Lists & Articles

Quick Takes: Rebel Girls

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Sometime during my bus trip from watching the 4-hour French culinary documentary Menus-Plaisirs at The Prytania to immediately follow it with the 3-hour Polish sci-fi epic On the Silver Globe at The Broad, it hit me.  If I lived in a bigger city with a full, robust repertory scene, I would have a weekly meltdown.  Thankfully, New Orleans is relatively laidback in its repertory programming, with most of the heavy lifting done by The Prytania’s Sunday-morning Classic Movies series and now Wildwood‘s Wednesday-night screenings at The Broad.  There’s usually only one or two now-or-never selections in any given month here, which is much more manageable than the nonstop deluge of rare 35mm prints that flood cities like Chicago & NYC.  Having a large portion of those screenings recently relocate to The Broad has made it even more manageable for me personally, since it’s the theater closest to my home.  So, I’ve been spending a lot of time watching older releases at my neighborhood cinema, but not too much time.  Except for the rare occasions when I have to choose between two once-in-a-lifetime screenings on opposite sides of town, I’m mostly unbothered, moisturized, happy, in my lane, focused, flourishing.

As a result, I’ve racked up a few short-form reviews of older movies I happened to catch at The Broad in recent weeks.  All three movies happen to be about rebellious young women’s lives as social outcasts, which likely says less about the kinds of films being programmed around town than it says about the kinds of films that motivate me to leave the couch.  Here they are in all their grimy, leather-jacketed glory (listed in the order that I watched them).

Vagabond (1985)

Second only to Alfred Hitchcock’s routine appearances in Prytania’s Classic Movies program, Agnès Varda has got to be the most frequently programmed director in town (or at least has been for as long as I’ve been paying attention to such things).  Since 2018, I’ve seen Le Bonheur, Faces Places, The Gleaners & I, and Cléo from 5 to 7 at local specialty screenings, and I even missed one of Jane B.  It’s an incredible string of luck that’s made me reluctant to catch up with Varda’s most iconic titles at home, with the assumption that they’ll eventually play in a proper theater if I’m patient enough to wait.  That spoiled brat entitlement recently paid off when Wildwood screened the 1985 drama Vagabond, one of Varda’s most celebrated post-Cléo triumphs. I immediately understood its reputation as one of her best, since it works equally well as a prequel to her dumpster-diving documentary The Gleaners & I (my personal favorite Varda) and as a crust-punk take on Citizen Kane (many serious critics’ personal favorite by anyone). 

Sandrine Bonnaire stars as a transient young woman named Mona, hitchhiking her way across France with no particular purpose or destination.  Mona loves smoking weed, listening to generic pop radio, and not being hassled to do much else.  We’re introduced to her as a corpse, frozen in a ditch without anyone looking for her or even really knowing who she is.  We get to know her through the posthumous testimonials of people whose lives she drifted through, her aimless story playing out in fractured flashback.  Everyone projects their own dreams, regrets, uses, and prejudices onto her but she was never vulnerable enough with any stranger ever to fully reveal herself, making her just as impossible to pin down in testimonial as Charles Foster Kane.  Only, Kane was defined by the crushing weight of his own ambition, while Mona is defined by her total lack of it.  As she camps on isolated roadsides and squats in abandoned estates, the people around her attempt to parse out the romance of her wandering vs the self-destructive impulse of her “withering.”  It’s essentially unacceptable for her to merely exist, and the world inevitably punishes her for it by abandoning her body in a ditch.

One of the reasons I put off watching this particular Varda film for so long is that its premise sounds so unrelentingly grim.  In truth, Vagabond strikes the same real-life balance between joy & misery that most of Varda’s films achieve; it just starts with tragedy instead of saving it for a last-minute shock.  Even Mona’s death has an absurdist humor to it in the end, as it results from the joyous carnival celebrations of a local community who isn’t aware how vulnerable she is to their drunken shenanigans.  As doomed as she is from the start and as unknowable as she remains to everyone she meets, Mona is a loveable, recognizable kind of rebel.  Varda might mock the people who project their own psychological hangups onto the character’s blank canvas, but she includes herself and her audience in that indictment.  By the end you really feel like you know Mona, especially if you’ve ever smelled the particular sweet-yeast/old-mold stench crusties tend to cultivate in their unwashed denim.  You don’t know her, though.  No one possibly could.

Rebel Dykes (2021)

I don’t know that Patois Film Fest‘s screening of the 2021 documentary Rebel Dykes technically counts as repertory, since it might very well have been the film’s local premiere.  I’ve been waiting to see this low-budget, D.I.Y. punk doc for years, but it seemingly never landed official distribution outside its initial festival run.  It was a perfect fit for Patois programmers’ focus on political activism, though, since it’s specifically about the anti-assimilationist queer politics of post-punk lesbian leather bars in 1980s London.  Ostracized both by internal debates over whether S&M & pornography were acceptable feminist practices and by external governmental oppression in Thatcher’s UK, the heavy-leather lesbians of the era formed a tight community initially mobilized by lust but eventually galvanized into political fury – mostly by necessity.  A lot of them are still around to tell the tale, too (a rare luxury for 1980s urban queer communities), including producer Siobhan Fahey, who’s interviewed among her friends as a first-hand witness to the scene.

Rebel Dykes has all the hallmarks of a self-indulgent documentary in which talking heads wax nostalgic about the “You had to be there” glory days, but it’s thankfully working with a deep archive of vintage material from the era that helps illustrate the scene’s historical importance.  That archive is especially helped by its subjects recalling a time when home video camcorders were first becoming affordable, giving a lot of the vintage footage the feel of grimy video art and, more practically, homemade pornography.  The animated interstitials that stitch those clips together are a lot less visually impressive, but there is a kind of homemade charm to them as well, as if a bored teenage punk made their own Flash Animation versions of Love & Rockets comic book covers.  Mostly, though, Rebel Dykes‘s nostalgia is sidestepped through its usefulness as a modern political motivator.  It was a perfect selection for the activism angle of the Patois program, as it got a rowdy crowd amped up to either throw some bricks through some government windows or to throw some BDSM sex parties with their friends – whichever is more politically expedient.

Out of the Blue (1980)

Appropriately enough, Wildwood also recently screened Dennis Hopper’s teen-punk precursor to Vagabond—1980’s Out of the Blue—which likewise features an aimless, denim & leather-clad rebel whose most prized possession is her portable radio.  Linda Manz stars as an Elvis & punk obsessed brat who rebels against her eternal car-crash homelife by running away from home and mimicking the destructive, hedonistic behaviors of the drug-addict grownups around her.  Meanwhile, Hopper rebels with equal gusto against every studio exec who ever gave him a chance, combining the ecstatic antisocial freedoms of Easy Rider with the ecstatic career-torching incoherence of The Last Movie to deliver the least commercial project of his notoriously chaotic stint as a New Hollywood auteur.  Belligerent, sloppy, brilliant – Out of the Blue had me laughing and holding back tears throughout, often simultaneously.

Almost all of the credit for the movie’s power belongs to Manz, of course, whose lead performance anchors Hopper’s messy narrative style in the exact way her voiceover narration anchored Malick’s in Days of Heaven.  Her thick New Yawka felt out of place in that Americana period piece, but it’s perfectly suited to her character here, since she’s essentially auditioning to become the fifth Ramone.  Manz’s dialogue mostly consists of provocative catchphrases like “Elvis!”, “Punk rock!”, “Kill hippies!”, “Subvert normality!” and “I hate men!”, all of which she either delivers in confrontational shouts at the dysfunctional adults around her or in mumbled private reassurances to herself.  She’s a teenage thumbsucker who loves her teddy bear, but she’s eager to break out of her addiction-rotted home to live the full Fabulous Stains punk rock fantasy on the road, a volatile combo of innocence & bravado.  The result of that combination is inevitably bleak, but she’s explosively entertaining & surprisingly funny on her journey to self-destruction.

Out of the Blue is the total Rebel Girl package.  It’s got the oddly joyful nihilism of Vagabond, the take-no-shit toughness of Rebel Dykes, and a special one-of-a-kind teen rebel quality that’s only ever been credibly brought to the screen by Linda Manz (give or take a Natasha Lyonne, who is partially credited for fostering the film’s recent digital restoration).  It’s also got one of hell of a theme song in that titular Neil Young track, which helps add instant emotional impact to Hopper’s aggressively abject, abrasive imagery.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Green Lantern — Emerald Knights (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. 

This one … it’s fine. Ok? It’s fine. This is an anthology film that centers around the first days of training of the Green Lantern Corps’ newest recruit, Arisia Rrab (Elisabeth Moss), with her induction into the group coinciding with a major crisis—naturally—that threatens the Corps’ founders, the Guardians, and the planet on which the organization is based, Oa. Things start out easy enough, as she meets her mentor Hal Jordan (Nathan Fillion, in the first of many portrayals of the character), learns about some of the Corps’ most legendary heroes of past and present, and ultimately proves her mettle by figuring out how to defeat the wraparound story’s big bad. And it’s fine! 

