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Bonus Features: A Place in the Sun (1951)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1951’s A Place in the Sun, is a high-emotions noir about a desperate social climber who drowns his pregnant girlfriend so she doesn’t get in the way of his wealthier, prettier romantic prospect.  In essence, it’s an epic-fuckboy melodrama about the moral crimes young men were willing to commit for the chance to be with Elizabeth Taylor.  She was the most marriageable woman of all time, after all, apparently lethally so.  At the time, Taylor was just starting to make the transition from child star to adult romantic lead, and A Place in the Sun doesn’t ask her to do much other than to look elegant while modeling classic gowns designed by Edith Head.  Most of the film’s more serious brooding is left to Taylor’s costars Montgomery Clift & Shelley Winters as the factory-worker couple who’re undone by her natural glamor. 

Elizabeth Taylor’s onscreen transformation into a convincingly mature actress did not begin & end with A Place in the Sun.  It was a gradual rebranding over several projects under her studio-system contract with MGM.  If you’re curious to track her progress through this transitional era, here are a few more titles to check out in addition to our Movie of the Month.

Conspirator (1949)

Elizabeth Taylor’s first role as an adult character was co-lead of the Cold War espionage thriller Conspirator, starring opposite Robert Taylor.  Elizabeth plays Robert’s 18-year-old bride but was only 16 at the time of shooting, while her co-star was more than double her age, in his late 30s.  That might sound like a gross, old-fashioned approach to Old Hollywood romance—and maybe it is—but it’s at least acknowledged & addressed in the text.  Elizabeth plays a young, bratty teenager who has no business getting married, while Robert plays a Soviet spy posing as a British officer who’s attracted to her because she’s naive and easy to manipulate.  There’s some sly humor to the way the pair star in entirely separate movies for the first half of Conspirator.  Elizabeth is playing girlish, flirty games while Robert is plotting to subvert the Western Bloc, often undermined by his young wife’s immature antics.  That tension slowly deflates once the bride is fully clued into her husband’s true allegiances, but the path to that reveal is more fun than you might expect.

Of course, the teenage Taylor radiates pure movie star glamor in this otherwise mediocre Red Scare noir — the same natural glamor that she echoes in the soon-to-come A Place in the Sun.  There’s something incredibly charming about her character’s insistence on being treated like an adult, while also being too scared to sleep alone during thunderstorms and waiting around like a puppy for her crush to call on the telephone.  Conspirator is far from her best onscreen work, but it is a clear marker of her transition into being seen as an adult by her audience, almost to the point of it being her character’s arc.  In a third-act argument with her Filthy Commie husband, he remarks, “You’ve grown up, haven’t you?”, and she spits back “You can’t lie to me anymore, if that’s what you mean.”  The couple’s age gap may make for an uncomfortable pairing, but the movie clearly knows what it’s doing with it; the paranoid anti-Communist politics on the other hand . . .

Father of the Bride (1950)

Vincent Minnelli’s original adaptation of the 1949 novel Father of the Bride is just as bubbly & fluffy as its later adaptations in Norah Ephron’s 1991 version and the most recent straight-to-HBO-Max remake.  Like in A Place in the Sun, Taylor isn’t asked to do much in the picture besides look elegant in her couture gowns, this time including an iconic wedding dress (that ironically telegraphs of her many tabloid-covered weddings decades down the line).  Most of the film’s psychological grit defaults to the titular father (Spencer Tracy), who narrates his neurotic breakdown as he watches Daddy’s Little Girl prepare to walk down the wedding aisle, struggling to reconcile how he sees her vs her actual, adult autonomy.  In that way, it’s a perfect role for the teenaged Taylor, who was asking audiences to stop looking at her like a little girl and start seeing her as an adult.  It’s also a strange, upsetting reflection of macho insecurities lurking just under the surface of every American dad’s Neanderthalic skull.

The 1950 Father of the Bride might be light-hearted fluff, but it’s still high-quality fluff when compared to the mawkish sentimentality of its two remakes.  At the very least, its surrealistic nightmare sequence in which Tracy sinks into the floor while walking Taylor down the aisle is the high-water mark for the series as visual art.  More importantly, there’s something about the promo shots of Tracy spanking Taylor in her wedding dress that gets to the core of this series’ Suburban Dad Psychosis more than anything that happens in the actual films.  This is fundamentally a comedy about how fathers infantilize their daughters for as long as they can get away with it, so there’s something apt about casting a young actor who was pleading to no longer be infantilized by her audience as a child star.

Giant (1956)

Taylor didn’t fully come into her own as a lead actor playing adult characters until she reunited with A Place in the Sun director George Stevens for the sprawling Texas family drama Giant.  Specifically, it happens about halfway into the epic melodrama, just when my borrowed library DVD prompted me to flip the disc over to Side B.  In the first 100 minutes on Side A, Taylor plays a defiant but romantic teenager who’s swept off her feet by a Texas cattle rancher (Rock Hudson), only to discover that her handsome, charming husband is also a raging racist & misogynist in most social settings, as is the way of his home state.  At the start of Side B, she’s shown knitting in the family parlor, her hair pasted grey for an unconvincing geriatric stage-drama effect.  Decades into her marriage to an old-fashioned, uptight cowboy, she’s still a progressive do-gooder who challenges his Conservative views on women and the Mexican servant class every chance she gets, which means she has a lot more to chew on here than she has in Conspirator, Father of the Bride, or even A Place in the Sun.  Giant is the kind of well-meaning, anti-racist drama that’s just old & creaky enough to undercut its point by casting white actors in brownface for the minor roles, but it’s still surprisingly left of center for a studio production of this epic scale, and Taylor is the main mouthpiece for its political messaging.

I’m tempted to pitch Giant as what might happen if Douglas Sirk guest-directed a season of Yellowstone, but the existence of Sirk’s Written on the Wind (released the same year, also starring Hudson) makes that comparison somewhat redundant.  Stevens was a formidable contemporary of Sirk’s, but there’s nothing especially stylish or personal about his filmmaking craft that makes Giant more essential viewing than Written on the Wind or Imitation of Life, which combine to cover a lot of the same thematic territory.  He was a talented workman director within the studio system, most reliable for his ability to manage large-scale productions without them spiraling out of control.  It’s not a flashy, auteurist approach to directing, but it does allow for the Old Hollywood dream factory to do its work at peak efficiency.  If nothing else, Giant is worth seeing for the spectacle of its cast.  It almost seems impossible that a single movie could gather Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Carroll Baker, Dennis Hopper and Sal Mineo all in one picture, but when you stretch your runtime out 3.5 hours and your setting over multiple decades, you have the space for that kind of feat.  Taylor & Hudson are the white-hot center of the drama, though, and they’re the main reason to clear an evening to watch it in full.  When Hudson first spots a teenage Taylor on her family farm, she’s riding a wild, misbehaved horse and he absentmindedly calls her a “beautiful animal” in a way that equates the two.  Years into their marriage, that wild streak never fades, and the adult version of Taylor’s character is given plenty open land to run free and buck Texas social conventions, to her husband’s fury & frustration.  It was a career-making role for her, one that cleared a path to the even juicier roles in Tennessee Williams & Edward Albee adaptations that were just over the horizon. 

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League — The Flashpoint Paradox (2013)

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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. 

Well … it’s come to this. This feature takes its name from the 2011 reboot of DC comics, The New 52, and if you’ve learned anything from reading these “issues,” it’s that each reboot of the comics requires a “crisis” event in order to reset everything and create a new, “fresh” jumping on point. For The New 52, that crisis was called Flashpoint, and it involved Barry Allen’s version of The Flash traveling back in time to prevent the death of his mother, only to return to a present so altered from his experience that things are worse for everyone else. Sure, his mom is alive in the present, but his wife is married to and has had children with another man, he is without his powers, and several key players in the ongoing preservation of mankind are absent or so altered that they are barely recognizable. If this sounds familiar to you, then maybe you read this comic, or maybe you watched the third season of CW’s The Flash, which adapted parts of this story, or you saw the disastrous Warner Bros release of The Flash last year, which also featured parts of this plot. For something so recent, it’s been picked apart and reused in quite a few adaptational ways. And hey – that’s fine! The source material isn’t the problem with this movie, it’s just that I hate the animation in this one, and I really despise that this was the first step in DC’s attempt to create a more interconnected universe (sigh) among these DTV features, which had heretofore been standalones or duologies. You see, this is the first film in the “DC Animated Movie Universe™,” and that series will encompass sixteen of the next twenty-four of these movies, with up to three or four of them being released in succession before they throw in the occasional standalone to break things up. I have a feeling we’ll be desperate for them when the time comes. On your mark, get set, I guess. 

We open with a brief prologue in which we establish the relationship between child Barry Allen and his mother, including her teaching him the so-called “serenity prayer” as a kind of proverb, followed by him discovering her murdered body after school one day. From this, we transition to present day, where Barry (Justin Chambers), accompanied by his wife Iris (Jennifer Hale), leaves flowers on his mother’s grave and says that he wishes he could have been fast enough to save her that day; Iris reminds him that he was only a boy, and if he had gotten home any earlier, it’s likely that he would have been murdered as well. This discussion is interrupted by news that several of Flash’s rogues have gathered at the Flash Museum in order to destroy his legacy; he arrives to face off against the Top, Mirror Master, Heat Wave, and Captains Boomerang and Cold. He handles them all with relative ease until the arrival of Eobard Thawne (C. Thomas Howell), aka the Reverse Flash, who manages to cement him onto a wall and attach a bomb to him. He also reveals that he’s put bombs on all of the other rogues present, and that’s when the rest of the Justice League arrive, and boy oh boy, are they ugly as shit. Their proportions are all out of whack in a way that I think is aiming to be anime-esque but is really just hideous. I mean, look at Superman here: 

His insignia is three times the width of his face, and his shoulders are 8.5 times as wide as the widest part of his jawline. For comparison, when drawing the human figure in proportion, most artistic instruction tells the artist to draw the shoulder line as twice the length of the height of the head, or three times as wide. Superman’s shoulders here are almost double that, at 3.75 times his head height and 6.92 times his head width. I know that some of this is a matter of artistic license or preference, but I would prefer not to look at this; it’s fucking hideous. If we’re being charitable, we can say that this is probably to provide greater contrast to how emaciated and weak his alternate self will appear in the other timeline (spoiler alert), but I hate it, and it puts as much of a sour taste in my mouth about his new film “series” right from the get-go, both the first time I saw it and this time as well. 

