Tag Archives: fashion

Superman III 4.25: Revenge of the Cowboys

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I knew that they were coming; I just didn’t think it would be this soon.

As you’ll no doubt recall, my introductory post for the blog discussed singing cowboys, an unaccountably popular film genre from the 30s and 40s that spawned dozens of movies per year, and then disappeared completely from the American public consciousness. The fate of the singing cowboys looms large over the history of superhero blockbusters, suggesting that even the most successful genres can be abandoned and forgotten.

The singing cowboys will be back one day, when comic-book stories are tired and played-out, to fight once again for their place in the pantheon. They are the existential threat just over the horizon, ready to pounce when the superheroes stumble.

And even here, the cowboys remind us that the eternal sequel is never assured.

Continue reading Superman III 4.25: Revenge of the Cowboys →

Swamp Thing 3.4: Love and Death

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So the first thing that Swamp Thing wants you to know about swamps is that swamps are terrible.

Coptering into the movie on a super shitty afternoon, which communicates to me that they could only afford to rent the helicopter for one day and couldn’t wait for the rain to stop, here comes Ms. Adrienne Barbeau, all dressed up in a suit and a disdainful expression.

She’s flying in from Washington as part of a government operation that’s so secret, they won’t even tell the audience which branch they work for. There’s a scientist around here somewhere, under all the cloud cover, who insists on doing top-secret voodoo science in a rusty old whack shack out on the far edge of the forbidden zone, surrounded by two feet of water as far as the eye can see, and a lot of drippy, decaying junk that apparently we’re supposed to think of as “the environment” these days.

As far as I can tell, the scientist is supposed to stay locked up in the house all the time and recombine DNA or whatever; the one time we see him go outside for a minute, he gets screamed at for breaking protocol. So why does he need to have his lab in the middle of the least convenient location in the continental US? People say that remote work is the new normal but look what happens.

Continue reading Swamp Thing 3.4: Love and Death →