reviews

The Not-So-New 52: Superman — Doomsday (2007)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, a new Swampflix feature for 2024. For background, I was a twenty-year-old college student in 2007 when there was a brand-new surge of comic book adaptations into films. Iron Man premiered in theaters the following year and, although it didn’t seem like it at the time, foretold a society-moving shift in the cinema landscape that would echo through today; elsewhere, someone at DC Comics was like, “What if we just started making animated direct-to-DVD features?” We were still four years out from the controversial 2011 DC comics reboot “New 52” (from which this feature takes its name), which most non-comic fans in the general public ether know nothing about. If they do, they might half-remember seeing a morning or midday show fluff piece about Superman’s new outfit (it was the one with the blue t-shirt and jeans, to make him seem more down to earth), or the noteworthy controversy surrounding the fact that DC’s creative staff dropped from 12% women to 1% during the editorial shake-up, or the fact that the new continuity portrayed Barbara “Batgirl/Oracle” Gordon’s previously permanent paraplegia as a temporary condition from which she recovered, essentially getting rid of one of the very few notable wheelchair users in comics. Or they might know of it from the fact that it was the new continuity introduced in the wake of Flashpoint, a Flash-centric timeline changing event that the general public is more aware of since it’s been adapted several times — first as an animated film in 2013 (which we’ll be getting to), then again as a plot point on the CW’s long-running (no pun intended) Flash TV series, and most recently last year as one of the inspirations for the narrative for last year’s Flash film. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Since that year, Marvel has produced thirty-three features (and over a dozen TV shows), while DC’s animation wing has produced about fifty-two of their animated movies without, to my knowledge, a single one of them ever hitting cinemas. I say “about fifty-two” because there are some that are split into two parts, the placement of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm within this list is debatable, at least one that is a repackaging of episodes of a webseries, and because anyone familiar with DC comics knows how much they love the number 52. With that in mind, I thought I might torture myself for as long as I could take and watch every single one of them, a new review coming each week to your virtual comic book stand here on Swampflix. I might go insane. Come along with me?

Superman: Doomsday was the first (give or take your feelings about the above-mentioned Mask of the Phantasm) of these films to hit the shelves of your local Best Buy, and I remember very clearly watching it on a Netflix DVD shortly after release. I also recall being impressed by it, with one particular scene standing out; it’s the intro scene for Lex Luthor (James “Spike” Marsters), in which his assistance Mercy Graves (Cree Summer) enters a room and he motions for her silence before finishing some kind of calculation in his head and entering it on his device and handing it off to her. When she asks if it’s the cure for cancer, he tells her it’s actually the cure for muscular dystrophy and directs her to have one of Lexcorp’s internal biomedical scientists work on turning the cure into a treatment—that is, to water it down and turn a one-time windfall into an ongoing source of income. I remember being utterly shocked at the sheer banality of his evil, truly the epitome of corporate emperors. 

This is immediately contrasted with Superman (Adam Baldwin), whom we see in his arctic Fortress of Solitude, spending his down time between rescuing cats from trees and fighting mechanical spiders trying to protect human life in a more mundane way. Lois (Anne Heche) is there with him, trying to get him to admit his secret identity—which she has already figured out on her own—as Clark Kent to her, which he skirts around with the excuse that confirming would somehow put her in danger, which she chalks up to simple fear of commitment. Elsewhere, an illegal drilling operation under the Lexcorp banner uncovers a buried spaceship, which turns out to contain an alien called “Doomsday” which was genetically engineered by an extraterrestrial race as the perfect, unstoppable soldier, which they then threw into space when they were unable to control him. Doomsday carves a swathe of murder and destruction all the way to Metropolis, where he engages in a lengthy battle with the other title character that ends with both of their deaths. 

In some ways, this is a condensation of the infamous “Death of Superman” comic book arc of the ’90s, with Kal-El’s death at the hands of Doomsday leading to the rise of several potential replacements, the most notable of whom were Conner “Superboy” Kent and Steel. In some ways, that’s what initially led me to be interested in starting this project, as 2018 saw the release of a more direct adaptation with the DC animated release of Death of Superman. Having long lost touch with this animated feature endeavor, my mind boggled at the fact that within ten years, they had already circled back around and were remaking their own work. I’m sure it won’t be exactly that when (if) I ever get to that one, but a quick look at the cast list and their associated characters tells me that it is a story that’s more extensively involved with a larger comic book character community. In Doomsday, the “Reign of the Supermen” super-mantle succession crisis of the comics is replaced with a singular clone of Superman, created by Lex from blood shed in Kal-El’s battle with Doomsday, one who starts out with the same ethos as the character that we have seen die but who gradually becomes more fascistic, going so far as to execute a recaptured super-felon rather than risk the possibility that he escape again. 

That’s an awful lot of discussion of Clark and Lex, but in my eyes, the real main character of this story is Lois. In a cast full of great performers (Martha Kent is voiced by Swoosie Kurtz!), the late Heche is doing absolutely phenomenal work selling Lois’s frustration, grief, cautious hope, and fierce determination. Having seen some of the later releases from this animation house, I can tell you that it would be easy to sleepwalk through the recording sessions and that some actors definitely do later on, but not Heche. I mourned her more watching this movie than one would expect from a purely commercial enterprise, but she carries this movie, with no apparent strain at all. A lot of the scenes are clearly condensed, but there’s still a surprising amount of pathos there. Particular standout scenes include her first meeting with Martha Kent, where both women are necessarily cagey—Martha because she’s unaware that Lois knows Superman was Clark and is thus concerned that the younger woman may simply be looking for a scoop, and Lois because she’s hesitant to admit how much she knows, and the scene in which the apparently newly resurrected Superman flies Lois home and responds with confused indifference when Lois kisses him—because, as a clone, he knows only what Luthor knows about Superman, and so isn’t privy to the real Superman’s private life. Heche and Lois are great here. 

