses the opportunity to finish off their archenemy once and for all. While in his civilian guise, Martian Manhunter is given a drink by an attractive woman who turns out to be his enemy Ma’alefa’ak (another shapeshifting Martian and, depending on the continuity, J’onn’s brother), and the drink turns out to contain a compound that will result in the Manhunter sweating out highly flammable magnesium. Wonder Woman faces off against Cheetah, who manages to land a cut on the Amazon, resulting in an infection that causes her to see everyone around her as Cheetah, so that she will fight until her heart gives out. Superman is lured to the top of the Daily Planet building because a downsized reporter is planning to jump off of the roof, but is in fact a disguised Metallo, who is armed with a gun with a kryptonite bullet. Flash ends up with a bomb drilled into his wrist which will explode if he goes under a certain speed, Green Lantern is lured to an apparent hostage situation that goes south in a way that leaves him feeling unworthy of his powers, and Batman is tricked out of his home by the apparent disterment of his parents’ graves, only to find himself taken off guard by Bane, who knocks him out and stuffs him in his father’s casket (with the late Thomas Wayne’s skeletal remains) and reburies them in Thomas’s grave.
It’s the darkest hour for the Justice League, but Batman breaks free first by digging himself out of his father’s grave and then finding Green Lantern and showing him that the people who were presumably killed by his failure were animatronics designed to shake his confidence, and along with newest ally Cyborg, they are able to rescue the others from their various traps. Batman reveals that all of these plans were actually his, that they were his failsafes should any of the other members of the League go rogue (or fall under brainwashing or magic compulsion, or any other manner of things that can and do happen in these four color fantasies). The others are not pleased with this revelation, but they still have to work together to face off against Vandal Savage, whose current plan is nothing short of genocidal: induce a solar flare that will ravage half of the planet’s surface and rewind the clock on mankind’s technological level to that of the Industrial Revolution.
As a movie, this one doesn’t really feel like a sequel to the film that preceded it. While that one began life as a part of the Justice animated series, it had an entirely new voice cast that relied on some of the stunt casting that this series was known for, while this one mostly brings back the voice cast of that show. Kevin Conroy is back as Batman (as it should ever be), Tim Daly returns to voice Superman, Susan Eisenberg again voices Wonder Woman, Carl Lumbly is once again Martian Manhunter, and Michael Rosenbaum also returns to play Flash (albeit a different Flash). The only major casting change is that this film has Nathan Fillion as Green Lantern, as it features the Hal Jordan version of the character rather than the John Stewart version (voiced by Phil LaMarr). This is Fillion’s second time playing the character following his appearance in Emerald Knights. The character designs are a little different, too, and I watched this one several times without ever realizing it was supposed to be connected to Crisis, despite that one being one of my favorites. This time around, the connections were a little more apparent, especially in the musical choices; the opening title theme for this one very clearly incorporates the distinctive notation from the first. You can hear the exact same motif when the title appears here in Crisis and here, but I don’t think I’ve ever watched them close enough together to notice that before. There’s also fun new voice talent in this one, and it falls to me as one of the carriers of the Farscape fandom flame to call special attention to Claudia Black’s performance as Cheetah, which is absolutely delightful. The scene where Wonder Woman sees everyone as Cheetah gives Black the chance to do some neat little work as different variations on the same voice, which I liked a lot.
Speaking of villains, however, this one falls a little flat in that department. Whereas Crisis had two interesting villains in the form of the nihilistic Owlman and the unhinged Superwoman, this is one of the thinner portrayals of Vandal Savage. Phil Morris’s voice acting is strong, but the characterization is a bit light, especially when you compare him here to his presence as the overall big bad of Young Justice, which admittedly had a lot more time to flesh him out. While both Owlman’s plan to destroy all universes and Vandal’s here to rule by reducing the population to a manageable half are very much schlocky comic book evil plans, the former had a sense of reality to it based on character motivation, while the latter feels broad and out of proportion for the motivation, like taking a bulldozer to a hangnail. Doom hinges on two major axes: the emotional core of the League’s feelings of betrayal due to Batman’s distrust, and the narrative plot point of the doomsday plan. The climax of the first is much more interesting and comes fairly early on, while the evil plot itself—despite being smaller in scale than in the preceding film—feels very cackly, Saturday morning cartoony.