Anyway, after they disarm the bombs and Thawne is taken into custody, he says some creepy shit and we head into the opening credits. When we re-emerge into the film proper, Barry wakes up at his desk to find that things are not quite as he remembered them; his boss asks him for an update on the case of the Elongated Kid being murdered rather than the Elongated Man, a TV news report shows a “Citizen” Cold fighting off Captain Boomerang at the Cold Museum, and oh, yeah, he doesn’t have his powers, and his mother is alive. He tries to tell his mom that he’s the Flash, but she doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about. Elsewhere, a more grizzled Batman (Kevin McKidd) has no problem using guns or throwing his enemies off of buildings to their deaths, although his attempted murder of a villainess is interrupted by Cyborg (Michael B. Jordan, wasted in this role). The younger hero attempts to recruit the Bat into joining the squad that the former is attempting to put together—and in so doing exposits the greater context of what’s happening in this new reality—in order to end the war between Atlantis, as led by Aquaman (Cary Elwes) and the Amazons, with Queen Diana (Vanessa Marshall) as their leader. These two plotlines intersect when Barry, desperate to find someone to help him figure everything out, slips into Wayne Manor, where he finds that this world’s Batman is Thomas Wayne, who became a vigilante when his young son was gunned down in an alley, rather than the other way around. From here, it’s all about figuring out how to get Barry’s powers back and set right what once went wrong. 

There’s fun to be wrung here from some of the little twists of fate and characterization on the darker side of the mirror. It’s so corny that Martha Wayne becomes the Joker in the same moment that Thomas decides to become Batman that it loops all the way back around to being kind of cool, actually. The idea of the “Shazam Kids,” a group of kids to all merge into one hero in the form of Captain Marvel/Shazam is also a neat little touch. Otherwise, though this is a real slog to get through. My problem with the animation isn’t just that the new character designs are awful (although they are, just terrible, really), but also that some of the designs that are clearly reused from other projects look bizarre alongside these bulging hulks; this is most noticeable with the contingent of Atlanteans who are clearly just copied over from Young Justice (Kaldur is especially obvious), who look like carefully carved Greek statues next to the blown-out Aquaman. It also looks cheap, and it has the unfortunate problem of looking cheaper the longer the movie goes on, as if they were running out of budget with every minute. The seams show most close to the end when a newly-repowered Barry is running at superspeed, and the figure of him running on screen looks like an incompletely rendered animatic, like they didn’t actually bother to give the animation team time to finish rendering the CG elements for the final release. One would think that, with the launch of a new ongoing film franchise following this movie that some of the budget would be spent on creating, for instance, a CGI running Flash that looks top-notch, so that they could then use that same model for future films in the series, but this just looks like shit. Furthermore, although it isn’t this film’s fault, both other adaptations of this story for TV and film include the fact that Barry sets out to save his mother from being killed as the catalyst for the plot, meaning that the mystery in this adaptation—who changed the past and why—is utterly moot if you’re coming to this film after interacting with either of those pieces of media. 

I hate this one, and it doesn’t even really need to exist. In a meta sense, I understand the impulse to make one last movie under the Warner Premier label (which dissolved in 2013 and was absorbed into Warner Bros Home Entertainment and Warner Bros Animation; the next film will be released with solely the latter in its production logos), and to find it clever to do a rebooting crisis as the finale. That doesn’t make me feel more fondly toward it, however. Almost all of these movies so far have been completely standalone, with no connection to one another. So what continuity do you need to reboot in order to start telling a new story from the ground up? None! Just start your DTV interconnected franchise with the next movie! There was no tract of land here that needed to be cleared to build a new house, just open space, and they stuck this hideous movie in here for no good reason.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Superman — Unbound (2013)

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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. 

Superman: Unbound is a breath of fresh air after what feels like way too many of these animated DC movies in a row that were centered around the morality of killing. Under the Red Hood had, as its central feature, that the Red Hood’s vendetta against Batman wasn’t because the latter let Jason Todd die, but because he let Jason’s killer, Joker, live. Superman vs. The Elite focused on the importance of Superman’s intractable moral code and how his rule that he never uses deadly force ensures that he is a benevolent force in contrast to the “modern” Elite. Dark Knight Returns has Batman’s refusal to break his no-killing rule in order to put Joker down for good also be a major plot point, as his almost doing so and then being framed for the Joker’s murder is the primary axis on which the second part turns. Although all of these movies were adaptations of source material that was spread out across decades of comics, having all of them adapted within such a short time was beginning to feel stale and uncreative. And that’s not even getting into the fact that the next film from this studio, Flashpoint Paradox, will also feature this as a plot point (in the form of an alternate timeline Batman who is willing to murder), it’s nice to get a break from that, if only for one movie. 

That Unbound is a little different is a nice change of pace, even if it creates a bit of a snarl regarding which of these movies are related to each other, which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, given how often this is a problem in the originating medium. Remember when we talked about Superman/Batman: Apocalypse, and how that was an adaptation of the “Supergirl from Krypton” story arc in that book that led into the 2005 relaunch of the Supergirl comic, which was itself created to reintroduce the character after the most recent reboot of the company’s continuity with 2005-6’s Infinite Crisis (not to be confused with 1986’s Crisis on Infinite Earths)? Long-running Superman foe Brainiac hadn’t been seen since that crossover event, and was reintroduced in 2008 with a storyline in the “Brainiac” storyline from Superman’s main comic, Action Comics, upon which Unbound is based. That comic plot heavily featured the involvement of the new Kara Zor-El Supergirl that we all now know and love, and threads left over from both “Supergirl from Krypton” and her own ongoing series are part of the “Brainaic” arc. So, to recap, this film is an adaptation of a storyline that follows closely upon and directly tied to the storyline that was adapted into Apocalypse, but Unbound is, for some reason, not a sequel to Apocalypse in its film form. It’s okay if you need to take a break or a drink after that, I promise. It’s not really relevant, but has to be mentioned because, in case you’ve never noticed, comic book pedantry is the lifeblood of the internet, where you’re reading this right now. 

Unbound opens in the middle of a hostage situation, as Lois Lane (Stana Katic) has been taken by armed men after volunteering to be their captive in lieu of other, less Superman-adjacent people who might otherwise be at higher risk, per her logic. It’s not him who comes to her assistance initially, however, as the first hero to arrive on scene is Supergirl (Molly Quinn), whose recent appearance in this fictional world is given some lip service based on the fact that Lane’s captors don’t recognize her. Superman (Matt Bomer) eventually arrives on the scene, and our unrelated-to-the-plot action cold open comes to a conclusion. Back at the offices of The Daily Planet, one of Lois’s co-workers hits on her piggishly while insinuating that he “knows” Clark and Lois aren’t together because there can be only one reason that Kent is forever disappearing without explanation and is ostensibly single despite being built like a brick house, and it starts with “in” and ends with “the closet.” Clark walks in while this is happening and uses his heat vision to cause the man to take a harmless but humiliating tumble out of his chair, which sets up our emotional conflict for this film: Clark and Lois are dating, she knows his secret identity, she does count on him to rescue her from terrorists but not the office misogynist, she thinks that there’s no reason to keep their relationship a secret while he keeps her at emotional arm’s length with that tired old canard about how their dating as civilians would somehow endanger her, and so on and so forth. 

As a side note, for each of these movies that has focused on Superman as the primary character (rather than just as a member of the Justice League), whether as a result of what source material is chosen for adaptation or through deliberate choice, the most traditional Clark/Lois relationships (she adores Superman and either sees Clark as just a friend or is obsessed with proving that he’s secretly the big blue boy scout) has either been excised or used as part of the narrative and then dismissed. In Doomsday, Lois and Superman are openly dating but he refuses to “come out” to her as Clark until the end of the film, when his (temporary) death at the hands of the titular villain put things into perspective for him. In Public Enemies, she’s absent completely, other than an unvoiced cameo at the end of the film, and she’s likewise not present in the entirety of Apocalypse. All Star Superman featured their relationship as a major part of the plot, with Superman and Lois having been an item for some time and him again “coming out” to her as Clark as he nears the end of his life. Most recently, in Superman vs. The Elite, their relationship was as intimate as it could be, with her already being aware of both of his identities and the two of them at least cohabitating and possibly being married already. Here, the formula is a little different: she’s aware of both of his identities, the two are dating, but they’ve kept their relationship (as Clark and Lois) a secret; even still, based on the recurring story elements we’ve mentioned, it’s not exactly a surprise that the events of the film cause Clark to (sing along if you know the words) re-evaluate his position and decide to come around to Lois’s more open way of thinking. 