Where the movie is less enjoyable is in the visuals. Although there is a lot of really great, dynamic animated action (the Doomsday vs. Superman battle takes up a solid chunk of screen time but never quite reaches the point where the audience is bored), the character designs are inconsistent. Some of this can be blamed on the designs being imported from the DC Animated Universe of TV shows that had recently come to a close with the ending of Justice League Unlimited in 2006, very shortly before this film went into production. That canon began with Batman: The Animated Series all the way back in 1992, where the eyes under Batman’s cowl were simply featureless white space, which allowed for the animators of that series to allow the character to express emotion through the shape and change of the “eye holes.” When Bruce was out of costume, he and the other characters had a fully drawn eye, with an upper and lower line representing the outline of the eye, sclera, and a single dot for both the iris and the pupil. When Superman: The Animated Series started airing in 1996, both Clark and Superman were drawn with a simpler eye design of a single line to indicate the upper edge of the eye, and again with a single dot to represent the pupil and the iris, but no identifiable sclera; I can only assume that this was to keep Clark’s face from looking too “busy” or being too detailed with the addition of his glasses. When you look at all of the Justice League together in their respective shows, they all have different eye designs, but they don’t look odd next to each other because there are so many different designs: Supes has his single line and dot, Martian Manhunter has his red eyes, Wonder Woman has very detailed eyes (full upper lid line, partial or full lower lid line, visible sclera, distinct blue iris and black pupil), Green Lantern has his distinctive fully outlined eye shape with a singular green iris with no pupillary dot, and the characters with masks like Flash either follow the Batman design of white spaces under their cowls or, in the case of Hawkgirl, have solely pupils under the mask but pupils and an iris when unmasked. 

Here, however, three of our main characters are so disparate in their design that they look janky together in a way that distracts the eye. Superman once again has the single upper lid line and the single (almost beady) pupil dot, while Lois has the fully detailed eyes like the Wonder Woman example above, except that her eye color is darker, so that she appears to have a distinct pupil and iris in some close ups but in most wider shots appears to have a single, gigantic pupil. Jimmy Olsen, in turn, has all the details, including a blue iris that also appears to be too large when compared to the other characters. I understand that importing these character designs from the TV animation probably saved a lot of time and work, but I can’t pretend that I didn’t notice it, and even if you’ve seen this before and didn’t consciously recognize that had happened, your unconscious probably did. Once you add in Mercy Graves’s lack of any nose (she just has two nostril slits), it’s messy. 

That having been said, this is a fun movie. In a pre-MCU and pre-Big Bang Theory world, it was pretty daring to have an animated feature—and therefore to many people’s minds, a movie for kids—that is so unflinching in its depiction of violence and grief. It was moderately controversial at that time for precisely that reason, although I feel it’s probably faded into relative obscurity now that the self-appointed so-called moral guardians have moved on to harassing accepting parents and inciting violence against librarians. Looking at it now, fifteen years later, when the market has been completely oversaturated not just with superheroes but various conceptual deconstructions and reconstructions of them with the mainstream adaptations of things like The Boys and Invincible, this one looks rather tame in comparison. Still, it’s not to be scoffed at, and there are much worse ways to spend seventy-seven minutes. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Holdovers (2023)

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Every year, I get into a discussion with at least one person about the fact that I don’t much care for Christmas music. There are a lot of reasons for this. For one thing, I grew up in a household in which we were only allowed to listen to one radio station, one that was Contemporary Christian music 10.5 months of the year and nothing but the same 30-40 Christmas songs in the six weeks leading up to Christmas. It wasn’t as if you were going to hear anything tongue-in-cheek on 92.7 “The Bridge,” which means no “Santa Baby,” no Chipmunks, no mothers kissing Santa Claus or grandmothers getting run over by reindeer; you might get something haunting and ethereal that you wouldn’t get on a mainstream station like Amy Grant’s “Breath of Heaven” to almost make up for the dearth of otherwise worthwhile material, but that was about it. Add in that they didn’t even have more than one version of the standards that they did have, and it was a monotonous time. Secondly, I often find that people who have positive associations with Christmas have never had a job working retail, which means that they’ve never heard the same unimaginative version of “Little Drummer Boy” six times while manning an eight-hour shift at the cash register at Urban Outfitters (or worse, the Nook nook at Barnes & Noble, where you attempt to convince people who just came in to get a copy of Green Eggs and Ham for their niece to buy a less-functional iPad at the same price point), which will kill any fondness you might have had for a song. Still, every year, my best friend and I watch The Muppet Christmas Carol, and it’s part of our tradition that sometime during “It Feels Like Christmas” I turn to her and say “Y’know, I think this is my favorite Christmas carol. Not my favorite Christmas Carol adaptation, but like my favorite Christmas song,” and she says “Y’know, you say that every year.” That film came out allllll the way back in 1992, and although there have been a few other Christmas movies that have come out since whose appeal was universal (Elf), blandly inoffensive in a corporate way (The Santa Clause), or bizarre (Krampus) enough to be considered part of the Christmas Movie Canon (at least to some), they are few and far between. We may have a new one with The Holdovers, though. 

