This Week, You Will Flip Your Lids for:

• thirsty monsters
• manly men
• smooth images
• battling Batmen
• Double Features!

Thanks to Miller for contributing this week. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy New Year!

For Vulture, prompted by the release of Poor Things Katie Rife ranks all the Frankensteins by horniness:

Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (1966): Technically, Dr. Maria Frankenstein (Narda Onyx) is the OG doctor’s granddaughter. That’s one of the least brain-breaking things about this 1966 “B” movie programmer, which mashes up two popular genres of its time: Gothic horror and Westerns. The backstory here is that the Frankensteins have re-established themselves in the Old West, a desirable location for its lack of regulatory oversight and frequent lightning storms. (The fact that it’s full of hunky outlaws is a bonus.) Dr. Maria claims she needs a “brute” who’s “strong like a giant” for her experiments, so his body will survive the electric shock. But her lusty eyes roving over the musclebound gunslinger soon to be known as Igor (Cal Bolder) betray her true intentions. What does Jesse James have to do with all of this, you ask? Don’t worry about it.

At Wired, John Semley interviews Michael Mann about why he and his men do what they do:

Capturing Enzo racing—engaging in what the character terms “our deadly passion, our terrible joy”—was key to Mann’s understanding of him. It’s here that Mann, the persnickety technician, can’t help but surrender to those romantic impulses. “Why do we race? Why do we try to run faster? Why do we try to go to the moon? Why do we try to do anything innovative and different and better than it’s ever been done before?” he swoons. “You and what you’re doing all become one. It’s not you driving the car. You and the car become a unified whole, something harmonic.”

Chris Person at Aftermath considers the disturbing implications of AI upscaling in movies:

What actually chills my blood more than anything is the thought that a lot of people think this all looks pretty good. You see this mindset at work whenever an AI fetishist posts a stable diffusion image of a woman with 13 fingers, 40 incisors and comically huge breasts. There’s an entire portion of the population that takes overt pleasure in the over-smoothed, perverts that prefer all media to be fast, high frame rate, and scrubbed squeaky clean. The cameras on our phones don’t simply capture images anymore, they compute them and ‘optimize’ them. It’s Italian Futurism in 4k, a noise reduction death drive. It’s not simply enough for much of digital cinema to look crystal clear and lifeless; the past should be denoised, grain managed and cleaned to conform to that standard. It is expedient and profitable if people don’t remember what film is supposed to look like.

On the anniversary of its (Christmas Day!) release, Polygon‘s Dylan Roth pits Mask of the Phantasm against the other top Batman movies to prove its superiority:

But in The Dark Knight, making Gotham feel like a real place also makes it feel generic. Mask of the Phantasm’s Gotham is an art deco retrofuturistic setting; The Dark Knight’s Gotham has no identity whatsoever. Gone are the unique quirks and landmarks established in Batman Begins, like the elevated train line or the hellish slums, the Narrows. The Dark Knight was shot on location in Chicago, but it avoids recognizable Chicago landmarks and replaces them with nothing, as if adding any set dressing would inherently make the setting less real, and by extension less “adult.” […] A head-to-head matchup between Mark Hamill’s animated Joker and Heath Ledger’s live-action Joker is essentially impossible. They’re completely different, they play totally different roles in their respective films, and they’re both perfect. However, Conroy and Bale’s Bruce Waynes share a similar emotional journey. Both portrayals capture something essential about the character as he’s been portrayed in the comics since at least the late ’70s: Where other superheroes struggle to maintain some semblance of a normal life, Bruce Wayne is trying his damnedest not to live one.

And the editors at MUBI asked contributing critics to come up with double features of 2023 films and older discoveries, leading to some rich and rewarding juxtapositions:

Kim Hew-Low, NEW: The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki, Japan) + OLD: My Octopus Teacher (James Reed and Pippa Ehrlich, 2020)

“It’s a classic boy meets beast story—not exactly romance, but full of heart, and if not love itself than certainly a testament to its transformative potential.”