BIG MONSTERS IN: 'The Suicide Squad', 'Gamera the Brave' & 'Superman: Man of Tomorrow'

 

BIG MONSTERS!

The Suicide Squad

Writer & Director: James Gunn

2021, USA-Canada-UK

 

Superman: Man of Tomorrow

Chris Palmer, 2020, USA

Writer: Tim Sheridan

 

Gamera the Brave

Chiisaki yûsha-tachi: Gamera

Ryuta Tasaki, 2005, Japan

Writer: Yukari Tatsui

 

Coming out of ‘The Suicide Squad’, my friend wondered if they had just chosen the stupidest monster they could think of. I had to explain that Starro the Conqueror had a long history in the DC Universe (since 1960). In fact, he was the adversary in the first comic I bought myself from a spinner rack during a caravan holiday: he was fighting The Justic League. I was familiar with comics because I had been reading the ‘Star Wars’ weekly comic, and then monthly, since the film came out when I was seven, so I was aware of Star Lord, The Watcher, Micronauts, Deathlok, Adam Warlock, etc. I mean, I knew ‘Whizzer & Chips’ and all that aimed specifically at kids, but it was ‘Star Wars’ and the support stories that burnt into my mind. I even have a soft spot for the alien attack story in ‘V/H/S/2’ because it reminded me of how unsettled I was by the origin of Peter Quill/Star Lord when the aliens blasted away his parents.  But when I just happened to pick up a comic from the spinner rack, which was my first true Superhero comic as a kid, it was a revelation. The apocalyptic nature of that story unsettled and blew my mind and, if I hadn’t been hooked on comics through ‘Star Wars’, I certainly was from then on.

But yeh, I did wonder why Starro for ‘The Suicide Squad’. But then I also read somewhere that James Gunn – charged with making Suicide Squad cool and saleable after the first botched attempt – felt that Polkadot Man was the most ridiculous DC villain, and then it made more sense: he was going for the naff, ridiculous villains too; for laughs, for the ridiculousness, because they were more expendable. The ones that the main franchises wouldn’t touch Not Harley Quinn of course, but…

‘The Suicide Squad’ starts dark and dangerously enough with Michael Rooker as Savant, leading us into a suicide squad of dodgy comic book villains (hey, I recognise Captain Boomerang!) that are going to be infiltrating an enemy island – but the joke is that they are just the distraction while the real squad is landing elsewhere. There’s a decent vein of dark humour from the start – detachable arms is probably the first big laugh – and the promise of something nasty, which the film delivers on a hit-and-miss basis. The initial competitiveness between Bloodsport (Idris Elba giving a textured performance of self-loathing which provides a lot of ballast) and Peacemaker (John Cena finding the conflicted humanity of a delusional scumbag) decimating what they think are the enemy but in fact are rebels is a typical delivery of black humour with a very sour punchline, for example. And then you have King Shark swallowing people whole, which the film doesn’t hold back from: voiced by Sylvester Stallone may make this a gag, but again the film insists on giving even King Shark pathos and a little misunderstood monster dimension. And of course, there’s Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn which, you know: she’s good. I like little highlights like Harley unlocking her shackles with her toes, showing how she’s formidable as she is unpredictable.

There’s a lot of good stuff here, a few surprises, a considerable cast that sells two-bit, two-dimensional characters, but for some reason there seems to be a magic ingredient missing. It’s too long where it should have benefitted from being snappier, for a start. When we get to Starro, it’s maybe a chapter too long. There just doesn’t quite seem to be the zing of Gunn’s ‘Guardian of the Galaxy’. He ought to be the guy able to elevate the underdog super-characters, but here the moments and incidentals are greater than the whole. But Rob Hunter’s conclusion that “‘The Suicide Squad’ is a Brilliantly Stupid Blast of Big Laughs and Bloody Chaos” also has a lot to it. It’s always diverting and I currently believe that, when expectations won’t interfere with the article at hand, I will certainly enjoy a second watch more, that I am likely to go with Hunter’s conclusion.

Starro has a mistreated monster aspect: he was taken from his normal astral habitat, brought to earth, incarcerated and experimented on. And when he fights back, the American forces accountable decide to bunk from responsibility and leave the natives to their fate. There’s plenty of barbs at the delusion and sheer inhumanity of political plotting here, not least in Peacemaker saying he doesn’t care how many men women and children he has to kill to achieve “peace”. It’s played as a gag, but it points at the wider plotting Amanda Waller leads in the schemes to use and sacrifice The Suicide Squad. It’s the political players that are worse villains than our proletariat villains. This is only reinforced as the film can’t quite avoid the idea that inside every bad guy there’s a good guy just trying to get out. A film of outright villainy will probably be as divisive as ‘I Care a Lot’, so here are a bunch of anti-heroes. Starro’s defeat is agreeably nasty and accents teamwork; and the other memorable moment comes when lots of mini-Starros swarm from the alien’s “armpit”.

