Author: nik dirga

I'm an American journalist who has lived in New Zealand for more than a decade now.

The Justice Society of America: And justice for all

Comic book fans love their legacies, and there’s no group with more legacy out there than the Justice Society of America. Comics’ first superhero team debuted back in 1940 and 84 years on, they’re still out there, with many of the original members who fought during World War II carrying on fighting crime despite theoretically pushing 100 years old now. 

But hey, kids, it’s comics, and even if the original Flash and Green Lantern might be a little long in the tooth, they’re still out there. The JSA was generally home to the second tier of the early DC heroes – Hawkman, Doctor Fate, Starman and the like. It was literally the first time superhero characters from different stories got together and decided to hang out. They inspired the more famous Justice League that started in the 1960s and have kept coming back, for decades now. The latest JSA revival is about to hit the stands.

I stumbled across a big ol’ pile of All-Star Squadron comics at a yard sale back in the day, which was writer Roy Thomas’ faithful reimagining of the Justice Society’s adventures in World War II, along with pretty much every other vintage comics character of the period thrown in the mix.

I fell in love with Thomas’ amiable, corny comics – nobody is more of a comics history buff than he is, and even if his dialogue can sometimes be embarrassingly uncool, his love for the characters always shines through. The All-Star Squadron’s whole vibe was retro without being childish, and for 70 issues or so in the ‘80s it brought the JSA back to life again. (Heck, I even named my own team of goofy superheroes “The All-Spongy Squadron” in a tip of the hat to ol’ Roy Thomas.) 

What I love about these comics was that there were so MANY heroes, from stalwarts like Superman and Hawkman to second-tier characters like Johnny Quick and Robotman to who-the-hell-are-these-people obscurities like The Jester and The Human Bomb. When we saw the entire All-Star Squadron in one heaving double-page spread, I wanted to know who all these guys were and what their deals were. That’s how comics hook you. 

The thing I’ve always enjoyed about the JSA/All-Star Squadron in all its many incarnations is its sense of family and legacy. Newer heroes came along like Power Girl, a grown-up Robin and Batman’s daughter The Huntress in the excellent 1970s All-Star Comics revival, while Roy Thomas’ spin-offs Infinity Inc and Young All-Stars added even more characters into the mix.

The Justice Society’s 84-year-tenure is a history of the superhero comic itself, with all its ups and downs – the JSA went away in the 1950s as superhero comics dropped in popularity, swung back in the 1960s to inspire the Silver Age of Comics, and got a bit grim and gritty in the modern age just like everything else.  

The biggest and so far best JSA revival was the 1996-2006 one spearheaded by writer Geoff Johns, which took all that hefty legacy and sense of history and stapled it to some ripping good modern action-filled superhero yarns. The Justice League are the big guys, yeah, but the JSA were the ones who started it all, and it was great to see a comic that embraced their legacy in a dynamic fashion. 

You’d think superheroes whose whole existence is tied to being around since World War II would eventually fade, but the JSA just keep ticking along, and so far, nobody has really retconned their deep ties to the 1940s away yet. (Some of the old original JSA have died, but others have had their improbable longevity waved away by magic, science, being lost in limbo, speed forces, et cetera.) 

Big super-teams out there like the Justice League and Avengers are constantly breaking up, reforming, et cetera. But while the JSA has gone dormant at times, their legacy has never quite been rebooted or erased and their core has remained refreshingly the same, with Hawkman, the original Flash or Green Lantern almost always in the mix. 

Unfortunately the most recent 2022-2024 12-issue Justice Society revival by Johns was a disappointment, with an endless procession of new characters being introduced and very little being done with them and none of the pivotal characterisation Johns’ earlier work had.

The JSA and All-Star Squadron have always been crowded with heroes, but this latest Justice Society revival felt more like a list of soup ingredients than a pantheon of icons. It was an endless series of teasers in search of a story, something a little too common in the MCU-ified comics world these days. 

Fortunately, we’ve already got the next JSA reinvention ready to go, with new writer Jeff Lemire taking on the team that won’t die. I’ll be checking it out, of course and always hoping for the best. Superhero teams are everywhere these days, but the one that started the whole thing off is still my club of choice. 

