Lists & Articles

The Not-So-New 52: Legion of the Super-Heroes (2022)

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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’ve seen the first fifteen minutes of this movie a few times now. It’s not boring, really, but it was something that I just kept trying to watch in the late hours when I didn’t feel like expending the effort to think about what to watch, so I would often put it on and then fall asleep. Now that I’ve managed to make it all the way through, it’s another solid but unexceptional entry in this franchise. And man, this period of films sure does have a hard-on for Solomon Grundy, don’t they? 

After a pre-credits opening in which teenaged Kara Zor-El (Meg Donnelly) learns from her mother that she has been accepted to the “military guild” on the same day that Krypton is destroyed, she escapes in the only working pod, only to be knocked off course. When we catch up to the present day, Kara—still a teenager even though her infant cousin has now grown up and become Superman because of her pod having taken longer to reach Earth—is having trouble adjusting to life on our planet. Everything is technologically inferior in a way that isolates her. When she attempts to stop Solomon Grundy from going on a rampage, she’s confronted by a man who is upset that her activity has resulted in wanton property damage. Batman (Jensen Ackles) pulls Superman (Darren Criss) aside and says that Kara’s impulsivity makes her dangerous, and that something has to be done about this. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s almost exactly the same as the beginning of Apocalypse. As in that film, the solution is to send Kara off to train elsewhere with people who are more like her; in this case, that means heading off to the 31st Century, to train at the academy of the Legion of Superheroes, a kind of interplanetary Justice League of the future. There, she’s initially smitten with Mon-El, a flying invincible hero of the Superman mold, and has an instant altercation with a man she recognizes as Brainiac, but whom she later learns is fellow legionnaire in training Brainiac 5 (Harry Shum, Jr.). A quick tour of the grounds sets the groundwork for action later in the film, including foreshadowing the presence of a vault of confiscated weapons, which is subject to a heist later in the film. 

Here’s a bit of a meta-spoiler; the animation studio is going to do a massive reset of this continuity after just one more of these, a film titled Warworld. That means that this is, for all intents and purposes, the second to last in this sub-franchise. After one Superman film, a sort-of Flash movie that mostly took place in an alternate past, a king-sized Batman flick, and a Green Lantern buddy space opera, we’re on our fifth film, and we’re already leaving a lot of story potential out there on the court to be swept under the rug as having happened between movies while racing toward a reset button. That begs the question of why they would even make these as interconnected movies in the first place if that interconnection is purely a matter of branding (oops, maybe I just answered my own question there). For all its flaws and variances between the films that made it up, the DCAMU at least felt like there was a reason for it to exist, and there was some reward for following them in the form of longer character arcs. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Here, we get a few brief minutes of Superman and Batman in the present before Supergirl’s gallivanting off to the future, and a quick check-in right in the middle of Kara’s adventures in superschooling to let us know that there’s a terrorist organization that almost managed to acquire Brainiac 1’s head from the lab in which it is being studied. Other than that, there’s no reason for this to not simply be a solo Supergirl outing, or it could keep the title it has now if there’s some concern about the movie selling fewer DVDs if it’s more obviously about a woman (the poor sales of Catwoman: Hunted probably contributed to this). The target demographic of this movie is very, very concerned about cooties. 

What we do have is pretty rote. The rest of the student body at Legionnaire Academy is pretty lackluster. The most impressive is a woman who can split into three (and only three) versions of herself; the rest include your normal assortment of ragtag underdogs whose uncool powers are completely useless, until they’re all working in tandem at the end and everyone gets a moment to shine. There’s a guy who can turn himself invisible (but not anything else, like his clothing), a shy “phantom girl,” a man who can inflate himself and bounce around, and everybody’s favorite actually-a-comic-book-character Arms-Fall-Off-Boy, whose arms fall off. None of them have any hope of becoming Legionnaires when they complete their training, as it’s widely agreed that superChad Mon-El has the single open position on the team locked down. For half a second I got excited that they might be teasing a Mon-El/Brainiac 5 romantic pairing, but instead we have a pretty rote story about Kara having a crush on Mon-El before her friction with Brainiac 5 turns into begrudging respect, which is itself replaced by romantic interest. Brainiac 5 is a total Spock, though, since he won’t shut up about how he’s the smartest, most logical guy in the universe; I get the appeal. There is a traitor in the ranks, though, and given that this is little more than a futuristic variation on the stock “nerds vs. jocks” plot, you can probably guess who turns out to be the mole. Turns out they’re a member of the same terrorist organization that Bats and Superman dealt with in the 21st Century, which has existed for over a thousand years now and which serves one goal: help Brainiac (1) conquer the universe. Of course the man behind everything is Brainiac; it’s always, always Brainiac. I’m so tired. 

As it turns out, one of the things in the superweapon vault has the potential to rewrite existence and Brainiac wants it but even he wasn’t smart enough to bypass the security system, so he let successive generations of himself become smarter until Brainiac 5 came along, whose sense of heroism could be manipulated into opening the vault. For what it’s worth, I am giving the film an extra half star purely because Brainiac 1 shows up at the end with Brainiacs 2-4 sticking out of his lumpy flesh and crying out in pain like Monstro Elisasue, so that was fun (he’s even defeated because all of his constituent parts decide they want ultimate power for themselves, and he’s torn apart by his own absorbed clones). Some amount of world shattering wigglies do expand, which I wouldn’t normally mention, but it might be important later since we’re speedrunning toward a crisis-style reset. In the end, Supergirl and Brainiac 5 make out and get together, and the Legionnaires who were conveniently kept away from HQ while all of this was going on return home and say that they’re going to let in all of the wacky misfits, even Arms-Fall-Off Boy! The end. Is this the last we’ve seen of Brainiac? I sure hope so. Y’all can keep Sinestro, too. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman and Superman – Battle of the Super Sons (2022)

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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.

Of all of the films on this list, this was the one I was least looking forward to. The few clips that I saw prior to my screening did not endear me to its 3D animation style, and it seemed squarely aimed at a child audience based on the premise alone. What this ended up being was much better than I expected, even if its PG-13 rating is a little baffling. 

Jonathan Kent (Jack Dylan Grazer) is about to turn twelve, and is old enough to start to resent the frequent absences of his journalist father, Clark (Travis Willingham), despite frequent lectures from his mother Lois (Laura Bailey) about the importance of the fourth estate. When dear old dad misses Jonathan’s baseball game on his birthday, the boy broods in his room and runs from his father when he does come home, taking off into a cornfield before his emotional stress gets the better of him and he manifests heat vision. Hiding in the barn afterward, his father reveals to him for the first time that he’s not always off chasing stories, but averting tsunamis and stopping falling space debris, because pops is Superman. Jonathan is delighted at this news (despite, like many children, having a preference for the “cooler” Batman). After a touching father-and-son flight around the world in the vein of Aladdin’s “A Whole New World” musical sequence, the two go to Gotham, where Superman introduces his son to Batman (Troy Baker) and the latter’s own son, Damian/Robin (Jack Griffo). There’s immediate friction between the elitist Damian and “farm boy” Jonathan, and their conflict belies Damian’s own insecurities, specifically that the Teen Titans don’t want him because of his tendencies toward both violence and lone-wolfism, rejecting him from the team. When an interstellar invading force assimilates huge swathes of the earth’s population, including the Justice League and the Titans, it’s up to the boys to put aside their differences and save both their dads and the world. 

