Our current Movie of the Month, 1968’s The Swimmer, stars Burt Lancaster as an aging suburban playboy who, on a whim, decides to “swim home” by visiting a string of friends’ backyard pools across his wealthy East Coast neighborhood. It’s a boldly vapid premise that New Hollywood button-pusher Frank Perry (along with his then-wife Eleanor Perry, who wrote the majority of his early screenplays) somehow molded into a low-key mindmelter of 1960s moral rot through an eerie, matter-of-fact sense of surrealism. The Swimmer is more of a quirky character piece than it is concerned with the internal logic of its supernatural plot. Instead of only traveling by the “continuous” “river” of swimming pools he initially envisions over his morning cocktail, Lancaster spends much of the runtime galloping alongside horses, leisurely walking through forests, and crossing highway traffic barefoot. He does often emerge from one borrowed swimming pool to the next, though, and along the way we dig deeper into the ugliness of his himbo playboy lifestyle. He starts the film as a masterful charmer, seducing the world (or at least the world’s wives and mistresses) with an infectious swinging-60s bravado. By the time he swims his last pool, we recognize him as a miserable piece of shit who doesn’t deserve to kiss the feet of the infinite wonderful women of his past whom we meet along the way. The overall result is sinisterly ludicrous beefcake melodrama, presented in lurid Technicolor.
I can’t think of a better time to revisit The Swimmer than now. Not only was its general film-nerd awareness boosted during its brief run on the Criterion Channel earlier this year, but it’s also been so brutally, unrelentingly hot outside that all I want to do is look at, dive into, and drown in swimming pools. Every day that I have to take the bus or walk home from work in the Carribean hell heat of downtown New Orleans, I imagine how wonderful it would be if I could swim my way across the city in an endless line of swimming pools instead, just like in Perry’s film. Unfortunately, even Lancaster’s decrepit playboy protagonist couldn’t pull that off without cutting some corners on-foot, so his swimming-home dream remains unachievable. However, I have been able to swim my way across several other movies in the same milieu as The Swimmer: intense psychological dramas centered around summertime sex, booze and, of course, swimming pools. So, here are a few more titles in that subgenre to check out in addition to our Movie of the Month.
La Piscine (The Swimming Pool, 1969)
There’s no telling how the over-the-hill playboy Ned sees himself in The Swimmer, but it might look a little like 1960s Alain Delon. Delon was in his prime when he filmed his own poolside psych drama La Piscine, but his outer beauty does little to conceal the inner ugliness he shares with Lancaster in The Swimmer. The film opens with Delon lounging half-naked poolside, barely lifting his head to sip his cocktail, then initiating sex with his girlfriend the second she’s within butt-swatting reach. The couple are enjoying a horny, lazy vacation in South France before the reverie is interrupted the arrival of her ex-boyfriend and his teenage daughter, played by a young Jane Birkin. Tensions quickly rise as it’s immediately apparent that everyone in the makeshift foursome is attracted to exactly the wrong person, threatening to escalate the volatile group dynamic with physical violence if anyone acts on their obvious, mutual desire.
La Piscine is not especially exciting as a psychological crime thriller, but it still excels as deliriously overheated summertime hedonism. It feels like the entire cast is always seconds away from either a poolside orgy or an afternoon nap, and they’re all too miserable to enjoy either option. It’s a real shame for all involved that the tension is released through violence instead of orgasm. Before that act of violence (which takes place in the titular pool, of course), they lounge around a true summertime Eden, soaking up the oversaturated Eastman Color sunshine of a gorgeous, chic European locale. There have been plenty of erotic dramas & thrillers over the years that have taken direct influence from La Piscine, but the director I found myself thinking of most was Luca Guadagnino, who borrowed its summertime color palette for Call Me By Your Name and its plot for A Bigger Splash (another classic in Swimming Pool Cinema).
Swimming Pool (2003)
Luca Guadagnino is not the only European hedonist to have floated a soft remake of La Piscine. François Ozon’s 2003 erotic thriller Swimming Pool is so directly influenced by La Piscine that it barely bothered to change the title. Charlotte Rampling stars as an uptight pulp mystery writer in need of inspiration, vacationing at another Southern French villa with its own backyard swimming pool. Once there, she becomes obsessed with the sex life of a local twentysomething who has frequent, loud fuck sessions just one bedroom wall away. The two mismatched women quickly develop a catty, petty roommate rivalry that, again, escalates to a shocking act of violence involving the swimming pool just outside their bedroom windows. Swimming Pool works really well as a poolside erotic thriller (telegraphing some of the best aspects of Ozon’s Double Lover), but it works even better as a repressed-Brits-vs-the-liberated-French cultural differences comedy, as Rampling struggles to adjust to the local hedonism.
The differences between the two women’s personalities are plainly delineated by how they interact with the titular swimming pool. While the younger roomie is content to swim in the pool without any leaf-skimming or PH maintenance, Rampling coldly declares “I absolutely loathe swimming pools” as a way to imply only a filthy beast would swim in that Petri dish. It’s the difference between someone who truly lives and someone who only writes about people who live, a difference that Ozon sketches out with a sly smirk by the final reveal. He also has a lot of fun playing with the wavy mirror surface of the pool water, reflecting and abstracting Rampling’s obsessive gaze as she ogles the half-naked youth swimming & fucking just outside her own bedroom.
Deep End (1970)
If all of these suburban & provincial swim sites make the other swimming pool dramas on this list a little difficult to relate to as an urbanite in need of cooling off, dive into Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End instead. Set in downtown Swinging 60s London, Deep End follows the mouthbreather exploits of a horny teenager who falls for his older coworker in an urban bathhouse, to both of their perils. The story gradually establishes a hierarchy of low-level sex work from bathhouse-attendant tips to porno theater cruising sites to strip clubs and actual, true-blue brothels, but the bathhouse’s swimming pool is ultimately its main source of leisure and its main site of violence, as is customary to the genre. As the teen’s older, street-wiser coworker, Jane Asher might be the most inspired “Risk it all for her” casting in the history of the practice; she could easily make a chump out of anyone. Still, it’s incredibly bleak watching the ways the poorly socialized lout conspires to sexually corner her so that he can lose his virginity with his boyhood crush. It probably says something that when he does finally corner her in the deep end of the central pool, it’s been entirely drained of water. It’s eerily empty.
All four of these movies involve sex between adults and nearby youth. All involve heavy drinking and physical violence, usually poolside. No wonder this year’s January horror novelty Night Swim found so much to be scared of just beneath the surface of its backyard suburban swimming hole. Pools are not just an excuse to get half-naked & cool off in a semi-social setting. They’re also deadly, with just as much threat of drowning as threat of spontaneous sex & merriment.
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.
At the end of my review of Reign of the Supermen, I mentioned that, given DC’s tendency to milk every udder until it bleeds, it’s possible that the “DCAMU” may one day return following the yet-to-be-reviewed Justice League Dark: Apokalips War that serves as the mini-franchise’s finale. After all, who would have thought that, nearly thirteen years after the 2006 finale of Justice League Unlimited, there would be another installment in the DC Animated Universe that we all knew and loved (I have decided that I must align myself with the camp that does not count that other thing). In 2019, Warner Animation released Justice League vs. The Fatal Five, a continuation of sorts from JLU, and honestly? I love it.
We open in the 31st Century, where some members of the Legion of Superheroes attempt to hold off several villains as they attempt to steal a bubble-shaped time machine. A future, heroic version of Brainiac attempts to upload a virus to the time craft so that even if they fail to stop the bad guys, they won’t be able to get aboard and get up to their temporal shenanigans. The trio of villains gets past him just as the upload hits 99%, and they are able to get away, although not without a stowaway, Thomas “Star Boy” Kallor (Elyes Gabel), who travels on the outside of the time sphere and manages to get the upload complete, imprisoning the villains within as the sphere falls to earth in the 21st Century, as does Star Boy. While Superman (George Newbern) and Wonder Woman (Susan Eisenberg) save civilians from the falling ship, Star Boy lands and realizes that his supply of medication, which he needs to take periodically to stabilize his thoughts and clear his mind, has been destroyed. He goes in search of a replacement at a nearby pharmacy only to realize too late that there is no equivalent in this time period; in the process of attempting to get help, he disrobes because he thinks that the pharmacist is frightened by his costume. As one would expect when a naked man appears in a pharmacy in the middle of the night demanding a medication that does not exist and talking about being from a different time, the authorities become involved, and Batman (Kevin Conroy) ultimately appears on the scene, too, taking the temporally displaced babbler to Arkham, while the locked sphere is taken to Justice League headquarters for analysis.