The meat of the story lies in its vignettes, which are perfectly suitable. Together, both we and Arisia learn about the origins of the Green Lanterns, the forging of their rings and those rings’ selection of the first four bearers, including one unlikely candidate in the form of the Guardians’ scribe, who—naturally—winds up defying all expectations. When Arisia worries about how her boot camp with the hulking Kilowog (Henry Rollins) will go, Hal recounts Kilowog’s own brutal training under a previous veteran, who came to see the potential in his pupil when the younger man demonstrated exceptional heroism. When Hal and Arisia encounter Laira (Kelly Hu) and she delivers a prophecy to them, we learn about Laira’s backstory as a princess whose father was saved from death at the hands of an army by the sacrifice of their area’s Green Lantern, and how his ring chose Laira as his successor; years later, she is forced to intervene when her father seeks revenge against his previous oppressors. The following recitation is the best of the bunch, which is fitting, as it’s an adaptation of one of the best stories in the extended GL universe, “Mogo Doesn’t Socialize,” and although it’s a pretty famous one, I won’t spoil it here on the off chance that you’d have any interest in this movie without already having read it. Finally, the still-a-Green-Lantern Sinestro (Jason Isaacs) reveals that his late friend Abin Sur (Arnold Vosloo) was a great believer in fate, unlike Sinestro, until he learned of a prophecy that Sinestro would fall to the dark side and create a Corps that was powered by fear, and rejected the concept of destiny. All that having been wrapped up, the framing device gets wrapped up when the combined might of the Green Lanterns are able to enact Arisia’s crazy/inspired plan and defeat the film’s villain, and a new era dawns. 

This movie is fine. It’s a little thin, which is ironic considering that this one is actually the longest of these films to date, clocking in at 83 minutes; the franchise wouldn’t break the 80 minute mark again for six years, and that’s not even taking into consideration that the title sequence for Emerald Knights is the shortest of them so far as well, not counting Wonder Woman, which consisted solely of a title card. Public Enemies, for example, had a 2:10 title sequence, First Flight’s was two minutes long, and Doomsday clocked in with a whopping three minutes, which is a lot of screen time for something that’s barely more than 75 minutes long. This one is more packed with story than any of the others have been, but that’s not a huge mark in its favor. Although every single one of these things is a corporate product, this one feels the most like it was made with its brand name in mind. This came out the same year as the ill-fated live action Green Lantern starring Ryan Reynolds, and Emerald Knights positively smacks of an attempt to coax some easy money out of a gullible public through synergistic marketing. It’s not badly made—Lauren Montgomery and the other directors on the project are doing good work—but none of these segments are better than the stories from which they’re adapted. Only the first vignette (and the wraparound) is new material, and while it’s fine, that’s all that it is. That same sense of corporate oversight and aftertaste is present in how this film mostly pulls its punches. Compare any of the scenes of action in this one to, for instance, the casual cruelty of Sinestro and the brutal violence of Boodikka’s death in First Flight, or the Amazon battles of Wonder Woman, or even the threat of death by immolation at the hands of the Joker in Under the Red Hood, and this one has more of a Saturday morning feel. It has to if we’re going to be able to package it in a multi-disc set alongside the surefire hit live action feature in time for Christmas! Except it didn’t happen that way, and this film suffers for having been destined (haha) to not only be forgotten because of that movie, but worse because of it, too. 

In its defense, none of these are bad stories. They’re just not as interesting here as they are in the comics, and none of them stands out as an adaptation that improves upon the original text. I can see David Gibbons’s art for “Mogo Doesn’t Socialize” so clearly in my mind (and, at least at the time of writing, you can find it here in its entirety), and although this film does dabble in different art styles for each segment like Gotham Knight, the differences between vignettes is not as extreme, so this one isn’t as exciting as the original comic story. As an intro to the greater Green Lantern mythos for newbies, this one might be perfectly suitable, but it’s very middle of the road for this direct-to-video project, and a little too much of a Green Lantern-shaped corporate project to really lose oneself in.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Swampflix Guide to the Oscars, 2024

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There are 38 feature films nominated for the 2024 Academy Awards ceremony.  We here at Swampflix have reviewed exactly half of the films nominated (so far!), which isn’t nearly a high enough ratio to comment on the quality of the overall selection with any authority.  We’re still happy to see movies we enjoyed listed among the nominees, though, including two major titles from our own Top 10 Films of 2023 list. The Academy rarely gets these things right when actually choosing the winners, but from what we’ve seen this year’s list is a decent sample of what 2023 cinema had to offer.

Listed below are the 18 Oscar-Nominated films from 2023 that we covered for the site, ranked from best to . . . least-best, based on our star ratings and internal voting. Each entry is accompanied by a blurb, a link to our corresponding review, and a mention of the awards the films were nominated for.

Barbie, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Ryan Gosling), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (America Ferrera), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, Best Original Song (“What Was I Made For?”), and Best Original Song (“I’m Just Ken”)

“Greta Gerwig’s hot-pink meta daydream combines the bubbly pop feminism of Legally Blonde with the movie-magic artifice of The Wizard of Oz to craft the modern ideal of wide-appeal Hollywood filmmaking. It’s fantastic, an instant classic.”

Poor Things, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Yorgos Lanthimos), Best Actress in a Leading Role (Emma Stone), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Mark Ruffalo), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Editing, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Production Design, and Best Original Score

“Yorgos Lanthimos has always poked at assumed social norms as if they were a corpse he found in the woods.  That naive interrogation has never been as scientifically thorough nor as wickedly fun as it is here, though, to the point where he’s articulated the entire human experience through repurposed dead flesh. We love everything about this perverse Frankenstein story: every outrageous set & costume design, every grotesque CG creature that toddles in the background, every one of Mark Ruffalo’s man-baby tantrums and, of course, every moment of Emma Stone’s central performance as an unhinged goblin child.”

Past Lives, nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay

“Past Lives is truly a perfect title. Each time that the two meet, so much about themselves has changed, to the point that they don’t perceive themselves as the same people. This is textual; at one point, Nora draws a distinction between her adult self and the child Na Young that Hae Sung used to know. Hae Sung, however, still sees Na Young inside of Nora, and she does the same for him; they may not be literally reincarnated, but they are different people with something innate and unchanging inside that they recognize in one another. This cycle is reinforced in the way that Nora and Hae Sung see each other only every twelve years, like clockwork. Even the location choices reiterate the cyclical nature of the two’s relationship: on the day that they reunite in their thirties, the two are framed against Jane’s Carousel, and they later also take the ferry tour around the Statue of Liberty. Both are rides that ultimately end in the same place that they begin and then cycle again, in a lovely metaphor.”

Anatomy of a Fall, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Justine Triet), Best Actress in a Leading Role (Sandra Hüller), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing

“Sandra Hüller is captivating in Anatomie d’une chute (Anatomy of a Fall) as a woman who must stand trial for the murder of her husband, all while we in the audience never learn whether his death was an accident, suicide, or murder. That absence of information is a shadowy void in the center of this film, a known unknown whose invisibility means that, just as in life, all we have to go on are people’s imperfect memories, their self-serving rationalizations, and the presumption of honesty. One of the most mature movies for adults of recent years and the one with the most enduring appeal of 2023.”

The Holdovers, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Roll (Paul Giamatti), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Editing

“Is there a way to describe something that’s almost the platonic ideal of an indie darling? Like, something that could accurately be said to be simply a rebundling of cliches but which is also somehow entirely new? That’s what Christmas sleeper hit The Holdovers is—to be honest, there may not be an entirely original idea anywhere in here, but that doesn’t make it any less affecting, emotional, or funny. Alexander Payne masterfully molds together a film that made me ache for every person on screen, a story I’d seen before but nonetheless brand new.”

Godzilla Minus One, nominated for Best Visual Effects

“It was a great year for nostalgic throwbacks to vintage tokusatsu (see also: Shin Ultraman, Shin Kamen Rider, Smoking Causes Coughing), but this is the only title in that crop to hit the notes of deep communal hurt from the original 1954 Godzilla film that started it all. That sincerity is incredibly rewarding, if not only because it’s the only Godzilla movie I can remember making me cry.”

The Boy and the Heron, nominated for Best Animated Feature

“A coming-of-age story that incorporates many of the best parts of children’s fantasy that came before it, from The Chronicles of Narnia to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and more, The Boy and the Heron sees these familiar narrative devices through the lens of a childhood haunted by grief and as imagined by the most talented living animation director, Hayao Miyazaki. A movie that can be frustrating to an audience that is unwilling to float along with its dream logic or to those viewers who are uncomfortable with ambiguity, it’s hard to imagine that something this stuffed with the fantastic could be said to leave a lot to the imagination, but it does. Most recommended movie of the year for bird people.”

