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.
It had to happen eventually that one of these animated movies would emerge as an object lesson in adaptation that’s faithful in some ways and divergent in others, to ill effect in both realms. Batman: Gotham by Gaslight was a critically and commonly well-received 1989 Elseworlds comic that asked, What if Batman, but steampunk? and What if Batman fought Jack the Ripper?, which was the style at the time. This film adapts both of those questions directly, although it chooses a different culprit for who the Ripper turns out to be (it’s still an effective mystery, but who’s behind the Ripper’s blade in the comic is that story’s equivalent of The Joker, that comparison is absent here and the killer is someone else. Gotham by Gaslight transports the (apparently) eternally fertile narrative ground of a serial killer in the London Fog has been transported to the nearly identical (but explicitly American, even in this setting) city of Gotham, where the city streets are stalked by two different disguised men. The first, of course, is the Ripper, whose true identity forms the core mystery of the story. The other is a Victorian Batman, who is in fact the city’s recently returned prodigal son, the orphaned billionaire Bruce Wayne (Bruce Greenwood).
As with a lot of What if [Character] but [Specific Era/Location]? stories, this one transports all of the accoutrement of the character to the time and place that the author (or, more commonly, fanfiction writer) has a fascination with. So, while “Catwoman” isn’t here, Selina Kyle (Jennifer Carpenter) is, as an actress and singer who grew up as the daughter of a lion tamer, hence a handiness with a whip and an affection for cats. Leslie Thompkins, the kindly child psychologist who helped mend the young Bruce’s psyche in the comics, is here Sister Leslie (Grey Griffin), who ran the orphanage in which Bruce was raised. There’s a district attorney Harvey Dent, a showgirl (and, lest we forget because this is a Ripper story, sex worker) Pamela Isley, a police Commissioner named Gordon, a Doctor Hugo Strange, and so on and so forth. It’s a conceit that I think can be fun and rewarding, but can also be kind of tired. In fact, the thing that I felt most weighed down that recent Matt Reeves Batman movie was the fact that it was a Batman movie, and thus in the middle of this high budget, grimy neo-noir featuring some interesting creative choices, decent editing, and occasionally great visuals, you also had to have Colin Farrell as the Penguin for some reason. This kind of “Batman skin on a Victorian period piece” integration of the whole rogues gallery usually works best when the narrative finds something interesting to do with it or a way to twist expectations, and it does do that here in one small way, as there is both a Two-Face and a Harvey Dent, but they are not the same person here.
Visually, the most frustrating thing about this one is that it uses the general design aesthetics of the source material (simplified for animation) but none of the grain or grit that made that one’s overall look so memorable. In fact, although there have been other releases in this overall franchise that looked worse, the discrepancy between the mood and atmosphere of the original comic and this adaptation make this one feel cheaper than those others. For instance, take a look at this page of the original comic, which evokes both the yellowing of a newspaper and the sickly yellow light of the oil lamps in the district in which the scene takes place. It sets a tone that is lacking from this movie. That’s an overall issue with a lot, but not all, of these movies. When adapting from a well-liked source material, one can choose to try and imitate the original art as closely as possible while also “sanding off” some of the detail work that would be too difficult to animate (like New Frontier or All-Star Superman), or make something that looks completely different (like Doomsday’s use of a more Bruce Timm style, or Superman vs. The Elite’s Tartakovsky-esque crescent moon head shapes). This chooses to do some detail sanding in order to ape the art style of the original, but in doing so genericizes the overall feel of Mike Mignola’s pre-Hellboy artwork and the moodiness that made the graphic novel memorable enough to attempt to adapt nearly thirty years later in the first place. Paradoxically, this one is well-drawn but ultimately flat-looking, and not dynamic enough or visually arresting enough to really capture your attention.
That said, if you’re going to watch this one, it’s going to be because you’re interested in seeing who the Ripper is, and I won’t spoil that for you here. It’s a novel (and welcome) choice to forego any Jokery completely, and the twist is satisfactorily executed, with the fact that the Ripper was driven mad by the inhumanity he witnessed during the Civil War being an interesting touch. Performance-wise, the return of Greenwood to the Batman role after previously voicing him in Under the Red Hood is a good one, and his performance helps inflate some of the limper elements of the story. When it comes to the casting, however, the standout here is Anthony “Giles from Buffy” Head as Alfred, although he is underutilized. Perhaps you, dear reader, have not seen so many of these that you need them to be visually dynamic in order to be appreciated, and a middle of the road Jack the Ripper story dressed up in cape and cowl will be more fun for you. At the same time, if that’s what you’re looking for, what you really want to get your hands on is the 1989 comic. Your library system probably has a copy! Why don’t you go look that up right now, actually?
Welcome to Episode #217 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss a grab bag of new releases from the first half of 2024, starting with Dev Patel’s caste-system fight club revenger Monkey Man.
One venue in which enthusiastic moviegoing is still alive & well is the Outdoor Movie Night, especially the free, inflatable-screen showings of Family Friendly favorites like Coco or Moana. Those screenings are more of a community event than your typical, isolating trip to the cinema. Families spread out on picnic blankets, halfheartedly try to keep their kids in eyesight as they play around with new friends and, whenever bored enough, pay attention to the movie being projected. It’s cute. The Broadside offers that same kind of Outdoor Movie Night experience with a little more formal structure & focus, having built a Family Friend compound next to The Broad Theater for regular concerts & laid-back screenings. The recent Wildwood showing of 1980’s Carny made great use of that communal atmosphere. To play off the movie’s traveling-carnival setting, they invited face-painters, stilt-walkers, tarot readers, and cotton candy spinners as a pre-show warmup, concluding with local musician Brookiecita (of LSD Clownsystem) introducing the film over a slideshow of her own childhood photographs from growing up on the carnival circuit. There were indeed kids running around the grounds too, this time eating cotton candy and enjoying the “VIP room” of inflatable pools.
That Outdoor Movie Night atmosphere is worth noting here because Carny is absolutely not a Family Friendly affair. This is one of those teenage Jodie Foster roles that edge right up to the line of being too slimy to stomach without ever fully crossing it (see also: Taxi Driver, Foxes, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane). Foster plays an underage waitress who’s bored with the tedium of small-town living, so she joins a traveling carnival on a whim after lusting after its most boisterous performer (Gary Busey in horrifying clown makeup). Struggling to establish her place in the carnival beyond her function as The Dunk Tank Clown’s girlfriend, she briefly auditions as one of the striptease dancers in the “hoochie coochie” tent. This decision lands the teenager in multiple compromising scenarios: modeling lingerie for hooting drunkards, getting body-slammed onto the stage by said drunkards, and eventually getting tied to a bed by a villainous goon who threatens to sexually assault her before her fellow carnies intervene. The worst part is that her much older boyfriend knows exactly how old she is (while she lies to everyone else about already being 18), and the safer, more appropriate job he eventually finds for her is still as sexual bait in one of the carnival-game booths – this time working marks for pocket change, which we see play out in a lengthy sequence of lesbian cruising.
All of this dangerous flirtation with Jodie Foster’s early cinematic persona as Teenage Jailbait is eased by the film always implying its sex scenes instead of fully illustrating them and by its characterization of her as a consenting participant in her own seduction & indoctrination. It’s also eased by the fact that Carny isn’t really about her seduction into the carny lifestyle at all. It’s more of a love story about the two best bros she gets between: Busey as the clown and musician Robbie Robertson as his “midway” hustler trailer-mate. Busey & Robertson love each other with furious devotion, often expressing their mutual affection in drunken acts of group sex with women they pick up on the road. It throws off their dynamic when Busey catches real feelings for Foster, then, and that goes double for when Robertson inevitably has sex with her too. Their seething jealousies & whispered bickering just outside of her earshot end up taking over the foreground of the movie while her own coming of age carny-life story fades into the background, so that it’s less of a love triangle than it is a tortured bromance. That helps steal some attention away from the situational leering at Foster’s body, but Carny still made for an intensely uncomfortable watch at times, especially in an Outdoor Movie Night setting.