It’s unfortunate that this one is a bit of a dull note to end our time with Lauren Montgomery, who directed this film and several previous, starting with Superman Doomsday, when she was only twenty-seven years old(!). She was also a storyboard artist for that one, before she directed Wonder Woman, First Flight, Crisis on Two Earths, Apocalypse, and Year One. She was a storyboard artist on virtually all of the others, and she would continue to do this up through Batman: Bad Blood, at which point she became very heavily involved with a series called Voltron: Legendary Defender. These days, it looks like she’s gearing up to direct an as-yet-untitled animated film that is being released by Avatar Studios (she had previously been a storyboard artist on eight episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender and was a supervising producer on The Legend of Korra in addition to doing some storyboard work for that program), so she’s still working, but this will be her last feature for this franchise. I wish her well! If they ever do another follow-up in this sub-series, I would love to see her return. For now, though, we say goodbye, and choose to remember her work at its best.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli celebrate Godzilla’s 70th birthday (and first Oscar win) by looking back to the monster’s 1954 debut.
“Nothing lasts, really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long.”
All of the stills and promotional posters for David Lean’s 1945 adultery drama Brief Encounter had convinced me that it was going to be a noir, not a stately stage play adaptation. Having now seen the film in full, I’m not entirely sure I was wrong. Brief Encounter is a kind of classic noir where the inciting crime is an emotional affair instead of a heist or a murder. It has all of the stylistic markers of noir: the drastic camera angles, the haze of urban steam, a morally compromised lead recounting their crimes in a confessional narration track. The fact that there’s no actual crime to speak of does little to muddle that flirtation with the genre. When the potential adulterers develop their first inside joke it’s like watching them load a revolver. Each kiss is another bullet unloaded from its chamber. When they chain-smoke on empty city streets to calm their nerves, they act as if they’re on the lam, avoiding eye contact with city cops. The whole affair is just as thrillingly romantic as it is unavoidably doomed.
The opening shots of this lean, 86-minute stunner are of two commuter trains passing in opposite directions at a furious speed, their billows of steam settling into a wispy veil over the platform where our would-be lovers first meet. Later, the lovers are similarly veiled by the gauze of cigarette smoke under movie projector lights, in the cinema where they spend Thursday afternoons sitting in the tension of each other’s desire. Their entire affair carries the impermanence and impossibility of a dream, with both dreamers daring each other to make it real. Celia Johnson narrates their emotional crimes in flashback, looking for someone safe to confess to and eventually settling on an internal monologue to her doting but unexciting husband. In her months-long flirtation with Trevor Howard’s mysterious but gentlemanly doctor, she never gets a glimpse of his homelife with his wife, but we get the sense that it’s just as sweetly serene. Their entire relationship is based on the spark of excitement found in flirting with a stranger while waiting for their opposite-direction trains home, a romance that can only flourish in a liminal space. If they did leave their spouses for each other, they’d likely settle into the same warm but bland domestic routines; the spell would be broken.
Whether David Lean was knowingly playing with the tones & tropes of film noir here is unclear. Since the genre had not yet been fully codified or even named, it’s more likely that he simply framed an adulterous dalliance as if it were a legal crime instead of just a moral one, and the stylistic overtones of the era took care of the rest. Either way, it’s clear that Brief Encounter has endured as a major influence on modern filmmakers, from the moody high-style tension of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love to the opening across-the-bar “What’s their deal?” speculation of Celine Song’s Past Lives. Because it’s such a dialogue heavy stage-to-screen production, a lot of its power is creditable to Johnson & Howard’s acting chops, especially in the physicality of their guilt-haunted faces. When Johnson reassures the audience, “I’m a happily married woman,” her body language tells a different story, and there’s similar complexity lurking behind every line delivery of her imagined confession. Still, Lean is a formidable third wheel, guiding this trainwreck romance from the director’s chair with such intensity that you can practically feel his hand tilting the frame. There’s no event or action I can point to that would help classify it as a thriller, but it is thrilling from start to end, with a final line of dialogue that’s more explosive than any stick of stolen dynamite.
