Quick Takes: Summertime Drama

June 24, 2024 / swampflix / 1 Comment

It’s been a strangely quiet summer for theatrical moviegoing so far, thanks largely to last year’s Hollywood labor strikes. All of the usual corporate slop that clogs up American movie marquees has been arriving in a slow trickle instead of a constant flood, which has many box office pundits panicking about the collapse of theatrical exhibition as a viable industry. I understand that theaters need weekly hits to sell enough popcorn to keep the projectors running, but I have to admit I’ve mostly been enjoying the lull. This year’s short supply of substantial superhero sequels & IP extenders has left a lot of room for smaller, gentler films to breathe in local cinemas – from digital restorations of already venerated classics like Le Samouraï & It’s Such a Beautiful Day to future classics in D.I.Y. outsider art like Hundreds of Beavers & The People’s Joker. It’s actually been a great summer for movies so far if all you care about is easy access to high-quality cinema, which pretty much fully accounts for my selfish POV.

Last year, when I wrote about the state of summertime moviegoing in early June, I reported that I had retreated from theaters to watch smaller, quieter movies than what they were offering at home instead. This year, I don’t have to stream those quiet dramas from my couch; they’re actually playing in New Orleans cinemas right now. Theaters may be struggling, but attentive cinephiles are thriving. So, here are a few short-form reviews of the smaller-scale, smaller-budget dramas currently playing across the city (among other titles I haven’t had time to catch up with yet, like The Bikeriders, Tuesday, and I Used to Be Funny).

Ghostlight

The most consistent, predictable supplier of the small-scale indie drama is, of course, The Sundance Film Festival, which typically opens the year with a handful of buzzy, awardsy titles that inevitably get drowned out by louder, flashier titles from later festivals like Cannes. Somehow, Ghostlight plays directly into the tropes & expectations of a typical Sundance selection but earns sharp laughs and emotional pangs though that familiar template. A family drama about a macho, emotionally closed-off construction worker who gets in touch with his feelings by signing up to play Romeo Montague in a community-theatre Shakespeare production, it’s got the general shape of a standard post-Little Miss Sunshine festival breakout. However, it ends up being an inversion of hokey indie drama tropes instead of playing them straight. There are plenty dramas that are shot like documentaries, and there are plenty documentaries that are shot like dramas; Ghostlight is a drama shot like a documentary that’s shot like a drama (a turdocen, if you will). There are also plenty dramas wherein an actor’s real life starts to mirror a role they’re playing in their art, but Ghostlight is about an already famous play that starts to mirror the actor’s life instead, taking the teen-suicide themes of Romeo & Juliet more seriously than most modern adaptations and interpretations. It’s shockingly successful in that inversion too. If nothing else, it made me cry earlier & more often than any other new release I’ve seen so far this year.

I don’t often cry when something sad happens in a movie, like when the farm burns down in Minari. I tend to cry at mawkish acts of kindness, like when Mrs. Harris is gifted the dress she desperately wanted after her trip to Paris. In Ghostlight, all of the saddest events in our tough-exterior construction worker’s life happen before the audience meets the big softie. All we really know about him at first is that he’s explosively angry when pressed to talk about his feelings, and that he’s currently rehearsing for two auditions: one for a legal deposition in a civil lawsuit and one for his first theatrical role as Romeo. The audience is able to deduce the details of the lawsuit long before our grieving hero has the strength to voice them, based on his discomfort with the plot of the Shakespearean tragedy he was roped into performing. The biggest tearjerking moments are all in the way his small social circle gently pushes him to heal without scaring him off: Dolly de Leon as a failed pro actor who takes him in like a wounded puppy, Katherine Mallen Kupferer as his theatre-nerd daughter who finally has a mechanism for bonding with her walled-off father, Tara Mallen as his put-upon wife who supports his surprising new hobby even though it threatens the couple’s domestic intimacy. It’s a lovely, loving communal dynamic that only gets more emotionally effective once you learn that the central family unit is played by a real-life family of Chicago-area actors, led by Keith Kupferer as the hard-hatted thespian. So much of Ghostlight‘s premise and presentation sounds phony in the abstract, but in practice there’s a raw, healing truth to it that’s cathartic to anyone willing to be vulnerable.

Janet Planet

Not everyone wants to spend the hot summer months having a public ugly-cry about small acts of kindness. Maybe you just want to space out in your neighborhood theater’s AC and observe small acts of being. The 1990s period piece Janet Planet is a warmly familiar coming-of-age story slowwwed down to the tempo of summer bugs ambiently chirping in the woods. It’s like a less traumatic Aftersun, chronicling the summer months spent by a young girl named Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) quietly observing her mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson). The film’s chapter breaks are named after various temporary boarders & lovers who drift through the small family’s home, mostly without incident. Lacy is a bookworm introvert who observes the adult behavior around her with searing intensity, which redirects the dramatic scrutiny of the movie towards Janet’s relationships. Occasionally, she’ll match her mother’s impulsive, depressed disposition with unprompted one-liners like “Do you know what’s funny? Every moment of my life is hell.” Mostly, though, this is a drama of recognition, dragging the audience back to childhood experiences of being lonely, bored, and disregarded – filling your empty schedule with personal rituals, like compulsively plastering your loose hairs on the shower wall. Lacy is realistically awkward, selfish, and nosy for a child her age. We’ve all been there, but not all of us were so still and so quiet about it.

I would have never guessed that Janet Planet is the debut film of a well-known playwright (Annie Baker), given the general sparseness of its spoken dialogue. There’s a detailed specificity to Lacy’s environment at the edge of 1990s Massachusetts hippie communes that feels like the work of a novelist, especially by the time she’s attending midsummer puppet festivals and watching her mother run an at-home acupuncture clinic (the titular Janet Planet). At the same time, it belongs to a broad lineage of observational coming-of-age stories broadcasting the inner lives of young girls: Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, My Girl, Mermaids, Now & Then, Eighth Grade, Peppermint Soda, the aforementioned Aftersun, etc. Its major distinction within that canon is in its slow-cinema distancing, in which a fixed camera silently observes the figures shrinking in its frame as they wander at the edges of American wilderness, their thoughts drowned out by the roaring static of birds & bugs. I suppose it’s also distinct in that it’s the only film in this canon with a Laurie Anderson needle drop, which alone says a lot about the idiosyncrasies of Lacy & Janet’s particular, peculiar home environment.

Evil Does Not Exist

Falling further down the slow-cinema rabbit hole, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest drama Evil Does Not Exist is even more quietly observant of its characters’ bodies shrinking against the enormity of nature, often staring into a fixed place in the wooded distance for minutes on end. Unlike Janet Planet, though, it’s set in the snowy mountains of a small village outside Tokyo, which is a visually appealing reprieve from the Climate Change heat waves outside the cinema walls. That village will not be small for long. After distantly observing the daily lives & labor of the rural locals, we’re led to a fluorescent-lit townhall meeting wherein greedy real estate developers announce a plan to establish a large-scale “glamping” site for tourists that will transform the village forever, despite protests. The rest of the film is a tense battle of wills between skeptical locals who want to maintain an authentic relationship with their environment (represented by Hitoshi Okima) and big-city phonies who want to commodify that authenticity as an amusement-park experience (represented by Tyuji Kosaka). This philosophical clash inevitably culminates in a shocking act of violence in the final seconds, but most of the “evil” depicted in the film is quietly bureaucratic and told through the grimaces of the locals being steamrolled for short-term profits.

I had an unexpectedly conflicted reaction to Evil Does Not Exist, especially to its cheap digi-video image quality. Its amateur-grade digital video felt appropriately soulless when mocking the sinister mundanity of City Brain but felt flat & ugly when gazing at the idyllic mundanity of Country Life. Dramatically, it packs neither the emotional wallop of Ghostlight nor the melancholic beauty of Janet Planet, even if its political & philosophical themes are more sharply defined. It ended up being a mixed bag for me, which was a surprise after being enthusiastic about the other Hamaguchis I’ve seen (Drive My Car and Asako I & II). Still, its quiet mood and overly patient pacing make for excellent summertime counterprogramming just as much as Ghostlight or Janet Planet. These are the kinds of movies that theaters usually only have space for in the last-minute awards campaigns of winter, so excuse me if I’m a little perversely grateful for mainstream Hollywood’s current supply-chain struggles.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League vs. Teen Titans (2016)

June 19, 2024June 19, 2024 / swampflix / 6 Comments

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, Boomer is 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 feel like I just said this about Justice League: Gods and Monsters, but it’s nice to know that here at about the halfway point of this project, I can still be surprised. Despite having a pretty basic title that promises little more than two teams being thrown at one another like action figures, Justice League vs. Teen Titans breaks out of its role as just another smash-’em-up in this interconnected narrative. You also wouldn’t think it from the very generic promo images that are associated with the film either, but this is a horror movie, and despite being animated, it manages to be a pretty effective one.

