mark boomer redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman vs. Robin (2015)

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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. 

In this follow-up to Son of Batman, the titular Batman and son butt heads over (sigh) the use of deadly force. It’s more complicated than that this time around, luckily, but that’s once again the dead horse we’re beating, still. It was hard to get my enthusiasm up for this one, since it not only features Damian, whom I’m mostly apathetic about, but also introduces the Court of Owls, a Gotham secret society introduced shortly after I stopped reading comics and which I don’t find particularly interesting. This ended up being a bit more interesting than expected, though, and helped me push through. 

The film opens with Batman (Jason O’Mara) following Robin/Damian (Stuart Allen) to the hideout of the evil Dollmaker (Weird Al(!)), where the latter has traced a series of kidnappings. The ten-year-old Boy Wonder has impulsively gone ahead and forced Batman to follow him instead of going together. By the time he catches up, he starts freeing the children while his son and sidekick pursues Dollmaker, leaving an opportunity for the mysterious Talon (Jeremy Sisto) to introduce himself (mysteriously, of course), give Damian a little speech about how murder is sometimes necessary, and then kill Dollmaker, leaving the scene so that it appears Damian did it. Bruce is quick to believe that this is the case, even if Alfred (David McCallum) and Dick/Nightwing (Sean Maher) are more willing to believe the boy. Alfred, rather irresponsibly, fiddles with the home security system to allow Robin the chance to go roaming about the city at night—remember, trained assassin or not, he is ten—which allows Talon to continue to try and lure the kid to the dark side. For his part, Bruce isn’t doing such a hot job at being a father, given that he hasn’t even mentioned Damian to the woman that he’s currently dating, Samantha (Grey DeLisle), let alone introduced them, and he’s having a hard time adjusting to suddenly being a father. Luckily, this leads easily into flashbacks to his own childhood, including his hearing about a secret society known as “the Court of Owls” that rule Gotham from the shadows, and his father’s gentle bedtime promises that there was no such thing. In the present, it’s clear that they do, and that they’re pulling some strings; in fact, their Grandmaster is unwittingly working away at him from two angles, as the Court is attempting to flush out Batman before he can end their criminal activities and court (no pun intended) Bruce Wayne into joining their ranks after his father had rejected them decades before. Talon is their enforcer, and his loyalty is based upon their promise to make him into one of their immortal soldiers (with the caveat that they haven’t really perfected the process, and it seems to always be a little bit of a failure). 

The fight scenes in this one are pretty good, which is always true, but there’s a little more variety in this outing. There’s sparring earlier on between Damian and other characters, and it’s fine and all, but there’s a clear difference in the body language of the characters later in the film when Damian has gone rogue. In his first fight with Batman, it’s clear that Bruce is just trying to let his son tire himself out with his spin kicks and acrobatics so that he doesn’t actually have to punch his child in the face, but eventually realizes he’s going to have to, and that was sufficiently dynamic visually that it’s worth noting upon. The big invasion of Wayne Manor by the Court’s “Owls” made for a satisfactory climactic set piece, albeit I’m very bored with Batmechs, I can tell you that much. What really makes this one stand out is Bruce getting dosed with hallucinogenic gas; he basically has a bad acid trip in which he foresees Damian becoming a killer, wearing the cape and cowl, and that makes him want to be a better father. In his hallucination, the child version of himself/Damian (their similarity to one another having previously been underscored by using the same character model with different eye colors in the earlier film is carried over into this one) tells him that, in his grief, he had allowed himself to become little better than the “dark forces” that killed his parents, and that his unwillingness to listen to his son would cause Damian to become something even worse. 

These movies are rarely this psychologically mature or complex, so I like that what drives the emotional story for the two main adult characters here, Talon and Bruce, is what each of them is projecting about themselves onto Damian. You know Batman’s backstory, and Talon’s is a kind of dark mirror of both Bruce’s and Damian’s. An orphan like Bruce, Talon was taken in by a thief who taught him how the finer points of burglary in a kind of criminal reflection of Bruce’s mentorship of Dick and Damian, but Talon was mercilessly beaten for his failures. This led to him becoming a vigilante as an adult as well, but under the guidance of the Court of Owls, his activity always has the flavor of violent vengeance, while Bruce (ostensibly) values justice over revenge. Bruce hallucinates Damian as a mass-murderer on an unimaginable scale because he fears this darkness in himself. Talon, for his part, sees a great deal of himself in Damian, and perhaps also sees the possibility of making up for what was done to him, turning the boy into a killer like himself but also making sure that the generational abusive trauma stops with him, as twisted as that might be. When it becomes the best option for the Court’s end goals to kill Damian, Talon ultimately refuses, looking into the boy’s face and seeing his own, just as Bruce had, and being unwilling to continue the cycle of violence, revolting against the Court instead. The ultimate conflict comes down to two different men projecting their traumas onto a little boy, and what they do when that trigger is brushed. It’s thoughtful, and elevates this one a little bit over some others in this franchise. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ace in the Hole (1951)

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Within the first five minutes of Ace in the Hole, Kirk Douglas does one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen: hitting the carriage return button on a typewriter and while holding a match to the machine, igniting it so that he can light his cigarette. It’s also the last thing he does before we find out what kind of man he really is, and our respect for him is going to vary a lot over the next hour and a half. Douglas is Charles Tatum, a newspaperman extraordinaire, who’s worked in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and every other major news center in the U.S., and he’s lost his job in every one because he brings about libel suits, gets involved with the publisher’s wife, or gets caught drinking “out of season.” He tells all this to Jacob Q. Boot (Porter Hall), the editor, publisher, and owner of the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin, when he finds himself stranded in New Mexico. Boot, a man who is notably wearing both belt and suspenders, tells him that he’s also the town lawyer and edits every word before printing, that Mrs. Boot is a grandmother thrice over who would be flattered to be on the receiving end of Tatum’s attention, but that he won’t tolerate any liquor on the premises. Tatum sees this as an opportunity to start small and transition back to the big leagues, but after a year of dull news and a lack of anything exciting, he’s grown restless. 

He and the paper’s young photographer Herbie Cook (Robert Arthur) are sent on a trip to cover a rattlesnake hunt, but when they stop for gas in a place called Escudero, they find the station and its attached diner empty, save for a grieving older woman who does not greet or notice them. Realizing that there’s some ruckus going on behind the place at some nearby caverns, they start to drive up and come upon Lorraine Minosa (Jan Sterling), who tells them that her husband has been caught in a cave-in while exploring some “Indian” caves (the film never identifies the tribe other than a reference to the Minosa’s cafe selling Navajo blankets, and since Escudero doesn’t seem to be a real place, we don’t even have a region that would allow us to determine the tribe from a territory map). They drive up to the mouth of the cave and Tatum talks his way past the deputy and, given blankets and coffee by the buried man’s father, enters the cave, where he meets Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) and, turning on the charm, convinces the man to trust him. 