Back to the narrative, Clark must dash out of a staff meeting when there’s news of a meteorite that’s headed toward Arizona. When he gets there, however, he learns that the meteorite is actually a probe that can transform into a humanoid robot that he puts down after some difficulty. Bringing the ‘bot back to his Fortress of Solitude, Kara joins him and identifies the probe as a herald of Brainiac (John Noble), a spacefaring cyborg who roams the galaxy in an effort to collect all knowledge in the universe. It’s not a bad goal, but his methods are genocidal: he finds planets with sentient life, “collects” one of said planet’s major cities and shrinks it down to bell jar size and keeps it in his menagerie, then destroys the planet. It’s the result of a flaw in his programming; once he’s “studied” a planet, he can’t let it grow and change from that point forward because then his knowledge would be incomplete, so he must ensure that his database remains inerrant by freezing the planet in time via total annihilation. Kara saw him in action when she was a child, as he came to Krypton and “collected” the planet’s Argo City; the only reason anyone lived to tell the tale was because Brainiac didn’t see the logic in wasting the energy to blow up a planet that was already on the precipice of destruction. Having learned this, Superman heads into space aboard a Kryptonian ship to face Brainiac head-on and, if possible, restore the shrunken cities that the cyborg has captured. 

I like how straightforward this one is, and as these movies go, this is possibly one of the ones with the lowest barrier to entry. You don’t really need to know anything about Brainiac since it’s all explained over the course of the film. There are a lot of nifty setpieces, like Supes’s early desert battle with the Brainiac probe, Superman’s time spent shrunken down and placed into Argo City, and the final swampy battle between Superman and Brainiac proper. This film also approaches the series’ mandate for more adult storytelling from a different angle, as it doesn’t rely solely on more violence to hit a PG-13 rating, and instead uses more adult humor (Lois is surprised that Clark didn’t think of pretending to be gay years ago, as it’s “the perfect cover,” made more on-the-nose given that this is the first time that the character has been voiced by an out gay man). There’s also some horror on display here, too, of the overt body horror variety on display with all of the upgrades Brainiac has made to his body and the way that all of his weird prehensile tubes attach to him, as well as the terror of more subtle moments. This is best evidenced when Superman is horrified to learn that the people in Brainiac’s shrunken cities are alive but essentially in stasis, meaning that one of the children who is excited to see him has been a toddler for decades. It’s good stuff, and reminds me of the simplicity of the old Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons of the 1940s: straightforward, cleanly animated, and digestible. Not necessarily the best of the lot, but a perfect low-commitment animated movie for a rainy weekend afternoon. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Psychic Damage at The Overlook Film Festival

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The term “horror” can apply to such a wide range of narrative, thematic, and aesthetic traditions that it’s almost too wide of an umbrella to be considered a single genre.  I’m always especially impressed with The Overlook Film Festival’s interpretation of what qualifies as horror in its programming, which makes room for films as disparate in tone & intent as a when-spiders-attack creature feature set in a French housing block and an internal identity crisis triggered by obsessive television watching in the American suburbs.  This breadth of curation was especially on my mind while attending a trio of films about psychic mediums at this year’s Overlook – three films that had little, if anything, in common beyond the shared subject of their premises.  Not all horror films are interested in scaring their audience; some are interested in making us laugh, some in making us ponder the incompressible phenomena of daily life.  It’s incredible that I saw all of that territory covered in three Overlook selections that all happened to feature spiritual mediums’ attempts to communicate with the spirits of the dead.  Horror is everything; everything is horror.

Look into My Eyes

Documentarian Lana Wilson sounded surprised by Overlook’s flexible definition of horror as well, introducing her film Look into My Eyes by saying she was “tickled” by its selection for this year’s festival.  It totally makes sense in the context of the overall program, though, given its open-minded curiosity about spiritual mediums who claim to communicate with the dead.  Look into My Eyes is an intimate documentary about the therapeutic powers and performative artistry of New York City psychics & mediums.  It would be easy for a doc with that subject to find ironic amusement in the eccentric characters interviewed, but Wilson cares way more about the interpersonal communication & emotional healing of spiritual sessions than the legitimacy of the supposedly supernatural practice.  Neither skeptical nor defensive, she focuses on what the psychics themselves get out of the sessions (beyond the obvious monetary compensation) instead of what they do for their clients.  They’re real people seeking connection to realms of the unreal, which makes for a fascinating dissonance if you care to listen long enough to get to know them.

Within the context of a horror movie festival, it’s impossible not to notice the genre movie cinephilia of the psychics profiled here, something Wilson acknowledged in the post-screening Q&A.  One interviewee hangs a poster of Jack Torrance on their bathroom wall, as if he were about to break into the room with an axe; another is a John Waters obsessive who’s transformed her apartment into a shrine honoring Divine (a woman after my own filthy heart).  All seven of the psychics profiled are artistically creative, most of them having started as actors in the performing arts before settling into parapsychology as a side hustle.  Wilson does not use this revelation as a gotcha to expose them as frauds, because it’s not something that her subjects see as shameful or disqualifying.  They’re channeling the spirits of the dead the same way they’d channel a fictional character, and (most of the time) it feels real to them.  They’re often just as haunted by grief & loss as their clients and both sides of the transactional divide find the practice therapeutic (an intimacy that’s heightened by the movie being filmed at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic).  It’s possible that out of the 150 or so NYC psychics Wilson contacted as potential subjects for this project, she subconsciously chose these particular 7 because they share her own interests in the creative act of filmmaking, so that it says less about the practice at large than it says about the director’s bias.  Even if so, the reason the movie works is because she is genuinely curious about their professional & private lives; any curiosity about the spiritual world beyond our own is secondary.

Sleep

Like with Look into My Eyes, it’s also ambiguous as to whether the Korean horror Sleep is actually a ghost story, or just a story about people who believe in ghosts.  Curiously, the answer to that open-ended question also hinges on whether a struggling actor is telling the truth when they appear to be communicating with the dead, or whether they’re performing for personal survival.  The actor in question is played by Lee Sun-kyun, the Parasite performer who unexpectedly died shortly after this film’s international premiere last year.  Lee’s real-life death is made even more acutely painful by how lovably charming he is in Sleep as a doting husband who feels immense guilt about his nightly sleepwalking episodes that torment his equally adorable but increasingly frazzled wife (Train to Busan’s Jung Yu-mi).  Scared that the out-of-character violence of her husband’s sleepwalking episodes will threaten the health of their newborn baby, the normally skeptical wife allows her mother to bring a psychic medium into the house to help exorcise the evil spirit that’s supposedly taken root in his body.  Whether the husband believes in the ghost himself is ultimately up for debate, since he may very well be play-acting with the superstition just long enough to be cured by modern medical science, hoping his wife doesn’t attempt to violently extract the “ghost” from inside him in the meantime.

Speaking of Parasite, Sleep is the debut feature of director Jason Yu, a young protegee of Bong Joon-ho (who recommended Lee take the lead role as the possibly-possessed husband).   That professional connection is worth noting because it informs Sleep’s oddly prankish tone.  Whether or not this is a legitimate ghost story, it certainly is an adorable romcom.  Lee & Jung are super cute together, which makes it all the more tragic when the sleepwalking-ghost turns them against each other.  It’s a romcom, sure, but it’s a romcom about how psychotically violent you can become if your partner disrupts your sleep for long enough, with the wife taking over most of the horror duties in the back half once she fully commits to believing in the presence of a ghost.  Thinking back to the ice-cold humor of Bong’s own debut Barking Dogs Never Bite, Sleep is also notable for its willingness to go there in its onscreen violence against innocents.  No one is safe here; pregnant women, newborn babies, and Pomeranians are all in genuine mortal danger.  Whether they will be saved by prescribed medication or old-world prayer relics is a fight between husband & wife – a fight with surprisingly, viciously funny results.

Oddity

Of course, not everybody goes into horror movies looking to have a laugh or to feel empathy.  Sometimes, audiences actually want to be scared.  The scariest movie about a spiritual medium I saw at this year’s Overlook was the Irish ghost story Oddity, in which violent spirits are weaponized for revenge amongst the living. The only movie I saw on the program that had me more on edge was the one that featured spiders crawling all over people’s faces & bodies, which by comparison feels like cheating.  Oddity has to take its time to build the reasoning & mythology behind its supernatural scares, which start when a blind psychic arrives uninvited to the home where her twin sister was allegedly murdered by an escaped mental patient.  Armed with a psychic ability to read hidden personal truths in physical possessions, she seeks answers about her sister’s death in the widower’s home, then sets about righting past wrongs with the help of present ghosts.  She also weaponizes the physical body of a gnarled wooden puppet she drags into that home, a consistently creepy prop that recalls the puppet reaction cutaways from the 80s horror oddity Pin.

Oddity is a consistent series of routine fright gags that follow a rigid pattern of getting super quiet right before cutting to a ghost with a loud soundtrack stinger, and yet it made me jump every single time.  After the credits rolled, I was startled again by the physical presence of the wooden puppet, which the festival programmers had quietly propped up at the exit door mid-screening.  Personally, I don’t always need horror films to be scary to be worthwhile.  I mostly cherish the genre for the freedom it gives filmmakers to ignore the limitations of real-world logic, and I’m usually onboard for whatever they choose to do with that permission to imagine.  I couldn’t have asked for a better ending to this year’s festival than Oddity, though, since it reminded me that the primary value most audiences seek in horror is its ability to scare, which is just as valid & rewarding as anything else the genre can achieve.  After seeing a documentary about real-world psychics’ emotional lives and a domestic comedy about psychics’ superstitious opposition to modern science, being genuinely scared by a movie on the same subject was a necessary, grounding experience.  That unlimited range in tone & purpose is exactly what makes the horror genre so rewarding, and it’s what makes Overlook Film Festival an unmissable yearly ritual on the New Orleans culture calendar.

