stephen root

The Not-So-New 52: Batman — Year One (2011)

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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. 

Right here on the cusp of the twelfth film of this project, I hit the first snag; Batman: Year One is not available on HBO Max, or whatever it’s called these days. Heretofore, every single one of these movies was on the service, and from what I can tell, all of the remaining ones are as well. With the high number of premium subscription service material that has started to migrate over to free services (Lovecraft Country is on Tubi, the people’s streaming service) or more widely accessed ones (Six Feet Under is on Netflix) while David Zaslav plunders and pillages HBO and Warner Brothers, I checked to see if it was on one of those, and it was not. In fact, it’s only available as a rental. So, while I wait to acquire it through the library, I figured I’d talk a little bit about the recent history of these movies as they relate to streaming and the Warner Bros. conglomeration. It hasn’t come up here before, but Warner got into it pretty heavy with Netflix some years back, and it was because of these movies. 

Well, it was technically mostly because of Warner Premiere, but considering that Warner Premiere consisted almost entirely of these films, cheapy cash-ins on legacy animated properties (Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown; Tom and Jerry Meet Sherlock Holmes; A Miser Brothers’ Christmas), even cheaper long-distant sequels to Warner properties (Return to House on Haunted Hill, The Dukes of Hazzard: The Beginning, The Lost Boys: The Tribe), eleven separate Scooby-Doo movies, and—inexplicably—Trick ‘r Treat, let’s be honest, these DC flicks were the real reason this happened. In 2010, Netflix and Warner agreed that the former, which was still largely a DVD-by-mail service and had not pivoted to streaming as their primary market, would allow for a 28-day gap between the retail release of a DVD and the date that it would be allowed to be sent out to subscribers. This was under pressure from Warner, who cited at the time that they make approximately 75% of their retail sales for all physical media within that time frame. By 2012, this window had increased to 56 days; to put that time frame into perspective, the first film to be affected by the 28-day window would have been Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, and the last to be mailed out within the first month would be this film, before the next one (Justice League: Doom) would be delayed to two months. 

All of this is, of course, moot now, as Netflix ended its DVD service as of September of last year. A half decade ago, however, DC had the idea to create their own streaming service. It would not only host every DC-related series and movie ever produced, but it would also provide unfettered access to the company’s digital comic vault that contained every story ever published, and would produce a few original series, notably the previously mentioned Titans, the Doom Patrol adaptation, and (most excitingly for me and the reason that I signed up for it) the third season of the prematurely canceled Young Justice series, which was originally supposed to be a Netflix production. DC Universe, as the service was called, didn’t last long, launching in September of 2018 and being discontinued in less than three years in January of 2021, when its programming was folded into the then-new HBO Max service, which had replaced HBO Go in September of 2020, and even as HBO Max was rebranded Max in May of 2023. This didn’t include everything that DC Universe had hosted (obscure TV series like the 1980s Superboy didn’t migrate over), but it has, to my knowledge, always included these animated movies, and the fact that Batman: Year One seems to be missing is another indicator, perhaps, that the overall quality of the service has declined. 

Batman: Year One is a fairly faithful adaptation of its source material, perhaps the most true-to-the-text one we have seen so far. Said comic is also the oldest one that has been tackled in this franchise as well. The Year One comic was released in 1986, following on the heels of the previously discussed crossover event Crisis on Infinite Earths, and was intended to cement what would now be the character’s new origin canon, although the Dark Knight’s was one of the least changed backstories under the new reboot. An adaptation of the comic languished in development for decades. In fact, the legends tell us that it was even considered for adaptation as the third film in the Burton Batman franchise, before the reins were turned over to Joel Schumacher in order to move in a more “kid-friendly” direction and away from the gritty reality of this narrative. Years later, when Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins was first announced, I seem to remember early trade publications citing that it would be a direct adaptation of Year One, but I don’t feel like fighting with the pathetic shell of a useful search engine that Google has become in order to confirm that one way or another. Even without that confirmation, the 2005 film does bear many similarities to the comic, with two major direct lifts from it; the first is the scene in which Batman summons a huge flock of bats that darken the sky using a supersonic device, and the second a sequence in which Jim Gordon tells Batman, his new ally, about the impending appearance of a clown-like villain who calls himself “Joker,” which is the final scene in both movies. 

