Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
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.
Hundreds of Beavers is a film that doesn’t seem like it would be able to sustain its premise or its vision for the entirety of its 108 minute runtime, but it somehow manages to do so. This movie made me laugh aloud, on average, about every thirty seconds all the way through. I don’t know that it will work for everyone, but it certainly did for me. Shot in black and white, this is a Looney Tunes sketch stretched to feature length, about a man named Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), a successful applejacker who loses everything in a fire after imbibing a bit too much one night and finds himself alone and cold in the Canadian wilderness. After several unsuccessful attempts at catching wild game, he finally manages to put together a few Wile E. Coyote-esque traps (without any assistance from ACME at all) and sustain himself. Eventually, he stumbles upon a fur trader (Doug Mancheski) and his lovely daughter (Olivia Graves), decides to become a fur trapper himself in order to win her hand, and sets out to acquire the furs of the titular hundreds of beavers. Oh, and did we mention that every animal in this film is portrayed via high-quality mascot costumes?
Our generation (and those bracketing it, so don’t think you’re not included in this, dear reader) usually encounter the animated shorts of the past at such a young age that their surreality is lost on us. The language of it is simple and straightforward in a way that we understand, even when we’re still piloting safety scissors with mushy, mushy brains. In Wackiki Wabbit, when Bugs Bunny ends up on an island with two castaways who look at him and see not a cartoon rabbit but a piping hot, meaty entree, we don’t give it a second thought. Seeing that gag translated to live action, and then grow more bizarrely envisioned and strangely realized each time the increasingly starved Kayak fails to gather eggs or catch a fish, one comes face to face with just how surreal the cartoon world is, and that makes it all the funnier as these man-sized fursuit beavers start to demonstrate a human-like complexity of thought. They go from animals that are slightly too clever to be caught by Kayak’s first attempts at traps to full on rocket scientists as the film moves along, and it happens so gradually that you find yourself trying to remember where everything went off the rails before you remember this happened moments after you started the movie.
I recently had some trouble trying to figure out what to say about Spirited Away for similar reasons. It was hard to explain what works so well about Spirited Away because you find yourself simply recapping the movie, which undersells what makes it so special. It’s really best for you to discover all the things that it has in store for you by watching it, because no description of any of the film’s gags will do justice to taking it in with your own (presumably two) eyeballs. But, since you’re already here, I might as well list some of my favorites, right? At one point in the film, Kayak is taken under the wing of an older, wiser fur trapper (Wes Tank), who teaches him how to master the art; said trapper uses a dog-driven sled, and each night, the dogs (remember, every animal is a person in a mascot suit) play a card game. As they camp in a wolf-ridden forest, the dogs are slowly taken in the night, so that we go from a full table of dogs in the iconic “dogs playing poker” mold to a single, shivering dog playing solitaire alone. It’s a gag on top of a gag on top of a gag, and that’s Hundreds of Beavers to the core: gags all the way down. I was also particularly taken with a very droopy, stoned-looking frog puppet and was delighted when it reappeared later in the film, and the commitment to the humans-as-animals bit extends all the way to having the horses in the film be that stereotypical sitcom get-up of two people acting as the front and rear of a mare. It never gets old, and that’s the real treasure here. The film never lets you catch your breath long enough to get tired of its schtick, and that kind of sustained humor is a rarity.
You (yes, you!) can watch Hundreds of Beavers, for free, right now, as long as you have your library card, and you’re stateside. As of this writing, the film is still streaming for free on Hoopla, the service that provides you with four free borrows a month via your local library.
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.
We’re Oz Perkins fans around these parts. Brandon gave both The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Gretel and Hansel four-star reviews. While the director’s first feature, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, got a cooler reaction from him, it remains my favorite of his works. (Admittedly, part of that might be the fact that I find Ruth Wilson to be one of the most utterly watchable and magnetic performers currently working). Or it was my favorite … until Longlegs came along.
Set in Oregon sometime during the Clinton administration, Longlegs is the story of Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a young FBI field agent whose preternatural hunches catch the attention of her superiors, resulting in her reassignment to a decades-long hunt for a serial killer known as “Longlegs” (Nicolas Cage) based upon Zodiac-like notes that he leaves behind at the scenes of brutal murders of entire families. As she spends time working on the case, she concludes that Longlegs’ targeting of families of young girls whose birthdays all fall on the fourteenth of the month is Satanic in nature, and that when plotted out on a calendar, it becomes clear that Longlegs is creating an image of an inverted triangle, which Harker finds in occult literature. Her boss, Carter (Blair Underwood), is impressed by her initiative and insight, and after a night of bonding, he gets drunk and asks Harker to drive him home, where she meets his family: wife Anna (Carmel Amit) and precocious daughter Ruby (Ava Kelders). Their relationship is slightly complicated when Carter discovers that on Harker’s ninth birthday, her mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) filed a police report about a strange man approaching the young Lee when she was home alone. Ruth, with whom Lee is in frequent contact, lives in a dilapidated farmhouse that is choked with hoarder ephemera, and when she directs her daughter to take a look through some Polaroids that are still in a box in her childhood bedroom, Lee suddenly remembers the day that she—barely—managed to avoid becoming one of Longlegs’ victims. Of course, why that is the case turns out to be much more complex (not to mention sinister) than is immediately apparent.
The biggest influence on the film, and the one that is most often cited in criticism, is The Silence of the Lambs. That much is apparent, from the setting to the choice of a young female FBI agent as the lead, all the way down to Longlegs’ not-quite-Buffalo-Bill basement lair, where instead of making suits out of women’s flesh he crafts lovingly faithful doll reproductions of the young girls who, along with their family, are killed at his hands. There’s also a bit of other Thomas Harris Lecter-containing media in play here; the walk-through of one of the crime scenes is straight out of Manhunter(or Red Dragon, if you prefer), and Underwood seems to be channeling a bit of Laurence Fishburne’s portrayal of Jack Crawford from the Hannibal TV series.