Intending to capitalize on the potential human-interest story, Tatum sets up shop in the Minosa’s motel/gas station/cafe and gets to work, taking the story of a veteran trapped in a cave-in and pairing that with the sensationalist story that he may have been the victim of vengeance from “Indian spirits” due to his treasure hunting in the appropriately ominously named “Mountain of the Seven Vultures.” When he discovers Lorraine preparing to leave the next morning with the eleven dollars she takes from the till and convinces her to stay, at first attempting to appeal to her wifely love for her husband and, when this tack doesn’t work, promises that she’ll find herself rich enough to take off with a lot more than eleven dollars if she sticks around and plays along. Tatum manipulates all involved, as he charms the sheriff (Ray Teal) as well, promising him re-election as he will play the part of the local hero coordinating activities; the sheriff, in turn, manipulates the engineer in charge of getting the man out to switch from his initial plan of putting in supporting struts to secure the passageway and getting Leo out in about a day to a more involved, visually striking plan to drill down through the mountain to get him out, which will stretch the operations out to five to seven days. The whole thing turns into a media circus — literally at one point, as the number of people drawn in by the spectacle starts to enter quadruple digits and the carnival is brought in. As Tatum becomes more energized and starts getting calls from the big city papers again, he continues to gamble with Leo’s life (hence the title) as he tries to get back on top. 

This is a whip smart movie with fast, witty dialogue, so sharp that it could shave your chin. Douglas is phenomenal, bigger than life, so much louder and more boisterous than everyone around him that you can see clearly that it’s not just his ability to read people and offer them exactly what they want; it’s his pure charisma and the way that he takes up all the air in the room. Sterling’s performance, however, is the standout to me. You’d think it would be impossible to make us like a woman who’s willing to use her husband’s physical entrapment as an excuse to escape, but she so effectively captures the boredom and tiredness of being trapped in a desert nowhere. When Tatum invokes her need to repay her husband for marrying her and giving her a life, she tells that him that she was fooled by his promise that he owned sixty acres and “a big business,” with the acres amounting to useless sand and the business being a place where she “sell[s] eight hamburgers a week and a case of soda pop” while Leo continues to treasure hunt in a clearly unsafe cave. She’s been repaying him for five years, she says, and she’s ready to get out; she’s vain and apathetic about her husband’s situation, but she’s also got a point. 

She’s among the few people who can give Tatum a run for his money in the sass department, including an early defining character moment when he asks if they can put him up for the night and she responds with “Sixty beautiful rooms at the Escudero Ritz. Which will it be, ocean view or mountain view?” Tatum’s editor Boot can also go toe-to-toe with him on occasion, as evidenced by him pulling a nickel out of his pocket and handing it over to Tatum when they first meet and Tatum negs the Sun-Bulletin by way of leading up to the offering of his services. Perhaps most fun, however, is the one-scene appearance of Richard Gaines as Nagel, a fiery, tempestuous New York editor who makes J.K. Simmons’s J. Jonah Jameson look like a bored Brian Williams. The people who can’t compete with him generally fall under his spell. The sheriff, for his part, is utterly guileless in his corruption and ability to be manipulated and goes so far as to have “Re-Elect Gus Krentz for Sheriff” painted on the side of the mountain one night, which is so comically odious that you almost have to respect him. He’s not as smooth or as clever as Lorraine, but he is devious, and willing to twist any arm that he can get his hands on, if it puts a penny in his pocket. 

The thing about gambling is that you can only ride a lucky deal for so long, and if you keep on going and keep on pushing, your luck will eventually run out. Tatum’s right about the cynical nature of the public—eighty-four people trapped in a mine is not as newsworthy as one man—but he’s also haunted by the same flaws that cast him out of the metropoles and into the desert in the first place, including his insistence that he doesn’t “make things happen, [he only] write[s] about them.” By the time he starts drinking again, he’s already lost his way completely, not that he was ever the most respectable member of the fourth estate. It’s not merely enough that he’s coercing reality into a narrative that he can sell, it’s that he’s also pushing the limit of Leo’s endurance, as he starts to develop pneumonia due to being unable to move for days, and he’s corrupting sweet Herbie all the while. 

There’s really only one way this could all end, but I won’t give it away, as this is one that should be experienced in its entirety. And if you know the Hays Code, you know that everyone here has to be punished for their sins, although how that plays out is still a fantastic watch, and this has become my new favorite Douglas performance. The film is marred by some casual racism; the widespread use of the blanket term “Indian” is definitely a product of a different time, and it’s worsened by Tatum’s treatment of a Native American employee of the Sun-Bulletin, whom he first greets with “How” and later calls “Geronimo.” Still, there’s a reason that this one was rediscovered after many years being treated as a failure. Openly critical of both the police and media, it was an embarrassment to the studio, only becoming more widely known since its 2007 Criterion release. It’s not perfect, but it is great. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League – Throne of Atlantis (2015)

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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. 

It’s been a bit since our heroes first met and all of that during Justice League: War, and they’re not exactly keeping in touch. When a U.S. submarine carrying nuclear warheads is sunk, Cyborg is tasked with investigating, and as he examines the wreckage, he uncovers that the nukes have been stolen, before he is attacked by unseen enemies. Back at headquarters, he manages to get the team to assemble to watch a holographic recreation of his investigation, which reveals the form of his assailants; Wonder Woman recognizes them as the sea-dwelling Atlanteans. Elsewhere, new character Arthur Curry is drinking his grief over his recently deceased father at a seaside bar and expositing about his woes to a lobster in a tank. When said crustacean is selected to be another patron’s dinner, this escalates to an altercation in which Arthur finds himself squaring off against four other men, and emerging victorious – even having an attempted stabbing fail as the blade breaks in his attacker’s hand. This is reported to Queen Atlanna, the widowed ruler of Atlantis and Arthur’s mother, who sends her lieutenant Mera to bring Arthur home. As the child of two worlds—Atlantis and the surface—she hopes that his ascension to the throne will build a bridge of peaceful coexistence. Unfortunately, her younger son Orm has his sights set on becoming king, and he’s willing to fly as many false flags as needed (and commit matricide) to get there. 

After a little bit of a rocky start, this franchise is operating like a well-oiled machine at this point: functional and reliable. And when we’re talking about machinery, that’s what we’re hoping for: that our car starts when we’re ready to go somewhere, that our coffee mugs and spoons come out of the dishwasher free of debris, that our oscillating fans both fan and oscillate. We don’t really pay attention to those things until the car doesn’t start, your drinking glasses have crud on them, or you wake up in the middle of the night and you’ve sweat through your pillow (again). There’s nothing bad to say about Throne of Atlantis, but I’m trying to think of adjectives other than “serviceable” and “adequate.” I didn’t see the live-action Aquaman (I have my limits), but I’m positive it’s better than that – no offense to Nicole Kidman, who I’m sure had a bit of fun and could hardly be bothered to care about the film’s reception in this here swamp.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing that stands out. Mera’s “hard water” powerset is fun and is used in a lot of fun ways, and her slaying of swathes of enemy combatants and sea monsters of approximate sapience is fun to watch, especially given how grisly it is. There’s a Lovecraftian monster down in the deeps that our heroes have to fight; that’s pretty neat. Arthur even gets to throw in a declaration of “Outrageous,” which was the catchphrase of Aquaman in The Brave and the Bold, the characterization that, alongside his appearances on Justice League, credited with “saving” the character from the sillier version of him that appeared in Superfriends and became the primary image of him in pop culture. If you cared about that fact, you would probably already know it, but heaven help me if I don’t mention it. The humor mostly lands, especially with regards to Hal Jordan’s ongoing rivalry with Batman; in this one, he responds to the Caped Crusader’s delay in responding to a memo by going straight to Gotham and helping him take down the goons he’s tailing, except now he’s ruined the fifth step in a ten step investigation with his showboating. These little character touches are what are most pleasant about these films overall, and is the thing that most makes them feel worthwhile.