It’s almost Christmas, 1970, at the New England boarding school Barton Academy. Junior Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) is excited to spend his winter break in Saint Kitts with his family, even packing up a pair of beach briefs that he describes as the most masculine thing that he could wear, as they’re the same as the ones James Bond wore in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. On the last (half) day of the term, the strict and authoritarian ancient civilizations professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) “generously” offers to let one of his classes, comprised mostly of boys who have failed the midyear exam, to take a retest upon their return, although there will be new material on that test, which means more studying during their vacation. Both of their Christmas plans are derailed, however. When one of his peers fakes a relative’s illness to get out of chaperoning the “holdovers” (boys who will be staying at the school rather than returning to their parents for the holidays), Hunham is enlisted to perform these duties, and he is all but told outright by the school’s headmaster Dr. Woodrip (Andrew Garman) that this is in retaliation for his refusal to give a passing grade to the son of a senator, costing Barton one of its largest donors. While waiting for his pickup, Tully receives a phone call from his mother, canceling their family trip at the last minute so that she can spend this time as a late honeymoon with the boy’s new stepfather, thus leaving him as one of the aforementioned holdovers, all of whom will be bunking in the infirmary as the dorms and school building will be without heat for the duration, for cost-saving reasons. The only other person who will be around consistently is Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the cafeteria manager, who is hesitant to leave the last place that she spent time with her late son Curtis, who was recently killed in action in Vietnam. 

Although there are initially five students at Barton for Christmas, that number is whittled down to just Angus when one of the other boys’ father, a mogul of some kind, comes to collect his son for a ski trip and takes the other boys along, with Angus’s mother being unreachable on her vacation in order to give permission for him to go. When Angus injures himself while leading Paul on a chase around the school building, he is taken to the hospital, where he lies to cover for Paul and prevent the older man from losing his job, although he says he will call on the return of an equivalent favor one day. While eating in town on the way back, they encounter Lydia (Carrie Preston), Dr. Woodrip’s assistant, who tells them that she picks up a few shifts waiting tables over the holidays every year, and invites them to her Christmas party. They take her up on her offer and attend the party along with Mary, and while Angus hits it off with Lydia’s niece, Paul falls into the trap of being optimistic about Lydia’s potential to be attracted to him only to discover she has a boyfriend, and Mary drinks too much and has a breakdown about the loss of her son in the house’s kitchen. She’s not too drunk to tell Paul off about how he’s treating Angus. This eventually leads to the two taking a field trip into Boston after Christmas, but one of the stops they make along the way ends up having consequences that neither of them could have predicted. 

Paul Hunham is a fascinating character. We’re not meant to like him very much at first, and I think that he’s off-putting in that he represents the version of ourselves that we fear others see: unattractive, smelly, clumsy, incapable of telling a story. Our sympathy for him grows, however, as the pieces of his life fall into place as he and Angus get to know one another and open up to each other more: abusive father, scholarship to Barton Academy at age fifteen, went on to an Ivy League school where his more privileged roommate deflected his own plagiarism by framing Paul and Paul’s subsequent retaliation costing him his education. He returned to Barton, where he was given a position by a kindly former headmaster who saw his potential, only to now be serving at the leisure of a man who was once his own pupil. His backstory also intertwines with Mary’s, as she reveals that although Curtis likewise was able to attend Barton on scholarship, but upon graduation, he wasn’t able to go straight into university like his rich classmates and enlisted in the service in order to attend school on the G.I. Bill when he returned — but he didn’t come back. Along with Angus, who didn’t grow up in wealth and is only in attendance at Barton because his mother’s new husband is wealthy, they are the outsiders amongst the elite. In contrast, school’s effortlessly charming quarterback is initially left at the school by his father because the boy refuses to cut his long blond 1970s hair, but when he hears the helicopter approaching the school, he exclaims that he knew his father would break first, and he returns to school after break with a shorn head. Unlike the tragedies of the lives of our three leads, his troubles are shallow and silly, as his father’s feud was over nothing more than vanity and was resolved with no real loss since the boy was being stubborn about his hair because, in a world where you really have no other problems, what else are you going to fight about? 

If you’re reading this and thinking to yourself, “Wait, didn’t I hear that this movie was a comedy?” you are correct, it is; it’s just my nature to get hung up on the melancholy parts of these kinds of dramedies. Now that it’s addressed, it’s worth noting that this movie is, in fact, hilarious. Sessa is fantastic, a breakout freshman performance from an unknown actor who just happened to audition for the movie because he attended the school at which it was being filmed. There’s a scene late in the film when Paul is sitting at a bowling alley bar and he attempts to talk to two of the Bostonians there, a bartender and a regular dressed as Santa. He attempts to ingratiate himself with them by delivering a rambling monologue about how Santa should be dressed according to Grecian tradition, and although it’s exactly the kind of thing that would be very annoying behavior from a stranger at the bar, Giamatti plays it with the perfect intermix of attempted frivolity and joviality with witless, unobservant boorishness that it’s impossible not to be charmed by it in spite of oneself. Sessa manages to do the same with Angus, making him a triumphant example of a kid who’s too smart for his own good but is also struggling with rejection from his peers and his lack of friends in spite of his good nature underneath. It’s a very charming form of humor, and it works just as well as all of the great physical comedy that is going on around it (special mention to Paul Hunham’s absolutely pathetic attempt to throw a football). 