But somehow, Starro the CGI creation is less fun than the last act of Kaiku mayhem in the animated ‘Superman: man of tomorrow’. This enlivens a sober if somewhat over-familiar origin story. The parasitic alien comes to Earth via one of crude anarchic bounty-hunter Lobo’s weapons: it possesses an unwitting victim and – with genuine horror edges – feeds on people and grows and grows. It’s big and pink and seems to nod at the Emmerich’s 1998 ‘Godzilla’ design. This is where comics and live-action may conflict: a gargantuan pink Godzilla and alien starfish may work on paper but may be a stretch too far for those not committed gleeful comic book absurdities, colour codes and suspension-of-belief. CGI makes anything and everything possible, but when it runs wild you get vapid ‘Aquaman’; at its overloaded best you get ‘Avengers: Infinity War’; with more focus you get the trippy ‘Dr. Strange’ set pieces that look like Jack Kirby panels come to life. It’s true that, for whatever reason, the animation of ‘Spider-man: Into the Spider-Verse’ will always feel more impressive and convincing than Starro’s rampage, although I have no doubt that it required just as much work and devotion by its architects.  It also helps that animation like ‘Superman: man of tomorrow’ feels decidedly cinematic: the shots of Parasite are designed and framed to accentuate its size and awesomeness. Also, the smartness and seriousness of intent, it’s horror and kaiju edges raised this DC animated feature above the perfunctory.

But, you see, Starro itself wasn’t quite as entertaining as the genuine fun of the kiddie kaiju, ‘Gamera the Brave’ either. So, the heritage of this film is the ‘Son of Godzilla’ lineage, but the “Monsters: Fight!” while stupid humans play geek chorus agenda was pretty much a given with the franchise by that point, far from any Atomic horror messages the seminal original may have had. But as far as A Boy And His Kaiju tales go, this kid is less annoying and cloying than many in this franchise. There’s also a fine eye on display by director Ryuta Tasaki – he monsters on the bridge, for example. But what really pleases, and what really matters, is that there are some considerably enjoyable effects. There’s no hope for Gamera – who is, after all, a flying turtle, although better looking that, say, ‘Gamera vs Viras’ (1968) – but his nemesis Zedus has an excellent monster suit, and watching them go at it and ploughing through miniatures is great fun. It’s augmented with CGI, but this is real monster suit and model work stuff, still rooted in the analogue, and for that it’s endearing. Of course, it is steers full throttle into mawkishness, but it is a decent enough, undemanding kid’s film. But it is probably a bit much when it hinges an emotional moment on a turtle butt sticking out of a skyscraper.

And I guess that’s the thing that CGI doesn’t possess. It doesn’t possess the call to goodwill where the audience is happy to make allowances for the shortcomings, in a way that is part of the charm. Perhaps that goodwill is sorely tested by, say, something like the giant plant-alien of ‘Dr Who and the Seeds of Doom’, but the sheer foolhardy ambition of Dr Who’s attempt is part of its entertainment. But I have never felt the inclination to give allowances to CGI in the same way I would Godzilla. Indeed, when we progress into the later instalments, I am often left enjoying just how good the suits are.

Now, there is no way ‘Gamera the Brave’ is better than ‘The Suicide Squad’, but just to say that Starro is less compelling that the practical designs of Zedus, and its absurdity less enjoyable than the animated Parasite. Perhaps its that CGI hues even closer to photo-realism and that we tend to reject the uncanny valley more in live-action films. Is Starro a bit too... goofy? But I never thought I would get to see something like a realist Starro on a rampage in a film when I first picked up that ‘Justice League of America #189’ comic off the spinner rack. So, you know: you kids don’t know how spoilt you are.