After a ten month time jump, we meet our new additions to the League since we last saw them, lo these many years ago. At JL HQ, Mr. Terrific (Kevin Michael Richardson), a supergenius gadgeteer hero is working to unlock the mysterious sphere. In the field, Batman is training/testing Miss Martian (Daniela Bobadilla), niece of team member Martian Manhunter, to see if she’s ready to join the team. Finally and most interestingly, we meet Jessica Cruz (Diane Guerrero), a woman who, while hiking with some friends in the Pacific Northwest, stumbled upon a mafia burial; her friends were executed in front of her and she managed to escape, but now suffers from extreme agoraphobia. She also happens to be Earth’s most recent recruit into the Green Lantern Corps, and it’s her that the villains from the future are after. You see, the titular Fatal Five were defeated in their own time, ten centuries hence, and the heroes of the future could think of no way to properly incarcerate their most powerful member except to send her into the past, when the Green Lantern Corps still existed, so that they could lock her up there. When Terrific and Superman finally crack the enigma of the time sphere, the three freed villains can now seek out Jessica to use her as the key to free their incarcerated companions and become the Fatal Five once more.
Within the first five minutes of the movie, as I mentioned above, we get to see the power trio of the Justice League again, and I have to tell you, I was not expecting to have the emotional reaction to this that I did. I imprinted on the nineties animated Batman at a very young age (I have very distinct memories of running down our very long driveway from the bus after kindergarten to watch it on Baton Rouge’s FOX affiliate, WGMB, and can even remember specific images and episodes), and I grew up with that franchise and its associated media like Justice League and Justice League Unlimited. I was nineteen when JLU ended, so this version of these characters were very formative for me. When Superman saves a child from being obliterated by the falling time ship and commends the kid for his courage but tells him that it’s okay to run sometimes, and then Wonder Woman appears next to him, and they play that electric guitar riff (you know, the one from like fifteen seconds into the JLU opening theme), I actually got a little verklempt.
I also really like that the group we know and love is still together, and still gaining new members, and that this expanded runtime allows the story to center in on Jessica, to deal straightforwardly with her PTSD and her agoraphobia, and to allow her to bond with this timelost hero of the future over their dual psychological issues. Although it would have been nice to see Flash, Manhunter, or some of the other characters that we haven’t seen in a long time, the absence of John Stewart, the Green Lantern from the TV show (an absence that is explained by the fact that Lanterns are dealing with a major issue in deep space, which also handily explains why the prison break on their headquarters world meets such little resistance) means that we get to spend a lot of time with Jessica, and I really liked her. She’s ultimately this film’s main character, as she is the one who undergoes dynamic change and growth over the course of the narrative, up to and including facing her fears in her darkest hour and ultimately forging herself into something stronger as a result. To a lesser extent, we get to spend some time with Miss Martian, a character who was still largely unknown at the time that JLU went off the air (she would become more prominent after the character was one of the main cast in Young Justice), and it’s fun to see her in this animation style; she’s very cute, and I like her characterization in this narrative.
On an extratextual note, this one is also special because it’s the last time that the late Kevin Conroy voiced his iconic role. After JLU’s conclusion, he voiced the character in several of these animated releases: Gotham Knight, Public Enemies, Apocalypse, Doom, Flashpoint Paradox, Assault on Arkham, and The Killing Joke, but this was the first time that he was reprising this Batman, with this design, the one that I grew up with and the one that I love most. Conroy passed away in 2022 after a private battle with cancer, and although archive audio (I assume) was used in one of these animated films that was released just this year, this 2019 release is the last time that he really got to play this part. It’s made all the more touching that there is a sequence in which Batman, Jessica, and Miss Martian enter Star Boy’s mind and see the future there, which includes a museum dedicated to the founders of the Justice League (and in which Jessica sees a statue of herself, which helps her to understand her place in all of this and gives her the confidence that she needs to keep picking herself up again). Here, Batman gazes upon a memorial to himself, some hundred decades into the future, and although there’s no change in his attitude, it’s a loving (if coincidental) tribute to Conroy as well, who will forever be my Batman. May he rest in peace.
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.
Following on the heels of The Death of Superman, this film picks up six months later. Despite the appearance of four heirs apparent to the mantle of the Man of Steel, crime in Metropolis is on the rise. Who are these mystery men? There’s the youthful “Metropolis Kid” (who insists he is the new Superman but is nicknamed “Superboy”), a teen with Superman’s powers; there’s the more “energy projection” less “physical punching” Last Son of Krypton (who is later dubbed “The Eradicator” because of his catchphrase that “[X] must be eradicated”), who practices a less nuanced view of morality and justice than the Superman we knew and loved; there’s a new Man of Steel as embodied by super-scientist John Henry Irons in a mech suit (you know him as “Steel”); and finally, claiming to be the real Superman reanimated and undergoing ongoing repair by Kryptonian technology, there’s a half-mechanical Man of Tomorrow, a “Cyborg Superman,” if you will. In the midst of all of this, Lois and the Kents are forced to veil their grief, as “Clark” is simply “missing,” while they alone know that Superman and Clark were buried in the same coffin, although that resting place has been disturbed and the body of the late Kryptonian is missing . . .
I was surprised how much I ended up enjoying this one. The last film was little more than set-up for this one, and to be honest, there was more foreshadowing in that one that paid off here than even I realized. For instance, I did mention that there was a tour that Lois took of the lab where Kal-El’s ship was being stored and that there were holograms that were part of that ship’s records, but I didn’t imagine at the time that this was laying the groundwork for one of the false heirs, Eradicator, to actually be a hologram from the ship, one that we got to see in the first film. It had also been a while since we saw Kal-El and Diana dating, so the reminder in Death that they had a past not only contributed to the reality of their close friendship in that film, but also laid groundwork for some really nice interaction between Diana and Lois. That’s a level of detail I didn’t expect to see, and was pleasantly surprised by. These movies usually run half the length of their MCU “counterparts,” so there’s a lot less of the casual hanging out that characterizes those films and which were such an important component in that series becoming as popular as it did at its height. They run leaner and sparser, but the decision to split this overarching story into two films serves both but does this one a lot of good (that this one is 87 minutes, one of the longer of these animated features, also helps). There’s room to breathe, and there came a moment in the film where I thought to myself “Wow, a lot sure has happened in this one,” which is not something that often crosses my mind during these screenings.
There are a lot of touches here that I really like. Superboy is initially pretty obnoxious, but the revelation that he picks up his cringeworthy slang from nineties sitcoms makes it a little more tolerable, and there’s an unusually subtle animation choice that works as a nice piece of foreshadowing; the supposed clone of Superman does not share the hero’s blue eyes, and his eyes are instead grey, like Luthor’s, which makes sense when we later learn that Lex’s DNA was added to the mix. That’s an uncommon level of attention to detail for these movies, and it did not go unnoticed in this household. The misdirect regarding the Fortress of Solitude caretaker robots referring to “Kal-El” absorbing energy while the camera pans past Eradicator is a nice one too; although we in the audience know that he’s not the real Superman, it still creates an air of mystery as to why his robots would think that Eradicator was, until it’s revealed that this was the audience’s confusion, not theirs. The scenes between Lois and Irons are also a lot of fun as she, a woman infamous for not seeing through the thinnest of disguises, says that his civilian cover isn’t very good. As the most straightforwardly heroic of the potential new Supermen, he feels like a good addition to this universe, alongside Superboy, who is a lot more fun once the narrative stops making him such a horndog.
Within the narrative, there’s a really nice escalation of stakes when a visit from the president (who bears a marked resemblance to Hillary Clinton, which, um) to the site of the launch of the Justice League’s new Watchtower satellite. The Cyborg Superman, who has just spent some time trying to convince Lois that he’s the real Supes—just with really extensive prosthetics and some memory loss—mostly stands by when a boom tube portal opens and several of Darkseid’s minions, called “parademons,” exit and start to attack the site. Although the combined forces of the League and the Supermen are enough to fight off the parademons, the portal through which they arrived “falls” to the earth and appears to kill the League, leaving only a crater. From there, it’s revealed that the Cyborg Superman is none other than Hank Henshaw, the presumed dead astronaut from part one, who was “rescued” by Darkseid so that he could be an emissary. He begins to hand out devices that give normal people superpowers, although this is a feint intended to use the newly empowered individuals to help bring Darkseid’s forces to earth. And, of course, the real Superman, who has been slowly recovering inside of his pod, emerges just in time to resume the fight, although he’s initially too weak to do much fighting, until the Watchtower is launched and the sun rises, and … well, the rest is history.