Outside of that franchise, what I was most reminded of while watching the film were two separate novels by South African writer Lauren Beukes: The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters. The former is about an early twentieth century serial killer and drifter who happens upon a house that is itself a nexus of evil, allowing him to exit into any time between 1929 and 1993 and directing him to seek out and murder certain women (the titular “shining girls”) for unknown purposes. When he brutally stabs a teenage girl named Kirby Mizrachi in 1989, he leaves her for dead, but she survives and, years later, she seeks her still unidentified attempted murderer. That 1990s setting, a killer who targets specific young women based on direction from a malevolent entity, and a main character has an encounter with her would-be killer in her youth and becomes the impetus behind his demise in her adulthood are all details that Longlegs shares, although the stories are markedly different in almost every other way.
The connection to Broken Monsters is a little more oblique, as the narrative of that novel features an ambitiously (and fruitfully) large net of point of view characters, but of whom one is a serial killer who creates “art” out of body parts of humans and animals alike, not unlike several of the killers from the aforementioned Hannibal series. When with other characters, the narrative is alternatively a straightforward urban crime drama (the homicide detective), a little bit Hard Candy (her daughter), an ironically voiced view of Detroit’s art scene that provides important context for the killer’s motivation (the aging hipster journalist), etc. When we are in the killer’s point-of-view chapters, their point of view includes being forced/inspired by an ominous force that the reader assumes is a manifestation of the killer’s broken mind … until the same thing appears in a chapter that’s focused on one of their victims, revealing that the demonic entity is, in fact, very real. That happens here as well, as Longlegs shifts from an unconventional homage to Silence of the Lambs with the slightly supernatural narrative conceit that the lead character has preternatural insight into a horror that all-but-literally goes to hell.
I haven’t really engaged with the discourse about the movie, so I’m not sure whether this is being cited elsewhere, but it’s worth noting that this film was very funny. Underwood is a natural charmer, so Carter’s interactions with the stoic, reserved, and frankly spooky Harker are fun to watch, and this moved into outright laughter for me when Harker meets young Ruby and she asks her parents if she can show Harker her room. As the two awkwardly sit next to one another, Harker notes that Ruby has one those canopies that some kids have and asks her, stiltedly, “Do you … go … in it?” I saw this with a very responsive audience, and this got a big laugh. There’s also a great scene with the flamboyant administrator of a mental facility where the sole survivor of one of Longlegs’ family slayings resides, and a forensics nerd who gets far too excited about a strange doll that’s found hidden at one of the previous murder sites. I’ve heard reports that some screenings have had people laughing in response to Nicolas Cage, but I’m happy to say that this didn’t happen at my screening, and I found his performance terrifying. It’s the overcorrection to Harker’s stoicism, which I think is played for laughs at certain points; I can see people finding it too much, but it worked for me. I’ll also say that Alicia Witt is phenomenal here; as a longtime defender of Urban Legend, she’s one of my favorites that I feel like we never get to see enough of. I did spend a chunk of the movie thinking that Ruth was being played by Samantha Sloyan, but I’ll let you Google that yourself and tell me if you think I’m that far off the mark.
Over on the podcast, we often talk about when a film “Does That Thing I Like,” which is when a horror movie features up a deliberately ambiguous premise that could conclude with either a rational explanation for events or a supernatural one, and, instead of going the well-worn route of concluding with “[the devil/witchcraft/possession/ghosts/whatever] [is/are] real!” (I’ll admit that if the ratio of demonic-to-scientific rationales were reversed, movies would be both a lot more boring and most of them would end exactly like an episode of Scooby-Doo, but I still appreciate it when it happens.) Unfortunately, there are so few of these movies that mentioning any of them would spoil them, especially given how often the twist is simply that there’s a boy living in the walls. Longlegs is like the platonic ideal of how to “Do the Thing I Think Is Tired” but make it fresh, new, exciting, and scary. I am a person who has lived alone for most of his adult life and who can count the number of nightmares he has had in that time on just two hands, but the night after I saw this movie, I got up and went to the bathroom in the night, I had to turn the light on, not because I needed it to find my way, but because I needed it to dispel the shadows before I could get out of bed. The reason why The Thing I Like is The Thing I Like is because I live in the real world; I’m not afraid of ghosts or demons or swamp monsters (other than alligators, obviously), so they don’t scare me in the movies, either. Your Ghostfaces, your various Thomas Harris serial killers like Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill, even that home invasion scene in Fargo—slapstick as it is—those are things that get my anxiety up; those are the reason that I occasionally have to pull the shower curtain back or check my closets. When we briefly discussed the film on our recent podcast episode about Planet of the Vampires, Brandon noted that Longlegs is a movie that feelsevil. And that’s as succinctly as I can put it. Nothing in this film is something that I am afraid of in real life, but its evil is so palpable and real that I had to turn on the lights in the middle of the night. I don’t know that I can give a movie higher praise than that.
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
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.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Planet of the Vampires (1965), Mario Bava’s atmospheric Italo sci-fi precursor to Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979).
00:00 Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh 05:40 Video rental stores
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
It had to happen eventually that one of these animated movies would emerge as an object lesson in adaptation that’s faithful in some ways and divergent in others, to ill effect in both realms. Batman: Gotham by Gaslight was a critically and commonly well-received 1989 Elseworlds comic that asked, What if Batman, but steampunk? and What if Batman fought Jack the Ripper?, which was the style at the time. This film adapts both of those questions directly, although it chooses a different culprit for who the Ripper turns out to be (it’s still an effective mystery, but who’s behind the Ripper’s blade in the comic is that story’s equivalent of The Joker, that comparison is absent here and the killer is someone else. Gotham by Gaslight transports the (apparently) eternally fertile narrative ground of a serial killer in the London Fog has been transported to the nearly identical (but explicitly American, even in this setting) city of Gotham, where the city streets are stalked by two different disguised men. The first, of course, is the Ripper, whose true identity forms the core mystery of the story. The other is a Victorian Batman, who is in fact the city’s recently returned prodigal son, the orphaned billionaire Bruce Wayne (Bruce Greenwood).