Movies I Have Never Seen #30: Stop Making Sense (1984)

What is it? “The greatest concert movie of all time,” capturing the Talking Heads at their very best during a series of shows in Hollywood in 1983, featuring frontman David Byrne’s jittery pop-funk songs and directed by future Academy Award winner Jonathan Demme early in his career. 

Why I never saw it: Blame laziness, blame cultural overload, blame the fact there’s only so many hours in the day, but finally seeing this one fills in a major gap in my hipster brain. I’m actually a big fan of the Talking Heads and Stop Making Sense has been on my list to see forever, but the talk about the recent 40th anniversary re-release made me realise though I’ve seen excerpts over the years I still had never seen it in full – despite David Byrne’s more recent theatrical show American Utopia being one of my favourite concert movies of recent years, despite playing my favourite Heads classic Remain In Light on repeat for years now, despite having a well-worn copy of Byrne’s great book How Music Works, I somehow missed out on the movie that captures the Heads at their brilliant peak. 

Also, a confession: Concert movies tend to be a little hit or miss for me. There’s no substitute for seeing music live, the thrum of the instruments shaking the little hairs on your arm, the chaotic buzz of the crowd. And while there have been many terrific concert movies – Gimme Shelter, Amazing Grace, The Last Waltz, Summer of Soul, Sign O’ The Times, etc — to me the best way to see them is still in a crowded cinema so you can get close to the communal experience. All that said, Stop Making Sense is the rare exception that breaks that barrier between screen and artist so thoroughly, even if you’re watching it alone in your bedroom you nearly feel as invigorated as you would if you had actually been there to see the Heads live, four decades ago. (Although probably less sweaty, hopefully.) 

Does it measure up to its rep? The marvel of watching Stop Making Sense so many years after it’s been crowned the “best” concert movie is seeing exactly how it earned that trophy. The staging is tremendous – starting out with Byrne, alone on stage, gyrating through the twitchy “Psycho Killer,” but slowly joined in the next numbers by the rest of the band. It builds the spirit of the music from personal into something broad and communal, a circle of friends that make life better than it is. By the time they’re wheeling out elaborate drum sets and keyboards on risers on stage, you’re filled with glorious anticipation over what escalation you’re about to see next. It’s a building of momentum that means Stop Making Sense keeps rising and rising in energy until the cathartic release of “Take Me By The River” explodes forth.

It’s also fascinating to see how the late, great Demme changes the visualisation and energy of each song, the insanely cheerful energy of “Life During Wartime” where Byrne ends up running entire laps around the stage, the brilliant contrasting shadowy close-ups of “What A Day That Was,” the iconic “big suit” dance of “Girlfriend Is Better.” David Byrne is like an animated cartoon come to life in many of these songs, making moves with his body that seem to defy physics but somehow perfectly fit the moment.

And while Byrne’s wired, brilliant energy is the guiding light of Stop Making Sense, it’s also a fantastic showcase for the entire band – Demme doesn’t ignore the rest of the band, the great backup singers and guest performers, with pretty much everyone getting a showcase. Stop Making Sense is filled with great tiny gestures, from bassist Tina Weymouth’s shy smile to the brilliant grins of guitarist Alex Weir. More than any other concert movie, it shows how music builds, how a great band is a team, a series of parts working together in perfect synchronicity. Music is a remarkable thing that we tend to let wash over us without appreciating the talent and precision that goes into it, and without becoming some kind of academic lesson, Stop Making Sense takes us into the sweet, building mystery of sound. 

Worth seeing? Without a doubt, unless you’ve got stone in your heart, Stop Making Sense is one of the great life-affirming slices of musical cinema humanity has to offer.  Some of the movies in this long-running series I’ve watched kind of dutifully to fill in a film history gap. But this one is the kind of movie that just leaves you feeling good about our silly little species on this silly little planet, and of the things we can make when we’re not busy screwing everything up. I can see watching Stop Making Sense once a year for the rest of my life just to get a dopamine buzz and forget all my troubles for 90 glittering minutes. And somehow, that truly makes sense.

Now available – Amoeba Adventures: The Warmth Of The Sun on Amazon

Howdy, folks! Introducing the second collection of my Amoeba Adventures comics this year!

Amoeba Adventures: The Warmth Of The Sun is a brand-new paperback that collects the first six issues of the all-new Amoeba stories written and drawn by me from 2020 to 2023!