Damian’s up to his normal shenanigans, again. Some second stringers like Weather Wizard are causing a ruckus, and the League is there to pound everyone into submission like it’s gear night and the lights are about to come on. Damian’s on crowd control duty, which means he’s standing in a single place and pointing in the direction that fleeing people should use to evacuate. Understandably bored at being given the superhero job equivalent of holding the sign that says “SLOW” on one side and “STOP” on the other at a road construction site, he gets involved when he sees the opportunity to go after the aforementioned climate-based villain. Unbeknownst to the boy, the Weather Wizard is possessed by some four-eyed space demon, and Damian’s brutal takedown forces the demon vapor out of his body, leaving no one to question. Bruce has, once again, had it up the metaphorical here, so Nightwing takes the kid to stay with the Titans, a team run by his ladyfriend, Starfire (Kari Wahlgren). She’s playing den mother to: Jaime Reyes (Jake T. Austin), aka Blue Beetle, a kid with an alien “scarab” on his back that transforms into weaponry and such; Garfield “Beast Boy” Logan (Brandon Soo Hoo), a green boy who can shapeshift into animals; and goth-girl-who’s-sort-of-the-devil’s-daughter Raven (Taissa Farminga, in an inspired bit of casting).

It’s Raven and her backstory on which this film hangs. Her mother was a teen runaway who got involved with a cult, and when said organization did a little ceremony to see what would happen, they summoned an extra-dimensional entity known as Trigon (Jon Bernthal). Raven’s mother was the naive but willing Rosemary in this situation, and her baby, Raven was to be the vessel through which Trigon would permanently enter our plane of existence to conquer the earth and turn it into a hell-like place. His time is nigh, as it turns out, and he’s stepping up his astral gaslighting to get her to open up the portal. Helping his cause is a possessed Superman, through whom Trigon’s minions are able to dig what can only be described as a stargate out of the desert, in preparation for his coming. When the Titans are attacked by Trigon’s henchmen while on an outing to a carnival for some mandatory team-building fun, Raven spills this backstory, and tells them about how she was raised in a magic utopia until she was about eleven, when Trigon found their little hidden fairyland and turned it into hell; this is not an exaggeration, as pits of molten lava erupt, everything is turned to ashes, and every living thing evaporates in a puff, except Raven. She pretended to join him, she sealed him in a crystal that she hid in another dimension, but apparently he’s out and trying to get a stranglehold on our dimension. The Titans can’t be possessed since Raven is protecting them, but nothing is stopping Trigon’s forces from taking over the League . . .

There are a lot of great teen horror elements in here, mostly put to good use. The carnival is such an iconic location for a horror movie and doubly so when the characters are teens, so that whole sequence is a lot of fun. There’s also something about Raven’s pale emo girl aesthetic that’s such a key element of the genre that it transcends decades, so much so that you can almost hear the performance that Winona Ryder would have given as this character if the movie was made in the 80s, or the one that Fairuza Balk would have given if this had been made in the era of The Craft. Her borderline fanfiction backstory—demon daddy didn’t love me and also he is actually essentially the devil—is actually fun here, so I have no complaints. I’ve never really cared all that much about this character in any other media, not even Titans (2018), which I watched all the way through along with dozens of others worldwide, but this is the perfect length to condense everything down into a digestible package. But what really sells this as a horror story is just how awful and gross things get.

We eventually go all the way to (similar to but legally distinct from) Hell, but even before we get there, there’s enough to disturb us here in our own dimension. Raven’s recap of her origin story includes a scene in which Raven’s willing mother is frightened out of her mind when the glamour on her lover fades and she finds herself facing his true demonic form, complete with jet black horns that sprout and grow with a disgusting sound effect, and with additional points popping out like antlers as they elongate. Superman finds himself alone in his apartment laundry room, and not only is the sequence drawn with a lot of spookiness, he tries to get the image out of his head by beating it against a wall for what may have been hours, which is difficult to watch. Once the group does get to the place where the crystal should be, everything for as far as the eye can see just looks like exposed, flayed muscle tissue, with tumorous bones and teeth popping out randomly. At one point, a wall of corpses comes alive and pulls a villain into itself, tearing it apart, all while a giant metal rhombus hovers above the landscape like Leviathan in Hellraiser 2. Beast Boy undergoes a full-on Cronenbergian/Akira tumorous body horror transformation upon exposure to Hell’s energy. Punches are not being pulled in this movie, and its animation lets it get away with a lot.

This isn’t a perfect movie. For one thing, the pace at which they were putting these out and the strains that this would put on any animation team are starting to show, as there are quite a few obvious animation errors that I’m surprised weren’t caught prior to release, mostly in the carnival sequence. One of these is a misspelled sign that advertises “Salloons” [sic] instead of balloons, and another is when Raven and Damian end up dropping their respective guards around each other as they see their dual reflections in some funhouse mirrors, which reflects a sign that says “Smoothies” but doesn’t mirror the text. This sequence, while fun, also goes for that Final Destination vibe with the inclusion of an emo ballad that I believe was written specifically for this release, plays in its entirety over a montage of the Titans bonding, and which is one of the worst things that I have ever heard, genuinely. If you must hear it for yourself, it’s here, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. But if you can make it through that, you’ll be rewarded with something really fun, like a kaiju-sized Trigon making a beeline toward a city to destroy it while Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Flash are completely powerless against it, or dimensions made of meat. That soundtrack is knocking this one back a few pegs, but don’t let that make you skip this one (maybe just mute it during the carnival montage).

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lynch in Limbo, Culture in Decline

June 15, 2024 / swampflix / 3 Comments

Full disclosure: I have extremely unhip opinions about David Lynch. The accepted wisdom among movie nerds is that late-style Lynch is the director at his best, with the titles Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, and Twin Peaks: The Return earning frequent accolades as the absolute artistic pinnacle of cinema. I find them borderline unwatchable. My favorite Lynch titles are much better behaved: Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, Original Flavor Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart … essentially, Lynch for normies. It brings me no pleasure to take the conservative stance on this, wherein David Lynch was at his creative best when his vision was tempered by studio notes instead of being allowed to run wild. In my tragically square view of his catalog, the last great movie he made was while working for Walt Disney Pictures, which is never the side someone wants to take in an argument. So, I’ve done a lot of recent soul-searching on why, for example, Lost Highway works for me but Mulholland Drive does not, when they’re essentially the same inexplicable persona-crisis story told in two different ways. Or why I enjoy the chaotic absurdism of Twin Peaks‘s second season that most fans hate, while I could not force myself to finish the third-season arc of the same television show that fans frequently cite as “The Greatest Film of All Time” on my Twitter feed. It was during a recent screening of Blue Velvet at Canal Place (as part of their new Prytania Cinema Club series) when I finally came up with a theory. Forgive me as I work it out on this blog as a form of public therapy.

It’s likely that Blue Velvet remains Lynch’s finest hour in my mind simply because it’s the very first film of his that I watched. A feverish erotic thriller set down the street from where the Cleavers live, the film has a very accessible premise — perfect for teenagers desperate to see something strange & risqué. Looking back as an adult who’s since seen all of Lynch’s features before & after, Blue Velvet paradoxically becomes both eerier and more familiar. As literal as the film is about its peek into the grimy underworld just beneath the pristine surface of American suburbia (starting with the bugs & larvae wriggling below subdivision flowerbeds), it also indulges in capital-L Lynchian dream-logic imagery that cannot be fully explained without robbing its magic. What do the closeups of a roaring wind blowing out a candle symbolize to the audience beyond association with the villainous Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who has incorporated candlelight into his nightly sexual abuse routine? To me, they become an abstract symbol of that violence, often equating the white-knight heroics of our doofus protagonist Jeffery Beaumont (Kyle McLachlan) to Booth’s violence by appearing during his own interactions with the victim that unites them (Isabella Rossellini). Putting that association into words makes the image sound triter than it is in practice, though, especially since the link between hero & villain is vocalized multiple times in the dialogue (when Laura Dern’s virginal love interest says, “I can’t figure out whether you’re a detective or a pervert,” and, more directly, when Hopper says, “You’re like me”). Maybe a more recent Lynch film would “explain” their connection entirely through the candle imagery without that accompanying dialogue, but the effect would more or less be the same.