As with a lot of What if [Character] but [Specific Era/Location]? stories, this one transports all of the accoutrement of the character to the time and place that the author (or, more commonly, fanfiction writer) has a fascination with. So, while “Catwoman” isn’t here, Selina Kyle (Jennifer Carpenter) is, as an actress and singer who grew up as the daughter of a lion tamer, hence a handiness with a whip and an affection for cats. Leslie Thompkins, the kindly child psychologist who helped mend the young Bruce’s psyche in the comics, is here Sister Leslie (Grey Griffin), who ran the orphanage in which Bruce was raised. There’s a district attorney Harvey Dent, a showgirl (and, lest we forget because this is a Ripper story, sex worker) Pamela Isley, a police Commissioner named Gordon, a Doctor Hugo Strange, and so on and so forth. It’s a conceit that I think can be fun and rewarding, but can also be kind of tired. In fact, the thing that I felt most weighed down that recent Matt Reeves Batman movie was the fact that it was a Batman movie, and thus in the middle of this high budget, grimy neo-noir featuring some interesting creative choices, decent editing, and occasionally great visuals, you also had to have Colin Farrell as the Penguin for some reason. This kind of “Batman skin on a Victorian period piece” integration of the whole rogues gallery usually works best when the narrative finds something interesting to do with it or a way to twist expectations, and it does do that here in one small way, as there is both a Two-Face and a Harvey Dent, but they are not the same person here.
Visually, the most frustrating thing about this one is that it uses the general design aesthetics of the source material (simplified for animation) but none of the grain or grit that made that one’s overall look so memorable. In fact, although there have been other releases in this overall franchise that looked worse, the discrepancy between the mood and atmosphere of the original comic and this adaptation make this one feel cheaper than those others. For instance, take a look at this page of the original comic, which evokes both the yellowing of a newspaper and the sickly yellow light of the oil lamps in the district in which the scene takes place. It sets a tone that is lacking from this movie. That’s an overall issue with a lot, but not all, of these movies. When adapting from a well-liked source material, one can choose to try and imitate the original art as closely as possible while also “sanding off” some of the detail work that would be too difficult to animate (like New Frontier or All-Star Superman), or make something that looks completely different (like Doomsday’s use of a more Bruce Timm style, or Superman vs. The Elite’s Tartakovsky-esque crescent moon head shapes). This chooses to do some detail sanding in order to ape the art style of the original, but in doing so genericizes the overall feel of Mike Mignola’s pre-Hellboy artwork and the moodiness that made the graphic novel memorable enough to attempt to adapt nearly thirty years later in the first place. Paradoxically, this one is well-drawn but ultimately flat-looking, and not dynamic enough or visually arresting enough to really capture your attention.
That said, if you’re going to watch this one, it’s going to be because you’re interested in seeing who the Ripper is, and I won’t spoil that for you here. It’s a novel (and welcome) choice to forego any Jokery completely, and the twist is satisfactorily executed, with the fact that the Ripper was driven mad by the inhumanity he witnessed during the Civil War being an interesting touch. Performance-wise, the return of Greenwood to the Batman role after previously voicing him in Under the Red Hood is a good one, and his performance helps inflate some of the limper elements of the story. When it comes to the casting, however, the standout here is Anthony “Giles from Buffy” Head as Alfred, although he is underutilized. Perhaps you, dear reader, have not seen so many of these that you need them to be visually dynamic in order to be appreciated, and a middle of the road Jack the Ripper story dressed up in cape and cowl will be more fun for you. At the same time, if that’s what you’re looking for, what you really want to get your hands on is the 1989 comic. Your library system probably has a copy! Why don’t you go look that up right now, actually?
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
I think that I would have had a better impression of Batman and Harley Quinn if I had seen it when it was released, instead of in 2024, when we’ve already had a few seasons of the excellent animated adult Harley Quinn TV show. I’m sure this raucous, foul-mouthed representation of the character—which now seems like a tamer, less funny version of the TV series version—was probably more fun and exciting seven years ago, but it doesn’t hold up anymore. That’s only partially the film’s fault, however; it can’t be held accountable for the fact that what I think of as the best version of Harley Quinn was right around the corner, ready to overshadow it. I can blame it for being, well, not very good.
In a (contentious and challenged) continuation of the beloved Batman: The Animated Series, Batman (Kevin Conroy) and Nightwing (Loren Lester, reprising) must turn to the recently paroled/released Harley Quinn (Melissa Rauch, taking over for Arleen Sorkin, who originated the role and the character in the 90s) to try and find out where her BFF Poison Ivy (an utterly wasted Paget Brewster) is hiding. Ivy has recently teamed with poor man’s Swamp Thing “Floronic Man” (Kevin Michael Richardson) to steal some actual Swamp Thing matter from STAR Labs, with the goal of doing some “One man’s eco-terrorism is another man’s most ethical way to save the planet” shenanigans. Noting that Harley hasn’t reported to her parole officer in months, Nightwing finds her working at a kind of Super-Hooters where women dress in skimpy(er) versions of superheroine/villainess costumes. Tailing her, the two end up fighting one another; he asks why she’s resorted to this line of work instead of using her psychology doctorate, and she gets real with him about what the job market is like for ex-cons. She knocks him out, he wakes up tied to the bed, and they eventually hook up (although one can read the consensuality of the situation as dubious). She agrees to help the Dynamic Duo, they go on a couple of fest quests, and eventually they find Ivy and her new co-conspirator and save the day.
Due to time constraints as a result of work, travel, and my social life, I ended up accidentally watching this one as if it were a three-part episode of the series, as the film’s 74-minute runtime breaks down into three neat segments that are roughly the length of an episode of The Animated Series. I don’t think it suffered from that. In fact, I don’t mention it often, but I’ve probably watched about a third of these so far in more than one sitting, a practice I don’t normally condone (a movie is like a spell or most poems, to be consumed all at once or the magic could be dispelled), but which hasn’t really impacted my reading of these as texts. If anything, it’s made me engage with them more. The ones that really capture my interest are straightforward, one sitting, beginning to end viewing experiences, while the ones that fail to really grab me are the ones that I realize I have to rewind and rewatch parts of because my mind was starting to wander. And some, like Gotham Knight and Emerald Knights, are episodic by design, while others are episodic as a result of the fact that they are adapting stories that originated in a serialized, month-to-month medium, like All Star Superman (although that one gets a full viewing every time). Viewed through that lens, this is a three-parter with a first episode that I found mostly boring, a second part that was a big improvement, and a finale that was fine, I guess.