Prometheus is a possibly immortal amoeba. Rambunny is a violent, large rabbit. Spif is a genius scientist. Dawn sets things on fire. Ninja Ant is a bug with attitude. Now, we pick up the stars of 1990s small press comics hit Amoeba Adventures in their first new tales in years to find them dealing with detective mysteries, deadly former foes, impending parenthood and occasional nights at the disco. Oh, and coffee. There’s always coffee. Collecting Amoeba Adventures #28-33 as well as behind-the-scenes commentary, extra art and more!

On the fence? Here’s a few quotes from actual humans who I totally didn’t pay to say nice things:

“It’s imaginative, funny, heartfelt and smart. And it evolves, just like Prometheus, the protoplasmic protagonist himself” – Jason DeGroot, Small Press Heroes.com. 

“I’ve been following Nik for many years and he just keeps putting out great stuff. He’s better than ever!” – Steve Keeter, Talking Small Press on YouTube.

This nifty 150-page paperback is now available for a mere US$12.99 over on Amazon! (For those down under, here’s the Amazon AU link) 

And if you missed out earlier this year, why not make it a double and pick up THE BEST OF AMOEBA ADVENTURES as well, collecting my favourite of my 1990s small press comics in a huuuuuge 350-page paperback or fancy deluxe hardcover, along with piles of rare art, guest pin-ups by Dave Sim, Sergio Aragones, Matt Feazell and Stan Sakai and a huge 10-page section of notes, gossip and rambling on how these comics came to be! You can get the Best Of Amoeba Adventures over on Amazon as well! 

And hey, if you want to be a totally awesome person, please feel free to leave reviews of both or either of the Amoeba Adventures books on Amazon so I can extend my plans for world domination in a very niche market of comics about amoebas!

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

The most recent issue, June’s AMOEBA ADVENTURES #34, is still available as a totally free download or ask about the limited print edition!  This time, it’s three separate short stories set in the Amoeba Universe, featuring Prometheus’ most bizarre adventure yet, Rambunny battling it out with the vigilante The Period, and Ninja Ant and Dawn Star’s mellow movie date gone horribly wrong! With guest art by Tony Lorenz and Thomas Ahearn! 

FOR ALL YOUR AMOEBA UPDATES

Give a like to the Amoeba Adventures by Nik Dirga page on Facebook for updates on future comics, links to my non-comics journalism work and more!

Rik Mayall, the patron saint of confident self-loathing

Nobody made being a total bastard quite as funny as Rik Mayall. 

When I first stumbled on The Young Ones in the late ‘80s during its inexplicable MTV late-night airing in America, I felt like I’d seen into a different universe. The anarchic gang of college misfits were all hilarious, but to me, Mayall’s Rick was on another level of twitchy, ego-free energy, willing to make himself look as sweaty and horrible as possible for the gag. He bounced perfectly off Ade Edmondson’s ultraviolent punk parody Vyvyan. 

Rik Mayall’s been gone 10 years now, a fact I still find kind of baffling. His comedy was so insanely energetic it seems impossible it should ever be stilled. 

Mayall was the patron saint of comedy that combined ego and humiliation in equal measures. 

Rick on The Young Ones was everyone’s worst nightmare of a pretentious, oblivious student, adopting pet causes left and right, constantly sure of his own righteousness and yet constantly trembling with his own self-hatred. You felt sorry for him but you also probably wanted to kick him right in his stupid face, too.

Nothing ever worked out for Rick, who hated everyone but hated himself the most. Mayall managed the extremely tricky wrangle of making this hilariously funny, a character who’s all twitchy id whether he’s trying to pick up “birds” at a party or insulting his roommates. Nobody ever spat out “Bastard!” quite as caustically as Mayall. 

Later on, in their follow-up show Bottom, Mayall and Edmondson refined the Young Ones formula by narrowing in on losers Rick and Eddie, two gormless young men hurtling towards pathetic middle age. Bottom, as good mate Bob recently recalled in his own blog, is a masterpiece of over-the-top comedy, where every gag is pushed as far as it will go and then some.

Mayall and Edmondson smack each other around like a Looney Tunes cartoon, are consumed with unrequited lust for the opposite sex and their own sleazy poverty. I like to pretend that Bottom’s “Richard Richard” and Eddie are of course The Young Ones’ Rick and Vyvyan about 10 years on, youthful idealism and identities ground away and living lives of quiet desperation. 

