Drive-Away Dolls (2024)

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We’re coming up on nearly two years since I first started my “Summer of the Coen Brothers” marathon, where I intended to watch every one of the familial pair’s films over the course of Summer 2022. And to be fair, I almost made it! Starting with Blood Simple in May and going in mostly chronological order until I skipped over The Big Lebowski (on account of having seen it at least a hundred times already – although I circled back, don’t worry), I was moving at a pretty good clip. Then we skipped over a rewatch of No Country for Old Men to accommodate one of my friends’ schedules, and other than that one, we finished up in December of 2022, with the only outstanding unseen film in their oeuvre being 2021’s Tragedy of Macbeth. “But wait!” I hear you say. “That was a solo project for Joel! That doesn’t count!” And you might be right, but with my screening of that one still pending, I can’t speak for how much of the Coens-ness of the duo is present in it. I can say that it’s present in Ethan’s new project Drive-Away Dolls, although there is an air of … incompleteness about it. 

It’s 1999, almost 2000, and you can tell by the fact that lesbian bars still exist. Our two leads are Texas gal Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and her friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), both of whom are of the sapphic persuasion. Like most classic Coen-penned duos, they are a study in reflections and symmetries; Jamie is the drawling, energetic, oversexed libertine to Marian’s frumpily-dressed, hasn’t-been-laid-in-years bookworm. When Jamie gets kicked out for cheating by her girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), Marian puts her up, but only briefly, as she herself is traveling to Florida to visit an elderly relative and do some birding. Jamie convinces Marian to let her come along, noting that they can get a free car via a “drive away” service. I’ve never heard of this, but it apparently involves delivering an assigned vehicle to an assigned destination. I’m not sure if this service still exists or if it ever did; it’s hard to believe it would, but I imagine people who only know AirBnB learning about Couchsurfing would be similarly incredulous, so I’ll keep an open mind. Unbeknownst to them, as a result of a mix-up at the office of a surly man named Curlie (Bill Camp), the car that they are selected to transport was supposed to deliver certain extralegal goods. And, since duos are a Coen specialty, we get another one whose role is to pursue the other: two “heavies,” one a brutish, monosyllabic goon named Flint (C.J. Wilson) and the other a self-assured wannabe smooth-talker called Arliss (Joey Slotnick). They report up to a man known only as “The Chief” (Colman Domingo), who finds himself in deep trouble with a disembodied voice demanding better from the other end of the phone. 

I didn’t love this one, I’m afraid. I liked it; I liked it plenty, in fact. But there is something that’s just not quite whole about it. There are a lot of images and concepts that line up in an unexpected way at the end, which I always enjoy in a Coen production, the way the puzzle falls into place perfectly. For instance, there are several faux-80mm “groovy” psychedelic sequences that initially seem to serve as out-of-place scene transitions, but which ultimately relate to the overall plot since (spoilers), the Macguffin that the women are carrying turns out to be a case full of dildos molded by a hippie woman named Tiffany Plastercaster (Miley Cyrus) from her lovers, several of which have risen to positions of prominence and power in the intervening time. My favorite of these moments, however, comes in the form of a few dreams Marian has about her childhood, in which she had a crush on the woman next door who sunbathed in the nude, and the focus that her memories have on the neighbor’s footwear: cowboy boots, like Jamie’s. This folding back upon itself that the film does, which creates a new interpretation of what we’ve already seen and functionally bookends the plot, is complete in itself as a sum of its parts, but is still somehow lacking in transcending that arithmetic. 

I enjoyed the many references to Henry James. Throughout, Marian is seen reading The Europeans, which leads into a discussion between her and Jamie about The Portrait of a Lady, which Jamie cites as the English class assignment that turned her off of reading forever. Still later, The Chief is also reading a James novel (although I missed which one it was), and the film reveals its true title, Henry James’s Drive-Away Dykes, right before the end credits. In truth, however, the author that I couldn’t stop thinking about was Tom Robbins. There’s a real kinetic energy to Dolls at certain points, verging on the positively zany. A similar zaniness is a recurring element in Robbins’s work, and there’s just something about lesbian cowboys in the 1970s that makes it almost entirely impossible to put up a barrier in your mind between this work and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. 