First, the good. The “Superbabes” restaurant is a fun sight gag, but that’s all there really is to write home about in the first act. The middle is better, as the unlikely trio’s research brings them to a shack in the woods where assorted colorful hoodlums and hooligans gather, with visual references to the Adam West Batman series aplenty, and even includes two musical numbers, one of which is endearing and funny (we’ll get to the second in “the bad”). There’s even a toilet humor gag that managed to cross the line into getting an actual laugh from me; Harley has some greasy food, she begs for the Batmobile to be pulled over so that she can use the facilities, Batman assumes it’s a ruse to escape and refuses, Harley passes a great volume of gas, Nightwing begs to roll the window down, and Batman again refuses, saying that it “Smells like discipline.” It’s a good gag, as there’s an abundance of writers who adore Batman to the point of biblical idolatry, and to tweak their over-the-top stoicism is funny both with and without that context. The final act also includes a pretty funny bit, where it seems like the day will be saved by the appearance of Swamp Thing, here a nearly omniscient/omnipotent vegetation deity, but he really just shows up to wag his finger at the villain and affects the plot not at all. It’s like the seed of an idea for the kind of gags and bits that the Harley Quinn animated series pulls off, and although it’s in its infancy here, it’s a good joke.
When it comes to the bad, I have to say, I don’t like Rauch as Harley. It’s funny, because I know she got her big break on Big Bang Theory, a series I have seen approximately 57 minutes of and all of them under duress, the same place that TV Harley Kaley Cuoco gathered much of her attention. (To me, I will always remember her from the endless promotion of 8 Simple Rules that aired constantly during reruns of Grounded for Life when I was in high school, as well as for her role as Billie, the Cousin Oliver of original recipe Charmed’s final season, because my brain is broken in so, so many ways.) Cuoco seems born to voice this role, while Rauch is doing … I don’t know, I’m sure it’s her best. It’s not quite as iconic as Sorkin’s original Harley, or as perfectly suited as Tara Strong’s chameleon-like version, or as unhinged as Cuoco’s ascension to animated Harley supreme. Sometimes, when watching the show, I can almost see Cuoco in the sound booth when she lets out one of Harley’s frustrated cries, really getting into the body language and everything. In this, Harley sounds so canned and rehearsed that you imagine that there was almost no motion during the entire recording session. It’s a very frustrating experience. This gets pushed past my tolerance limits when we have an entire musical performance of Rauch-as-Harley singing the seminal, perfect The Nerves (although obviously best known as a Blondie single) track “Hanging on the Telephone.” I’m not one to get upset when a filmmaker gets a little self-indulgent, but this is a real speedbump in this one, especially as it comes on the heels of the aforementioned fun music number.
I wish that I could watch this with completely fresh eyes when it was a new release, without the baggage of a much better, funnier, more exciting, and better performed adaptation of the character. But we’re all trapped within the horizon of our experiences, so here I am, trying and failing to like this release.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Paul Verhoeven’s satirical adaptation of the Robert A. Heinlein sci-fi military novel Starship Troopers.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve sought to plug some holes in my watching of certain directorial canons. Starting in the summer of 2022, I began the process of watching every Coen Brothers movie in chronological order. This worked pretty well until I got to The Big Lebowski, a movie that I, like many others, made a core part of their teenage personalities in their youth, and as such I skipped over in order to return at a later date. Now, having finally given No Country for Old Men a rewatch, I’m ready to put them in a non-definitive, completely personal ranking of my favorites.
Honorable Mention:Crimewave, the 1985 Sam Raimi flop that Joel and Ethan co-wrote, is quite a bit of fun. Looney Tunes-esque in a similar vein to this year’s Hundreds of Beavers, the film follows a hapless nerd who stumbles upon one of his employers’ plot to kill the other, but gets distracted from doing anything about it by a quest to find his dream girl. It’s not great, but it’s worth the effort if you’re into it. Some of its narrative elements would be echoed in The Hudsucker Proxy, but I would say that, other than a stellar performance from Jennifer Jason Leigh and Proxy’s fun ending, rewatching this one would be my preference in most regards.
Dishonorable Mention: When we talked about Heathers recently, Brandon mentioned that he had finally seen Drive-Away Dolls, and he felt that my review of the film had been far too kind to it. I concurred at the time and must further agree now, as my opinion of the film has only declined in the intervening months. In fact, the only new release I’ve disliked more this whole year so far is that NYT propaganda “documentary” that wholeheartedly and unabashedly committed to validating the Zionist entity. A little lesbian love story set at the turn of the millennium but with the trappings of seventies film sounds like a good time, and at times it does manage to be, but it’s incredibly uneven and while Geraldine Viswanathan is charming, Margaret Qualley is delivering a community theater caliber performance that you’ll either get used to or learn to live with before the end of the film. Do you still think police violence against citizens can be funny? Then this is the movie for you, and I mean that in the most derogatory way possible.
18.The Ladykillers (2004) – This is, without a shadow of a doubt, the worst of the Coen Brothers’ filmography. This one isn’t even a subjective ranking; I would say that this is a widely agreed upon fact, and I’m not here to champion it as an underrated classic. There’s a distinct leap in quality between this and the next entry on this list; that one is second from the bottom but only because it is “merely” good, while this one is actually quite bad. This film, a remake of an earlier British Alec Guinness vehicle in which a group of thieves take up residency in an unsuspecting landlady’s home in order to gain access to a vault through her house, sucks. It’s racist, mean-spirited, and not funny. If every copy of this movie on earth were destroyed, the world would be a better place.