Later on, Mayall played the world’s most corrupt politician Alan B’stard in the witty satire New Statesman, and was great as blustery fool Lord Flashheart in Black Adder. He tried to break through in the US with the loud, antic cult comedy Drop Dead Fred, but it didn’t quite work – Mayall’s frantic man-child routine got grating quickly when stretched out to an entire movie. 

At his best, Mayall played insecure, hateful guys who can never quite figure out that they’re their own worst enemy. It’s a marker of his talent that the creeps and bastards he played still felt ever so slightly loveable. When Bottom’s Richard Richard gets a well-deserved ass-kicking and then sits there ugly-weeping, who doesn’t feel a twinge? Maybe it’s just me. Losers are inevitable more entertaining than winners. 

Rik was carried off by a heart attack in June 2014 at just 56. It’s probably the blackest of comedy to say so, but sometimes I wonder if that’s the way the Young Ones’ Rick, Bottom’s Richie and New Statesman’s B’stard all wouldn’t have gone as well, pushing their self-loathing energy until it burst. 

I can still watch those episodes of The Young Ones and Bottom over and over no matter how many times I’ve seen them, and Mayall’s comic skill, working himself up into a sweaty red-faced mess to get a laugh, gets me every time. I only wish we’d gotten a little bit more of him. 

Jimmy Carter at 100 – The President who keeps going and going

Jimmy Carter is the longest-lived American president, and as he turns 100 years old, it turns out he was also pretty much the last of his kind.

Growing up in California, I was just a kid when the former peanut farmer from Georgia became an unlikely president in 1976, aiming to wipe away some of the disillusioned taint of the Nixon years. He’s the first president I have memory of, smiling away from the tiny TV in our kitchen.

He turns 100 years old today, and despite his single term, he will never quite be the footnote of other presidential one-termers like Benjamin Harrison and Chester Arthur.

Carter is the last living American president from the 1970s and 1980s, the last World War II veteran to take that mantle, and nobody under age 50 now will have any real memories of his term in office. Yet, he was unique among recent American leaders and marked a sea change from the stern likes of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Jimmy Carter wore blue jeans and denim shirts and cracked a disarmingly wide grin that quickly became iconic in politics.

He was the last true “dark horse” presidential candidate to win, almost unknown outside of Georgia a mere 18 months before the election. His opponents asked, “Jimmy who?”

In contrast, Barack Obama had already made the keynote speech at the national Democratic convention four years before his own election, and TV host and self-promoter Donald Trump was long a household name.

Other than Trump, there have been few other presidents who have been quite so visible a force in American history after their term ended. Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to forge peace agreements and awareness of human rights in 2002, long after he left office humbled by a landslide defeat to Ronald Reagan.

Compare that to, say, George W. Bush, who practically vanished from public life after 2009. Carter kept on being a voice for what he believed in, even when it ticked off the current presidents.

His post-presidency has lasted an astonishing 43+ years, the longest ever by more than a decade. That in large part accounts for his historical redemption. You outlive your enemies.

Carter’s humility is part of his brand – he continues to live in the house in Plains, Georgia he moved into in 1961, and until his health deteriorated, taught at the local Sunday School for years.

He didn’t always take on sexy causes, but work like the Carter Center’s efforts to eliminate awful parasitic Guinea worm infections in Africa improved millions and millions of lives.

Even back in the 1990s, Carter’s reputation was gradually recovering, as his work for Habitat for Humanity and diplomatic efforts became more widely known, and Reagan-mania receded into the past.

I was living then in Oxford, Mississippi, and was friends with one of the best local bands, Blue Mountain, led by Cary Hudson and Laurie Stirratt, who were delivering great alt-country rock at the local bars on a regular basis. 

One of Blue Mountain’s best barnstormers was the anthem ‘Jimmy Carter,’ a twangy country-rock romp that instantly makes you want to stomp up and down with glee. It’s hard to imagine a cheery, apolitical ode to any US President as a hit pop single in this seething era of angry hot takes, but ‘Jimmy Carter’ has a gleeful optimism that recasts the dark horse’s presidential victory in 1976 as the ultimate American small town boy makes good story. 