-Brandon Ledet

Les horreurs d’Overlook

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One thing I’m always searching for at New Orleans French Film Fest every year is French-language horror films: the kinds of artsy genre titles that premiere in the Midnight or Un Certain Regard programs at Cannes and then quietly seep onto streaming platforms like Mubi & Kanopy years later with no wide theatrical distro.  This year’s French Film Fest lineup delivered the familial sorcery drama Omen and the bestial body horror The Animal Kingdom, which where both solid but left me wanting more.  Thankfully, Overlook Film Fest came through town just a few weeks later, screening a surprising number of French-language titles that would have been just as worthy of New Orleans French Film Fest proper.  Partially sponsored by Mubi, the international programming at this year’s Overlook was impressively robust, and I made the most of what French-language horrors I could cram into my schedule . . .

Hood Witch

Like the aforementioned Animal Kingdom, Hood Witch is more of a fugitive-on-the-run thriller than a proper horror film.  Like Omen, it’s also an attempt to reconcile old-world witchcraft practices with modern cultural sensibilities.  Golshifteh Farahani stars as Nour, a single mother who exploits her Parisian neighborhood’s religious superstitions so she can financially  support her young son.  This mostly manifests in a smuggling operation that sneaks dangerous, exotic animals into the country for elaborate healing rituals and in developing an app that connects users to the faith healers who practice them – like Uber for exorcists.  Her schemes blow up in her face when one of her customers suddenly dies, having relied on old-world sorcery where modern medicine should have intervened.  She’s blamed for the tragedy by the most conservative zealots of her community, which leads to a literal witch hunt through city streets.  It’s an exciting clash of modernized, urban witchcraft and old-fashioned, tried and true cultural misogyny – a clash that’s telegraphed by an opening montage of witchcraft documentation through the ages, from Häxan to TikTok.

Hood Witch is most inventive in its weaponization of smartphones on both sides of the witches vs mob justice divide.  The mob uses their phones to broadcast the fugitive witch’s live location to fellow vigilantes, stirring up paranoia in the ability to turn anyone with an internet connection into a Matrix-style sleeper agent; they also use their phones’ flashlights as makeshift torches.  The so-called witch uses her social media feed to antagonize her legion of anonymous enemies with broadcasts of spells & curses they don’t need to be physically present for to suffer.  In some ways the movie pulls its punches in constantly teasing the audience about whether Nour is an atheist or a believer (and in occasionally shying away from onscreen gore), but Nour herself relies on that ambiguity to survive.  It also wouldn’t be a modernization of old-world witch hunts if she wasn’t wrongly accused of practicing sorcery, so it can’t fully commit to the supernatural implications of its premise without completely undermining its thesis.  Omen does a much better job of fully satisfying both sides of that believer-skeptic divide, but that’s about the only way the two films can be compared.

Red Rooms

The reason I’m specifying “French-language” so much here is that there are always a few French-Canadian titles that sneak onto the French Film Fest lineup, which means I’m also going to sneak one onto this list. Like Hood Witch, Red Rooms is more of a thriller than an outright horror film, and it’s also one of that generates a lot of its tension through online misbehavior.  Set in Quebec, it’s a Fincherian cyberthriller about an edgy fashion model who’s romantically obsessed with a tabloid-famous serial killer.

The film opens in the sterilized white void of a Quebecois courtroom, where one long shot follows the opening arguments of the obviously guilty killer’s crimes, floating between the horror on the faces of his teen victims’ parents and the perverse attraction on the faces of his doting fan club.  Later, the screen glows red as our fashion model anti-heroine watches direct evidence of the gruesome crimes in question: dark web snuff videos purchased with Bitcoin currency she earns through shady video poker transactions & Neon Demon-style photo shoots.  This bizarre, improbable collection of character details never gets any easier to understand or to stomach.  Red Rooms is mostly just a chilling character study of an absolute weirdo, one who’s only one or two dark web searches beyond the average true crime junkie.  Nothing especially shocking happens in the movie, but every new detail about our POV fashionista is revealed as a twisty Event, while the world around her breaks down into pixelated digital waste.

Infested

In a way, the when-spiders-attack horror Infested is the perfect crossroads between typical French Film Fest & Overlook programming, where Shudder meets Mubi.  Since the sensation of venomous spiders crawling all over your body and hatching eggs inside it is so automatically, reflexively freaky, the movie has a lot of free time for bonus details like character development & emotional stakes.  Another Parisian horror in which a well-meaning exotic animal smuggler whose personal-survival hustles result in a body count, it’s a story about the breakdown of community in a time of supernatural crisis.  Our boneheaded sweetheart protagonist is introduced specifically in the context of his relationships with his housing block community, so that later there’s genuine emotional heft to his friendships & family bonds being tested by selfish survival instincts once his escaped specimens mutate into supernatural arachnid monsters.  It’s like one of those semi-documentary film festival dramas about life on the poverty line in French housing projects (Girlhood, Gagarine, Cuties, etc.), except with way more gigantic, pissed off spiders than usual.

If there’s anything especially nuanced about Infested‘s scares, it’s in the way the cops outside the housing block are just as dangerous as the killer spiders inside.  There’s a deep, valid mistrust of the armed brutes who are supposedly quarantining residents for their own safety that not only informs characters’ desperate decision making here, but also illuminates some of the mob justice mentality of Hood Witch in retrospect.  That’s not what makes the movie scary, though.  It’s the constant flood of CGI spiders that invade the homes & bodies of that community that makes the movie so effectively upsetting.  All told, I attended thirteen screenings at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, and without question Infested was the scariest theatrical experience of the weekend.  It didn’t have to try all that hard to earn that accolade (at least not when compared to more inventive, cerebral horrors like I Saw the TV Glow or Cuckoo) but it more than made up for that easy layup by investing in its characters, taking care to make sure each of their deaths matter to the audience.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: The Dark Knight Returns (2012, 2013)

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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. 

In this very special double-sized issue of The Not-So-New 52, we will be covering not one but two films (after a fashion). Even though it’s Marvel that’s better known for their double-sized special editions, I won’t let the fact that Warner Premiere released their adaptation of Frank Miller’s seminal 1986 work The Dark Knight Returns in two separate parts keep me from reviewing them together. Combined, they make up a run time of just about two-and-a-half hours, which is the length of a real movie and is shorter than any live action Batman movie has been since 2005, so let’s get to it.

The Dark Knight Returns is probably one of the best known stories in the Batman canon, right? It, alongside Watchmen, basically shattered the paradigm of comic books as a medium in the late 1980s, ushering in (for better and for worse) a whole new era of comics, one designed with a more mature reader in mind. For some, this meant more adult storytelling; for others, this meant more grounded, realistic stories; for still others, this meant more tits, guns, and swearing, none of which are bad things in their own right, but which were not used creatively. The comic version of Returns can be considered a bit of an original sin with regards to creating expectations of maturity in the medium that instead ushered in an era characterized by a lack of subtlety, artistically meritless storytelling, and so, so, so many pockets—more than anyone could ever want or need. But Returns can’t be blamed for that, since other than a few poorly aged elements (as in Year One, Frank Miller’s depiction of Selena is once again as a sex worker, although she’s graduated to madame in her old age), there’s nothing that stands out. It was groundbreaking in its time and for good reason. Even reading it today, it’s hard not to be impressed with the unconventional use of the medium, from the way that political talking heads are presented in little boxes that capture the not-quite-square edges of a cathode ray tube TV, the way that simultaneous action is depicted not from simple panel-to-panel cutaways but in the way that a splash page might be boxed in by a series of smaller squares and errant dialogue boxes. Its place in the canon is well-deserved, and while I understand the critical backlash when it’s viewed through the lens of its (il)legacy, I see this for the landmark that it is. 

This is the story of an aged Bruce Wayne, forced out of retirement just as Jim Gordon is forced into it, back on the prowl after watching his city fall into disrepair and dystopia under the Reagan administration (an element that the film keeps intact, making a product of its time into a period piece). As more innocent civilians fall victim to the ever-expanding gang calling themselves The Mutants, Bruce once again dons the cowl in order to fight the rising tide of crime in Gotham. Along the way, he finds himself aided by Carrie Kelly, a teenage tomboy who christens herself the new Robin and refuses to be left out of things. Unfortunately, although the wounds of the past may scar and heal, they can also run deep. The supposedly reformed Harvey Dent, now having undergone extensive reconstruction of the side of his face that scarred him and made him Two-Face, is unable to avoid the temptations of recidivism and his own alter ego, while the Joker, catatonic (and thus harmless) for decades, awakens out of his waking sleep as soon as his nemesis returns to public attention. 

This ends Part 1 of the films, while Part 2 spends some time with the long-delayed final dance between Batman and Joker, which ends in a way that brings down the wrath of Gotham’s new commissioner, Ellen Yindel, who wants Batman brought down, dead or alive. Outside of the context of all of this, there’s Cold War shenanigans afoot, which finally intersects with our main story when the Gipper starts a nuclear war with the USSR via conflict with the fictional nation of Corto Maltese. Superman, reduced to little more than an errand boy for the White House, manages to divert the missiles that are bound for the US, but only just, and the resultant EMP blast causes chaos in Gotham. Through the respect that he commands from the Mutants gang—some of whom have already rechristened themselves “Sons of Batman” following his hard-won defeat of the Mutant leader—he conscripts them to help get people out of harm’s way in the forms of various fires and other disasters. In one memorable image, the shadow of an airplane that is falling out of the sky grows larger as people scream in terror below. And in the midst of all of this, Reagan sends Superman in to “handle” his old friend.