The candle is only one isolated image among many that Lynch overloads with thematic significance; the longer you spend immersed in his world the more significance those totems take on. It becomes significant that Rossellini hides her kitchen knife behind a radiator, since it recalls her fellow torch-singer who lives in a radiator in Eraserhead. The hypnotic yellow lines passing under Frank Booth’s car recall Lost Highway. Booth’s widespread smearing of red lipstick across his face before planting a Judas kiss on Jefferey’s mouth recalls the lipstick facemask of Wild at Heart. When the camera pushes into the canals of a severed ear that Jeffery discovers in an open field, finding an entire inner world there, a modern audience recalls the same push-in to the interior of the Mulholland Drive puzzle box. In retrospect, even just the casting of McLachlan, Dern, and Jack Nance feel like just as much of directorial calling cards as the heavy curtains Lynch always uses to mark his liminal spaces (in this case, Rossellini’s bedroom). David Lynch has essentially been making the same movie his entire career. He just repositions its building blocks into new, puzzling configurations as if he’s trying to work out a question he’s not fully sure how to ask. In Blue Velvet, that internal interrogation seems to be fixated on self-disgust over the peculiarities of heterosexual male lust, especially in the Madonna/whore dynamic represented by Dern & Rossellini. In the bigger picture scope of his career, he seems largely concerned with the manifestation of violence & Evil in an indifferent world. Jeffrey’s melodramatic delivery of the question “Why are there people like Frank?” earned some ironic laughter in my theater, but I believe Lynch is posing it sincerely. It’s a question he’s been asking over & over again for decades, often in fear that there’s even a fraction of Frank inside himself.

My theory on the divide between Lynch’s pre- and post-Mulholland Drive career, then, has less to do with how the director has changed than it does with how the world changed around him. Not all of the heightened melodrama of Blue Velvet can be taken seriously. If nothing else, Laura Dern’s recounting of a dream in which a flock of robins represent pure, universal love fully crosses the line from Sirkian melodrama to TV movie theatrics, inviting ironic chuckles from the audience. I don’t know that Lynch himself is laughing, though. He appears to find the mundanity of mainstream media to be oddly sinister, drawing out uncanny interactions from lesser artforms with just enough awkward pausing & ominous whooshing to make them genuinely nightmarish. There’s a winking reference to the soap opera quality of Twin Peaks in the parodic inclusion of a fictional program called Invitation to Love, often playing on characters’ TV sets throughout the show. Likewise, Blue Velvet draws comparison between the erotic thriller and the Old Hollywood noir by showing Jefferey’s mother watching old noirs on her living room TV whenever the audience passes through. Mulholland Drive was also designed as an eerie abstraction of televised-drama aesthetics, as the majority of the film is a pilot for an ABC series that was famously rejected for being too uncommercial. It’s the same approach to post-modern warping of mainstream media in all cases, but over time the cultural circumstances of that media changed. When Lynch was finding the eerie world just below the surface of a Sirk film or a Days of Our Lives style soap, there’s a substantial, defined aesthetic to the source material that he’s working with. Decades later, when he’s making the nightmare version of late-90s television in Mulholland Drive, the affect is flatter, uglier, less appealing. The switch from celluloid to digital video in Inland Empire is emblematic of a steep decline in pop culture aesthetics across the board. In other words, David Lynch did not get worse as time went on; the culture did.

Of course, this is all subjective, to the point where it might not even be coherent. Given that there is currently a push to bring back the pop culture aesthetics of the late-90s and early-00s in the resurgence of low-rise Paris Hilton fashion, nu-metal rap rock, and “indie sleaze” college radio jams, it’s clear that there is some fondness for that era of cultural refuse that I cannot share in, possibly out of leftover embarrassment from being around when it was fresh. The awkward acting & staging of Mulholland Drive reminds me of wasted hours of watching garbage-water melodrama on broadcast TV as a kid, desperately trying to squeeze entertainment value out of titles as insipid as Touched by an Angel and Walker, Texas Ranger. The vintage television quality of that aesthetic might be a lot more romantic for a younger audience who wasn’t there to cringe through it in real time, the same way that I find the sinister reflection of 80s TV media in films like Blue Velvet to be mesmerizing. If anything, I should be applauding David Lynch for keeping up with the times as his work evolved alongside the mainstream culture it subverts. I might not personally be enthusiastic for his latest projects, but I’m also not cheering on his recent struggles to land funding, if not only because I know the pain of watching your favorite filmmaker get soft-censored by cowardly investors (having been left hanging by unrealized John Waters projects like Liarmouth & Fruitcake). I’ve just come to realize that my personal split with Lynch is not a reaction to his thoughtfulness & seriousness as an artist; that has not changed. It’s a reaction to The Great Enshittification of everything, positioning him as a found-materials artist who’s been given less & less substantial materials to work with as the quality in craft across all media has gotten generally worse (at least to my aging, Millennial eyes).

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – Bad Blood (2016)

June 12, 2024June 13, 2024 / swampflix / 1 Comment

We’ve talked a little bit about the CW’s “Arrowverse” series of shows in this feature, but there’s one name that hasn’t really come up here yet, and that’s Batwoman (no, not that one). The interconnectedness of the so-called “Bat Family” is already a tangled web, and it gets more tangled every year, so I’m not going to get into that, but suffice it to say that the current Batwoman, aka Kate Kane, was introduced in 2006 as an updated version of an earlier character, one who was introduced for the sole purpose of showing how super not-gay Batman was in the wake of Frederic Wertham’s infamous censorship call-to-arms, The Seduction of the Innocent. As a way of thumbing the industry’s collective nose at Wertham and his regressive quackery, Kate was explicitly made a lesbian. This was a big deal at the time (as someone who was reading Young Avengers, which featured a gay couple in the form of Wiccan and Hulkling, I can tell you that the contemporary comic letter pages were a fiery, brimstone-y place), and in some ways still was at the time that Batwoman, the 2019 TV series, premiered – at least, if the neanderthal braying of online agitators in the wake of the show’s airing is anything to go by. In the series, which follows the characterization of Kate/Batwoman that was introduced by our old friend The New 52, Bruce Wayne’s cousin Kate returns to Gotham some time after the abdication of the city by its Dark Knight, and she discovers the Batcave and all the gadgets, retrofits them to suit her needs, and then sets out to clean up the city. Tale as old as time, right?

Among the DC CW shows, Batwoman was the most … cursed, one could say. The first season never completed filming because of COVID, the lead performer (Ruby Rose) left between seasons one and two, and the show’s mixed messaging about the role of the “Crows,” a private security firm headed by Kate’s father, was questionable even before BLM and has only grown more tone deaf over time. Reports have been mixed for years as to whether Rose was fired (for alleged behavior on set) or quit (due to being pretty badly injured during some stunt filming and not taking adequate recuperation time), and although we’ll probably never know for certain, I can say that I think Rose leaving was to the show’s benefit. That tone deafness regarding “non-police” police was rampant all over the first season, to the point where, although I would never agree with the bigots who hated the show on principle about why, they weren’t wrong that it … kinda sucked.

Rose’s exit allowed for the show to go in a different direction. Javicia Leslie was cast as Ryan Wilder, an ex-con out on parole following a short term she served following some poor police work (redundant, I know) on the part of the Crows; when Kate’s plane crashes near where Ryan has parked for the night in the van that she’s living in, Ryan finds the batsuit and puts it to work right away. She was a completely fresh take on the character, and that allowed for new and interesting developments. In the first season, the romantic conflict comes from the fact that Kate and her love interest, Meagan Good’s Sophie Moore, were in military training together before Kate was given the boot for failing to follow “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” while Sophie didn’t speak up for Kate or herself and is still deeply closeted by the time of the pilot. Batwoman’s archnemesis, Alice (as in “of Wonderland”), is also tied to Kate because—spoiler alert—she’s actually the long presumed dead twin sister that Kate hasn’t seen since her supposed death when they were in elementary school. It didn’t help that Rachel Skarsten’s not-quite-Joker performance was the most interesting thing about the series, either, making her more engaging and magnetic than our purported hero.

