susan sarandon

Blue Beetle (2023)

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I’m not really sure that I have superhero fatigue. Scratch that; I definitely do, but I also have superhero fatigue fatigue. We’ve been hearing about how the general population is growing tired of superhero movies for over half a decade now, and yet, there’s still no real end in sight. Marvel is keeping its slate full while DC is getting ready to reboot everything again (which, to be fair, if you’ve ever been a fan of DC Comics, you know that this is DC’s modus operandi when things start to get complicated). Paul Rudd’s inherent charm couldn’t save the dreadful Ant-Man: Quantumania, Ezra Miller’s extracurricular activities didn’t help The Flash reach an audience, and there’s a non-zero chance that this paragraph is the first that you’re hearing about Shazam: Fury of the Gods. It feels like being a corporate shill to call any comic book adaptation that’s hot off the presses a breath of fresh air, but Blue Beetle has a surprising amount of heart, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) just finished his pre-law undergrad—at Gotham University, naturally—and is returning to his Florida home to reunite with his family. Unbeknownst to him, the rest of the Reyes clan has undergone some shake-ups that threaten their home; his father (Damián Alcázar) suffered a heart attack, with the medical bills costing him his mechanic business, and worse, their landlord has sold their family home to the Kord Corporation, which intends to raze the property to build more luxury condominiums. Kord Industries, currently headed by Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon) in the wake of the disappearance of her CEO brother Ted, is quickly becoming the only game in town, and they also employ Jaime’s younger sister Milagro (Belissa Escobedo) as part of the cleaning crew at the Kord estate. While working with her one day, Jaime witnesses a verbal altercation between Victoria and her niece, Jenny (Bruna Marquezine), over Victoria’s planned direction for the company, turning their attention back to the machinery of war after her father purged weapon research and development when he was CEO. Both Jaime and Milagro end up fired, but Jenny tells Jaime to come to Kord HQ the following day so that she can find gainful employment for him there. Unfortunately, her attempts at corporate espionage—in the form of the theft of something called “the scarab”—that same day are discovered fairly quickly, and she entrusts her stolen goods to Jaime, who is able to abscond with them. 

Back home, Jaime’s family insist that he open the box Jenny gave him and look inside, and the piece of alien tech within immediately bonds to him and takes him on a familiar Greatest American Hero/Raimi Spider-Man style “learning to control newfound powers” sequence. It’s pretty rote stuff all things considered, but the bog standard narrative is elevated by novelty in the performances of both the lead and the supporting cast. Sarandon lends the whole thing a sense of gravitas that the film proper doesn’t fully earn, but the real standout is George Lopez, who plays Jaime’s Uncle Rudy. A dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist, Rudy acts as occasional expositor, such as in the scenes where he explains the legacy of the heretofore unmentioned previous crime-fighting Blue Beetle, unlikely gadgeteer, and comic relief. He’s clearly having a lot of fun in the role, and although the comedy of the first half of the film felt a little limp and forced, the second half makes up for it. 

Look, I’m no fool. I know that there’s no profound moral reason that any company seeks to diversify its staff or output. Faced with outcry in the midst of the June 2020 protests, several major studios hired dozens of DEI employees and strategists and then, as soon as things got quite, those hires were first on the chopping block when “trimming the fat.” Your dad or your cousin or your old college roommate can repeat “Go woke, go broke” until they’re blue in the face, but the truth of the matter is that no megacorp is putting funding toward creating more diverse content out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s all about money, and it always is. Disney’s casting of Halle Berry in The Little Mermaid isn’t part of some grand conspiracy to obliterate “white culture,” they cast her because now they can sell a white Ariel doll and a Black Ariel doll. It’s really as simple as that. There may have been a time when I could have appreciated Blue Beetle more for its pure representation, but things have changed a lot since we could all rest on such neoliberal laurels. Warner Brothers didn’t release this film to theaters because of strong convictions about the treatment of Latine populations in the U.S. or concerns about gentrification of non-white neighborhoods or to take a stand against corporate overreach; in fact, the fact that it touches on these issues while being part of a giant corporate conglomerate is almost insulting. 