Everyone gets a moment to shine here, which is nice. I was surprised by how emotionally invested I had become by the time of this film’s climax, and the moment when Steel and Superboy team up to distract the assimilated Darkseid army was surprisingly potent; I didn’t pump my fist in the air, but I did get a big smile on my face, despite the fact that the fight scenes in these movies are rarely that exciting to me. Lois gets to have her face-off with the man who claimed to be her dead lover, and even Lex gets a rare moment of heroism when he manages to activate a portal that allows the Justice League to return from the purgatory dimension they were stuck in and act as the cavalry in the final battle. The fight scenes themselves are some of the best that these movies have had to offer, too, with more fluid and dynamic motion than these films have mustered, giving a slightly anime-esque feel that I appreciated. I was ultimately pretty taken aback at just how well this one worked, both as a film unto itself and as a part of this subfranchise, and it really stands out. If I had to make a complaint, it’s that there’s an extratextual piece of information that makes this feel somewhat abortive. There are only three of these “DCAMU” films left, one of which is a Batman feature (of course), one of which is a Wonder Woman movie (the first since 2009’s Wonder Woman, ten years and thirty-three films prior), and a Justice League Dark sequel to serve as the finale. It doesn’t really feel like there’s going to be another chance to check in on Superboy and Steel, which is a bit of a bummer, as they really helped with the feeling that this franchise still had a lot of room to grow and expand, and they were fun characters with the potential for some really fascinating storytelling. Of course, if there’s anything about DC that’s proven to be true over the years, it’s that they will squeeze every last drop out of their IP and then grind the dust to make break if they can, so it’s possible that these last three won’t be the last three, but I won’t be holding my breath. This is a high note for one of the last few installments, and I’d give it a chance, especially if you can combine it as a double feature with its predecessor.
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and we discuss it afterwards. This month Brandon made Britnee & Boomer watch The Swimmer (1968).
Brandon: I first discovered the surreal 60s melodrama The Swimmer when we covered director Frank Perry’s late-career mainstream comedy Hello Again for a previous Movie of the Month. I watched a few great films from Perry that month, but the dream-state machismo of this one in particular has constantly been on my mind in the few years since. Even so, I can’t think of a better time to revisit The Swimmer than now. Not only was its film-nerd awareness boosted during its brief run on the Criterion Channel earlier this year, but it’s also been so brutally, unrelentingly hot outside that all I want to do is look at, dive into, and drown in swimming pools. Every day that I have to take the bus or walk home from work in the Caribbean hell heat of downtown New Orleans, I like to imagine how wonderful it would be if I could swim my way across the city in an endless line of swimming pools instead, just like in Perry’s film. It really put a different spin on those awful “Proud to swim home” bumper stickers that littered the city in the years after Hurricane Katrina.
On a less whimsical note, The Swimmer has also taken on some additional relevance for me this US presidential election season. There’s something about watching a delusional egotist refuse to face the reality of his age and his social responsibilities until he crashes into it like a brick wall that just “hits different” this year. A past-his-prime Burt Lancaster stars as that titular egotist: a functional alcoholic who relies a little too heavily on his outdated social status as the neighborhood partyboy for a family man of his middle age. He spends the entire movie downing cocktails poolside in his signature Speedo, shamelessly flirting with every woman who’s in butt-slapping distance no matter age or marital status. You can’t say he’s a man without ambition, though. On a whim, the suburban hedonist declares that he is going to “swim home” by visiting a string of friends’ backyard pools across his wealthy upstate Connecticut neighborhood. On the journey, we witness the exact moment his carefree hunk status sours among the local socialites, so that he has no friends or family left at the end of his selfish, Quixotic quest for permanent leisure.
The “swimming home” plot of The Swimmer sounds like an absurdly vapid premise for a movie, but Frank Perry (along with then-wife Eleanor Perry, who wrote most of his early screenplays) somehow molds it into a low-key mind-melter of 1960s moral rot. He mostly pulls that off by digging into the aquatic anti-hero’s psyche, charting the progress of the story more through character revelations than through the practical details of the borderline supernatural plot. Instead of only traveling by the “continuous” “river” of swimming pools he initially envisions over his morning cocktail, Lancaster spends a lot of runtime galloping alongside horses, casually strolling through forests, and crossing highway traffic barefoot. He does often emerge from one borrowed swimming pool to the next, though, and along the way we sink deeper into the ugliness of his himbo playboy lifestyle. He starts the film as a masterful charmer, seducing the world (or at least the world’s wives and mistresses) with an infectious swinging-60s bravado. By the time he swims his last pool, we recognize him as a miserable piece of shit who doesn’t deserve to kiss the feet of the infinite wonderful women from his past who we meet along the way. The overall result is sinisterly ludicrous beefcake melodrama, presented in lurid Technicolor.
I do think it’s strange that a movie with such a high-concept premise is so willing to brush aside its own internal logic. Perry could have easily edited the story together so that the pools all appeared connected, without worrying about real-world practicality. What did y’all make of the parts of The Swimmer where Lancaster travels by land instead of by water? Did they feel like a shortcut cheat on his “swimming home” project or were they just as strangely compelling as his dips in the pool?
Britnee: Ned is bonkers, and I absolutely loved watching him unravel among the country club elite. Particularly the hot dog cart scene where Ned fights with the homeowner of the party he crashes about ownership of a hot dog cart. This is Americana!
When thinking about Ned’s swimming pool challenge, having him truly not swim all the way home made watching his misery all the more delightful. He failed his own project where he made the rules; this guy sucks so much. I also really enjoyed all of the wild non-swimming barefoot activities, such as jumping horse hurdles and walking on the road while barefoot. I wasn’t expecting a gore element in this movie, but good God, those feet were torn up.
Boomer: Oh boy, but I did love this one. I have my own affection for the idea of swimming home. For years, my best friend has teased me whenever I look at a body of water and think “I wonder if I could swim in that,” and living where I live now, there are so many beautiful bodies of water that are tempting, especially when the pool in my building often gets too hot in the summer to be refreshing (last year, my neighbor temped it at 92 degrees one August day). Last year, we defused the summer heat by going to a local outdoor watering hole called Jessica Hollis Park, which was wonderful. We would load up the car, head out as a quartet, and spend five to six hours out there in the crisp, cool water from the Colorado River; one friend got a snorkel set for me and I would often spend a couple of those hours just snorkeling and swimming. On one of the last days of summer, while I looked back wistfully as our car climbed the hill, I said that sometimes I wished that I could just live down there, and my best friend said that, while the rest of the party watched me snorkeling, they had joked that “every summer, he gets closer and closer to becoming amphibious.” I never get tired of it. Luckily, unlike Ned, I never have to experience a series of increasingly hostile neighbors and former friends each time that I surface.
What I liked most about this was the tinge of surreal horror that goes on throughout. When we first meet Ned, he emerges from the woods, clad only in his bathing suit, and greets two neighbors who welcome him warmly and affectionately. Even they, however, are surprised by some of the things that he says, particularly when he mentions that he has a desire for his two daughters to have their weddings in the Merrill house one day; this takes them aback and is our first and earliest indication that Ned is, in some way, living in a state of delusion. For the rest of the film, no matter how much time passes, he is insistent on a few precepts, from which he cannot deviate: that he must “swim home” via the pool route, that his daughters are at that very moment playing tennis, and that his wife Lucinda is waiting for him. The first few people whom he encounters take this in stride with little exception, but as he approaches his destination, those he meets are less inclined to partake in the maintenance of his illusions, although they are never able to dissuade him or bring him back to reality. Of particular note is one man who seems to be Ned’s true friend, who tells him about a job that Ned might be right for that could help him get back on his feet, which Ned shrugs off as unnecessary, causing the man to be somewhat offended that Ned thinks he has to maintain his pride and insist that he needs no such thing; to watch him shout “There’s no need to pretend with me,” while Ned runs off with a girl less than half his age, rejecting what may well be his last chance at salvation, is heartbreaking.