“In the bicentennial summer of our faded glory land a bright new face appeared upon the scene. Of an honest peanut farmer by the name of Jimmy Carter. His eyes were set on every schoolboy’s dream.”

I must have heard Blue Mountain play ‘Jimmy Carter’ a hundred times in the 1990s. It always brought the house down, in the Deep South where a crowd full of Republicans and Democrats alike bounced around singing that catchy chorus saluting a Democrat – “Shake the hand of the man with a hand full of love” – and its hopeful promise of a politician who actually cared – “Well he said I’d never lie to you, and what’s more he never did.” 

Bombastic myth-making? True. A great song? Also true. 

An excellent biography a few years back, His Very Best: Jimmy Carter – A Life by Jonathan Alter, makes a compelling case that Carter’s presidency mattered more than we thought. He brought the language of environmentalism into the mainstream and spoke up for human rights. He worked to end nuclear proliferation – a policy followed up by Reagan – and pushed for more diversity and equality in government positions.

Yet he was far more of a micro-manager than a leader, a quality which ultimately sealed his defeat in 1980. The fumbled attempts to solve the Iran hostage crisis ensured his fate. Carter couldn’t match Reagan’s inspiring if often insubstantial rhetoric and seemed small compared to the ex-Hollywood star’s breezy confidence.

Optimistic Reagan was memorably described by historian Rick Perlstein as an “athlete of the imagination,” while Carter is recalled by Alter as “a visionary who was not a natural leader.” While Carter, more than 10 years younger than Nixon or Gerald Ford, was arguably the first “modern” President, in the end he was replaced by the first “Hollywood” President.

Carter was hardly a perfect president – he could be abrupt and too pious and faltered dealing with some of the crises in his administration. That famous grin could drop quickly and reveal a cold, frosty side.

Yet his own ego always seemed a little less in the service of raw greed and power-mongering like certain recent presidents we could mention, and more a driving fundamental core of his character fuelled by a deep religious faith. Carter wanted a perfect world.

Did he succeed? Well, no, but Carter speaks more to the good side of much-mythologised American can-do spirit – and his unwavering dedication to seeing that better world through the next 40-plus years of his life tells us it wasn’t just an act.

Jimmy Carter was neither the best nor worst of American presidents, but he had a quality that feels rare in an America torn apart by division, outrage merchants and an entire generation of politicians that now seems to be competing to see who can be the biggest jerk.

The presidency has been full of con men, before and after Carter. There have been elements of Carter in his successors – Clinton’s boundless energetic attempts to sow his own charitable legacy; Obama’s cool intellectual approach to governing; George W. Bush’s down-home mannerism, Biden’s soft-spoken optimism.

Yet in the past century, there has never been another president quite like the unique combination of humble Southern charm and faith-filled confidence that animates all the long years of Carter’s life.

“Today almost every politician wants to be seen as an outsider,” Alter writes. “Carter was the real thing.”

Posters on the wall, the ultimate status update

Actual photo from actual college apartment circa 1991. Note awesome Elvis Costello poster and Blue Velvet poster, as well as rarely-used bicycles, mandatory beanbag, pile of Rolling Stone magazines.

Once you hit (cough cough) a certain age, you start to wonder about the things you’ve carried around with you for years.

This old mailing tube of posters has somehow made it from Mississippi to California to Oregon to New Zealand in the past 25+ years or so, carrying with it a rolled-up album of things I used to stick on my walls.

Once upon a time, I wallpapered my rooms with posters, a bright-eyed college student out on his own and determined to announce his personal style to the world, or at least anyone who visited his apartment or dorm. Status update: Look at my cool tastes, man!

But you do reach a point in life where you probably aren’t hanging posters quite so much, where thumbtacked personal statements on the wall seem a little gauche. 

Yet I still have my tube of posters, tucked away in a corner of a closet. I can’t bring myself to get rid of it, even as the cardboard tube turns slowly grey with age. 

Posters were a cheap way to advertise yourself. I still remember many of the ones I no longer own – a gigantic poster of The Beatles in their super-groovy late hippie splendour circa 1969 that hung in my high school bedroom; an extremely creepy poster advertising The Cure’s “Love Cats” single; an amazing, huge poster advertising Elvis Costello’s album Trust that I wish I still owned. 