With that in mind, it’s kind of a big deal that the reins of this movie were handed over to Angel Manuel Soto, whose larger body of work has been concerned with American imperialism in Puerto Rico, as well as the rise of American fascism. His C.V. includes the feature La Granja, a set of interconnecting stories about people from various walks of life struggling with PR’s economic collapse, as well as the short docs I Struggle Where You Vacation and Inside Trump’s America, which focus on the lives of ordinary Puerto Ricans as they struggle with Washington’s sluggishness in the fact of PR’s debt crisis and the terrifying reality of the merging of cult and mob mentalities, respectively. Soto doesn’t leave his past or his beliefs behind in making Blue Beetle, which makes for a bizarre melding, as Rudy (accurately) calls Batman a fascist and Jaime’s grandmother flashes back to her revolutionary days in Mexico while wielding a giant gun and shouting (in Spanish) “Death to the Imperialists!” The irony of this is thick: Batman is DC’s most lucrative cash cow, and there’s no separating the gorged tick that is Warner Brothers from American capitalistic imperialism’s hide. Audre Lorde reminds us that “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” but Soto is giving it a shot. It may not make the movie better, but it certainly doesn’t make it worse. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

White Palace (1990)

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From the Criterion Channel’s recent Erotic Thriller streaming program to Karina Longworth’s recent “Erotic 90s” podcast run to the documentary We Kill for Love‘s exhaustive catalog of the erotic thriller’s DTV era, much attention is currently being paid to streamy Hollywood smut from decades past.  The dumbest, schlockiest, most preposterous VHS rentals of yesteryear are currently being paraded around as high art worthy of deep academic analysis, no longer just late-night time filler for horndogs.  It’s a great time to be a cinephile.  If I were going to throw one more lost-to-time erotic artifact on top of this already mountainous pile of moldy cassettes, I’d like to direct audiences to the 1990 melodrama White Palace, which stars two icons of the genre – Bull Durham‘s Susan Sarandon & Sex, Lies, and Videotape‘s James Spader.  White Palace is worth revisiting for the same reason all of these sweaty schlock “classics” are; it’s proof that Hollywood used to regularly make racy movies for adults instead of four-quadrant crowdpleasers where “everyone is beautiful, and no one is horny.”  It’s also great contrast to the more desperate, over-the-top erotic thrillers of that era, in that its own sexuality is much more confident, relaxed, and underplayed than its competitors on the Major Video shelf.  While most Erotic 90s™ relics twisted themselves in knots trying to steam up the audience, White Palace simply casts the two hottest actors in Hollywood as its leads and lets their chemistry do the work.  It makes it look easy.

“The story of a younger man and a bolder woman,” White Palace stars Spader as a highly successful 20-something lawyer and Sarandon as his disheveled 40-something diner waitress – the hottest woman on the planet.  They first lock eyes when he Karens out demanding a refund at her knockoff White Castle burger joint; they quickly bond over cheap booze & familial grief in the bar down the street; and then, against all glaring red flags that they are not made for each other, they bone.  They bone a lot.  There’s nothing especially sinister nor traumatic to get in the way of their boning either.  Transgressing the borders of class & culture (he’s Jewish; she’s a godless hedonist) is certainly taboo in the context of an American romance, but it’s not an insurmountable hurdle for their passionate fuck fests.  If you compare it against the twisty illogic of the era’s erotic thrillers—the identity hijack of Single White Female, the underground bisexual conspiracy network of Basic Instinct, the virtual reality espionage of Disclosure, etc.—this erotic drama’s central conflict is relatively tame & understated.  If anything, its biggest transgressions are in how often it centers female pleasure in its animalistic boning sessions, integrating cunnilingus & vibrator use with the same frankness as fellatio.  Even with most of Spader & Sarandon’s thrusting hidden under a thin layer of bed sheets, it’s incredible that they got that much honest, non-misogynist sexuality past the sex-negative ghouls at the MPAA.  Usually, they’d have to punish the sexpot diner waitress for her crimes against decency with a last-minute storm of Fatal Attraction bathtub bullets to justify the indulgence, but this movie is much more wholesome & low-key than its hyperviolent equivalents.

White Palace is a glorious time capsule of early-90s cheese & sleaze.  You may want to snicker at its saxophone-heavy scoring of St. Louis tourism shots, or its sex montage set to a chipper country tune about the joys of fucking younger men, but its most dated qualities are central to its charm.  There are plenty of 90s-specific casting choices to celebrate in the supporting cast too, including Misery‘s Kathy Bates, Pretty Woman‘s Jason Alexander, and two central players from the iconic Jewish sitcom The Nanny (Renee Taylor & Rachel Chagall).  Its adjacency to more histrionic Erotic 90s classics is its greatest strength, though, even if you can only feel their twisted influence in scenes where Sarandon is encouraging Spader to drive while wasted or where Spader stares at his wife’s grave while listening to mental replays of Sarandon’s moans.  In a way, it’s White Palace‘s resistance to indulging the trashier war-of-the-sexes tropes of the era that’s holding it back from being critically exalted among the best of its kind.  It’s just not flashy enough to earn the same attention as all-out smut fests like The Doom Generation, which just enjoyed a full theatrical victory lap among all this Erotic 90s fanfare.  Instead, it’s currently unavailable to watch by any legal means other than, I suppose, borrowing the out-of-print Full Screen DVD I happened to find at a local thrift store.  White Palace wasn’t quite sleazy enough to earn a spot in The Criterion Channel’s Erotic Thrillers package, so its day in the sun as a recovered erotic relic is still to come (and come and come and come).  I hope to see it come soon.