This one’s good. It’s not going to be anybody’s favorite (other than dyed-in-the-wool Aquafans), but it’s violent, colorful, funny, and seventy-two minutes long. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Mulholland Drive (2001)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss David Lynch’s Hollywood psych thriller Mulholland Drive (2001).

00:00 Welcome

04:05 Dodgeball (2004)
08:57 My Lucky Stars (1985)
12:43 The Lair of the White Worm (1988)
15:14 Notorious (1946)
17:28 Ace in the Hole (1951)
24:52 Monkey Man (2024)
28:01 The Sweet East (2024)
35:58 Justice League vs Teen Titans (2016)
41:05 Mars Express (2024)
49:26 She is Conann (2024)

56:40 Mulholland Drive (2001)

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

– The Podcast Crew

The Sweet East (2024)

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I’m not really sure how to feel about The Sweet East. There’s a neat little Through the Looking Glass theme that’s threaded throughout that I really enjoy (even when it gets the occasional wire-crossed with Adventures in Wonderland, like most Alice-homaging media does), Talia Ryder gives a magnetic performance amongst a half dozen fully realized supporting roles, and it even manages to get a little surreal on occasion despite being shot with documentary-evoking post-production that effectively contributes to its sense of realism. But I’m not sure if I liked it, or if it was good. This is one that’s best discussed with a plot summary, so if you don’t want to get spoiled, skip ahead to the paragraph that begins “What I straightforwardly love . . .”

Lillian (Ryder) is on a high school field trip to Washington D.C. While out with the group, which includes a guy that she hooked up with and his girlfriend, she is in the bathroom when the very place she is in is attacked by a gun-wielding QAnon lunatic who’s pulling his own Pizzagate. A platinum-haired punk with greatly gauged ears (Earl Cave, bad seed of Nick Cave) pulls her back into the bathroom and, in attempting to get out through the ceiling, discovers that the bathroom’s mirror conceals a secret passage through which they escape through a series of tunnels, avoiding the occasional teddy bear and tricycle. She goes with the punk, named Caleb, and his friends back to their communal crust house, where he eventually shows her his dick under the pretense of showing off his piercings (of which there are too, too many, and some of which seem anatomically impossible). She smokes a bowl with a woman named Annabel who tells her about how she recently left a man because he hit her, then falls asleep. The next morning, she joins a group of a dozen or so of the punks on an expedition to a park in Trenton, where they intend to get into a physical altercation with right-wingers they have been told will be there. The place turns out to be more nature preserve than picnic ground, and the punks run their mouths so much amongst themselves that they pass by the group that they’re looking for without noticing, while Lillian (who stopped to pee) hears them nearby as soon as the punks are out of earshot. 

She wanders into what turns out to be a neo-Nazi cookout, where she immediately attracts the attention of the awkward Lawrence (Simon Rex), who makes his way over to her and introduces himself. Thinking quickly, she gives the name Annabel, and Lawrence, who turns out to be a Poe scholar, just about creams himself; she even takes Annabel’s story about fleeing an abuser, and Lawrence immediately buys her some clothes and food and gives her a place to stay in his family home, which he now occupies alone. Lawrence is a character that puzzles me, because it’s him that I’m least sure what to think of. He displays plenty of overt bigotries above and beyond his closeted Nazism, including wiping a glass of water delivered to him by a Black waitress with a napkin before touching it and using the slurs t****y and f****t conversationally and with his whole chest. He’s handsome because Simon Rex is handsome, and he’s erudite and doesn’t talk down to Lillian/Annabel, but his singular obsession with Poe and what one presumes is at least a decade of no social interaction other than delivering lectures means that he’s a one-track bore on top of being a Nazi piece of shit. Some of this is played for comedy, and some of it lands. When giving her the initial tour, he tells her that she won’t want for reading material as he gestures at shelves full of books like she’s the Belle to his Beast, but when we see any of these shelves up close, they’re full of material of the obsessive war history variety, and she ends up reading a book about the history of trains, if I recall correctly. Later, he shows Lillian the semi-biographical short Edgar Allen Poe from 1909, directed by (yes, that) D.W. Griffiths, and overexplains the way that the film abbreviates and combines various parts of Poe’s life as if this seven-minute short is his Zapruder or Godfather, which is a funny bit. Although Lillian attempts to seduce him are unsuccessful, she does convince him to let her go along with him on a trip to New York, a trip that involves him delivering a duffel bag provided by a skinhead to a rendezvous there. When left alone in their hotel, after convincing Lawrence to move them into a single hotel room so that she could have access to the duffle, finds that it’s filled with cash and absconds. 

Within minutes, Lillian is stopped on the street by two filmmakers, producer Matthew (Jeremy O. Harris) and director Molly (Ayo Edebiri), who immediately enlist her to read for a part in Molly’s film. The two of them talk more at her than to her about what the film is about than what it is, in a hyperactive sugar rush of academia/filmcrit brainworm buzzwords that, unfortunately I understood more of than I would care to admit, which is going to be really embarrassing if there turns out to have been no authorial intent involved. After a brief audition, she meets her onscreen love interest in international heartthrob Ian Reynolds (international heartthrob Jacob Elordi), and the two end up being photographed together by the tabloids. Unfortunately, this ultimately leads to the aforementioned skinhead tracking her down to the shooting location in a rural location, and when Ian’s fooling about with a prop pistol causes a shootout to occur, Lillian is rescued by Mohammad (Rish Shah), a crewmember on the film. He manages to whisk her away to a farmstead across the border in Vermont, where he hides her away in an attic room of a barn and warns her not to let her presence become known, as he has to hide her not just from the neo-Nazis but also his brother Ahmad (Mazin Akar), who is leading some kind of Islamic community, one that includes physical training, assault rifles, and—for all intents and purposes—sweatin’ to the oldies, as Lillian observes from her single window. 

Mohammad continues to keep her locked away by telling her that the killers from what has been dubbed the “Mohawk Valley Massacre” are still loose, but when she manages to get out one day when everyone is away in town, she finds a newspaper indicating that they have been in custody for some time. When the group of men living on the compound return, she manages to convince a charmed Ahmad that she is a local girl who got lost looking for her missing dog, and escapes, only to fall asleep in a snowstorm and be rescued by another long-winded man, this time a priest (Gibby Haynes) who tells her that the police are coming to take her home and then starts to lecture her about the Chapel of the Milk Grotto before she slips back into unconsciousness. She wakes up back home; all of the girls that were in her senior class are pregnant, and people have adjusted to her return, but then her entire family is shocked when the television shows that an apparent terrorist bombing has occurred at the football stadium that was hosting the game they were watching. Who did it isn’t important—the crust conclave, the Trenton neo-Nazis, Ahmad’s group, or even someone completely unrelated—at this point, Lillian has seen a great deal of the east, and the only unifying factor in all of the groups that she has met is that they are all frustrated with the status quo, and ready to do violence. She walks away from the family as they gather to watch in horror, passing in front of a flag with forty-eight stars as we head into the credits. 