Frank Miller, who wrote both Year One and The Dark Knight Rises in a short period of time in the back half of the 1980s, is a polarizing figure, and there are elements of his political … “eccentricities” all over the original work and, as a result of being a pretty faithful adaptation, this film. Don’t be confused by the fact that Reagan is presented as a bumbling fool playing dice with the so-called free world in the name of his ego and the corporations that own him; this is a story that deeply reflects the right-wing views of its creator. It’s tricky, because Miller’s oeuvre often reflects a staunch anti-authoritarian bent, insofar as he depicts all politicians as either puppets or puppeteers, all police (other than Jim Gordon) as rotten and violent, and all authority as inherently corrupt. On the other hand, his heroes are usually somewhere on a narrow spectrum between the Randian hero (individualistic, suited to his life through intelligence and aptitude, characterized by moral fortitude — at least in the eyes of the author) and the Great Man Theory (that great leaders, like Batman and Jim Gordon, are born with the instinct to lead when the need for them to emerge is greatest, and that history is founded upon the acts of such men); the latter of these two is a pillar of fascism, and the former could charitably be called fascism-curious. Miller’s Batman is the libertarian Batman, for better or for worse, but in a way that feels so quaint that it’s almost comforting in its simplicity in comparison to whatever the fuck is happening today. 

So, yeah, Reagan is the overarching villain of this piece, but not because of any of the reasons that he was in real life (scratch just about any social problem in our country and Reagan bleeds), but because his cowboy aw-shucks approach to international conflict wrote a check that his ass couldn’t cash. All the other targets of ridicule are strawman sock puppets through whom Miller can verbalize a reductive caricature of bleeding hearts who get their comeuppance, always painfully and frequently fatally; they espouse the kind of wooly-headed liberal thinking that leads to getting gassed to death. Carrie Kelley’s parents are burnouts too stoned to notice that their teenage daughter isn’t in her room at night, let alone that she’s become the protege of the local vigilante that they consider a fascist (a bit of pre-emptive mocking of any reader who might have the same criticism). All mainstream media TV anchors (other than Lana Lang) are empty-headed, spineless gigglepusses spouting glib puns while delivering devastating, life-changing news. A man-on-the-street interview features one man praising Batman’s defeat of the Mutant leader and expressing that he hopes the Dark Knight takes out the landlords next, and we’re supposed to disagree with him. The (then) newer, gentler approach to psychiatric treatment is painted as an elaborate pantomime of rendering individual responsibility irrelevant through the construction of a narrative of victimhood, which is a reactionary position to a reductive view of some mental health. 

The last of these is personified in Dr. Bartholomew Wolper, a fame-seeking psychiatrist who also identifies Batman as a “fascist vigilante,” and who first gains attention in the narrative as the doctor treating Harvey Dent. Wolper’s argument is that all of the rogues gallery of Gotham are all victims of Batman, you see, acting out horrific crimes because the Batman is so menacing that he creates his own villains. After three years of rehabilitation and extensive reconstructive surgery that restores him to his pre-Two-Face face, Wolper is successful in getting Dent paroled, only for Dent to disappear within hours and return to his old habits immediately, with his mantra of “both sides match” given a darker meaning as we see that he hallucinates himself as fully scarred now. Despite this clear error in judgment, when Joker is inspired out of his withdrawal from the world, Wolper is given the opportunity to treat him as well, and once again advocates for the release of a dangerous murderer. The irony, of course, is that Wolper is actually right this time, as the narrative makes it clear that Joker truly had no will to live without a
Batman to face, and he probably would have remained in his catatonia until he died of old age if Bruce hadn’t been forced to take up the cowl again and wake him up out of his stupor. Any kudos we could give Wolper for his insight here is immediately irrelevant, as he is the Joker’s first victim almost immediately, getting his throat slit live on television while on a thinly veiled late night show (in the original comic, the host is “Dave Endocrine” and clearly modeled on Letterman, while in the film he’s just a generic brunet voiced by the actual Conan O’Brien). 

This is a fundamentally conservative work in many ways, but more than that, it’s reactionary. The media, the peace movement, psychiatry as whole: it’s all quackery in Miller’s eyes and is therefore the same under his pen. In this most recent viewing, my second, I was struck by some of the similarities to a semi-contemporary work that we had recently discussed on the podcast, Tightrope, which was also right-of-center in its relationship with 80s urban crime. Even if you’ve never really identified it as such, you know the kind of thing that I’m talking about when you see it. Everything’s always grimy, the city is a place where it’s not safe to go out at night or in the day, as upstanding citizens are in constant mortal danger at the hands of violent addicts and remorseless sociopaths, and the only thing standing between life and death for the next victim is a morally gray cop who’s not afraid to get his hands dirty. It bears a lot in common with Returns, down to the Reagan cameo (in Tightrope, this is in the form of a papier-mâché head of the Gipp in a parade float storage facility). Returns takes place in a similarly dangerous locale, but with a societal order whose edges are more frayed and a greater sense of hopelessness, but it’s impossible to separate it from its regressive elements; that man on the street who wanted Batman to take care of landlords that I mentioned a few paragraphs back? In Miller’s original text, it’s homosexuals that he hopes Batman eradicates with violence. Even when the words are changed, that spirit of bone-deep right-wing meanness permeates everything. 

But the fact of the matter is this: The Dark Knight Returns is a great narrative. Truly one of the best. All through the first half of the story, I kept thinking about how it’s impossible to really translate the way that the comic used its form as part of its storytelling device into a feature for the screen, and grousing about the things that I didn’t like about it. Some of the 80s slang that the Mutants and Carrie use is like, totally radical, so razor, utterly fetch, but sounds artificial when actually spoken aloud instead of read on the page, and the casting of Ariel Winter (of Modern Family fame) as Carrie was also dissonant to me in a way that was distracting. But once the meat of the story gets going, it takes off and doesn’t stop, and I was won over by it. Peter Weller endows the aged Wayne with so much pathos that it’s impossible not to be moved by it, which feels silly to say about one of these little direct to video products, but there’s a great attention to detail here that’s worth the time, even if it’s twice what’s normal for one of these. It’s not perfect, but it’s so damn good that you forgive it for its shortcomings. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Superman vs. The Elite (2012)

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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. 

It’s funny that Batman: Year One is the shortest of these films, faithfully adapting a brief four-issue comic run, while this follow-up is about ten minutes longer despite adapting a single issue, Action Comics #775, titled “What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice & the American Way?” But let’s back up a bit; remember when we talked about All Star Superman and I mentioned in passing that DC Comics had a habit not just of rebooting, but also of buying out other comic book companies and then grafting that company’s line up onto their own as a new universe in their big multiversal complex? We didn’t get into it at the time, but that wasn’t just a thing that they did back in the golden era, it’s something that they still do, or at least they were still doing up until the turn of the millennium. You see, discussion of Superman vs. the Elite requires a little bit of discussion about The Authority, a comic published by Wildstorm, shortly after DC’s acquisition of said organization, and buckle up, because this is a wild one – no pun intended. Jim Lee, already a widely beloved and known comic book artist, founded WildStorm in 1992 as one of the initial studios working under Image Comics, starting out with two Lee-drawn series, WildC.A.T.S. and Stormwatch (hence “WildStorm”). Stormwatch saw sales and interest stagnate as the nineties continued, and in 1997, Warren Ellis was brought on to helm the series’ second volume; he used this opportunity to inspect comics as a medium, and he slowly introduced a couple of his original characters to the series. 

First up was Jenny Sparks (intro’d in 1996 in issue #37 of the first volume of Stormwatch), an electrical lady (let’s leave it at that, if you’re a fan, you know, but let’s not drag this down or out), followed by Apollo and Midnighter in February 1998’s Stormwatch vol. 2 #4. These two are obvious pastiches of more famous heroes, with the sun god representing Superman and the violent vigilante standing in for Batma; and they’re a couple, although this isn’t confirmed for a few years. Now, going back to WildStorm for a minute, it’s worth noting that they didn’t just publish entries in their own little superhero universe, but they also licensed other properties like The X-Files, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th. So, uh, in August of 1998, virtually all of the characters not created by Ellis were killed off … by xenomorphs … in an intracompany one-shot entitled WildC.A.T.s/Aliens. This let Ellis pick his favorites and start a new team with them, so that’s good news for him, right? Except, sometime late that year, Lee sold WildStorm to DC Comics, with the deal going into effect in January of 1999. In yet another plot twist, however, DC still gave Ellis the go-ahead to proceed with the planned comic The Authority, which was headed by Jenny Sparks and featured Superman Apollo and Batman Midnighter, as well as Hawkgirl Swift and Doctor Fate the Doctor, alongside characters like The Engineer and Jack Hawksmoor, whose analogues are less straightforward. The first issue of The Authority hit the newsstands in May of 1999, and it was already clearly a different kind of comic — one in which the “heroes” weren’t afraid to kill their enemies, with the issue’s final pages showing panels of Midnighter breaking necks and Jack Hawksmoor punching a man in the face so hard that his head explodes. Then issue #2 starts with this image:

Or at least it does in the reprints. That was what I read, lo these many years ago, when a friend loaned me his trade paperbacks when I was a freshman in college, a half decade or so after these were originally published. I really enjoyed them at the time, although I remember them with the same sort of “I can’t believe I’ve never read something like this before” awe that I felt about some other things which, looking back, have aged terribly (Garth Ennis’s Preacher comes to mind). A quick review of the comics themselves on a few sites of ill repute alongside the publication information among a frighteningly high number of tabs that were created since I started writing this document tells me that what I liked mostly came from the Ellis era, while what left a bad taste in my mouth (like the character of Seth Cowie) came later, when the comic was handed off to Mark Millar. In general, The Authority was a book about, essentially, a team of empowered people who were willing not just to kill, but to murder. 