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, nominated for Best Visual Effects

“There were moments that made me think of Basket Case 2, of all things, which is a strange thing to say about a movie in this larger franchise, owned and operated by a monopolistic media empire.”

May December, nominated for Best Original Screenplay

“Netflix is kind of the perfect home for this, since it’s playing with TV Movie aesthetics anyway. Usually when great directors’ work gets sidelined there it’s disappointing; this time it’s darkly funny.”

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, nominated for Best Sound and Best Visual Effects

“By some miracle nearly matches both the absurdly convoluted humanity-vs-AI combat of Mrs. Davis and the absurdly over-the-top espionage action spectacle of Pathaan, making it one of the most entertaining American blockbusters of the year by default. Unfortunately, like a lot of other American blockbusters this year, it’s also only half a movie.”

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, nominated for Best Animated Feature

“A weird thing happens to me when I watch these movies where I’m not especially invested in the story but I still well up with emotion because of how beautiful everything is visually. The art of the moving image and such.”

The Zone of Interest, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Jonathan Glazer), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best International Feature (United Kingdom), Best Sound

“I don’t know that further into ice-cold Haneke cruelty was the direction I wanted Glazer’s career to go, but he at least makes the misery worthwhile. The rare war atrocity movie that doesn’t let you off the hook for not being as bad as a literal Nazi, but instead prompts you to dwell on the ways all modern life & labor parallels that specific moment in normalized Evil.”

Killers of the Flower Moon, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Martin Scorsese), Best Actress in a Leading Role (Lily Gladstone), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Robert De Niro), Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Production Design, Best Original Score, and Best Original Song (“Wahzhazhe – A Song for My People”)

“Feels more like Scorsese in Boardwalk Empire mode than Scorsese in Goodfellas mode (more dramatic than cinematic), save for a few stylistic jolts in the final hour. Still, it’s a quintessentially American story told by a quintessential American storyteller, and there are far less noble things he could be doing with $treaming $ervice money than turbocharging Lily Gladstone’s career.”

American Fiction, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role (Jeffrey Wright), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Sterling K. Brown), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score

“A delightfully cynical skewering of NPR liberalism, even if it often feels like the call is coming from inside the house.”

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, nominated for Best Original Score

“If there are any complaints, it’s that the film runs a little long. Every chase scene is, frankly, excellent, with the only real set-piece that felt like ‘too much’ being the swarm of eels that Indie must face while diving for a map on the floor of the Aegean Sea, and even that is, at the very least, visually distinctive from any other action sequence seen before in this franchise. It feels true to the spirit of the franchise and the character in a way that Crystal Skull barely attempts; one would expect there to be more fanservice-y elements present, but all the nostalgia factor was largely used up in the last movie, meaning that this one had to do some real lifting, and it does. The CGI on Ford’s face is apparent, but all of the other sequences feel real and practical (other than the horse chase through the subway, admittedly). The sins of Crystal Skull may never be fully painted over, but this one does a pretty good job, and even has a truly ludicrous final action sequence that strides up to the line of cartoonish but falls back at the perfect second, which is a lot of fun.”

Robot Dreams, nominated for Best Animated Feature

“The jokes are more cute than hilarious. The animation is more tidy than expressive. It’s like reading the Sunday funnies on a week when the cartoonists are feeling especially sentimental.”

Oppenheimer, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Christopher Nolan), Best Actor in a Leading Role (Cillian Murphy), Best Actor in a Sup. Role (Robert Downey Jr.), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Emily Blunt), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Production Design, Best Original Score, and Best Sound

“Strives to overcome its limitations as a legal testimony drama by drawing immense energy from a three-hour crosscutting montage and relentless repetition of its own title at a Gabbo! Gabbo! Gabbo! rhythm. It mostly succeeds, but at what cost??”

Flamin’ Hot, nominated for Best Original Song (“The Fire Inside”)

“Maybe the most egregious of the infinite PR movies in this Year of the Brands; corporate bullshit of the lowest order.” 

-The Swampflix Crew

The Not-So-New 52: All-Star Superman (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. 

One of the purposes of DC’s “New 52” project when it first released was to create a new entry point for readers. This is an eternal problem for comic books, especially those with as long a history as many characters have. Superman’s been around since 1938 with Batman following just a year later and Wonder Woman hitting newsstands in 1941, and that kind of archive creates a barrier for a lot of potential new readers who don’t want to have to deal with nearly a century of backstory and history before diving into the most recent adventures of characters. DC has been trying to correct this perceived problem for almost half of its existence now, with the aforementioned Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1986 intended to “reset” the timeline and start afresh; even further back, however, they were faced with the problem that a character introduced around the time of WWII should have aged quite a lot by the era of the Silver Age of comics that began in the mid-fifties. At that time, DC introduced several more modern versions of their older heroes, with the two biggest examples being the creation of the Barry Allen version of the Flash, the iconic red speedsuit with the lightning bolt replacing the older, unmasked version of the character who wore a helmet, and the modern Green Lantern, with test pilot Hal Jordan serving as the face of an intergalactic organization on Earth, rather than the older version of Alan Scott, with his red outfit and green cape. 

This presented a conundrum, however, as readers were now expected to follow a contemporary Justice League, in which the big three teamed up with the new Flash and Green Lantern in the then-present, while also knowing that the same trinity had teamed up with Jay Garrick’s Flash and Alan Scott’s Green Lantern during and after WWII. In an attempt to cut through this Gordian Knot, DC decreed that all JSA stories took place in an alternate dimension on “Earth Two,” and that their contemporary products were taking place on a primary Earth. This lasted a while, but that bandage couldn’t cover everything as DC continued to expand, either because their writers introduced another dimension to this multiverse or because they had bought out another comic company and needed to integrate those characters into their own books. This was the impetus behind Crisis on Infinite Earths, to take that infinity back down to a manageable single continuity. But nothing’s ever really gone, as comic continuities blew back out to intracosmic proportions, and had to be whittled back down again. 

Fourteen years after Crisis, DC rival Marvel was facing a similar problem. Instead of the Crisis-to-reboot pipeline that would become DC’s favorite plot device, they took a different approach, through the creation of the “Ultimate” sub-print. Books with this label could take a ground-up approach to telling stories from a new beginning (Peter Parker’s earliest days as Spider-Man, a new first/original class of X-Men, a Black Widow whose backstory didn’t rely on the Soviet Union, etc.) while setting stories in the present day (for better and for worse, as the Avengers equivalent The Ultimates is one of the most immediately post-9/11 things that you’re likely to read). This was a huge success for Marvel, as it ensured that longtime fans with an investment in the classic continuity got what they wanted, and new and old readers alike could check out newer comics that didn’t require you to keep track of how many Xorns there are or understand the finer points of Genoshan law. You may have never heard of the Ultimate imprint, but you’ve definitely seen its influence: it was in the pages of The Ultimates that Nick Fury was first portrayed as a Black man (and drawn to look like Samuel L. Jackson to boot), and Miles Morales was created as a character in Ultimate Spider-Man. A few year later, DC was still about half a decade away from doing what it always does—reboot everything, all at once, and use the same building blocks to create a new, singular continuity—and they decided to give their own version of an ultimate continuity a chance with their All Star imprint. 

It was, unfortunately and in many ways, dead on arrival. Frank Miller’s flagship series All Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder was widely anticipated but was the immediate target of well-deserved mockery and disdain. It infamously featured a panel in which Batman asks young Dick Grayson “Are you [slur for disabled people] or something?” that you’ve no doubt seen as a meme floating around and perhaps even dismissed as edited, but which I can assure you is very real. It would be an easy metric to compare the success of the Ultimate line versus the All Star line by just comparing their lengths; the former ran from 2000 to 2015, while the latter only managed to eke out an existence from 2005 to 2008. Even that isn’t a good metric, however, as that entire three year run only covers All Star Batman, which ran for a mere ten issues with an absurdly erratic schedule; notably, Issue #4 released in March of 2006 and Issue #5 didn’t hit shelves for over a year, releasing in July of 2007. Although several other titles under the imprint were announced, including All Star Wonder Woman, All Star Green Lantern, and All Star Batgirl, the only other title that was released was All Star Superman, written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Frank Quitely. Although this one had some schedule slippage like its counterpart, with new issues released about every two months other than a six month gap between issues 5 and 6, it was much better received (DC even divorced it from the rest of the All Star continuity at some point, trying to put some distance between the prestige and the stink). I don’t think that discontinuity was initially intended, but it’s been a long time since I read that run so I can’t be certain of my hypothesis—that Morrison intended for this to be an ongoing book and, when he read the writing on the wall, decided to shift course and aim toward a more definitive, rewarding finale. Still, given how widely popular the All Star Superman run became, it’s no surprise that DC and Warner Premiere would want to adapt it into one of their animated films, and with the entire story complete, they were able to condense it some and better foreshadow the ending. 