What I straightforwardly love about this one is the fairy tale narrative of it. Caleb the white haired punk with the noteworthily droopy ears is our White Rabbit, leading Alice behind the looking glass (even though he is a Wonderland character, you rarely get Alice without him regardless of which work is being adapted); Molly and Matt are the film’s equivalents of Tweedledee and Tweedledum, whose language clearly shares the same words as Lillian/Alice’s but are nonetheless fitted together in ways that she is unable to follow. Some of the other elements are less obvious, as when Lillian is taken for a walk by Mohammad while the others are away and he impresses her by naming every tree that they pass, in an inversion of the scene in Looking Glass in which Alice crosses the “wood where things have no names.” One of the most subtle ones relates to rivers and streams, which in Looking Glass portray the boundaries between the rows of a chessboard in keeping with that book’s motif, and Lillian’s crossing of several rivers and other boundaries on her journey. First, we see the Potomac when she is in DC, and when Lawrence first tells her about his home, he says that it’s “right on the Delaware,” and we see the two of them boating there together. When she’s on location for the shooting of As It Churns, she’s seen sitting on a rocking chair on a dock beside a river, smoking. Later, the crossing of the state border into Vermont is important enough that this film’s segment, as displayed on the interstitial title card, is entitled “First Time in Vermont?” As a Looking Glass Easter Egg hunt, it’s a fair bit of fun. 

Lillian’s actions throughout the film are fun. In each new encounter, she uses something from the previous vignette to her advantage. First, it’s stealing Annabel’s name and backstory when she encounters Lawrence. Later, she cherry-picks an observation from one of Lawrence’s lectures about how Europe perceives America as a young nation that will eventually “evolve” into their “decadent socialism” when it matures, which she turns on the pompous Ian Reynolds when he’s giving the filmmaking group a hard time while out one night. From Molly, she learns that there’s a certain way that she purses her lips when she’s acting that reads as completely genuine, and she uses this exact face on Ahmad in order to come off as naive and dim in order to escape the compound. I’m less enthralled with Lillian as a character. This film has the misfortune of being released after the sustained success of Poor Things, a film with which it shares themes and narrative beats, which is to The Sweet East’s detriment in any comparison. Both feature a naive protagonist who goes on an odyssey of being guided by different people, mostly men, who desire her carnally, and whom she must constantly and continuously evaluate and negotiate with as they attempt to teach her something or institutionalize her into accepting their proffered marriages. 

Talia Ryder is more than up to the challenge, and she’s stunning here, but I don’t love that Lillian is so fond of the r-slur, which is a big hindrance. I don’t expect my protagonists to be perfect, but it sends mixed messages when placed alongside Lawrence’s own bigoted language, which I can only assume is there to remind us that no matter how eloquent he is, he’s an unrepentant racist whom we are supposed to disdain. (In fact, Lillian also uses the f-slur at one point, which I had almost forgotten about.) I’m also not enamored of the “both sidesing” of the various groups we see. The crust punks, who I might remind you we last see setting out to do the good work of bashing in some Nazi skulls, are presented as ineffectual, all while also being mocked for being unable to get organized properly and containing individuals, like Caleb, who are posers with rich parents who are raging to rage, not because they’re at all affected by the machine. Molly and Matt are a parody of what middle Americans think of coastal media elites and pretentious film folk, and we can only assume that Mohammad was planning to keep Lillian captive until she was fully Stockholmed (although there’s sufficient evidence to argue that his brother’s camp is actually a gay boot camp thing). Lawrence is a man whose ideas are objectively evil, but he’s treated with the softest gloves by the narrative, and I don’t like that. It’s possible that there’s something I’m missing here, and I could be completely wrong, but I don’t like this. 

Overall, this one is a mixed bag. There’s a lot that’s great going for it cinematically (director Sean Price Williams was D.P. on my beloved Queen of Earth), and there’s something interesting about the interplay between all of these individuals and communities that Lillian interacts with, but I’m just not sure that it nails down all of its theses as surely as it could and should. Worth seeing, but not internalizing. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Monkey Man (2024)

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The story of how Monkey Man came to be seen by anyone is a narrative about power, capital, and the cowardice of corporations that underscores the themes of the film in a metatextual way. Initially intended to be released on Netflix, that organization was planning to shelve the film, as its straightforward criticism of Hindu nationalism in India, which is gaining power in a time of rising fascism globally, was considered inappropriate while Netflix is courting international expansion into the subcontinent. The film was seen by Jordan Peele, who flexed his not-inconsiderable muscle to get Monkey Man released theatrically stateside, and it’s now available for digital purchase as well. The film itself—directed by, produced by, and starring Dev Patel—follows a fairly straightforward narrative of revenge, but one which is wrapped up in political and state violence and the corruption of faith by seekers of power.

As a child, our protagonist, who is given no name other than “Kid,” lived in a village that was razed to the ground by corrupt police officer—redundant, I know—Rana Singh (Sikandar Kher), under the direction of Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande). Shakti is a widely respected faith leader whose apparent religious devotion is a cover for his ever-expanding empire of factories, which he claims to the press are simply “communes,” and the destruction of Kid’s home is merely one in a long line of such actions, where the survivors are either forced to flee or become little more than chattel slaves in the factories that are built over the land they once called home. Like most murderous and fanatical entities, like (for instance) the Zionist terrorist state, they arrive with “records” that indicate these sites “historically” belong to someone else, and that the land is being “returned,” and in so doing rape, pillage, burn, and murder innocents while pretending that they are offering them the opportunity to flee. Now an adult, Kid scrapes by in an underground kickboxing ring as Monkey Man, the monkey-masked “heel” who puts on a good show before taking the fall against “face” characters like King Cobra, Shere Khan, and Baloo the Bear. The monkey mask means something different to him, however, as it represents his connection to Hanuman, a Hindu deity who was the subject of his mother’s devotion. The film opens as he prepares for his roaring rampage of revenge, setting up the theft of the handbag of Queenie Kapoor (Ashwini Kalsekar), the foul-mouthed owner-operator of a luxury brothel called Kings, then returning it to her with a sufficiently believable cover story and rejecting her offer of a cash reward in exchange for a job.

From there, he ingratiates himself to Queenie’s henchman Alphonso (Pitobash) by giving him inside information about the kickboxing matches, and he works his way up to a penthouse party that Singh is attending. He manages to almost complete his assassination of the man, but his impulsive need to deliver an action hero one liner to Singh, “Blessings from my mother,” allows an opening for the officer to get the upper hand. A wounded Kid flees and falls into a polluted river, where he would have died were he not rescued by a group of hijra, a community of transgender, intersex, or eunuch people who live communally (and in some nations in South Asia are recognized officially and legally as a third gender). Earlier in the film, during a broadcast that Kid watches after taking another dive in the ring, the TV cuts from a journalist’s softball interview with Shakti to coverage of anti-trans violence at the hands of right-wing agitators, although, as with media in the west, their failure to make a connection between the two stories is a deliberate obfuscation of that connection. Alpha (Vipin Sharma), the guru of the hijra community, nurses Kid back to health, and the community at large helps renew his vigor as he approaches another opportunity to take down both Singh and Shakti.