We throw the phrase “instant classic” around a lot these days. I’ve said it myself about things that didn’t stand the test of time and which have faded into obscurity. I don’t know if we’ll be able to look back on this one in ten years and say that it’s part of the canon, but I do know that I’ll be watching it one year from now, and that’s good enough for me.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Kokomo City (2023)

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Kokomo City is one of the most visually stunning documentaries I’ve seen in a long while, composed entirely of black & white images so stark in contrast they recall old-world nitrate celluloid; it’s practically filmed in black & silver.  It’s also one of the most awkwardly edited docs I’ve seen in a long while, to the point where it’s difficult to believe it was shot & edited by the same person.  First-time filmmaker D. Smith started the project largely as a one-woman show, interviewing a small cast of transgender sex workers about their lives & labor while she was on the verge of choosing between the trade and homelessness herself.  Her total control over the project as a director, cinematographer, and editor speaks to its qualities as an intimate, personal work that makes space for its subjects to speak candidly about their lives without hesitation or filter.  It also speaks to Smith’s comedic sensibilities, often undercutting those confessional interviews’ darker turns with the boi-oi-oing sound effects & slide whistles of a vaudevillian cartoon.  Maybe that choice was necessary to prevent the film from becoming one-dimensional miserabilist poverty porn about Black trans women’s lives, but its flippant soundtrack choices and shot-to-shot rhythms still distract from how gorgeous its individual images are in isolation.  It’s continually frustrating that these same raw materials could easily be re-edited into something timelessly cool instead of something needlessly frantic. 

This is likely a silly complaint to make about a project that’s entire point is to just listen to four women tell their own stories in their own environments.  In conversation, the subjects redefine sex work as “survival work”, making it clear that even in the best circumstances their lives are in the hands of their (often closeted, often married) clients.  There’s a morbid humor to their interviews even without the Looney Tunes sound cues; the movie opens with a near-death experience involving a john with a handgun that’s recited as if it were a cocktail party anecdote instead of a traumatic memory.  Smith is determined to communicate that the women’s lives are not joyless, which comes through clearly enough in its fish-eye lens music video skits and stylistic callbacks to classic She’s Gotta Have It-era NYC indie filmmaking.  There’s just something about those anecdotes’ sequencing that feels over-fussed in the edit.  It’s jazzy in a 30 Rock kind of way instead of jazzy in a Tribe Called Quest kind of way, which distracts from the individual stories being recorded.  The four women interviewed—Daniella Carter, Koko Da Doll, Liyah Mitchell, Dominique Silver—get much-deserved “Starring …” title cards in the opening credits, which is a testament to how much the movie hangs off their every word.  It’s very much worth rolling your eyes at a couple corny needle drops and morning-radio shock jock sound effects to hear what they have to say, especially since they all look so incredible saying it.

I’m being a little overly critical here, especially for a movie made with so few resources.  Kokomo City is clearly a cut above the kinds of poverty-line trans life documentaries I’m used to seeing at film festivals – titles like Pier Kids, Kiki, and Check It!.  It’s only frustrating because a few small tweaks in the editing style could’ve elevated it to something much more substantial, landing it among all-time queer classics like Paris is Burning, The Queen, and Dressed in Blue.  I’m likely being shortsighted on this point; time will likely be kind to Kokomo City both as an aesthetic object and as a cultural time capsule.  Its Instagram-inspired art direction, rap skit comedic antics, and gaudy onscreen text might cheapen its more immediately satisfying choices to my old-man eyes & ears right now, but in time might make it indispensable as a document of a specific moment in outsider queer culture.  Maybe this was what watching the video-art experimentation of Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied felt like thirty years ago.  It certainly carries the same sense of communal grief, political fury, and defiant humor.  I might just need a little time & distance to fully appreciate how those impulses are warped by the tools of modern digital filmmaking.

-Brandon Ledet

Medusa Deluxe (2023)

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I’ve been slipping into my laziest writing tendencies lately, defaulting to an oddly optometrist approach to film criticism.  Because I’ve been catching up with too many 2023 releases all at once in this final month of the year, it’s been too difficult to write about them all in individual reviews.  So, I’ve been forcing them into false-binary competitions, like an eye doctor operating a phoropter.  Which is better, 1 or 2?  1: the melodrama about child abuse; or 2: the melodrama about gourmet food?  1: the class warfare thriller about homoerotic lust; or 2: the small-town thriller about lesbian lust?  1: the literary drama challenging current trends in mainstream publication; or 2: the literary documentary challenging a long-dead author’s seminal novel?  Setting up these arbitrary binaries is an easy go-to when the only other option is assessing a film on its own merits (blech), and it’s a habit I hope to break soon.  However, I won’t be breaking it today.

It would be impossible to discuss the British whodunnit Medusa Deluxe without comparing it against the recent Irish crime comedy Deadly Cuts.  That is, if you’re one of the few people who’ve happened to see both pictures, which feels statistically improbable for anyone living outside the UK.  Still, I’m not sure how many dark comedies there are about murders behind the scenes at hairstyling competitions; I’ve personally seen exactly two, and they were released just a year apart in the US.  Sticking to the phoropter binary device I’ve set up for myself here, I’ll say that Medusa Deluxe is a lot more stylish than Deadly Cuts, spending most of its 100 minutes on a single, seemingly unbroken shot that investigates an off-screen murder in real time.  On the other hand, it’s also a lot less funny than Deadly Cuts, so as a head-to-head contest it’s kind of a wash (and rise).  To continue my mixed metaphor, it’s like the fine-tuning portion of an optometrist visit where you’re no longer sure which image is sharper, and you’re mostly just impatient to get the trivial comparisons over with.