So, as season two begins, you have a whole supporting cast who not only don’t know if Kate’s dead or alive, but who also have no idea who this new person in Kate’s costume is. Skarsten’s Alice has to find something new to obsess over now that she can’t just keep pestering the sister she blames for never finding her, and her attempts to play on the guilt of that become a no-sell for Ryan, who grew up in the foster system. To their credit, the CW DC shows often tried to address social issues, and even when their heart was in the right place, it did so pretty clumsily (Black Lightning did it best, obviously, while Supergirl was a real roller-coaster of comrade/allyship). When it was made a selling point of the show, it was often to the show’s detriment. For me, this comes through most clearly in Batwoman’s first season treatment of Sophie, where filthy rich white woman Kate Kane lives in constant judgment of Sophie’s past choices. Kate’s constant exhortations that Sophie should come out of the closet are pure Western neoliberalism, dictating the lives of others without real knowledge of their lived experiences and dangers. But, because it had to pull a soft reboot before it ever really got going, Batwoman was able to do more and be a more interesting text for discourse because it wasn’t a “message” show, or it was at least no longer trying to send the same message that it was from its initial conception. Over time, Ryan and Sophie grow closer without all the emotional baggage of what Kate and Sophie had in the past, and this is the only show that I can think of offhand which had a queer relationship between two Black women as its primary romance storyline. It ended up being a lot better than it had a right to be.

This is all yet another long lead up to me talking about an animated DC film, because this one introduces the Kate Kane Batwoman to this continuity. Batman: Bad Blood opens some six months after Batman vs. Robin, in a pretty cool sequence in which several C-tier Bat-nemeses are gathered in a warehouse and a familiar cloaked figure starts to take them out from the shadows—except, as the firing of a handgun from the darkness reveals—this isn’t Batman (Jason O’Mara), but Batwoman (Yvonne Strahovski). Batman soon intervenes himself, but in so doing, he ends up being blown to bits when the warehouse explodes. The absence of Batman, highlighted by the fact that the Bat-signal is going unanswered and the public has started to notice, leads to Bruce’s son Damian (Stuart Allen) being drawn home, and prompts the return of Nightwing/Dick Grayson (Sean Maher) as well, while Kate enlists her father’s help in trying to find any evidence that Bruce is still alive. Dick finds himself forced to take on the mantle of Batman—something that was his greatest dream as a child before it morphed into the thing that he wanted to escape from most as he matured—but when he recognizes Kate, he unmasks himself to her and takes her on as a probationary member of the team. They’re further joined by yet another new Bat-hero, Batwing (Gaius Charles), who is the son of Wayne Enterprises’ Lucius Fox.

The villain this time around is someone called “The Heretic,” whom Batman seemed to recognize despite his mask in the moments before his death. We in the audience even get a glimpse of the man beneath when he does, but this franchise’s aforementioned difficulty in differentiating the faces of its square-jawed manly men ensures that it means nothing to us. It turns out that he’s operating under the direction of Damian’s mother and Bruce’s ex-lover, Talia al-Ghul (Morena Baccarin), who also has the Mad Hatter and his mind control tech as integral parts of her plan. The Bat Brigade invades her hideout and manages a rescue of Bruce before the fifty-minute mark, and then the real evil plot kicks in: Talia’s turned him into a Batmanchurian Candidate, with the intention of using Hatter’s tech to take over Gotham City (and then, of course, the world). From there, the film dissolves into a series of (admittedly well-executed) cliches, with the finale taking place aboard a floating tech summit. We get our designated girl fight between Talia and Batwoman, Batman’s brainwashing is broken by one of those “I know you’re in there somewhere” speeches, and a floating base is prevented from colliding with Wayne Tower at juuuuuuuust the last second. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, but it’s fun, and sufficiently exciting. I got a real kick out of watching all of these folks flying around in their costumes; it gave me flashbacks to watching G-Force/Gatchaman in my youth.

It’s telling that I had more to say about the Batwoman TV series than I did about this movie. Funnily enough, this one goes back to basics with its Kate Kane, as she is decidedly not Bruce’s cousin here. The most interesting thing about this one is that it gives us a chance to see how these characters play off of each other when the title character is missing, where we have a void in the center of this narrative that creates an opportunity for us to spend more time with the others. Dick and Damian are the most fun together that they have ever been here, and the backstory that Dick and Kate knew each other because of cotillions and such is a nice detail. That still highlights some of the film’s weaknesses. These have become self-perpetuating now, so there’s no need to think too hard about certain details; for example, it would have been much more fun if Dick-as-Batman had gotten a little too acrobatic with his fighting, and if this had been the thing to tip off Damian and Kate that he wasn’t the “real” Batman. Instead, they just know when they see him. The dialogue here is a bit more fun than normal too, since Batman isn’t around glooming up the place, and that’s a nice change, but it doesn’t reach the level of being truly special.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Movie of the Month: Notorious (1946)

June 11, 2024June 11, 2024 / swampflix / 3 Comments

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 Boomer made Brandon & Britnee watch Notorious (1946).

Boomer: For many years, I’ve been calling Notorious my favorite film of the Hitchcock oeuvre. I’ve recently been filling in some blind spots—most notably The Birds and Dial “M” for Murder, which are pretty big ones in that canon—so I wasn’t sure if I would still hold this one in such high esteem, or if I had simply been trying to be cool as a teenager and cite a lesser known one as my favorite and had been, perhaps, wrong all these years (even if I were, I was still of a feather with Roger Ebert, who named it as his favorite work of the director’s). I still remember the first time I caught this one on TCM when I was in high school, with the requisite intro and outro presented by Robert Osborne. He drew attention to the way that the camera at one point provides a point-of-view shot of Ingmar Bergman’s inebriated driving, her view occluded by her errant hair, and how this was meant to give the viewer a sense of her drunkenness; he talked about how Hitch had received a visit from some men from the state who were curious about why the British director seemed to know so much more about uranium than one would expect for someone not involved in espionage. He praised the arch performance of Madame Konstantin and pointed out the way that the story is bookended with a Nazi’s back to the audience as he faces judgment. And, of course, there was discussion about all that Hayes Code-skirting kissing and nuzzling.

Notorious is a love story. Girl’s father is imprisoned for treason, girl meets boy, boy recruits her to infiltrate a cabal of expatriated Nazis who are living in Brazil, boy gets inexplicably jealous when she is able to ingratiate herself with the mark, girl and boy are able to solve the mystery of her new husband’s dealings. Tale as old as time. In more specific terms, Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) is, at the story’s outset, present for the sentencing of her father to a Miami prison for his sedition and espionage, and although we are never made privy to the details, his final statement to the court reveals that he is unrepentant. She has a party at her house to drown her sorrows, and is drawn to a mysterious handsome man named Devlin (Cary Grant). She finds herself both intrigued and infuriated by his calm stoicism, and her attempts to get him to crack escalate to her insisting that the two of them go for a drive, where her reckless speeding catches the attention of a motorcycle cop, who lets them go when he sees Devlin’s identification. The next morning, he reveals to Alicia that he has been sent to recruit her for a job in Brazil. Once there, the two of them fall in love, although their little state-sponsored honeymoon comes to an abrupt end when her mission is revealed; she is to ingratiate herself with one Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), a former contact of her father’s who, in the past, was infatuated with her. Devlin has a little pout about this and freezes Alicia out when she begs for some other way she could help, one that wouldn’t tear the two of them apart. It doesn’t work, and Sebastian proves to be an easy mark, and within a short time, he asks her to marry him. Alicia gives Devlin one more chance to speak up and pull her out, but he doesn’t, and she ends up the new Mrs. Sebastian. Her new husband adores her completely, but his hard-nosed mother (Madame Konstantin) is more suspicious of her new daughter-in-law.

What struck me on this most recent viewing is that this film is unhurried, and while an argument could be made that this is to its detriment, I think that true only insofar as one reads this as a thriller, and that it is to Notorious‘s benefit as a love story. So much of the romance is already raced past in order to establish Devlin and Alicia’s passion for one another, and I think that it might be a disservice to the believability of that love to try and abbreviate it any further. It’s fascinating that, as with the previous collaboration between Bergman and Rains, Casablanca, the things which sever our two lovers are duty and patriotism; except that in that film, released at the height of the war in 1942, our reunited Ilsa and Rick are rent asunder for what can be assumed to be the rest of their lives, while this post-war 1946 picture sees Alicia and Devlin get a happy ending (or at least are implied to have one). Spending this much time with the two of them means that the plot doesn’t really kick in until the midpoint of the movie, after an appropriate amount of time to lull you into forgetting that there’s something inevitably coming to rip the two lovers apart. It lends an air of tragedy and gravitas to their parting that they must continue to see one another but deny their passions, which Devlin does behind a screen of sex shaming while Alicia has a harder time concealing her happiness with his company, even when doing so arouses suspicion.