Of course, discomfort was the intent. The movie opens with Busey smearing on his greasy clown paint before hopping into the dunk-tank cage, antagonizing every mark who strolls by like a screeching gorilla. It concludes with a classic hall-of-mirrors horror sequence in which the carnies plot to scare off local thugs who are shaking them down for obscene payouts, essentially borrowing its climax from Tod Browning’s 1930s cult classic Freaks. Despite those intentionally scary images and the amoral sexual politics of Foster’s seduction into the carny lifestyle, Brookiecita introduced the movie as a humanizing, empathetic portrayal of traveling carnival folk as a type of found family. Likewise, Robertson co-wrote, produced, and partially scored the picture based on his own experiences as a teenage carnival worker, fondly remembering his time in the business. Personally, I got my own “seedy underbelly of the carnival” crash course from Bikini Kill’s “Carnival,” not The Band’s “Life is a Carnival,” but I like to think I still got the message. In Carny, Robertson seemed to be acknowledging both the warmth of the carnival community when dealing with their own and the grimy, violent hucksterism they could stoop to when dealing with outsiders. In a way, that clash of familial warmth and carnival grime actually made it a perfect Outdoor Movie Night selection, the best one I’ve seen since The Broadside screened Demons with live prog-rock accompaniment.
When Joe Dante’s mashup epic The Movie Orgy first toured the hippie-infested college campuses of 1960s America, it was a mobile party sponsored by Schlitz Beer – more of a “happening” than a movie. The vibe was much calmer during its recent screening at The Broad, where a half-dozen or so hopeless nerds politely avoided eye contact by scrolling on our phones until the trailers started, then dutifully watched the film in its entirety while stragglers quietly filtered in & out during its sprawling runtime. Even the length of The Movie Orgy is more sensible than it used to be. The AGFA scan that’s currently available for public exhibition is “only” 5 hours long, when earlier cuts have been reported to reach the 7-hour mark. Maybe the world has become too well behaved & socially awkward to ever recreate the raucous atmosphere of The Movie Orgy‘s stoners-at-a-kegger origins from a half-century ago. More likely, it’s just hard to get a good party going at 2pm on a weekday.
It’s important to note the circumstances of exhibition in this case, because the movie is technically illegal to distribute at any price point higher than Free. Long before Everything is Terrible! excavated moldy junk media from garage-sale VHS tapes in their own digital-era mashups, Joe Dante (along with fellow Corman alumnus Jon Davison) did the same for discarded strips of 16mm film. The Movie Orgy is the great American scrapbook: a maniacal clip show stitched together from scraps of cartoons, commercials, newsreels, monster-movie schlock, government propaganda, and other disposable ephemera. In its boozy college campus run, that ironic collage of American pop culture runoff would’ve invited loud, boisterous mockery from the turned-on/tuned-in/dropped-out audience, like an MST3k prototype for acid freaks. In its current form, it’s more like digging through a shoebox of decades-old ticket stubs from your grandparents’ teenage years, unearthing evidence of low-budget, low-brow genre trash that’s otherwise been forgotten to time.
In theory, The Movie Orgy is a purely cinematic archive, but in practice it feels more like flipping through TV channels or clicking around the internet. America’s racism, bloodlust, misogyny, hucksterism, and cheap monster movies are all compounded into one grotesque gestalt. King Kong’s iconic climb up the Empire State Building shares the same psychic space as an urban attack from the giant turkey-monster of The Giant Claw, a film of much lowlier pedigree. Richard Nixon, The Beatles, and early, optimistic reports about The Vietnam War are given equal footing as toothpaste ads and a contextless gag featuring a chimpanzee who plays the drums. The construction of this absurd montage is much cruder than what you’ll find in its modern mashup descendants like The Great Satan or Ask Any Buddy, since there are no digital means to smooth over the abrupt transitions between each individual clip. You can feel Joe Dante’s presence in the editing room, going mad while physically cutting & pasting everything together as a D.I.Y. outsider art project that got out of hand.
Dante made The Movie Orgy as a cinema-obsessed art school student looking to party. Years later, Roger Corman hired him to edit trailers for the exact kind of low-budget creature features that The Movie Orgy lovingly mocked, turning that party into a profession. Like most Corman hires, the job eventually led to Dante directing cheap-o horror pictures himself, to great success within and beyond the Roger Corman Film School. His comic sensibilities were already well-honed in this early effort, landing huge laughs with runner gags involving a 50-foot-tall woman’s petty romantic jealousies, a bad-boy greaser who doesn’t like to be “crowded”, and a headache medicine for “sensitive people” that each get exponentially funnier the more they repeat over the seemingly infinite runtime. The Movie Orgy is designed to be amusing for anyone who drifts in & out of attention as they consume & piss out another round of Schlitz Beer, but it’s most comedically rewarding for the long-haul movie nerds who stick with every relentless minute from start to end like it’s an academic research project – likely because Dante is one of us.
Our current Movie of the Month, 1989’s BabyCakes, is a made-for-TV romcom starring Ricki Lake as the world’s most adorable stalker. It follows the exact narrative beats of the original 1985 German film it adapts, Sugarbaby, but it handles them with a much lighter, gentler touch. In Sugarbaby, our lonely mortician protagonist has no friends or hobbies outside her obsessive scheming to sleep with the married man who catches her lustful eye. It’s a much darker film than BabyCakes tonally, but it’s also much more colorful, as it’s lit with enough candy-color gels to halfway convince you that it was directed by Dario Argento under a German pseudonym. BabyCakes sands off all the stranger, off-putting details of the original to instead deliver a familiar, cutesy romcom about a woman struggling with self-image issues as the world constantly taunts her for being overweight; Ricki Lake’s bubbly personality lifts the general mood of that story, as does the decision to make her object of desire an engaged man instead of a married one. Even her stalking is played as an adorable quirk in 80s-romcom montage, as she tries on different disguises while tracking down her supposed soulmate.
One essential romcom element of BabyCakes is the quirky circumstances of its star-couple’s professions. Ricki Lake not only plays a mortician in this case; she’s the morgue’s designated beautician, livening up dead bodies with cheery glam makeup. The hunk she stalks in the NYC subway system is not traveling to a boring desk job in some office cubicle somewhere; he’s the subway train conductor who drives her to work everyday, a much less common occupation. Naturally, then, the NYC subway setting where she first lays eyes on him becomes a defining component of the film, affording it some novelty as a Public Transit Romcom instead of just a generic one. It’s in the subways where she forces a meet-cute, where she flirts by buying him Sugar Babies at a vending machine, where she dresses like a mustachioed janitor to sneak a peek at his work schedule, etc. That setting had me thinking a lot about public-transit romances as a result, so here are a few more titles in that subgenre to check out in addition to our Movie of the Month.
While You Were Sleeping (1995)
The most adorable public-transit romcom I could find also involves some unethical scheming and lusting from afar by its female star, in this case Sandra Bullock instead of Ricki Lake. Like in The Net, Bullock stars as an unloved schlub with no social life outside her relationship with her cat. Her only romantic prospect is making cartoon-wolf eyes at a handsome businessman stranger (Peter Gallagher), whom she watches board the train for his morning commute with ritualistic devotion. You see, her quirky romcom occupation is working the token booth for the Chicago L-Train system, which the movie specifies early in an opening credits sequence that features hotdog stands, Wrigley Field, and a Michael Jordan statue to establish locality. It also ends on an image of Bullock riding the L-Train herself as a passenger instead of a booth worker, modeling a classic white wedding dress and a “JUST MARRIED” sign as if she had hired a limousine in the suburbs.
While You Were Sleeping doesn’t spend too much time on that train platform, though. In an early scene, her mysterious would-be beau is mugged and falls unconscious onto the tracks, when she suddenly springs to action for the first time in her go-nowhere life and pulls his limp body to safety. Much of the rest of the film is spent in hospital rooms and the newly comatose man’s family home as she hides her non-relationship with him by pretending to be his fiancée. It’s a convoluted sitcom set-up that would lead to one doozy of a “Grandma, how did you meet Grandpa?” conversation by the time she makes a genuine romantic connection, but in terms of romcom logic it’s all relatively reasonable & adorable. Notably, she is eventually proposed to through the plexiglass barrier of the train-platform tollbooth, with an engagement ring passed along as if it were token fare. Cute!
On the Line (2002)
If you wish While You Were Sleeping had more emphasis on the novelty of its Chicago L-Train setting and are willing to give up little things like the movie being good or watchable, On the Line is the perfect public-transit romcom alternative. In fact, that is the only case in which it is recommendable. *NSYNC backup singers Lance Bass & Joey Fatone play boneheaded bros in the worst college-campus cover band you’ve ever heard. While Fatone refuses to grow up after college (continuing to live out his rockstar fantasy by playing dive bars and wearing t-shirts that helpfully say “ROCK” on them), Bass gets a boring desk job at an ad agency, which means a lot of morning commutes on the L. It’s on one of those trips to work when he strikes up a genuine connection with a fellow rider, chickens out when it’s time to ask for her number, and then spends the rest of the movie trying to complete the missed connection. When they inevitably find each other a second time, it’s on the same train platform, where they once again flirtatiously bond by reciting Al Green song titles and the lineage of American presidents. I am not kidding.