Notes on comics, animated features and 'Joker'

‘Joker’

Todd Phillips, 2019, USA-Canada

Written by Todd Phillips & Scott Silver

I was just at the right age when the Eighties’ comics revolution happened. I mean, I already loved Alan Moore’s ‘Swamp Thing’ – I was already a horror fan, after all – but I was deeply into Batman too. Then there was Moore’s ‘Watchmen’ and ‘The Killing Joke’ and Frank Miller’s ‘The Dark Knight’ and Neil Gaiman’s ‘Sandman’ … all that legendary stuff. I was just the right age for all that to be poignant and formative. The very first comic I ever bought myself was on a camping trip with my Dad (was this 1981?) and it was a copy of ‘The Justice League’ where The Starfish Conqueror took over a city: this edition ended on the cliff-hanger of a lot of city people with starfish over their faces, the Starfish Conqueror possessing them, and I was introduced to the idea of an apocalypse. I mean, I had been reading ‘Star Wars’ comics ever since the film came out and that and the support stories had apocalypse in abundance, but there was something about this ‘Justice League’ edition that struck a chord. Even if I had every ‘Star Wars’ comic ever released (and how much money that collection would that fetch now if I still had them?), it was from this edition of ‘JLA’ that I seemed to buy every comic on the shelf. I am a lifelong comics fan.

Despite what the adults may have thought, comics have long been

the introduction to The Big Themes for kids. And anyone keeping up with the litany of contemporary animated films knows that they have been growing up in full view and yet never noticed in the mainstream even as animation is bigger and more diverse than ever – and then ‘Spider-man: into the Spider-verse’ made people sit up and notice. But Batman has been long trading in seriousness. It may be the kind of earnestness that Lego Batman parodies, but it’s why I have always found the character reliably entertaining. Batman is a “super-hero” (yes yes, I know he doesn’t have super powers, but he’s still thought of in that way; plus he had bottomless wealth and he’s a superfighter and thinker, a real Übermensch) – it’s true that he always seemed to have a hotline to cool: ‘Beware the Batman’ animated series had a theme by The Dum Dum Girls, for instance.

Although Batman draws heavily from noir and crime fiction, he is also close to the horror genre. Surely more than others (discounting the supernaturally derived heroes) his gallery of villains hue closest to horror. There was even an Andy Warhol Batman/Dracula film apparently. But whilst he was out fighting horror monsters, I would also hazard that ‘Batman’ fiction is many reader’s introduction to mental illness as a dramatic device: split personalities, obsessives, narcissists, serial killers, etc. And so: Joker is a horrific psychopath.

In ‘Batman: Hush’, Joker has one of the best moments, heckling as

Batman and Clayface fight. But there’s never the sense that Joker is genuinely comedic: that’s not the point. ‘Hush’ continues the high standard of Batman animations that have been quietly turning out quality work since ‘Sub-Zero’ and ‘Mask of the Phantasm’. ‘Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse’ was dazzling, but there had been a lot of solid and interesting superhero animation output beneath the radar for a long time, but suddenly people took notice. It was no surprise to anyone that had been following the ‘LEGO’ and ‘Teen Titans GO!’ cartoons that they were so well written, meta and entertaining. And of course almost all screen superheroes owes a debt to the seminal ‘Batman: the animated series’: I used to video Saturday morning kids’ TV whilst I was working just to catch this. It was a perfect balance of cartoon – the style harking back to the 1940s’ Fleischer Studio ‘Superman’ cartoons – and more mature allusions: the dialogue was as sharp as the mood was shadowy; here was Batman fighting with hints of martial arts and I felt it the first time his fighting skills rendered convincingly on screen.

If Tim Burton kept an agreeable amount of the camp surrounding Batman, it was the Chris Nolan films that really went into the Bruce Wayne drop-dead serious perspective. If you preferred the camp of Batman – and perhaps never could get beyond Adam West – then there was always the agreeable ‘Batman: The Brave and the Bold’ cartoon; but even these were knowing and not condescending with the final Bat-Mite episode berating those critics that only wanted their Batman relentlessly serious. The ‘Batman’ animated films were happily continuing the dark hues from the comics even as ‘LEGO Batman: Family Matters’ made a mockery of the idea that Bruce Wayne was a loner. Entries such as ‘Bad Blood’ and ‘Hush’ carried on with the unhinged edges, with the latter this time giving The Riddler a little Joker madness and a make-over.

The adaptation of ‘The Killing Joke’ came in for a lot of backlash for having Joker rape Barbara Gordon. However, in terms of the character it made sense: he will do anything to upset, provoke, troll and drive people mad. That was his whole agenda: to finally give Batman one bad day that would drive the Dark Knight over the edge. In the comics, Joker had long lost the ‘60s campness that went towards neutering his insanity. Mark Hamill had done definitive voicework for Joker in the seminal ‘Batman: the animated series’ and here he toned down some of his hysterics to maybe create one of the most convincingly credible evocations of the character. In their final conversation, Joker even seems to drop the pretence of mania for a more-or-less serious but brief consideration of his nosediving relationship with Batman. And note he kinda fluffs that punchline. In both ‘The Killing Joke’ and ‘Joker’, Joker is called out for a self-serving nihilistic philosophy and being whiny. 