The 1996 BBC Films production of Twelfth Night: Or What You Will is a mostly faithful staging of the classic Shakespeare comedy, directed by The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Trevor Nunn. It’s not the kind of MTV-era update to Shakespeare’s text that you’ll find in fellow 90s titles like 10 Things I Hate About You or My Own Private Idaho, which tried to Make the Bard Cool Again for a generation who mostly knew him through frustrating homework assignments. You wouldn’t know that from Twelfth Night‘s poster, though, which sold it as exactly that. Attempting to cash in on a recent string of mainstream gay comedies with themes of crossdressing & drag, 1996’s Twelfth Night was marketed with the tagline, “Before Priscilla crossed the desert, Wong Foo met Julie Newmar, and the Birdcage was unlocked, there was … Twelfth Night.” I assume most adults expecting a boundary-pushing gay farce based on that marketing would’ve found this film tame by comparison, as the queer sexual tension of the text isn’t updated or sensationalized for the 90s in any flashy, daring way. If nothing else, it’s somewhat surprising that Tromeo & Juliet is the 1996 Shakespeare update that includes a lesbian makeout session, given which one would’ve been supported by its source text.
I have to imagine, then, that this version of Twelfth Night was a little more subtle & subversive in its queer appeal. If the adult audience marketed to in that tagline were already well fed by the mainstream echoes of New Queer Cinema and the bratty teens of the time were looking for Shakespeare plays set in the halls of their high school (preferably starring Julia Styles), it’s the younger, more sheltered crowd who would’ve benefited most from the queer themes of Shakespeare’s play. It’s not hard to imagine a heavily policed gay preteen who wasn’t allowed to rent a copy of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert sneaking Twelfth Night past their parents as a cultured, educational video store selection. 1996’s Twelfth Night seems ideally suited as a queer-awakening VHS rental for younger audiences who grew up watching titles like Ever After, The Secret Garden, and The Secret of Roan Inish in regular slumber party rotation or on solo lazy afternoons. Romeo+Juliet was the Shakespeare update with true Gay 90s™ flair; this one lets the confused-lust genderfuckery of the original play stand on its own without any post-MTV stylistic embellishments. It’s very warmly pleasant & endearing for that, and maybe even quietly transgressive depending on the parental censorship of your childhood household.
I won’t dare recount the plot of such a faithful adaptation of the original play here, at least not until this blog starts generating income as a SparkNotes subsidiary. All you need to know is that twins who make do as traveling entertainers are separated by shipwreck, presuming each other dead. Putting their twin-magic cabaret act to good use, the sister goes into hiding in male drag and quickly gets entangled in a queer love triangle with a man & woman who use her as a romantic surrogate, to the sexual confusion of everyone involved. Then, her near-identical twin brother shows up wearing the same dumb little wispy mustache, leading to a chaotic reset to normalcy at a heterosexual wedding, in classic farcical tradition. Before order is restored, though, there’s plenty of intense dwelling on the same-gender attraction stoked by the hiding-in-drag sitcom premise. Characters often breathe heavy as they lean in for a near-kiss – an exchange that reads gay whether it’s Viola-as-Cesario nearly kissing her male employer or Viola-as-Cesario nearly kissing her employer’s female crush. Other highlights include tender bathtub flirtation between bros and an opening-credits montage where Viola first gets into Cesario drag, with major emphasis put on her stuffing the crotch of her pants for accuracy. It’s not hard to imagine a young audience discovering things about themselves watching all of this gender play & queer desire onscreen, and it’s all presented under the guise of traditional, sophisticated theatre.