The tube still holds some posters dating back more than 30 years now. A shiny poster advertising Peter Gabriel’s “So” as I dove deep into my Gabriel fandom for the first time.  I’ve got a Salvador Dali print that I bought my freshman year in college, consumed with how cool and ecclectic I was going to be. It hung around for years in a cheap plastic frame and somehow still endures, a bit tatty, in a corner of my office. 

Movie posters of Blue Velvet and Fear In Loathing In Las Vegas that probably date back to my late 1990s time working in a video store (remember those?). Museum exhibition posters from Melbourne and Oregon. A concert poster from Guided By Voices’ not-so “final” tour in 2004 in Portland. Battered prints from an artist friend in Mississippi, perpetually curved from years in that cardboard tube. Most of these haven’t hung on a wall for years, but I still keep them around. 

There’s a poster of Monty Python’s John Cleese as the Minister of Silly Walks that hung around my first apartment  in Oxford, Mississippi, and one day ended up on my university-age son’s own bedroom walls in New Zealand. After 30+ years it’s bent, torn and tattered and probably near retiring to a recycling bin, but somehow I just can’t let old Minister Cleese go yet. 

Long before Instagram profiles and TikToks, a cheap poster was a way to broadcast who you are, or who you wanted to be, as you assembled the pieces of your future self. These are the movies I like, these are the musicians I listen to. Appreciate me! 

I’m not a college student any more but I figure I can still give one or two of these posters a chance to air out in an inconspicuous spot in the house now and again. I’m sure I can find a corner of my office for that Blue Velvet poster, I reckon. 

The Penguin review – Batman’s goofiest villain is no longer a joke

For a bloke who turns 85 years old this year, Batman is holding up pretty well.

The caped crusader has been reinvented countless times since his 1939 debut, and that’s the secret of his longevity.

You want a friendly Batman? Adam West’s day-glo 1960s TV series fits the bill. Bold and epic? There’s plenty of animated series to choose from. Dark and gritty? Pick up Frank Miller’s classic Dark Knight Returns graphic novel. Somewhere in the middle, with lots of Gothic architecture? Tim Burton’s unique 1989 Batman still holds up very well.

Those Bat-villains just keep on going, too. Batman probably has the best rogues’ gallery in comic books – a twisted collection of eccentric obsessives strongly defined enough to take the spotlight in many of their own solo comics and movies. Stars who have played the Joker have now won two Academy Awards for Best Actor. For many, battling the Bat as the Riddler, Catwoman or Clayface is still a feather in the cap.

The world of Batman has proved itself ripe for interpretation, whether it’s Robert Pattinson’s brooding emo turn in 2022’s The Batman or villainous Harley Quinn starring in her own filthily funny and irreverent animated series.

But a new HBO spin-off of that 2022 Batman movie serves up one of the darkest takes yet on Batman’s Gotham City, starring Colin Farrell reprising his role as the scheming gangster Penguin.

The Penguin has always kind of been the also-ran of Bat-villains, despite hanging about for decades. A pudgy, monocle-wearing bird-obsessed weirdo with trick umbrellas, he was memorably brought to life by a cacklingly campy Burgess Meredith in the 1960s TV series, while Danny DeVito in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns was a waterlogged, creepy outcast.

Wipe all that out of the memory with Farrell’s sinister “Oz” – who loathes the nickname Penguin – a scarred and crippled mobster who nearly stole the show in The Batman. There are no trick umbrellas here.

An unrecognisable Farrell, looking like an overweight Robert DeNiro run through a smudgy photocopier, played Penguin in The Batman film as a seedy Goodfellas-style criminal.

It was a magnetic performance with its visceral sleaze, and over the new eight-part miniseries Farrell’s snarling take on this most ridiculous of Bat-villains makes a good case for why you should never overlook a penguin.

In The Penguin, which picks right up after the near-destruction of Gotham City in The Batman’s climax, Farrell gets a showcase a world away from big budget MCU-style comic adventures.

Farrell feels consistently underrated as an actor, despite some excellent performances in films like After Yang or In Bruges and an Oscar nomination for The Banshees of Inisherin. He gives the oily Penguin a sense of wounded soul despite working under piles of makeup and padding to create the character’s waddling presence.

This isn’t your childhood Batman and definitely isn’t for kids – while the Bat himself is only referred to in passing, The Penguin is a deliciously nasty slice of noir, filled with F-bombs and shockingly violent deaths, far more The Sopranos than Batman Forever.

