Reign of the Supermen

Set six months after The Death of Superman, Sam Liu's follow up, Reign of the Supermen, gives us a Metropolis full of pretenders and facsimiles, each desperate to fill the shoes of the absent Man of Steel. These aspirants include a horny teenage clone, Karl Kesel and Tom Grummett's Conner Kent reconfigured as a grasping pop star in the Justin Bieber mold. His 'appearances' - not just your typical altruism, Superboy also turns up to film premieres and mixes in with crowds of adoring adolescent fans - are micromanaged by his father-cum-manager Lex Luthor, here voiced by Rainn Wilson who brings his trademark man-on-the-verge-of-shrieking-mania to the role.

Screenwriters Tim Sheridan and Jim Krieg also punch up the Cyborg Superman's origins, marrying the biomechanical horror of the character to the micro-marked flesh of Jack Kirby's Apokolips. The creature's raw material, astronaut Hank Henshaw, perished in the previous film, frozen in the headlights of Doomsday's meteorite delivery vehicle. Moments from death, Henshaw ignored the pleas of his colleagues (including his wife) to do basically anything but sit smiling with the expectation that Superman would rock up any second and put everything right. Reign, a much more fluid and free-flowing episode than its predecessor, has fun working through this raving lunatic's disappointments. The animators warp his body and dimensions, filling the 1.78:1 frame with his screaming, mechanised face as he stomps around, searching for a powerless, party-in-the-back Superman.

SANO - CHUVA (prod. Madara)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #45 by Simon Bisley

Jasper Mitchell - Mystical Nostalgia

The Death of Superman

Flat and soft where recent big-screen DC adaptations have gone for grunged-up and spiky, The Death of Superman is the rare animated film that manages to create a palpable void around its characters and situations, a death space that nulls attention. This incredible feat is accomplished both through slack, lackadaisical editing and a screenplay scrambling for the cheery irreverence of a Joss Whedon serial. Despite the grave pugilism promised by the title, an inordinate amount of the film's running time is set aside so we can churn through Clark Kent's big coming out moment with Lois Lane. It's an underdeveloped plot strand that renders Lane atypically bovine while Kent summons up the courage to take off his glasses.

Presumably, these scenes exist to keep this Superman, abnormally inattentive and self-absorbed, from dealing with the film's rampaging threat, Doomsday. Naturally, all the film's best bits revolve around this invincible monster, from his bored pulping of small town policemen to the extra little step he takes after delivering a skull-cracking haymaker to The Flash. The simplistic, multi-camera style set-ups that leave two-thirds of the film feeling like an animated soap opera are abandoned for Death's centrepiece, a twenty minute fight between Superman and a hyper-evolved brute. You can feel thought and consideration bleeding into the film. Teams of animators thinking up new, exciting ways to stage collisions between two ostensibly invulnerable creatures, blowing all the work time and budget they saved by keeping the first 50 minutes routine.

Andy Shand - Journey to a Nearby Star

Hotel Pools - Nightshade

Films 2018

Annihilation takes a different approach to alien contact, instead of placing mankind in the driver's seat, solving and conquering an invader, Alex Garland's film makes us subservient. The extraterrestrial presence dividing relentlessly in Area X does not approach us as separate entities, the sanctity of individual identity is not respected, people are reduced to cells and code, building blocks to be disassembled and reconfigured.

Life, sentience, is nourishment for The Shimmer's malignancy, treated as a behavioural quirk to be smothered and processed. Like Alien and The Thing, the horror in Garland's film is in arousing the attention of something so powerful and inscrutable that its designs go beyond the predatory. To be killed and consumed proposes two actors working with differing degrees of agency. To be trapped, examined, pulled apart and replicated goes further still, perverting and offending the basic specialness we feel about our humanity.

Natalie Portman's Lena meets her facsimile shortly after accidentally bleeding into the throbbing, fluorescent fissure that used to be her colleague. The copy, a featureless marionette with a petrochemical iridescence, parrots Lena's movements, dancing and colliding with its mother. Upon waking, a bleeding Lena picks at the combusted remains of her husband, the man she's followed into this nightmare, finding a white phosphorous grenade.

Garlands film proposes a basic invasion building block - the fiery destruction of the mother base, then explains it in a way that that informs the piece's approach to the wider extraterrestrial threat. Lena pulls the pin then hands the flame to the doppelganger. This Promethean boon ignites in the alien's hand, a ravenous, chaotic form of life whose touch renders the copy drunk and floundering. The fire consumes the visitor's cradle, then blazes out across the entire manufactured landscape either destroying and consuming the invader's presence or, perhaps, finally sating its voracious hunger.