This is a short one, but it’s got meat on its bones. On the same January day, Gotham City’s “prodigal son” Bruce Wayne (The OC’s Benjamin McKenzie) returns home, musing from his high vantage point as he flies into the city that it almost looks calm from the air, despite being a seedy place of misery at ground level, while Internal Affairs Lieutenant James Gordon (Bryan Cranston) arrives in the city by train, fretting about the place’s high crime rates and his concerns about bringing his pregnant wife to such a place. Bruce plans to rid Gotham of crime from the ground up, demonstrating that he has spent his eight year absence training physically to do so. Elsewhere, Gordon is “welcomed” to the GCPD by corrupt Commissioner Loeb (frequent Cohen Brothers collaborator Jon Polito), reckless and bloodthirsty SWAT lieutenant Brendon (Stephen Root), and Gordon’s new partner, the violent and hair-triggered Flass (Fred Tatasciore). Loeb hints at some dark part of Gordon’s past that makes him think that he’ll be easy to extort, but Gordon’s plan is the same as Bruce’s: making Gotham a place worth living in. Bruce’s first night out as an attempted crime fighter goes very poorly, as he attempts to rescue an underage sex worker from her pimp, only to be stabbed by the girl herself and being severely beaten by the crowd that gathers. The person who deals him the most damage is a prostitute named Selena Kyle (Eliza Dushku, in a pretty thankless role overall considering what she’s capable of). Although he manages to evade police and drag his way into his home, Bruce sits facing a bust of his father and planning to let himself bleed out if he doesn’t receive a sign that he should go on, which arrives in the form of a bat that crashes through the window. We don’t get to hear the line about “criminals [being] a cowardly and superstitious lot” in his internal monologue, but this is a very straightforward reenactment of the same scene in the comics, which emulates the first appearance of the character all the way back in 1939. 

Inspired, Bruce takes on the costumed alter ego of “Batman,” and although he starts out hassling a trio of teenagers boosting a television set, he eventually works his way up to threatening Loeb and his associate, the mobster Carmine Falcone (Alex Rocco), during a dinner at one of their homes. Gordon is the mythological one good apple in the GCPD, but Loeb’s fury about Batman’s threats leads him to assign Gordon to finding the Batman, all while Jim faces off against his own department — up to and including his fellow detectives beating him with a baseball bat in a parking garage while wearing masks because he refuses to get dirty and join the grift like they did. Inspired by the Bat, Selena Kyle decides to become a masked denizen of the night herself, but in pursuit of theft instead of justice, and models her costume on a cat motif. 

At barely more than an hour, this one just barely qualifies as a feature, but it’s a pretty good one. It’s economically paced, even if the parts with Selena feel like dead weight. In contrast, the original comic had a bit more plot having to do with Harvey Dent (the future Two-Face) as the third face of the fight for justice in Gotham, from within the DA’s office, with the added wrinkle that his overt derring-do made him one of Gordon’s suspects for the true identity of Batman. The Selena stuff is also everything that has aged most poorly about the source material, as it was one of those things where Frank Miller just couldn’t help himself but make Catwoman a sex worker (this was retconned almost immediately and is, for all intents and purposes, the only thing considered non-canonical in the comic to this day). The film’s biggest weakness, however, is that everything great about it has already been adapted in some form. Batman: The Animated Series depicted the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne almost exactly as it was retold in Year One, down to angle and perspectives from the comic. An uninformed viewer would likely see this one and think that it was ripping off Batman Begins by centering the narrative around the antics of Carmine Falcone or having Batman be saved by the appearance of hundreds of bats, but both that character and that sequence originated in this film’s source material. As a whole, I can’t see it having much reason to exist other than for its own sake and for the interest of people who are already familiar with and fans of the comic, which doesn’t seem to add up to much. Cranston is great as Gordon, and it’s great that what feels like the entire second half of the film is just Batman vs. cops, but I’m not sure it’s enough, especially given the number of hoops you have to jump through to find this one. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it does feel … vestigial.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Happily (2021)

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There’s a certain kind of low-budget indie comedy that’s packed with the hippest, funniest comedians you know . . . who just sorta sit around with nothing to do.  They’re not so much hangout films as they are grotesque wastes of talent.  What’s frustrating about the recent “dark romantic comedy” Happily is that starts as something conceptually, visually exciting in its first act, only to devolve into one of those comedy-scene talent wasters as it quickly runs out of ideas.  Happily opens with a wicked black humor and a heightened visual style that recalls what everyone was drooling over with Game Night back in 2018.  Unfortunately, it leads with all its best gags & ideas, so after a while you’re just kinda hanging out with hip L.A. comedians in a nice house – which isn’t so bad but also isn’t so great.

Joel McHale & Kerry Bishé star as a couple whose persistent happiness and mutual lust—as if they were still newlyweds after 14 years of marriage—crazes everyone around them.  Their cutesy PDA and ease with conflict resolution is first presented as a mild annoyance to their more realistically jaded, coupled friends.  Then, Stephen Root appears at their doorstep like the mysterious G-Man in Richard Kelly’s The Box, explaining that their lovey-dovey behavior is supernaturally deranged, a cosmic defect he needs to fix with an injectable fluorescent serum.  That Twilight Zone intrusion on the otherwise formulaic plot feels like it should be the start to a wild, twisty ride.  Instead, it abruptly halts the movie’s momentum, forcing it to retreat to a low-key couple’s getaway weekend in a bland Californian mansion with its tail tucked between its legs.