17. I’m not going to win over many people with this placement, but I just didn’t love The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). It’s not a bad movie, not by a long shot, and I almost want to put it higher on the list purely by virtue of its sheer madcap energy and that bonkers It’s a Wonderful Life-inspired ending, complete with angels and all. I think about the joke wherein one of the characters is barely saved from falling to his death by the strength of his stitching all the time; there’s a brief flashback of his tailor offering him the extra-strength stitching option and him declining, then the tailor using the heavy-duty stuff anyway just out of appreciation for his client, then the film cuts back to him being saved. It’s the kind of joke that you used to get from The Simpsons, where there are actually four or five jokes packed into one tiny story beat. Don’t let this one’s placement on this list make you think it’s a bad movie; it’s quite good, and there’s an ocean of quality between The Ladykillers and this. Jennifer Jason Leigh is a delight here, doing a truly wonderful transatlantic accent and delivering her dialogue like she’s in His Girl Friday, where every syllable is a bullet, and her mouth is a machine gun.
16. Generally considered to be one of the duo’s lesser outings, I still think that there’s a lot of fun to be had with Intolerable Cruelty (2003). It’s an imitation of the kind of madcap comedies that the duo were already affectionately ribbing in Proxy, but deliberately playing around with the fact that those films, which largely predate no-fault divorce options and had to skirt around the Hays Code. Instead of innocent trysts, the escalation of hostilities (and flirtation) between divorce law superstar George Clooney and predatory marry-and-dump gold-digger Catherine Zeta-Jones is a battle of wits and will while also being sweet and romantic to watch, as one never knows who’s pulling the wool over whose eyes at any given moment and who’s genuinely fallen for whom from minute to minute. It’s not stellar, but it’s still fun, and the most likely to come on TNT some afternoon when you’re visiting your parents, so be on the lookout.
15. There’s something truly arresting about The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). A noir shot in black and white, the film stars Billy Bob Thornton as Ed Crane, a barber working in his brother-in-law’s shop. He suspects his wife (Frances McDormand) is having an affair with her boss (James Gandolfini), so when he gets the opportunity to invest money with a man named Tolliver (Jon Polite), he blackmails Gandolfini’s character and gets the money, only for the man to find and kill Toliver. When Gandolfini confronts Thornton, the two struggle and Gandolfini is killed, and McDormand is blamed, both for the death and the apparent embezzlement. And then things just keep getting worse. It’s a tragedy in slow motion, the kind of story that the Coens tell over and over again, in which some amount of money is stolen or embezzled, and the everyman characters that we have met, plagued by problems as small and simple as mere ennui or as vast and deadly as owed money to organized crime, make bad choices that just make things worse and worse. It’s in their work going back as far as their first film, Blood Simple, and has carried over into works directly (like the FX series Fargo) and indirectly (like this year’s Last Stop in Yuma County) inspired by them. It’s fun to see it played out here in simple period piece monochrome, a great throwback that’s better than it has any right to be.
14. Speaking of Blood Simple (1984), in this first feature outing, the brothers knocked it out of the park. Featuring the debut of Frances McDormand, who would become a longtime collaborator of the pair (and Joel’s wife), the film follows the tragic affair between Abby (McDormand) and Ray (John Getz), who works for her husband Marty (Dan Hedaya). When Marty finds out, he hires a P.I. named Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) to kill the two of them. Visser double-crosses them all, but in doing so, he leaves behind evidence that could implicate him in Marty’s death, but Ray believes Abby was the one behind the killing. There’s nothing but blood and trauma from that point on, and the bros hit the ground running with their iconic aesthetics and favorite narrative devices — killing over an amount of money ($10K) that’s pretty low considering the stakes of the violence involved, rear brake lights at night, and deathly dark fields lit solely by the moon, where a silhouette of a man digs a grave. It’s only so low because they would go on to do this many more times, perfecting it with each incarnation; while this one rises to greatness, it doesn’t surpass it.
13. There was a time in my life when The Big Lebowski (1998) was my favorite movie. I had the poster in my dorm room, I almost wore out the DVD, I even recognized that the title of Phoebe Bridgers’ seminal album Stranger in the Alps was a reference to the edited-for-TV dialogue of the movie when it used to air on Comedy Central. (When John Goodman’s character is smashing a car with a golf club, he screams “This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass,” which made it to cable as “This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps,” perhaps the funniest dialogue replacement ever, right up there with TV Die Hard’s “Yippe-ki-yay, melon farmer.”) It’s probably the duo’s most famous movie, certainly the most quoted and the one that most people remember. Hell, while writing this, I needed to go to the store and get some rice for curry, and in the rice and beans aisle, not even an hour ago, I saw an elderly man wearing a “Lebowski 2024” shirt that read “This aggression will not stand, man.” It was a huge part of the cultural zeitgeist, and perhaps I simply watched it too many times in my youth, but I find very little about it to be as engaging as I once did. Julianne Moore is astonishing here, and I love her, and Jeff Bridges delivers a knockout performance as The Dude, but I just don’t have the strong feelings about this one that I used to. Maybe it was watching it go completely mainstream for too long, but it no longer has the place in my heart that it used to. It’s still wonderful, though, it just gets an outsized portion of critical attention within the brothers’ oeuvre.
12. I love an anthology film, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) fires on all cylinders (or in every chamber, as the western-themed shorts may require) for me. The tales within range from the jaunty title segment, which features frequent Coen collaborator Tim Blake Nelson as the fastest draw in the west, a singing cowboy whose preternatural luck is bound to run out sometime since “you can’t be top dog forever,” to a thoughtful character study (“All Gold Canyon”) about a prospector who refuses to give up, to a couple of beautifully dreary stories about a group of people in a stagecoach that may be bound for eternity and a traveling entertainer who is willing to shortsightedly “trade” his longtime companion and friend for the next most interesting thing in order to suit the public’s changing tastes (“The Mortal Remains” and “Meal Ticket,” respectively). My favorite segment, however, is “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” a perfectly depressing story about a woman who loses her brother on a wagon train and has no choice but to continue on, finding love with a rustler who offers to marry her and start a farm out west when their destination is reached. Everything seems like it’ll turn out all right for her in the end, until she, well, gets rattled. I usually find westerns to be incredibly boring, something that Brandon and I share in common, so much so that I’ve never even gone back and watched all of the “cowboy” episodes of my favorite TV show, The Twilight Zone, but this one really worked for me, especially as some of these segments are “spooky” or mysterious in the vein of Zone while also featuring that trademark Coen wit.