I also really loved the way that we get a slow trickle of information about what a fraud and a failure Ned is that slowly turns into a torrent, before ending in a rainstorm so vast that it threatens to consume him. Although this information never shakes his faith in his destination, it does begin to deteriorate his image of himself, so that the sexy, still fit older man who, in the film’s opening scenes, is the envy of his fellow middle aged men and declares that he still feels as athletic and powerful as he did before he took his first drink or had his first smoke (he can even keep pace with a horse!), eventually becomes a limping, tired, cold man whose feet are (as Britnee noted) in bad shape. First, there is the couple that is happy to greet him, then the mother of a man he says was a friend of his, but whom she states he never came to see in the hospital; Ned doesn’t even know that the man, Eric Hammar, seems to have died from his injuries. He happens upon his daughters’ former babysitter, now twenty, and whisks her away, indicating that he’s moving into a place where only the sweetly naive have faith in him, and even the girl’s younger brother seems to find the whole idea of “swimming home” odd and perhaps even sinister. Here, we learn more about just how delusional he is, as he asks the girl, Julie, to come up to the house and babysit, but she knows that his daughters are too old to need that kind of minding. From here, we head to the party where Ned is presented with his last chance to get off of his self-destructive path, as he comes upon the only woman in the film who would be responsive to his advances and the aforementioned friend who tells him about a potential job, but he rejects them both in favor of running off with a woman thirty-five years younger than he is in order to lovebomb her following her confession of a childhood crush on him. He scares her off eventually, and the narrative takes a real turn here, as things become more sinister and we get to see Ned in his worst moment in the film.
There is a moment where Ned comes upon the home of a wealthy nudist couple, just as their chauffeur arrives at the gate. Ned calls out to him using the wrong name, which in part reiterates for us that Ned’s regression into fantasy is also a regression into his past, as if he has a kind of euphoria-induced amnesia of the last few years when everything went wrong. It’s textual that he “forgets” how old his daughters are and that his wife has left him, as well as “not remembering” that one of his “friends” had died, so it’s natural that he might also “not remember” that one of his neighbors had changed employees. Subtextually, however, I think that this is also meant to highlight that Ned is, well, kind of a racist—mistaking one Black employee for another, as he asks the new driver if he ever met his predecessor, and then talks up said predecessor for all of his fine qualities. The new driver (he’s credited as “Halloran’s Chauffeur;” my apologies for not being able to give a name) then asks if the old driver had “natural rhythm,” to which Ned too-quickly replies, which earns him a bit of a side eye and a harrumph. Ned couldn’t tell these two men apart and then tried to ingratiate himself through stereotypes, and although his mental state degrades further, this is the first time that we see him commit a real moral wrong (trespassing and grabassing notwithstanding).
Things just get worse from here, where he ends up at a party where the hostess calls him a gate crasher and insults him, implying a past when Ned was her social better and the Merrills snubbed her and her husband, but that the latter couple is now the one with more social cache and status. After embarrassing himself by throwing a fit over the hot dog wagon that Britnee mentioned, he ends up in the middle of the film’s show-stopping performance from Janice Rule, who reveals herself to be an actress and Ned’s former lover before he ditched her. This is where we learn the most about Ned, and it’s delivered terrifically: he was always a charmer, they had their affair, during which time he only ever took her out where they could blend in and be invisible, before dumping her in a very crowded and hoity-toity place via a bunch of tired old saws about “the duties of a father and a husband,” hoping that she wouldn’t make a scene (she did). It’s great stuff, and reveals to both us and—seemingly—Ned himself that he’s a real cad. Then, emerging from the largest pool yet (after having to degrade himself by begging for fifty cents as well as show an attendant that he had washed between his toes), he’s further humiliated by a grocer and a barshop owner. The barman initially shows sympathy and compassion for Ned while his wife and the grocer taunt him for his wife’s expensive and pretentious tastes, his lack of discipline with his children that has led them to running wild (there’s even a reference to their “wild driving” and an accident that was kept out of the papers, which I interpreted to possibly mean that one of his own children had been responsible for the collision that ultimately killed Eric Hammar), and his unpaid tabs at both establishments. The barman’s wife even degrades the memory of his daughters, saying that the two girls would come in and mock him constantly. First a trickle of information about Ned, then a river, and all of it very bleak and haunting.
One of the things that tickled me most about Ned was his constant referent to “tomorrow.” Every time someone talks about getting together: “Let’s grab lunch tomorrow,” “bring your money because we’re playing golf tomorrow,” “you’ll have to come out and babysit the girls tomorrow,” “come over tomorrow and play tennis with my daughters.” It tells us something interesting about his character, which is that Ned is a man who over-commits, just as he has to the physically demanding “swimming home” idea, just as he wanted to become Julie’s overly devoted lover/mentor/protector (ew) after spending a couple of hours together, just as he has bought too much into the idea that he can make something real if he believes it hard enough. It reminded me of the Popeye character Wimpy, and his classic quote (I guess?) “I’d gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today,” which only got funnier and sadder as he extorted a cup of lemonade from a child by buying it on credit, then later found himself groveling for the entry fee to a public pool. Ned’s problems are always tomorrow’s problems; today, he has to swim home.
Lagniappe
Britnee: I’ve heard wonderful things about The Swimmer for years, but I never had the appetite to watch it. Something about watching Burt Lancaster swim in suburbia for over an hour just didn’t put me in the movie watching mood. Back in my college years, I had to watch Lancaster’s Go Tell the Spartans movie for a history course, and ever since then, I can only see Lancaster as a very tired and very tan macho man in his late 60s/70s film era. In The Swimmer, he is indeed a very tired and very tan macho man, but with a much better flavor (and much worse hair).
Boomer: I would be remiss in my duties if I were not to note that Diana Muldaur appeared in both the original Star Trek series and Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the latter, she spent an entire season as the ship’s doctor while Gates McFadden took some time away from the show (coming back almost immediately after the firing of a producer whose had sexually harassed her). In the former, she played two separate guest characters. I looked them up again to be sure, but this film actually came out during the summer between her two appearances, as she appeared in “Return to Tomorrow” in February 1968, The Swimmer released in May of 1968, and her second ST episode “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” aired in October of 1968. Big year for Muldaur-heads! (It also feels remiss not to note that Joan Rivers is in this movie, as a woman who tells Ned that she doesn’t get the appeal of pools, as they’re “murder on [her] hair.”)
I borrowed the Blu-ray for this one from my local library, and it’s a fun disc. The FBI warning and the “opinions expressed” disclaimer both have this goofy cartoon “water” overlay to make it look like you’re viewing it underwater, which was a novelty that I was surprisingly charmed by. The main menu also has a slickly edited montage of out-of-context scenes and beachy music that set up the feeling that you’re in for a groovy, sexy romp, which this movie definitely isn’t. I can only imagine the reaction of someone who wasn’t already vaguely familiar with the film’s concept picking this off of the shelf or out of a streaming line-up because of the hunky Lancaster on the cover and thinking that’s what they were about to watch, which is also very funny to me. Of course, they probably didn’t want to use the original poster despite the tagline “When you talk about ‘The Swimmer’ will you talk about yourself?” which is an all-timer—legendary—piece of film marketing.
Brandon: Time moves quick, whether or not you move along with it, as our overaged playboy protagonist discovers here. When I revisited The Swimmer for this conversation, Joe Biden was still stubbornly running for President in spite of loud, constant uproar urging him to step aside for someone younger & sharper to lead the Democratic Party. Trained to expect that nothing good ever happens, I assumed he was going to hold onto his delusions of youth & vigor all the way until an easily lost election. A lot has changed since then, but not so much that the film’s themes of a geriatric egotist refusing to cede power despite their obvious mental & moral slippage no longer has resonance in American electoral politics. Hell, as of this posting, there’s still one running for the office of US President.
Next month: Boomer presents Inherit the Wind (1960)
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.
When I first heard that DC animated had released a film titled The Death of Superman, I wasn’t that surprised. I had, at the time, only recently attempted to watch Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay and had, as I noted in the review of that film, found the opening to be rather tasteless. As a result, when hearing that a new adaptation of Superman’s death was about to be released, I thought, “Didn’t they already do that?” and then thought, “Oh, I guess they’re really just out of ideas.” Now that I’ve watched all of these (so far) in order, I have to say that it was more that this was where an adaptation of that story best slotted into this sub-franchise of the DCAMU, the eleventh of these films overall. It’s a little thin, all things considered, but that’s really because it’s more about setting up the next film than it is about the actual narrative that this adaptation covers. A little comic history: back in the nineties, DC was getting ready to marry Lois and Clark/Superman. However, at the time, the ABC series Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, was currently airing, and they wanted to marry the two characters to one another, but not for at least another season. So, ABC called in a favor and DC came up with a plan to delay the comic marriage of Clark and Lois until it was time for it to happen in the show as well, for synergy. As a result, they came up with the idea to “kill” Superman temporarily and then have a yearlong series of stories in which various characters attempt to fill the void that his death created, before the real deal triumphantly returns to reassume his place. That one little decision on behalf of a mostly forgotten Superman-adjacent primetime TV show is why we’re here today.
