animation

That Gum You Like is Back in Style

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I had a classic theatrical experience at the downtown location of The Prytania this Wednesday, when I caught a double feature of the new Looney Tunes movie and the new Soderbergh. Since both films mercifully clock in around 90 minutes a piece, it was not an especially exhausting trip to the cinema, but more importantly they paired well as a charming throwback to theatrical programming of the distant past. The next morning, I read a series of confusing headlines about how “Moviegoers Want More Comedies, Thrillers and Action Titles,” so they haven’t been showing up to theaters for lack of interest in what’s currently out there. The survey generating those headlines is obviously flawed, since moviegoers simply don’t know what’s currently out there. Anyone claiming they don’t regularly go to the theater because “They don’t make ’em like they used to,” has lost sight of what’s actually on theatrical marquees, a problem that could be solved if they’d just glance up. The Day the Earth Blew Up & Black Bag are both exactly how they used to make ’em; it’s more that audiences “don’t watch ’em like they used to.” The habit of checking the newspaper for listings of what happens to be playing this afternoon or physically stopping by the nearest theater and catching whatever has the most convenient showtime is a lost cultural practice.

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie is about as classic as they come. Sure, its sexual & cultural references are a little more up to date than the anarchic sex & archaic pop culture parodies of Looney Tunes past (with innuendo about anonymous truck stop hookups and visual allusions to sci-fi horror classics like The Thing, Invasion of The Body Snatchers, Jurassic Park, and Night of the Living Dead). At its core, though, it’s just an extended Merrie Melodies short, following the goofball exploits of Daffy Duck & Porky Pig as they desperately attempt to hold onto their entry-level jobs at the local bubblegum factory while simultaneously fighting off a space alien who wants to poison that gum with a mind-controlling goo. Classic stuff. The humor ranges from vaudevillian slapstick to Ren & Stimpy gross-outs in a cacophonously loud celebration of all things loony, all rendered in glorious 2D animation. In a better world, every movie would open with a condensed version of this kind of goofball novelty as an appetizer for the Feature Presentation, maybe accompanied by a short news report about The War or what Lana Turner wore to her recent premiere. Instead, we live in a Hell dimension where its day-to-day box office uneasiness is a bargaining tool in backroom negotiations about whether the other recently completed Looney Tunes feature should be released to theaters or deleted from the Warner Brothers servers for a tax write-off. It’s grim out there.

For the adults in the room, Steven Soderberg has put a pause on his recent unsane genre experiments to instead re-establish his presence as one of Hollywood’s more classical entertainers. Black Bag finds the director returning to the suave professionalism of past commercial triumphs, this time casting Michael Fassbender & Cate Blanchett as a married couple of international cyber-spies who would literally kill for each other despite their shared need to constantly lie in order to do their jobs. The spy plot is a tangled mess of double-triple-crossings involving two “interlocked counterplans” to break this elite marriage part (and take over the world in the process), but none of that really matters. The project is more about signaling a return to the handsome, timeless world of tweed caps, stirred cocktails, and wholehearted monogamy. Soderbergh puts in a Herculean effort to make monogamous marital commitment sexy & cool. It’s a trick he finds much easier to pull off with Fassbender’s love of administering polygraph tests to fellow spies, since those come with their own bondage gear that signals sexiness from the jump. Setting all of this laidback, horny sophistication in the swankiest corners of downtown London and then going out of your way to cast a former James Bond actor in a prominent role (Pierce Brosnan, as the spy agency’s untrustworthy head honcho) all feels like a deliberate callback to the kind of classic thriller surveyed moviegoers claim to want, even if they’re not used to seeing it filtered through Soderbergh’s personal kink for commercial-grade digital textures.

In a word, Black Bag is cute. It’s a nice little treat for Soderbergh casuals who prefer the classic sophistication of Ocean’s 11 over the erratic playfulness of Ocean’s 12. I’m happy for that audience, even though I can’t relate. Similarly, The Day the Earth Blew Up is cute. It’s good for a few sensible chuckles and a few outright guffaws (the origin story for Porky Pig’s trademark stutter got an especially big, unexpected laugh out of me), but it’s in no way attempting to invent or innovate. It’s classic Looney Tunes buffoonery, a familiarly pleasant offering for anyone who’s looking to get out of the house and chomp some popcorn at The Movies. Watching it as a warm-up for a handsomely staged spy thriller about the timeless beauty of a traditional marriage felt like an experience that I could have had at the picture show at any time in the past century. People largely seem unaware that these traditionally entertaining movies are out in the world right now, though, since only the occasional Event Film (i.e., reboots, superhero flicks, live-action remakes of Disney cartoons) seems able to cut through the social media babble to grab their attention. It’s a problem I don’t really know how to fix, but thankfully I’m not in marketing, so it’s not really my job to fix. I just like going to the movies. Every week, I check my local listings and pop in to see what’s being offered to me. It’s a constantly rewarding hobby, one that requires minimal effort.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Wallace & Gromit – Vengeance Most Fowl (2025)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the stop-motion animated comedy Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2025).

00:00 Welcome

05:20 Dark Passage (1947)
06:47 Rock Hudson
09:33 Crank: High Voltage (2009)
14:08 Dogra Magra (1988)
22:33 Cinema Paradiso (1988)
32:00 To Catch a Thief (1955)
42:22 Rashomon (1950)
49:30 Cunk on Life (2025)
54:00 The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
1:01:21 Nosferatu (2024)
1:05:33 Our Little Secret (2024)
1:13:00 Mirage (1965)
1:19:00 Pepe (2025)

1:24:00 Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2025)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds (2024)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Belgian-French animated fantasy adventure Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds (2024).

00:00 SEFCA’s Top 10 Films of 2024

07:49 Strangers on a Train (1951)
13:13 Laufey’s A Night at the Symphony (2024)
19:46 The Not-So-New 52
24:05 My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
30:09 Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (2024)
35:43 Nosferatu (2024)
40:14 Holding Back the Tide (2024)
43:45 Nickel Boys (2024)
48:50 Daaaaaalí! (2024)
52:04 Yannick (2024)
57:17 Wicked Part 1 (2024)
59:46 Flow (2024)

1:00:42 Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds (2024)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Injustice (2021)

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

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

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

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

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

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Memoir of a Snail (2024)

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Memoir of a Snail is a new stop-motion animated dramedy about cruelty, loneliness, and mental illness from the director of 2009’s Mary & Max: a stop-motion dramedy about cruelty, loneliness, and mental illness.  It’s also the best movie I saw at this year’s New Orleans Film Festival, where it was met with waves of warm laughter and audible wincing from a packed audience (whereas Mary & Max played to mostly empty theaters when it went into wide release 15 years ago).  I’m really into what Adam Elliot’s doing.  He’s got a tangible, darkly comic sense of despair to his work that’s matched only by fellow snail’s pace animator Don Hertzfeldt.  Thankfully, this time Elliot borrows a little Jean-Pierre Juenet whimsy to help cut the bitterness of that despair, but it’s not an entirely convincing affirmation about life’s silver linings. Even though he ends his morbid tale of lifelong sibling suffering on an unexpected happy note, he’s still the living personification of the “Do you think a depressed person make this?” gag from Parks & Rec.  Elliot makes sad little tableaus about lonely shut-ins for a sad little audience of lonely shut-ins . . . Then you see all the celebrity vocal performance credits in the concluding scroll (Sarah Snook, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Magda Szubanksi, Nick Cave, etc.) and assume he’s gotta be doing somewhat alright.

Memoir of a Snail is a story told to a snail by an adult woman dressed as a snail.  Continuing the epistolary format of Mary & Max, Grace Pudel (Snook) recounts her entire life’s journey to her favorite pet mollusk (Sylvia, after Sylvia Plath), occasionally pausing to recite letters written by loved ones – namely, her estranged brother Gilbert (Smit-McPhee) and her geriatric bestie Pinky (Jacki Weaver).  All three are lonely souls who’ve had a real tough time of it, having lived lives defined by tragic isolation from family, depressive bouts of self-hatred, and cruel bullying from small-minded townies.  Grace has found joy only in those two remaining members of her family, and most of her life since being orphaned as a child has been a struggle to restore that family unit in a single location.  The struggle is mostly inward, but it’s externally marked by Grace’s obsessive collection of snail-themed clutter.  She lives alone and gradually turns her small-town home into a shrine to all things snails, carpeting the floors, walls, and shelves with snails & snaily tchotchkes, burying herself under the weight of a singular personal obsession instead of reaching out for genuine human contact.  She even costumes herself as a snail in her everyday dress, signaling to the world that she’d rather find safety in her own shell than be vulnerable to the worst of humanity.

Adam Elliot admits to the audience that he sees a part of himself in Grace Pudel by making her great ambition in life to become a stop-motion animator.  The gamble there is hoping the audience will see ourselves in Grace Pudel too, which is a pretty solid bet if you’re sitting inside watching stop-motion cartoons about loneliness at a film festival instead of enjoying the crisp Fall weather outside.  Elliot throws a lot of cruelty at us, including especially vicious sequences involving gay bashing and nonconsensual force-feeding fetishism.  If you’re the kind of shut-in sad sack who occasionally grumbles “Goddamn life!” to yourself at your lowest moments, though, there’s plenty humor to be found in Grace’s never-ending misfortunes, like when her adoptive parents find more joy in swinger culture than being around her or when her brothers’ adoptive religious-nut parents speak in tongues like cattle auctioneers during prayer.  There’s a kind of classic Tim Burton sentimentality to Memoir of a Snail that acknowledges how miserable life can be for social outsiders while celebrating those outsiders for their eccentricities.  Elliot is eager to illustrate monstrous, unforgivable human behavior at every turn, but he just as often underlines the survival need for human touch & companionship.  While Grace’s constant search for silver linings might read as sad & desperate, she does always find them.

-Brandon Ledet

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

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

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

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

Ok, it’s a little derogatory. 

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

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

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

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

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice Society – World War II (2021)

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

Here we go, boys and ghouls, the “Tomorrowverse” is officially on, as we now have our second film in this subfranchise. That title is a little on the silly side, but it is a fair sight better than “DCAMU,” and I’m hoping the number of times I have to type that particular acronym will now be fewer and further between. Justice Society: World War II is a narrative about the current-day Flash, Barry Allen (Matt Bomer), apparently traveling into the past as a result of moving so fast that he breaks the Speed Force barrier. Finding himself in the middle of World War II, the fastest man alive finds himself face-to-face with the Flash of the past, Jay Garrick (Armen Taylor), as well as a team of commandos who are operating on behalf of the Allies. There’s Hourman (Mathew Mercer), who can take a serum of his own invention that provides him with super strength and durability for an hour, but which he cannot take more than once per twenty-four hour cycle; Hawkman (Omid Abtahi), an infinitely reincarnated ancient Egyptian who possesses wings; Black Canary (Elysia Rotaru), a street-level vigilante and occasional scofflaw who harnesses sound as a weapon via her sonic scream; and the group’s leader, the Amazonian Wonder Woman (Stana Katic), as well as her longtime boyfriend and U.S. Army liaison Steve Trevor (Chris Diamantopoulos). Together, they are on a special mission to stop Hitler’s ongoing search for supernatural artifacts that he hopes will give him an edge in the war. 

I’m still not won over by this art style, but it does fit a bit better here, with the thick line animation being more akin to the cartoonery of decades past. It still feels a bit Venture Bros. for something that’s supposed to be taken a bit more seriously, but within the context of this being a story set in a different time it manages to work, more or less. If this were the aesthetic solely of this time period (which, spoiler alert, is actually a different timeline, meaning that they’re going multiversal in only the second film of this new subfranchise—yikes), I’d be more accepting, but I guess for as many of these as I’m going to have to watch (four to eight, depending on how you count things), I’m just going to have to stomach it. For what it’s worth, before starting this project, I had already watched the upcoming-within-this-project Legion of Superheroes of my own volition—I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I love Supergirl—and found it less distracting there, although it’s entirely possible that I assumed it was a one-off and not the defining visual style of a film series. 

There’s not much to say about this one. It falls right in the middle ranking of these movies: solid, but unremarkable. I guess it’s fun that Matt Bomer and Stana Katic are together again after they previously played Superman and Lois Lane, respectively, all the way back in Superman: Unbound, if you’re into that kind of thing. As far as character work, the Flash/Iris relationship is really thin, but the stuff between Trevor and Wonder Woman, who has promised to marry him “one day” but who rejects each individual proposal, is probably the most interesting thing about this flick. Their ongoing incomplete engagement serves as a kind of good luck charm to get them through the war, and we start to believe in its efficacy just as much as they do, until that luck finally runs out. It’s the emotional crux on which this narrative hangs, and it reads and even elicits a twinge in the heartstrings, even if it never manages to pluck them. It’s also a welcome reprieve to see what may well be the only team-up movie in forty-odd movies that doesn’t feature Batman, especially given that the next few are set to be very Bat-heavy. The perfect place for this movie is on a Saturday afternoon on Cartoon Network ten years ago. Where it belongs now is where it is: near the end of an assembly line that’s starting to wind down (like Cartoon Network now). Not bad, but not special.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Wonder Woman – Bloodlines (2019)

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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. 

Now that we’re over two-thirds of the way through this project, while watching the first fifteen minutes or so of Wonder Woman: Bloodlines, I started to think about how I would be ranking all of these once I’ve seen and completed my reviews of all of them (a day that I dream about like Maximus hovering his hand over a field of wheat in his dreams in Gladiator, as I will at last know peace). The number of these films and their groupings of stratified quality mean that I can’t simply sit down and write a top-to-bottom list like I recently did of the Coen Brothers’ films, so I started to think of them as existing in more of a tiered list. I broke it down into five groups, from worst to best: (1) Garbage; (2) Fine, I Guess; (3) Solid But Unexceptional; (4) Possesses Some Notable Quality or Sophistication; (5) Cinema, Baby. During the opening scenes of this film, which are set an uncertain number of years before the primary body of the narrative, we get a condensed version of the Wonder Woman origin story. Pilot Steve Trevor (Jeffrey Donovan) crashes into the ocean near Themyscira, an island full of warrior Amazons, and is rescued by the island’s princess, Diana (Rosario Dawson). She opts to return him to “man’s world,” and in this version, she does so in rebellion against her mother, Queen Hippolyta (Cree Summer), who tells her daughter that she no longer recognizes her and, while she can take Trevor home, her treasonous actions mean that she can never return. 

Stateside, Diana meets Etta Candy (Adrienne C. Moore), Trevor’s boss (I think?), who helps her get set up in a new home with an archaeologist, Professor Julia Kapatelis (Nia Vardalos), and her daughter Vanessa (Marie Avgeropoulos). Vanessa is entering that part of adolescence where the youth forsake their native tongues and speak only in sarcasm, and she is at first miffed that there’s suddenly a new woman in their home (and a princess to boot), but she and Diana start to bond over their shared backgrounds as the daughters of demanding mothers. Unfortunately, Julia is an academic of ancient times who suddenly has a demigoddess who is steeped in myth and legend under her roof, and we see in montage that she becomes inattentive to her daughter’s needs, causing Vanessa to grow resentful of both her mother and their guest, acting out by going goth and shaving half of her head, as one does. Diana, in all of this, tries to remain supportive of and give comfort to Vanessa, never realizing that her constant presence is one of the roots of the problem. This culminates in Diana becoming a public figure as Wonder Woman and moving out of the Kapatelis home before we skip to the film’s “present,” wherein Diana is working with Candy and a now-bearded Trevor when she is approached by Julia again; she’s discovered that Vanessa has stolen from her employer, pharmaceutical magnate Veronica Cale, and is planning to sell a pilfered artifact to villainous Dr. Poison. Wanting to help, Diana goes to try and stop the sale, which is (of course) happening in a warehouse and there are (of course) minions with machine guns, and although her intervention probably saves Vanessa’s life, Julia is killed. Vanessa, furious that about the death of a mother who should not have been there, blames Diana solely for this, and aligns herself with Dr. Poison and her partner, Dr. Cyber, to get revenge. 

During that montage sequence mentioned above, there’s a lot of storytelling that happens purely through visuals, which is a nice touch that many of these films lack. We get a clear idea of what Vanessa’s childhood bedroom looks like before her goth-punk phase, and it’s a normal teenage girl’s bedroom: glowing stars on the ceiling, artwork of flowers and butterflies, books about teen vampire romance. At the midpoint of her transition to half-shaved rebel, her room changes, too, with her wooden headboard replaced with a wrought iron one that resembles the arch of a gothic church window, there’s a bust of a dragon on top of her dresser, and her wall features at least one poster with a skull on it. It’s not the most elaborate form of visual storytelling, but demonstrates an attention to detail that’s noteworthy here. I also find this dynamic between Diana, Julia, and Vanessa to be one of the more compelling and unusually sophisticated ones. While Vanessa’s blind lashing out at Diana following Julia’s death is hypocritical, as the only reason that the entire situation occurred was because Vanessa—manipulated or not—was willing to commit corporate espionage, but she’s also not wrong that Julia should not have been present at the scene, and it was a bad idea to bring her there. You can see all of the resentment and rage that built up inside of her over the past decade, as Diana’s attempts to extend an olive branch to Vanessa as she becomes more bitter about it only make the situation worse. 

When it comes to emotional complications in these movies, it’s rare to see one that isn’t a de facto part of the genre — questioning if and when to reveal one’s secret identity to a loved one, the extent of responsibility that a vigilante figure possesses when they inspire counteractivity in the form of escalating violence, etc. This emotional conflict is unique in these films, and that the movie is able to further complicate this by making it about the relationship between mothers and daughters, not only between Diana and Hippolyta as well as Vanessa and Julia, but also the bond that forms between Diana and Julia, one that falls outside of the title-referent “bloodlines.” That interruption and supplanting of the maternal relationship between Vanessa and Julia is the impetus for everything that transpires, and it’s nice that the conflict is born out of something so human and familiar rather than an alien invasion, a plot by a secretive cabal of socialites, warlords of the distant future, or the nefarious activities of an island of ninjas. Even though this one devolves into the same old battle at the end (one which is fine but suffers in comparison to the dynamic and interesting fluid action of Reign of the Supermen), that core human conflict makes it rise above the “Solid But Unexceptional” category into “Possessed a Notable Sophistication.” 

-Brandon Ledet