-Brandon Ledet

My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea (2017)

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I don’t often get excited for modern animation. The flat, rounded-out, overly precise digital designs of CG-animated movies, including well-respected behemoths of the medium like Disney & Pixar, are largely uninspiring to me, even if they illustrate a well-told story. My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea is the perfect antidote to these troubled, CG animation times. Jumping from Fantagraphics-published graphic novels to feature-length filmmaking, visual artist Dash Shaw overwhelms the senses in My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea with a tactile, unnecessarily complex visual style that feels like the philosophical opposite of modern CG animation doldrums. Shaw’s loosely sketched figures navigate blindingly colorful backgrounds of ever-shifting multimedia collage, recalling the more psychedelic impulses that invade the black & white stick figure frames of Don Herzfeld’s work or the short-form experiments you might catch in a late-night haze on Adult Swim. This eccentric visual design is paired with an over-the-top, go-for-broke plot (spelled out plainly in the title), but is also tempered by a laid-back, juvenile attitude that calmly strolls through its dizzying whirlpool of ambitious ideas. In a perfect world, a film this visually stunning & naturally cool would gather at least a cult audience through its challenge to the inhuman computer graphics style that typically guides modern animation aesthetics. Instead, My Entire High School Singing into the Sea had a single-week, single-screen theatrical run in New Orleans before disappearing for nearly a full year and then popping up on Netflix to little fanfare. Dash Shaw dared to leave his grubby little fingerprints all over this messy, overly-ambitious debut, delivering the film that modern animation needs, but no audience seems to want.

Jason Schwartzman stars as an unpopular jerk of a high school student who wastes his energy overachieving as a “journalist” for the school newspaper, making this film feel somewhat like an unsanctioned Rushmore sequel. Since he’s both a social nuisance and a known blowhard, his warnings to the student body that the school (which was built both cliffside and on a fault line) is at risk of crumbling at the slightest earthquake are an act of crying wolf. Early in the runtime, this foretold earthquake knocks the entire high school into the adjacent sea and the majority of the film is a Titanic-like race for survival as the building sinks into the water. Schwartzman’s prickly protagonist is joined on his voyage to safety by an impressive voice cast of tagalongs: Reggie Watts & Maya Rudolph as fellow newspaper nerds, Lena Dunham as a Tracy Flick-like over-achiever, and (the MVP of the movie) Susan Sarandon as a tough-as-nails lunch lady who acts as the group’s only muscle. Each speak in hushed, flat voices, incredibly calm in the face of their surroundings burning, crumbling and flooding in ever-worsening mayhem. My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea is a laid-back irreverent comedy, but it does not shy away from the Hellish displays of widespread destruction its over-the-top premise naturally inspires. Our ragtag group of aggressively casual, self-obsessed teens (and their remarkably buff lunch lady) are subjected to the horrors of libraries aflame, flesh-eating miniature sharks, haunted locker rooms, and makeshift dystopian societies that deify social popularity to determine their leaders. It’s all very goofy & flippantly nonchalant about the panic that defines its borders, but it’s also a perilous journey to safety & rescue littered with the blood, guts, limbs, and severed heads of the less-fortunate students who don’t make the cut.

The simplicity of that story is a necessity, as it allows room for the much busier visual assault that obliterates eyeballs for the entirety of the runtime. Before the picture starts, a title card warns of potential risks for inducing photosensitive epilepsy. It becomes immediately apparent why, as just a character running to catch a school bus in the opening scene is a layered, video game-inspired adventure of visual hyperactivity. Dash Shaw’s debut movie is bursting with weirdo experiments that push animation as a medium by remixing older, more hands-on methods into new, stunning arrangements. It’s like the mashup DJ equivalent of a modern animated feature in that way, except that its adoption of past, rudimentary techniques are transformative, not nostalgic. Crayon scribbles, amateur sketchbook doodling, and Prince Achmed-style cutouts supply its elemental building blocks, but their cumulative, layered effect is something much more impressively complex than those D.I.Y. tactics imply. My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea is a simple, irreverent comedy about teen brats winging their way through an absurd, impossible crisis. It’s also a bold vision for how animation can evolve in meaningful, tactile ways without fully succumbing to 100% computerization. And if you don’t personally enjoy what Shaw accomplishes in the picture, don’t worry. His dialogue promises, “Next time I’ll water it down so that it’s shitty and more popular!”