Medusa Deluxe sets up unfair expectations of greatness by opening with its best scene, in which actor Clare Perkins runs circles around her costars talking shit about a rival hairdresser who’s just been killed & scalped hours before their regional competition.  Perkins continues to steal every scene she’s in as a rawly genuine, scrappy artist who’s ready to throw punches at anyone who challenges or disrespects her work.  It’s almost a shame that the movie isn’t a Rye Lane style walk-and-talk about her character’s daily routine running a salon instead of a real-time investigation of her rival’s murder, since no one else ever lives up to her performance.  As someone who doesn’t know their “poofs” from their “fontages”, I can’t report exactly what’s going on with her colleagues’ outrageous hairstyles as they wait around backstage to be interviewed by the cops, but I do know they’re beautiful works of art.  I also admire the way that the hairdressers’ usual salon gossip adapts so well to speculation of who amongst them might be The Killer, just as a lot of recent real-world salon gossip has devolved to speculation over true-crime tabloid stories of abductions & murders.  Only Perkins stands out as a memorable player in the stage-play drama of their predicament, though; everyone else is just chattering in gorgeous weaves, wigs, and hair sculptures.

First-time director Thomas Hardiman is showy here in the way first-time directors often are, following his small cast of characters around a labyrinth of tiny dressing rooms with the same handheld virtuosity that Friedkin used to shoot his early stage play adaptations.  If it were released in the 90s, it would likely be lumped in with the wave of Tarantino knockoffs that flooded video stores, detailing the stylists’ lives outside of competition instead of focusing on the crime that holds them captive, the same way that Reservoir Dogs is about the events around a botched bank heist instead of the heist itself.  Only, the competitive hairstyling world it depicts is more of a recent Instagram-era phenomenon, so it couldn’t have been made at all back then, leaving the much sillier Deadly Cuts as its only useful comparison point.  Both films are smart for choosing this specific subcultural setting, because of the opportunity for eye candy & sight gags (at one point, Perkins is “maced” with Tresemmé by a competitor) and because it’s the kind of insular community that fosters years of long-simmering resentments, which can turn violent.  Both also choose to conclude on a Bollywood-inspired dance video, which only intensifies the urge to compare them.  Medusa Deluxe is the more ambitious film of the two, but that also means it’s the one that asks you to take it more seriously, which both dulls its humor and opens it to more critical scrutiny.  Deadly Cuts gets away being with being the low-key charmer that’s good to have around for a laugh, like a pair of novelty sunglasses you don’t actually need vs. the regular prescription glasses you wear every day.

-Brandon Ledet

The Boy and the Heron (2023)

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Full disclosure: I’ve been struggling with what to write about The Boy and the Heron for over a week now. It’s obviously a beautiful movie, made with loving care, attention to detail, and bizarre imagination that one has come to expect from Hayao Miyazaki, and has all of his hallmarks of adorable and anti-adorable creatures, but also has a narrative that feels more incomplete than normal. I should also disclose that, although I am a forever proponent of watching these films with subtitles rather than with dubbing, my viewing experience was of the dubbed version of the film, and I’m not certain if there are differences between the two versions that could explain some of what I’m missing. 

Mahito Maki is a twelve-year-old boy who awakens one night to learn that there is a fire raging through Tokyo, and that the hospital where his mother is located is in the center of the conflagration. He runs toward the fire’s destruction, but his mother is lost. Some time later, his father, a manufacturer of air munitions, evacuates his family to his wife’s ancestral estate, currently occupied by his late wife’s sister, whom he has married in the interim since the opening scene. Mahito has trouble bonding with Natsuko, whom everyone remarks upon as being nearly identical to his late mother, and he further isolates himself by intentionally gouging a nasty wound in his head that is then presumed to have been the result of violence from bullies, and he is allowed to remain at the estate rather than having to go to school. Exploring the area, he finds a run-down structure and enters it through a doorway that is not completely sealed; later, he learns from one of his stepmother’s seven attendants, Kiriko, that this was the library of his great-granduncle, who was obsessed with magic and who disappeared in his youth, prompting the tower to be sealed. Mahito also finds himself the subject of the attention of a large grey heron, which speaks to him in a language he understands and tempts the boy to follow him into the tower. Fashioning himself a bow and an accompanying arrow (fletched with a recovered feather from the heron), Mahito enters the tower with Kiriko when searching for Natsuko, who has disappeared; deep within a hall, they encounter the heron again, who tempts Mahito with an image of this mother. Mahito manages to injure the heron in its beak because of the transitive magical properties of the heron’s feather, turning him into a grotesque bird man, who is ordered by a wizard to assist Mahito in his journey, and the heron, Kiriko, and Mahito find themselves transported to another world.