Taken at nothing more than face value, this is a fun action movie, where the choreography of the fighting is absolutely stellar. The film references its most overt influence, John Wick, on its sleeve by mentioning the film by name, but Patel has cited Korean action flicks Ajeossi (aka The Man from Nowhere) and I Saw the Devil as well. I haven’t seen the former, and, unfortunately, it’s been so long since I saw the latter that my memory isn’t clear enough to pull out specific influences. The action here is stunning, with long sequences that remain exciting through a combination of dynamic camera work, novel shot choices, exciting locations, and the kind of frenetic energy that feels like speeding. There’s a bathroom brawl that’s the equal of, if not better than, the one in M.I.: Fallout, and the sequence there is a franchise highlight. A flight from police on foot and then via electric rickshaw (complete with a Fast & Furious style NOS-injector) is a ton of fun, and the final assault on Kings owes a lot to The Raid—that certainly wasn’t the first film to have our protagonist(s) take out a building floor by floor as they approached their boss battle, but it arguably perfected it. This comes off not as a compilation or recitation of hits, but as something exciting and worthwhile in and of itself, and even if that’s all that one takes from it, this is still a great action movie.

I appreciate the depth of this one, though, and I especially love the way that the hijra are treated with respect and dignity, and that they get to fulfill an important narrative role in the story not just as the community that nursed the hero back to health and was saved by him in the end, but that they get to be the cavalry that backs him up when all seems lost. Queerness in India isn’t something that I have a scholarly knowledge of, obviously, but I have been privy to anecdotes, and I think that there is something in the nature of fascism that tells on itself in the discrepancy between the homophobias here and abroad. In the U.S. and the larger West, the supremacy of fundamentalist Christian politics plays a key role in instilling, inscribing, and disguising bigotry in the hearts and minds of the populace — that is, being queer is wrong because (their reading of) their scripture says so. In India, even though the population is predominantly Hindu and fundamentalist Hindu politics are a key role in that nation’s contemporary authoritarianism, Hinduism and the texts thereof are full of queer deities and heroes that are absent from the canonized Old and New Testaments. Fire god Agni had a husband and a wife and there are tales that explicitly reference him having sexual encounters with men; Ardhanarishvara (whose temple is attended by Alpha and the other hijra in the film) is a split-down-the-middle merging of Shiva and his consort Parvati; and many others characters like Shikhandi and Arjuna are transformed between sex and gender. There’s no “scriptural basis” (as we would call it in the West) for the homophobia and transphobia of the rising right wing where Monkey Man takes place, but it still happens because those bigotries are inherent to fascism, not to faith. You’re not going to see a movie made in the West where a group of transwomen get to be the cavalry that rescues the hero outside of the occasional shoestring-budgeted envelope pusher, but you can see it here, and that’s lovely.

The only thing that really doesn’t fit here is the presence of the love interest, Sita (Sobhita Dhulipala). There’s a reason that we’ve gotten this far without mentioning her. Sita is one of the sex workers employed at Kings, and the fact that she seems to be Singh’s favorite is made known does little to affect motivation or characterization — with Kid already seeking to kill Singh for assaulting and murdering his mother, there’s no real need to give him additional reasons to want the man dead, and in fact muddles things a little. Her major contribution to the film is that she’s the one who takes out Queenie so that we don’t have to see our hero shoot a woman, and that means she’s more plot point than character. Other than that, however, this is just about a perfect action film, and one with a lot going on under the surface, which it draws attention to through its continuous motif of roots; Kid’s mother shows him the roots of the trees in and around their village and teaches him about their spiritual significance; the people who are threatened with being forcibly relocated, including Kid’s community and the hijra are implicitly and explicitly being uprooted, and the temple in which Alpha and their people live is one with roots that run deeper than a man is tall. As a text and an action film, this one is definitely rewarding and worth seeking out.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – Assault on Arkham (2014)

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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. 

For the first time since Superman: Unbound, we’ve got one of these movies that’s not part of the “DCAMU.” It’s not untethered from a pre-existing continuity altogether, however, as this one is, for all intents and purposes, deliberately invoked synergy between the animated direct-to-video films and the Batman: Arkham video game franchise. I’m not really familiar with those; I played through about 20% of the first game, decided it wasn’t really the kind of gameplay that I’m into, and never really returned to it. They’re popular games, critically and commercially, but I’m just not that into that much sneaking and stealthing. With that admission, I have no idea how this movie is supposed to fit into that continuity (Wikipedia has that covered for you, if you’re interested), and if there’s something I’m supposed to be annoyed about here because it contradicts this or that here and there, you’ve come to the wrong place for that bit of criticism. But as you can already tell from the star rating above, this one turned out a lot better than the last couple of times the studio plopped out a cross-promotional tie-in. 

The Riddler (Matthew Gray Gubler) is up to shenanigans, and Amanda Waller (CCH Pounder) has one of her black ops teams on murder duty, but Batman (Kevin Conroy) takes care of the situation and remands Riddler back to Arkham Asylum. This prompts Waller to put together—you guessed it—a Suicide Squad, to infiltrate the facility and reclaim a thumb drive in Riddler’s cane. Her recruits are Deadshot (Neal McDonough), Captain Boomerang (Greg Ellis), Black Spider (Giancarlo Esposito), King Shark (John DiMaggio), and Killer Frost (Jennifer Hale). Oh, and Harley Quinn (Hynden Walch), of course, and our sacrificial goon who gets his head blown off to prove Waller’s sincerity to the others is KGBeast, if you’re playing bingo at home. Harley lets herself get caught and taken to Arkham as part of the infiltration plan, but things are complicated by the fact that she and a thoroughly locked-down Joker end up interacting. This triggers her rage and ends up with her attempting to shoot him through the holes in his Hannibal Lecter-esque cell, which is only effective insofar as creating a tear on the inside of his cell that will allow him to escape later. There are plans within plans, of course, as one or more of the draftees may be there to “take care” of Riddler, and their competing agendas mean that there are going to be some changing loyalties throughout. 

This isn’t a Batman movie – not really. I’m not all that shocked that this falls under the “Batman” label, however, and not just because it’s extended universe (sigh) stuff for the Arkham games. There are (roughly) 52 of these, as noted in the introduction, and within those titles, “Wonder Woman” appears all of twice (3.8%), “Superman” ten times (19.2%), and “Justice League” thirteen times (25%). “Batman” appears in twenty titles (38.5%), and that’s all down to the fact that WB marketing knows what side of the batbread is batbuttered. Batman is around but this isn’t about him. This is a Suicide Squad movie, through and through, with a plot that, in some ways, both presages the much-maligned 2016 feature and pre-emptively improves upon it. There’s bound to be character overlap, of course, but the premise of this one is a lot more sensible; instead of sending a crew of mostly-mortal criminals who happen to have good aim to try and stop a magical apocalypse, here we’ve got a few different skill sets that are tasked to work together to pull off a heist, and some of them also have “assassination” in their specific dossier. When he does appear, Batman is working his own parallel investigation that periodically overlaps or interacts with the Squad pulling an Ocean’s to get into a vault. 