-Brandon Ledet

Speed Racer (2008)

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It can be difficult to pinpoint the exact moment a movie’s reputation crosses the line dividing underrated gem and overrated misfire, but the live-action Speed Racer reboot is getting dangerously close to crossing that threshold. After a string of cult hits with Bound, The Matrix, and V for Vendetta, the Wachkowskis got their first taste of massive critical & financial failure when Speed Racer flopped in wide release. In development under several creative teams since 1992 and racking up a budget well over the $100 million mark, the project was likely doomed from the start, but what the Wachowskis delivered was far more bizarrely energetic & personally enthusiastic than what you’d typically expect from major blockbusters that suffer similar growing pains. Speed Racer’s green screen vision of a live-action hyperreality where everything from future sport car races on impossible Hot Wheels-style tracks to pancake breakfasts in a small suburban home feels equally, eye-bleedingly cartoonish is an intense sugar rush of weird ideas I wish even half of all summertime blockbusters could stack up to. The problem is this enthusiasm amounts to an unwieldy, 140 minute long story that’s more epic in length than it is in scale, shoveling that visual sugar into audience’s mouths by the truckload instead of the spoonful. As much as I empathize with dedicated fans of the film who wish to counteract the disregard for this weirdo visual energy by hailing it as a masterpiece, I have to admit that the film is ultimately Too Much of itself. Its cumulative effect is impressive, but exhausting.

Emile Hirsch stars as the titular Speed Racer, a suburban racecar driver who struggles to live in the shadow of his presumed-dead brother, Rex Racer. Speedy has a team of helping hands hoisting up his legacy (as all racecar drivers do), including a parental power couple played by John Goodman & Susan Sarandon and a ride or die love interest played by Christina Ricci. Outside a subplot concerning the death/disappearance of Rex Racer & the not-so-secret identity of the mysterious outlaw Racer X, the story mostly concerns Speedy’s struggles with fame as he’s called up to the big leagues by major corporate sponsors. A dichotomy between small, wholesome racing families and massive big money corporations is drawn as Speedy is asked to participate in a rigged system where racecar driving is treated like pro wrestling: scripted sports entertainment. I don’t have a mind specifically geared to care about cars, but the video game landscapes where these races are staged are a beautiful sight to behold. Speed Racer can often devolve into a jumbled mess of flashback-corrupted timelines and go-nowhere Gags For The Kids involving a goof-em-up chimpanzee, but its story about a young upstart toppling an evil corporation through a pure, passionate dedication to his sport is certainly infectious, especially when paired with this kind of sci-fi, Rollerballish futurism. I’m not sure early scenes detailing Speed Racer’s childhood troubles adjusting to schoolwork & literally competing with his brother’s memory have to be nearly as extensive as they are, but they do help establish the heightened, color-intense surreality of a child’s imagination that commands the film’s overall aesthetic. In terms of plot, Speed Racer‘s major flaw might be that there’s too much of it, possibly a result of adapting pre-existing manga & anime source material for s standalone feature.

I don’t mean to sound overly negative on the Wachowskis’ aggressively strange, admirably overreaching cartoon vision. I was entirely sold on Speed Racer as an ambitious, singular work of world-building through simple CGI, the way Steven Chow features often impress me in their unembarrassed embrace of the artform. The way characters feel entirely separate from their background environments (which feature the most artificial-looking Nature exteriors since Douglas Sirk) is very much in tune with the art of comic book panels & anime action sequences, maybe more so than any other live-action film outside Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. The way the film clashes a wholesome, nostalgic worldview represented in old-timey racing footage from the silent era and line readings of “Jeepers!” & “Cool beans!” against a ludicrous future overrun by segways & impossible superhighways is a beautifully rendered aesthetic I’m not sure I’ve ever seen in a film before. I totally agree with Speed Racer apologists & devotees who contend that the alternate reality fantasy the Wachowskis crafted here should not have been dismissed outright (the way I readily dismissed their sci-fi adventure epic Jupiter Ascending without blinking). What keeps me from hailing the work as a overlooked masterpiece, though, is the way that fantasy is made to be exhausting by something as easily fixable as the film’s length. After about 80 minutes of Speed Racer the film had offered an incredible cartoon hyperreality the world has never seen before. The only thing it can do for the hour that follows, however, is offer more of what you’ve already seen. As delighted as I was by any of the film’s in-the-moment surprises (one gag involving a weaponized beehive in particular had me choking on my wine), the film’s overall effect was just Too Much of a Good Thing. If Speed Racer were an hour shorter I’d likely be joining in the praise of it as an overlooked masterpiece. As is, I can only appreciate it as a fascinating, sprawling mess of deliciously bizarre, enthusiastic ideas that long outlive their welcome.

-Brandon Ledet