This month’s Unloved is a long overdue look at one of the most purely fun and diabolically creative features of the ’90s, whose rejection signaled the beginning of the end for clever, personal comic adaptations as fun to think about as they are to watch.
As the comic cinema of today circles the drain (we can hope), “Tank Girl” is a reminder that a movie based on a graphic novel wasn’t always a bleary, bloated non-entity. They used to let these have personality and life, and no one’s cinema had more life than Rachel Talalay’s. She’s working pretty steadily now, which is great, but I mourn the loss of a timeline where she became as big as favorites of mine like Paul Thomas Anderson, Roland Emmerich, or Gore Verbinski. Women so rarely get to be this outsized in culture, this absurd and serious about their un-seriousness.
To watch more of Scout Tafoya’s video essays from his series The Unloved, click here.