Strangely, I had an easier time adjusting to the animation style here than I have in the “Tomorrowverse” movies, perhaps because these character models don’t constantly call to mind Adult Swim shows of a bygone era. It’s certainly not up to something like Pixar’s output, but it’s pretty decent, if occasionally wonky. I don’t think we ever see anyone close the front door of the Kent farmhouse, as characters often walk in and leave the door wide open while they have a conversation until the scene ends, so it really does seem like everyone here was raised in the proverbial barn. There are even scenes that were rather impressive, most notably the scene in which Green Arrow, bow cocked, searches the JL’s “Watchtower” satellite for a potential invader, as there’s a lot of fun rotation around the character and the movement of both model and lighting was effectively moody. There are also several scenes of characters walking out of dark shadows to reveal that they’ve been taken over by Starro spores that reminded me of one of my all-time favorite comfort Halloween watches, The Faculty, and that always gets points with me. 

Characterwise, I appreciated that this film had one of the most infuriatingly unlikeable versions of Damian Wayne to date, and that his character arc over the course of this one moves him to a more sympathetic place, which was impressive. When we first meet him, he’s snide and condescending while Bruce stands by embarrassed, apologizing for the fact that his spawn is a bratty little edgelord. He even kicks Jonathan over the edge of one of the many non-OSHA-compliant platforms in the Batcave as a “test” to see if he can get the other boy’s flight power to activate in a traumatic situation (it does not work, and Jonathan is almost smashed to death on stalacmites). His decision to head straight to Jonathan’s school and recruit him to his “save the dads” mission is pragmatic, but also speaks to his desire to prove that he can be a team player. For his part, Jonathan himself is in a meeting with the principal following an altercation with a bully named Melvin; the school administrator tells Jonathan that Melvin is troubled and that if Jonathan can extend the other boy a little grace and look past his harsh exterior, people like Melvin can be the most loyal friend one can ask for. This doesn’t really seem to be true in the case of Melvin (that kid’s a little asshole), but it does echo through his scenes with Damian, as Jonathan is able to win him over through his own clever thinking and spirit of determination. It’s not the most nuanced or original storytelling, but it’s not talking down to its audience. 

Speaking of which, I’m not really sure who this film is supposed to be for. I mentioned that PG-13 rating above, and for most of the runtime, I was hard-pressed to think of why that might be the case. Not every movie that’s about children is for children, obviously. No child should see Come and See or Graveyard of the Fireflies before they’re old enough to process what they’re seeing. This, however, definitely has the air of being made for a younger audience than these movies are normally suited for. In fact, the moment that a character said “damn,” I was a little shocked, as Super Sons had theretofore been so … family-friendly? The plot point about young Jonathan feeling ignored by his father because he missed the kid’s baseball game is a cliche lifted straight out of Hook, and both Damian and Jonathan’s playground insults are feeble in a way that couldn’t possibly interest an adult audience but might, perhaps, pass muster with a child. I found myself surprisingly touched by all the time that Clark and Jonathan spend together in Act I, but it’s not sophisticated, adult stuff; it’s for kids. After the midpoint, however, things start to get a little more violent, as if the film was lulling you into a false sense of security before moving on to Starro’s little seastar-with-an-eye things horribly emerging from characters’ mouths and, in the finale, all of those eyes bursting bloodily when the hive mind is defeated. I’m not sure what to make of this, honestly, since it takes what is clearly a PG family movie into something that’s more in line with what the standard audience of these movies would expect, but I find it hard to imagine them not being bored with the film’s more squeaky-clean daycare-safe first half. Ultimately, it’s pretty decent, if tonally uneven, and for someone who normally rolls his eyes at stories about fathers and sons, I found this story inoffensive and occasionally tender. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Anora and Her Friends

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Sean Baker’s time is here.  After nailing down his gig-labor docufiction style in the 2004 food-delivery tragedy Take Out and then applying it to a long string of sex-industry dramas in the couple decades since, Baker has finally earned his moment in the prestige-circuit spotlight.  Earlier breakthroughs like Tangerine & The Florida Project perfectly calibrated his caustically funny, soberingly traumatic storytelling style in his best work to date, but he emerged from those triumphs recognized as a name to watch rather than one of the modern greats.  He’s been recalibrating in the years since, going full heel in his deliberately unlovable black comedy Red Rocket before face-turning to the opposite extreme in his latest work, Anora.  Clearly, Baker has decided he wants audiences to love him again, and it’s impressive to see him swing so wildly in tone between his last two features without losing his voice.  Anora is the feel-good sweet counterbalance to the feel-bad sour Sean Baker of Red Rocket.  Both are equally funny & frantic, but only one is affable enough to set the filmmaker up for a Best-Picture Oscar run after taking home the top prize at Cannes.  It’s his time.

The surprising thing about Anora’s critical success is that it’s such a dutiful continuation of the work Baker’s already been doing for years – just with an extra dash of sugar to help sweeten the bitter.  Mikey Madison stars as the titular erotic dancer, another trapped-by-capitalism sex worker in a long tradition of Sean Baker anti-heroines dating at least as far back as 2012’s Starlet.  Anora is a thorny, chaotic, unfiltered baddie whom the audience instantly loves for her faults, because she’s fun to be around.  Like in Tangerine & The Florida Project, we meet her working customers in a high-stress but manageable profession, then follow her on an anarchic journey through her larger urban community, walking a tightrope between slapstick physical comedy & face-slap physical violence until she’s offered a moment of grace in the final beat.  As the editor, Baker has worked out a well-timed rhythm for this story template through its many repetitions in previous works.  He sweeps the audience up in the hedonistic romance of Anora’s Vegas-strip marriage to a big-spender Russian brat who offers a Cinderellic escape from the strip club circuit in exchange for helping secure a green card.  The quick-edit montage of that fantasy then slows down to linger on its real-world fallout, investing increasingly long, painful stretches of time on Russian gangsters’ retribution for the young couple generating tabloid headlines that embarrass the brat’s oligarch father.  The laughs continue to roll in, but the punchlines (and physical punches) get more brutal with each impact until it just isn’t fun anymore, as is the Sean Baker way.

There’s nothing especially revelatory about the Sean Baker formula in Anora.  In the context of his filmography, it’s just more of the same (of a very good thing).  However, the increased attention to his career-long project as an auteur has had its immediate benefits, not least of all in Baker’s collaboration with the local repertory series Gap Tooth Cinema (formerly known as Wildwood).  When asked to program a screening for Gap Tooth as a primer for what he was aiming to achieve in Anora, Baker offered three titles as options: Fellini’s Oscar-winning sex worker drama Nights of Cabiria, the fish-out-of-water Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America, and a second Italian sex-work story in 1960’s Adua and Her Friends.  Gap Tooth ultimately selected Adua, the most obscure title of the trio and, more importantly, one of the very best titles they’ve screened to date.  I don’t know that Sean Baker’s name would have come to mind had I discovered Adua and Her Friends in a different context, since it’s a much more formally polished picture than the anarchic comedies he’s become known for since he filmed Tangerine on an iPhone.  The comparisons that more readily came to mind were Mildred Pierce, Volver, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.  It’s a less recognizable title than any of those comparisons, but that’s the only way in which it’s lesser.  It’s an incredibly stylish, sexy, tragic, and cool story of self-reinvented sex workers making do in late-50s Italy, one that speaks well to Baker’s genuine interest in his characters’ inner lives beyond what they symbolize as society’s economic casualties.

Adua and Her Friends is a darkly comic drama about a small crew of sex workers who are forcibly retired by the Merlin Law of 1958, which ceased the legal operation of all Italian brothels.  Unsure how to get by without the only trade they have experience in, the women conspire to open a rural, roadside restaurant as a front for a new, illegal brothel they will run themselves.  Only, after a few successful months of food service—depicted as being equally difficult as prostitution—they decide they’d rather “go straight” in their new business than convert it into an underground brothel.  As you’d expect, the self-reinvented women’s lives as restaurateurs are upended by men from their past that refuse to let them start fresh, the same way Anora is blocked from upgrading her social position from escort to wife.  Where Adua excels is in taking the time to flesh out the inner lives & conflicts of each woman in its main cast.  Lolita is led astray by conmen who take advantage of her youthful naivete; Marilina struggles to reestablish a familial relationship with her estranged son; Milly hopes to leave her past behind and start over as a devoted housewife, Anora-style.  Adua (Oscar-winner Simone Signoret) gets the first & final word in her struggle to establish a new career before she ages out of her livelihood, but the movie is an ensemble-cast melodrama at heart, asking you to love, laugh with, and weep for every woman at the roadside restaurant (and to hiss at the cads who selfishly ruin it all).