I’m not here to question the late master of suspense and the choices that he made, but I do think that there was room for at least one more close call for Alicia in the Sebastian manor. Madame Sebastian regards Alicia with a constant air of appraisal and unspoken but nonetheless present disapproval. The party sequence in which Alicia and Devlin, through some exciting near-misses, manage to enter the wine cellar in which the secret uranium is hidden and abscond with evidence, is a thrilling one, and there’s some truly magnificent camerawork that swoops over the great Sebastian house entryway, with its checkered tile pattern calling to mind a chessboard that Alicia must cross, before it zooms in on the tiny key in her hand. But I do wish that Alicia had almost been caught another time before or after this, to really build up the tension, although that would risk making the Sebastians seem more naive and less threatening, if she were able to get away with too much before they catch on to her. And when they do catch on to her, we get one of the great lines that I think about all the time, stated by Madame Sebastian to her heartbroken son: “We are protected by the enormity of your stupidity — for a time.”

It’s interesting that this one comes right on the heels of the war, when the potential for a Nazi resurgence on another continent after a short breather was something that would have been on the minds of every member sitting in that audience. I’m hard pressed to think of a contemporary or even recent analogy for how that plot point must have felt for the people watching the film, for whom the revelations of just how depraved and barbaric the regime had been within its borders were still an unfolding series of horrors. I wonder, Brandon, if you feel that the way contemporary events were folded into the narrative is as effective now as it was then, if the film would function as well without that element (and instead focused on a fictional cabal of more generic evil plotters), and if you have any other thoughts on the matter?

Brandon: As you’ve already implied, this is a love story first and an espionoir second, with most of the thrills in the first hour generated through the bitter flirtation between Bergman & Grant. The dialogue walks right up to the line of spilling the details of Bergman’s loose morals every time they bicker, and it’s not hard to imagine Hays Code censors tugging their collars in the screening room. As for contemporary audiences’ reaction to the secret Nazi cabal in the second hour, it’s also not hard to imagine that feeling like a more immediate, chilling threat in the 1940s that it is all these decades later. I just don’t think Hitchcock is interested enough in their fascist violence or ideology to make the specifics of their villainy central to the text. Would the movie be all that different if it were made a few years later and our reluctant couple were spying on Cold War Russians instead of Nazis in exile? I have my doubts. Casablanca was specifically about the futility of attempting to remain politically neutral in the face of Nazi fascism, and it was filmed before America joined the war. Comedies like Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be parodied the specifics of Hitler’s racism & mannerisms while he was still alive and ascending to power. Besides the Brazilian setting and the Uranium smuggling plot, there isn’t much specificity to the Nazi presence in Notorious, except as shadowy villains whose suspicion raises the tension of the espionage romance that’s front & center. The specifics of exactly why that romance is so tense (mostly Grant’s closed-minded frustration with Bergman’s disregard for womanly virtue) also go unstated, but most of the fun of the movie is in watching Hitchcock chip away at the restraints that block him from fully vocalizing them. Most of his interest is in the fictional, bitter romance he’s created, not in the real-world politics.

The only way I really felt Hitchcock’s disgust with Nazi scum was through the ghoulish specter of Madame Sebastian, who radiates pure hate in every scene while her younger cohorts act like proper gentlemen. Most of the Nazi cabal’s villainy is hidden behind locked doors, but the matron of the house proudly parades her cruelty out in the open as a voluntary enforcer and a true believer in the cause. She can’t even crochet in her rocking chair without coming across as a Nazi piece of shit, which is a major credit to Madame Konstantin’s performance. Britnee, as our resident hagsploitation expert, I have to ask where you think Madame Sebastian’s legacy falls in the cinematic canon of evil old women. It wouldn’t be for another decade or so that Hitchcock literally put the “Psycho” in “psychobiddy” (speaking of menacing rocking chairs), but it seems he was already interested in the horrors of a hateful, overbearing mother here, assigning most of the onscreen evil to the elderly Madame. The question is, was she evil enough for the task? Did she give you the proper psychobiddy tingles?

Britnee: I’m honored to be considered a hagsploitation expert and will immediately add that to my résumé. With such powerful performances from Bergman and Grant, it’s hard to focus on anyone else, but Madame Konstantin earns your attention. I’m always excited to spend time with a mean old lady who wears fancy dresses, so I was riveted during her scenes. Her cold, emotionless tone & face alone gave me the chills, along with her being Nazi trash. The scene where Alexander wakes her up to tell her the news about being married to an American agent was gold. Madame Sebastian is covered in satin sheets and lights up a cigarette with a devious smile before she starts calling the shots in a “Mommy knows best” sort of way. Alexander’s mommy issues were the icing on the cake for this thriller. It created a very eerie atmosphere, especially in the latter half of the film when we’re stuck in the oedipus mansion with a poisoned Alicia. I got goosebumps when Madame Sebastian appeared in that creepy black dress while Devlin was rescuing Alicia from their evil clutches. Once again, this is more evidence that elderly women with horrible hair make wonderful villains, and Hitchcock knew it. He may just be the godfather of hagsploitation.

Lagniappe

Britnee: Notorious was made into a 5-act opera that premiered in Sweden in 2015. From the clips I’ve stumbled upon, it looks absolutely amazing!

Boomer: I’m embarrassed to admit how late in my life I learned that Isabella Rossellini is Ingrid Bergman’s daughter (this year!). I’ve seen Bergman in a couple of other flicks since learning this, but Notorious is the one in which I see the most direct ties to her daughter. Even though this one comes after Gaslight and Casablanca, both of which I have seen in abundance just as I have Notorious, her accent here is perhaps at its most undisguised. There are moments throughout where I can almost hear Rossellini speaking through her mother, as the more senior actress’s pronunciation here is the most like her daughter’s.

Brandon: Bergman’s intro in the opening sequence is magnificently badass. Who could help falling for a cop-hating lush with a death wish and a sparkly top that exposes her midriff? The fabulously talented pervert that he is, Hathcock puts just as much effort into establishing her character in this opening sequence as he does shooting the espionage payoffs in the final act. The hair-in-eyes effects shot while she’s drunk-driving is one of his great flourishes of camera trickery, and it’s immediately followed up by extreme, twisty Dutch angles from her POV while she sees the room spinning in bed, failing to sober up. As far as noir’s great femmes fatales go, I can only think of one ferocious character intro that outpaces Bergman’s here: Ann Savage’s relentless viciousness in Edward G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945). And even she was meant to be seen as less loveable than she was, uh, savage.

Next month: Britnee presents Babycakes (1989)

-The Swampflix Crew

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League – Gods and Monsters (2015)

June 5, 2024June 5, 2024 / swampflix / 5 Comments

It would be very easy for this film’s setting, in which we see a “different” or “morally inverted/skewed” twist on the Justice League, to be very tired at this point. We’ve had good heroes framed as evil, seen a true hero face off against a team of morally questionable “heroes” who act as his foil(s), and visited both an alternate dimension with evil versions of our heroes and an alternate timeline with morally “unchained” versions of our heroes. I’ve seen part of the big Crisis on Infinite Earths animated film that DC is currently in the process of releasing at this very moment, and spoiler alert, we’re not out of the woods yet. Surprisingly, by going full “Elseworlds” with this one, it feels fresh and inventive, rather than like we’re trodding all-too-familiar ground.

In the world of Justice League: Gods and Monsters, the titular team is composed of only three people: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Except that this Wonder Woman isn’t Diana, Princess of Themyscira or Paradise Island, but a humanoid extraterrestrial warrior woman named Bekka who hails from the planet of New Genesis. Batman isn’t Bruce Wayne, but is instead Dr. Kirk Langstrom, who appears in the comics and its adaptations as B-tier (if you’re feeling generous) Batman villain Man-Bat, a giant bat creature who was once a man. Here, Langstrom is reimagined as a kind of vampiric anti-hero in the vein of Morbius. Superman is still the last son of Krypton, but we eschew the traditional baby-in-the-space-bulrushes story, and instead Jor-El and Lara are just going to dump some DNA into a rocket and send off a theoretical child they neither know nor love, like in Man of Steel. At the last moment, however, General Zod storms into the laboratory and sticks his finger into the machine (not a euphemism), so that the child that arrives after space gestation is genetically his and Lara’s son. Upon reaching the earth, instead of being discovered by the Kents, who are able to adopt the space child and hide his spaceship on their farm, he is instead first discovered by migrant workers who must flee from government agents, causing this Superman to grow up with no knowledge of his heritage while the government has possession of his pod and access to its technology.