Despite their previous appearances together showing them enjoying one another’s company on a few dates, Superman (Jerry O’Connell) and Wonder Woman (Rosario Dawson) are now merely good friends and colleagues, and Superman has taken up dating his beloved Lois Lane (Rebecca Romijn) in his civilian identity as Clark Kent, although he has not yet come out to her as being Superman. Wonder Woman encourages him to do so, and his need to make a decision sooner than later is exacerbated when a meeting of the Justice League reveals that The Flash (Christopher Gorham) is getting married soon, and when Kal-El asks Barry if Iris “knows,” Barry tells him that he revealed his identity to her “ages ago.” Shortly after Superman gives Lois a tour of S.T.A.R. Labs, which houses the spacepod that brought him to earth and which contains holographic records that include an image of his parents, his other family, the Kents, arrive in town and want to meet Lois. Over the course of their dinner, Lois comes to realize that she actually knows almost nothing about her beau, for the first time recognizing how guarded he is around her and wondering what the cause is. She leaves him for the night, and he has a heart to heart with his mother wherein she admits that, at her age, it doesn’t seem like keeping secrets is really all that important anymore.
On the less domestic, more superheroic side of things, we learn that Lex Luthor (Rainn Wilson) has found a way to circumvent his house arrest and is still up to nefarious doings, including attempting to create a clone version of Superman which he can control as well as merging earth and Apokoliptian technology to sell to criminals. Seemingly coincidentally, a “boom tube” wormhole opens not far from the earth, spitting out a misshapen asteroid that starts to fall toward the planet, crashing into the ocean. Several of Aquaman (Matt Lanter)’s guards converge on the undersea crash site at the same time as a Lexcorp submersible. All are slain by a monster that emerges from the wreckage, who then makes his way to land and toward Metropolis, killing every living thing in his path. In the meantime, Clark reveals his secret to Lois, only to be called away to deal with the monster after it takes out the entire rest of the Justice League, although Wonder Woman goes down last and hardest. Clark leaves a note for Lois with his last secret (“I love you”) and then heads out to defeat the monster, while also having to deal with interference from Luthor, who gets involved both because of his ego and because he believes that the monster’s genetics will help him to stabilize the unstable makeup of all the deformed clones he’s hiding in the basement of Lexcorp.
While 2007’s Superman: Doomsday served to condense both the “Death of Superman” and the “Reign of the Supermen” comic arcs into a single movie, this one covers only the former and gives that original narrative some breathing room. I’m torn about the ongoing expansion of the Justice League as it seems to continue to happen largely offscreen and/or in the background. Justice League: Dark showed Hawkman and Martian Manhunter hanging around the League’s headquarters in non-speaking roles, and while Manhunter gets a line this film (voiced by Nyambi Nyambi), it’s strange that we don’t get a sense of camaraderie between the characters in the way that the earliest of these movies did. The relationship between Clark and Diana is strong, but the fact that Superman didn’t even know that the Flash was getting married makes it seem like, although this team is growing in number between movies when we’re not getting to see it, they’re not growing in friendship, and that’s the only reason that anyone would have to remain emotionally invested in this series as it advances. At least this one, since Batman is really and truly powerless against an unstoppable killing machine with no weak points, he gets out of the way and lets Superman take center stage here, although Wonder Woman is no slouch either. That inclusion of the whole League, however, allows for a consistent heightening of the stakes that appropriately ratchets the tension, even if we already know Superman is headed for his death because, you know, the title is at the beginning.
Of course, there are the seeds of the Supermen to come in this one. We see a young super clone being grown in a vat like a Venture brother; we meet Dr. John Henry Irons, who will eventually become Steel; we even get to see a hopeful astronaut named Hank Henshaw remain optimistic that Superman will save his crew even as their ship is pelted by debris from the asteroid’s incursion, killing his wife and their other companions, and even if you don’t know where that’s going, it’s successful as foreshadowing. Those are fun little seeds being planted. As for other things I really like, having O’Connell’s real life spouse voice Lois is a cute little treat, and their great natural chemistry comes through in the performance. Romijn is an underappreciated star, in my opinion, but she’s not given the same potency of material here that Anne Heche had on her plate in Doomsday. The best parts of that movie come after the fight with Doomsday that take up only Act I of that film (and which serves as the final climax of this one), wherein Lois grieves in secret because while the whole world mourns Superman she’s mourning Clark, struggles with her conflicting feelings about seeking comfort with the Kents, who are (as in this one) strangers to her, is initially delighted that Superman seems to have been resurrected only to be devastated by his reserved treatment of her. Romijn’s Lois isn’t given as much to do; the story focuses more on Clark’s internal struggle with whether to tell her his secret than it does on her learning the truth and puzzling out all the implications. When she thinks Clark is going to break up with her, she tells him that she’s absolutely not going to stop coming into the office, as if this eighties-ass Kate & Allie punchline is supposed to be empowering, when instead it besmirches the entire script. Hepburn and Tracy it ain’t. This one is fine. It’s not predictable that some fringe film critic is going to sit down and watch all of these movies week after week; it’s logical to assume that the decade plus between the release of Doomsday and this movie would mean that you probably forgot most of the story beats for this even before they changed up other plot elements, or that Doomsday came out when you were too young to notice these things and now you’re a sophomore or a junior and thus the primary audience for this. (We should never really be under any illusion about that, and recognize that these movies rise above mediocrity at any point is kind of a miracle, to be honest.) This one is above the average for this overall franchise, but it’s missing something special that would push it into a more memorable state. It’s a necessary step in this film series, and thus can’t really be skipped, but it’s one that there’s no real reason to recommend other than for that reason, so take from that what you will.
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 few years back, [Erstwhile Roommate of Boomer] and I were browsing through the then-current version of the HBO app and stumbled upon the then-latest DC animated movie. We managed to barely get through the opening, which we found kind of distasteful and crass. That movie was Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay, and I wasn’t really looking forward to this one on this watch-through, since my previous experience was negative. Upon watching the film in its entirety, however, I can report it’s actually pretty fun. Whereas the humor in Batman and Harley Quinn mostly missed the mark, this one manages to weave together an interesting narrative that plays to the strengths of the characters chosen for this outing, while also tapping into an irreverence that previous darker attempts at comedy failed to achieve.
After a cold open in which an ill-conceived attempt by a couple of hotheads to get out of Suicide Squad duty leaves everyone but Deadshot (Christian Slater) dead, Amanda Waller (a perfectly cast Vanessa Williams) sends him into the field alongside the moralistic martial artist Bronze Tiger (Billy Brown), gimmicky sharpshooter Captain Boomerang, literal and figurative ice queen Killer Frost (Kristin Bauer van Straten), cybernetically enhanced Copperhead, and, of course, Harley Quinn (Tara Strong). Their mission: to retrieve a magical object, a literal “Get Out of Hell Free” card, which Waller secretly seeks for herself as she has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and now that the truth is out that hell is quite real, she knows she’s got a better shot at cheating her way out of it than seeking redemption. Two other parties are after the object, however, as immortal (but as he points out, not invulnerable) mutant caveman Vandal Savage is after is in pursuit of the card, as is the Reverse Flash. This film ties itself back to Flashpoint Paradox by having C. Thomas Howell reprise this role, and his whole deal is that when he was shot in the head at the end of that film, he “froze” himself in the moments before death with his superspeed, but each time he uses it, he gets that much closer to dying from the wound. (You just kind of have to go with it.)
The end of this one is a bit of a foregone conclusion. You don’t really introduce a member of this team whose imprisonment is the result of revenge killing the men who murdered his family, and who remains tortured by the loss of them despite being a vigilante who is willing to kill, and then also have a get out of hell free card, without the audience putting those two puzzle pieces together long before the finale. There are a lot of fun twists and turns along the way, though, and the comedy pretty much lands. Waller has to make this mission “off the books” (since it’s really her personal play to avoid damnation rather than a government sanctioned action), so the Squad heads out to the card’s last known location in a decrepit RV. This means that, of course we’re going to have a scene where Copperhead flashes his fangs at a child in the next car while they’re on their road trip to scare them, and of course we’re going to have a bus full of nuns show up at some point as a visual gag. A lot of it is pretty rote, but there’s some playfulness that makes this one a little more memorable. Of particular note is that the person that the group is initially sent to find, Steel Maxum, turns out to be both an exotic dancer and the unlikely former host of DC cosmic org chart bigwig Doctor Fate. Greg Grunberg has some fun with the role, playing up the guy’s himbo nature, which is so at odds with extreme stoicism of Doctor Fate that it makes for some good gags. Used to less comedic and more dramatic effect is the way that Vandal Savage’s plans are ultimately undone by his own inhuman morality; his daughter turns on him after Vandal allows her girlfriend to be killed in some crossfire, citing that she is “expendable.” He later says that he has had more children than he could ever count, and yet they always fail him because they think too small, when it seems like the real lesson he keeps failing over and over again is not to underestimate the power of love.
