It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

You believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to The Next Picture Show, a movie The Week podcast, devoted to a classic film and the way it shaped our thoughts on a recent release. I'm Keith Phipps here again with Scott Tobias. Genevieve Koski. Tasha Robinson is on some kind of crime spree or something, but we do have our special guest, Angelica J. Bastian, join us again this week. Hi, Angelica. Hello, y'all. In our last episode, we revisited Thelman Louise, the landmark 1991 film that used

hallmarks of the road movie to explore the state of gender relations.

This week, we return our attention to another movie that uses a recognizable form to go to

some unexpected places, birds of prey, and the infantabulous emancipation of one Harley Quinn.

Critics, those in this podcast included, didn't find a lot to like about the 2018 film Suicide

Squad, a kind of dirty dozen gloss featuring a team of supervillains turned heroes who

fight a greater enemy, in this case, a lot of CGI goop. But almost everyone agreed that

Margot Robbie offered a winning spin on

Harley Quinn, a Batman-adjacent character first introduced as a Joker's girlfriend in the 90s

series Batman, the animated series. Since then, Harley has become a fixture of comics and developed

into a wildcard whose madness also gifts her with a kind of self-awareness. It's that

Harley that shows up in Birds of Prey,

a film directed by Kathy Yan from his script by Christina Hodson. Having parted ways with the

Joker, Harley finds herself an object of revenge for the many Gotham underworld residents

she's wronged or just annoyed over the years. These include Black Mask, a sadistic crime lord

who covets a diamond containing the secret codes that will allow

him to access a great fortune.

The only problem, it's in the possession of the young pickpocket to Sandra Kane, played

by Ella J. Basco.

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