As when she voiced the character before in Public Enemies, Pounder once again proves that she was born to play Waller, although the character is reduced to being a bit more one-note and villainous than more nuanced portrayals since, in case you forgot, this is a video game tie-in. Walch is fun as Harley Quinn, who’s played comedically in this deadly serious world, which makes for a nice touch. Other characters get in on it, too, with the odd romance that grows between Killer Frost and King Shark drawing a few chuckles. Shark himself looks a lot like Venture Bros. character Baron Underbheit, which adds to the comedy, and when his head explodes, it seems that direct visual inspiration is taken from the goombas in the Super Mario Bros. movie. It’s a tad obvious from the outset that Joker will escape from his cell and complicate the plan, but there’s a lot of real tension in the helicopter escape scene. All of the fight scenes are decent, and the animation is nice and fluid. 

There should be no mistaking; this is a product first and a creative endeavor last, but it’s a product of good quality that ticks off all the right boxes. Conroy is Batman, forever (no pun intended) and always. If you’re looking for a fun little Suicide Squad story, this is well above the median. And the breakout scene where all of the villains get to show off a little is fun. There are worse Suicide Squads out there, even if this one only exists to milk a few extra dollars out of fans of the game series. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Movie of the Month: Torch Song Trilogy (1988)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and we discuss it afterwards. This month Brandon made Boomer and Britnee watch Torch Song Trilogy (1988).

Brandon: On a recent vacation to San Francisco, I found myself in the Haight-Ashbury location of Amoeba Music, digging through the LGBTQ section of the record store’s used Blu-rays & DVDs.  There were plenty of obscure gems in there, as you might expect, and I took home copies of the surrealistic drag-queen freak show Luminous Procuress as well as the punk-and-junk porno chic documentary Kamikaze Hearts.  However, my biggest score that day was a used copy of a film distributed by Warner Bros subsidiary New Line Cinema, something much more mainstream than the other standout titles in the bin.  1988’s Torch Song Trilogy has been commercially unavailable since I first watched it on the HBO Max streaming service back in 2021, when it caught my eye in the platform’s “Leaving Soon” section.  Since then, it has only been legally accessible through used physical media, as it is currently unavailable to rent or stream through any online platform.  The Streaming Era illusion that everything is available all of the time is always frustrating when trying to access most movies made before 1990 (an illusion only made bearable by the continued existence of a public library system), but it’s especially frustrating when it comes to mainstream crowd-pleaser fare like Torch Song Trilogy.  This is not the audience-alienating arthouse abstraction of a Luminous Procuress or a Kamikaze Hearts; it shouldn’t feel like some major score to find a copy in the wild. It’s more the Jewish New Yorker equivalent of a Steel Magnolias or a Fried Green Tomatoes than it is some niche-interest obscurity.  I have to suspect it’s only being treated as such because it’s been ghettoized as A Gay Movie instead of simply A Good Movie, which is a shameful indication of how much progress is left to be made.

Torch Song Trilogy is Harvey Fierstein’s big-screen adaptation of his own stage play about a drag queen’s life, loves, and heartbreaks in 1970s New York.  It might be one of the few 80s & 90s gay classics that doesn’t have to touch the communal devastation of HIV/AIDS, since it’s set before the darkest days of the epidemic.  The opening shot of a graveyard at the outskirts of New York City feels like visual acknowledgement of how cultural circumstances had changed between the film’s setting & production, but the mission of the story that follows is mostly to show an adult gay man living a full, healthy, normal life . . . filtered through the wry humor of Fierstein’s hyper-specific personality.  There’s a little hangover Boys in the Band-style, woe-is-me self-pitying in Fierstein’s semi-biographical retelling of his own love life, but he remains delightfully charming throughout as he recalls his two great loves: one with a strait-laced, self-conflicted bisexual (Ed, Brian Kerwin) that was doomed to fail and one with a perfectly angelic partner (Alan, Matthew Broderick) that only failed because of violent societal bigotry.  The major benefit of the film’s strange distribution deficiencies is that owning it on DVD means you can also access Fierstein’s lovely commentary track and double the time you get to spend with his unmistakable voice & persona; it’s like becoming good friends with a garbage disposal made entirely of fine silks.  Loving the movie means loving his specific personality, from his adorable failures to flirt graciously to his fierce defenses of drag queen respectability and the validity of monogamous homosexual partnership.  His stage performances as Virginia Hamm are classic barroom drag that feel like broadcasts from a bygone world (one I last experienced first-hand at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge in San Francisco), but a lot of his observations about seeking traditional love among strangers who are just cruising for sex still ring true, especially as modern dating rituals have been re-warped around the de-personalized window shopping of hookup apps.

There’s something about how complicated, interwoven, and passionate every relationship feels here that reminded me of Yentl of all things, except transported to a modern urban setting I’m more personally connected to.  Structurally, there are some drawbacks to Fierstein’s insistence on covering decades of personal turmoil & interpersonal drama in a single picture, but the movie’s greatest accomplishment is ultimately its approximation of a full, authentic life – something gay men were rarely afforded onscreen at the time, even the cis white ones.  By all accounts, the original stage-play version of Torch Song Trilogy approximated an even fuller, more authentic record of gay life in 1970s NYC, since it was twice as long as its movie adaptation.  One of the producers’ only contractual obligations was that the movie could be no longer than 2 hours, which meant a lot of tough-choice editing of a play that ran for 4.  Instead of narrowing in on a few key moments in his life (through the fictional avatar of Arnold Beckoff), Fierstein decided to maintain the full breadth of the play’s story for most of the runtime, so that an inopportune bathroom break means that you could miss a half-decade of love & loss.  It isn’t until the final sequence that he really slows the story down to stew in the drama of one key event: a home visit from his loving, homophobic mother (Anne Bancroft).  After so many sweeping gestures covering long stretches in Arnold’s life, there’s initially something jarring about stopping the momentum cold to depict a heated bicker-battle between mother & son, but that’s also where a lot of the strongest, most coherent political arguments about the validity of gay life & gay romance are voiced in clear terms.  Boomer, what did you think about the lopsided emphasis on the drama of the final act and how it relates to the broader storytelling style of earlier segments?  Was it a meaningful dramatic shift or just an awkward one?

Boomer: There’s something important to note here about the original staging that contributes to this: each of the three segments were meant to be done in different styles, so much so that it’s almost a miracle that they work when smashed together into the veritas of the screen. In the first segment, International Stud, the story is told in fragments between Arnold and Ed, with the two actors kept apart on stage and the narrative being relayed through a series of phone calls (staged like this), while Fugue in a Nursery, which is the play in which Alan and Arnold visit Mr. and Mrs. Ed, is staged with all four actors in one giant bed (see this image from the 2018 revival). It’s only the final segment, about Arnold and his mother, that the style is more naturalistic and less surreal, in an effort to make the pain of those moments all the more visceral and meaningful. That carries over into the film, and in all honesty, it ought to. Joy can be fleeting, especially for those in the queer community (as we see all too gruesomely with Alan’s death at the hands of a band of bigots, who are seen standing around at the scene even after the ambulances arrive, watching with impunity as their victims are carted away while they remain free men). When you’re happy and in love, it really can feel like three years pass in the blink of an eye, while pain, especially that which comes from intolerance, ends up taking up much more room in our memories than our happiness. 