Much like in Baker’s films, the majority of Adua and Her Friends is a surprisingly good time, with plenty slapstick gags & irreverently bawdy jokes undercutting the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold tropes typical to this subject.  Like Anora, it’s a 2+ hour comedy with an emotionally devastating ending, one that carefully avoids making its titular sex worker a purely pitiable symbol of societal cruelty even while acknowledging that she’s backed into a pretty shitty corner.  Adua and Anora can be plenty cruel themselves when it helps their day-to-day survival.  That might be where the two films’ overlapping interests end, since Adua lounges in a much more relaxed hangout vibe than Anora, scored by repetitions of Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk” rather than t.A.T.u.’s “All the Things She Said.”  Adua and her friends loiter around their Italian villa, fanning themselves in a deep-focus tableau, while Anora is dragged around Vegas & NYC by Russian mobsters who (for the most part) don’t see her as a human being.  There is one early sequence in Adua where a black-out drunken night is represented in choppy lost-time edits that may have been an influence on the rhythms of Anora’s first act, but otherwise I assume Baker was inspired less by the film’s formal style than he was by the characterizations of its main cast.  The frank, sincere, humanizing approach to sex-worker portraiture in Adua and Her Friends speaks well to Sean Baker’s continued interest in sex-work as a cinematic subject and, although both were great, I feel like I learned more about his work through its presentation than I did by watching his latest film.

 -Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Green Lantern – Beware My Power (2022)

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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.

Green Lantern: Beware My Power falls squarely in the “solid, but unexceptional” tier of these movies for me. The story is interesting, and it goes out of its way to deliver something different from the films that came before it, making overtures toward space opera as a genre, while also falling back on some old standby narrative elements, like framing the narrative around a central mystery (this time, it’s “What re-ignited the conflict between two worlds brokering an uneasy peace?”) and having a Green Lantern with PTSD serve as the main character. But it also errs on the side of being a bit messy, its moral quandary is muddled, and there’s something amiss in the editing. 

John Stewart (Aldis Hodge and therefore automatically an extra half star) is a veteran of the Iraqi Quagmire struggling to deal with his PTSD now that he’s back in civilian life when a UFO crashes into the junkyard next door. He rescues a small blue alien dude from the wreckage, who speaks to him cryptically before his body self-destructs at the moment he dies, leaving behind a green ring that slips itself onto his finger and starts talking to him. Unable to remove it, he asks the ring if someone could help him understand what’s happening to him, and the ring surrounds him in a protective shield and take him to the JLA’s satellite “Watchtower,” where after a round of extremely typical “misunderstanding means fight” stuff, Green Arrow (Jimmi Simpson) and the newest Green Lantern are off to the GL HQ planet of Oa in the self-repaired crashed ship. Upon arrival, they find the headquarters in ruins and meet Shayera Hol (Jamie Gray Hyder), a warrior of the planet Thanagar, which is populated by winged humanoids. She tells them that the Green Lanterns had helped to create a truce between the Thanagarians and the basically human people of Rann, who were at war with one another. An attempt to build a bridge between their two planets, metaphorically and (using teleportation tech known as “zeta beams”) literally, went awry, putting the two planets right next to each other and wreaking untold havoc on both. Each side blames the other, with good evidence on both fronts, although this turns out to be due to an external party that’s performing false flag efforts on both Rann and Thanagar. Along the way, they pick up Adam Strange (Brian Bloom), a hero of Rann whom even the Thanagarians respect, and who has been presumed dead for years. 

Of course, the villain behind everything is Sinestro. It’s always Sinestro. I got tricked into thinking for a while that this story might go somewhere different, but nope: Sinestro. There does turn out to be another party behind him pulling things from the shadows, but the moment that it was revealed that the Rann/Thanagar beam-bridge thing was sabotaged by Sinestro, I rolled my eyes. (Worse still, upon looking up the movie on Wikipedia to review the cast list, it looks like the film’s poster/DVD cover straight up shows Sinestro; so much for making it a “mystery” at all.) Up to this point, I was willing to forgive a lot of the film’s flaws. A lot of the animation seems a little choppy around the edges, and there’s a distinct feeling that I get that certain frames were extended by fractions of a second, as if they needed just an extra minute and change of runtime in order to meet a contractual obligation and they were going to get those 87 seconds with what was already completed, even if it meant making the time between each character’s lines feel juuuuuuust a teensy bit too long. 

Further, there’s a real “Not all cops” vibe early in the film that I wasn’t a big fan of, and seems particularly tone deaf given the time of release and the film’s main character. After manhandling a guy because he was being an obnoxious jerk while John was having a PTSD flashback, John then comes across two men planning to burn an unhoused guy alive in an alley simply for being there, and he fights them off. The police arrive just as he puts on a few finishing moves and tase him, only letting him go once they run a background check and learn that he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. The whole thing feels weird, out of place, regressive, and apathetic about police brutality. Given that one of the film’s theses revolves around moral justifications for taking a life, it feels weird to include this run-in with the police one of the film’s first scenes. I’m not exaggerating either; the first time that GL and GA meet Shayera, John almost kills her in their fight, as he has her pinned under a mental construct and is in the process of crushing her to death as his ring repeats “Lethal force is not authorized,” over and over again. It’s because of John’s PTSD, of course, as he keeps flashing back to the moment that one of his fellow soldiers was killed next to him, followed by an attack by an enemy combatant who stabs John through his hand in the altercation before John is able to get the upper hand. This gets called back a couple of times, including a scene near the end when the film’s big bad does the same. When the gang manages to rescue the imprisoned Hal Jordan, his old buddy Green Arrow is shocked when the newly freed man kills one of the enemy facility’s guards without hesitation, as Hal says that his experience in Sinestro’s prison has hardened him. Still later, the final villain is defeated when Arrow is forced to kill them, as there’s no other choice. 

Justification for homicide seems like a strange place for these movies to go. I suppose it could be construed as necessary given that our newest Lantern here is a combat veteran, and the fact that John is haunted by the things he saw (and did) in the war makes for a much more complex character than the ones we’ve seen so far in this series. I don’t want to complain about the creative team on this one giving more depth to any of the characters, but it’s definitely a weird choice. A lot of the other choices I really liked, though. Although Unbound spent some time in space aboard Brainiac’s ship and the failed assault on the planet Apokolips obviously launched from space, it’s surprising that it’s taken over forty of these movies to make a proper, space-set sci-fi story (it also took them more than forty of these before they made one with a Black lead, it should be mentioned). The influences from Star Wars are all over. The Green Lanterns’ powers are given elements of The Force here (during a long interstellar trip, John even practices his use of his new powers with the ring like Luke does aboard the Millennium Falcon). There’s a dark, corrupting influence that causes the moral fall of the greatest and most respected member of an intergalactic peace-keeping order, and the fall of that order leaves only one last Jedi Green Lantern, one free of the influence of previous generations. Hal Jordan’s prison beard even makes him look almost exactly like prequel Obi-Wan. If you’re going to borrow (or steal), do it from the best, I suppose. 