With one that functions as well as this one does, there’s not much more to say without simply recapping more of the film’s comedic moments, and I think that this one is better enjoyed than it is retold. It’s pretty funny, so I say: go forth and enjoy.
The tongue-in-cheek superhero team-up Deadpool & Wolverine releases wide this week, and its box office performance is sure to attract a lot of scrutiny from online pundits who specialize in that kind of thing. That’s because the once-dependable genre of live-action superhero blockbusters has largely retreated from suburban multiplexes to instead play it safe on streaming platforms like Disney+, leaving a massive void on movie theater marquees the past couple summers. I’m sure much will be written about what the Deadpool sequel’s box office receipts indicate about the future of live-action superhero media in particular, as well as the future of theatrical exhibition for big-budget movies in general, but that’s not the story that’s got my attention right now. What’s fascinated me in this summer’s superhero drought is the genre that’s swooped in to replace those traditional blockbusters with an entirely different kind of corporate IP: the horror franchise. Instead of saving anticipated horror sequels for the Halloween pre-gaming of Fall, studios have found open space in the summer release calendar to position them as the big-ticket Movie of the Week, to easy financial success. It helps that horror movies typically cost 1/100th of a superhero blockbuster budget, making them better suited to turn a profit with the current, shrunken moviegoing public, but it’s still an interesting shift.
There are two original, non-franchise horror movies of note in theaters right now that are easily the scariest I’ve seen all year: the Irish ghost story Oddity and the Satanic serial killer thriller Longlegs. Those standalone creep-outs are not the kind of horror blockbuster I’m describing here. When I recently had a couple days off work to spend at The Movies, most of what was accessible to me were IP-extenders for already-established horrors & thrillers, all released this summer. I felt the same way watching that triple feature of MaXXXine (a sequel), A Quiet Place: Day One (a prequel), and Twisters (a rebootquel) that I usually feel watching sequels, prequels, and reboots to big-budget action movies this time of year: mild, momentary amusement that quickly faded from my memory the further away I got from the theater. Longlegs & Oddity are designed to unnerve the audience by dragging us through previously unseen corners of Hell, guided by the Twisted Minds of their respective auteurs (Oz Perkins & Damian Mc Carthy). The horror sequels & prequels they’re up against are too warmly familiar to unnerve anyone. They were designed to remind us of movies we already like, providing a pleasantly violent atmosphere where we can purchase & consume popcorn. They’re essentially the MCU for nerds in black t-shirts who already have definite Halloween plans months in advance.
In that context, this trio of movies were adequately entertaining. Like X, MaXXXine is mostly a work of pastiche, updating the 70s Texas Porn Star Massacre grime of the original to the New Wave Hookers grime of the warped-VHS 1980s. That 80s aesthetic may not be as novel for a modern slasher as the Old Hollywood melodrama of the X prequel Pearl, but it at least panders enough to my personal tastes to give the movie a pass. For all of MaXXXine‘s vintage horror & porno references, though, the thing it reminded me of most was Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Red Riding Hood arc on the third season of The Deuce, which only places it about 5 years deep into the archives instead of the 40 it aimed for. It’s fun, but it’s fluff. Mia Goth is notably subdued as the porn-star-victim on the run after she got to play unhinged villain in the franchise’s last outing, which is something I could also say about director Michael Sarnoski’s presence in Day One, his prequel to A Quiet Place. Sarnoski’s debut feature Pig was an emotionally devastating riff on the John Wick revenge pic, sending a wounded Nicolas Cage on a culinary warpath that established the director as a name to watch. It’s a shame, then, that Sarnoski’s follow-up is just . . . another Quiet Place. There’s a little novelty in the franchise’s move to an urban setting at the exact moment of alien invasion, but otherwise Day One is just more of the same – similar to MaXXXine‘s shift to an 80s horror-porno aesthetic only slightly shaking up the X status quo.
The most successful film of this trio is the decades-later rebootquel Twisters, which updates the storm-chasing hijinks of the 90s Jan De Bont blockbuster Twister with small touches of dramatic restraint from Minari director Lee Isaac Chung (joining Sarnoski in the one-for-them check cashing line at the bank). Some might balk at the idea of labeling either Twister movie as Horror, but they’re both essentially monster-attack movies wherein the the monster happens to be bad weather. Both films climax at small-town horror screenings (The Shining in Twister and Frankenstein in Twisters) where the tornado rips through the screen as a direct, literal replacement for horror icons being projected from the past. The reason I’m pushing to include Twisters here is that it exemplifies what the future of horror blockbuster filmmaking might become. I’m shocked to report that I enjoyed the tornado movie more than the apocalyptic monster movie or the retro porno-horror, likely because it’s the one that’s most honest about the familiar, unchallenging entertainment it aims to deliver. Twisters is an emotionally satisfying pick-up truck commercial—complete with country-rock soundtrack—that occasionally takes breaks from promoting Dodge Ram products to indulge in thunderous kaiju horror action. Chung asserts his tastefulness as a serious artist by cutting out two traditional summer blockbuster payoffs that would’ve mapped it directly to a 90s template: the movie’s Big Bad being sucked into a tornado and a Big Kiss being shared between the leads. Otherwise, he’s making an anonymous, IP-driven action movie, and that shamelessness mostly works in his favor. It’s the kind of summertime fun you want to eat mozzarella sticks to.
Maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here. It was cute & relatable for Lupita Nyong’o’s doomed hero in A Quiet Place: Day One to seek one last comfort before death at a neighborhood pizzeria, but the success of Twisters suggests a better way. Maybe Sarnoski & company should have capitalized on the Blooming Onion facial design on the Quiet Place monsters and scored a tie-in promotional deal with Outback Steakhouse, sending Nyong’o to seek comfort there instead. A24 certainly understands the value of that kind of old-school hucksterism, and you can currently purchase a commemorative MaXXXine thong from their online giftshop, among other X-branded wares. All they need is some Universal Pictures-scale monetary backing to reach their full horror blockbuster potential. Or maybe this is all just a fluke. It’s possible that the lucrative return of Deadpool or The Joker or The Avengers will convince Hollywood to exclusively get back into the superhero movie business, putting this summer’s horror blockbuster era to a swift end. Personally, I hope not. I didn’t necessarily appreciate these horror sequels & prequels on any deeper level than I appreciate a Marvel or Star Wars or Fast & Furious picture, but I do prefer to spend my time in their stylistic milieu. Any excuse to hide from the New Orleans heat in the darkened, air-conditioned rooms of my neighborhood theater is welcome, but the more monsters we can cram into those rooms the better.
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.
It had to happen eventually that one of these animated movies would emerge as an object lesson in adaptation that’s faithful in some ways and divergent in others, to ill effect in both realms. Batman: Gotham by Gaslight was a critically and commonly well-received 1989 Elseworlds comic that asked, What if Batman, but steampunk? and What if Batman fought Jack the Ripper?, which was the style at the time. This film adapts both of those questions directly, although it chooses a different culprit for who the Ripper turns out to be (it’s still an effective mystery, but who’s behind the Ripper’s blade in the comic is that story’s equivalent of The Joker, that comparison is absent here and the killer is someone else. Gotham by Gaslight transports the (apparently) eternally fertile narrative ground of a serial killer in the London Fog has been transported to the nearly identical (but explicitly American, even in this setting) city of Gotham, where the city streets are stalked by two different disguised men. The first, of course, is the Ripper, whose true identity forms the core mystery of the story. The other is a Victorian Batman, who is in fact the city’s recently returned prodigal son, the orphaned billionaire Bruce Wayne (Bruce Greenwood).