There’s verisimilitude in that, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t get to spend a long time in sympathetic happiness with Arnold and his loves during the good times, too, and the dilation of unhappy times isn’t merely realism for its own sake, it gives us time to really ground ourselves. This is a piece of fiction that’s about gay people but was breaking out of the mold at the time by not being simply for gay people as well. We see this in the difference between Arnold and his brother Phil, who understands his brother better than their parents do but whose life is clearly one with very few stumbling blocks and in which he can simply saunter without much trouble. The straights in the audience are presumed to be of the same cloth and thus need to have the portrait of what it’s like to have to deal with one’s (loving and beloved) mother also behave in a manner that’s dismissive, cruel, mean-spirited, and bigoted toward her own son, and they need to look into that portrait long enough to get it. Even if the need to provide some socially conscious “messaging” has dimmed in the intervening decades, this scene is also still the tour-de-force segment that makes auditioning for the role of “Ma” worthwhile, enough to attract an actress of the caliber of Estelle Getty (as in the original staging) or Anne Bancroft (as in the film). While I agree that it changes the timbre, I’m not sure I’m fully in agreement that it changes the momentum, as it still feels like it’s barreling through, helped along by the frenetic energy that the desperate-to-please soon-to-be-adopted David brings to the proceedings; he and Ed never seem to really sit still, so it creates the illusion of motion even if the subject matter at hand is heavy and slow. 

One of the things that I really loved about this one was that it wasn’t (and felt no need to be) a “message” picture. With the first cases of HIV being diagnosed in the summer of 1981, the triptych of plays first opened less than two weeks after the January 4th establishment of GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis), the first U.S. community-based AIDS service provider, on the fifteenth of that month. As such, there’s really no room in the narrative for the specter of HIV/AIDS to loom large, and although the intervening years between the play’s premiere and the release of the film were haunted by that epidemic, it’s still banished from the narrative. That’s because this is a story about queer . . . well, not queer “joy” exactly, but one in which the omnipresent shadow of social inequality, potential violence, and familial rejection is outshone by the light of authentic living, easy intimacy, and finding the humor in things. As such, although it may be telling the audience something they might not know or understand about the way that gay people are treated by their families, it doesn’t feel the need to educate them about those broader social issues, the way a lot of other queer films of the time did. 

Britnee, given that this was originally a (series of) stage production(s), there’s a lot of room for more sumptuous, lived-in set design in a film adaptation, as well as the opportunity to do a little more visual storytelling. One of favorite bits of this is how Arnold shows us that the ASL sign for “fucking” is to make two rabbits with your hands and bang them together, and then we see that Arnold’s decor is more rabbit centric than your local grocery store in the lead up to Easter. Another is the change that we see in Ed’s farmhouse between Arnold’s first and (possibly) last visits there, that tell us how much time has passed as Ed has had the time to repair the steps and put up proper supports on the porch. This, more than the change in tempo, is what stands out to me about the final scenes with Mrs. Beckoff, as they are heavier on dialogue (read: argument) for exposition and character work, as those last few scenes of the two of them feel more like a stage play than any other part. Are there any visual flourishes or touches of visual storytelling in particular that stood out to you? 

Britnee: Torch Song Trilogy has been on my watchlist for years. I didn’t have much knowledge of what the film was actually about or based on, but I knew that Harvey Fierstein starred in it. That’s more than enough to pique my interest because he is such a gem. I had no idea that it was based on a play that Fierstein wrote himself! Like Brandon, it reminded me so much of Steel Magnolias, which was also a film adapted from a play with a personal, auto-biographical touch. Both films have loveable characters, witty dialogue, and create a feeling of intimacy between the audience and characters. I felt like I was Arnold’s confidant, following him throughout his journey. Of course, that intimacy with the audience is very typical of a stage play, but it doesn’t always translate to film as successfully as it does in this one.

Until you mentioned it, Boomer, I didn’t notice the rabbit connection! I was admiring the rabbit tea kettle among all of the other rabbit trinkets of Arnold’s, but I had no idea that it was in reference to the ASL bit. There are just so many layers to discover! If I had to highlight any other the visual storytelling touches, there is only one that really stuck with me. I adored the opening sequence of a young Arnold playing dress-up in his mother’s closet, which then transitions to adult Arnold in his dressing room before the first drag performance. There were so many important moments that occur in his dressing room, and to remember one of his earliest crucial moments occurred in his first makeshift dressing room (his mother’s closet) really touched my heart. The ultimate sacred space. 

Lagniappe

Brandon: I’m glad to hear y’all were also delighted by the overbearing rabbit theme of Arnold’s home decor.  I’ve obviously only seen this movie a few times so far, but with every watch my eyes are drawn to more rabbit decorations that I didn’t catch previously.  They’re hopping all over the frame, and yet the only acknowledgement of them (besides the ASL connection) is a brief moment when a hungover Alan quizzically examines a rabbit-themed mug Howard hands him with breakfast before noticing he’s surrounded by them.  Otherwise, it’s just one of many small touches that makes Arnold feel like a full, real person instead of a scripted character and a political mouthpiece.  

Britnee: The dramatic relationship between Arnold and his mother gave us some powerful moments, but I kept wondering about the relationships Arnold had with his brother and father. We do see these characters interact with each other and there’s some dialogue referring to each in various conversations, but I would have loved to see their relationships explored more. Since the play is twice as long as the movie, I’m curious to see if they’re more explored there and were cut for time.

Boomer: Because I always want to recommend it to everyone, especially because it’s one of the few musical theater adjacent texts that I, a musical agnostic, enjoy, I want to call attention to the fact that Tovah Felspuh is totally channeling Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Beckoff in her introductory scene in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, beyond just cashing in on some of the same character tropes. Secondly, as a film that is filled with countless quotable lines, the one that has resounded around in my skull the most since the screening is “He used to be a euphemism, now he’s just a friend.” And finally, I find it funny that Brandon should mention the apps in his intro, since I watched this film in a way that I hope Fierstein would appreciate: lying on a bed in a Denver hostel, swiping away app notifications as they attempted to grab my attention and cover the top half of my screen. 

Next month: Boomer presents Notorious (1946)

-The Swampflix Crew

The Not-So-New 52: Son of Batman (2014)

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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. 

Canon is a funny thing. I think that for a lot of people and within a lot of media, what’s “real” in any long-running piece of fiction is whatever was the normal state of affairs when you entered the fandom. Whatever happens moving forward from there is just new stuff to enjoy or not. When something is added retroactively (usually referred to as “retcon,” as in “retroactive continuity”), it can be something really fun and new and interesting, or it might end up being a big pile of steaming garbage. For the former, my favorite comic book character of all time, Jessica Jones, was completely retconned out of nothing for the series Alias (no relation) because Brian Michael Bendis wasn’t allowed to use Jessica “Spider-Woman” Drew for his noir detective series, so he had to make someone up. For the latter, my go-to example is the 2003 retcon that Chuck Austen introduced in an X-Men storyline entitled “The Draco.” This arc “revealed” that beloved character Nightcrawler was actually half-demon and his entire years-long arc of coming to terms with his faith and becoming a member of the clergy was actually a manipulation on the part of a group that sought to “unveil” his “demonic” form in concurrence with a technologically-induced rapture once they were able to elevate him to pope. Everybody hated it, no one accepts it as canon, and we’ve probably had two or three more retcons since then. As an example of changes that have gone back and forth for better and for worse, there are the characters of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, who were initially introduced merely as members of Magento’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants before being revealed to be his children (good), before they were again retconned to not only not be his children, but to also not be mutants at all. Why? Because the characters had been members of the Avengers at one point, and thus were shared between Disney’s ownership of MCU-related film rights and Fox’s then-independent ownership of X-Men-related film rights, and Disney, like a toxic parent in a shared custody situation, flexed their muscles to get the source material to change. 

I have to admit that I struggle with this myself, with the particular way that my brain functions meaning that I’m in conflict between being (a) resistant to big changes, (b) appreciative of new angles that make for a more interesting story even if it’s not in alignment with what I’ve believed before, and (c) annoyed by changes that conflicts with what we already knew. Where I was worst about this (and where I’ve been forced to grow the most in how I approach the material) is in the Star Trek franchise. My weird little prepubescent brain accepted the aesthetic differences between my contemporary present and the original series without question, but by the time Enterprise rolled around, I was of just the right age to take offense at and get too caught up in complaining about its “too modern” look for a prequel series. It’s been over two decades since, and the large and amorphous continuity of Star Trek has just gotten bigger and more difficult to contain in the intervening years, and at this point, I don’t care how neurodivergent you (and by “you” I mean “we”) are, sometimes you just have to let go. 

This is all a long-winded introduction to talk about my feelings about the ways that the story of Batman changed over the course of my life. When I was a kid, Batman: The Animated Series was Batman, with the occasional sighting of an episode of the Adam West sixties series when I was at the home of a relative who had cable. All of the things that are “Batman” to me are caught up in that series: the faithful loyalty and acerbic wit of Alfred, the partnership of a Robin, the unresolved romantic/sexual tension with Catwoman, the rivalry with the Joker, the presence of a large, consistent rogues gallery (Mr. Freeze, The Riddler, Penguin, Poison Ivy, Two-Face, and second-stringers like Clayface, Scarecrow, and Mad Hatter), and an eventual Batgirl. But when you’re talking about a story continuity that was already six decades old at that point, all of those elements had to have been introduced as new at some point, and, as it was ongoing, it was never going to remain static and unchanging at that point. In fact, the character of Harley Quinn, who is now one of the most recognizable and well-known DC characters in the mainstream, was created for and introduced within BTAS, and although she’s beloved by now, I’m sure that there were cranky gatekeepers at the time who hated her introduction. New live action films continued to be made, and their effect on the landscape of the comics and their affiliated media would echo across the narrative topography, and those reverberations would then end up in the new adaptations, symbiotically. It’s impossible to know which ones are going to be a flash in the pan before being rejected and never referenced again (see above re: demon Nightcrawler) and which ones will “take” and stick around. When the whole “Court of Owls” thing (a secret society of rich Gothamites going back generations who influenced the city) was introduced in 2012, I didn’t think it would stick around, but given that it’s now associated with Bat-lore in the public consciousness because of Fox’s Gotham, it’s probably here to stay. Even before that when Damian Wayne, Batman’s son via Talia al Ghul, was first introduced in comics in 2006, the obvious expectation was that he would prove so unpopular that he would be written out as a character and written off as a failed ploy, but here we are, nearly twenty years later, and it looks like he’s here to stay, too. 

Son of Batman opens on the island fortress headquarters of the League of Assassins, headed by Ra’s al Ghul (Giancarlo Esposito). Under his grandfather’s tutelage, young Damian (Stuart Allan) is being trained to one day replace Ra’s, all under the watchful eye of his mother, Talia (Morena Baccarin). Under the cover of night, spurned pupil Deathstroke (Thomas Gibson), who was previously being groomed to become the new leader of the League before Damian’s birth, has returned for revenge. Ra’s is critically injured and, unable to make it to the Lazarus Pit that has so prolonged his life, dies. In order to seek out her father’s killer and find her revenge, Talia leaves her son with his father, whom she knows is both Bruce Wayne and Batman (Jason O’Mara), under the care of the hero and his butler, Alfred (David McCallum). Gotham is less of a safe haven than expected, however, as this is also the home of Dr. Kirk Langstrom (Xander Berkeley), a scientist who has been working on a serum that will turn League assassins into bat hybrid creatures known as “Manbats.” When Langstrom and Talia are both captured by Deathstroke, it’s up to Batman and former protege turned independent hero Dick “Nightwing” Grayson (Sean Maher) to find them and stop Deathstroke, with young Damian as the newer, less morally clear Robin.

This is a good one. The animation is crisp, the designs are clean, the contrast is extremely well done. Scenes in the day are suffused with light, and the more frequent night scenes have a slight moonlight glow to them. It’s carried over from Justice League: War, of course, but it’s nice that it’s consistent here, and this slots into the same art style as that film without looking identical to it, which is a nicer touch than I was expecting from this ongoing series. The fact that this is supposed to be a new timeline that’s still in the early days of the emergence of heroes continues to be a bit of sand in the shoe, as the previous film made it seem like Batman had only been on the scene for a couple of years at the most, while this one now establishes that he’s been at this long enough that he’s already had one young sidekick graduate to start his own enterprise. It’s also strange that this series would decide to kill off Ra’s al Ghul so early into this franchise (only the third film now if we count Flashpoint Paradox, and the first to focus on Batman primarily), it seems very sudden and early to get rid of one of the Bat’s most important foes, and means that any attempts to graft other adaptations of stories into this continuity may have to compensate for his absence. 

Still, that’s not this film’s problem. It’s good! Not special, really, but good, definitely above the median of quality in this overall franchise so far. I ended up making yet another long-winded introduction and a comparison to Star Trek (two of my specialties!) all up top because, really, there’s not that much to say. I’ve listed what I didn’t like above, and it’s mostly minor stuff that relates to continuity, and which most people probably wouldn’t care too much about. What there is to like isn’t so groundbreaking that it requires description, either; the fight choreography is very good, and the more ninja-style action is a real standout when most of these fights are all about punching while flying, eye beams, and occasional Amazonian hand-to-hand content. Damian has a lot of potential for his petulance to be extremely annoying, especially when he has a nepo baby’s sense of smug entitlement coupled with no real qualms about committing straight up murder because of how he was raised. Instead, he’s not only tolerable, but occasionally even likable, when he isn’t being a twerp about how effeminate the original Robin costume was. 

I might have been wrong about this new continuity within the larger franchise. I’ve seen a few of the others and although I don’t remember disliking them, I don’t remember them being particularly memorable, either. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: House (1977)

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Boomer, Brandon, and Alli celebrate a Lagniappe Podcast milestone by discussing Nobuhiko Obayashi’s psychedelic cult classic House (1977).

00:00 Episode 100

07:00 No Country for Old Men (2007)
13:32 Challengers (2024)
20:55 The Beast (2024)
34:38 Dial M for Murder (1954)
45:33 The People’s Joker (2024)
49:06 Humane (2024)

55:48 House (1977)

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– The Podcast Crew