Do not ask me what happens between those two fateful meetings on the L, because I am not sure there is an answer. In lieu of minor details like plot, themes, or jokes, On the Line is a collection of occurrences that pass time between train stops. Besides a heroic third-act nut shot in which one of Bass’s idiot friends catches a baseball with his crotch at the aforementioned Wrigley Field, most of the “humor” of the film consists of characters reacting to non-events with softly sarcastic retorts like “Okayyyy,” “Well excuuuuuse me,” and “Ooooohhh that’s gotta hurt.” Otherwise, it’s all just background noise meant to promote a tie-in CD soundtrack that features acts like Britney Spears, Mandy Moore, Vitamin C and, of course, *NSYNC (the rest of whom show up for a “hilarious” post-credits gag where they play flamboyantly gay hairdressers, to the movie’s shame). Other on-screen corporate sponsorships include Reebok, Total Request Live, McDonalds, Chyna, and Al Green, the poor bastard. And because Bass works at an ad agency, the movie even dares to include a conversation with his boss (Dave Foley, embarrassing himself alongside coworker Jerry Stiller) that cynically attempts to define the term “tween females” as a marketing demographic. The main product being marketed to those tween females was, of course, Lance Bass himself, who comes across here as a not especially talented singer who’s terrified of women. Hopefully they vicariously learned to love public transit in the process too, which I suppose is also advertised among all those corporate brands. If nothing else, the romance is directly tied to the wonders of the L-Train by the time a character declares “Love might not make the world go round, but it’s what makes the ride worthwhile” to a car full of semi-annoyed passengers.
Paterson (2016)
If you’re looking for a movie that’s both good and heavily public transit-themed, I’d recommend stepping slightly outside the romcom genre to take a ride with Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s zen slice-of-life drama starring Adam Driver. Paterson may not technically be a romcom, but it is both romantic & comedic. Driver leans into his surname by driving a city bus around his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, earning just enough of a decent living to pay for his eccentric wife’s art supplies. His character’s first name also happens to be Paterson, which is one of many amusing coincidences that become quietly surreal as they recur: seeing twins around town, hearing repeated lines of dialogue, and striking up conversations with strangers who happen to be practicing poets. You see, Paterson is not only a bus driver, no more than Sandra Bullock’s lovelorn protagonist was only a tollbooth worker or Lance Bass was only a mediocre singer. He’s also an amateur poet who spends his alone time between bus rides writing work he never intends to publish, poems that are only read by his adoring wife. It’s all very aimless & low-stakes, but it’s also very lovely.
I generally find Jarmusch’s “I may be a millionaire but I’m still an aimless slacker at heart” schtick to be super irritating. However, as a former poetry major who rides the bus to work every day and whose biggest ambition in life is to write on the clock, I can’t be too too annoyed in this case. If nothing else, Paterson gets the act of writing poetry correct in a way that few movies do. It’s all about revising the same few lines over & over again until they’re exactly correct; it’s also all about the language of imagery. Paterson gets the humble appeal of riding the city bus right too, even if it is a little idealistic about how pleasant & clean the bus itself and the conversations eavesdropped on it tend to be (speaking as a person of NORTA experience). While You Were Sleeping & Baby Cakes have the most adorable use of their public-transit settings on this list; On the Line has the most absurd. For its part, Paterson just has the most. There are a lot of quiet, contemplative bus rides as the movie peacefully rolls along, which is the exact kind of energy I try to bring to my morning commute every day.
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.
I think that I would have had a better impression of Batman and Harley Quinn if I had seen it when it was released, instead of in 2024, when we’ve already had a few seasons of the excellent animated adult Harley Quinn TV show. I’m sure this raucous, foul-mouthed representation of the character—which now seems like a tamer, less funny version of the TV series version—was probably more fun and exciting seven years ago, but it doesn’t hold up anymore. That’s only partially the film’s fault, however; it can’t be held accountable for the fact that what I think of as the best version of Harley Quinn was right around the corner, ready to overshadow it. I can blame it for being, well, not very good.
In a (contentious and challenged) continuation of the beloved Batman: The Animated Series, Batman (Kevin Conroy) and Nightwing (Loren Lester, reprising) must turn to the recently paroled/released Harley Quinn (Melissa Rauch, taking over for Arleen Sorkin, who originated the role and the character in the 90s) to try and find out where her BFF Poison Ivy (an utterly wasted Paget Brewster) is hiding. Ivy has recently teamed with poor man’s Swamp Thing “Floronic Man” (Kevin Michael Richardson) to steal some actual Swamp Thing matter from STAR Labs, with the goal of doing some “One man’s eco-terrorism is another man’s most ethical way to save the planet” shenanigans. Noting that Harley hasn’t reported to her parole officer in months, Nightwing finds her working at a kind of Super-Hooters where women dress in skimpy(er) versions of superheroine/villainess costumes. Tailing her, the two end up fighting one another; he asks why she’s resorted to this line of work instead of using her psychology doctorate, and she gets real with him about what the job market is like for ex-cons. She knocks him out, he wakes up tied to the bed, and they eventually hook up (although one can read the consensuality of the situation as dubious). She agrees to help the Dynamic Duo, they go on a couple of fest quests, and eventually they find Ivy and her new co-conspirator and save the day.
Due to time constraints as a result of work, travel, and my social life, I ended up accidentally watching this one as if it were a three-part episode of the series, as the film’s 74-minute runtime breaks down into three neat segments that are roughly the length of an episode of The Animated Series. I don’t think it suffered from that. In fact, I don’t mention it often, but I’ve probably watched about a third of these so far in more than one sitting, a practice I don’t normally condone (a movie is like a spell or most poems, to be consumed all at once or the magic could be dispelled), but which hasn’t really impacted my reading of these as texts. If anything, it’s made me engage with them more. The ones that really capture my interest are straightforward, one sitting, beginning to end viewing experiences, while the ones that fail to really grab me are the ones that I realize I have to rewind and rewatch parts of because my mind was starting to wander. And some, like Gotham Knight and Emerald Knights, are episodic by design, while others are episodic as a result of the fact that they are adapting stories that originated in a serialized, month-to-month medium, like All Star Superman (although that one gets a full viewing every time). Viewed through that lens, this is a three-parter with a first episode that I found mostly boring, a second part that was a big improvement, and a finale that was fine, I guess.
First, the good. The “Superbabes” restaurant is a fun sight gag, but that’s all there really is to write home about in the first act. The middle is better, as the unlikely trio’s research brings them to a shack in the woods where assorted colorful hoodlums and hooligans gather, with visual references to the Adam West Batman series aplenty, and even includes two musical numbers, one of which is endearing and funny (we’ll get to the second in “the bad”). There’s even a toilet humor gag that managed to cross the line into getting an actual laugh from me; Harley has some greasy food, she begs for the Batmobile to be pulled over so that she can use the facilities, Batman assumes it’s a ruse to escape and refuses, Harley passes a great volume of gas, Nightwing begs to roll the window down, and Batman again refuses, saying that it “Smells like discipline.” It’s a good gag, as there’s an abundance of writers who adore Batman to the point of biblical idolatry, and to tweak their over-the-top stoicism is funny both with and without that context. The final act also includes a pretty funny bit, where it seems like the day will be saved by the appearance of Swamp Thing, here a nearly omniscient/omnipotent vegetation deity, but he really just shows up to wag his finger at the villain and affects the plot not at all. It’s like the seed of an idea for the kind of gags and bits that the Harley Quinn animated series pulls off, and although it’s in its infancy here, it’s a good joke.
When it comes to the bad, I have to say, I don’t like Rauch as Harley. It’s funny, because I know she got her big break on Big Bang Theory, a series I have seen approximately 57 minutes of and all of them under duress, the same place that TV Harley Kaley Cuoco gathered much of her attention. (To me, I will always remember her from the endless promotion of 8 Simple Rules that aired constantly during reruns of Grounded for Life when I was in high school, as well as for her role as Billie, the Cousin Oliver of original recipe Charmed’s final season, because my brain is broken in so, so many ways.) Cuoco seems born to voice this role, while Rauch is doing … I don’t know, I’m sure it’s her best. It’s not quite as iconic as Sorkin’s original Harley, or as perfectly suited as Tara Strong’s chameleon-like version, or as unhinged as Cuoco’s ascension to animated Harley supreme. Sometimes, when watching the show, I can almost see Cuoco in the sound booth when she lets out one of Harley’s frustrated cries, really getting into the body language and everything. In this, Harley sounds so canned and rehearsed that you imagine that there was almost no motion during the entire recording session. It’s a very frustrating experience. This gets pushed past my tolerance limits when we have an entire musical performance of Rauch-as-Harley singing the seminal, perfect The Nerves (although obviously best known as a Blondie single) track “Hanging on the Telephone.” I’m not one to get upset when a filmmaker gets a little self-indulgent, but this is a real speedbump in this one, especially as it comes on the heels of the aforementioned fun music number.