And as for Todd Phillips’ ‘Joker’… wouldn’t the character find it hilarious that his origin story has been seen as a powderkeg in the zeitgeist? Wouldn’t he just. The ultimate troll upsetting the establishment: exactly as it should be. Despite Phillips reported daft comments on contemporary comedy, with his ‘The Hangover’ films backing up his argument (and Marc Maron’s retort to this is correct https://heroichollywood.com/joker-marc-maron-todd-phillips/), the film is remarkably astute, the detail coherent, and hence the wealth of analysis it has provoked. I am going to be pro-‘Joker’.

It’s consistent and convincing enough that I have seen social media threads discussing the symbolism of black characters in the film: the care staff and the woman down the hall. It’s a film where discussions of its workings evolve into long discussions of its detail. On Kermode and Mayo’s BBC film podcast, the most enthusiastic, lucid and effected viewers that write in seem to be those that work in mental health care. It arguably contains enough artistic merit, social awareness, empathy, ambiguity and notable aesthetic to make it cinema beyond the confines of its ostensible and much maligned genre. And where it lucks subtlety, Joaquin Phoenix’s performance and Hildur Guðnadóttir’s soundtrack keep things grounded and shaded.

Of course, Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is exceptional, somewhere between the all-elbows physicality of his performance in ‘The Master’ and the more seething threat he evokes in ‘You Were Never Really Here’. It’s in the quiet hint of a Joker-style reaction when he is given a gun in the locker-room that hints at the unreliable narrator. It’s in the moment when, after his apparent first kill, he goes to the bathroom and seems to be working out his response through interpretive dance. Later, this escalates to a glam showstopper on a long staircase. Never once does Phoenix’s hold on the character wavers as he descends further into delusion psychopathy.

And surely by the end, for a variety of reasons, we learn to distrust everything from his perspective. One minute his mother seems bedridden; the next he is dancing with her, for example. Was he really given that gun? And then: was he really jumped by kids (doesn’t his boss say it’s the second time)? Are we just witnessing not only his delusion, but his persecution complex that he uses to validate his violence?

It seems one of the critical narratives being given is that Arthur Fleck is an incel, but I see little evidence of Arthur Fleck’s misogyny in the film. He thinks he can’t get a girlfriend, but we don’t see him try and although he is creepy, it doesn’t seem that he’s a true danger to the woman down the hall. Not that he isn’t, but we don’t see him cross that line, so the incel narrative seems imposed on the storyline to fit the narrative of mass-shooters that we know give incel grievances as motivation. In this sense, it’s a film that tells an incendiary truth and captures some of the zeitgeist where a viewer can impose their own agenda. But it’s not even subtext that it bears criticism of health care resources being cut so much that people like Arthur Fleck are left unattended and free to go off the rails – and this is the core.

Martin Scorsese may have berated superhero films as “not cinema”, but ‘Joker’ is fair example of what a Scorsese comic book film might be: after all, it owes so much to ‘Taxi Driver’ and ‘King of Comedy’. Look: there’s even Robert De Niro. Arthur Fleck sees urban life as a homage to Seventies cinema. Or maybe, focusing on its broad social criticism of cutting health care, it’s something like a comic book film by Mike Leigh. And Francis Ford Coppola joined in the superhero megafilm bashing. All esteemed directors that are not above using broad strokes and caricatures (isn’t there an argument that Scorsese doesn’t exactly depict a positive vision of Italian-Americans?) and if comic book films aren’t these iconic directors’ thing, the genre is still wading in humanism (superheroes promote doing good and empathy and existential angst, for example).

Batman vs Joker is that old tale of Light vs Dark, etc, and ‘Joker’ gives the latter some attention to colour-in an origin with some credibility. It does some justice to a foremost fictional troll hellbent on psychopathy. It’s always been this way: comics were blamed for all kinds of delinquency, then superhero publications for being childish, etc.; comics have somewhat more credibility now but a certainly cultural inability to take them seriously had moved on to the films – at least for some. It’s certainly more mature than the revenge porn of ‘Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood’, or titles that aim to subvert the genre like ‘Kick-Ass’ or ‘Brightburn’. Kick-back and deconstruction of the genre has always been a thing: take Moore’s ‘Watchmen’, and then you have shows like ‘The Umbrella Academy’ and ‘The Boys’. But smaller genre titles have been doing this for a while: ‘Super’ and ‘Defendor’ for example, and best of all ‘Chronicle’.

‘Joker’ is a natural progression of themes that have always been inherent in the character and the genre, if you were a fan and paying attention. Comics have always been mixing seriousness and clown colours.