Presuming that you are no longer a sheltered 90s child depending on Blockbuster Video rentals to smuggle Gay Content into your family home, the best reason to watch the 1996 Twelfth Night at this point is the cast. Imogen Stubbs does a decent enough job in the central Cesario drag king role, in which (through Viola) she mostly equates being a man to being a Bugs Bunny level smartass. Ben Kingsley, Richard E. Grant, and Nigel Hawthorne are all formidable fools in the goofball periphery of the central conflict as well, along with what I can only presume are veterans of The Royal Shakespeare Company and of multi-episode arcs of Downton Abbey. The real draw in the cast, though, is a young Helena Bonham Carter, especially if you have any nostalgia for the era when her time machine got stuck in centuries past and she made a name for herself playing love interests in costume dramas (including an early starring role in director Trevor Nunn’s Lady Jane). While the film’s younger video store audiences experienced a queer awakening at home, HBC was experiencing a kind of goth awakening onscreen as Olivia, who’s introduced in mourning for her own deceased brother, which is what attracts Viola to her. She takes to black lace like no one before or since; it’s a marriage built to last longer than any among the story’s main players, so it’s romantic to think that it all started here.
How to Build a Truth Engine is a documentary about disinformation and how we can try to combat it. Bookended by footage of the terrorist insurrection on January 6th, 2021, the film features journalists, software engineers, anthropologists, neuroscientists, and other talking heads as they tackle the topic of information warfare. The bitter irony, as one of those interviewed says, is that we live in an era in which people have access to more information than ever before, but that same mechanism which has enabled that access has also provided such a fertile breeding ground for misinformation that people have been algorithmically partitioned off into different realities. As we move from expert to expert, an idea of consciousness is constructed for the uninitiated: that among the strengths of the human mind are its abilities to recognize patterns and then complete those patterns. They don’t get into the nitty gritty about it overmuch, but if you’ve ever taken an anthropological literature course, it’s familiar, and it isn’t overcomplicated to the point where the viewer is going to have a syllabus’s worth of Michelle Sugiyama articles to read or need to learn the word “pareidolia.”
The film rests on several pillars that all of us living in reality understand to be fundamentally true. Neurologically speaking, humans find patterns in everything, even when there isn’t one (in the same way that we see a cloud and superimpose “bunny” or “whale”), and it’s become clear that information warfare is the new frontier of mankind’s conflicts. Journalism is a dying industry despite the fact that we need the fifth estate now more than ever, and the root cause of this has been the dissolution of legacy and local newspapers as advertising revenue dried up (the connection between this and capitalism, however, is not made by this film). There was a time when there was a (mostly) functional journalistic body wherein the Woodwards and Bernsteins of the world were capable of bringing down men who abused their power – sometimes, anyway. Now that most people get their news from social media, there is no longer any official entity or body that can be held legally liable for spreading and disseminating information that is not only not fact-checked, but which is often patently false upon its face. People’s algorithmically driven social media feeds exist solely to drive engagement on the platform, not deliver factual or truthful content, and we are all living in a bit of a hellscape because of it.
The people to whom we are introduced as experts in their field have very impressive credentials. There’s Susan Benesch, the current faculty associate of Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. She’s also the founder of the Dangerous Speech Project, an initiative that attempts to balance concerns about inflammatory, inciting rhetoric and the necessity of protecting free speech through the tactic of “counterspeech,” a form of providing alternative narratives in an empathetic way as a means to counter hate speech and misinformation. Zahra M. Aghajan, a clinical neuroscience researcher, is interviewed several times. There’s also Vwani Roychowdhury, a professor who has been with UCLA’s electrical engineering department since 1996, and who is also Director of The Roychowdhury Group in Computational Science, which specializes in machine learning and application; along for the ride is Behnam Shahbazi, a student for whom Roychowdhury was the advisor for Shahbazi’s paper a”StoryMiner: An Automated and Scalable Framework for Story Analysis and Detection from Social Media.” There’s also Itzhak Fried, MD, PhD, a neurosurgeon and Professor In Residence and Director of the Epilepsy Surgery Program at UCLA Health, who has been recognized several times for his advancement of the science.