I wish that I could watch this with completely fresh eyes when it was a new release, without the baggage of a much better, funnier, more exciting, and better performed adaptation of the character. But we’re all trapped within the horizon of our experiences, so here I am, trying and failing to like this release.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Paul Verhoeven’s satirical adaptation of the Robert A. Heinlein sci-fi military novel Starship Troopers.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve sought to plug some holes in my watching of certain directorial canons. Starting in the summer of 2022, I began the process of watching every Coen Brothers movie in chronological order. This worked pretty well until I got to The Big Lebowski, a movie that I, like many others, made a core part of their teenage personalities in their youth, and as such I skipped over in order to return at a later date. Now, having finally given No Country for Old Men a rewatch, I’m ready to put them in a non-definitive, completely personal ranking of my favorites.
Honorable Mention:Crimewave, the 1985 Sam Raimi flop that Joel and Ethan co-wrote, is quite a bit of fun. Looney Tunes-esque in a similar vein to this year’s Hundreds of Beavers, the film follows a hapless nerd who stumbles upon one of his employers’ plot to kill the other, but gets distracted from doing anything about it by a quest to find his dream girl. It’s not great, but it’s worth the effort if you’re into it. Some of its narrative elements would be echoed in The Hudsucker Proxy, but I would say that, other than a stellar performance from Jennifer Jason Leigh and Proxy’s fun ending, rewatching this one would be my preference in most regards.
Dishonorable Mention: When we talked about Heathers recently, Brandon mentioned that he had finally seen Drive-Away Dolls, and he felt that my review of the film had been far too kind to it. I concurred at the time and must further agree now, as my opinion of the film has only declined in the intervening months. In fact, the only new release I’ve disliked more this whole year so far is that NYT propaganda “documentary” that wholeheartedly and unabashedly committed to validating the Zionist entity. A little lesbian love story set at the turn of the millennium but with the trappings of seventies film sounds like a good time, and at times it does manage to be, but it’s incredibly uneven and while Geraldine Viswanathan is charming, Margaret Qualley is delivering a community theater caliber performance that you’ll either get used to or learn to live with before the end of the film. Do you still think police violence against citizens can be funny? Then this is the movie for you, and I mean that in the most derogatory way possible.
18.The Ladykillers (2004) – This is, without a shadow of a doubt, the worst of the Coen Brothers’ filmography. This one isn’t even a subjective ranking; I would say that this is a widely agreed upon fact, and I’m not here to champion it as an underrated classic. There’s a distinct leap in quality between this and the next entry on this list; that one is second from the bottom but only because it is “merely” good, while this one is actually quite bad. This film, a remake of an earlier British Alec Guinness vehicle in which a group of thieves take up residency in an unsuspecting landlady’s home in order to gain access to a vault through her house, sucks. It’s racist, mean-spirited, and not funny. If every copy of this movie on earth were destroyed, the world would be a better place.
17. I’m not going to win over many people with this placement, but I just didn’t love The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). It’s not a bad movie, not by a long shot, and I almost want to put it higher on the list purely by virtue of its sheer madcap energy and that bonkers It’s a Wonderful Life-inspired ending, complete with angels and all. I think about the joke wherein one of the characters is barely saved from falling to his death by the strength of his stitching all the time; there’s a brief flashback of his tailor offering him the extra-strength stitching option and him declining, then the tailor using the heavy-duty stuff anyway just out of appreciation for his client, then the film cuts back to him being saved. It’s the kind of joke that you used to get from The Simpsons, where there are actually four or five jokes packed into one tiny story beat. Don’t let this one’s placement on this list make you think it’s a bad movie; it’s quite good, and there’s an ocean of quality between The Ladykillers and this. Jennifer Jason Leigh is a delight here, doing a truly wonderful transatlantic accent and delivering her dialogue like she’s in His Girl Friday, where every syllable is a bullet, and her mouth is a machine gun.
16. Generally considered to be one of the duo’s lesser outings, I still think that there’s a lot of fun to be had with Intolerable Cruelty (2003). It’s an imitation of the kind of madcap comedies that the duo were already affectionately ribbing in Proxy, but deliberately playing around with the fact that those films, which largely predate no-fault divorce options and had to skirt around the Hays Code. Instead of innocent trysts, the escalation of hostilities (and flirtation) between divorce law superstar George Clooney and predatory marry-and-dump gold-digger Catherine Zeta-Jones is a battle of wits and will while also being sweet and romantic to watch, as one never knows who’s pulling the wool over whose eyes at any given moment and who’s genuinely fallen for whom from minute to minute. It’s not stellar, but it’s still fun, and the most likely to come on TNT some afternoon when you’re visiting your parents, so be on the lookout.
15. There’s something truly arresting about The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). A noir shot in black and white, the film stars Billy Bob Thornton as Ed Crane, a barber working in his brother-in-law’s shop. He suspects his wife (Frances McDormand) is having an affair with her boss (James Gandolfini), so when he gets the opportunity to invest money with a man named Tolliver (Jon Polite), he blackmails Gandolfini’s character and gets the money, only for the man to find and kill Toliver. When Gandolfini confronts Thornton, the two struggle and Gandolfini is killed, and McDormand is blamed, both for the death and the apparent embezzlement. And then things just keep getting worse. It’s a tragedy in slow motion, the kind of story that the Coens tell over and over again, in which some amount of money is stolen or embezzled, and the everyman characters that we have met, plagued by problems as small and simple as mere ennui or as vast and deadly as owed money to organized crime, make bad choices that just make things worse and worse. It’s in their work going back as far as their first film, Blood Simple, and has carried over into works directly (like the FX series Fargo) and indirectly (like this year’s Last Stop in Yuma County) inspired by them. It’s fun to see it played out here in simple period piece monochrome, a great throwback that’s better than it has any right to be.
14. Speaking of Blood Simple (1984), in this first feature outing, the brothers knocked it out of the park. Featuring the debut of Frances McDormand, who would become a longtime collaborator of the pair (and Joel’s wife), the film follows the tragic affair between Abby (McDormand) and Ray (John Getz), who works for her husband Marty (Dan Hedaya). When Marty finds out, he hires a P.I. named Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) to kill the two of them. Visser double-crosses them all, but in doing so, he leaves behind evidence that could implicate him in Marty’s death, but Ray believes Abby was the one behind the killing. There’s nothing but blood and trauma from that point on, and the bros hit the ground running with their iconic aesthetics and favorite narrative devices — killing over an amount of money ($10K) that’s pretty low considering the stakes of the violence involved, rear brake lights at night, and deathly dark fields lit solely by the moon, where a silhouette of a man digs a grave. It’s only so low because they would go on to do this many more times, perfecting it with each incarnation; while this one rises to greatness, it doesn’t surpass it.
13. There was a time in my life when The Big Lebowski (1998) was my favorite movie. I had the poster in my dorm room, I almost wore out the DVD, I even recognized that the title of Phoebe Bridgers’ seminal album Stranger in the Alps was a reference to the edited-for-TV dialogue of the movie when it used to air on Comedy Central. (When John Goodman’s character is smashing a car with a golf club, he screams “This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass,” which made it to cable as “This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps,” perhaps the funniest dialogue replacement ever, right up there with TV Die Hard’s “Yippe-ki-yay, melon farmer.”) It’s probably the duo’s most famous movie, certainly the most quoted and the one that most people remember. Hell, while writing this, I needed to go to the store and get some rice for curry, and in the rice and beans aisle, not even an hour ago, I saw an elderly man wearing a “Lebowski 2024” shirt that read “This aggression will not stand, man.” It was a huge part of the cultural zeitgeist, and perhaps I simply watched it too many times in my youth, but I find very little about it to be as engaging as I once did. Julianne Moore is astonishing here, and I love her, and Jeff Bridges delivers a knockout performance as The Dude, but I just don’t have the strong feelings about this one that I used to. Maybe it was watching it go completely mainstream for too long, but it no longer has the place in my heart that it used to. It’s still wonderful, though, it just gets an outsized portion of critical attention within the brothers’ oeuvre.
12. I love an anthology film, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) fires on all cylinders (or in every chamber, as the western-themed shorts may require) for me. The tales within range from the jaunty title segment, which features frequent Coen collaborator Tim Blake Nelson as the fastest draw in the west, a singing cowboy whose preternatural luck is bound to run out sometime since “you can’t be top dog forever,” to a thoughtful character study (“All Gold Canyon”) about a prospector who refuses to give up, to a couple of beautifully dreary stories about a group of people in a stagecoach that may be bound for eternity and a traveling entertainer who is willing to shortsightedly “trade” his longtime companion and friend for the next most interesting thing in order to suit the public’s changing tastes (“The Mortal Remains” and “Meal Ticket,” respectively). My favorite segment, however, is “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” a perfectly depressing story about a woman who loses her brother on a wagon train and has no choice but to continue on, finding love with a rustler who offers to marry her and start a farm out west when their destination is reached. Everything seems like it’ll turn out all right for her in the end, until she, well, gets rattled. I usually find westerns to be incredibly boring, something that Brandon and I share in common, so much so that I’ve never even gone back and watched all of the “cowboy” episodes of my favorite TV show, The Twilight Zone, but this one really worked for me, especially as some of these segments are “spooky” or mysterious in the vein of Zone while also featuring that trademark Coen wit.
11. It’s reductivist, but I sometimes think that there are two kinds of Coen Brothers movies: No Country for Old Men movies and Burn After Reading (2008) movies. The former includes things like Miller’s Crossing and the aforementioned Blood Simple—engrossing variations on/experiments in noir filmmaking that are (mostly) non-comedic outings about the pervasiveness of evil, greed, and violence. The latter includes movies that are straightforward comedies, although admittedly zany, madcap ones, like Lebowski and Hail, Caesar!. Burn After Reading is such a fun little exercise in making a “small” movie after the epic scope of No Country, which premiered only the year before. No expensive night shooting in the desert, no costly period piece-accommodating locations and vehicles, and a full half hour shorter, this is a short, swiftly moving story of falling dominoes with—explicitly—no point. Dim-witted personal trainer Chad (Brad Pitt) and his colleague, the down-on-herself Linda (Frances McDormand) come into possession of the banal memoirs of an alcoholic former CIA analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovitch), as a result of his wife Katie (Tilda Swinton)’s copying of his files in preparation for divorce. Linda and Chad first try to blackmail Cox, thinking that they have happened upon state secrets, then attempt to sell the memoirs to the Russians when this fails, which brings them tangentially into contact with hound dog U.S. Marshal Harry (George Clooney). There’s still some (hilarious) violence, and some grue that’s probably not as funny to everyone as it is to me. When it’s over, you won’t have to question the nature of man or whether greed is the downfall of all mankind, you’ll just remember that George Clooney engineers and builds a sex machine that’s the size of a stationary bike; what more could you possibly ask for?
10. One of the recurring motifs in a lot of the brothers’ body of work is that of the missing money, the ransom or loot that becomes the central motivating factor in every character’s choices. It’s in both their comedies (Hail, Caesar!, Ladykillers, Lebowski) and their noirs (No Country, Blood Simple, The Man Who Wasn’t There). Most often, we see our central characters taken down by their greed, and their willingness to commit acts of savagery as they grow more and more desperate. In Miller’s Crossing (1990), this isn’t the tragic flaw of our lead, but of a supporting character, Bernie (John Turturro). See, Bernie’s the brother of Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), the moll of local crime boss Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney) who’s also carrying on an affair with O’Bannon’s prime enforcer, Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne). Tom is our main character here, but it’s Bernie’s greed that has a far-reaching effect on everyone else around him. Despite the fact that Bernie is his lady’s brother, Leo orders Tom to kill him. When Bernie pleads for mercy, however, Tom shoots his gun into the ground and lets the other man go, like the huntsman sparing Snow White. Bernie can’t stay away for long, however, and when he comes back around and starts to stir up trouble, including trying to blackmail his would-be killer, it comes back to bite him. There are some moments of comic levity here (Leo O’Bannon’s shooting spree following an ill-advised attack on his home stands out, as does the scene where Jon Polito’s Caspar takes over the police and starts clearing house), but overall, this one stands out as one of the best Coen dramas, with a downer ending that rivals Inside Llewyn Davis’s, even if it can’t touch the darkness of No Country.
9. I mentioned before when talking about Buster Scruggs that I am not a fan of westerns. Even the great spaghetti westerns of the past have a lot of bias to overcome in order for me to like them. But I was immediately won over by True Grit (2010), a remake of the 1969 John Wayne vehicle, this time with a grizzled, mush-mouthed Jeff Bridges in the Rooster Cogburn role. As in the original, a young girl hires Cogburn, a deputy U.S. Marshall, to help her track down her father’s killer, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). At the same time, Chaney is being pursued by Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), for the murder of a state senator. If we’re following the noir/madcap dichotomy outlined above, then Buster Scruggs is their western variant on the latter and Grit is their western variant on the former, and it works. Brolin’s Chaney is a truly disturbing monster; he’s no Anton Chigurh, but he has no qualms about murdering a child for no reason other than spite. As the girl with true grit, Mattie Ross, Hailee Steinfeld gives a star-making performance, and it’s a treat to see. Bridges and Damon have great chemistry, as do Steinfeld and Bridges (look, it’s Jeff Bridges; everyone has chemistry with him), and there are powerhouse performances all around. A western for people who hate westerns.
8. If there’s anything I usually hate more than I hate westerns, it’s a musical without Muppets (I love everything with Muppets in it, even and perhaps especially musicals). I’ve come around over the years from being a pure hater of the genre to having a few nontraditional ones that I really like (like London Road, Top Secret!, and Baahubali), and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) also has a place on that list (in fact, I love both Coen musicals, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves). Forsaking most of their normal collaborators, this one features a cast of mostly younger performers, some of whom were only a few years away from major star vehicles, and focuses on a kind of person that I think all of us have known at some point in our lives. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaacs) is a musician, a truly talented once-in-a-generation voice (literally and narratively), but one whose Shakespearian character flaw is his shortsightedness. Just like the people around him, the audience sympathizes with him because of the tragic loss of his musical partner, without whom he seems lost, while also bearing silent, frustrated witness as he throws away every opportunity that comes his way. He impulsively sleeps with his friend’s wife, who ends up pregnant (although it’s unclear if the child is his), he turns down a position as a member of a trio when offered the chance at a real, longterm, lucrative option, and he takes a quick payout of $200 for a session performance that, had he accepted royalties instead, would have set him up for life. He can’t even go back to the merchant marines since his license was in a box of his things that his sister kept, which he impulsively told her to toss out. The fact that the film both begins and ends with the same scene, in which Llewyn is beaten in an alley by a man with a grudge, means that if you started the movie again the moment that it ended, you’d be right back where you left off, in an endless loop of Llewyn Davis getting the shit kicked out of him, literally and figuratively. And it’s all set to a phenomenal folksy score, which includes a hauntingly beautiful cover of the “500 Miles” as sung by Isaacs, Carey Mulligan, and Justin Timberlake. Truly one of the greats.
7. One of the duo’s most underrated films, Hail, Caesar! (2016) is a riot. I don’t know why people don’t love this one more, or why it doesn’t get more love. Was the country just not in a place where they wanted this in 2016? Did everyone think it was uncool to love a movie in which Channing Tatum dances with his clothes on? Did the “would that it were” scene not work for most people? This is a movie in which Tilda Swinton plays twin gossip columnists who work for rival newspapers. I’d watch a movie that was just that, and here it’s only one of a million hilarious gags. The film centers on a fictional version of real-life studio “fixer” Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), who covers up the various scandals that Capitol Pictures’ retained stars get into, like figuring out how an unmarried actress can arrange to adopt her own child via a series of legal loopholes, thereby keeping the child and her image. Hollywood leading man Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) is kidnapped from the set of a Ben-Hur-esque epic by communists, and Mannix gets the ransom note. Elsewhere on the lot, young singing cowboy Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), whose specialties as an actor include lasso and guitar but do not include acting, has been cast in a comedy of manners (think Lady Windermere’s Fan), in which he is unable to deliver the arch, aristocratic lines required because of his drawl. In the midst of all this, Scarlett Johanson does a full synchronized swim routine, Channing Tatum does a full cheeky, kinda horny, Gene Kelly-style musical number, Ralph Fiennes tries to teach an ingénue hick to enunciate, and in case you forgot, identical gossip columnists who are both suspicious of Whitlock’s sudden disappearance. This movie is so much fun, and I really wish it had gotten the attention and love it deserved and the time, and still does.