Released in 2011, All Star Superman is, essentially, a story about a god who walks among mortals resolving his final business before he dies. As the story opens, the titular big blue boy scout (James Deaton) must fly to the sun and rescue some scientists whose research mission has been sabotaged. In the process, he absorbs an extraordinary amount of solar radiation, which leaves him supercharged (no pun intended) but also dying. He sets out to complete any remaining work that he can and ensure that anything that must continue after he dies is left in the hands of a worthy successor. This includes confessing his secret identity to his love, Lois Lane (Christina Hendricks), and depositing a city of shrunken Kryptonians on a new planet that they can live on, among other things. In the comics, there was a rough correlation between the issues and the individual feats of strength of Hercules, and while this film doesn’t have time to adapt every single one, it does encapsulate the best of them, and shows us what a Superman story made by someone who loves the character can really achieve. 

After revealing his identity to Lois, he takes her back to his selenite clubhouse and gives her the grand tour, where we learn that his life is otherworldly in ways that we don’t normally see; he keeps an extraterrestrial being called a “sun-eater” as a pet and feeds it tiny stars that he creates on his “cosmic anvil,” for instance. It’s goofy Golden Age nonsense, but it’s treated with such sincerity that it works. He has a host of humanoid robots that he created to maintain the place as well as countless other gadgets that he uses for his various missions to help humanity: curing diseases, ending hunger, ensuring peace. And, behind the door that he forbids Lois to enter like some kind of well-meaning Bluebeard, he’s creating a serum that she can drink and have his powers for a day. After their day of superheroing and adventuring together, he takes off for a while to deal with the aforementioned shrunken city, only to return and discover that two Kryptonian astronauts have come to Earth with the intent of colonizing it; Superman stands up to them emphatically despite their greater strength and power, and when they turn out to be dying, still treats them with empathy and kindness. Finally, in his guise as Clark Kent, he visits Lex Luthor (Anthony LaPaglia) in prison, where he learns that the incarcerated super genius was behind the earlier solar mission failure, as a means to ensure that even after he is executed for his crimes, he will have finally killed Superman. Lex’s final defeat comes when, after using a similar serum to give himself powers, he sees the world as last son of Krypton does, down to the forces that bind matter together, and realizes that all of his justifications about why he couldn’t save the world because of Superman standing in his way were self-defeating, and that he could have changed everything if he had allowed himself to be inspired rather than enraged. 

The relationship between Superman and Lex is a beautiful nugget at the heart of this story. Morrison portrays the former as an all-loving god, who, even as his time grows short, still takes the time to appear to Lex as his clumsy, bumbling alter ego to implore the world’s richest man to see through the lies he has told himself and be better. Despite all his brilliance, Lex can’t see through the Clark Kent facade not because it’s such a good mask, but because when he looks at his foe, all Luthor is capable of feeling is diminished by his existence, rather than empowered by him. As Clark “accidentally” trips over a wire that was mere moments from electrocuting Luthor to death, Lex doesn’t see through his ruse because he simply can’t imagine that a being as powerful as Superman would ever bother with such sleight of hand, because Lex himself wouldn’t. It’s one of the best explorations of the relationship put on the page (and adapted to screen), and it’s fascinating to watch it play out. 

I have a mixed relationship with Frank Quitely’s artwork. It’s certainly distinctive, and among the pantheons of comic artists whose work is immediately recognizable, like Jim Lee, Jack Kirby, and even Rob Liefeld. His previous team up with Morrison on the turn-of-the-millennium run on New X-Men was widely praised at the time for its narrative, but I find it rather difficult to read based solely on how ugly it is. Around the same time, the two also worked together on the DC book JLA: Earth 2, and my criticism of that is the same. By the time of All Star Superman, however, he had matured a lot as an artist, and although his hallmarks are still very present, a random page from that comic shows a huge leap forward, showing characters with similar builds but distinct body language that differentiates them, as well as poses that aren’t just action and modeling posture but those that tell a story with their subtlety, like Lois’s coyness in the linked image. This film follows that same art style, and it ends up looking gorgeous on screen, and I’m glad that they followed Quitely’s designs. It makes this film feel distinct from the others in this series (similar to how New Frontier’s translation of Darwyn Cooke’s style still makes it stand out from the rest of the films), and it’s suited to this epically influenced narrative. This is one worth checking out. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

New Orleans French Film Fest 2024

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It’s the more laidback of the New Orleans Film Society‘s two annual film festivals, but New Orleans French Film Fest is still always a major highlight of the city’s cinematic calendar.  It’s more of a for-the-locals event than the Oscars-qualifying red-carpet pageantry of New Orleans Film Fest proper, and since it’s all contained to one single-screen venue, attendees tend to become fast friends in line between movies.  Every spring, French Film Fest takes over the original Uptown location of The Prytania for a solid week of French-language cinema from all over the world.  It’s usually slotted in the lull between the chaos of Mardi Gras and the chaos of Festival Season, a time when there’s nothing better to do but hide from the few weeks of nice weather we’re allotted every year in a darkened movie theater.  I’m forever looking forward to it, even now that this year’s fest has just concluded.

One of the more charming rituals of French Film Fest is the way it integrates The Prytania’s usual Sunday morning slot for the Rene Brunet Classic Movies series.  This year, that repertory slot was filled by 1978’s La Cage aux Folles, the French farce that was remade as The Birdcage in 1990s Hollywood.  Curiously, the projection was SD quality, when past years’ Classic Movie selections like Breathless, Children of Paradise, and Cleo from 5 to 7 were screened in crisp digital restoration. It was a warmly lowkey presentation that fit the tone of the film, though, recalling the feeling of renting a Blockbuster Video cassette of a classic comedy to watch with the family.  A lot of the jokes in La Cage aux Folles might be overly familiar for audiences who’ve seen them repeated beat-for-beat in The Birdcage, but I can report that the VHS-quality scan absolutely killed with a full 10am audience anyway. It’s classically funny stuff.

Everything else I saw at this year’s festival were new releases, many of them just now arriving in the US after premiering at last year’s Euro festivals like Cannes & Berlinale.  They were the kinds of non-commercial art cinema that most audiences can only access at home on streaming services and borrowed public-library DVDs, unless they happen to live in a city with a bustling Film Festival calendar.  As a couple of titles were real patience-testers in their sprawling, unrushed runtimes, I appreciated the chance to watch them without distraction in a proper theater.  Even moreso, it just felt great to spend a week watching esoteric cinema with up-for-anything filmgoers in a century-old single-screener – downing gallons of black coffee between screenings to keep up the momentum.  To quote every hack journalist who’s ever been flown out to Cannes … Vive le cinéma, vive la différence!

Below, you’ll find a rating & blurb for every new release I caught at this year’s New Orleans French Film Fest, ranked from favorite to least favorite. Enjoy!

Omen (Augure)

What’s scarier: sorcery or disappointing your family?  Omen is a magical-realist emigration drama about a Congolese-born man who returns to visit his family after growing up estranged in Belgium.  The family is displeased to see him and his white, pregnant wife, both of whom they greet more like demons than like fellow human beings.  After an ill-timed nosebleed is misinterpreted as an attempt to curse the family with his demonic spirit, he and his wife are briefly held hostage for a sorcery ritual meant to disarm their threat to the community.  Then, the central POV of the story fragments into multiple perspectives, abstracting Omen into a much more unique, open-minded story than what’s initially presented.  I’ve seen tons of Afro-European emigration dramas of its kind at film festivals in the past (most often dramatizing the shifting identity of French-Senegalese immigrants), which set a very clear expectation of where this story would go.  It turns out the movie was deliberately fucking with me through those set expectations, much to my delight.

Rapper-turned-filmmaker Baloji Tshiani leaves a lot more room for voices from the opposite side of this post-colonial culture clash to be heard with clarity & sincerity than what audiences have been trained to expect.  Usually, we follow characters who were born in Africa but socialized in Europe as they float between the two worlds, untethered to any clear sense of personal identity.  That’s how Omen starts, but then we get to know the Congo Republic through the eyes of its lifelong citizens who never left.  The two worlds are described as belonging to “a different reality” and “a different space time”, conveyed here through magical-realist fairy tale logic that includes breast-milk witchcraft, a music video retelling of “Hansel & Gretel,” a Neptune Frost-style “Cyber Utopia,” and Warriors-style street gangs of warring marching bands, luchadores, and crossdressing ballerinas.  None of these stylistic touches come across as empty aesthetics, either.  The region’s religious conservatism, political corruption, labor exploitation, financial desperation, and mass stripping of identity are all taken gravely seriously; they’re just expressed through the visual language of a culture that operates in a “different space-time” from what most audiences are used to seeing.