“But wait!” I hear you say—how do you keep doing that?—“But wait, did you say ‘1970s?’ I thought you said it was 1999.” And you’re right! I did say that! But the overall aesthetic of Dolls is very aligned with the 70s, and it’s apparent that the film would be set in that decade were it not for the need for our very out, very lesbian leads to be able to walk around with almost no overt bigotry (they deal with less than they would have in the real world in 1999, or now, for that matter), and because the film wants to take a few namby-pamby, weak-fisted potshots at “traditionalist” reactionaries. Jamie looks like she stepped out of the past, while Marian’s work outfit features the kind of ribbon tie you see in office photos of yesteryear. When the two of them go to a “basement party” with a team of lesbian college athletes, their group rotating makeout session is not only timed out based on the A- and B-sides of a vinyl record, but the album in question is Linda Ronstadt’s Hasten Down the Wind, released in 1976. I think this movie would be more fun if it ripped off the band-aid and went full 1970s period piece. Although that wouldn’t line up with the timeline of the film’s villain having his dick duplicated during the lava lamp days, I don’t think that’s what really stopped them. 

It’s mostly a set-up so that the film can end with a newspaper headline that reveals that a Republican senator was shot outside of a lesbian bar carrying a suitcase full of dildos—haw haw—more than it is any kind of insightful or thoughtful satire. The scene in the trailer in which Marian and Jamie are asked what kind of people they are and proudly respond “We’re Democrats!” is just as awkward in the film proper. That neoliberal wishy-washiness is what makes Dolls feel like an artifact of the past, more than the near-Y2K setting, the 1970s aesthetic, or anything else. There are moments when the cartooniness works, like when Jamie and Marian start screaming when Flint and Arliss finally catch up to them, complete with zooms around the room that call to mind Raising Arizona and Crimewave, but then there are nearly as many others where that tone feels awkward and out of date. For instance, the scene where Sukie is tearfully struggling with an electric screwdriver while attempting to unmount a wall-mounted dildo, so sloppily that it’s stripping the screws, flip-flopping between rage and regret? Funny. Her punching Jamie in the face in front of a bar full of people the first time that she sees her after finding out she cheated? Not funny, and it’s made even less so by the fact that Sukie is a cop, one we’re supposed to find funny for abusing her power (a scene in which she “comedically” refuses to let an inmate see his lawyer is particularly unamusing), and whose trigger-happiness saves the day at the end. Some of it is as funny as it possibly can be, with her easy handling of Arliss and Flint when they come to her place looking for Jamie being a real standout of physical comedy, but that’s on Feldstein and her performance, and not the character as written on the page. In contrast, the character of Curlie is perfectly funny all the way through, from his insistence that Jamie not call him by his name because it’s “too familiar” to the scene where he is unable to call for help and muses aloud, “Who will save Curlie?” He’s used just enough to not become tiresome, and is a real example of the kind of richly funny “regular fellers” that permeate the landscape of the Coen tapestry, and is one of the characters that the movie is doing just right. 
The others, however, often feel flat, and there’s a real “Democrats-kneeling-in-kente-cloth / Ruthkanda forever” energy to it that undercuts what could otherwise be a more radical piece of queer art. Like Desert Hearts, it’s unusually satisfying to see WLW sexual activity as both (a) fun and (b) not for the straight male gaze. However, I’m torn about the treatment of the “Black church lady in a big hat” archetype at the end, as we finally meet Mairan’s aunt and Jamie gloats to her that the two of them are going to Massachusetts because women can get married there. On the one hand, in part, liberation means not having to pussyfoot (sorry) around one’s sexuality and identity to appease another person’s bigotry; on the other, that the filmmakers chose to end the movie on this scene specifically so we can all (presumably) laugh at a white lesbian woman making an older Black church lady uncomfortable is a choice that calls to mind the poor handling of race in The Ladykillers. I’m less torn about the scene in which the soccer team sends Flint and Arliss on a wild goose chase that ends with them in an Alabama juke joint, where the joke of the scene is that the two goons are unable to interpret the supposedly unintelligible dialogue of an older Black man. It’s got a real Trump-era SNL liberalism to it, is what I’m saying, and it clearly wants to be more radical than it is but is hampered by—to put it frankly—an older generation’s idea of liberation, and that seventeen-year idea-to-release window certainly isn’t doing it any favors. There’s a lot to enjoy and enough laughs to make it worthwhile, but it won’t be anybody’s favorite Coen project, as it feels primed to age like mayo in the sun.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Swampflix Guide to the Oscars, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

Past Lives, nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay

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

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

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

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

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

Godzilla Minus One, nominated for Best Visual Effects

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

The Boy and the Heron, nominated for Best Animated Feature

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

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

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

May December, nominated for Best Original Screenplay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robot Dreams, nominated for Best Animated Feature

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

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

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

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

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

-The Swampflix Crew

Podcast #207: Tenet (2020) & 2024’s Best Director Nominees

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Welcome to Episode #207 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss the earlier works of this year’s Best Director Oscar nominees, starting with Christopher Nolan’s backwards-explosions sci-fi action thriller Tenet (2020). Enjoy!