Too Old to Die Young

TOO OLD TO DIE YOUNG

Nicolas Winding Refn, 2019,
USA, tv series

Ed Brubaker is one of the writer-creators of ‘Too Late to Die Young’, the series created with and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, and in issue 5 June 2019 of ‘Criminal’ he writes in his editorial:

"It is unlike anything out there, by a wide margin, so expect weird and shocking and hypnotic and gorgeous, all at the same time. Do not expect anything resembling a traditional TV series."*

And it’s hard to argue with this. Even the FX’s series ‘Fargo’ didn’t go quite so far out into being an unapologetic ambient piece. In ‘Too Late to Die Young’, the jigsaw pieces take episodes to reveal themselves and then assemble. Like so much of TV of interest, this can be traced back to ‘Twin Peaks’ in its unwavering pursuit of mood, if not mystery. 

It starts as it means to go on, with a 360 degree pan around a parking lot for three minutes or so. Has television ever offered such a series of cinematic gorgeous long takes? This is part of the very substance of this series, languid panning shots or 360 degrees to take in the full context. Every shot is like a fashion shoot. Every doorway is like a picture frame. The use of colour and light is a natural progression from the aesthetic that Mario Bavi was using in earnest in 1964’s ‘Blood and black Lace’. See how the cool blue of the night outside offsets the orange of the bulbs hanging inside? Relish the hellish purple of the whipping barn and the deep blue of the nightclub.

 

It’s often like photographs by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, or of David LaChappelle brought to life. The cinematography by Darius Khondji and Diego Garcia is exemplary. It’s the opposite of the neo-realism or insights offered by, say, ‘The Wire’ or ‘Headhunters’, but doesn’t indulge in the magic-realism of ‘Fargo’ and its more about the visuals than even ‘Gomorrah’. Rather, it is entirely cinematic in its patience and gloss. It’s a natural extension of the kind of glamourous crime fiction aesthetic introduced by Michael Mann’s ‘Miami Vice’. Cliff Martinez’s score creeps up on you, suddenly declaring itself from its drones and shadows and when the effect of this and the visuals coalesce, it is frequently sublime. But there is a plot.

Ed Brubaker has long been a reliable and excellent writer of crime comics, and it’s his mean focus that seems to have shaved off Refn’s campier dramatics while Refn’s aloofness minimises Brubaker’s empathy. Here, we have a wealth of characters and not one is particularly likeable or redeemable. Miles Teller is Martin Jones, a corrupt cop with an under-age girlfriend, Janey (Nell Tiger Free) – she’s a prodigy, incidentally. He’s just rolling with the punches, going from corruption to corruption until he kind of stumbles upon the idea of morality and decides he wants to be a kind of ethical hitman. Teller proves a great straight man for all the offbeat tendancies, stoically spitting his way through the killings and characters. He is minimal in what he says, pausing before he says anything, but shouldn’t be underestimated: he knows just what to say to get in and out of situations; to insinuate himself with a couple of despicable pornographers or to make a man wielding a shotgun in his face just lower his guard for a crucial instant (“Your mother sent me.”).

Meanwhile, Jesus (Augusto Aguilera) is biding his time to becoming a gangster kingpin. He keeps quiet because he’s insinuating himself; he’s not one of those hotheads. Beneath this silence, though, it slowly emerges that he is hiding the most appalling ruthlessness and egotism. Set in motion by his mother’s death at the hands of the police (an assassination?) – and there’s lots of incestuous kinks at play here – he is ruthlessly setting his ducks in a row, aided by his wife (Cristina Rodlo), who has secrets of her own. Most of the eroticism is provided by them: the flesh of Aguilera and Rodlo is swooned over by the camera in equal measure with the male, the female and the gay gaze being equally used.  

Elsewhere, you can debate about who is more nutzo and enjoyable: William Baldwin’s performance as the growling father of Teller’s underage girlfriend or Hart Bochner as the police chief that treats his station as an amateur dramatics venue.

Even as it takes its time, there are plenty to twists and surprises coming and when the storylines do come together, it doesn’t waste time getting to the nub. There are many riveting sequences: gangsters druggily dancing outside their headquarters before a drive-by shooting; Jones insinuating himself with the pornographers; a car chase that grinds to a halt in the desert; The High Priestess going about her work at a motel or a bar; etc.

Deadpan and ethereal, this won’t be for everyone, but if works for you, it’s a frequently mesmerising trip sprinkled with the exclamation marks of ugly crime fiction.

 “Please. Tell me that motherfucker isn’t a real cop.”

·        * “The Secret Ingredient is Crime”, ‘Criminal’ issue 5, June 2019.