6. The film company that Mannix works for in Hail is, as noted above, Capitol Pictures, a fake studio created originally for Barton Fink (1991), another Hollywood-set period piece, albeit one that takes place ten years prior to Hail, in 1941. Experiencing some writer’s block while crafting Miller’s Crossing, the brothers wrote that into a side project, about screenwriter Barton Fink (John Turturro), who takes a job at Capitol, and the neighbor with whom he shares a wall at the rundown Hotel Earle, insurance salesman Charlie Meadows (John Goodman). It’s a very confessional movie, as Fink, despite declaring his affinity for and connection to the common man, seems to be only able to create heady works that most people find too pretentious to connect with. For years before seeing this one, I saw a clip in which it was discussed by some film folk and which featured a scene from near the end in which John Goodman stood, furious, in the middle of a hotel as it burned; the talking heads who were deliberating about the movie talked about its purgatorial feel, which I took to mean that there was a larger metaphysical narrative than there really is, although Fink is a man who cannot go home and who is trapped in a place that seems hellish to him, unable to get out of his contract until he completes his Faustian bargain, the terms of which he may never be able to satisfy. It’s all a great deal of anxious, tense fun, and this is one of my favorite performances from John Mahoney, who plays a Faulknerian archetype named Bill Mayhew, a former novelist who has been reduced to writing movies (derogatory), a perfect foil for Fink, who has been elevated from playwright to screenwriter (complimentary).
5. Among all of the películas de hermanos (I’m sick of typing “brothers,” sue me), there’s one that stands directly in the middle of their dichotomy with a solid foot in both. Fargo (1996) is a dark, mean movie about little people with meaningless lives doing harm to one another over petty, trivial things. A movie in which being able to commit cold blooded murder doesn’t mean you can’t also be sniveling or pathetic. But Fargo is also about gentleness, comfort, and quiet dignity. A car salesman (William H. Macy) who’s racked up a significant amount of debt meets with two small-time criminals (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to have them fake-kidnap his wife without her knowledge, so that his wealthy father-in-law will pay a ransom that they will divvy up amongst themselves. When an unsuspecting state trooper is killed by the more psychotic of the two kidnappers, rural police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) begins an investigation into his slaying. Gunderson, who had heretofore never dealt with a crime of this severity, is a sweet woman who one at first assumes will not be up to the challenge of dealing with a criminal element of such monstrous evil. Instead, her charming, folksy naivete and belief in fundamental and foundational good remains unshaken despite staring into the abyss even as her ideas about human nature and the ways that people can hurt one another over something so low and crass as money are expanded. Buscemi and Macy are amazing as two sides of the same coin: desperate, nebbish, powerless rodents who constantly bite off more than they can chew; Stormare’s performance is palpably evil, like you’re staring into a man possessed by nothing more than pure, primordial hatred. But McDormand is the star here, and it’s no wonder that this was the performance that made her both an Oscar winner and a household name. It’s the perfect synergy of the two different Janus heads of the Coen brand: both deeply nihilistic in its examination of man’s inhumanity while also terrifically funny in its occasional slapstick and madcap energy. You’ll never laugh harder at a woman experiencing a terrifying home invasion.
4. There are parables inside of parables in A Serious Man (2009). Michael Stuhlbarg plays physics professor Larry Gopnik, whose life is in the process of falling apart. His son hasn’t even had his bar mitzvah yet, but he’s already smoking pot, and worse, buying it on credit. His daughter, from whom his son is stealing the money to support his habit, has a life full of hair washing and sock hops, and she’s not exercising a single brain cell more than is needed for those two activities. His brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), is homeless and staying with the family, while also working on a kabbalistic, “mathematical” map of the universe and all the probability thereof. One of his students refuses to accept his grade on the basis that it will cost him his scholarship, and when said student attempts to bribe him and Larry tries to return the money to the boy’s father, he’s told that the latter will sue the former for libel if he speaks out about the bribery attempt, or if he keeps the money without changing the grade, forcing him into an impossible situation. Perhaps worst of all, his wife demands that he provide her with a ghet, which will allow her to marry her lover, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). It’s the Book of Job, for modern (or mid-century modern, as the case may be) times. Despite having done nothing wrong (he doesn’t even covet his neighbor’s wife until much later in the film), Larry is subject to a plague of issues that disrupt his life and threaten to take away everything. Over the course of the film, he visits three different rabbis of increasing uselessness (the first merely tells him to work on changing his perspective on things while the last is clearly senile and quoting the lyrics to “Somebody to Love”); the second tells him a story about a dentist who discovers Hebrew inscription on the inside of a patient’s teeth, a parable that neither the character nor the film elucidates, and with which both we and Larry must now grapple. The film manages to keep Larry sympathetic without being pathetic, and when we laugh, we’re never laughing at him, even when he starts to make bad decisions further down the line. An overlooked classic in their canon, in my opinion.
3. The summer that I was fourteen, I must have watched O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000) thirty times. It was everywhere in my community; everybody’s mom had the soundtrack in the CD slot of her Ford Explorer, everybody’s dad was doing their impressions of George Clooney as Ulysses Everitt McGill, the Soggy Bottom Boys were all over the radio, and I had the movie on VHS, which I would start from the beginning again whenever it ended, sometimes twice a day. I know it backwards and forwards; I know it by heart. In grad school, I spit out a paper on its Odysseyan themes while drunk and in three hours, and my professor read from it to the class. I cannot see a can of pomade without thinking of “I’m a Dapper Dan man, dammit!”, and I think about the scene in which blind record producer Stephen Root is hoodwinked every time I hear the word “accompaniment.” This movie lives and breathes inside of me. I use the phrase “in the highways and in the hedges” in my own writing enough that I should pay royalties for it, and there are instructions in my final wishes to ensure that Alison Krauss is played at my funeral. “We thought you was a toad” is one of the finest lines in American cinema history to me. I don’t think I could love it more than I already do. McGill, along with Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) escape from a chain gang so that they can retrieve a treasure that McGill squirreled away on his family farm, on land that is set to be flooded to make a lake. McGill’s ultimate goal, however, is to reunite with his wife Penny (Holly Hunter)—get it?—and win her back. Along the way they run afoul of a one-eyed highwaymen (the cyclops), a group of Baptists (lotus eaters), a trio of mournfully singing women who drink them under the table and rob them (sirens), and also the KKK (your guess is as good as mine). And it’s a bluegrass/folk musical! One of the most beautiful movies in their oeuvre, O Brother is a top tier film in anyone’s canon.
2. What is there that’s left to say about No Country for Old Men (2007) that hasn’t already been said? It achieved a level of critical success that none of the Coens’ other movies could hope to accomplish, winning half of the eight Oscar nominations it received, three of the nine BAFTA categories in which it was nominated, three of five nominated Critics’ Choice awards, was nominated for the Palme d’Or, got an outstanding achievement award from the DGA, and was nominated for 110 film awards all in all, with a 63.6% success rate. And it is an outstanding achievement, as a novel adaptation, as a film in its own right, and as a star-making vehicle for Javier Bardem, whose portrayal of Anton Chigurh has catapulted the character to a level of household recognition as one of cinema’s ultimate, infamous villains alongside Darth Vader, Dracula, Hannibal Lector, Jack Torrance, and the Wicked Witch of the West. It’s eerie, and quiet, and is the ultimate distillation of the Coen abstract that evil is an unstoppable force, that nostalgia for a less brutal and dark time is a fallacy because humankind and its darkness are inextricable from one another and have been since we crawled up out of the murk, but although we are fallible, warmth and light are still within reach. Tommy Lee Jones was born to play this role, grizzled sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who, like Marge Gunderson before him, gets caught up in a crime that’s outside of his frame of reference. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) comes upon the remains of a massacre while out hunting, stumbling across the scene of a drug deal gone wrong, wherein everyone is dead but one suffering man. Nearby, he finds a briefcase full of money, which he takes with him; hours later, in the night, his conscience gets the better of him, and he returns with water for the survivor, only to discover that not only is he too late, but he’s now been seen at the scene by dangerous men. Chigurh, and unrepentant sociopath, is tasked with tracking down the money, while Moss does everything in his power to stay one step ahead, with Bell on the trail of both of them. Moss is clever enough that there’s genuine suspense over whether he’ll manage to get the better of Chigurh, while Bell puzzles out the latter’s M.O. It’s tense, it’s beautiful, it’s truly one of the greats.
1. There’s only one movie left that it could be, right? Fun fact: when I was a senior in high school, a DVD of Raising Arizona (1987) was a raffle prize for a fundraiser that one of the student organizations was holding. I bought a ticket solely for this reason, and I won that DVD because we were meant to be together. In only their second feature, Joel and Ethan crafted one of the greatest comedies of all time. Even if they never did anything after Arizona, there’s an Evil Dead-esque steadicam P.O.V. oner in this movie that comes up a driveway, across a yard, climbs a ladder, enters a window, and almost goes down a screaming woman’s throat that would solidify and cement them as filmmaking greats for all time. The story of eternally recidivist convenience store robber H.I. (Nicolas Cage) and his unlikely but perfect romantic match in police officer “Ed” (Holly Hunter), Raising Arizona follows their attempts to start a family despite Ed’s sterility preventing them from having a baby and H.I.’s criminal record preventing them from adopting. When wealthy unfinished furniture magnate Nathan Arizona idly jokes to the news media that his wife’s recent birthing of five quintuplets means that they almost have more kids than they can handle, the two end up kidnapping one of the babies to raise as their own. Assorted troubles arise in the form of H.I. losing his job after taking offense to his boss’s suggestion that the two of them “swing” with him and his wife, the breakout of H.I.’s friends (John Goodman and William Forsythe) from a nearby penitentiary and their subsequent extended stay at H.I. and Ed’s place, and the appearance of a seemingly demonic bounty hunter (even Chigurh doesn’t grenade bunny rabbits or cause flowers to burst into flames with his mere presence) who’s tracking the baby for the Arizonas. I won’t argue that No Country is a “better” movie, whatever that might mean to you, dear reader, but I could never rank it above Raising Arizona in my heart. It wouldn’t be honest; it wouldn’t be true. Cage, Hunter, and Goodman are a perfect trifecta of magic here, real lightning in a bottle stuff. I’m going to be thinking of this movie until my dying breath.
Heretofore a director of mostly short films and music videos, first-time feature director Francis Galluppi has burst onto the scene with something that’s both indebted to indie upstarts of the past and which feels like a breath of fresh air. Last Stop in Yuma County is a spare movie; it doesn’t look or feel cheap although you can definitely tell it was made on a marginal budget. It’s lean in just the right places to take this story to the next level.
In the 1970s, an unnamed traveling knife salesman (Jim Cummings) stops for gas while en route to see his daughter, in the custody of his ex-wife, for her birthday. He arrives at a filling station only to learn from the attendant, Vernon (Faizon Love), that he’s waiting for the fuel truck to arrive, and that he’s welcome to wait in the attached diner. Since this is, as the title says, the last stop in Yuma, he has little choice. The diner’s waitress and possibly sole employee, Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue), is dropped off by her sheriff husband, Charlie, while the salesman hears on the radio about a bank robbery a few counties over. Once the diner opens, Charlotte and the salesman make pleasant chit-chat while trying to ignore the rising heat, as the diner’s air conditioner is no longer working. Before long, another car stops in for gas and gets the same bad news, and its occupants also choose to idle the time away in the diner. While Charlotte takes their order, the salesman notices that they are driving the same green Pinto described in the radio bulletin. The robbers, young hothead Travis (Nicholas Logan) and middle-aged, stone-cold Beau (Richard Brake), take note that the salesman and the waitress seem to be exchanging confidences, and cut the phone line when Charlotte tries to call Charlie, who takes too long to come to the phone. (Charlie’s assistant, Virginia, is played by the one and only Barbara Crampton.) Beau tells them to play nice and tasks Charlotte with grilling each customer who comes in about their fuel situation and, if any of them have gas, he’ll simply take that car and let everyone live.
The diner starts to fill up as more and more people arrive at the fill-up station. An elderly couple from Texas (Robin Bartlett and Gene Jones, the latter of whom you may remember as the gas station attendant whose small talk infuriates Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men) takes up residence at one table, and Charlie’s deputy Gavin (Connor Paolo) comes in for coffee, which sets Beau and Travis on edge. Charlotte almost manages to get a warning out, but Gavin’s careless collision with Travis costs her the opportunity. Two drifters, Miles (Ryan Masson) and Sybil (Sierra McCormick), also find their way to the diner, and Miles, who already idolized the criminals he heard about on the radio since he and Sybil have a whole anti-social folie-a-deux, attempts to steal the bank loot from the Pinto’s trunk before he’s spotted and they have to head into the diner to avoid being caught. It’s when local rancher Pete (Jon Proudstar) arrives, solely to have lunch since he filled up the day before, that things finally get out of hand. The meek salesman writes a note to his daughter and sticks it in his pocket and prepares to make a stand, but a standoff occurs when Beau takes Charlotte hostage, with Pete, the Texans, and Miles all pulling their guns on each other. Miles tries to bargain for part of the loot for helping Beau and Travis, and then things take a real turn for the worse.
There are a couple of minor elements that spotlight Yuma as a first-time outing for a feature director. Throughout the film, one of its strengths is a beautiful, constant, yellow desert light coming in from the outside; it’s very atmospheric in a way that contributes to the tension. But when the salesman shows up at the diner around dawn (it’s specifically said that it opens at six o’clock, and he watches Charlotte enter and turn the “open” sign around), the light is already that same pallid yellow of noon. It’s unchanging, and it’s a minor detail, but one that I couldn’t help but notice. The scene in which Beau explains—calmly, coolly, and dispassionately—exactly why the salesman and Charlotte are still alive, it’s delivered as a monologue. It’s a strong one, and one that’s done in a single long take, which works great with the tone. However, there’s a moment in the speech when Beau says, “Do you understand?” [beat] “Good,” and then continues with his directions. We can assume, yes, that Charlotte and/or the salesman nodded their assent, but it feels weird not to see that response in the text, without a cutaway. You can’t cut the question from the monologue without cutting the long take, and you can’t cut to the other characters reacting without doing the same, but it nonetheless feels a little awkward.
That’s all that there is to quibble about, though. This is a great piece of work, moody and tense. From the opening credits on, we know that the fuel truck isn’t coming, as the opening credits play out over its crash site, so we know that things can only go tragically (and boy do they). Cummings’ transformation from timidity to reluctant courage is fun to watch, and when his character starts to make selfish choices, we go into full Coen Brothers mode as he succumbs to his own personal greed, up to and including a moment where it seems like he will be forced to bury the cash beside the road like Jerry Lundegaard. Beau and Travis even superficially resemble other pairs of criminals that the Coens often conceive in their films, with Braker’s Beau in particular a welcome presence as his casual cruelty means the stakes are as high as possible, and the performance of base, blood simple (ha) meanness that Braker brings to the role is a highlight. The placement of the dominoes that create the narrative flow is excellent, with some really elegant foreshadowing and rhyming imagery. It’s hard to say more about this one without giving too much away (in fact, I may already have), but if you’re yearning for something in the vein of a less sprawling No Country in a tight ninety minutes, this is a perfect choice.
Most genre movie freaks may have moved on to shiny new boutique Blu-rays and moldy old VHS tapes, but I still collect most of my movies at the tried-and-true distribution hub of the thrift store DVD rack. You don’t always find rare gems at the thrift store, but you often find movies cheaper than they cost to rent on streaming, with the added bonus of a Special Features menu that most streamers don’t bother to upload. My recent pickup of the 1960s sci-fi lucha libre classic Santo vs. The Martian Invasion felt like a blessing by both metrics; it’s rare enough that it’s not currently available to stream at home with English subtitles, and the disc includes several Bonus Features, including full-length commentaries and a 30-minute interview with Santo’s heir, Son of Santo. It felt like even more of a blessing when those subtitles turned out to be a variation of Comic Sans, which I’m not sure I’ve ever seen outside of an ironic lyrics-only music video on YouTube. I don’t know that reporting on these details is useful to anyone who didn’t happen to be shopping at the Thrift City USA on the West Bank last weekend, but I still want to advertise that the dream is still alive in the thrift store DVD racks of New Orleans in general. I suppose I also want to report that the home distribution label Kit Parker Films is surprisingly generous with their bargain-bin DVDs’ bonus content, so look out for those discs in particular while you’re digging through the stacks.
Billed on its title card as Santo the Silver Mask vs The Invasion of the Martians, this specific bargain-bin discovery is a fairly typical Atomic Age sci-fi cheapie about an alien invasion of planet Earth; its hero just happens to be the masked luchador Santo, protector of “the weak and the defenseless.” The alien-invasion plot is a little confused, with the Martians announcing their presence to the citizens of Mexico via multiple television broadcasts and having their evil deeds widely reported in local newspapers, then later being treated as a conspiratorial government secret hidden from the public. Instead of getting that story straight, the movie intensely focuses on the physical abilities & vulnerabilities of the Martians. Much attention is paid to the fact that they frequently take “oxygen pills” to be able to withstand Earth’s atmosphere, among other needless explanations of their uncanny ability to speak Spanish. There’s also an intense fixation on their cube-shaped helmets’ Astral Eye, a glowing eyeball that allows them to either hypnotize or disintegrate nearby Earthlings, depending on the demands of the day. They can also wrestle fairly well, which makes them the perfect opponent for Santo, the greatest & bravest wrestler who ever lived. Santo repeatedly grapples with the blonde-wigged beefcake models from planet Mars, eternally flustered by their ability to teleport back to the safety of their spaceship every time the impromptu matches don’t go their way. He eventually wins by stealing one of their teleportation devices to infiltrate and explode that ship himself, like a wrestler claiming a championship belt (literally; the device is belt-shaped).
The Martian Invasion loses a little steam once these intergalactic lucha libre matches return to a proper wrestling ring instead of being staged in exterior locations on the streets of Mexico, but most of its vintage sci-fi hijinks remain adorable & fun. Instead of brooding in the bootleg Gothic atmosphere of horror pictures like Santo vs The Vampire Women or Santo and the Blue Demon vs Dracula and the Wolf Man, a lot of the runtime is filled with insane, rapid-fire dialogue about the peculiarities of the Martian species. There’s also some fun 60s kitsch to the cheesecake Martian women in particular, who hypnotize & seduce the major players of Mexican patriarchy with the laziest futuristic go-go dancing you’ve ever seen. Between that half-hearted eroticism and the absurd over-reliance on stock footage to pad out the budget, I was often reminded of some of my favorite Atomic Age sci-fi novelties: Nude on the Moon, Cat-Women of the Moon, Queen of Blood, The Astounding She-Monster, etc. None of those comparison points feature extensive wrestling matches, though, which gives this an extra layer of novelty the same way the Santo horror films feel novel compared to their classic Universal Horror equivalents.
Something I don’t have context for is how much of an anomaly The Martian Invasion is within the larger Santo canon. It felt a little zippier & goofier than the couple horror films I’ve seen starring the masked luchador, which rely heavily on classic haunted-house mood & dread. I don’t have enough evidence to say how typical that is to Santo’s filmography, though, because I’ve only seen three of what Wikipedia lists as “at least 54” titles in his catalog. Given the pace at which I’m finding notable Santo movies on used discs or streaming, it’s likely I’ll never get the complete picture of his big-screen work before I run out of time and die. Honestly, I still can’t even pin down the exact list of titles that make up that catalog. Wikipedia, IMDb, and Letterboxd all have conflicting lists of what count as an official Santo film, and the “Filmografia” Special Feature on my Martian Invasion disc only includes 52 of his “at least 54” titles. To help illustrate the immensity & inconsistency of that catalog, I have transcribed the entire “Filmografia” feature of the Kit Parker DVD below. It’s the kind of list that has made me accept that I will only see whichever films I happen to pick up at local thrift stores, completionism be damned. May they all be as fun & loaded with bonus features as Santo vs The Martian Invasion.
Filmografia
1958
SANTO CONTRA EL CEREBRO DEL MAL aka El Cerebro del Mal Santo vs The Evil Brain
SANTO CONTRA LOS HOMBRES INFERNALES Santo vs The Infernal Men aka White Cargo
1961
SANTO CONTRA LOS ZOMBIES Santo vs The Zombies Released in the U.S. as Invasion of the Zombies
SANTO CONTRA EL RED DEL CRIMEN Santo vs The King of Crime
SANTO EN EL HOTEL DE LA MUERTE Santo in The Hotel of Death
SANTO CONTRA EL CEREBRO DIABOLICO Santo vs The Diabolical Brain
1962
SANTO CONTRA LAS MUJERES VAMPIRAS Santo vs The Vampire Women Released in the U.S. as Samson vs The Vampire Women
1963
SANTO EN EL MUSEO DE CERA Santo in The Wax Museum Released in the U.S. as Samson in the Wax Museum
SANTO CONTRA EL ESTRANGULADOR Santo vs The Strangler
SANTO CONTRA EL ESPECTRO DEL ESTRANGULADOR Santo vs The Ghost of the Strangler
1964
SANTO EN ATACAN LAS BRUJAS aka Santo En La Casa De Las Brujas Santo in The Witches Attack
BLUE DEMON CONTRA EL PODER SATANICO Blue Demon vs The Satanic Power Cameo appearance
SANTO CONTRA EL HACHA DIABOLICA Santo vs The Diabolical Ax
1965
SANTO EN LOS PROFANADORES DE TUMBAS aka Los Traficantes De La Muerte Santo in The Grave Robbers
SANTO EN EL BARON BRAKOLA Santo in Baron Brakola
1966
SANTO CONTRA LA INVASION DE LOS MARCIANOS Santo vs The Martian Invasion
SANTO CONTRA LOS VILLANOS DEL RING Santo vs The Villains of The Ring
SANTO EN OPERACION 67 Santo in Operation 67
1967
SANTO EN EL TESORO DE MOCTEZUMA Santo in The Treasure of Moctezuma
1968
SANTO EN EL TESORO DE DRACULA Santo in Dracula’s Treasure aka EL Vampiro y El Sexo
SANTO CONTRA CAPULINA Santo vs Capulina
1969
SANTO CONTRA BLUE DEMON EN LA ATLANTIDA Santo vs Blue Demon in Atlantis
SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA LOS MONSTRUOS Santo & Blue Demon vs The Monsters
SANTO Y BLUE DEMON EN EL MUNDO DE LOS MUERTOS Santo & Blue Demon in The World of the Dead
SANTO CONTRA LOS CAZADORES DE CABEZAS Santo vs The Headhunters
SANTO FRENTE A LA MUERTE Santo Faces Death aka Santo vs The Mafia Killers
1970
SANTO CONTRA LOS JINETES DEL TERROR Santo vs The Terror Riders aka The Lepers and Sex
SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LAS MUJERES VAMPIRAS Santo in The Revenge of the Vampire Women
SANTO CONTRA LA MAFIA DEL VICIO Santo vs The Mafia of Vice aka Mission Sabotage
SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LA MOMIA Santo in The Revenge of the Mummy
LAS MOMIAS DE GUANAJUATO The Mummies of Guanajuato Co-starring Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras
1971
SANTO CONTRA LA HIJA DE FRANKENSTEIN Santo vs Frankenstein’s Daughter
SANTO CONTRA LOS ASESINOS DE OTROS MUNDOS Santo vs The Killers from Other Worlds aka Santo vs The Living Atom
SANTO Y EL AGUILA REAL Santo and The Royal Eagle aka Santo and The Tigress in The Royal Eagle
SANTO EN MISION SUICIDA Santo in Suicide Mission
SANTO EN EL MISTERIO DE LA PERLA NEGRA Santo in The Mystery of The Black Pearl aka Santo in The Caribbean Connection Released in Spain in 1971 and in Mexico in 1974
1972
SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA DRACULA Y EL HOMBRE LOBO Santo & Blue Demon vs Dracula & The Wolfman
SANTO CONTRA LOS SECUESTRADORES Santo vs The Kidnappers
SANTO CONTRA LA MAGIA NEGRA Santo vs Black Magic
SANTO & BLUE DEMON EN LAS BESTIAS DEL TERROR Santo & Blue Demon in The Beasts of Terror
SANTO EN LAS LOBAS Santo in The She-Wolves
SANTO EN ANONIMO MORTAL Santo in Anonymous Death Threat
1973
SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA EL DR. FRANKENSTEIN Santo & Blue Demon vs Dr. Frankenstein
SANTO CONTRA EL DR. MURERTE Santo vs Dr. Death aka Santo Strikes Again
1974
SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LA LLORONA Santo in The Revenge of The Crying Woman
1975
SANTO EN ORO NEGRO aka La Noche De San Juan Santo in Black Gold
1977
MISTERIO EN LAS BERMUDAS Mystery in Bermuda Co-starring Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras
1979
SANTO EN LA FRONTERA DEL TERROR Santo at the Border of Terror aka Santo vs The White Shadow
1981
SANTO CONTRA EL ASESINO DE LA TELEVISION Santo vs The Television Killer
CHANOC Y EL HIJO DEL SANTO VS LOS VAMPIROS ASESINOS Chanoc & The Son of Santo vs The Killer Vampires Cameo appearance
1982
SANTO EN EL PUNO DE LA MUERTE Santo in The Fist of Death
SANTO EN LA FURIA DE LOS KARATECAS Santo in The Fury of the Karate Experts
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