From a production perspective, this one is a little sloppy, but I’ve finally gotten used to the animation style, so it’s not intolerable. Narratively, it’s a refreshing change of pace to get out and do some space stuff, since the last time we did anything close to this scale was in Emerald Knights, which was over thirty movies ago. Characterwise, the choices they made about John Stewart’s past are an interesting wrinkle that delivers more pathos than normal, and his interactions with Green Arrow are a lot of fun. I love Aldis Hodge, so that’s a plus. Still, this one gets a “Solid, But Unexceptional.” 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Gamera’s 90s Makeover

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All you really need to earn respectability in the entertainment industry is to stick around long enough for the bad reviews to fade away and your presence is undeniable. It worked for Keanu Reeves, it worked for Adam Sandler, and it also worked for the fire-breathing turtle monster Gamera.  When Gamera first premiered in the 1960s, the giant turtle beast was essentially a goofy knockoff of Godzilla, and he was treated as such.  As a result, he quickly pivoted to become a “hero to children everywhere” in a long string of kiddie sequels (before Godzilla also got into that game), so that the original Daikaijū Gamera film was never treated with the same critical or historical respect as the original Gojira.  We all love Earth’s hard-shelled protector anyway, though, so it’s good to know that Gamera did eventually get his deserved victory lap in the 1990s, when he was given a slick, big-budget makeover to help boost his reputation as one of the kaiju greats.  I haven’t yet seen all of Gamera’s kid-friendly sequels from the 1960s & 70s, but I can’t imagine any could compare with his action-blockbuster spectacles from the 1990s.  Gamera’s Heisei-era trilogy is a glorious run of high-style, high-energy kaiju pictures that for once genuinely compete with the best of the Godzilla series, instead of registering as a court jester pretender to the King of Monsters’ throne.

The debut of that 90s makeover, 1995’s Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, is both the best and the most faithful of the trilogy.  Gamera is re-introduced to the world as a living relic of Atlantis, not a newly arrived extraterrestrial protector.  He battles the Giant Claw-like bird creatures the Gyaos from his 1960s days, who are theorized to have been activated by Climate Change, and his ability to fight them off is powered by a child’s love.  Just in case audiences weren’t sure that this straightforward Gamera revival was inspired by the success of Jurassic Park, Guardian of the Universe almost immediately includes an archeological dig and a scene where the scientist studying the Gyaos shoves an entire arm into their droppings like Laura Dern going shoulder deep in triceratops poop.  It’s the Jurassic Park style mixed-media approach to the visual effects that really makes this one stand out, since the plot and the monster-of-the-week enemies are such classic Gamera fare.  There’s something gorgeous about the film’s 90s green screen magic, surveillance video inserts, and rudimentary CGI mixing with the rubber monster suit tactility of classic kaiju pictures that inspires awe in this reputation-rehabilitator.  We are all Sam Neill gazing upwards, slack-jawed at our giant reptile friend and, then, begging the Japanese military to stop shooting at him so he can save the day.  Every time Gamera bleeds green ooze in his fight to save us, we too ooze a tear in solidarity.

Things turn more horrific in the 1996 sequel Gamera 2: Attack of Legion, shifting from Jurassic Park to Mimic in Hollywood comparison terms.  Instead of fighting off the Gyaos sky-beasts, Gamera has to face underground bug creatures collectively called Legion.  As a threat, Legion can be genuinely unnerving in their Phase IV-style insectoid organization skills, at one point carpeting Gamera’s entire body in a collective swarm.  In individual design, they’re a touch creepier than the Arachnids from Starship Troopers, adding a gross little cyclops eyeball to the center of each bug’s frame.  All we can do in the face of such horrors is to thank Gamera for sticking around to protect us . . . unless you happen to be one of the poor children orphaned by the large-scale destruction of his skyscraper heroism.  Gamera’s enemy in the third installment, 1999’s Revenge of Iris, is the titular parasitic monster that has been orphaned by the turtle’s heroic violence, birthed from a loan surviving egg seemingly borrowed from the set of an Alien sequel.  Really, though, Gamera has to contend with the disaffected child psychically linked to that monster, who lost her parents when Gamera crushed their apartment during a Legion attack in the previous picture.  It’s a plot that questions whether the widespread collateral damage of Gamera’s heroism is worth having him around to fight off lesser monsters, to the point where he has to fight a personified version of the Trauma he’s caused in past battles. We all still love the big guy, but accountability is important.

Of the two sequels, Revenge of Iris is the only true contender for possibly besting Guardian of the Universe as the best of Gamera’s 90s run.  By that point in the series, Gamera’s reputation as something too goofy to take seriously had been fully overcome, so there was only one goal left to achieve: make Gamera scary.  It’s an incredible accomplishment, achieved by filming the giant turtle beast from inside the homes he’s supposedly protecting with his righteous, vengeful violence.  There’s a somber, funereal tone to Revenge of Iris, as if it were clear to the filmmakers that Gamera’s 90s revival was a special moment in time that had already reached its natural conclusion.  Images of dead Gyaos covered in flies and a sea floor carpeted in dead Gameras from Atlantis’s ancient past convey a sad finality to the series echoed in Gamera’s “What have I done?” moment self-reflection when he realizes he has traumatized the very children he sought to protect.  Personally, I was much more impressed & delighted by the spectacle of Gamera’s official makeover in Guardian of the Universe, but the tonal & thematic accomplishments in Revenge of Iris are just as remarkable, considering the monster’s humble origins three decades earlier.  Attack of Legion is a worthy bridge between those two franchise pillars as well, especially on the strength of its creepy creature designs.  Gamera may not have emerged from his 90s run as a hero to all children everywhere, but he carved out an even bigger place for himself in this overgrown child’s heart.  I love my giant turtle friend, and I’m happy that he eventually found the respect he’s always deserved.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Catwoman – Hunted (2021)

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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.

There’s a moment in this movie where Selina “Catwoman” Kyle is in the middle of a heist, very early in the runtime, when—suddenly—a Batarang appears in front of her, and a cowled shape moves in the shadows. I sighed a heavy sigh; after Soul of the Dragon, nearly three hours of a Long Halloween, and the Batman-heavy Injustice, I was really, really tired of the Batman. You can’t imagine the relief I felt a few minutes later when Batwoman emerged from the shadows. At this point, I’ll take any reprieve that I can get. 

The film opens at a lavish party being hosted by Barbara “Cheetah” Minerva (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), which doubles as the onboarding of Gotham mob boss Black Mask (Jonathan Banks) into the criminal organization “Leviathan.” It’s a costume ball as well, which serves to help a woman who arrives in an old-school Catwoman outfit, catching Black Mask’s eye and prompting him to invite her to accompany his party inside. Unbeknownst to him, the woman on his arm is the real Selina Kyle (Elizabeth Gillies), and she makes her way through the party flirting and pickpocketing until she can get into Minerva’s vault. Along with her faithful feline companion Isis, abscond with the Cat’s Eye Emerald, which Black Mask brought as his buy-in on this criminal enterprise. Mask and his henchman pursue Catwoman along with Minerva’s brute Tobias Whale (Keith David), but she manages to escape, only to be apprehended by Kate Kane, aka Batwoman (Stephane Beatriz), who spirits her aboard an aircraft that Interpol has “acquired” from Penguin. There she meets secret agents Julia Pennyworth (Lauren Cohan) and King Faraday (Jonathan Frakes!), who enlist her help in bringing down Leviathan by acting as bait for Minerva et al’s cronies, promising to wipe her criminal record clean if she succeeds. 