Rounding things out are a host of New York Times employees, some of whom operate across multiple departments but all of whom are involved with the “Visual Investigations” team, which they themselves describe as “combin[ing] traditional reporting with digital sleuthing and the forensic analysis of visual evidence to find truth, hold the powerful to account and deconstruct important news events.” There’s Malachy Browne, who’s the “enterprise director” of this team, who has won the Pulitzer twice, first in 2020 for exposing Russian culpability in Syrian hospital bombings, and again in 2023 for the team’s involvement in exposing which Russian unit was responsible for the murder of over two dozen civilians in Bucha, and the name of the commander of the unit. We’re walked through a lot of the reconstruction of this particular investigation, which establishes the credibility of the team, which also includes Haley Willis, who mostly covers human rights topics with the V.I., and Muyi Xiao, whose beat includes covering the news out of China. Her credentials are established through her coverage of COVID-19 as early as mid-January 2020, initially through reconstructing forensic digital data of communication between medical professionals but which was quickly silenced by the Chinese government.
Several years back, I made a new friend who told me that he never watched documentaries, citing that he had taken a specific rhetoric of film class that made him too savvy to all of the ways that documentaries are manipulative, so he simply couldn’t trust any of them any more. I thought about him a lot while watching this doc, one that I was genuinely excited to see. As someone who has lost family members down the rabbit hole of bizarre, impossible conspiracy theories in the past ten years as they have approached mainstream metastasis, I was hoping for something new, something fresh, perhaps some new idea about how to break through to the brainwashed masses. And I was still mostly appreciative of the film, even as it repeated tired old canards that all of us who have watched as logic and reason were beaten back into the darkness in the past decade already know. I was a little surprised by the sloppiness of the proofreading for the subtitles (my screening featured them for the entire run time, not simply when translation was needed). I raised an eyebrow at the idea that A.I. (in the form of StoryMiner, a potential contender for the “truth engine” of the title) could somehow be harnessed for good to help seek and map out online conspiracy theories so that counterspeech could be developed to fight back against misinformation (it’s telling that I saw this just two days after another SXSW event featuring a sizzle reel of A.I. salespitching was booed). And, in the wake of the way that the Overton Window on trans liberation has been moved further and further into right-wing conservatism because the NYT is a chickenshit rag that has started acting as a mouthpiece for the exact kind of vile rhetoric that this documentary is (correctly) identifying as evil, I was skeptical of how much this documentary was dick-riding the erstwhile newspaper of record.
All these things, in combination with very style-over-substance editing (the visuals in this documentary are, at my estimation, 85% semi-related drone footage with voice over), were matters of concern. I was still willing to go along with the presentation, all while wondering if there would be a mention of Palestine’s apartheid and the way that even people who consider themselves “liberal” have been silent about the issue for years and have revealed themselves as genocide apologists in the past six months; as the film went on, I thought “well, perhaps that’s a topic that’s outside of the scope of this particular documentary.” After all, it was difficult to tell when this was produced, or when the footage was shot. Muyi Xiao appears in some footage with braces, and some without (and, simply to clarify and not to belittle, when I saw “without” I mean “before”). When she is walking around Times Square, advertising can be seen for the final season of Insecure—which aired its finale the day after Christmas in 2021—but then again, I’m 98% percent positive that some of the drone footage included an advertisement of the 2011 film Real Steel (it could be an advertisement for something else entirely that simply has the same name and a similar typeface, but I couldn’t find evidence of anything like that while researching in prep for this review). And then. And then.