Without giving anything away, Calibre is what happens when moneyed self-assurance collides with a situation that cannot be bullshitted or brute-forced. Martin McCann's Marcus is used to getting his own way, he's cocky and successful, a man who treats every interaction as an opportunity to score points. Best pal Vaughn is happy, or at least neutral enough, to indulge his friend's bravado no matter how much it may end up compromising him. He's along for the ride.

Visiting a small town in the Scottish highlands for a hunting trip, Marcus sets to throwing his weight around, winding up the pub regulars by sharing his cosmopolitan coke wraps with the object of everyone's affections then ingratiating himself with the local bigwigs by promising a vague, and presumably fictional, interest in the area's regeneration. Marcus is high on himself and determined to turn the screws on everybody else. Laws and rules are there to be flouted, he cannot conceive of a situation he cannot ooze his way around. Calibre then is about tiny concessions and short-cuts, and how easily basic mistakes, and the desire to avoid any kind of penalty, can lead to full-scale, excruciating, disaster.

First Reformed talks about knowledge and self-examination as weight, burdens to be slogged around and grappled with. Ethan Hawke's Pastor Toller is trapped, servile to an environment that does not nourish him. Writer-director Paul Schrader shoots urban sprawl and obnoxious mega churches as inhumane, alienating constructs that blight and obscure a tactile connection with the physical world around us. Abundant Life, the corporate sinkhole at the centre of the film, peddles compliance, religion packaged up and presented with the tranquillising reassurance of wealth. Toller struggles, attempting to engage with and conquer the emptiness this prompts inside himself, using his faith as a language and means towards personal discovery rather than pat, attention-diverting answers.

A serial killer confessional told with the creepy hesitance of a nerd building himself up to an out-and-out boast. Matt Dillon's Jack, in conversation with an unseen party, starts off describing his crimes - his life's work - not as an indulgence but as a reflex summoned up by his poisonous company. The demanding, insensitive strangers who foist themselves upon him or the greedy widows looking to bleed the system dry. Regardless of how he enters their orbit, Jack is insistent, it's just not his fault.

Writer-director Lars von Trier further massages this sociopathic jabbering with the mocking, sardonic voice of Jack's companion. This decision allows an ironic distance to assert itself in The House that Jack Built, similar to that found in Remy Belvaux, Andre Bonzel and Benoit Poelvoorde's Man Bites Dog. Attention is called to Jack's total misogyny, with just enough distaste that the film remains amusing until the exact point that Trier decides it shouldn't be. In its early passages the film is eating its cake and having it too. It's not until we get three or four recollections in that the mask is allowed to slip completely.

Jack stops talking about his crimes as accidental, situational occurrences that he has had the terrible fortune to stumble into. The icy veneer of buttoned-up, middle-class pretension that has allowed his repulsive hobby to register as acutely comedic is jettisoned for a sweaty, venomous chapter in which he talks about his greatest love and how he literally turned her into an object. The House that Jack Built talks about broadcasters and egomaniacs, men who demand, over and over, to be seen and discussed. They want to be venerated, to be held up and examined as inscrutable puzzles when, in reality, they're just nasty, selfish little pricks.

Leave No Trace is a delicate, deliberate film that examines interpersonal responsibilities and the idea that a parent's job is to prepare their child to deal with the wider world. Will (Ben Foster) finds society completely overwhelming, preferring to live in the bracketed wilderness of a national park with his daughter Tom (Thomasin McKenzie). Despite the tough, hardscrabble environment they inhabit the pair's relationship has a quiet, idyllic quality to it. There are no distractions or interference, Will can give Tom his full, undivided attention. The problem is that he's only really preparing her for a life exactly like the one she already has. Writer-director Debra Granik, working with co-writer Anne Rosellini, have the restraint to not make their film a series of messy, bubbling confrontations, instead we have ideas and alternatives slowly taking hold in two people who see different things in their futures.

Although The Night Comes for Us does feature guns of every stripe, they represent brief, terrifying expulsions in a whole designed around violent utility. Everything in Night is a weapon, anything with enough weight to crack or sharp enough to puncture is put to work. Goon bodies are blubbery and pregnable, they lack the fortification conferred by intent. Ito and his friends, our guides through this mayhem, are different, their courage armours them.