Which brings us back to Superman vs. The Elite. The film is based, as previously mentioned, on the Authority Elite, a new team of “heroes,” who appear on the scene shortly after a bit of a mixed PR issue for Superman (George Newbern). Supervillain Atomic Skull escapes from his imprisonment and goes on a rampage in Metropolis, killing dozens of people and causing the standard evil amount of property damage, before the Kryptonian arrives on the scene and apprehends the Skull, remanding him once again to the custody of the authorities (no relation). But the public isn’t fully satisfied by this resolution, as Supes finds himself questioned by several members of the populace about why he doesn’t just execute the Skull there on the spot, since he has the power to do so, and if he did, it would ensure that he won’t escape to do it again. Called to account for this before the UN, under the lead of Secretary Efrain Baxter (Henry Simmons), Superman is asked point blank, right at the nine-and-a-half minute mark: “Are you the Superman that the 21st Century needs?” Superman starts to give one of his speeches about how he isn’t an executioner, but he’s called away due to escalating tensions between the recurring fictional DC Middle Eastern nations of Bialya and Pokolistan. When he arrives on the scene, the Pokolistani military unleashes a new bio-weapon in the form of a big bug monster thing, that Superman fights for a bit before splitting in half; unfortunately, each half regenerates into its own separate entity, and Supes is assisted in putting them both down by the titular Elite, led by Manchester Black (Robin Atkin Downes). Afterwards, the starstruck neophyte heroes teleport away before they can embarrass themselves. 

People are excited by these new figures, at least initially. Unfortunately, after they work with Superman to save a high number of civilians from becoming casualties of terrorism, they set out to prove themselves to be the kind of heroes that “the world needs” for the modern world, including executing Atomic Skull in the street after another prison break and assassinating the leaders of Bialya and Pokolistan to end the conflict abroad. Kal-El, disquieted by the speed at which the citizenry turn on him and embrace superpowered beings dealing out summary executions, spends some time out of the public eye with Lois (Pauley Perrette), but is ultimately drawn back into the conflict and shows the world just how scary he can be without his unflinching adherence to his own moral code, killing the Elite one by one and forcing Manchester to watch and await his own murder . . . Until, of course, the curtain is pulled back to reveal that Superman has killed no one, and that all of this was a bit of pageantry to remind everyone that mercy is a virtue, especially in the face of an alien god. 

Writing this review has been a pain, to be honest. I got through that first batch of reviews for the first quarter of the year and told myself that I’d keep on powering through and keep my nice publication buffer in place, but this one was a real speed bump in that plan. The fact of that matter is that this one isn’t bad; it would be hard pressed to be less than decent given that the story on which it’s based is considered top tier. There was a solid year and a half (and three other movies) between All Star Superman and this one, which is sufficient time between releases (and expected viewings) for the immediate comparisons to one another to be less obvious, but when you watch them within a couple of weeks of one another, it becomes hard not to. I dislike the animation and character designs in this one quite a lot, with special attention to Manchester Black’s severely angular face and the exaggeration of Superman’s chin to the point of making his face pear shaped a lot of the time. Again, it’s not “bad” in any objective way like some of these that had extremely cheap looking character designs (Public Enemies comes to mind), but I’m not a fan. At other times, the action can look quite good, with Superman’s de-escalation of the Pokolistani and Bialyan conflict without the loss of life being a nice bit of fun, but it adds up to an experience that’s a little bit less than the sum of its parts. I think I would have liked this one a little more if we were further removed from All Star. Both of them are stories that examine the classic character through the lens of viewing him as a humble god living amongst mortals, more powerful than they but in awe of their potential; their shepherd, their servant, their steward … their Superman. But whereas the previous film does so by showing us an aloof omniscient being spending his last days making sure that his work will continue after his death, and in so doing creating a peaceful parable about choosing to be the best versions of ourselves, this one turns it back around on us and is about recognizing that might does not make right and that Superman (and perhaps, by extension, God)’s deification isn’t because of his omnipotence, but because of his mercifulness.

There’s a lot to really enjoy here, from the intentionally comedic (there’s an in-universe cartoon about Superman that features an even more kid-friendly version of the character) to the meaningful (Superman’s solemn crisis after his super-hearing causes him to overhear a child who has fallen under the sway of the Elite’s media influencer campaign to talk about how it would be “fun to kill,” even in a backyard game), to the heartfelt (the revelation that the note he left behind for Lois prior to his final showdown with the Elite saying simply “Believe, always believe”). I’m going to chalk it up to its proximity to All Star Superman as the reason that it failed to connect with me, even as I can admire parts of it. It probably works a lot better with a little breathing room. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Movie of the Month: A Place in the Sun (1951)

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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 Britnee made Boomer and Brandon watch A Place in the Sun (1951).

Britnee: Based on Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel An American Tragedy, George Stevens’s melodramatic noir masterpiece A Place in the Sun is one of my all-time favorite films. It’s overdramatic, shocking, gripping, and stars a young Elizabeth Taylor. That alone should convince anyone to watch it. Stevens won the Academy Award for Best Director for A Place in the Sun in 1951, and several years later in 1956, he won the award again for Giant (which also stars Elizabeth Taylor!). He treats his characters with such thoughtfulness and uses unique filmmaking techniques to drill through the layers of their humanity, drilling especially deep in this one.

George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) hitchhikes to California with the hopes of starting a career at his wealthy uncle’s factory. He’s working class and comes from a poor family, but he badly wants to be a part of the upper class. That’s American dream, isn’t it? He is given an entry-level job at the factory, where he hits it off with his co-worker, Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters). They become a couple but don’t make their relationship public because it’s against the rules for male and female factory workers to fraternize. Gradually, George starts to step out on Alice to get closer to Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor), the daughter of another wealthy industrialist in town. He’s hypnotized not only by Angela’s beauty, but by the status that she and her family hold. Angela is drawn to George as well, and she begins to invite him to more social events with the upper crust of society. Alice becomes increasingly upset as George puts her on the backburner to attend numerous fancy gatherings, and her frustrations are elevated when she finds out she is pregnant with his child. After her attempt to have an abortion is unsuccessful (in a very scandalous scene), she begins to pressure him into marriage. At the same time, his romantic relationship with Angela is blossoming.

Angela invites George to spend Labor Day weekend at her family’s lake house, which he does after telling Alice the trip is for his career advancement. Poor sweet Alice opens the morning paper to find a front-page photo of George having the time of his life on a boat with Angela. She tracks him down and quickly arrives to the town where they’re vacationing. This is the part of the film where I yell “Hell yeah, Alice! Show him you’re not messing around!” Unfortunately, when George meets her in town, he realizes that he needs to get rid of Alice to move on to a life with Angela, and that’s when the film takes the turn into being more of a legal thriller than a melodrama.

I’m always impressed by how much I’m drawn to the humanity of each main character in this film: Alice, Angela, and George. I know that George is terrible, but I’m almost able see into his soul. All of his sadness, confusion, and internal struggle with his conscience is boldly laid bare by Clift’s performance and enhanced by Stevens’s intense camera close-ups. Brandon, did you have a similar experience with George’s character?

Brandon: For me, the most surprising aspect of George’s character is that he’s not especially violent or sociopathic by nature; he’s just desperate.  When compared to the most infamous rowboat killer of Old Hollywood—Gene Tierny’s heartless murderess in 1945’s Leave Her to Heaven—George ain’t all that bad.  He’s operating from a similar place of selfishness, but it’s more out of financial gloom than it is out of inhuman cruelty.  His humanity didn’t strike me as especially deep or complex, though – just realistic.  One of the reasons Angela is so drawn to George is that he’s so quiet & pensive, which she misinterprets as him being “complicated”.  Really, he’s just distracted by the walls closing in on his potential future as the husband of a wealthy heiress, dooming him instead to a life as the impoverished husband of a lowly factory worker.  The more streetwise Alice, on the other hand, sees right through his desperate social climber schemes, since she doesn’t view his troubled badboy persona through the same naively romantic lens that Angela does.  Her own downfall is also one of financial desperation, making this more of a story about the evils of money & class division than it is a story about the evils of personal moral failure.

No matter the motivations for George’s mistreatment of Alice, he still behaves like an absolute scoundrel and a coward.  At its heart, A Place in the Sun is an epic-scale fuckboy melodrama about the moral crimes young men were willing to commit for the chance to be with Elizabeth Taylor, often at the expense of less outwardly elegant women like Shelley Winters.  After all, Taylor was the most marriageable woman of all time, apparently lethally so.  As with most classic melodramas, I found the interior lives of the two main actresses far more compelling than their counterpart in the male lead.  Montgomery Clift plays an adequate prototype for a leather clad street-tough that would soon be perfected by the likes of Marlon Brando & James Dean, but I mostly found him useful as a point of contrast between Taylor & Winters.  Elizabeth Taylor is the more stunningly beautiful actor of the pair, and she would go on to become one of the most-imitated, most-well-paid, and most-gossiped-about stars of studio-system Hollywood.  Shelley Winters acts circles around Taylor in the picture, though, and her talents were mostly rewarded with a late-stage career resurgence as a psychobiddy freakshow in hagsploitation schlock like Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?  One was great at acting, while the other was great at being a movie star, and I find it fascinating how that difference is reflected in their characters here, so early in their respective careers.

Boomer, since this is ultimately a movie about callously comparing women against each other, what do you make of the difference between what Elizabeth Taylor & Shelley Winters bring to the screen in their competing roles as Alice & Angela?