In its first half-hour, Happily is incredibly stylish for such an obviously cheap production.  Red color gels, eerie dreams, disco beats, and an infinite sea of repeating office cubicles overwhelm the familiarity of the film’s genre trappings, underlining the absurdity of its main couple’s commitment to their “happily ever after” romance.  Once it gets derailed into couples’ getaway weekend limbo, all that visual style and cosmic horror just evaporates.  The talented cast of welcome faces—Paul Scheer, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Natalie Morales, Charlyne Yi, Jon Daly, Breckin Meyer, etc.—becomes the main draw instead of the dark Twilight Zone surrealism, which is a real shame.  There are plenty of other films where you could watch hipster comedians act like cruel, bitter assholes in a lavish locale.  The early style and humor of Happily promised something much more conceptually and aesthetically unique.

And since there isn’t much more to say about the toothless hangout comedy that Happily unfortunately devolves into, I’ll just point to a few recent titles on its budget level that are much more emphatically committed to the biting dark humor of their high-concept, anti-romantic premises: Cheap Thrills, The One I Love, and It’s a Disaster.  Those are good movies, and this is almost one too.

-Brandon Ledet

The Country Bears (2002)

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Imagine if the infamous The Band documentary The Last Waltz was remade as a dramatic film where every actor was created by the animatronic technicians behind the Chuck E. Cheese house band. Now rework that premise into an 88 minute live action Disney comedy and you have the delightfully nightmarish flop The Country Bears from 2002. Much like other blatantly commercial misfires of pop culture past (Mac & Me, Super Mario Bros., Howard the Duck, Monster Trucks, etc.), The Country Bears‘s main draw is the disturbing novelty of its character design, the titular bears. The movie is too short and too ramshackle for the absurdity of its animatronic country musician bears to ever wear off, so every wiggle of their roboticized ears and every flicker in their dead robo-bear eyes registers as a crime against Nature. What distinguishes The Country Bears from other nightmarish misfires of shameless commercialism, however, is that its various goofs & gags can actually be genuinely funny on top of its overall surrealist novelty. Directed by Animaniacs writer (and Pinky & The Brain creator) Peter Hastings, the film is somehow successful as a straightforward kids’ comedy (for the kids who don’t wake up screaming later that evening, at least).

Our protagonist and audience surrogate is a preteen bear robot voiced by Haley Joel Osment, who opens the film asking human parents (including Steven Tobolowsky), “Am I adopted?” over the breakfast table. His human brother, a generic teen bully with early 00s frosted tips, is befuddled that his parents tell a white lie in that moment and that no one seems to care that Beary Barrington is a bear, taking it into his own hands to tell the truth. This inspires Beary to run away from home on a road trip to the concert hall where his all-time favorite band, The Country Bears, used to play regularly. Discovering that the robo-bear version of The Greatful Dead is currently broken up and the concert hall is in danger of being demolished, Beary vows To Get The Band Back Together in order to save the historic space that stands as his bear culture mecca. The plot is mostly a series of set pieces from there as he collects bear musicians voiced by Stephen Root, Toby Huss, Don Henley, Bonnie Raitt (in a disturbing bear form the producers are hoping you’ll find sexually attractive), etc. for the climactic, day-saving concert. Standing in the way of success is a demolition-happy real estate developer played by an especially deranged Christopher Walken and a set of idiot cops tasked with bringing Beary home to his “family.”

Watching these hideous robo-bears play their giant guitars, banjos, and harmonicas, it’s easy to fantasize about how much better this film could be with a punk or metal soundtrack than it is with the lackluster country pop served up here. There is something subversive about dedicating something so visually bizarre to a wholesomely American artform, though, and no matter how bland the music gets, the bears never stop being fascinating to look at, whereas if this film were made in the last five years they’d be rendered in grey mush CGI. As the winking-at-the-audience cameos from unexpected celebrities like Queen Latifah, Wyclef Jean, and Elton John pile up, the movie’s normalized commercial sheen becomes even more bizarre in juxtaposition with its hideous character designs & zany Animaniacs humor. Sped-up bus chases, cops getting beaten senseless by automated car washes, musical arm pit farting, and old lady diner patrons pulling saxophones out of nowhere amount to the logic of a music video or a Saturday morning cartoon, which makes the VH1 Behind the Music-inspired premise all the more ridiculous. The film never pauses long enough to allow you to wonder how this human/bear society functions socially or why Beary Barrington would have a Nine Inch Nails poster on his bedroom wall. The whole thing just barrels through diners, weddings, car washes, dive bars, and music video shoots toward the inevitable, day-saving concert climax. It comes and goes so quickly and with such bizarre enthusiasm that I barely had time to notice that I was constantly smiling throughout.