They aren't soft, malleable flesh, they're hardened and defiant in the face of injury, able to soak up a truly heroic amount of punishment before they yield. They do not surrender to simple slashes or even small calibre gunfire. Their entire bodies act as deterrent, limbs break then redirect blows, telephone directories provide the level of protection you'd expect from a bomb disposal suit. Even when stabbed their wounds ooze around and seize the incoming weaponry, allowing it to be repurposed against its original owners.

Original review

Mercifully short on actual rape, Coralie Fargeat's Revenge is more interested in examining the interpersonal dynamics that lead to certain men deciding they are owed something they haven't been offered. As far as Matilda Lutz's Jen is concerned she is enjoying a couple of days holiday with her married lover Richard in a secretive, secluded desert mansion. She is his girlfriend, he might even leave his family for her, that lends her status. When his hunting buddies arrive a day early, the couple are caught off guard.

Reality has intruded for Richard, he can no longer pretend he's living in a little bubble. These people know his wife. Trapped in the middle of nowhere with three slathering, reptilian men on her trail, Jen slowly starts to turn the tables. These men expect to succeed, they've bought all the weapons and kit, they even have snappy little all-terrain vehicles. What chance does an injured half-naked woman have? Comparatively, Jen is used to difficulty, she's a woman after all. She's adept at modifying her behaviour and persona to better suit the men attempting to overwhelm her. Jen thrives because of her ability to adapt then overcome.

Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You is genuinely magical, a socially conscious comedy with flights of science fiction fantasy grounded in the (very real, very apparent) callousness casually displayed by the exceedingly rich. Lakeith Stanfield's Cash is an African American telemarketer who is able to adopt the deep frequency-free shriek of a dumpy white actor when fielding calls, naturally this talent brings him nothing but success. Riley's film talks about status and a person's ability to move up and along social classes, asking if they can remain unaffected, uncompromised by their experiences on the other side. Cash finds himself increasingly valuable but, unfortunately, not as a partner or even really as a person. He's a commodity, an opportunity to deepen and protect someone else's fortune.

Jobs eh? Absolute nightmare. Andrew Bujalski's Support the Girls tracks an awful / typical day in the life of a manager working in a knock-off Hooters. Regina Hall's Lisa takes her position as a leader seriously. As far as she's concerned it isn't just a meaningless title to be invoked at will, used to separate herself, socially and financially, from the people she works alongside. To Lisa, management means an ongoing relationship with, and responsibility to, her staff, they're aren't problems to be filed away or discarded, they are, by the nature of their business, young, vulnerable woman finding their way in the world. They need to feel safe and protected, so that's exactly what she does. Lisa's approach is kind but firm, a den mother who, naturally, finds herself in opposition with her weak-piss supervisor, a scrawny nothing completely unable to engage with people beyond their ability to acquiesce to his fantasies.

You Were Never Really Here isn't interested in how a tortured man inflicts himself on the world, the events of the film are likewise not proposed or communicated in terms of catharsis either. Joe's already broken. No amount of pulverising will fix him. Writer-director Lynne Ramsay's focus is reflective rather than deflective then. A sharp, elliptical continuity constructed out of a lifetime of internalised trauma and the flawed, inadequate responses Joe has employed to placate himself.

Original review


After the Screaming Stops // Andre the Giant // Apostle // Avengers: Infinity War // The Ballad of Buster Scruggs // Black '47 // Black Panther // Chris Rock: Tamborine // Crazy Rich Asians // Creed II // A Futile and Stupid Gesture // Hold the Dark // Jurassic World: Lost Kingdom // The Legacy of the Whitetailed Deer Hunter // Mandy // Mission: Impossible - Fallout // Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle // Nothing Like A Dame // Ocean's 8 // Paradox // Possum // Solo: A Star Wars Story // Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse // Summer of '84 // They Shall Not Grow Old // Upgrade // Zama

Crystal Cola - Orion / Summer Night

Fractal Man - Reverie

Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII - TACTICAL ESPIONAGE

When not avoiding having to write up my favourite films of 2018 list, I do like to slowly circle the out-of-bounds gas in Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII's Blackout mode. Whereas everyone I watch on YouTube likes to steamroll around, obliterating everyone they come across with pinpoint accuracy, I prefer to get my belly on the ground, waiting for people to turn their dampened, distant crunches into full-blown, impatient mistakes.