00:00 Welcome

01:33 Harakiri (1962)
06:50 King of the Gypsies (1978)
10:24 Obsessed (2009)
15:35 New Orleans French Film Fest 2024
19:00 Our Body (2024)

24:06 Tenet (2020)
44:47 The Lobster (2015)
1:02:15 Birth (2004)
1:22:49 After Hours (1984)
1:39:47 Sibyl (2019)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

The Not-So-New 52: All-Star Superman (2011)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

New Orleans French Film Fest 2024

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

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

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

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

Omen (Augure)

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

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

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

Our Body (Notre corps)

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

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

Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros

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

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

The Animal Kingdom (Le règne animal)

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

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

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

The Crime is Mine (Mon crime)

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

-Brandon Ledet

Stopmotion (2024)

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A lot of the best stop-motion animation in recent years has been pure nightmare fuel.  Hellish visions like Mad God, The Wolf House, and the sickly puppetry of Violence Voyager have spoiled stop-motion freaks whose most cherished memories of the medium align more with vintage Švankmajer and Tool videos than with Wallace & Gromit or Rudolph & Hermey.  This new crop of stop-motion nightmares doesn’t bother much with plot or character; they’re more of a pure-cinema ice bath in the most grotesque, upsetting imagery their animators can mold together.  Until recently, British director Robert Morgan has ridden that wave of animated hellfire in his stop-motion horror shorts, but now that he’s graduated to his first feature, he’s proving to be a little more accommodating to audiences than Phil Tippet was in his own decades-in-the-making magnum opus.  Morgan’s film is intensely grotesque in both its imagery and its sound design the same way Mad God and The Wolf House were, but it’s much more familiar in its narrative structure and adherence to genre conventions.  It presents a small taste of pure-Hell animation for audiences who don’t have the patience for the medium’s more abstract, immersive titles, offering them frequent refuge in the relative safety of live-action drama.

Stopmotion is an artist-goes-mad horror about—shocker—a stop motion animator.  Aisling Franciosi stars as the assistant animator to her much more famous mother: an elderly, hands-on filmmaker who is losing the facilities of those aging hands, so she uses her daughter’s to complete her projects.  The daughter channels her frustration with her own stifled creativity as her mother’s “puppet” (both figuratively and by pet name) into her private, increasingly disturbing filmmaking.  She tries to find her own voice by tapping into her childhood imagination, which has stagnantly rotted into something bitter & violent.  Blacking out for hours in her isolated studio, she begins animating a cursed fairy tale about a lost girl in the woods who is hunted & tormented by a mysterious figure known as The Ash Man. She crafts both figures out of rotting meat & animal parts, making it viscerally unpleasant for anyone to visit & break her spells.  Meanwhile, she begins to expand her practice of “bringing dead things back to life” through animation by playing with her mother’s failing body . . . and by dispensing with anyone who dares interrupt her creative flow.  It’s a fairly conventional, predictable horror plot, except that it’s punctuated by scenes from the cursed fairy tale short that bubbles from the hellpits of the animator’s subconscious – its puppet players eventually escaping the screen to attack their creator in the flesh.

Despite all of the ways that Stopmotion contains & normalizes its most horrific images, it’s still a convincing testament to the dark power of creative drive.  There are few artforms as isolating as stop-motion animation, which requires long, patient hours of small movements with small results.  While our artist-in-peril’s colleagues are seeking paid, collaborative gigs for commercial work, she sinks exponentially further into the isolation of her craft.  The sounds of her concentrated breaths overloading the microphones or of her rotten meat puppets squishing under her careful manipulations are both truly unnerving and true to the nature of her chosen medium.  All that really matters here, though, is the putrid atmosphere of the Ash Man short that’s gradually doled out in a traditional, three-act fairy tale structure.  It’s upsetting in the same way Mad God & The Wolf House are; there just happens to be a lot less of it, and it’s somewhat diluted by narrative handholding that anchors it in the real world.  It’s a distinction that makes Stopmotion a good “genre” movie instead of a good “arthouse” movie, but whatever.  It’s good.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Ruling Class (1972)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the blasphemous, satirical comedy-musical The Ruling Class (1972), starring Peter O’Toole as a British noble who believes he is Jesus Christ.