This isn’t a new story, not really. Children going to fantasy worlds is one of the oldest tropes of children’s literature, whether that world be Narnia or Oz or Neverland or Wonderland or Fantasia or the Labyrinth (etc.), and, from what I can tell, the novel from which The Boy and the Heron takes most of its narrative inspiration, 2006’s The Book of Lost Things, is also one of these narratives. In that novel, the main character’s stepmother has already given birth to his half-sibling (rather than being pregnant still, as in the film), and so there are even more parallels to fantasy media of this kind; I haven’t read the book, but a review of several summaries implies that the presence of a new baby is part of the incitement of the protagonist’s journey, as in Labyrinth. The tropes here are from all over. Just like the Pevensies in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Mahito has been evacuated from a city center during WWII (although we’re not supposed to think too hard about the fact that Majito’s father is making military equipment for the Axis); the recent death of the boy’s mother is even more strongly felt here than in The NeverEnding Story; and this film manages to ride the line that divides the Oz books from their most famous adaptation with The Wizard of Oz, as Mahito’s journey is clearly real, as Dorothy (et al)’s travels into Oz were in L. Frank Baum’s novels, but said world contains images that are derived from things that he has seen in the real world, as in the 1939 picture. 

What is new here also seems to have come largely from Miyazaki. There’s nothing in any of the summaries of The Book of Lost Things that indicate recurring bird images and motifs as part of that novel’s narrative (the book seems to largely feature canines and lycanthropes), but we all know that this man loves flight; it’s all over his work. Here, this is seen in the “real” world via Mahito’s father’s work as an air munitions manufacturer but which translates into several different species of birds in the “fantasy” world, all of whom have different natures that present to Mahito as things which at first seem cruel or wicked to him but which ultimately prove that the apparent violence of nature exists not because of malice in the world, but simply because existence does not conform to us as individuals. There is the heron first, whose motivations are unclear and who exists more as a trickster, whose behavior is inscrutable. Second are the pelicans, who first attack Mahito and are later seen descending upon and devouring this film’s cutesy sprite creatures, the Warawara. Although they seem to be malicious in this attack at first, a dying gull tells Mahito that their people are starving as a result of having been brought to this place, where they have no other natural food source. Finally, we meet the parakeets, who are largely anthropomorphic and willing to eat human flesh. The last of these do have some malicious intent, just as Mahito’s emotional climax of the film requires that he recognize that he has malice within himself as well, which saves him from the same fate as his great-granduncle. It’s this same realization that he has come to an age where he has to force himself to grow and mature as a person by recognizing that he can feel negative emotions and not act upon them that leads him to finally accept Natsuko and go home. After he has a fun adventure with the time-traveling child version of his mother, of course. 

I’m not sure that this one is destined to become an indisputable classic like some of Miyazaki’s other work, but that’s what we always say about late additions to the canon of an auteur with a career that has already proven that it will have a lasting legacy. It’s clearly a deeply personal film, and when making something that is created with an intentionally idiosyncratic worldview (rather than aiming for something more like universal appeal), there’s always the danger of making it insular and inscrutable. I certainly expect this one to have a smaller audience of devotees than something like Princess Mononoke or even Howl’s Moving Castle (which was greeted with a similarly lukewarm/confused audience reception as The Boy and the Heron upon initial release, to my recollection), but if there’s one thing that I’ve learned over the years, it’s that there’s no Miyazaki film that isn’t someone’s favorite, and that will apply here, too. It could even happen to you. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Suitable Flesh (2023)

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Before his death in 2020, director Stuart Gordon was planning a comeback, alongside his screenwriting collaborator Dennis Paoli, with whom he had worked on films like Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Castle Freak. That intended return was to be Suitable Flesh, another Lovecraft adaptation, and although Gordon didn’t live to see it completed, his friend and longtime collaborator Barbara Crampton was determined to usher it to completion, which she achieved this year with Joe Lynch in the director’s chair. I’ve never seen any of Lynch’s feature work, but I was very impressed with his short film Truth in Journalism that was a bit of an internet phenom a few years ago (although the fact that everything that references the film online now gives away the twist, sometimes in the title). And while there’s nothing that’s technically wrong with this one, I have to admit that I just didn’t enjoy it. 

Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham) is a psychiatrist living an idyllic life of career success, loving marriage with handsome if temporarily unemployed husband Edward (Johnathon Schaech), and a fulfilling best friendship with colleague Daniella Upton (Crampton). After a session with a man who is trying to give up smoking, a young man from the nearby Miskatonic University bursts into her office and introduces himself as Asa Waite (Judah Lewis, of The Babysitter). He tells her that his father, Ephraim (Bruce Davison), wants his son’s body, in a scene that would have been more effective if it had been played with more ambiguous dialogue that implied (for instance, abuse at the hands of his father), but instead just sounds like ranting and raving. When she gets a phone call from Asa later, she fears that he’s in danger and goes to his house, only to become embroiled in an apparent domestic disturbance situation that belies dark magic. Eventually, Derby finds herself swapping back and forth between her body and that of Asa, but the entity with which she is exchanging corporeal forms with is not Asa, but something much older and more powerful, and if they switch a third time, it will be permanent. 

Narratively, this one is a bit sloppy, and it’s also not really a surprise that the Lovecraft story from which is takes its concept, “The Thing on the Doorstep”, is often considered one of the talented racist’s lesser works. Lewis is doing fine work as the menacing thing that first possesses Asa’s father before taking him over, and although I love seeing Graham in just about anything, there’s a bit of a disconnect between Lewis’s version of (what we’ll call) the spirit and hers, and I wish Graham’s version was as menacing as Lewis’s. There’s also something very fun about the idea of a possessing spirit that has bodysurfed through time in male bodies because of its misogynistic ideals, only to end up in a woman’s body and learn how much it enjoys riding dick. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to save this movie, nor is its gruesome final act, which is what I think will end up being what Suitable Flesh is most remembered for. A shambling, battered corpse that begs for death isn’t the freshest idea (An American Werewolf in London and Return of the Living Dead immediately spring to mind), but it’s realized here in a truly horrifying fashion. 