As I mentioned before, this film milks the NYT Visual Investigations team’s coverage of the Bucha massacre for all the credibility that they can, and there’s no argument that they did damn fine journalism there. Their coverage of a Syrian bombing is likewise impressive, including their demonstration of how satellite imagery is combined with cell phone footage to triangulate where the videos are taken and establish their veracity. Before we get to see a recap of the Bucha investigation, we hear a phone call, translated from Russian to English via on-screen subtitles, in which a soldier (presumably one of the paratroopers from 234th Air Assault Regiment) calls his mother. He asks her what the news at home is saying, what she is hearing from people around her, tells her that they keep being told of victory after victory, but that he and his companions have no idea how much of what they are told is true, if anything. Although we then go on to learn just how depraved the activities that this caller et al went on to perform in Bucha were, I can’t help but interpret that there’s an attempt at an invocation of empathy for him; you don’t play the audio of a confused, possibly scared soldier calling his mommy without an agenda. An hour or so later, after dozens of interviews and countless minutes of footage of jungles, oceans, and city skylines, another voicemail is played, one which is identified as being a call from a “Hamas terrorist” in October of 2023, and which is translated on-screen with a speech I won’t transcribe, but one which aligns with the narrative that Israel has attempted to put forth to justify their ongoing genocide of the people of Palestine. It’s horrific to hear, so brief that you wouldn’t even have to take a bathroom break to miss it, just have a thirty second coughing fit. It’s so out of place that it feels like it was inserted at the last minute, a quick little virtue signal to the bloodthirsty neoliberals who think (or pretend to think) that it’s antisemitic to criticize starving millions to death in their homes or cutting them to pieces with death from the sky.
I was shocked at this. I kept expecting that the film would loop back around on it, bring it up, maybe even use this as a demonstration piece to say, “Look how easy it is to use media to persuade; we told you that this audio recording was from Hamas and provided a translation that makes the blood boil, when in fact this is a recipe from a podcast.” In fact, it is one of the never-verified messages provided to the West by the Israeli military, and is treated not as a potential piece of propaganda to be analyzed, dissected, and verified. At best, in a text that is taking a moral stance on the literally society-sustaining importance of journalistic rigor, it feels like a half-baked and careless attempt at relevance that compromises the film’s integrity. A less charitable reading would be to say that this segment shatters any pretense that Engine could otherwise make that it maintains a clear set of ethics, and is therefore useless as a document of fact. The latter is my personal reading, and it renders what is otherwise a strong (if atypically slick) “documentary” which makes strong points about disinformation … as disinformation itself. I’m not going to pile on the contributors to the documentary for this; from what I can tell from additional research, Haley Willis spoke out against the firing of Emily Wilder from the Associated Press in 2021 when conservatives fought for her to be ousted because of her collegiate involvement with a pro-Palestinian justice organization. Further, although I was initially annoyed that there appears to be zero commentary about queer rights from Benesch’s Dangerous Speech Project (despite the overt hate speech that the community, especially trans people, have been subject to in recent years), they did issue a statement that they concurred with the ICJ’s denunciation of Israel’s genocidal rhetoric. As for searching for the names of the other participants in conjunction with this topic, most of the results keep leading back to the same Variety article, in which Siddhant Adlakha comes to the same conclusion that I do.
As I sat in the auditorium before my screening, I overheard an older group of people behind me talking about another documentary that they had seen during SXSW, which I assume was The Truth vs. Alex Jones. They were discussing how they hoped that the film would open some people’s eyes about the man, and about how broken the system is when the justice system can find a man guilty of defamation on a scale that boggles the mind and that same person can get right back to grinding, telling more lies and spreading more misinformation and warping more minds, with no real consequences. They hoped that they could get others to watch it and that it would open some minds about just how much damage Jones has done to democracy. I couldn’t help but think about that Vonnegut quote about how artistic resistance to governmental malfeasance and war is as effectual as a custard pie, and I never really lost the feeling that reminder brought on throughout the rest of Engine, even when I was attuned to it. The ability that this documentary had to change hearts and minds was infinitesimal to begin with, and its lack of conviction in its ethics eradicates that potential.