Like Gotham Knight before it, Catwoman: Hunted is drawn in an anime style, although it was handled by a single studio rather than several, as the earlier, vignette-based film was. That studio is OLM, best known in the west for their work on various Pokemon projects, and I love the art style. Catwoman herself is adorable, as is Isis (uh, please don’t take that out of context), and the designs of all of the characters make this one a very pleasant watch, especially following so closely on the heels of more Tomorrowverse thick-line drawing and the ugly art style that was omnipresent in Injustice. Of particular note is just how cool Cheetah looks once she hulks out into her big, feline form; it makes for a much more dynamic visual experience than the rotating house styles that I had come to expect from these, and it was a pleasant surprise once the film got started. I was already pretty won over, however, as the opening credits featured a great jazz soundtrack (courtesy of Yutaka Yamada) and a fun sequence which has this grainy feeling, like the images are drawn with chalk on newsprint. It’s very 70s, and I loved it. Looking back, this film is also one in which those opening credits serve a narrative function; it tells an impressionistic story of Catwoman going to Sochi and rescuing a large group of women from some kind of imprisonment. At first, this seems to simply be a little bit of character development, to signal to potential new viewers that this Catwoman isn’t just the criminal with whom they are likely already familiar, but also establishes her moral code. Further than that, however, this event is actually the impetus for the plot, as it’s later revealed that Catwoman liberated a group of women who were being human trafficked by Minerva, and that what seemed like little more than typical Catwoman steal-a-big-jewel shenanigans was actually the first step in a more complicated plot to take down Minerva. 

I suppose it’s not that unusual for a script by Greg Weisman to be clever. I’ve sung the praises of his television series Young Justice many times in these pages. I love it so much that I put on a random episode while doing some chores the other day and ended up not only just sitting down and watching it, but also having to force myself not to spend the rest of the day like that. For fans of animation in general, Weisman’s name may be familiar because of his development of the criminally underrated Gargoyles, a 90s Saturday morning Disney product that wove mythology, magic, and Shakespeare into its text while tackling ambitious topics like prejudice, redemption, legacy, and identity. If you read the above paragraph and read the names David Keith and Jonathan Frakes(!) and you’re familiar with Gargoyles, you might have already assumed Weisman was involved, as Keith voiced lead gargoyle Goliath and Frakes provided the voice of the show’s first and primary antagonist, Xanatos. Weisman’s work has always been noteworthy, and he’s one of those writers who knows exactly what part of my brain to metaphorically reach inside of and scratch an itch with a perfectly, elegantly constructed narrative. While we’re on the topic of Weisman, this one will probably be of particular interest to fans of the aforementioned Young Justice, as the film’s interest in not just Catwoman but cat women, as evident in the choice of Cheetah as the primary villain, means that the character Cheshire shows up here, with Kelly Hu reprising her voice role. I honestly can’t think of a single thing in this movie that would contradict YJ, so if you’re looking for something to fill the void left by the series (second) cancellation, this can slot right into that continuity, if you like. 

One of the best scenes in the film involves Selina and Kate, left alone on the fancy jet that Interpol commandeered, getting surprisingly intimate for these largely sexless movies. Selina draws a bath and plays at inviting Kate to join her, clearly aware of both Kate’s secret identity and her sapphic inclination. It’s a ploy to get a piece of equipment from Kate, but that doesn’t mean that Selina isn’t into it, and in this house, we fully support bisexual Catwoman. Although Batman isn’t present in the narrative, it’s clear that he and Selina are or have been “a thing,” as Selina is hesitant to use lethal force against Solomon Grundy because of a promise she made to an unnamed friend (before she gets the go-ahead from her teammates since Grundy is technically undead), and bristles at Kate calling her “Cat,” saying that “only he gets to call her that.” Still, this is a new, fun take on the typical Bat/Cat dynamic that we’ve grown used to, and the quippy, flirtatious banter between the two is a highlight of the script. I get the feeling that this one was not well received—it’s the lowest rated of all of these movies by IMDb users (an admittedly feral and untrustworthy lot), has only a 64% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 2.9 star rating on Letterboxd—but if you’re not a stick in the mud, don’t let that deter you. I’m going to give this some of the highest praise I possibly can, which is that this is one of a very short list of these NSN52 titles that, after this project is over, I might actually watch again. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Injustice (2021)

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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.

We don’t talk about video games around here very often. Although our bread and butter is film talk, obviously, we occasionally diverge and talk about books, music, and Star Trek. I enjoy video games, although I wouldn’t consider myself much of a gamer. When I enjoy something, I usually do nothing but play that game to completion (or close enough to completion that I’m satisfied) and then might not pick up a controller again for months, and even over a year at certain points in my life. I don’t think I’ve ever even brought it up over on the podcast, although if you go back through the archives and are curious as to why I didn’t write a single review in September of last year, the solution to that mystery is that I had just gotten Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I’m the kind of person who thinks that the newest system is always too expensive, and normally wait until the next generation is out before I even consider purchasing one. The XBox 360 released for Christmas 2004, but I didn’t buy one until I used my tax return to do so in February of 2008. I used nothing but that as my entire entertainment center for over a decade. The PS4 was released in 2013 and the PS5 in 2020, and I upgraded to the PS4 on Black Friday 2019, when the prices were already starting to drop and there was additional savings. But what really prompted me to upgrade was the release of two games that had me salivating: Spider-Man and Injustice 2. The latter of these was a sequel to a game that I had played on my 360, and although I had little interest in the narrative (such as it was; this is a one-to-two player 1v1 fighter of the Mortal Kombat mold after all), but I was intrigued about getting to play as Supergirl, my love for whom is well documented in these reviews. The narrative of the first game is simple; a furious Superman, enraged at having been tricked into killing a pregnant Lois by Joker, forgoes due process and just straight up kills the murderous clown. This ends up splitting various heroes down ethical lines as Superman slides further and further down the slippery moral slope, ending with him setting up a regime. When you play the storyline (rather than just the arena), you mostly play as members of the rebellion against this despot. 

It’s not the most original storyline. We’re up to our necks in “What if Superman, but evil?” at this point, and if you’re thinking that maybe this was before that was such a tired idea, then you’re sort of right. The game came out in 2013, while this film came out in 2021, at a point in time in which the world already had two seasons of The Boys. In 2013, this was fine — not just because it hadn’t been done to death yet, but also because it wasn’t supposed to be a movie, it was just supposed to be the bare skeleton upon which a fighting game was very thinly predicated. But piggies love slop (and I’m not excluding myself here) so of course the game got a prequel comic, and the prequel comic got an animated adaptation, and here we are. I never read that comic (and you can’t make me), but there were apparently enough changes that the film has a disputed reputation. For what its worth, this is one of the most fan-fictiony things that I have ever seen with a full animation budget, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. This movie is the equivalent of watching a child smash action figures into one another and weld together different half-remembered things that they know about characters into a messy narrative, except it’s also sadistic in a way that seems designed to appeal to someone who craves more adult media but can’t fathom going out of their DC comfort zone. 

The film opens on Clark (Justin Hartley) and Lois (Laura Bailey) in bed together, when Clark is awakened because he hears an extra heartbeat, revealing that Lois is pregnant. She goes off to work while Clark gets his Superman on and meets with Batman (Anson Mount), who deduces the good news even before his friend can reveal it. Unfortunately, the Joker (Kevin Pollak) is in Metropolis, where he murders Jimmy Olsen and kidnaps Lois. The whole league is brought in to try and find her before something bad can happen, and they work together to find that Joker and Harley Quinn (Gillian Jacobs) have stolen a submarine and that one of the nuclear warheads is missing. Superman brings the sub back to shore and boards it, and inhales some Scarecrow gas that has been laced with kryptonite, then attacks what he believes to be Doomsday and takes the monster into space, only to discover upon exiting the atmosphere that he’s dragged his lover and their child into space, where they both die. Worse still, a timer has been surgically grafted onto Lois’s heart, so that when it stops, the missing nuke detonates in Metropolis, atomizing the city. While Green Arrow (Reid Scott) takes Harley into what amounts to protective custody, Superman tracks down Batman and the Joker to Arkham, where he—over Batman’s protests—extrajudicially murders Joker. This sets the two heroes at odds with one another, as Superman starts down the slippery slope with Wonder Woman (Janet Varney), Cyborg (Brandon Michael Hall), Bruce’s own son Damian/Robin (Zach Callison), and others joining his regime, while Batman, Arrow, Catwoman, Dick/Nightwing, and others form a “rebellion” against Superman’s overreach. This starts small, with enforced peacekeeping in the Middle East through invasion and deconstruction of the power structures of fictional countries like Bialya and Qurac, but gets out of hand when he murders an entire warehouse full of young ravers because of their idolization of Joker as a figurehead against Superman’s fascism. From here, it’s hero versus hero, yawn, etc.