As with a lot of What if [Character] but [Specific Era/Location]? stories, this one transports all of the accoutrement of the character to the time and place that the author (or, more commonly, fanfiction writer) has a fascination with. So, while “Catwoman” isn’t here, Selina Kyle (Jennifer Carpenter) is, as an actress and singer who grew up as the daughter of a lion tamer, hence a handiness with a whip and an affection for cats. Leslie Thompkins, the kindly child psychologist who helped mend the young Bruce’s psyche in the comics, is here Sister Leslie (Grey Griffin), who ran the orphanage in which Bruce was raised. There’s a district attorney Harvey Dent, a showgirl (and, lest we forget because this is a Ripper story, sex worker) Pamela Isley, a police Commissioner named Gordon, a Doctor Hugo Strange, and so on and so forth. It’s a conceit that I think can be fun and rewarding, but can also be kind of tired. In fact, the thing that I felt most weighed down that recent Matt Reeves Batman movie was the fact that it was a Batman movie, and thus in the middle of this high budget, grimy neo-noir featuring some interesting creative choices, decent editing, and occasionally great visuals, you also had to have Colin Farrell as the Penguin for some reason. This kind of “Batman skin on a Victorian period piece” integration of the whole rogues gallery usually works best when the narrative finds something interesting to do with it or a way to twist expectations, and it does do that here in one small way, as there is both a Two-Face and a Harvey Dent, but they are not the same person here.
Visually, the most frustrating thing about this one is that it uses the general design aesthetics of the source material (simplified for animation) but none of the grain or grit that made that one’s overall look so memorable. In fact, although there have been other releases in this overall franchise that looked worse, the discrepancy between the mood and atmosphere of the original comic and this adaptation make this one feel cheaper than those others. For instance, take a look at this page of the original comic, which evokes both the yellowing of a newspaper and the sickly yellow light of the oil lamps in the district in which the scene takes place. It sets a tone that is lacking from this movie. That’s an overall issue with a lot, but not all, of these movies. When adapting from a well-liked source material, one can choose to try and imitate the original art as closely as possible while also “sanding off” some of the detail work that would be too difficult to animate (like New Frontier or All-Star Superman), or make something that looks completely different (like Doomsday’s use of a more Bruce Timm style, or Superman vs. The Elite’s Tartakovsky-esque crescent moon head shapes). This chooses to do some detail sanding in order to ape the art style of the original, but in doing so genericizes the overall feel of Mike Mignola’s pre-Hellboy artwork and the moodiness that made the graphic novel memorable enough to attempt to adapt nearly thirty years later in the first place. Paradoxically, this one is well-drawn but ultimately flat-looking, and not dynamic enough or visually arresting enough to really capture your attention.
That said, if you’re going to watch this one, it’s going to be because you’re interested in seeing who the Ripper is, and I won’t spoil that for you here. It’s a novel (and welcome) choice to forego any Jokery completely, and the twist is satisfactorily executed, with the fact that the Ripper was driven mad by the inhumanity he witnessed during the Civil War being an interesting touch. Performance-wise, the return of Greenwood to the Batman role after previously voicing him in Under the Red Hood is a good one, and his performance helps inflate some of the limper elements of the story. When it comes to the casting, however, the standout here is Anthony “Giles from Buffy” Head as Alfred, although he is underutilized. Perhaps you, dear reader, have not seen so many of these that you need them to be visually dynamic in order to be appreciated, and a middle of the road Jack the Ripper story dressed up in cape and cowl will be more fun for you. At the same time, if that’s what you’re looking for, what you really want to get your hands on is the 1989 comic. Your library system probably has a copy! Why don’t you go look that up right now, actually?
Our current Movie of the Month, 1989’s BabyCakes, is a made-for-TV romcom starring Ricki Lake as the world’s most adorable stalker. It follows the exact narrative beats of the original 1985 German film it adapts, Sugarbaby, but it handles them with a much lighter, gentler touch. In Sugarbaby, our lonely mortician protagonist has no friends or hobbies outside her obsessive scheming to sleep with the married man who catches her lustful eye. It’s a much darker film than BabyCakes tonally, but it’s also much more colorful, as it’s lit with enough candy-color gels to halfway convince you that it was directed by Dario Argento under a German pseudonym. BabyCakes sands off all the stranger, off-putting details of the original to instead deliver a familiar, cutesy romcom about a woman struggling with self-image issues as the world constantly taunts her for being overweight; Ricki Lake’s bubbly personality lifts the general mood of that story, as does the decision to make her object of desire an engaged man instead of a married one. Even her stalking is played as an adorable quirk in 80s-romcom montage, as she tries on different disguises while tracking down her supposed soulmate.
One essential romcom element of BabyCakes is the quirky circumstances of its star-couple’s professions. Ricki Lake not only plays a mortician in this case; she’s the morgue’s designated beautician, livening up dead bodies with cheery glam makeup. The hunk she stalks in the NYC subway system is not traveling to a boring desk job in some office cubicle somewhere; he’s the subway train conductor who drives her to work everyday, a much less common occupation. Naturally, then, the NYC subway setting where she first lays eyes on him becomes a defining component of the film, affording it some novelty as a Public Transit Romcom instead of just a generic one. It’s in the subways where she forces a meet-cute, where she flirts by buying him Sugar Babies at a vending machine, where she dresses like a mustachioed janitor to sneak a peek at his work schedule, etc. That setting had me thinking a lot about public-transit romances as a result, so here are a few more titles in that subgenre to check out in addition to our Movie of the Month.
While You Were Sleeping (1995)
The most adorable public-transit romcom I could find also involves some unethical scheming and lusting from afar by its female star, in this case Sandra Bullock instead of Ricki Lake. Like in The Net, Bullock stars as an unloved schlub with no social life outside her relationship with her cat. Her only romantic prospect is making cartoon-wolf eyes at a handsome businessman stranger (Peter Gallagher), whom she watches board the train for his morning commute with ritualistic devotion. You see, her quirky romcom occupation is working the token booth for the Chicago L-Train system, which the movie specifies early in an opening credits sequence that features hotdog stands, Wrigley Field, and a Michael Jordan statue to establish locality. It also ends on an image of Bullock riding the L-Train herself as a passenger instead of a booth worker, modeling a classic white wedding dress and a “JUST MARRIED” sign as if she had hired a limousine in the suburbs.
While You Were Sleeping doesn’t spend too much time on that train platform, though. In an early scene, her mysterious would-be beau is mugged and falls unconscious onto the tracks, when she suddenly springs to action for the first time in her go-nowhere life and pulls his limp body to safety. Much of the rest of the film is spent in hospital rooms and the newly comatose man’s family home as she hides her non-relationship with him by pretending to be his fiancée. It’s a convoluted sitcom set-up that would lead to one doozy of a “Grandma, how did you meet Grandpa?” conversation by the time she makes a genuine romantic connection, but in terms of romcom logic it’s all relatively reasonable & adorable. Notably, she is eventually proposed to through the plexiglass barrier of the train-platform tollbooth, with an engagement ring passed along as if it were token fare. Cute!
On the Line (2002)
If you wish While You Were Sleeping had more emphasis on the novelty of its Chicago L-Train setting and are willing to give up little things like the movie being good or watchable, On the Line is the perfect public-transit romcom alternative. In fact, that is the only case in which it is recommendable. *NSYNC backup singers Lance Bass & Joey Fatone play boneheaded bros in the worst college-campus cover band you’ve ever heard. While Fatone refuses to grow up after college (continuing to live out his rockstar fantasy by playing dive bars and wearing t-shirts that helpfully say “ROCK” on them), Bass gets a boring desk job at an ad agency, which means a lot of morning commutes on the L. It’s on one of those trips to work when he strikes up a genuine connection with a fellow rider, chickens out when it’s time to ask for her number, and then spends the rest of the movie trying to complete the missed connection. When they inevitably find each other a second time, it’s on the same train platform, where they once again flirtatiously bond by reciting Al Green song titles and the lineage of American presidents. I am not kidding.