-Brandon Ledet

Get Out (2017)

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fourstar

Although they’re often (rightly) called out for their inherent misogyny, there’s a popular reading of slasher films that claims they’re subversively, politically progressive because they ask a traditionally male audience to identify & empathize with a female victim’s POV. Aligning horror nerds’ sympathies with a Final Girl archetype might not seem like the height of radical discourse, especially considering what typically happens to those characters on-screen, but it does have a cultural value to it that might not be the first thing that comes to mind when discussing sleazy 80s slashers. The directorial debut of comedian Jordan Peele recognizes this function of horror audience sympathies and shifts its culturally critical eye from feminism to racial politics. Instead of a virginal, scantily clad blonde running from a masked killer with an explicitly phallic weapon, Get Out aligns its audience with a young black man put on constant defense by tone deaf, subtly applied racism. Part horror comedy, part racial satire, and part mind-bending sci-fi, Peele’s debut feature not only openly displays an encyclopedic knowledge of horror as an art form (directly recalling works as varied as Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, Under the Skin, and any number of Wes Craven titles), it also applies that knowledge to a purposeful, newly exciting variation on those past accomplishments. Get Out knows what makes horror effective as a genre and finds new avenues of cultural criticism to apply that effect to instead of just mirroring what came before, no small feat for a debut feature.

Our de facto Final Girl protagonist is a young, hip photographer visiting his white girlfriend’s family home for the first time. Isolated in a secluded, wealthy suburb, he’s faced with the outnumbered, paranoid feeling of being the only black man in a sea of white, smiling faces. The only other POC in his hosts’ community are “the help”, who have an unnatural, creepily robotic way of acting (assumedly in a direct nod to The Stepford Wives). Instead of tackling the blatant, violently hateful kind of racism that would more typically be skewered in this kind of movie, however, Get Out finds horror in racism’s much subtler, more difficult to pin down forms. The girlfriend’s family is initially very cordial with our Final Boy, but in an awkward, discomforting way, plagued with a wide variety of micro-aggressions he awkwardly smiles through to avoid confrontation. By using phrases like “my man,” “thang,” and “Sup, fam?” in an attempt to make him feel welcome and at ease, the family only makes his presence feel all the more alien. They declare proudly that they can’t possibly be racist, since they enthusiastically voted for Obama. Twice! The girlfriend, in turn, makes a big show of pointing out every subtle slight in an attempt to seem cool & above it all. Nothing about the scenario is cool. Through eerie atmosphere, mood-setting jump scares, and surreal nightmare imagery, Peele slowly, steadily reveals the ugly spirit lurking under this try-hard liberalism that reduces a human being into a cultural specimen. And when the corrupt, corrosive nature of that sentiment comes violently crashing to the surface, it’s exposed to be just as cruel & terrifying as the kind of racism usually depicted through white hoods & burning crosses.

Get Out is a good, well made genre film that then becomes spectacularly great in its violent, no fucks given third act. Peele’s well-rounded screenplay brings every stray theme, from the racial discomfort to the main character’s guilt over past inaction to metaphorical motifs as small as roadkill deer, back around for a glorious, purposeful conclusion. The seemingly well-meaning, casual racism that had been lurking under the surface like a paranoid delusion is exposed as a horrifically grotesque monster that reduces black men to physical objects, targets for the white & wealthy’s fascination & possessive entitlement. Additionally, Peele filters this thinly veiled maliciousness through a surreal nightmare where reality is warped by perception-shifting hypnosis. If I had one complaint about Get Out it’d be that it could’ve spent a lot more time diving into the otherworldly imagery & paralyzing implications of its hypnotic dream-space, known in-film as The Sunken Place, instead of chasing tension-cutting meta humor with the film’s comic relief character. The Final Boy’s best friend phones in periodically to act as an audience surrogate, asking questions like, “How are you not scared right now?” & directly calling out the girlfriend’s family as the creeps they so obviously are. He’s an amusing presence in the film, but he’s one that pushes Get Out away from the more unique touches of its modern horror surrealism into a more overly familiar horror/sketch comedy tone. However, Peele still gets the most he can out of his subtle nightmare plot’s moment to moment creepiness, especially from always-welcome character actors Catherine Keener & Stephen Root, and you can tell he made this passion project from the perspective of a life-long horror fan who knows exactly how the format works most efficiently. From Get Out‘s cultural criticism to its play with Final Girl tropes to the gloriously bizarre territory of its third act reveals & Sunken Place surrealism, it’s an impressive, striking debut feature, a great first go for a filmmaker who hopefully has a long career of these horrific, satirical mind-benders ahead of him.

-Brandon Ledet