Omen is packed with tons of striking images, tons of eerie atmosphere, and tons of characters squirming under soul-crushing tons of guilt.  The familiar, opening-segment protagonist is just one of many.

Our Body (Notre corps)

The dark fantasy of Omen was somewhat of an outlier at this year’s festival.  Most of this year’s program was defined by rigorous, realistic documentation of French-language cultures across the globe.  The major highlights hyped in the fest’s pre-screening intros were two documentaries that sprawled past the 2-hour runtime mark, with programmers half-apologizing and half-daring the audience with durational cinema ordeals. I showed up for both.  Of the two, Claire Simon’s exhaustive, 3-hour documentary about the daily operations of a Parisian hospital’s gynecology ward was my favorite. It starts as a fly-on-the-wall doc that observes the medical consultations & procedures that everyday French citizens undergo at the hospital.  Then, it gets incredibly personal incredibly quick as Simon becomes a patient herself.

Our Body is a little frustratingly slack in moments but overall impressive in scope, basically covering the entire span of human life in a single location.  Simon starts the film with mention that she walks past a graveyard when traveling from her home to the hospital for every day’s shoot.  In the hospital, she witnesses multiple modes of birth, therapeutic preparation for death, and endless variations of bodily transformation between those two points (including transgender perspectives that might otherwise be excluded from a less thoughtful gynecology doc).  It would have been a compelling film even if it maintained a Frederick Wiseman-style distance in its fascination with daily bureaucratic process, but its eventual Agnès Varda-style inclusion of Simon’s own medical crisis & recovery is what makes it something special.  As the title indicates, it’s impossible to maintain emotional distance when studying the creation, transformation, and expiration of the human body like this; we’re all intimately familiar with the condition of being human, even if only a fraction of us have ever had a C-Section.

Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros

Speaking of Frederick Wiseman, the 93-year-old director also had a sprawling documentary on this year’s French Film Fest lineup.  The four-hour runtime of Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros made Claire Simon’s film look puny by comparison, though.  It’s easily the longest movie I’ve ever watched in a theater (an experience made doubly daunting by the fact that I immediately bussed to The Broad Theater to watch Żuławski’s 3-hour sci-fi abstraction On the Silver Globe after it was over).  Thankfully, Menus-Plaisirs does not make its audience weep & squirm quite as much as Our Body does, since it’s about a trio of family-owned fine dining restaurants instead of the immense beauty & cruel limitations of the human body.  I can’t say it was an especially significant experience for me, at least not when compared to critics who recently declared it the Film of the Year.  Mostly, it was just a pleasant afternoon sit, like binge-watching a season of Top Chef guest-produced by Dodin Bouffant.

In Wiseman tradition, there is no voiceover or onscreen text explaining the interpersonal drama of the chefs at the story’s center.  In fact, all of the contextual background info about how the three restaurants operate is saved for a tableside conversation in the final 2 minutes of the runtime, so feel free to fast-forward 4 hours for that explanation if you’re feeling lost.  Even without the context, though, you gradually get to know the trio of chefs as a father who can’t quite let go of his business and his two apprentice sons, who struggle with a low, consistent hum of brotherly competition.  Because it’s a Wiseman movie, though, most of the drama is just the garnish decorating the main course: process.  We mostly just watch the chefs source ingredients, brief staff, prepare food, and schmooze guests.  The scenery is beautiful, the personality clashes are mostly under control, and everyone is well fed.  Life goes on.

The Animal Kingdom (Le règne animal)

One of my favorite French Film Fest traditions is selecting movies based entirely on the actresses featured in the cast, regardless of director, genre, or subtext.  The French Film Fest ritual is incomplete if I haven’t seen a mediocre movie starring at least one of a handful of festival-standard actresses: Isabelle Huppert, Juliette Binoche, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Marion Cotillard, etc.  And now, I can confidently say that Adèle Exarchopoulos has earned her place on that prestigious list.  I’m at the point where I’ll enjoy pretty much anything as long as Exarchopoulos is in it, including this supernatural thriller that was instantly forgotten after it premiered last year in Cannes’s Un Certain Regard program.

The Animal Kingdom is a moody fantasy film about a world where humans start mutating into other animal species, like a somber revision of the Netflix series Sweet Tooth.  The central drama is a coming-of-age story about a teenager who’s struggling with the sudden loss (or, rather, transformation) of his mother during this phenomenon.  He also struggles with the terrifying possibility that his own body might be transforming as well, in an especially monstrous version of puberty.  Then there’s his struggle to connect with his distracted father, who’s fixated on retrieving his feral-beast mother and reassimilating her into the family home.  Exarchopoulos operates at the fringes of the story as the father’s reluctant love interest.  She plays a kind of stock FBI character from 90s action thrillers, the kind who are always 2 or 3 steps behind the fugitive main players.  It’s like watching Tommy Lee Jones track escapees from the Island of Dr. Moreau – a part she plays with only mild enthusiasm.

There are a few Icarian moments when the ambition of the film’s superhuman CGI are not matched by the might of its budget, which often breaks the spell of the story it’s telling. There’s some grounding, visceral detail in the body horror of the beastly transformations, though, especially as characters pick at their bloodied nails, teeth, and stitches the way a wounded animal would.  That’s another time-honored French Film Fest tradition in itself, come to think of it: listening to an audience who don’t typically watch a lot of genre cinema express disgust with the ordeal of a well-executed gore gag.  I have particularly fond memories of watching the grotesque erotic thriller Double Lover with this exact festival crowd for that exact reason.  I just wish Adèle Exarchopoulos was given something half as interesting to do in this film as any one scene in that all-timer from Ozon.

The Crime is Mine (Mon crime)

François Ozon’s selection in this year’s French Film Fest was nowhere near as memorable as the nonstop freakshow of Double Lover, but it did hit a different quota for what I love to see at the fest.  The Crime is Mine is a traditional crowd-pleaser comedy that features a performance from festival-standard Isabelle Huppert, making for two collaborators who are both capable of much weirder, wilder work.  Huppert stars in this 1930s-throwback farce as a Silent Era film starlet who struggled to make the transition to talkies, so she instead attempts to become famous through a headline-grabbing murder.  It’s an adaptation of a stage-play comedy that mildly updates its source material, but mostly just aims to please.  It’s very charming & cute but deliberately unspecial, like a mildly more subversive version of See How They Run.  If you want to see Isabelle Huppert go big in an outrageous wig, you could do much worse, but you won’t walk away accusing Ozon of having The Lubitsch Touch.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Superman/Batman — Apocalypse (2010)

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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. 

I love Supergirl. Kara Zor-El is such a favorite character of mine that, even when I sold almost all of my comics half a decade ago, I couldn’t bear to part with the Supergirl issues that I had bought way back when I was a college freshman, the ones written by Jeph Loeb, penciled by Ian Churchill, and inked by Norm Rapmund (among others; for those who are interested in the minutiae, I’m talking about Volume 5). I spent hours practicing my own art by redrawing panels from that comic book run, and was completely fascinated by the comic run’s upending of the Supergirl narrative. Ever since her inception, Kara had always been treated as Clark/Kal/Superman’s younger cousin, who had been born on (essentially) a refugee colony before finding her way to Earth to meet the older relative who had so inspired her; that Kara (in)famously not only died but was retconned out of existence as part of the major 1986 comic event Crisis on Infinite Earths. I’ve never seen this discussed anywhere, but I have a feeling that part of that decision was the fact that the 1984 Supergirl film starring Helen Slater bombed so hard critically and commercially (calling it “not great” is charitable, but for a Supergirl fan like me it’s not without its charms). 

This Kara was a bold and fresh new direction for the character in the new millennium: instead of being the younger of the last two survivors of Krypton, the Kara introduced in 2005 was the older of the pair, at least chronologically, as she was already a teenager when their planet was destroyed. In fact, she had been sent specifically to become the guardian and caretaker for her baby cousin, but because her pod was caught up in a chunk of Kryptonian debris, she remained in suspended animation for several decades, arriving on Earth to meet a Kal who had already grown into an adult and become Superman. Now she was not only one of the last children of Krypton, but she was specifically more of a fish out of water, alienated both from the new world on which she found herself but also from the only person she could have reasonably expected to have an automatic connection to, as he had been raised in a completely different culture. Without a mission, without an anchor, Kara was a brand new character with a brand new angle to explore. Before the launch of her own title, the character was reintroduced in the Superman/Batman storyline “The Supergirl from Krypton,” which itself came on the heels of that same comic’s “Public Enemies” arc, which featured the titular duo having to stop an asteroid of Kryptonite from crashing into the Earth. If that sounds familiar, it should! That comic was adapted into Public Enemies, which we’ve already discussed. That means that we’ve come to the first direct sequel within this project, Superman/Batman: Apocalypse. 