Toby Fox - Hopes and Dreams

Myrone - El Dorado

Video Games 2018

Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII was begging to be skipped over. No campaign and a renewed focus on the wilfully obscure Nazi Zombies mode? No thanks. Even that new Battle Royale mode Raven Software were allegedly hurrying together reeked of desperation, a former champ remodelling itself to appeal to the kids (and their parent's credit cards). In-hand though it's difficult to decide which mode you want to play more. Multiplayer's refurbished, classic maps and handsome Specialist characters (Unreal clods with grumpy Street Fighter IV faces) are fun on fun. Easily able to gobble up entire evenings.

Blackout mode though is truly incredible. The series' core point-and-shoot gunplay may be exploded in terms of raw space and player count but second-to-second interaction stresses deconstruction, asking the player to instantly decode a constantly updating feed of tiny visual and audio cues. Several patches in, the sound mix is delightful, a clearly readable account of the unfolding battlefield. Played with a surround sound headset and enough trepidation to not fill your ears with your own thundering footsteps, Blackout is pure horror. An oppressive stream of the ambient and the actionable; anxiety-inducing information that demands either an instantaneous reaction or the nerve to stay still.

I missed out on Dark Souls first time around and, having played the third game and Bloodborne, I did wonder if the core joy of the game had been perfected elsewhere. This year's remaster was a revelation though, highlighting that iteration can often obscure more mercurial design choices. Dark Souls' world, the first half at least, is assembled like a vast, throbbing nexus. Levels upon levels built over each other, suggesting untold ages of rotting, dead-end progress. Withholding fast travel until quite far into the game ensures the player not only has to consider their destination but the journey that will return them to their deepest plunge. Shortcuts here, which in later games tend to allow quicker access to boss spawns, are instead organic, mysterious diversions, offering the player another level of interactive literacy.

Donut County puts players in control of a prowling hole. Hoover up enough knick-knacks and the pit expands, grower bigger and bigger until you're able to swallow up cars and even houses. The most obvious comparison to this mini-malevolence would be Katamari Damacy and, like Keita Takahashi's enduring masterpiece, Ben Esposito's game has charm to spare.

Book the damn territory with Fire Pro Wrestling World! I mean, of course, there's loads of fun to be had playing the Young Lion story mode or creating your own pastiche wrestlers. Gameplay is a fine-tuned dance that has you digitally dithering around the squared circle, sizing up your opponent, second-guessing their way out of a lock-up. The real juice though is a simulation mode that has you chasing Wrestling Observer Newsletter style star ratings, carefully modifying ring and match types to suit combatants, trying to capture the lightning in a bottle required for a full five stars. Or you could just stage Okada vs Omega V as a barbed-wire match.

Dialogue trees can make games feel like homework, forcing the player to scour verbose comebacks, searching for something that broadly aligns with what they actually want to say. Rather than try and simulate the text of conversations, Florence instead plays with rhythm and intent. The game follows a young woman through the lifetime of a relationship, capturing both the anxiety and elation of getting to know someone you like. In order to communicate to their would-be boyfriend, the player must assemble jigsaws that combine into pleasantly coloured word balloons.

Early interactions are nervy and awkward, hence the pieces are numerous and angular. As the couple settle into routine the assembly becomes less complicated, few pieces with rounded connections that easily fit together. The real brilliance of Florence comes when the couple argue. Balloons are still simple to construct but their colour has changed to red. Actual confrontations make multiple, successive demands on the player, the speed of your interaction picks up until you're pounding away at your opponent / partner. It's point scoring, recognisably the moment in a lover's quarrel where the original issue is forgotten and you're just hurting each other, trying to win.

428: Shibuya Scramble is a visual novel full of dead ends and digressions, a lively interactive story told with still images of live action actors posed like they're in a newspaper photo story. The game is very excited about pushing you off in the wrong directions, at times you feel like you're being deliberately prodded towards a never-ending succession of hilarious / horrifying Bad Endings.

An unbroken consideration of musculature and misfiring masculinity. God of War places the player a step behind ashen crank Kratos, party to both his body-shredding victories and his failure to sum up enough emotional courage to place his hand on his son's shoulder. There's a temptation to brand this kind of once-removed storytelling as 'cinematic' but that undersells the sheer proximity that God of War offers, a synthesis that arouses a sense of physical ownership in the player. Kratos as your favourite action figure. How dare anyone attempt to harm him or his child.