The Penguin is scrambling to take advantage of the chaos in Gotham’s criminal underworld after the events of The Batman. He’s nowhere near a “supervillain” yet, but he’s got big dreams, and ropes into his labyrinthine plans a conflicted teenager (Rhenzy Feliz) and the disturbed daughter of deceased crimelord Carmine Falcone, Sofia (Cristin Milioti).

The Penguin works best when it focuses on Farrell, but Milioti (Palm Springs, Black Mirror) is also striking channeling that good old Gotham City criminal intensity into an unpredictable performance. A rogue’s gallery of prominent actors like Mark Strong, Shohreh Aghdashloo and House of Cards’ Michael Kelly fill out the cast.

Over The Penguin’s eight episodes (the first five were viewed for review), a tangled web of double-crosses and violent heists unfolds, with Oz the Penguin scrambling over dead bodies as he hopes to make his mark on the world. While it may help set the stage for the 2026 sequel to The Batman, it also very much stands on its own even if you’re not a Bat-fan.

There’s no Batman, no Robin in sight, but you honestly don’t miss the Dark Knight too much with bad guys this watchable.

This review also published over at RNZ!

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the internet in Election 2024….

…Yeah, yeah, I’ve been writing about US politics again. Here’s a few links of recent work by me elsewhere on the internet:

For Radio New Zealand:

For The New Zealand Listener, an election-adjacent book review:

More non-election content soon!

Walter Matthau, the forgotten great 1970s action hero

There’s just something about Walter Matthau that gives a movie a little kick to me. 

Matthau had a face like an unmade bed, and his jowly face was called “hangdog” more times than you can count. But he was also a surprisingly malleable actor, a top-notch character actor who slowly worked his way into leading man roles. 

Matthau’s reputation settled in as the cranky curmudgeon often paired with his pal Jack Lemmon in movies like The Odd Couple and Grumpy Old Men (still one of my favourite ‘comfort viewing’ flicks), but for a while there in the ‘60s and ‘70s he tried being a rumpled action hero of sorts, playing both cops and crooks in a series of gritty classics. 

The 1970s saw the grand blossoming of leading men who didn’t all look like Robert Redford and Warren Beatty – Dustin Hoffman’s twitchy angst, Al Pacino’s angry passion, Gene Hackman’s everyman intensity. Matthau, who remained seen as a primarily comic actor, never quite comfortably rose into those ranks, but he could have. 

Before he pivoted more to comedy in his final years before his death in 2000, Matthau gave a witty spark of realism to movies like The Taking Of Pelham 123, Charley Varrick, The Laughing Policeman and Hopscotch, all fun spins on traditional crime tales. 

Matthau could be very menacing and played the villain a fair bit, in earlier gems like the Hitchockian Cary Grant starring Charade or the apocalyptic Fail-Safe. Hell, he even got into a fistfight with Elvis Presley in King Creole! 

His brief turn as a kind of action hero, though, often makes me wonder what if he’d stuck to that genre. The 1974 Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3 remains a great, tense ride, as gunmen take a New York subway train hostage and Matthau, an unimposing traffic cop, ends up caught in the middle. Like an early run at Die Hard, it’s one of the great “unexpected hero” hostage dramas. 

The Laughing Policeman from 1973 is one of those wonderfully sleazy downbeat San Francisco crime movies of the era, opening with a still-shocking massacre on a bus. Like its thematic cousin Dirty Harry, it’s filled with grim period detail, although IMHO it loses its way a bit with a sluggish and kind of problematic final act wrap for its central mystery.

In 1973’s Charley Varrick and 1980’s Hopscotch, Matthau leans on his comic scoundrel side to winning effect. His Varrick is a smartly confident bank robber in a zesty neo-noir, while in the underrated satire Hopscotch he’s a former CIA agent who goes rogue and basically devotes himself to trolling his former bosses in a globe-trotting hoot. 

But unlike Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, Matthau is never a swaggering alpha male, although he can be grumblingly sexist and arrogant like many a ‘70s male movie lead.

In his brief run at action hero stardom, the 50-something Matthau of the 1970s still feels oddly fresh and novel. It was an era where many of the staid conventions of American films were being shaken up, and having a guy who looked kind of like a worn-out off-duty office manager playing thieves, cops and con men just worked. 