The plot here adheres pretty closely to the source material. The kryptonite asteroid that Lex Luthor spent the previous film/arc underplaying has been destroyed, but not without leaving behind some debris, which includes a Kryptonian pod containing a young woman. She lands in Gotham Bay and is rescued by Batman before being taken under the wing of her cousin, whom she is surprised to learn is an adult and a hero, but he relinquishes custody of her to Wonder Woman and the Amazons when they arrive in Metropolis and insist that Kara is too powerful to live in such a populous location and “offer” to train her on Paradise Island. While there, Kara develops a close friendship with the precognitive blonde Lyla, who is wracked by visions of Clark pulling Kara’s lifeless corpse out of a body of water. Elsewhere, on the planet Apokolips, imperialist dictator Darkseid has decided that the girl who fell to Earth is the perfect candidate to become the new leader of his honor guard after the abdication and defection of his previous lieutenant, Big Barda. He arranges for the kidnapping of Kara from Themyscira, with the crossfire resulting in Lyla’s death, her vision fulfilled as we see it was her body that Superman cradles on the beach after the attack, not Kara’s. The trio of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman (joined by Big Barda) take the fight to Darkseid in order to retrieve the Girl of Steel and bring her home. 

One of the things that people mock most about the ‘84 Supergirl is that it’s not content to really be a story about Kara Zor-El the way that the preceding Christopher Reeve movies (the good ones, anyway) were stories about Superman. What I mean by that is that Supergirl isn’t just about a fish out of water superhero who happens to be a young woman, it’s about a young woman who occasionally gets involved in magical/superheroing shenanigans. It feels very much like what a board room full of men think young girls would want to see in a movie about a super girl: girls boarding school hooliganism, flying around horses, trying on a bunch of outfits, etc. Instead of Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor hatching a giant real estate plot that will result in cataclysmic death as collateral, Faye Dunaway’s Serena almost destroys a small town (and its Popeyes) because she’s obsessed with a groundskeeper who goes on a couple of dates with Kara and she saw him first (no offense to the actor, he’s a reasonably attractive man, but not exactly fight-an-alien hot). The problem with Apocalypse is that this film far too closely resembles that earlier film about Supergirl, up to and including the fact that her first interaction with humans is that a couple of blue-collar men make threatening sexual comments and then get their asses handed to them—these movies are twenty-five years apart, and that’s still the best that there is on offer here. Plus, this one has the addition of an extremely typical shopping montage that starts with Kara saying “Teach me everything there is to know about being an Earth girl!” and ends with “I think I’m going to love being an Earth girl!” It’s just so … I hate to use the word “uninspired,” but it really is. By the time the film tries to wring some pathos out of Kara’s concerns about whether her brief time as a villain in Darkseid’s employ was because of some darkness within her, it’s too little, too late; compared to the similar ambiguity about whether her darkness was internal or brought about through outside manipulation that we just saw in Under the Red Hood, this one falls very flat. 

That having been said, this movie is a major improvement over some parts of the previous installment in other ways. Gone are the ugly character designs that made Public Enemies an anti-aesthetic experience, replaced with the beautiful designs seen in Mike Turner’s on-page work, the same art that was so inspirational to me lo these many years ago. Although the relegation of Batman to more of a supporting role (despite what the title of the movie might suggest) means that the positive element of the easy friendship between him and Supes is absent, there’s still a lot to love here. Summer Glau was the adoration object of straight male nerds of the late aughts and early ‘10s, coming in hot off of her roles in Firefly and The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and she does good work here, and the late Andre Braugher is fantastic as Darkseid. And although I normally find my mind wandering during a lot of the action sequences in these movies, this one has several good ones, with the final showstopper battle with Darkseid at the Kent farm in Smallville being a real standout, not just in this movie, but for all of them. It’s brutal, and although it’s much smaller scale than most of the “urban population center” fights that populate this franchise, it has real punch. 

The first time I saw this one, back when it was released, I had no idea that it was a sequel to Public Enemies, a movie that I hadn’t seen, and I appreciated it for no other reason than because my (super)girl was in it. It functions just fine in that regard, even if it is middling in a lot of ways. When Supergirl was reintroduced in comics back in 2005, it had been nineteen years since the character was last seen, which seemed like such a triumphant return after an incredibly long time. It’s now been nineteen years since then, which is a nice piece of symmetry, but I wish that I had more to say about that other than express how much I loved those comics compared to how lukewarm I am on this adaptation. Really only of interest to fans of Kara Zor-El, and even then, it’s not the most interesting story with her that you can find. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman — Under the Red Hood (2010)

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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. 

I wasn’t totally sure that I would have something new to say about this movie. Of all of the movies in this project, this is the one that I’ve seen the most (I think; Crisis on Two Earths is another that I watched over and over again during a time when I didn’t have the internet at home), and we’ve already discussed it here on Swampflix as a Movie of the Month, alllll the way back in May of 2018. What I said in my intro there, that this is my favorite Batman movie—not just in animation, but in general—remains true. There’s nothing quite like it, and although there was a very brief moment when I considered skipping over this one since it had already been a subject here, I immediately realized that I would be depriving myself of a reason to watch one of my favorites again, so I dove right in. 

In case you don’t care to read our MotM about it (how dare you), the plot is this: after the bloody death of Jason Todd (Jensen Ackles), the second boy to wear the Robin costume, the lives of everyone involved are forever changed. Joker (John DiMaggio), who delivered the beating that clipped the Boy Wonder’s wings, is in jail; Batman (Bruce Greenwood) has taken on no new proteges and is even averse to teaming up with the first Robin, Dick Grayson, who now works on his own as the hero Nightwing (Neil Patrick Harris); and Ra’s al Ghul (Jason Isaacs), who initially teamed with the Joker so that the clown would distract Batman while he went about his world-changing shenanigans, was so disgusted by the sheer brutality of what happened that he has stopped minding the Caped Crusader’s business altogether, and attempted to make things right in a way that only served to make things worse. It’s now been several years, and a mysterious new vigilante has appeared in Gotham City, one who—unlike Batman—has no rule against killing his enemies and is more than willing to become a de facto crime boss in his pursuit of toppling the criminal empire of Black Mask (Wade Williams). Who is this new player, the Red Hood, and what does he want? 

There have been so many attempts to make comic book movies that are “darker,” or “edgier,” or “grittier,” but they almost universally go about this in ways that are aimed at seeming more dark to a certain demographic. Perhaps the most well known example of this was in one of the earliest trailers for the 2018 DC series Titans, which featured God’s prettiest angel Brenton Thwaites as Dick “Robin” Grayson growling “fuck Batman” (it’s at 0:55, if you’re interested), which immediately became the subject of much mockery online; for my money, it’s not nearly as cringe-inducing as every single thing about Jared Leto’s Joker, but that’s neither here nor there. Under the Red Hood manages to be the more adult story that people are always saying that they want, not through sheer violence (although there definitely is that) or nonsensical swearing (there’s nothing more blue than the occasional “damn” here), but just by honestly and earnestly portraying the loneliness and grief of loss and the resistance to accepting that someone you loved could return to you, transmogrified into a monster that you don’t recognize. This isn’t a story about a Batman who, at his core, is a scared little boy lashing out at the darkness that took his family from him; this is a story about a Batman who was a father, who saw that there was darkness in his son and tried to encourage him to refocus that energy into something that could affect positive change and then losing that son, twice. 

There’s a moment in this where Batman delivers one, six word line that floats to the top of my mind every time I think about this movie. It comes at the end of an exchange that Bruce has with Alfred over the radio:

Alfred: Sir, please take this to heart. Who Jason was before, how we lost him, and this dark miracle or curse that has brought about his return… it is not your fault. l know you view his death as your greatest failure but–

Bruce: His life and his death are my greatest failure. Do you remember how he was when I found him?

Alfred: Of course, sir.

Bruce: Fearless, arrogant, brash and gifted. Different [from] Dick in so many ways, but still so full of potential and power.But I knew, even from the beginning, he was dangerous. lf I hadn’t made him into Robin, he would have grown to do wrong. Then I got him killed.

And then—

Bruce: My partner. My soldier. My fault.

There’s no one who can hold a candle to Kevin Conroy when it comes to portrayals of Batman, but Greenwood comes very close here, infusing those simple words with meaning that far exceed the silliness of this whole animated endeavor. Greenwood’s Bruce is carrying the weight of the world in a way that only someone who recognizes the extent of the devastation that he has wrought can convey, the gravitas that can only be mustered by someone who suddenly finds themselves at the gates of Hell only to look back and see how much of highway they’ve paved with their good intentions. It’s stunning; I would honestly pay good money to watch ten seconds of footage of Bruce Greenwood delivering this brief monologue. He’s haunted, quite literally—at its core, this is a ghost story. Everywhere he goes, Bruce sees the echoes of the past, his occasional moments of joy but most often his failures and regrets: the flashback to the night that the Joker was born, a shadowplay of the day that he first met Jason as a street kid in the process of trying to boost the tires off of the Batmobile, a recollection of one of the many fights in which Jason’s aggression ran counter to their mission and which, in retrospect, question whether Jason’s fall to the dark side was inevitable. 

