For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the influential high school mean-girl comedy Heathers (1989).
00:00 The Big Texan Steak Ranch
09:00 Lured (1947) 11:10 Eraserhead (1977) 16:19 The House on Telegraph Hill (1951) 20:50 Drive-Away Dolls (2024) 24:18 Sasquatch Sunset (2024) 28:06 The Beast (2024)
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.
Well … it’s come to this. This feature takes its name from the 2011 reboot of DC comics, The New 52, and if you’ve learned anything from reading these “issues,” it’s that each reboot of the comics requires a “crisis” event in order to reset everything and create a new, “fresh” jumping on point. For The New 52, that crisis was called Flashpoint, and it involved Barry Allen’s version of The Flash traveling back in time to prevent the death of his mother, only to return to a present so altered from his experience that things are worse for everyone else. Sure, his mom is alive in the present, but his wife is married to and has had children with another man, he is without his powers, and several key players in the ongoing preservation of mankind are absent or so altered that they are barely recognizable. If this sounds familiar to you, then maybe you read this comic, or maybe you watched the third season of CW’s The Flash, which adapted parts of this story, or you saw the disastrous Warner Bros release of The Flash last year, which also featured parts of this plot. For something so recent, it’s been picked apart and reused in quite a few adaptational ways. And hey – that’s fine! The source material isn’t the problem with this movie, it’s just that I hate the animation in this one, and I really despise that this was the first step in DC’s attempt to create a more interconnected universe (sigh) among these DTV features, which had heretofore been standalones or duologies. You see, this is the first film in the “DC Animated Movie Universe™,” and that series will encompass sixteen of the next twenty-four of these movies, with up to three or four of them being released in succession before they throw in the occasional standalone to break things up. I have a feeling we’ll be desperate for them when the time comes. On your mark, get set, I guess.
We open with a brief prologue in which we establish the relationship between child Barry Allen and his mother, including her teaching him the so-called “serenity prayer” as a kind of proverb, followed by him discovering her murdered body after school one day. From this, we transition to present day, where Barry (Justin Chambers), accompanied by his wife Iris (Jennifer Hale), leaves flowers on his mother’s grave and says that he wishes he could have been fast enough to save her that day; Iris reminds him that he was only a boy, and if he had gotten home any earlier, it’s likely that he would have been murdered as well. This discussion is interrupted by news that several of Flash’s rogues have gathered at the Flash Museum in order to destroy his legacy; he arrives to face off against the Top, Mirror Master, Heat Wave, and Captains Boomerang and Cold. He handles them all with relative ease until the arrival of Eobard Thawne (C. Thomas Howell), aka the Reverse Flash, who manages to cement him onto a wall and attach a bomb to him. He also reveals that he’s put bombs on all of the other rogues present, and that’s when the rest of the Justice League arrive, and boy oh boy, are they ugly as shit. Their proportions are all out of whack in a way that I think is aiming to be anime-esque but is really just hideous. I mean, look at Superman here:
His insignia is three times the width of his face, and his shoulders are 8.5 times as wide as the widest part of his jawline. For comparison, when drawing the human figure in proportion, most artistic instruction tells the artist to draw the shoulder line as twice the length of the height of the head, or three times as wide. Superman’s shoulders here are almost double that, at 3.75 times his head height and 6.92 times his head width. I know that some of this is a matter of artistic license or preference, but I would prefer not to look at this; it’s fucking hideous. If we’re being charitable, we can say that this is probably to provide greater contrast to how emaciated and weak his alternate self will appear in the other timeline (spoiler alert), but I hate it, and it puts as much of a sour taste in my mouth about his new film “series” right from the get-go, both the first time I saw it and this time as well.
Anyway, after they disarm the bombs and Thawne is taken into custody, he says some creepy shit and we head into the opening credits. When we re-emerge into the film proper, Barry wakes up at his desk to find that things are not quite as he remembered them; his boss asks him for an update on the case of the Elongated Kid being murdered rather than the Elongated Man, a TV news report shows a “Citizen” Cold fighting off Captain Boomerang at the Cold Museum, and oh, yeah, he doesn’t have his powers, and his mother is alive. He tries to tell his mom that he’s the Flash, but she doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about. Elsewhere, a more grizzled Batman (Kevin McKidd) has no problem using guns or throwing his enemies off of buildings to their deaths, although his attempted murder of a villainess is interrupted by Cyborg (Michael B. Jordan, wasted in this role). The younger hero attempts to recruit the Bat into joining the squad that the former is attempting to put together—and in so doing exposits the greater context of what’s happening in this new reality—in order to end the war between Atlantis, as led by Aquaman (Cary Elwes) and the Amazons, with Queen Diana (Vanessa Marshall) as their leader. These two plotlines intersect when Barry, desperate to find someone to help him figure everything out, slips into Wayne Manor, where he finds that this world’s Batman is Thomas Wayne, who became a vigilante when his young son was gunned down in an alley, rather than the other way around. From here, it’s all about figuring out how to get Barry’s powers back and set right what once went wrong.