Boomer: Looking back to the Wikipedia summary for this film, I’m immediately struck by the second sentence. From the top, it reads: “In 1950, George Eastman, the poor nephew of rich industrialist Charles Eastman, is offered an entry-level job at his uncle’s factory, where he begins dating co-worker Alice Tripp. Alice believes George’s Eastman name will bring her advantages” [emphasis added]. I don’t think that this is true, actually. If it was said explicitly, then I missed it, and if it’s not explicit, I think that’s more of an inference on the part of the composer of the plot description than something that’s implied in the narrative. If anything, Alice just seems like a lonely girl stuck in the kind of job that women in the 50s were supposed to do until a man married them and they could become housewives, but there are plenty of women around her who are older than she is, so there’s an implication that she worries she could end up an “old maid” like them. The implication that Alice is concerned with hitching herself to George for financial reasons is particularly unkind to her; her willingness to terminate her pregnancy (even if she can’t find a doctor to perform the operation) makes it clear that she’s not trying to entrap him with a child, and her declaration that she doesn’t care if they have to live in poverty as long as their together rings true.

On the other hand, Taylor brings a lightness to her character that’s lovely to behold, and I think that we’re supposed to be as entranced by her ethereality as George is. Her name implies an angelic nature not just in that she remains faithfully devoted to George until the end, but also that she’s a being that’s forever out of his reach and unable to be touched. But there’s also a naivety to her, and I can’t tell if that’s something that I’m projecting from the metatext, or something that’s really there. Before this, Shelley Winters was a huge sex symbol, and her dressing down to play dowdy Alice here was actually her playing against type, and that undisguisable beauty that lies beneath is impossible to completely conceal. Some quick research tells me that this was filmed from October of 1949 to March of 1950, which means that Clift and Winters were 29 during filming, and Taylor turned 18 during February, 1950. Although Winters still has a healthy vitality and youthful glow under all their attempts to frump her down a little, Clift very much looks older than his age, and far too old for the high school aged Taylor. To me, that discrepancy implies that there was never really a chance that this would work out – that Angela’s infatuation with George, while reciprocated, is not really as deep as Alice’s genuine love for him, and is more of a passing fancy and a fascination with someone outside of her privileged class than loving devotion. Then again … I’m keenly aware that I’m looking at this from a modern perspective and from within the horizon of my own experience, so maybe I’m no better than the person who crafted that implication that Alice was a gold-digger in the Wikipedia article. At least I’m admitting it’s my interpretation and not citing it as a fact! Ultimately, I think that the fact that Taylor brings the air of the ingenue to the role and Winters, by default having to play the supposedly less desirable option, is the perfect foil to her. Both of them deserve better than what they got, but it’s particularly hard to watch what happens to Alice. 

While we’re on the topic of Alice, I do want to note that one of my favorite things about this one was the way that the art direction was such a powerful contributor to the narrative, since that hasn’t been touched upon yet. In the scene in which George calls home to tell his mother about his promotion, there’s a giant sign above the men camped out in her mission house asking the reader how long it’s been since they’ve written their mother, just to underline the distance between George and his mother, and the lack of contact between them. 

Still later, when George is at home obsessing over Angela, a neon sign in the distance flashes her last name (presumably on some building that her father owns) in the distance, illustrating his preoccupation. 

It’s not subtle, but I do like it. One that was subtle, however, was that every time we saw Alice’s address, whether it be on a piece of mail or on the side of the building where she lived, we saw that she lives at 4433 ½. It’s just another way that she’s stuck in the margins, a place not really held for her but one where she has to find somewhere to try and dig in and make space for herself. Poor Alice. 

Lagniappe

Boomer: The dissolve transitions in this movie are amazing. There’s so much storytelling happening in the visuals alone in this movie; the superimposition of shot over shot to convey mood, a character’s internal thoughts, everything — truly solid filmmaking, even if the movie milks its melodrama a little hard. 

Britnee: The atmosphere of Alice’s room in the boarding house really stuck with me. All of the claustrophobic shots in that room are so haunting. Particularly the scenes with that big open window at night. It’s the first thing that comes to my mind when I think about A Place in the Sun. I really can’t explain why.

Brandon: To further highlight the difference between what I appreciated in Taylor vs Winters, I’d like to point out my favorite moments of their respective, separate screentime.  Taylor’s best moment is in an early scene when she first flirts with Clift at a party, modeling an incredible, white floral Edith Head gown that has been imitated just as often in the decades since as her iconic hairstyle.  Meanwhile, Winters’s best moment is in the subtle choreography of her own flirtation with Clift at a movie theater, signaling her availability to him solely through strategic shifts in her body language.  Both contributions are essential to what makes this movie so great, but they’re very different contributions.

Next month: Brandon presents Torch Song Trilogy (1988)

– The Swampflix Crew

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League — Doom (2012)

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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. 

A direct sequel to Crisis on Two Earths, Justice League: Doom does not follow up on the apparent membership drive that ended the previous film. It seems that only one new recruit has joined the team since that movie’s finale, but it’s still a continuation, if one knows that this is the case and what to look for. This was another one that I had seen a few times even before beginning this project, not so much out of any particular fondness for it, but because it was the last one that was released before I finished grad school and moved back to Baton Rouge, so it was an easy one to put on in the background and do some unpacking or chores. It’s not as strong a film as Crisis was, but it still has some of the same magic, and it’s pretty good, even if it’s a little thinner than its predecessor. 

The Royal Flush gang, a villainous group that is characterized by their costumes taking inspiration from the highest point cards for the suit of spades, has been engaging in a series of break-ins, and Batman is on the case. He discovers that they have been using a piece of technology that allows them to pass through walls in order to complete their crimes, and when he engages them, the rest of the Justice League gets involved. During this distraction, Flash villain Mirror Master is able to use his ability to hide in reflections to surreptitiously enter the Batcave via the Batmobile’s rear view mirror, where he downloads files from the main computer. Some time later, each member of the League is attacked while they are alone. The man behind the attacks is Vandal Savage, an immortal who has been alive since the dawn of mankind, and he offers each of the League’s individual nemeses the opportunity to finish off their archenemy once and for all. While in his civilian guise, Martian Manhunter is given a drink by an attractive woman who turns out to be his enemy Ma’alefa’ak (another shapeshifting Martian and, depending on the continuity, J’onn’s brother), and the drink turns out to contain a compound that will result in the Manhunter sweating out highly flammable magnesium. Wonder Woman faces off against Cheetah, who manages to land a cut on the Amazon, resulting in an infection that causes her to see everyone around her as Cheetah, so that she will fight until her heart gives out. Superman is lured to the top of the Daily Planet building because a downsized reporter is planning to jump off of the roof, but is in fact a disguised Metallo, who is armed with a gun with a kryptonite bullet. Flash ends up with a bomb drilled into his wrist which will explode if he goes under a certain speed, Green Lantern is lured to an apparent hostage situation that goes south in a way that leaves him feeling unworthy of his powers, and Batman is tricked out of his home by the apparent disterment of his parents’ graves, only to find himself taken off guard by Bane, who knocks him out and stuffs him in his father’s casket (with the late Thomas Wayne’s skeletal remains) and reburies them in Thomas’s grave. 

It’s the darkest hour for the Justice League, but Batman breaks free first by digging himself out of his father’s grave and then finding Green Lantern and showing him that the people who were presumably killed by his failure were animatronics designed to shake his confidence, and along with newest ally Cyborg, they are able to rescue the others from their various traps. Batman reveals that all of these plans were actually his, that they were his failsafes should any of the other members of the League go rogue (or fall under brainwashing or magic compulsion, or any other manner of things that can and do happen in these four color fantasies). The others are not pleased with this revelation, but they still have to work together to face off against Vandal Savage, whose current plan is nothing short of genocidal: induce a solar flare that will ravage half of the planet’s surface and rewind the clock on mankind’s technological level to that of the Industrial Revolution. 

As a movie, this one doesn’t really feel like a sequel to the film that preceded it. While that one began life as a part of the Justice animated series, it had an entirely new voice cast that relied on some of the stunt casting that this series was known for, while this one mostly brings back the voice cast of that show. Kevin Conroy is back as Batman (as it should ever be), Tim Daly returns to voice Superman, Susan Eisenberg again voices Wonder Woman, Carl Lumbly is once again Martian Manhunter, and Michael Rosenbaum also returns to play Flash (albeit a different Flash). The only major casting change is that this film has Nathan Fillion as Green Lantern, as it features the Hal Jordan version of the character rather than the John Stewart version (voiced by Phil LaMarr). This is Fillion’s second time playing the character following his appearance in Emerald Knights. The character designs are a little different, too, and I watched this one several times without ever realizing it was supposed to be connected to Crisis, despite that one being one of my favorites. This time around, the connections were a little more apparent, especially in the musical choices; the opening title theme for this one very clearly incorporates the distinctive notation from the first. You can hear the exact same motif when the title appears here in Crisis and here, but I don’t think I’ve ever watched them close enough together to notice that before. There’s also fun new voice talent in this one, and it falls to me as one of the carriers of the Farscape fandom flame to call special attention to Claudia Black’s performance as Cheetah, which is absolutely delightful. The scene where Wonder Woman sees everyone as Cheetah gives Black the chance to do some neat little work as different variations on the same voice, which I liked a lot. 