Of course Red Hood is Jason—who else could he be? No DC property treats this like a spoiler anymore; when the aforementioned Titans did a variation on the Red Hood plot in its third season, the fact that Jason was under the helmet was a kind of internal reveal, but wasn’t played for shock for the audience, and now that the character has appeared in video games without any attempts to keep his identity a secret. I’m not even sure that this film intends to obscure this fact, given that the law of conservation of detail means that anyone who’s ever seen a movie before has already done the math long before Bruce figures it out. Reading the film this way, the lengths that Bruce goes to in order to try and convince himself that his adopted son can’t possibly be the murdering psychopath stalking the streets are all the more heartbreaking. He knows that Red Hood is Jason the moment that he hears Jason’s voice saying his name, but he still has to try and disprove it, even going so far as to dig up the boy’s (supposed) grave, all while we all already know the truth. He’s already lost Jason once, and now he has to grieve for him again, not because his son is dead, but because he’s too far gone to be saved. The hits don’t stop coming even when the two are face to face, when Jason tells Bruce that he doesn’t blame the older man for failing to save him, but he can’t stand living with the fact that Bruce let Joker live afterward. And why? “Because he took me away from you,” Jason says, softly. At the core of his grief, and his rage, is the belief that his father didn’t love him enough to avenge him. It’s devastating. 

Even though I like the brows on my culture to be both high and low in equal measure, I would never pretend that anything I’ve watched so far in this project would be adequately described as “cinema” even when the elements themselves can be cinematic (I’m still thinking about Anne Heche’s performance in Doomsday, even all these weeks later), but this one is really a cut above. If you were to watch only one of these movies, this is the one.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League — Crisis on Two Earths (2010)

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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. 

After the personal disappointment that was Superman/Batman: Public Enemies, I was pleasantly surprised to see that not only was the next movie on the docket one that I had seen before, but that it was one that I unabashedly love: Crisis on Two Earths. This one and the film that follows, Under the Red Hood (which I love so much it was the Movie of the Month for May 2018), are back-to-back great films, and the perfect way to wash out the lingering bad taste of Wonder Woman and Public Enemies. An interesting bit of trivia is that this narrative was originally supposed to be produced years earlier as a film that would bridge the gap between Justice League and its follow-up/continuation Justice League Unlimited, both of which I’m fond of. At the end of the former, longtime teammate Hawkgirl was revealed to be a mole for an invasion of Earth by her people, the Thanagarians, before she ultimately chooses to side with the people she was sent to spy upon, and the final arc saw the destruction of the JL’s “Watchtower” headquarters. At the beginning of the latter, the titular team of titans have a newly expanded roster (hence the “unlimited” moniker) and a new Watchtower base, the design of which is the same as the one that appears under construction at the end of this film. From this and other details, it’s easy to see where this would slot in between those TV seasons, but there’s enough that’s different that the viewer is still in for some surprises. 

Our film opens with two men we know as villains, Lex Luthor and the Joker (here known as The Jester) breaking into a facility and stealing a small piece of equipment, pursued by two shadowy figures. The Jester sacrifices himself to give Luthor time to escape, giving himself up to two silhouetted figures who appear to be Hawkgirl and Martian Manhunter, but who are revealed as twisted versions of the same. Luthor then transports himself to “our” world, where he immediately turns himself over to the police and demands to speak to Superman. We quickly learn that this version of Luthor comes from a world where the characters we know as heroes are instead replaced by villainous versions: in place of Superman (Mark Harmon), Ultraman (Brian Bloom) runs the Crime Syndicate, an organized crime outfit that he leads with Owlman (James Woods) as his lieutenant instead of Batman (William Baldwin) alongside Superwoman (Gina Torres) rather than Wonder Woman (Vanessa Marshall), Johnny Quick (James Patrick Stuart) in place of the Flash (Josh Keaton), and Power Ring instead of Green Lantern (both Nolan North). Luthor (Chris Noth) has come to beg for the help of the Justice League in order to defeat their evil counterparts and save his world. When they do join him in his crusade, they find themselves in conflict with that world’s U.S. president, a non-evil version of Wade “Deathstroke” Wilson (Bruce Davison), and Martian Manhunter (Jonathan Adams) finds himself falling in love with the president’s daughter, Rose (Freddi Rogers). 

This one is a lot of fun, and one of my top favorites of this franchise, even before beginning this watch project. One of the most compelling elements is the relationship between Owlman and Superwoman, who is not a version of Wonder Woman in this world but is instead a twisted mirror of longtime character Mary Marvel, as evidenced by the fact that her crew of “made men” consists of other Shazam-related characters. James Woods may be a name we only speak in soft whispers now in order to avoid catching his attention like the Eye of Sauron now that he’s gone completely fascist, but he gives a great vocal performance as a soft-spoken nihilist in comparison to the normal gruff brusqueness that we have come to expect from the Caped Crusader, and he becomes the true villain of this piece when his philosophy leads to him attempting to wipe out all Earths in every dimension. Convinced that all decisions are meaningless due to the fact that every choice made everywhere creates a new parallel dimension, leading to an exponentially large number of worlds, the number of which is so vast it is indistinguishable from infinity, he decides that the only “true” decision anyone can make is to destroy all of them. For her part, Superwoman, who is at first motivated solely by the desire to conquer and accumulate wealth, is completely on board with this idea once he explains it to her, and Gina Torres sells her ruthless fanaticism beautifully. The fact that she is, in reality, a teenage girl who has simply chosen to live as her adult superhero alter ego at all times makes the whole thing that much creepier and more fun to watch. 

The action scenes in this one are very exciting too, in a way that hasn’t been as memorable for me in several of these movies. The level of destruction wrought in Superman: Doomsday was impressive, but it was ultimately a lot of punching back and forth. Wonder Woman had the action as one of its high points, between the monsters vs. Amazons fight at the beginning and the rematch at the end (which included the raising of the dead and forcing the Amazons to fight the corpses of their own reanimated sisters), but this one is chock full, and some of the moments are fascinating in just how small they actually are. Batman, who initially stays behind when the rest of the League goes to the Crime Syndicate dimension as he thinks it falls outside of their purview and that they need to get their own house in order first, ends up facing off against the evil Marvel family on his own, and it’s just our luck as viewers that they appear on the Watchtower at a time when he’s in an Aliens-esque power loader, which makes the fight dynamic more interesting. Once it’s down to just him and Superwoman, he attempts to throw a punch while she has him pinned down, and she calmly tells him that this move will cost him a rib, and she casually breaks one of his by simply applying a tiny bit of pressure with her thumb. It’s deeply unsettling, and I love it. 

If there is one plot element that I’m not fully sold on, it’s the relationship between Martian Manhunter and Rose Wilson. There’s something to be said for Rose’s character’s refusal to lie down and roll over for the Crime Syndicate the same way that her father has, at the threat of great danger to her life. That Martian Manhunter conceals himself among her secret service detail and is forced to reveal himself in order to prevent her from assassination at the hands of that world’s evil version of Green Arrow is a fine narrative choice, but the romance that blossoms between them feels a bit tacked-on, even if its presence is supposed to serve as a reflection of what a love based on mutual admiration and fondness looks like, in contrast to the “love” between Owlman and Superwoman. I don’t love that Martian Manhunter mind melds with her after a single kiss (she tells him that this is how they show affection on Earth, and he demonstrates that on Mars they do the same through telepathic contact) and they share all of their thoughts with one another. It’s not merely that he doesn’t really explain this to her before doing so — and, in so doing, gives her a lifetime of his memories and gets all of hers, which makes it feel … less than consensual, especially since she now has firsthand memories of the genocide of the Martians from the point of view of their last survivor. It’s also that his memories include the death of what appears to be his wife and child, which makes the age gap between them feel weirder. I’m not really interested in weighing in on the current obsession with age gap discourse (other than to say that anyone who doesn’t see that the malicious adoption of this discussion by bad faith actors is a ploy to eventually move from “Eighteen-year-old women’s brains are still developing!” to “A woman can’t make rational decisions until she’s 25!” with the ultimate goal of getting to “Women shouldn’t be allowed to make their own decisions!” is a fool, and the insufficiently critical young leftists who are participating in this campaign are doing damage that will take decades to undo), but it does feel a little gross, given that we never really know how old Rose is supposed to be. 