11. It’s reductivist, but I sometimes think that there are two kinds of Coen Brothers movies: No Country for Old Men movies and Burn After Reading (2008) movies. The former includes things like Miller’s Crossing and the aforementioned Blood Simple—engrossing variations on/experiments in noir filmmaking that are (mostly) non-comedic outings about the pervasiveness of evil, greed, and violence. The latter includes movies that are straightforward comedies, although admittedly zany, madcap ones, like Lebowski and Hail, Caesar!. Burn After Reading is such a fun little exercise in making a “small” movie after the epic scope of No Country, which premiered only the year before. No expensive night shooting in the desert, no costly period piece-accommodating locations and vehicles, and a full half hour shorter, this is a short, swiftly moving story of falling dominoes with—explicitly—no point. Dim-witted personal trainer Chad (Brad Pitt) and his colleague, the down-on-herself Linda (Frances McDormand) come into possession of the banal memoirs of an alcoholic former CIA analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovitch), as a result of his wife Katie (Tilda Swinton)’s copying of his files in preparation for divorce. Linda and Chad first try to blackmail Cox, thinking that they have happened upon state secrets, then attempt to sell the memoirs to the Russians when this fails, which brings them tangentially into contact with hound dog U.S. Marshal Harry (George Clooney). There’s still some (hilarious) violence, and some grue that’s probably not as funny to everyone as it is to me. When it’s over, you won’t have to question the nature of man or whether greed is the downfall of all mankind, you’ll just remember that George Clooney engineers and builds a sex machine that’s the size of a stationary bike; what more could you possibly ask for?
10. One of the recurring motifs in a lot of the brothers’ body of work is that of the missing money, the ransom or loot that becomes the central motivating factor in every character’s choices. It’s in both their comedies (Hail, Caesar!, Ladykillers, Lebowski) and their noirs (No Country, Blood Simple, The Man Who Wasn’t There). Most often, we see our central characters taken down by their greed, and their willingness to commit acts of savagery as they grow more and more desperate. In Miller’s Crossing (1990), this isn’t the tragic flaw of our lead, but of a supporting character, Bernie (John Turturro). See, Bernie’s the brother of Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), the moll of local crime boss Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney) who’s also carrying on an affair with O’Bannon’s prime enforcer, Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne). Tom is our main character here, but it’s Bernie’s greed that has a far-reaching effect on everyone else around him. Despite the fact that Bernie is his lady’s brother, Leo orders Tom to kill him. When Bernie pleads for mercy, however, Tom shoots his gun into the ground and lets the other man go, like the huntsman sparing Snow White. Bernie can’t stay away for long, however, and when he comes back around and starts to stir up trouble, including trying to blackmail his would-be killer, it comes back to bite him. There are some moments of comic levity here (Leo O’Bannon’s shooting spree following an ill-advised attack on his home stands out, as does the scene where Jon Polito’s Caspar takes over the police and starts clearing house), but overall, this one stands out as one of the best Coen dramas, with a downer ending that rivals Inside Llewyn Davis’s, even if it can’t touch the darkness of No Country.
9. I mentioned before when talking about Buster Scruggs that I am not a fan of westerns. Even the great spaghetti westerns of the past have a lot of bias to overcome in order for me to like them. But I was immediately won over by True Grit (2010), a remake of the 1969 John Wayne vehicle, this time with a grizzled, mush-mouthed Jeff Bridges in the Rooster Cogburn role. As in the original, a young girl hires Cogburn, a deputy U.S. Marshall, to help her track down her father’s killer, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). At the same time, Chaney is being pursued by Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), for the murder of a state senator. If we’re following the noir/madcap dichotomy outlined above, then Buster Scruggs is their western variant on the latter and Grit is their western variant on the former, and it works. Brolin’s Chaney is a truly disturbing monster; he’s no Anton Chigurh, but he has no qualms about murdering a child for no reason other than spite. As the girl with true grit, Mattie Ross, Hailee Steinfeld gives a star-making performance, and it’s a treat to see. Bridges and Damon have great chemistry, as do Steinfeld and Bridges (look, it’s Jeff Bridges; everyone has chemistry with him), and there are powerhouse performances all around. A western for people who hate westerns.
8. If there’s anything I usually hate more than I hate westerns, it’s a musical without Muppets (I love everything with Muppets in it, even and perhaps especially musicals). I’ve come around over the years from being a pure hater of the genre to having a few nontraditional ones that I really like (like London Road, Top Secret!, and Baahubali), and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) also has a place on that list (in fact, I love both Coen musicals, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves). Forsaking most of their normal collaborators, this one features a cast of mostly younger performers, some of whom were only a few years away from major star vehicles, and focuses on a kind of person that I think all of us have known at some point in our lives. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaacs) is a musician, a truly talented once-in-a-generation voice (literally and narratively), but one whose Shakespearian character flaw is his shortsightedness. Just like the people around him, the audience sympathizes with him because of the tragic loss of his musical partner, without whom he seems lost, while also bearing silent, frustrated witness as he throws away every opportunity that comes his way. He impulsively sleeps with his friend’s wife, who ends up pregnant (although it’s unclear if the child is his), he turns down a position as a member of a trio when offered the chance at a real, longterm, lucrative option, and he takes a quick payout of $200 for a session performance that, had he accepted royalties instead, would have set him up for life. He can’t even go back to the merchant marines since his license was in a box of his things that his sister kept, which he impulsively told her to toss out. The fact that the film both begins and ends with the same scene, in which Llewyn is beaten in an alley by a man with a grudge, means that if you started the movie again the moment that it ended, you’d be right back where you left off, in an endless loop of Llewyn Davis getting the shit kicked out of him, literally and figuratively. And it’s all set to a phenomenal folksy score, which includes a hauntingly beautiful cover of the “500 Miles” as sung by Isaacs, Carey Mulligan, and Justin Timberlake. Truly one of the greats.