When I first read a blurb in the paper advertising a screening of Deborah Stratman’s Last Things, the description called to mind Enys Men: a “documentary exploring the geo-biosphere throughout evolution and extinction” featuring “stunning visuals ranging from the microscopic to unending landscapes” that “defies the boundaries of what a documentary can be.” There was the promise that the film blended science fiction with science fact but which continued to express itself as truth. In the end, it wasn’t like Enys Men at all. In fact, I’m not entirely sure what a good point of comparison would be, other than to say, with an awe and respect that this description wouldn’t normally imply, that it’s one of the most student film-y pictures I’ve ever seen. I loved it.
Insofar as Last Things has a narrative at all, it tells the story of the geology of our planet as an epic poem about the emergence of life in a form we wouldn’t recognize as life. Through the anthropomorphization of molecules and minerals, an origin myth emerges – one that’s not untrue in the way that a lot of origin myths are not untrue. For instance, did you ever consider that rocks could go extinct? I certainly hadn’t, but as it turns out, there was a time when iron floated freely in the planet’s oceans, suspended in it much like salt is at present. With the emergence of the first organisms that performed photosynthesis (cyanobacteria), oxygen became a component of the atmosphere for the first time, causing the iron in the ocean to oxidize and fall to the ocean floor, where they formed into banded rock of magnetite, silica, and other minerals. Formations like this one are extinct rocks, in the sense that they can never form again (at least not on this planet).
It’s fascinating stuff, but it’s also not for the easily bored. At only fifty minutes, it falls shy of the length we would normally classify as a feature film, but there will be moments when you wonder how that amount of time has not already elapsed. It’s comprised almost entirely of open-source footage: NASA’s conceptual animation lab footage of the planetary nebula cloud, electron microscope imagery of chloroplasts, images of ice forming in water blown up to the highest magnification. Whether its ambition exceeds its grasp is in the eye of the beholder, but I thoroughly enjoyed the way that a story emerges from the cutting and pasting of bits of philosophy, poetry, vintage science fiction, and more against the visuals of rocks, minerals, and protozoa. As we are told by a scientist talking about chondrites—meteors that fall to earth without interacting with another body outside of the asteroid belt, meaning that they have been unchanged since the moment the furnace of the sun spat them out, before our planet was formed—“All matter does have a history, but it doesn’t remember it.”
On the more fantastical end of the spectrum that Last Things slides up and down, our own bodies are stated to have a “genetic memory” connected to the rock, as the emergence of eukaryotic cells (and therefore life as we know it) required that the prokaryotic cells which banded together to symbiotically evolve into eukaryotic life required that taking in of minerals in order to form mitochondria. The film does this, ping-ponging back and forth between scientific fact and what we might call speculative geology, and it does it all with pulsing, hypnotic electronic music. It called to mind a movie that I saw at the New Orleans IMAX on a fifth grade field trip entitled The Hidden Dimension, which included a lot of microphotography, but to a much more psychedelic effect.
There came a moment in Last Things in which the camera lingers for a long time on a rock formation in a park. It made me think of the Kuleshov effect, the theory and effect that Lev Kuleshov was able to demonstrate through the editing together of disparate images intercut with the face of Russian silent film actor Ivan Mosjoukine. Although the image of Mosjoukine was unchanging, the audience interpreted different meanings from his (identical) facial expressions based upon what footage appeared in between. Between the music and the fantasy, it does almost start to feel as if the rock is experiencing something, even thought that clearly can’t be the case. Can it?
What’s the relationship between eukaryotic life, Petra, and glistening space concrete? Is there one? Director Stratman has stated that the film was born out of her existential panic about living through the planet’s sixth mass extinction event, and although I can’t speak for her, it seems to partially be about finding peace with the finity of human existence by viewing our transience, brevity, and diminutiveness by holding us up against mineral formations that meaningfully predate our solar system. If our concept of prehistory does not extend beyond the formation of the earth, it’s barely scratching the surface. And hey, the life that became us changed the planet; our ancestors caused rocks to go extinct, and those rocks became part of us, and although there’s no meaning in that, there is beauty, and we should appreciate it.
I’d recommend reading this interview with Stratman; it’s insightful, and it says more about Last Things than I can. And if you get the chance to see this one, don’t miss it.
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