Still, for me, the film’s highlight was Crampton (as she often is). She looks amazing here, and her turn as the confused Dr. Upton who has to come to terms with the fact that her best friend is not losing her mind but is in fact experiencing a truly supernatural event is a sight to behold. In many ways, she’s the true protagonist, the one with the most character development and the person with whom we sympathize the most. It makes the first half of the narrative seem like filler until we get to the good parts, and I have to be honest, I think the late Gordon would have gotten us there faster and better. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Moon Garden (2023)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the dreamworld fantasy film Moon Garden (2023).

00:00 Welcome

01:22 Inu-Oh (2022)
05:11 It’s a Wonderful Knife (2023)
08:22 Thanksgiving (2023)
11:35 The Marvels (2023)
22:06 The Killer (2023)
28:00 A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
33:45 E.T. (1982)
39:40 Godzilla Minus One (2023)
42:50 FYC Screeners

1:06:20 Moon Garden (2023)
1:33:13 Best of 2023 Catchup

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

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Stroszek (1977)

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Stroszek is a relentlessly downbeat tragicomedy about one man’s inability to escape the prison of society. The film opens with Bruno Stroszek being released from prison, where the kindly warden makes him promise to never drink again, as the street performer’s only crimes were all related to or caused by his alcoholism. As soon as he departs the office, however, he goes straight to a local pub, where the bartender recognizes him and greets him (as) warmly (as 1970s German stoicism allows), despite the fact that Stroszek has been gone for two and a half years. Stroszek attempts to greet Eva, a woman he knew before, but the two men with her reveal themselves as her pimps and send him on his way, but not before he offers to let her come and stay with him in the apartment that his old neighbor Mr. Scheitz has kept for him. Stroszek attempts to return to street performance, but there’s little love for the vagabond who can never remember to zip his fly, and although Eva does find her way to him and tries to help him spruce up the place, this ultimately leads to further harassment and beatings at the hands of her former pimps. Unable to turn to the police for help, Mr. Scheitz offers to let Eva and Stroszek accompany him to Wisconsin, where he is moving to live with his nephew for his remaining few years, and he even gets jobs for them as a waitress and a mechanic, respectively. 

Upon initial arrival in the states, the trio feels a rush of excitement and possibility while sightseeing around New York before they purchase an old car and make their way to the prairie town of Railroad Flats, an indistinguishable little spot of nowhere, a barren place of dead grass brown and dirty snow. Scheitz’s nephew is amenable to them, and things start out well for them at first despite the humility of their surroundings, as Eva finds her new line of work much more agreeable than her old, and Stroszek gets along with his equally alcoholic colleagues, and the nephew Scheitz even lets them set up a mobile home on his property to give them a leg up. The elder Scheitz is considered a bit of a curiosity around town, but the townsfolk are more bemused than annoyed at his wandering around and purportedly measuring “animal magnetism” using some kind of ammeter, speaking a language that none of them understand. Unfortunately, the good times aren’t meant to last; a “friendly” visit from an officer of the bank reveals that they are behind on their payments due to Stroszek’s inability to read the fine print on many of the documents that he signed, and although Eva is able to secure a temporary reprieve from repossession by temporarily returning to her old line of work, she is unsatisfied with where life has taken her and ultimately runs away, hitting the road with a couple of Vancouver-bound truckers. 

When Scheitz is arrested for a poorly-thought-out attempt at vengeance on the bank for taking Stroszek’s trailer, he is truly alone, with no music to play and with no one around who even speaks his language. Stroszek seeks out the only person he knows, a German businessman who was being harassed at the start of the film by Eva’s pimps and who said that he was going to a specific place in America where there was a park where people could see freely roaming bears. This turns out to be Cherokee, NC, and it is Stroszek’s final destination as well. 

If this were a different kind of movie, one might expect that Eva would turn around one day at her waitressing job and see that her two pimps have found her and plan to take her back to Berlin, or you might think that the fact that there are four unsolved and seemingly connected murders in Railroad Flats would come back as a plot point or be relevant in some way, but nothing like that happens. There are many long montages of hard work that drive home the mindless repetition of labor, and which contribute nothing to the film narratively but serve a purpose for defining the film’s mood. It’s a movie that requires the kind of patience that a lot of audiences no longer have, as it often lingers on its tableaux in order to fully sell the scale of the feelings of loss, loneliness, and hopelessness that the characters face. As an indictment of the American Dream and all of its unfulfilled promises, it functions beautifully and has a real sense of immediacy; within a few days of arriving in Railroad Flats, Stroszek witnesses his American benefactor pull one of his own teeth with a set of pliers for a sense of relief, which he witnesses with shock made all the more isolating by his lack of understanding of English. 

The film is not without its comedic moments, but even these are meant to speak to a greater melancholy. The biggest laugh that I got came in Wisconsin, when Scheitz translates his nephew’s admonition to Stroszek to stay away from a particular fence because the strip of land on the other side is in dispute between two farmers, both of whom refuse to let his enemy plow the area, which is explicitly called “fallow.” We see these two farmers as each gets very close to the edge of the disputed territory, both of them driving their tractors with their shotguns on their hips, pointed skyward … for the moment. It’s a very funny visual, evoking the image of jousting knights with their lances at the ready, but it also speaks to the kind of violence that America is capable of. Just as the two pimps in Berlin exercised control over Eva, these two men are also primed and ready to commit violence, with potentially life-ending consequences. Stroszek also visits a kind of arcade where trained animals perform tricks; put in a quarter and watch a rabbit run into a tiny fire engine and sit there as if he is the driver, or watch a chicken peck at a tiny piano as it plays a tune, or watch another chicken dance after pushing a button in a tiny jukebox. Not so funny is how Stroszek presumably sees himself in these beasts, forced to perform over and over again for a pitiable amount of money like a trained animal; in fact, the dancing chicken is the last image that we see of the film, and it lasts for some time, as a reminder of what Stroszek became before the end. 