00:00 Top 10 List math
16:42 Subjective star ratings

24:07 Madame Web (2024)
35:09 Showgirls (1995)
40:10 She-Devil (1989)
42:57 Amélie (2001)
46:38 Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart (2023)
47:48 Columbo (1971 – 2003)
52:48 This is Me … Now (2024)
58:01 Lisa Frankenstein (2024)
1:02:01 Omen (2024)
1:06:15 Stopmotion (2024)

1:09:26 The Ruling Class (1972)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

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

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Heavy Petting (1989)

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If you’re going to make a formulaic talking-heads documentary about a broad cultural topic, you might as well interview David Byrne: an actual Talking Head with a distinct cultural point of view.  There’s not much to the late-80s cultural commentary doc Heavy Petting that you can’t find in most current reality-TV confessionals, in which random, fame-desperate weirdos shamelessly divulge TMI insights into their personal lives in exchange for extended screentime.  The only difference, really, is that Heavy Petting interviews vintage hipster celebrities instead of contemporary nobodies, which gives it a sharp edge over its modern competition.  David Byrne is included among the likes of Laurie Anderson, Ann Magnuson, Sandra Bernhard, Alan Ginsburg, Abbie Hoffman, and William S. Burroughs as the talking heads interviewed – a real who’s who of art-school-weirdo idols who haunted the streets of 1980s New York City.  They’re all individually sat in front of a black-void Sears & Roebuck photoshoot backdrop and asked to recount their earliest childhood memories of and experiences with sex.  For the most part, they’re surprisingly open to the interrogation, give or take a visibly irritated Burroughs, who acts as if he’s impatiently waiting for a delayed bus ride home.  There might be decades of reality TV confessionals exposing the raw sexual psyches of everyday extroverts, but there’s only one place you can go to find David Byrne talk about the mechanics of open vs. closed-mouth kissing as if he were a middle school space alien who just crash-landed his UFO into the schoolyard, eager to smooch his first earthling.

One-and-done director Obie Benz juxtaposes these personal confessionals about childhood sexual discovery with vintage propaganda reels promoting sanitized, Leave It To Beaver era sexual “health”, as well as clips of the 1950s sex icons that subverted the morals of the era.  All of the interviewees were raised in an era when Elvis & Mansfield’s wiggle, Dean & Brando’s biker leather, and Monroe’s husky whisper commodified the horned-up rebellion of rock ‘n roll for teenage consumption (during the birth & definition of The Teenager as a concept), but they were not prepared for the physical mechanics & consequences of sex through any formal education.  Rock ‘n roll got them riled up, but the unscientific gender-performance propaganda of the era left them completely clueless about the basic facts of sex: the physiology of pregnancy, the existence of sperm, the existence of the female orgasm, etc.  It’s easy to dismiss the film’s subversive use of 1950s instructional reels as an aesthetic cliche, especially after decades of these same vintage, Father Knows Best-style images being mocked on ironic postcards & bumper stickers.  However, the personal vulnerability of the interviews and the low-key insidiousness of the stock footage prove to be shockingly affecting as the widespread failure of American sex “education” curdles the ironic laughter into political fury.  The initial novelty of hearing Abbie Hoffman reminisce about a totally-hetero circle jerk he had with his childhood schoolmates gradually gave way to my own resentful memories of being raised sex-ignorant as a small-town Catholic in the exact era this film was produced, leaving little room for nostalgic kitsch since the problem never went away.

I was initially annoyed by Benz’s choice to avoid labeling his interviewees in identifying chyrons.  You either know who Ann Magnuson is or you don’t; even the final montage jokingly credits her as a “TV spokesmodel”, not the fringe actress & Bongwater poet I know her as.  When that montage reveals that a couple reality-TV level nobodies (i.e., NYC businessmen) are mixed among the more recognizable talking heads, I came around on the decision.  The movie intends to diagnose a widespread cultural rot in the rift between America’s leather-jacket horniness and America’s prudish aversion to sex education, so it’s smart to demonstrate that it’s a psychological damage that affects everyone, not just artsy-fartsy perverts.  This closing-credits reveal also pairs the subjects with their actual high school photos, confronting the audience with the faces of children who were deliberately left unprepared for healthy sexual lives in the name of Family Values.  All of the marketing for Heavy Petting promises benign Gen-X irony and repurposed 1950s kitsch, but there’s something bravely vulnerable & culturally heinous about what it unearths in its interviews and its moldy stock footage.  I found it strangely powerful and unfairly undervalued.

-Brandon Ledet