There’s fun to be wrung here from some of the little twists of fate and characterization on the darker side of the mirror. It’s so corny that Martha Wayne becomes the Joker in the same moment that Thomas decides to become Batman that it loops all the way back around to being kind of cool, actually. The idea of the “Shazam Kids,” a group of kids to all merge into one hero in the form of Captain Marvel/Shazam is also a neat little touch. Otherwise, though this is a real slog to get through. My problem with the animation isn’t just that the new character designs are awful (although they are, just terrible, really), but also that some of the designs that are clearly reused from other projects look bizarre alongside these bulging hulks; this is most noticeable with the contingent of Atlanteans who are clearly just copied over from Young Justice (Kaldur is especially obvious), who look like carefully carved Greek statues next to the blown-out Aquaman. It also looks cheap, and it has the unfortunate problem of looking cheaper the longer the movie goes on, as if they were running out of budget with every minute. The seams show most close to the end when a newly-repowered Barry is running at superspeed, and the figure of him running on screen looks like an incompletely rendered animatic, like they didn’t actually bother to give the animation team time to finish rendering the CG elements for the final release. One would think that, with the launch of a new ongoing film franchise following this movie that some of the budget would be spent on creating, for instance, a CGI running Flash that looks top-notch, so that they could then use that same model for future films in the series, but this just looks like shit. Furthermore, although it isn’t this film’s fault, both other adaptations of this story for TV and film include the fact that Barry sets out to save his mother from being killed as the catalyst for the plot, meaning that the mystery in this adaptation—who changed the past and why—is utterly moot if you’re coming to this film after interacting with either of those pieces of media.
I hate this one, and it doesn’t even really need to exist. In a meta sense, I understand the impulse to make one last movie under the Warner Premier label (which dissolved in 2013 and was absorbed into Warner Bros Home Entertainment and Warner Bros Animation; the next film will be released with solely the latter in its production logos), and to find it clever to do a rebooting crisis as the finale. That doesn’t make me feel more fondly toward it, however. Almost all of these movies so far have been completely standalone, with no connection to one another. So what continuity do you need to reboot in order to start telling a new story from the ground up? None! Just start your DTV interconnected franchise with the next movie! There was no tract of land here that needed to be cleared to build a new house, just open space, and they stuck this hideous movie in here for no good reason.
There was a period of time in my childhood when I was convinced that Laurence Fishburne is the greatest actor alive. Decades later, I’m once again being swayed to believe that superlative, except now my supporting evidence has less to do with his work in the high-premise sci-fi films The Matrix & Event Horizon than it has to do with his more complex character work in Bill Duke’s Deep Cover & John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood. Fishburne was well rewarded in his 1990s heyday, including an Oscar nomination for his brutish portrayal of Ike Turner in What’s Love Got to With It? and an Independent Sprit Award for Best Male Lead in Deep Cover. To my knowledge, Event Horizon earned no Oscar buzz to speak of in 1997, which would have disappointed me to know at age 11. Since then, Fishburne has slipped into the Great Actor void, mostly working in TV and in IP extenders when studios should be churning out a new Awards Bait star vehicle for him every year the same way we pamper other living greats like Glenn Close, Annette Benning, and Meryl Streep. It’s a shame, especially once you get cynical about how other Black legends like Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett, and even Deep Cover director Bill Duke have been left to simmer on the same Hollywood backburner.
It might seem naive to discuss an undercover cop thriller like Deep Cover in these prestige-acting terms, but it really does give Fishburne a lot of room to show off. If nothing else, it somehow finds an entire new layer of self-conflict to the moral dilemma of a cop having to commit crimes to stop them, despite the already long-bald tires on that trope. We open with a flashback to the cop’s childhood trauma on A Very Shane Black Christmas, when his addict father was gunned down in front of him while robbing a liquor store for gift & drug money. The rest of the movie is set in the New Jack City 1990s, where Fishburne’s childhood trauma under the violence & desperation of addiction has curdled into furious disgust with the crack epidemic that has rattled Los Angeles. In order to take down the white ghouls at the top of the ladder who supply drugs to the Black community, Fishburne allows himself to be recruited to go undercover as one of their business partners. In the process, he gets especially close to a scummy yuppie lawyer played by Jeff Goldblum, whose “condescending infatuation with everything Black” makes their already volatile workplace relationship even more explosively tense. Most of Fishburne’s conflict is internal, though. He is handling, selling, and profiting off the one evil he has dedicated his life to avoiding, and every moment of that hypocritical turmoil weighs heavy in his angry, self-hating eyes.
Deep Cover is currently in print as a Criterion Collection Blu-ray, but it entered my house as a 20-year-old thrift store DVD. That dichotomy is a perfect snapshot of where it lands on the prestige/trash spectrum, stealthily operating as a high-style art film that’s gone undercover as a thriller-of-the-week marquee filler. Bill Duke’s directorial instincts deserve just as much credit for its impact as Fishburne’s acting chops, updating classic noir tropes for Spike Lee’s America. Fishburne’s overly verbose narration track is classic noir at least, and Duke’s vision of Los Angeles is one where every alley spews a volcano of mysterious urban steam into an atmospheric haze of neon reds & blues (often alternating from the tops of passing cop cars). The editing rhythms are chopped into jerky stops & jumps, feeling more DJ’d than traditionally spliced. Its aesthetic indulgence in post-MTV style only gets more intense from there the further its characters lose themselves in the momentum of cocaine psychosis – a style that eventually came full circle when the movie was marketed with a tie-in music video featuring Snoop Dogg & Dr. Dre. It’s a cool video promoting a very cool movie, but what I ended up cherishing most about Deep Cover was the amount of screenpsace it reserved for watching one our greatest living actors be great at acting. It’s shocking how few other movies afford Fishburne the same generosity.
The first noises you hear in Alex Garland’s Civil War are surround-sound blasts of static bouncing around the room in unpredictable, disorienting patterns. That discordance continues in the film’s crate-digging soundtrack, which includes songs from bands like Suicide & Silver Apples that disorient their audiences with off-rhythm oscillation for a near-psychedelic effect. Likewise, a sunny, up-beat party track from De La Soul violently clashes against a scene of brutal militarism in a way that’s chillingly wrong to the ear and to the heart. Civil War is cinema of discordance, a blockbuster art film that purports to take an apolitical view of inflammatory politics. That discordance is evident in its main subject: the psychology behind war journalism & battlefield photography. Even though the work itself is often noble, journalists’ personal impulses to participate in violence as up-close spectators can be disturbingly inhuman, and Garland’s main interest appears to be in the volatile disharmony between those two truths. It’s a movie about professional neutrals who act against every survival instinct in their bodies that tell them to fight or flee, and that instinct that says what you’re observing is dangerous & wrong carries over to the filmmaking craft as well – something that only becomes more disturbing when you find yourself enjoying it.
Kirsten Dunst stars as a respected photojournalist who reluctantly passes her torch to a young upstart played by Cailee Spaeny, mirroring the actors’ real-life professional dynamic as Sofia Coppola muses. Along with two similarly, generationally divided newspaper men (Wagner Moura & Stephen McKinley Henderson), they travel down the East Coast of a near-future America that’s devolved into chaos & bloodshed, hoping to document the final days of an illegitimate president who refuses to leave office (Nick Offerman) before he is executed by the combined military of defecting states. Like in Garland’s screenplay for 28 Days Later, their journey is an episodic collection of interactions with survivors who’ve shed the final semblances of civility in the wreckage of a dying society (including a show-stopping performance from Jesse Plemons as a small-time, sociopathic tyrant), except instead of a zombie virus everyone’s just fighting to survive extremist politics. The journalists look down on people who’ve consciously decided to stay out of the war—including their own parents—but in the almighty name of objectivity they attempt the same political avoidance, just from a much closer, more thrilling proximity. They sometimes pontificate about the importance of allowing readers to decide on the issues for themselves based on the raw data they provide from the front-lines, but Garland makes it clear that their attraction to the profession can be something much more selfish than that. Moments after watching & documenting real people bleed to death through a camera lens, they shout, “What a rush!” and compliment the artistic quality of each other’s pictures. They’re essentially adrenaline addicts who’ve found a way to philosophically justify getting their fix.
There may be something amoral about picking at the ethics & psychology of front-line war journalism in this way, especially at a time when we’re relying on the bravery of on-the-ground documentation from Gaza to counteract & contradict official government narratives that downplay an ongoing genocide. Civil War never makes any clear, overt statements about journalism as a discipline, though; it just dwells on how unnatural it is for journalists to be able to compartmentalize in real time during battle, even finding a perverse thrill in the excitement. They are active participants in war without ever admitting it to themselves, and most of the emotional, character-based drama of the film is tied to the ability to maintain that emotional distance as the consequences of the war get increasingly personal. As the lead, Dunst in particular struggles to stay protected in her compartmentalized headspace where nothing matters except getting “the money shot” of actual combatants being brutally killed just a few feet away from her camera. It shuts off like a light switch when she sees her inhuman behavior reflected in the younger version of herself, played by Spaeny. It also shuts off when reviewing her own artistically framed pictures of a dying colleague, which she deletes out of respect (and maybe out of self-disgust). However, as soon as she finds herself in competition to capture a front-page photo before other nearby journalists beat her to the punch, it flips back on, and the movie doesn’t seem to have anything concrete to say about that switch except to note how deeply strange it is as a professional talent. Nor does it really need to.
Like a lot of recent audience-dividers, it seems the major sticking point for most Civil War detractors is that Garland’s main thematic interests don’t match the themes of the movie they made up in their heads before arriving to the theater. Any claims from either audience or filmmaker that the movie is apolitical ring false, given that Nick Offerman plays a 3rd-term president who declares “Some are calling it the greatest victory of all time” in press conferences about his obvious, disastrous failures. If the allusions to Trump and the January 6 insurrection were any more blatant, the movie would be derided as an on-the-nose caricature. The divide between artist & audience is just one of personal interests. If you’re looking to Civil War for speculative fiction about where the current populist politics of our country may soon lead us, the movie is not interested enough in near-future worldbuilding to draw you a roadmap. It’s much more interested in the psychology of the unbiased, objective spectators of this extremist political discord than in the politics of those actually, actively participating in it, which it takes more as a given. Maybe that’s purely a statement about the nature of war journalism, or maybe it’s something that can be extrapolated as commentary on the consumption of horrific news footage as a subgenre of smartphone content, or as self-deprecating commentary on making fictional films about politics instead of directly participating in it. Maybe even Garland himself doesn’t know exactly what he wants to say about the act of reducing the horrors of real-world violence into sensationalist words & images, but it’s at least clear that he feels something alienating & cold in that spectatorship, and that feeling is effectively conveyed through his choices behind the camera.
I’ve never had much enthusiasm for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s two signature films—the notoriously brutal acid Western El Topo & the psychedelic tableaux The Holy Mountain—despite the immense visual beauty both films convey as a collection of still images. Jodorowsky is undeniably impressive as a visual stylist, but whenever he asserts full auteurist control over a picture, the visuals just kinda sit there, purposeless and without clear progression. I suspect, then, that the reason Santa Sangre stands out as the director’s best work is because he did not have that authorial control as the sole writer-director. The project was brought to Jodorowsky as an already fully formed idea by two Italian filmmakers: schlock giallo screenwriter Roberto Lioni and, more notably, Claudio Argento, who’s most famous for producing films directed by his older brother Dario (including the Argento classics Inferno & Tenebre). Those two external voices do little to rein in Jodorowsky’s wildly expressive, surrealistic visual style, but they do help anchor it to a more familiar, generic narrative structure that gives it a much sturdier shape. The imagery in Santa Sangre is just as gorgeous as anything you’ll see in The Holy Mountain, but it’s driven by a feverishly perverse Italo horror sensibility that gives it a much more satisfying sense of momentum.
Santa Sangre is a fine-art sideshow that finds ecstatic melodrama in the backstage lives of traveling carnies. In the early flashback sequence that establishes the dramatic stakes, there’s little stylistic difference from what might happen if Werner Herzog attempted a 1980s remake of Tod Browning’s Freaks (a possibility you can only effectively imagine by watching Herzog’s forgotten 2000s melodrama Invincible). Strongmen, clowns, strippers, dwarves, and trapezists are shot with a confrontational, near-documentary candor that walks just up to the line of “Get a load of these freaks!” gawking, but invests in the sincere, scene-to-scene drama of their humanity enough to mostly get away with it. The modern-timeline scenes set in a mental institution are even shakier in the tightrope they walk between honesty & exploitation. It doesn’t help that horror is an inherently exploitative medium in the way it others the mentally ill and physically disfigured for cheap scares, a tradition this particular title leans into by mirroring the plot of Hitchcock’s Psycho. In the flashback timeline, a young circus-performer child watches in horror as his mother’s arms are severed by his brutish, drunken father. In the present, he escapes from an insane asylum to act as his mother’s phantom arms, wearing painted nails and voguing like Willi Ninja as part of her new, altered stage act . . . and, of course, violently murdering anyone she singles out as a target, despite his squeamishness for violence. This perverse pantomime of Mommy Issues psychosis culminates in an all-timer of a twist ending that I will not dare spoil here.
There’s something deeply, spiritually honest about movies that act as circuses. Both artforms are a kind of cheap-entertainment spectacle that can convey pure, illusionary magic if the audience is willing to suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy the show. Some of the best scenes in Santa Sangre are just straightforward documentation of circus performers’ acts, costumes, and bodies, with Jodorowsky’s eye searching for ethereal beauty in their makeshift D.I.Y. glamor. It’s Argento & Lioni who provide a linear structure to support that beauty, though, and you can feel their influence in Santa Sangre‘s many Italo horror cliches. First of all, you don’t get much more giallo than borrowing your plot structure from Hitchcock – Psycho or Rear Window especially. Then, there’s the intense color gels & neons that mark the modern timeline of Santa Sangre but are not present in Jodorowsky’s previous works. The real signifier, though, is the framing of the first modern-day murder, in which a woman is stabbed to death by a disembodied arm wielding a knife, the killer’s identity obscured just off screen. It’s all classic giallo fare, right down to the awkward English dubbing and the sensational but nonsensical answer to the central mystery of the murders. I’m not exactly sure why Argento sought out Jodorowsky to direct this film instead of collaborating with Dario or Umberto Lenzi or Michael Soavi or whatever Italo schlockteur was around & looking for a paycheck. It was a smart choice, though, as the director’s attempts to elevate the carnival setting into a fine art gallery show combine with the producer’s assembly line horror filmmaking rhythms to craft something truly special that neither collaborator would ever achieve again on their own.
Generally, Jodorowsky movies are more interesting to think about in the abstract than they are to actually watch, which is why the unfinished-project documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune is the context where his name is most often repeated in modern discourse. Santa Sangre is the major exception to that conundrum. It may be just as exploitative & ableist as an actual carnival sideshow, but it’s also a work of tremendous beauty & emotional sincerity. It would be difficult to claim that a movie that goes out of its way to include depictions of forced prostitution, elephant dismemberment, and child torture via tattoo needles is not on some level mining empty shock value out of its setting & drama. The characters’ pain through surviving that outrageous violence is heartfelt, though, and the beauty of Jodorowsky’s photography protects the story from devolving into pure miserablism. Besides the narrative similarities to Psycho & Freaks, the movie also includes direct allusions to the James Wale classic The Invisible Man, another example of horror filmmaking’s highwire balancing act between cheap visual spectacle and sincere emotional torment. It’s a shame Jodorowsky didn’t work with by-the-numbers horror producers more often. The genre’s readymade narrative familiarity & eternal marketability might have really bulked up his relatively small filmography, both in quantity and in quality.
Welcome to Episode #210 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, Hanna, and guest Bill Arceneaux discuss a selection of horror films that screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, starting with the gory slow-cinema slasher In a Violent Nature.
The earliest press releases for the Universal Pictures horror Abigailreported it as a reimagining of the 1936 classic Dracula’s Daughter, citing Leigh Whannell’s 2020 remake of The Invisible Man and last year’s Nic-Cage-as-Dracula comedy Renfield as similar examples of what the studio is currently doing with its Classic Monsters brand. Technically, Abigail does feature a vampire’s daughter in its main cast, but that titular, bloodsucking brat’s similarities to Countess Marya Zaleska end there. No matter what the original pitch for Abigail might have been in first draft, it’s clear that the final product was more directly inspired by last year’s killer-doll meme comedy M3GAN than anything related to the original Dracula series. Anytime its little-girl villain does a quirky, TikTok friendly dance in her cutesy ballerina outfit, you can practically hear echoes of some producer yelling “Get me another M3GAN!” in the background. The Radio Silence creative team kindly obliged, churning out another M3GAN with the same dutiful, clock-punching enthusiasm that they’ve been using to send another Scream sequel down the conveyor belt every year. The movie is less a reimagining of a 90-year-old classic than it is a rerun of a novelty that just arrived last January.
To juice the premise for as many TikTokable moments as possible, Abigail never changes out of her tutu. The seemingly innocent little girl (Alisha Weir) is kidnapped after ballet practice and held ransom in an old dark house to extort millions out of her mysterious, dangerous father. She naps for a bit while her captors bicker & banter downstairs, so that each of the likeable, sleepwalking stars (Dan Stevens, Melissa Barrera, Kathryn Newton, the late Angus Cloud, etc.) can all get in their MCU-style quips before they’re ceremoniously slaughtered one at a time. Then Abigail wakes up, reveals her fangs, and throws in some pirouettes & jetés between ripping out throats with her mouth. The violence is bloody but predictable, especially if you’ve happened to see the movie’s trailers, which plainly spell out every single image & idea from the second hour while conveniently skipping over the tedious hangout portion of the first. There is no element of surprise or novelty here beyond your very first glimpse of an adolescent vampire in a tutu, which you already get just by walking past the poster in the lobby.
In short, Abigail is corporate slop. The best way to enjoy it is either chopped up into social media ads or screening on the back of an airplane seat headrest, wherever your attention is most often held hostage. I attended its world premiere at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, which likely should have heightened its fanfare through pomp & exclusivity but instead had the opposite effect. Screening in a festival environment among dozens of no-name productions with much smaller budgets and infinitely bigger ideas really highlighted how creatively bankrupt this kind of factory-line horror filmmaking can be. Using the legacy of something as substantial as Dracula’s Daughter to rush out a M3GAN follow-up before a proper M3GAN 2.0 sequel is ready for market conveys a depressingly limited scope of imagination in that context, especially since horror is the one guaranteed-profit genre where audiences are willing to go along with pretty much anything you throw at them. At the very least, Universal & Radio Silence could have better capitalized off the production’s one distinct, exciting idea by flooding the house with dozens, if not hundreds, of ballerina vampires instead of relying on just one. That way, it wouldn’t be so boring to wait for her to wrap up her nap.
A festival darling a couple of years ago, this DIY transfemme autofiction bildungsroman took an usually long time to reach general audiences, seeing as it was stuck in legal limbo for a while. You see, Vera Drew chose to tell the story of her life—from her earliest realizations that her body didn’t match her concept of herself, to her first real romance and how that other person’s journey of self-discovery helped her understand herself even further, into a happy, fantasy future—all through the lens of living in a comic book world. After an opening that parodies the framing device of Joker, we see a flashback to our essentially unnamed protagonist as a child (when her deadname is spoken aloud, by her mother for instance, it’s bleeped, except in one scene later where it’s uncensored to great effect). In this world, the little AMAB’s greatest dream is to one day be a cast member on UCB (that is, the United Clown Bureau, rather than the Upright Citizen’s Brigade) Live, a parody of SNL in which men in the cast are credited individually as Jokers or Jokemen, while all of the women are consigned to being credited en masse as “The Harlequins.”
Notably, in this imagining, that Bruce Wayne is Batman is a well-known fact, and he all but rules Gotham with an iron glove. His drones scour the streets for crime, all comedy other than that of UCB Live has been outlawed, and there are films about him in-universe, one of which is clearly a take on Batman Forever, with one of the lines spoken by Nicole Kidman cracking our protagonist’s egg. When she asks her mother about it on the car ride home after the movie, and whether one could be born into “the wrong body,” her mother takes her straight to Arkham, where the sinister Dr. Crane prescribes a semi-antidepressant called Smylex, which is taken via inhaler and instantly distorts the patient’s face into a rictus grin. After a troubled childhood in which an eternally offscreen father leaves all child-rearing to his wife, and with whom our protagonist has an understandably strained relationship, our protagonist (now played by Vera Drew as an adult) moves to Gotham and attempts to get involved on UCB Live and is accepted into the incubator program only to discover that it’s a for-profit scam. This does enable our protagonist to meet their new best friend, Oswald Cobblepot, at the UCB center, and the two of them decide to set up their own illegal anti-establishment “anti-comedy” club. A whole rogues gallery becomes the (lampshaded) found family of the protagonist, including Poison Ivy, Catwoman, Bane, and the Riddler (who gets in early as riddles are, in fact, the antithesis of jokes, making him perfect for their anti-comedy). Our protagonist finds that none of their jokes land, until one day, they see a performance by a Joker named Jason Todd, who’s modeled after the Jared Leto “interpretation” of the character, down to the “damaged” tattoo on his forehead.
The audience notices before our protagonist does that Jason’s open coat reveals his top surgery scars, so it comes as little surprise to us when he comes out as transgender to our protagonist, although it’s a mild shock to them. Our protagonist asks to be introduced on stage as Joker the Harlequin, and we see Joker and Jason, whom she calls “Mistah J,” play out, and it’s a perfect encapsulation of the complexity of relationships with people who are, whether they tell you at the start with a tattoo on their face or not, damaged. People who are toxic can also be the first people to see us for who we really are, and while that doesn’t cover for the ways in which their behavior is harmful, it does add shades of gray to the fact that these are people who may ultimately teach us something about ourselves. This culminates in our protagonist’s decision to proceed with gender affirming care, presented here as her plummet into a vat of estrogen, Harley Quinn style, only for her and Mr. J to come face to face with the Batman, who has his own abusive backstory with Jason. This is all stuff that is better discovered than recapped, so I won’t summarize further, but this sort of gives you the idea of what this narrative is. Kinda.
What’s really fun here is just how many different ideas and styles are combined. The segments about J-the-H’s childhood are largely live action, sometimes in locations or sets but sometimes backgrounded only by collages or drawings of her hometown of Smallville. The film-within-a-film mentioned above uses action figures and 3D models to bring not-Batman Forever to life, while some sequences are fully comprised of what appears to be hand-drawn animation. One character exists solely as a puppet, while Poison Ivy is a purely a computer model that looks like she was rendered for a Windows 2000 ROM-based semi-animated point-and-clicker, and characters with more immediate impact on the plot appear in whatever the reimagined memory demands. Some of the film is some combination of several of these, and it’s often so poorly composited that it looks like it’s been cobbled together with excerpts from The Amazing Bulk, but that adds charm rather than taking away from it. I should warn that making the film “busy” in this way might not work for everyone; my viewing companion in particular said that the film’s constant jumps between styles did not mesh with his particular strain of ADHD, and this seems to have made the narrative less legible to him than to me. If you’re able to handle pastiche movies like the kinds put out by Everything is Terrible, you’ll be able to follow this.
There’s a lot of heart here, especially when it’s clear that Vera is speaking through Joker, like when she admits that when she first arrived in the city she would sometimes call suicide hotlines that would automatically connect her to Kansas because of her area code, and she would use that experience to ground herself by asking how the weather was back home, even if that place had never really been “home.” It’s not all positive, however, as we also feel the biting sting of betrayal when Mr. J calls her by her deadname, the only time that it’s said clearly, in an argument; as she recalls, he had never even known her by that name, so it wasn’t an accident or a slip of the tongue but an intentional use to hurt her. It’s visceral and real, which feels like an odd thing to say about a movie that so provocatively calls attention to its artifice.
One thing that this one has over the film that it’s parodying/satirizing/reimagining is that it’s actually funny. I’ll admit that I didn’t see the entirety of Todd Phillips’s Joker, but I can promise you that I saw enough. It’s not funny. And hey, not every joke in this one lands, but they come so fast and so furiously across a variety of spectrums that there’s going to be something for everyone here, except for the people who refuse to give the film a chance based purely on their ideologies. The anti-comedy stylings of several of the jokers are funny in their anti-humor with no real knowledge of comics, but there are obviously in-jokes and references, like the omnipresence of the TV-topping mind control device that Jim Carrey’s Riddler’s plan in Forever hinged upon and Catwoman’s complaint that Frank Miller always writes her as a sex worker (not that sex work is bad, she clarifies, but because it’s sexist of him to think that women can’t just be burglars). Most of these are funny even without the context, and some of the jokes that landed most with my theater crowd were oblique jokes about pop culture in general; the biggest laugh of the night came when the yet-unhatched Joker asks to be introduced on stage as Joker the Harlequin for the first time and their Penguiny friend commenting on their femme attire and pointing out that drag, like comedy, had been outlawed, but only because of the fallout from the explosion at RuPaul’s fracking ranch.
This is an unusual experience of a film, and I expect that whatever impact it might have been able to have on larger culture has been largely blunted by Warner Bros’ intensive scrutiny and attempts to prevent its release with (unsustainable) claims that it falls outside of fair use, and the overall silence about it (so far at least) from the dipshit side of the cultural divide means that it may not get the popularity bump that everything the right wing pundits complain about does, for better and for worse. I didn’t really know what to expect, and I got something that was unique in its presentation but universal in its examination of the way that (sigh) sometimes, it’s society that’s sick, or it’s our parents who make us sick by their reaction to curiosity and parts of the human experience that are repressed due to societal pressures. It’s an Adult Swim fever dream, and, in its final moments and with its final line, it brought tears to my eyes. You know if this is for you, and if it is, seek it out.
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.
Superman: Unbound is a breath of fresh air after what feels like way too many of these animated DC movies in a row that were centered around the morality of killing. Under the Red Hood had, as its central feature, that the Red Hood’s vendetta against Batman wasn’t because the latter let Jason Todd die, but because he let Jason’s killer, Joker, live. Superman vs. The Elite focused on the importance of Superman’s intractable moral code and how his rule that he never uses deadly force ensures that he is a benevolent force in contrast to the “modern” Elite. Dark Knight Returns has Batman’s refusal to break his no-killing rule in order to put Joker down for good also be a major plot point, as his almost doing so and then being framed for the Joker’s murder is the primary axis on which the second part turns. Although all of these movies were adaptations of source material that was spread out across decades of comics, having all of them adapted within such a short time was beginning to feel stale and uncreative. And that’s not even getting into the fact that the next film from this studio, Flashpoint Paradox, will also feature this as a plot point (in the form of an alternate timeline Batman who is willing to murder), it’s nice to get a break from that, if only for one movie.
That Unbound is a little different is a nice change of pace, even if it creates a bit of a snarl regarding which of these movies are related to each other, which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, given how often this is a problem in the originating medium. Remember when we talked about Superman/Batman: Apocalypse, and how that was an adaptation of the “Supergirl from Krypton” story arc in that book that led into the 2005 relaunch of the Supergirl comic, which was itself created to reintroduce the character after the most recent reboot of the company’s continuity with 2005-6’s Infinite Crisis (not to be confused with 1986’s Crisis on Infinite Earths)? Long-running Superman foe Brainiac hadn’t been seen since that crossover event, and was reintroduced in 2008 with a storyline in the “Brainiac” storyline from Superman’s main comic, Action Comics, upon which Unbound is based. That comic plot heavily featured the involvement of the new Kara Zor-El Supergirl that we all now know and love, and threads left over from both “Supergirl from Krypton” and her own ongoing series are part of the “Brainaic” arc. So, to recap, this film is an adaptation of a storyline that follows closely upon and directly tied to the storyline that was adapted into Apocalypse, but Unbound is, for some reason, not a sequel to Apocalypse in its film form. It’s okay if you need to take a break or a drink after that, I promise. It’s not really relevant, but has to be mentioned because, in case you’ve never noticed, comic book pedantry is the lifeblood of the internet, where you’re reading this right now.
Unbound opens in the middle of a hostage situation, as Lois Lane (Stana Katic) has been taken by armed men after volunteering to be their captive in lieu of other, less Superman-adjacent people who might otherwise be at higher risk, per her logic. It’s not him who comes to her assistance initially, however, as the first hero to arrive on scene is Supergirl (Molly Quinn), whose recent appearance in this fictional world is given some lip service based on the fact that Lane’s captors don’t recognize her. Superman (Matt Bomer) eventually arrives on the scene, and our unrelated-to-the-plot action cold open comes to a conclusion. Back at the offices of The Daily Planet, one of Lois’s co-workers hits on her piggishly while insinuating that he “knows” Clark and Lois aren’t together because there can be only one reason that Kent is forever disappearing without explanation and is ostensibly single despite being built like a brick house, and it starts with “in” and ends with “the closet.” Clark walks in while this is happening and uses his heat vision to cause the man to take a harmless but humiliating tumble out of his chair, which sets up our emotional conflict for this film: Clark and Lois are dating, she knows his secret identity, she does count on him to rescue her from terrorists but not the office misogynist, she thinks that there’s no reason to keep their relationship a secret while he keeps her at emotional arm’s length with that tired old canard about how their dating as civilians would somehow endanger her, and so on and so forth.