It’s an interesting set-up that allows us to actually examine who these characters are, how they maintain relationships with each other and people on the outside, and how we perceive them as icons through a new lens, darkly. Superman (Benjamin Bratt) here has a more complicated relationship with humanity at large, and at one point idly comments that it might be easier to enforce peace through conquest. Is this a matter of nature or nurture? If it’s the latter, is it possible that there is some genetic predisposition toward egomania that he inherited from his militaristic father? If it’s nurture, is this the result of his identity being deliberately kept from him, or perhaps the result of more direct interaction with the ineptitude (and danger) of the status quo, having seen the way that the American government and people treated his undocumented adopted parents? His relationship with Lois Lane (Paget Brewster) is more adversarial here, and that’s a lot of fun to watch. Like mainstream Wonder Woman, Bekka (Tamara Taylor) is royalty, but instead of coming to “man’s world” as an ambassador of peace, she’s a refugee with nowhere to go after entering into an arranged marriage that was secretly an assassination/coup plot by her father. She’s carrying around a greater burden than Wonder Woman normally does, but she’s nonetheless still paired with Steve Trevor (Tahmoh Penikett) who is now the liaison between President Amanda Waller (Penny Johnson Jerald!) and the League.

As with most things in DC animation, however, Batman is still the star of the show. Michael C. Hall brings a lot of gravitas and pathos to Kirk Langstrom, which is good news, since he’s in a “these super scientists all knew each other in college and there was a terrible accident” plot. The film has to have a pretty strong emotional center if you’re aiming for a demographic that, if they’re at all interested in your product, has probably already seen this exact thing lampooned on The Venture Brothers; I’ve never seen Dexter, so my primary Hall touchpoint is Six Feet Under, and there’s a lot of the vulnerability and introversion that Hall brought to David Fisher there that’s coming through in this performance, perhaps making it slightly better than it has a right to be. See, he was one of the hand-picked graduates of a select group of students overseen by this world’s benevolent(ish) Lex Luthor (Jason Isaacs), although he’s only really remained close to his former best bud and nanomachine specialist Will Magnus (C. Thomas Howell) and Will’s wife Tina (Grey Griffin). Flashbacks to their college days reveal that Tina was always more in love with Kirk than Will, but that the former’s aloofness meant that she found herself in the arms of the latter, although Kirk’s social awkwardness partially stems from his desperate need to find a cure for a wasting disease with which he is afflicted. He’s researching the use of bat plasma, naturally, and when he hits upon the idea of incorporating Will’s research into his own as a hybrid treatment, they put their heads together on it, resulting in the unfortunate Hero Dracula state in which Kirk now finds himself.

The backstory of all three characters takes up a good portion of this film’s runtime, but it never feels expositional. This also means that the main plot of the film is cut down to the bare essentials, which does wonders for the pacing. It’s essentially a mystery story, as we see several other members of the Luthor special program for geniuses killed off by dark, unrecognizable creatures. When the third of these murders occur, it becomes clear that someone is attempting to frame the Justice League for these killings by mimicking their powers and/or fighting techniques. What is “Project Fairplay,” and what does it have to do with the murders? And why take the extra step of making it seem like the Justice League has crossed the moral event horizon? It’s an effective little mystery, probably the first time that one of these movies has attempted a superwhodunit and managed to succeed, with multiple twists that lead up to the big reveal.

It’s also worth noting that Gods and Monsters is done in the artistic style of Bruce Timm, which is to say that it echoes the design aesthetics of Batman: The Animated Series and its associated properties, including Justice League and Justice League: Unlimited. What’s interesting about that is that one of the occasional complaints about those series was that the character designs were too static, specifically that it could be hard to tell the difference between characters when they were unmasked, and that all the female characters in particular were almost identical. I didn’t bring it up in Batman vs. Robin, but that inability to differentiate between characters is becoming an issue over in that ongoing franchise. The big reveal scene of Talon’s identity in that movie (and that he was sleeping with Bruce’s love interest) was completely undercut by the fact that, with the shadowing choices used in the scene to evoke the light of a city skyline at night meant that I initially thought we were finding out that Talon was Nightwing, since they had the exact same jawline, cheekbones, and haircut. Later scenes in normal lighting reveal that he’s a brunet, which helps us tell them apart from that point on in the film when they are out of costume, but that’s not the kind of character modeling you want in an animated film. Here, even though they have the same hair color and are in a lot of scenes together during their college flashbacks, even in the relatively simplified Bruce Timm style, Magnus and Langstrom have sufficiently different features that it’s never an issue, and that’s worth praising here. It’s a small thing, but it’s important.

I enjoyed this one as a nice, refreshing break, and as an interesting spin on the whole “through a lens, darkly” thing that shows us our characters in a different context. The animation style feels like coming home after a long time away, and the plot zips along at a great pace between legitimately interesting backstory reveals. This one gets an unequivocal recommendation.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman vs. Robin (2015)

May 29, 2024May 29, 2024 / swampflix / 2 Comments

In this follow-up to Son of Batman, the titular Batman and son butt heads over (sigh) the use of deadly force. It’s more complicated than that this time around, luckily, but that’s once again the dead horse we’re beating, still. It was hard to get my enthusiasm up for this one, since it not only features Damian, whom I’m mostly apathetic about, but also introduces the Court of Owls, a Gotham secret society introduced shortly after I stopped reading comics and which I don’t find particularly interesting. This ended up being a bit more interesting than expected, though, and helped me push through.

The film opens with Batman (Jason O’Mara) following Robin/Damian (Stuart Allen) to the hideout of the evil Dollmaker (Weird Al(!)), where the latter has traced a series of kidnappings. The ten-year-old Boy Wonder has impulsively gone ahead and forced Batman to follow him instead of going together. By the time he catches up, he starts freeing the children while his son and sidekick pursues Dollmaker, leaving an opportunity for the mysterious Talon (Jeremy Sisto) to introduce himself (mysteriously, of course), give Damian a little speech about how murder is sometimes necessary, and then kill Dollmaker, leaving the scene so that it appears Damian did it. Bruce is quick to believe that this is the case, even if Alfred (David McCallum) and Dick/Nightwing (Sean Maher) are more willing to believe the boy. Alfred, rather irresponsibly, fiddles with the home security system to allow Robin the chance to go roaming about the city at night—remember, trained assassin or not, he is ten—which allows Talon to continue to try and lure the kid to the dark side. For his part, Bruce isn’t doing such a hot job at being a father, given that he hasn’t even mentioned Damian to the woman that he’s currently dating, Samantha (Grey DeLisle), let alone introduced them, and he’s having a hard time adjusting to suddenly being a father. Luckily, this leads easily into flashbacks to his own childhood, including his hearing about a secret society known as “the Court of Owls” that rule Gotham from the shadows, and his father’s gentle bedtime promises that there was no such thing. In the present, it’s clear that they do, and that they’re pulling some strings; in fact, their Grandmaster is unwittingly working away at him from two angles, as the Court is attempting to flush out Batman before he can end their criminal activities and court (no pun intended) Bruce Wayne into joining their ranks after his father had rejected them decades before. Talon is their enforcer, and his loyalty is based upon their promise to make him into one of their immortal soldiers (with the caveat that they haven’t really perfected the process, and it seems to always be a little bit of a failure).

The fight scenes in this one are pretty good, which is always true, but there’s a little more variety in this outing. There’s sparring earlier on between Damian and other characters, and it’s fine and all, but there’s a clear difference in the body language of the characters later in the film when Damian has gone rogue. In his first fight with Batman, it’s clear that Bruce is just trying to let his son tire himself out with his spin kicks and acrobatics so that he doesn’t actually have to punch his child in the face, but eventually realizes he’s going to have to, and that was sufficiently dynamic visually that it’s worth noting upon. The big invasion of Wayne Manor by the Court’s “Owls” made for a satisfactory climactic set piece, albeit I’m very bored with Batmechs, I can tell you that much. What really makes this one stand out is Bruce getting dosed with hallucinogenic gas; he basically has a bad acid trip in which he foresees Damian becoming a killer, wearing the cape and cowl, and that makes him want to be a better father. In his hallucination, the child version of himself/Damian (their similarity to one another having previously been underscored by using the same character model with different eye colors in the earlier film is carried over into this one) tells him that, in his grief, he had allowed himself to become little better than the “dark forces” that killed his parents, and that his unwillingness to listen to his son would cause Damian to become something even worse.