You know that thing that people love to mock about MCU movies where a character says, “Well, that just happened,” even though no one has ever uttered that line in any of those? In this movie, someone actually says it, and I couldn’t believe just how creatively bankrupt the film already was at that point, a mere fifteen minutes in. It doesn’t bode well for the film overall, and is oddly also a part of the only thing in the movie that gave me any joy, which was the interaction between Arrow and Harley. He’s a very self-serious man, and their playful antipathy (complete with periodic gassings of one another) is some of the only levity that this gritty film musters. I’ve loved Jacobs since Community and she’s an inspired choice for Harley here, and she’s clearly having a lot of fun with it. Their rapport is fun, especially when she manages to crack through Arrow’s resistance on certain things (notably, she criticizes him for naming his secret HQ the “Arrowcave,” noting that “Batcave” makes sense as bats live in caves, she recommends the “Quiver,” which he adopts fairly quickly as he realizes that she has a point). That’s about all that there is to enjoy here, however, as the rest of the film alternates between being utterly dour, repetitive in its action sequences, and occasionally just straight up fanservice of the kind a child playing with toys would enjoy. What if Damian killed Nightwing? But, but what if when that happened Dick became, like, a version of Deadman called Deadwing (no, really)? It’s best enjoyed if you have the mind of a child, but isn’t really appropriate for children, which means it’s best suited exactly for the kind of manchildren that, to its credit, it’s clearly made for. That’s not a recipe for a good movie, though, and it shows in the final product. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The SubstAnimator

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Coralie Fargeat’s entertainment-industry body horror The Substance has hung around in theaters for way longer than I expected it to, likely propelled by its eye-catching marketability on social media platforms like TikTok & Instagram.  While I’ve been struggling to catch the blink-and-miss-it local runs for similarly small, artfully grotesque oddities like Guy Maddin’s Rumours & Adam Schimberg’s A Different Man, I still have multiple daily options to rewatch The Substance, which premiered here weeks earlier.  That kind of theatrical longevity is great for a genre film’s long-term reputation (just look what it did for Parasite), but in the short-term it does lead to some pretty annoying naysaying online.  The two most frequently repeated, hack critiques I’ve seen of The Substance as it lingers weeks beyond its expected expiration date is that 1. “It’s not really a horror movie; it’s more of a body horror,” and 2. It’s a shallow movie that believes it’s deep, as indicated by its set-decor’s multiple allusions to Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining.  I’m not entirely sure what to do with the pedantic hairsplitting that makes you believe the body horror subgenre is a separate medium than horror filmmaking at large, but I do believe both of those lines of critique would fall apart if the nitpickers would just . . . lighten up a little.  Yes, Fargeat’s monstrous tale of the self-hatred that results from the unrealistic, misogynistic beauty standards of mass media does carry a lot of heavy emotional & political weight in theme, but in execution the film is functionally a comedy.  Specifically, it is a horror comedy, which I cannot believe I have to clarify still counts as horror.  It’s a grotesque picture with a righteously angry message, but it’s also meant to be a fun time at the movies, which I assume has a lot to do with how long it’s hung around on local marquees.

When The Substance‘s loudest detractors fixate on its background nods to the carpet patterns & bathroom tiles of The Shining, they’re deliberately looking past the large, glowing sign in the foreground pointing to the movie’s entertainment value as an over-the-top goof.  Early festival reviews out of Cannes did Fargeat’s film no favors by likening it to the headier body horror of a Cronenberg or a Ducournau, when it tonally falls much closer to the traditions of body horror’s knucklehead class: Hennenlotter, Yuzna and, most prominently, Stuart Gordon.  Its echoes of Gordon’s work ring loudest, of course, since the titular substance Demi Moore injects into her body to release her younger, better, monstrous self is visually modeled to look exactly like the “re-agent” chemical in Re-Animator.  Both substances are green-glowing liquids injected via a comically oversized syringe, and both are misused to reverse the natural bodily process of aging – the “activator” serum of The Substance by releasing a younger form of the user and the “re-agent” serum of Re-Animator by reanimating the corpses of the recently deceased.  As the attempts to cheat aging (and its kissing cousin Death) escalate in both films, the violence reaches a spectacular practical-effects crescendo, in one case on live television and in the other case at the morgue.  The entire scripting of The Substance might as well have resulted from a writing exercise teasing out what would happen if you injected the re-agent serum of Re-Animator into a still-living person (a question with a much less satisfying answer in Re-Animator‘s own wisely deleted scenes).  Fargeat’s background references to The Shining might have underlined the more somber themes of isolation & self-destruction her film shares with the Kubrick classic, but there’s a bright, glowing signal in the foreground telling the audience the exact kind of horror she was really going for here: blunt, gross, funny, excessive – just like Re-Animator.

Funnily enough, Re-Animator needed its own signal to the audience that it’s okay to laugh & have a good time with its morbid, literary mayhem as a Lovecraft adaptation.  That signal arrived in the goofy musical stylings of Richard Band, who has over a hundred credits as a composer under the Full Moon brand run by his brother, Charles.  Gordon might be the only horror auteur outside the Band family that’s made extensive use of Richard Band’s signature carnival music compositions, partly because his Saturday-morning children’s TV melodies are a poor fit for more serious horror movies and partly because his brother keeps him too busy to stray elsewhere.  According to Band’s interviews about the making of Re-Animator, he was the first member of the creative team to suggest that it should be played as a horror comedy instead of a straight horror.  When watching early rushes and trying to come up with a motif to match, he remembers urging Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna to see how silly and over-the-top the movie was, that even if they played it as a super-serious gore fest it would still make the audience laugh.  Band credits himself for highlighting the sillier notes of Re-Animator in both his “quirky” riff on the Psycho score and his music’s influence on the final edit.  Since every project Band, Gordon, and Yuzna have made since their early success with Re-Animator has continued its violently silly tone, it’s a difficult anecdote to believe.  No matter what they tried to make on a script level, it likely would’ve come out goofy on the production end anyway.  That’s just how they are.  Even so, Richard Band’s quirked-up Psycho spoof cuts through as a loud signal to the audience that it’s okay to have fun no matter how thematically dark or viscerally fucked up Re-Animator gets as it escalates.  I wonder if there were grumpy horror-nerd audiences at the time who were pissed about that score’s allusions to a Hitchcock classic, as if it were trying to convey something deep instead of something cartoonishly goofy.  Thankfully, we don’t have to know.

There are two major advantages that Re-Animator has over The Substance, and they both have to do with time.  One is that Re-Animator doesn’t waste a second of its own time, skipping right over the “Sue” segment of The Substance‘s evolution to get to the “Monstro ElisaSue” mayhem of its third act, shaving off an hour of runtime in the process.  That will never change.  The other is that it’s been around for four decades now, so that all of the most annoying bad-faith takes that it was met with in early release have all faded away, drowned out by celebrations of its over-the-top horror comedy delights.  The Substance will eventually get there too, as evidenced by how long audiences have been keeping its theatrical run alive against all odds.

-Brandon Ledet

New Orleans Film Fest 2024: Documentary Round-Up

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Normally, when I scan the New Orleans Film Fest line-up for titles I might be interested in, I rely heavily on the “Narrative Features” filter on their lineup.  This year, I only caught a couple narrative films in-person at the festival: the Zambian funeral drama On Becoming a Guinea Fowl and the Australian stop-motion comedy Memoir of a Snail.  Most of my NOFF selections were filed under the “Documentary Feature” tab instead, and I watched them at home.  All of the documentaries I caught at the festival were intimate portraits of on-the-fringe artists – most empowering, one eerily alienating.  They’re also all still currently available to stream on the festival’s Virtual Cinema portal through the end of this weekend.

So, here’s a quick-takes round-up of all the documentary features I watched during the 35th annual New Orleans Film Festival.  It’s a short but commendable list, one that will make me think twice about my small-minded Narrative Feature biases in future years (and maybe about getting out of the house to see them in-person).

Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story

The Jackie Shane whose story is told in the Canadian-streamer documentary Any Other Way was a popular R&B singer turned agoraphobic recluse – the kind of life-changing discovery you always hope to find whenever you dig through dusty record crates.  Shane was a transgender woman who performed in 1950s & 60s nightclubs in a “flamboyant” boymode persona, a younger contemporary and friend of the similarly styled Little Richard (to the point where early concert posters listed her as “Little Jackie”).  Her early notoriety as a stage act was earned through singing raucous vocals while playing drums in a standing position, which upped the rock ‘n roll theatricality of her shows.  Later, she leaned into the gender-nonconformity of her stage persona by introducing more women’s clothes into her onstage wardrobe, moving from Nashville to Toronto to mitigate the policing of her race & gender.  Her work got increasingly personal, culminating in a confessional live-recording LP that the movie cites as her magnum opus.  Then, she suddenly disappeared from public life, moving again to California and, eventually, back to Tennessee to fully embody her transgender identity, giving up fame for personal authenticity.  It’s both a shame that she was pressured into sacrificing one for the other and a shame that she didn’t live long enough to fully actualize the career resurgence that she was on the precipice of enjoying in the 2010s, when her trans identity was less of a professional liability than a basic fact.

The other shame about Jackie Shane is that there isn’t much video of her performing her music, with the exception of a single televised performance that was almost lost to archival neglect.  She did a wonderful job acting as her own archivist, though.  There’s a wealth of audio, still photographs, journals, costumes, and other artifacts that Any Other Way transforms into an art gallery installation in Shane’s honor.  Some Loving Vincent-style rotoscope animation helps fill in the gaps, with two actresses hired to portray Shane as both a young stage performer and an older shut-in who only communicated with her documentarians by phone in lengthy, candid interviews.  Those actresses are also interviewed about how Shane’s story resonates with their own relationships with transgender identity, which adds another layer of context & thematic depth to the usual talking-head style interviews with the music-historian nerds who most appreciate her as a stage act. Jackie Shane is recreated as a lip-synced watercolor in motion, living on in anecdotes about the time she headlined a popular Toronto nightclub for 10 weeks straight or the time she upstaged Etta James (and, according to some photographs, stole her wig).  It’s a loving tribute to an incredible artist who’s in danger of continuing to slip into obscurity without it, since there’s so little reference material in the world outside of Shane’s storage unit & surviving acquaintances.

Eponymous

In a way, Eponymous is also a portrait of an obscure artist, but it’s more of an exorcism than a tribute.  Hiram Percy is most legendary for his invention of the gun silencer, having already been born into wealth as the son of Hiram Maxim, inventor of the fully automatic machine gun.  Less notably, he was also an amateur filmmaking enthusiast in the early years of the medium, experimenting with the techniques & uses of cinematography in the early 20th century.  This is a complicated legacy for Caroline Rumley, an experimental filmmaker married to a descendent of Hiram Maxim, who shares his ancestors’ name.  Eponymous is an essay film in which Rumley voices her discomforts marrying into a family best known for inventing new, efficient ways to kill human beings in the arts of war & murder.  She struggles with that in-law familial history through hushed narration, imposed onto footage shot by Hiram Percy Maxim in his independent-artist days as an early filmmaking pioneer (with particular attention paid to the double meaning of the word “shot” in filmmaking and weaponry).  Diaristic notes from Percy detail the evolution of amateur, at-home filmmaking from simple portraiture to travel documentation to magic tricks to visual poetry.  Meanwhile, Rumley reaches for the next evolution in the medium, now that it’s aged into a century-old artform: cursed windows into the past.

There are a lot of personal essay films out there illustrated by menacing home video footage, but usually that footage isn’t over a hundred years old, which gives this one a genuinely haunted feeling . . . Well, that and all the talk of machine gun deaths.  The clips are often short, due to the physical and financial limitations of the home-movies medium in the early days of motion picture cameras.  The way Rumley loops, reverses, and teases out those images in close-up study illustrates her fall down an especially dark family-history rabbit hole in obsessive detail.  Some of her choices in presentation can be a little difficult to parse—including a bold white line that often bifurcates the frame—but the intense intimacy of the film suggests that it wasn’t made with an audience in mind outside her of own head anyway.  On Becoming a Guinea Fowl was the best film I saw at the festival about a familial legacy of violence buried just beneath a cheery surface of social niceties, but Eponymous was the one with the more fascinating visual textures – the one that fixated on the art of the moving image.

I Love You, AllWays

A more recent document of D.I.Y. art history can be found in Stuart Sox’s I Love You, AllWays, a loving tribute to the dive-bar cabaret that hosts most of New Orleans’s best drag & burlesque shows.  A spiritual sequel to Sox’s Decadence-weekend hustle doc To Decadence, With Love, this temporal check-in on the local drag scene mostly focuses on the first couple years of COVID, when the venue barely squeezed by to survive.  Even though it’s still recent history, it’s an emotionally tough time to revisit, dragging the audience back to an era when virus variants & vaccination dodgers prolonged a never-ending social lockdown, made doubly devastating by the local impact of Hurricane Ida just as things were headed in a positive direction.  That framing hit me hard, since I used to regularly attend shows at The AllWays until the pandemic, when I abruptly lost the momentum.  There’s even a shot of the calendar from the month they had to close in 2020, and you can clearly see a listing for the Joni Michell drag night I went to right before doing absolutely nothing outside my house (besides work) for about two years.

While The AllWays’s function as a queer communal hub can lead to a lot of passionate interviews with its owner and regular performers, there is something a little silly about taking this subject so seriously.  After intense emotional stress about what New Orleans life & culture would be without the AllWays, the venue bounces back to host the exact kind of pantomimed sexual anarchy it’s been home to for years: curbside peep shows, a twerking-Jesus passion play, and a burlesque performer pegging a watermelon with a strap-on dildo like the modern, erotic equivalent of Gallagher.  I’d be lying if I said the film’s appeal to pathos didn’t work on me, though.  Its genuine, soul-deep love for The AllWays made me so warmly nostalgic for pre-COVID drag shows there that I consciously overlooked its anachronistic VHS tape-warp filters that aimed to induce that nostalgia the cheap way (considering how much less that aesthetic marker has to do with the era it’s recalling than its other visual devices, like its vertical-video smartphone footage or its hesitantly typed Facebook posts).  The good news is that there’s no need to be nostalgic at all, really.  From what I can tell passing by, The AllWays appears to be just as lively today as all the other live performance venues on that busy strip of St. Claude Ave; I just need to start showing up again to get back into the flow of things.

The Flamingo

I said that all four of these documentaries are portraits of artists, and I guess Mary “The Flamingo” Phillips is the one I’d most have to make a case for that to be true.  Defined in The Flamingo mostly as a late-blooming divorcee who became a 60-something dominatrix after being turned on by the Fifty Shades of Grey book series, Phillips functions more as a sex therapist than as an artist.  She does paint and pose for visual art outside of her dungeon space, though, and she has turned her domme persona as The Flamingo into a visual branding project, decorating her body and her living spaces with as much pink-flamingo iconography as they can accommodate.  The Flamingo is, of course, a kind of performance in itself, as alluded to by the terminology of her craft in words like “scene” and “play.”

As straightforward as The Flamingo is in documenting Phillips as she binds, spanks, swaddles, and dirty-talks her scene partners, the movie is admittedly less about the mechanics of her artistry than it is about the effect that artistry has on her plainclothes persona.  She’s found renewed confidence & self-worth in the kink & polyamory scenes, often stressing that her fulfilment in these activities has little to do with penetrative sex; she’s finding herself by becoming someone else.  That inward search makes for a calm, gentle, meditative portrait despite its often-salacious images & subject.  It’s the kind of unrushed doc that will linger on the rippling waves of pool water or the squawking birds of its title for a half-minute of stationary reflection before moving onto the next stop in Phillips’s daily rounds.  Even her interviews play like a casual chat over morning coffee rather than an all-important revelation in a moment of great personal upheaval.  It’s nice.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – The Long Halloween Pts. 1 & 2 (2021)

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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.

When I watched Matt Reeves’s The Batman a couple of years ago, one of the things that struck me about it was how much more I thought I would have enjoyed it as a standard crime movie without all the baggage of being attached to a huge intellectual property. Although that comes with making a film that’s all but guaranteed to make a profit (note: I started composing this review before the underwhelming opening of Folie à Deux), it’s also ultimately pretty limiting in how creative you can be before you start alienating that core audience by deviating “too much” from the source material. When it comes to The Long Halloween, I read the source material some fifteen years ago, but there were elements of the Robert Pattinson movie that seemed familiar, and now having had my memory refreshed by the animated adaptation of that comic, it’s clear that the live action movie took major plot inspiration from it. Strange that two such similar projects/products were in production at the same time and released within such proximity, with this week’s double feature having been released in 2021, followed closely by The Batman in 2022. Given that this was split into two roughly 85-minute halves, they add up to almost the same length (2 hours 56 minutes for the Reeves film, 2 hours 52 minutes for The Long Halloween) as well, which makes the comparison between the two almost a requirement. Since this is also a special double feature “issue,” I also did something a little special this week and watched this movie with a couple of friends, instead of late at night, alone and ashamed in the dark, so we’ll have some additional commentary tonight. 

A special note! This film is based on a highly regarded comic book from the 1990s, and which essentially continued the story from the 1987 miniseries Batman: Year One, which was previously adapted to an animated film. This film is not a sequel to that one. It is, however, placed in the “Tomorrowverse” series that began with Man of Tomorrow. This means that this one has that same thick-line art style as that film, which I mostly managed to get used to over the course of almost three hours, but every time Jim Gordon was on screen all I could think about was Rusty Venture. This is neither derogatory or a compliment, just an observation. 

Ok, it’s a little derogatory. 

It’s early in the career of the Batman (Jensen Ackles). Bruce Wayne is pressured by Gotham City mob boss Carmine Falcone (Titus Welliver) to help him launder his money, leading him to ally himself with new, seemingly incorruptible Gotham District Attorney Harvey Dent (Josh Duhamel) and Commissioner Jim Gordon (Billy Burke) – not as Wayne, of course, but as Batman. When he breaks into the Falcone penthouse to search for evidence, he encounters Catwoman (Naya Rivera), who is doing the same thing; they chase each other around doing parkour and other such foreplay. She leads him to a warehouse where cash is waiting to be laundered, and Batman, Gordon, and Dent agree to destroy it in order to strike a crippling blow to Falcone’s machine. Falcone’s waging a war on two fronts, as people close to him begin to drop like flies at the hands of a serial killer that the press nicknames “Holiday,” as each of the victims is slain on a holiday, beginning with Halloween. The killer’s m.o. is simple: a single gunshot, silenced by the nipple of a baby bottle. As the year of the titular “long Halloween” plays out, Arkham Asylum lives up to its reputation, as several of the old rogues gallery escape from their confinement there, including Scarecrow, Poison Ivy (Katee Sackhoff!), and, as you would expect, the Joker (Troy Baker). At the heart of it all, however, remains the question: who is Holiday? 

During the break between the first and second parts of this story, one of my viewing companions asked me how this one compared to the others that I have watched so far. I explained my tier system and said that, at least at that point, The Long Halloween was above average. I genuinely had no idea who the killer would turn out to be, I was engaged with the mystery, and I appreciated the film’s attempts to be more of a gangster movie than a comic book one, even if all of the goodwill it had in that arena required that it lift lines directly from The Godfather. And, hey, the last scene of that first one involved a man being shot overboard in Gotham Harbor and then getting atomized by a yacht’s giant subsurface turbines. You don’t see that every day! There are a few seemingly irrelevant scenes early in the film that featured Solomon Grundy, and I asked my not-well-versed-in-comics viewing companion if any of those scenes meant anything to her or if she even understood them, and she assured me that they did not. It’s rare to be able to get that kind of feedback from someone with neither much interest in these films in general or knowledge about all the things that get stuffed in here. This illustrated one of the issues that I have with these movies, which is that they aren’t really accessible to someone who isn’t already at least somewhat steeped in the fiction that this conglomerate has been producing for nearly a century. On the other hand, it’s not really clear who would be interested in these things other than those people. 

For what it’s worth, I appreciated that the film had a consistent theme of duality throughout. That’s patently obvious in the character of Two-Face, but one of the things that I liked here was that it was unclear from the outset whether Bruce and Selena know about the other’s nocturnal activities. My interpretation of the narrative is that neither one of them knows, but that Selena figures it out first and it takes Bruce a bit longer. When the two of them break up (as Selena and Bruce), Bruce says something along the lines of “We’re just two different people,” which I appreciated as a little bit of clever dialogue since both of them do, in fact, literally have two different personae. Where this is least interesting is in Bruce’s struggle between working in the darkness versus the light, and I have to be honest—I could not make myself care about this at this point. There was this podcast about a decade ago called The Worst Idea of All Time, wherein two NZ comedians watched the same (bad) movie every week for a year and did 52 episodes about it. I had friends who were fans, and at the time I thought I would be tough enough to do that with certain movies. Now, having seen Batman contend with his moral code for the umpteenth time, I can say that those men were brave. It’s beginning to feel purgatorial, frankly. 

That’s not this movie’s fault, however, and I would praise it for having a mystery that I found pretty compelling, and when all of the pieces fell into place, the resolution scratched that same part of my brain that gets pleasure from Murder She Wrote and Columbo. The clues really were there all along, and although I got to the solution before the characters did, it was only by a matter of minutes. That having been said, my viewing companions were not as entertained or engaged by it as I was. Their notes, collectively, identified that the mystery was not that interesting, that Batman seemed kind of dumb, and that the art style makes Jim Gordon look too much like Dr. Venture (oh, wait, that last one is me again). Neutral comments included that “the art style was easy to get used to,” and that it was derivative, but that this could be because it inspired some storytelling elements that are now commonplace or otherwise old hat. We were all in agreement that the film did not, perhaps, need to be this long. The film does not do itself any favors by featuring panels from the comic in its opening credits sequence—artwork which is moody, shadowed, and full of rich character detail—which makes the film’s animation look plain and dulled in comparison. If you want to experience this story, that’s the preferable option. This one makes a case for its existence and makes for a fairly interesting watch, though. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond