animation

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

The Not-So-New 52: The Death of Superman (2018)

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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 first heard that DC animated had released a film titled The Death of Superman, I wasn’t that surprised. I had, at the time, only recently attempted to watch Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay and had, as I noted in the review of that film, found the opening to be rather tasteless. As a result, when hearing that a new adaptation of Superman’s death was about to be released, I thought, “Didn’t they already do that?” and then thought, “Oh, I guess they’re really just out of ideas.” Now that I’ve watched all of these (so far) in order, I have to say that it was more that this was where an adaptation of that story best slotted into this sub-franchise of the DCAMU, the eleventh of these films overall. It’s a little thin, all things considered, but that’s really because it’s more about setting up the next film than it is about the actual narrative that this adaptation covers. A little comic history: back in the nineties, DC was getting ready to marry Lois and Clark/Superman. However, at the time, the ABC series Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, was currently airing, and they wanted to marry the two characters to one another, but not for at least another season. So, ABC called in a favor and DC came up with a plan to delay the comic marriage of Clark and Lois until it was time for it to happen in the show as well, for synergy. As a result, they came up with the idea to “kill” Superman temporarily and then have a yearlong series of stories in which various characters attempt to fill the void that his death created, before the real deal triumphantly returns to reassume his place. That one little decision on behalf of a mostly forgotten Superman-adjacent primetime TV show is why we’re here today. 

Despite their previous appearances together showing them enjoying one another’s company on a few dates, Superman (Jerry O’Connell) and Wonder Woman (Rosario Dawson) are now merely good friends and colleagues, and Superman has taken up dating his beloved Lois Lane (Rebecca Romijn) in his civilian identity as Clark Kent, although he has not yet come out to her as being Superman. Wonder Woman encourages him to do so, and his need to make a decision sooner than later is exacerbated when a meeting of the Justice League reveals that The Flash (Christopher Gorham) is getting married soon, and when Kal-El asks Barry if Iris “knows,” Barry tells him that he revealed his identity to her “ages ago.” Shortly after Superman gives Lois a tour of S.T.A.R. Labs, which houses the spacepod that brought him to earth and which contains holographic records that include an image of his parents, his other family, the Kents, arrive in town and want to meet Lois. Over the course of their dinner, Lois comes to realize that she actually knows almost nothing about her beau, for the first time recognizing how guarded he is around her and wondering what the cause is. She leaves him for the night, and he has a heart to heart with his mother wherein she admits that, at her age, it doesn’t seem like keeping secrets is really all that important anymore. 

On the less domestic, more superheroic side of things, we learn that Lex Luthor (Rainn Wilson) has found a way to circumvent his house arrest and is still up to nefarious doings, including attempting to create a clone version of Superman which he can control as well as merging earth and Apokoliptian technology to sell to criminals. Seemingly coincidentally, a “boom tube” wormhole opens not far from the earth, spitting out a misshapen asteroid that starts to fall toward the planet, crashing into the ocean. Several of Aquaman (Matt Lanter)’s guards converge on the undersea crash site at the same time as a Lexcorp submersible. All are slain by a monster that emerges from the wreckage, who then makes his way to land and toward Metropolis, killing every living thing in his path. In the meantime, Clark reveals his secret to Lois, only to be called away to deal with the monster after it takes out the entire rest of the Justice League, although Wonder Woman goes down last and hardest. Clark leaves a note for Lois with his last secret (“I love you”) and then heads out to defeat the monster, while also having to deal with interference from Luthor, who gets involved both because of his ego and because he believes that the monster’s genetics will help him to stabilize the unstable makeup of all the deformed clones he’s hiding in the basement of Lexcorp. 

While 2007’s Superman: Doomsday served to condense both the “Death of Superman” and the “Reign of the Supermen” comic arcs into a single movie, this one covers only the former and gives that original narrative some breathing room. I’m torn about the ongoing expansion of the Justice League as it seems to continue to happen largely offscreen and/or in the background. Justice League: Dark showed Hawkman and Martian Manhunter hanging around the League’s headquarters in non-speaking roles, and while Manhunter gets a line this film (voiced by Nyambi Nyambi), it’s strange that we don’t get a sense of camaraderie between the characters in the way that the earliest of these movies did. The relationship between Clark and Diana is strong, but the fact that Superman didn’t even know that the Flash was getting married makes it seem like, although this team is growing in number between movies when we’re not getting to see it, they’re not growing in friendship, and that’s the only reason that anyone would have to remain emotionally invested in this series as it advances. At least this one, since Batman is really and truly powerless against an unstoppable killing machine with no weak points, he gets out of the way and lets Superman take center stage here, although Wonder Woman is no slouch either. That inclusion of the whole League, however, allows for a consistent heightening of the stakes that appropriately ratchets the tension, even if we already know Superman is headed for his death because, you know, the title is at the beginning. 

Of course, there are the seeds of the Supermen to come in this one. We see a young super clone being grown in a vat like a Venture brother; we meet Dr. John Henry Irons, who will eventually become Steel; we even get to see a hopeful astronaut named Hank Henshaw remain optimistic that Superman will save his crew even as their ship is pelted by debris from the asteroid’s incursion, killing his wife and their other companions, and even if you don’t know where that’s going, it’s successful as foreshadowing. Those are fun little seeds being planted. As for other things I really like, having O’Connell’s real life spouse voice Lois is a cute little treat, and their great natural chemistry comes through in the performance. Romijn is an underappreciated star, in my opinion, but she’s not given the same potency of material here that Anne Heche had on her plate in Doomsday. The best parts of that movie come after the fight with Doomsday that take up only Act I of that film (and which serves as the final climax of this one), wherein Lois grieves in secret because while the whole world mourns Superman she’s mourning Clark, struggles with her conflicting feelings about seeking comfort with the Kents, who are (as in this one) strangers to her, is initially delighted that Superman seems to have been resurrected only to be devastated by his reserved treatment of her. Romijn’s Lois isn’t given as much to do; the story focuses more on Clark’s internal struggle with whether to tell her his secret than it does on her learning the truth and puzzling out all the implications. When she thinks Clark is going to break up with her, she tells him that she’s absolutely not going to stop coming into the office, as if this eighties-ass Kate & Allie punchline is supposed to be empowering, when instead it besmirches the entire script. Hepburn and Tracy it ain’t. 
This one is fine. It’s not predictable that some fringe film critic is going to sit down and watch all of these movies week after week; it’s logical to assume that the decade plus between the release of Doomsday and this movie would mean that you probably forgot most of the story beats for this even before they changed up other plot elements, or that Doomsday came out when you were too young to notice these things and now you’re a sophomore or a junior and thus the primary audience for this. (We should never really be under any illusion about that, and recognize that these movies rise above mediocrity at any point is kind of a miracle, to be honest.) This one is above the average for this overall franchise, but it’s missing something special that would push it into a more memorable state. It’s a necessary step in this film series, and thus can’t really be skipped, but it’s one that there’s no real reason to recommend other than for that reason, so take from that what you will.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Spirited Away (2001)

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Nearly a decade ago, when I was getting ready to move away from Baton Rouge, a friend of mine was likewise preparing to head back west to be with her now-husband. We had a dual garage sale in which we tried to get rid of some various knick-knacks. We didn’t have much that anyone would want, and we weren’t very successful. As a joke, she had priced her DVD of Spirited Away at a million dollars, because she didn’t actually want to part with it, and when she realized that I had never seen it, she gave it to me. I’m ashamed to say that in the interim, half-remembered bits of other Miyazaki films blended together during a rewatch of several of them shortly after my accident in 2018, making me think that I had watched it. When I sat down to do a rewatch in preparation for the culmination of Swampflix’s upcoming ten-year anniversary project, it turned out that I hadn’t, so this was a beautiful first-time watch for me. I have a friend who has only recently come into my life but with whom I’ve grown very close very quickly was looking forward to sharing this one with me at a screening at our local arthouse theater as it was a huge part of his childhood, plans which were dashed when we both tested positive for COVID the day before the screening. Since we both had it, however, we decided to push forward with our plans and watch it together that same night anyway. 

I’ve been digesting it ever since, and I’m still not fully sure what to say about it. It’s not just a movie; it’s a magic spell, a fairy tale journey, an unconventional narrative composed of little condensations of fantasy that moves blithely from storybeat to storybeat without ever stopping to catch its breath. It introduces and resolves so many things so quickly that the pacing reminds one of an episode of golden-age Simpsons, where a bag-boy strike in act one leads to near-death on an African waterfall at the climax. It runs on feverish imagination, unrestrained by the need to adhere to any real act structure at all. 

Chihiro is an elementary-aged girl who, along with her parents, is moving to a new home. Along the way, her father takes a detour down a road that ends at a red pedestrian gate in a wall that extends as far as the eye can see in either direction. The trio enters the area, which her father believes (and perceives) to be an abandoned amusement park; her father and mother unquestioningly eat food which they stumble upon while Chihiro explores further, meeting a boy named Haku, who implores her to take her parents back across the river before sunset. When Chihiro returns to her parents, however, they have been turned into pigs by the spirit food, as the place reveals itself to be the home of innumerable kami spirits. She refuses to leave them behind and becomes trapped there, while various parties attempt to locate her as they can smell a human amongst them. Haku helps her to evade capture and directs her to find and seek employment with a spider-like spirit named Kamaji, who runs the boiler that powers the baths of the bathhouse that serves as the primary location for the film. She proves herself to him and he asks Lin, a more humanoid bathhouse worker, to take Chihiro to Yubaba, the witch who runs the bathhouse (and is responsible for her parents’ transformation). Yubaba attempts to scare Chihiro into running off, but when she is unable to do so, she gives the girl a job, although her contract is Faustian. She takes part of the kanji of Chihiro’s name away, leaving only “Sen,” which becomes the girl’s new name. Chihiro/Sen later learns from Haku that this stripping of one’s name also leads to the loss of one’s memory, and that he is also cursed to work for Yubaba since he cannot remember his own true name. 

It’s hard to describe Spirited Away other than to outline the plot like I have above, but it goes in so many interesting directions with such vivid and luscious imagery that simply recapitulating the narrative diminishes it. Chihiro is the kind of kid everyone wishes they could have been: stalwart in the face of overwhelming odds, unrelenting in her devotion to saving her parents and returning to the real world, and compelled by an abundance of compassion that seeks no reward but nonetheless is granted them. She’s Dorothy Gale, and she’s Alice, and she’s also completely her own character, brave and fierce but always kind and thoughtful. She’s unwilling to trade her freedom for anyone else’s, and although this morality seems alien to the spirits who inhabit the world around her, it also gives her fresh eyes that grant her the ability to resolve issues the spirits can’t, like finding the source of a polluted river spirit’s pain and removing it like the thorn from the paw of Aesop’s lion, healing it. When she fails, it’s never because of her lack of ingenuity, it’s merely because she fails to grasp all of the social rules of a culture that she’s only recently found herself within. 

Visually, the film is stunning. After nearly two decades, it’s still as vibrant and gorgeous as it was the first time audiences saw it. Each sequence is beautiful, and every frame is filled to the brim with baroque details of the spirit world, but it’s almost impossible to try and explain it, because this is a movie that one has to see in order to really understand. It’s like trying to explain a painting to someone who’s never seen it; it has to be experienced, has to be felt, has to wash over you and make you a part of its world. It’s magic.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Suicide Squad – Hell to Pay (2018) 

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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. 

A few years back, [Erstwhile Roommate of Boomer] and I were browsing through the then-current version of the HBO app and stumbled upon the then-latest DC animated movie. We managed to barely get through the opening, which we found kind of distasteful and crass. That movie was Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay, and I wasn’t really looking forward to this one on this watch-through, since my previous experience was negative. Upon watching the film in its entirety, however, I can report it’s actually pretty fun. Whereas the humor in Batman and Harley Quinn mostly missed the mark, this one manages to weave together an interesting narrative that plays to the strengths of the characters chosen for this outing, while also tapping into an irreverence that previous darker attempts at comedy failed to achieve. 

After a cold open in which an ill-conceived attempt by a couple of hotheads to get out of Suicide Squad duty leaves everyone but Deadshot (Christian Slater) dead, Amanda Waller (a perfectly cast Vanessa Williams) sends him into the field alongside the moralistic martial artist Bronze Tiger (Billy Brown), gimmicky sharpshooter Captain Boomerang, literal and figurative ice queen Killer Frost (Kristin Bauer van Straten), cybernetically enhanced Copperhead, and, of course, Harley Quinn (Tara Strong). Their mission: to retrieve a magical object, a literal “Get Out of Hell Free” card, which Waller secretly seeks for herself as she has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and now that the truth is out that hell is quite real, she knows she’s got a better shot at cheating her way out of it than seeking redemption. Two other parties are after the object, however, as immortal (but as he points out, not invulnerable) mutant caveman Vandal Savage is after is in pursuit of the card, as is the Reverse Flash. This film ties itself back to Flashpoint Paradox by having C. Thomas Howell reprise this role, and his whole deal is that when he was shot in the head at the end of that film, he “froze” himself in the moments before death with his superspeed, but each time he uses it, he gets that much closer to dying from the wound. (You just kind of have to go with it.) 

The end of this one is a bit of a foregone conclusion. You don’t really introduce a member of this team whose imprisonment is the result of revenge killing the men who murdered his family, and who remains tortured by the loss of them despite being a vigilante who is willing to kill, and then also have a get out of hell free card, without the audience putting those two puzzle pieces together long before the finale. There are a lot of fun twists and turns along the way, though, and the comedy pretty much lands. Waller has to make this mission “off the books” (since it’s really her personal play to avoid damnation rather than a government sanctioned action), so the Squad heads out to the card’s last known location in a decrepit RV. This means that, of course we’re going to have a scene where Copperhead flashes his fangs at a child in the next car while they’re on their road trip to scare them, and of course we’re going to have a bus full of nuns show up at some point as a visual gag. A lot of it is pretty rote, but there’s some playfulness that makes this one a little more memorable. Of particular note is that the person that the group is initially sent to find, Steel Maxum, turns out to be both an exotic dancer and the unlikely former host of DC cosmic org chart bigwig Doctor Fate. Greg Grunberg has some fun with the role, playing up the guy’s himbo nature, which is so at odds with extreme stoicism of Doctor Fate that it makes for some good gags. Used to less comedic and more dramatic effect is the way that Vandal Savage’s plans are ultimately undone by his own inhuman morality; his daughter turns on him after Vandal allows her girlfriend to be killed in some crossfire, citing that she is “expendable.” He later says that he has had more children than he could ever count, and yet they always fail him because they think too small, when it seems like the real lesson he keeps failing over and over again is not to underestimate the power of love. 

With one that functions as well as this one does, there’s not much more to say without simply recapping more of the film’s comedic moments, and I think that this one is better enjoyed than it is retold. It’s pretty funny, so I say: go forth and enjoy. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman and Harley Quinn (2017)

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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 think that I would have had a better impression of Batman and Harley Quinn if I had seen it when it was released, instead of in 2024, when we’ve already had a few seasons of the excellent animated adult Harley Quinn TV show. I’m sure this raucous, foul-mouthed representation of the character—which now seems like a tamer, less funny version of the TV series version—was probably more fun and exciting seven years ago, but it doesn’t hold up anymore. That’s only partially the film’s fault, however; it can’t be held accountable for the fact that what I think of as the best version of Harley Quinn was right around the corner, ready to overshadow it. I can blame it for being, well, not very good. 

In a (contentious and challenged) continuation of the beloved Batman: The Animated Series, Batman (Kevin Conroy) and Nightwing (Loren Lester, reprising) must turn to the recently paroled/released Harley Quinn (Melissa Rauch, taking over for Arleen Sorkin, who originated the role and the character in the 90s) to try and find out where her BFF Poison Ivy (an utterly wasted Paget Brewster) is hiding. Ivy has recently teamed with poor man’s Swamp Thing “Floronic Man” (Kevin Michael Richardson) to steal some actual Swamp Thing matter from STAR Labs, with the goal of doing some “One man’s eco-terrorism is another man’s most ethical way to save the planet” shenanigans. Noting that Harley hasn’t reported to her parole officer in months, Nightwing finds her working at a kind of Super-Hooters where women dress in skimpy(er) versions of superheroine/villainess costumes. Tailing her, the two end up fighting one another; he asks why she’s resorted to this line of work instead of using her psychology doctorate, and she gets real with him about what the job market is like for ex-cons. She knocks him out, he wakes up tied to the bed, and they eventually hook up (although one can read the consensuality of the situation as dubious). She agrees to help the Dynamic Duo, they go on a couple of fest quests, and eventually they find Ivy and her new co-conspirator and save the day. 

Due to time constraints as a result of work, travel, and my social life, I ended up accidentally watching this one as if it were a three-part episode of the series, as the film’s 74-minute runtime breaks down into three neat segments that are roughly the length of an episode of The Animated Series. I don’t think it suffered from that. In fact, I don’t mention it often, but I’ve probably watched about a third of these so far in more than one sitting, a practice I don’t normally condone (a movie is like a spell or most poems, to be consumed all at once or the magic could be dispelled), but which hasn’t really impacted my reading of these as texts. If anything, it’s made me engage with them more. The ones that really capture my interest are straightforward, one sitting, beginning to end viewing experiences, while the ones that fail to really grab me are the ones that I realize I have to rewind and rewatch parts of because my mind was starting to wander. And some, like Gotham Knight and Emerald Knights, are episodic by design, while others are episodic as a result of the fact that they are adapting stories that originated in a serialized, month-to-month medium, like All Star Superman (although that one gets a full viewing every time). Viewed through that lens, this is a three-parter with a first episode that I found mostly boring, a second part that was a big improvement, and a finale that was fine, I guess. 

First, the good. The “Superbabes” restaurant is a fun sight gag, but that’s all there really is to write home about in the first act. The middle is better, as the unlikely trio’s research brings them to a shack in the woods where assorted colorful hoodlums and hooligans gather, with visual references to the Adam West Batman series aplenty, and even includes two musical numbers, one of which is endearing and funny (we’ll get to the second in “the bad”). There’s even a toilet humor gag that managed to cross the line into getting an actual laugh from me; Harley has some greasy food, she begs for the Batmobile to be pulled over so that she can use the facilities, Batman assumes it’s a ruse to escape and refuses, Harley passes a great volume of gas, Nightwing begs to roll the window down, and Batman again refuses, saying that it “Smells like discipline.” It’s a good gag, as there’s an abundance of writers who adore Batman to the point of biblical idolatry, and to tweak their over-the-top stoicism is funny both with and without that context. The final act also includes a pretty funny bit, where it seems like the day will be saved by the appearance of Swamp Thing, here a nearly omniscient/omnipotent vegetation deity, but he really just shows up to wag his finger at the villain and affects the plot not at all. It’s like the seed of an idea for the kind of gags and bits that the Harley Quinn animated series pulls off, and although it’s in its infancy here, it’s a good joke. 

When it comes to the bad, I have to say, I don’t like Rauch as Harley. It’s funny, because I know she got her big break on Big Bang Theory, a series I have seen approximately 57 minutes of and all of them under duress, the same place that TV Harley Kaley Cuoco gathered much of her attention. (To me, I will always remember her from the endless promotion of 8 Simple Rules that aired constantly during reruns of Grounded for Life when I was in high school, as well as for her role as Billie, the Cousin Oliver of original recipe Charmed’s final season, because my brain is broken in so, so many ways.) Cuoco seems born to voice this role, while Rauch is doing … I don’t know, I’m sure it’s her best. It’s not quite as iconic as Sorkin’s original Harley, or as perfectly suited as Tara Strong’s chameleon-like version, or as unhinged as Cuoco’s ascension to animated Harley supreme. Sometimes, when watching the show, I can almost see Cuoco in the sound booth when she lets out one of Harley’s frustrated cries, really getting into the body language and everything. In this, Harley sounds so canned and rehearsed that you imagine that there was almost no motion during the entire recording session. It’s a very frustrating experience. This gets pushed past my tolerance limits when we have an entire musical performance of Rauch-as-Harley singing the seminal, perfect The Nerves (although obviously best known as a Blondie single) track “Hanging on the Telephone.” I’m not one to get upset when a filmmaker gets a little self-indulgent, but this is a real speedbump in this one, especially as it comes on the heels of the aforementioned fun music number. 

I wish that I could watch this with completely fresh eyes when it was a new release, without the baggage of a much better, funnier, more exciting, and better performed adaptation of the character. But we’re all trapped within the horizon of our experiences, so here I am, trying and failing to like this release. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League Dark (2017)

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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. 

After a semi-successful attempt at horror with Justice League vs. Teen Titans, we return to the ongoing animated cinematic universe with another horror-adjacent picture as well as a revisitation of supernatural themes. Following an opening sequence in which the big three—Wonder Woman, Superman, and Batman—each deal with acts of violence instigated by normal civilians seeing other people as monstrous demons, we find DC’s resident occultist, we get our first glimpse of John Constantine (voiced by Matt Ryan, who played the character in live action on his own short-lived live action series that premiered in the 2014 TV season, and was later imported into the CW’s “Arrowverse” proper). He and Jason Blood (Ray Chase), a functionally immortal former medieval knight permanently bonded to a noble demon named Etrigan, are playing poker against some of Hell’s bigwigs. When Constantine wins big, it turns into a magic fight, in which Constantine and Blood/Etrigan emerge victorious. Elsewhere, Batman, who has faced off against magical villains multiple times, remains skeptical about the supernatural elements of his current cases, until he begins to receive messages telling him to seek out Constantine. To do so, he must first reunite with an old flame, the stage magician Zatanna (Camilla Luddington), who supplements her prestidigitation with real sorcery. She reveals that the messages he has been receiving are from Boston “Deadman” Brand (Nicholas Turturro), a former acrobat who was killed mid-act and who is now a roaming spirit with the ability to possess the living in order to fight crime. Once this “Justice League Dark” is assembled, they learn that their fight has something to do with the long presumed-dead villain Destiny, and that reality hangs in the balance. 

Personal confession time: Zatanna is one of my favorite comic book characters. I’m revealing my age a little here, but back when I still had a Tumblr, my custom background was a repeating image of Zatanna’s face from Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers run, which was one of the first comics that I read and, although it’s not as fondly remembered now as it once was, it was formative for me. I wish that she was in her more traditional magician’s outfit in this instead of the goofy ass New 52 costume that they’ve stuck her in here (it may be purely to make the animation easier, but the fact that they’ve given her detached sleeves here instead of those fishnet gauntlets from the comic book improves this look a solid 10%), but at least we’ll always have Young Justice for that, at least until Max cycles it off to some internet backwater like they’ve done with so much other programming. I also really like Ryan’s take on Constantine, and he’s played the character across so many mediums now that I can’t help but feel like he’s stamped himself onto the character just as much as the late Kevin Conroy did with Batman. There’s something deliciously Kolchak-like about his portrayal; everywhere that Constantine goes, everybody knows him, and they all hate his guts. It’s fun. 

As far as the horror elements go, this one is more understated than JLvTT. How scary it is depends on how weirded out you are by the demons that we meet. It’s frontloaded a little bit in that regard, as when we see the points of view of the characters who are enspelled to see demons in the form of those around them, the monsters they are seeing are truly repulsive and nauseating. The ultimate villain of the piece isn’t as imposing or uncannily inhuman as Trigon was, and while the magical fight at the end is cool, it doesn’t have that opening-scene-of-Wishmaster viscerality that made JLvTT stand out. That doesn’t mean it isn’t impressive or interesting, however. In fact, as this one gets to do a big magic battle that doesn’t come down to a big punch-’em-up at the end. Those vary in quality, but I can say that having watched so many of these in quick succession, a lot of them have become an undifferentiated battle sequence in my memories, if I retain any of those parts at all. This could have easily degenerated into a blue-beam-versus-red-beam fight as well, but some real detail went into differentiating the kinds of magic that each character wields and creating a sequence in which they work together and in conflict with each other at certain points. Like I said, it’s just not scary. But it is cool. 

Speaking of cool, we have to talk about the omnipresence of Batman in this series. So far, this seventh film is the fourth “Justice League” title, while all three other films have been “Batman” movies, and of the ones that have “Justice League” in the title, he’s been one of the major players in those plots as well, with him being the only member of the League in this movie with more than five minutes of screentime. It’s clear that DC Animation knows that he’s the moneymaker, and they’re not afraid to milk his presence for all that it’s worth, or overutilize him the same way that Marvel did Wolverine in the nineties or Star Wars is still doing with Darth Vader. Those aren’t positive comparisons, but I don’t think that this is as detrimental to the product. I would probably feel differently if this wasn’t following right on the heels of The Killing Joke, so I’m willing to account for viewer saturation fatigue as I remind myself once again that these films were never meant to be watched so shortly after one another. I just felt it was worth noting that the Leaguer most closely associated with the “dark” Justice League of the comics was Wonder Woman, which makes sense as she is a demigoddess and therefore a magical being. It’s Batman here for purely marketing purposes, and although that hasn’t created a negative effect yet, any time that becomes the case, the art itself declines.

Narratively, this one felt a bit like a Clive Barker novel. There’s a sequence in the movie where Constantine and Zatanna have to go into an enspelled victim’s mind, and the villain takes advantage of them being out of play in the physical world to make a move on them there. In order to do so, it creates a monster out of shit by backing up all of the toilets in the hospital where the man lies comatose. I know for sure that there was a shitmonster in Everville, and although I wouldn’t bet money on it, I think that there’s one in Imajica as well (as with these movies, I read those two in too-close proximity to one another and there’s a few things that are blended together in my recollection). That lends this rendition of Constantine a little bit of Barker’s Harry D’Amour character, which mixes well with Constantine’s constant—no pun intended—escapes from the consequences of his actions at the expense of those around him. It really comes back to bite him in the ass in this one, and it’s well-conceived. This one also feels like it can be watched separately from the rest of this series, if you’re just a Constantine (or Zatanna) fan and can’t be arsed with consuming the others. It’s a little more cheaply made than some of the others, but the seams are still pretty intact. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League vs. Teen Titans (2016)

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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 feel like I just said this about Justice League: Gods and Monsters, but it’s nice to know that here at about the halfway point of this project, I can still be surprised. Despite having a pretty basic title that promises little more than two teams being thrown at one another like action figures, Justice League vs. Teen Titans breaks out of its role as just another smash-’em-up in this interconnected narrative. You also wouldn’t think it from the very generic promo images that are associated with the film either, but this is a horror movie, and despite being animated, it manages to be a pretty effective one. 

Damian’s up to his normal shenanigans, again. Some second stringers like Weather Wizard are causing a ruckus, and the League is there to pound everyone into submission like it’s gear night and the lights are about to come on. Damian’s on crowd control duty, which means he’s standing in a single place and pointing in the direction that fleeing people should use to evacuate. Understandably bored at being given the superhero job equivalent of holding the sign that says “SLOW” on one side and “STOP” on the other at a road construction site, he gets involved when he sees the opportunity to go after the aforementioned climate-based villain. Unbeknownst to the boy, the Weather Wizard is possessed by some four-eyed space demon, and Damian’s brutal takedown forces the demon vapor out of his body, leaving no one to question. Bruce has, once again, had it up the metaphorical here, so Nightwing takes the kid to stay with the Titans, a team run by his ladyfriend, Starfire (Kari Wahlgren). She’s playing den mother to: Jaime Reyes (Jake T. Austin), aka Blue Beetle, a kid with an alien “scarab” on his back that transforms into weaponry and such; Garfield “Beast Boy” Logan (Brandon Soo Hoo), a green boy who can shapeshift into animals; and goth-girl-who’s-sort-of-the-devil’s-daughter Raven (Taissa Farminga, in an inspired bit of casting).  

It’s Raven and her backstory on which this film hangs. Her mother was a teen runaway who got involved with a cult, and when said organization did a little ceremony to see what would happen, they summoned an extra-dimensional entity known as Trigon (Jon Bernthal). Raven’s mother was the naive but willing Rosemary in this situation, and her baby, Raven was to be the vessel through which Trigon would permanently enter our plane of existence to conquer the earth and turn it into a hell-like place. His time is nigh, as it turns out, and he’s stepping up his astral gaslighting to get her to open up the portal. Helping his cause is a possessed Superman, through whom Trigon’s minions are able to dig what can only be described as a stargate out of the desert, in preparation for his coming. When the Titans are attacked by Trigon’s henchmen while on an outing to a carnival for some mandatory team-building fun, Raven spills this backstory, and tells them about how she was raised in a magic utopia until she was about eleven, when Trigon found their little hidden fairyland and turned it into hell; this is not an exaggeration, as pits of molten lava erupt, everything is turned to ashes, and every living thing evaporates in a puff, except Raven. She pretended to join him, she sealed him in a crystal that she hid in another dimension, but apparently he’s out and trying to get a stranglehold on our dimension. The Titans can’t be possessed since Raven is protecting them, but nothing is stopping Trigon’s forces from taking over the League . . .

There are a lot of great teen horror elements in here, mostly put to good use. The carnival is such an iconic location for a horror movie and doubly so when the characters are teens, so that whole sequence is a lot of fun. There’s also something about Raven’s pale emo girl aesthetic that’s such a key element of the genre that it transcends decades, so much so that you can almost hear the performance that Winona Ryder would have given as this character if the movie was made in the 80s, or the one that Fairuza Balk would have given if this had been made in the era of The Craft. Her borderline fanfiction backstory—demon daddy didn’t love me and also he is actually essentially the devil—is actually fun here, so I have no complaints. I’ve never really cared all that much about this character in any other media, not even Titans (2018), which I watched all the way through along with dozens of others worldwide, but this is the perfect length to condense everything down into a digestible package. But what really sells this as a horror story is just how awful and gross things get. 

We eventually go all the way to (similar to but legally distinct from) Hell, but even before we get there, there’s enough to disturb us here in our own dimension. Raven’s recap of her origin story includes a scene in which Raven’s willing mother is frightened out of her mind when the glamour on her lover fades and she finds herself facing his true demonic form, complete with jet black horns that sprout and grow with a disgusting sound effect, and with additional points popping out like antlers as they elongate. Superman finds himself alone in his apartment laundry room, and not only is the sequence drawn with a lot of spookiness, he tries to get the image out of his head by beating it against a wall for what may have been hours, which is difficult to watch. Once the group does get to the place where the crystal should be, everything for as far as the eye can see just looks like exposed, flayed muscle tissue, with tumorous bones and teeth popping out randomly. At one point, a wall of corpses comes alive and pulls a villain into itself, tearing it apart, all while a giant metal rhombus hovers above the landscape like Leviathan in Hellraiser 2. Beast Boy undergoes a full-on Cronenbergian/Akira tumorous body horror transformation upon exposure to Hell’s energy. Punches are not being pulled in this movie, and its animation lets it get away with a lot.

This isn’t a perfect movie. For one thing, the pace at which they were putting these out and the strains that this would put on any animation team are starting to show, as there are quite a few obvious animation errors that I’m surprised weren’t caught prior to release, mostly in the carnival sequence. One of these is a misspelled sign that advertises “Salloons” [sic] instead of balloons, and another is when Raven and Damian end up dropping their respective guards around each other as they see their dual reflections in some funhouse mirrors, which reflects a sign that says “Smoothies” but doesn’t mirror the text. This sequence, while fun, also goes for that Final Destination vibe with the inclusion of an emo ballad that I believe was written specifically for this release, plays in its entirety over a montage of the Titans bonding, and which is one of the worst things that I have ever heard, genuinely. If you must hear it for yourself, it’s here, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. But if you can make it through that, you’ll be rewarded with something really fun, like a kaiju-sized Trigon making a beeline toward a city to destroy it while Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Flash are completely powerless against it, or dimensions made of meat. That soundtrack is knocking this one back a few pegs, but don’t let that make you skip this one (maybe just mute it during the carnival montage).

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012)

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When I saw Don Hertzfeldt’s latest animated short at this year’s Overlook, there was an hour-long line of giddy nerds queued up to squeeze in for a specialty screening and Q&A.  A few months later, ME was paired with a victory-lap roadshow exhibition of Hertzfeldt’s 2012 feature It’s Such a Beautiful Day, which I attended with a smattering of fellow introverts avoiding eye contact and the afternoon sun in the complimentary AC.  Both experiences were immaculate.  The hustle & bustle of the film festival environment made ME feel like a burning-hot ticket, especially since fans could corner the animator in the flesh to force such intimate experiences as asking questions during a moderated panel, showing him the tattoos he inspired, asking for autographs and, in my case, catching a glimpse of him wolfing down Shake Shack between screenings like a regular Joe.  The theatrical rollout was obviously less intimate, but Hertzfeldt did his best to make it feel personal.  As an intermission between the short & feature, he FaceTimes the audience with a pre-recorded message to explain the ways in which It’s Such a Beautiful Day was a breakthrough formal experiment for his art and to also apologize for exhaustion of watching it so soon after ME.  It still felt like a one-of-a-kind presentation for a work that was once streaming without context or personalization on Netflix, even though this exact Cinematic Event is currently touring dozens of international cities.

I’ve never thought of Hertzfeldt as a public figure before this recent tour.  Since he largely works alone on self-taught animation techniques that take years to calibrate, I’ve always imagined him as a reclusive outsider artist, the exact kind of quiet introvert that his movies attract to the theater.  Early works like Billy’s Balloon, Rejected, and Beautiful Day all had a word-of-mouth quality to their cultural awareness, and if his widest critical breakout World of Tomorrow screened anywhere near where I live with this level of fanfare, I totally missed it.  Unsurprisingly, it turns out Hertzfeldt does carry himself with a quiet, shy, apologetic demeanor, seemingly surprised by the continued cult enthusiasm for his animated stick figure abstractions.  It also turns out that his public personality was a lot more integral to the tone & narrative of It’s Such a Beautiful Day than I remembered, since his gentle voice is a constant hum on its soundtrack as the film’s scene-by-scene narrator.  There’s an observational comic-strip humor to It’s Such a Beautiful Day that makes it feel a hand-drawn diary, especially considering the direct, intimate rapport the director establishes with his audience through narration.  That’s what makes it so horrifying when it develops into a diary of personal anxieties rather than a diary of personal experiences as its story escalates, given that if any of this happened to Hertzfeldt himself, he would be either institutionalized or, more likely, dead.

Hertzfeldt narrates the daily, mundane thoughts & experiences of a middle-aged stick figure named Bill.  Our milquetoast protagonist starts his journey suffering the same nagging indignities that plague us all: awkwardly waiting for buses, awkwardly chatting with strangers, awkwardly navigating urban hellscapes, etc.  Bill’s suffering takes on increasing specificity as his mental health declines, though, due largely to a brain tumor that distorts his ability to think clearly (and inevitably kills him).  Although told in third-person, the narration is filtered entirely through Bill’s increasingly warped perception of reality, and the imagery warps to match it.  The white copy-paper backdrop of Hertzfeldt’s early works give way to photographic mixed-media textures that Bill stumbles through in non-linear time loops, untethered from logic.  His observations occasionally become crass & offensive as his POV is compromised by his tumor, making this one of the great illustrations of intrusive thoughts, mental illness, and unreliable narration.  Like all of Hertzfeldt’s work, it’s also a great illustration of Millennial humor, from its grim death-wish nihilism to its LOL-so-random internet cringe.  There’s even a literal bacon joke that anchors the picture to the Epic Bacon humor of the 2010s, which only makes it more impressive that the film manages to sketch out an earnest, authentic big-picture demonstration of what it feels like to think & function with a brain distorted by anxiety, depression, and physical malady.  For a small, devoted audience, no film has ever felt truer.

When Hertzfeldt refers to It’s Such a Beautiful Day as experimental, he means it more in terms of process than in terms of genre.  He filmed the animation cells for the project using a bulky 1940s camera, experimenting with how to segment the frame through multiple exposures by blocking the lens, sometimes mixing traditional animation with stock footage.  Even so, there are some aesthetic touches to the film that do recall Experimental Cinema in the Stan Brakhage/Maya Deren sense, with flashes of pure color overtaking the screen to tell the story through emotion & mood rather than through figure & voice.  It was a drastic evolution for an animator who used to work exclusively in black & white line drawings, with only a few pops of color adding visual excitement to the frame – an evolution that’s since only gotten more extreme through multi-media layering in The World of Tomorrow & ME.  The one thing that hasn’t changed, really, is Hertzfeldt’s unique sense of comic timing, which mines dark humor out of the mundane absurdism of being alive.  His ability to perfectly time a punchline made him a cult figure long before he fully distinguished his craft as a visual artist, so it’s been wonderful to spend so much time hearing those jokes in his own voice this year, whether in his heavily-narrated cult classic or in his Q&A tour promoting his new, dialogue-free short.  It’s fitting, then, that the only way to access these films (if they aren’t physically traveling to your neighborhood theater) is to purchase them directly from the artist’s website.  I imagine he personally packages each shipment by hand and includes a scribbled note of apology for making your brain a little darker with his harsh approach to life & art.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – Bad Blood (2016)

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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’ve talked a little bit about the CW’s “Arrowverse” series of shows in this feature, but there’s one name that hasn’t really come up here yet, and that’s Batwoman (no, not that one). The interconnectedness of the so-called “Bat Family” is already a tangled web, and it gets more tangled every year, so I’m not going to get into that, but suffice it to say that the current Batwoman, aka Kate Kane, was introduced in 2006 as an updated version of an earlier character, one who was introduced for the sole purpose of showing how super not-gay Batman was in the wake of Frederic Wertham’s infamous censorship call-to-arms, The Seduction of the Innocent. As a way of thumbing the industry’s collective nose at Wertham and his regressive quackery, Kate was explicitly made a lesbian. This was a big deal at the time (as someone who was reading Young Avengers, which featured a gay couple in the form of Wiccan and Hulkling, I can tell you that the contemporary comic letter pages were a fiery, brimstone-y place), and in some ways still was at the time that Batwoman, the 2019 TV series, premiered – at least, if the neanderthal braying of online agitators in the wake of the show’s airing is anything to go by. In the series, which follows the characterization of Kate/Batwoman that was introduced by our old friend The New 52, Bruce Wayne’s cousin Kate returns to Gotham some time after the abdication of the city by its Dark Knight, and she discovers the Batcave and all the gadgets, retrofits them to suit her needs, and then sets out to clean up the city. Tale as old as time, right? 

Among the DC CW shows, Batwoman was the most … cursed, one could say. The first season never completed filming because of COVID, the lead performer (Ruby Rose) left between seasons one and two, and the show’s mixed messaging about the role of the “Crows,” a private security firm headed by Kate’s father, was questionable even before BLM and has only grown more tone deaf over time. Reports have been mixed for years as to whether Rose was fired (for alleged behavior on set) or quit (due to being pretty badly injured during some stunt filming and not taking adequate recuperation time), and although we’ll probably never know for certain, I can say that I think Rose leaving was to the show’s benefit. That tone deafness regarding “non-police” police was rampant all over the first season, to the point where, although I would never agree with the bigots who hated the show on principle about why, they weren’t wrong that it … kinda sucked. 

Rose’s exit allowed for the show to go in a different direction. Javicia Leslie was cast as Ryan Wilder, an ex-con out on parole following a short term she served following some poor police work (redundant, I know) on the part of the Crows; when Kate’s plane crashes near where Ryan has parked for the night in the van that she’s living in, Ryan finds the batsuit and puts it to work right away. She was a completely fresh take on the character, and that allowed for new and interesting developments. In the first season, the romantic conflict comes from the fact that Kate and her love interest, Meagan Good’s Sophie Moore, were in military training together before Kate was given the boot for failing to follow “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” while Sophie didn’t speak up for Kate or herself and is still deeply closeted by the time of the pilot. Batwoman’s archnemesis, Alice (as in “of Wonderland”), is also tied to Kate because—spoiler alert—she’s actually the long presumed dead twin sister that Kate hasn’t seen since her supposed death when they were in elementary school. It didn’t help that Rachel Skarsten’s not-quite-Joker performance was the most interesting thing about the series, either, making her more engaging and magnetic than our purported hero. 

So, as season two begins, you have a whole supporting cast who not only don’t know if Kate’s dead or alive, but who also have no idea who this new person in Kate’s costume is. Skarsten’s Alice has to find something new to obsess over now that she can’t just keep pestering the sister she blames for never finding her, and her attempts to play on the guilt of that become a no-sell for Ryan, who grew up in the foster system. To their credit, the CW DC shows often tried to address social issues, and even when their heart was in the right place, it did so pretty clumsily (Black Lightning did it best, obviously, while Supergirl was a real roller-coaster of comrade/allyship). When it was made a selling point of the show, it was often to the show’s detriment. For me, this comes through most clearly in Batwoman’s first season treatment of Sophie, where filthy rich white woman Kate Kane lives in constant judgment of Sophie’s past choices. Kate’s constant exhortations that Sophie should come out of the closet are pure Western neoliberalism, dictating the lives of others without real knowledge of their lived experiences and dangers. But, because it had to pull a soft reboot before it ever really got going, Batwoman was able to do more and be a more interesting text for discourse because it wasn’t a “message” show, or it was at least no longer trying to send the same message that it was from its initial conception. Over time, Ryan and Sophie grow closer without all the emotional baggage of what Kate and Sophie had in the past, and this is the only show that I can think of offhand which had a queer relationship between two Black women as its primary romance storyline. It ended up being a lot better than it had a right to be. 

This is all yet another long lead up to me talking about an animated DC film, because this one introduces the Kate Kane Batwoman to this continuity. Batman: Bad Blood opens some six months after Batman vs. Robin, in a pretty cool sequence in which several C-tier Bat-nemeses are gathered in a warehouse and a familiar cloaked figure starts to take them out from the shadows—except, as the firing of a handgun from the darkness reveals—this isn’t Batman (Jason O’Mara), but Batwoman (Yvonne Strahovski). Batman soon intervenes himself, but in so doing, he ends up being blown to bits when the warehouse explodes. The absence of Batman, highlighted by the fact that the Bat-signal is going unanswered and the public has started to notice, leads to Bruce’s son Damian (Stuart Allen) being drawn home, and prompts the return of Nightwing/Dick Grayson (Sean Maher) as well, while Kate enlists her father’s help in trying to find any evidence that Bruce is still alive. Dick finds himself forced to take on the mantle of Batman—something that was his greatest dream as a child before it morphed into the thing that he wanted to escape from most as he matured—but when he recognizes Kate, he unmasks himself to her and takes her on as a probationary member of the team. They’re further joined by yet another new Bat-hero, Batwing (Gaius Charles), who is the son of Wayne Enterprises’ Lucius Fox. 

The villain this time around is someone called “The Heretic,” whom Batman seemed to recognize despite his mask in the moments before his death. We in the audience even get a glimpse of the man beneath when he does, but this franchise’s aforementioned difficulty in differentiating the faces of its square-jawed manly men ensures that it means nothing to us. It turns out that he’s operating under the direction of Damian’s mother and Bruce’s ex-lover, Talia al-Ghul (Morena Baccarin), who also has the Mad Hatter and his mind control tech as integral parts of her plan. The Bat Brigade invades her hideout and manages a rescue of Bruce before the fifty-minute mark, and then the real evil plot kicks in: Talia’s turned him into a Batmanchurian Candidate, with the intention of using Hatter’s tech to take over Gotham City (and then, of course, the world). From there, the film dissolves into a series of (admittedly well-executed) cliches, with the finale taking place aboard a floating tech summit. We get our designated girl fight between Talia and Batwoman, Batman’s brainwashing is broken by one of those “I know you’re in there somewhere” speeches, and a floating base is prevented from colliding with Wayne Tower at juuuuuuuust the last second. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, but it’s fun, and sufficiently exciting. I got a real kick out of watching all of these folks flying around in their costumes; it gave me flashbacks to watching G-Force/Gatchaman in my youth. 

It’s telling that I had more to say about the Batwoman TV series than I did about this movie. Funnily enough, this one goes back to basics with its Kate Kane, as she is decidedly not Bruce’s cousin here. The most interesting thing about this one is that it gives us a chance to see how these characters play off of each other when the title character is missing, where we have a void in the center of this narrative that creates an opportunity for us to spend more time with the others. Dick and Damian are the most fun together that they have ever been here, and the backstory that Dick and Kate knew each other because of cotillions and such is a nice detail. That still highlights some of the film’s weaknesses. These have become self-perpetuating now, so there’s no need to think too hard about certain details; for example, it would have been much more fun if Dick-as-Batman had gotten a little too acrobatic with his fighting, and if this had been the thing to tip off Damian and Kate that he wasn’t the “real” Batman. Instead, they just know when they see him. The dialogue here is a bit more fun than normal too, since Batman isn’t around glooming up the place, and that’s a nice change, but it doesn’t reach the level of being truly special.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Mind Game (2004)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

I’ve been incredibly lucky to see multiple movies by Japanese animator Masaaki Yuasa in a proper theater, where his vibrant free-for-all imagery shines in all its psychedelic glory.  While he mostly works as a showrunner for televised anime, Yuasa’s feature films Inu-Oh and Night is Short, Walk on Girl both played at local multiplexes in their initial run, and both made it clear why his expressive, imaginative visual style often gets him cited as a successor to the late Satoshi Kon.  It’s a shame I was either too young or too out of the loop to catch his debut feature Mind Game that way in 2004, but thankfully local repertory series WW Cinema recently filled in that gap.  I was instantly on board for the layered multimedia animation style of Mind Game, which quickly establishes Yuasa as a visual genius, even if only in flashes.  It took me much longer to warm up to the film’s immature nerd-boy sexuality, but I eventually got there once that got psychedelic too.  Mind Game likely would’ve been my favorite movie as a teenager had I caught it fresh, but now I can only see it as a crude prototype for Yuasa’s more recent masterworks like Inu-Oh.  Regardless, any time one of his films plays on a nearby screen is a cultural event, especially since I don’t watch nearly enough television to keep up with the bulk of his work.

Nishi is a young 20-somethings loser who’s still hung up on his childhood crush and his childhood dreams of becoming a famous manga artist but is too shy & cowardly to do anything about either.  When his crush is threatened with rape by two yakuza in her family’s diner, he fails to come to her defense, speaking up just forcefully enough to get himself shot instead of saving the day.  In the afterlife, his soul is confronted with video footage of his cowardice, then defies the orders of a shapeshifting God to fade into oblivion by instead returning to his body to fight off the rapist gangsters who killed him.  The gamble works, sending the yakuza’s victims on a wild car chase that lands them in the belly of a whale for the majority of the remaining runtime.  Then things get weird.  Inside the whale, Nishi gradually learns emotional maturity and how to genuinely connect with people instead of ogling them as a pervy outsider.  It’s character growth that somewhat helps soften the grotesque sexual assault depicted in the first half and the constant commentary on the cartoonish proportions of his love interest’s breasts – just not entirely.  The main point of the story is about learning to fully embrace life instead of cowering from it, but there is some tangible subtext in a young Yuasa beating himself up about his own social immaturity as an illustrator who’s used to living & thinking alone instead of healthily interacting with others.  The good news is that two decades later he’s demonstrated that personal maturity in Inu-Oh, which has all of the visual inventiveness of Mind Game (including gorgeous animation of mythical whales) without all the teen-boy sexual hangups souring the vibe.

As much as I’m downplaying Mind Game as one of Yuasa’s finest works, it is oddly the one I’d most readily return to for rewatch.  That’s mostly because it’s bookended by gorgeous, rapid-fire montages of isolated images that piece together a birth-to-death lifespan for its four central characters (the whale-belly captives) that I’m not sure I fully absorbed on first watch.  Yuasa gives you just enough visual information for your brain’s pattern-recognition software to piece everything together, but I’m not sure I fully trust the conclusions I reached in the theater.  For a movie that spends most of its time sitting around the belly of a whale, waiting for something to happen in existential angst, it really does throw a lot at you.  The representation of God as a kaleidoscopic collection of impossible bodies that changes shape every time you look directly at it is a major highlight, recalling Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D. from The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.  There’s a funhouse mirror warping to most of the imagery that stretches through the screen to literally bend your mind, but there’s also a Tom Goes to the Mayor-esque use of crude photocopy printouts that grounds the whole thing in the rudimentary tools of its era.  All of Yuasa’s magic tricks are already proudly on display in Mind Game; it’s just a shame that his immaturity was just as loudly vibrant in this instance. Or maybe it’s just a shame that I had personally aged out of its grody nerd-boy charms before I caught up with it.

-Brandon Ledet