7. One of the duo’s most underrated films, Hail, Caesar! (2016) is a riot. I don’t know why people don’t love this one more, or why it doesn’t get more love. Was the country just not in a place where they wanted this in 2016? Did everyone think it was uncool to love a movie in which Channing Tatum dances with his clothes on? Did the “would that it were” scene not work for most people? This is a movie in which Tilda Swinton plays twin gossip columnists who work for rival newspapers. I’d watch a movie that was just that, and here it’s only one of a million hilarious gags. The film centers on a fictional version of real-life studio “fixer” Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), who covers up the various scandals that Capitol Pictures’ retained stars get into, like figuring out how an unmarried actress can arrange to adopt her own child via a series of legal loopholes, thereby keeping the child and her image. Hollywood leading man Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) is kidnapped from the set of a Ben-Hur-esque epic by communists, and Mannix gets the ransom note. Elsewhere on the lot, young singing cowboy Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), whose specialties as an actor include lasso and guitar but do not include acting, has been cast in a comedy of manners (think Lady Windermere’s Fan), in which he is unable to deliver the arch, aristocratic lines required because of his drawl. In the midst of all this, Scarlett Johanson does a full synchronized swim routine, Channing Tatum does a full cheeky, kinda horny, Gene Kelly-style musical number, Ralph Fiennes tries to teach an ingénue hick to enunciate, and in case you forgot, identical gossip columnists who are both suspicious of Whitlock’s sudden disappearance. This movie is so much fun, and I really wish it had gotten the attention and love it deserved and the time, and still does.
6. The film company that Mannix works for in Hail is, as noted above, Capitol Pictures, a fake studio created originally for Barton Fink (1991), another Hollywood-set period piece, albeit one that takes place ten years prior to Hail, in 1941. Experiencing some writer’s block while crafting Miller’s Crossing, the brothers wrote that into a side project, about screenwriter Barton Fink (John Turturro), who takes a job at Capitol, and the neighbor with whom he shares a wall at the rundown Hotel Earle, insurance salesman Charlie Meadows (John Goodman). It’s a very confessional movie, as Fink, despite declaring his affinity for and connection to the common man, seems to be only able to create heady works that most people find too pretentious to connect with. For years before seeing this one, I saw a clip in which it was discussed by some film folk and which featured a scene from near the end in which John Goodman stood, furious, in the middle of a hotel as it burned; the talking heads who were deliberating about the movie talked about its purgatorial feel, which I took to mean that there was a larger metaphysical narrative than there really is, although Fink is a man who cannot go home and who is trapped in a place that seems hellish to him, unable to get out of his contract until he completes his Faustian bargain, the terms of which he may never be able to satisfy. It’s all a great deal of anxious, tense fun, and this is one of my favorite performances from John Mahoney, who plays a Faulknerian archetype named Bill Mayhew, a former novelist who has been reduced to writing movies (derogatory), a perfect foil for Fink, who has been elevated from playwright to screenwriter (complimentary).
5. Among all of the películas de hermanos (I’m sick of typing “brothers,” sue me), there’s one that stands directly in the middle of their dichotomy with a solid foot in both. Fargo (1996) is a dark, mean movie about little people with meaningless lives doing harm to one another over petty, trivial things. A movie in which being able to commit cold blooded murder doesn’t mean you can’t also be sniveling or pathetic. But Fargo is also about gentleness, comfort, and quiet dignity. A car salesman (William H. Macy) who’s racked up a significant amount of debt meets with two small-time criminals (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to have them fake-kidnap his wife without her knowledge, so that his wealthy father-in-law will pay a ransom that they will divvy up amongst themselves. When an unsuspecting state trooper is killed by the more psychotic of the two kidnappers, rural police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) begins an investigation into his slaying. Gunderson, who had heretofore never dealt with a crime of this severity, is a sweet woman who one at first assumes will not be up to the challenge of dealing with a criminal element of such monstrous evil. Instead, her charming, folksy naivete and belief in fundamental and foundational good remains unshaken despite staring into the abyss even as her ideas about human nature and the ways that people can hurt one another over something so low and crass as money are expanded. Buscemi and Macy are amazing as two sides of the same coin: desperate, nebbish, powerless rodents who constantly bite off more than they can chew; Stormare’s performance is palpably evil, like you’re staring into a man possessed by nothing more than pure, primordial hatred. But McDormand is the star here, and it’s no wonder that this was the performance that made her both an Oscar winner and a household name. It’s the perfect synergy of the two different Janus heads of the Coen brand: both deeply nihilistic in its examination of man’s inhumanity while also terrifically funny in its occasional slapstick and madcap energy. You’ll never laugh harder at a woman experiencing a terrifying home invasion.
4. There are parables inside of parables in A Serious Man (2009). Michael Stuhlbarg plays physics professor Larry Gopnik, whose life is in the process of falling apart. His son hasn’t even had his bar mitzvah yet, but he’s already smoking pot, and worse, buying it on credit. His daughter, from whom his son is stealing the money to support his habit, has a life full of hair washing and sock hops, and she’s not exercising a single brain cell more than is needed for those two activities. His brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), is homeless and staying with the family, while also working on a kabbalistic, “mathematical” map of the universe and all the probability thereof. One of his students refuses to accept his grade on the basis that it will cost him his scholarship, and when said student attempts to bribe him and Larry tries to return the money to the boy’s father, he’s told that the latter will sue the former for libel if he speaks out about the bribery attempt, or if he keeps the money without changing the grade, forcing him into an impossible situation. Perhaps worst of all, his wife demands that he provide her with a ghet, which will allow her to marry her lover, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). It’s the Book of Job, for modern (or mid-century modern, as the case may be) times. Despite having done nothing wrong (he doesn’t even covet his neighbor’s wife until much later in the film), Larry is subject to a plague of issues that disrupt his life and threaten to take away everything. Over the course of the film, he visits three different rabbis of increasing uselessness (the first merely tells him to work on changing his perspective on things while the last is clearly senile and quoting the lyrics to “Somebody to Love”); the second tells him a story about a dentist who discovers Hebrew inscription on the inside of a patient’s teeth, a parable that neither the character nor the film elucidates, and with which both we and Larry must now grapple. The film manages to keep Larry sympathetic without being pathetic, and when we laugh, we’re never laughing at him, even when he starts to make bad decisions further down the line. An overlooked classic in their canon, in my opinion.
3. The summer that I was fourteen, I must have watched O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000) thirty times. It was everywhere in my community; everybody’s mom had the soundtrack in the CD slot of her Ford Explorer, everybody’s dad was doing their impressions of George Clooney as Ulysses Everitt McGill, the Soggy Bottom Boys were all over the radio, and I had the movie on VHS, which I would start from the beginning again whenever it ended, sometimes twice a day. I know it backwards and forwards; I know it by heart. In grad school, I spit out a paper on its Odysseyan themes while drunk and in three hours, and my professor read from it to the class. I cannot see a can of pomade without thinking of “I’m a Dapper Dan man, dammit!”, and I think about the scene in which blind record producer Stephen Root is hoodwinked every time I hear the word “accompaniment.” This movie lives and breathes inside of me. I use the phrase “in the highways and in the hedges” in my own writing enough that I should pay royalties for it, and there are instructions in my final wishes to ensure that Alison Krauss is played at my funeral. “We thought you was a toad” is one of the finest lines in American cinema history to me. I don’t think I could love it more than I already do. McGill, along with Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) escape from a chain gang so that they can retrieve a treasure that McGill squirreled away on his family farm, on land that is set to be flooded to make a lake. McGill’s ultimate goal, however, is to reunite with his wife Penny (Holly Hunter)—get it?—and win her back. Along the way they run afoul of a one-eyed highwaymen (the cyclops), a group of Baptists (lotus eaters), a trio of mournfully singing women who drink them under the table and rob them (sirens), and also the KKK (your guess is as good as mine). And it’s a bluegrass/folk musical! One of the most beautiful movies in their oeuvre, O Brother is a top tier film in anyone’s canon.
2. What is there that’s left to say about No Country for Old Men (2007) that hasn’t already been said? It achieved a level of critical success that none of the Coens’ other movies could hope to accomplish, winning half of the eight Oscar nominations it received, three of the nine BAFTA categories in which it was nominated, three of five nominated Critics’ Choice awards, was nominated for the Palme d’Or, got an outstanding achievement award from the DGA, and was nominated for 110 film awards all in all, with a 63.6% success rate. And it is an outstanding achievement, as a novel adaptation, as a film in its own right, and as a star-making vehicle for Javier Bardem, whose portrayal of Anton Chigurh has catapulted the character to a level of household recognition as one of cinema’s ultimate, infamous villains alongside Darth Vader, Dracula, Hannibal Lector, Jack Torrance, and the Wicked Witch of the West. It’s eerie, and quiet, and is the ultimate distillation of the Coen abstract that evil is an unstoppable force, that nostalgia for a less brutal and dark time is a fallacy because humankind and its darkness are inextricable from one another and have been since we crawled up out of the murk, but although we are fallible, warmth and light are still within reach. Tommy Lee Jones was born to play this role, grizzled sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who, like Marge Gunderson before him, gets caught up in a crime that’s outside of his frame of reference. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) comes upon the remains of a massacre while out hunting, stumbling across the scene of a drug deal gone wrong, wherein everyone is dead but one suffering man. Nearby, he finds a briefcase full of money, which he takes with him; hours later, in the night, his conscience gets the better of him, and he returns with water for the survivor, only to discover that not only is he too late, but he’s now been seen at the scene by dangerous men. Chigurh, and unrepentant sociopath, is tasked with tracking down the money, while Moss does everything in his power to stay one step ahead, with Bell on the trail of both of them. Moss is clever enough that there’s genuine suspense over whether he’ll manage to get the better of Chigurh, while Bell puzzles out the latter’s M.O. It’s tense, it’s beautiful, it’s truly one of the greats.
1. There’s only one movie left that it could be, right? Fun fact: when I was a senior in high school, a DVD of Raising Arizona (1987) was a raffle prize for a fundraiser that one of the student organizations was holding. I bought a ticket solely for this reason, and I won that DVD because we were meant to be together. In only their second feature, Joel and Ethan crafted one of the greatest comedies of all time. Even if they never did anything after Arizona, there’s an Evil Dead-esque steadicam P.O.V. oner in this movie that comes up a driveway, across a yard, climbs a ladder, enters a window, and almost goes down a screaming woman’s throat that would solidify and cement them as filmmaking greats for all time. The story of eternally recidivist convenience store robber H.I. (Nicolas Cage) and his unlikely but perfect romantic match in police officer “Ed” (Holly Hunter), Raising Arizona follows their attempts to start a family despite Ed’s sterility preventing them from having a baby and H.I.’s criminal record preventing them from adopting. When wealthy unfinished furniture magnate Nathan Arizona idly jokes to the news media that his wife’s recent birthing of five quintuplets means that they almost have more kids than they can handle, the two end up kidnapping one of the babies to raise as their own. Assorted troubles arise in the form of H.I. losing his job after taking offense to his boss’s suggestion that the two of them “swing” with him and his wife, the breakout of H.I.’s friends (John Goodman and William Forsythe) from a nearby penitentiary and their subsequent extended stay at H.I. and Ed’s place, and the appearance of a seemingly demonic bounty hunter (even Chigurh doesn’t grenade bunny rabbits or cause flowers to burst into flames with his mere presence) who’s tracking the baby for the Arizonas. I won’t argue that No Country is a “better” movie, whatever that might mean to you, dear reader, but I could never rank it above Raising Arizona in my heart. It wouldn’t be honest; it wouldn’t be true. Cage, Hunter, and Goodman are a perfect trifecta of magic here, real lightning in a bottle stuff. I’m going to be thinking of this movie until my dying breath.
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