I really want to call out Lauren Montgomery here, who shares directing credit with Sam Liu. Montgomery helmed Doomsday, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern: First Flight, and she’s doing excellent work here as well. Liu’s previous work in this particular franchise was on Public Enemies, which also was nothing to scoff at, especially since I don’t blame him for that film’s egregious art style, any more than I blame Montgomery for the sexist elements of 2009’s Wonder Woman. This one is the best looking of all of them, with the tightest storytelling and the most interesting premise, which manages to feel fully realized despite this film having the same 75-ish minute runtime as all of the other movies so far. In some cases, that’s been the sole positive selling point for these movies, that with their minimal time investment, there’s no reason not to give it a shot. This one feels complete and unrushed in that time while still telling a full and compelling story, and I love that about it. This one gets the biggest recommendation from me yet. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Krewe Divine 2024

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For Carnival 2017, a few members of the Swampflix crew joined forces to pray at the altar of the almighty Divine. The greatest drag queen of all time, Divine was the frequent collaborator & long-time muse of our favorite filmmaker, John Waters. Her influence on the pop culture landscape extends far beyond the Pope of Trash’s Dreamlanders era, however, emanating to as far-reaching places as the San Franciscan performers The Cockettes, the punkification of disco, and Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Our intent was to honor the Queen of Filth in all her fabulously fucked-up glory by maintaining a new Mardi Gras tradition in Krewe Divine, a costuming krewe meant to masquerade in the French Quarter on every Fat Tuesday into perpetuity.

There’s no telling how Krewe Divine will expand or evolve from here as we do our best to honor the Queen of Filth in the future, but for now, enjoy some pictures from our 2024 excursion, our sixth year in operation as Swampflix’s official Mardi Gras krewe:

Eat Shit!

❤ Krewe Divine ❤

My Week with Marlene

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I know for a fact that there was a recent time when Marlene Dietrich’s numerous, star-making collaborations with director Josef von Sternberg were streaming on The Criterion Channel.  I know this because I happened to watch one of the lesser titles from that collection, The Devil is a Woman, during that window.  If I had known how difficult it would be to access the Dietrich/von Sternberg oeuvre just a few years later, I would’ve pushed myself to stream them all when I could, not just the one that jumped out at me because it had “Devil” in the title and was set during Carnival.  Currently, none of von Sternberg’s collaborations with his sexual-anarchist muse are streaming on any online platform (legally, at least), which means you’re either coughing up $100 for Criterion’s DVD box set (The Blu-Ray discs are currently out of print) or you’re waiting patiently for them to return to their streaming platform some distant, wistful year.  Well, I’ve unlocked a secret third option: buying used DVD copies of whatever Marlene Dietrich movies I happen to stumble across in thrift stores.  Sure, I’ve still never seen Morocco or The Blue Angel—two of her most beloved collaborations with von Sternberg—but I’ve managed to pick up a few of their shared titles in the meantime to help me get through this unexpected streaming drought.

1932’s Blonde Venus finds von Sternberg in awe of Dietrich’s charisma . . . and her stockinged gams.  She stars in this pre-Code adultery drama as a woman who is simply too fabulous to cut it as a housewife, too magnetic to not be onstage, so badass it’s criminal (in this case to her marriage’s peril).  As flattering as von Sternberg’s movie is to Dietrich’s plentiful charms, he still dramatically puts her through the ringer.  Blonde Venus opens with Dietrich and fellow, unnamed actresses skinny-dipping – their naked flesh just barely obscured by reflections on the surface of the water.  They’re naturally peeped on by group of horny fuckboys, one of whom is smooth enough to talk Dietrich into a date after her next performance.  Years later, she’s married to the galoot, raising their son, and worried that their family won’t be able to survive the financial burden of her sickly husband’s skyrocketing medical expenses.  Of course, this leads her to return to the stage to earn quick cash (in a time when “dancer” effectively translated to “prostitute”), where she quickly is led astray by a young, wealthy, hunky Cary Grant who throws her marriage into a death spiral.  Blonde Venus is extremely dated to 1930s sensibilities, by which I mean Dietrich’s stage numbers get real racist real quick, with her first performance featuring a gorilla suit and a bevy of buxom dancers in blackface.  It’s dated in all the right ways too, though, laying on so many double-entendre line readings and horned-up “come hither” glances that you’re tempted to say von Sternberg has “The Lubitsch Touch“.  Of course, he’s actually got his own touch, which mostly shows in the lighting’s gorgeous play with silhouettes & shadows and in the drama’s gloomy mood, which is something you won’t find in most of Lubitsch’s pre-Code sex comedies.

Shanghai Express, from the same year, doubles down on the gloomy drama, trapping Dietrich in a series of locked train cars where are no stages for the fräulein with the redrawn brow-lines to model sparkly outfits or sing cabaret.  Instead of locking horns with a fellow horned-up cabaret dancer named Taxi (whom she insults in Blonde Venus by asking “Do you charge for the first mile?” in perfect ice-queen bitchiness), Dietrich is instead paired with an equally gorgeous & charismatic actress who genuinely poses a threat.  Shanghai Express is a rolling cage match in which Dietrich & Anna May Wong are locked in tight quarters to compete for the title of most alluring femme fatale; I’m afraid Orientalism wins out in the end, but it’s still a beautiful fight.  Like in Blonde Venus, things get real racist real quick, with every character casually tossing around the word “chinaman” and musing about the moral corruption of The East in practically every scene of dialogue (and with the villain appearing in yellowface to seal the deal).  I very much understand the movie’s appeal to those who rank it highly in the Dietrich von Sternberg catalog, especially as a political thriller in which a train of innocent passengers are held hostage & tormented by corrupt Chinese officials in an increasingly tense stalling of their lives.  The government corruption, moralist Christian hypocrisy, and opium trade maneuvers that drive the plot are all intriguing enough in this Dietrich von Sternberg bottle episode, but I just couldn’t get past the Orientalist stink of the premise & setting.  As perfectly cast as she is, Anna May Wong is herself a victim of that racist streak, with her screentime greatly diminished in comparison to Dietrich, who stars as the infamous “coaster” (coastline sex worker) Shanghai Lily.  Dietrich lands some great zingers about how “respectable people” are “dull” and how she & God are “not on speaking terms”, but they’d all be better served in a film where she’s a bawdy cabaret performer instead of an expatriate political refugee.

1931’s Dishonored splits the difference between Blonde Venus and Shanghai Express, combining the best parts of both films to achieve the highest highs of this thrift-store-purchase trio, despite having the lowest name recognition.  Dietrich stars as a sex-worker musician and as a political agitator, using her alluring beauty & party-girl charms to infiltrate Russian forces as lady-spy X-27.  Dishonored is the most visually showy von Sternberg film I’ve seen so far, layering shadows, dissolves, and foreground props in what could’ve been a very straightforward wartime espionage drama otherwise.  It’s also got plenty of pre-Code shocks, most lovably in a rare Carnival sequence that credibly conveys the debauchery of the holiday (even more so than in The Devil is a Woman).  It’s ideal TCM broadcast fodder all around, with lines of dialogue like “I suppose I’m no good, that’s all,” and “The more you cheat and the more you lie, the more exciting you become” registering as all-timers that should be just as iconic as “Here’s looking at you, kid” and “Of all the gin joints in all the world, she walks into mine.”  It’s a bleak, bleak, bleak picture, even for its time – featuring two suicides in its opening half hour and concluding on an unflinchingly brutal execution.  At the same time, von Sternberg leaves plenty of room for ribald joviality, with Dietrich joking about the difference between “serving her country” as a spy vs “serving her countrymen” as a streetwalker.  Like in Shanghai Express, she doesn’t sing any cabaret numbers, but she does play plenty of piano, and her director is going so buck wild with his lingering dissolves and long-distance push-ins that you hardly have time to notice she’s not performing on a stage.

I cannot claim that Dishonored is the best of Marlene Dietrich’s collaborations with Josef von Sternberg, because I am working with an incomplete data set.  I can only report that it’s the best of their collaborations that I currently have access to.  It seems almost criminal that any of the seven films they made together wouldn’t be currently available to the public on a streaming service, but scarcity of access is a constant in any cinephile’s life.  Unless you’re lucky enough to have the made-up, mythological resource of “disposable income”, it’s likely you’re used to having your film selections dictated by access points like library cards, video store rentals, thrift store purchases, and shared streaming-service passwords; I know they’re what drive the programming on this humble film blog, anyway.  I’m committed to catching up with Morocco, The Blue Angel, and The Scarlet Empress the next time they’re conveniently available to me, but I will admit there was an unbeatable thrill to finding used copies of a few other blind spot titles in the Dietrich von Sternberg catalog to hold me over until then – especially since Dishonored & Blonde Venus ended up being such rewarding pre-Code dramas that might’ve felt more anonymous if I watched all seven movies at once.

-Brandon Ledet