A love letter to Sega arcade games, particularly those made by Yu Suzuki, Horizon Chase Turbo recalls Outrun, Hang On and even Sonic the Hedgehog 2's blistering three-dimensional bonus stages. The player car blasts forward with very little sense of horizontal drift, inputs are strictly the digital taps of route correction. It's soothing, managerial.

A funny wibbly-wobbly man is trying to get places. You can help him by aiming his feet like a mortar, then firing them off towards dangerous new islands. That's it. If you mess this process up the man will cry and cry. So best if you just get your aim right every time. Kori Walk is bright, poppy and sickly sweet enough to register as acutely sinister.




If there was a better gaming experience this year than organising Tetris Effect's gently pearlescent shapes to Noboru Mutoh and Kate Brady's swirling, pounding Connected (Yours Forever), well, I didn't play it.


Also Liked:

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch // Monster Boy and The Cursed Kingdom // Monster Hunter: World // Pato Box // Shadow of the Colossus // Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption // Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition // Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection // Strikers Edge // Super Destronaut DX // Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[st]

Music 2018

Andy Shand - Master of the Stars // Beach House - Black Car // Christine and The Queens - Girlfriend (feat. Dam-Funk) // Ex:Re - Romance // Hotel Pools & ALISON - Drift // Janelle Monae - Make Me Feel // Kendrick Lamar, SZA - All the Stars // Khruangbin - Shades of Man // Lucy in Disguise - Lost Signal // Mooggy - Modernisem // Myrone - A New Philosophy // Paramore - Rose-Colored Boy // Sadsic - Soft Zurabian Cope // Savaged Regime - Xeno Crisis Area 1 // Superorganism - Everybody Wants to Be Famous


Also Liked:

ADMO - On the Nightway // ALISON // BluntOne - Ganymede // Childish Gambino - This is America // Chromatics - Black Walls and Blue Girl // Crystal Cola - Evening Romance // Daniel Deluxe - Territory // Foewi - Interference // Forhill - Moon Pit // Gorillaz - Humility // Irving Force - Overlord // Kylie Minogue - Dancing // L'indecis - Soulful // MAWORLD - Before You // Moondragon - Going Home // MYDREAMYADVENTURE - StonedCutie // Myrone - Voyager // Noboru Mutoh and Kate Brady - Connected (Yours Forever) // oDDling - Ascend // Parquet Courts - Wide Awake // Power Glove - Loaded // Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever - Talking Straight // She's Not Real - Saber // Sparkly Night - Flavours (Intro) // Street Cleaner - Murdercycle // Thom Yorke // 24hrs Feat. Lil Pump - Lie Detector //Ty Segall - 5 Ft Tall // Yo La Tengo - For You Too

Fusion 42 - Orbit

Myrone - Play the Space Dude

Godzilla: King of the Monsters - MONSTER ZERO

Although there's no sign of a Venusian Princess, it does look like Michael Dougherty's Godzilla: King of the Monsters will be taking some cues from 1964's Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, at least in terms of which of Toho's creatures has turned up for the feature scrap. Ghidorah, the main threat to Godzilla's throne, looks spectacular, rendered here as an enormous, swirling leviathan, pulsing with Satanic energy and ready to burn mankind off its planet.

Allem Iversom - Mink

Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII - SNEAKING MISSION

The sound mix isn't quite perfect yet but it's amazing how many clues you can get to someone's location in Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII's Blackout mode if you just stop moving for a second and listen. So, you know, I'm not camping, I'm playing tactically.

Digital Foundry Retro - Resident Evil 2

Ahead of a certain remake's imminent release, Digital Foundry's John Linneman talks us through the various ports of the original Resident Evil 2.

Gogeta by Young Jijii

Hotel Pools & ALISON - Drift

Resident Evil 2 - LAST ESCAPE

As well as evolving flesh cube William Birkin, Resident Evil 2 remake's Claire Redfield will also be receiving ongoing hassle from a newly disguised Mr X. You've gotta love that pork pie hat, probably wants to lecture Miss Redfield on the lost art of medieval gallantry too. The original Mackintosh monster from the PS1 release could be easily outwitted by leaving then returning to an area, not so this revision. X will not be put off by doors or even the odd grenade launched at his person. It's a nice touch that he pushes basic enemies like zombies out of his way to maintain the pursuit too. January 25th can't come soon enough.

Bumblebee by Ashley Wood