I have to admit that, despite all my writing about film, I’ve actually seen very little Herzog (in fact, this is only my second, after Grizzly Man), but from what I’ve absorbed about the man’s work from the pop cultural landscape, this seems like one of this works that defined his sensibility in the public eye. It’s bleak, but beautiful.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Zone of Interest (2023)

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If you’re a particular kind of self-serious cinephile, every new Jonathan Glazer movie is a Cultural Event, largely because of scarcity.  The director only has four features to his name, stretched across two decades, with half of that time passing since his previous film Under the Skin arrived in 2013.  Glazer has been “a name to watch” since his early 2000s stunners Birth & Sexy Beast (if not since his iconic 1990s music videos like “Virtual Insanity” & “Karma Police”).  Every project is so carefully planned & crafted that there’s always intense anticipation of what shape his career is going to take overall. He makes too few films for anyone to predict the big-picture trajectory of his art; there just isn’t enough data.  So, I have to admit that I was a little disappointed by the announcement of his latest project, The Zone of Interest, because it doesn’t fit the shape I personally wanted for his career.  I would’ve much preferred that Glazer dove deeper into the uncanny surrealism of films like Birth & Under the Skin than where he chose to go: sinking further into ice-cold Hanekean cruelty instead.  Still, The Zone of Interest is a title of interest by default, regardless of subject or approach, and Glazer at least makes the misery meaningful & worthwhile. 

The Zone of Interest is the rare war atrocity drama that doesn’t let its audience off the hook for not being as bad as literal Nazis, but instead prompts us to dwell on the ways all modern life & labor echoes that specific moment in normalized Evil.  Sandra Hüller (Toni Erdmann, Anatomy of a Fall) stars as the doting housewife of the Nazi officer who runs Auschwitz (Rudolf Höss, played by Christian Friedel).  The couple’s idyllic home shares an external wall with the concentration camp, which soundtracks their daily domestic routines with the excruciating sounds of torture & genocide. The wife raises children, hosts parties, and tends to the garden.  The husband works tirelessly to invent more efficient ways to gas & incinerate Jews.  Both are separated from the tactile details of the violence that makes their lovely home possible, except in stark reminders when the busy work of the day is over and all that is left is the quiet of their conscience: lounging in a calm river polluted with the ashes of their victims, struggling to sleep in a house lit by the orange glow of the crematoriums, etc.  It’s a slowly escalating, dehumanizing horror that they’ve deliberately numbed themselves enough to not even notice, but it deeply sickens outsiders who briefly visit their home to smell the flowers or play with the kids.

If Glazer were a lesser artist, he would have firmly anchored his WWII drama to the tools & tones of the past, comforting his audience with the emotional distance of time.  Instead, he shoots The Zone of Interest in the style of a modern reality show, documenting the domestic busyness of his central couple on continuously running security cameras like an especially horrific episode of Big Brother.  There are even night-vision sequences that catch small acts of subversion the cameras aren’t supposed to see – good deeds that eventually go brutally punished.  Later, he interrupts the 1940s timeline with images of concentration camps’ current function as history museums, again finding a way to frame them as sites of heinous banality.  The automated-home modernization of this historical drama might initially register as a formalistic novelty, but the constant reminder that the movie is being made now with today’s technology gradually has a clear thematic purpose.  Anyone with a smartphone should be familiar with the feeling of becoming numb to grand-scale injustice & genocide as background noise while we busy ourselves with the meaningless tasks of the day.  Anyone who’s ever been lucratively employed should recognize the feeling that our jobs & lifestyles are causing active harm to people we cannot see.  We’ve all seen too many Holocaust dramas to truly feel the emotional sting of another one as if it were out first; Glazer does his best to shake us out of that numbness by making one specifically rooted in the doomscroller era.

Everything is tastefully, technically on-point here.  I was initially distracted by the automated security camera editing style, which had me looking for visible cameras in every frame, but the approach eventually proved itself thematically justified.  Mica Levi’s thunderous, minimalist score is maybe their sparsest work to date, but it’s effective in its restraint.  A24 has been well-behaved in their marketing & distribution of the film, refraining from selling boutique Nazi merch or leaning into trite FYC awards campaigning.  Glazer has again taken his time to deliver something thoughtfully crafted but not overfussed, proving himself to be one of our most patient auteurs.  I likely would not have watched The Zone of Interest if his name were not attached, since I’m generally skeptical of what yet another wartime genocide drama could possibly illuminate about history that audiences don’t already know (and have learned to ignore).  Glazer sidesteps that tedium by stating the historical facts of the narrative in plain terms – illuminating the dull, background evils of modern living instead of safely retreating to the past.  It’s not the project I would’ve greenlit if I were signing his checks, but it’s a worthy entry in his small canon of thorny, alienating features.  All I can do now is sit in the tension of what he’ll make next, likely until sometime in the 2030s.

-Brandon Ledet