There’s still something soothing for me about watching Matthau’s unpolished nonchalance amble about in a movie, and I like to think in a parallel universe, Matthau-starring versions of gritty flicks like The French Connection and Chinatown would’ve blown my mind. 

Kamala-mania and looking for a sense of optimism in America again 

Hey, remember when we all thought the 2024 presidential race would be a dire, dull rematch?

The last two months or so of US politics has been a head-spinning whirl, and watching Kamala Harris take to the stage and deliver a confident, concise acceptance of the Democratic presidential nomination this week has capped off the frenzy nicely. 

I’ve been an American political convention tragic for far too many years, dating back to the Reagan era. They’re bombastic commercials and insanely wasteful propaganda, but they also do sometimes provide unforgettable moments. They’re a snapshot of where the country stands every four years, and how it’s looking ahead. 

The Republican convention with its Hulk Hogans and the Democratic convention with its Oprah Winfreys set the stage for November’s battle between Harris and Donald Trump. They also had very different vibes. For my day job I ended up exhaustively live blogging both convention speeches, and while some years people say the candidates are all the same, you couldn’t get much different than Harris and Trump in both approach and message. 

Even the speech lengths were a contrast – about 40 minutes for Harris vs more than 92 minutes for Trump (the longest convention acceptance speech of all time, apparently).

I admit my biases: I found the Democrat convention more hopeful, and more representative of the multicoloured, freedom loving America I want to believe in. There was simply a sense of joy, a word everyone from Tim Walz to Bill Clinton has attached to the Democratic campaign this year. I’ve watched lots of those endless state roll call of delegate votes at conventions, where dull guys stand up and say things like “From the great state of Idaho, home of the nation’s finest potatoes and the world’s biggest ball of twine, we proudly cast our 27 votes for….”

But I have never, ever seen something at a convention as effortlessly silly and cool as Lil Jon introducing Georgia’s roll call at Chicago this week:

I have to admit I’ve watched this clip a good dozen times because there’s something so overblown and yet quintessentially American about it all. A bit irreverent? A bit egocentric? Sure. But also, it was fun as hell. “Fun” is a vibe that seems sorely lacking in American politics the last eight years. 

In my political lifetime, the candidate who was more optimistic and, for lack of a better word, cheerful, has typically won. It’s not even a party thing – Reagan’s sunny demeanour overwhelmed Jimmy Carter, as George W. Bush’s down home aw-shucks vibe took down Al Gore and John Kerry’s patrician sternness. Bill Clinton’s good cheer beat the first President Bush while Joe Biden’s warmth edged past Trump in 2020. Joe Biden, for all his merits, was a shaky deliverer for the joy vibe these days, while his vice president seems to have easily stepped up to the task. 

I mean, I’m in a bubble. We’re all in bubbles, really, so the world I’m seeing maybe isn’t what a Trump supporter in Mississippi is. But, it’s hard to envision the Republican nominee smiling so easily, playing baseball, petting a dog, embracing his children, all those everyday things that make up most American lives away from the echo chambers. 

I have lost a lot of faith in my home country these last few years, to be honest. Perhaps it’s being an American who’s lived abroad nearly 20 years now, but I often felt like I didn’t recognise it anymore. The whitewashing spin of what happened January 6, 2021 and the ensuing forgiveness and rehabilitation of Trump by too many people who should know better was the final straw for me. I felt baffled. 

I don’t make firm predictions about US politics anymore, because it’s too easy to get your heart broken. I know what I would like to see happen in November, but I’m very aware that it could go either way still. I don’t think America would simply die if Trump was re-elected, after everything we’ve seen, but what a big bloody wound that would be.

I saw a lot of optimism this week that I’d like to believe in myself. A sense of hope might go a long way in this election, particularly when the other side seems mired in conflicting messages and a consistent willingness to bemoan everything, blame everything on other factors and make apocalyptic prophecies. 

I sure would like to see something to chip away at the endless tension and anger infecting so much of America these days, although you might only get there by deleting the internet and the algorithm-fuelled outrage machine of social media, to be honest. 

In the end, what sways things might be this – do you want a smile or do you want a glower? I just want my country of birth to be a place again that looks forward, rather than backward, one where a sense of fair-minded kindness drowns out the endless hate. Will we get there? Stay tuned.