As a side note, for each of these movies that has focused on Superman as the primary character (rather than just as a member of the Justice League), whether as a result of what source material is chosen for adaptation or through deliberate choice, the most traditional Clark/Lois relationships (she adores Superman and either sees Clark as just a friend or is obsessed with proving that he’s secretly the big blue boy scout) has either been excised or used as part of the narrative and then dismissed. In Doomsday, Lois and Superman are openly dating but he refuses to “come out” to her as Clark until the end of the film, when his (temporary) death at the hands of the titular villain put things into perspective for him. In Public Enemies, she’s absent completely, other than an unvoiced cameo at the end of the film, and she’s likewise not present in the entirety of Apocalypse. All Star Superman featured their relationship as a major part of the plot, with Superman and Lois having been an item for some time and him again “coming out” to her as Clark as he nears the end of his life. Most recently, in Superman vs. The Elite, their relationship was as intimate as it could be, with her already being aware of both of his identities and the two of them at least cohabitating and possibly being married already. Here, the formula is a little different: she’s aware of both of his identities, the two are dating, but they’ve kept their relationship (as Clark and Lois) a secret; even still, based on the recurring story elements we’ve mentioned, it’s not exactly a surprise that the events of the film cause Clark to (sing along if you know the words) re-evaluate his position and decide to come around to Lois’s more open way of thinking.
Back to the narrative, Clark must dash out of a staff meeting when there’s news of a meteorite that’s headed toward Arizona. When he gets there, however, he learns that the meteorite is actually a probe that can transform into a humanoid robot that he puts down after some difficulty. Bringing the ‘bot back to his Fortress of Solitude, Kara joins him and identifies the probe as a herald of Brainiac (John Noble), a spacefaring cyborg who roams the galaxy in an effort to collect all knowledge in the universe. It’s not a bad goal, but his methods are genocidal: he finds planets with sentient life, “collects” one of said planet’s major cities and shrinks it down to bell jar size and keeps it in his menagerie, then destroys the planet. It’s the result of a flaw in his programming; once he’s “studied” a planet, he can’t let it grow and change from that point forward because then his knowledge would be incomplete, so he must ensure that his database remains inerrant by freezing the planet in time via total annihilation. Kara saw him in action when she was a child, as he came to Krypton and “collected” the planet’s Argo City; the only reason anyone lived to tell the tale was because Brainiac didn’t see the logic in wasting the energy to blow up a planet that was already on the precipice of destruction. Having learned this, Superman heads into space aboard a Kryptonian ship to face Brainiac head-on and, if possible, restore the shrunken cities that the cyborg has captured.
I like how straightforward this one is, and as these movies go, this is possibly one of the ones with the lowest barrier to entry. You don’t really need to know anything about Brainiac since it’s all explained over the course of the film. There are a lot of nifty setpieces, like Supes’s early desert battle with the Brainiac probe, Superman’s time spent shrunken down and placed into Argo City, and the final swampy battle between Superman and Brainiac proper. This film also approaches the series’ mandate for more adult storytelling from a different angle, as it doesn’t rely solely on more violence to hit a PG-13 rating, and instead uses more adult humor (Lois is surprised that Clark didn’t think of pretending to be gay years ago, as it’s “the perfect cover,” made more on-the-nose given that this is the first time that the character has been voiced by an out gay man). There’s also some horror on display here, too, of the overt body horror variety on display with all of the upgrades Brainiac has made to his body and the way that all of his weird prehensile tubes attach to him, as well as the terror of more subtle moments. This is best evidenced when Superman is horrified to learn that the people in Brainiac’s shrunken cities are alive but essentially in stasis, meaning that one of the children who is excited to see him has been a toddler for decades. It’s good stuff, and reminds me of the simplicity of the old Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons of the 1940s: straightforward, cleanly animated, and digestible. Not necessarily the best of the lot, but a perfect low-commitment animated movie for a rainy weekend afternoon.
Boredom is a funny thing. I recently attended a screening of Family Portrait, a domestic drama that runs just under eighty minutes. In truth, I call it a “drama” because I’m not really sure what else it could be, even though the word drama implies a level of action that’s not really present here. I don’t want to come down too hard on this film, as it was made by a local filmmaker and shot in the hill country near me, with help from a grant from the film society to which I belong. When asked about it by friends after the show, I admitted that although I wasn’t bored by it (I am, after all, that insufferable film person archetype who loves The Tree of Wooden Clogs and whom the internet loves to hate), it was boring. Intentionally so, I think, but nonetheless, a successful experiment in generating the sensation of being the guest at someone else’s family get-together and having nothing to do there is going to be, well, that. Director Lucy Kerr could not be present at the screening that I attended, but she shot an introduction for the film that looked like she was being forced to do it at gunpoint, and that set a certain tone for the whole thing.
The plot, such as it is, revolves around Katy (Deragh Campbell), who has returned to her family’s humongous estate, which lies on the Guadalupe River, so that her assembled sisters, brothers-in-law, and nieces and nephews can take their Christmas card photo. Also present is her boyfriend Olek (Chris Galust), a Polish immigrant, who is to be the photographer and who is excused from the photograph as he has not married into the family yet. After the film opens with a dialogue-free scene in which these as-yet-unknown-to-us characters cross a large yard and gather beneath a tree in slightly slowed footage, the soundtrack droning as we see a few small interactions between characters that imply we’ll be learning more about them later, we start the day with Katy, who wakes up later than the rest of the family. She asks Olek why he reacted the way he did to one of the other near-dozen adults the previous night; he didn’t like the way that they were talking about his accent (which they misidentify as Russian despite knowing he’s Polish), and she reminds him that these are simple Texas people. Her mother prepares breakfast (with the help of a “domestic”), her father tells a meandering story about how one of the family’s photos (that we don’t get to see) is a famous one that was long-misidentified as being from the Vietnam War rather than from WWII. The family gets word that an uncle’s stepdaughter has died after a recent hospital visit; Katy’s father expresses that he thinks that she died because she went to the hospital (and in this case he appears to be right, as the implication is that she was an early COVID-19 victim before the virus was acknowledged), which leads to a light argument with his daughters about hospital safety and mandatory (meningitis) vaccines (for public university students).
Most of the film follows Katy as she tries to find her mother so that they can take their card photo and she and Olek can catch their flight, while everyone else just kind of shrugs off her concerns and says that the matriarch has to be around somewhere. Most of the interactions that take place do so around her as she wanders the property, finally going into first the woods and then the river before coming back to the house, and the film ending. Two of her brothers in law lounge on lawn chairs as one recounts to the other at hypnotic length about how the office that he worked at in the early nineties became obsessed with watching a streaming video of a university coffee pot. Her sisters have a brief talk about dreams in the most literal way possible; one of them admits that she literally has no ability to imagine things, that she can’t create an image in her mind, and that she doesn’t really know if she dreams. Recounting it as a topic here makes it sound thoughtful, and I want to clarify here that this is not the case. It’s more like being privy to a discussion between three adults with no real inner lives to speak of as they while away a lunch date in the next booth over at Bennigan’s. In fact, every conversation that every character has is so insubstantial that, in comparison to how little seemed to happen, I’m surprised I was able to get this much text onto the page describing these vignettes.
They only constitute about a fifth of the film, however, as the rest of it consists mostly of long shots of leaves blowing in the wind, water flowing in a stream, minutes-long extreme close-ups of jawlines and partial profiles, and long pans around what can only be described as a compound rather than a yard as Katy languidly looks for her mother. One of my first interpretations, which I must admit is not too charitable to Kerr, was that this was a poor attempt at imitating European art films. You know when you’re watching something like King of the Hill or Arrested Development or The Simpsons and there’s a gag about a film in the vein of, say, Tree of Wooden Clogs, and they parody it as plotless, static, and boring? Family Portrait, in some ways, feels like someone who’s never seen a European film but who has seen the parodies of it trying to make an earnest attempt at that kind of art. That’s boring, but like I said, that doesn’t bore me. I’ve seen a lot of this kind of grasping for artistic merit over the years, and this one is far and away one of the prettiest examples, if nothing else. From there, though, I thought, perhaps that is the point. After all, we’ve all had that feeling of the midday doldrums, the feeling you get when you’ve been around family for too long (or spent some time with someone else’s huge family) and you’ve got nothing but time to kill until the appointed hour of dinner or to leave (or take a family picture). Adding a layer of that element of anxiety that’s moderately surreal and ephemeral but not quite nightmarish; it’s a stress dream about getting everything together in time to make it to the airport and trying to get help from the people around you, but they’re all completely apathetic about it. It evokes that fine line between boredom and panic, and if I had come to rest on that as my final reading of the text, I would have concluded that the movie was a bit pretentious but harmless and sufficiently pleasant in terms of its technical composition, and I’d add that I was glad I had seen it in the theater as I don’t think I would have been able to stay engaged at home.
But in the composition of this review, I’ve decided to try and go very generous with regards to Kerr, and say that maybe Family Portrait isn’t about that at all. You see, this isn’t at all what I was expecting when I first saw this on the film society’s calendar, with a blurb that summarized the film as “Gathering at the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic, a Texas clan’s attempts to sit for a photograph are foiled by a missing matriarch and her disturbed daughter,” and which promised “a study of cracked family dynamics into a series of chiaroscuro contrasts.” You read that and you think “Oh, maybe it’s about a family that doesn’t get along very well but who are able to put things aside once a year for this picture, and then they end up trapped together for an extended period of time.” That sounds fun. Or “Maybe it’s about the conflict between this rich family and their servants as they’re all forced together.” I loved Triangle of Sadness, that sounds great! But this film is none of those things. The novel coronavirus is largely a background detail in Family Portrait, and I couldn’t stop wondering why such a minor narrative element was so vital to the narrative of the marketing. The sudden disappearance of Katy’s mother isn’t because she got infected; that’s not how it works.
The only conclusion I could reach was that, perhaps, this is a film about the banality of evil, in a similar vein as Zone of Interest. If that’s the case, it’s also an oddly confessional one, as Kerr shot the film entirely in and around her family home, which she notes in the introduction is called “Kerplunk” in a presumed play on the family name (and in fact, a plaque with Kerplunk written on it appears in one of the many common rooms in the house, where the men of the family are watching football). If I were a first-time filmmaker and the recipient of a grant, I wouldn’t cop to the fact that I grew up in that level of decadent comfort, in a gigantic home of countless rooms on an estate that meets a lazy flowing river and encompasses various other buildings as well as separate tennis and basketball courts. It’s like advertising to the whole world that you had the privilege of a spacious home and plenty of outdoor space while the rest of us were squirreled away in our little apartment hovels sanitizing apples and cereal boxes. This family, which we’ll call “the Kerrs” for the sake of simplicity, are completely insulated from the reality of the pandemic at their gates, with their servants still at hand and where the most stressful thing in life is trying to take a photograph. The banality of every conversation, then, contributes to the larger examination of aristocratic separation from common suffering, and that’s a brave thing to bring to the table for dissection as a filmmaker.
Is this a confession? A pretension? An experiment in boredom? In the end, I’m not sure.
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