Do not ask me what happens between those two fateful meetings on the L, because I am not sure there is an answer. In lieu of minor details like plot, themes, or jokes, On the Line is a collection of occurrences that pass time between train stops. Besides a heroic third-act nut shot in which one of Bass’s idiot friends catches a baseball with his crotch at the aforementioned Wrigley Field, most of the “humor” of the film consists of characters reacting to non-events with softly sarcastic retorts like “Okayyyy,” “Well excuuuuuse me,” and “Ooooohhh that’s gotta hurt.” Otherwise, it’s all just background noise meant to promote a tie-in CD soundtrack that features acts like Britney Spears, Mandy Moore, Vitamin C and, of course, *NSYNC (the rest of whom show up for a “hilarious” post-credits gag where they play flamboyantly gay hairdressers, to the movie’s shame). Other on-screen corporate sponsorships include Reebok, Total Request Live, McDonalds, Chyna, and Al Green, the poor bastard. And because Bass works at an ad agency, the movie even dares to include a conversation with his boss (Dave Foley, embarrassing himself alongside coworker Jerry Stiller) that cynically attempts to define the term “tween females” as a marketing demographic. The main product being marketed to those tween females was, of course, Lance Bass himself, who comes across here as a not especially talented singer who’s terrified of women. Hopefully they vicariously learned to love public transit in the process too, which I suppose is also advertised among all those corporate brands. If nothing else, the romance is directly tied to the wonders of the L-Train by the time a character declares “Love might not make the world go round, but it’s what makes the ride worthwhile” to a car full of semi-annoyed passengers.
Paterson (2016)
If you’re looking for a movie that’s both good and heavily public transit-themed, I’d recommend stepping slightly outside the romcom genre to take a ride with Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s zen slice-of-life drama starring Adam Driver. Paterson may not technically be a romcom, but it is both romantic & comedic. Driver leans into his surname by driving a city bus around his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, earning just enough of a decent living to pay for his eccentric wife’s art supplies. His character’s first name also happens to be Paterson, which is one of many amusing coincidences that become quietly surreal as they recur: seeing twins around town, hearing repeated lines of dialogue, and striking up conversations with strangers who happen to be practicing poets. You see, Paterson is not only a bus driver, no more than Sandra Bullock’s lovelorn protagonist was only a tollbooth worker or Lance Bass was only a mediocre singer. He’s also an amateur poet who spends his alone time between bus rides writing work he never intends to publish, poems that are only read by his adoring wife. It’s all very aimless & low-stakes, but it’s also very lovely.
I generally find Jarmusch’s “I may be a millionaire but I’m still an aimless slacker at heart” schtick to be super irritating. However, as a former poetry major who rides the bus to work every day and whose biggest ambition in life is to write on the clock, I can’t be too too annoyed in this case. If nothing else, Paterson gets the act of writing poetry correct in a way that few movies do. It’s all about revising the same few lines over & over again until they’re exactly correct; it’s also all about the language of imagery. Paterson gets the humble appeal of riding the city bus right too, even if it is a little idealistic about how pleasant & clean the bus itself and the conversations eavesdropped on it tend to be (speaking as a person of NORTA experience). While You Were Sleeping & Baby Cakes have the most adorable use of their public-transit settings on this list; On the Line has the most absurd. For its part, Paterson just has the most. There are a lot of quiet, contemplative bus rides as the movie peacefully rolls along, which is the exact kind of energy I try to bring to my morning commute every day.
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.
I think that I would have had a better impression of Batman and Harley Quinn if I had seen it when it was released, instead of in 2024, when we’ve already had a few seasons of the excellent animated adult Harley Quinn TV show. I’m sure this raucous, foul-mouthed representation of the character—which now seems like a tamer, less funny version of the TV series version—was probably more fun and exciting seven years ago, but it doesn’t hold up anymore. That’s only partially the film’s fault, however; it can’t be held accountable for the fact that what I think of as the best version of Harley Quinn was right around the corner, ready to overshadow it. I can blame it for being, well, not very good.
In a (contentious and challenged) continuation of the beloved Batman: The Animated Series, Batman (Kevin Conroy) and Nightwing (Loren Lester, reprising) must turn to the recently paroled/released Harley Quinn (Melissa Rauch, taking over for Arleen Sorkin, who originated the role and the character in the 90s) to try and find out where her BFF Poison Ivy (an utterly wasted Paget Brewster) is hiding. Ivy has recently teamed with poor man’s Swamp Thing “Floronic Man” (Kevin Michael Richardson) to steal some actual Swamp Thing matter from STAR Labs, with the goal of doing some “One man’s eco-terrorism is another man’s most ethical way to save the planet” shenanigans. Noting that Harley hasn’t reported to her parole officer in months, Nightwing finds her working at a kind of Super-Hooters where women dress in skimpy(er) versions of superheroine/villainess costumes. Tailing her, the two end up fighting one another; he asks why she’s resorted to this line of work instead of using her psychology doctorate, and she gets real with him about what the job market is like for ex-cons. She knocks him out, he wakes up tied to the bed, and they eventually hook up (although one can read the consensuality of the situation as dubious). She agrees to help the Dynamic Duo, they go on a couple of fest quests, and eventually they find Ivy and her new co-conspirator and save the day.
Due to time constraints as a result of work, travel, and my social life, I ended up accidentally watching this one as if it were a three-part episode of the series, as the film’s 74-minute runtime breaks down into three neat segments that are roughly the length of an episode of The Animated Series. I don’t think it suffered from that. In fact, I don’t mention it often, but I’ve probably watched about a third of these so far in more than one sitting, a practice I don’t normally condone (a movie is like a spell or most poems, to be consumed all at once or the magic could be dispelled), but which hasn’t really impacted my reading of these as texts. If anything, it’s made me engage with them more. The ones that really capture my interest are straightforward, one sitting, beginning to end viewing experiences, while the ones that fail to really grab me are the ones that I realize I have to rewind and rewatch parts of because my mind was starting to wander. And some, like Gotham Knight and Emerald Knights, are episodic by design, while others are episodic as a result of the fact that they are adapting stories that originated in a serialized, month-to-month medium, like All Star Superman (although that one gets a full viewing every time). Viewed through that lens, this is a three-parter with a first episode that I found mostly boring, a second part that was a big improvement, and a finale that was fine, I guess.
First, the good. The “Superbabes” restaurant is a fun sight gag, but that’s all there really is to write home about in the first act. The middle is better, as the unlikely trio’s research brings them to a shack in the woods where assorted colorful hoodlums and hooligans gather, with visual references to the Adam West Batman series aplenty, and even includes two musical numbers, one of which is endearing and funny (we’ll get to the second in “the bad”). There’s even a toilet humor gag that managed to cross the line into getting an actual laugh from me; Harley has some greasy food, she begs for the Batmobile to be pulled over so that she can use the facilities, Batman assumes it’s a ruse to escape and refuses, Harley passes a great volume of gas, Nightwing begs to roll the window down, and Batman again refuses, saying that it “Smells like discipline.” It’s a good gag, as there’s an abundance of writers who adore Batman to the point of biblical idolatry, and to tweak their over-the-top stoicism is funny both with and without that context. The final act also includes a pretty funny bit, where it seems like the day will be saved by the appearance of Swamp Thing, here a nearly omniscient/omnipotent vegetation deity, but he really just shows up to wag his finger at the villain and affects the plot not at all. It’s like the seed of an idea for the kind of gags and bits that the Harley Quinn animated series pulls off, and although it’s in its infancy here, it’s a good joke.
When it comes to the bad, I have to say, I don’t like Rauch as Harley. It’s funny, because I know she got her big break on Big Bang Theory, a series I have seen approximately 57 minutes of and all of them under duress, the same place that TV Harley Kaley Cuoco gathered much of her attention. (To me, I will always remember her from the endless promotion of 8 Simple Rules that aired constantly during reruns of Grounded for Life when I was in high school, as well as for her role as Billie, the Cousin Oliver of original recipe Charmed’s final season, because my brain is broken in so, so many ways.) Cuoco seems born to voice this role, while Rauch is doing … I don’t know, I’m sure it’s her best. It’s not quite as iconic as Sorkin’s original Harley, or as perfectly suited as Tara Strong’s chameleon-like version, or as unhinged as Cuoco’s ascension to animated Harley supreme. Sometimes, when watching the show, I can almost see Cuoco in the sound booth when she lets out one of Harley’s frustrated cries, really getting into the body language and everything. In this, Harley sounds so canned and rehearsed that you imagine that there was almost no motion during the entire recording session. It’s a very frustrating experience. This gets pushed past my tolerance limits when we have an entire musical performance of Rauch-as-Harley singing the seminal, perfect The Nerves (although obviously best known as a Blondie single) track “Hanging on the Telephone.” I’m not one to get upset when a filmmaker gets a little self-indulgent, but this is a real speedbump in this one, especially as it comes on the heels of the aforementioned fun music number.
I wish that I could watch this with completely fresh eyes when it was a new release, without the baggage of a much better, funnier, more exciting, and better performed adaptation of the character. But we’re all trapped within the horizon of our experiences, so here I am, trying and failing to like this release.
Swampflix 