Speaking of villains, however, this one falls a little flat in that department. Whereas Crisis had two interesting villains in the form of the nihilistic Owlman and the unhinged Superwoman, this is one of the thinner portrayals of Vandal Savage. Phil Morris’s voice acting is strong, but the characterization is a bit light, especially when you compare him here to his presence as the overall big bad of Young Justice, which admittedly had a lot more time to flesh him out. While both Owlman’s plan to destroy all universes and Vandal’s here to rule by reducing the population to a manageable half are very much schlocky comic book evil plans, the former had a sense of reality to it based on character motivation, while the latter feels broad and out of proportion for the motivation, like taking a bulldozer to a hangnail. Doom hinges on two major axes: the emotional core of the League’s feelings of betrayal due to Batman’s distrust, and the narrative plot point of the doomsday plan. The climax of the first is much more interesting and comes fairly early on, while the evil plot itself—despite being smaller in scale than in the preceding film—feels very cackly, Saturday morning cartoony. 

It’s unfortunate that this one is a bit of a dull note to end our time with Lauren Montgomery, who directed this film and several previous, starting with Superman Doomsday, when she was only twenty-seven years old(!). She was also a storyboard artist for that one, before she directed Wonder Woman, First Flight, Crisis on Two Earths, Apocalypse, and Year One. She was a storyboard artist on virtually all of the others, and she would continue to do this up through Batman: Bad Blood, at which point she became very heavily involved with a series called Voltron: Legendary Defender. These days, it looks like she’s gearing up to direct an as-yet-untitled animated film that is being released by Avatar Studios (she had previously been a storyboard artist on eight episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender and was a supervising producer on The Legend of Korra in addition to doing some storyboard work for that program), so she’s still working, but this will be her last feature for this franchise. I wish her well! If they ever do another follow-up in this sub-series, I would love to see her return. For now, though, we say goodbye, and choose to remember her work at its best.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman — Year One (2011)

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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. 

Right here on the cusp of the twelfth film of this project, I hit the first snag; Batman: Year One is not available on HBO Max, or whatever it’s called these days. Heretofore, every single one of these movies was on the service, and from what I can tell, all of the remaining ones are as well. With the high number of premium subscription service material that has started to migrate over to free services (Lovecraft Country is on Tubi, the people’s streaming service) or more widely accessed ones (Six Feet Under is on Netflix) while David Zaslav plunders and pillages HBO and Warner Brothers, I checked to see if it was on one of those, and it was not. In fact, it’s only available as a rental. So, while I wait to acquire it through the library, I figured I’d talk a little bit about the recent history of these movies as they relate to streaming and the Warner Bros. conglomeration. It hasn’t come up here before, but Warner got into it pretty heavy with Netflix some years back, and it was because of these movies. 

Well, it was technically mostly because of Warner Premiere, but considering that Warner Premiere consisted almost entirely of these films, cheapy cash-ins on legacy animated properties (Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown; Tom and Jerry Meet Sherlock Holmes; A Miser Brothers’ Christmas), even cheaper long-distant sequels to Warner properties (Return to House on Haunted Hill, The Dukes of Hazzard: The Beginning, The Lost Boys: The Tribe), eleven separate Scooby-Doo movies, and—inexplicably—Trick ‘r Treat, let’s be honest, these DC flicks were the real reason this happened. In 2010, Netflix and Warner agreed that the former, which was still largely a DVD-by-mail service and had not pivoted to streaming as their primary market, would allow for a 28-day gap between the retail release of a DVD and the date that it would be allowed to be sent out to subscribers. This was under pressure from Warner, who cited at the time that they make approximately 75% of their retail sales for all physical media within that time frame. By 2012, this window had increased to 56 days; to put that time frame into perspective, the first film to be affected by the 28-day window would have been Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, and the last to be mailed out within the first month would be this film, before the next one (Justice League: Doom) would be delayed to two months. 

All of this is, of course, moot now, as Netflix ended its DVD service as of September of last year. A half decade ago, however, DC had the idea to create their own streaming service. It would not only host every DC-related series and movie ever produced, but it would also provide unfettered access to the company’s digital comic vault that contained every story ever published, and would produce a few original series, notably the previously mentioned Titans, the Doom Patrol adaptation, and (most excitingly for me and the reason that I signed up for it) the third season of the prematurely canceled Young Justice series, which was originally supposed to be a Netflix production. DC Universe, as the service was called, didn’t last long, launching in September of 2018 and being discontinued in less than three years in January of 2021, when its programming was folded into the then-new HBO Max service, which had replaced HBO Go in September of 2020, and even as HBO Max was rebranded Max in May of 2023. This didn’t include everything that DC Universe had hosted (obscure TV series like the 1980s Superboy didn’t migrate over), but it has, to my knowledge, always included these animated movies, and the fact that Batman: Year One seems to be missing is another indicator, perhaps, that the overall quality of the service has declined. 

Batman: Year One is a fairly faithful adaptation of its source material, perhaps the most true-to-the-text one we have seen so far. Said comic is also the oldest one that has been tackled in this franchise as well. The Year One comic was released in 1986, following on the heels of the previously discussed crossover event Crisis on Infinite Earths, and was intended to cement what would now be the character’s new origin canon, although the Dark Knight’s was one of the least changed backstories under the new reboot. An adaptation of the comic languished in development for decades. In fact, the legends tell us that it was even considered for adaptation as the third film in the Burton Batman franchise, before the reins were turned over to Joel Schumacher in order to move in a more “kid-friendly” direction and away from the gritty reality of this narrative. Years later, when Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins was first announced, I seem to remember early trade publications citing that it would be a direct adaptation of Year One, but I don’t feel like fighting with the pathetic shell of a useful search engine that Google has become in order to confirm that one way or another. Even without that confirmation, the 2005 film does bear many similarities to the comic, with two major direct lifts from it; the first is the scene in which Batman summons a huge flock of bats that darken the sky using a supersonic device, and the second a sequence in which Jim Gordon tells Batman, his new ally, about the impending appearance of a clown-like villain who calls himself “Joker,” which is the final scene in both movies. 

This is a short one, but it’s got meat on its bones. On the same January day, Gotham City’s “prodigal son” Bruce Wayne (The OC’s Benjamin McKenzie) returns home, musing from his high vantage point as he flies into the city that it almost looks calm from the air, despite being a seedy place of misery at ground level, while Internal Affairs Lieutenant James Gordon (Bryan Cranston) arrives in the city by train, fretting about the place’s high crime rates and his concerns about bringing his pregnant wife to such a place. Bruce plans to rid Gotham of crime from the ground up, demonstrating that he has spent his eight year absence training physically to do so. Elsewhere, Gordon is “welcomed” to the GCPD by corrupt Commissioner Loeb (frequent Cohen Brothers collaborator Jon Polito), reckless and bloodthirsty SWAT lieutenant Brendon (Stephen Root), and Gordon’s new partner, the violent and hair-triggered Flass (Fred Tatasciore). Loeb hints at some dark part of Gordon’s past that makes him think that he’ll be easy to extort, but Gordon’s plan is the same as Bruce’s: making Gotham a place worth living in. Bruce’s first night out as an attempted crime fighter goes very poorly, as he attempts to rescue an underage sex worker from her pimp, only to be stabbed by the girl herself and being severely beaten by the crowd that gathers. The person who deals him the most damage is a prostitute named Selena Kyle (Eliza Dushku, in a pretty thankless role overall considering what she’s capable of). Although he manages to evade police and drag his way into his home, Bruce sits facing a bust of his father and planning to let himself bleed out if he doesn’t receive a sign that he should go on, which arrives in the form of a bat that crashes through the window. We don’t get to hear the line about “criminals [being] a cowardly and superstitious lot” in his internal monologue, but this is a very straightforward reenactment of the same scene in the comics, which emulates the first appearance of the character all the way back in 1939. 

Inspired, Bruce takes on the costumed alter ego of “Batman,” and although he starts out hassling a trio of teenagers boosting a television set, he eventually works his way up to threatening Loeb and his associate, the mobster Carmine Falcone (Alex Rocco), during a dinner at one of their homes. Gordon is the mythological one good apple in the GCPD, but Loeb’s fury about Batman’s threats leads him to assign Gordon to finding the Batman, all while Jim faces off against his own department — up to and including his fellow detectives beating him with a baseball bat in a parking garage while wearing masks because he refuses to get dirty and join the grift like they did. Inspired by the Bat, Selena Kyle decides to become a masked denizen of the night herself, but in pursuit of theft instead of justice, and models her costume on a cat motif. 

At barely more than an hour, this one just barely qualifies as a feature, but it’s a pretty good one. It’s economically paced, even if the parts with Selena feel like dead weight. In contrast, the original comic had a bit more plot having to do with Harvey Dent (the future Two-Face) as the third face of the fight for justice in Gotham, from within the DA’s office, with the added wrinkle that his overt derring-do made him one of Gordon’s suspects for the true identity of Batman. The Selena stuff is also everything that has aged most poorly about the source material, as it was one of those things where Frank Miller just couldn’t help himself but make Catwoman a sex worker (this was retconned almost immediately and is, for all intents and purposes, the only thing considered non-canonical in the comic to this day). The film’s biggest weakness, however, is that everything great about it has already been adapted in some form. Batman: The Animated Series depicted the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne almost exactly as it was retold in Year One, down to angle and perspectives from the comic. An uninformed viewer would likely see this one and think that it was ripping off Batman Begins by centering the narrative around the antics of Carmine Falcone or having Batman be saved by the appearance of hundreds of bats, but both that character and that sequence originated in this film’s source material. As a whole, I can’t see it having much reason to exist other than for its own sake and for the interest of people who are already familiar with and fans of the comic, which doesn’t seem to add up to much. Cranston is great as Gordon, and it’s great that what feels like the entire second half of the film is just Batman vs. cops, but I’m not sure it’s enough, especially given the number of hoops you have to jump through to find this one. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it does feel … vestigial.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond