I cannot tell the difference between enjoying a gimmicky horror movie and enjoying getting tipsy to a gimmicky horror movie with my friends. Is the January schlock horror flick about the killer swimming pool genuinely enjoyable, or did I just enjoy hanging out in an empty multiplex on its opening night, opening a couple smuggled cans of sparkling wine to share with pals? Unclear. What I do know is that every calendar year deserves at least one wide-release horror about a killer object, and this year we’re being spoiled with at least two: the one about the killer pool (Night Swim) and an upcoming one about a killer teddy bear (Imaginary). Last year, we were even more spoiled with an especially fun one about a killer doll powered by A.I. (M3GAN). Other recent triumphs include one about a killer dress (In Fabric), a killer jacket (Deerskin), a killer weave (Bad Hair), and the killer pool’s distant cousin the killer water slide (Aquaslash). I’m already looking forward to next year’s Panerasploitation pic about killer lemonade, which could learn a thing or two about how Night Swim stretches a simple premise about killer liquid to fill up a feature runtime. If nothing else, it would make for a fun time-killer on the first Friday of 2025.
If there’s any clear argument against Night Swim’s value as a novelty horror about a haunted object, it’s that it gets distracted from its killer [INSERT NOUN HERE] premise with a second, unrelated noun: baseball. Wyatt Russell continues his campaign to replace Kevin Costner as the go-to Baseball Movie guy by starring as a Major League player whose career is derailed by a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. Conveniently enough, his doctors prescribe that he starts water therapy to help lessen the severity of his MS symptoms, an easy win for a man who just bought a house with a haunted swimming pool. In the ideal version of this movie, the pool would be a deadly threat simply because it is a pool, and all action & dialogue would take place either poolside or underwater. In the version we got, the pool is deadly because Wyatt Russell wants to play baseball again, making a bargain with the evil pool to regain the lost functions of his body so he can return to the majors. The pool grants his wish but requires a sacrifice, so Russell has to choose which of his two children he loves less (much like Fritz Von Erich in The Iron Claw). The choice is hilariously easy for Baseball Dad, who has one athletic child and one indoor kid. Still, at some point in the bargaining process he becomes a zombielike soldier who carries out the pool’s evil will even when he’s not swimming – possibly because roughly 60% of his body is made of water, an additional vulnerability on top of his all-consuming obsession with professional baseball.
Distractions on the baseball diamond aside, Night Swim provides plenty of evil swimming pool content for anyone tickled by its premise. It touches on as many pool-related activities as it can in 100 minutes, ranging from the genuinely spooky (reaching into a filter or drain without being able to see what you’re touching, sometimes being greeted with sharp objects or mysterious wet hair) to the deeply silly (horrifying games of Marco Polo, chicken fight, and diving for coins). It cheats on its killer-object premise as often as it can, not only by making Baseball Dad a walking pool zombie but also by filling the pool with the CGI ghosts of past sacrifices. It also shamelessly borrows iconic scares from much better films, referencing both the toy-in-the-drain sequence from IT and the Sunken Place reality break from Get Out. That latter allusion at least feels true to the liminal realms of underwater swimming, though, and Night Swim is at its most convincingly cinematic when the evil pool becomes a boundaryless void disconnected from the baseball-obsessed suburbia above the water’s surface. In one of its most inspired scenes, Kerry Condon (following up her Oscar nominated performance in Banshees of Inisherin with the formidable role of Baseball Dad’s browbeating wife) goes for an ill-advised nigh swim and the camera assumes her POV, revealing demonic jump scares as her head rotates from underwater to sideways surface breaths. It’s a clever gag that can only work in a movie about a killer pool, which is all we’re really looking for in this kind of novelty.
The most potentially divisive aspect of Night Swim is its decision to mostly play its swimming-pool premise with deadpan seriousness. There are a couple moments when it winks at the audience (most notably in a scene where Wyatt Russell explains his miraculous recovery from MS with the inane line “We have a pool”, delivered directly to camera), but for the most part its goofy tone is underplayed. There’s plenty of humor to be found in the fact that every single thought in these non-characters’ heads could be neatly categorized as either “BASEBALL” or “POOL”, but the film thankfully never dives into the self-mocking parody of a Cocaine Bear. The pool is deadly serious business to them, and the inherent silliness of the premise is allowed to speak for itself in contrast to their poolside misery. A lot of audiences will be frustrated by that refusal to indulge in full-tilt horror comedy, but not every first-weekend January schlock release can be a clever crowd-pleaser like M3GAN. It wasn’t Night Swim‘s job to constantly jab the audience in the ribs and ask, “Isn’t this killer pool movie hilarious???” That task is best left to a small group of tipsy friends with a couple hours to kill on a Friday night.
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
Many years ago, I used to own the two trade paperback volumes that comprised Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier comic. The miniseries is an exercise in reimagining the transition between what is considered the comic book Golden Age (about 1938 to 1956, notable for the introductions of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) and that same medium’s Silver Age (1956 to 1970, notable for the introduction of the modern versions of the Flash and Green Lantern as well as the formation of the Justice League in place of the Justice Society). Set over the course of fifteen years, the series begins with the disruption of the superheroic Justice Society in the face of McCarthyism and sees Superman and Wonder Woman go to work for the government while Batman retreats into the shadows. Later, the emergence of new heroes like Flash and Green Lantern, and the accidental transportation of Martian Manhunter from his home planet to earth, arise just in time for the combined forces of two generations of heroes to take on an extinction level threat in the form of a living island populated by sauropods.
Those two volumes were, unfortunately, some of the many books that I sold before my interstate move eight years ago as I was paring down my belongings. I haven’t read it since, but I recall it fondly, and I remember being very pleased with the animated adaptation’s ability to tell the same story concisely without the omission of too many important details. I even used to own this one on DVD before it, too, was resold in one of my many moves. Although it mostly holds up as a movie, I must have grown a lot since the last time I saw it, as some of its flaws stand out rather clearly these days.
In the closing days—in fact, the final day—of the Korean War, USAF pilot Hal Jordan is shot down by Korean pilots moments after learning that an armistice has been declared; he is able to parachute into relative safety, but finds himself facing an enemy soldier who is unaware that the war is over, and is forced to kill the man in self defense. His resulting PTSD from this incident causes him to be the subject of mockery from others after discharge, as they consider him cowardly and perhaps too sympathetic to communism. Elsewhere, Martian J’onn J’onzz is teleported to Gotham City by an astronomer running an experiment, who then dies of a heart attack upon seeing the extraterrestrial’s form. A shapeshifter, J’onzz adopts the persona of a trustworthy detective, all while remaining fearful of violence from humans should they see his true form. These three new heroes as well as the DC “trinity” are brought together, alongside a bevy of comic deep cut characters and some who have become more well-known in the interim because of their presence in the CW “Arrowverse” shows, to face off against the living island and the malevolent consciousness called “the Centre” which animates it.
This is a gorgeously animated movie. It shouldn’t be a surprise that this is a very strong entry into this canon, since the source material was so well loved that it won all three of comics’ major awards, the Eisner, the Harvey, and the Shuster. Darwyn Cooke’s distinctive art style for the comic translates well to fluid motion, and the imagery is evocative of an older era that works well for the narrative. I really appreciate a lot of the artistic choices made here, with the choice to draw Wonder Woman as half a head taller than Superman being a particular source of jot for me. Although the film updates the title to include the phrase “Justice League,” the majority of the story focuses on Hal “Green Lantern” Jordan, and it may simply be that I am a Buffy fan (now and forever), but the choice to cast David Boreanaz, most well known to many as the vampire cursed with a soul, is particularly inspired. Hal feels guilt and shame, but not for the things that his fellow combatants think he should, and is tortured by the blood on his hands, and that’s not only within Boreanaz’s wheelhouse, it’s his forte. Equally genius was the casting of Lucy Lawless to voice Wonder Woman, even if it’s a shame that there’s so little of her in the film; still, she shines in every scene that she is in, and there’s a particular standout sequence in which she liberates a camp of “comfort women,” teaches them to fight, and leaves their former enslavers at the mercy of the freed women. Superman is aghast at this as they are both working as agents of the U.S. at the time, but it’s a well-crafted reminder that this immortal woman has an ethics and morality that is defined by a sense of justice that predates his “American way.”
Despite Diana’s rejection of it, there is a distinctly jingoistic flair to some of the proceedings, and there’s a strange sense of sincerity to it that was lost on me in previous viewings. It is important to bear in mind that post-9/11 American Exceptionalism was an ever-present shadow on the entire landscape of media produced in the west, and in 2008 we were still a few years out from the point where non-satire mainstream films would be able to be openly anti-authoritarian and question the state again (the dam-breaker being the success of The Hunger Games, or at least that’s where I normally pin the turning point). As a comic, New Frontier was able to be a little more subversive, with the narrative focus on McCarthyism serving as a parallel to the contemporary (2004) witch-hunting and scapegoating of members of government who opposed the Bush Administration’s warmongering in the Middle East. The film also cut (other than a mention in the news) a storyline about a Black vigilante who fought the KKK before being murdered at the hands of a white lynch mob, as another indictment of the idea that the past was a place where things were “simpler” and “better.” Most of what remains is shown through the eyes of our objectively good viewpoint characters: the xenophobia that Martian Manhunter knows exists and cloaks himself against in order to “pass,” the muttering of bar patrons that they suspect Flash of being a commit because of his red costume, and the aforementioned belittlement that Hal Jordan receives from those who mistake his pacifism for cowardice and his PTSD for weakness. All of that disappears in the back half of this movie, however, as the film goes full Uncle Sam at the end, with all of the assembled forces against The Centre being identified explicitly as Americans, and, upon their victory, an excerpt from the JFK speech is played over a montage of the new and senior heroes fighting alongside one another as they move forward with a new (American) destiny. It’s not that the film’s sudden, new, shallow patriotism is bad in and of itself (it arguably could be, but I don’t have that in me today), it’s that it comes out of nowhere. I think that the intent is to show a rejection of McCarthy-era fearmongering giving way to a new dawn, but it’s a little too quick of a turn in a film that runs less than eighty minutes. It’s still one of the best of this series, but something I couldn’t ignore on this rewatch.
“How can you be a nymphomaniac and never had sex?” “I’m choosy.”
The Criterion Channel has been doing a great job of resurrecting a forgotten generation of once-respected Gen-X indie filmmakers whose work has been weirdly difficult to see in recent years – names like Atom Egoyan, Gregg Araki, and Hal Hartley. During the glory days of independent film festivals and college radio chic, these low-budget, mid-notoriety auteurs enjoyed a surprising level of cultural mystique that has faded as the distribution of their work has effectively trickled into non-existence. Maybe that break wasn’t all so bad for their memory & reputation, though. Revisiting Hal Hartley’s filmography as a Criterion Channel micro-collection in the streaming age feels like taking a time machine back to the Classic Indie Filmmaking days of the 1990s. In particular, there’s something charmingly quaint about how his low-effort crime picture Amateur functions as a relic of that era. Every one of his characters loiter around public spaces smoking cigarettes, flipping through porno mags, and making deadpan quips over background tracks by PJ Harvey & Liz Phair. It’s cute in its own grimy little way, a dusty souvenir of 90s slacker kitsch.
The “amateur” of the title could refer to any one of the main players in Hartley’s off-Broadway, on-camera stage drama. Isabelle Huppert plays an ex-nun who’s learning a new trade as a writer of porno-mag erotica. Elina Löwensohn plays a video store porno actress who’s trying to break away from the industry by making big moves as a self-employed gangster. Martin Donovan is caught between them as a total amnesiac with a violent past – an amateur at basically everything due to his newfound medical condition. The unlikely trio eventually find themselves “on the run from bloodthirsty corporate assholes” as they cross paths with the gangsters at the top of the porno industry food chain, a mistake that has them evading handcuffs & bullets. This premise sounds like it might make for an exciting, sordid action thriller—and maybe it still could—but that kind of entertainment is not on Amateur‘s agenda. Mostly, Hartley uses the plot as an excuse to have his characters lounge around in hip NYC fashions (styled as a relapsed Catholic pervert, a soft goth, and a business prick, respectfully) while listening to college radio classics by the likes of The Jesus Lizard, Pavement, and My Blood Valentine.
There might be some genuine thematic heft in Amateur that I’m not taking seriously here, something about how New York City is a dangerous playground where desperate transplants reinvent themselves. That might have resonated with me more if it were NYC community theatre instead of a Hal Hartley film preserved in time. I mostly found myself distracted by just how Totally ’90s the movie was in its search for contemporary cool cred. Its gigantic cellphones, breakfast diner ashtrays, and business cards for phone sex lines were all just as specific to its status as an Indie 90s relic as its single-scene cameo from a loud-mouthed Parker Posey. This is a movie with multiple recurring arguments about why “floppy discs” are neither floppy, nor circular. Everyone is either absurdly angry or wistfully despondent in a perfectly Gen-X 90s kind of way, and there’s a lot of easy humor pulled from the clash between those two default attitudes. It’s an easy era to feel nostalgia for as a movie nerd, if not only because people like Hartley, Egoyan, and Araki used to get relatively robust distribution & critical attention, as opposed to the current cinematic landscape where you’re either making over-advertised corporate IP slop or disposable streaming service filler. We used to be a country, a proper country with a proper indie cinema scene, and the proof is currently streaming on Criterion.
I would’ve watched my first Frederick Wiseman movie a lot sooner if someone told me he made a fly-on-the-wall nudie cutie. By all accounts, Wiseman’s documentaries are the height of observational, humanist filmmaking, but I can never quite motivate myself to actually watch one. A three-and-a-half-hour documentary about the current state of the New York Public Library system? A four-hour doc about the daily operations of a Michelin Star restaurant? A four-and-a-half-hour doc about the inner-workings of Boston’s municipal government? I often hear that these are some of the very best documentaries ever made, but they always sound more like doing homework or serving jury duty than watching a movie. There’s no valor in being incurious, though, so I did eventually find a Wiseman picture that met me halfway (by cutting his late-period runtimes in half) and spoke to one of my personal cinematic interests (sex). The 2011 doc Crazy Horse finds Wiseman hanging out in the titular Parisian strip club, documenting the backstage & onstage mechanics of its decades-running cabaret act. It’s a series of cutesy, old-fashioned stripteases occasionally interrupted by nitpicking arguments between dancers, choreographers, and producers about how the staging of the show should evolve. It delivers all of the usual step-by-step procedural storytelling of the fly-on-the-wall documentary approach Wiseman helped pioneer, except mildly spiced up with a little early Russ Meyer nudie picture kitsch. I can’t speak for everyone, but I would personally much rather hang around behind the stage of a Parisian burlesque than behind a desk at Boston City Hall, which made Crazy Horse the ideal entry point into Wiseman’s catalog.
I obviously can’t compare the stylistic approach of Crazy Horse to Wiseman’s more iconic works, but I will say it’s a lot less … dry than I expected. Sure, he locks the camera onto a single, fixed horizontal plane for long, lingering shots, but in this case it’s to capture the fluid movements of a nude body under psychedelic gel lights. There are also wordless montages of those gel lights switching on or off or switching colors, like the marquees lighting up at dusk sequence of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Wiseman might be a notoriously patient, restrained filmmaker, but even he can’t resist framing the stage performances of Crazy Horse with a touch of the razzle-dazzle pizazz with which Bob Fosse framed Cabaret; no one could. Self-promoted as “the best chic nude show in town,” the Crazy Horse stage show provides plenty of psychedelic-kitsch eye candy to fill a feature-length documentary. Wiseman being who he is, though, he also drags his cameras to the mundane meeting rooms, merch stands, and projection booths that make the magic happen – documenting long, circular debates about the future of the show. You get the sense watching the performances that not much has changed about the Crazy Horse cabaret act since it was first staged in the 1950s (besides maybe some technological stagecraft, some musical novelties, and the occasional celebrity appearance from someone like Dita Von Teese, who appears on background posters through the film), and yet the choreographer endlessly argues with other staff about the evolving creative vision of the show. It’s an empire built on cheap thrills, cheap champagne, and even cheaper pop music, but it’s treated like the staging of a high-art opera. The great joy of Wiseman’s film is in how he’s willing to underline the irony of those passionate discussions, while also fully indulging in the visual beauty of what those artists are fighting for.
A lot of the backstage bickering about the creative direction of Le Crazy Horse Saloon is a classic art vs. commerce debate. On one side, there’s the poetic visionary who draws inspiration for his choreography from his dreams; on the other, there are off-screen investors insisting on the most consistent, lucrative show possible to keep the money flowing. The commerce side of that debate can be outright grotesque, particularly in a sequence where hopeful dancers are auditioned for the aesthetics of their bodies instead of their talents as performers. The art speaks for itself, though, and as corny as some of the sub-Busby Berkeley stripteases can feel conceptually, there’s a genuine elegance to their artistry that goes far beyond mere sexual titillation. I wonder how often Wiseman’s had to sit through similar debates about the commercial viability of his own work throughout the decades. He’s a well-venerated auteur at this point, but even the most adventurous moviegoing audiences can be intimidated by the seemingly mundane stories he chooses to tell. I hear that his new film Menus-Plaisirs is one of the best documentaries of the year, but I’ve spent far too much of my life working in commercial kitchens to want to return there for another four sweaty hours. Even the two-hour stretch of Crazy Horse wore on me a little once I got the full scope of the movie’s subject, and this one features glittery titties & swinging tassels instead of lengthy meetings with a local city council. I enjoyed my time with Wiseman and the girls, but I’ll also confess that it still felt like clocking in for a shift at work. I felt like I was a Crazy Horse busboy for a night, a gig that only a teenage Parisians could fully love.
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, a new Swampflix feature for 2024. For background, I was a twenty-year-old college student in 2007 when there was a brand-new surge of comic book adaptations into films. Iron Man premiered in theaters the following year and, although it didn’t seem like it at the time, foretold a society-moving shift in the cinema landscape that would echo through today; elsewhere, someone at DC Comics was like, “What if we just started making animated direct-to-DVD features?” We were still four years out from the controversial 2011 DC comics reboot “New 52” (from which this feature takes its name), which most non-comic fans in the general public ether know nothing about. If they do, they might half-remember seeing a morning or midday show fluff piece about Superman’s new outfit (it was the one with the blue t-shirt and jeans, to make him seem more down to earth), or the noteworthy controversy surrounding the fact that DC’s creative staff dropped from 12% women to 1% during the editorial shake-up, or the fact that the new continuity portrayed Barbara “Batgirl/Oracle” Gordon’s previously permanent paraplegia as a temporary condition from which she recovered, essentially getting rid of one of the very few notable wheelchair users in comics. Or they might know of it from the fact that it was the new continuity introduced in the wake of Flashpoint, a Flash-centric timeline changing event that the general public is more aware of since it’s been adapted several times — first as an animated film in 2013 (which we’ll be getting to), then again as a plot point on the CW’s long-running (no pun intended) Flash TV series, and most recently last year as one of the inspirations for the narrative for last year’s Flash film. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Since that year, Marvel has produced thirty-three features (and over a dozen TV shows), while DC’s animation wing has produced about fifty-two of their animated movies without, to my knowledge, a single one of them ever hitting cinemas. I say “about fifty-two” because there are some that are split into two parts, the placement of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm within this list is debatable, at least one that is a repackaging of episodes of a webseries, and because anyone familiar with DC comics knows how much they love the number 52. With that in mind, I thought I might torture myself for as long as I could take and watch every single one of them, a new review coming each week to your virtual comic book stand here on Swampflix. I might go insane. Come along with me?
Superman: Doomsday was the first (give or take your feelings about the above-mentioned Mask of the Phantasm) of these films to hit the shelves of your local Best Buy, and I remember very clearly watching it on a Netflix DVD shortly after release. I also recall being impressed by it, with one particular scene standing out; it’s the intro scene for Lex Luthor (James “Spike” Marsters), in which his assistance Mercy Graves (Cree Summer) enters a room and he motions for her silence before finishing some kind of calculation in his head and entering it on his device and handing it off to her. When she asks if it’s the cure for cancer, he tells her it’s actually the cure for muscular dystrophy and directs her to have one of Lexcorp’s internal biomedical scientists work on turning the cure into a treatment—that is, to water it down and turn a one-time windfall into an ongoing source of income. I remember being utterly shocked at the sheer banality of his evil, truly the epitome of corporate emperors.
This is immediately contrasted with Superman (Adam Baldwin), whom we see in his arctic Fortress of Solitude, spending his down time between rescuing cats from trees and fighting mechanical spiders trying to protect human life in a more mundane way. Lois (Anne Heche) is there with him, trying to get him to admit his secret identity—which she has already figured out on her own—as Clark Kent to her, which he skirts around with the excuse that confirming would somehow put her in danger, which she chalks up to simple fear of commitment. Elsewhere, an illegal drilling operation under the Lexcorp banner uncovers a buried spaceship, which turns out to contain an alien called “Doomsday” which was genetically engineered by an extraterrestrial race as the perfect, unstoppable soldier, which they then threw into space when they were unable to control him. Doomsday carves a swathe of murder and destruction all the way to Metropolis, where he engages in a lengthy battle with the other title character that ends with both of their deaths.
In some ways, this is a condensation of the infamous “Death of Superman” comic book arc of the ’90s, with Kal-El’s death at the hands of Doomsday leading to the rise of several potential replacements, the most notable of whom were Conner “Superboy” Kent and Steel. In some ways, that’s what initially led me to be interested in starting this project, as 2018 saw the release of a more direct adaptation with the DC animated release of Death of Superman. Having long lost touch with this animated feature endeavor, my mind boggled at the fact that within ten years, they had already circled back around and were remaking their own work. I’m sure it won’t be exactly that when (if) I ever get to that one, but a quick look at the cast list and their associated characters tells me that it is a story that’s more extensively involved with a larger comic book character community. In Doomsday, the “Reign of the Supermen” super-mantle succession crisis of the comics is replaced with a singular clone of Superman, created by Lex from blood shed in Kal-El’s battle with Doomsday, one who starts out with the same ethos as the character that we have seen die but who gradually becomes more fascistic, going so far as to execute a recaptured super-felon rather than risk the possibility that he escape again.
That’s an awful lot of discussion of Clark and Lex, but in my eyes, the real main character of this story is Lois. In a cast full of great performers (Martha Kent is voiced by Swoosie Kurtz!), the late Heche is doing absolutely phenomenal work selling Lois’s frustration, grief, cautious hope, and fierce determination. Having seen some of the later releases from this animation house, I can tell you that it would be easy to sleepwalk through the recording sessions and that some actors definitely do later on, but not Heche. I mourned her more watching this movie than one would expect from a purely commercial enterprise, but she carries this movie, with no apparent strain at all. A lot of the scenes are clearly condensed, but there’s still a surprising amount of pathos there. Particular standout scenes include her first meeting with Martha Kent, where both women are necessarily cagey—Martha because she’s unaware that Lois knows Superman was Clark and is thus concerned that the younger woman may simply be looking for a scoop, and Lois because she’s hesitant to admit how much she knows, and the scene in which the apparently newly resurrected Superman flies Lois home and responds with confused indifference when Lois kisses him—because, as a clone, he knows only what Luthor knows about Superman, and so isn’t privy to the real Superman’s private life. Heche and Lois are great here.
Where the movie is less enjoyable is in the visuals. Although there is a lot of really great, dynamic animated action (the Doomsday vs. Superman battle takes up a solid chunk of screen time but never quite reaches the point where the audience is bored), the character designs are inconsistent. Some of this can be blamed on the designs being imported from the DC Animated Universe of TV shows that had recently come to a close with the ending of Justice League Unlimited in 2006, very shortly before this film went into production. That canon began with Batman: The Animated Series all the way back in 1992, where the eyes under Batman’s cowl were simply featureless white space, which allowed for the animators of that series to allow the character to express emotion through the shape and change of the “eye holes.” When Bruce was out of costume, he and the other characters had a fully drawn eye, with an upper and lower line representing the outline of the eye, sclera, and a single dot for both the iris and the pupil. When Superman: The Animated Series started airing in 1996, both Clark and Superman were drawn with a simpler eye design of a single line to indicate the upper edge of the eye, and again with a single dot to represent the pupil and the iris, but no identifiable sclera; I can only assume that this was to keep Clark’s face from looking too “busy” or being too detailed with the addition of his glasses. When you look at all of the Justice League together in their respective shows, they all have different eye designs, but they don’t look odd next to each other because there are so many different designs: Supes has his single line and dot, Martian Manhunter has his red eyes, Wonder Woman has very detailed eyes (full upper lid line, partial or full lower lid line, visible sclera, distinct blue iris and black pupil), Green Lantern has his distinctive fully outlined eye shape with a singular green iris with no pupillary dot, and the characters with masks like Flash either follow the Batman design of white spaces under their cowls or, in the case of Hawkgirl, have solely pupils under the mask but pupils and an iris when unmasked.
Here, however, three of our main characters are so disparate in their design that they look janky together in a way that distracts the eye. Superman once again has the single upper lid line and the single (almost beady) pupil dot, while Lois has the fully detailed eyes like the Wonder Woman example above, except that her eye color is darker, so that she appears to have a distinct pupil and iris in some close ups but in most wider shots appears to have a single, gigantic pupil. Jimmy Olsen, in turn, has all the details, including a blue iris that also appears to be too large when compared to the other characters. I understand that importing these character designs from the TV animation probably saved a lot of time and work, but I can’t pretend that I didn’t notice it, and even if you’ve seen this before and didn’t consciously recognize that had happened, your unconscious probably did. Once you add in Mercy Graves’s lack of any nose (she just has two nostril slits), it’s messy.
That having been said, this is a fun movie. In a pre-MCU and pre-Big Bang Theory world, it was pretty daring to have an animated feature—and therefore to many people’s minds, a movie for kids—that is so unflinching in its depiction of violence and grief. It was moderately controversial at that time for precisely that reason, although I feel it’s probably faded into relative obscurity now that the self-appointed so-called moral guardians have moved on to harassing accepting parents and inciting violence against librarians. Looking at it now, fifteen years later, when the market has been completely oversaturated not just with superheroes but various conceptual deconstructions and reconstructions of them with the mainstream adaptations of things like The Boys and Invincible, this one looks rather tame in comparison. Still, it’s not to be scoffed at, and there are much worse ways to spend seventy-seven minutes.
The antiquated puritanism of the MPAA was on my mind all of last year. In January 2023, professional critics reviewed an NC-17 cut of Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool at Sundance that was quickly edited down to an R for theatrical distribution that same month, censoring what artistic sexual content could be accessed by adult moviegoers. In the spring, the milquetoast M Night Shyamalan apocalypse thriller Knock at the Cabin was rated R for its PG-13 level depictions of violence, presumably because the central couple in peril are gay men. In the summer, Ira Sachs’s love triangle drama Passages was similarly bumped up to an NC-17 rating for its depictions of bisexual lovemaking, followed by the much vulgarer but much straighter Poor Things landing an R in the Winter. Is it because Poor Things was distributed by a Disney subsidiary that gets preferential treatment over smaller, artsier indie distributors like Mubi, or is it just another data point in the MPAA’s long history of homophobic bias? Likely, it’s both. None of this industrial background noise should influence how these films are critically assessed, but it’s impossible to ignore, since the MPAA’s relationship with national theater chains dictates what art audiences can access across the US. The only way to watch the NC-17 cut of Infinity Pool or the R-rated cut of M3GAN was to rent them VOD at home long after their theatrical runs, because corporate theaters would not touch them in fear of losing money. Long after the breaking up of The Hays Code, we’re still getting compromised, self-censored art due to the backwards moralism of review boards that preach patriotism & Family Values above artistic freedom. It’s infuriating.
To get a clear idea of just how outdated the MPAA’s worldview on the morality of art is, consider that the most comprehensive documentary on the subject was released nearly twenty years ago, and most of its assessments of the organization still hold true. The only major change in the movie rating process since Kirby Dick made This Film is Not Yet Rated in 2006 is that his outrage that five or six media conglomerates get preferential treatment by the MPAA over their independent competitors feels quaint now, since the number of giant corporations who own everything has gotten even smaller (see: Disney distributing a film like Poor Things). Everything else the movie observes about the MPAA’s prudishness towards artistic depictions of what they deem “aberrational behavior” is still accurate to the way the organization censors media by bottlenecking its distribution, give or take the importance that companies like Wal-Mart & Blockbuster play in the supply chain. In the most damning auditing of receipts, Dick runs a side-by-side montage of sexual imagery that was rated “R” vs. imagery that was rated “NC-17” by the MPAA, demonstrating a clear bias against queer media vs. its straight equivalents. The MPAA describes itself as a board of “ordinary people” assessing this sexual content for potential immorality, but the board is made up entirely of Republican parents, a slanted view of what’s “ordinary” that Dick exposes by doxxing the anonymous members of the board. He then demonstrates a step-by-step walkthrough of the MPAA’s unfair appeals process by submitting This Film is Not Yet Rated itself for a lower-than-NC-17 rating, illustrating how independent films are excluded from insights that would streamline the costly process and revealing that, to this day, the appeals board includes multiple clergymen to ensure the upright moralism of the art. It was embarrassingly outdated even back in 2006, and nothing substantial has changed about it in the decades since.
You can never forget how long ago This Film is Not Yet Rated was made, either, because it is extremely dated in its 2000s era documentary aesthetics. The film managed to not only make me furious about the current state of American movie ratings but also reignited my anger over my college-era years of mediocre straight-to-DVD filmmaking. Everything about the film’s frantic, flippant editing and its on-camera inclusion of Dick himself is filtered through a distinctly 2000s style of irreverent pop-docs about how, like, marijuana laws are bullshit or how Wal-Mart is evil or whatever. The film’s dirt on the MPAA is valuable enough to make the dated stylistic annoyances worthwhile, but it did occasionally make me question who really caused more damage to pop culture in the long run: Jack Valenti or Michael Moore? Half of This Film is Not Yet Rated is presented as a traditional talking-heads doc where director Kimberly Pierce vents about how she was allowed to depict as much gaybashing violence as she wanted in Boys Don’t Cry but women’s orgasmic pleasure was a no-go, or John Waters vents about how the playful kink of A Dirty Shame was relatively wholesome & tame in a post-internet world where most kids have already “seen more hardcore pornography than their parents.” The other half of the film is a little shakier. Kirby Dick centers himself as the host of a movie-industry version of the television show Cheaters, hiring private investigators to shuttle him around LA harassing once-anonymous members of the MPAA in public spaces outside their guarded building. It’s great that he’s out there annoying the right people, but it’s annoying all the same, and it’s a shame to see the director of the all-time great Bob Flanagan documentary Sick debase himself by imitating the distinctly 2000s filmmaking style of a blowhard hack like Moore.
It’s no matter, really. Any enemy of the MPAA is a friend of mine; it’s a kindship I immediately felt when this film opened with a list of all the great director’s who’ve appealed X or NC-17 ratings from the review board, including names like Waters, Cronenberg, Russell, Almodóvar, Friedkin, and Lynch. All my friends were there. It makes me sick to think about how much great art from those filmmakers was lost or dulled down due to the outdated prudishness of the industry’s ratings board, not to mention how many similar artists’ names I don’t even know because they were locked out of official distribution by the expense of the ratings process. I don’t know that This Film is Not Yet Rated fixed any of the problems that it diagnoses, but it at least clearly pissed off the MPAA for a brief time in 2006, which by default makes it an effective work of small-scale activism. When it’s not a candid-camera prank show, it’s also a concise explainer of why the MPAA system is so embarrassingly out of date, which unfortunately remains useful in the context of 2020s theatrical distribution.
Every year, I get into a discussion with at least one person about the fact that I don’t much care for Christmas music. There are a lot of reasons for this. For one thing, I grew up in a household in which we were only allowed to listen to one radio station, one that was Contemporary Christian music 10.5 months of the year and nothing but the same 30-40 Christmas songs in the six weeks leading up to Christmas. It wasn’t as if you were going to hear anything tongue-in-cheek on 92.7 “The Bridge,” which means no “Santa Baby,” no Chipmunks, no mothers kissing Santa Claus or grandmothers getting run over by reindeer; you might get something haunting and ethereal that you wouldn’t get on a mainstream station like Amy Grant’s “Breath of Heaven” to almost make up for the dearth of otherwise worthwhile material, but that was about it. Add in that they didn’t even have more than one version of the standards that they did have, and it was a monotonous time. Secondly, I often find that people who have positive associations with Christmas have never had a job working retail, which means that they’ve never heard the same unimaginative version of “Little Drummer Boy” six times while manning an eight-hour shift at the cash register at Urban Outfitters (or worse, the Nook nook at Barnes & Noble, where you attempt to convince people who just came in to get a copy of Green Eggs and Ham for their niece to buy a less-functional iPad at the same price point), which will kill any fondness you might have had for a song. Still, every year, my best friend and I watch The Muppet Christmas Carol, and it’s part of our tradition that sometime during “It Feels Like Christmas” I turn to her and say “Y’know, I think this is my favorite Christmas carol. Not my favorite Christmas Carol adaptation, but like my favorite Christmas song,” and she says “Y’know, you say that every year.” That film came out allllll the way back in 1992, and although there have been a few other Christmas movies that have come out since whose appeal was universal (Elf), blandly inoffensive in a corporate way (The Santa Clause), or bizarre (Krampus) enough to be considered part of the Christmas Movie Canon (at least to some), they are few and far between. We may have a new one with The Holdovers, though.
It’s almost Christmas, 1970, at the New England boarding school Barton Academy. Junior Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) is excited to spend his winter break in Saint Kitts with his family, even packing up a pair of beach briefs that he describes as the most masculine thing that he could wear, as they’re the same as the ones James Bond wore in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. On the last (half) day of the term, the strict and authoritarian ancient civilizations professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) “generously” offers to let one of his classes, comprised mostly of boys who have failed the midyear exam, to take a retest upon their return, although there will be new material on that test, which means more studying during their vacation. Both of their Christmas plans are derailed, however. When one of his peers fakes a relative’s illness to get out of chaperoning the “holdovers” (boys who will be staying at the school rather than returning to their parents for the holidays), Hunham is enlisted to perform these duties, and he is all but told outright by the school’s headmaster Dr. Woodrip (Andrew Garman) that this is in retaliation for his refusal to give a passing grade to the son of a senator, costing Barton one of its largest donors. While waiting for his pickup, Tully receives a phone call from his mother, canceling their family trip at the last minute so that she can spend this time as a late honeymoon with the boy’s new stepfather, thus leaving him as one of the aforementioned holdovers, all of whom will be bunking in the infirmary as the dorms and school building will be without heat for the duration, for cost-saving reasons. The only other person who will be around consistently is Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the cafeteria manager, who is hesitant to leave the last place that she spent time with her late son Curtis, who was recently killed in action in Vietnam.
Although there are initially five students at Barton for Christmas, that number is whittled down to just Angus when one of the other boys’ father, a mogul of some kind, comes to collect his son for a ski trip and takes the other boys along, with Angus’s mother being unreachable on her vacation in order to give permission for him to go. When Angus injures himself while leading Paul on a chase around the school building, he is taken to the hospital, where he lies to cover for Paul and prevent the older man from losing his job, although he says he will call on the return of an equivalent favor one day. While eating in town on the way back, they encounter Lydia (Carrie Preston), Dr. Woodrip’s assistant, who tells them that she picks up a few shifts waiting tables over the holidays every year, and invites them to her Christmas party. They take her up on her offer and attend the party along with Mary, and while Angus hits it off with Lydia’s niece, Paul falls into the trap of being optimistic about Lydia’s potential to be attracted to him only to discover she has a boyfriend, and Mary drinks too much and has a breakdown about the loss of her son in the house’s kitchen. She’s not too drunk to tell Paul off about how he’s treating Angus. This eventually leads to the two taking a field trip into Boston after Christmas, but one of the stops they make along the way ends up having consequences that neither of them could have predicted.
Paul Hunham is a fascinating character. We’re not meant to like him very much at first, and I think that he’s off-putting in that he represents the version of ourselves that we fear others see: unattractive, smelly, clumsy, incapable of telling a story. Our sympathy for him grows, however, as the pieces of his life fall into place as he and Angus get to know one another and open up to each other more: abusive father, scholarship to Barton Academy at age fifteen, went on to an Ivy League school where his more privileged roommate deflected his own plagiarism by framing Paul and Paul’s subsequent retaliation costing him his education. He returned to Barton, where he was given a position by a kindly former headmaster who saw his potential, only to now be serving at the leisure of a man who was once his own pupil. His backstory also intertwines with Mary’s, as she reveals that although Curtis likewise was able to attend Barton on scholarship, but upon graduation, he wasn’t able to go straight into university like his rich classmates and enlisted in the service in order to attend school on the G.I. Bill when he returned — but he didn’t come back. Along with Angus, who didn’t grow up in wealth and is only in attendance at Barton because his mother’s new husband is wealthy, they are the outsiders amongst the elite. In contrast, school’s effortlessly charming quarterback is initially left at the school by his father because the boy refuses to cut his long blond 1970s hair, but when he hears the helicopter approaching the school, he exclaims that he knew his father would break first, and he returns to school after break with a shorn head. Unlike the tragedies of the lives of our three leads, his troubles are shallow and silly, as his father’s feud was over nothing more than vanity and was resolved with no real loss since the boy was being stubborn about his hair because, in a world where you really have no other problems, what else are you going to fight about?
If you’re reading this and thinking to yourself, “Wait, didn’t I hear that this movie was a comedy?” you are correct, it is; it’s just my nature to get hung up on the melancholy parts of these kinds of dramedies. Now that it’s addressed, it’s worth noting that this movie is, in fact, hilarious. Sessa is fantastic, a breakout freshman performance from an unknown actor who just happened to audition for the movie because he attended the school at which it was being filmed. There’s a scene late in the film when Paul is sitting at a bowling alley bar and he attempts to talk to two of the Bostonians there, a bartender and a regular dressed as Santa. He attempts to ingratiate himself with them by delivering a rambling monologue about how Santa should be dressed according to Grecian tradition, and although it’s exactly the kind of thing that would be very annoying behavior from a stranger at the bar, Giamatti plays it with the perfect intermix of attempted frivolity and joviality with witless, unobservant boorishness that it’s impossible not to be charmed by it in spite of oneself. Sessa manages to do the same with Angus, making him a triumphant example of a kid who’s too smart for his own good but is also struggling with rejection from his peers and his lack of friends in spite of his good nature underneath. It’s a very charming form of humor, and it works just as well as all of the great physical comedy that is going on around it (special mention to Paul Hunham’s absolutely pathetic attempt to throw a football).
We throw the phrase “instant classic” around a lot these days. I’ve said it myself about things that didn’t stand the test of time and which have faded into obscurity. I don’t know if we’ll be able to look back on this one in ten years and say that it’s part of the canon, but I do know that I’ll be watching it one year from now, and that’s good enough for me.
Kokomo City is one of the most visually stunning documentaries I’ve seen in a long while, composed entirely of black & white images so stark in contrast they recall old-world nitrate celluloid; it’s practically filmed in black & silver. It’s also one of the most awkwardly edited docs I’ve seen in a long while, to the point where it’s difficult to believe it was shot & edited by the same person. First-time filmmaker D. Smith started the project largely as a one-woman show, interviewing a small cast of transgender sex workers about their lives & labor while she was on the verge of choosing between the trade and homelessness herself. Her total control over the project as a director, cinematographer, and editor speaks to its qualities as an intimate, personal work that makes space for its subjects to speak candidly about their lives without hesitation or filter. It also speaks to Smith’s comedic sensibilities, often undercutting those confessional interviews’ darker turns with the boi-oi-oing sound effects & slide whistles of a vaudevillian cartoon. Maybe that choice was necessary to prevent the film from becoming one-dimensional miserabilist poverty porn about Black trans women’s lives, but its flippant soundtrack choices and shot-to-shot rhythms still distract from how gorgeous its individual images are in isolation. It’s continually frustrating that these same raw materials could easily be re-edited into something timelessly cool instead of something needlessly frantic.
This is likely a silly complaint to make about a project that’s entire point is to just listen to four women tell their own stories in their own environments. In conversation, the subjects redefine sex work as “survival work”, making it clear that even in the best circumstances their lives are in the hands of their (often closeted, often married) clients. There’s a morbid humor to their interviews even without the Looney Tunes sound cues; the movie opens with a near-death experience involving a john with a handgun that’s recited as if it were a cocktail party anecdote instead of a traumatic memory. Smith is determined to communicate that the women’s lives are not joyless, which comes through clearly enough in its fish-eye lens music video skits and stylistic callbacks to classic She’s Gotta Have It-era NYC indie filmmaking. There’s just something about those anecdotes’ sequencing that feels over-fussed in the edit. It’s jazzy in a 30 Rock kind of way instead of jazzy in a Tribe Called Quest kind of way, which distracts from the individual stories being recorded. The four women interviewed—Daniella Carter, Koko Da Doll, Liyah Mitchell, Dominique Silver—get much-deserved “Starring …” title cards in the opening credits, which is a testament to how much the movie hangs off their every word. It’s very much worth rolling your eyes at a couple corny needle drops and morning-radio shock jock sound effects to hear what they have to say, especially since they all look so incredible saying it.
I’m being a little overly critical here, especially for a movie made with so few resources. Kokomo City is clearly a cut above the kinds of poverty-line trans life documentaries I’m used to seeing at film festivals – titles like Pier Kids,Kiki, and Check It!. It’s only frustrating because a few small tweaks in the editing style could’ve elevated it to something much more substantial, landing it among all-time queer classics like Paris is Burning, The Queen, and Dressed in Blue. I’m likely being shortsighted on this point; time will likely be kind to Kokomo City both as an aesthetic object and as a cultural time capsule. Its Instagram-inspired art direction, rap skit comedic antics, and gaudy onscreen text might cheapen its more immediately satisfying choices to my old-man eyes & ears right now, but in time might make it indispensable as a document of a specific moment in outsider queer culture. Maybe this was what watching the video-art experimentation of Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied felt like thirty years ago. It certainly carries the same sense of communal grief, political fury, and defiant humor. I might just need a little time & distance to fully appreciate how those impulses are warped by the tools of modern digital filmmaking.
It would be impossible to discuss the British whodunnit Medusa Deluxe without comparing it against the recent Irish crime comedy Deadly Cuts. That is, if you’re one of the few people who’ve happened to see both pictures, which feels statistically improbable for anyone living outside the UK. Still, I’m not sure how many dark comedies there are about murders behind the scenes at hairstyling competitions; I’ve personally seen exactly two, and they were released just a year apart in the US. Sticking to the phoropter binary device I’ve set up for myself here, I’ll say that Medusa Deluxe is a lot more stylish than Deadly Cuts, spending most of its 100 minutes on a single, seemingly unbroken shot that investigates an off-screen murder in real time. On the other hand, it’s also a lot less funny than Deadly Cuts, so as a head-to-head contest it’s kind of a wash (and rise). To continue my mixed metaphor, it’s like the fine-tuning portion of an optometrist visit where you’re no longer sure which image is sharper, and you’re mostly just impatient to get the trivial comparisons over with.
Medusa Deluxe sets up unfair expectations of greatness by opening with its best scene, in which actor Clare Perkins runs circles around her costars talking shit about a rival hairdresser who’s just been killed & scalped hours before their regional competition. Perkins continues to steal every scene she’s in as a rawly genuine, scrappy artist who’s ready to throw punches at anyone who challenges or disrespects her work. It’s almost a shame that the movie isn’t a Rye Lane style walk-and-talk about her character’s daily routine running a salon instead of a real-time investigation of her rival’s murder, since no one else ever lives up to her performance. As someone who doesn’t know their “poofs” from their “fontages”, I can’t report exactly what’s going on with her colleagues’ outrageous hairstyles as they wait around backstage to be interviewed by the cops, but I do know they’re beautiful works of art. I also admire the way that the hairdressers’ usual salon gossip adapts so well to speculation of who amongst them might be The Killer, just as a lot of recent real-world salon gossip has devolved to speculation over true-crime tabloid stories of abductions & murders. Only Perkins stands out as a memorable player in the stage-play drama of their predicament, though; everyone else is just chattering in gorgeous weaves, wigs, and hair sculptures.
First-time director Thomas Hardiman is showy here in the way first-time directors often are, following his small cast of characters around a labyrinth of tiny dressing rooms with the same handheld virtuosity that Friedkin used to shoot his early stage play adaptations. If it were released in the 90s, it would likely be lumped in with the wave of Tarantino knockoffs that flooded video stores, detailing the stylists’ lives outside of competition instead of focusing on the crime that holds them captive, the same way that Reservoir Dogs is about the events around a botched bank heist instead of the heist itself. Only, the competitive hairstyling world it depicts is more of a recent Instagram-era phenomenon, so it couldn’t have been made at all back then, leaving the much sillier Deadly Cuts as its only useful comparison point. Both films are smart for choosing this specific subcultural setting, because of the opportunity for eye candy & sight gags (at one point, Perkins is “maced” with Tresemmé by a competitor) and because it’s the kind of insular community that fosters years of long-simmering resentments, which can turn violent. Both also choose to conclude on a Bollywood-inspired dance video, which only intensifies the urge to compare them. Medusa Deluxe is the more ambitious film of the two, but that also means it’s the one that asks you to take it more seriously, which both dulls its humor and opens it to more critical scrutiny. Deadly Cuts gets away being with being the low-key charmer that’s good to have around for a laugh, like a pair of novelty sunglasses you don’t actually need vs. the regular prescription glasses you wear every day.
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