These movies are rarely this psychologically mature or complex, so I like that what drives the emotional story for the two main adult characters here, Talon and Bruce, is what each of them is projecting about themselves onto Damian. You know Batman’s backstory, and Talon’s is a kind of dark mirror of both Bruce’s and Damian’s. An orphan like Bruce, Talon was taken in by a thief who taught him how the finer points of burglary in a kind of criminal reflection of Bruce’s mentorship of Dick and Damian, but Talon was mercilessly beaten for his failures. This led to him becoming a vigilante as an adult as well, but under the guidance of the Court of Owls, his activity always has the flavor of violent vengeance, while Bruce (ostensibly) values justice over revenge. Bruce hallucinates Damian as a mass-murderer on an unimaginable scale because he fears this darkness in himself. Talon, for his part, sees a great deal of himself in Damian, and perhaps also sees the possibility of making up for what was done to him, turning the boy into a killer like himself but also making sure that the generational abusive trauma stops with him, as twisted as that might be. When it becomes the best option for the Court’s end goals to kill Damian, Talon ultimately refuses, looking into the boy’s face and seeing his own, just as Bruce had, and being unwilling to continue the cycle of violence, revolting against the Court instead. The ultimate conflict comes down to two different men projecting their traumas onto a little boy, and what they do when that trigger is brushed. It’s thoughtful, and elevates this one a little bit over some others in this franchise.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Bonus Features: Torch Song Trilogy (1988)

May 24, 2024May 24, 2024 / swampflix / 2 Comments

Our current Movie of the Month, 1988’s Torch Song Trilogy, is Harvey Fierstein’s big-screen adaptation of his own stage play about a drag queen’s life, loves, and heartbreaks in 1970s New York. The film’s greatest accomplishments lie less in its queer political advocacy than they lie in its dramatic approximation of a full, authentic life for Fierstein’s protagonist – something gay men were rarely afforded onscreen at the time, even the cis white ones. By all accounts, the original stage play version of Torch Song Trilogy approximated an even fuller, more authentic record of gay life in 1970s NYC, since it was twice as long as its movie adaptation. One of the producers’ only contractual obligations for Fierstein’s screenplay was that the movie could be no longer than two hours, which meant a lot of tough-choice editing of a play that ran for four. Instead of narrowing in on a few key moments in his life (through the fictional avatar of Arnold Beckoff), Fierstein decided to maintain the full breadth of the play’s story for most of the runtime, so that an inopportune bathroom break means that you could miss a half-decade of love & loss.

Torch Song Trilogy was unique but not alone in its no-big-deal dramatization of everyday gay life for a 1980s audience. In general, independent filmmaking was a relatively robust industry in that era, which means there were plenty of gay filmmakers in that era who were eager to flesh out representation for their own demographic on the big screen. If you’re curious to see other 1980s dramas about gay life in the big city, here are a few more titles to check out in addition to our Movie of the Month.

Buddies (1985)

Torch Song Trilogy is notably one of the few gay 80s classics that doesn’t touch the communal devastation of AIDS, since it’s set before the darkest days of the epidemic. It opens with a shot of a graveyard at the outskirts of New York City that visually acknowledges how cultural circumstances had changed between the film’s 1970s setting & 1980s production, but the mission of the story that follows is mostly to show an adult gay man living a full, healthy, normal life . . . filtered through the wry humor of Fierstein’s hyper-specific personality. Arthur J. Bressan’s 1985 landmark Buddies does not sidestep the horrors of its time in the same way, but it does take similar interest in fleshing out its central characters’ lives & personalities, so they don’t register only as statistics. The opening credits of Buddies scroll over a computer printout of deceased AIDS patients’ names to establish the scope of the illness’s death toll, but it then focuses on just two onscreen characters to humanize those names as full, real people. Everyone else with a speaking role is a disembodied voice, heard from just off-screen. The only people who matter are a man dying of AIDS-related health complications and a volunteer “Buddy” who’s been assigned to keep him company after he’s been left to die alone by family & friends.

Self-billed as “the first dramatic feature about the AIDS crisis”, Buddies has all of the furious politics of a Tongues Untied presented with the endearing tenderness of a Torch Song Trilogy, almost cleanly split between its only two onscreen characters. Geoff Edholm stars as the dying man: a gay-rights activist whose commitment to communal advocacy proved to be no match to his community’s fear of transmission in the early, hazy days of AIDS research. David Schachter is his assigned, volunteer buddy: a shy assimilationist who’s content to live a quiet domestic life with his boyfriend without any public acknowledgement of his sexuality. Through lengthy stage-play conversations voicing their opposing views, they reluctantly learn from each other and become vulnerably intimate despite their opposing politics and lifespan expectancy. It’s a painfully emotional watch, of course, especially after you learn that the actors’ real lives almost exactly mirrored the respective arcs of their characters. Bressan’s own personality as an auteur is also just as clearly visible in the picture as Fierstein’s in Torch Song Trilogy, given that his two central characters bond by watching his earlier films together in a hospital room (from the political activism documentary Gay U.S.A. to the age-gap porno Forbidden Letters) and that Bressan himself soon lost his life to the AIDS epidemic as well as Edholm.

Parting Glances (1986)

Released just one year after Buddies, 1986’s Parting Glances offers a tempered middle ground between Bressan’s confrontational politics and Fierstein’s heart-on-sleeve melodrama. Unlike Torch Song Trilogy, it does contend with the unignorable presence of AIDS in contemporary urban gay life, but unlike Buddies it relegates AIDS to being just one aspect of modern gay life, not the totality of it. Steve Buscemi plays the HIV+ character who bears the burden of that vital representation: a new wave musician with a once bustling social life who’s been shunned by his own community out of knee-jerk fear & stigma. He remains defiantly playful & energetic despite being treated as if he were already dead by his chosen family, quipping his way through cramped-apartment cocktail parties and video-art recordings of his will. Curiously, though, he is not the main character of the film; that designation belongs to his happily-coupled bestie who lives the quiet, assimilated domestic life that Fierstein craves in Torch Song Trilogy and Schacter starts to question in Buddies. Both characters bounce their understandably jaded world views off friends, neighbors, and potential sexual partners while hopping around NYC social spaces, living a full life. The contrast in the way they’re received by that community is drastically different, though, depending on their disclosed HIV status.

I may not have spent decades living in the big city like Harvey Fierstein, but I can name at least two things that were beautiful in 1980s NYC: the independent filmmaking scene and Steve Buscemi. Parting Glances can’t help but feel a little restrained watching it so soon after its more confrontational precedent in Buddies, but every scene featuring Buscemi as a defiantly sardonic man with AIDS is electric. It says a lot that he’s not the main character but he’s the only face on the poster, affording the film the kind of strong, singular personality Fierstein impressed on Torch Song Trilogy and Bressan impressed on Buddies. Like with Buddies, its open, honest discussion of AIDS during the violent silence of the Reagan regime only gets heavier knowing the history of the artists involved who also died of AIDS-related illnesses, including promising young director & playwright Bill Sherwood in this case, who did not live to make another film.

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

Believe it or not, not all urban gay life in the 1980s was confined to New York City. They even had gay men across the pond back then, as dramatized in 1985’s My Beautiful Laundrette. While gay men in America were fighting to survive Reagan, gay men in England were fighting to survive Thatcher, and the cultural circumstances on either side of that divide were remarkably similar. So, My Beautiful Laundrette has to dig a little deeper into cultural specifics in order to stand out among gay independent cinema of its era, notably doing so here as the only film on this list with a non-white lead (albeit a closeted one). Gordon Warnecke stars as a young Pakistani man who works his way up his uncle’s small-scale crime network until he can carve out a money-maker of his own by running one of the mobsters’ few legitimate businesses: a kitschy, old-school laundromat. In order to help with the day-to-day operations (and to manufacture opportunities to have sex in the back office), he employs a childhood friend & potential future lover played by Daniel Day Lewis, who has betrayed their intimate bond by joining the ranks of some racist, fascist street punks.

My Beautiful Laundrette takes so long to establish its premise that you forget you’re watching a Gay Movie until the leads start making out. Decades later, it still feels remarkable to see a drama that treats that identity marker as background texture instead of it informing every single character decision & line of dialogue. There were infinite hurdles to surviving Thatcher; being a gay man was just one of them. In that way, this is the film that best lives up to Torch Song Trilogy‘s presumed mission to depict a gay character with a full, fulfilling life. It’s not exactly a healthy life, though, given that he has to navigate the racism of his community, the homophobic violence of the crime world, and his own internal questions of identity as a second-generation immigrant whose family hates the “little island” where they’ve raised him. That doesn’t mean the movie is shy about his sexuality though. If anything, it has the hottest sexual dynamics of any film listed here, with Daniel Day Lewis’s punk reprobate licking his employer’s neck, spitting champagne into his mouth, and playing into a class-divide role play dynamic that touches on all of the film’s hot-wire political issues at once.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League – Throne of Atlantis (2015)

May 22, 2024May 22, 2024 / swampflix / 1 Comment

It’s been a bit since our heroes first met and all of that during Justice League: War, and they’re not exactly keeping in touch. When a U.S. submarine carrying nuclear warheads is sunk, Cyborg is tasked with investigating, and as he examines the wreckage, he uncovers that the nukes have been stolen, before he is attacked by unseen enemies. Back at headquarters, he manages to get the team to assemble to watch a holographic recreation of his investigation, which reveals the form of his assailants; Wonder Woman recognizes them as the sea-dwelling Atlanteans. Elsewhere, new character Arthur Curry is drinking his grief over his recently deceased father at a seaside bar and expositing about his woes to a lobster in a tank. When said crustacean is selected to be another patron’s dinner, this escalates to an altercation in which Arthur finds himself squaring off against four other men, and emerging victorious – even having an attempted stabbing fail as the blade breaks in his attacker’s hand. This is reported to Queen Atlanna, the widowed ruler of Atlantis and Arthur’s mother, who sends her lieutenant Mera to bring Arthur home. As the child of two worlds—Atlantis and the surface—she hopes that his ascension to the throne will build a bridge of peaceful coexistence. Unfortunately, her younger son Orm has his sights set on becoming king, and he’s willing to fly as many false flags as needed (and commit matricide) to get there.

After a little bit of a rocky start, this franchise is operating like a well-oiled machine at this point: functional and reliable. And when we’re talking about machinery, that’s what we’re hoping for: that our car starts when we’re ready to go somewhere, that our coffee mugs and spoons come out of the dishwasher free of debris, that our oscillating fans both fan and oscillate. We don’t really pay attention to those things until the car doesn’t start, your drinking glasses have crud on them, or you wake up in the middle of the night and you’ve sweat through your pillow (again). There’s nothing bad to say about Throne of Atlantis, but I’m trying to think of adjectives other than “serviceable” and “adequate.” I didn’t see the live-action Aquaman (I have my limits), but I’m positive it’s better than that – no offense to Nicole Kidman, who I’m sure had a bit of fun and could hardly be bothered to care about the film’s reception in this here swamp.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing that stands out. Mera’s “hard water” powerset is fun and is used in a lot of fun ways, and her slaying of swathes of enemy combatants and sea monsters of approximate sapience is fun to watch, especially given how grisly it is. There’s a Lovecraftian monster down in the deeps that our heroes have to fight; that’s pretty neat. Arthur even gets to throw in a declaration of “Outrageous,” which was the catchphrase of Aquaman in The Brave and the Bold, the characterization that, alongside his appearances on Justice League, credited with “saving” the character from the sillier version of him that appeared in Superfriends and became the primary image of him in pop culture. If you cared about that fact, you would probably already know it, but heaven help me if I don’t mention it. The humor mostly lands, especially with regards to Hal Jordan’s ongoing rivalry with Batman; in this one, he responds to the Caped Crusader’s delay in responding to a memo by going straight to Gotham and helping him take down the goons he’s tailing, except now he’s ruined the fifth step in a ten step investigation with his showboating. These little character touches are what are most pleasant about these films overall, and is the thing that most makes them feel worthwhile.

This one’s good. It’s not going to be anybody’s favorite (other than dyed-in-the-wool Aquafans), but it’s violent, colorful, funny, and seventy-two minutes long.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – Assault on Arkham (2014)

May 15, 2024May 15, 2024 / swampflix / 1 Comment

For the first time since Superman: Unbound, we’ve got one of these movies that’s not part of the “DCAMU.” It’s not untethered from a pre-existing continuity altogether, however, as this one is, for all intents and purposes, deliberately invoked synergy between the animated direct-to-video films and the Batman: Arkham video game franchise. I’m not really familiar with those; I played through about 20% of the first game, decided it wasn’t really the kind of gameplay that I’m into, and never really returned to it. They’re popular games, critically and commercially, but I’m just not that into that much sneaking and stealthing. With that admission, I have no idea how this movie is supposed to fit into that continuity (Wikipedia has that covered for you, if you’re interested), and if there’s something I’m supposed to be annoyed about here because it contradicts this or that here and there, you’ve come to the wrong place for that bit of criticism. But as you can already tell from the star rating above, this one turned out a lot better than the last couple of times the studio plopped out a cross-promotional tie-in.

The Riddler (Matthew Gray Gubler) is up to shenanigans, and Amanda Waller (CCH Pounder) has one of her black ops teams on murder duty, but Batman (Kevin Conroy) takes care of the situation and remands Riddler back to Arkham Asylum. This prompts Waller to put together—you guessed it—a Suicide Squad, to infiltrate the facility and reclaim a thumb drive in Riddler’s cane. Her recruits are Deadshot (Neal McDonough), Captain Boomerang (Greg Ellis), Black Spider (Giancarlo Esposito), King Shark (John DiMaggio), and Killer Frost (Jennifer Hale). Oh, and Harley Quinn (Hynden Walch), of course, and our sacrificial goon who gets his head blown off to prove Waller’s sincerity to the others is KGBeast, if you’re playing bingo at home. Harley lets herself get caught and taken to Arkham as part of the infiltration plan, but things are complicated by the fact that she and a thoroughly locked-down Joker end up interacting. This triggers her rage and ends up with her attempting to shoot him through the holes in his Hannibal Lecter-esque cell, which is only effective insofar as creating a tear on the inside of his cell that will allow him to escape later. There are plans within plans, of course, as one or more of the draftees may be there to “take care” of Riddler, and their competing agendas mean that there are going to be some changing loyalties throughout.

This isn’t a Batman movie – not really. I’m not all that shocked that this falls under the “Batman” label, however, and not just because it’s extended universe (sigh) stuff for the Arkham games. There are (roughly) 52 of these, as noted in the introduction, and within those titles, “Wonder Woman” appears all of twice (3.8%), “Superman” ten times (19.2%), and “Justice League” thirteen times (25%). “Batman” appears in twenty titles (38.5%), and that’s all down to the fact that WB marketing knows what side of the batbread is batbuttered. Batman is around but this isn’t about him. This is a Suicide Squad movie, through and through, with a plot that, in some ways, both presages the much-maligned 2016 feature and pre-emptively improves upon it. There’s bound to be character overlap, of course, but the premise of this one is a lot more sensible; instead of sending a crew of mostly-mortal criminals who happen to have good aim to try and stop a magical apocalypse, here we’ve got a few different skill sets that are tasked to work together to pull off a heist, and some of them also have “assassination” in their specific dossier. When he does appear, Batman is working his own parallel investigation that periodically overlaps or interacts with the Squad pulling an Ocean’s to get into a vault.

As when she voiced the character before in Public Enemies, Pounder once again proves that she was born to play Waller, although the character is reduced to being a bit more one-note and villainous than more nuanced portrayals since, in case you forgot, this is a video game tie-in. Walch is fun as Harley Quinn, who’s played comedically in this deadly serious world, which makes for a nice touch. Other characters get in on it, too, with the odd romance that grows between Killer Frost and King Shark drawing a few chuckles. Shark himself looks a lot like Venture Bros. character Baron Underbheit, which adds to the comedy, and when his head explodes, it seems that direct visual inspiration is taken from the goombas in the Super Mario Bros. movie. It’s a tad obvious from the outset that Joker will escape from his cell and complicate the plan, but there’s a lot of real tension in the helicopter escape scene. All of the fight scenes are decent, and the animation is nice and fluid.

There should be no mistaking; this is a product first and a creative endeavor last, but it’s a product of good quality that ticks off all the right boxes. Conroy is Batman, forever (no pun intended) and always. If you’re looking for a fun little Suicide Squad story, this is well above the median. And the breakout scene where all of the villains get to show off a little is fun. There are worse Suicide Squads out there, even if this one only exists to milk a few extra dollars out of fans of the game series.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Swampflix

New Orleans film blog & podcast

Lists & Articles

Quick Takes: Summertime Drama

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League vs. Teen Titans (2016)

Lynch in Limbo, Culture in Decline

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – Bad Blood (2016)

Movie of the Month: Notorious (1946)

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League – Gods and Monsters (2015)

The Not-So-New 52: Batman vs. Robin (2015)

Bonus Features: Torch Song Trilogy (1988)

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League – Throne of Atlantis (2015)

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – Assault on Arkham (2014)